Cynical Cinema

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors in the world.  He is the man behind the best of the Blade movies, Blade II, the incredible recent film Pan’s Labyrinth, and of course the first Hellboy film, which I really liked.  The thing that made Hellboy great was that it didn’t look like other superhero or comic book movies.  It looked like something totally new.  Dark, spectacular and imaginative, the world occupied by the characters was vivid and appealing.  And Ron Perlman as Hellboy was perfect.  A completely new type of comic book hero.  The spawn of hell, a creature who existed to protect the world from the supernatural creatures that threaten to destroy it, who at the same time has the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old.  He smokes cigars and drinks beer and basically lives the life of a young adult, only he lives it in isolation, separated from the world by the government which uses him to do their dirty work.

Hellboy II:  The Golden Army is very similar.  The set designs are once again vivid and wonderful, the creatures and monsters Hellboy has to face are once again interesting and really cool looking, and Ron Perlman is as good as ever.  (Perlman, I should add, has worked with Del Toro twice before - once in the original Hellboy, obviously, and once as the coolest bad guy in Blade II.)  However, the creatures are not quite as cool as they were the first time around.  Partly because they remind me of a lot of other creatures.  Guillermo del Toro creatures.  There is a bizarre creature with no eyes in it’s head, but rather in it’s wings, that at one point helps to heal Hellboy.  And it really reminded me of the creature with eyes in it’s hands from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The bad guy, an elf prince named Nuada, played by Luke Goss, reminds me very much of the bad guy in Blade II.  Perhaps that is because, now that I’ve done my research, in Blade II the bad guy Nomak was played by…Luke Goss.  But he seems to be made up the same way in this one - he’s just Nomak with hair - and it’s a little disconcerting.

I really don’t want to rag on Guillermo del Toro for ripping off…himself.  Once you’ve created such memorable stuff in your career, it’s not such a bad idea to revisit the things that worked once before.  After all, we all want to hear the new AC/DC album, knowing full well it will be exactly the same as every other AC/DC album.  But the story in Hellboy II is a little weaker as well.  This movie could have been a much deeper commentary on the “nature of heroism” and so forth.  Not that I’m asking it to be The Dark Knight, which would be an unreasonable expectation, but this sort of thing is hinted at so often in the movie that it’s disappointing not to see it fleshed out.

Hellboy is of course, being a young adult at heart, eager to escape from the close confines of the government lab where he is housed.  He now lives with his girlfriend from the first movie, played by Selma Blair, a woman who can control fire.  And he’s constantly at odds with the government management, represented ably by Jeffrey Tambor.  Hellboy wants to be a hero, beloved in the city, and wants the public to recognize him for his good deeds.  Basically, he feels he deserves to be a celebrity.  And perhaps he’s right.  The government wants to keep him under wraps.  They want to relegate “Hellboy” sightings to the tabloids, creating a “bigfoot” or “loch ness” aura around him.  And perhaps they’re right.

There are a few scenes where Hellboy IS seen by the public, and even though he has clearly just helped them out, they are afraid of him and assume he’s a bad guy, because, well, he looks like the devil.  All of this stuff would be really interesting if the movie was willing to go into it, but it never really does.  Also interesting would have been the real motivation of the elf prince, Nuada, and his relationship with his twin sister.  He wants to resurrect the Golden Army, an unstoppable force, to take over the world from the humans.  He points to the fact that the elves and mystical creatures have abandoned the world to the humans many years ago, and human beings have just screwed it up.  Unless these supernatural creatures reclaim the world from the humans, the Earth will be destroyed.  And it’s their Earth too.

This could be a really fascinating debate.  Is it worth killing the humans if you know they are in the process, inadvertent or not, of killing you?  Does the word of the elf king, given to the human race many thousands of years ago and forgotten by today’s people, mean more than protecting your environment?  I could see this movie becoming a serious ethical dilemma for everyone, but it never goes there either.  Nadua is the villain, he wants to destroy all human beings, and he must be stopped.  He is evil.  End of story.  It;s too bad, because Hellboy II is every bit as visually impressive as Hellboy, the cast is equally terrific (although I do miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien), there is still a lot of good humour and the energy is still fantastic. 

But Hellboy II does not reach the level of Hellboy simply because it sets up some interesting stuff that never pays off, in favour of throwing even more impressive and stunning visuals at us.  And all of that is great - Guillermo del Toro is one of the directors who can make the best use of a massive budget - but it’s a little overwhelming while the story ends up being a little underwhelming.  The first one was a must-see.  And if you liked that one, this one is a should-rent.

Alliance Films came out with the Blade trilogy on August 26th.  It’s a two-disc edition, with two of the movies on one disc and one on the other.  There are no terrific special features, it’s just a plain, bargain set of the three Blade films in a package that is conveniently the same size as every other DVD in your collection.  And if you don’t have these films already, this is one you should add to your collection.  Here’s why:

Blade (8/10):  The original Blade movie was terrific, a real breath of fresh air in the world of comic book movies.  Wesley Snipes was big, muscular, bad-ass and mean.  Kris Kristofferson was amazing as Whistler, Blade’s mentor.  And Stephen Dorff was terrific as the bad guy, a vampire who wanted to trigger the Blood Tide - an event that would, I think, turn everyone in the world into a vampire.  Or something.  The point is, this movie was awesome.  Sword fighting, guns, vampires disintegrating and great special effects, and Snipes as the most ass-kicking, toughest, meanest comic book character of all time.  There was even some good comedy - mostly provided by Donal Logue, who kept getting his arm chopped off.  And for the really cult comic book fans - some appearances by Traci Lords and Udo Kier.  Terrific!

Blade II (10/10):  By far, the best of the series.  Directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), this film is as pulse-pounding and visually impressive as any comic book adaptation could aspire to be.  (Well, until 2008 when The Dark Knight came along.)  Snipes is now even more bad-ass, and he is given some awfully cool villains with which to work.  Luke Goss appears as Nomak, a new breed of vampire that preys on both humans AND vampires.  So now the vampires want a truce with Blade, because they are after the same enemy for once.  And Blade hooks up with the Blood Pack, a cheesily-named group of vampire bad-asses who have been training their whole lives to kill Blade, but now must work with him.  Ron Perlman, as the tough-guy leader of the Blood Pack, is amazing.  And even the secondary characters are cool actors - Norman Reedus as a stoner hippie helping Blade and Whistler, and Asian action movie legend Donnie Yen even shows up as a kung-fu fighting member of the Blood Pack.  And the vampire princess, played by Leonor Varela, is one of the hottest women ever in a movie.  Visually stunning, never-ending action, and some seriously bad-ass characters and actors made this movie not just a guilty pleasure, but the best in the trilogy.

Blade: Trinity (3/10):  One of the biggest letdowns I have ever had at a movie.  Del Toro is gone as director, replaced by David S. Goyer.  Kristofferson is gone early in the film, replaced by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel.  And I really like Ryan Reynolds - he even has some solid comedic scenes in this film.  But an action star?  Jessica Biel an action star?  I know she really wants to be, and she keeps trying and trying to be one, but she isn’t an action star.  Or a great actress.  She’s hot.  That’s about it.  I mean, stick to movies where you are hot.  Those, you can do.  Blade II had Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen.  Blade Trinity can only suffer by comparison.  But it isn’t just Reynolds and Biel that are the problem.  Snipes is the only genuine action star in the movie, but he is given just about nothing to do.  The script is dreadful, the concept just doesn’t work, and there are some really long, extended scenes that make absolutely no sense.  The other Blade films were genuinely dark, tough, gritty entries that could, on some level, be considered horror films.  This one is an absolute joke.  Not only that, Blade is now the co-star.  In his own film.  Because Biel and Reynolds are the real action stars.  Come on!  This one is total garbage.

 The two-disc Blade trilogy came out August 26th from Alliance Films.  Pick it up!  And ignore that third one.

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.