Cynical Cinema

Call me jaded. I probably am. But most of the time, I have a very easy time suspending my disbelief when movies get into out-of-this-world, totally-impossible territory. But it’s up to the movie to pull you in. And if you’re going to make, say, Spy Kids, you need to make this otherwordly scene so entertaining and captivating that people forget easily how implausible it is. Journey To The Center of the Earth is not one of those movies. I mean, if you’re going to create a world, at the center of the Earth, and have glow-in-the-dark birds and tyrannosaurs and gigantic sea monsters inhabit that world, that’s fine. But you must, in doing so, acknowledge that this is all scientifically impossible. I mean, the falling six thousand, four hundred kilometres to the center of the earth and surviving. The idea that being at the centre of the earth would not, in itself, kill you. And the idea that you could survive the trip back to the surface riding on a geyser. All of this is, I think we can all agree, scientifically impossible.

And that’s fine. Movies do not have to make scientific sense, or even attempt to be plausible. They are made for kids. And kids watch Space Chimps. But here’s the thing - if you’re the one making this film, you NEED to, at the very least, acknowledge that you are making something far, far outside the realm of realistic science. And in order to make that acknowledgement, ALL you have to do - ALL - is not call attention to it. Like, make your protagonist a kid, who falls down a really, really deep six thousand kilometre hole, into the centre of the Earth, and lands on…I don’t know…a marshmallow tree, and somehow survives. And then there is this massive world. That would be really, really easy to do.

The thing NOT to do is to make your protagonist a scientist. Or Brendan Fraser. In this case, Journey To The Center Of The Earth has made both mistakes at once. The protagonist IS Brendan Fraser. Playing a scientist. Who is constantly figuring out scientific things. Like, the walls are made of magnesium, and if you light magnesium with a match, it burns. This could come in handy. The geothermal winds are more powerful and strong than the surface winds, so we need to put our boat-kite way up in the air. The ground is made of tungsten calcite, and therefore is in imminent danger of collapsing. (I’m making up most of these words. I don’t remember the movie well enough and I don’t care enough about it to look them up.)

But the point I’m making is that if you’re going to make one of your characters a genius, you can only do so if your movie is also going to be smart. And if you are going to make one of your characters a scientist, your movie should at the very least be scientifically plausible. Make Brendan Fraser a crane operator, or a Wendy’s manager, and I would have much, much less of a problem with this movie.

Now, I must give the DVD some credit here - it comes with 3-D glasses, so if you wish you can put on those glasses and watch this movie in 3-D.  And some of that is pretty cool.  But even if those special effects were the greatest in movie history, I wouldn’t be willing to sit through this story, this script and this acting in order to find out. Skip this one, either way. Journey To The Centre of the Earth comes out October 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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.