Not simply Steven Spielberg’s most prescient sci-fi work but also one of his finest, Minority Report may not fully investigate the moral questions raised by its tale (based on a Philip K. Dick short story), but it makes up for such deficiencies with muscular rollercoaster thrills and a poignant portrait of man’s capacity for free will. Spielberg’s film is set in a phenomenally realistic 2054 defined by holographic touch-screen computers, vertical and horizontal roadways upon which cars move along tracks, and omnipresent eye-scanners that perform security as well as deliver customer-targeted advertising. This breathtakingly conceived environment (shot in glistening cool hues by Janusz Kaminski) is crime-free thanks to a trio of psychics known as pre-cogs (with Samantha Morton as the most powerful) who are used by Washington D.C.’s “Pre-Crime” law enforcement unit to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes, a tactic that raises a host of ethical issues that Spielberg, for a time, nicely addresses without diverting attention away from his central, adrenalized mystery narrative.
That plot concerns lead pre-crime officer John Anderton (Tom Cruise), who upon discovering that the infallible pre-cogs have pinned him as the city’s next murderer, flees incarceration and sets out to prove his innocence. Scott Frank and Jon Cohen’s script is a bit overstuffed and unwieldy, yet throughout, Spielberg’s stewardship keeps the proceedings on fast-track course. The director effortlessly navigates the ins and outs of this futuristic The Wrong Man-style saga and its centerpiece sequences (one involving a fight carried out on the backs of jet pack-enabled adversaries), with his film smoothly commingling Orwellian commentary about justice, national defense and fate with slam-bang action kicks. Cruise’s performance is rooted in rugged self-preservation single-mindedness, but the actor adds nuance when necessary, largely via Anderton’s struggle to deal with the years-earlier kidnapping and death of his son (a thread that provides Spielberg with his pet father-son theme). The third act gets bogged down in investigative sleuthing at the expense of examining the moral consequences of Pre-Crime. Still, the shift in focus toward Anderton and his enemies’ ability to choose their destiny is nonetheless evocatively addressed, as is – amidst the high-flying set pieces – the nature of memory, the pain of regret and the desire for survival.
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January 20, 2011
Army of Darkness (1992): C+
Replacing horror with uninhibited monster movie jokiness, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness picks up where Evil Dead II left off, with chainsaw-handed hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) transported via an unholy portal to 1300 A.D., where he’s forced to find the Necronomican (i.e. the Book of the Dead) to return home, all while fighting an army of the undead. Directed and co-written by Raimi, this period saga turns Ash into an out-and-out wisecracking badass with unparalleled fighting skills, unassailable confidence, and a habit of punctuating each macho quip with an Elvis-style “baby.” Campbell is great, as is Raimi’s cinematography, which zooms, twists and somersaults during first-person POV shots of stabbing spears and flying fiery cannonballs. There’s energy to spare, and at times it’s put to good use, as during a rollicking sequence in which Ash is beset by impish miniature versions of himself à la Gulliver’s Travels. Too bad, then, that Army of Darkness’ story is so perfunctory and lame that there’s nothing to tether its bits and pieces of loopy madness. After floundering around during its first half with barely related scenes of Ash acting comically confident and buffoonishly sparring off against horrific adversaries, the film spends its latter portion staging a prolonged battle between militias of men and skeletons that’s short on inspiration and urgency, and thus serves only to highlight Raimi’s clever (for the early ‘90s, at least) melding of live-action and stop-motion effects. By opting for gonzo mania over any element of unnerving otherworldly terror, the film proves just a throwaway goof, and ultimately one with an inflated sense of its own funniness.
January 07, 2011
The Way Back (2010): B
A tale of man’s capacity to endure that’s layered with Christian undercurrents, The Way Back tells the astounding true-life story of three prisoners who in 1940 broke out of a Siberian gulag and journeyed four-thousand miles by foot across the snowy wilderness, arid desert and Himalayan mountains to freedom in India. Peter Weir’s first film since 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World opens with Polish everyman Janusz (Jim Sturgess) being fingered by his wife – after obvious torture – as a foreign spy. Incarcerated in a Siberian prison, Janusz breaks out with the help of a few comrades, including unsentimental American Mr. Smith (Ed Harris) and vicious criminal Valka (Colin Farrell), whose flight isn’t from Mother Russia – at one point, he proudly defends his chest tattoo of Lenin and Stalin by claiming that the latter is a “man of iron” – but from debts likely to get him killed. Their subsequent journey takes them across terrain that Weir and regular cinematographer Russell Boyd depict as simultaneously hostile and gorgeous, the imposing and threatening environment constantly dwarfing the men (visually, emotionally, physically) as they valiantly attempt to make their way to safety. Though its narrative is occasionally sluggish and burdened by a coda that tips too far into mawkish melodrama, Weir’s film captures a potent, tangible sense of space, and his cast – relegated to long stretches of silence punctuated by desperate action, as when a starving Farrell frantically munches on a caterpillar – conveys internal and external exhaustion and determination with little showboating. Eventually joined by a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) who’s fleeing a Russian farming collective, the troupe’s odyssey soon exhibits Christian shadings – buckets of water from a desert well are poured over men’s heads baptismally; Janusz later bathes in a stream with arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ pose; and, ultimately, Janusz refuses to quit, or let Mr. Smith give up and die, in the blindingly hot desert because he’s driven by a need to find and forgive his wife for her accusation. As such, The Way Back, bolstered by Weir’s evocatively soulful depiction of the vast untamed Earth, proves a subtly touching religiously oriented saga of compassion, conviction and absolution.
January 05, 2011
2010 Film Critic Polls
Aside from contributing to Slant Magazine's year-end feature, I was also fortunate enough to be invited to participate in three 2010 film critics polls, held by The Village Voice, indieWIRE, and The L Magazine (respectively). My ballots for the first two, and the third's final results, can be found below.
The 2010 Village Voice Film Critics' Poll - Nick Schager
indieWIRE's Annual Critics Survey 2010 - Nick Schager
The L's Second Annual Film Poll
Final 2010 Round-Up
As this post's title makes clear, here are the last of my 2010 reviews (not counting some blog reviews that'll appear here shortly).
On to 2011!
Out Now:
True Grit (Slant magazine)
Little Fockers (Slant magazine)
Summer Wars (Time Out New York)
The Fourth Kind (2010): C-
“I’m actress Milla Jovovich,” states Milla Jovovich while explaining, during an awfully awkward prologue, the conceit of The Fourth Kind, a film in which Jovovich and fellow actors reenact supposedly real footage involving a string of possible alien abductions in Nome, Alaska in 2000. That authentic video is largely culled from the therapy sessions of Dr. Abbey Tyler, whose patients – all experiencing similar bizarre dreams of an ominous owl – freak out like possessed maniacs under hypnosis. In director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s fictionalized sequences, we also see these sessions, often side-by-side with the “verité” segments, as well as witness Dr. Tyler’s (Jovovich) interactions with a skeptical colleague (Elias Koteas), a close-minded sheriff (Will Patton) and her two kids, one of whom has gone blind thanks to the recent murder of her father. If the Unsolved Mysteries vibe of Osunsanmi’s recreations aren’t tip-off enough – what with their raft of smoky blue shadows and spooky suggestions of otherworldly enigmas – The Fourth Kind’s ostensible archival footage proves so clunky and transparently phony that the entire gimmick collapses. Of course, its imdb.com cast list also disproves the film’s claims of being partly comprised of documentary material. Yet regardless of such “is it true?” questions, the larger issue is the second-rate nature of this thriller’s performances and scripting, both of which go for giant emotional explosions rather than any sense of logic or nuance. And as for suspense or horror, well, there’s simply nothing of the kind to be found here.
Megamind (2010): B
Turning a traditional Superman-esque scenario on its enormous noggin, DreamWorks’ animated Megamind proves a revisionist superhero saga rooted in questions of free will. In Metro City, narcissistic do-gooder Metro Man (Brad Pitt) does constant battle with his insecure nemesis Megamind (Will Ferrell), a giant blue-headed villain whose nefarious motivations – as spied in an intro that recaps the duo’s childhood rivalry – are born as much from jealousy and a desire to be loved as from pure evilness. However, when one of his plots actually kills Metro Man and he becomes supreme ruler of the metropolis, Megamind finds himself without purpose, and bored with wreaking havoc alongside alien-fish sidekick Minion (David Cross), he soon endeavors to woo Lois Lane stand-in Roxanne Ritchie (Tina Fey) and turn a dork (Jonah Hill) into a new heroic adversary. Director Tom McGrath’s film features bright, bouncy animation and fluid action that, while a bit too reminiscent of The Incredibles (and, in terms of Megamind himself, Monsters vs. Aliens’ Gallaxhar), nonetheless ably matches the script’s rat-a-tat-tat pacing and stream of witty one-liners, many of which tweak the genre’s conventions and hallowed classics (the best: a Marlon Brando gag). Given how assured it often feels, Megamind should be more consistently laugh-out-loud funny rather than just mildly amusing, but its vocal cast – especially Ferrell as the crazed but sensitive Megamind – is uniformly strong. Moreover, though its more subversive impulses are rarely indulged to their fullest, its story’s third-act inversions still provide a pointed rebuke to superhero narratives’ set-in-stone dynamics.
Knight and Day (2010): C
Knight and Day attempts to walk a delicate tightrope, simultaneously parodying and indulging in outrageous super-spy action, and fails in both endeavors. James Mangold’s big-budget snooze features Tom Cruise as Roy Miller, a rogue secret agent man who may also be insane. This possibility greatly disturbs June Havens (Cameron Diaz), the classic car-restoring mechanic (ha!) who becomes unwittingly embroiled in Roy’s efforts to evade arms dealers and federal officers who want the perpetual energy battery in his possession. This coveted object is a serviceable MacGuffin, but Mangold’s wannabe-jaunty globe-hopping film is a far cry from Hitchcockian, going through its CG-enhanced set pieces and playful Cruise-Diaz banter with more dutifulness than inspiration. Striving for a balance between gravity and goofiness, the story as a whole, and Cruise’s performance in particular, prove incapable of selling either successfully, so that when Roy engages in an airline fight against anonymous thugs – a skirmish that involves both brutal deaths and jokes about crotch knifings – there’s neither humor or tension, just the visible strain of performers vainly vacillating between disparate modes. A few of the numerous gags stick, such as one in which June periodically awakens from drug-induced sleep to catch glimpses of Roy spiriting her away from dangerous predicaments (now she’s on a boat, now she’s jumping from a plummeting plane, etc.). Yet by and large, Knight and Day’s humor undercuts its suspense and its attentiveness to blockbuster genre demands (giant set pieces, dialogue awash in one-liners) drags down any sense of levity, thereby stranding its game cast in an adventure short on playfulness and long on desperation.
And Soon the Darkness (1970): C+
A mood of open-air claustrophobia is the prime calling card of And Soon the Darkness, Robert Fuest’s thriller about the nasty predicament two pretty girls find themselves in while bicycling on holiday through the French countryside. Set along roads that cut through vast fields and by deep forests, the film’s empty spaces are confining and threatening, adding persistent unease to a story that slowly but surely devolves into ludicrousness. After making a stink about the tediousness of their vacation, Cathy (Michele Dotrice) settles down for a nap at the edge of the woods and refuses to budge, compelling her companion Jane (Pamela Franklin) to continue on alone. No sooner are they separated than Cathy is drying mysteriously wet underwear on tree branches and Jane is being warned by a café owner that she shouldn’t be traversing this dangerous road alone. So far so good, though once Jane discovers that Cathy has gone missing, and is then offered help by a stranger named Paul (Sandor Elès) who had been creepily flirting/stalking Cathy and now claims to be a cop, the plot becomes a prolonged game of misdirection, with Fuest ham-fistedly suggesting that every person around – which also includes an old deaf farmer prone to stabbing things with a knife and putting panties on his head – might be Cathy’s abductor. The director’s assured use of silence and well-staged games of cat-and-mouse amplify the malicious, paranoid tone. Yet And Soon the Darkness’s ineffective red herrings contribute to an overarching sense that the film isn’t sure about what destination to choose, an impression solidified by a finale that – despite one expertly deranged smile on a killer’s face – is as random as it is deflating.
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