Vantage Point (Pete Travis, USA, 2008) March 14, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 2000s, Drama, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense, Crime , 4 commentsVantage Point Links: Trailer / Imdb
Directed by Pete Travis; screenplay by Berry Levy; starring Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Edgar Ramirez, Bruce McGill, Sigourney Weaver
Dennis Quaid has always been an actor I’ve admired. His emotion is right their in his face – in the jagged contours of rugged skin and eyes that can look straight through you. Since he lost the pretty-boy shine of his 1979 underappreciated classic Breaking Away, and a little later the rightly unappreciated Jaws 3, he’s been one of Hollywood’s most dependable assets. However, often the films themselves haven’t stood up to his understated stature. Indeed, if it wasn’t for his output in 2000 (Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Gregory Hoblit’s Back To The Future-like Frequency) many wouldn’t even know who he is. It’s a shame then, given high expectations from an energetic trailer and promise shown previously by director Pete Travis, that Vantage Point has to shelved under Patriotic Pap with all the other vacuous Hollywood actioners of the past few years.
Essentially, Vantage Point fails because it negates to recognise the inherent criticism of its narrative is also a criticism of itself. We are presented different viewpoints of the same event – beginning, not arbitrarily in a newsroom – evidentially showing that perspective can really affect opinion and knowledge of an event. That in itself isn’t particularly profound, but in terms of the media (especially the U.S networks such as Fox), it’s something worthy of investigation. However, director Pete Travis quickly forgets his opening ten minutes, finding more satisfaction in glossing over a clichéd and particularly convoluted plot with flashbacks to different characters. That’s where we find the route of the problem. Vantage Point may be unique for the first half-hour (it’ll suck you in with its quick pace and fast-editing) but the narrative extravagance wears off. You take the film at a stripped-down, bare-bones level, and it becomes an overblown movie, that is at times confusing and frequently makes little sense.
The plot concerns the American president’s visit to Spain for a public meeting regarding world terrorism. Unfortunately, or should that be ironically, the president gets shot twice from a sniper secreted in one of the nearby buildings. An explosion is heard and then another huge blast destroys the podium where the president was addressing the crowd. The initial pandemonium after the shooting is turned into utter devastation. We see this same sequence played out from several viewpoints – the GNN news team and their cameras (with Sigourney Weaver in charge), the secret agent guarding the president (Dennis Quaid), an onlooker and his video camera (Forest Whitaker), a Spanish police office (Eduardo Noriega), eventually getting to the president himself (William Hurt).
I didn’t have a problem with the repeated narrative but I did have issue with the way it was used. The first half hour is tense and exciting but ultimately unfulfilling. Travis hardly gives us a political thriller with any bite, so the next best thing would be at least a critical evaluation of the all-too powerful U.S. media. Maybe how their anchored news based on bias, political and commercial agendas affects mass audience, told through Hollywood action and suspense. But no, we get red-herrings, the usual patriotism, and the same kind mass audience manipulation seen in the likes of Fox news. When the film reverts back to the beginning for the fourth time you can’t help but will something else to happen, and although each character’s view gives us something new, it’s insignificant. That’s because the film’s biggest twist (twist being far too kind a word) is held back until halfway through when we shift further back in time to the president’s viewpoint.
In terms of twists – yes, it takes you by surprise – but it doesn’t treat the audience with any respect. If you’re going to show different viewpoints starting with your basic U.S. news network team with all their cameras and a reporter complaining of censorship, you’re setting precedence for the rest of the film. That being, given all the perspectives of an event, only then can you formulate a true meaning from it. Getting one perspective may be clouded in judgement, coloured by prejudice, and so on. The film doesn’t simply offer us all angles and allow us to generate opinion, it provides us information in a specific way, allowing plot details to come out and therefore placing the audience in the events as the director wants you to see and hear them. Okay, so aside from the manipulative hand of the director (it’s a film, we expect to go from A to B to C, from the first act to the second to the third), Travis holds back on the perhaps the most important perspective of all - that being the president himself. What we find out essentially – without giving it away – is that, yet again, human life can be easily discarded as long as someone stands in the way of a bullet heading the president’s way. This precarious tone didn’t sit right with me but it certainly wasn’t the only thing from the president’s viewpoint that failed. What you learn in literature is that red-herrings are fun but you shouldn’t hide something from the audience that the characters already know. I’d forgive this if (because we as an audience are inherently sided with the ‘good-guys’ we wouldn’t know what the ‘bad-guys’ know) the film didn’t use this as the most important aspect of the plot and indeed, the whole set-up for the film’s finale. However, it does, and therefore it’s one of the films major downfalls.
Perhaps the most telling reason why Vantage Point cannot be considered anything more than a letdown is the ending. Simply, the finale is too far-fetched. The audience is asked to suspend its disbelief for a film that has prided itself on documentary realism (Travis’ trademark handheld camerawork) and a sort of honest depiction of terrible, possibly real life events. First off, we have to accept that Dennis Quaid’s car can withstand a side-on crash and still manage to travel at speeds in pursuit of his target. We then have to accept that our culprit (I’m going to issue a spoiler warning right here, which will be in effect until the end of the paragraph!), having gone to all the trouble to set the whole assassination up (clearly proving he has little regard for human life), will swerve to miss a little girl standing in the road thus turning his own car over and thwarting his plans. In addition, Quaid’s car just so happens to crash fifty yards away, and in the midst of several smashed vehicles, he heads right for Bad Guy Number 1’s, opens the door and low and behold, case solved.
I think Pete Travis’ film’s ability to masquerade as something more than it really is, is the cause of my distaste. After all, as a piece of Hollywood fluff, it doesn’t do a lot wrong. It’s very quickly paced, doesn’t outstay its welcome with a running time around ninety minutes, and features some great character actors. Although I didn’t feel Forest Whitaker excelled, he’s still a wonderful talent, and there’s some lovely moments between him and a little girl before and after the shooting and explosions take place. Said Taghmaoui is also strong in his role but he doesn’t quite hit the sadistic unease of his Iraqi soldier in Three Kings, and that chilling speech about Michael Jackson’s face. Stand-out, as mentioned, has to be Dennis Quaid who’s like an old west gunslinger that has hung up his boots but come out of retirement for one last showdown. In the right role, which he definitely is here, all the lines on his face speak a thousand words and a hundred stories. In support, Sigourney Weaver plays the controlled TV news director who loses her rag when all hell breaks loose, but it’s a shame she isn’t more prominent.
Vantage Point is like cinematic plastic surgery. Essentially, director Pete Travis has given a face-lift to the convoluted, unoriginal Hollywood action film we’ve seen a hundred times, yet, forgot to patch up the cracks. It’s a calculated film with a cold message that will ultimately leave you unfulfilled.
Rating: 2 out of 5
© Copyright Daniel Stephens 2008
The Benchwarmers (Dennis Dugan, 2006, USA) March 2, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Dennis Dugan; screenplay by Allen Covert/Nick Swardson; starring Rob Schneider, David Spade, Jon Heder, Jon Lovitz, Craig Kilborn, Molly Sims
I’ve been very critical of director Dennis Dugan over the last few years. Who could blame me? He gave the world the awful Saving Silverman and followed it up with the spiteful racial slurs of National Security (a film that embodied bad taste). So, with trepidation I began to watch his 2006 film The Benchwarmers with little in the way of expectation. What I learned was with a good script and some energetic performances, Dugan can turn out a decent movie. In fact, this is the best film he’s made since Happy Gilmore.
The film concerns grown-up ‘nerds’ Gus (Scheider), Richie (Spade), and Clark (Heder) who, after witnessing a helpless kid getting bullied by the little league baseball team, decide to form the ‘Benchwarmers’. With the help of billionaire Mel (Lovitz) they start a baseball competition in order to beat the little league teams who won’t let the weirdos, geeks, and computer nerds play ball.
Essentially, and the main reason the film is so delightfully entertaining, is that it’s basically about adults beating the hell out of scrawny little teenagers. There’s a fabulous moment when Richie gets his first hit. Remembering the jibes the chubby, young catcher had given him, he rounds third base and decides, instead of going easy on the twelve year old, he’ll jump in the air and fly, feet first, straight into his head mask. The child, dazed and obviously confused, hits the floor semi-unconscious. Talk about pulling no punches. There’s a great undercurrent to the humour in that it utilises childish sarcasm and silly physical comedy in a way that mocks the stereotypes inherent in young culture. The film accepts that children can be very cruel to both other children and adults due to their less-informed and polarized, pop-culture dominated view on the world, and basically mocks them for it. It’s refreshing to see a film that sheds the innocence of childhood, and The Benchwarmers certainly reminds of that other cynical baseball movie The Bad News Bears with Walter Mathau.
The film also seems to be made by a group of people either, continuously high on something or, thanks to the catering crew, given a diet consisting of far too much sugar during production. You can only applaud the introduction of baseball legend Reggie Jackson with an old photo depicting a young Reggie with a huge afro, or Jon Lovitz’s mechanical butler who delivers any sandwich your heart desires from its plastic belly. You’ve also got to love the billionaire’s home which is decked out with Star Wars figures, and made to look like the dinner hall from the Starship Enterprise. When Lovitz turns up in Kit from Knightrider you know the film is celebrating the sort of nerd-culture that makes some unfortunate children the target for spiteful bullies.
You’ve also got to give the film credit for the performances, especially Jon Heder (from Napoleon Dynamite fame) who is basically a twelve year old in a twenty year old body. He is the highlight of the movie with some wonderfully sardonic asides. Amongst many excellent moments there’s a great scene when Heder, whose favourite meal is macaroni, asks what steroids are, and gets the reply that it makes your ‘Pee Pee’ smaller. Heder suddenly has a revelation and says, ‘there must be steroids in macaroni!’.
The Benchwarmers is a delightful comedy that, while the kids laugh at the insane nature of it all, adults will be chuckling in the background thinking they can finally get their own back on the pesky little tearaways. Dugan allows the film to get preachy towards the end but it moves along at quite pace, clocking in at under eighty minutes, so hardly outstays its welcome. It’s refreshing, crazy at times, cynical throughout, and sweet when it needs to be, but above all else, it’s one funny movie.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Death Sentence (James Wan, 2007, USA) February 22, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 2000s, Drama, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense, Crime , 1 comment so farDirected by James Wan; written by Ian Jeffers; starring Kevin Bacon, Kelly Preston, Garrett Hedlund, Staurt Lafferty, John Goodman
Death Sentence TRAILER: CLICK HERE
It you want to see a movie that so perfectly encapsulates deux ex machina look no further than James Wan’s Death Sentence. It’s an unoriginal piece of filmmaking that hinges on one of the biggest horror clichés in the book. It’s a shame because director Wan definitely has an eye for action and suspense. Indeed, Death Sentence (about a man driven to revenge after his son is murdered and his family terrorised by a urban gang) might be messy but it’s taut and intriguing when Wan concentrates on his action sequences. It isn’t surprising since this is the writer-director who brought us the brilliant Saw. What is rather discouraging is the fact his blood-splattered revenge movie lacks Saw’s unique ability to stay one step ahead of the discerning horror fan and viewer. The grander scale of Death Sentence seems to limit the effectiveness of Wan’s directorial capabilities proving that bigger budgets and bigger stars hinder the talents of those once forced to utilize the ‘reigned-in’ limitations of low-budget independent cinema. When Wan attempts to be subtle in Death Sentence we find the film digress to colourless melodrama and soap-opera styling.
It’s also a shame that although the film does have a few twists they can’t help the fact it’s all in the wake of better cinematic excursions. As a take on I Spit On Your Grave, Death Sentence doesn’t have the political or socialistic undertones, while it doesn’t hold a candle to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Wan is a long way from creating the characterisation and tone of something like Deliverance, while his film lacks the vitality and overpowering tension of Dead Man’s Shoes. The film also lacks a strong central performance largely because Bacon’s Hume isn’t as well-written as say William Foster who was so brilliantly embodied by Micheal Douglas in Falling Down. Yet, the film begs and borrows from the more assured hands that feed it, and there is no more damaging criticism than the obvious truth – we’ve seen much better many times before.
Perhaps Wan’s main point here is how a man (in this case Kevin Bacon’s Mike Hume) degenerates from a loving father to a bloodied, shaven-headed killer. This is without a doubt the film’s most interesting aspect but it’s also the most poorly handled. It goes back to the beginning of the movie when the murder of his son takes place. They stop for petrol at a filling station because, quite out of the blue, Hume runs out of the stuff just after picking up his son from a hockey match. Immediately, I switched off. I couldn’t believe the film hinged on the most over-used cliché in horror film and literature. This sets precedence the film never gets over. Hume’s degeneration is based solely on unbelievable, poorly executed plot points and fake aesthetics. Are we really to believe shaving your head makes you immune to pain and a marksman with a shotgun? The film’s worst scene comes when – after buying what can only be called ‘a shit-load of guns’ – Bacon uses a how-to manual to learn how to use, fire, load and reload the weapons. He clearly struggles as he drops bullets and can’t load them properly. Suddenly, seconds later, after shaving his head and turning a solemn, bemused facial expression into stone-faced anger, he’s John J. Rambo. It’s the worst way to use a montage sequence and Wan does it clearly believing his audience are pre-schoolers (a fatal mistake since such young children wouldn’t even be allowed into the theatre to watch the movie).
As an action film it’s better than average – at times, taut and engaging. But as a piece of cinema that looks at one man’s destruction and the fall of patriarchal society, it’s soap-opera with Hollywood bells and whistles.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005, UK) February 20, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 2000s, Drama, Film reviews, Romance, Crime , 2 commentsWritten and directed by Woody Allen; starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Brian Cox, Emily Mortimer
Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Chris Wilton graces the screen in Woody Allen’s Match Point with the hideous manifestation of greed and self-loathing. At times it’s like watching the over-privileged, middle-classes spitting on poor-peasant viewers who happened, accidentally and clearly unfortunately, to sit within saliva-propelling distance. Yet, underneath the money and comfortable lifestyles, there’s a part of you who wants to be Chris Wilton. Here’s a guy, as distasteful as they come, who has it all, wants more and gets it, and avoids the consequences of his actions. Isn’t there something in that that we all want? It harks back to Allen’s interest in lust and infatuation – the fine line between it and love – and its relationship with good luck and bad luck. Someone can lust about having several sexual partners and the family life at home at the same time, but its destructiveness can define that line between what you really care about and what you simply obsess after through jealousy and greed-fueled self-fulfillment. But, isn’t the real thrill about this, and perhaps Allen’s point by the end: are you lucky enough to get away with it?
I’ve got to give Woody Allen credit for trying something outside his comfort zone – both theatrically and personally. Match Point sees the director play with genre convention and manufacture a few more plot surprises than we usually see from him, while filming the movie on-location in London, away from his native America and his cherished New York city. In retrospect, anybody new to the talented writer-director who brought the world the wonderful Manhattan and Annie Hall might not know just how diverse Allen’s work is. Indeed, anybody who remembers his musical Everyone Says I Love You, his slapstick heroics of Sleeper, or whimsical fantasy of The Purple Rose Of Cairo, might think Match Point is straight-forward drama. But, Allen’s London-based film is unique in its thematic direction. Here, unlike the others where after the first ten minutes the audience knew Allen’s basic tone, Match Point flicks a switch halfway through turning its neurotic flirtations and jealous-lusting into dark-drama hinged on one man’s basic need to be everything to everyone all the time.
I’d liken it to 2004’s Closer - both in terms of the London locale and themes of infatuation and obsession – but, just like Mike Nichol’s film, we’re provided characters so distasteful and self-absorbed it becomes difficult to sympathise with them. While Match Point throws its audience for a loop in the last twenty minutes, the second half of the film feels like a different movie. The first half is much too slowly paced (Allen’s English dialogue having its basis on stereotype doesn’t help), and while it comes together more in the final twenty minutes, you’re desperately trying to remember what happened in the hour you subconsciously switched off. The ending also feels contrived and it’s sudden jump in pace is distracting in comparison with the laboured, pedestrian first act.
Allen is restrained throughout and while his idea of neurotic self-loathing and a passion for those things seemingly beyond reach clearly comes from experience and deep-rooted empathy, his film lacks the love it needed to temper the outward lusting. Wilton’s sexual attraction to the beautiful Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson) is the hot and sweaty counterpoint to the cold and mechanical life he has with his wife. But, Allen doesn’t fully establish Wilton’s ability to love and this affects the impact of the finale.
Match Point is an interesting, if infuriating, Woody Allen film. Its uneven tone and humourless, unlikable characters make it one of his less assured efforts.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007, USA) September 26, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Romance , add a commentDir. D.J. Caruso; screenplay by Christopher B. Landon, Carl Ellsworth; starring Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse
If the best thing about Disturbia is how it updates the age-old story of the mysterious next-door neighbour for a 21st century audience groomed on mobile phones, Ipods, and online gaming, we’re clutching at straws. I’m talking about the sort of straws Tom Hanks couldn’t get his hands on in The ‘Burbs (there was no following people around taking pictures on phones, or getting mini-DV footage of the culprit doing nasty deeds). Yet he, and the film, was better for it. Indeed, dress-up any bad movie in all the bells and whistles you can find from jump cuts to scantily-clad young actresses to pop culture references and you’re still left with a bad, uninspired cinematic experience.
Director D. J. Caruso has potted around the film industry as a producer and second unit director on many throwaway Hollywood movies of the past few years. His notable work on the poor sequel to Stakeout and the mildly entertaining Drop Zone provide clues of his inspiration when at the helm, but it’s his own films that give a clear indication why Disturbia is just another notch on his C.V. that fails to succeed. One of the major problems I had with the movie was how it appeared to be two different films pieced together at around the forty minute mark. You can stick half an apple and half an orange together and call it original but what you really have is a rather odd looking fruit salad. When he makes it work in his 2002 thriller The Salton Sea it’s intriguing and entertaining, but when it doesn’t (Taking Lives didn’t know whether it was Seven or a feature episode of The X Files, and likewise Two For The Money tried to be too many things and was let down by a poor third act) it’s an unfortunate but glaring example of a director trying to be better than he is.
In Disturbia it’s unclear whether Caruso wants to play on suburban culture (the sort of American dream paranoia characterised by 1950s television, and youth culture and the breakdown of the family unit in seventies movies by Spielberg and Lucas) or indeed homage the techniques and style of Hitchcock’s suspense thrillers. Certainly, there’s obvious reference to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Spielberg/Lucas protégé Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath, but Disturbia fails to live up to its inspirations. Because the film is so derivative it becomes far too predictable and loses any suspense the director attempts to build in the final third. It’s far too easy to spot what could be termed the ‘binocular shock reveal’, where a long lens is used to track around a position in space – for example empty windows in an apartment block or house – and suddenly someone or something appears in full view. It’s even easier to spot ‘whodunnit’ by unoriginal red-herrings that, because of their overuse, act as giant arrows pointing directly at those culpable.
Yet, perhaps the worse thing is that it takes forever for the film to get going. We’re forced to watch American Pie without the jokes for forty minutes as, after a good set-up, the plot meanders around Kale Brecht’s electronically monitored house arrest, his frustrating attempts to occupy himself (I suppose if this was American Pie he’d be masturbating furiously, but Caruso has him downloading music, playing online gaming, and testing the range of the electronic tag strapped to his ankle), and spying on the neighbours. It could have been so much fun with a bit of mystery and some oddball characters but Caruso forgets about plot development or the themes of loss established in the opening sequence, deciding to have Brecht vie for the attentions of the beautiful girl next door. When the characters eventually decide that something nasty is going on and investigate, the audience has already been lost. It all untangles so quickly you don’t have a chance to take it in, and there’s very little to care about. Caruso makes the cardinal sin of creating people who you can sympathise with (and therefore don’t want to see come to any harm) but fails to ever put them in a situation where you genuinely believe they are in danger. Even when the annoying best friend Ronnie seems to be a goner, Caruso has Brecht casually playing tonsil tennis with Ashley Carlson (Sarah Roemer). Is he not upset about losing his friend? Of course he isn’t because Ronnie is still alive and kicking, making the supposedly surprising reveal of Ronnie’s reappearance a complete failure.
Essentially, D. J. Caruso’s film wants to be part Rear Window, part The ‘Burbs, part What Lies Beneath, but ends up like an unfunny version of American Pie meets The Girl Next Door with a murder-mystery lumped on the end. Disturbia’s crowded collection of influences, its director who tries to do more than his limited talent allows, and its untidy, predictable script, make for a viewing that’s as uneasy as the movie title would suggest. And sadly, that’s not a complement.
Rating: 1 out of 5
R.V. (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2006, USA) June 1, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , add a commentDir. Barry Sonnenfeld; screenplay by Geoff Rodkey; starring Robin Williams, JoJo, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth
I’m not saying my sister has bad taste in films, I’m just saying our tastes differ, and when she recommended Robin Williams’ 2006 film R.V. to me, I had some reservations. I had seen the trailer and liked what I’d seen but thought surely it was a low-grade National Lampoon’s Vacation with childish humour that didn’t equate very well with an adult audience. After watching it, in many respects I was right, but Sonnenfeld is a director who for me personally, makes three bad films to every good one, and while R.V. might be bereft of the wry sarcasm and ensemble selection of characters from Harold Ramis’ National Lampoon’s Vacaton, it maintains the fish-out-of-water histrionics and innocent, familial values that made the aforementioned film so endearing. R.V. isn’t a great film, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored by anyone wanting ninety minutes of escapist fun. Yes, it’s aimed at young teens, and it’s slot on Sunday afternoon television is already assured, but Robin Williams has a ball with his character (getting back into comedy after several dramatic roles), and while the humour might not be to everyone’s liking (indeed, comedy can be such a fickle genre to review), I found myself getting caught up in the physical eccentricities of it all and really warming to it.
The film reminded me of a few eighties movies, perhaps the reason I liked it so much. It has an obvious homage to Richard Donner’s The Goonies when the family of characters find themselves falling down a rain-soaked hill that looks uncannily like a waterslide. There’s a little bit of Parenthood in there, and most certainly National Lampoon’s Vacation. Indeed, the film takes on the very same ideals, which make it interesting for parents who watch it with their kids. The film begins with Robin Williams’ character Bob Munro telling his very young daughter that they will be the best of friends forever. We then cut to several years later when the daughter is a rebellious fifteen year old who not ‘hates’ her father. Munro finds himself being alienated from his family – he works too much and doesn’t get to spend time with his wife, while his son struggles to come to terms with is small stature, and his daughter desperately seeks individualism. Munro himself can’t really understand where it all went wrong. He started a family and, effectively, in working hard to support it, has become a bit-part player. This sets up the vacation, which Munro uses as a ruse to get to a business meeting he doesn’t want to tell his wife about. Throughout the journey, Munro begins to bond with his family and learn about himself, especially the value of a family unit.
You could easily say it’s pretty rudimentary storytelling, almost contrived, and it is to a certain degree, but Sonnenfeld keeps the pace up and never allows the film’s message to become preachy. Where it falls down is in the characters beyond Munro, who are little more than caricatures. His wife is dutiful but wants the exuberance of their early relationship to come back, his son and daughter are both rebellious but all they really need is some tender loving care from their father; it’s uninspired and seriously hampers the film on multiple viewings. But what makes the film so watchable is Williams, who energises the movie with his great physical humour, his love of comedy excreting from every pore.
R.V. is enjoyable in a innocent, childlike, Sunday-dinner-round-the-table, type of way. If nothing else, it’ll keep the kids happy for a couple of hours.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (Liam Lynch, 2006, USA) May 29, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , 2 commentsDir. Liam Lynch; screenplay by Jack Black & Kyle Gass; starring Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Jason Reed, Ronnie James Dio, Tim Robbins, Dave Grohl, Ben Stiller
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny is a film aimed primarily at their fans. It’s also targeted, unfortunately, at those who enjoyed This Is Spinal Tap, the Beatles in Yellow Submarine, rock opus Tommy, or Eric Idle in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. But beyond its novelty, it pales in comparison.
At times, the film seems more concerned conforming to rock and roll conventions like the psychedelic hallucinations brought on by a rampant overindulgence with acid that made Yellow Submarine so unique but ultimately completely rubbish. The Beatles movie might have been a strange affair with little merit, but at least it was honest. The Pick of Destiny wants to be the Yellow Submarine of the MTV-generation, it wants to celebrate music like Tommy, and it desperately wants to be as funny as This Is Spinal Tap, but it’s nothing more than a poorly-scripted set of sketches (Black and Gass are much more suited to their television work and comedy sketches seen on The Complete Masterworks).
Jack Black tries his level best to make it work, and has some amusing moments, but he’s not helped by Kyle Gass who reminds me of a middle-aged man at a wedding party trying to score with the twenty year old bridesmaids. Gass is a master of the guitar but he’s a terrible actor.
Apart from a beautiful transition for the opening credits when electric guitar-driven music is seamlessly dissolved into an orchestral score (this is right about the time when you’ve still got high hopes for the film), it’s incoherent, messy, and seriously lacking in laughs. I’m both a fan of Tenacious D and Jack Black, but this isn’t a celebration of rock n roll, it’s a feature-length promotion for a sub-par rock album that won’t sell very well.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006, USA) May 22, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense, Sci-fi/Fantasy, Crime , 6 commentsDir. Tony Scott; screenplay by Bill Marsilii, Terry Rossio; starring Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Bruce Greenwood
As the closing credits begin at the end of Déjà Vu, a title appears commemorating the people of New Orleans for their ‘strength and enduring spirit.’ Clearly, the film alludes to those who lost their lives, and the many that tried to save life, after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Yet, the film has more close ties to the unnatural disaster that appeared in New York on the 11th of September 2001, and that eternal question of ‘what if’. What if you could go back in time and stop those planes from taking off? The film shares the sentiments of other time travel movies such as Back To The Future, and more recently, Frequency and Timecop, but at its heart, it’s a quintessential American hero movie. It’s about facing adversity and challenging all the one holds sacred.
After a bomb explodes on a boat in New Orleans, ATF agent Doug Carlin (Washington) begins to investigate, finding some unexplainable ties between himself and one of the female victims. When he learns that she was found dead an hour before the explosion he begins to question the line of enquiry and the FBI invite him to help with their enquiries. He’s introduced to a new piece of technology that allows its viewers to see events as they occurred four and a half days prior. However, they can’t pause or rewind the footage and they can only view events four and a half days before the present day. Therefore, they have to wait until they can watch the footage of the exploding boat. Their job in the mean time is to decide where to look on the boat, and who to look for, as they only get one chance to get it right. But when Carlin realises they can influence the events in the past, stopping the tragedy before it happens becomes his prime objective.
There’s was a moment around the fifty minute mark where I felt the film was being far too complicated for its own good. Scott takes the influences of big brother, CCTV, and government spy satellites one step further from his own 1998 film Enemy Of The State. Here he depicts a way of seeing into the past and uses very specific scientific details to tell us just exactly how it works. However, the threat of total invasion of privacy is quite apparent in Enemy Of The State, the way the government watches the world is believable and based on fact. Déjà Vu bends the rules slightly, taking fact and adding quite a lot of fiction. Certainly when the film really gets going, it’s a roller-coaster of adventurism, explosions, bad guys, and car chases, but Scott never really sets his audience up for the fantasy aspect of his story. Suddenly we are asked to stretch are imagination from a hard-nosed police investigation (with the psychological angle of a cop seemingly breaking down) and a mysterious terrorist threat, to a time-travel fantasy about folding the space-time continuum, Einstein-Rosen bridges, worm holes, Wheeler Boundaries, and EM pulses. When Carlin asks, ‘What if there’s more than physics’, I’m pleading there isn’t. The problem is that it comes out of nowhere, and while it is a twist in the tale, the surprise element is extinguished my confusing science and the attempt to fuse reality with unreality. It’s fundamental storytelling – take for example, Jurassic Park which, setting aside all the marketing campaigns, began by showing us a caged beast attacking game keepers. It set-up what was to come. In Back To The Future, Robert Zemeckis filled the early part of the movie with ‘time’ metaphors, and in Frequency we are introduced to the mystical qualities of the Aurora Borealis and hearing old radio broadcasts. In Déjà Vu, Scott throws in a few red-herrings (the film’s title is a clue, as is Carlin finding a voice recording left by himself, finger prints in a building he never knowingly went to, and a message seemingly addressed to himself) but doesn’t completely set-up the big, time-traveling jolt to the system, and even then, behind all the science, he can’t hide the odd plot hole. While you could argue the plot intricacies make for a more fulfilling second viewing, and in effect, directly set-up what is to come, the film simply does not prepare the viewer for its change of direction. Essentially, I wasn’t ready to suspend my disbelief so suddenly, and it takes some time for everything to position itself back into place.
However, when the movie settles back down, and you take on-board that essentially the film is about influencing events that happened four and half days ago in order to prevent tragedies in the future, there’s enough high-octane thrills to make you forget about any problems you might have with the film’s plot logic. Indeed, while I have reservations about the middle part of the film, the first fifty minutes is intriguing, while the last half hour is thrillingly eventful. A lot of the thanks have to go to Denzel Washington who provides another powerhouse performance, and beautifully grounds the fantastical with a very raw representation of a man desperate to save life.
Déjà Vu might not be as polished as Scott’s Enemy Of The State, or as well-orchestrated as the director’s other collaboration with Washington on Man On Fire, but it’s frequently more enjoyable than Spy Game and Domino. It is at times a little over-complicated with a messy plot but it’s an entertaining action movie that never outstays its welcome.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Jason X (James Isaac, 2001, USA) May 20, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 1 comment so farDir. James Isaac; screenplay by Todd Farmer; starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Chuck Campbell
The beauty to watching a film you have zero expectations of is that when it delivers, in the smallest, almost insignificant way, it can be a thrilling event. Jason X might be yet another addition in the Friday The 13th franchise but its way better than some of the awful later sequels. You can tell it’s post-Scream with its self-reflexive attitudes but unlike many of the slasher films that appeared after 1997, director Isaac puts most of his effort into playful use of the character and to not taking itself too seriously. The film is silly and at times quite funny, but it doesn’t insult its audience by trying to be something that it’s not. Isaac knows his limitations and runs with what he’s got. It makes for a frequently enjoyable entry in the series.
After the federal government fail to kill Jason through various executions including hanging and electrocution, they decide, because of his ability to regenerate dead tissue (oh, that’s how he keeps coming back to life is it!) that he needs to be experimented on. However, he escapes when they try to move him to a new facility and Rowan (Lexa Doig), a government official sent to make sure he stays locked up, gets killed trying to get Jason in the cryogenic freezer. Four-hundred years later, a group of students and their teachers, find the perfectly preserved bodies of both Jason and Rowan. Taking the bodies back to their spaceship, they manage to revive Rowan, but by the time she’s told them about Jason’s destructive capabilities, it’s too late and the killer is running a deadly rampage aboard the ship.
It would be foolish of me to continue singing the praises of Jason X without clarifying that it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good movie. The production design is awful, and the plot is a cobbled together mismatch of all the Alien movies. In fact, you can make up the whole story from each of the Alien films. For instance, scientists find the cryogenically preserved body of a woman who defeated an unstoppable killer (the beginning of James Cameron’s Aliens), and then bring her and the killer aboard their spaceship which docks with a larger mother ship (the set-up in Ridley Scott’s Alien). We then see the scientists and students not heeding Rowan’s warning about Jason (David Fincher’s Alien 3), before the unscrupulous Professor Lowe decides he can use Jason for his own monetary gain (a plot thread that runs through Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection). There’s also the whole idea that Jason can be used for military purposes which is a prominent idea that features in all the Alien movies, and when Jason does start to reek havoc onboard the spaceship we see a group of gun-toting mercenaries trying to bring him down (seen also in Jeunet’s film, as well as Cameron’s first sequel).
Yet, the film works because it’s a crazy confectionary of outlandish ideas hinged on a tried and trusted plot, and generic conventions. As a slasher film it’s a rather turgid and hardly frightening experience, but the playful use of Jason as an entity certainly makes it a worthwhile viewing for the post-Scream generation. For fans of the original film, it rather makes a mockery of the heritage with Jason, just like Freddy Krueger and Micheal Myers, becoming a comic freak show that a paying public can throw things at. But, it’s an enjoyable mishmash of teen slasher cliché and science-fiction intrigue. The whole last twenty minutes has to be seen to be believed.
Rating: 2 our of 5
The Friday the 13th Series so far:
Friday The 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980, USA) - The raw and bloody original was a lot less influential than people think. It was massively inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween and not nearly as good. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part II (Steve Miner, 1981, USA) - The second film is the first where Jason actually is the killer. It’s more enjoyable than the original film but far too similar. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part III (Steve Miner, 1982, USA) - It’s exactly the same film as the previous two, with the unfortunate bonus of 3-D. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - The Final Chapter (Part IV) (Joseph Zito, 1984, USA) - The film stars a young Corey Feldman who has to come to his older sister’s aid when Jason takes a fancy to her. This is silly fun and follows a very similar path to the films that proceeded it. However, it’s a better film than Part III and the most enjoyable of the sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - A New Beginning (Part V) (Danny Steinmann, 1985, USA) - The best sequel is followed by the worst. A plotless mess and the worst Jason Voorhees film in the franchise. The fifth film tries to reignite the series after Jason is seemingly killed for good, but it fails to do a good job, simply stringing together bloody deaths for the sake of showing off the latest prosthetic and make-up effects. Waste of time. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Lives: Friday The 13th Part IV (Tom McLoughlin, 1986, USA) - A coherent plot helps Part IV be one of the better sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (John Buechler, 1988, USA) - A nice premise that sees a sort of Carrie V Jason battle is sadly under-developed. However, it makes for some fun sequences and a little inventiveness to what had, by this time, become a rather dull retread of the same plot line. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Rob Heddon, 1989, USA) - A terrible mess that lacks any sort of plot. There’s some nice special-effects towards the end but you’d have fallen asleep by the time you get to them. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Adam Marcus, 1993, USA) - Jason gets killed at the beginning which is about the only decent bit of the movie. Rating: 1 out of 5
Freddy Versus Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003, USA) - A gimmicky piece of rubbish seeing Freddy Krueger battling Jason Voorhees. On paper it seems like a crowd-pleaser but it’s bad filmmaking 101, and isn’t as fun as Jason X. Rating: 1 out of 5
Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005, USA) May 18, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 6 commentsDir. Andrzej Bartkowiak; screenplay by Dave Callahan & Wesley Strick; starring The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Ben Daniels
In one of the great self-reflexive moments that Kevin Smith does so well, Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, ‘you gotta do a safe picture, then you can do an art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the paycheck picture because your friend says you owe him.’ It’s a great little moment in a great little movie, and fittingly, describes the sentiments of Rosamund Pike who turns up in Doom surely because she either has bills to pay or she owes a friend. The Libertine, Pride And Prejudice, and the Devil You Know actress surely knew what a mess she was getting herself into when she read Callahan and Strick’s script. I’ll just backtrack for a second – did I just say it took two people to write this awful film – I think I did.
Essentially, Doom is like a high-budget TV movie with nothing resembling conflict, characterisation, or originality. Any videogame conversion to the big-screen can be forgiven for a lack of original material but the film struggles to find any conflict within its rocket-scientist mumbo-jumbo and over-complicated plotting. For a film that concerns a group of combat marines going into battle (after a distant planet issues a distress call), you’d expect a certain amount of tension, but director Bartkowiak seems either unable or unwilling. There’s a silly moment when The Rock tells his marines it’s ‘game time’ as they exit a helicopter to go into a building. The marines check the area for danger as an elevator opens with the audience half expecting something nasty to appear. Alas, it doesn’t and the men enter the elevator. Danger must surely be close? Not exactly, as the marines find their floor, we learn they’ve entered a building that acts, much like an airport, and transports them to the planet that needs their assistance. Essentially, they’re at a futuristic airport. So, we wonder, why all the gun-ready, macho-posturing as they first got into the elevator, because there was no danger whatsoever. Retrospectively, it’s laughable, as you could see the Wayans brothers or the Zucker’s using such a gag as parody, not serious, supposedly tension-building drama. In fact, I countered at least three false starts for The Rock and his gang of idiots before they face any real danger. By then, I’d switched off and started self-palm reading, something that was difficult because it was far too dark to do it properly, and secondly, I have absolutely no idea how to palm read.
Fundamentally, Doom is a complete failure because it doesn’t do the one thing it should. That is, to offer exciting and dramatic action, underscored by a relevant and overpowering threat. You think about the films it wants to be - Aliens and Predator - and they both had what was required in abundance. In Aliens, even before the marines face any direct threat, tension is created because they go to a planet they and the audience know could be populated by evil, unstoppable monsters. The fact that when they initially get there, everyone on the planet has disappeared, heightens this level of suspense (what happened? Why? Where are all the people?). The soldiers are faced with desolate corridors, artificial lighting beginning to fade, and the obvious signs of struggle, a last stand. Likewise, in Predator, when the soldiers find another slain group of marines, they begin to question what exactly they are up against. Can they defeat it, where another group of soldiers failed? Both these scenes appear well before any proper combat and yet the audience is left excited in anticipation. Doom is far too confused in its build-up, pedestrian-paced, and makes the cardinal sin of paying homage to films far better than itself.
Perhaps, the film’s main problem is Bartkowiak, a cinematographer-turned-director, whose credits at the helm include Romeo Must Die and the Steven Seagal film Exit Wounds. He paints Doom in stylish blacks and greys, with futuristic colour flourishes, and doesn’t allow himself to show too much of the excellent production design, wisely keeping it in shadow. Yet, his control of off-screen space is less refined. He struggles to focus our attention as the messy plot that features caricature, paper-thin characters has them scattering all over the place. Bartkowiak doesn’t know whether to stick or twist, and we’re left with a languid pace that meanders on a very confused course. He draws too much on what other filmmakers have done before, and can’t overcome the clichéd script with its uninventive plot and awful dialogue. The film is also devoid of humour, something that has certainly helped other videogame and especially comic book adaptations.
Maybe I went into the film with higher expectations than I should have had. I didn’t expect an especially great action film, but I did expect a sense of adventure. When Bartkowiak goes to Doom-vision (filming the shot in much the same way as the game is played in first person perspective) I felt it was inspired. At the very least it celebrated the film’s roots, and gave the videogame fans something intrinsic to enjoy. It was also a very good piece of filmmaking (but arrives far too late in the movie), probably attributed to Bartkowiak’s cinematographic background, as he uses fast-paced edits and a claustrophobic mise-en-scene to place the audience directly into the action with danger all around. Yet, unfortunately, it’s one bright spot in a great expanse of humourless, tensionless black. Doom is uninspired, big-budget Hollywood. Where have we heard that before?
Rating: 1 out of 5