The Tournament Review

I remember having a conversation with my friend Josh regarding a poster for a movie called Gangster Squad. I told Josh that it reminded me of the kind of ideas a I had when I was in high school, and if I were the one writing the movie (back then) it would be about 4 disgruntled assassins, who all worked for different gangs: a disgruntled ex-cop mob guy (who resembled me), a ninja for the yakuza, a big heavy machinegun guy for the Russians, etc. It would end with a massive battle as the gangster squad take on 100s of goons who work for the gangs that dissed them. It all sounds pretty puerile and immature, a reflection of my lack of understanding of the world around me, and of crime.

That’s not to say that Jonathan Frank and Nick Rowntree are immature. The conceived this film whilst at college with the director Scott Mann. The film is about a tournament of the world’s best assassins, who compete to see who’s the greatest in the world while the richest bet on its outcome.

I say this with love: the film is like something I would have wrote when I was younger. It speaks to me on a certain level, what with the glamorisations of assassins and the fetishisation of weaponry and insane skills. The lack of understanding of the real world: hackers simply redirect calls and emergency services are suspended, so the environment is lawless like a modern day wild west. It even includes a major role for Kelly Hu, with whom I had a massive crush on in year 10. In many ways this film was made for me.

The characters are paper thin, and like big action ensembles their only distinguishing features are their appearance and their abilities. Ving Rhames is a big, old-fashioned style hitman, Sebastian Foucan as an agile parkour killer, Scott Adkins as a crazy Russian with a cool scar, etc. The most interesting to me is Ian Somerhalder’s psychopathic Texan, who we first see shooting a dog. He screams anime to me, with his garish white coat, crazy hair, and ‘skilled rival’ mindset in contrast to Rhames’ character. So much of his construction resembles what a non-American thinks Americans are really like. Robert Carlyle rounds out the cast as an alcoholic priest caught in the middle of the tournament.

The action is fun, sometimes exaggerated, and very violent. You can tell this is an independent film. Many people completely explode in this movie, and the beginning sequence is soaked in blood. I also love how each assassin kind of goes outside their gimmick, like the Russian martial artist throwing grenades and the parkour expert shooting guns. Some of the action setpieces are a lot of fun and pretty imaginative. Again, this reminds me of something a teenage me would have written, and that’s what makes this movie so cool.

This brings me back to the days of my youth where the coolest things ever were silenced SMGs, night vision goggles and samurai swords, and the word ‘assassin’ denoted something skilled and deadly and awesome. Back before maturity and an understanding of the real world set in. I’ve been dealing a lot with childhood nostalgia, thinking back to how I felt and how media affected me when I was particularly young, this film spoke to the fantasies I had when I was a teen. I could almost imagine myself writing this thing as it transpired onscreen.

So, while this movie isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, if you were a teenage boy in the early 2000s this movie is right up your damn alley.

****stars

Ant Reviews: Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore (2013)

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The OTHER Iron Man movie of 2013 is a straight-to-DVD anime that may or may not take place between The Avengers (2012) and Iron Man 3 (2013). The story centres on mysterious new villain Technovore, who targets Tony Stark with his strange and unstoppable bio-organic technology. This forces Stark on the run from S.H.I.E.L.D. and features non-super-powered heroes Hawkeye, Black Widow, Nick Fury and, surprisingly, The Punisher.

I had watched the Iron Man Anime series, which shares a few similarities with this film in that there is a link to the live-action Marvel Universe, with the series taking place after Iron Man (2008) and featuring characters from that film. Iron Man is a character well suited to a Japanese audience, and that series saw Stark setting up a shop in Japan with a Japanese scientist counterpart fulfilling the role that Pepper Potts normally would. The series was OK, it had a better pace and was more interesting than the snail-pace X-Men anime and had an art style more consistent than the uneven Wolverine Anime.

The animation is fine; mixing what I think is traditional animation with digital representations of his armour for the action sequences. Some of the action flies by too fast, and no real sense of geography is offered. The character representations are pretty, and the villain’s method of killing people is visually interesting, so overall the art is solid if frenetic.

In terms of voices, the series had the star power of Adrian Pasdar, which the film replaced with Mathew Mercer, a fine replacement who sounds a lot like Nolan North when in Tony Stark mode. Troy Baker, known for being Nightwing in the new Injustice: Gods Among Us game, is Hawkeye while Seth Green’s wife Clare Grant is Black Widow. All do fine work, though the guy who plays Nick Fury is a little off. They also draw him as if he’s stoned throughout the whole thing, bizarrely. He’s not calm and collected like Samuel L Jackson’s version, just sedate.

The celebrity draw of the film is Norman Reedus, who plays Frank Castle, the Punisher. He gets top billing, and I think they designed the Punisher to look more like Reedus then any Punisher that has been on-screen before. He ads a cold calmness to the role, and lacks the southern accent I became used to hearing out of Darrel Dixon. I always enjoy hearing a familiar voice in a cartoon; half the fun of watching contemporary DC cartoons is to pick out the celebrity voices and see how well they suit the roles.

He is a surprising and welcome addition, and his absent is strongly felt. He’s only in the film for a little bit, in the first half. And it is in this first half where the film has any interest and innovation. Once he leaves the film devolves into boring and uninteresting clichés, many of them associated with Japanese animation.

The villains are children who haven’t grown up, and who live in one big room. One of them is weird, catatonic, and sits in a chair. The whole sequence reminds me of Akira (1988) when we are introduced to the superpowered children. There are a few visual cues from the location as well as how the villain’s physical damage towards the end resembles Akira’s Tetsuo. And, like Tetsuo, the villain takes control of a satellite. The final 20 mins of the film deal with the villain’s powers in overdrive, and a lot of this visually looks like some Neon Genesis: Evangelion in both design and action. The Technovore, in human form, waxes lyrical in a very wordy, unrealistic fashion, which is common of Japanese animation and is a staple of the form, I suppose. 

Safe to say that in this second half I lost the most interest, and wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on. Rhodey was injured but came back OK, the villain took over the Helicarrier and then a whole city and it was all very confusing, and to be honest, boring. The whole affair is an OK way to spend your time, but it ultimately isn’t the most original piece nor is it the most exciting. The Marvel Anime have always been hit-and-miss, and at this point I’m not sure if it is a problem with the quality of the productions or all the moments I have issues with are simply conventions of a medium I’m not all that familiar with. That is to say that I’ve asked myself “would I enjoy this more if I was Japanese and understood anime?” So…I’m hanging out for Iron Man 3 tomorrow. That should be fun.

*1/2stars

Ant Reviews: Welcome To The Punch (2013)

Eran Creevy’s Welcome to the Punch centres on Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) and his feverish pursuit of master thief Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong), who returns to London to help his son who’s caught up in a nasty conspiracy. Fans of British television would recognise a vast majority of the cast, made up of David Morrissey, Peter Mullan (currently kicking arse in Top of The Lake) Daniel Mays, Andrea Riseborough (who’s starring alongside Tom Cruise in Oblivion) among others.  

Ed Wild’s cinematography is slick, cold and sharp, and presents an unrecognizable London, with its lights shining in the dark under a blue hue. The look is very alien and very modern European. While rendering familiar places unrecognizable is a cool thing to do (see Leon The Professional and how New York looks like the Parisian underbelly) this does little to make the film stand out as a British version of Heat (1995); many shots look like the film could have been shot in Sweden.  

And that would not be that bad, though, if not for that glaring Heat comparison. This film is another action crime epic, like Michael Mann’s masterpiece, with the central protagonists being cops and robbers playing cat and mouse. This time there is more of a third party threat than there is in Mann’s film, but the comparison is unmistakeable. Going back to the problem of it not looking too much like England: the film could have been shot in the US without much of the dialogue being changed, and as a ‘British Heat’, I feel the film needed just a bit more to make you associate it with the UK. 

But perhaps a British audience with receive the plot better than I did, as the conspiracy that ties all major events together involves guns, and the issue of providing guns to UK police in a standard capacity a la the US. This may be a big issue in the UK post-riots, but in the film to me it lacked a certain kind of relevance, and felt fake and un-British as a conspiracy idea. 

The whole thing feels just too American to me. I suppose that’s a trapping of the genre, as action films of this type originated there and as such the plot and character conventions feel too American. The film is peppered with these clichés here and there, and as such the film feels like Brits trying to make an American movie. It feels odd as all the actors on display are top-shelf and at times the story and the dialogue feel amateurish. 

I say amateurish as I recognise the film in a certain way, its very familiar to me. Not to say that it is; the script won third place in a competition regarding unproduced screenplays, and found itself with Ridley Scott as one of its executive producers. I’m just saying that at a young age I felt like I could make a ‘smart’ action movie, more of a drama with shooting in it, and had many ideas of writing a film that would have probably turned out very much like ....Punch. Maybe I will write something like that someday, and it feels sometimes like the film is cramming American ideas and scenarios into a British setting, and that feels to me like something a teenager would write. 

Which brings me to the film’s misleading title. It feels like the title of a sassier film, and while there actually is a plot-based reason as to the name of the film (the words ‘welcome to the punch’ are blink-and-you-miss-it, but there) the film overall lacks the kind of energy that the title suggests. There is one great scene, however, where three heroic characters hold a villain’s grandma hostage, and shootout ensues. This scene crackles with energy and innovation, and is shot brilliantly. It makes one wonder why the rest of the film is rather flat, and one must assume that this scene was a ‘this has to be in the movie’ kind of scenes that the director must have dreamt about making, as it is the only one with a discernible amount of care put into it. It’s the most exciting and certainly the most memorable scene in an otherwise unmemorable film. 

The performances are ok. The cast are made up of UK TV favourites of mine, with some of their great film actors thrown in for good measure. The problem is they’re not given much to work with. In a short amount of time the two main characters are dealt great personal blows, and both reactions aren’t given the right amount of time or gravitas they deserve. It’s easy to determine who the bad guy is behind it all (it rhymes with ‘flavid florriesy’) and the reasons and motivations for such criminal acts are hastily sped through. 

 

The problem is we’re not given much of a reason to care what happens to any of the characters, really, which leaves us with a cold film that goes through the motions at times, save for the before mentioned hostage scene. It at times feels like the actors filmed this on the weekends while they worked on bigger, better productions during the week; Daniel Mays looks liked he walked straight off the set of Ashes to Ashes. But it is good seeing McAvoy with a ginger beard (my friend Andrew has the same problem) and being more like a tough man than the grown teenager he looks like in Wanted. He turns in a good performance, but Strong’s scenes needed a bit more oomph. He’s a bit too cold and calculated, and needed more life. 

In all Welcome to the Punch is ok. It’s certainly not the worst film in the world, but it is by no means the most memorable or the most original. It’s also a surprisingly long film, so if you’re in the mood to watch quality UK actors do an ok job in an predictable American style heist revenge film, give it a look. But I had a better time watching The Sweeney (2012).

Essay: New Dredd, Apartments and Influences

So my friend Josh has been raving about the new Dredd film coming out, with Keith Urban. As cheesy as it was, I still have fond nostalgic thoughts for the original Judge Dredd (1995) so I was have interested, half weary about a new Dredd film, what with this age of remakes and reboots. I was mainly in love with the 90s colourful Blade Runner style environment that was created, as fake as it sometimes looked, and seeing images from the teaser made me suspicious it would turn out to be (what Josh and I call) ‘Lo-Fi Sci-fi’, that is to say, a sci-fi movie that doesn’t transport you to a completely different context, because they film in uninteresting contemporary locations, most probably somewhere in Toronto or Vancouver. Think of the difference between the all encompassing dystopia of Blade Runner and the uneven, real world/crazy futurism dichotomy of Minority Report or The 6^th Day. Let’s just say that the old Judge Dredd consisted of completely fabricated sets and environments, while they’re filming parts of the 2012 Dredd in South Africa. 

Admittedly I’ve started to appreciate the location idea: Judge Dredd stories are set in a post-nuclear-war city, why wouldn’t the whole place be sun-drenched? But it wasn’t until the big trailer debut where my doubts really came to the forefront. The plot of Dredd is such: in the future thousands of people live in giant apartment blocks, one such block ruled by Lena Headley, a controller of a powerful drug. The Judges, police with the power of judge, jury and executioner, storm her building, battle to the top and attempt to capture her. 

It was in this trailer where I found there was a huge comparisons to and Gareth Evan’s Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) (2012) come about. In both trailers, cops raid an apartment building, only to have the gang boss inform his criminal tenants that they must kill the invading cops. I know both films were created and developed independently of each other, and my friend Josh has insisted that trailers sometimes screw a film up completely. Some early-bird reviews have reassured me that the film is much better than it seems on paper, so while I’m now a little keener to watch the film (pictures like this make me excited) the comparison cannot be ignored. 

But why is such a story so prevelant. As I said, both films developed independently (Dredd is written by the amazing Alex Garland, after all), so how could two completely different sets of moviemakers come up with the same basic story? I thought about some great foreign films I’d watched along the same veign: violent murder and chaos in an apartment building. And you’d be surprised at how many there are. Those films are Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [●REC] (2007) from Spain, Benjamin Rocher and Yannick Dahan’s La Horde (The Horde) (2009) from France and the aforementioned Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) from Indonesia.

Lets start with a movie called The Horde. Oooh boy, is it rough. Imagine a combination of two of my favourite films from the past couple of years, Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) and Dawn of the Dead (2003). In this film, violent, corrupt cops raid a dilapidated apartment building to take out a drug lord (see the theme?). This time it’s over the death of one of their own, and of course, there’s a super race of shark-toothed zombies attacking the building, while Paris burns on the horizon. 

 The characters are what make this for me. Low down and dirty gangsters teaming up with low down and dirty, violent and vengeful corrupt cops. Not a single soft character in the bunch, really, all vicious and all of them violent killers. It makes for some fun moments, there’s no pretty heroine, no handsome hero, just tough guys being tough, none of them sympathetic or relatable, just hard. It really is one of the most badass horror films I’ve seen, and if you’re a dude, like, a DUDE’S DUDE, then you’ll appreciate some of the badassery on display, involving one of the most brutal and heroic sacrifices in a Zombie film, ever. 

 Another zombie apartment building film is Balagueró and Plaza’s [●REC]. In this, a very good looking journalist (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman tail emergency workers, who receive a call about an apartment building. Within they find a situation of escalating terror, where a viral zombie infestation has taken place, of which there is no escape: the police have sealed the place up, and anyone who breaks this quarantine will be killed (which they learn the hard way). This film was also made into an American version called Quarantine (2008), and eventually a crappy straight to DVD sequel. Despite it being a first-person camera perspective film, or found footage film, the Spanish REC films have spawned two very successful sequels and is very popular in that part of the world.

 Oh boy, if The Horde was rough, this was more terrifying than brutal. One of the most adrenaline-inducing films I’ve ever seen, there’s one chase scene toward the end that’s full-on crazy. Though more in the vein of 28 Days Later, with blood spewing, red eyes and running zombies, the films makes great use of the camera conceit and the pace of its vicious antagonists. The night-vision sequence at the end is classic, and the whole film blends terror, dread and creepiness together into a great little package. I remember watching the film on my TV the first time; with the sound down, playing the computer a bit as well so I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed by it, like the pussy that I am. It was so much easier to stomach without the screams, haha. 

 And now we get to The Raid. I stumbled across the trailer once, and showed it to my dad, who is Indonesian. He thought it was great, but I never had any illusions that it would make its way to Australian shores, yet low and behold, it was getting some impressive international buzz and I took my dad out for Mexican and a movie. 

 The story is simple enough: a team of elite police raid a dilapidated apartment block to take out a drug lord. The inhabitants of the building are told they’d live rent-free if they killed a cop, and thus Rama, the plucky rookie, kicks a lot of arse as they battle floor by floor towards the penthouse. That’s about it for the plot. 

 I have to say that the film was delightfully violent. I’m not really big on high violence, unless it’s against bad guys, then I’m ok with that. I know it sounds like a dumb contrast, but if you watch Rambo (2008), for all the violence against enemy soldiers there was, there were scenes of innocent people being machine-gunned and children being bayoneted, which was hard for me to stomach. This also marks the first time I’ve seen people walk out of a cinema because of the violence.

 I’ve read reviews damning the film because of its tissue-paper-thin plot and weak characterisation. It doesn’t really matter to me, not in this film, especially considering the action and the entertainment is of a high quality. When you’re slapping your knee they way I was and laughing as loud as I was (much to my father’s embarrassed chagrin) it doesn’t matter as much as it should. Personally I was pleased at seeing an openly Islamic hero, who prays before a rigorous workout. I mean, yeah it’s a film from an Islamic nation, but in this post-911, post-Osama world, it’s good to see a sympathetic, heroic Islamic character.

 Ultimately the film is very much like a computer game. I’ve always been aware of this when I watched an episode of the now dead ABC program Mondo Thingo, a pop culture program, where tey discussed videogame movies. It wasn’t just that they were making films of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, but now films are being influenced by video games. To illustrate they simply played a clip from Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), where a handcuffed Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas swing their way down the side of a building, the whole thing structured like an old Nintendo game. The Raid, however, resembles more a game called Die Hard Arcade, and reminded me a little of Time Crisis in its story as well, but that’s just me. 

 So perhaps that’s the most enduring influence on all these films, the Video Game influence. All films are in apartment buildings, all films have a constant violent antagonistic presence, and all films ultimately involve reaching the very top (or, in The Horde, the very bottom) to achieve some kind of conclusive end and all films have a level-by level structure to them, which explains the apartment building conceit. 

So despite some imagery and plot conceits that both Dredd and The Raid share, idea that both films have their roots in gaming and video game structure has made the comparison a little easier to stomach. The whole situation reminds me of the Coldplay Plagarism case, where Coldplay was accused of stealing a song, though both songs were influenced by old Nintendo the Legend of Zelda theme. There is such a thing as two independent artists coming to the same conclusion. And here I am thinking that all these films were influenced by American pop cinema, when it’s the home entertainment that’s the real culprit.  

Ant Reviews: Chronicle (2012)

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

So I complain about the constant youtube ads for Chronicle on my Facebook. Then my friend Roma calls and complains that he, too, is getting annoyed that every time he watches something on youtube he’s forced to watch 15 seconds of that damn mini trailer. We both hate the use of that Jessie J song, just that little snippet. The one that goes

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-ChingCha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the world dance….

And how every time we have to watch a youtube clip we end up with that infernal song stuck in our heads. It’s not just the song that’s annoying, it’s that little tiny sliver of the chorus that really fucking gets to me. Roma says he hates the bit when Michael B. Jordan goes ‘YEAH’ just after that little bit. I was starting to really hate the dimples in Alex Russell’s cheeks, and how he rubs his fingers as if to say MONEH. No fault to him or the film makers, it was just a simple laugh in the film, overblown to excessive extremes in (what is now) a successful internet marketing campaign. But Roma and I couldn’t help but hear that fucking song, just that little clip of the chorus, playing over and over and over again as we watched the film. And I’m not exaggerating.

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

 So just to let you know, that’s where I’m coming from when I review this movie.

The film starts promisingly enough, where the conceit of the camera is introduced so that the main character Andrew (Dale DeHaan) makes sure that his Dad (Michael Kelly) wont come in and hit him while the camera is recording. Thus begins our insight into Andrew’s tortured world, the life of an American teenager and all that it brings. It’s a little bit of a white man’s Akira, with troubled teens seeking popularity and mental powers and lashing out. Since the trailer the main plot, and how the characters get their powers, reminds me of a 1999 X-Files episode called Rush, where 20-somethings pretending to be teens break into a mysterious cave and get superpowers. In both cases the actual getting of the powers is never explained, though in The X-Files they got superspeed instead of telekinesis.

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

I couldn’t get over how Andrew looked like my friend Josh, to the point of distraction. DeHaan is convincing enough, for a guy a year younger than me too act and look like a teenager. Michael B Jordan is great, a surprisingly warm character under all the high school popularity. Michael Kelly is always great, he’s a good actor at playing difficult characters. One masterful scene has us side with the abusive dad for a moment, understanding and relating to the pressure he’s under and the way he lashes out, but soon we hate his guts again because he’s genuinely an irredeemably a prick.

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

 

Josh Trank’s direction is a bit hit and miss, and by that I mean that the handheld camera conceit gets in the way sometimes. Often when watching handheld movies I just wish that everything be third person again, so that we can just absorb events and not have to judge whether or not the conceit is still strong in some scenes. It seems odd that Andrew would record everything, and while the other characters acknowledge that, sometimes it stretches credibility. Why must he record everything? We know he had the camera to record his father’s abuse, but that doesn’t really stop him later on. Who will he show this footage too. And with the use of the other cameras scattered throughout the film, I’m unsure what the final cut of the movie is: is it a collection of events, a chronicle to document the events of the characters, and if so who compiled and arranged the footage? If it is some kind of abstract move, and simply a filmmakers conceit to insist that the whole film be shot on cameras that are in the story itself? Is it a statement that our whole world is recorded on tape? I hardly think that’s the main message of the film, as it has little to do with the plot in that sense. It would have been better without the constrictions of the handheld conceit, and though the final action sequence was innovative, it would have been great not to have to wonder how we were going to have a camera show record events. And I mean, why is Andrew filming himself mugging some losers on his street. Does that make sense?

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

There were some good bits that challenged my expectations a little. Some of the scenes where the main characters test out their abilities were fun and convincing. The interactions between Andrew and Steve (Jordan) were nice, considering how badly Andrew had been treated by everyone around him. Some of the abuse scenes hit a little to close to home for me, and were unpleasant in that they were real, which is a compliment. There is a great scene where Andrew and Steve hold a talent show segment with Andrew’s powers, which gains him popularity and girls. It was well done and had a nice tone to it.

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

But I had a problem with the plot. This is where I’m afraid I’m going to have to delve into spoilers. 

SPOILERS BEGIN

Ultimately Andrew is beaten down to the point that he lashes out and destroys stuff. He starts killing people and raging, and his cousin Matt has to kill him. There is a subplot of the film where Andrew suggested they all fly to Tibet to discover inner peace and enlightenment. This is his dream; his escape from the harshness of life and a Middle American teen. The film ends with Matt landing in Tibet, honouring Andrew by completing his quest for peace. This bothered the fuck out of me, and it felt cruel and wasteful. That’s when the movie lost a star in my opinion.

I don’t understand what message they’re trying to send with this film. We follow Andrew, his plight, his rise and fall. We empathize with him, we associate with him, we wish to see how the film ends for his sake. His life is rough, and nothing really works out for him. He’s a little quiet, but not really a sinner. He responds to the abuse that he’s put through, and with power he finally stands up for himself and makes something of himself. He meets a good friend in Steve, who introduces him to high school popularity, and he gets this close to being blown, until he throws up on the girl to his private and public humiliation. Nothing works out for him and it’s terrible. He dresses up in his fathers old fireman gear (a symbol of a fallen hero that his father has become, but I doubt that the filmmakers were getting deep on that particular point) and he engages on a brief life of crime to get money for drugs his mother needs before getting blown up, then his mother dies and his father blames him. When Andrew finally cuts loose and rampages, we’re on his side and understand his plight. We want him to overcome. But he never does. He dies a loser. 

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

In the end it’s Matt that’s left standing, much to my chagrin. He’s the least well-developed character of the piece, boring to a point. Suddenly he’s portrayed as a (Kaneda-esque) Hero to Andrew’s (Tetsuo-esque) Villain, with very little preparation to establish him as such prior to the final battle. And I don’t know what that means to the audience or what the filmmakers are trying to say to with his tragic triumph over his cousing. See, Matt is a reasonably popular, reasonalbly normal kid from a presumably healthy home, and is richer than Andrew seeing as he owns a car and drives Andrew to school every day. There is a hot blonde (Ashley Hinshaw) who also videotapes everything, who we first meet as she’s flirting with Andrew. Matt cockblocks, and ends up with her. And again, Matt kills Andrew and stands on the side of the angels, interrupting Andrew’s justified explosion of power and also negating any hard-earned redemption and peace, a peace that he ends up claiming on Andrew’s behalf at the film’s conclusion. Is that the message? If you’re shat on your whole life, you’ll end up a loser and die a loser, and if you have a good life you’ll end up being ok in the end? As my mate Roma said quite succinctly at the end of the film: “If you’re a loser, don’t try and follow the winners path.”

SPOILERS END

…Ain’t about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the wooorld dance….

I’m going to take a stab at why I think they did what they did. I think they tried to make a superhero movie without making a superhero movie. And I think in their attempts at keeping things real and unlike a superhero film they ended up stumbling upon something with a bit more worth, this story of a troubled teen’s life. And in their attempts at trying to go back to the superhero story they ended up ruining any goodwill they’d established, and all the fine character moments they’d crafted in order to solidify their main characters into comic book archetypes.

This film, in my mind, suffered the same thing Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) did. In that they had interesting characters and contexts, great, innovative ideas and approaches, subverting what we’d come to expect from well known narratives and concepts. Then when Evans is in the proper Captain outfit, doing proper superhero things, the film gets bored and wraps things up in a jiffy. That’s what happened here with Chronicle: the superhero film elements ruined the superhero film.

So yeah, what would have been an interesting teen sci fi drama is instead a failed superhero movie. That ending really annoyed me. I would have liked to see Andrew overcome his rage, over come his surroundings, and to find the inner peace his tortured soul desired. Seeing as the film is a morality tale about the dangers of power, perhaps if he’d overcome his problems without his powers, to well and truly triumph over adversity. It would have paved the way for a true sequel, not the half-assed one they’d end up making with the surviving characters. Cos in the end it really is about the (ha) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching, it is about the Ba-Bling Ba-Bling. We all wanna make the wooorld dance….

**stars

PS my friend Roma hated the movie. Couldn’t get over that fucking youtube campaign. Who could blame him?

Ant Reviews: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call (2009)

Terry's path into depravity and debauchery began with a jump into murky Hurricane Katrina floodwaters. This selfish act to save a drowning man leaves Terry with a permanently bad back and an addiction to painkillers. A year later we join Terry in his downward spiral into oblivion. And this is where Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant truly begins.

Bad Lieutenant a compelling character study of a man who wavers between good cop and outright criminal as he struggles with the case of a massacred Senegalese immigrant family. His day to day struggles make fascinating viewing with both Herzog and Nicolas Cage creating a complex character of both unreserved honesty and desperate deceptiveness. Cage imbues his Terry with manic intensity, while applying breaks here and there to show subtle virtuousness in some small acts. Arm in arm we go with him, down into the depths. The long-faced craziness that many audiences have come to expect (and have derided him for) works in Cage’s favour; late-career Cage is exceptional in roles that suit him, like Lord Of War (2005) and not in fare like Ghost Rider (2007).

The supporting cast also give great performances. Eva Mendes takes the familiar and at times thankless role of the ‘hooker girlfriend’ and gives it some depth and gravitas. Val Kilmer is good in his small role despite his current place in the movie scene at the moment. I speak of course in regards to his straight to DVD work he’s been doing of late, in fact I’d caught another corrupt-cop-in-post-Katrina-New-Orleans film, it was called Streets of Blood (2009) and it was a mishmash of Training Day (2001) and Street Kings (2008) and it wasn’t very good. Bad Lieutenant was a straight to DVD film here in Australia, and if it weren’t for some slick direction from Herzog and some fine performances, you’d be fooled into thinking it actually was. It’s interesting to see Cage and Kilmer on screen, two contemporaries, and both are making b-movies though Cage is still getting his theatrical releases. In fact, this stands as my only real dislike of the film: the damn name of it. It makes me cringe to say it. The linking of this with an older, Abel Ferrara directed film, does the film no favours due to comparisons and fact that the name doesn't roll of the tongue particularly well. The straight-to-DVDness to the name of the film no doubt turned people of a fine film and a strong performance by Cage, which is a shame.

Another surprise is Jennifer Coolidge as Terry’s stepmother Genevieve. I’ve seen Coolidge play the same high-voiced ditz many times, from an episode of The Closer, to MadTV to American Pie (where it all started) and it was very pleasing to see her play an alcoholic who drinks in spite of her husband, who’s recovering from his addictions and going to AA meetings. In addition there are sleazy drug dealers, Brad Douriff being fantastic and this one customer of Mendes that’s outrageously and satisfyingly over the top as he is douchey. 

Herzog fills his film with a healthy dash of drug-fuelled weirdness. In particular there is an enduring lizard motif that pervades the film, from a club called the Gator’s Retreat (where Terry robs patrons for their drugs), to two singing iguanas to a brief and beautiful detour Herzog makes at one point with an alligator by a roadside crash. To aid this is the sporadic score, which wavers from quite pedestrian at times to all out inspired weirdness, sometimes in the same scene.

Ultimately the film is about right and wrong, about doing the right thing at the right time. Terry’s redemption and damnation coexist in small acts of kindness that reminds us that he’s still human, that there is a good man under the muck. These moments give Cage’s Terry enough complexity and depth, an also unpredictability, that we the audience follow him relentlessly. We relish in his hedonism and debauchery, we cheer at the honesty he displays in his outbursts, we’re warmed by his kindness. So much are we invested in Cage’s career-best performance that we want the best but fear the worst, and to Herzog’s unconventional, shameless and audacious credit, he gives us an ending we all secretly hoped we’d get but never dare expect.

****stars