Archive for the ‘Action & Adventure’ Category

Avatar

January 10, 2010

Avatar is the quintessential Hollywood blockbuster. It operates on Big Effects, Big Action, Big Emotions, and Big Themes. By keeping things Big and borrowing on universal notions of myth-making, writer-director James Cameron has created an archetypal action-adventure with broad appeal. That might be understating it as, at this writing, Avatar has cracked the billion-dollar box office ceiling and continues to soar beyond The Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man flicks and on towards heights reached only by Cameron’s previous epic Titanic.

The film draws on very elemental emotions — one’s love and loyalty for heritage and personal history, one’s love of family and instinctual bond with children, family, and nature and, conversely, our mistrust of technology and any motive founded on industrial and imperialist ambition. Hence, identifying with its themes is a knee-jerk reflex, and you can’t help but feel used because of it; being a work designed to appeal to the largest possible audience, Avatar’s moral universe is rigorously black and white.

The story here is a variation on the Dances with Wolves template (or Pocahontas template, depending on your cinematic recall): A soldier from an encroaching civilization spends time with the members of the enemy, i.e. the people indigenous to the land, and, through the course of his interaction, gains not only respect and sympathy for them, but falls in love with one of their women (Avatar digresses from the Wolves example in that the woman in question is an actual, true-blood native). Meanwhile, the advancing forces to which our soldier belongs invade, and the soldier fights alongside his adopted brethren as they face the annihilation of their race. Visually, the film also bears more than a few echoes of Lord of the Rings, but, to Cameron’s credit, it also contains a wealth of texture and detail, both natural and technological, that Avatar can claim entirely for itself.

Avatar replaces Wolves’ Old West frontier for a futuristic milieu set on the lush and fantastical landscapes of Pandora — a moon on which humans have discovered a rare and much-prized mineral (Unobtainium, a MacGuffin if there ever was one). The deposits are detected directly below the settlement of the Na’vi — a race of highly intelligent, super-tall, blue-skinned beings that co-exist harmoniously with all living things on their world. Into this utopia arrives Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine back in service to infiltrate the Na’vi culture and gain their trust so that the humans can negotiate their re-settlement before blasting apart their land to get at the Unobtainium. But the more Jake spends time among the Na’vi, particularly with the headstrong and beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the more he knows he cannot take up arms against them.

To be clear, it’s not Jake’s physical self that interacts with the Na’vi but his Avatar, a synthesized Na’vi-like extension of himself that he controls via a system of neural link-ups. Capable of manipulating his Avatar is exhilarating to Jake, not least because it gives him the sensation of having working legs again, and he revels in his Avatar’s superhuman movement, flight, and agility. Together with a scientific team led by the no-nonsense Dr. Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) — the leading expert on Pandora and its inhabitants — Jake becomes immersed into the Na’vi culture and customs, and, thanks to Neytiri’s conditioning, he becomes quickly adapted to the Na’vi’s spry lifestyle of scaling treetops and cliffs effortlessly, and taming dragon-like creatures which serve as the Na’vi’s aerial consorts.

When the humans do launch their inevitable invasion, Jake, Neytiri, and their comrades take to the skies or attack on their steeds, showering bows and arrows against all manner of fire-blazing military hardware. And this being an environmental sci-fi/fantasy, Pandora itself becomes a character, a living organism with a capacity for vengeance that cannot be ruled out. All of the above provide ample opportunities for Cameron and his production team to give us a feast of eye-popping panoramas, action scenarios, and bravura conceptual imaginings.

In broad strokes, Cameron paints an allegory of American expansionism — think 19th-century Manifest Destiny applied to an alien planet 150 years from now — with daubs of anti-corporate indignation thrown in. Avatar’s themes and sentiments are impossible to deny however thickly Cameron spreads it around because, in watching the plight of the Na’vi, we link what we see directly to atrocities in our own past and in our own world right now. What keeps us rooting for the movie — and what was also the case with Titanic — is the chemistry between its two disparate but fierce-hearted souls who genuinely fall in love with each other. Worthington and Saldana provide enough wattage to keep the film’s human center alive and beating, while Cameron wraps their story in an armature of generally impressive 3D attractions as well as a righteousness that’s touching yet all too simplistic.

Grade: B

Directed by: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Dileep Rao, Laz Alonso

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Fantasy, Science Fiction | 2 Comments »

The Hurt Locker

January 2, 2010

My guess is that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker will be henceforth taught in cinema courses as a masterly illustration of how one stages and pieces together an effective action sequence on film. There are several of them to choose from throughout this riveting Iraq War drama, each one demonstrating Bigelow’s shrewd command over the manipulation of space, time, and rhythm. Her battle scenes reap the maximum of suspense and terror in this story about a bomb disposal unit serving amidst the firestorm of the Iraq War in 2004.

One of Bigelow and writer Mark Boal’s riskiest gambles is that they essentially have a protagonist — the unit’s leader, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) — who undergoes little to no change in the course of their story. In fact, James resists any change to his manner and attitude towards war. His men see him as a reckless thrill-seeker, a man obsessed with cheating death if there’s an adrenaline rush to be had. The two in James’s charge, Sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) spend a great deal of the film clashing with James, questioning his sanity, but, in the end, performing courageously — though resentfully — alongside him. James is really a ball of manic, destructive energy roiling beneath an assured facade. On the other hand, James has a conscience: Bigelow shows us as much when he has a nervous breakdown following the death of a young Iraqi boy whom he’d befriended. Just as quickly, though, James is back on the job, eager for another set of ticking bombs that must be defused, another firefight in which he could narrowly skirt death.

Renner plays James unflinchingly, only rarely giving us a glimpse of the damaged soul lurking beneath the soldier’s bastion of toughness and professionalism. At the risk of alienating his audience, Renner stays true to James’s cool exterior, delivering an unforgettable depiction of how war can warp and distort a man’s spirit. Matching him scene for scene is Anthony Mackie as Sanborn, James’s moral opposite. Baffled, even horrified, by his commanding officer’s matter-of-fact attitude to a high-risk assignment, and his readiness to expose himself and his men to danger, Mackie calls out James time and again; he, along with Geraghty’s Eldridge (another excellent performance), stand in as our moral counterbalance in a crumbling state where life has lost its value.

In an otherwise apolitical film, Bigelow provides a poignant sociopolitical critique with one single cut. Late in the film, we see a traveling shot of Iraqi children, seen through the window of a Humvee, running along the roadside. A cut retains the camera movement but now, instead of children, we’re looking through the glass doors of a supermarket freezer section, staring at an endless row of pizzas of all varieties. We’ve cut from Iraq to America, a place of deprivation to one of plenty. But, more than that, in cutting from children to meaningless products, Bigelow juxtaposes a gross disparity in values: In a single cut, we’ve shunted from a place whose future hangs in the balance, from faces of children who may not live to see it, to one with arguably no future at all, or whose values can be summarized by a vision of a supermarket freezer section.

The Hurt Locker is a top-notch suspense picture in the old-school mold, fashioned after the B-movie masterpieces of Robert Aldrich and Sam Fuller. Boal’s script can feel episodic to a fault — it’s essentially a series of battle scenes with time-outs for conversation and for providing the grim details of the soldiers’ off-duty lives in the barracks. But what saves his and Bigelow’s film, ultimately, are the deeply etched characterizations, the sense of evolving relationships between soldiers and between Americans and Iraqis, that make each successive battle not just an action scene but a crucible in which these relationships are tested. Perhaps most startling of all the film’s accomplishments is how it approximates the soldiers’ feeling of utter anxiety as they fight a war on foreign soil: This isn’t Iraq so much as a completely different planet, hostile and hateful of their presence, in which everything and everyone is a potential enemy, and even the ground before you can explode and swallow you whole.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, David Morse, Ralph Fiennes, Evangeline Lilly, Christian Camargo

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Best of 2009, Drama | 1 Comment »

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

November 9, 2009

It’s difficult to parse out the associations–literary, symbolic, mythic, etc.–from the intrinsic merits of this first installment of the Narnia series. I say it’s difficult because we live in a time when, as a society, we seem to be craving these primal, communal, iconic representations of good triumphing over evil: The popularity of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter films/books, this season’s King Kong, and the anticipation for next year’s Superman are all obvious proof. We live in times when our collective morale has hit rock bottom, or close to it.

Nothing in our world right now–the way its leaders are running it (especially our own)–jives with our ingrained sense of what is right, good, just, real. So we seem to be craving these simple yet direct allegories to wash out the bad taste of our daily realities, maybe more so now than, well, anytime since the Vietnam Era. Joseph Campbell, in discussing the timeless appeal of myths, mentions how human beings have always looked to these good-over-evil storylines to palliate our moral and mortal fear of the world around us. I think mass audience movies–the popular arts, in general–are meant to appeal to us on a very fundamental, simplistic level. It’s how myths convey their meanings–by appealing to our hearts, not our brains. The brain, moreover, is an overrated organ, anyway: The world isn’t going to improve on brainpower, but on “heartpower” (as corny as that sounds). All this is a roundabout way of pointing out that it’s tough to address Andrew Adamson’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s books. As a movie, it’s professionally competent and well paced, and touches on all the traditional tropes of the fantasy-adventure genre.

So, having said all that, The Lion, The Witch… is a Christian allegory in which four siblings–the Pevensies–having escaped from the London Blitz of WWII, find sanctuary in a country manor. There, upon entering a mysterious wardrobe closet, they chance upon a magical land fallen under the gloomy spell of the so-called White Witch (Tilda Swinton). Talking beavers inform the incredulous children of a prophecy in which four humans, one day, will aid Narnia’s forces of good–led by Alsan, a properly majestic lion and the story’s Christ figure–in vanquishing the White Witch and restoring peace and joy to Narnia. Soon, the siblings find themselves preparing for an imminent battle with the White Witch over the fate of Narnia.

Along the way, in order to save the children from jeopardy, Aslan sacrifices himself. This is no spoiler–Aslan’s self-sacrifice is central to Lewis’s Christ allegory–while the children, backed by a loyal legion of mythical and magical creatures, do battle with the White Witch, backed by her army of fearsome beasts. I found Lewis’s story, as filmed by Andrew Adamson, enormously simplistic and, perhaps for that reason, enormously effective. The parable of the Christ figure saving a world under the shadow of evil through pure faith and goodness is eternally resonant in our world, answering our need for self-realization and redemption in our daily lives. So, I think to a significant degree, this movie trades on the easy but powerful emotions. The question is: Does the movie do so on its own merits?

Adamson’s direction, for its part, is straight-ahead, workmanlike, with little flair outside the bounds of Lewis’s blueprint. The movie’s CGI, on the whole, is excellent, especially the chattering animals and the climactic battle sequence–which, by the way, can’t escape being a minor knockoff of Peter Jackson’s ground shattering work in LOTR. Then, again, fairly or not, all fantasy-adventures will hereupon be compared to LOTR. The acting is solid enough–the children give innocent, guile-free performances, Tilda Swinton’s authority on screen elevates every scene she’s in, and there’s nice clean-up work from the always-marvelous Jim Broadbent in a role that’s much too short.

That brings me to the movie’s main flaw: its script. While Narnia breezes by, even at 140 minutes, I felt its characters needed padding out. The story could do with more scenes up-front of the Pevensie siblings and their mutual bond, and, likewise, more scenes of Broadbent’s Professor Kirke, with his wisps of quirky wisdom, and more of a sense of Narnia itself. Unlike Jackson’s depiction of Middle Earth, Adamson’s Narnia doesn’t feel like a place unto itself, living and breathing, but just an extension of the plot. Its textures and borders don’t feel lived-in, but, rather, perfunctory, a sort of generic Never-Never Land, akin to a child’s run-of-the-mill fantasy daydream. Still, Narnia’s overall production is fabulous, and the story’s religious symbolism and mythic appeal transfers to the screen intact. My guess is that The Lion, The Witch… will appeal to our jaded, consumer- and cynicism-driven age and to all of us in need of a jab of earnest, old-fashioned moralism to save the day. There are plenty of us out there who need it right now.

Grade: B

Directed by: Andrew Adamson
Written by: Ann Peacock, Andrew Adamson, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Cast: Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anne Popplewell, Tilda Swinton, Jim Broadbent, James McAvoy

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Fantasy | 1 Comment »

Children of Men

November 9, 2009

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Based on the novel by P.D. James, director and co-writer Alfonso Cuarón’s futuristic adventure derives its power from a premise as potent and primal as they come. Early in the 21st century, women are, suddenly and inexplicably, rendered infertile. No one knows why; reasons ranging from environmental pollution and genetic testing are cited as possible culprits. That’s neither nor there, however, because both mankind and civilization are rapidly unraveling. The world that Children of Men’s hero, Theodore Faron (Clive Owen), an erstwhile social activist, inhabits is riddled with political instability, terrorism, riots, economic crises and nuclear conflagrations. Britain has become a police state, violently quashing all discontent. Because of large-scale illegal immigration into Britain from less stable parts of the world, the country has adopted a violent policy against it. Everywhere we see police rounding up migrants into buses, hauling them off into Guantanamo-like detention camps. They’re ruthless in how they treat citizens who, in turn, have become disaffected, or else taken up arms in their struggle against the system. Terrorism and persecution widespread. The use of legalized over-the-counter euthanasia drugs is encouraged for all.

So it’s no surprise that when Baby Diego dies, everyone everywhere is sent into a grief-stricken tailspin. Reputedly the youngest man on Earth, Baby Diego is killed in a violent incident that characterizes the tenor of the times. The event underscores the fragility of the fate of our species, a twist of the proverbial knife already embedded in our backs. But Faron’s already inside his own grief vortex; twenty years ago, right around the time when pregnancy rates worldwide were dropping, he and his former wife Julian (Julianne Moore) laid to rest their own child. It was, in a way, the end of both their lives.

Those pieces in place, Cuarón shunts into action mode, “chase picture” mode to be exact, after Julian pays the disaffected Faron a surprise visit. She tells him about Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a teenage girl who miraculously happens to be pregnant, and charges him with the task of transporting Kee and her nurse, Miriam (Pam Ferris), to the coast where they can be delivered into the hands of a benevolent organization called the Human Project. The existence of the Human Project is itself open to question, a rumor more than a fact, but it’s a chance Faron decides is worth taking; the world’s too dangerous to entrust with anything this precious. Faron’s not kidding either, for no sooner have they set out on the road than the group is set upon by sectarians determined to make Kee’s soon-to-be-born baby the poster child for their revolution.

Children of Men exudes an aura of effortlessness in how it lays out the particulars of its complex social and political realities. The pandemonium that wracks this future-world feels both logical and palpable; without that crucial sense of plausibility, Cuarón and company’s script would’ve been lost at sea. The same can be said of Cuarón’s assuredly brilliant direction, at much at ease with developing a range of absorbing characters as with staging one riveting action set piece after another. Owen creates the kind of hero you can’t help but immediately sympathize with and root for: Faron is a bedraggled Everyman, he has no power, no authority, and he wouldn’t know how to use a firearm if he found one in his hands. But, wounded by the loss of his own child, he’s the heart and soul of the picture, driven solely by his desire to save. And not just Owen; Children of Men is marked by high caliber performances throughout, particularly from Ferris, whose Miriam is Kee’s only protection and professional support; from Chiwetel Ejiofor whose militant leader Luke’s yearning for revolution becomes wrongly enmeshed with his desire to co-opt Kee’s child; from Ashitey whose Kee’s vulnerability is shielded only by her maternal pluckiness; and from the ever-watchable Michael Caine as a pot-smoking, lank-haired eccentric who’s the closest thing Faron has to a guide and benefactor.

Through a series of escapes and captures, Faron, Kee and Miriam manage to flee Luke and his organization only to wind up in a Homeland Security detention camp. In depicting their arrival at the camp, Cuarón’s acutely evokes, without exploiting, our collective incredulity for places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Cuarón’s sequence is frightening and bears the stamp of truth for anyone who’s seen images in the news of hooded prisoners, Gestapo-like guards, and unwholesome, barbed-wire ringed compounds. It’s at the camp that Cuarón’s direction (and his picture) gathers steam. He begins with an excruciatingly suspenseful sequence in which Faron tries to find Kee — in the final pangs of labor — a safe corner in these pellmell surroundings where she can give birth, and builds to a bravura climax as Faron must infiltrate a war zone to fetch Kee and her newborn. Cuarón’s courage and craftsmanship — together with the skills of his superb cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — prove themselves in a shattering single-take sequence in which a very simple but enormously effective juxtaposition is established between the roar of gunfire against the crying of an infant as Faron tries to sneak mother and child out of a besieged building. A more mind-blowing display of technical virtuosity in tandem with emotional power hasn’t been burned into celluloid since the opening of Saving Private Ryan. At one point in Children of Men, Miriam comments how the voices of children are what keep the world from tipping into self-destruction. That sentiment is borne out precisely and perfectly in Cuarón’s final scenes.

All that keeps Children of Men from achieving masterpiece status is a greater sense of Faron himself. The script never delves deeply enough into Faron’s character; we know that he’s a burned-out shell of a man, haunted by feelings of fatelessness, but, of Faron’s inner life, we glean very little. Rather, he is a flat character who goes from one challenge to the next, as demanded by the story and with an attitude that remains the same whether he’s fetching a cup of coffee or a baby from a burning building. Faron should have been Cuarón’s bid to assert his personality over this material, an opportunity to provide his “spin” on the terrible state of the world (real and allegorical) and perhaps his own world-view as an artist. Children of Men gives us Cuarón the prodigal filmmaker, notching another success in a long string of them, though it comes frustratingly close to giving us Cuarón, the newly minted auteur.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Cast: Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam, Danny Huston, Claire-Hope Ashitey, Peter Mullan, Pam Ferris, Michael Caine

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Science Fiction, Thriller | 1 Comment »

Casino Royale

November 9, 2009

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The 21st Bond film is also the first truly worthy spin through the Bond universe since Roger Moore’s goofy escapades of the late 70’s/early ’80s. I enjoyed the gravitas that Timothy Dalton brought to the role in his pair of outings, and the élan with which Pierce Brosnan went through 007’s paces from 1995’s Goldeneye to 2002’s Die Another Day. But as smooth and stalwart a Bond as Brosnan was, the franchise producers never handed the actor a vehicle equal to his stature. Indeed, Die Another Day may have come closest — a silly but exciting enough thrill ride, whose cheesy get-ups and entendres were somewhat compensated for by Halle Berry as an impossibly sexy spy who matched up well with Brosnan. With Casino Royale, the folks behind Bond bring in a new man: Daniel Craig. Like many others, I have admired Craig as an actor (Road to Perdition, Layer Cake) but felt unsure, even incredulous, of how he’d modify (read: tamper with) what gold-standard bearer Sean Connery, then Moore, Dalton and Brosnan had molded and perfected over forty-plus years. I was on my guard.

Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, together with Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash), reach back to Flemming’s first Bond novel, an origin story of sorts, to give us a glimpse of Bond when he was first promoted to “007″ status in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The story offers an occasion to trace the shaping of the Bond persona into the one by which we associate him — the debonair spy and ladies’ man, who’d just as soon kill you as look at you. Casino Royale imagines Bond (or the pre-Bond) as an impulsive mercenary whose hot-headedness and ego compromise his ability to make cool, calculated judgments. Craig’s Bond shoots first, asks questions later. He’s prone to make decisions out of blind pride than shrewd tact, and he’s also the first Bond who isn’t afraid to show his softer side. Here, in other words, we find a complex, fully-rounded character, a romantic as attuned to his heart as to the mission at hand, and, as Anthony Lane in The New Yorker put it, the series’ “first proper bleeder.” This guy gets bruised and banged up enough in one movie to make up for twenty movies in which Bond escaped without a scratch and with his hair hardly out of place.

The plot of Casino Royale is (relative to many previous entries) refreshingly lean and coherent. It concerns a financier/broker of terrorist activities, named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). Le Chiffre, a scarfaced, sourpussed gentleman-gambler whose bad eye leaks blood at the first sign of distress, invests his clients’ monies into operations, i.e. terrorist strikes, meant to sabotage the financial health of massive corporations. When one such operation doesn’t come off as planned and his clients are champing at the bit for the recovery of their investments, Le Chiffre decides to hold a high-stakes poker tournament at the swank titular casino-hotel in a bid to recover his clients’ fortunes. That’s when Bond charges in; as much as M (the always-regal Judi Dench) has her misgivings about the loose cannon Bond, she assigns him the mission of trumping Le Chiffre at the poker game and close down his terrorist racket. Sent to watch over the money, floated by the British treasury, to be staked in the game is Vesper Lynd (Eva Green). She’s sinuous and beautiful enough to qualify as a Bond Girl, but exceeds the narrow limits of that role thanks to Green’s reserved, sensitive performance.

A good second-half portion of Casino Royale is taken up by the critical poker face-off with Le Chiffre. The proceedings are lengthy, but not without their share of breathless diversions. These include a headlong confrontation in a stairwell between Bond and some pissed-off terrorists, to another inside a grimy post-industrial torture chamber in which Bond’s manhood is threatened with mutilation (and after which the males in the audience won’t be able to shake away the thought of testicular pain for days afterward), to a mad dash to Bond’s Aston Martin where a conveniently placed defibrillator is all that stands between the spy and a rapid death-by-poisoned martini. That last scene is an amusing metaphor not only for how Casino Royale is the Bond people’s bid to jumpstart their franchise back to relevance, but also for Lynd’s literal and figurative reviving of Bond’s heart.

Sparks fly the instant Bond and Lynd meet, but their mutual attraction is communicated largely through the language of verbal jabs and mischievous asides that keep both of them on their toes. In terms of steaminess and sex, Casino Royale is pretty modest compared to most Bond films, and when Bond does get busy, it’s not motivated by momentary lust or sexual manipulation, but something far tougher to wriggle out of: Love. As scripted, the central romance between Bond and Lynd that takes over the film’s second half is handled shoddily and in too-broad strokes. Luckily, Craig and Green’s commitment to their roles and their on-screen chemistry compensates. Craig capably crosses a great deal of emotional territory, from the tough-guy posturings of a more traditional Bond to a genuinely human vulnerability, with almost no help from the script itself.

Casino Royale brings Goldeneye director Martin Cambell back into the fray. Campbell has a knack for creating crisp, adroit action sequences. In fact, the footchase that opens the film ranks as among the most exihilarating ever staged, as Bond pursues a terrorist through the pell-mell streets of a tumbledown Madagascar neighborhood. The chase blows through a construction site, then up the dizzying heights of a gantry where one delirious stunt after another is breathtakingly pulled off. Aided by vertiginous stuntwork and whipsmart editing, it’s also a fantastic introduction to Craig’s gangbusters take on Bond. Wisely, though, Campbell doesn’t try to top his opening, but keeps his action scenes thereafter limited to short bursts, while he takes up the issue of what do with a spy obstinately in love with an accountant, a woman compromised by her own mysterious past. Hard lessons lie ahead for this start-up Bond, chiefly among them: Trust no one and nothing, least of all the romantic flutterings of one’s own heart.

What stays with you, whether you’re a Bond fanatic or a casual viewer, is Daniel Craig himself. He has the chops to pull off a Bond at once in-your-face but also emotionally nuanced; his is the first Bond we relate to as a flawed, sympathetic human being, rather than as a cultural monolith. Craig plays Bond as a product of abandonment, of working-class anti-bourgeois anger, as a man driven to lonesomeness by a harsh upbringing and determined to use the system to take out his aggressions against it as much as to earn his keep. The question of whether Craig’s Bond is faithful to Flemming’s version isn’t as important as whether Craig can continue to offer us a Bond this compelling in future installments, in which the now-chastened and newly minted 007 becomes a character of diminishing emotional returns.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Martin Campbell
Screenplay by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis
Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Giancarlo Giannini, Caterina Murino, Simon Abkarian, Isaach De Bankolé, Jesper Christiansen, Ivan Milicevic

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

District 9

August 31, 2009

District 9

The premise for District 9 — even as alien invasion scenarios go — is pretty damn ludicrous. But if you can get past it, and you’re a fan of the Peter Jackson school of over-the-top, shoot-em-up violence, then you stand a good chance of enjoying what’s otherwise a clever and provocative sci-fi thrill machine. Here’s the stretch: A superior alien civilization arrives on Earth in a spaceship large enough to house thousands, or even millions. It conks to a stop above Johannesburg, South Africa.

When humans find that its occupants are ailing or debilitated, they promptly remove and house them in makeshift refugee zones in the city. Soon thereafter, these zones become sprawling, militarized slums, where the aliens (whom we derogatorily call “Prawns”) live in shanties, amidst poverty, corruption and political oppression, segregated from the human population. Off the bat, District 9’s apartheid-informed, sociopolitical allegory comes raging at us full-force with scenes of alien riots and police brutality. Except, these aliens aren’t simple life forms, like bees or ants, as the filmmakers would have us believe; by the magnitude of their advancement — their superior weaponry, physical strength and space-travel technology — we can’t buy that even the Prawns’ version of “worker bees” does not possess the survival instincts to resist and overpower their bullying, would-be human oppressors. What’s weirder, the Prawns trade their hyper-advanced guns (seriously, one shot is all it would take to turn you into a splatter of pasta sauce on the wall) to local Nigerian racketeers for cans of cat food — apparently, the Prawns develop a taste for it (as they do for human prostitutes). At this point, it’s as if Jackson and company dumb-down and degrade their aliens just so their humans will appear more disgusting and oppressive in opposition. By conceding to such absurd, simple-minded ideas, they risk dumbing down their entire, already shaky premise.

All great science-fiction, especially of the “Close Encounters” variety, asks us to question our natures and our place in the universe. Most often, mankind comes up short when faced with the prospect of encountering “the other.” From The Day the Earth Stood Still to Close Encounters, Contact and even The Terminator series, humans usually get suspicious, agitated, devious, or even downright hostile. Though a few individuals in these stories have the sagacity to overcome such base instincts, mankind by and large is depicted as being dominated by them. District 9 lands squarely in that territory as Blomkamp, his co-writer Terri Tatchell and producer Jackson revel in the gross venality and xenophobia of the human species. We’re not far into District 9 before our simmering contempt for our own kind reaches a roiling boil as scenes unravel of armed security forces running havoc in the aliens’ shantytown, badgering and brutalizing them into submitting to government plans to re-locate the Prawns to a new site.

It’s during these eviction operations that District 9 kicks into full gear. When Wikus (Sharlton Copley), a by-the-book bureaucrat in charge of the Prawn re-location scheme, gets exposed to an alien chemical, he finds himself, to much terror and bafflement, turning into a Prawn himself. As a human-Prawn mutant, capable of operating the aliens’ bio-mechanical weaponry, Wikus is suddenly the most highly prized guinea pig in the world. On the run from the military, Wikus holes up in the Prawns’ shantytown and finds his only ally and confidante in the alien’s leader — resourceful, intelligent, and the only one who knows how to restore Wikus to his human state. The leader promises to help Wikus if he, in turn, helps him secure the last bit of technology he needs to render their spaceship operational and, hence, return to the Prawns’ home planet.

What District 9 does exceptionally well — and this is crucial for an action-thriller — is draw the line distinctly between good and evil. In this world, the humans are the villains, and, if you were to judge from District 9, humans have got to be the nastiest, sleaziest life form around, quick to hate, greed, and violence. It makes one wonder how we, as a species, survived as long as we did given the vileness of our nature. As a viewer, I haven’t hated humans this much since Children of Men and, before that, T2: Judgment Day. That clear polarity makes us identify with the aliens that much more, and root for Wikus and his Prawn allies.

The violence here is excessive to the point of being cartoonish — people are blowing up like paintballs left and right — but it’s predicated on such an emotional investment that we want the aliens’ fight against the humans to be as bold and decisive as Blomkamp’s visuals and the digital soundtrack will allow. Indeed, the movie’s final 40 minutes is an extended, Saving Private Ryan-esque action sequence that’s as riveting as they get as Wikus fends off an army of zealous, machine gun-happy troops while his alien comrades set their own plan into motion.

Precision editing and a clever sense of narrative and point-of-view — we’re told the story through a variety of means, from news blurbs (a la Starship Troopers), surveillance cameras, docu-style coverage blended together with more traditional styles — all amp up tension, suspense, and keep us hooked no matter the silliness of the story’s set-up. District 9 doesn’t carry much weight as sociopolitical commentary or satire but, taken on the merits of its shrewd story sense and craftsmanship, it’s a popcorn entertainment destined to stay in our minds. Till the sequel at least.

Grade: B

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvanie Strike, William Allen Young, Vanessa Haywood, Robert Ho

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Science Fiction, Thriller | 3 Comments »

The Bourne Ultimatum

August 14, 2009

Director Paul Greengrass’ gangbusters visual style, together with a sharp script by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, and George Nolfi, provide a satisfying conclusion (unless they’ve got another sequel up their sleeves) to this intelligent series. Ultimatum takes steely-eyed superspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) to the upper echelons of his quest to uncover his own identity.

Bourne’s is a reverse quest as it were, one that leads him from the netherworld of his amnesia, back to himself as he traces the origins of his nature, his killer instincts. He treads dangerous terrain, though, as those involved in creating his identity now seek to destroy him, deploying assassins at every turn, in every corner of the globe, as Bourne wends his way, in Ultimatum, from Russia to New York City, with stops in London, Madrid, and Tangier, back to the inner sanctum of the CIA, where those responsible for his existential crisis lurk.

On Bourne’s trail this time around is the ice-cold, by-the-book CIA director Noah Vossen (played with chilly professionalism by the top-notch David Strathairn) who’s willing to do whatever it takes to eliminate Bourne and keep the covert carte-blanche tactics enjoyed by his bureaucracy from public record. Off-balancing Vossen’s cold-bloodedness is Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) whose shark-like drive to capture Bourne is gradually tempered by conscience as the utter venality of those she works for dawns on her. The moral symmetry thus laid in place, Greengrass and company set Bourne loose through Europe, onward to America, following the bread crumbs of clues laid down by an investigative journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Consadine), and, later, Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the CIA operative sympathetic to Bourne for reasons never clearly disclosed, yet tantilizing just the same.

Damon has taken us shrewdly from the blundersome, scatter-brained Bourne of the first installment to Ultimatum’s more assured, tactful version, in forward velocity in every scene. He wears the role confidently, with authority, and matches up capably with the intelligence of the Bourne screenplays as well as the excellent performers he plays alongside — from Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, and Franke Potente of the series’ first half, to Strathairn and Allen of the second.

But the heart of the beast is Greengrass’ pulsating style. While I found the director’s jittery, faux-documentary camerawork too expressive for its own good in the second film, The Bourne Supremacy — which seemed too jarring a shift from the clean, crisp style that distinguished Doug Liman’s direction in Identity — Greengrass’ trademark fevered camera and editing suits Ultimatum to a tee, possibly because the stakes in the larger story are now on par with it. In fact, Ultimatum boasts what may well be among the greatest action sequences ever shot and staged — a hyperkinetic foot chase across the rooftops and balconies of a Tangier neighborhood as Bourne pursues a fleet-footed, acrobatic assassin (Joey Ansah) who has Nicky in his cross-hairs. It’s a bravura, breathless combination of camerawork, editing, stuntwork, and performance, culminating in a fight sequence that not only thrills but brings chillingly to the surface Bourne’s opposing halves: the man vs. the killing machine.

Ultimatum takes Bourne to the narrative conclusion of his search for self. The movies strip his identity, bit by bit, to nearly nothing. But what lingers, finally, and why the series is so appealing, is the enduring sense of romantic adventure, a feeling that, though all seems lost, there is much left to re-gain for Bourne. Or whatever his name happens to be.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Written by: Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns, George Nolfi
Cast: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez, Albert Finney, Joan Allen, Joey Ansah, Colin Stinton

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Thriller | Leave a Comment »

Blood Diamond

June 18, 2009

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Contrary to many who found Edward Zwick’s latest politically informed mega-production too snared in its own good intentions, I found Blood Diamond’s heart-on-its-sleeve moralism and diligent righteousness but a mildly intrusive backdrop to what is an old-fashioned adventure-romance. Leonardo DiCaprio impresses once again as Danny Archer, a cutthroat soldier of fortune from Zimbabwe, now plying his trade in Sierra Leone as a diamond smuggler. Set during the harrowing civil wars that seared through western Africa in the late 1990s, the picture’s players and premise are motivated entirely by the illegal diamond trade running rampant during that time.

DiCaprio’s Archer is an operative in the service of an army official who, in a practice common to the conflict’s corrupt leaders, is involved in the black market trading of illegally extracted diamonds for military arms. After a cache of black-market diamonds he’s attempting to smuggle across the border is confiscated, Archer’s left to scramble for another way to recover the fortune those diamonds would’ve reaped, before his bosses find and kill him. He chances on Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a villager separated by the war from his family and who’s vowed to recover his son from the clutches of the mafia-like, anti-government militants. Archer learns that Solomon’s got the goods on a massive diamond, one he’s stashed away in a secret location near a rebel encampment, and finesses his way into Solomon’s good graces, offering to help him to find his son in exchange for the diamond. Complicating matters for Archer, though, is the gung-ho and gorgeous Maddy Bowen (Connelly), a journalist researching an article about the practice of black-market diamond smuggling used to fuel the civil war. Maddy and Archer have an instant and volatile sexual chemistry, and they exploit it to get what they want from the other. Archer agrees to proffer information vital to Maddy’s article if she’ll, in turn, help Vandy find his son. Archer’s deal, of course, is motivated by his all-consuming desire to find the hidden diamond. The push-pull polarities set up in Leavitt’s script between Archer and Maddy, and Archer and Solomon ably drive Blood Diamond’s narrative engines across the strife-torn Sierra Leone landscape.

For all of Blood Diamond’s grand scale and insistent political correctness, neither Leavitt’s script nor Zwick’s direction overplay their hand. They shrewdly stick to the immediate variables of their story, giving us glimpses into the netherworld of Sierra Leone’s civil war only when called upon by narrative necessity. This is not to say that they exploit the grimness and suffering of Africa’s misfortunes for the sake of a bloody good yarn. Rather, by affording it a place just behind the action, informing it without engulfing it, Blood Diamond packs an emotional wallop; in a storytelling strategy rare for this director, we don’t find ourselves laden with didactic demands, but, instead, swept up in an exciting narrative, free to process its moral equations on our own. In DiCaprio’s Archer, we find a psychologically scarred, morally ambiguous anti-hero after the classic Hemingway mold; Archer’s a through-and-through professional, incited by people and events to rediscover his long-compromised values. Indeed, if you’re familiar enough with the tone and tropes of Hemingway’s fiction, it’s impossible not to be reminded of them as we follow Archer’s transformation. In DiCaprio’s sensational performance and in Zwick’s committed storytelling, we find an exhilarating — if unintentional — tribute to that American master of the existential wartime action-romance.

Grade: A-

Directed by: Edward Zwick
Written by: Charles Leavitt
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Kagiso Kuypers, Arnold Vosloo, Antony Coleman, Benu Mabhena, David Harewood, Jimi Mistry, Michael Sheen, Stephen Collins

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Drama | 1 Comment »

Batman Begins

June 15, 2009

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The script for Batman Begins by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer scores on certain levels, but, as narrative, it lacks clearly drawn lines between “good” and “evil.” In short, it’s a mess: We have the League of Shadows, we have Bruce Wayne’s corporate empire, we have Gotham’s criminal underworld, and we have the cops who are in bed with the criminals. Then, towards the end, we have that bit about the looneys being set loose from the asylum (this isn’t much of a spoiler, just a detail). All of these disparate and wholly independent factors are then jumbled together in Nolan and Goyer’s cuisinart of a script, and, honestly, we have no idea “where to look,” so to speak,” due to its muddled, unconvincing narrative arc, the climax of which feels extremely contrived. The overall story feels a lot more frenzied than it needs to be, and by the end you can hear the movie wheezing as it strains to wring every last gasp of suspense from its plotline. What happened to the ideal of a pure, clear-cut hero vs. villain story, the kind we saw realized to perfection in Mario Puzo’s script for Superman?

The performances range from cutie-pie Katie Holmes’ passable limning of Rachel Dawes to Morgan Freeman’s delightfully dapper Lucius Fox and Liam Neeson’s decently villainous Henry Ducard. Michael Caine (Alfred) and Rutger Hauer (Earle) fill their shoes satisfactorily and collect their paychecks. Gary Oldman (Gordon) just tries not to look too embarrassed, the fey Cillian Murphy (Crane) hams it up (badly), all while Christian Bale seems hardly able to breathe in his lead role. Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is a grim, scowling sourpuss. Sure, the character has every reason to be in a bad mood, but what we need–finally!–is a superhero performance that feels natural, guileless. I was desperate for Bale’s Bruce Wayne to say something off-handed, crack a joke, relax those stiffened shoulders. This is the curse of playing Wayne, I think, and it’s one that’s affected everyone who ever played him, including Michael Keaton (my favorite of the contemporary ones). Let’s get over it, folks! This is not serious psychodrama; it’s just a comic book character. At least the 60’s TV show had the good sense to put that in perspective with its campy, melodramatic attitude and perhaps that’s why Adam West’s campier Bruce Wayne might’ve been the perfect interpretation of what is, in essence, a pulp character.

Anyway, none of this is to say that I didn’t like Batman Begins. It’s passable entertainment that our culture has wildly overrated. To put it into a bit of perspective, Bryan Singer’s work in X-Men might’ve had more flair while Nolan just seems straitjacketed in this material. He seems to have jettisoned the exhilaration of making a movie in place of earning the imprimatur of being a bankable director, someone capable of churning out consumable, mass market “entertainment.”

Grade: B-

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
Cast: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman

Posted in Action & Adventure, All Reviews Archive, Thriller | 1 Comment »