Doomsday. Out today. (****4/10)
Rhona Mitra is magnificent. She is gorgeous, tough, a good actress and…well…gorgeous. And yet, she has really not been the superstar many had predicted she would become. In the last few years she has had bit parts in horrible movies like The Number 23 and good ones like Shooter. And she has starred in one movie that really, really sucked, Skinwalkers. It seems to me that Doomsday is a movie designed as a star vehicle for her, so she can become the next big hot movie star. But it may never happen for her. For the first half hour watching this movie, my girlfriend kept asking - “is that the girl from Underworld?” and I had to say no, that’s Kate Beckinsale. Or, “is that the girl from Van Helsing?” And I have to say no, that is also Kate Beckinsale. You see, Rhona Mitra does indeed look a lot like Kate Beckinsale. And that actually is a problem.
It’s mostly a problem because she is basically playing Kate Beckinsale. In Underworld and Van Helsing. And even that would be fine, if Doomsday wasn’t ripping off so many movies itself. Doomsday comes out today, August 5th, from Alliance Films. It’s basically Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome crossed with The Road Warrior crossed with Mission: Impossible crossed with Children of Men. With some medieval cliches thrown in. The movie starts with a virus that is killing thousands of people in Scotland. The military shuts down basically the entire country, and builds a wall around it. Trapped inside are the people and the virus, left to die horribly on their own. Of course not everyone dies, and when the virus (the “Reaper” virus - straight out of Blade II?) re-appears, the government must send someone into the quarantine zone to find a cure.
That someone is Rhona Mitra, who takes her all-star Mission: Impossible team into the walled-off area. Very quickly, they run afoul of a gang of baddies straight out of Mad Max. There is no real reason for these bad guys to attack them, but this is where the story has to go. The spiky hair, the motorcycles, the buses, the carrs, the lunatics, the face-paint and the evil women and men create many scenes out of the Road Warrior, including some crazy high-speed chases on the abandoned highways. Now, I’m not one of those people who searches for inconsistencies in movies so that I can complain about them. So when one leaps out at me, it has to be a pretty big error on the part of the continuity people. If you’re in a high-speed chase in a luxury sports car, and a bad guy coming the other way smashes a giant hole in your windshield with a bat, and then you drive that car through a bus that then explodes as you come out the other side, your windshield should really not still be intact. This is something they really should have noticed. I mean, I did.
Civilization behind the wall has devolved, and of course half of it has devolved into Mad Max, run by a madman named Sol. The other half, run by Sol’s father Kane (Malcolm McDowell), is at war with the Mad Max crew. When Mitra escapes her capture at the hands of Sol, she ends up captured by Kane. Who lives in a medieval castle on the other side of the quarantine zone. HIS people don’t have punk haircuts and face paint and facial piercings, but they DO dress up in knight’s armour and feudal costumes. And of course, they enjoy watching gladiator combat. And of course they send in Mitra to engage in said combat. And of course, being the bad-ass that she is, she wins her fight against the crazy soldier in chain mail with a giant mace.
Doomsday is certainly not for children - there are some awfully gory scenes. And it also isn’t for animal lovers. Rabbits, cows, all kinds of animals get squished, crushed, blown up, and shredded. But the biggest problem with the movie is the blood and guts and gore. It’s the fact that nothing in the movie is original. At all. The only thing this movie has that I haven’t seen in another film before is Rhona Mitra’s ass in tight pants. And while that is a magnificent original feature of Doomsday, it doesn’t make up for the trains and buses and motorcycles from the Road Warrior, the characters from Thunderdome, the gladiator movie cliches, the blood spatter on the screen and futuristic vision from Children of Men, the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, and finally, amazingly, a scene ripped off from The Last Boyscout! Mitra at one point really, honestly, channels Bruce Willis in The Last Boyscout. “If he touches me again, I’ll kill him where he stands.” Not joking.
Then again, Doomsday is not awful. It actually takes the best parts of each movie it rips off, and Rhona Mitra is good about taking off that bulky suit and getting into her tight workout clothes right away. Mitra deserves to become a star. She is spectacularly gorgeous and a very good actress. But this isn’t the movie that will make her that star. The movies that make people stars are the ones that are original. Doomsday will not do for Mitra what Underworld did for Beckinsale. And it won’t do what Mad Max did for Mel Gibson, or Die Hard for Bruce Willis. At best, it is a solid indication of what she can do and who she can become. And at best it’s a reasonably entertaining movie for people who have seen very few other movies in their lives.