Cynical Cinema

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.

That’s eight out of ten on my randomly-decided-upon measuring stick for movies. The box for the Russell Crowe - Christian Bale remake of 3:10 to Yuma says “The Best Western Since Unforgiven!” This is not true. It is, however, the SECOND best western since Unforgiven. The best one was a little-seen film called The Proposition, starring Guy Pearce, and it was a phenomenal film. What 3:10 to Yuma understands very, very well is the western hero. The greatest westerns all had heroes cut from one of two cloths. Either they were generally decent people who didn’t want to use guns but were forced into it, like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Or, they were tough, rugged frontier men who did not fear death, who were perfectly happy using a pistol, but they had a dark side and were not all good. Like Clint Eastwood in The Good The Bad and the Ugly, William Holden in the Wild Bunch, John Wayne in The Searchers, or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. True western heroes are never the type that are happy, upstanding citizens who also are great gunfighters who don’t fear death and are dangerous to bad guys but perfectly safe to good guys. That hero is the mark of a less interesting western movie. One that can still be good, but never great.

Another thing 3:10 to Yuma gets right is the villain. Yes. I hate it in movies when the bad guy whoots his own man just to prove what a bad guy he really is. And yes, Russell Crowe shoots his own man in the very first scene he’s in. But this time, it is with a purpose. It is not an attempt to make him into the personification of evil, he actually has a reason. Both Crowe and Christian Bale are absolutely fantastic in the movie, both playing the western “heroes” with shades of grey. Peter Fonda is fantastic as well, as a grizzled old Pinkerton detective, a standard character in the old westerns - the lawman charged with upholding the law who may actually be more evil than the man he is bringing to justice.

And that is what makes 3:10 to Yuma fantastic. This film really is a throwback to the western tradition of the 1950s when the original was made. That is one reason this is not a classic western. Really, there is nothing new here. This is just a revitalization and a masterful rendition of an old genre. There are two other things (two characters, in fact) that hold the movie back from being truly great - but it isn’t really the movie’s fault. You see, at the time in the 1950s, these two characters were in many of the westerns. But since then, these characters have become standard in countless movies, and so they seem like cliches. The one character is Crowe’s right-hand man, played by Ben Foster. He is the psychotic killer we see all too often in movies, the man who will kill anyone without compunction, but who looks upon his mentor with a kind of respect that borders on worship. The other character is Bale’s young son, who is almost cartoonish at the beginning of the film with his bitterness at his father and his lack of respect for his toughness. Of course we know he will respect his father by the end of the film, so it seems like overkill with so much of it at the beginning.

But the best part of 3:10 to Yuma is Russell Crowe. He is magnificent as the outlaw with ambiguous motives, he’s absolutely captivating whenever he is on the screen. He is able to walk a fine line between charm and menace, and it’s such a magnetic performance that we never lose sight of who he is. A killer and a bandit with some kind of conscience. He makes every scene he’s in come to life, and that’s almost the entire movie. The gunfights are great - realistic and gritty, if a little stylized. The final gun battle is also the second best since Unforgiven (number two is that final gun fight in Open Range.)

This is definitely the best well-publicized western since Unforgiven, but there have been quite a few good ones in the last few years, for all you western fans - Seraphim Falls was terrific, Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson turned in some great performances. The Proposition was criminally overlooked. Dead Man also, although that may well be because it is just so weird. But definitely worth seeing. And Open Range was a pretty good representation of the genre. It’s a genre that has been called dead many times, but with films like 3:10 to Yuma, one can only hope that the next resurrection of the western is coming soon.

There have been hundreds of movies made about vampires. Vampires themselves have become so pervasive in our culture that movies no longer need to explain them. The rules are set. A vampire bites you, you become one. You kill them by stabbing them with wood through the heart, or by getting them into the sunlight, or by throwing holy water on them or by hiring Wesley Snipes. Therefore, it is fairly difficult to make a vampire movie that has a fresh, new concept. And 30 Days of Night does not try to do so. On the surface, it appears to be a very by-the-numbers vampire flick. One with a neat premise - in Alaska, there is an entire month (30 days) where there is no sun. As such, creatures who are light-sensitive, such as vampires, would be free to roam around all day every day and destroy all the people in a small Alaskan town. And this is where the movie begins. Another great thing about vampire movies is that you never need to question the motivation of the bad guys. They’re vampires. Vampires = bad. Bad = killing humans. No more questions.

So, in that sense, this is a vampire movie. The creatures can’t handle UV light, and they are in town simply to hunt and kill all humans. Never mind why. No one cares, least of all the humans who are being hunted. However, no wooden stakes through the heart for these baddies. No, the only way to kill them, other than sunlight, is beheading. Which leads to some pretty gory ax-to-the-throat scenes. So…are these really vampires? ‘Cause…they kinda are, and kinda aren’t…again, who cares? Not the people. They just want to hide and run and then, eventually, as all people do in films like this one, kill all their enemies. Josh Hartnett plays a cop in this small Alaskan town, reprising his standard Pearl Harbouresque role as the smiley hot guy love interest, the poor man’s Heath Ledger. The director is David Slade, who did an excellent but very hard-to-watch pedophile-related movie recently called Hard Candy. (It stars a diabolical and creepy Ellen Page before Juno.) And the de-rigeur hot chick is played by Melissa George. At the beginning of the film, she is fighting with Hartnett and racing to catch a plane away from Alaska. Do we wonder at all whether she’ll make it to the plane? Or patch up her relationship before the movie ends? Do we care? Make with the quasi-vampires already.

And they do. Ben Foster (Russell Crowe’s right-hand man in 3:10 To Yuma) has a creepy turn as the foreshadower of the invasion, and the creepy bad guys show up 19 minutes in. There is a genuinely startling rock-paper-scissors scene, a painful oh-it’s-grandma-smoking-the-weed scene, and someone uses the phrase “coked up on PCP”. I don’t think it was meant to be ironic. Snow, it turns out, is a terrific canvas to better show blood spatter - Dexter would be in his element here. And this movie is definitely gory, sometimes gross, often creepy, but somehow rarely scary, if at all. Once we have seen the vampires in all their glory, there isn’t much to frighten us any more. In fact, the last half hour of this almost-two-hour movie has less in common with horror movies than it does with old westerns. This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, and that sort of thing. And that’s the real problem with 30 Days of Night. It is too long. There are some genuinely tense moments, some terrific shocks and some great ideas. But by the end, we have either guessed the ending or we no longer care, and we’re kinda glad the whole thing is over. My fingers are tired. I’m glad this review’s over.