September, 2005
The Transporter 2
Official Site | IMDb
Of all the inexplicable movie series, the most
inexplicable to me is the Transporter movies. There are a couple of
positive elements. There's the concept of a guy who will transport
anything anywhere, no questions asked. There is also a star (Jason
Statham) who has mastered the art of the look so menacing, he can win a
fight without throwing a punch.
The first Transporter movie used a plot device that
goes on my all time list of hated plot devices. A professional goes out
of his way to show that he does his job according to a set of rules. HE
then runs into a situation where he decides to break his own rules,
screwing over his employer, and rendering himself unhirable. To this
movie's credit, it does address this, if only tangentially. Gone is the
posh, European villa. In its place, a cheap house in Florida. Out is
the basement full of boats, weapons, and other goodies. In is parking
his car in the driveway. Out is transporting millions of dollars worth
of illicit goods. In is driving a rich girl to and from school as a
"favor" to a friend. Sure, that favor is probably "I feel sorry for
you. Here's a job worth a few bucks until you can get back on your
feet."
The plot is paper thin. It is merely an excuse to
demonstrate the fact that transporter Frank Martin (Statham) can kick
ass and drive really well. The rich girl is the daughter of the
nation's drug czar. A conference is being held with drug czars from
around the world. The daughter is kidnapped by as stereotypical a
stylish Cuban gangster as you could imagine. Scarface was a model of
writing restraint compared to this guy. The plan is to inject her with
a super virus that kills off anyone that comes in contact with the
carrier. No drug czars = big business. Of course, doing the math would
tell you that millions would die within a week, but our villain
apparently doesn't understand the necessity of having breathing
customers. His muscle is a woman whose chosen fighting outfit is a
bikini, black stockings, red high heels, and enough eye shadow to
camouflage an entire infantry division. She and Martin spar a couple
times, and we're all primed for a big, final fight. The fight is
a disappointment that ends in less than thirty seconds when she has a
meeting with an unfortunately spiky piece of object d'art in her
employer's living room.
This is a movie that needs to sit down and decide
exactly what movie it wants to be. So many similar genres are touched
on. Is it the ultra-realistic, gritty crime drama, as Martin's search
for the little girl would suggest? Is it the comedy cop, buddy movie,
as his interplay with nemesis from the first movie Tarconi (Francois
Berleand) would imply? Does it want to be an action fantasy piece, as
the scene where he hits a ramp, flipping the car through a 360 degree
spin, knocking a bomb off with a conveniently placed crane would
suggest. One comical scene (deserving of its own paragraph) shows a
desperate desire to be a Jackie Chan movie.
Martin pulls into Cuban guy's driveway. A dozen guys
are there to meet him. He eludes them, escaping into the garage, where
he breaks off the key to the armory in the lock. The thugs break open
an "in case of fire" case which contains four fire axes (they must be
expecting some big fires). These dozen guys find a compartment with
four fire axes and come out armed with, yes, four fire axes, but
also....samurai swords. The garage is apparently unfinished, as
scaffolding and plastic sheeting abound. Cuban guy must really trust
his workers as amidst this mess, he parks a sporty little car easily
worth six figures. The fight is one of those numbers where guys armed
with melee weapons circle the hero, attack one at a time, get hit, fall
down, writhe in pain on the ground, and then get up when its their turn
to fall down again. Martin uses everything at his disposal, including
the steam carrying pipes forming the scaffolding (yes, I said steam
carrying pipes forming the scaffolding).
Hell, this is fun. I'll keep going, as the ending is
just as silly.
Cuban guy escapes in his helicopter as muscle chick
dies in her thirty second fight. His regular pilot must have been on
vacation, because he flies to the airport traveling fifty feet above
major highways. Following along, Martin keeps pace, even after Cuban
guy gets into his jet. The jet taxis for a full minute, traveling at
least a mile or more before taking off. Martin uses the time to get
underneath the plane and enter through the wheel well, leaving the
driverless car to plunge through the billboard at the end of the
runway. In the ensuing flight, the pilot is killed, causing the jet to
crash into the ocean. It stays in one piece and both unseatbelted
occupants are unhurt enough to continue their fight.
Grade: D-
The Brothers Grimm
Official Site | IMDb
Pretty soon they're going to stop letting Terry
Gilliam make movies. His movies are met with a great deal of
anticipation, get mediocre reviews, and lose a boatload of money.
Sometimes they lose a boatload of money and don't even get finished, as
was the case with his The Man Who
Killed Don Quixote (the resulting documentary, Lost In LaMancha, is a must see).
It's a shame, but he's going to run out of people willing to back
him.
The Brothers Grimm
is another Gilliam project that looked so good going in. Wilhelm Grimm
(Matt Damon) and his brother Jacob (Heath Ledger) make their money as
con men. They roam the countryside, looking for villages where there
are legends of evil. Their team then pretends to be the witch or ghost
or whatever, the brothers swoop in, and charge money to get rid of the
evil. It's a good racket until they are caught by Delatombe (Jonathan
Pryce), Napoleon's man in charge in occupied Germany.
Delatombe sets them a task. There is a village where
it looks like there really is some bad magic going on, and the natives
are getting restless. He sends the brothers to sort it all out, sending
along his chief torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) to keep watch over
them. Cavaldi is a miscalculation in a movie brought down by way too
many miscalculations. He is clearly supposed to be the comic relief,
but delivers his lines in an accent so thick that most of his funny
lines pass by while you're trying to figure out what the hell it was he
just said. He's just too over the top to be of any use to the movie.
The brothers have to venture deep into an enchanted
forest where the kidnapped children are taken. This forest is another
miscalculation. It exists only as a series of fanciful Terry Gilliam
sets, each one not relating at all to the next. They are great sets,
inventive and wonderful to look at, there's just nothing much going on
in them. It's a great example of style without substance.
Also missing is the deliciousness of the source material.
A good Brothers Grimm story may be full of horrible things happening to
people, but there's always a sense of satisfaction, as the most
horrible things happen to those who deserve it. That page turning tone
isn't there. This is a movie that at times is an ordeal, and is often
just too (please excuse me) grim.
Grade: C
The Man
Official Site | IMDb
Dental supply salesman Andy Fiddler (Eugene Levy)
flies off to Detroit for a convention. He plans on popping in, giving
his speech, and going home. Agent Derrick Vann (Samuel L Jackson) has
just lost his partner. He isn't too concerned as the partner was a
dirty cop. Suspicion falls on him, however, so he sets out to bust the
bad guys and recover a truckload of guns. Problems (and, I suppose,
wackiness) ensues when the initial contact goes bad and the smugglers
think Fiddler is their buyer, and not Vann. Vann then essentially
kidnaps Fiddler to see the deal through and bring the bad guys down.
It hurts to watch movies with such a fundamental
miscalculation as The Man
does. When the premise from which your entire movie is supposed to flow
is blundered so badly, nothing good can happen. This is supposed to be
an Odd Couple-like story with
the good hearted small town guy and the bad ass big city cop clashing
in their time together. These two characters are so far apart and so
extreme, they become annoying. Very little is funny, whether it's
Fiddler coming up with alternates to swearing or Vann coercing
confessions with forceful application of his car. It was as if a
different set of writers wrote each characters' material, focusing on
the most cliched aspects of their personality types, and the results
were randomly assembled with paste on construction paper.
Grade: D+
A Sound Of Thunder
Official Site | IMDb
A Sound Of
Thunder plays like a bad made for the Sc-Fi Channel movie. It
suffers from that laziness of plot and detail indicative of something
cranked out as fast as possible so that the production team could move
on to their next project.
Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) works for a time travel
safari outfit owned by Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley). The company
charges a small fortune to take its clients back in time to kill a
dinosaur. Utmost care has been taken to find a dinosaur within seconds
of death. The bullets are made of liquid nitrogen so that nothing is
left behind. The "hunters" are given strict instructions to stay on the
path. The goal is to change nothing in the past. If you were to go
tramping through the woods, millions of years ago, who knows how the
changes you made would multiply themselves in present day.
One expedition doesn't go quite as planned. A
gun jams and the timeline shifts. Returning to present day, Ryer finds
subtle changes that become worse as time waves ripple through the eons.
Unless the scientists can go back and fix things, humanity will have
never existed, leaving the world to giant mutant bugs.
The instances of cheapness, inconstancies, and
laziness are too numerous to mention. The rubber suited dinosaurs, the
obviousness of actors standing in front of a rear projection screen, a
news report telling us how there are suddenly no animals in the wild
and then telling us fish are beaching themselves, the guy who says "I
can't feel my legs" as he's walking, Ryer driving a car and shouting
"look out" seconds before being attacked from behind and above, the
classic dry clothes after walking through a swamp, the even more
classic two minute long underwater action sequence without coming up
for air, and the best of all, finding a particle accelerator and
turning into a time machine (after the needed hard drive has been
underwater) in a matter of a few minutes, powering it up in a city
without power, and going back in time, using the convenient built in
seat.
Grade: D
The Constant Gardener
Official Site | IMDb
Lord Of War
Official Site | IMDb
Lord Of War
reminds me a little bit of Catch Me
If You Can, the Steven Spielberg film with Leonardo DiCaprio as
a jet setting con man. Each movie was marketed in a certain way to make
them look like light hearted romps. What's the one line you remember
form the commercial?
"I'm from the ATF."
"I'm guessing this isn't about the alcohol or tobacco."
They both went on to be dark portraits of troubled men. Both movies
could have benefited from some lightness.
Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) witnessed a mob execution
as a young boy and had an epiphany: someone needs to sell these guys
their guns. Starting with a one gun deal to a local thug, he built his
empire into a money printing machine, having enough pull and knowing
the right people to be able to, for example, buy up most of the East's
stockpile after the fall of communism.
The big difference between the two characters is
DiCaprio's Frank Abingale mostly ripped off faceless corporations,
Orlov's business results in death on a large scale. Cage does a good
job portraying his struggle to come to terms with this. He is given a
conscience in FBI agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) who makes it his
mission to bring Orlov to justice. In another movie, Valentine would be
the hero. Here, Orlov is the antihero, but Valentine still gets to be a
decent, upstanding guy, only out pursuing justice.
The movie is a travelogue of Orlov's sales
throughout the years. We follow him around the world and through the
decades. It's the kind of movie that doesn't live or die by a strong
script or good direction, but in the choice of actor to play the lead.
Cage succeeds in making Orlov a guy we can care about and want to watch
for two hours.
Grade: B
The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
Official
Site | IMDb
Based on actual events (although to what degree, I
have neither the time nor the desire to find out), The Exorcism Of Emily Rose gives us
two intercut movies, both of which are somewhat unsatisfying. The first
movie features Emily (Jennifer Carpenter) still alive. She is a happy,
God fearing teenager who wins a scholarship to attend college. Judging
by the campus, the institution must have had a great graduate program
in gloomy lighting. There, through no fault of her own, she gets
possessed by some big time, heavy duty demons. She returns home where
her health steadily fails. Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) is brought in.
His advice is to take her completely off her meds and attempt an
exorcism. After some scratching at the walls and some spooky
shenanigans out in the barn, she dies. In terms of the genre, it isn't
the best, never achieving anything spooky or suspenseful.
The second movie is set after Moore is charged in
Emily's death. The prosecutor (Campbell Scott) thinks there was nothing
supernatural going on, and produces a string of witnesses to prove his
point. Moore's attorney, Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) tries to prove
demonic possession, and comes up with her own witnesses. His argument
comes down to an interpretation of medical symptoms, hers comes down to
the question "what if?". All I know about trials I learned from movies
and television. Armed with that limited knowledge, this court room
material seems wrong. Frustratingly, an attorney will question a
witness, who will leave a gaping hole for the opposition to pounce
upon. You wait for the cross examination and for a real debate to
begin. Not only does the cross examination never come, the issues
raised are never spoken of again.
I'm not going to be nice and say that the effort was
there, and that one or the other stories needed to be developed better.
This is a movie that, to succeed, needed both stories to be strong.
Grade: C
Cry Wolf
Official Site | IMDb
Remember the fun games we all used to play in
college? Like that one where we all got together in the chapel, sat in
a circle, and tried to cast suspicion on one another. Remember that
night, heady on youthful exuberance, we came up with a plan to convince
the rest of the campus that a serial killer was on the loose? Good
times.
In this latest piece of horror aimed at the teenage
market, a group of late twenty-something prep schoolers prowl around
their privileged lives. The new guy Owen (Julian Morris) instantly
catches the eye of Dodger (Lindy Booth), the de facto group leader (de
facto as these movies never let the fat guy, the gay guy, the black
guy, or the Asian chick be the leader). After a disappointing session
of their "find the mole" game, they decide to up the stakes, linking
the disappearance of a local girl to a serial killer they made up.
Wouldn't it be great if a crappy movie featured a
prank that went exactly as designed, lasted exactly as long as
intended, and gave everyone a good laugh? I keep hoping. But wouldn't
you know it, the killer becomes real and starts hacking up the
participants in the prank. Is it a case of mystical hoodoo or
opportunism? One thing's for sure, Professor Walker (Jon Bon Jovi) is
made out to be the obvious suspect, so you know it's not him.
As the last reel (do films even have reels anymore?)
begins it becomes pretty obvious who the opportunist (oops) is. Instead
of letting us figure it out on our own, the movie ends over and over
and over again, reexplaining things for the benefit of those too slow
to get it the first time.
Grade: D
Just Like Heaven
Official Site | IMDb
Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon): Career driven doctor
involved in car accident.
David (Mark Ruffalo): Guy who sublets her apartment
and is harassed by her ghost.
Just Like Heaven:
Stock romantic comedy with adequate chemistry and requisite third act
problems where the whole thing could be solved by two characters having
a twenty second conversation. So average it's not worth the effort of
writing a review.
Grade: C
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride
Offical Site | IMDb
This film is about as unmistakably Tim Burton as
they come. The character design and the tone of the story line are
instantly recognizable if you've seen any of his previously animated
work. He doesn't really challenge himself to try anything new. Whether
that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your opinion of him, I
guess.
Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) is marrying up. His
merchant family is overjoyed to be marrying into a family with an
important name. The family with the important name is happy to be
marrying into a family that still has money. Happily for everybody, the
young couple seem to like each other. End of story - we all live
happily ever after. Except that on the way home, Victor accidentally
proposes to a corpse who accepts. He descends into the underworld, as
those in charge there see this as a binding marriage. He spends his
time trying to escape an inventively realized world.
Burton could have handled more story. When you take
the run time of 74 minutes and subtract the credits and unnecessary
songs, you're left with well under an hour. It probably would have been
just as good as an eight minute Fractured Fairy Tale.
Grade: B
Flightplan
Official Site | IMDb
Jodie Foster is an actress who lends instant
credibility to a project. She never seems to make movies just for the
paycheck. When you see her name in an ad, you can be assured that it
was a script that at the very least she thought was good.
Flightplan
is a locked room mystery, one of my favorite kinds of stories. Some
crime occurs in a completely sealed environment, and you have to figure
out who the bad guy is and how the bad guy did it. The locked room here
is an airplane in flight. Kyle (Jodie Foster) is coming home to New
York with her recently deceased husband's body. She falls asleep and
wakes up to find that her daughter is missing. No one believes that the
daughter got on board. It's up to the air marshal (Peter Sarsgaard) to
decide if she's crazy or not.
It's pretty unsatisfying all around. Kyle spends the
entire movie saying either "Where's my daughter?" or "I'm not crazy".
There's little movement toward a solution until the bad guy says
"Here's how I did it, and why". There's no build up of clues. The
conspiracy, when it comes to light, depended on a series of events to
happen exactly the right way so that the only was it makes any sense is
if you don't think about it.
Grade: C+