Action Archives - Page 29 of 50 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

July 11, 2008****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Germany, Hungary, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, John Hurt
written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw It’s at the forefront of one’s mind during Hellboy II: The Golden Army (hereafter Hellboy II), Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant dance along an ephemeral tightrope between pop and Puccini, that David Cronenberg and Howard Shore recently converted their remake of The Fly into a full-fledged opera: I can see the same thing happening with a lot of del Toro’s pictures. The director’s said that after his Pan’s Labyrinth “something popped” in regards to his restraint in allowing the menagerie of monsters in his brain free rein over his imagination–and that he endeavoured to bring all the madness of Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” universe to the big screen with or without a commensurately giant budget. (Of Summer ’08’s blockbusters, Hellboy II, costing around 85 million dollars, might be the most frugal.) The result is a film so crammed to the gills with invention that a bit of background business in a scene set at a bazaar hidden beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (this is the second great genre film this year after Cloverfield to make a pit stop at that particular locale) wherein a creature plays a pipe made out of a tanned human corpse is left uncommented-upon and is somehow ultimately unremarkable. The wonders of Hellboy II as experienced through our avatars Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz (Selma Blair), and Abe (Doug Jones, this time vocalizing the character as well)–team members for a covert government agency that deals with supernatural intrusions–are the way the world is, and it’s fascinatingly left for the normals in the audience to crane for a better look.

Hancock (2008)

July 1, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Superhero, Theatrical, Will Smith

***/****
starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Jae Head
screenplay by Vy Vincent Ngo & Vince Gilligan
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw I’m an unabashed Peter Berg fan. I think that his Very Bad Things is naughty and transgressive in ways that Judd Apatow could only pretend; that his The Rundown is the first film since Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small to use little people correctly in a rollicking, rousing sentence; and that his Friday Night Lights did a very fine job of essaying the insular madness of Texas high-school football. Berg’s last picture, The Kingdom, is the finest pop explication of the brief history of (and our relationship with) the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and now his superhero epic Hancock has the temerity to try to address the colour barrier in comics as it relates, uneasily, to these United States. Talking about it tells everything, so beware the major spoiler, but Hancock has at its centre an indestructible, airborne, super-strong black man with a white wife who, should he spend too much time near her, renders him completely, utterly mortal and thus subject to the world that would see them apart. Consider that this is a mega-budget, 4^th of July blockbuster starring Will Smith, the black guy all America can agree on, doing the old miscegenation tango with the whitest white girl on the planet, South African lovely Charlize Theron, which should have aged white Republicans twisted up in their Confederate-flag panties. We’re only really forty years removed from Selma, Alabama, and here’s forty-year-old Will Smith planting a big wet one on Theron’s lips in a tentpole flick the summer that Barack Obama became the first black man chosen as the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States. God bless America, free(r) at last.

Bridge to Terabithia (2007) [Widescreen]; The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007); The Spiderwick Chronicles [2-Disc Field Guide Edition] – DVDs

June 30, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Thriller

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA
**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C
starring Josh Hutcherson, Annasophia Robb, Robert Patrick, Zooey Deschanel
screenplay by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson, based on the book by Katherine Paterson
directed by Gabor Csupo

THE SEEKER: THE DARK IS RISING
½*/**** N/A
starring Alexander Ludwig, Christopher Eccleston, Ian McShane, Frances Conroy
screenplay by John Hodge, based on the book by Susan Cooper
directed by David L. Cunningham

THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn
screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick and John Sayles, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black
directed by Mark Waters

by Walter Chaw In the genre of wide-eyed, hyperactive ‘tween bullshit, there seems a common thread of missing parents or siblings with all the attendant Oedipal complexities upon which to coat-hanger every genus of just-pubescent, Uncle Joe Campbell shenanigans. (Oh, I get it, it’s a metaphor for strange hair, jerking-off, and embarrassing hard-ons–no wonder I identify with these things again as I get older.) More underground than overt adolescent emo rock-star/rapist fantasies like vampirism, the flicks of this type that work–such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, or the third and fifth Harry Potters, or The Passion of the Christ–incorporate the uncertainty and body horror of growing up with hero/martyr fantasies and, ultimately, the melancholy of childhood’s end. The result of a job well done is a piece of enduring, often befuddling, resonance, owing in part to the canny hijacking of some existing folklore or mythology (including comic books) and the gratifying recognition that at the end of all that hormonal devastation is the justification of manhood. Psychosexual psychodrama at least, the new crop of boy-into-man-boy flicks, in the wake of the astounding success of that certain boy wizard (and, shit, probably Shrek‘s, too), takes a new interest in fantasy as a means to specific ontological ends. For this unabashed fan of Matthew Robbins’s idyllic, laden Dragonslayer, it’s not entirely bad news.

Cloverfield (2008) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 25, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David
screenplay by Drew Goddard
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I love its freedom and its exuberance, its sense of fun and its creativity. I love that it uses The Blair Witch Project as a launchpad for its low-tech, found-footage brilliance; I love its genius-level viral marketing campaign and its Ludditism and overt technophobia. Where The Blair Witch Project skewered trust-fund kids picking a particularly unfortunate senior project, Cloverfield takes on twentysomething urbanites on top of the world in Manhattan, celebrating the departure of one of their own on the night the chickens come home to roost. There's no explanation of the mayhem in Cloverfield beyond that a monster has attacked and that the recoil its rampage spawns inevitably resembles memories of our collective scarring by 9/11. All it does, really, is clarify that when people at Ground Zero referred to the falling of the WTC as "just like in a movie," it didn't point to a divorce from reality but to an inability, utterly, to conceive of anything so epoch-shaking as possible outside the prism of our precious, silver-graven images. The history depicted in our films is the only history we know.

Dirty Harry [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 23, 2008****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Ian Pugh, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Revenge, Thriller

DIRTY HARRY (1971)
****/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A- EXTRAS A
starring Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, Andy Robinson
screenplay by Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner
directed by Don Siegel

MAGNUM FORCE (1973)
***/**** IMAGE A SOUND A- EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Hal Holbrook, Mitchell Ryan, David Soul
screenplay by John Milius and Michael Cimino
directed by Ted Post

THE ENFORCER (1976)
**/**** IMAGE A- SOUND A EXTRAS B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Tyne Daly, Harry Guardino, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Dean Riesner
directed by James Fargo

SUDDEN IMPACT (1983)
*½/**** IMAGE C+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B
starring Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, Bradford Dillman
screenplay by Joseph C. Stinson
directed by Clint Eastwood

THE DEAD POOL (1988)
***/**** IMAGE A+ SOUND A- EXTRAS B-
starring Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim
screenplay by Steve Sharon
directed by Buddy Van Horn

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The barrel of a sniper rifle seeps through a memorial-wall dedication to San Francisco’s finest, and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry establishes right off the bat that the war on crime is just that: a war; the real question is how to properly fight it when the only real motivators are fear and anger. The film already has its ready-made villain in a fictionalized version of the Bay Area’s own Zodiac Killer, “Scorpio” (Andy Robinson, almost certainly the greatest madman in cinematic history), and the viewer encounters a terrifying golem personifying his frustrations with killers consistently eluding a seemingly-helpless police force and criminals who are caught and released back into society on mere technicalities. Dirty Harry only takes the next logical step by pandering to our basest desires with an equally frightening and chaotic icon: “Dirty Harry” Callahan (Clint Eastwood, at the top of his game), an inspector in the SFPD’s Homicide department who lost his wife to a drunk driver a while back and now takes it out on the rest of criminal society with his .44 Magnum, blasting a hole through any motherfucker unfortunate enough to disturb the peace in his presence. The French Connection‘s Popeye Doyle impressed with his dogged determination, but Harry is the genuine realization of a dick-raising fantasy of the quintessential modern man (notice that the numbers of his radio call sign, “Inspector 71,” reflect the film’s year of release) in that he gives us everything we want without burdening us with the trauma of actually having to become him.

10,000 BC (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 22, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, South Africa, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Steven Strait, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis, Joel Virgel
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Gather 'round, younglings, pull up a rock. Comfortable? Good. Roland Emmerich's 10,000 BC is about a young warrior named "D'Leh" (Steven Strait) who has the bad judgment to fall in love with doll-eyed Evolet (Camilla Belle)–who herself has the bad judgment to be kidnapped by slave traders. The movie starts in the Himalayas, I think, and ends there following an interminable foray in a rainforest as well as an Egyptian detour. I know it's Egypt because we see them building Pyramids in the desert, though I confess to being a little confused by the revelation that mammoths are beasts of burden in 10,000 BC, forced to participate in the construction of said pyramids. I had time to wonder aloud about how this is the second film after Jumper in 2008's deadly winter-doldrums sweepstakes to go to Egypt's Valley of Kings, and about how D'Leh and his mentor Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) could not only make the hike from Nepal (or somewhere) to Egypt wearing sandals and standard-issue Tarzan gear, but also why they were dressed like that on an exposed, snow-covered mountain in the first place. 10,000 BC's first mistake is giving the audience time to think at all, seeing as how the same courtesy was not afforded to anyone on the production side of things–thus allowing for domesticated sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths to decorate this epic™ quest in pursuit of a damsel so under-developed that when it's revealed she has scars in the shape of the constellation Orion, I genuinely had no idea why it mattered. Still don't.

The Love Guru (2008) + Get Smart (2008)

June 19, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK, ZERO STARS

THE LOVE GURU
ZERO STARS/****
starring Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Mike Myers & Graham Gordy
directed by Marco Schnabel

GET SMART
***/****
starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, James Caan
screenplay by Tim J. Astle & Matt Ember
directed by Peter Segal

by Walter Chaw Dick this, cock that, penis penis penis–let me mention in the interest of full, ahem, disclosure that I don't think Mike Myers is funny; that Chris Farley's death was a great shame for a lot of reasons, among the worst that his passing opened the door for Myers to voice Shrek; and that it's not amusing in the slightest to make an endless stream of johnson jokes. The Love Guru has Myers sort of taking a wave at a cheap Indian accent in a redux of that Eddie Murphy triumph Holy Man–which means, essentially, that he proves himself not as committed as Will Ferrell and not as feral as Adam Sandler and not as neutered, as it happens, as Eddie Murphy. Myers, in other words, is less than his peers, doomed to be upstaged at every turn by anyone unfortunate enough to share a scene with him. (Doomed, too, to be constantly undermined by his inability to resist mugging for the camera.) Myers is Guru Pitka, a writer of Dr. Phil-cum-Deepak Chopra self-help volumes hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Jane (Jessica Alba), to cure star winger Roanoke (Romany Malco) of his sudden case of the shakes. Thus Myers marries his two passions (hockey and not being funny) into one noxious ball of shit and wiener jokes, in the process taking a colossal dump on an entire culture with puerile wordplays like "Guru Satchabigknoba" and "Guru Tugginmypudha" (Ben Kingsley, playing it cross-eyed). It was funny when Monty Python did it, yes, because Monty Python was made up of people who were funny.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

June 12, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Edward Norton, Liv Tyler, Tim Roth, William Hurt
screenplay by Zak Penn and Edward Harrison
directed by Louis Leterrier

by Walter Chaw Pretty much the unmitigated disaster its trailers predicted it to be, Louis Leterrier's noisome The Incredible Hulk is a cacophony of bad CGI, bad acting, and gravid serio-melodramatics that leaves only the disturbing image of Liv Tyler's acres of bangs standing in the aftermath of its absurd wreckage. It's a vanity piece for Edward Norton (as if Norton is ever in anything else these days) that washes out as one of the more puzzling examples of such, in that the only thing anyone's there to see is Hulk smash. Maybe not so puzzling upon further reflection; I heard someone describe Jim Carrey at a certain point in his career as the six-hundred pound gorilla–find Norton at the apogee of his own ego bloat in The Incredible Hulk. Rumoured to have rewritten wide patches of Zak Penn's script (and credited here as, tee hee, Edward Harrison), Norton strikes me as a player/coach in the mold of Sylvester Stallone but unburdened with Stallone's sense of temporal place and popular self-awareness. Norton's acts of persona-construction are involved with painting himself as more romantic and smarter (The Illusionist), more romantic and moral (The Painted Veil), or more romantic and mysterious (Down in the Valley) than the average bear (tragic Monsieur Curie Bruce Banner the amalgam of all three, of course), with little room in his Nietzschian self-regard for human frailty or much complexity. He's an actor capable of astonishing nuance, making it doubly frustrating that he seems to resent that in the Fight Club food chain, he's Edward Norton and not Brad Pitt. The Incredible Hulk is the hundred-pound weakling flexing in the mirror and answering the ad on the back of the comic book.

Jumper (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

June 8, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Diane Lane
screenplay by David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Steven Gould
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw Jumper is the first movie director Doug Liman hasn't been able to save with his amazing way with action sequences. Blame its glaring inconsistencies, the overuse of one nifty special effect that renders the picture's centrepiece an anticlimax, and a passel of squeezed-off performances as truncated–as brief–as the rest of the picture feels. It's over before it begins, wasn't much while it lasted, and is so brazen in its abuse of internal logic that the only audience that would see it will be irritated by it. Based on a Steven Gould cult novel I read years ago (but not long ago enough to love it), its high concept is that there are genetic anomalies among us who are capable of teleporting anywhere they've been before; the catch is that a group of witch hunters is eager to kill them because they're abominations before God. It's Highlander, essentially, or any vampire movie, a skylark about rock-star bandits that swaps immortality for the ability to zip around at will–with only some party-pooping senior citizen (it's snow-on-the-roof Samuel L. Jackson this time around, playing Illuminati-cum-Homeland Security bogie Roland) around to spoil the fun. The obligatory hot chick is dead-eyed Rachel Bilson as Millie, trading not so much up from Zach Braff in The Last Kiss as sideways to Hayden Christensen's protag "jumper" David. Millie and David have loved one another since high school, a misleadingly fun prologue tells us: what follows is about an hour of deadening, repetitive, useless nonsense that fails, completely, to provide a universe in which this stuff makes any kind of impact, even as escapism.

The Recruit (2003) – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

June 1, 20082000s, Action, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Switzerland, Thriller

*½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD – Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, Bridget Moynahan, Gabriel Macht
screenplay by Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Aussie director Roger Donaldson's No Way Out is one of the better Cold War paranoia films: sexy, tricky, and packed with the sort of performances (from Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman, and Will Patton) that spin gold from proverbial straw. Donaldson's The Recruit is another derivative post-Cold War knockoff: boring, predictable, and laden with the sort of hackneyed turns that are not only immanently forgettable, but also doomed to eventually be left off the resumé during those Academy clip retrospectives. What a difference sixteen years makes.

V for Vendetta (2006) – Blu-ray Disc

May 29, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Germany, Revenge, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
starring Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt
screenplay by The Wachowski Brothers, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore & David Lloyd
directed by James McTeigue

by Walter Chaw As documents for the opposition go, V for Vendetta may be the ballsiest, angriest picture of the current administration, flashing without apology images of naked prisoners of the state, shackled in black hoods and held in clear acrylic boxes while a febrile talking head and his cloistered intimates (called "fingers") form a closed fist around them. It surmises a future where the government plants stories in centrally-owned media conglomerates, controlling groupthink by providing just one point of view. Woe be unto those with a critical mind because what, after all, is more dangerous to a dictatorial theocracy than a question? But more, the picture is an impassioned plea for alternative lifestyles, exposing the melodrama of Brokeback Mountain to be embarrassed, even polite, when the struggle for equal regard is something that should be undertaken with passion and brio–it's life and death, and V for Vendetta presents it as such. There are no half measures in a film that takes as its hero an eloquent monologist in a Guy Fawkes mask (Hugo Weaving), his erstwhile, reluctant sidekick a young woman, Evey (Natalie Portman), transformed through the government-sanctioned abduction of her parents and a period of torture and imprisonment into not an avenging angel, but a voice of reason. How fascinating that the reasonable solution in the picture is the destruction of Britain's Parliament on the Thames.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007) [Four-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 19, 2008****/****, 1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The prototype for the modern science-fiction film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, through its seemingly endless iterations, through its growing cult of personality and a production history that's become as familiar as a Herzog shooting mythology, retains its ability to astonish as–along with John Carpenter's contemporaneous The Thing–the last hurrah for the non-CGI, in-camera effects piece. Tron, The Last Starfighter, and Firefox were destined to be the rule of the day at the expense of matte painters and model-makers, here working out puzzles like how to make a futuristic, mechanized advertising blimp appear to be shooting strobes through the glassed ceiling of the Bradbury. Indeed, it's almost impossible to watch Blade Runner now without taking its technical brilliance for granted. It looks like it was made in 2007 (particularly in its newest, digitized incarnation); with its lack of the bluescreen artifacts that plague many of its contemporaries, it's easy to think of a mainframe as the movie's author.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008)

May 15, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Poland, Slovenia, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
starring Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
screenplay by Andrew Adamson & Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the novel by C.S. Lewis
directed by Andrew Adamson

by Walter Chaw Let’s face it: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (hereafter Narnia 2) is by most objective measures a complete mess. It doesn’t do a particularly good job of shading in its backstory (you really need to have read the book or seen the first film very recently) and its narrative proper is truncated and spastic. The characters don’t demonstrate enough awe when they’re confronted with a minotaur for the first time, nor do they register the appropriate shock upon characters from their storybooks suddenly appearing in their midst. Though there’s a real problem with special-effects films that spend too much time gawping at their own illusions, it’s not much better when pictures like this give its characters good reason to be surprised and they’re not. It begins in the middle and ends with an exit tune so embarrassing that it threatens to completely deflate the goodwill the picture has, against all odds, built to that point–but damn it if it isn’t quite good for all that. Narnia 2 reminds of Stardust in that sense: it works because it works, because the connective tissue that’s there in the ephemera is made of sinew and spider silk–strong, fibrous, and sticky even when the actual plotting does the film no favours. Its themes are universal even though C.S. Lewis is unabashedly Christian; what’s laudable about the first instalment and now this sequel is the obvious pains taken to present themes of resurrection, redemption, and faith as archetype rather than dogma. Attaching something so specific as an idea of Satan, for instance, to a brief, remarkably affecting reappearance of The White Witch (Tilda Swinton) is a reach and missing the point besides. Narnia 2 is about believing in something so simple as a greater power–about humility and resisting temptation and the easy path. Yoda had something to say to my generation from atop a log in Dagobah, and it’s possible to see Narnia 2 as Luke’s invitation to meet his darker self in the roots of a gnarled old tree.

Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc

May 13, 20081990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

National Treasure (2004) [Widescreen] + Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) [Director’s Cut – Unrated, New Extended Version] – DVDs|National Treasure [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 11, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Mystery, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

NATIONAL TREASURE
½*/****
DVD – Image B Sound A Extras C+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Diane Kruger
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
directed by Jon Turteltaub

by Walter Chaw How's this for a barometer of the national cinematic weather? National Treasure is going to get more praise than condemnation from me because it isn't homophobic, misogynistic, or blatantly misanthropic. All it is, really, is astonishingly boring, terribly stupid, and, it bears repeating, boring. It's boring. (Also stupid.) Essentially the film is a Hardy Boys adventure where cryptic clues have our intrepid boy scouts traversing America's historic landmarks on a scavenger hunt for two hours and change. Where the hero is a misunderstood scholar, his sidekick is a computer nerd, and his girlfriend's hobby is history because history is cool. (The sequel will probably touch on spelling, maybe arithmetic–be still my beating heart.) And where inspiration runs out a little over half-an-hour into the runtime, causing National Treasure to resort to recycling the same rising and falling in action over and over into–and our film's history buffs will appreciate this–what seems an eternity.

Speed Racer (2008)

May 8, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Family, Germany, Japan, Sci-Fi, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, John Goodman, Matthew Fox
written and directed by The Wachowski Brothers

by Walter Chaw This generation’s Tron lands with unsurprisingly little fanfare early in the 2008 blockbuster sweepstakes, the victim of niche nostalgia and bottomless kitsch as well as the theory that total indulgence from all involved will prevent The Wachowski Brothers’ Speed Racer from turning out to be their Spruce Goose. I’ve seen just enough “Speed Racer” cartoons to recognize when people like John Goodman are impersonating badly-drawn ’60s television anime (as opposed to Goodman impersonating badly-drawn ’60s Hanna-Barbera)–and just enough, too, to futilely hope against hope that there wouldn’t be a chimp and a chubby tyke who stow away in a racecar’s trunk now and again. But I haven’t seen nearly enough of the TV series to want to see more of it, and after enduring the Cool World live-action version of “Speed Racer”, I confess I’ve sort of lost the will to live. In other words, I was never a fan of the cartoon and was mainly interested in this trainwreck on the strength of Bound and The Matrix. Still, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t take a moment to laud the brothers on their audacity–the very quality I appreciated in the two Matrix sequels, which were, by most analysis, disasters. It seems like sour grapes to knock the picture besides–or at least it seems futile, because the Wachowskis don’t appear to care what people think of them along their road to wearing Kleenex boxes on their feet and saving their pee in mason jars. Speed Racer is exhibit one in the case that the Wachowskis aren’t in it for praise (they’re not going to get any credible praise here) or money (they’re already loaded), but rather to luxuriate in the contents of their den’s shelves: first Alan Moore comics with V for Vendetta, now this excruciatingly faithful reproduction of an inexplicable camp artifact. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they weren’t huge fans of “Voltron.”

Iron Man (2008)

May 7, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Iron Man is garden-variety pop heroism/wish-fulfillment that, marinated in Robert Downey Jr.'s effortless insouciant sauce, speaks volumes about the psychology of our nation at this disgusted, exhausted moment in our history. The plot's only casualties save its grand fiend are nameless Afghanis: terrorists on the one side, collateral damage on the other–few of them receiving the nobility of an individual death. Even the chief Al-Qaeda baddie is blown-up discreetly in the wings after a white guy first dazzles him with technology, then paralyzes him with the same. (Call it awe and shock.) The film's politics are easy and its racism similarly cavalier: Better dead than red (er, brown); when historians look back at this era in popular culture, it won't be terribly difficult to pick out that which forms the backbone of contemporary "Why We Fight" propaganda. What recommends the picture are sterling performances by Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow as Iron Man's Girl Friday, Jeff Bridges as the mentor-cum-baddie, and wonderful, reserved, dignified Shaun Toub in a too-brief cameo as the sole voice of moral "otherness." What's unfortunate about the flick is that it takes an awful long time to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff–almost entirely CGI-rendered–falls curiously flat. Not quite boring, Iron Man just seems sprung. There's no forward momentum, no impetus, no real gravity. With all that firepower at its fingertips, it has no idea where to point itself.

The Devil’s Own (1997) – Blu-ray Disc

May 5, 20081990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Margaret Colin, Ruben Blades
screenplay by David Aaron Cohen & Vincent Patrick and Kevin Jarre
directed by Alan J. Pakula

by Bill Chambers One of the intriguing consequences of a new home-video medium is that, whether due to a paucity of selection or, in my case, professional obligation, you wind up revisiting some marginal titles you never thought you'd have cause to see again. Case in point: the final film from the mercurial Alan J. Pakula, 1997's The Devil's Own, which docks on Blu-ray as part of Sony's suddenly-aggressive catalogue rollout. The kind of topical widescreen melodrama Hollywood trotted out pretty regularly in the CinemaScope era, as well as the kind of glib commentary on another nation's failures you'd expect from Edward Zwick or Sydney Pollack before Pakula, the picture began life as a typically-contentious Kevin Jarre script about a vicious, coke-snorting IRA terrorist who crosses paths with a "hair-bag"–i.e., a cop still walking the beat long past his prime–while on the lam in New York.

Bionic Woman: Volume One (2007) – DVD

April 15, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Ian Pugh, DVD, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A Extras C
"Pilot," "Paradise Lost," "Sisterhood," "Faceoff," "The Education of Jaime Sommers," "The List," "Trust Issues," "Do Not Disturb"

by Ian Pugh David Eick's remake of the old Lindsay Wagner series "The Bionic Woman" is a near-literal relic straight out of 1976 so thoroughly convinced of its premise's timelessness that it merely tosses the same old shit together with popular concerns of the 21^st century–terrorism, the Iraq War, North Korea, the omnipresence of computer technology–in the vague hope that it will all alchemize into something that can stand on its own two feet. Call it the oblivious antithesis to an astonishing meta property like Live Free or Die Hard: it carries the expectation for tension within a battle of seemingly-incalculable odds when the outcome was long ago decided in the little guy's favour–I mean, like, decades ago. Interestingly enough, amid its largely indifferent applications of wire-fu, the new "Bionic Woman" offers the best auto-critical metaphor with its mustiest holdover from its precursor: the super-futuristic "action" sound effect that originated in "The Six Million Dollar Man" has been replaced by something that sounds like a computerized approximation of a stalled car.

Street Kings (2008)

April 10, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans
screenplay by James Ellroy and Kurt Wimmer and Jamie Moss
directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Keanu Reeves’s turn on the ring-around-the-mopey of skeezy LA crime dramas based on (or written by, or inspired by, or ripped-off from) James Ellroy’s hard-boiled noir prose is David Ayer’s second time around this track, Street Kings. No wonder it feels weary and worked-over, then, from the opening blare of an alarm clock to a gritty™ conclusion that suggests that the status quo is FUBAR–always has been, always will be, now with mas macho! Close your eyes and without any mental flexing replace Reeves with Ethan Hawke or Christian Bale or Scott Speedman or Joaquin Phoenix, or sub Reeves’s character’s commanding officer Wander (Forrest Whittaker) with similar wool-clad bogeys done not better but identically by Kurt Russell and James Cromwell. It’s never a question of who’s rotten in the force (everybody, stupid), never in question what the role of the anti-hero will be. Rather, it’s mainly a matter of what place vigilante justice will have in this moral quagmire of due process vs. capping the hoods and letting the legal vultures pick over the sticky wickets. It’s the Dirty Harry school of hanging judgment–the iconography of Eastwood and Bronson and Stallone in the ’80s (culminating for the latter in the ultimate state-sanctioned vigilante, Judge Dredd)–and it’s only really interesting for its popularity again amid the reign of a President who’s modelled his administration after Reagan’s. Why this concern about the breakdown of due process and the futility of real justice during terms that give lip-service loudest to a return to values? We only make films this ugly and futile when to a large extent we’ve abandoned any hope that our institutions of security will protect us from the night.