Tag Archives: action

The Dark Knight

mv5bmzyxmze1nzy4nl5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtcxoti2mq-_v1_It is, I retroactively declare, a good weekend I think for seeing a new movie premiere. After spending a couple of hours around a pizza and an airing of Batman Begins, we rushed off to the theater for a Friday night showing. I’ve spent some time thinking about what I could possibly say about The Dark Knight in the subsequent 48 hours, and I honestly don’t have much better of an idea right now than I did walking out of the theater.

First of all, there’s the story route, but I refuse to do more than thumbnail it, because there are massive spoilers both for fantastic individual scenes and for the highly detailed and brilliantly executed plot. Anyway, a little time has passed and Batman hovers in a precarious middle ground between hated vigilante and police-sponsored hero. Gotham is gradually coming out of its dark age, and district attorney Harvey Dent’s hardline stance against the crumbling mob families is the best evidence of this fact. But there’s a bank-robbing clown who calls himself the Joker who has other ideas on that topic; and he has a plan.

All of which is stage-setting that’s clear within the first 15 minutes or so. If anyone wants to tell you more than that, don’t let them. Although Batman Begins was a lot more of a traditionally mythological hero’s journey, it had nowhere near the psychological depth of The Dark Knight. Christian Bale understands Bruce Wayne in a way that nobody but Michael Keaton has ever come close to, and Heath Ledger’s death was nothing short of a fucking tragedy for movie-goers everywhere, even if his portrayal of the Joker would have been the pinnacle of his talent. I would not have ever guessed I’d say someone surpassed Nicholson, but the writing was probably as much to blame as the acting. They really were two different characters, and the current one the darker and more insane by far.

My point being, with two such powerful leads, an equally strong supporting cast, and additional psychological elements from legal crusader Dent and returning ADA Rachel, Bruce’s love interest and Dent’s current girlfriend… with all of that going for it, there is a lot of room to play in and with a lot of interesting characters’ psyches. And this occurs in spades, to the point where it might be fair to describe the ride as an emotional wringer. But it is also the best movie I’ve seen all year, easily.[1] Juno and Iron Man come close, each in their own ways, but this hit all my buttons just right.

In summary: wow. Now go see it. (Yes, again. I know I would have tonight, if I hadn’t been at work instead.)

[1] Well. Zombie Strippers. But otherwise.

Get Smart

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I know I used to watch the old Get Smart TV show, and that I maybe even saw a previous theatrical release with a nude bomb, which strikes me as a hilariously ’70s conceit, thinking back on it now. What I remember of the show is pretty limited, although I have access to all manner of catchphrases and signature devices in my brain. I think I’d be willing to watch it a couple of times, just to see how it holds up, but my expectation is that it’s one of those shows where the heroes win implausibly despite being consummate bumblers for the most part. Funny and definitely influential, but probably an ultimately flawed product of a less advanced television environment.

But I wanted to see the movie anyhow, because Steve Carell is awesome and Anne Hathaway is both hot and has performed well in every role I’ve seen and Dwayne Johnson deserves to be supported for any role he takes that isn’t family-oriented, so that he’ll go back to making cool movies. (See also: Diesel, Vin.) So when I learned that the Dallas contingent was going to see it on Saturday, and in my neck of the woods no less, I was in. Plus, bonus massive serving of Shiner Bock available at the theater. Worst case, good company and beer, right?

Here’s the thing, though. This was decidedly best case. I cannot tell you the last time I’ve seen a more consistently funny movie, plus it was neither one of the infinite disposable parody movies we’ve been blighted with lately nor the much better (though still not quite to my taste) gross-out comedies that seem to fill the rest of the slots. And on top of being a purist comedy, it had a fun, non-throwaway plot and characters chock full of heart. Like I said, I think of Maxwell Smart as a bumbler who manages to win despite his dubious talents rather than because of them, a la Clousseau or Inspector Gadget. Whoever wrote this saw a much more earnest character; Carell’s Smart is overly enthusiastic and incredibly green, but with genuine spy talent buried underneath that, and limitlessly optimistic. I just love homages, adaptations, or remakes where you can tell that the person in charge has genuine love for the original work, rather than just a desire to cash in. In this case, I have the impression that it was not just the people in charge, but everyone involved from top to bottom. And they done good.

The Incredible Hulk

I can’t really explain what went wrong with The Incredible Hulk. It was much more of a super-hero movie than Ang Lee’s much derided The Hulk from a few years ago. It did a really good job of pulling in numerous sly references to the ’70s TV show, plus of course to the original Marvel comics. The effects were always spot on, as they have been of late. And I have to geek out a little bit at the way that the various movies are being tied into a cohesive Marvel Universe, just as the comics have always done.

These all sound like pretty good things. And yet, it felt like a late winter release from Marvel a la Daredevil, rather than the summer renaissance they’ve provided so often this decade, most recently with Iron Man. I know that part of the problem has got to lie with the Hulk himself; at least, what I’ve read from 1962-1967 reveals him as an insufficiently interesting character with especially uninteresting villains. And sure enough, the majority of the movie related to Bruce Banner being hunted by the army, angered, transformed, eventually captured anyway, and so on, because the army and General Ross are practically his only interesting foes, and they because of the human element. Which is good and all, but falls flat in an ostensible superhero movie. You need super villains for things to work.[1] If you don’t believe me, ask Ang Lee.

On the other hand, though, whatever pejorative comments have been thrown at Lee over the past few years, the primary flaw of his Hulk was in making a movie whose reach far exceeded its grasp. There are worse epitaphs to be cursed with, and among them is to make a movie that simply didn’t bother to reach very far at all.

[1] And, okay, this had a super-villain. Which was pretty much an alternate brute strength guy who we do not like because he isn’t green and because Liv Tyler doesn’t like him. (Well, and he’s kind of a douchebag.) Still, not much of an improvement on the army, which he is incidentally a part of in the first place. On the bright side, they laid groundwork for the only interesting Hulk villain I’ve seen in the comics to be present in a potential sequel. So that’s something.

Iron Man (2008)

mv5bmtcznti2oduwof5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtu0ntizmw-_v1_sy1000_cr006741000_al_Going to a sneak preview is a thing that… well, okay, I’ve done it pretty damn recently, but I haven’t been to an advance preview for a blockbuster that everyone in the world is going to see, at least not in a while. However, I have an awesome friend named Kara who has that skill where she knows every single person on the planet, and can therefore get into clubs or crowded restaurants sans reservation, that kind of thing. As a result, she received an astonishing number of passes to Iron Man last night. Enough to fill more than an entire middle row with people that she knows (many of them people I know as well, and not incidentally including me). And this is just not an unusual event around her. So, yay Kara!

And then, on top of being surrounded by awesome, there was the whole ‘crowd of people who all love this idea too’ that I’ve mentioned liking from time to time. The energy of a theater full of real fans, in a big event movie like this, is something I really dig. (Even though, sometimes, I felt a little like our row was appreciating everything on a more visceral level than the rest of the crowd. I don’t know if this is factual or just proximity to what I could hear best, and if it is true, I don’t how much to blame on the huge press section just below us in the middle.) The downside of crowds is that, even in shorts and a t-shirt, I was dying of heat by the final act. Too many people and lack of air-conditioning spells consequences, my friends. But they did sell me a milkshake, so that was pleasant.

The careful readers among you may be noticing that I haven’t said very much about the actual movie yet. There’s a good reason for this, which is that I don’t wish to set anyone’s expectations at an unfortunate level. Realize that my Iron Man experience essentially consists of the first couple of years of him in the comics, plus the first many years of his time with the Avengers, and whatever odds and ends I’ve heard about his doings in the Civil War thing that just happened, but my feeling is that the latter has no real bearing on anything for these purposes. But, with the amount of Iron Man experience I have, I’m prepared to say that this is the best Marvel movie that wasn’t Spider-Man.

Contributing factors to this claim include the awesomeness of Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark, more special effects than you can shake a pointed stick at, the tastefully understated but always clear and heartfelt interactions[1] between Tony and his friends (which casts a wider net than you may initially think), the ease with which origin story and Iron Man versus a bad guy were shoehorned into the same two hours, and I’ll have to reiterate how great Robert Downey Jr. was. Even though I’m only familiar with the 1960s versions of the characters, it’s instantly apparent that at least Tony Stark and Pepper Potts were meant to grow into these two characters when adjusted for modernity. There’s no way to ask for more than pitch perfect characterization in a comic book adaptation; if you have that, the rest is guaranteed to work, says me. And this? Did.

[1] Later, you’re going to realize that this is hilarious.

The Forbidden Kingdom

True confessions time: I never really got deeply into kung fu movies. I mean, I watched Bruce Lee movies when I was a kid, because they were just there for the taking on weekend afternoons on the UHF channels, and how could you not watch them? And it was awesome to see all the ass-kickery as Bruce (or whoever) made his way through an army of lesser men and then took out some bad guy or other in an ultimate confrontation. But I never really got into the storyline, just the chopsocky. And then later Jackie Chan appeared with his death-defying stunts of pure awesome but the same kind of storyline. And then Jet Li and his hidden snapper brought wuxia to my attention, with its emphasis on magical realism and Chinese folklore, and finally there were plots that I could get into, but I knew there was a ton of background to it that I somehow managed to miss on those long ago weekend afternoons, and I’ve felt kind of out of the loop ever since. It’s very tragic.

The thing about The Forbidden Kingdom is that it felt just like an introductory guide to the genre that didn’t assume you would know everything that was going on. A kung-fu-obsessed teen gets caught up in an armed robbery gone wrong, ends up with a magical staff, and is transported to historical China, where the staff must be returned to the Monkey King, lest the land be held forever under the tyranny of the Jade Warlord. Luckily, he has help in the form of traveling drunken scholar Jackie Chan, laconic monk Jet Li, and really hot chick-in-search-of-revenge Sparrow. He’ll need all their help, considering that the Jade Warlord has an army nearly as unstoppable as he is all by himself, plus a newly hired witch. (Upside of Chinese witches: they are also extremely hot, not bent and crone-y like lame Western witches. Downside: in addition to the magical powers, they also know kung fu. But, well, it’s historical China: everyone knows kung fu, is what I’m trying to say here.) And so our hero has to live out years of daydream fantasies, but with the complications that real life is a lot harder than imagination, and also a lot more deadly.

I got sidetracked by plot just now, but my point is, the hero-kid’s eyes gave me the window I needed. This was slightly ironic considering that he should have understood everything that was going on, what with his obsession with the movies.[1] But the huge blindspot between the movies and the reality (if you will) left a lot of room for explaining things to the audience. So if you’re like me and you accidentally missed this boat, or if you’ve got a kid that is in serious need of some Eastern cinema, The Forbidden Kingdom is a really great place to start. And if you’re not like me and you have been involved in these genres all along, well, my highly unscientific survey of one person says that it was pretty great through an old hand’s eyes as well.

[1] Or I guess it could be that in the movie’s reality, not unlike my apparent own, wuxia didn’t exist as a genre for him to have watched? If so, this was unclear at best and I think disproven by modern movie titles.

Doomsday

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Spring is a weird time for movies. I mean, usually not for me, because it’s often full of horror options, but it feels like there are fewer this year than usual, and thusly I join the ranks of people for whom spring is a weird time for movies. Or I could get off my ass and start catching up on the horror movies that are available to me, but I’m getting way the hell off topic here. What I’m actually trying to say is, there are all kinds of movies that I sort of want to see, enough to keep me going twice a week for probably the next month solid. But there are practically no movies that I want to see so badly that I can immediately point at the listing and say, “That’s the one, no question, how are we not already eating popcorn?!” I suppose this also happens a little bit in the fall, but by then I’m so glutted on summer fare that I barely notice.

This is the exact situation that occurred on Monday, after having dismissed the pointlessly bad movies about high school kids using underground mixed martial arts competitions as a metaphor for growing up and the flooded with Spring-Breakers kid flicks. The remaining options were Vantage Point, wherein a lot of people witness and try to unravel a Presidential assassination, and Doomsday, wherein a semi-recognizable actress faces off against post-apocalyptic Scotland. I wanted to see both in a vague sort of way without expecting awesome out of either of them, but we ended up going with Doomsday because it was showing earlier, and also because there’s clearly something about post-apocalyptica that revs my engine.

Apparently, sometime later this year a flesh-ravaging deadly virus breaks out in Edinburgh, say, and England walls off Scotland to contain it. Then thirty years pass. Now the virus has resurfaced in London, and tough-as-nails hot chick Rhona Mitra is sent behind the wall with a small military team on a suicide mission to recover a cure that has only been speculated to exist. What follows is an adrenaline-filled hodge-podge of politics, cannibalism, pole-dancing, gladiatorial combat, piercings, and car chases populated by every single person that’s seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and really wished they’d been old enough to be an extra when it came out. And if the Road Warrior motif doesn’t float your boat, things change directions in an equally awesome way about two-thirds of the way in. All this, plus gory sensibilities and a slick, dark sense of humor surprised me out of my former blasé attitude into having genuine fun at every turn. If the summer were not exclusively reserved for sequels these days, Doomsday would have been a perfect July action flick, and you should consider it an early treat for 2008’s season.

Jumper (2008)

First I was lazy, then I was busy, then I was distracted, then I was sick. Like, a lot sick. Stupid flu. I bet if they’d had the right shot available this year, I wouldn’t have gotten it, is all I’m saying, and then I’d only have three excuses instead of four. (Plus more money, but that’s a separate issue.) Anyway, these problems have conspired to prevent me from finishing a book in practically ages, so I’m alright on that front, but I have seen a couple of movies, one of them weeks ago. So that part is embarrassing, but I shall rectify the issue via a quick review now!

Jumper tells the story of a guy who used to be Anakin Skywalker, but instead of having a lightsaber and a pregnant girlfriend, he can teleport around and also his girlfriend isn’t pregnant. So really, life would be fantastic, since he can steal whatever he needs with no hope of being caught[1] and there’s no child support to worry about. Except his girlfriend notices little inconsistencies in his story like how she last saw him trapped under a frozen river like ten years ago and how he has an awful lot of money for not spending much time at a job and how people want to kill her because she knows him. Which is a pity, life being so great otherwise.

Well, and there’s one other fly in the ointment, I suppose, in that Samuel L. Jackson runs (or at least runs the operational end of) an organization of Paladins who have been hunting down Jumpers for centuries. They claim that this is because only God should have the power to be everywhere, but even a first-year Jesuit could easily point out that the Jumpers are only one place at a time, and anyway God made them that way, right, so what’s the big deal? Clearly the truth of the matter is that Sam is still angry about the time when the kid cut his arm off and pushed him off a building, and he invented this centuries-old underground war out of whole cloth to cover the revenge angle so it would play better to the audience. Which I can understand all of except the part where he actually thought anyone would buy the conspiracy in the first place, because, come on! What did those Jumper dudes ever do to y’all, seriously? If you were Bankers instead of Paladins, yeah, that would be one thing.

I approved of all the nifty teleportastic special effects, and of the awesome location shots, and that they dunked Rachel Bilson in a lake[2], and even in a Little Engine That Could kind of way I approved of them setting themselves up for a sequel. I cannot bring myself to approve of the plot, or really even of using the word ‘plot’ in conjunction with the shooting script that ended up on film. That would be going a little too far. But it had eye candy and humor; even the intentional kind, from time to time. I hope it turns into a cult classic, now that I’m thinking about it, because that would be a pretty fair outcome.

[1] and he doesn’t really need to spend any money on gas or airplane tickets in the first place, such that he could probably go legit as a one-man shipping company, but at least that never actually happens, because holy wow, it would have been boring.
[2] Seriously, prune skin aside, if I had my way that girl would never be dry.

Hitman (2007)

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hitman_ver3_xlgOnce upon a time there was a video game named Hitman 2 that I played in a desultory fashion before setting it aside and moving on to other things. It had a pretty good stealthy assassin vibe rather than the guns-blazing Rambo style, and as big a fan as I’ve been of the Thief series, I expected to like it a lot. However, I kind of failed to really get into how the game ticked; despite my best efforts, I ended up doing the guns blazing thing consistently instead of sneaking in and out, leaving behind just an inexplicable dead body. So, y’know, that’s probably on me, and the story would end there in a completely dissatisfactory way, except that someone decided to make a movie based on this game and the others in its series.

Between the fact that it was a movie based on a video game and the fact that I’d had so little luck getting into one of the games it was based on, my expectations for Hitman were kept manageably low. It’s possible this was an extremely good thing, but I mostly found it to be unnecessary. Several characters and the look of things were drawn straight out of the games, but plotwise this could have been any boilerplate “extremely skilled assassin is abandoned or turned on by his former bosses, and must race against time and an army of theoretically equally skilled opponents to discover the truth or make amends or take down the organization that betrayed him” story. Nothing is left out, not the graceful action scenes turning violent, bloody murder into a dance, not the frequently naked $ETHNICITY prostitute who had no way out until he came along, and certainly not the overly convoluted, red-herring-littered revelation of the conspiracy that has brought everything to this point of crisis. Don’t think of it as a video game movie, think of it as an action movie that has a spin-off video game. It’s not entirely inaccurate, and gives a much fairer snapshot of both media.

Beowulf (2007)

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MV5BMTUzMjM0MTc3MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzU0ODMyMw@@._V1__SX1537_SY747_Things which I did not like about Beowulf: the way that either the 3D glasses directly or my regular glasses compressed beneath them were pushing against my sinuses so hard that occasional tears would stream down my face, and also the way that this gave me a nearly blinding headache by the end of the movie. I also wasn’t a giant fan of the times when coins or rocks or other small objects would fly out of the screen at me; the closer they got, the more out of focus and obviously fake they looked.

Things which I did like about Beowulf: practically everything else. I expected it to be gorgeous and awesome, and it pretty well was, what with the strides in depth of field they’ve made over the past few years. The screen really does look like it’s there in front of you spread out with the same depth as though you were in the front row at Beowulf: The Play, with the added bonus that the larger objects sometimes stick out over the audience instead of staying on the stage. The people looked… well, pretty fake at first, but mostly not too fake towards the end, as though my brain just took an hour or so to accept them. (Oddly, Grendel never looked the least bit fake.) The acting was often over the top, but look at the source material! And it had a good bit of subtlety and skill in it when needed.

So, a long time ago, like in the 4 digits range of years ago, someone wrote down a poem. In it, a warrior called Beowulf came to Denmark to kill a monster that was bothering everyone there. Later, he killed its mother, because of how she was unhappy about her son having been killed. Much later still as a king, he killed a dragon, but died doing so. That’s basically the entire story, as far as it goes. The only things particularly notable about it are that the stories are padded out to extreme length, partly with battle details but mostly with braggadocio on the behalf of the protagonist, and that it is the first piece of literature written in English. (Where first equals oldest in existence, at least that we’ve found yet. But since English doesn’t greatly predate the poem, it’s a fairly easy claim to make.) All of which adds up to a story with eye candy that has clearly been leveraged to great effect, but not much else going for it, right? Right.

Except, wrong! 10th century pre-British people understood spectacle[1], make no mistake. But they did not particularly understand story structure, probably because mostly what people wanted out of their story-telling was to be amused or excited, and you don’t really need themes or foreshadowing or alliteration (well, it was a performed piece; probably alliteration was fine, but they for sure frowned on fucking foreshadowing) to accomplish these goals. With our rather more sophisticated modern tastes[1], we of course hope for a little bit more to tie everything together. And with Neil Gaiman in the script credits, I can’t really act surprised that we got it. My point is, there was a lot more movie there than I expected from the trailers. Comedy[2], pathos, consequence and regret, all in addition to completely acceptable spectacle. I can dig it.

I did say I liked practically everything else. In the interests of full disclosure, one more thing bugged me. Late in the film, there’s a damsel-in-distress scene. I’m not automatically opposed to these on principle, but it simultaneously served no plot function and required no masculine intervention to solve, and yet I immediately knew that they were going to need the big strong man to come save them and had to roll my eyes. To those who will complain that modern feminism postdates the story of Beowulf, and thus making a point of the girls saving themselves would have been a little bit grating and out of place: I agree completely! The scene served no purpose at all and should have been removed entirely, is all I’m saying.

[1] By which I mean, check out the rack on Grendel’s mom!
[2] Clever scripting, sure, but also pretty decent physical comedy. Beowulf runs around naked, but the goods are always artfully concealed by random candlesticks or severed arms or things. Which is only a little funny by itself and has been done before, except that the 3D thing makes it seem as though if you crane your neck just right, stupid Wiglaf will no longer be blocking your view. (Trust me, the girl in the seat next to me was trying.)

Live Free or Die Hard

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MV5BNDQxMDE1OTg4NV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTMzOTQzMw@@._V1__SX1537_SY747_Hard to believe, but true: once upon a time, the modern action blockbuster didn’t exist. Armageddon? Deep Impact? The Rock? Time was, those movies didn’t get made. Sure, Star Wars and Indiana Jones were contributing factors, but they were more about the summer blockbuster. As far as the action version, you have to go back to Christmas of 1988. There’s this wise-cracking cop in an office building full of terrorists, and stuff that blows up, and Beethoven’s Ninth playing. And sure, that’s yawn-worthy now, but the writing and the acting for Die Hard still stand up, despite decades of mostly pale imitators. (Also, it’s the first time I was aware of surround sound in theaters.) And then it had a couple of sequels. Which were fine and all, with the explosions and the wisecracking, but they never really stood out to me in the same way.

Now, however… here’s the best way I can explain Live Free or Die Hard. The people who wrote it and filmed it were people who also think Die Hard was the definitive action movie, and they wanted to make a sequel worthy of the name. Sure, the action is over the top. It’s supposed to be, it’s an action blockbuster. But it’s not over the top in such a way that you find yourself wondering how we’re supposed to believe anyone could ever do that stuff. (Like, say, Rambo sequels.) There’s definitely one sequence that is over the top; I rolled my eyes pretty hard. But John McClane is never superhuman. He’s tough, and he’s luckier than his fair share, but mostly he’s just taking his only option and running with it instead of giving up, and that guy? That guy is pretty much what heroes are.

Also, the plot is more of a sequel to the original than either of the other sequels. I know that the third one was specifically about a guy who wanted revenge for Alan Rickman’s untimely demise. Even still, the fourth one is a much better sequel, plot-wise as well as thematically. Now that everyone in the country who isn’t me has seen the Transformers more times than you can shake a pointed stick at, I say go see Die Hard 4. Unless you didn’t like the original for some reason? That would be weird, but you won’t like this one either, in that unlikely case. Otherwise, you should be golden.

And I’ll go contritely see the Transformers. Because at this point, I’m kind of an embarrassment over here.