After watching too many sloppily-made thrillers filling up space on Netflix (including Mercury Rising, Double Jeopardy, and Along Came a Spider), it’s a relief the my next choice, The Hunted, is so solidly made. You really can’t expect anything less from William Friedkin.
So why is it so unsatisfying? First, it doesn’t really capitalize on the potential of an intriguing character: a former special forces agent, trained to become a dehumanized killing machine, who can’t “turn it off”. Pitting such a damaged person against the man who trained him ought to have produced fireworks. Instead of a character study we only get a series of chase sequences.
Benicio Del Toro‘s trademark blasé mumbling is his whole appeal, but here he just seems to be sleepwalking. At the time, Tommy Lee Jones was on the tail end of his plausibility as an action hero, and The Hunted certainly plays off his signature role in The Fugitive. But his performance conveys his character’s guilt in richer ways than the script does.
For meaning and emotional oomph, the movie leans pretty heavily on a thuddingly obvious metaphor (a wounded wolf) and a Johnny Cash tune.
Not to imply that screenwriting and revision are easy, but Bruce Beresford’s Double Jeopardy is only one rewrite away from being a decent action thriller. The elevator pitch is obvious enough (The Fugitive… but with a lady!), but it truly does have a killer hook: jilted woman – framed for a murder that not only did she not commit, it didn’t even happen – is legally free to actually commit the crime if she wishes. Give it a solid cast (Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones in roles they could both do in their sleep), and it should have been a home run.
It does all start out rather well, surely better than its generally poor Letterboxd reviews would imply. But the plot holes and implausibilities quickly pile up and you find out why people hate it. There are lots of issues to point to, but I was frustrated by its two biggest problems:
First, the failure to identify what should have been the core of the story: Tommy Lee Jones’ character coming around to believing his quarry may be innocent. Instead, he simply pursues her for a while, and suddenly offhandedly mentions near the end that he figures she didn’t do it. What should have been a key story beat was underplayed to the point of almost vanishing.
Second, the final confrontation makes no logical sense. If Judd and Jones find the supposedly-dead murder victim alive and well, then problem solved, right? Simply drag him in front of a judge and all of Judd’s problems go away. But no, instead they propose some sort of insane double-wrap-around reverse/inverse blackmail scheme that makes no sense whatsoever, which produces a scuffle and then she just shoots him anyway.
I suspect the filmmakers were working backwards from a premise they were too attached to.
You get the idea. But Intolerable Cruelty is the movie for you if what you’ve always wanted is a modern-day Cary Grant-type romantic comedy in which two opposites fall reluctantly in love, seasoned with dashes of that unmistakable Coen flavor:
slapstick ultraviolence: A grotesque giant accidentally shoots himself in the mouth, and it’s played for laughs.
creepy weirdness: The nightmarish boss from hell is straight out of an old Sam Raimi movie.
basement humor: This screenplay’s idea of witty banter is to have everybody say “nail your ass” over and over. A lot.
It’s biggest failing is that the chemistry between the leads only goes one way. Whether by design or Catherine Zeta-Jones’ blank performance, George Clooney plays smitten kitten to her ice queen. Clooney falls all over her, mugging like a madman (as if he were doing an impression of Jim Carrey, come to think of it), while she looks mildly bored at best.
I was very pleasantly surprised by James Mangold’s The Wolverine. Everybody involved did the right thing by simply pretending that the appallingly awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine was never made.
Marvel Comics continues their (mostly) winning streak, showing everyone how superhero movies should be done. Hopefully soon we will be rid of grimly ultraviolet takes on children’s characters like Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen and The Man of Steel. The Wolverine is just the right kind of “serious”, in the sense that it focuses on character and not on vengeful violence. I’m tired of gruesome sights like Superman summarily executing General Zod by snapping his neck.
The Wolverine should be commended for having four major female characters, when a typical superhero movie maxes out at one (such as Lois Lane in Man of Steel and Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man). But The Wolverine squanders this achievement by casting women than look like supermodels, and a script that fails The Bechdel Test. All any of the women talk about are Logan and their daddy issues.
Mangold is a true chameleon, having tackled everything from indie drama (Heavy) to Oscar-bait biopic (Walk the Line). He’s handled action before (Knight and Day, 3:10 to Yuma), but here in his first real summer blockbuster popcorn movie, he exhibits a remarkable stylishness and even a little visual poetry. One scene stages a self-surgery straight out of a Cronenberg film. And when Wolverine races through the streets of a Japanese village to rescue his beloved imprisoned in a tower, swarms of ninjas shoot tethered arrows into his back, in an apparent homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The sight is startlingly moving, like something out of a violent fairy tale.
It also helps that until the climactic action sequence, not a single character parades around in a spandex costume. By the point that the villains Viper and Silver Samurai show up in full four-color splendor for a big comic book-esque fight sequence, I thought, what the hell, this movie has totally earned it.
Doug Liman’s Fair Game is an important movie. The legacy of the Bush Administration’s war on terror comprises many grand injustices: civilian casualties, torture, increased resentment worldwide, eroded civil liberties, et al. In other words, lots of raw material for screenplays.
Most treatments of the war on terror in movies so far have been fictional explorations of its cost upon American soldiers and their families (including The Messenger and In the Valley of Elah). Fair Game belongs to a different genre: the dramatization of actual figures in the midst of specific events. Fair Game is structured as a more conventional biopic than more rigorous recreations like The Road to Guantanamo, United 93, and Zero Dark Thirty.
Fair Game dramatizes the public scapegoating of CIA officer Valerie Plame and former Ambassador to Africa Joe Wilson simply because their jobs tasked them with giving answers to difficult questions, questions that they didn’t realize had already been given scripted answers by the Bush Administration. Plame and Wilson’s intelligence conflicted with the preconceived fictional narrative that Iraq was pursing a nuclear weapons program. Plame and Wilson were both firmly ensconced within the system, and chewed up by it when they tried to resist their exploitation.
Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame in Fair Game
One possible flaw with Fair Game is that it strives to position Plame and Wilson as the protagonists of a traditional two-hour biopic narrative. They are burdened with traditional character motivations, such as to clear their names, save their marriage, and expose villainy. The facts of history don’t really make for a conventionally satisfying climax to a thriller plot. When Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, it was through no direct action of the fictionalized Plame and Wilson.
Fair Game rightly highlights Plame and Wilson’s heroism in exposing the administration’s lies, but the demands of a conventional biopic to present its protagonists as having vindicated themselves doesn’t really fit in this particular case.
Director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer is almost unbearably dreadful. It continues a recent trend in the fantasy genre: fairy tails used as raw material for soullessly engineered all-ages escapism. See also: Snow White and The Huntsman and Tim Burton’s appalling Alice in Wonderland.
It’s hard to understand how Singer could demonstrate the ability to turn pulpy material into smart movies (a la The Usual Suspects and X-Men), and yet also be so tone deaf to turn out the misconceived Superman Returns, and now this.
Replete with enough gruesome yet bloodless violence to earn a PG-13 rating (thrill to the sight of crushed heads, arrows through tongues, etc., all without the annoying little consequences that go with murder). All of this is absurd, as otherwise the movie is too dumb and simplistic to appeal to anyone over 12.
Worst of all, Jack the Giant Slayer is a pitiful waste of its vastly overqualified cast, including Ian McShane, Ewan McGregor, Stanly Tucci, Bill Nighy, and Eddie Marsan. Unfortunately and perhaps inevitably, whatever charisma these veterans are able to project through the CGI noise only reveals the two leads (Nicholas Hoult and Eleanor Tomlinson) as hopelessly outclassed, generic, bland, and boring.
Conventional wisdom will tell you there is only one good Matrix movie, and it’s called The Matrix. Conventional wisdom is wrong.
The Wachowski‘s The Matrix Reloaded does everything movie lovers claim they want from sequels, and complain that Hollywood so rarely gives them: it expands the cast of characters while still taking care to enrich the returning players, it delves deeper into the themes of the first film while widening the scope to include even more, it explores the fictional universe in ways that illuminate the character’s motivations, it ups the ante on cutting-edge special effects, and expertly raises the stakes for a grand climax in a promised subsequent film.
Stop! It’s bullet time.
The Matrix Reloaded is smarter, has more exceptional action set pieces, and employs a more consistent sense of morality than the original The Matrix. It always bothered me that Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) casually sacrifice innocent humans by the dozens in the first film. I am sure it was a deliberate creative choice that in Reloaded, the heroes battle only virtual “programs”.
So why the popular opinion that both Matrix sequels suck? Here’s my theory: the concluding film in the trilogy (The Matrix Revolutions) fails to live up to everything set up by Reloaded. The mediocre third film makes all three look bad in retrospect. With time, I maintain people will look back and reappraise the entire trilogy and recognize The Matrix Reloaded as the best of the three.
A true gem. I think Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is part of informal trilogy (with The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Man On the Moon) in which Jim Carrey found a way to channel his manic energy and rubber-face-pulling into dramatic roles, in films that were not only populist, but also critically acclaimed.
That said, there are a few scenes in which it’s clear Weir wasn’t able to rein in Carrey’s more outré compulsions. Many interesting supporting characters (Noah Emmerich as Truman’s lifelong ersatz pal, who nevertheless seems to have some genuine affection for him, and Laura Linney as a decidedly more professional actor just doing a job) simply disappear from the film. It may not be perfect, but it builds to a very moving emotional wallop at the end.
Long term Star Trek fans may bemoan the fact that the latest films have ejected much of what was previously considered essential ingredients. Gone are the spacey metaphors for what a moral utopian society might look like, not to mention the years of established chronology and backstory.
But to old timer Trekkers I say: too bad. Trek ran itself into the ground years ago as the Voyager and Enterprise series disappeared up their own backsides. It was long past time for Star Trek to undergo shock therapy to adjust to a new era.
But given the mostly clean slate set up by J.J. Abrams’ first film in 2009, I wish Star Trek Into Darkness had struck out for new territories instead of largely retreading the original series episode “Space Seed” and the movie The Wrath of Khan. The return of the titular villain in Khan held a great deal of weight for Trek fans in 1982. A character from the often campy and casual ’60s television series was treated with a degree of seriousness, as Kirk et al were forced to deal with the consequences of actions taken and forgotten years prior.
When we encounter a “new” Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) for the first time in Star Trek Into Darkness, what does it mean to non-fans? Little beyond a possibly faintly familiar name. If the point of rebooting Star Trek was to give it some meaning for modern audiences not versed in Trek lore, even this supposedly fresh Khan comes with too much historical baggage that is poorly explained here. Even as a long time Star Trek fan, I was a little at a loss to understand who exactly he was based on the evidence supplied by exposition.
The Star Trek Into Darkness cast is earthbound.
Any degree of consistency between franchise entries is rare. Star Trek Into Darkness shares a great deal with its predecessor, for good or for ill. The good being that it is handsomely, nay, expertly made. The ill being that its plot barely holds together. Admiral Marcus’ (Peter Weller) diabolical scheme makes little to no sense. As I understood what was shown on screen, he had two separate goals: to speed along a possibly inevitable war with the Klingons, and also to kill a cryogenically frozen army of genetically enhanced supersoldiers left over from World War III. He attempts both schemes at the same time, in the least efficient way possible. I blame Hollywood’s current can-do-no-wrong golden boy Damon Lindelof, who is also rumored to have been responsible for the incomprehensible plot issues with Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
Speaking of incomprehensible issues, the title “Star Trek Into Darkness” is just plain nonsense. But I still found it a rollicking good time, as I did with the the original 2009 film, and wish there was less of a long gap between them. Now that J.J. Abrams is preoccupied with a very different “Star —-” franchise, that gap may be even longer, or we may see Trek taken over by another auteur.
By the time Scream 4 appeared, over a decade after the original trilogy began, the horror genre had moved on from the ironic, winking mode the series popularized. A character in Scream 4 complains that most horror movies traffic more in outright gore (“I hate that torture porn shit”). On television, The Walking Dead characters are so divorced from pop culture that they don’t even know the word “zombie”. How does the usual tone of the Scream movies play to today’s audiences?
In this context, Scream 4 would seem old fashioned throwback to the ironic 90s, were it not significantly more cynical than its predecessors. Scream 2 overtly critiqued sequels, Scream 3 deconstructed trilogies, and now Scream 4 openly uses the word “franchise”. Movies are more the product of big business than ever before, and now that’s the subject of the movies themselves.
Scream 4 does make a few half-hearted stabs (sorry) at relevance by roping in social media (one kid liveblogs the whole thing), and celebrity culture. The murderers’ motivation has moved on from sex and revenge to desire to the kind of instant celebrity enjoyed today by the likes of teenage murderers and socialite drunks.
Amusingly, Scream 4 self-mythologizes itself with the movie-within-the-movie Stab, amusingly credited to Robert Rodriguez. Actually, I think I’d rather see that movie.
