Cynical Cinema

Shoot ‘Em Up is the latest DVD to be released by Alliance Atlantis, it hit stores yesterday and it was the biggest release of the week. The movie stars Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti, two terrific actors who seem bemused at best with their involvement in the film. Shoot ‘Em Up is sort of a spoof of the genre, the shoot-em-up genre, where every scene is taken to it’s extreme utmost, where most of the staples of the genre are spoofed, sort of, and sent up, kind of. It’s a tough movie to review, and for me, it was kind of tough to watch. You see, when you are clearly “sending up” a genre, that gives you license to do a lot of things. You can defy the laws of physics with your action set pieces. You can get away with having bad guys with the aim of storm troopers and good guys with the aim of Robin Hood. You can even get away with breaks in continuity and terrible dialogue, because people might just think “well, that’s just part of the spoof”.

Where Shoot ‘Em Up lost me was where the lines blurred between an actual action movie and a send-up of action movies. Hot Fuzz was a terrific action-movie spoof, because we, the audience, were constantly aware that the action sequences were created more for amusement than for adrenaline-pumping, hardcore, edge-of-your-seat thrills. In Shoot ‘Em Up, I constantly felt like the action scenes were supposed to be taken sort-of seriously. Sure, there was a small wink to credibility and plausibility here and there. But the lines and the action are delivered so straight, especially by Clive Owen, that it becomes difficult to laugh along with the implausible. At least Giammatti is constantly aware that he is playing a Gary Oldman-esque cartoon character, and hams it up in a way that indicates he is enjoying himself.

But merely acknowledging the ridiculousness of your movie does not mean that terrible dialogue can be given a pass. The dialogue is so bad in places that it literally stops the movie. Owen dispatches a bad guy by jamming a carrot through his eye and out the back of his head, and then says “eat your vegetables”, or some such nonsense. It actually stops the movie dead, and more bad guys have to run in to be killed off just to jump start the flow of the movie once more. The worst line is delivered by Monica Bellucci: “You know, Smith. I’ve just figured out what you hate most of all. Yourself“. Ouch. If she was overacting, hamming it up like Giammatti, this could have slid. But she delivers this in such earnest seriousness that you can’t help but cringe.

There are few cliches in movies worse than the bad guy who is SO evil that he will kill his own men just for screwing up. He cares so little about human life, you see, that he is willing to kill even those he needs! This has never been plausible, unless it’s some sadistic Nazi colonel with the weight of the whole Third Reich behind him. You wouldn’t dare disobey him, you see, for they would just send another guy to replace him, and THAT guy would kill you. But if it’s just the boss, then…what? Suppose your boss came to the cubicle of the guy next to you, and fired him because there had been a spelling error on the memo he sent out about the office Christmas party. How long would you stay in that job? Now, suppose that boss didn’t just fire your co-worker, but bludgeoned him to death with an ax handle? Would you keep your job, making damn sure to use spell check when you sent out a memo, or would you call the police? These bad guys sure are evil, what with their indiscriminate killing. But how could they ever get anyone to work for them? Ever?

And Paul Giamatti somehow has seven hundred expendable commandos working for him. Another obnoxious cliche in movies - the government. Because the bad guys are the government, they can cover up ANYTHING. Even the sudden appearance of seven hundred bodies, in abandoned warehouses, above a heavy metal club, in the middle of highways, in the park, in a field, and at six hundred other locations around town. No one will EVER know. They’re the GOVERNMENT. And of course, Clive Owen can kill anyone he looks at funny, but seems to miss the main bad guy every single time, until the final, dramatic showdown. Again, this slides by because the movie doesn’t take itself seriously. Just like that guy who wanders in from nowhere to explain the entire set-up and give us all the information we need to know, like some kind of contrived narrator.

But again, that is not an excuse for bad dialogue or scripting. Spoiler alert! Stop here if you don’t want to know major plot points! Of which there are not many! You see, the whole killing spree revolves around a baby factory. There is an important senator running for President of the United States on a platform of gun control. This senator also has a disease for which he needs bone marrow, and women are being artificially inseminated with this man’s DNA so he can have a child that will be able to donate it’s bone marrow and save his life. The bad guys are the gun lobby, who are against gun control, for obvious reasons, and they think that by killing these mothers and their babies, they are basically murdering the senator. OK, it’s a far-fetched movie, so this isn’t a problem. But what is a problem is that when we find out these gun-crazy nuts are working WITH the senator, none of that gets explained. If they were working WITH him now, why would they still want to kill the babies and thereby dispatch the presidential candidate? He has agreed to reverse his stance on gun control, so why are they still out there killing babies?

All the standard guns-and-action movie devices are in place here. The guy who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, who also happens to be the deadliest man alive. The hooker with the heart of gold (although her personal method of prostitution is too weird to be anything other than a comedic device, and too strange and off-putting to get any laughs). The dark personal past, skeletons in the closet, sad secret history of the tough-as-nails good guy. The crazy leaps in logic that are made by every single character to ensure they are all in the same place at the same time, that no sane person or Stephen Hawking would ever be able to deduce. It’s all there, but it is either played too straight for a spoof, or too bonkers for a straight movie. Shoot ‘Em Up has some pretty cool action scenes (the rope scene, the warehouse scene - NOT the skydiving scene, which was obnoxious), but it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Or, it knows what it wants to be but doesn’t know how to get there.

It’s like a Limp Bizkit album, that really wants to be a rock album AND a rap album, but ends up kind of failing at both.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a sequel to Elizabeth, which was a very good movie from 1998 that netted Cate Blanchett her first Oscar nomination. I suppose Oscar feels as though they ought to nominate her again, if her first performance in the same role was Academy-Award-worthy, then so too must this one be, right? Wrong. Not that Blanchett is bad. But last year, Helen Mirren was exquisite in her role as this very same queen, Elizabeth the First. And Mirren showed exactly what that role should be. She defined it. And one of the main reasons is - and much as I hate it when actresses do this - they uglied her up. If history tells us anything through pictures about Queen Elizabeth I, it is that she was fairly ugly. Mirren put on a fake nose and made herself look less attractive than she actually is. Charlize Theron did the same for Monster, and that was OK too. They were both playing real people. Real, ugly, people. Cate Blanchett is not ugly. She is, in fact, striking and beautiful. That this is historically inaccurate is insignificant. But if she were to look like Helen Mirren did, it would add a certain weight to the role that is just not present here.

Oh sure, she’s good. In fact, she’s great, and has been in every movie in which she has appeared in her illustrious career. But deserving of an Oscar nod she is not. Aside from the occasional mood swing and enraged outburst, little is required of Blanchett here except to have a pale face and appear queenly. The movie itself is not that good either. The first one was a breath of fresh air, it looked like something fairly new when I saw it back in the 90s. But now this sequel feels like just another period piece, like Becoming Jane which was also just released, and countless others. “Period piece” basically means people dress up in old-timey clothes and talk old-timey talk and do stuff that must have happened in old-timey times. Some are magnificent, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not. There is of course, the prerequisite love story, this one between Blanchett and Clive Owen, who plays the famous adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh. Owen is decent in that role as well, bringing charm and old-timey manliness to the role, and Geoffrey Rush is terrific as always in his supporting role, that of Sir Francis Walsingham. But the whole movie feels a little forced.

And when it finally ends, and there is a bit of action, it feels tacked on, and too-little-too-late. The rest of the film had just plain bored me by then, and I didn’t care what happened to our heroes. Elizabeth: The Golden Age does what a period piece should do - have great costumes and convey the feel of that time period. But it does little else. And so does Cate Blanchett.

I have been attempting to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible in the week leading up to the Big Event, but I have managed only to see those that are on DVD. And I have seen everything that is on DVD so far that is up for an award. Which means I have still missed out on dozens of films. I have seen all the Best Actor movies except for the likely winner, There Will Be Blood. I have seen only two of the Best Picture nominees, No Country For Old Men and Michael Clayton. In point of fact, the only categories where I have seen all five nominees are Sound Editing, where one of them is Transformers, and makeup, where one of them is Norbit. And I have seen only three of the Best Actress nominees. So far, I am rooting for Julie Christie to win Best Actress for Away From Her, simply because it’s slightly better than Marion Cotillard’s job in La Vie En Rose. But really, I am hoping for Anyone But Cate Blanchett This Year. She will certainly win others in her career, since she has that Meryl Streep thing going for her - she will be nominated for every movie she does for the rest of time - and she may well win Best Supporting for I’m Not There (another film that I regret to say I have yet to see), but she does not deserve it for this one. At least there’s a category for Costume Design. Oh, the prestige!

Speaking of costume design, and by extension period pieces, here is a brief list of the ten best period pieces ever made (and by brief, I mean ten items long):

10. The Piano (1993)
9. Raise The Red Lantern (1991)
8. Once Upon A Time in America (1984)
7. The Seventh Seal (1957)
6. Rashomon (1951)
5. The Duellists (1977)
4. Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003)
3. Once Upon A Time In China (1991)
2. The Untouchables (1987)
1. The Seven Samurai (1954)

Hmm…two Robert DeNiro, two Harvey Keitel, two Toshiro Mifune. Maybe I need to diversify my taste some. But anyone who insists that Titanic should be on that list should be kicked in the leg.