The Bourne Ultimatum - Review

The Bourne movies have been a surprise at every turn. The first one showed up in theaters out of nowhere packed with balls to the wall action, courtesy of an actor once thought of as momma’s boy Oscar winner convincingly playing the biggest super-spy badass since James Bond. By the second film audiences came prepared, assuming they knew what they were in for; but new director Paul Greengrass took Bourne’s story to an entirely new level and left just about everyone picking themselves up off the floor. Now Bourne is back for a third and final adventure in The Bourne Ultimatum, and nothing has changed even though nothing is the same. Get ready to have your ass blown out of the theater because once again Greengrass and Damon deliver on a movie packed with more “holy shit did that just happen” moments than you can shake a sub-machine gun at.

Greengrass hasn’t just topped the previous Bourne movies in every way, he’s raised the bar for the spy and action genres for years to come, and he’s done it in a movie without very little dialogue. This is Matt Damon’s Cast Away except without a volley ball sidekick and with minute after minute of pulse pounding peril and violence instead of slow starvation. Damon plows through The Bourne Ultimatum like a force of nature; a silent, a living weapon on a mission of determined, unstoppable discovery. That’s right, discovery. In The Bourne Supremacy Bourne made the bad guys pay. This time he’s had enough and wants to know who he is. Bourne simply wants to be done with everything and he’s not the kind of guy that takes no for an answer.

The action is absolutely unbelievable, eye-popping stuff. I’m not just talking about one or two big action sequences here. Every second, every moment of The Bourne Ultimatum is jammed with danger, pounding and pounding against the screen in unstoppable waves of energy and intensity. Greengrass never lets up, not even for a second. His cameras keep rolling and Matt Damon keeps moving, putting plans together on the fly and eliminating obstacles one by one as he moves in a steady, straight line towards his final goal in a complicated, rhythmic dance of controlled destruction. We’re swept right along with him, and if you’re like me your nails will be firmly buried in the arm of your chair the film’s entire 111 minutes.

What is perhaps even more amazing than the movie’s ability to do things that’ll make your jaw drop, is the way it manages to do character development in the middle of all those car crashes and explosions, and does it without words. So much of the credit for that has to go to Damon, who even though he’s not talking says volumes with what’s going on behind that stoic, no-nonsense expression Bourne keeps wearing. Without saying a word, Damon puts together a complete picture of what his now familiar character is going through, not just externally but internally as well. Bourne is a living weapon, but a suffering, breathing, feeling weapon who, more than ever you’ll find yourself rooting for.

If there’s anything to be disappointed in here it’s that The Bourne Ultimatum is almost certainly the last one. Every movie has improved on the last, culminating in a third film which is easily the best movie of the summer and probably the best action movie of the year. Imagine where they might have taken it for a fourth movie. Jason Bourne is going out on top, don’t forget to duck the shrapnel that comes flying out of the screen.

El Cantante - Review

If JLo’s career went catatonic after Gigli, then after El Cantante I think it’s probably safe to go ahead and pull the plug on it. There’s no coming out of this coma. El Cantante is the worst movie I’ve seen since the last Jennifer Lopez teams up with her man movie, and if someone manages to make a worse film this year that’ll be quite an accomplishment.

The movie pretends to be the story of famed Salsa singer Hector Lavoe, as told from the perspective of his longtime wife Puchi. Even though putting spouses together in movies almost always results in cinematic disaster, El Cantante does it anyway by casting real life husband and wife Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez as Hector and Puchi. I say the movie pretends to be told from the perspective of Puchi, because it only seems to stick to this premise when convenient. The movie pauses frequently to let Lopez as Puchi, in some sort of bizarre, mock interview introduce each scene. This gives Lopez a chance to showcase her complete lack of acting talent. The movie’s awful mock interviews with her play out like someone’s final exam in acting class, and JLo looks like she’s practicing to play the character in front of a mirror. Lopez actually seems to become a worse actress with each picture, and her work in El Cantante represents a new low. But the really annoying thing about all the screen time she’s given to smoke and stare at the camera is that it’s all for nothing since once the scene she’s introducing starts rolling the camera follows Hector everywhere, with or without Puchi. There’s no real attempt to tell the story from her perspective, because that sort of complexity is light-years beyond this script’s grasp.

If there were a bright spot in the film, it might have been Marc Anthony as Hector Lavoe. He certainly looks convincing, drugging and whoring, and shrugging his way through the picture. Unfortunately El Cantante never lets us get to know his character. The movie skips through his life with no real rhyme or reason. It’s like watching the Hector Lavoe story on fast forward, were the remote control being held by a blindfolded mental patient who randomly switches to slow motion based upon a random bubbling sensation in his bowels. There’s no point to any of it, and the movie skips through Hector’s life without letting us know who he is or why he’s important.

The film can’t even properly present his music, the man never sings an entire song and if there was any sort of process to coming up with his sound it’s ignored. Lavoe simply shows up in New York and goes to work singing. Well we presume he’s singing. We don’t see much of it really, though people keep talking about how great he is and soon for no particular reason and with almost no effort on his part, he’s instantly elevated to the status of Latin god.

The same is true of his relationship with Puchi, who just sort of shows up, and then they’re together. We don’t know why they’re together, there’s no attempt to figure out why Puchi sticks with him, or even to figure out what they have in common besides a mutual affection for heavy drugs. Though maybe it’s for the best. If JLo can’t handle the meager morsels El Cantante’s lousy script gives her, I shudder to think what she might have done to good material. The musician biopic craze dies right here; bury it to the left of Jennifer Lopez’s once significant career.

Blades of Glory - Review

Who would have thought that The Cutting Edge, the 1992 romantic drama starring Moira Kelly and D.B. Sweeney as bickering would-be Olympic figure skaters could ever provide a template for a Will Ferrell comedy? And yet it is all there in the spectacularly silly laugh riot Blades of Glory: The bitter enemies who soften when they are forced to work together, the wealthy father pushing his child to win the gold, the rival team that threatens the hopefuls' dreams, the dedicated coach, and the unprecedented maneuver that will either surely win the competition or maim or even kill one of the partners. Talk about your miracles on ice. Somehow the screenwriters have taken a drippy love story and utterly transformed it.

Not that Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder, in the rich kid role of Jimmy MacElroy, is anywhere near as snooty as Kelly. In his peacock costume, he may just cut a more delicate figure out on the rink. But Ferrell's Chazz Michael Michaels is, if anything, even fuller of machismo than Sweeney, coming across like Elvis Stojko's bad boy cousin, prone to sex addiction, alcoholism, and steroid abuse, a heavy-metal demon on skates. That Jimmy and Chazz hate each other is only natural, but when that enmity leads to a fistfight in front of a worldwide televised audience, they lose everything when each is banned from the sport for life.

Banned from individual competition that is, which is what sets the plot in motion when Jimmy discovers there is a loophole and that they can still compete in pairs skating. With only weeks to go before nationals and no female partners in sight, their only alternative is to skate with each other and become the first same-sex pair skaters in the sports' history. It is a thin joke to build a movie on, predicated on gay panic and the stereotype that somehow male figure skaters are not as masculine as athletes in other sports.

It would seem that the comedy would wear out long before the movie ended, and yet it doesn't. The writers do find a surprisingly many ways to milk laughs out of the situation, and directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck are blessed with excellent timing. Jimmy and Chazz's skating rivals Stranz (Will Arnett) and Fairchild Van Waldenberg (Amy Poehler), a quasi-incestuous brother and sister act, are hilarious in their own ridiculous subplot and even funnier on ice in their ludicrous (but brilliantly conceived) routines. If Jenna Fischer as their timid sister Katie (and Jimmy's love interest) does not fare as well, it is only that her pallid character is underwritten.

But Blades of Glory lives or dies on the strength of Ferrell and Heder, and they come through like the champs that they are. The movie takes advantage of the disparities between their sizes, their ages, and perhaps most importantly, their personalities, with Chazz's outgoing and aggressive bonhomie contrasting wonderfully with the shy, timid Jimmy. Both men are superb physical comedians who don't mind looking foolish. That lack of self-consciousness is an ace in the hole, building laugh upon laugh.

Sure, no one is going to remember Blades of Glory come Oscar time, but it's not that type of movie. But as a piece of popcorn entertainment, it really is cutting edge. If there was an Olympics for purely fun movies, this would skate away with one of those pretty medals.

The Condemned - Review

Just what the world needs: Survivor: Devil's Island. For that is essentially what the latest dubious action extravaganza from World Wrestling Entertainment, The Condemned, is as 10 prisoners fight to the death in a contest where only one is supposed to get out alive. The title is not just a description of the competitors; it is also a warning, as in catch this at the multiplex and know that you are condemning yourself to 112 minutes of pure punishment. This is not a movie so much as an exercise in audience abuse.

"Stone Cold" Steve Austin clearly hopes to be the latest wrestler to become a movie star à la The Rock, but the bullet-headed performer lacks the latter's magnetism, amiable personality, healthy sense of humor, and talent. Also missing in action is any kind of common sense, since it is hard to imagine anyone reading the toxic screenplay and thinking that anything good could possibly come out of it. Yet, according to the film's press notes, Austin himself brought the script to the producers.

This is one of those action movies in which there is essentially no line between the good guys and the bad guys. Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) expects to make a large fortune by beaming this live-action snuff contest live over the Internet, justifying what he is doing by pointing out that they are all death row inmates.

Of the 10, eight are purely cannon fodder, their deaths as inevitable as they are grisly. The two remaining might also be the worst of the bunch. Jack Conrad (Austin), trained by no less than the U.S. military to be a cold-blooded killer, is a Special Forces guy who specializes in undercover "black ops." The Guatemalan operation that landed him a death sentence was but the last in a series of lethal assignments. "He's probably killed more people than anyone on that island," a representative from the Department of Defense claims. Ah, yes, Conrad is a true patriot, a killing machine for his country.

Opposite him is his British counterpart Ewan McStarley (a snarling Vinnie Jones), also Special Forces, imprisoned in Africa for killing 17 men and raping nine women in a Rwandan village. He also rapes one of the two women on the island and he cheats at the game, the sexual violence and his chicanery making him the bad guy. But it is a tough call. Neither Conrad nor McStarley are people anyone would want to run into in a dark alley—or even broad daylight.

The psycho as hero, what a concept, but these two victims of too much testosterone and too many steroids do serve their purpose, since the only thing The Condemned does well is violence. Director Scott Wiper does know a thing or two about providing visceral, bone-crunching, empty-headed thrills, often without resorting to visual effects in scenes that are a sadist's dream.

More noxious than any of the violence is the way the movie wants to have it both ways. As the show wears on and people start dying in gruesome fashion, the show's director and the millionaire's girlfriend develop consciences, even as the ratings go through the roof. An ongoing debate develops over the basic immorality of the project and of the audience back home watching. Given what The Condemned dishes out and that the movie's producers obviously think there is a market for this kind of outsized mayhem, that little subplot is the height of hypocrisy.

At least the title is appropriate. Meant to describe the show's contestants, it instead describes what the movie should be, as in condemned to the trash heap.