Cynical Cinema

These Asterix et Obelix movies are impressive films. A massive cast, some of the most well-known actors in the world, and a seemingly limitless budget for what are, in many ways, modest movies. Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatre is no exception. In fact, this movie is the most expensive movie ever made in France. Gerard Depardieu and Christian Clavier return as the titular heroes, and Monica Bellucci shows up as the titular heroine. I think I can safely make this proclamation right now. Never, in the history of children’s movies, has there been a sexier, hotter, more ridiculously smoldering character. France is a little different than North America, you see. In North America, you can show explosions and violence and fighting and killing in kids’ movies, but kissing? That’s kind of a stretch…

In France, however, they make movies like this one. Monica Bellucci, possibly the most magnificent, gorgeous specimen on movie screens the world over, is Cleopatra. She wears different, opulent, clothes in every scene. Sometimes those clothes are see-through. Other times, they manage to reveal everything but nipple. And still other times, there are gratuitous (but welcome) shots of the top of her ass crack. How often do you get to see something so glorious in a kids’ movie? In my memory, never. In fact, not only is Monica Bellucci the hottest women ever to appear in a kids’ movie, she is also the hottest Cleopatra of all time. Elizabeth Taylor was awfully close in 1963, but in 1963 she wasn’t wearing anything like this.

Once again, with this film, there are no English subtitles or English dubbing, which means that unless you speak French there will be a significant language barrier. However, the actions and plot are so cartoonish that you may be able to figure it out anyway. Jamel Debbouze plays Numerobis, an Egyptian architect, who has been commissioned by Cleopatra to build a palace in Egypt for Julius Caesar. This is all the result of some silly bet between Caesar and Cleopatra, which makes virtually no sense at all, but at least it sets up the plot. Numerobis has three months in which to build this gigantic palace, and of course can’t possibly finish it in that time. So he visits Asterix and Obelix in Gaul to persuade them to help him finish on time, with their magical potion. Soon, all the workers in Egypt are sipping the magic potion and gaining superhuman strength, and the palace is going up quickly. (This involves some Monty Python-esque dialogue between the labourers, who explain that they are not slaves, and then go on strike to reduce their days to 18 hours and to get fewer whippings.)

But, of course, there has to be a villain in the movie. In this case, it is the “official” Egyptian architect, Amonbofis, played by Gerard Darmon. We suppose that his main reason for attempting to sabotage the construction of this palace is that his feelings have been hurt, in that he was not the architect chosen to build the place. Other than that, there seems to be no reason for him to be angry. He conspires with Caesar, who wants to destroy the palace that is being built FOR him, so he can win a bet…all of this is tied together with loose connections and plot holes and leaps in logic that are so comic booky in nature that keeping it all straight would require a PhD in idiocy.

And once again, the biggest failing in the film is the adherence to the comic books themselves. The boars they eat are gigantic. They bring Cleopatra a cake that is as big as a person. No one questions these things, because it’s a comic book. But they just don’t work on the big screen. You wonder why, when the fighting between the Gauls and the Roman army is going to be so cartoonish, would they bother amassing such a gigantic number of actors to play soldiers. And then, the whole movie closes with a song by Snoop Dogg. Bizarre. However, at the end, one question was answered for me. I wondered why, in the first movie, Caesar was played by Gottfried John, and in this film he’s played by the director, Alain Chabat. Well, he gets to seriously make out with Monica Bellucci. I think I may have cast myself as Caesar were I the director in this case as well. It turns out that this is the plum role in the film.

Once again, just like Asterix et Obelix Contre Cesar, this is a film that is great for kids in the sense that it will help them with their French and they will want to watch it even though they don’t understand every word. And you will want to watch it for Monica Bellucci. Which makes it very worthwhile, while still being not very good. Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatre comes out along with Asterix et Obelix Contre Cesar today, July 1st, from Alliance Films.

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.