Thinking Out Loud

Tag: 2003

  • William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying

    William Friedkin’s The Hunted is solid but unsatisfying

    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.

  • The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty

    The chemistry only goes one way in The Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty

    Intolerable Cruelty is usually found at or near the bottom of Best-to-Worst films by the Coen Brothers:

    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.

  • The Matrix Reloaded is the best Matrix movie

    The Matrix Reloaded is the best Matrix movie

    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.

    Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Reloaded
    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.

  • Bong Joon-ho’s Salinui Chueok (Memories of Murder)

    Bong Joon-ho’s Salinui Chueok (Memories of Murder)

    A police procedural based on a true serial killer case, a rare phenomenon for South Korea in the 1980s. Grizzled detectives chasing down a serial killer is well-trod territory in film, but director Bong Joon-ho approaches it with a genre-defying sense of humor. Also surprisingly effective is its pleasantly lackadaisical pacing that truly takes its time to fully investigate character and incident.

  • Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone

    Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone

    This from the director of Crumb and Ghost World?

    The big pleasure of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is definitely that it utterly wallows in a bah-humbug tone, a welcome tonic to the seemingly perpetual holiday season. I write this in June, and I’m afraid to so much as blink, lest the plastic Santas and X-mas lights materialize in the nanosecond my eyes are closed.

    Billy Bob Thornton is gleefully repugnant as the comman Willie, making little or no attempt to make his character sympathetic. And yet he is somehow attractive, shown entertaining numerous one-night stands, and ultimately connecting with a decent woman (if alcoholic and a little crazy). After all, the viewer is reminded that Willie is played by the man that married Angelina Jolie, so there is clearly something there.

    Glimpses of humanity do peek through, if colored by his terrible personality and backstory. For example, when the Thurman (Brett Kelly) denigrates himself, Willie explodes in profanity, extorting him not to think about himself that way.

    Willie’s partner Marcus (Tony Cox) initially seems similarly roguish, in fact the wit and brains of the duo. In a reversal that fatally breaks the comic tone of the film, he is revealed as a cruelly callous criminal psychopath when he outright murders Gin (Bernie Mac). So that makes Willie more sympathetic by subtraction — only because he doesn’t murder, and proves himself at least somewhat capable of forming friendships.

    Unexpected and ultimately short-fused is the eventual turn towards the sappy and sentimental. Bad Santa‘s happy ending, partly told through voiceover) betrays the tone of the movie and even leads me to suspect some post-production tinkering.

  • John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale

    John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale

    When it comes to action cinema maestros like John Woo — I can enjoy the the hyped-up action and weirdness of something like Face/Off, but find that the extreme violence and gunplay can sometimes cross the line from escapism into being inhumane. Paycheck, scoring a mere PG-13 from the MPAA, is less violent than most of Woo’s others, but also unfortunately less weird or even fun.

    It’s also not as smart or subversive as a Philip K. Dick adaptation ought to be. I think Minority Report is the first so far to capture what made Dick’s tales so timeless and relevant.

    Uma Thurman, following her star turn as the Kung-Fu action cinema goddess in Kill Bill, plays backup love interest to Ben Affleck, who himself is no great shakes here. He was funny and self-deprecating when recently hosting Saturday Night Live, if a little juvenile. His 90’s goatee-wearing, ironic geek guy in Chasing Amy was actually quite realistic. Even his Daredevil hinted at the suffering and isolation in the midst of all the superhero silliness (there’s a chilling scene where we see him return home after a night of crime-busting, where he painfully strips off his protective uniform to reveal more than a few bruises and scars, and then blithely chews a handful of pain-killers straight). But he doesn’t read as a convincing engineer in Paycheck, and his good looks and physique directly contradict dialog in the film that describes him as just a regular guy, and not a secret agent action hero.