Cynical Cinema

Hancock has a great star.  It has a great soundtrack.  And it has a great premise.  Will Smith stars as a superhero with a drinking problem, a man who saves people just because that seems to be the thing he should be doing, while showing complete disregard for the property he destroys while doing so, or the massive amount of destruction he creates while rescuing innocent people and stopping criminals.  I absolutely love the idea that this is the first movie I’ve seen that really shows the consequences of the actions of a superhero.  Sure, he stopped the gun-toting bad guys, but in doing so he’s caused four million dollars worth of damage to L.A. highways and buildings.

A few funny scenes open the film, with Smith flying through highway signs, destroying cop cars with his drunken buffoonery, and eventually setting down the SUV full of bad guys on top of a building in the sky over Los Angeles.  But the movie quickly takes a turn when he meets Jason Bateman - in another hilarious scene where Hancock saves Bateman from a train, then unnecessarily destroys the train rather than getting out of the way.  The one thing I wish I had seen in this film is a little more of the consequences of these actions.  With the train derailment, the cop cars exploding, wouldn’t there be a rather heavy toll in terms of human life?  Why are we hearing about the monetary vaule of the damage when people clearly would have died?  Well, as it turns out, Peter Berg wanted to maintain a light tone in the movie, and keep some humour in there.  And it would be tough to do that if Hancock was actually killing people.

 When he meets Bateman, a P.R. man, the movie changes as Bateman tries to change Hancock’s public image.  He realizes that deep down beneath the drunken exterior, Hancock really just wants to be liked.  And he convinces Hancock to respond to the 6,000+ outstanding warrants out for his arrest.  The theory being that if Hancock goes to jail, he will be seen by the public as admitting his sins, and that eventually the public will miss him when crime rises.  And, for the most part, it works.  We learn a little bit about Hancock’s back story, and yet another story line develops, this one involving Bateman’s wife, played by Charlize Theron.  And by this time there is too much going on.  And we stop caring, even when things start coming together.

A drunken superhero is a great idea - how would one arrest this man?  Who could possibly convince him to sober up?  Would the lives he saves be worth it compared with the lives he inadvertently takes?  All of these things are touched upon in Hancock, but it isn’t quite enough.  In the end, there is nothing terribly interesting about the movie.  Watching Will Smith is always a good time, and he is reliably engaging as the imbittered, sour Superman figure.  But the bizarre story twists near the end feel like a clumsy way to create some actual drama.  You have an invincible superhero, and he’s the only one of his kind on Earth.  So in order for there to be a real bad guy who can actually kill Hancock, and therefore create some drama in a will-he-make-it sort of way, they had to find a way for this to come about.  And it’s contrived and irritating.

Hancock is decent.  It features a great Will Smith (but we all knew he would be), and a solid premise with interesting ideas.  But I would have really liked to see those interesting ideas explored more, and (amazingly) I’d have liked to see Charlize Theron less.

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.

The Incredible Hulk was the third-best comic book adaptation of the past summer.  Considering, however, that the other two were Iron Man and The Dark Knight, that’s some pretty good company.  And it appears that if you’ve seen Iron Man, then you definitely have to see The Incredible Hulk.  And vice versa.  Not only are both of them terrific movies, but a tiny cameo appearance at the end of this film indicates that there will be some kind of cross-over between the two at a later date.  And that crossover is certainly something that I want to see. 

The main reason these movies are great are the actors.  Robert Downey Jr. is magnificent as Iron Man, and Edward Norton is just as good as The Incredible Hulk.  Where normally film studios making superhero movies are looking for guys with chiseled bodies and chiseled faces and “the look”, rather than people who can really act.  So we get Brandon Routh playing Superman.  Which is fine, but the added element of serious acting provided by Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk creates a far more compelling movie overall. 

That being said, the other serious actors in this movie are underused.  Willima Hurt, one of the world’s great actors, plays Banner’s nemesis, General Thaddeus Ross, who wants to capture Banner to harness the power of the Hulk into a weapon.  He is cartoonish, which one would expect from a comic book movie, but I was hoping for something more.  Norton’s character isn’t a cartoon, why should Ross be one?  Same goes for Liv Tyler, who plays Banner’s obligatory love interest, and yet she serves the comic book movie cliched purpose of being in distress and getting rescued, and then complaining to her father (General Ross) about his treatment of her boyfriend.  Basically, her sole purpose in the movie is to get hurt or attacked, an event which inevitably leads to more rage in the Hulk, which allows him to become more powerful.  And that’s about it.

Tim Roth is fantastic as the really bad guy, Emil Blonsky, a commando from Russia and Britain (mostly Britain…I think).  He is so impressed with the power of the Hulk that he wants the same thing for himself, and this leads to a showdown at the end of the film between two massive behemoths in New York City.  It’s always New York City when two massive creatures have a battle to the death.  Well, New York City or Tokyo.  In this case, we don’t see any people die, or at least, we’re not certain they are dead.  But with the crazy mayhem of wreckage that exists at the end of this scene, we can only assume that hundreds of innocent people have lost their lives.  At the very least, hundreds of people lost their cars.

The Incredible Hulk works because of Norton.  The special effects are pretty good, although there are some moments where we are acutely aware that we are watching computer-generated monsters fighting.  The story movies along quickly, but for the most part it is a chase movie.  The government agents try to track down Bruce Banner, but he turns into the Hulk before they can capture him, and he wrecks a bunch of stuff and runs off, only to be tracked down again, and the whole process is repeated.  There is a love interest who exists mostly to help make him angry.  And the bad guys exist mostly to be cartoon-bad-guys, so evil that they make the Hulk seem like the good guy in comparison.

With all this going on, it would have been very easy for this movie to sink to the level of the standard, average, by-the-numbers comic book adaptation.  But it’s Norton who gives the movie it’s heart and soul, something it desperately needs.  When the movie opens, he’s a tortured man working at a soda-bottling plant in Brazil, trying desperately to keep his emotions under control.  Even when a situation calls for anger, he can’t allow himself to become excited in any way.  He wears a heart monitor to make sure that nothing goes awry, and the conflict within him is apparent.  This also leads to the best line in the movie.  In Brazil, the film is subtitled, and Banner’s Spanish isn’t exactly top-notch.  He says “don’t make me…hungry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m…hungry.”  One of the two lines we expect in the movie - the other, “Hulk Smash!” plays out at the end.  Bases covered!

On the Blu-Ray DVD I have, there are dozens of special features, some of which are worthwhile and some of which are not.  The most interesting of these special features is an “alternate opening”, which I think would have worked better than the one they used.  Bruce Banner is running across the deserted wasteland of either Antarctica or the Arctic, having just wreaked havoc in his personal life, and seen the Hulk appear in himself for the first time.  It is incredibly poignant, as it parallels almost exactly the final scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein book, where Frankenstein’s monster is running off, by himself, over the ice in the Arctic.  It sets up the movie perfectly, worldlessly conveying the conflict in Banner’s tortured soul.  He can’t help what he is, but he can’t live with it either.

At the very end of The Incredible Hulk, we get a cameo appearance from another major star, one which indicates that there will be a crossover movie in the coming years between The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man and perhaps some other, as-yet-unreleased movies.  And even though I’m generally not a comic book guy, this is about the most exciting news I can imagine.  Watch these movies.  Buy Iron Man, and at the very least rent The Incredible Hulk.  Then you, too, will be prepared for the upcoming awesome.

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.

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.