The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Television, Thriller

*/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C-

by Walter Chaw Universal and Kids’ WB present the abominable and derivative The Mummy: Quest for the Lost Scrolls, the first three episodes of a tragically bad action-adventure cartoon based on characters from Stephen Sommers’s live-action blockbuster The Mummy Returns. After Aryan-izing Fraser’s Rick O’Connell and his irritating moppet Alex (who is, predictably, the star of the show), the animators proceed to rip-off sources as disconcertingly varied as The Evil Dead, Star Wars, and Sommers’s Mummy saga, natch, all while perpetuating myths of the wilting femme and the foppish Brit that, shockingly, its adult counterparts never did.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) [Widescreen] + [3-Disc Collector’s Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, DVD, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery

Le Pacte des loups
***½/****
WIDESCREEN DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras B
3-DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD – Image B Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Emilie Dequenne, Vincent Cassel
screenplay by Christophe Gans, Stephane Cabel
directed by Christophe Gans

by Walter Chaw A beautiful girl adrift in a vast natural expanse is set upon by an unseen menace and slammed against a solid object before being dragged away to her bloodily-masticated doom. Enter a famed naturalist (Samuel Le Bihan), considered the expert in the breed of beast that might be responsible for the heinous deed; his investigations mostly reveal that the culprit is larger than your average monster. Alas, no one in the isolated and picturesque community believes him, consoling themselves in an amateur hunt that bags a load of smaller members of the creature’s species. When the killing continues, the famed naturalist, his highly-trained sidekick (martial artist Mark Dacascos, here reunited with his Crying Freeman director), and a meek member of the ruling class along for the adventure, lay down a series of traps, gather hunting implements, and, after some derring-do, overcome their foe, incurring tremendous losses in the process.

The Tuxedo (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jason Isaacs, Debi Mazar
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson
directed by Kevin Donovan

Tuxedoby Walter Chaw Between watching Jennifer Love Hewitt’s breasts consistently upstage her (and be constantly commented upon besides) and Jackie Chan try hard to erase his legacy as the best physical comedian of the talkies, it’s tempting to declare that The Tuxedo is a bankrupt entertainment and a remorseless time pit. Tempting and not entirely inaccurate, but in truth The Tuxedo is more than just cheerfully misogynistic (and most of Chan’s films are, in one way or another, woman-hating), cartoonish, and even racist in a Green Hornet/Kato sort of way–The Tuxedo is a symptom of a far deeper concern involving the inability of the West to ever make proper use of hijacked foreign commodities or construct an action film anymore that doesn’t resort to slapstick childishness and/or grotesque violence.

Blade II (2002) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Vampire

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Luke Goss
screenplay by David S. Goyer
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw Detailing the uncomfortable alliance of Blade and his arch-enemy vampires against a mutant “crack-addict” form of vampire called “Reapers,” Blade II introduces the hints of a twice-illicit romance between Blade (Wesley Snipes) and a succubus princess Nyssa (Leonor Varela) that blossoms after a meet-cute involving the threat of beheading and castration (awww), as well as an unusually pithy look at strange bedfellows in a mutually beneficial conflagration.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Germany, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Roger R. Cross, Ray Park
screenplay by Peter M. Lenkov and Alan B. McElroy
directed by Kaos

Ballisticby Walter Chaw Walking away with the title of Most Incomprehensible Film of 2002 (walking away is also, incidentally, what you should do when presented with the prospect of seeing this film), Wych Kaosayananda’s ponderously branded Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is a collection of puzzling explosions married to a series of alternately stunning and hilarious line deliveries of, to be fair, unspeakable exposition. It hopes to obscure its awfulness with its volume or, failing that, to dress up its stupidity with backlit shots of a woman communing with a captive manatee.

TIFF ’02: The Good Thief

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Ireland, Romance, Thriller, TIFF, UK
***/****starring Nick Nolte, Tcheky Karyo, Said Taghmaoui, Nutsa Kukhianidzewritten and directed by Neil Jordan by Bill Chambers A loose remake of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur (director Neil Jordan seems to have cast Tcheky Karyo for the way "Bob le flambeur" rolls off his tongue), The Good Thief is a minor-ish work from Jordan that benefits mightily, as most movies would, from Chris Menges's cinematography. Nolte inherits Roger Duchesne's role as Bob Montagne, an expert gambler and larcenist who in this film is hooked on heroin out of what appears to be sheer boredom. (A hilarious scene finds him stumbling…

Near Dark (1987) – DVD (THX)

Posted in****/****, 1980s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Romance, Thriller, Vampire

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton
screenplay by Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Mustownby Walter Chaw There is an element of the delirious in Kathryn Bigelow’s superb, genre-bending nomadic vampire fable Near Dark–an element of the hopelessly erotic, the melancholic, the breathless. Like the best vampire myths, it recognizes that the root of the monster lies in sexual consumption and addiction, in the interplay between nostalgia for the freedom of youth and the pricklier remembrance of the confused fever dreams of adolescence. (Hence the recurrence in modern myth of a Methuselah beast trapped in the soft body of a child.)

We Were Soldiers (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, War

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Sam Elliott, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Randall Wallace, based on the memoir We Were Soldiers Once…and Young : Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
directed by Randall Wallace

by Walter Chaw We Were Soldiers is a rousing war epic presented as the world’s most gruesome underdog sports intrigue, its carnage–fuelled by a brilliant attention to the decisions made in the heat of battle by a genius-level military mind–at once exploitive and orgasmic in its cathartic effectiveness. Concerning the bloodiest confrontation between the United States and North Vietnam, which took place in the infancy (November 14, 1965) of the doomed police action at LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, the memoir of the battle We Were Soldiers Once…and Young (by battlefield commander Lt. Col. Hal Moore with war journalist Joseph Galloway) finds its way to the screen with Mel Gibson as Moore and his Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace at the typewriter and behind the camera.

Con Express (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD

½*/**** Image D Sound C
starring Sean Patrick Flannery, Arnold Vosloo, Ursula Karven, Tim Thomerson
screenplay by Terry Cunningham, Paul Birkett
directed by Terry Cunningham

by Walter Chaw A mosaic of stock footage and terrible acting that makes Extreme Limits look decent, Con Express is a Jim Wynorski cheapie that happens to be directed this time around by a pretender to the “king of knock-off schlock” crown named “Terry Cunningham.” Titled with honesty, Con Express is a scam promising thrills that takes you for a stultifying ride. It’s a direct-to-video howler promising the guy who played The Mummy (Arnold Vosloo) playing Anton, a villain of the non-zombie variety (a rogue Russian general–as if there were any other kind) again bent on taking over the world. Arrayed against him are beautiful Slavic agent Natalya (Ursula Karven) and hunky customs agent Brooks (Sean Patrick Flannery), who (gasp) develop romantic feelings for one another even though they start out hating one another. Between South African Vosloo, German Karven, Enemy at the Gates, and K-19, I begin to wonder if there are any such things as actual Russians or if they’re just a mythological Hollywood bogey manufactured as a bottomless well of nostalgic Red menace-dom.

xXx (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, Asia Argento, Martin Csokas
screenplay by Rich Wilkes
directed by Rob Cohen

Xxxby Walter Chaw The first film of the summer to actually make my ears bleed, Rob Cohen’s xXx is a lightshow wrapped around an idiot plot that may or may not become a franchise based entirely on how hungry audiences are for another poorly-made boom-boom fest and how susceptible they are to a marketing machine intent on repackaging a cheap updating of Condorman as “the next James Bond.” Vin Diesel (apparently separated at birth from his sister, David Schwimmer) plays monosyllabic Neanderthal Xander “my friends call me ‘X'” Cage, an extreme-sports political activist who steals conservative senators’ cars and drives them off bridges with pal Tony Hawk. When a dapper tuxedoed NSA (don’t ask) agent is assassinated at an industrial concert in Prague, lone wolf spymaster Gus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, in Batman supervillain Two-Face makeup) does a Dirty Dozen and recruits the shadowy agency’s next superagent from a pool of dangerous criminals.

Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Carla Gugino, Alexa Vega, Daryl Sabara
written and directed by Robert Rodriguez

by Walter Chaw Owing to Robert Rodriguez’s infectious goodwill and delirious visual sensibility, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams is the kind of children’s movie that respects a child’s imagination along with parental patience. Packed with invention from its opening theme park to its closing Island of Dr. Moreau, the picture is a three-pepper salsa that, for all its flashing gizmos and stop-motion monsters, suggests that the best gadget is a rubber band, and that the most important quest is one undertaken on behalf of a family member.

The Time Machine (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Sci-Fi, Time Travel, United Arab Emirates

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Guy Pearce, Jeremy Irons, Philip Bosco, Phyllida Law
screenplay by David Duncan and John Logan, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Simon Wells

by Walter Chaw A cacophonous mess of misguided revisionism and misplaced emphasis, Simon Wells’s (and an uncredited Gore Verbinski’s) updating of H.G. Wells’s poli-sci-fi schlock masterpiece The Time Machine is a miasmic disaster, a sinkhole of shrug-worthy special effects, matte paintings, relentless music, and dangling plotlines and motivations. It isn’t that The Time Machine is incoherent; it’s that the film aspires after several rewrites to one day become incoherent. Not even the best efforts of the always-excellent Guy Pearce can save what is in essence a pathetic cutting-room attempt to wrest the movie back from the abyss of a director suffering a nervous breakdown with eighteen days to go in the shooting schedule and a governing philosophy that believes Orlando Jones would make a good HAL-9000.

Speed (1994) [Five Star Collection] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by Graham Yost
directed by Jan de Bont

by Bill Chambers At the risk of calling it generic, Speed is such a perfect title for the film to which it belongs that you’re almost reminded of those unornamented yellow boxes dotting the aisles of grocery stores everywhere–the ones labelled simply “SALT,” “FLOUR,” “BRAN FLAKES”…you get the picture. Though “Speed” gives it permission to be about anything, the film, to its credit, actually practices velocity and momentum. It puts the action movies that preceded it on fast-forward, so that in each sequence is packed the sum thrills of a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal joint. It’s one of the few films in which propulsion forgives stupidity because it makes the point-blank claim of being an amphetamine.

Innerspace (1987) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Commentary B+
starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg Ryan, Kevin McCarthy
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam and Chip Proser
directed by Joe Dante

by Bill Chambers Fifties monster movies and grindhouse sludge bookended Joe Dante’s coming-of-age, and these twin species of B cinema–sisters in spirit if not in execution–often squish up against each other in his work as a director. The man who gave us the loving but danger-filled tribute to showman William Castle and Castle’s acolytes Matinee (a better Cuban Missile crisis picture, he said ducking tomatoes, than Thirteen Days) preceded his tenure with neo-Castle Roger Corman (for whom he made Piranha) by covering every last exploitation picture of the early-Seventies for THE FILM BULLETIN.

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002) [The Chosen Edition] + Contract Killer (1998) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Satire, Thriller

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk

CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai

by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.

K-9: P.I. (2002) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A
starring James Belushi, Gary Basaraba, Kim Huffman, Jody Racicot
screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Ed Horowitz
directed by Richard J. Lewis

by Walter Chaw Much more interesting than talking about a film called K-9: P.I. is talking about exactly the kind of mind it takes to embrace the idea of a standard buddy picture composed of one half mangy dog and one half German Shepherd not once, not twice, but thrice. On the night of their retirement, Dooley (James Belushi) and Jerry Lee (King) break up a microchip heist, which, of course, makes them the prime suspects of the crime in the eyes of the evil FBI. The feds are always wicked bumblers in films of this breed; the police chiefs always give the heroes a hard time; and there are always femmes fatale to briefly distract the hero from the super-bland "appropriate" love interest.

Men in Black II (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Rip Torn, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Walter Chaw Coming in at just shy of eighty-five minutes, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II is that breed of value-free summer entertainment–call it the “lacklustre blockbuster”–that gives mainstream movies a bad name. It’s all first act and no second or third, meaning everything that happens in the film would function as the set-up in a real film (see also: all of ‘Episodes‘ 1 and 2), and that its primary purpose is to act the whorish shill for product placement–never does the silver screen so resemble a bulletin board as when this variety of film drags itself into the googolplex. Special effects are asked to behave like character, motivation, and narrative while the actors paid exorbitant amounts to caper by themselves before a blue screen do their best not to cackle like Snidely Whiplash making off with burlap bags that have dollar signs painted on them. The audience is the damsel in distress in this flickering melodrama, tied to the railroad tracks as a great lumbering behemoth barrels down, the engineer asleep at the rudder.

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Jarrod Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Family, Sci-Fi

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
screenplay by John A. Davis and David N. Weiss & J. David Stem and Steve Oedekerk
directed by John A. Davis

by Jarrod Chambers There is a new innocence abroad. You can see it in movies such as Spider-Man and the Academy Award-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, which feel no need to undercut the goodness of their heroes or the morality of the story with black irony. They tell us, in effect, that it is okay to be a nice guy whose heart is in the right place, who uses his abilities in the service of good, who makes mistakes and pays for them without becoming bitter or psychotic. I, for one, think it’s a breath of fresh air after the dark, depressing visions of the Tim Burton Batman era.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

The Powerpuff Girls
**/****
screenplay by Craig McCracken, Charlie Bean, Lauren Faust, Paul Rudish, Don Shank
directed by Craig McCracken

by Walter Chaw I remember this Nora Dunn skit on “Saturday Night Live” where she plays a French chanteuse draped over a piano singing “Send in the Clowns” translated into French and then back into English again. The result was incomprehensible and funny–for a while. Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls Movie (based on his Cartoon Network series “Powerpuff Girls”, natch) is American animation translated into Japanese animé back into American animation: similarly incomprehensible, not quite so funny, and it overstays its welcome, too. Because the humour of the piece is reliant on the slow burn and the extended take, when a joke doesn’t work there’s a lot of downtime (Men in Black II suffers a similar malady), and because most of the jokes don’t work, even for the bib-and-diaper set, at around seventy minutes The Powerpuff Girls Movie is powerfully boring stuff.

Pearl Harbor (2001) [60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition]|Pearl Harbor: The Director’s Cut [VISTA Series] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Romance, War

*½/****
ACE DVD – Image A+ Sound A (DD) A+ (DTS) Extras C+
VISTA DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Tom Sizemore
screenplay by Randall Wallace
directed by Michael Bay

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I must shamefully admit that I greeted the approach of Pearl Harbor‘s release with a mixture of moral righteousness and secret anticipation. I knew that no good could come from the intersection of the WWII nostalgia wave and the craven instincts of producer Jerry Bruckheimer; anyone who had seen Top Gun, his earlier effort in military pornography, would have to surmise that his new film’s potential for right-wing jingoism was clearly off the scale. These suspicions were confirmed once I saw the trailer, its sickening combination of swelling music, explosions, dashing soldiers and the FDR “Day of Infamy” speech promising propaganda of Riefenstahlian proportions. Anyone who reads me would expect me to give it a good shellacking, and so I hoped for a total outrage to crucify without remorse–reaping me the happy side effect of securing me the moral high ground from which to preach.