Cynical Cinema

I am a moderate Star Wars nerd.  In the sense that I probably know more about the series than the average person, but that comes more as a result of being a film buff than anything else.  I have friends who can tell me the names of every character, including those who are not named in the movies themselves but rather in the credits only.  I am not one of those people.  I took the kids out to see the premiere of the new Star Wars:  Clone Wars, and I was amazed that they knew the names of more characters than I did.  It turns out that a lot of that comes from a video game called Lego Star Wars.  This is how they learn the Star Wars story.

I am, however, enough of a Star Wars nerd to realize that Star Wars:  Clone Wars is the title that should have been chosen for that dreadful second installment in the series, the sickeningly-named Attack of the Clones.  I really think the title of that movie actually made the whole film seem worse than it actually was.  And it was already pretty bad, (until Yoda threw down).  This new animated movie IS better, but that isn’t saying much.  This one takes place at the time of the Clone Wars (obviously), and gives the clones names and personalities.  In this case Rex is the leader of the clones who are working with Annakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Also new is Ahsoka, Annakin’s “padawan” learner.  She is basically his apprentice, following him around and learning the ways of the Jedi.  The stage is set for some character development, when Yoda mentions that Annakin has managed well with his padawan, it might be tough for him to let her go later.  But that, we can only assume, will be left for a future episode in this animated series.  Because nothing of that nature happens in this one.  In fact, almost nothing happens in this one.  It is merely an endless series of battles between droid armies and clone armies.  There are several cool battle scenes, including one that is vertical, up the side of a cliff, but after a while we want story.

Basically, the first 80 minutes of the movie are these battles, around a strange story.  Jabba The Hut’s son has been kidnapped by the evil Count Dooku.  The Jedi have been enlisted to bring the Hut kid back unharmed, but Dooku is really setting them up so that Jabba thinks it was in fact the Jedi who kidnapped his son.  At stake are a bunch of shipping lanes controlled by Jabba, lanes which could turn the balance of the battle in the favour of either the droids or the clones.  Dooku has his preferred assassin tracking the Jedi, a sinister female agent named Ventress.  She shows up a few times, then goes away, and proves to be a fairly useless character.

Finally, in the last 15 minutes of the film, the story begins.  Padme Amydala shows up - remember her?  Annakin’s lover and the future mother of Luke and Leia?  She attempts to broker a deal with Jabba through his uncle who lives in the city.  In doing so, she uncovers the massive conspiracy behind the Hut kidnapping, and the story resolves itself in fifteen minutes.  With more battles.  In the end, this is really a Star Wars movie made for kids, in that the story line is incredibly simplistic and the characters are completely two-dimensional.  (Ironic, for an animated 3D movie, eh?)  And because we, the Star Wars audience, are already so familiar with these characters (Annakin, Obi-Wan, Dooku, Jabba The Hut), we know them as more than two-dimensional already. 

So it becomes obnoxious when Annakin has no layers.  He’s not the young innocent Jedi, he isn’t the guy who’s going to turn into Darth Vader, he’s just the headstrong hero of an action movie.  That’s it.  For a story that is already so familiar to all of us, filling in the blanks between Episode II and Episode III ought to involve more than a silly story about Jabba The Hut and his gross young son.  And it really should be more than just a 95-minute battle.

After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff.  And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching.  Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery.  It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life.  The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter.  The Deer Hunter this is not.  Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences.  And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert.  But the rest of the cast is weak at best.

Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall.  Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell.  Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man.  Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.

There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people.  But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure.  Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers.  And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept.  What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power.  It’s too bad.

The main problem with Jumper, as it is with most Hayden Christensen movies, is Hayden Christensen.  He is so wooden, he may as well be a totem pole.  Or Steven Seagal.  In this movie his love interest is Rachel Bilson, some girl who is famous from some TV show called The OC.  She is not a great actress, but compared to him she’s Greta Garbo and Meryl Streep rolled into one.  And then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who will appear in just about anything ever, phoning it in as he does in the bad ones.  And this really is a bad movie.  The story is that Christensen is a “jumper”, some kind of person who can just disappear from where he is and reappear anywhere he likes.  He robs banks with this power, builds something of a playboy lifestyle, until finally he is tracked down by Jackson.  Jackson is a “palladin”, which is an organization?  A species?  A committee?  dedicated to tracking down and killing these “jumpers”.

Christensen escapes the first time, meets another “jumper”, finds out there are others like him, and finally meets his mother, Diane Lane, who abandoned him when he was a five-year-old.  Basically, the last hour of this movie is a cross-dimensional, all-over-the-world chase and escape involving the two jumpers and Jackson and the other palladins.  Which is all well and good, but I’d like a little more story.  Where do these “jumpers” come from?  Why do they exist?  Who are the palladins?  Why do they want to kill the jumpers?  How come the jumpers don’t always know that there are others like them?  Any back story at all would be nice, but there is none.  Zip.  All of this leads to a fairly mundane, inexplicable and silly conclusion after a mundane, inexplicable and silly movie.

But I kind of like it.  In a way, Jumper is delighfully idiotic.  The scenes where buses fly through time and space to emerge in the Arabian desert are insane.  The plot twists and the ideas that characters have and the complete lack of effort from Jackson and Lane are, in a way, hilarious.  The pointless and contrived involvement of Bilson, the unecessary high-school-bully scene, the wannabe heart-rending scenes with Christensen and his father…it all adds up to enough lunacy and idiocy and stupidity to make this movie somehow watchable through it’s mercifully short hour and a half running time.  I can’t say it’s a good movie without feeling a little nauseous, but I can say that you may well enjoy it.

When I bought my Blu-Ray player, almost a year ago, it came with 5 free Blu-Ray movies.  I had to fill out a little card checking off the movies I might like, and they would be shipped to my house.  Because it was almost a year ago, there weren’t many movies out on Blu-Ray yet.  So although I could grab Full Metal Jacket and The Prestige, the others were a crap-shoot, so I just picked the three I hadn’t seen.  One of those was S.W.A.T.  I think.  I can’t really remember.  In fact, I had completely forgotten I had ever placed this order, since it took eight months for it to arrive.  And when it did, it came with a not saying there had been a “slight delay” in shipping because one of the titles I had requested was no longer being made and they had to replace it with something else.  And maybe that something was S.W.A.T.  I sure hope I didn’t order it on purpose.

And that’s why the movie, although it’s old, merits a review.  Because people who are loving the Blu-Ray technology are buying up everything they can on that medium.  Every movie that’s out there on Blu-Ray gets serious consideration from the owners of the players.  And I am writing this to warn those of you who may want to purchase all these films to avoid SWAT.  At all costs.  It doesn’t matter one bit how good it looks on your TV, it is a giant waste of your time.  Yet another vehicle for Colin Farrell to play an Irish tough guy, SWAT concerns the LAPD SWAT team, the “toughest, meanest, best, coolest, heaviest, deadliest, most powerful, most bad-ass, most attractive fighting force in the world”.  Or something.

Colin Farrell, Michelle Rodriguez, LL Cool J, Samuel L. Jackson, and some other chumps train to be SWAT.  Farrell is getting a second chance at the team, one that comes after a dust-up with his out-of-control former SWAT team-mate.  I wonder if that preamble will be referenced later?  Of course it will!  For the first hour of the movie, the team trains.  And then they pass their course.  Much to the chagrin of their captain, who hates them!  We also get to see the evil antics of some foreign bad-guy.  He might be a drug dealer, or a human trafficker, or  a counterfeiter or a distributor of fake Faberge Eggs.  We have no idea.  We just know he’s evil, because he kills folks, and he will obviously eventually be the guy who faces off against the SWAT team.

So after an hour plus of six guys looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to each other while wearing mad-cool sunglasses, there is actually…the plot!  Of the movie!  Which involves the entire city attacking the SWAT team, who respond by looking tough, talking tough, flexing and posing and saying bad-ass things to other people while wearing mad-cool sunglasses.  There is actually no story in the film, no compelling character, no single scene that’s cool enough to justify the action portions of the film…no reason at all to watch this hunk of junk.

John Cusack can do clever dialogue in his sleep.  And at the beginning of 1408, he does.  He and Samuel L. Jackson engage in a very intelligent exchange, through which they both appear to be phoning it in.  You see, Cusack is a ghost-story-debunker, and Jackson is a hotel manager whose hotel has a demon room.  Room 1408.  Jackson does not want Cusack to stay in that room, but Cusack insists, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.  Sam Jackson and John Cusack will never suck, they are both too good for that, but their performances here are average at best.  Jackson is good, however, when he begins to warn Cusack away from the room.  His delivery, while matter-of-fact, is decidedly unsettling, and he gets better as the scene goes on. 

And the movie gets better as it goes on.  It’s based on a short story by Stephen King, which is nice and succinct and interesting.  But the movie expands on that short story in a big way.  And good thing too, because the story, while quick, to the point, and fun, would have made a fairly lousy movie, and the resolution would have been pretty trite and boring on screen.  For those of you who have read the story, rest assured.  It does NOT end the same way.  And it doesn’t develop the same way either.  The only thing the book and the movie have in common is the beginning.  Cusack is a writer, who has given up what looked to be a very promising career as a brilliant writer to churn out a bunch of low-rent ghost-story books about haunted castles and hotels and such.  And in the course of his research, he happens upon the Dolphin hotel, where 56 people have died in room 1408 since the hotel opened.

What happens next is not so much a ghost story as it is a bizarre, horrific acid trip for Cusack.  Describing what goes on would be pointless, since much of it is meaningless, a lot of it is boring, and very little is actually scary.  But there are some freaky moments, and frightening ones, that involve Cusack himself.  A tense moment on the ledge outside the hotel, and another tense claustrophobic scene in the air ducts above room 1408.  In the end, the creepy vibe and the actual scares come from Cusack himself more so than from his surroundings and the happenings in the room.  And as such, the movie is decent because Cusack himself is decent.  At times he just doesn’t seem cut out for the terror-acting, and at other times his bemusement turns to alarm which turns into fear in a very believeable progression.  As Cusack goes, so goes 1408.  He’s decent, the movie is decent.

Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the kind of movie you get when producers look at all the other movies and TV shows that have been made in the past year, and try to make one just like that.  But with a new idea that will make this movie seem different!  And they’ve already done the spy thing, they’ve done the cop-on-the-edge thing, they’ve done the Negotiator (also with Jackson), and they’ve done every combination and permutation of the characters from CSI and Bones and Cold Case and Medium and every other cop-related profession.  But wait - we have never done a movie about the guy who cleans up the blood after murders!  This is so NEW!  Oh, it doesn’t matter that it’s the exact same story we’ve used in every movie and TV show over the past ten years, this character is new.  He cleans up blood!  Get it?

So you get a movie about a murder, and a guy trying to solve it, and police corruption and extramarital affairs and betrayal and father-daughter relationships and blah blah blah, ground up in the meat grinder of every script ever written, and spit out into this movie with the fresh new character idea.  And we have Samuel L. Jackson as the guy who comes by after cops are done their investigations and cleans up the blood and gross stuff at murder scenes.  This, really has almost nothing to do with the rest of the movie.  It just gives the film a title and a new, fresh main character who is still a cop and still solves crimes but isn’t the same.  And next thing you know, he gets caught up in a web of intrigue that involves a mysterious hot chick (Eva Mendes) and his former best friend and cop-buddy (Ed Harris).  Be warned - the next bits here contain spoilers!

In watching Cleaner, I discovered a few bothersome things.  First of all, one of my favourite actors, Ed Harris, has somehow become a bit of a caricature.  I was sad when Harris showed up, as Jackson’s best friend, and I thought - oh, no!  You can’t trust Ed Harris!  Think of Gone Baby Gone, A History of Violence, and now this!  I knew it the second he stepped onto the screen.  Ed Harris is just too big an actor to play second-banana, the hero’s best friend.  If he’s in there as something other than the star, he’s the surprise hero cop, or the bad guy.  That’s it.  And then Eva Mendes shows up.  And I’m thinking  - oh no!  Don’t trust Eva Mendes either!  She just looks like a vamp who will screw you over.  And then there’s Luis Guzman, who I really like.  He seems untrustworthy, which likely means that by the end he will be a good guy, and an ally to our hero.  And lo and behold, all of these assumptions turned out to be true!  This is either because these actors are now typecast, or because the director somehow telegraphed the ending.

 And I believe that the latter is true.  The direction in this movie, by Renny Harlin, is clumsy at best.  Harlin, I would argue, has never directed a good movie in his career.  His previous best was The Long Kiss Goodnight, also with Samuel L. Jackson, and it was average at best.  Too often he seems to try to add a small twist to existing plots and cliched scripts, and ends up making boring film.  And Cleaner is no exception.  The clumsiness is most apparent in the relationship between Jackson and his daughter, played very ably by Keke Palmer.  But the best acting in the world couldn’t save Cleaner from the clumsy, awkward, obvious and irritating moments between the two.  Their relationship swings wildly from that father-daughter sharing-everything warm and fuzzy one to the absentee-father-who-lets-his-work-dominate-his-home-life one.  Sometimes within the same scene!  And the latter relationship culminates in that oh-so-obnoxious cliche, him MISSING HER SOCCER GAME!  I HATE the parent-missing-the-child’s-soccer-game cliche. 

And the other, close-bond father-daughter relationship culminates with another horrible cliche that I hate.  The daughter, having to choose between her distant father and the trusted family friend who all of a sudden can’t be trusted, chooses to shoot the formerly trusted family friend.  I hate this ending.  It hasn’t been original or interesting since the third time it was used, in 1923.  Oh, come on.  Just an example of the powerfully unoriginal, clumsily constructed movie that is the Cleaner.  It is so neatly wrapped up in a tidy little package at the end that it looks really stupid.  This movie really needed to be far rougher around the edges to even keep my attention for more than half the film.  Avoid this, it sucks.