Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (**1/2)

This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sequel comes nine years after its predecessor, so the most impressive thing about it might be that it got made with the cast members (and director Adam McKay) intact. It’s the tail end of the disco era, and the dawn of the 24-news era. Thus, rather than parodying local news and the introduction of women into the newsroom, it features Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy working for an upstart operation called GNN (Global News Network). Ron thinks 24-hour news is “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” but a paycheck’s a paycheck. Also on board are his pals: the playboy Brian (Paul Rudd), the racist/sexist Champ (David Koechner), and the simple-minded Brick (Steve Carrell). Ron’s nemesis turned spouse (Christina Applegate) is not on board, but is in the movie. They have a son.

McKay and Ferrell’s schtick is to let the jokes fly and see what sticks, with the force of the delivery sometimes compensating for half-funny lines, sometimes merely emphasizing the lame ones. “Who the hell is Julius Caesar?…I don’t follow the NBA,” is the kind of exchange that half the audience will be amused at, and half will groan at. I’m sure the people who like the movie will disagree about which lines worked and which fell flat. One thing I found incredibly tedious was an entire subplot involving Ron’s new boss, who is, somewhat implausibly, a 30ish black woman (Meagan Good). Besides creating another female role, the character seems mostly to exist to provide an excuse for lame jokes about race. Time was when plain old racist jokes were acceptable; the modern substitute is to make jokes about racists. This itself became tiresome years ago. Maybe because the movie takes place in the early 1980s (the hits-laden soundtrack keeps reminding us) it seemed somehow fresh to have a scene with Burgundy, invited by the boss to dinner, trotting out “jive talk” in an effort to seem “hip” and “down with it,” but in fact it was as painful to look at as all the quoted phrases I just used.

The original Anchorman lacked a real satirical bite but was pretty funny. This sequel, with a better satirical target, since the 24-hour news culture is still very much with us, still mostly lacks satirical bite. Burgundy is the Inspector Clouseau of the news world, spontaneously or accidentally coming up with most of the dubious innovations of the post-cable TV news world — traffic chases on camera, Fox-News-style superpatriotism, focus on celebrities, etc. But beyond that the movie doesn’t have anything to say about those developments. It is simply a silly movie.

Now, being silly is okay. Interrupting the story with the odd fantasy sequence can be fun. And if the main characters are caricatures of womanizers, jerks, and idiots, I’m okay with that, too. But then, don’t show me that for 90 minutes and then follow up with a soppy, sentimental conclusion that asks me to have a big soft spot for these people, one that has them suddenly, and unconvincingly, developing a conscience (and/or a brain). And don’t have a big climax, an overblown successor to the West-Side Story style gang fight in the original, that is much more impressive for its guest-star roster than its humor quotient.

McKay and Ferrell are not going through the motions here. Instead, it seems like they may have tried too hard. If you’re into the kind of humor in the first Anchorman, you’ll probably laugh at something or other here. I’d bet there are more punch lines per minute than in almost any other comedy in recent memory (except maybe toward the end). But I’d also bet that, for most people, a lower percentage of them land.

IMDB link

viewed 12/4/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 12/18/13 (revised 12/26/13)

Before Midnight (***1/4)

Among 2004’s least likely sequels was Before Sunset, a nine-years-later reuniting of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), the couple who shared one intense night together in Vienna in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. The ending of that movie — spoiler! — left it ambiguous as to whether the couple would stay together. Right on schedule, nine more years having passed, this movie tells us that what we wanted to happen did. (Incidentally, having seen the other two is not a prerequisite to this film, which deftly fills in the relevant details. The screenplay is credited to Linklater as well as the two leads)

There are, more or less, four acts. First is the car ride, after Jesse, a writer, leaves his son at the airport. We quickly learn that that the son lives in Chicago with his mother, that Jesse and his ex have a bad relationship, and that the airport is in Greece, where Jesse and Celine continue vacationing with their twin daughters, who are conveniently sleeping for most of part one, leaving their parents to chat.  Just like the other installments, the movie is all talk, little action, so they chat a lot. They live in Paris, so Jesse laments that he can only see his son in summer. Is he  just feeling guilty, or guilt tripping Celine?

The difference between the first two movies is that, even when Jesse and Celine disagreed, the discussion was hypothetical, philosophical. Act two, in which they discuss love and sex with the literary types they’re staying with, is much in this mode. Act three finds the couple exploring (so, some nice scenery of ancient ruins and architecture), but mostly talking, including the light-yet-heavy subject of whether they would be attracted to each other if they’d just met.

The minor spat of the beginning becomes the seed of the more intense final act, which is most different from anything in the other two movies, just as the idealization of a brief encounter is different from a relationship.  I didn’t mind that, and in fact liked the last part best, having been a little anxious for the discussion to get where it was going before that. However, I did think that I might have preferred that the couple’s disagreement be of the sort that could be blamed equally on either party. In fact, I think most people will think one is more at fault.

In any case. this installment lacks the fairy tale quality of the other films. But it has the same verisimilitude that makes these people seem like a real couple, though Hawke’s edgy vibe is different from Delpy’s cool one. So, I’m marking my calendar for 2022, in case Linklater and his two leads decide that Celine and Jesse aren’t done talking.

IMDb link

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (***1/4)

Unlike with other movies, I feel compelled to categorize myself in reviewing Harry Potter films, of which this is, as everyone must know, the last. And so, I declare myself a non-reader of the J. K. Rowling series. I have liked, but not been enthralled by, all of the previous movie adaptations. The series is in good hands in wrapping up, with David Yates returning to direct his fourth one and Steve Kloves, who’s written all but one of the films, again handling the screenplay. And, of course, the familiar faces of the primary cast; for once, no new major character is introduced.

The plot is at once devastatingly simple—Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) must locate the last of the “horcruxes” and finally confront evil Voldemort—and typically complex. That is, the big picture stays in focus, but, without having read the books, or at least having a deep recall of earlier installments, one is confronted with a succession of minor and medium characters with  dimly remembered back stories. Once or twice I had the sensation that a character was only present in the film as a sop to fans of the novels, and that there was a back story I was missing.

In temperament, though, the movie is plain spoken. It’s as dark as one expects, but without the sense of ennui and melancholia that pervaded parts of Deathly Hallows, Part 1. The three principals, Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint), though together for a great deal of the film, interact mostly in a functional way. “Brilliant!” and “That’s It!” are the sort of dialogue that most often passes between them. No time for post-adolescent angst when the devil’s afoot. Any emotional heft comes from the cumulative force of nine films in ten years, though also, later, from bloodied children. Yet you can’t help noticing the very “adult-ness” of these actors/characters first seen as pre-teens. It’s perfect that the series should end now.

Visually, the film is stately, emphasizing especially the imposing edifice of the Hogwarts school, where events take Harry, though he’s graduated. Special effects are not lacking, but in service of the plot, and only a few times drawing attention to themselves. There is quite a lot of wizardry, though; it’s a wonder there’s no “kill Voldemort” spell that would quite simplify the plot. Instead, we get smaller versions of this; no sooner does an obstacle present itself than a heretofore unknown spell, substance, or magic object provides a way out. Most magical of all, though, might be Helena Bonham Carter as…Hermione, in disguise, doing an uncanny Emma Watson imitation and supplying the limited comic relief.

The most wicked and satisfying plot turn has little to do with spells, a lot to do with creepy professor turned nasty headmaster Snape (Alan Rickman), and everything to do with human qualities good and not. Harry’s inevitable face-off with evil is almost unavoidably trite, simply for being so inevitable, just as Voldemort himself is trite and unsatisfying compared to the evil in one’s imagination. It’s something like the gun battle in High Noon, both the whole point of what’s come before and not the point at all. Wisely, the film doesn’t quite end there. It ends right, finally.

IMDB link

viewed 8/7/11 at UA Riverview and reviewed 8/7/11 and 8/8/11

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (**3/4)

This is the third film (though based on the fifth of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels), so I guess it had to be in 3-D. Visually, it’s fairly well done. But most of the characters are still two-dimensional. An exception is Lucy, who is the youngest, though actress Georgie Henley, who plays her is noticeably older than in the other two films. She is here the most prominent character, entering Narnia with her older brother, Edmund, and a new character, detested cousin Eustace. Obnoxious, haughty, and disbelieving (skepticism is not a virtue in Lewis’s world), he functions as comic relief for the first half of the film, sharing that function with Reepicheep, the talking, fencing mouse voiced by Simon Pegg. Of the several other new characters, they are much less memorable than the ones in the other two films, and their appearances are briefer. The other major character who returns is Caspian (Ben Barnes). As the title character of the previous film, he had a lot more to do, though. For the purposes of this film, to say that he is the brave, young, and wise ruler of Narnia is to say all that needs to be said. As for the other two Pevensie children, they make only token appearances.

All in all, this was the weakest of the three films. The first, built around the children’s discovery of Narnia and the task of unfreezing it, and the second, centering on an epic battle, were satisfyingly cohesive in a way that this was not, even if it’s shorter. I have not read the novels, so my reaction is not based on that, but for the first time I felt in watching that the story was clearly culled from a larger work. Themes and events whiz by, never to be revived. Yes, everyone is supposed to be searching for magic swords to free some people entrapped by a magic mist, but truly, this is a pretty boring uniting theme, since neither the mist nor the swords have significant stories behind them (in the movie version). Could be also I just don’t care for movies about random magic objects. Maybe that’s why I thought the Lord of the Rings trilogy was so overrated. Perhaps too the lack of input by Andrew Adamson, who directed and cowrote the first two movies, is missed. (Michael Apted helmed this one.) It reminded me a little of the last Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where they just keep wandering from one setting to another, but nothing seemed really to happen. It’s not as dull as that, nor as misguided as the last of the Austin Powers movies, or of the Spy Kids franchise (also in 3-D), but does help make the case that when it comes to film series, the third time is not always the charm.

IMDB link

viewed at Rave UPenn (PFS screening) and reviewed 12/2/10

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (***1/4)

Picking up about where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, this is nonetheless a different film than its predecessor. You don’t particularly need to have seen part one to make sense of part two, and in fact there is hardly any character overlap, save Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) himself. Here Mesrine is no longer the angry young man. He is older and has settled into a career, albeit as a bank robber only dabbling in other crimes. He is still capable of violence but it seems more measured. He reserves most of his hatred for the police and those running France’s maximum-security prisons. He believes himself to have a credo, to be a man of his word even as he publishes an exaggerated memoir aimed at increasing his fame and notoriety.

Lacking some of the vitality of Killer Instinct, this installment is nearly a character study, though its prison-escape sequence bests the one in the first film, and there are multiple shootouts. Here his penchant for disguises is more prominent. Like the first film, this one starts off with his death in 1979. Since it begins in 1973, it doesn’t skip ahead in time as much. It’s still episodic, but less so. Unlike the first film, this ends where it begins, with the police killing Mesrine. We now see this, for the first time, from the viewpoint of the police, a clever reminder that, to them, this was no master criminal, no gentleman bandit, but a thug they were determined to take down.

IMDB link

viewed 9/8/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8–9/10

Sex and the City 2 (***)

“It’s like 1998 all over again,” says Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) at one point in this sequel, naming the year Sex and the City premiered on HBO. In this case, that’s a good thing. The title may not show much originality, but the story returns to the strengths of the series—female bonding, glamorous settings, strange fashion choices, and tasteful double entendres—while updating us on the lives of the four gal pals.

A fabulous gay wedding kicks off the film, complete with Liza Minelli officiating. Marriage is, in fact, the theme, although the sexually rapacious Samantha (Kim Catrell) is still blessedly single. She’s now combating menopause with an array of pills and hormones. Lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and housemom Charlotte (Kristin Davis) are navigating the effects of career, children, and having a sexy nanny on their marriages. As for Carrie, she and Big (Chris Noth) are still working on theirs after two years, but thankfully that doesn’t take up half the film like in the first movie. It’s a much more episodic film, though like the first one it’s written and directed by Michael Patrick King.

The most unusual thing about the story is not the sex, but the city, which for about half of the runtime is not Manhattan, but Abu Dhabi. The reason the ladies wind up there is unimportant and barely plausible, but provides plenty of opportunities to show off luxury as well as outfits that, much of the time, might best be called get-ups. Placing the women in even this most modern part of the Middle East provides some amusing culture clash moments. As with the earlier film, the setting puts Samantha in a sexual straightjacket, as she can barely abide even the more relaxed standards afforded to foreigners. The difference is that here her inclination is to rebel—humorously—against them, whereas her attempts at monogamy in the first movie robbed her of her one salient personality feature. It also had her stuck in Los Angeles, away from the other women, and that separation is another mistake that doesn’t get repeated here. The strength of the Sex and the City franchise is not in the characters as individuals, but in the way that they play off of one another. Excepting some of the early scenes with Carrie and Big, most of the time the women are all together.

Sex and the City 2, while updating some storylines, doesn’t take the series in any bold new directions. Those who find the series to be a celebration of self-absorption and materialism will continue to find it so. (Carrie does, however, refer to something as a “waste of money,” which surely must be a rare phrase in her vocabulary.) If the last movie erred on the side of seriousness, the second movie does the opposite, while still seeming a bit bloated. But, despite some forced moments, it does a better job than the first of encompassing adult themes while keeping the light, witty tone of the television series.

IMDB link

viewed at Moorestown and reviewed 5/30/10

District 13: Ultimatum (***1/4)

A sequel to one of the better action movies of the last decade, this one comes with a generic-sounding subtitle, but shows that the ever-fecund mind of its screenwriter/producer Luc Besson ( La Femme Nikita, The Transporter) is still fertile. (Besson also has a hand in the simultaneously opening From Paris with Love.) Certainly District B13, set in a near-future Paris where the city’s most crime-ridden section had been walled off from the rest of town, would be better known were it not in French. The simple-but-serviceable plot provided a sturdy framework for original action sequences involving David Belle, inventor of a discipline called parkour. Parkour involves efficiently adapting one’s movements to the surrounding objects, which in practice means a lot of running and jumping.

There is unfortunately less parkour than in the original. Belle’s character, a kind of thug-turned-hero, plays second fiddle to the cop character played by Cyril Raffaelli in both films. Hand-to-hand combat and martial arts are the specialties of Raffaeli, who often works as a stuntman or stunt coordinator. In an over-the-top but highly entertaining early sequence that turns out to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, he infiltrates a corrupt club, uses a disguise to lure the bad guys one by one, and uses an original Van Gogh painting as a weapon/shield while keeping it from getting scratched. Again, circumstances require that the cop and the ex-thug team up to save District 13, this time from outright demolition. The district is portrayed as a multicultural jungle so lawless that even the cops fear to tread there, yet in the end cynicism yields to the French values of liberté, egalité, fraternité.

IMDB link

viewed 1/28/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/29/10

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (***)

Does this movie need to be reviewed? Maybe not, but anyway…. This is neither my favorite nor my least-favorite of the series, but was enjoyable enough. Steve Kloves, who authored the screenplays for all of the movies except 2007’s Order of the Phoenix, has returned, and David Yates directs his second straight entry in the series. As with the last one, a new teacher (Jim Broadbent, yet another Oscar-nominated British thespian) at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the impetus for the main storyline. Not as obviously evil as Imelda Staunton’s character in Phoenix, Broadbent’s potions professor is nonetheless mixed up somehow with Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape; Snape is mixed up with Harry’s nemesis and fellow student, Draco Malfoy; and Malfoy is mixed up with Lord Voldemort. I already can’t exactly remember the details, but I mostly followed it as I watched, although a better memory of the other films would have helped.

Voldemort used to be called “He who must not be named,” but Harry and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) are getting too old for euphemisms. Old enough to have romantic desires, certainly, and even to feel jealous. The increasing maturity of the main characters plays naturally into the increasingly dark feel of the series, yet provides comic relief as well, notably in Ron’s having to contend with a bubbly classmate’s florid crush. While action and fantasy elements, like a luck potion and an exciting quidditch match, continue to play a part in the events, ordinary human desires create the real magic of the series. There is too much going on for the films to create the depth of characters that would make me love them, or that the J. K. Rowlings novels perhaps inspire (I’ve not read any), but there’s enough that I want to see what happens next.

IMDB link

viewed 7/17/09 at AMC Marple; reviewed 8/6/09

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (***)

Guillermo del Toro follows his brilliant blend of fantasy and historical drama, Pan’s Labyrinth, with a sequel to his 2004 comic adaptation. The titular hero (Ron Perlman) returns with the amusing world-weariness that, aside from his grotesque appearance, is his most notable feature. Yeah, he’s really strong, but that’s typcial superhero stuff, and so’s the basic plot, which has to do with an underworld prince (Luke Goss) threatening to unloose a bunch of dormant mechanical men to realize his dream of ethnic cleansing, the cleansees in question being the entire human race, starting with New York City.

More than the storyline, or the okay subplot in which Hellboy and his firey girlfriend (Selma Blair) try to resolve their combustible relationship, the appeal is in the variety of odd creatures. They can be found at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, whose team is led by a German-accented dude with a fishbowl for a head and features fish-man Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). But even more can be found among their foes, who include tiny, man-eating tooth fairies and giant, killer vegetation. Fantasy fans and comic geeks will eat this up, but it won’t win over anyone who doesn’t care about that stuff.

IMDB link

viewed 7/12/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 7/25/08

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (**3/4)

Maybe Hollywood was worried there weren’t enough recent movies to make sequels to, old ones to remake, or 1970s TV shows to turn into big-screen extravaganzas, and there was a fear that new ideas would be needed. Finding a new way to plunder the past, they’ve begun churning out sequels with action heroes—Rocky, Rambo, Die Hard’s John McClain—who’d apparently retired in the 1990s. So here’s Harrison Ford, 65 years old, reuniting with director Steven Spielberg in the fourth installment of the Indy series, one that, instead of being set in the 1930s, brings the adventurer-professor into the age of Elvis and the Red Menace. The primary villain is a Soviet agent played by the ever-versatile Cate Blanchett. As the film begins, KGB agents have captured Indy, along with his friend Mac (Ray Winstone), in the Nevada desert and forced him to help find a dead alien in a crate. Will the creaky Indy escape from a passel of KGB agents? Of course.

Actually, 65 or not, Ford looks fine, and a few more gray hairs kind of suits a character who was kind of curmudgeonly to begin with. He plays surprisingly well off a newly acquired, slick-haired sidekick (Shia LaBeouf) whose mother has a past with Indy and whose motorcycle barely survives a chase through the Yale University campus. Then, the cast head off to Peru, where Indy reunites under unpleasant circumstances with an old colleague (John Hurt) and an old girlfriend (Karen Allen). The return of the spunky Allen (she was in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but not the first two sequels) is welcome, but mildly underwritten.

Whereas the first half of the movie has a nice balance of humor, action, and plot development, the last half seems to devolve into a very long chase scene, with an anticlimactic ending that relies too much on CGI effects. Maybe I’m just less enthralled by crystal skulls than George Lucas, who came up with the idea for the movie, but I felt like Dr. Jones’s quickly rattled-off explanations of all the clues were just excuses to get to the next action sequence. And while Ford has aged well, time (and Indy’s many imitators) has made the series seem less novel. This one made me think especially of the National Treasure movies, particularly the lesser second one, which similarly piled on the unreality. Here, Indy survives killer ants, waterfall plunges, and, oh yeah, a nuclear bomb while revealing the ability to translate ancient Mayan on the fly. The KGB agents, meanwhile, repeatedly turn into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Individually, none of these elements was that objectionable, but in totality they seemed over the top, even for a series that’s supposed to be that way. So I didn’t love the film, but Spielberg does know how to make an action scene exciting, so the result is a mixed bag.

IMDB link

viewed 5/24/08; reviewed 5/29/08 and 6/1/08

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (***1/4)

The sequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a different sort of movie. First, the four Pevensie children have been to Narnia once before, and they are smarter, more worldly, and highly skilled at archery and such. Although there is some surprise as they find that the year that has passed for them in London has lasted centuries on Narnia, the film launches much more quickly into the main plotline. This involves the efforts of the Narnians and their allies (inlcuding the Pevensies) to topple a usurper to the throne, whose rightful heir is young Caspian (Ben Barnes). Basically, it’s a fairly typical story of good and evil, but enough intricacies exist that, compared to the earlier film, children may be confused.

Second, while somehow the movie is rated PG, not PG-13, it is noticeably more violent than the first, and overall darker in tone. The brutality of war is more implied than shown, but it’s there all the same. Villainous King Miraz (Sergio Castellitto) has a Mediterranean accent, and his regime somehow had the feel of Inquistion-era Spain. Leavening this somewhat is an element of humor that was largely missing before, yet never seems unnatural. Even a swashbuckling mouse, reminiscent of the character voiced by Antonio Banderas in the Shrek movies, is welcome comic relief.

Third, the allegorical Christian elements are more pervasive. For much of the movie the lion Aslan, the Christ analogue, is unseen; only Lucy, the youngest has faith that he will return. This was, to me, fine. However, I less cared for the the climax, which involves a deus ex machina in which the deus is quite literally God, or his Narnian counterpart. Not to give away anything, but I’d have rather seen the Pevensies save the day rather than the special-effects cavalry. (Admittedly, the effects are all impressive, save perhaps for one involving the return of another character from volume one.)

Because of its lighter tone and feeling of newness, as well as a less familiar story arc, I liked the first movie better, but this one was skillfully enough done that I expect many people, especially adults, will take the opposite view. The creative forces behind the first movie are still there, including director Andrew Adamson, who fills the screen with fierce battle scenes, gorgeous overhead shots, and a variety of new creatures and personages previously unseen. As before, I was most impressed by the women, Georgie Henley’s Lucy, and Anna Popplewell’s Susan, but brothers Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Peter (William Moseley) each have important parts in the story also.

IMDB link

viewed 5/1/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 5/22/08

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (**1/4)

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle didn’t quite reinvent the stoner comedy, but it had a unique dynamic between the two leads and seemed organically conceived. This feels strained, like the work of people forced to come up with a second act when the first one said all that needed to be said. Despite all the emphasis on pot humor, the duo (John Cho, Kal Penn) here don’t seem like stoners, just smart kids who make foolish choices, like lighting up on a plane, which is how Guantanamo comes into the picture. Yes, it’s strained. The ensuing escape turns this into a road movie, with the boys fleeing the law and trying to hook up with once and future girlfriends. An amiable goofiness pervades. The reappearance of Neil Patrick Harris as pot-smoking, prostitute-loving “Neil Patrick Harris” (to quote the credits) has an amusing randomness about it. Some of the humor relates to stereotyping, not only of the Asian stars but a redneck couple who help out the two fugitives. The characters are still solid, but neither the plot nor the jokes are enough to make this stand out among other comic offerings.

IMDB link

viewed 5/3/08; revised 3/30/14

previous version of review:

An admission: I never saw Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, so I have no idea if this is worse or better. As for this sequel, I wasn’t impressed one way or the other. Despite all the emphasis on pot humor, the duo (John Cho, Kal Penn) don’t seem like stoners, just smart kids who make foolish choices, like lighting up on a plane, which is how Guantanamo comes into the picture. The ensuing escape turns this into a road movie, with the boys fleeing the law and trying to hook up with once and future girlfriends. An amiable goofiness pervades. The reappearance of Neil Patrick Harris as pot-smoking, prostitute-loving “Neil Patrick Harris” (to quote the credits) has an amusing randomness about it. Some of the humor relates to stereotyping, not only of the Asian stars but a redneck couple who help out the two fugitives. I liked the characters, but neither the plot nor the jokes are enough to make this stand out among other comic offerings.

Rambo (**1/4)

Following by a few months the revival of his long-dormant Rocky franchise, Sylvester Stallone has done the same for action hero John Rambo. The simple title of this numberless fourth entry might suggest Stallone, who directed, was intending to recapture the feel of the beginning of the series, as with Rocky Balboa. But no, this is much more the straight action movie of the second and third films than the character drama of the original First Blood. As the story begins, the gruff, incredibly buff Rambo is a snake wrangler in Thailand who’s persuaded to escort some missionaries up the river to neighboring Burma. Thanks to brutal footage that precedes the opening credits, we already know about the government soldiers who have been brutalizing the countryside, hunting for rebels.

Stallone has called this an antiwar movie, but the anti-violence missionary leader comes off as a well-meaning but naive nincompoop. Rambo himself has become fatalistic and so does not interfere in the mission, but when the spectre of white womanhood being violated arises, his remaining shred of idealism is awakened. “Live for nothing or die for something,” as he puts it, thus expending a good portion of his dialogue. We are meant to deplore the soldiers’ thirst for violence, while at the same time the movie’s raison d’etre would seem to be to satisfy the audience’s thirst for violence. This is accomplished with stunning savagery, as Rambo and a team of mercenaries, but mostly Rambo, machine gun, stab, slice, chop, strangle and (it appeared) nuke their way through hundreds of mostly interchangeable baddies. Disemboweling one of the soldiers, Rambo’s delight seems to match their earlier debauchery. But hey, he’s a good guy, delivering the goods.

IMDB link

reviewed 1/27/08

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (**3/4)

This sequel to 2004’s National Treasure is like a fifth-generation carbon copy, looking just like the original, only a little shoddier. A couple of fairly entertaining action sequences are supported by scaffolding even more precarious than the barely balanced platform hidden behind Mount Rushmore where the cast find themselves in the climax. earlier, there’s a car chase through London, wherein hero Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) drives on the wrong side of the road but still escapes from the nominal villain (Ed Harris). Harris’s character is a rival historian/treasure hunter with the virtue of being ambiguous, but the liability of making hardly any sense. Neither does the rest of the movie. Rather than suspension of disbelief, suspension of all higher brain functions may be required to enjoy this written-by-a-committee sequel.

Cage is re-joined by most of part one’s cast. Love interest/document expert Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) is separated from Gates, so he can woo her again. Friend Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) returns as the stock character of the electronics expert who can defeat the Buckingham Palace computer system in 30 seconds but can’t get a girlfriend. Jon Voigt as Ben’s dad has a bigger part than before, and Ben also has at his disposal a linguistics expert played by Helen Mirren. Ben’s role is to look at an obscure clue in Paris and realize seconds later that he needs to break into the queen’s desk in London. Somehow this will all clear Gates’s ancestor of having conspired with President Lincoln’s assassin.

This all goes by so fast you won’t have time to ponder all the implausibilities. It will test the resolve of the “it’s just a movie” crowd, but assuming that a semblance of realism is not an issue, it has very much the same fun feel as the original Treasure, and in Mirren actually has one thing that’s better. Touching on familiar bits of history without being intellectual, these popcorn sellers fill a niche for those seeking an all-ages adventure without much violence, but the first one was the real Treasure.


IMDB link


reviewed 1/17/08

Saw IV (**1/4)

This movie begins unpleasantly enough, with the autopsy of one John Kramer. Mr. Kramer, known better as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) to moviegoers, died along with his protegée in Saw III, but only the naive would have thought that meant the end of the series. As his ex-wife (Betsy Russell, seen briefly in the last installment) explains, John planned everything, even anticipating his own death. Or is it that yet another Rube Goldberg of torture devices has carried on his work? Whomever it is, he (or she) has been busy. There are several victims here. The first two are actually shown before the autopsy. A blinded man is chained to another whose mouth has been somehow sealed shut. One has the key, one the lock, and cooperation is not in the cards. If you’ve seen the other Saw films, you’ll know that this seemingly unrelated sequence will tie back into the story much later, and in fact everything here is tied together in a way that probably took a lot of thought on the part of the multiple screenwriters. (They are new, but the director, Darren Lynn Bousman, returns from the last two films, preserving the herky-jerky editing style and reliance on jarring mini-flashbacks to tie everything together.) Even more than before, the events of the last installment are tied into this one.

The main storyline relates to officer Rigg, who is being punished by Jigsaw (or whomever) for being a neglectful husband and having a hero complex. Lots and lots of microcassette tapes, typed instructions, and scrawls on the wall, and watching others suffer accompany his lesson. If you’ve missed these films, Jigsaw’s modus operandi is to teach a moral lesson by engaging the victim in a device from which the only escape involves a harsh variation on Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” code. None of his devices fails.

Only occasionally does the film seem to want us to sympathize with the killer, as when a rapist must blind himself to survive; in that case the filmmakers are sure to make him obese and slovenly. Immoral simply isn’t enough. There is cleverness in these movies, but still I am repulsed by the idea that their appeal is as fictional snuff films. As an “objective” critic, I’d say that the section of the film in which we learn about Kramer’s conversion into Jigsaw is trite. I think that for those who haven’t seen Saw III, or don’t remember it well, certain aspects of the plot will be confusing, though I suspect it all fits together seamlessly. (It’s only the overall concept that’s ludicrous.) But it makes me wonder, is this really the sort of movie that people really want to see more of? As Jigsaw would say, make your choice.

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reviewed 10/28/07

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (**3/4)

Yet another sequel, but they couldn’t call it Elizabeth II, because it’s still about England’s Elizabeth I, who is still played by Cate Blanchett, who is still as excellent as in the original. It’s 1585; no longer the young girl consolidating power, the queen is the unquestioned ruler during a time of trouble. Well, almost unquestioned. Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton) was a potential rival to her throne and an inspiration for England’s Catholics, some of whom might have liked to depose the Protestant Elizabeth. From the exterior, there was Spain’s Catholic King Philip, who threatened to expand his empire.

The movie doesn’t delve deeply into the politics of the religious war going on inside England, an admittedly complicated subject, but a large chunk is given over to the plotting against the throne. I found some of that confusing, filled with characters of whom I lost track. More successful, on the whole, is the recounting of Elizabeth and her friendship/flirtation with roguish, but loyal Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). Still, there was something disconcerting about watching the course of the first movie play in reverse. There, she becomes a woman. Here, she is already a queen, as Blanchett’s fierce voice and regal presence makes clear from her first scene, but reverts into girlish self-doubt in the presence of Raleigh. (Despite makeup, Blanchett does look a tad youthful for a woman who was in her fifties during the events portrayed.) I don’t know about the true relationship of these figures, but I preferred the more assertive, self-assured ruler of the start. Does even the Virgin Queen fall into a pitable state in the presence of overwhelming masculinity?

Only the threat of the Spanish Armada, it seems, can rouse Elizabeth to leadership. This is still worth seeing if you enjoy historical dramas. But despite the return of screenwriter Michael Hirst and director Shekhar Kapur, like most sequels it impresses less than its forebear.

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reviewed 10/11/07

Resident Evil: Extinction (***)

The very last of the summer 2007 “threequels” is also the most unassuming. Based on a video game, these future-set actioners haven’t been blockbusters, merely low-key successes. Maybe that’s why this doesn’t come off as overblown and pretentious like so many others. Each of the movies is a little different too. In the first movie, Alice escapes from the scientists experimenting on her. In the second, she confronts the effects of the virus that has spread across “Racoon City” and turned much of the populace into flesh-craving zombies. Now, with the virus spread across the planet, cool, collected Alice (Milla Jovovich) aids a convoy (of which Ali Larter plays the leader) and opposes a mad scientist in a world that resembles that of Road Warrior, only with zombies. All those undead folks gives the opportunity for lots of mayhem without it seeming too gruesome. The virus has also spread to other life forms, leading to sequences featuring mad dogs and birds. Fuel and food shortages represent other obstacles for the few that survive. The whole subplot with the scientist is on the goofy side, and missing is much detail about how the world got to be the way it is. But the strength of the movie is that it doesn’t try to do too much. Some good action scenes—Alice’s signature move is twirling twin knives in each hand before she offs a couple of zombies—enough story to move things forward, and some variation keep things interesting. Probably the other two films are slightly better, but it’s close enough that I suspect many people will disagree. Enough loose ends remain to see that writer Paul W. S. Anderson has some ideas about a fourth entry (though none is planned).

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reviewed 9/24/07

Mr. Bean’s Holiday (***1/4)

Clever visual humor makes this in most ways superior to the first Mr. Bean movie, and partly atones for star Rowan Atkinson’s lame attempt to merge Bean and James Bond in Johnny English.

Mr. Bean started out as a silent TV character before Atkinson appeared in the aptly named Bean in 1997. Here he wins a trip to France and travels from Paris to Cannes. Unlike in many American films, France here is depicted as a French-speaking country, which works out well. The language barrier plays into Bean’s natural disinclination to speak. Also, the new setting accentuates the fish-out-of-water feeling and provides a good platform for Atkinson’s Chaplinesque oddness. He’s an absurdist everyman, repelling with his facial expressions, endearing via his essential harmlessness, and solving a series of problems, largely of his own making, using his childlike sense of logic. The humor isn’t subtle, but it’s low-key. For example, the film has the same gag as one in Wild Hogs. The hero accidentally spills a drink on a laptop computer. Unlike in Wild Hogs, it was realized that having the computer catch on fire and extending the joke for twice as long would not make it funnier. Director Steve Bendelack favors long takes and long shots that allow us to watch the humor slowly unfold. A highlight is Bean’s desperate attempt to raise money via a karaoke street performance, using one song after another until he finally finds the right one.

Becoming entangled with a boy who’s lost his father (due to Bean's inadvertent mishap) and an actress, Bean becomes, sort of, a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. Willem Dafoe amuses as a pretentious American film director. Old-fashioned yet timeless, with appeal for all ages, this was a pleasant surprise.

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reviewed 8/28/07

Rush Hour 3 (*1/2)

It’s been six years since Rush Hour 2, and six years since Chris Tucker made a movie. I swear I kind of liked the first two movies in this series, so either this one is a lot worse or it just took awhile for me to become completely annoyed by Tucker’s character, James Carter. We first reacquaint ourselves with Carter, now a traffic cop, as he’s being berated for falsely arresting some Iranian scientists and trying to pick up some “sushi-grade” women for himself and Hong Kong-born Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan). Presumably, Carter thinks Japanese and Chinese are the same thing. As for the Iranians, just because they’re scientists “doesn’t mean they won’t blow shit up.” Carter’s too busy to socialize, acting as the bodyguard of Ambassador Han, who’s making a big speech about the Chinese Triad gangsters at the World Criminal Court. Thus reacquainted with our heroes, we follow the Triads’ trail to…France.

The movie shows a side of Paris you can only see on a studio backlot, the halfway decent climax in what’s supposed to be the Eiffel Tower the only apparent justification. That and a silly bit in which the boys question/threaten a Chinese-looking thug with the help of a multilingual nun because he only speaks...French. This may be the comic highlight, notwithstanding the civil-liberties violations, so you can imagine the lowlights. Incidentally and idiotically, the thug’s the only character in the movie who doesn’t speak English. A couple of the French characters can barely speak French, it would seem, notably the variably accented cabbie sidekick Carter and Lee acquire, who later argues with his wife...in English. It’s an odd contrast to the multiple scenes in which Lee speaks Chinese to other Chinese characters. Language also figures in what’s supposed to be a showcase scene for Tucker. Wandering into a dressing-room full of showgirls, he tells them he’s the costume designer. Having clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t know French, he nonetheless speaks in a French accent so he can a) blend in and b) have an excuse to ask the women to strip. Seen in a random sitcom, this would have been corny already. What really made it cringe-worthy was that the apparently lobotomized dancers appear to believe him. Watching this in a fairly crowded theater, I listened for laughter and heard not a peep.

Admittedly, the same audience pretty much stayed intact to watch the predictable outtakes at the end, so what do I know? Whether you like the movie pretty much will depend if you think Tucker’s Carter babbling a 90-minute stream of bullshit is funny. Yes, the plot is perforated like Swiss-cheese, yes, Brent Ratner’s direction and Jeff Nathanson’s script are uninspired, and yes, martial-arts expert Chan has lost a step or two, but that I didn’t laugh at all is what made the movie a truly trying experience. The mismatched partners schtick has worn very thin, too. Rush Hour 3 counts on distant memories of past installments to establish what these guys are doing together. The action parts, fewer than before, are fair to middling, the best being the one in the Tower. Chan there displays some of the dexterity he did in movies he made as a younger man. Overall, though, I felt like I was watching three episodes of a sitcom that had long since “jumped the shark.”

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reviewed 8/12/07

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (***1/4)

Again, England’s most popular wizard has taken over the world’s movie screens. David Yates is the fourth director in the series, but this is the first of the five films not to feature a screenplay by Steve Kloves. The difference isn’t jarring, but the script by Michael Goldenberg (Contact, Peter Pan) encompasses a little less. Depending on your point of view, this means that it’s a more streamlined story that’s easier to follow, or that a lot has been left out.

In an apparent effort to have every living British Oscar nominee appear in the series, Helena Bonham Carter and Imelda Staunton are new to the cast. Carter, to feature more prominently in later films, has a small part as a villain. However, Staunton (Vera Drake) is, other than Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint), the only major character in this episode, although newcomer Evanna Lynch has a substantial role as guileless Luna Lovegood, new friend to Harry. Hardly anyone’s left out of the story entirely, but such figures as Draco Malfoy, Harry’s least-favorite fellow student, make only token appearances. In his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry has more significant concerns, not least of which is the threat of being expelled at the outset of the film. Staunton’s Delores Umbridge becomes his newest nemesis after she’s hired as the new teacher of the Dark Arts. She’s also the leader of the naysayers at the Ministry of Magic, who disbelieve Harry’s assertion that evil Lord Valdemort has returned.

Thus the movie’s plot is set up within the first fifteen minutes, and almost everything else has to do with that. If Hogwarts were a Catholic school, Umbridge would be the nun who rapped naughty students on the knuckles, fought the teaching of evolution, and railed against rock and roll. Allied with Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore, Harry tries to rally the opposition in secret. The last movie in the series introduced more personal themes as the young wizards and witches felt the stirs of puberty, but Harry barely has time to kiss his girlfriend from The Goblet of Fire. Umbridge is a straightforwardly evil character who manages to cow even the imperious Professor Snape (Alan Rickman). Why she and the Ministry of Magic so oppose the notion of Valdemort’s return isn’t well explained, but in any case good and evil are clear enough.

Harry himself provides the three-dimensionality. It’s not that he’s a morally ambiguous character. When he frets about losing his sense of right and wrong, you won’t believe it, but you’ll believe that Harry does. Much credit here belongs to Radcliffe, who conveys real, ordinary emotions, like fear and uncertainty. It’s this that sets him apart from all of the action heroes of summer. Faced for the first time with being disbelieved and rejected, he is anxious. Aside from the plot, this installment is Harry becoming an adult.

On the whole, #4 remains my favorite of the films. It’s more fun, and nothing here is as exciting or as visually inspired as its dragon battle. The interplay of the various personalities perhaps get short shrift here as well. But the extended showdown at the end is well-crafted, and some new creatures are introduced. There remains an intelligence that helps the series continue to attract a wide audience, so I’ll be happily anticipating Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in 2008.

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written 7/16/07