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When writer/director Chris Weitz adapted the first of Philip Pullman’s three His Dark Materials novels into a feature film, he skirted around the book’s anti-religion elements in order to cater to notoriously over-sensitive Christian groups. That’s alright, in The Golden Compass the Church was really only a stand in for any authoritarian, repressive organization and so Weitz has replaced them with generic fascists. It still gets the message across. Should the other books in the series ever get adapted, it may become more of a problem, since the story’s twists and turns lead to a desperate battle to kill God with the help of gay Angels. There’s no getting around that. No wonder the Catholic Church is protesting Weitz’s religiously cleansed Golden Compass anyway, perhaps afraid that if people see it, the rest of the books will get made and suddenly they’ll have a pew full of parishioners trying to stick Yaweh in the gut with a shiv. Or something like that.
For now though, Pullman’s tale is little damaged by a filmmaker’s fear of offending right-wingers, and The Golden Compass sticks rather closely to the narrative on which it’s based. It’s still the tale of Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards), a precocious little girl in a parallel world, caught up in magic and intrigue beyond her ken.
We first meet little Lyra scrambling through the streets around the University where she lives, playing games with the group of boys who are her enemies and friends. Her world is one not so different from our own, but yet very different in fundamental ways. It seems eternally trapped in the 18th Century, except an 18th Century where magic is real and often put to such humdrum uses as pulling horseless carriages. The carriages are horseless, because the animals in her world are all daemons. A daemon is the physical manifestation of a person’s soul. Every man and woman alive in Lyra’s world has one, and it takes the form of a talking animal, the shape it takes and the personality exudes being literal manifestations of who that person is on the inside. In Lyra’s world no one is ever alone, and on a cold night everybody has something fuzzy to cuddle up with. Teddy bear sales have no doubt been long mired in recession.
The daemons are a neat gimmick, but one fraught with filmmaking peril. Too much of them and Pullmans’ intrinsically dark and edgy tale turns into a mad caricature full of silly, Bugs Bunny like creatures running amok amongst humans. Too little of them, and the essential oddity of the story is lost, leaving us with yet another in a long line of bland, Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings clones. Weitz acceptably walks the line between those two extremes, giving us enough daemons to keep it interesting, but leaving the humans at the center of the story while daemons hang around in the background, out of frame, off camera, sometimes barely noticed as they would be if we were actually there with Lyra, and as used to seeing them and interacting with them as you would be any other appendage, like a pinky finger.
Soon after we meet them, Lyra and her daemon Pant are launched into adventure. She’s taken to live with the evil Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who though breathtakingly beautiful, is up to no good. Mrs. Coulter had a hand in kidnapping Lyra’s best friend Roger and so Lyra, with the help of an all too conveniently introduced band of nomadic sea-faring Gyptians, journeys to the far frozen north. There she’ll attempt to rescue her friend, meeting witches, Ice Bears and aeronauts along the way. Moment to moment the movie’s entertaining enough. Watching a talking polar bear slap on a suit of armor and charge into battle is pretty cool, and in his all too few and too brief moments on screen Sam Elliott runs away with the movie as a cowboy balloonist named Lee Scoresby with a jackrabbit daemon named Hester (voiced by Kathy Bates). But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the movie aside from the CGI and hand to hand fighting, intrigue and political maneuvering which Weitz glosses over with tedious, and predictable exposition scenes that never really fit in with the rest of the movie.
There’s just too much exposition and not enough explanation in Weitz’s film. His script spends a lot of time talking about the complexities of Lyra’s world, but little time showing any of it. I wonder if anyone who hasn’t already read the book will have any idea what’s going on. Most of what happens comes off as convenient, lazily written coincidence; if you haven’t read the book you’ll probably think it one of those movies where things turn out the way they do simply because it’s a movie, and not because there’s any rhyme or reason to what’s happened. Whether or not you’ve read the books you’ll enjoy The Golden Compass on some level, but it feels rushed, and I doubt anyone who hasn’t already read the books will be interested in going back for more if there’s ever a sequel.
Nic Cage is back and running another fine-toothed comb through American history. Hey, treasure hunting isn’t just for guys in cool hats anymore. It’s been almost wholly taken over by dudes with overly long, bad hair. Sorry Indy. National Treasure: Book of Secrets is a worthy enough successor to the first National Treasure movie, and continues its tradition of well, just having a helluva lot of fun with American history. Except perhaps it’s just a little less fun this time around; the Gates family saga has gotten more spastic with the wear and tear of use.
As always, it’s about more than simply finding gold for Ben Gates (Nic Cage). In this second film, our heroic history treasure hunter is out primarily to clear his family’s name. Luckily, the route to doing that is paved with bricks of long lost bullion. When a missing page from Lincoln assassinator John Wilkes Booth’s diary is discovered, Ben Gate’s great great grandfather is accused of being the mastermind behind the Lincoln assassination. To prove his ancestor an innocent patriot, Ben sets out to uncover the real meaning of the diary page, which he believes is the first clue in a treasure map. Guess what? It is.
If there’s a problem with Book of Secrets, it’s that the whole thing has gotten too caffeinated. Director John Turtletaub, perhaps in an effort to follow the built in necessity for a sequel to be bigger and flashier than the original, amps the film up further than it ought to go. Clues fly by fast and furiously, sometimes too fast to really get any sort of hold on what’s going on. Following along with Ben Gates as he leaps from one clue to the next becomes almost an impossible task by the movie’s end, and at some point you’re forced to simply throw up your hands and let whatever happens happen. That’s alright, I was content to sit back and watch all the national monuments on display fly by. You can’t go wrong setting your movie’s finale on Mt. Rushmore.
So maybe the mystery’s not quite as easy to follow, but the character’s still work and the idea of tracking down the true story of historical figures for profit is still a blast. Nic Cage continues to use the uber-nerd persona he’s built up over the years effectively as Gates. Somehow watching him rattle off volumes and volumes of facts is incredibly entertaining. He brings so much enthusiasm to the character, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the history he’s geeking out over hunting. The movies best moments are still the ones where Cage and his crew are simply talking things out, riffing on what they know and sitting around figuring out where it’s going to take them. All the tunnels and traps are only window dressing, a reason to get us to the next historical geek-out session.
The supporting cast is mostly just there. This is Cage’s movie. Jon Voight is effective as his aged father, and Helen Mirren is a nice addition as his mother. Diane Kruger is back as his girlfriend, though honestly they could have brought in any randomly hot blonde to step into the role and no one would have noticed any difference. Justin Bartha is still the perfect sidekick, witty, weird, and funny in all the wrong moments.
National Treasure 2’s script deserves special credit, for giving us a bad guy who’s more than just some sniveling billionaire out for riches. Ed Harris’ plays Ben Gates’ opposition, but the movie’s strength comes more from pitting Gates against the historical clues he must uncover than in pitting him against any human baddie. So, with Gates true opponent being a bunch of clues, Harris ends up with more complexity than the average bad guy and his character, while ultimately forgettable, at least isn’t predictable.
If you liked National Treasure, you’re going to have fun with Book of Secrets. Maybe not quite as much fun, but it’s still a good movie going bet, especially if you’re looking for something to haul the whole family to in this holiday season. Come on, you can’t take grandma to see Dewey Cox. Granny shouldn’t even be allowed to say his name, let alone watch him next to you in a theater. It’s great escapism, but more than that, it’s escapism with substance. It’s fantasy, but enough of it is grounded in real history that the film’s bound to get you interested in the real deal. I know it did for me. The first thing I did when I got home was to Google John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Yes it exists, and yes there really are 18 pages missing. Want to know what might happen if one of them turned up? Hey there’s this movie called Book of Secrets…
An adaptation of the popular videogame of the same name, Hitman is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect it to be. The bad kind. It’s incredible that after all this time Hollywood still hasn’t been able to figure out the videogame to movie genre. Maybe they don’t think they have to since the movies make tons of money anyway, but as a gamer myself it sure would be nice if filmmakers would start taking us seriously. Or perhaps I should say it would be nice if someone hired a serious filmmaker to make one of these movies.
That hasn’t happened yet, and so we’re stuck with videogame movies done by cinematic cellar dwellers like Paul W.S. Anderson, Uwe Boll, and in this case Xavier Gens. He directs Hitman from a script by Skip Woods, a script which doesn’t do him any favors. It’s as shallow and empty as it is convoluted and confusing in telling the story of Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) a bald, bar-coded killer for hire.
There’s a halfhearted attempt to develop a back story for 47 in the film’s opening credits, but for the most part he leaps on to the screen as is. We never really understand who he is, what he is, or why he does what he does and Gens doesn’t seem to care. I learned more about Olyphant’s hitman character in the film’s trailers than I did during the running time of the movie itself. The trailers talk about 47 as an agent of a disavowed brotherhood of the Catholic Church, and allude to a secret religious conspiracy, all of which seems interesting. None of that is in the movie. Instead, we get a bald guy who we’re told is a member of an “organization” and simply walks around shooting people, without any obvious motivation, and with a life that begins when you enter the theater and ends when you walk out of it. He’s given no history, no personality. 47 is a walking, talking, killing robot and we never get to know him.
Because we don’t know who he is, his actions are often confusing. 47 is on a mission, the mission goes wrong, and a lot of people are trying to kill him. We don’t really know why, and though the film is filled with plot revelations none of them seem to add up to anything. Even after the movie, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what I saw. There was this bald guy, he shot a bunch of people, then he drove away. Interpol is after him, some people he kills, others he lets live for no other reason than that it would make him too unsympathetic to kill one of the good guys. He saves a girl named Nika (Olga Kurylenko) too, because apparently he has a thing for facial tattoos, and because the movie needed a way to work in some gratuitous nudity. At least it’s good gratuitous nudity. Olga Kurylenko is built like a gazelle.
What I’m getting at here is obvious: Nika’s luscious legs aside, Hitman is an unmitigated mess. The script is a disaster, the plot is a waste of time, and the characters aren’t just unsympathetic, they’re empty, hollow shells which are little better than computer generated constructs. I’m not sure why they bothered with flesh and blood actors.
The movie has one thing going for it and one thing only: It looks pretty. Gens has a real flair for gritty, Euro-trash and the film drips with dark contrasts and long, lingering, gorgeous slow-motion shots littered with bullets. His characters are dressed in dark contrasting colors which really pop on screen, and he makes full use of that, framing each shot carefully and contrasting Olyphant’s shiny bald head with his surroundings.
If only all that great cinematography had been used on some sort of mind-blowing action sequence I might have been able to forgive the film’s muddled mess of a script. But Hitman can’t even accomplish that. Most of the movie’s action boils down to a guy standing and posing with guns. There’s a sword fight between hitmen, but it comes off like a spatula fight. In the face of real action movies like The Bourne Ultimatum and Live Free or Die Hard, Hitman’s action isn’t that exciting. I kept waiting for the film to hit its big, defining moment; kept waiting for that big, penultimate action sequence; kept waiting for the plot to unravel and make sense. It never happened, and I wish Hitman hadn’t either.
When writer/director Chris Weitz adapted the first of Philip Pullman’s three His Dark Materials novels into a feature film, he skirted around the book’s anti-religion elements in order to cater to notoriously over-sensitive Christian groups. That’s alright, in The Golden Compass the Church was really only a stand in for any authoritarian, repressive organization and so Weitz has replaced them with generic fascists. It still gets the message across. Should the other books in the series ever get adapted, it may become more of a problem, since the story’s twists and turns lead to a desperate battle to kill God with the help of gay Angels. There’s no getting around that. No wonder the Catholic Church is protesting Weitz’s religiously cleansed Golden Compass anyway, perhaps afraid that if people see it, the rest of the books will get made and suddenly they’ll have a pew full of parishioners trying to stick Yaweh in the gut with a shiv. Or something like that.
