Action Archives - Page 33 of 49 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 28, 20061970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, DVD, Road Movie

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by James Lee Barrett and Charles Shyer & Alan Mandel
directed by Hal Needham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One thing is inescapably true: Smokey and the Bandit was not aimed at people like me. Only the most casual, least demanding filmgoer need apply to this good-ol'-boy version of Vanishing Point–people with as much beer in them as possible, ready to laugh at cheap jokes and root for a speed demon. They are welcome to the movie, but the fact remains that anyone with even a scintilla of interest in film as art is pretty much left out in the cold. As I can hear a mountain of e-mail forming denouncing me for my perceived elitism, let me be perfectly clear: anyone in the market for Burt Reynolds driving fast and making Jackie Gleason apoplectic will find this the sort of thing that they like.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)

September 27, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Martial Arts, Romance, Theatrical

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry's exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels–French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director's maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero's hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating–more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it's more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) [Widescreen] – DVD

September 25, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Superhero

½*/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras C+
starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by Simon Kinberg & Zak Penn
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw As an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates in a franchise that had as its primary claim to eternity that it was sensitive to the plight of homosexuals, Brett Ratner's painfully queer X-Men: The Last Stand (hereafter "X3") manages to present its series of melodramatic vignettes in such a way as to completely negate any sense of peril, individuality, or struggle for the characters. Without a sense of weight, the references in the piece to genocide and The Holocaust ("Ink shall never again touch my skin!" says Ian McKellen's Magneto) become pure, laggard exploitation in the service of a sub-par superhero action film that shows its true colours time and again in its hatred of women ("Hell hath no fury!") and loathing of female sexuality, as well as in its flat-eyed regard of children trying to hasp off their wings while their fathers attempt to break down the bathroom door. It's Michael Bay's Schindler's List: a reptilian populist, at ease with the slick and facile, has been asked to take the reins of a project that, for whatever its crimes of pacing and exposition, had in its Bryan Singer-helmed episodes the good sense not to kick over ant piles it wasn't prepared to contain.

TIFF ’06: Fay Grim

September 19, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Espionage, Film Festivals, France, Germany, TIFF

**/****starring Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrowswritten and directed by Hal Hartley by Bill Chambers Those hoping this unexpected sequel to the terrific Henry Fool will be a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. I think the problem is not that Parker Posey can't carry a picture (Posey's more of a movie star than she is a character actor, after all, so inflexible is her neurotic persona), but that her Fay Grim can't carry a picture. In that sense, Fay Grim is a little bit like a highbrow Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with virtually…

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

September 13, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

TIFF ’06: The Host

September 10, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Korea, TIFF

Gue-mool***½/****starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-sungscreenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won, Baek Chul-hyundirected by Bong Joon-ho by Bill Chambers I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood (or maybe Shiloh), observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's not merely that I…

Equinox [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

August 13, 20061960s, 1970s, Action, Adventure, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, The Criterion Collection

THE EQUINOX …A JOURNEY INTO THE SUPERNATURAL (1967)
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Skip Shimer, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers, Jr., Robin Snider
screenplay by Mark Thomas McGee
directed by Mark Thomas McGee & Dennis Muren

EQUINOX (1970)
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Edward Connell, Barbara Hewitt, Frank Boers jr., Robin Christopher
written and directed by Jack Woods

by Walter Chaw Four teens on a double-date venture into the hills around California in search of an old, dotty professor only to learn that the crazy old bat's unleashed the spawn of Hell with a book written by the devil. When producer Jack Harris bought The Equinox …A Journey Into the Supernatural (hereafter The Equinox) and hired B-hack Jack Woods to partially rewrite and reshoot it three years after its completion, he would insert a new character in evil, unibrowed park ranger Asmodeus (Woods), thus imposing a weird element of pervy grope cinema while handily washing away in a wave of lowbrow mediocrity most of what makes The Equinox so exceptional. Comparing the two versions (the revamp's title streamlined to Equinox) is an example of the difference between gifted amateurs pursuing a passion and slick exploitation artists applying their own interpretations (this time the burgeoning drive-in market) of where they might grab the quickest buck. For The Equinox to endure as an underground classic despite its co-optation is something like The Magnificent Ambersons maintaining its masterpiece status despite the non-existence of Welles's original cut. It's quite a relief, in other words, that Dennis Muren's The Equinox has survived for comparison's sake.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

August 4, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sports, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Gary Cole
screenplay by Will Ferrell & Adam McKay
directed by Adam McKay

by Walter Chaw I feel about Will Ferrell the way I feel about Jack Black: that they're good second-fiddles on occasion, but put them in a lead role and my eyeballs roll into the back of my head. Imagine my surprise that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (hereafter Talledega Nights) showcases Ferrell's Faulknerian idiot man-child to great advantage in a vehicle that's sharp, smart, topical, and funny. It's an exuberant satire in every sense of the abused term–a twisting of familiar elements into grotesquerie that brings to light the essential absurdity of the familiar, sketching a portrait of the divide between the blue states and the red states with a feather bludgeon. It's this year's Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, doing for anti-intellectual animals and effete eggheads what that film did for the racism leveled in popular culture at "favoured" minorities. This is the finest document yet of the special brand of idiocy that compels our noble Congress to rename French Fries and French toast in their commissary or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the air of noblesse oblige that taints the highbrow's mincing, faux-outraged response. Credit Talladega Nights for this: no one's necks have ever been redder than those sported by these self-described retards, and no brainy gay Frenchmen have ever been this gay and French.

Miami Vice (2006)

July 27, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Drama, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, Gong Li, Naomie Harris
written and directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Slot Michael Mann's Miami Vice in there alongside other millennial films about the disintegration of society and its subsequent renewal along tribal, exclusively masculine lines. It's a film from whose nihilism I would've recoiled just a few years ago, but now I see that as perhaps the definitive trend of the first six years of this brave new world (first five after 9/11, the inciting event of this love affair with apocalyptic cultural reset) and not entirely divorced from our reality besides. The best illustration of how we've gone from the voodoo of self-esteem of the Reagan '80s (for which the Mann-produced "Miami Vice" television show has become something of a cultural roadmark) to the blasted, self-abnegating, divided wasteland of Bush 2's America might be the difference between the white suits and socks-less loafers of the previous incarnation to the flak-jackets and high-velocity splatter head-shots of this one. WWI introduced irony into our lexicon with the advent of long-range, impersonal murder–and 9/11 deepened it in the popular culture in the United States with an existential fatalism borne of the idea that not only is sudden, arbitrary destruction from above a possibility, but most likely an unavoidable eventuality.

Street Law (1974) + The Big Racket (1976) + The Heroin Busters (1977) – DVDs

July 26, 20061970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Italy, Thriller

STREET LAW
Il cittadino si ribella
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Giancarlo Prete, Barbara Bach, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Dino Maiuri
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE BIG RACKET
Il grande racket
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Fabio Testi, Vincent Gardenia, Renzo Palmer
screenplay by Arduino Maiuri, Massimo de Rita, Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

THE HEROIN BUSTERS
La via della droga
*½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Fabio Testi, David Hemmings, Sherry Buchanan
screenplay by Massimo de Rita and Enzo G. Castellari
directed by Enzo G. Castellari

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There comes a point in every man's life when he finds himself pushed too far. By "too far," I naturally mean the moment where a) criminal thugs are roaming the streets, and b) innocent bystanders are completely expendable in their apprehension and/or bloody death. And if Blue Underground is to be believed, Enzo G. Castellari long ago reached that point. The champagne of exploitation labels has lavished infinite care on three of the master's most lurid exploits: the Death Wish precursor Street Law; the police-vigilante epic The Big Racket; and the relatively routine drug drama The Heroin Busters. Each of these films does away with such nuisances as due process and respect for public safety. Castellari's oeuvre reveals the dark underbelly of '70s permissiveness, which on one hand extended the hippie mandate to less shaggy extremes but on the other encouraged right-wingers to embrace police-brutality extravaganzas.

Running Scared (2006) – DVD

July 13, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Germany, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Paul Walker, Cameron Bright, Vera Farmiga, Chazz Palminteri
written and directed by Wayne Kramer

by Walter Chaw I liked Wayne Kramer's Running Scared because Running Scared isn't ashamed of itself. It's not terribly audacious (in direct contradiction to the consensus opinion that the film is "over-the-top," I found it to be sort of tame in its sexuality, violence, and atrocity) and it's not witty or smart or loaded with the archetype that a direct homage to the Brothers Grimm (the picture is set in the fictitious hamlet of "Grimley") would imply. Its prologue's cliffhanger, for instance, is paid off at the end in absolutely the most spineless way possible, betraying the dark fairytale template of which the film is so proud. (Fairytales were never this squeamish about strangers actually injuring–sometimes killing–children.) Besides, there's nothing terribly subversive about suggesting that the world is a dangerous place for kids. And yet, there is embedded in Running Scared's clueless schizophrenia (it wants to be edgy even as it's spending the majority of its energy on slick editing tricks, comic-book CGI effects, and a restless camera that doesn't hold still long enough for a fly to land on it) a nasty, seductive class of real cinematic infatuation and a knowledge, idiot savant-like or otherwise, of how to implicate a viewer in the things unfolding onscreen. A neat trick. Neater because the protagonist with which we suture, as it were, is played by one Paul Walker: possibly the worst actor the United States has ever produced, no matter what Armond White says.

BloodRayne (2006) [Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD

July 6, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Germany, Horror, Vampire, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras C
starring Kristanna Loken, Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Guinevere Turner
directed by Uwe Boll

by Walter Chaw It seems sort of pointless at this juncture to keep kicking at Uwe Boll–indeed, there's a minor backlash against all the lash, most of it dedicated to defending the Kraut Ed Wood along the lines of his latest, the excrescent BloodRayne, as being only as bad as ordinary bad films and not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail. The secret to this bountiful wealth of backhanded praise, Boll has discovered, is found somewhere in the intersection of gratuitous gore and gratuitous nudity–both virtues forgiving a multitude of the director's other shortcomings (a tin ear, a blind eye, a plugger's grace, and so on), because it transforms his sword-and-sorcery saga into something that looks and sounds just like the crap most of us squandered our misspent youth surfing for on late night cable, tissue in one hand, lotion in the other. Without stretching too extravagantly, it's easy to see in that great sloppy act of pubescent self-abuse the very same method guiding Boll's hand at the camera through his ersatz trilogy of terrible. Fair to wonder a time or two over the course of the film if someone should invoke the Geneva Convention and get the fuck outta dodge. I guess there's a purpose to everything under the sun, and BloodRayne, based on a video game series of the same name, must be around to give hope to anyone with a camera in a country with a tax loophole that they, too, can make really bad movies with which to waste other peoples' lives.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

July 6, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw I've liked almost everything Gore Verbinski's done up to this point–he's treated genre pictures with a degree of sobriety that's refreshing when snarky post-modernism seems the golden mean. But Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (hereafter Pirates 2, though "Pirates Reloaded" is perhaps the more appropriate paraphrase) carries with it the taint of desperation that comes with impossibly raised expectations and a burgeoning "known" director who–for lack of a better idea–devotes himself to the notion that magnification is the same thing as inspiration. A giant budget and a franchise tag is an effective snuff to that alchemical combination of energy and brilliance that has thus far typified Verbinski's output, and Pirates 2 is exhibit one of just how boring an unimaginably expensive a blockbuster can be when it jettisons character and story in favour of gimmick and state-of-the-art-for-now special effects. The first of two consecutively-shot sequels, the movie has the added difficulty of being entrusted (like Episode II, The Two Towers, and The Matrix Reloaded) with the exposition third of the tripartite narrative arc. Pirates 2 is a middle without a beginning or end that tries to compensate for that deficiency by throwing money at the problem. Yo ho-hum.

Superman Returns (2006)

June 28, 2006****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
starring Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Kevin Spacey
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw The saddest, most desperately lonesome and melancholy mainstream film in recent memory, Bryan Singer's Superman Returns is about loss and, as a Scrabble board early in the picture denotes, alienation. It's about fathers and sons and, by extension, why so many of our mythologies are about sons divorced from fathers who spend the rest of their lives, nay, the rest of eternity striving for impossible reunions. Prometheus is mentioned by name while Atlas, Christ, and Lucifer are referenced in image, Singer's transition from fallen Titans to fallen Angels an ineffably graceful symbolic examination of where, exactly, comic-book martyrs and gods (of which Superman is both) place in the modern spiritual pantheon. Superman is a figure at a juncture in the middle of pagan and Christian just as he's become something like a transitional icon bridging science and religion, classic comics and the modern superhero era, and Americana and the Wasteland. In the film, Superman is a character warring between what he wants and the destiny his father has charted for him–and aren't we all. When a child in Superman Returns takes a picture with his cell phone that we recognize as the cover for Superman's debut, 1938's "Action Comics" No. 1, it's at once bemused and in love with Richard Donner's original vision of the hero, but most of all it's eloquent in its assured, maybe even prickly, recognition of where we were and what we've become.

Riddick Trilogy: The Franchise Collection – DVD

June 7, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Short Films, Thriller

PITCH BLACK – UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT (2000)
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Vin Diesel, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, Keith David
screenplay by Jim & Ken Wheat and David Twohy
directed by David Twohy

DARK FURY (2004)
The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
screenplay by Brett Matthews
directed by Peter Chung

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK – UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT (2004)
***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Vin Diesel, Thandie Newton, Karl Urban, Judi Dench
written and directed by David Twohy

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover At the dawn of the century came a little movie called Pitch Black that didn't seem like an opportunity for blockbuster inflation. Produced for a mere $20 million, it turned out to be only moderately successful yet built up a cult following on video and cable. In the interim, its star Vin Diesel did smash business in The Fast and the Furious and xXx, positioning him as the next bankable action hero and generating a hunt for properties with which to exploit his appeal. Thus did the chamber piece Pitch Black beget the big-budget extravaganza The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel nobody was particularly salivating for but which showed up anyway to widespread confusion and audience indifference. The two films couldn't be more disparate: where the former is a guilt-ridden ensemble piece in which the ensemble rapidly dwindles, the latter is an over-designed star spectacular with a glut of supporting supplicants and plenty of action set-pieces.

Firewall (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

June 4, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub
screenplay by Joe Forte
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw Because 63-year-old Harrison Ford is pushing mandatory retirement age in most industries, his new movie Firewall is aimed squarely at an older, more affluent, less savvy demographic. Casting the aging demigod as a greying bank executive extorted by the usual band of eurotrash techno-terrorists holding his perfect family hostage, it's a fable of paranoia that finds evil in not only the modern cell phone bogey, but other mysterious beasts like iPods, phone cameras, GPS devices, fax machines, and online banking, too. Its never-explained title, in fact, refers to a technology that protects against malignant computer codes floating around the World Wide Web–but rather than try to define this for an audience that's ideally long-resistant to such cogent explanations, it makes the "firewall" a literal thing by devolving into another homeland security allegory, with the craggy paterfamilias meting out sweet vengeance against a gaggle of interlopers. Better to have called it "Antivirus"–but Michael Bay's probably reserved that title for his kick-ass foreign terrorist/avian flu metaphor.

Poseidon (2006)

May 11, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Jacinda Barrett, Richard Dreyfuss
screenplay by Mark Protosevich, based on the novel The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

by Walter Chaw Sort of like Ghost Ship without the gore (and it promptly loses the points it earns for being sans Julianna Marguiles by featuring Kevin Dillon), Wolfgang Petersen's soggy underwater soaper Poseidon starts with a theoretically exciting (but just unintentionally hilarious) set-piece and limps the rest of the way on the standard old slogging-through-wet-hallways bullroar that may be the very definition of "un-exciting." Kurt Russell is Robert, an ex-fireman/ex-New York mayor who appears to have a gambling problem and a contentious relationship with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), which will of course be resolved, Mark Twain-style, by a late-in-the-show heroic action. Josh Lucas is Dylan, the rogue ex-Navy man with a plan; Jimmy Bennett is the buck-toothed little idiot who wanders off a lot (and Jacinda Barrett is his long-suffering mom, Maggie); Richard Dreyfuss plays Richard, a suicidal queen planning on leaving his pals with a hefty bill by leaping from the mighty Poseidon luxury liner's galleria after dinner; and all people of colour are meatbags to be fed to the mill whenever someone needs an example of what could happen to the rich whiteys not unfortunate enough to be in steerage.

Munich (2005) – DVD

May 8, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, DVD, France, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich–the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

May 5, 20062000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Espionage, Germany, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup
screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. That classic combination of a film that doesn't make any sense with one that doesn't inspire anyone to invest an iota of emotion in giving a crap, J.J. Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (hereafter M:i:III) isn't convoluted like the first two instalments so much as it's just incoherent and loud. It's the camera-in-a blender-school of action filmmaking: There's so little understanding of spatial relationships that the whole thing plays like that Naked Gun gag where the gunfight is taking place between two people within arm's reach of one another. An extended heist sequence set in Vatican City, for instance, features the four members of IMF ("Impossible Mission Force") hotshot Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) team (Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the requisite hot Asian chick (Maggie Q)) running around in completely anonymous locations, sticking doodads to walls, and confirming to one another that they're "ready" and "in place." But without knowledge of their plan, their location (respective to one another and their goal, whatever that might be), their peril, or the stakes, you're left with four people doing something for some reason, necessitating our willingness to play along with the charade that we know who these people are, what their goal is, and why we should care. Consider a helicopter chase through a wind farm, too, and the many lovely visuals that such an enticing premise suggests–then look to the end-product, which is a lot of tight shots of helicopters in the middle of the night, parts of giant windmills, a bad soundtrack, and multiple decibel screaming about "incoming" and "they've got a lock on us." Who does? And where are they going on that wind farm? And why does the promise of an instrument-factory explosion induce yawns?

United 93 (2006)

April 28, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Lewis Alsamari, JJ Johnson, Trish Gates, Polly Adams
written and directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw I guess when you talk about a movie like Paul Greengrass's United 93, you have to talk about the propriety of the project: Whether death, fear, and suffering at its most obscene is something we should try to know or gratefully shield ourselves from. Should 9/11 already be an Oprah special and a national holiday? It's an essential question, a defining one–and on either side of the question's divide, you'll find one person who thinks we should see our soldiers' caskets draped in American flags and another who feels that seeing war casualties is somehow bad for morale or, if our fearless leaders are to be believed, somehow unpatriotic. Ignorance is as blissful now as it ever was–it's one aphorism the film honours. Another is that you reap what you sow: The belief that our civil liberties, for which we eagerly fight and die to protect on foreign soil, are the first things we seem to sacrifice in times of peril (including a vocal rabble wondering if we're "ready" for a 9/11 film), is far stickier when the proposition before us is that Islamic extremists don't like us because of that which defines us as Americans. ("They hate our freedom" is the party line.) So when our government begins to infringe on our personal freedom after a meticulously organized and coordinated terrorist attack took us completely unawares (I still recall with a shudder how then-Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice claimed that no one could have imagined it) more than four years ago, that means–more than over twenty-one hundred military dead (and counting) does–that we've already lost.