The Village
Writer/Director M. Night Shyamalan was, with the release of his 1999 smash hit The Sixth Sense, hailed by some as a of filmmaking genius, almost on a par with Hitchcock in his ability to balance detailed characters with the demands of genre. For some reason, the film’s obvious final twist, the lynchpin on which the entire supernatural thriller depended, seemed not to have been spotted from the giveaway trailer by enough people, and it also made obscene amounts of money. His follow-up, the comic book inspired twisty-turny, supposedly philosophical Unbreakable also did pretty well with both critics and paying customers, despite being just a tad silly and having yet another fairly obvious twist for its final pay-off. Signs saw Mel Gibson being freaked out by aliens in yet another variation on the same theme.
The basic premise here seems most reminiscent of Tim Burton’s often underrated comedy/horror/whodunnit Sleepy Hollow – the notion of a village living in fear of some terrible threat amongst the trees – but Shyamalan is hardly known for his humour (despite being the writer behind the kiddie comedy Stuart Little). This is a darker movie than Burton’s altogether – and it’s not often that you get to say that. The creatures who circle the town, occasionally venturing in on an attack, are kept in the shadows for a good portion of the film: an unknown, terrifying threat that could become murderous at any moment. It seems the director has been preparing for this movie by watching the first two classic instalments of the Sigourney Weaver-starring Alien series on a constant loop.
The real difference between this and his last few films is that whereas they both relied on strong performances from one or two relatively psychologically complex and confused central characters. Here Shyamalan is working with a large ensemble cast, made up of a number of big names, from Oscar nominees Joaquin Phoenix, who also cropped up in Signs, and the Alien movies’ own Sigourney Weaver to Oscar-winner Adrian Brody (he of the Halle Berry onstage snog fame).
The Village once again combines the supernatural and ridiculous which seems to be becoming Shyamalan’s trademark, but with an added touch of classic horror film shock tactics to add to his ability to build fear and confusion in his audience. Needless to say, there are also his copyrighted plot twists, which are just as surprising/predictable as his previous ones, depending on your point of view. If you liked his last few movies, and object to anyone claiming them to be predictable and silly, there’s a fair chance that this one will appeal as well. If not, it is just possible that the bonus psychological shocker element may overcome any doubts you may have about this supposed film genius. But only just.
The Bourne Supremacy
The hit 2002 amnesiac spy thriller The Bourne Identity was a surprisingly intelligent and enjoyable reworking of the genre, helped greatly by the unusual choice of director. The man in charge, Doug Liman, was previously best known for his cult movies Swingers and Go, and was a brave choice to tackle a big-budget summer movie fronted by one of Hollywood’s hottest stars, Matt Damon. For the sequel, Liman has moved on, but the studio has decided to risk it again by getting in another director with no experience of either the genre or making blockbusters.
It is rare for a director to make the move from television to film, and rarer still for such a move to pay off. They are very different media, despite all the apparent similarities, with cinema being by far the more demanding. Having learned his trade making television documentaries for the likes of World in Action, The Bourne Supremacy’s helm, Paul Greengrass, has only made a few big screen outings before, yet here demonstrates amply that it is possible to use such a position to his advantage.
Much like its predecessor, this movie is an unqualified success. Greengrass deftly combines documentary-style visuals with paranoid spy antics to create a claustrophobic and frantic action thriller. It is a bold move, harking back to the likes of classics The Ipcress File and The French Connection, bringing a grainy realism to a genre which, for the last few years, has mostly been overwhelmed with the gloss of the Bond films or Charlie’s Angels.
Matt Damon once again puts in a remarkably accomplished performance, putting his old writing partner and best buddy Ben Affleck to shame. After their Oscar win for Good Will Hunting, the Affleck/Damon partnership seemed set to take over Hollywood with their combination of apparent intelligence, good looks and easy humour. After a few more films together (though sadly no more scripts), Affleck’s star has plummeted after a string of box office disasters like the unpronounceable and unwatchable Gigli, while Damon’s film choices seem far better considered, with the likes of The Talented Mr Ripley and the Bourne franchise.
Where the first film found Bourne desperately trying to piece together who he is while avoiding the unwelcome attention of various agencies, the second sees him still recovering from his former amnesia, and desperately trying to escape the continued unwanted intrusions of his violent past. If only it were that simple. Drawn into yet more plots and conspiracies, Bourne finds himself embroiled in an international game of cat and mouse which he must win if he is ever to reclaim his life, even if he still doesn’t know precisely what his life is…
When the third film in the series hits the multiplexes in a few years, it seems likely that Damon will return once again. On the basis of the first two in the series, this can only be a good thing. The only concern remains the question: why are the three best films of the summer all sequels?
Dodgeball
There’s little funnier on this earth than watching a man with a mullet and a moustache getting repeatedly hit around the head by fast-moving balls. For those unfamiliar with this somewhat American sport, normally played in schools, not by grown men, it is introduced via a fake 1950s training film as “the sport of violence, exclusion and degradation”. It may sound childish – hell, it is childish – but it’s also hilarious. The only way you won’t be amused is if you have no joy remaining, and the simple things in life no longer hold any appeal. Which would, let’s face it, not be a particularly pleasant situation to be in.
Ben Stiller, rapidly securing his position alongside Jack Black as everyone’s favourite Hollywood funny man, is the mulleted moustachioed man in question – the self-obsessed fitness guru White Goodman, effectively Derek Zoolander if he had owned a gym. It is certainly the style of Stiller’s most successful outing to date that Dodgeball is attempting to recreate. The spot-on fashion comedy that was 2001’s Zoolander showcased Stiller at his very best, combining physical comedy with genuine humour and walking a fine line between social satire and the just plain silly. This is more in the same vein.
Where Zoolander mocked male vanity and the fashion industry, Dodgeball’s target is male vanity plain and simple. Stiller’s mulleted gym owner is a former fatty who still hasn’t managed to control his cravings for junk food and is attempting to take over the aptly named Average Joe’s gym, run by Vince Vaughan’s regular guy, Peter La Fleur. In danger of bankruptcy, Peter and his regulars decide to compete in a Las Vegas Dodgeball tournament, despite all being more or less utterly unfit and never having played the game in their lives. The near psychotic Patches (the excellent Rip Torn), a former Dodgeball ace, comes to their aid with a tough training regime that largely involvs being hit around the head with lumps of metal – but will it be enough for them to win? Who cares as long as they all get hit around the head a lot?
As is no doubt apparent, the plot is somewhat sparse, but to be honest, plot is hardly the point here. Who needs sophisticated comedy and witty dialogue where the site of grown men hurting themselves does the job with half the effort? The success of the likes of Jackass and home movie shows like You’ve Been Framed has proved there is a great market for amusing pain. Here, that pain is (mostly) faked and tightly choreographed, but it is no less amusing for the lack of true discomfort.
The whole aim of this movie is soliciting raucous belly-laughs from its audience via a range of wince-inducing slapstick tomfoolery. Add to that a guy who thinks he’s a pirate, and what more could you ask for? Dodgeball is top-notch mindless, stupid fun.
Spartan
David Mamet has been keeping a fairly low profile for the last few years: his last cinematic outing was as co-screenwriter for Ridley Scott’s quirky, big-budget serial killer thriller Hannibal back in 2001. He is, of course, most fondly remembered by cinephiles for his claustrophobic ensemble character study, 1992’s superb Glengarry Glen Ross, and excellent script for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, as well as his strangely prescient screenplay for 1997’s Wag the Dog, in which an American President launches a fictional war to help win an election.
This film also marks a return of sorts for Val Kilmer, a much-derided actor who hasn’t really bothered to put in any effort to a performance since his turn as Doc Holliday in 1993’s entertaining western Tombstone. The phrase “Val Kilmer was really good in…” is more often than not used with a heavy dose of sarcasm, but this is one of those rare movies where he actually lives up to the potential he showed as Jim Morrison in 1991’s The Doors and, believe it or not, when Kilmer puts in a good performance he can hack it with the best of them.
Here, Kilmer takes on one of those cinematic archetypes that so many actors seem drawn to at some point in their careers – the super-cool secret agent, master of his art, with a plentiful supply of witty quips, the heart of a killer, yet an underlying moral certainty that gives him the strength to go up against even his superiors if he feels they are in the wrong. But this is not the usual cliché-ridden spy flick – at least, not for the majority of its length.
Mamet specialises in complexity and intelligence, as well as in great dialogue, and when it comes to crafting a political conspiracy thriller it is a given that he will be able to create something more interesting than the usual Hollywood pap. No True Lies, this, but an altogether darker beast, aided by some interesting camerawork from Director of Photography Juan Ruiz Anchía, the man behind the visual claustrophobia and depression of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is artfully replicated for a different genre here.
On the surface the plot is simple: a university student has been kidnapped by what appears to be an international sex-slave ring but, and here’s the typical Hollywood twist, she is the daughter of the President himself. Yet Mamet would never be satisfied to leave it at that, and nothing is as simple as it seems. As Kilmer’s agent is set off on the trail of the kidnappers, uncertainties pile on top of confusions, making for a satisfying maelstrom of doubts that will keep the audience happily guessing away.
For a good two thirds of the movie, the narrative twists and turns in a wild orgy of inventive and intelligent plotting, with more questions mounting up with each passing scene, Kilmer a brooding, determined hard-man at the eye of the storm of conspiracy. But as the story rushes towards its conclusion in a Tom Clancy dash there are sadly a few directorial and scripting stumbles along the route – largely due to the need to explain everything.
If Mamet had been able to leave at least some of the threads dangling loose, this could have been a real classic. As it is, Spartan settles neatly in alongside the likes of Philip Noyce’s Clear and Present Danger and Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire as a good effort at a complex political thriller that, despite falling slightly short of its potential, is still worthy of a couple of hours of your life.
I, Robot
The movie is based on the classic Isaac Asimov short story collection of the same name that centred on his famous three laws of robotics, which have since been adopted by the real world robotics industry. These laws state that: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Considering these laws cannot be broken by a programmed machine, how could a robot, as seems to be the case, have killed a human being?
A Sci-Fi film based around the hunt for a robot that might have broken its programming and become sentient. Sound familiar? Yep, it seems a lot like Ridley Scott’s seminal portrait of a dystopian future, the Harrison Ford-starring Blade Runner, doesn’t it? Well, yes - but only because Philip K. Dick, the author of the short story Blade Runner was based on, took so many of his ideas from Asimov.
Blade Runner set the standard for grotty future worlds, and has been imitated so often over the last twenty years that the idea of the future being unpleasant and battered has become yet another Hollywood cliché. It takes a director with a bit of originality to come up with a good variation on the theme, and former music video helmer Alex Proyas certainly does. Chuck in everyone’s favourite wise-cracking male lead with an ability to actually act, Will Smith, and this looks like a sure-fire hit, so why the slight hesitation to heap on the praise?
The only potential problem, as is sadly still the case with altogether too many films, is the special effects. The look of the film, far from being as original as Proyas’ cult hits The Crow or Dark City, is very similar to that of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 blockbuster Minority Report – a sleek but real futuristic world, similar to our own, but with fancier cars and all kinds of new technologies that only exist in prototype form (if at all) today. All very well and good, but in terms of Hollywood special effects, two years is a very long time. Computer effects technology has moved on a lot since Minority Report. The physics of the computer generated elements – most obviously the robots – should be more realistic. They simply don’t seem to be affected by the laws of gravity as they should be. Plus there’s the problem that they look a little too much like the battle droids from Star Wars: Episode I for comfort – and that was made five years ago.
However, that’s probably being needlessly picky. Compared to the kinds of effects we had to put up with before the computer revolution of the 1990s, the film is spectacular and, in any case, it is more the ideas than the effects that are the heart of the movie. It has explosions, it has fights, it has car chases – all the usual ingredients for a summer blockbuster – but more unusually it has a certain amount of intelligence. It’s well worth a look and, if you aren’t bothered by the similarities in style to other films of the genre, it could well end up a favourite.
Home on the Range
What is it with Dame Judi Dench? After years of sticking primarily to TV and the stage, she suddenly appears to be taking every film role offered. In three weeks she’ll be seen zooming around in space in The Chronicles of Riddick, here she’s lending her voice to what will apparently be the last Disney film to be animated in the old, hand-drawn manner. From now on, computers will be taking over, ending nearly seventy years of Disney feature film tradition.
It’s therefore a real shame that this film really doesn’t cut it. This is not so much The Lion King as The Aristocats – one of those rather shoddy, half-hearted features Disney seem to put out more from habit than any real desire to make something really decent, funny or original. Coming as it does a few weeks after Shrek 2, it really looks far shoddier in comparison – otherwise it may simply have seemed a bit weak, rather than actively bad. In reality, it is by no means truly awful – it’s just blandly average, the sort of film that used to be churned out in the bad old days before the likes of Toy Story came to revolutionise kids’ cinema.
Here, Dench teams up with the frequently irritating Rosanne Barr and the hardly well-known Jennifer Tilly, between them providing the voices of three cows in the depths of the Old West who discover that their ranch is in danger of bankruptcy. They hook up with a cocky horse, a wannabe Bounty Hunter voiced by Cuba Gooding Jr – an actor who, since his Oscar-winning turn in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, has appeared in nothing but dross. The film’s four-legged heroes set off to try and capture a local outlaw, the Randy Quaid-voiced human Alameda Slim.
Cue the usual mish-mash of songs, bizarrely including contributions from K.D. Lang and even Quaid himself, lightweight jokes and, following the lead of the Shrek movies but to less effect, the odd movie reference. It’s all very safe, unchallenging, predictable and, as with pretty much every Disney movie ever made (well, bar some of those 1930s shorts which appeared to condone Nazism), utterly inoffensive.
This is one of those films designed purely for the kids, which adults forced to watch as well will find a tad tedious in places, but probably won’t resent having to sit through too much. It is, however, a disappointing end to seven decades of Disney tradition. The hand-drawing legacy of the studio’s animation division deserved a more classic send-off.
The Chronicles of Riddick
In a summer which has seen two sequels, to Spider-Man and Shrek, actually improve upon the originals, it is a shame that the same can’t be said for The Chronicles of Riddick. This would be more accurately titled Pitch Black 2, as Vin Diesel here reprises his role as the bizarre-eyed anti-hero of the sci fi shocker from a few years back. If you haven’t seen the original, it is well worth hunting out. In fact, you could watch it at home for far less than you’ll waste going to the cinema for this mindless, artless nonsense, and actually have a moderately entertaining time to boot.
Vin Diesel appeared to have a lot of promise when he first appeared as one of Tom Hanks’ band of brothers in Spielberg’s blockbusting World War Two epic Saving Private Ryan. His distinctive voice, used to good effect in the animated hit The Iron Giant, appeared to suggest some kind of actual acting ability to boot, as did his turn in the cult hit Boiler Room, lauded at the time as a late 1990s Wall Street.
Diesel’s hulking physique and apparent ability to merge tough-guy with talent was soon spotted by studio execs, who had been desperately hunting for the next Sly/Arnie ever since the action heroes of the 80s had started to look a tad doddery. He even had a cool-sounding name (who cares that it isn’t his real one?). His first outing as the lead got the execs slathering: the low-budget sci-fi cult hit Pitch Black. Despite being a blatant rip off of the James Cameron classic Aliens it was well enough put together, with a cunning enough central premise (which also kept the effects budget down), that it did surprisingly well.
The prime problem with the sequel is its star, Diesel himself. Ever since the glossy dross of The Fast and the Furious, Diesel has lost it. That movie, another moderately entertaining but mindless showcase for the potential new action hero saw him sink into a near-monosyllabic grunting delivery which has since become his trademark. XXX was more of the same – the fame had started to get to his head, and his talent seemed to have declined in direct proportion to his salary’s rise.
That Diesel has lost it is no surprise. The real shock here is the presence of some genuinely good actors: Thandie Newton, Linus Roache, and – most shockingly or all – our very own Dame Judi Dench. Perhaps she thought she’d try and follow the lead of her old Royal Shakespeare Company acting partners Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Ian Holm and make a move into blockbuster territory. She picked the wrong film to try and make the crossover.
You’d expect some silly choices from a meathead ex-criminal like Diesel, but not from an actress with the talent and experience of Dame Judi. The fact that she struggles valiantly on with what she must surely have realised to be utter rubbish is testament to her professionalism, but she – and Newton and Roache – are wasted here. So would your time and money be if you head to the local multiplex for this one: save it for something entertaining, or at least something that isn’t so palpably unoriginal, boring and idiotic as this.
Catwoman
This film has been well over a decade in the making, but you’d never guess to look at it. As played by Michelle Pfeiffer, the Catwoman of 1992’s Batman Returns became a sultry, sexy, instant cinematic icon. The plan was that more Batman films would follow and his kinky rubber-clad female foe-cum-lover would get her own spin-off series, much as Jennifer Garner’s Elektra has got her own movie on the back of 2003’s Daredevil.
But Warner Brothers faffed about and Pfeiffer lost interest. Various replacements were mooted, but then two Warners superhero projects, the Dean Cain/Terri Hatcher Superman TV series and Tim Burton’s planned Superman film, were cancelled within a year of each other. Warners seemed to have lost interest in superheroics for good.
Since the wild and unexpected success of Blade and Warners’ own Matrix in 1998-9, superhero flicks have made an incredible comeback. We’ve had X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, The Hulk – all big hits, but none of them for Warners. The studio’s execs were understandably getting a bit miffed. Over the last few years, several proposed Batman films have fallen through, and the Superman project remains trapped in development hell, with practically every director in Hollywood having been involved at some stage. Warners really, really wanted a superhero hit to avoid missing the boat that their own films arguably launched.
This is not the hit they were looking for.
Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was Selina Kyle, mal-treated secretary doing her bit for feminism by getting her revenge on her chauvinistic boss via a violent and sexually dominant alternate personality. Here, Halle Berry’s is Patience Philips, a graphic designer for a cosmetics company, trying to stop the release of a dangerous new anti-aging drug. There is, to be fair an attempt to link the two feline avengers, but it’s a half-hearted one at best.
Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was tortured, confused, self-destructive, tragic and so utterly sympathetic despite her dubious morality and motives. Her doomed split-personality love affair as Selina/Catwoman with Bruce Wayne/Batman was a wonderful piece of character motivation and plot tension. None of that is present here.
Berry’s Catwoman is more single-minded and self-assured, and so less complex and far less interesting, and the plot is too simplistic to hold any real interest. Added to that is the fact that, although Berry is undeniably hugely attractive, she simply isn’t as sexy here as Pfeiffer was in the same role. Part of the point of the character is her sex appeal, yet bar a couple of overly gratuitous scenes, here it is non-existent. The less said about the truly awful costume the better.
Why turn a character that was sexy and complex into one that is bland and boring? Why churn out a predictable, threadbare plot when you’ve had twelve years to perfect the script? The answer is sadly simple: Warners didn’t want to take any risks. They wanted a superhero film to leech some of the success rival studios have been having, but knew that their new star-laden Batman Begins film wouldn’t be ready for a while. They didn’t want to miss the boat, so this has been churned out in the meantime in a highly cynical attempt to sucker fans of some of the great superhero films of the last few years into parting with their hard-earned dosh. Let’s just hope that next year’s Batman flick isn’t such a half-hearted job as this.
