Cynical Cinema

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.

There is very little mystery to Resurrecting the Champ. Oh, the studio would have you believe that there is a big twist, but anyone who has seen the trailers knows exactly what that twist is. I won’t reveal it here, since perhaps some have not seen the trailers, and this movie is worth seeing if you don’t already know the ending. Josh Hartnett plays a newspaper sports beat writer in Denver who comes across a homeless man, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson refers to himself as “Champ”, and tells Hartnett that his name is Bob Satterfield, once the third-ranked heavyweight contender in the world. The man who once broke Rocky Marciano’s nose in an exhibition fight. Soon, Hartnett is working on the story of a lifetime, one of those tug-at-the-heartstrings pieces about a down-and-out former superstar boxer. The movie seems to be set about fifteen years ago, because that is the only way to justify statements like “no one has ever done a story about what happens to boxers after they retire”. Umm…yeah, they have. But - not, apparently, in 1990! Or whenever this thing is supposed to take place. OK…John Elway is contemplating retirement the following season, so that could be any time between 1990 and 1997.

Hartnett does some vaguely immoral things in attempting to cash in on his bombshell story. And some clearly immoral things. And in doing so, he risks alienating his young son, who idolizes his dad. The path of the movie shifts seamlessly from being a story about Jackson to being a story about Hartnett, and follows a pretty standard story arc. I read a review of this on rottentomatoes.com that used the word “uplifting” about twelve times. And I can see why. This movie is trying, desperately, to be one of those feel-good redemption stories, in the vein of The Pursuit Of Happyness, or Shawshank Redemption. And although it is very slick, and very smooth, it still smacks of effort. Characters do things that they would never normally do, but at least it gives them a reason to redeem themselves. Other characters seem completely blind to little clues that are obvious to us. Clues that would give away that big twist. And clues that come fairly heavy-handed early on. And too much of this relies on coincidence to be fully believable.

Yes, Resurrecting the Champ is fairly uplifting. And yes, it contains a good message. And yes, it is slick and well-done. But it just doesn’t get there. Watching this I was constantly aware that this was movie-world, and that I knew the next thing that would happen before the characters did, and that the end would be a foregone formulaic conclusion. The best thing about the movie, however, is Samuel L. Jackson. His performance here might be the best of his career since Jules Winfield. So often when I watch him in a role, no matter how far it departs from Pulp Fiction, I can’t get past the fact that this is the actor, Samuel L. Jackson. This is the first time I forgot about Jackson, the actor. I was watching Battlin’ Bob Satterfield, former heavyweight contender, former sideshow circus boxer, now homeless broken man. A magnificent job by Jackson, it’s just too bad the movie around that performance couldn’t have been better.