The Big Whatsit

At some point, I would like to get around to talking about my favourite films of the last twelve months (I really must try and see Atonement first, which I reckon will be this year’s official ‘worthy’ movie). Until then, how about a look at the dreck, the flicks that made me sigh with disappointment about millions spent on so little return?

Naturally, articles like these focus on the latest instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean, but in all honesty I quite liked At World’s End. Maybe my underwhelming reaction to Dead Man’s Chest left me not expecting much, and therefore gave me the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised, but I found its humour to be good natured, and the return of Geoffrey Rush in the role of Barbossa turned out to be a real bonus. It wasn’t brilliant, of course. The whole story involving Calypso didn’t make much sense, but for once Depp’s lampoonery didn’t become too clogging, and the scene where the ship blows up (without letting on who’s it was, and who was on it at the time) was one of the year’s most well staged set pieces. Sadly for me, since mine son got his hands on the DVD, we’ve had to watch it on an almost continuous loop, meaning I can quote chunks of its ridiculous dialogue verbatim.

Nor does this scurrilous assortment contain titles that I thought might be fairly crap to start off with - stand up and take a bow The Invasion, Evan Almighty and Saw Far Too Many. The idea of a list of disappointments means the only inclusions can be films I thought might turn out to be all right, and weren’t. An obvious starting point is The Simpsons Movie, which wasn’t bad, but appeared to be weighed down by too many years of anticipation to live up to its expectations. TSM was funny, even riotous in places, but it played exactly like all it could ever really be - an extended version of a television episode, and by now we expected more. What exactly the ‘more’ is remains elusive. Had the makers tinkered with their formula to produce something that could truly stand out from the series, we would no doubt have been crying about how far America’s first family had strayed from what made it great. A no-win situation, in other words, and in that light the resulting motion picture probably pitched itself about right. What a pity that it arrived around fifteen years after a movie could have done anything that’s fresh. Funnily enough, its best moments weren’t when it messed about with the idea of the Simpsons being on the big screen, but rather when it reverted to what the series always did best - showing the family at home and at play i.e. the first half hour, before the dome arrives. I loved all the bits where Homer was arsing around with his pig, even if they reminded me of one of my favourite episodes too much (the one with Mr Pinchy, Homer’s pet lobster), and as with any other regular viewer, I suspect it was all a bit bemusing as the events on screen bore little difference to what we get several times a day on the TV. There wasn’t enough Mr Burns either, but it would have been impossible to cover everyone’s favourite supporting characters.

2007 brought with it the summer of the threequel, and two appear in this list, beginning with Spider-Man 3 (my review), which set awfully high standards for itself that the latest instalment couldn’t maintain. The trouble is that Peter Parker’s third outing isn’t a terrible movie. There are lots of good things to say about it, including its magnificent effects work and the intentionally hilarious bits where Pete turns evil… and emo! But it was all done so far by the numbers, with our webslinger lurching from superhero crisis to domestic problems in a kind of tiresome build-up of turmoil. I’m afraid that by the end, I couldn’t care less whether he sorted it out with Mary Jane. Poor Kirsten Dunst had next to nothing to work with, found herself speaking tedious lines relating to shoehorned in plot developments that made her character look petty and peevish, until the inevitable climax that found her - again, again, again - in peril. Most girls would have given up years ago. What was the point of Gwen Stacy? Was Aunt May present for any reason other than to deliver the occasional wise word? Why didn’t Harry get over it? His dad was clearly a wrong ‘un, yet he was willing to give up almost everything to pursue Spider-Man until his butler popped up at the optimum narrative moment to tell him his cause was all wrong. How much heartache could have been averted had he just done this sooner? The overall impression I got was a of a film where the characters didn’t act like people at all but merely as pawns, slaves to an overtly complex and definitely too long plot that required them to say and do things in order to shuffle things on a little. Considering this movie was written and directed by Sam Raimi, better was expected.

Spidey was an entertainment tour de force next to Shrek the Third (my review), a horrible bit of business that took fun characters and a treasure trove of plotting possibilities and somehow turned out to be an unfunny, awful mess. Saddled with a stack of people and narrative strands from the first two chapters, the writers of St3 apparently couldn’t decide what to do with them, and came up with a yarn that produced no sense of development. The film has the barest excuse for a story, and instead exists to splice in any number of cheap sight gags and unfunny sitcom moments. Take, for instance, the characters of Donkey and Puss in Boots, the scene-stealers from Episodes One and Two respectively. Criminally underused here, the movie contrives to switch their personalities (I can’t remember how, but it doesn’t matter), so that the Donkey is inside Puss in Boots, and vice versa. This had the potential to be witty, but instead nothing happened, the moment wasted as we were whisked from their predicament to something else. How they managed to waste the obvious voice talents of Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas is beyond me, yet somehow they did. That aside, the film continues to satirise other movies, with diminishing returns (surely comedy has moved on from movie parodies, especially after the people behind Epic/Date/Scary Movie ploughed that furrow so frequently and recklessly), and churn out endless bawdy jokes that will mean nothing to younger audiences. You deserve more. Pixar Studios might not always be perfect, but Ratatouille had enough class and charm to leave this shambles standing.

In our house, we’re enough in thrall to freak weather conditions to catch up with Flood, a sort of rip-off of The Day after Tomorrow that swaps ice for water, and moves the action from New York to that London. Our bad. What a terrible piece of hokum this was, featuring special effects that made Doctor Who at its most CGI look like a Weta production, unconvincing performances, and a story that held precious little human interest. This had the feel of one of those BBC drama documentaries (like the one about the super-volcano under Yellowstone Park), and had it been shown on television with some scientific rationale backing up the on-screen events, it might have been more palatable. Instead, the genuinely talented cast (Robert Carlyle, Tom Courtenay, Joanne Whalley-not-Kilmer) talk a kind of impervious techno-babble about flood effects whilst London is ripped apart by CGI water surges. At one point, we suddenly learn that Whalley’s character has two girls who might be trapped somewhere in the city. It’s almost as if, having completed the script, the writers realised there wasn’t enough human drama for the characters to deal with so hurriedly tagged on a nonsensical little storyline in which a mother is worried about her kids. Oh, then she learns on the phone that they’re safe, and everything’s all right again. Huh? Elsewhere, the budget was clearly blown on bad effects, as Flood contains one of the direr scores of the year (a bit like The Crystal Maze - no, really), and the whole thing ends abruptly, as though the producers pulled the plug before viewers could be made to sit through any more. They were doing us a favour. The Day after Tomorrow might not have been anyone’s idea of a superb work of art, but somehow Emmerich looks like Bergman next to this.

But it wasn’t the worst. My ire was directed most firmly against Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Shekhar Kapur’s daft follow-up to 1998’s Elizabeth. The previous movie happens to be one of my favourite historical epics, a surprisingly mature look at the young queen’s rise from imprisoned black sheep to undisputed monarch. The film had style, looked fantastic, featured a splendid baddie in Christopher Eccleston’s Norfolk, and above it all towered Cate Blanchett as a credible young Liz. Vulnerable yet steel-hearted, Blanchett captured virtually every scene, and clearly the sequel couldn’t have been made without her.

The Golden Age once again stars Blanchett, and she’s very, very good in the lead role,  but the rest is almost wholly terrible. Anyone who has watched The Tudors (not to mention Elizabeth itself) will come to the table fully aware that films like this play hard and fast with historical facts, but here it’s as though the research has been carried out by a bored GCSE student. It features the Spanish Armada, Mary Queen of Scots and Walter Raleigh, yet the details are subject in all cases to what looks best on the screen. Clive Owen’s Raleigh starts off correctly as little more than a glorified pirate; by the end, he’s defeated the Armada singlehandedly by leading the fire ships into its massed fleet, leaping from rigging to rigging before obviously making his escape. The normally superb Samantha Morton is Queen Mary, and hers should be a meaty role. Instead, Mary is sidelined, being only present as the catalyst for war between England and Spain. In general, The Golden Age is a disjointed experience, jumping between episodic vignettes, the money clearly going on its admittedly fabulous costumes and make-up. You half expect Simon Schama to walk on between scenes, explaining what the hell’s going on, because it’s hard to work things out otherwise.

But the real crime of the movie is that it’s actually fairly dull. It shouldn’t be. The story of Elizabeth I’s reign is one filled with incident and intrigue, and the film has two dramatically perfect happenings to record - Elizabeth’s relationship with Mary, and the defeat of the Armada. Yet both events are rushed, shoved to one side in favour of the camera’s fascination with Bess and her non-romance with Raleigh. A wasted opportunity, and perhaps one where two films would have sufficed instead of one, thus rendering the story more cohesive and one that simply made any sense.

But that’s enough from me. What did you think? Has there been worse, some instances of movies I enjoyed that you found to be utter dross? Talking of which, we’re off to see The Golden Compass tomorrow. A mate of work called it ‘the worst film I’ve seen this year,’ so the signs aren’t too good. As a Pullman fan, not to mention a believer in giving something the benefit of the doubt, I live in hope, however forlorn and misplaced it may be.

In the meantime, it just remains for me to wish all my readers the happiest of Christmasses. Have a good one, and I’ll see you on the other side, several pounds heavier and with all those new DVDs unwrapped!