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Babylon A.D. is Vin Diesel’s entire career in microcosm. He starts out as a gritty, amoral, selfish murderer a la Pitch Black, gets in a few car chases, pulls off some X-Games stunts, attempts some dramatic stuff which never really works, gets all sci-fi with confusing futuristic plot exposition, and by the end he’s morphed into The Pacifier, a glorified babysitter who has given up his guns for polo shirts and awkwardness with kids. As with every recent Vin Diesel project, when the credits roll, you’ll kick yourself for having been suckered into watching yet another one of his crummy movies.
The one thing all bad Vin Diesel movies have in common is that the film’s problems are never actually his fault. Vin delivers his usual solid, gruff performance in Babylon A.D., but the movie doesn’t deserve him. The film’s director Mathieu Kassovitz has already come out and blamed this disaster on studio interference, and that may be the case. I’m not here to assign blame though, simply to review what shows up on screen. What we have here is a mess.
It starts well enough, with Vin wandering around in a near-future Eastern Europe which looks a lot like the 80s near-future Detroit from Robocop. Vin is a mercenary named Toorop, hired to smuggle a girl named Aurora and her nun caretaker Rebeka into America. The set off through Russia, planning to sneak across the Bering Straight into Canada, even though the Bering Straight connects Russia to Alaska. Perhaps in the future Alaska has been conquered by the Canucks, there’s no real explanation for that or most of the sillier conceits going on in the movie.
The thing is, the closer they get to America the more the movie’s plot starts to stink. Whether it’s because Fox’s lawyers chopped the film to bits or because the script is piece of junk, I can’t tell you. All I can say is that with every step Vin Diesel takes, the less the movie makes sense and the less you want to hang around and see where it ends up. It’s a baffling film, one minute Toorop is a me first, work for the highest bidder killer, the next a guy with a bag of money drops out of the sky (literally) and he decides he’s no longer interested in his own life and chooses to walk off into certain death for someone he doesn’t know and has no reason to care about. Toorop morphs from cynical badass to stupid pussy for no apparent reason, and we’re supposed to buy it.
Even with its completely inconsistent characters, Babylon A.D. might have been sort of fun. In fact it is, for the first 40 or 50 minutes. There’s some mildly entertaining action sequences, done with average stunts and practical effects. It feels like you’re watching a particularly well executed episode of post apocalyptic thriller on the Sci Fi channel. At some point though, the fun stops and it becomes such a total mess that all you can do is laugh at it. The movie has no idea how to wrap things up and even worse, no idea how to explain any of what’s been going on. There’s some mumbo jumbo about virgin births which never amounts to anything, and some vague allusions to a cultish, corporate religion, but not enough explanation to connect the dots between any of it. I still have no idea why we were following around most of the people in this movie, and I don’t know that the actors in it do either. If they don’t know what they’re doing, then it’s doubtful you will. Don’t bother buying a ticket.
Deception is a lean, well-crafted sex thriller with a polished European feel and a striking visual style courtesy of first time Swiss director Marcel Langenegger. It’s a quieter sort of thriller than we’ve become used to after so many Bourne flicks, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. To the contrary: there are plenty of thrills (and plenty of sex) packed into this briskly paced film, but at its core Deception is a character driven meditation on alienation in regimented world (The Metamorphosis, anyone?). Sure it’s as fizzy as a glass of champagne in most other ways, but who says entertainment can’t also be intellectually stimulating?
Ewan McGregor plays the nebbishy Jonathan McQuarry, an 18-hour a day workaholic accountant with no social life to speak of. He spends his evenings alone in glass buildings, staring out blankly from behind his laptop screen at the lighted streets of New York. Langenegger creates visual metaphors for Jonathan’s ghost-like isolation, many of them lifted from Antonioni. In one scene Jonathan rides an elevator while two women chat about their sex life, blatantly unconscious to his presence. In another he is left stranded between two concrete pillars, just having had the subway doors slam in his face.
His colorless existence changes dramatically when Jonathan meets the charismatic, snake-like lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman). With a charming smile and an invitation for tennis, Wyatt slowly coaxes Jonathan out of his unsociable shell. The plot picks up steam when a cell phone switch up between the two men leads the hapless Jonathan to a Sex Club informally called “The List” (“Intimacy without intricacy” is its motto). Soon the fairly virginal Jonathan is taking a giddy tour of the most fancy hotels in New York, meeting Wall Street women for consequence free sex (including the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling as the “Belle of Wall Street” with a self-declared soft spot for “bashful boys”). It is not until he meets the luminous, if remote ‘S’ (Michelle Williams) that Jonathan truly begins to blossom. Alas, a good thing never lasts as an ill-fated tryst throws Jonathan into the midst of a sex scandal, engineered by the dubious Wyatt – obviously not the white-collar type he pretended to be to entrap the naïve Jonathan in his web. It is now clear that Jonathan will have to outmaneuver the crafty Wyatt in order to save himself from social ruin.
The lead performances are uniformly solid. McGregor plays Jonathan as an inelegant numbers man uncomfortable in his own skin. His severely parted hair and geeky glasses are a shield, a layer of protection between him and the world. As the film progresses McGregor subtly changes his character’s tics, showing how Jonathan is changed, not just by his passion for ‘S’, but by a newly found sense of self-worth. Jackman glitters as a cruelly suave conman with a taste for international crime. Williams has eyes the size of platters and lips to match, but sadly doesn’t have enough screen time here to truly give an effective performance. Still, her empathetic presence is a welcome one; its obvious Jonathan would fall in love with ‘S’ at first sight, which is all that’s really required of her (this is a sex thriller, after all).
Mark Bomback’s (Live Free or Die Hard) script for Deception is exceedingly tidy; there are no extraneous scenes or plot lines left unresolved. The narrative hurtles smoothly towards the satisfying, if somewhat predictable ending. Any predictability in the last 20 minutes can be forgiven however, because the rest film is put together in such an appealing, thoroughly entertaining way. We are left with the sense that every part of Deception was as carefully plotted out as Wyatt’s takedown of Jonathan. Deception knows exactly where it’s going and exactly how it’s going to get there. It may be popcorn, but it’s well-made popcorn and that makes all the difference.
Jumper takes a pretty cool sci-fi idea, and doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with it. On the surface it should be a stronger film. Everything’s there, but director Doug Liman, helming his first film since 2005’s success Mr. & Mrs. Smith, never puts all the pieces together.
Hayden Christensen stars as David Rice, a boy from a single parent, broken home who at the age of 15, discovers he has the ability to instantaneously teleport himself any place he can visualize. David uses his ability to teleport himself away from his father, and years later we catch up with him as a young adult. He’s used his abilities to make himself rich, and he lives a solitary life of leisure, teleporting from his couch to the refrigerator, and from the refrigerator to Egypt where he has lunch sitting on the head of the Sphinx. Distance means nothing to him, and he appears content to go on skulking around the world sleeping with women in different countries and having the kind of good time we all wish we could have.
Of course nothing that good lasts forever, and it’s not long before David is discovered with a secret organization whose sole purpose is to hunt down and murder “jumpers” (their term for people with his abilities). After narrowly escaping his first violent encounter with the nameless organization’s top operative Roland (Samuel L. Jackson with white paint on his head), David runs home, gets the girl (Rachel Bilson) so he can put her in extreme danger, and then joins forces with a fellow jumper to kick some secret organization ass.
The problem with all of this is that Liman never stops to make any sense of it. We get a good feel for David, but never any notion of who or what this secret group is, why they’re attacking him, or how they’re able to find him in the first place. Most of what happens in the film happens simply because it’s written that way. It’s almost as if the movie needed to be longer. It touches on too many different subplots and never really resolves any of them. The movie sets itself off on a certain path, and that path leads absolutely nowhere. And so what could have been an interesting science fiction adventure ends up as a fun, but ultimately unsatisfying adventure flick.
Jumper is fun though, and maybe that’s enough to justify seeing it. Some of the action sequences are moderately thrilling, even if they don’t seem to really mean anything. Samuel L. Jackson is wasted, but the teleportation effects are cool and Hayden is adequate as a spoiled man-child turned pseudo-hero. It’s an empty special effects flick which had the potential to be better than it is, but it's so riddled with plot holes that it never musters up the mental energy to actually be better. Sometimes thrilling, occasionally confounding, Jumper is a great concept which seems to only have half of a script, cut up into bits and pieces.
Alvin, Simon and Theodore have been a part of American culture for nearly half a century. They’ve covered just about every genre of popular music, from the country stylings of Garth Brooks to the top of the pop charts with songs from Madonna and Michael Jackson. I’m not sure how many times the little guys have been reinvented, but the music has always been at the heart of their adventures, and this latest retelling sticks to that tradition.
There’s a little bit of something for everyone. Folks who grew up listening to The Chipmunks will be delighted by the return of classic songs like “Christmas Don’t Be Late” and “Witch Doctor”, both of which are cleverly woven into the plot. Youngsters who have never met the characters before (which shouldn’t be surprising since they haven’t been in theaters in over 20 years) will be excited and entertained by all the slapstick antics. Everyone else in between can enjoy the charming script and holiday-appropriate story about what’s really important in life. Pay no attention to those pathetic looking hip-hip posters that Fox is flashing everywhere; the movie isn’t that ridiculous.
This film isn’t the first for the trio, but it is easily their best, getting back to where it all began: a down on his luck musician and three singing chipmunks. Dave Seville (played by Jason Lee who, I’m sad to say, is the weakest acorn of the bunch) is just about to abandon his career as a song writer when he crosses paths with orphaned baby chipmunk siblings. To his surprise and good fortune, they just happen to be amazing singers and dancers.
Inspired, Dave brings them into his house, never imagining the massive levels of havoc that such little creatures are capable of wreaking. And yet, despite their unintentionally destructive ways, they do have a knack for music. In no time Dave’s songs and their voices begin sweeping the world. But, despite their musical partnership, the four begin to reach the inescapable reality that they’re becoming a family.
If the story ended there it would be a bit too schmaltzy, so the movie takes a page from the real world of child music celebrities to fill out the second act. Without regret or apology it takes a swipe at a music industry known for exploiting young performers as the Chipmunks find themselves lured away from Dave by a record company interested only in their ability to generate major amounts of cash.
Focused on glamour and greed, the studio markets the Chipmunk brand to frothing fans who wouldn’t recognize good music if they heard it. Over-worked, under-loved, and forced to sing ridiculous songs, the boys become victims of a frenzied industry bent on milking every last dollar out of them, no matter the expense or damage to the boys. Fortunately for the little guys, they have a father figure who loves them and manages to pull them back before their lives are destroyed. If only Britney Spear’s parents had been as loving as ol’ David Seville.
Alvin and the Chipmunks is wonderfully fun, even if it is a little creepy to hear Alvin singing the words to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me”. If you love The Chipmunks, this is a great new chapter to add to your memories; and if you’ve never really gotten to know them before, this movie is a perfect place to start.
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.
Death Sentence stars Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a bookish insurance adjuster who inexplicably turns into Rambo when his family in threatens. To call the film ludicrous is something of an understatement. It’s clunky and poorly thought out; the only thing worse than the movie’s cliché vengeance script is the clunky way James Wan directs it.
It starts when Nick’s oldest son is murdered by a bunch of cartoonish thugs in the middle of a robbery. When I say they’re cartoonish, I really mean it. They drive around in formation, hauling ass in noisy muscle cars with flames painted on the side of them. The gang he’s up against looks like something that fell off the back of a bad pulp novel, white guys running around with shaved heads and cheap leather jackets, wielding machetes in the middle of the city for no other reason that I can think of than that they generate more blood for Wan to splash on his camera.
The murder of his kid pushes Nick over the edge, and he declares war on the gangbangers who did it. Soon his entire family is in jeopardy, and the movie becomes about whether or not he can save him. It’s all of course, utterly ridiculous since five minutes ago Nick was sitting in a glorified cubicle pouring over risk assessments. Now he’s suddenly a badass weapons expert and hand to hand combat specialist. Come on Death Sentence, at least give us one of those idiotic training montages.
For most of its running time, the film alternates between overly emotive, poorly delivered speeches and clunky action sequences. The movie’s heavy emotional components never work, because the actors are clueless and don’t ever seem to know what to do with them. The film’s gritty action beats fall flat on their face because they’re clumsily staged and impossible to buy into. For instance in one of the movie’s most tense, big-action moments Kevin Bacon is supposed to climb out the front window of a car right before it falls off a building. Instead of getting the hell out of there as fast as he can, he hangs out just sort of biding his time, only leaping out of the car right as it gets to the edge, as if he somehow knew there was an audience watching and it’d make things more exciting if he escaped at the last minute.
On the positive side, John Goodman has a passively enjoyable cameo as a fat, sweaty arms dealer and at least Death Sentence isn’t loaded down with bad CGI and cheesy special effects. Wan sticks to practical stunts and does his best to deliver gritty, hard edged action. He fails, but at least the guy tried. That’s more than we usually get in the standard, modern revenge flick.
This fourth Die Hard movie is a pleasant surprise. Though they’ve taken the annoying tact of truncating the “f” word off the end of John McClane’s trademark catchphrase, otherwise the hard-hitting, beat to a bloody pulp edge that these movies have always had remains. Director Len Wiseman accomplishes that inside a PG-13 rating by taking the film right to the MPAA’s edge. He’s appeased the Fox executives desire to make it teen friendly by shaving inches (blood spatters only 4 inches instead of 11), and still leaves enough room for McClane to punch the shit out of all of that prime demo pandering crap.
Die Hard 4 fits together in much the same way Die Hard 3 did, with maybe a little bit of True Lies mixed in. Instead of being locked in a building or an airport the way he was in 1 and 2, McClane is sent roving across the countryside with a sidekick. In 3 that sidekick was Samuel L. Jackson. In this one it’s Justin Long as Matt Farrell, a computer hacker in over his head. The country’s computer infrastructure is under attack by high-tech terrorists, and McClane and Farrell end up being our last line of defense through a series of completely bogus, silly plot coincidences which you won’t care about since you’ll be too busy watching McClane fall down an elevator shaft.
The action is faced paced and hard hitting. Wiseman has done a meticulous job of editing the film, staying right with the action and the gore until the last possible second, when it might push the film over the R-rated edge, and then jumping away from it to something else. He does it so skillfully you probably won’t even notice the Hard that’s missing, by the time you walk out of the theater your brain will have automatically filled it all in. However, maybe he should have also edited out most of the movie’s driving scenes. It’s hard to believe when you consider how seamless the rest of the effects work in the movie is, but most of the film’s driving scenes look like something that fell out of 1957. It’s so bad it’s jarring. At times it’s almost laughably obvious that Willis and Long are sitting in a fake car in front of a green screen. You’d think they’d be able to do something that Hollywood has been doing right for decades. I guess they spent their effects budget on helicopters. Given the choice, I’d have gone with exploding whirlybirds too.
Willis is still great as McClane and I’m starting to think this is one character that’s only going to get better as he gets older. By the time Willis is 80, I’d be perfectly happy to see McClane wheeled in to take over for Bruce Campbell’s Elvis in some sort of nursing-home based Bubba Ho-Tep sequel. The older he gets, the crankier he gets, and the more fun there is to be had. It helps that he has such a good rapport with Justin Long. Long is sometimes hit or miss. He’s good in movies like Galaxy Quest and Idiocracy, but he’s sort of a waste of space in Accepted. In Live Free or Die Hard he’s at his best, and his chemistry with Willis works. Special thanks to the script, which doesn’t turn Long’s character into one of those boring hacker fountains of techno-babble. Instead that role is filled by Kevin Smith, in a cameo as the stereotypical, basement dwelling, computer nerd. Kevin’s a master communicator so he’s great on screen, but the films seems to treat him as if he’s twelve instead of thirty-seven. Something about that’s not right, and it’s no fault of Kevin’s.
If there’s any real criticism to be leveled at Live Free or Die Hard though, it’s that the movie never really shows us anything new. The action is big and fun, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking and for the most part it’s a bunch of riffs on action sequences we’ve seen before either in Die Hard movies or in other, inferior action films. It doesn’t help that the villains and their master plan are kind of a bore. Sure they’ve cooked up an intricate scheme, unfortunately it’s a lot like the one used by Simon Gruber in Die Hard: With a Vengeance except instead of dump trucks these bad guys are doing everything with computers. Dump trucks are a lot more interesting. Because the script is so intent on being hip with modern technology, a good portion of the film’s most evil moments are spent watching bad guys type furiously at computers. Luckily it’s not long before the not so technologically savvy McClane picks up a laptop and uses it to bash someone over the head.
The bottom line here is that Live Free or Die Hard will fit pretty comfortably on a shelf with the rest of the Die Hard movies. If you’re one of those people who thinks that the only good Die Hard movie was the first one, then this isn’t going to change your mind. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you think Die Hard: With a Vengeance was a blast, then you’re going to feel much the same way about this one. McClane is back!
The first complaint you're going to hear about Pathfinder from people is that it’s not historically accurate. Viking helmets have horns on them, they landed in the wrong part of the country, etc. That complaint is easily addressed. The subtitle of Pathfinder (although it appears nowhere in the movie) is “Legend of the Ghost Warrior.” It’s a legend – it doesn’t have to be historically accurate. Even though the subtitle is in name only, the opening of the movie specifically addresses that “the legend is what follows” in the movie. In fact, that “legend” business probably saves the story from a lot of potential problems, giving the filmmakers an instant excuse to address movie issues.
The story centers around a Viking child who is beaten and left for dead by his people for refusing to hurt an Indian child. The Indians find him and raise him as one of their own. Fifteen years later, the Vikings return and the boy, named Ghost, helps defend his people from their attackers, “the dragon people.”
So Karl Urban plays a character who was resistant to combat as a child, was raised among Indians, but still has excellent ability with sword, shield, and armor? Easy explanation – it’s the stuff of legends. Legendary figures have always had bigger than life skills, so the fact that a pacifistic child who is raised in a culture that doesn’t use these kinds of weapons is irrelevant. He’s a legend. This also can be used to excuse the fact that he still speaks the Viking language with ease and at no point exhibits the sound or feel for the language of the people who raised him. Legends can do that sort of stuff. Just look at Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. I may not like it, but at least it makes sense in the context of the “legend” idea.
What isn’t the stuff of legends, and isn’t written off as easily as the massive characterization problems, is the horrific filmmaking on display Pathfinder. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you give a feature film to a music video director who has no ability beyond the three-minute format. Director Marcus Nispel shows every trait of “MTV filmmaking” from a shaky camera during action sequences that moves so much it left me dizzy for twenty minutes after the movie, to quick editing to help build tension. One particular scene, featuring Ghost riding a shield down a snow covered mountain (again – legendary), held no shot for more than two-three seconds. I know. I counted.
The introduction calls the movie a legend, but Nispel’s visual approach is anything but. The film has a grainy, stark contrasted look that probably hides much in the way of mistakes, but also hides most details. While it has an interesting effect on the Viking warriors, making them huge, lumbering shadows of dread, it creates a tone to the movie typically reserved for realistic environments, further enhanced by a washed out color scheme. That tone completely contradicts the legendary theme behind the story. At the same time, it sets the viewer off. Why would either the Vikings or the Indians want to live in such a dreary world?
It’s not just the visual style Nispel approaches the film with, or the MTV filmmaking at work. There are basic tenants of filmmaking that are completely absent here. There are rarely any establishing shots, so the passage of time and place is completely lost on the audience. One scene has the Vikings chasing Ghost and his companions through caves, but there is never any idea given how close any of them are to each other. Typically you establish the scene, then play within it, but the movie is devoid of any of those basic principles.
Pathfinder is not just a bad movie, it’s the equivalent of a cinematic abortion. Some of the horrible ideas can be written off due to the tale’s status as a “legend” but that doesn’t excuse the technically poor work behind the movie. It’s safe to say that Karl Urban and Clancy Brown deserve better than a movie like this, and if this is the best Nispel can do he’s about to give Uwe Boll some competition in the Worst Director category. At least Boll can excuse away his work as a tax write off. There’s no excuse for Pathfinder.
Babylon A.D. is Vin Diesel’s entire career in microcosm. He starts out as a gritty, amoral, selfish murderer a la Pitch Black, gets in a few car chases, pulls off some X-Games stunts, attempts some dramatic stuff which never really works, gets all sci-fi with confusing futuristic plot exposition, and by the end he’s morphed into The Pacifier, a glorified babysitter who has given up his guns for polo shirts and awkwardness with kids. As with every recent Vin Diesel project, when the credits roll, you’ll kick yourself for having been suckered into watching yet another one of his crummy movies.
