The International - Review

The International has a big obstacle in its way right from the outset: How do you make banking interesting? Like making math fun, turning the world of money lending into something that’ll keep you awake for two hours, is a tall order. A Beautiful Mind made math exciting by using a lead character who is not only crazy, but experiences amusing hallucinations. The International tries to make banking more fun than watching paint dry, by turning the finance industry into one big, espionage ridden shoot-em-up. Though recently laid off Wallstreet workers looking for payback may take pleasure in seeing a few bank executives rubbed out, when the bullets aren’t flying you’re likely to find yourself wishing for that wet paint.

The problem is really the plot, which never makes a lot of sense. Clive Owen plays Louis, an Interpol agent investigating a vague and complicated banking organization called the IBBC. He’s after them because, they lend money to people. Some of their lendees are even bad people and apparently banks are supposed to do some sort of background check before opening a saving account? I’m not sure, but Clive Owen seems really pissed about it. Or maybe he’s just pissed that the bank keeps sending assassins to kill his friends. Ok, killing people is a crime so I understand why he’d take them down for that, except they wouldn’t have killed his friends if he hadn’t already been investigating them for, again, money lending. Last I checked, aren’t banks supposed to lend money? It’s not like the IBBC was selling bad mortgages. If there’s an accountant in the audience, see it and send me an e-mail straightening this whole thing out.

Luckily The International doesn’t wait long before it starts inventing excuses for Clive Owen to fire off a gun. When that’s happening, the movie is intense and visceral. In between those scenes, it’s full of artifice in which cliché, brain dead superiors scream that our heroes are out of time and must drop the case, even though they’re obviously getting massive results and doing everything right. But the movie needs tension when the bullets aren’t flying, so there’s a lot of talk about needless timelines which serve no other purpose than to be a ticking clock. Clive needs a reason to drive his car really fast. Gotta stop those bankers, before they make another loan!

At some point Naomi Watts gets into the mix as a New York investigator with a stake in what’s going on. She’s left out of the gunplay and I’m not entirely sure why she’s in the story at all. It doesn’t matter. There’s a fantastic shootout in the middle of the movie, set inside the Guggenheim museum. This is almost certainly the only thing you’ll remember when walking out of the movie, and since Naomi Watts isn’t involved, feel free to write her off. The Guggenheim sequence though, you’re not likely to forget. The International is worth sitting through if only to see it. It’s well shot yes, but spectacular mainly because of the setting. The museum is a series of never ending, spiraling, balcony ramps with beautiful glass artwork in the center. You can guess what happens when Clive Owen has to fight off an army of guys armed with machine guns. Big fun. That’s what.

Still, this a movie about banking. Shoehorn all the bullets you want into it, but it remains a plot driven by accountants. Maybe that’s relevant, with the economy in shambles because of the greed of banking executives like the ones Clive sets out to blow up in The International. I know I’d certainly like some revenge against those bastards. Unfortunately The International’s approach is stark, cold, and not one that lends itself to revenge. In the movie’s final moments the script takes a vicious left turn in an effort to strip away everything and leave us with only the emotional and raw. Yet even there, Tom Tykwer’s direction ensures that the film remains calculating and distant, as if instead of a movie we’re watching a monetary transaction between a filmmaker and his audience.

Pink Panther 2 - Review

Steve Martin continues to be a revered comedy icon even 10 years after his last relevant comedy (that would be Bowfinger), but even he knew he needed some help to get anyone to accept a second remake of the classic Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. So for The Pink Panther 2, Martin stacks the deck with talented comedians and actors from across the globe. Emily Mortimer and Jean Reno are back, John Cleese has replaced Kevin Kline as Clouseau's nemesis Inspector Dreyfus, and Alfred Molina and Andy Garcia have joined as international investigators brought to France when, once again, the Pink Panther diamond is lifted. Add in Aishwarya Rai as a mysterious diamond expert, Lily Tomlin as an etiquette teacher and Jeremy Irons as a suspected culprit, and it's a cast that would make anything worth watching.

Anything except The Pink Panther 2, that is. The movie that brings together all these stars is a dull and obvious comedy that either squanders the talent of its cast or leaves them to founder within the scrambled and episodic screenplay. Decent pratfalls and physical gags will take you a long way, but there needs to be some semblance of wit and coherence to keep viewers older than 10 interested. Harald Zwart steps in for director Shawn Levy here, but his poor sense of comedic timing and lack of visual style may have only made matters worse.

When the film opens Inspector Clouseau (Martin) has been relegated to parking meter duty after winning a Medal of Honor at the end of the last film, with Dreyfus hoping to keep him out of the office and out of the way. But when the Pink Panther is stolen, along with priceless artifacts from Italy, Japan and England, Clouseau is the obvious choice to join the international Dream Team charged with recovering the items. There's a Brit (Molina), an Italian (Garcia) and a Japanese whiz kid (Yuki Matsuzaki), all of them exasperated by Clouseau's ego and clumsiness. The Italian is more interested Clouseau's secretary Nicole (Mortimer), whom he woos even while Nicole and Clouseau refuse to acknowledge their mutual crushes.

Joined by jewel expert Sonia (Rai), the Dream Team travels the globe on the trail of the mysterious thief The Tornado. Each location is essentially just a new opportunity for a Clouseau pratfall. He runs atop a giant globe in a mansion, he falls off the Pope's balcony, he burns down a restaurant in Rome. The physical gags, as tired as they may be, work a whole lot better than the French jokes, which once again find Clouseau unable to pronounce "hamburger" and, in his scenes with Tomlin, constantly ogling women. The goal seems to be to establish some kind of witty repartee among the assorted comic legends, but all the verbal scenes are draggy and obvious, making Tomlin's presence, for the first time ever, unwanted.

Mortimer brings some sparkle as the dopey and devoted Nicole, and Molina especially makes a fun opponent for Clouseau, as in one early scene where the two size each other up by lobbing random insults like "You were 14 before you learned to enjoy the taste of avocado!" Reno, though his character lurks weirdly on the sidelines for most of the film, gets a beautifully bizarre song-and-dance scene with Martin. You get the sense that, in a better movie with more ambition, the audience could be having as much fun as the stars did behind the scenes.

Once I was watching The Office on DVD, and spent 10 minutes watching deleted scenes before I realized it wasn't the actual episode. The Pink Panther 2 is pretty much the same experience, making you wonder if there's a cut of the film that doesn't linger so needlessly on Clouseau's love triangle, or leaves out the scenes (Clouseau karate fights with tweens?) that have nothing to do with the plot. But apparently Martin and Zwart really did want to make a movie this aimless and derivative, aware that their target audience of children won't know what they're missing. Would that the rest of us could be so lucky.

Taken - Review

Taken really has no right to be as much fun as it is. A movie with less interest in character development and dialogue than in roundhouse kicks and gunplay, Taken is brutish and loud and slow in parts, but also undeniably entertaining.

The presence of Liam Neeson in the lead role is a bonus, but surprisingly, not really the source of success. Credit goes to Pierre Morel, the director who previously made the gonzo French action movie District B13 and brings the same frenetic, sadistic energy to the manifold action sequences here. The plot takes forever to get going, and suffers throughout from terrible dialogue and ridiculous twists, but when it comes to the action-- which is why you bought the ticket in the first place, of course-- Morel is completely in charge..

But first, there's an interminable half hour or so spent meeting Bryan Mills (Neeson), a former spy now living in Los Angeles in order to be closer to his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with her mom (Famke Janssen) and a rich stepdad who buys her a pony for her 16th birthday. Mills, poor guy, can only afford a karaoke machine. We needlessly watch Mills return briefly to the job to protect a pop star-- and take down an assailant in the process-- and hang out with his old spy buddies, since apparently screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen took the "show, don't tell" method of exposition way, way too seriously.

The plot finally emerges when Kim asks permission to spend the summer in Paris, and Mills, an insanely overprotective father, denies her at first. She then confirms the worst suspicions of every overprotective parent on earth by getting kidnapped, along with her friend Amanda, within minutes of arriving in Paris. After a frantic phone call with Kim that gives a few key clues about the kidnappers, Mills has packed his toolkit of weapons and jetted overseas, preparing to "tear down the EIffel Tower if I have to" in order to find his daughter.

He stops just short of that, but destroys any number of cars, construction sites, and lives as he races through the seedy underbelly of Paris. He determines Kim and Amanda have been taken by Albanian traffickers, who kidnap unassuming young women and, usually within 70 hours, ship them away forever. A number of plot threads that might give more insight into this under-discussed, tragic world are abandoned, including an odd moment when Mills cares for a kidnapped woman whom he first thinks is Kim. There's also an encounter in which Mills' French government contact appears to be in cahoots with the traffickers, but that's mostly an excuse for Mills to throw a few more punches and track another clue.

The action, though sometimes over-edited and confusing, is mostly thrilling, including an early chase scene at a construction site and a final confrontation on a boat in the Seine. Neeson is such an automatically empathetic figure that he gets away with a lot, including torturing a suspect, threatening innocent bystanders, and shooting a man's wife in the arm to teach him a lesson. There's a whole lot of violence within the PG-13 rating, and not all of it of the satisfying, "justice to the bad guys!' kind. But action fans will be continually impressed by Morel's skill behind the camera, and instinctive understanding of how to pace even the most extended action sequence.

Maggie Grace, even given how little she has to do in her role, is astonishingly bad at playing a teenager, and Famke Janssen adds another to her line of blank, stuck-up wife roles. But all the movie really needs is Neeson and a row of henchmen for him to mow down, and as long as the action is moving, it all works fine. A 5-minute coda to wrap up the characters reminds you of how awful the beginning was, and keeps the movie from really qualifying as "good." But as fast, dumb entertainment goes, Taken is tough to beat.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans - Review

Six years ago Underworld brought an unimpressive vampire vs. werewolves story to theaters. Playing with far too frequently used archetypes and concepts, and featuring horridly filmed combat sequences, the result was underwhelming and disappointing. Now we get a prequel that shows us the back story that Underworld told the audience in its dramatic climax. Despite being material we’ve heard before, with no real twists to speak of, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is probably the best movie in the series, although that’s still not saying too much.

The third movie in the franchise backs up several centuries in the Underworld storyline, showing the origin of the Lycans, a breed of werewolf that starts with Lucian (Michael Sheen). The vampires breed the Lycans as protectors - slaves intended to protect the vampires during the harmful daylight hours. Through the events of the film, the werewolves rebel against their former masters, exactly as we’d been told before, and the war between the vampires and Lycans begins.

The key to Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is substitution - take the elements fans liked in the original movie and find a way to make them fit here. Instead of Kate Beckinsale, Rhona Mitra steps into the corset of the heroine, playing Sonja, who is the daughter to Viktor, the vampire leader (Bill Nighy). It also borrows the star-crossed lovers caught in a forbidden romance storyline from the previous movies, placing Sonja and Lucian, as the young couple, which is what leads to the beginning of the war as their secret passion is revealed.

Rise of the Lycans takes on a difficult task - tell a story we’ve already been told, without any possible threat really occurring for the main characters, since we know both of the mortal enemies, Lucian and Viktor, are around for the subsequent films. Despite that, the movie does a good job of telling its story, perhaps because it doesn’t try to throw any twists in or adjust the story from what fans know it to be. We were told the original story in the first Underworld, and the writers stay faithful to that 100%.

Somehow, the more primitive setting works better visually for this movie than the gothic take on the contemporary city did in the previous pictures. In particular, the ornate armor and garb of the vampires creates a really neat environment that feels a lot more true to the vampire culture the movies have established than the Matrix appearance the other movies have sported. The visuals aren’t perfect though, especially because that annoying inability to film combat sequences has been carried over from the other pictures. When the action starts, prepare to get dizzy and lose most of the context of what’s going on. The visual effects for the Lycans, which put me off from the first movie, look a little improved here as well, although that could be due to the fact that they mostly appear during the ill-filmed action sequences.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans isn't solid enough to fully convert anyone unimpressed with the previous chapters, but this is definitely the strongest movie in the series and sure to please existing fans of the series, especially because it stays true to the pre-established history of the franchise. I would even go so far as to say I wouldn’t mind seeing another Underworld picture set in this era. Maybe a departure from the previous movie’s storyline and characters is exactly what this franchise needed.