Cynical Cinema

I never thought I would again see this day.  I had begun to rely on Jason Statham!  In fact, he had become the most consistent, and reliable, purveyor of garbage this side of Steven Seagal!  Not that I am comparing Statham’s acting skills to Seagal’s.  Statham can act circles around Seagal, and by that I mean he is capable of facial expressions.  In fact, Statham is a decent enough actor - he has the sort of macho charisma that characterizes some solid B-movie actors.  Bruce Campbell, or Ray Liotta in his early years.  But more than anything, he has been a sort of second-rate Bruce Willis, and his career has mirrored Willis’ in a lot of ways.  After what some (including me) would call his breakthrough role in the excellent movie Snatch, (his Die Hard), he has acted in thirty-one movies each year, and they have all been weak at best.

I know, I know, The Italian Job was pretty good.  But that wasn’t his movie, it was Mark Wahlberg’s.  So let’s examine Staham’s output since Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. 

Turn It Up:  This starred rappers Pras and Ja Rule.  Yep.
John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars:  This starred rapper Ice Cube.  And Natasha Henstridge.  And it was STILL awful.
Mean Machine:  A British version of The Longest Yard.  Starring Vinne Jones, a tougher, uglier version of Statham.
The One:  One of Jet Li’s worst movies.  But at least it had Jet Li.
The Transporter:  An absolutely bonkers, idiotic high-octane action flick.  Statham’s first real starring role.
Cellular:  Kim Basinger thriller.  Involving cell phones.
London:  One of Jessica Biel’s worst movies.  Which makes it pretty darn awful.
Revolver (4/10):  Stars rapper Andre 2000.  And Ray Liotta, the Statham-before-Statham.  Big twist ending!
Transporter 2:  Even worse than the first.
Chaos (4/10):  A mess of a movie that thinks it’s way smarter than it is.  But it DOES involve a big twist ending!
Crank:  A guilty pleasure.  It really is a terrible movie, but it’s a LOT of fun.
War (5/10):  Teams Statham with Jet Li again.  Better than The One, but that’s not saying much.  Big twist ending!
In The Name of the King:  A Dungeon Siege Tale (2/10):  Uwe Boll, perhaps the worst director alive, makes his worst movie.  And it stars Jason Statham as a farmer who happens to know kung-fu!

And now, we get The Bank Job.  I’m expecting a low-rent Italian Job, with less acting, less planning, and more explosions.  And then - halfway through, I am realizing that I’m actually into this!  This movie is really, really good!  Saffron Burrows (who for some reason doesn’t get billing here at all - in fact, only Statham is billed at all - which may be why this one flew under the radar) is a femme fatale who gets into trouble at customs in Britain.  MI-5, or MI-6, or some big, shadowy agency in Britain, recruits her to rob a bank.  They need to recover some compromising photos of the princess, photos that are being held by a major underworld figure in London.  The government can’t touch this bad guy until they take the photos away from him, and they are in his safe deposit box at this bank.  But there can’t be a trail back to the government, so they recruit Burrows to build a gang and rob the bank on their behalf.

She goes after Statham first.  He’s kind of an old flame, and he used to be a crook, but he’s now a small-time car dealer trying to go straight and having a tough time.  He in turn recruits a few of his crook friends that he trusts, and they plan the robbery.  This involves drilling under the ground and directly into the bank vault.  Every character in the film is interesting and well-written, the script is very smart, and everything about this heist film rings true.  And it should - this is based on a true story, and this whole thing really did happen in 1971.  Roger Donaldson has done a marvelous job directing the movie, and although the ending is intense and fairly complex, it isn’t one of those obnoxious BIG TWISTS that have come to define Statham movies of late.  The Bank Job is a remarkable movie.

The one complaint I have is that the characters keep referring to anyone involved in criminal activity as a “villain”.  Like, “I know most of the villains in London”.  Which I guess must be some sort of British slang, but it’s a little disconcerting.  Other than that, the movie is close to flawless.  I really hope this signals a new phase in Statham’s career, because I do like him.  After all, Bruce Wilis followed up on Die Hard with Look Who’s Talking, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Hudson Hawk before he became cool again.  But I do see that Statham is about to hit the big screen again with The Transporter III…

Jet Li has recently suggested that he will no longer be making kung-fu epics. This does not mean he will not be making movies where he is good at kung fu, because if that were the case he would no longer have a career. No, what it means is that we are no longer going to be treated to brilliant movies like Hero or Once Upon A Time In China. It also means we are not going to see him in decent-to-pretty-good movies like Fearless any more. No, Jet Li has quit the genre that has provided him with his only truly excellent moviesto concentrate on American movies where he still performs martial arts, (wushu, to be specific) only now he will wear normal street clothes and be paired with wisecracking cops. Like Jackie Chan movies, only without the charm, the elaborate stunts or the laughs. These are the films that have made Li a star in America, and not one of them has been very good. Romeo Must Die, The One, Lethal Weapon 4, Kiss of the Dragon, Cradle 2 The Grave? All fairly awful. (I must confess to having a soft spot for Unleashed, if only for Bob Hoskins and Jet Li’s surprisingly decent performance.)

So now, having left the martial arts epics forever with the disappointing Fearless, Jet Li brings us War, a movie that sees him performing bad-ass wushu manouevers as he is paired with a wisecracking bad-ass cop, played by Jason Statham. Li plays the assassin “Rogue”, not the shape-shifting naked hottie Rebecca Romijn Rogue, but a variation on the theme. You see, Rogue has this habit of using plastic surgery to change his face after every hit, thereby never being identifiable to the cops. This is a device used in many movies. I’m not sure how reliable this method of concealing your identity is. I have seen what someone who undergoes multiple plastic surgeries looks like. They look like Donatella Versace, The Cat Lady, and Michael Jackson. They do not look like Jet Li. Also, it occurs to me that you can still tell that Michael Jackson is Michael Jackson, even if it’s the Wes Craven freaky-horror film version of Michael Jackson. In War, the assumption is that plastic surgeons can just go ahead and re-create faces at will. For example, if I wanted to look like Russell Crowe, (and I do), it would be very easy for me to go see Jet Li’s plastic surgeon, pay him enough, and emerge with an Australian accent and a penchant for phone-throwing. Tremendous.

Early on in the movie, Jason Statham’s partner and his entire family are killed by the nefarious assassin, Rogue. In the scene, Rogue is wearing a mask. I wonder why? A mask? When Jet Li, as Rogue, dispatches people with extreme prejudice throughout the rest of the movie, he seems unconcerned about who might see his face. So why the mask in the early scene? I bet we’ll find out later…I certainly hope the reason is that THAT Rogue was a different guy, and at the end of the movie we can still like Jet Li. I don’t want to see a Jet Li movie where I don’t like Jet Li. That would ruin my good-time movie fun. Also, as one of the entertain-me-but-don’t-challenge-me movie viewing mob, I would like a satisfactory ending to explain everything, where all the good guys live and all the bad guys die and the buddies walk off into the sunset together.

I must say the ending of War WAS a surprise to me. However, it was not surprising because it was a crazy twist I didn’t see coming, but because I couldn’t believe that even this movie would have resorted to an ending this dumb. Even the most bloated, brainless couch potato watching this film would be unsatisfied with the ending. The twist and the finish are so badly tacked-on that they might as well have been one of those it-was-all-just-a-dream endings. And the twists accomplish a few things. First off, they ensure that you will never watch the movie again, because knowing the truth at the end means the entire rest of the movie makes absolutely no sense. Secondly, if you pay close attention to the ending, it creates more plot holes and problems than it solves. And thirdly, it will not even satisfy those good-guys-live-and-bad-guys-die movie watchers. There is nothing wrong with being one of those movie watchers. You don’t want to think too hard about a film, you just want to be entertained. That is OK.

However, War has spent so long, through the whole film, catering to that exact moviegoer, making sure that they ARE entertained, that the ending will leave that particular viewer unusually unsatisfied and puzzled. It’s like they got to the end and thought “hey, you know what would make critics like this? Making it dark, and strange, and unsatisfying, with a twist - critics love that stuff”. Their problem was that they didn’t realize that if you are going to do that, you have to be aware of where you are going when you START the movie, and not just tack it on at the end. (This doesn’t always work either - as the next review will explain.)

Jet Li is a very good actor and an even better martial artist, but his skills are best used in the martial arts epics. It looks as though Hero will always be his best movie, simply because he has given up on that type of movie, and has resigned himself to doing movies such as War. His wushu skills are still breathtaking, the fights are still awesome, but the stories in these movies are crappy at best, and come out of some ridiculous screenplay machine they have in Hollywood where you feed in the names of the actors and out pops a script. “Jason Statham and Jet Li” whirrr….War! (Well, they were together in The One as well, but this time Statham gets equal billing.) It’s depressing. You know that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, where the band is playing the country fair, opening for the puppet show? Because Nigel Tufnel is gone, they have only six songs to play, and once those songs are done they kick into the “jazz odyssey”? Jet Li’s recent career move reminds me of this. He has given up being awesome, like Spinal Tap, and has gone ahead with his jazz odyssey. American films.

If a movie is going to be confusing, that is fine. If you have to watch that movie a second time in order to fully understand everything, that is fine. If you need a third or fourth viewing, I’m OK with that too. However, these movies rarely do great at the box office. Most of their money is made on DVD, where people can watch the film over and over in order to understand what’s going on. This worked very well for The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Memento…all great movies, all difficult to follow, all requiring at the very least a second viewing. But that is the key. If you are going to make a movie like that, make it worthwhile. Make it entertaining enough and cool enough and mysterious enough that people want to sit through it a second time. If you put a lot of effort into making your movie actually make sense, then you should make sure people will watch it enough to actually make sense of it. This is the problem with Slipstream, it is the problem with Southland Tales, and it is the biggest problem with Revolver.

Jason Statham stars in Revolver as a man who has just been let out of prison. He tracks down the guy who put him behind bars, Ray Liotta, and goes after him. Then he finds out that he has only three days to live, and meets two strange men (Big Pussy from The Sopranos and Andre 3000 from Outkast) who blackmail him into doing some bad things. Or are they actually bad things? Statham is the ultimate B-level star, a guy who will never make the jump to Bruce Willis status, but remain forever mired on a Jean-Claude Van Damme level of celebrity. The Transporter movies, Crank (where he has one day to live), War, just about everything he has done has made money, but they are, make no mistake, B movies. As is Revolver. Ray Liotta is a B-level actor as well. Some say the ultimate B-movie actor. And this movie is B class all the way. But it is trying SO HARD not to be. It tries SO hard to be the next Memento or Fight Club. Mystery upon mystery, layer upon layer, enigmas and red herrings and twists and turns and revelations. All the while, Statham does a voice over that smacks of self-satisfaction, analogies to chess and The Art Of War and philosophy and Machiavelli. However, these references are not nearly as smart as the makers of Revolver think they are.

And in the end, the movie does not sustain enough momentum to make it worth watching again. The end screwed me up the first time. I kind of got it, but not fully. And yet, the movie itself was not compelling enough to watch it again. His motivations seem clearly explained by his chess-related voiceovers, but if you look a little below the surface, nothing he does makes any sense, if he is as smart as he seems to think he is. Then there are these weird “artsy” animated bits thrown in, I can’t imagine why. This film is so self-satisfied and so obnoxious that even if the ending baffles you, you will never go back to check it out yourself. This movie is not smart, it is not deep, and it is not good.

Stick Jason Statham, Wesley Snipes and Ryan Phillippe in a movie together, and what do you have? A certified, genuine, authentically stamped no-bones-about-it B-movie. These are B list guys all the way, and although Snipes has had breakthrough moments, he is no longer box office gold. Or even silver. Or copper. And Phillippe, while he once looked like an actor with promise, he has now been surpassed in the very same roles by - believe it or not - his doppleganger Justin Timberlake. He is now best known as the ex-husband of Reese Witherspoon. Bottoms out. And Statham makes forty movies a year, twenty of which are just explosions and guns and fights, and twenty of which are explosions and guns and fights and Big Twist endings. Chaos is one of the latter. Look out! Here comes the Big Twist Ending! I don’t mind saying this, because the twist really sucks.

So does most of the movie. It opens with a standoff on a bridge. The hostage is…duhduhduh…a congressman’s daughter! A CONGRESSMAN! His daughter! This makes things that much more difficult because you see…he’s a congressman! Americans seem to have a lot of love for their congressmen, and a lot of fear when it comes to their Powers. It seems pretty logical to them that if you screw up a hostage situation with the daughter of…a congressman! then that congressman will take your job and ruin your career and possibly, if he has a long reach…get you killed. Can you imagine a Canadian movie doing this? Like, the daughter of an NDP MPP gets kidnapped, and the cops all walk on eggshells because he’s…an MPP! HE’s the GUY who controls a portion of the Senior’s Secretariat! Better watch yourselves on this one, boys. Don’t mess this one up. He’s an MPP.

Anyway, that takes up only about six seconds, and ends abruptly, so we know that we will be getting the rest of the snippets from that event throughout the movie, and we know that if we saw the entire scene at once, we would instantly figure out the Big Twist Ending, so we wait. The fallout from the big Congressman’s Daughter incident was that one cop was fired, and another was suspended. We see this cop’s house, and he has used up an entire wall by plastering it with newspaper clippings from the incident. He does this not because any rational disgraced cop would do so, but because it makes it easy for a camera to pan over the collage, letting us in on the beginning of the story without having to resort to a narrator. The fact that not one of the six hundred newspaper clippings actually says anything about the incident itself, or has any pictures that would give things away, makes sense. THAT information has to come out SLOWLY, over the course of the movie!

Then Wesley Snipes robs a bank. Snipes seems to really relish playing the bad guy lately, and he’s basically playing Blade, only as a bank robber. The cops show up and there is a standoff…just like every other standoff in every other bad movie, no cop listens to the commander. Once the order has been given to go in, the SWAT team cowboys will not stop. They will then ignore all subsequent orders. This has happened in maybe seven thousand movies, and zero times in real life. Some great lines ensue, like “Are you ADD?” Apparently, judging by the way this line is delivered, ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, is the new “retarded”. Only more PC, because it doesn’t mock the intellectually challenged. The bad guys get away, of course, because they are super-well organized and have it all figured out. The WAY they get away - never really explained. And if they think they HAVE explained it, they’re ADD.

There follows a car chase. This is one of those chases in which a motorcycle chases a car. The motorcycle starts off six feet behind the car. What this motorcyclist believes he can do to apprehend the suspect once he catches the car, we are not sure. However, he decides that being six feet behind the car is not good enough. He must take a shortcut in order to make up that distance. This shortcut goes through buildings, alleys, fruit stands, windows, and causes hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to the city, but it was worth it! Because he emerges from the window into the street and ends up…six feet behind the car! The chase continues…I sure do love these movie scenes. They make terrific sense.

Then there is the cop who will do ANYTHING to get his man, the elimination of the suspects, the murder of the witnesses, and this incredibly silly and stupid bit about chaos theory. The movie thinks this is a smart idea to throw on top of the movie - the concept being that what seems random on the surface is, upon further investigation, actually a pattern that can be quantified. Which would make sense only if what we see on the surface appears random, or if the subsequent underlying pattern existed. Neither is true of this movie. The ending is more than predictable, and given how smart they think their cops are (chaos theory!) the whole thing should have been as painfully obvious to them as it is to us, the viewers. Chaos is just silly, and that would be fine for a movie, except that it thinks it is more than that. It believes it is smart, but really it is just ADD.

First came House of the Dead.  Then Alone in the Dark.  Then Bloodrayne.  And now comes Uwe Boll’s absolute best film!  On the heels of several of the most putrid, stinky directorial efforts in the history of cinema, Boll has managed to create a film that is merely putrid and smelly.  I recognized just about every actor in this movie, which stuns me.  How is this guy, the most villified director working today, able to convince people to appear in his films?  Well, it provides a pretty decent barometer for actors.  Which ones actually care about their craft, and which ones are in it only for the money.  In The Name of the King features the following actors who are in it only for the money:  Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Lelee Sobieski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Kristanna Loken, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard and John Rhys-Davies.

 Why do you need a name actor (albeit not BIG-name actors) in every major role in a film?  When you have an inexplicable budget of 80 million dollars and no idea how to spend it.  What costs a lot of money?  Name actors.  Perfect.  So…we still have money left?  Good.  Let’s spend it on swooshy foggy special effects.  We can use that like forty times in the movie before it irritates people!  And since we have more than two hours to tell our story, but only six minutes of actual story, let’s have super-long battle scenes.  Each thirty-minute battle scene ought to have at least four thousand jump cuts, since it has been proven that movie audiences are unable to focus on a given image for more than one tenth of a second.  And they HATE knowing what’s happening in a battle.

Given the fact that one and a half hours of this two hour plus movie is taken up with sword fighting and battleaxes and creepy evil creatures killing innocent villagers and children, giving it a PG rating is bonkers.  By the standards of the MPAA, this movie does in fact fit into the PG area.  There is no real blood, and what blood there is is some kind of black smokey stuff.  Boll seems so intent on getting that rating, however, that the fighting is boring and sanitized and very confusing.  Which means three quarters of the movie is boring and sanitized and confusing.  Getting name actors at the very least means that you are getting fairly decent actors.  Which also means that when you cram them into this pile of garbage, it’s even more painful watching them struggle to make something interesting out of the horrible dialogue and idiotic set-pieces.  They literally have nothing to do, and no opportunity is given to them to make this any better.

The non-name actors, however, seem to think they are in a Shakespeare play.  They deliver their lines with stage-actor pomp and pretension, projecting their lines at some non-existent audience.  And at the beginning, the movie is written as though someone thought he was Shakespeare.  “Respect doth need be earned by the mass of men.  Mine be my birthright!”  What?  Mercifully, this ends fairly quickly and the movie forgets about it’s pretensions to the Bard by Minute Twenty-one.  Then the movie gets into painful, through-the-eyeball-into-the smoky-swirly shots, and slow-motion camera work that follows every object around as it is carried from  place to place. 

The movie is more than two hours long, and yet, plot points pop up incredibly abruptly.  You are the son of the king!  Wait…what?  Couldn’t there have been some kind of buildup there?  This leads to the film having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever.  Burt Reynolds seems to be channeling his lackluster performance from Striptease, there are multiple bizarre shots straight out of Tremors, there are ninjas.  Ninjas that do everything in a synchronized fashion, as though they are competing in the new Olympic demonstration event, synchronized ninja-ing.  The soundtrack music is awful and intrusive, there is a scene where Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds hold hands - in slow-motion!  Hundreds of “why did that guy do that”, or “what happened to that guy”, or “how did that guy get there” moments, and the grand finale involves a swordfight where the swords are controlled by the minds of magicians and - fight themselves!  There is nothing in this movie worth watching, nothing worth mentioning, and nothing that didn’t make me angry.  But it IS the best one Uwe Boll has ever done.