Cynical Cinema

This summer, we’re pretty spoiled when it comes to the big, blockbuster comic book movies.  Iron Man was absolutely fantastic, and The Dark Knight is the best comic book flick ever made.  And looked at in that light, the re-release of The Punisher, special extended edition, would be easy to overlook.  And perhaps that’s for the best.  Now, I must say I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the original Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren in 1989.  That scene where he’s being tortured on that table, and the bad guys are about to do that comic book thing where they leave the room, assuming he’s going to die.  And through the pain, and the horror, he yells at their departing backs;  “Hey!  HEY!  Have a nice day.”  Magnificently idiotic!

And although there are parts of the new Punisher that are aggressively mediocre enough to be kind of funny, and there are moments that actually verge on the magnificently idiotic, the movie just doesn’t have enough of those moments to justify watching it.  This new, extended edition, appears to have added a whole new story line.  One which requires a major military scene in Kuwait to start the movie and set up this story line.  And yet, that scene was never filmed.  Too expensive, you see.  So what they have done is photograph the actors, and they’ve animated the scene to kick off the movie.  The main problem with that is that not only does it feel tacked on, but it also makes that whole story line tacked on, and they were probably right to cut it out in the first cut of the movie.

This movie was too long the first time.  Now they’ve added an extra twenty minutes, making it interminable.  It just isn’t compelling enough to get me to sit there for two hours plus.  Thomas Jane is OK as the comic book hero (who has no superpowers or special abilities, except…anger?)  And John Travolta is alright as the Comic Book villain, Howard Saint.  But there are so many bothersome moments in the film.  If Saint wants the Punisher dead so badly, why does he send one person at a time?  Why not send his whole team?  And if the Punisher keeps losing all these fights, isn’t he more the Punished than the Punisher?  And why does he go to such great lengths to mess with the minds of his targets when he’s just going to walk in and blow them away three days later anyway?

Not only was this movie average at best the first time around, it has become even more bloated and obnoxious this time.  While it’s an easy DVD to watch when you’ve shut off your brain, there is no real redeeming value to this film or DVD edition.  Even the special features are weak - all we get is a “making-of” nine minute feature about this extended edition, which involves picture taking and drawing.  Boring.  Just like the movie.  It came out July 15th from Alliance Films.

A movie based on a Stephen King novel is not always an indication that good things will happen. Most of us remember most of the movies based on his books as complete train wrecks. Dreamcatcher, Needful Things, Maximum Overdrive, Cujo…all awful films. There have been only two really successful movies based on King’s works - The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. (Although I didn’t like the Green Mile much, at least it wasn’t Graveyard Shift.) Both of those films were directed by Frank Darabont, who seems to do his best work when he collaborates with Stephen King. (He was also the screenwriter for The Fly 2 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Which were as bad as Needful Things.)

The Mist is their third film together, and it does rise a little bit above the other King movies, but does not approach the quality of say, Shawshank. The biggest problem with the movie seems to be, remarkably, a disconnect between the writer and the director. Stephen King is successful because he understands that the scariest thing in the world is other people, far more so than any monsters or spirits or bugs that might hide in the mist. But Darabont is so intent on showing the dark side of human nature and the evil that resides within men that he is too anxious to show it. The premise of the story is that a mist descends over a small town, and there are horrible creatures that hide within that mist and kill people when they venture too far into that mist. A bunch of people are trapped inside the local grocery-hardware store, and they begin to self-destruct. Apparently, as far as this film is concerned, these people are so ready to turn on each other that they do so within one minute of the mist descending. They are instantly transformed into idiots, maniacs and evil-doers, in the time it would take normal people to finally understand there was anything wrong.

And am I the only one who notices that Aaron Eckhardt and Thomas Jane are the same person? Jane is the star of The Mist, a father who is protecting his young son at all costs against the creatures outside, and more importantly, the religious fanatic nutjobs inside. He is, for all intents and purposes, Aaron Eckhardt with less smiling. They are the same person, and I will not believe otherwise until I see them in the same movie together. In the same scene. I like Jane, and in this film, he is pretty good. So is Toby Jones, as a supermarket employee who looks like Andy Warhol but is able to channel his inner Rambo when the situation calls for bloodshed and firearms. This occurs almost right away, and the first monster attack comes early. It isn’t terribly scary, but then the monsters aren’t supposed to be the scary part of the story. It is the people.

The problem is with the people. Their conflicts feel forced, since they seem to go against what one would assume about human nature. No matter how much your neighbour might hate you, if you are put in a situation where creatures are attempting to eat you, you would try to get along with that neighbour, no? And if thirty people tell you that something in the mist is eating people, your first reaction is not likely to be “this must be an elaborate practical joke being played on me by everyone”. It would more likely be something like “there might well be things in the mist that want to eat me”. So the whole human-emotions-at-their-basest theme becomes a little comic bookish. There are also some cheesy, irritating speeches about the nature of humanity, which seem to have a greater purpose, but nothing really rings true.

The people in the store have been trapped there for two days. Two days, and already they have split into two factions. The reasonable people who want to work to get out of there, and the far larger group of people who listen to the horrible bible-thumping religious zealot woman and decide to sacrifice children. This could work if it was done better. But it isn’t. The Mist has two things going for it. First of all, it does what good horror movies are supposed to do. Which is to make some kind of social and political commentary out of the horror. That comment here is basically that if you scare people enough, you can get them to do anything and follow anyone. I wonder what that’s directed toward? And secondly, the ending. Although it doesn’t save the whole movie, it certainly comes as a surprise, and you can definitely chalk it up among the most shocking endings to a movie.

One more thing - if you’re going to have creatures from “another dimension” that “cross over into our world”, wouldn’t you expect those creatures to be something cool that you’ve never seen before? If they were just giant locusts and pterodactyl-men and monster spiders, wouldn’t you think someone had created them here? Just a thought.