Cynical Cinema

Alliance Films came out with the Blade trilogy on August 26th.  It’s a two-disc edition, with two of the movies on one disc and one on the other.  There are no terrific special features, it’s just a plain, bargain set of the three Blade films in a package that is conveniently the same size as every other DVD in your collection.  And if you don’t have these films already, this is one you should add to your collection.  Here’s why:

Blade (8/10):  The original Blade movie was terrific, a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies.  Wesley Snipes was big, muscular, bad-ass and mean.  Kris Kristofferson was amazing as Whistler, Blade’s mentor.  And Stephen Dorff was terrific as the bad guy, a vampire who wanted to trigger the Blood Tide - an event that would, I think, turn everyone in the world into a vampire.  Or something.  The point is, this movie was awesome.  Sword fighting, guns, vampires disintegrating and great special effects, and Snipes as the most ass-kicking, toughest, meanest comic book character of all time.  There was even some good comedy - mostly provided by Donal Logue, who kept getting his arm chopped off.  And for the really cult comic book fans - some appearances by Traci Lords and Udo Kier.  Terrific!

Blade II (10/10):  By far, the best of the series.  Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), this film is as pulse-pounding and visually impressive as any comic book adaptation could aspire to be.  (Well, until 2008 when The Dark Knight came along.)  Snipes is now even more bad-ass, and he is given some awfully cool villains with which to work.  Luke Goss appears as Nomak, a new breed of vampire that preys on both humans AND vampires.  So now the vampires want a truce with Blade, because they are after the same enemy for once.  And Blade hooks up with the Blood Pack, a cheesily-named group of vampire bad-asses who have been training their whole lives to kill Blade, but now must work with him.  Ron Perlman, as the tough-guy leader of the Blood Pack, is amazing.  And even the secondary characters are cool actors - Norman Reedus as a stoner hippie helping Blade and Whistler, and Asian action movie legend Donnie Yen even shows up as a kung-fu fighting member of the Blood Pack.  And the vampire princess, played by Leonor Varela, is one of the hottest women ever in a movie.  Visually stunning, never-ending action, and some seriously bad-ass characters and actors made this movie not just a guilty pleasure, but the best in the trilogy.

Blade: Trinity (3/10):  One of the biggest letdowns I have ever had at a movie.  Del Toro is gone as director, replaced by David S. Goyer.  Kristofferson is gone early in the film, replaced by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.  And I really like Ryan Reynolds - he even has some solid comedic scenes in this film.  But an action star?  Jessica Biel an action star?  I know she really wants to be, and she keeps trying and trying to be one, but she isn’t an action star.  Or a great actress.  She’s hot.  That’s about it.  I mean, stick to movies where you are hot.  Those, you can do.  Blade II had Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen.  Blade Trinity can only suffer by comparison.  But it isn’t just Reynolds and Biel that are the problem.  Snipes is the only genuine action star in the movie, but he is given just about nothing to do.  The script is dreadful, the concept just doesn’t work, and there are some really long, extended scenes that make absolutely no sense.  The other Blade films were genuinely dark, tough, gritty entries that could, on some level, be considered horror films.  This one is an absolute joke.  Not only that, Blade is now the co-star.  In his own film.  Because Biel and Reynolds are the real action stars.  Come on!  This one is total garbage.

 The two-disc Blade trilogy came out August 26th from Alliance Films.  Pick it up!  And ignore that third one.

I have already gone on at length about No Country For Old Men.  Without a doubt in my mind, it was the best movie of last year.  For the full review:  http://blog.rogersradiointernet.com/cynicalcinema/2008/05/10/no-country-for-old-men-best-movie-of-the-millenium-1010/  Now, Alliance Films is releasing it again, along with The Man Who Wasn’t There in a two-disc set.  A two-disc set everyone should buy.  Not only is No Country For Old Men the best film of the past ten years, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a very underrated classic.  Since I have already reviewed No Country, I’ll talk about that one here instead.

Billy Bob Thornton plays a barber who hates his life.  He tries to do something, anything, to relieve his boredom, and that something is blackmail.  He blackmails James Gandolfini, his wife’s boss, who is having an affair with his wife (Frances McDormand).  A fairly innocent, one-time plan at first, the whole thing, as with all film noir, spirals out of control, and before long, Thornton is involved with murder.  And then things get really weird.  The film is shot in black and white, set in the forties, and feels just like 1940s film noir.  It captures the tone, the feeling, and the pacing of great noir, and there are some great performances by Thornton, McDormand, Gandolfini, and Tony Shaloub as a high-priced lawyer.  Also terrific is Scarlett Johannson, who appears as a young ingenue piano player, and looks even hotter in black and white with a 40s hairdo.  And then there is the whole alien abduction thing.  Insane, but this movie is terrific.

The Coen Brothers have done some of the best movies of the past twenty years.  And two of them are packaged together today by Alliance Films.  Well worth picking them both up.

First off, I want to say that Pineapple Express is the worst movie made by the combination of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen.  That being said, it is still better than most other comedies in the world.  And just because it doesn’t live up to the promise of Superbad and 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.  Because it is.  It is funny.  And it is good. 

Normally, I don’t much like stoner movies.  With the possible exception of Half Baked.  The problem I have with these movies is that they assume the people watching are in on the joke.  Like there’s some kind of giant stoner culture in the world where everyone listens to the same music, watches the same movies and TV shows, and knows all the same jokes.  They have the same vocabulary - reefer, bong, hydro, roach, so on and so forth.  And because I’m watching the movie, they assume I too am a part of this club.  And I’m not.  I don’t want to be a part of this club.  I don’t like this vocabulary.  I don’t like the word “Bogart” being thrown at me by some pothead as though it’s a secret word only him, me, and nine hundred thousand other useless potheads know.

Pineapple Express is different.  Seth Rogen stars as a weed-smoking process server.  His job is to dress up in different disguises in order to get close to people and serve them with legal papers.  James Franco stars as his weed dealer, a total burnout desperate for a friend.  After Rogen witnesses a murder, he and Franco are sent on a crazy flight all over the city, looking for some people and hiding from others.  Originally, the two characters were the opposite.  Franco was cast as the uptight process server and Rogen was to be the laid-back burnout dealer.  Which would have been ideal casting, one would think.  But somehow, along the way, the roles got switched.  And they decided to have Rogen play the guy with the job and the suit and the tie and the girlfriend, and pretty-boy James Franco became the dope smoking burnout.  And it works.  I can only assume it works even better than it would have the other way around.

Franco plays a character as far removed from Harry Osbourne in Spiderman as is possible.  And Rogen is fantastic, as usual.  The chemistry between the two is incredible, and the dialogue is great.  It appears to be dialogue that Rogen and Apatow can write in their sleep, but that is still better than anything this side of Kevin Smith.  The scene at the end, where Rogen, Franco and their dealer buddy Danny McBride are sitting around in a restaurant rehashing the events of the movie is absolutely hilarious.  And the opening scene, where Bill Hader is a test subject in a military experiment with marijuana is priceless. 

After that, the movie is haphazard, and there are moments that are hit-and-miss.  But the spirit of the film is endearing and fun.  The scenes where the two main characters try to do things they’ve seen in action movies, with real life results, are terrific.  Franco tries to kick the window out of a police car, but succeeds only in putting his foot through the windshield, where it gets stuck.  And the car chase ensues, with his foot hanging out of the window in front of him, and we all laugh.  Because it’s real and it’s funny.  And so is the rest of this movie.  Check out Pineapple Express.  You don’t have to be a stoner to like it.  Which is why it’s a good stoner movie.

The original Mummy movie was kind of neat.  Not fantastic, not a brilliant achievement by any means, but fun and action-packed and charming in a certain way.  The second Mummy was much worse.  But at the very least it was exactly what kids have come to expect from Brendan Fraser.  He will draw laughs by falling down and hurting himself, and he will throw cheesy lines at the screen with all the charisma of a bag of trail mix.  All of this is cranked up for the third installment in the series, The Mummy:  Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  And it is much, much worse.  This is one of the worst movies of the year.  Like many series that run on too long (think about that original run of Batman movies) there are more and more characters thrown at the screen.

The original players are back - Brendan Fraser as the wisecracking spy-archaeologist-mummyfighter.  John Hannah as Fraser’s long-suffering, greedy but good at heart brother-in law.  Maria Bello stands in for Rachel Weisz, and that’s a decent switch.  Rachel Weisz does absolutely nothing for me, whereas I do like Maria Bello.  But, like the other characters, she is given just about nothing to do.  Thrown into the mix this time are Luke Ford as Fraser and Bello’s son, a…dashing archaeologist.  Almost the exact same story as Indiana Jones 4.  Then there is Isabella Leong, who is thousands of years old and guards the emperor’s tomb.  Her mother (Michelle Yeoh) also guards the tomb.  And then there’s an ancient Chinese general, a double-crossing museum curator, and the emperor himself.  Jet Li.

Everything about this movie is dreadful.  Great actors like Michelle Yeoh, Maria Bello and Jet Li are given, basically, nothing to do.  Every other actor is a cartoon.  Especially Luke Ford, who exudes the personality of a wet towel as the most boring “dashing archaeologist” of all time.  Somehow, this two-thousand-year-old woman falls in love with this tofu-stir-fry of a man.  How does this happen?  I think it all took place when he said “golly, I think you’re neat”.  And BAM!  Love.  The set-up involves Fraser and Bello being recruited to transport some kind of artifact to China.  Why them?  Well, the bad guy made sure it would be them.  Why did he do that?  Well, so they could be in the movie, of course.  And that’s about the extent of the logic that goes on here.  Until the Abominable Snowmen show up to put the narrative back on the straight and narrow.  No, really.  The Yeti come.

So we get some kind of ancient mystical cryptic secret.  Luke Ford, the linoleum floor of dashing archaeologists, has uncovered the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Who is Jet Li.  The woman who defends the tomb attacks him.  But then they fall in love when the bad guys show up and have this crystal thing, and it opens the emperor’s sarcophagus and removes the curse that was placed on him thousands of years ago.  Why do they do this?  Because the crazy army guy thinks that the world needs a crazy emperor.  Which is fine.  We DO need a crazy emperor who can somehow shoot fire from his eyes and create icicles with his mind.  So far so good.  Well, so bad.  But it gets worse.

It turns out that the emperor (who is still a computer-generated Jet Li) needs to get to some kind of gateway in the mountains (the YETI mountains) with his crystal.  And if he arrives there, and puts the crystal in the hole, ALL will be LOST!  So he gets there and puts the crystal in the hole, and…oh.  It just shows him where he needs to go now.  But if he gets THERE, and drinks from the water, he will become immortal and be able to turn into a dragon, and ALL will be LOST!  So he gets to the cave, drinks the water, and…oh.  It turns out that NOW, all he needs to do is raise his army and cross the Great Wall of China, and then ALL will be LOST!

It really seems like they are making this movie up as they go along.  The emperor gets to a certain place, and they realize that the movie has only been going for half an hour, and they need to make it longer.  So they create another crisis and another trek and add more and more characters.  At the end of the film, they have the same problem - it isn’t yet long enough - so they pad it with a really cheesy, lame computer-generated battle between armies of the undead.  And then - the one moment that could have saved this movie!  Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, two of the greatest actors in the history of kung-fu movies, are going to have a sword fight!  And…ugh.  The sword fight is six thrusts, six parries, and forty-eight jump cuts.  We have NO idea what’s going on! 

And that’s the problem with most of this movie.  This is a non-stop, beginning to end action movie.  So at the very least, it should involve compelling action.  But this movie is directed by Rob Cohen.  The guy behind The Fast And The Furious.  And it looks like a crappy music video.  So many jump cuts, so much frenetic editing, that we never, ever know what’s actually going on.  When you have Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh who are going to fight with swords, you know what you could do?  Nothing.  Just get out of the way, point one camera at them, and let them go.  They know what they’re doing.  But Cohen obviously couldn’t leave well enough alone, and the charm and excitement are completely sucked out of this film.

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.

Jet Li is still an awfully cool actor, and great martial artist. But he’s a little past his prime when it comes to the high-flying stunts and crazy kung-fu action. That prime came between 1991 (Once Upon A Time In China) and 2002 (Hero). And one of the best films in that span was Tai Chi Master, a 1993 movie directed by Yuen Woo Ping. Ping is one of the greatest kung-fu action directors of all time. He’s the visionary behind such fantastic films as Iron Monkey, Drunken Master, and Wing Chun. He’s also the fight choreographer on Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and Kung Fu Hustle. And one of his best (and Li’s best) is Tai Chi Master, which comes out on DVD today, August 5th, from Alliance Films.

In addition to Li, Tai Chi Master stars Michelle Yeoh, who became a massive international kung-fu superstar with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000. As kids, Junbao (Li) and Tienbo (played by Chin Siu-Ho) are inseperable. Although Tienbo is clearly a little bit of a bully, and takes advanatage of Junbao all the time, Junbao is too naive and good-natured to let it bother him. But it becomes clear early on that while Junbao will always be pure of heart and mind, Tienbo is headed for bad news. The two are in training at a Shaolin temple, and after a violent incident perpetrated by Tienbo, the two are booted out. Lost and adrift in the world, after spending their entire lives in the Shaolin temple, they are kung-fu masters with no idea how to live a regular life. Jet Li is playing the role he was born to play, the wide-eyed, innocent optimist who ends up having his world crash down around him and turns into the bad-ass who fights for truth and justice.

The two best friends soon split - Tienbo to join the government’s soldiers, with a plan to move up the ranks in order to make money. We realize right away, although Junbao of course doesn’t, that this path will make him into a really bad guy. Junbao, on the other hand, ends up becoming a member of a resistance force that fights against government corruption. Of course, we know the stage is set for an ultimate showdown between the two former best friends, but it’s the journey that is magnificent. As in every kung-fu film, there is some comedy, and although it is rare in Tai-Chi Master, the comedic scenes are very, very funny. Michelle Yeoh shows up as a kung-fu master whose husband has left her for an important official in the government, and she is drinking her sorrows away. Which leads to the inevitable drunken restaurant kung-fu showdown that is so standard in kung-fu films of the 80s and 90s. But rarely has it been done this well.

And it’s the kung-fu that makes this movie so great. There are some of the greatest, most adrenaline-pumping action fight scenes in oriental cinema in Tai Chi Master. The story isn’t classic, but it’s very good. The acting isn’t classic, but it’s very good. The comedy isn’t classic, but it’s very good. But the kung-fu IS classic. And that means that Tai Chi Master verges on being classic itself. It isn’t quite classic, but it’s very, very good.

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors in the world.  He is the man behind the best of the Blade movies, Blade II, the incredible recent film Pan’s Labyrinth, and of course the first Hellboy film, which I really liked.  The thing that made Hellboy great was that it didn’t look like other superhero or comic book movies.  It looked like something totally new.  Dark, spectacular and imaginative, the world occupied by the characters was vivid and appealing.  And Ron Perlman as Hellboy was perfect.  A completely new type of comic book hero.  The spawn of hell, a creature who existed to protect the world from the supernatural creatures that threaten to destroy it, who at the same time has the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old.  He smokes cigars and drinks beer and basically lives the life of a young adult, only he lives it in isolation, separated from the world by the government which uses him to do their dirty work.

Hellboy II:  The Golden Army is very similar.  The set designs are once again vivid and wonderful, the creatures and monsters Hellboy has to face are once again interesting and really cool looking, and Ron Perlman is as good as ever.  (Perlman, I should add, has worked with Del Toro twice before - once in the original Hellboy, obviously, and once as the coolest bad guy in Blade II.)  However, the creatures are not quite as cool as they were the first time around.  Partly because they remind me of a lot of other creatures.  Guillermo del Toro creatures.  There is a bizarre creature with no eyes in it’s head, but rather in it’s wings, that at one point helps to heal Hellboy.  And it really reminded me of the creature with eyes in it’s hands from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The bad guy, an elf prince named Nuada, played by Luke Goss, reminds me very much of the bad guy in Blade II.  Perhaps that is because, now that I’ve done my research, in Blade II the bad guy Nomak was played by…Luke Goss.  But he seems to be made up the same way in this one - he’s just Nomak with hair - and it’s a little disconcerting.

I really don’t want to rag on Guillermo del Toro for ripping off…himself.  Once you’ve created such memorable stuff in your career, it’s not such a bad idea to revisit the things that worked once before.  After all, we all want to hear the new AC/DC album, knowing full well it will be exactly the same as every other AC/DC album.  But the story in Hellboy II is a little weaker as well.  This movie could have been a much deeper commentary on the “nature of heroism” and so forth.  Not that I’m asking it to be The Dark Knight, which would be an unreasonable expectation, but this sort of thing is hinted at so often in the movie that it’s disappointing not to see it fleshed out.

Hellboy is of course, being a young adult at heart, eager to escape from the close confines of the government lab where he is housed.  He now lives with his girlfriend from the first movie, played by Selma Blair, a woman who can control fire.  And he’s constantly at odds with the government management, represented ably by Jeffrey Tambor.  Hellboy wants to be a hero, beloved in the city, and wants the public to recognize him for his good deeds.  Basically, he feels he deserves to be a celebrity.  And perhaps he’s right.  The government wants to keep him under wraps.  They want to relegate “Hellboy” sightings to the tabloids, creating a “bigfoot” or “loch ness” aura around him.  And perhaps they’re right.

There are a few scenes where Hellboy IS seen by the public, and even though he has clearly just helped them out, they are afraid of him and assume he’s a bad guy, because, well, he looks like the devil.  All of this stuff would be really interesting if the movie was willing to go into it, but it never really does.  Also interesting would have been the real motivation of the elf prince, Nuada, and his relationship with his twin sister.  He wants to resurrect the Golden Army, an unstoppable force, to take over the world from the humans.  He points to the fact that the elves and mystical creatures have abandoned the world to the humans many years ago, and human beings have just screwed it up.  Unless these supernatural creatures reclaim the world from the humans, the Earth will be destroyed.  And it’s their Earth too.

This could be a really fascinating debate.  Is it worth killing the humans if you know they are in the process, inadvertent or not, of killing you?  Does the word of the elf king, given to the human race many thousands of years ago and forgotten by today’s people, mean more than protecting your environment?  I could see this movie becoming a serious ethical dilemma for everyone, but it never goes there either.  Nadua is the villain, he wants to destroy all human beings, and he must be stopped.  He is evil.  End of story.  It;s too bad, because Hellboy II is every bit as visually impressive as Hellboy, the cast is equally terrific (although I do miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien), there is still a lot of good humour and the energy is still fantastic. 

But Hellboy II does not reach the level of Hellboy simply because it sets up some interesting stuff that never pays off, in favour of throwing even more impressive and stunning visuals at us.  And all of that is great - Guillermo del Toro is one of the directors who can make the best use of a massive budget - but it’s a little overwhelming while the story ends up being a little underwhelming.  The first one was a must-see.  And if you liked that one, this one is a should-rent.

Hancock has a great star.  It has a great soundtrack.  And it has a great premise.  Will Smith stars as a superhero with a drinking problem, a man who saves people just because that seems to be the thing he should be doing, while showing complete disregard for the property he destroys while doing so, or the massive amount of destruction he creates while rescuing innocent people and stopping criminals.  I absolutely love the idea that this is the first movie I’ve seen that really shows the consequences of the actions of a superhero.  Sure, he stopped the gun-toting bad guys, but in doing so he’s caused four million dollars worth of damage to L.A. highways and buildings.

A few funny scenes open the film, with Smith flying through highway signs, destroying cop cars with his drunken buffoonery, and eventually setting down the SUV full of bad guys on top of a building in the sky over Los Angeles.  But the movie quickly takes a turn when he meets Jason Bateman - in another hilarious scene where Hancock saves Bateman from a train, then unnecessarily destroys the train rather than getting out of the way.  The one thing I wish I had seen in this film is a little more of the consequences of these actions.  With the train derailment, the cop cars exploding, wouldn’t there be a rather heavy toll in terms of human life?  Why are we hearing about the monetary vaule of the damage when people clearly would have died?  Well, as it turns out, Peter Berg wanted to maintain a light tone in the movie, and keep some humour in there.  And it would be tough to do that if Hancock was actually killing people.

 When he meets Bateman, a P.R. man, the movie changes as Bateman tries to change Hancock’s public image.  He realizes that deep down beneath the drunken exterior, Hancock really just wants to be liked.  And he convinces Hancock to respond to the 6,000+ outstanding warrants out for his arrest.  The theory being that if Hancock goes to jail, he will be seen by the public as admitting his sins, and that eventually the public will miss him when crime rises.  And, for the most part, it works.  We learn a little bit about Hancock’s back story, and yet another story line develops, this one involving Bateman’s wife, played by Charlize Theron.  And by this time there is too much going on.  And we stop caring, even when things start coming together.

A drunken superhero is a great idea - how would one arrest this man?  Who could possibly convince him to sober up?  Would the lives he saves be worth it compared with the lives he inadvertently takes?  All of these things are touched upon in Hancock, but it isn’t quite enough.  In the end, there is nothing terribly interesting about the movie.  Watching Will Smith is always a good time, and he is reliably engaging as the imbittered, sour Superman figure.  But the bizarre story twists near the end feel like a clumsy way to create some actual drama.  You have an invincible superhero, and he’s the only one of his kind on Earth.  So in order for there to be a real bad guy who can actually kill Hancock, and therefore create some drama in a will-he-make-it sort of way, they had to find a way for this to come about.  And it’s contrived and irritating.

Hancock is decent.  It features a great Will Smith (but we all knew he would be), and a solid premise with interesting ideas.  But I would have really liked to see those interesting ideas explored more, and (amazingly) I’d have liked to see Charlize Theron less.

This summer, we’re pretty spoiled when it comes to the big, blockbuster comic book movies.  Iron Man was absolutely fantastic, and The Dark Knight is the best comic book flick ever made.  And looked at in that light, the re-release of The Punisher, special extended edition, would be easy to overlook.  And perhaps that’s for the best.  Now, I must say I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the original Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren in 1989.  That scene where he’s being tortured on that table, and the bad guys are about to do that comic book thing where they leave the room, assuming he’s going to die.  And through the pain, and the horror, he yells at their departing backs;  “Hey!  HEY!  Have a nice day.”  Magnificently idiotic!

And although there are parts of the new Punisher that are aggressively mediocre enough to be kind of funny, and there are moments that actually verge on the magnificently idiotic, the movie just doesn’t have enough of those moments to justify watching it.  This new, extended edition, appears to have added a whole new story line.  One which requires a major military scene in Kuwait to start the movie and set up this story line.  And yet, that scene was never filmed.  Too expensive, you see.  So what they have done is photograph the actors, and they’ve animated the scene to kick off the movie.  The main problem with that is that not only does it feel tacked on, but it also makes that whole story line tacked on, and they were probably right to cut it out in the first cut of the movie.

This movie was too long the first time.  Now they’ve added an extra twenty minutes, making it interminable.  It just isn’t compelling enough to get me to sit there for two hours plus.  Thomas Jane is OK as the comic book hero (who has no superpowers or special abilities, except…anger?)  And John Travolta is alright as the Comic Book villain, Howard Saint.  But there are so many bothersome moments in the film.  If Saint wants the Punisher dead so badly, why does he send one person at a time?  Why not send his whole team?  And if the Punisher keeps losing all these fights, isn’t he more the Punished than the Punisher?  And why does he go to such great lengths to mess with the minds of his targets when he’s just going to walk in and blow them away three days later anyway?

Not only was this movie average at best the first time around, it has become even more bloated and obnoxious this time.  While it’s an easy DVD to watch when you’ve shut off your brain, there is no real redeeming value to this film or DVD edition.  Even the special features are weak - all we get is a “making-of” nine minute feature about this extended edition, which involves picture taking and drawing.  Boring.  Just like the movie.  It came out July 15th from Alliance Films.

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.