Movies: February 2007 Archives
The Host arrives in the U.S. on the kind of advance billing that greeted Asian genre features like the stripped-down horror movie Ringu, the ultraviolent reality-tv parody Battle Royale, and the intensely scripted double-crosses of Infernal Affairs. Those films maxed out geek buzz because they were sterling examples of something Hollywood rarely gets right -- the raucous, galvanizing, and uncompromising genre movie. Where Hollywood genre pictures increasingly call attention to their own ridiculousness, somehow the best of their Asian counterparts have managed to keep an unrivalled air of seriousness about them, even when the concept is ridiculously outré: Fukasaku kept the schoolchildren's deathmatch that was Battle Royale under control by shooting it just like a war movie, and by casting Takeshi Kitano, Japan's ultimate black-comic performer, in an important supporting role. Scorsese updated Infernal Affairs to great effect partly by working with a William Monahan screenplay that smartly made the story even more hard-boiled, and the Hollywood fantasy film got a boost from the largely po-faced (and intermittently excellent) Lord of the Rings series. With King Kong, Peter Jackson even made a go at rescuing the Hollywood monster movie from the Godzilla slums. But his movie was bloated and overly cutesy and felt, ultimately, ponderous in a way you wouldn't expect a giant-gorilla movie to be. (Perhaps all those Oscars put the wrong ideas in Jackson's head.)
Severance gets off to an amazing start — it plays like a The Office-style comedy of corporate manners crossed with a Friday the 13th style slasher movie with encoded satire on U.S./British foreign policy and birds coming home to roost. It’s good fun throughout, although the clever horror tropes degenerate into standard-issue action-chase fodder by the film’s final reels.
(Note: This review, originally written last year for the White Plains Times, is being blogged by special request.)
This sci-fi potboiler about a struggle between humans and a subculture of diseased-but-genetically-enhanced people known as “hemophages” doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is — a convenient way for unlikely action hero Milla Jovovich to secure some health insurance in the gap between Resident Evil movies. Green-screen technology makes glossy, violent fantasies like this possible on a (relatively) low budget, but it also strips the picture of the kind of imperfections that make some low-budget science-fiction movies so entertaining. There’s no evidence of a human fingerprint on any of the impossibly clean white surfaces of the rooms through which Jovovich battles her way, dispatching armies of identical hit men with a flick of a sword or a hail of bullets, and there’s none of the choreographed pizzazz or visual flair that make Asian martial-arts epics so compelling. The film’s appeal is limited entirely to the star presence of Jovovich herself, sporting an impossibly toned body, some cool outfits and a determined glare. If she doesn’t get your motor running, forget it — everything else on the screen may as well have been designed by the guys at Apple Computer. It’s available in PG-13 and extended “unrated” versions. D
Paul Verhoeven has received some of the stupider film reviews in recent history. I'm still floored by the number of people who see Robocop as an endorsement of, rather than satire on, the idea of unfettered and uncompromising law enforcement. Robocop may be the ultimate bad L.A. Cop, but the storyline, which had Peter Weller playing an armored cyborg struggling to regain his humanity, was a far cry from Dirty Harry wish-fulfillment. (I'm assuming Verhoeven needn't be held accountable here for any number of unthinking meatheads who might have taken away from the film some kind of inspirational message about the validity of Rodney King tactics among police officers, but some viewers would doubtless argue that point.)
Well, what did you expect him to call it? Crazy Bitches?
The carnivorous killer Hannibal Lecter, first introduced in an excellent Thomas Harris novel called Red Dragon and then made the focus of a follow-up, The Silence of the Lambs, and its sequel, Hannibal, has gotten a thorough workout in a succession of big-screen versions (including not one but two adaptations of Red Dragon). Predicated on the notion that what’s really missing from the saga is an origin story, this belabored prequel about Nazis, the Russian army, and Lithuanian orphans is crassly conceived, poorly executed, and devoid of wit and/or charm. There's plenty of clumsy storytelling but very little in the way of atmosphere and credibility, nor even hints of Lecter's vaunted cleverness. Granted, the character portrayed by Anthony Hopkins is meant to have a few decades of experience on the teen variation played here by the French actor Gaspard Ulliel, but where Hopkins invested Lecter with penetrating insight and a flair for the theatrical, Ulliel just acts like a mildly excitable high-schooler whose iPod is loaded with one too many emo revenge fantasies. Gong Li — again with the gorgeous Chinese woman playing a gorgeous Japanese woman! — is wasted, but at least adds a touch of class to the proceedings. The problem is Hannibal Rising is worse than inept — it's out-and-out dull, despite the occasional glimmer of an intriguing idea. Harris himself wrote the screenplay, which is based on his own novel. Not having read it, I can’t say whether this tedious movie is worse than the book. But one thing’s for sure — out of everyone involved with this sorry project, Harris is the one who should be most ashamed of himself for not realizing it was a terrible, terrible idea. D
A version of this review was originally published in theWhite Plains Times.
It’s hard to believe that, little over 15 years ago, I had never even seen a Hong Kong action movie, much less suspected that the Hong Kong mixture of gunplay and impossible heroics would become the dominant action form in Hollywood. Once John Woo finished completely remaking world action cinema, the Asian contingent stepped up and changed the way studios make horror movies, too. Right place, right time — the Japanese angry-spirit movies like Ringu and Ju-on arrived stateside in near-perfect sync with the breakout success of The Sixth Sense (a movie that I still regard as a one-trick pony, but credit for helping deliver us from a purgatory of cynically bad, teen-oriented horror pictures starring interchangeably chesty young ladies sans acting skills), and the Scream-addled American film industry took some notice. The Ring, starring the very grown-up Naomi Watts, was a pretty good remake of an extremely creepy Japanese original, but the J-horror remakes have delivered increasingly diminishing returns. Let’s hope the trend is nearing its end with The Messengers.
Explosive, ferocious, and nihilistic, Smokin’ Aces positions itself as 2007’s movie to beat in the categories of gratuitous violence and egregious overplotting. It’s all about a Vegas lounge singer, Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven), and the flotilla of gangsters, assassins and cops racing to snatch him from his penthouse hideout atop a Lake Tahoe casino resort. The good news is it’s pretty entertaining stuff — a near-constant stream of gunshots, profanity, blood spatter, death scenes, and half-naked prostitutes. The bad news is it’s simply overloaded — instead of developing characters that we can latch onto amid the carnage, writer/director Joe Carnahan concocts a whole bunch of tedious backstory (The old plastic-surgery gambit? Really?) that’s delivered in talking-head exposition sequences that bookend the film’s action-filled midsection. It’s also highly derivative, borrowing a hyperactive narrative style from folks like Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie but failing to match their wit and/or rambunctiousness. What it most reminded me of is the Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance, which mounted a similar multiway cops-and-robbers assault on a hotel suite with more panache, better dialogue, and (this last one is also important) brevity. In Carnahan’s bullet-ridden testosterone fantasia, the aggressive disregard for human life gets tiresome, but at least some of the characters are fun — there’s a lethally dopey skinhead (Chris Pine) and a heartsick lesbian sniper (Taraji P. Henson) — and the ensemble cast (which includes Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia, and musicians Alicia Keys and Common) is generally excellent. C+
A version of this review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.