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When he’s not making big-budget, empty-headed blockbusters I have no idea where Roland Emmerich’s movie watching tastes lay. But I can think of at least five movies which I know he’s seen, since his new movie 10,000 B.C. takes them, grinds them up into a paste, and spreads them liberally across the screen. Emmerich’s script is a rehash of Apocalypto, with a dash of The Ten Commandments and 300 thrown in. His production design borrows liberally from Lord of the Rings, and his villains were lifted straight out of Stargate and plopped down in the middle of a brand new desert. All five of those movies are good on their own, but when they’re ripped off by Emmerich in one sprawling epic; the result is a tedious bore in which grubby people stand around muttering in a variety of badly chosen accents.
It starts with a primitive mountain village where generation after generation has subsisted by hunting the great mammock. The great mammock looks a lot like a wooly mammoth, I guess 10,000 years ago they hadn’t invented the “th” sound yet. Luckily, they have invented the rest of the English language and so our caveman characters speak in lovely, strangely accented American. There’s a lot of prophecy mumbo jumbo at the outset, which feels as if it drags on for at least the length of the Mesozoic age, until finally we get to the story. Strange men on horses kidnap half the village and run off with them. The three remaining hunters set off on foot to save their kidnapped friends, and along the way encounter mud and vicious proto-Egyptians.
D’Leh (Steven Strait) is our hero, a glassy-eyed primitive from a race of people with an affinity for not bathing and wearing bad Rasta-wigs. I saw no sign of the herb, but if they were smoking it, that might help explain the movie’s downright lethargic, disinterested pace. D’Leh drifts across the countryside in pursuit of his girlfriend and his people, and whenever there’s a problem the movie invents another random prophecy spouted by an aged oracle to solve whatever corner the plot has managed to paint itself into. At one point they quite literally dig a wise man up out of the ground to give the movie its next, much needed MacGuffin.
I will say one thing for 10,000 B.C.: the special effects aren’t as bad as they look in the trailer. Or maybe I simply didn’t notice them, since almost all of the movie’s big special effects are actually in the trailer. If you’ve watched any advertisements for the film, you’ve already seen nearly all of the excitement it has in its bag of tricks. Between the ten seconds of running mammoths and growling saber-toothed tigers 10,000 B.C. has nothing to offer but a lot of wandering around in the mud and guys thrusting spears into things off camera. Well maybe that’s not quite fair. There is a scene in the middle where everyone plays Honey I Shrunk the Kid as they run around in the midst of oversized blades of grass being eaten by giant, squawking turkey vultures. But other than that it’s a lot of half naked, grungy Rastafarian primitives standing around holding spears and trying to figure out which prophesy to follow next. Here’s a prophecy for you: You’ll hate this movie. See something else.
In Vantage Point, an action movie masquerades as an intelligent mystery, and nothing is really what it seems to be. Normally I’d be opposed to watching a terrorist attack played over and over and over again, but that’s what the movie does for its first sixty minutes or so. It does so under the pretense of showing us the attack from different perspectives as a way of uncovering what’s happening, but all it’s really doing is introducing us to all of the movie’s major players before abandoning it’s multiple perspective conceit and launching into a big, no holds barred, car chase finish filled with coincidence.
It stars, among others, Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, and Forest Whitaker. Quaid and Fox are secret service agents assigned to protect the president (William Hurt) while he makes a speech in Spain. Quaid is the old agent whose lost is nerve and probably should have retired, and it’s the kind of role Dennis could probably have pulled off in his sleep. Whitaker is an American tourist, who happens to be in the crowd with a camcorder when the president is suddenly shot, and for no apparent reason gets it into his head that the best way to help the Secret Service is to chase after them on foot with his camcorder. It’s a bizarre decision, one of many which the movie pursues simply because it’s a movie and they needed an excuse to get these people where they want them for the aforementioned, guns blazing finale.
The movie introduces each character one at a time, following them right up until the attack and then shortly thereafter. Then it stops, literally rewinds and shows us the same thing from a new character’s perspective, following that character until he too reaches a predetermined cut off point. At the end, everyone is in the same place and Vantage Point abandons its gimmick and simply lets fly.
Aside from that gimmick, it’s a pretty standard case of “save the president”, and Vantage Point pulls that off admirably. It’s consistently taut and intense. Sometimes the specifics of the chase get a little silly, but it’s largely entertaining, and only becomes even more so once the movie stops rewinding and simply starts going. The movie’s script asks little of its actors, except to stand around looking determined and grim. It’s almost like a vacation for someone as accomplished as Whitaker, who normally makes his living playing deeply troubled dictators or tackling roles that might earn him an Oscar. He and everyone else involved in the film is good, but they ought to be in something so simple.
If there’s anything to complain about, besides the script’s occasional dependence on coincidence and unrealistic behavior, it’s that the movie’s vantage point gimmick serves no real purpose. It’s there because the script is too lazy to weave all its characters together into one narrative, and not because they’ve thought of some unique and interesting way to tell this story. It works, but Vantage Point would have worked just as well told traditionally, maybe even better. Sure the movie's multiple viewpoint contrivance is just an excuse to get to a car chase, but it's a good car chase.
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.
I’ve never been prouder of Hollywood. They’ve taken a dark, eerie, and emotionally shattering post-apocalyptic script and turned it into a big budget blockbuster starring Will Smith, without compromising any of the challenging, gut-wrenching content that made the whole thing so tragically beautifully haunting in the first place. I Am Legend is an absolutely uncompromising film, the solitary and hopeless story of one man, staying alive and refusing to surrender even when there’s no longer any reason to continue. It sticks with that too, not as a setup to some big action set piece, but as a genuinely moving, horrifying, and thrilling journey into one man’s lonely, desperate hell.
That man, the last man, is Will Smith as military scientist Robert Neville. I guess he’s also technically speaking, mayor of New York and president of the United States, since there’s no one else left to fill the jobs. Three years ago, the population of planet Earth was wiped out by a plague, and as far as Robert can tell he’s all that’s left. Except that is, for the mindless, vicious, vampire-like, sunlight allergic creatures which scream, hunt, and bloodlust just outside his front door each and every night.
Robert has survived for two reasons, and neither of them have anything to do with his natural immunity to a world-killing disease. That only helped him survive the first wave of dying. He’s lived this long because he’s smart and because he’s utterly focused, unwavering in his determination, no matter how ludicrous or far-fetched, to “fix this”. Each day he follows the same, specific, carefully thought out routine. He gets up, he eats, he hunts, he looks futilely for other survivors, and he looks for a cure. When the sun goes down, he bars the windows and hides in his bathtub with his only companion, a German Shepherd named Sam, praying that tonight won’t be the night that his carefully planned precautions fail, and the monsters find him.
Much of the film is spent watching Robert toil under these conditions, as the already dead world around him starts to crumble even further. The monsters he’s been avoiding are getting worse, he’s no closer to finding a cure, and he’s long since run out of hope. It soon becomes clear that Robert keeps working and living not because he really thinks he’ll succeed, but because there is quite simply nothing else for him to do. It is what’s kept him sane and strong so far, but soon what little strength he has left is put to the test.
Will Smith is quite simply commanding as Robert Neville. Unlike his other big-budget efforts, he’s calm and restrained as Neville, remaining not only catchphrase free, but also managing to be utterly broken and vulnerable beneath a complicated veneer of determination and strength. We knew Will Smith could act, we just haven’t seen him do it in anything with a major Hollywood budget. Finally though, he’s fully cast off the Big Willie persona that earns him all those paychecks and turned in something deep and mesmerizing. And he has to, because the movie rests entirely on his shoulders. For most of its running time, there are no other characters. Will simply is the movie, his only sounding board an expectedly silent canine companion.
Meanwhile, this is still a big-budget, Hollywood action movie… of sorts. It’s full of all the usual, splashy (and sometimes bad/unnecessary... what ever happened to animal trainers and prosthetics?) CGI and eye-popping set pieces. The film would be worth seeing just for its opening scene alone, in which Will Smith pops a rifle out the window of his “borrowed” Ford Mustang and goes high-speed deer hunting through downtown New York. Warner Brothers got their money’s worth. Except where other action movies would be loud and jittery, I Am Legend is still and quiet. It looks glossy, but director Francis Lawrence makes his movie zig when all the big money behind it might normally urge him towards zag. The movie takes chances, assuming its audience is up for more than ear-splitting explosions, zombie retreads, and happy, catchphrase laden endings; even if this is an effects heavy, tentpole Holiday pic. I can't however, help wishing the film's final script had taken it even further. It ends almost too abruptly, where earlier drafts of the script went even further in putting Neville through the wringer. But perhaps that's asking too much. Even as it is, it's hard to say if it’ll pay off, smart and downbeat rarely plays mainstream (just look at the fast disappearance of Frank Darabont’s The Mist), but if you’re up for melancholy and contemplation in an action-thriller; then it just doesn’t get much better than I Am Legend.
When he’s not making big-budget, empty-headed blockbusters I have no idea where Roland Emmerich’s movie watching tastes lay. But I can think of at least five movies which I know he’s seen, since his new movie 10,000 B.C. takes them, grinds them up into a paste, and spreads them liberally across the screen. Emmerich’s script is a rehash of Apocalypto, with a dash of The Ten Commandments and 300 thrown in. His production design borrows liberally from Lord of the Rings, and his villains were lifted straight out of Stargate and plopped down in the middle of a brand new desert. All five of those movies are good on their own, but when they’re ripped off by Emmerich in one sprawling epic; the result is a tedious bore in which grubby people stand around muttering in a variety of badly chosen accents.
