It's hard to dislike a film as fundamentally good-natured as this one. Like its predecessor, American Pie 2 wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, it's a sex comedy and therefore relies on some degree of promiscuity for its laffs. On the other, it's mindful of its responsibilities to society at large, presenting loving, longer-term relationships as an indicator of health and stability. Both films take the time to illustrate how their young-adult protagonists come to individual, somewhat contradictory conclusions about their sexuality, and that's heartening. But the sequel is hampered by an absence of new ideas, spending a full half-hour of its running time doing little more than making congratulatory references to the first film. Critically, such dedication to formula makes the characters feel utterly manufactured. The film is too episodic, but a couple of the episodes are quite funny -- one pokes fun at the awe with which young guys regard the concept of lesbianism, and another is a metaphor for the guilt associated with masturbation. For a few brief moments, it actually concerns itself with some of the female characters as well as the male. But this sequel is too prefab to be either liberating or comforting, and it's discouraging to imagine real teenagers recognizing much of themselves on the screen this time around.
Don't buy a ticket to this baldly implausible yarn, which pits pissed-off dad Michael Douglas against a same-day deadline to yank a six-digit number out of the addled brain of mental patient Brittany Murphy, lest his daughter be killed by frustrated bank robbers. Douglas coasts through this one on his usual rich-white-guy angst, as the script boasts little in the way of characterization. Murphy is quite good as the traumatized inmate, while Famke Janssen is wasted as Douglas's addled wife, who's stuck in bed with a broken leg. The story is rooted too ineluctably in coincidence, with Douglas tarted up as some kind of super-shrink. Meanwhile, Gary Fleder's direction is a little clumsy, telegraphing most of the plot twists in advance rather than springing them at just the right moment. The climax, apparently lifted from The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, is almost excruciatingly tedious, and the whole affair is marbled with the liminal sadism that made Fleder's previous Kiss the Girls unpalatable.
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN [D]
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, an expensive commercial failure that simultaneously christened and bankrupted animation studio Square Pictures, embarks on the foolish task of replacing actors with photorealistic computer-generated simulacra. Unfortunately for Final Fantasy, the technology ain't there yet. Protagonist Aki, promoted as a mopey sex symbol for the PlayStation crowd, moves like a robot and her hair is animated to the point of distraction. Her face is plasticine in appearance -- kind of a cross between Mira Sorvino and Hello Kitty -- and her body structure adheres to current fashion, with breasts of medium girth and a gaunt ass and thighs suggesting "fitness." More telling, she always seems to be on the verge of tears -- is this an avatar of the fantasy life of the computer programmer? With better dialogue and characterization, I might find Aki appealing despite her robotic movements and facial expressions. But she's emblematic of a popular culture that wants its titillation to idealize the human body in the style of Maxim magazine, obscuring most of the stuff that makes it interesting in the first place in favor of a generic glassy coating. The same goes for the rest of the film's characters. There are moments when some of them look fairly realistic, but the illusions are short-lived. What's worse, the dialogue is just atrocious, the overly derivative story mainly a matter of humdrum expository monologues, and the imagery only intermittently impressive. At least Tomb Raider had the recognizably human (if overstuffed) Angelina Jolie going for it, despite poor writing and hopelessly phony cinematography. In that light, the arrogance of Final Fantasy, which assumes that we'll pay nine bucks and spend 100 minutes happily watching electronic puppets stiffly mimic human emotions, is overwhelming.
Despite the largely scathing critical notices, I slunk into the theater to see this one after finding myself across the street from Graumann's Chinese in Hollywood with the rest of the afternoon to kill and only one movie title on the marquee. The tyranny of low expectations had me slouching in my seat from the very first reel; yes, Angelina Jolie photographs beautifully -- particularly when her insanely ripe lips float atop the shadow darkness of the movie screen, as they do in the very first shot -- but her very 21st-century screen presence seemed woefully out of place in this, a late-19th-century period piece set (for no good reason) in Cuba. But as the film unspooled, it became clear that director Michael Cristofer has no real knack for capturing a time and place. What he excels at is taking nudie pictures of Angelina Jolie, as this film and his previous TV movie Gia amply demonstrate. Yes, I know it's just a pout here and an arched eyebrow there, but Jolie's blithely devilish posturing is a perfect match for the melodrama on tap, and even the ersatz porn is a step up from the saturated but terminally adolescent sexuality of Tomb Raider. This kind of crap does make me giggle, but there's an absurd poignancy to the whole affair. Forget about the usually formidable Antonio Banderas, who comes across as a Spanish Pierce Brosnan, and please don't worry about the ludicrous storyline and the hilariously overbaked dialogue -- despite Cristofer's rather dour corpus of work to date (he directed the reputedly terrible Body Shots and wrote the abysmal-by-common-acclamation The Bonfire of the Vanities), I insist on believing that this is all delivered with a nudge and a wink. Sue me.
This Planet of the Apes is big and weird enough to benefit from Burton's heightened sense of art direction, even though it never jets into the stratosphere like the similarly expensive but oh-so-misanthropic Mars Attacks!. It's a shrewd career move, sure. Burton's willingness to play ball may secure his nest egg, but it gives us a movie that's striking but still frustratingly reserved. Burton's film has more visual credibility than its predecessor, but it lacks the earlier film's crazy inspiration. Further, it feels like the rigors of managing the budget kept Burton from spending time with his performers. I mean, I've never been a Mark Wahlberg fan, but I have been surprised by how well he slips himself into films like Boogie Nights and Three Kings. Here, he's utterly inexpressive, as is the lovely Estella Warren, a pouty model-turned-actress who fairly demands to be made to wear animal skins in cheesy science fiction movies. (Perhaps she was born 50 years too late.) Burton has never been a great director of action, and the hand-to-hand combat showcased here is an uninspired hodge-podge. The apes, however, are very convincing, particularly Tim Roth's ferocious, scenery-chewing General Thade. And I like the ending, a spectacularly baffling cliffhanger that proves Burton enjoys dicking around with his audience. Hopefully it's a sign that he'll put his Hollywood cred to daring use, but I worry that he's being assimilated.
One shot in Rat Race made me laugh as hard as anything I've ever seen in a movie—without giving it away, I'll say that it's a slow-motion shot involving a monster truck. Otherwise, there are few giggles to be found as this limp take-off on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World sends second-class celebrities on a quest for a $2 million prize stash. I wanted to call it a "globe-trotting" quest, or even a "cross-country" quest, but that's part of the problem. The rich and strange casino magnate played by John Cleese has these misfits scrambling to get all the way from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Silver City, New Mexico, a distance that could be covered by a VW microbus in less than a day's time. (Lack of ambition is this film's defining aesthetic.) Pranksters Seth Green and Vince Vieluf manage to shut down the Vegas airport, forcing their rivals to travel by land -- or, in one case, by helicopter. Matters are complicated by skinheads, Smashmouth, and a malevolent squirrel farmer. Highlights include a nattering Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Blackadder), who's inexplicably put to sleep for the bulk of the movie, a guileless, exunerant Amy Smart (Road Trip), and that monster truck I mentioned, of which Green and Vieluf make the most. Mostly, though, Rat Race is the definition of late-summer ennui -- I couldn't believe how happy I was to see Wayne Knight show up.
Expert performances elevate this heist fluff to some level of credibility. Robert De Niro is clearly the main attraction, and he invests his aging-thief-yearning-to-go-straight with a satisfying degree of pathos. But Edward Norton is equally terrific, and Marlon Brando doesn't even seem to have phoned this one in. Director Frank Oz keeps things moving and stays out of the way. Fingerprints on the story and screenplay come from four different guys, including Soderbergh collaborator Lem Dobbs, and the end result is a film that has little unique character -- but also one that makes no missteps. That you can see the requisite twists coming from several reels away does not reduce the pain and pleasure of watching the characters get jerked through the wringer. The very definition of a good time at the movies.