Got a bit of a backlog of movies I’ve been meaning to talk about, so here are some quick reviews.
Doomsday
Almost awesome. It had all the right influences (
Road Warrior,
Escape from New York, and the medieval movie of your choice) and filtered them through the story of a booty-kickin’ Action Girl with a soundtrack that includes Adam Ant, Fine Young Cannibals, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Any movie that uses Frankie’s “Two Tribes Go to War” as the background music to a
Road Warrior-style chase scene immediately rules.
Unfortunately, the medieval movie that the filmmakers were influenced by appears to be
Flesh + Blood. The violence and gore is over the top, but in a bad way. There’s zero restraint and that doesn’t work for the movie. For instance, one of the bad guys is a gang leader named Solomon. He’s depicted part of the time as a fun, charming villain, but then he goes and does absolutely despicable things that we get to see in graphic detail. That might be a cool, nuanced approach for a drama, but not an adventure movie like this.
Four out of five Frankies.The Bank Job
Not really what I was expecting. It’s a spy movie disguised as a caper movie and the caper part works pretty well, but the spies are pretty much idiots, so I didn’t enjoy that bit. I haven’t researched the real-life events that it’s based on, but I suspect that the spy angle is speculation based on conspiracy theory. And kind of dumb conspiracy theory at that.
If the British government wanted to retrieve potentially damaging photographs from a bank safe deposit box, surely there are better, easier ways to go about it than covertly hiring a bunch of local crooks to break in and do it for them. The unknown, uncontrollable variables the spies had to accept to even consider the mission are infinite. In fact, there’s not a single element that the spies
do control during the whole film.
The caper part of it works though because the crooks are pretty charming. Especially, naturally, Jason Statham. But they’re none of them so charming that I wanted to see them get away with robbing people’s safe deposit boxes. This isn’t insured bank money we’re talking about. It’s people’s jewelry and passports and birth certificates. Yeah, some crooked people banked there (in fact, in a hard-to-believe coincidence, apparently
all of London’s slimy underground banked there), but I couldn’t forget that the thieves were stealing from real people and unlike in a good caper movie, I wanted to see them all caught.
Two out of five secret tunnels.Lust, Caution
I was hoping this would be an awesome spy story set in WWII, Japanese-occupied China. And it
is a spy story; just not an awesome one. It’s about a young, Chinese girl who joins the Chinese resistance when Japan invades. She and her other college chums come up with a scheme to assassinate a high-level Chinese official who’s working with the Japanese to oppress the Chinese people. The scheme involves our heroine’s seducing the official so that she can lure him into a trap where her friends will kill him. Unfortunately, the official is a very careful man and difficult to snare. So she has to keep working on him - keep seducing him - until he slips up.
The movie’s title comes from the focus on the obvious sexual tension between the girl and the official, and how that’s in conflict with his paranoid, extremely cautious nature. And that’s the movie’s primary concern. Where
The Bank Job is a bad spy movie pretending to be an okay caper film,
Lust, Caution is a powerful, but twisted love story masquerading as a fairly decent spy flick. As long as you know that’s what you’re in for, you should do fine. I didn’t, so I had to adjust on the fly. Sort of like what I had to do with Ang Lee’s
Hulk. I can appreciate it for what it is in hindsight, but I still really wish it was more like what I’d hoped for.
Four out of five clandestine meetings in coffee shops.Nim’s Island
Jodie Foster + island adventure + Gerard Butler in dual roles (both of which are handsome adventurers) + fantastic story about love, promises, and bravery + bearded dragon = Freaking. Awesome.
Five out of five Alex Rovers.Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
I avoided this in the theater for two reasons. The lesser of the two was that it didn’t have Sarah Conner in it and I’d fallen for her in
T2. I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy a Terminator movie without her.
The bigger reason though was that it didn’t have James Cameron in it either and without his vision to guide it, I was afraid that it would lead the franchise down the
Highlander path. By which I mean that
Highlander is a fan-freaking-tastic movie, but the sequels sucked because they abandoned the concept and continuity established by the first. “There can be only one,” indeed.
That’s what I was afraid would happen with the Terminator movies. Someone would come along and try to keep the series going, but would go too far and not only lose the feel of the first two, but ignore the careful, almost intricate continuity they’d set up.
Fortunately, to my surprise,
T3 didn’t do that. It was a logical extension of what had come before. It was pretty brave in its ending, but that worked for me. It makes me want to see sequels, which is not
at all the response I thought I’d have.
SPOILERS BELOWNot that there aren’t problems. John Conner and his girlfriend walk into top secret military bases
far too easily and the Schwarzenegger Terminator’s conflict about its programming was cheesy and horribly acted. I’ve seen Schwarzenegger do some good acting, but he wasn’t doing it here. There’s other silliness too, like how in the midst of nuclear Armageddon, US military leaders somehow instinctively turn to punk kid John Conner for comfort.
So, yes. Flawed, really pretty average action movie. But
so much better than I thought it would be.
Three out of five naked Terminator women.
holds up all that well as a movie, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating the character of Solara (Mila Kunis). She doesn't start out especially tough - she's as frightened and dominated by Carnegie (Gary Oldman) as the rest of the town - but she's brave enough to take her chance at escape with Eli (Denzel Washington) when she sees it and soon becomes outright heroic.
, Kunis brought a lot of strength and intelligence to a character who on paper only needed to be pretty and bitchy. She continues giving those qualities to her film characters, which is why I love watching her movies even when she's not wreaking holy vengeance with a submachine gun.
and Crash, for instance
) and I like a lot of the people in this one (mostly folks from Alias and Grey's Anatomy, and Anne Hathaway and Queen Latifah). But there was an unfortunate, anthology-like feel to it where - even though the stories connected - they weren't consistent in tone or quality and I found myself wishing to skip past many of them, even when they featured a favorite actor.
, Gamer
, and Law Abiding Citizen
he's been working hard to fix that. On the other hand, while I don't like a lot of romantic comedies, I do like certain things about them and The Bounty Hunter managed to push a couple of those buttons. Not creatively, mind you, but in that knee-jerk, "I like it when they do that" way. And Butler and Aniston are nice to look at. I have to take Jennifer Aniston in small doses, but this is the first thing I've seen her in since the last season of Friends
.
