Cynical Cinema

One of the great things about older movies is the fact that without the special effects we have today, the movies had to be good. They were carried by acting, scripts, direction and cinematography. Today’s horror movies are special effects crap-fests and bloody gross-out flicks. I used to think that was because we as an audience had become so desensitized to violence and scary scenes that they had to become more and more over the top before they elicited a reaction out of us. I no longer think that’s the case. I now think the reason is more simple. We use special effects because we can, studios know really gross movies are cheap and make their money back, and that way we can just churn out movie after movie without ever writing a real script or creating real tension. This is a blanket statement, and I apologize to such films as 28 Days Later and the first Saw.The best horror movie I’ve seen in a while is The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not the 1978 version, which I have never seen but which seems to be more well known, but the 1956 original, which was truly intelligent. In the old days, every monster movie, zombie movie, alien attack film, was done not only for shock value, but also as a broad social commentary. Body Snatchers is no exception. The social comment, in a way, presages it’s own future in today’s horror movies. The idea is that we as a people are becoming so desensitized that our emotions are becoming almost invisible. There are no big scares in the film, you don’t see anyone die, but the tone and the script are so well executed that you are riveted to your seat the whole time.

The working title for the new film Shattered was Butterfly On a Wheel. That would have been a better title, because it would have made no sense. The inclusion of the phrase in the movie also makes no sense. The full quote is “who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel”, and it comes from a poem by Alexander Pope called “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, which is a true classic in the world of poetry. In it’s context in the poem, it refers to an enemy of Pope’s. His doctor (Dr. Arbothnot, it would seem) had warned him about the dangers of composing poems that attacked his peers in society, and so Pope responded by sending him a series of poems that attacked these people. The line, used in it’s proper context, refers to a wheel, the medieval torture device, which seems excessive when used to destroy a butterfly, and exists as a testament to the cruelty and excessive nature of one who would do such a thing. As my friend Kent used to say “it’s like swatting a fly with a Buick”.

In it’s context in the movie, the line is meant to be taken differently. Gerard Butler and Maria Bello play a married couple with a charming young daughter, who is captured by a sociopathic Pierce Brosnan, who holds her for ransom. Before long, it becomes clear that Brosnan is not in this for money, but rather for some kind of personal vendetta against this family. He will kill their daughter, you see, unless Bello and Butler jump through all kinds of hoops. It sets up a Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma…what would you do to save your child? Would you kill an innocent person? And other such light-hearted fare. The quote from Pope comes up again and again, but it is fairly misused. The idea behind it in the film is that this couple are the butterfly, and are so insignificant to Brosnan that he can toy with them, as he would a butterfly upon a wheel. And he is so cruel crazy and evil that he is willing to toruture them in this excessive way. This seems to be the correct interpretation of the quote. However, the twist at the end changes things, and the quote all of a sudden becomes terribly misused.

Ah, yes. The TWIST at the END. I can’t review this movie very well without giving away the ending, and I am tempted to do so because this is one of those irritating by-the-numbers twist-ending movies. I will not, because I’m sure some people will watch and enjoy this. But there have been so many movies made in this style, especially since the success of The Usual Suspects. And there have been many that were better than Shattered. Derailed was better than this movie. Here’s the problem with this twist ending. The director paid a lot of attention to the mechanics of the twist. He went into the movie knowing the ending, and made sure that if you watch the movie again, the right things happen at the right time. It all makes sense mechanically. Yes, that guy could have said that thing to that lady while the other guy was over here. Fine. But the emotional reactions of the people involved are not so closely monitored. Knowing what we know (at the end, and maybe quite a bit earlier), the reactions of the key people in key situations are not what they should be. And the contrivances of the plot, which seems (at the end) to have been so meticulously planned out, seem so forced. If one of the characters involved did anything, at certain points, other than what they actually did in that situation, the whole plan could not have proceeded as it did.

I know, this all sounds so vague. If that guy and this guy had talked to this guy instead of that guy…this is because I think people might actually watch the film and enjoy it. And there are some good things to work with here. Maria Bello is terrific in her role as the terrorized mom, and Gerard Bulter has moments of great acting as well. But overall, this is simply an obvious, pain-by-numbers BIG TWIST movie, where the twist at the end becomes the only reason any of the movie was ever made. And that is obnoxious. Imagine…Eric Clapton going through the motions on Layla just so he could get to that piano part.

In a boxing ring, Lewis. Singing Won’t Get Fooled Again? Daltrey. Acting in Johnny Was? Neither, really. Lennox Lewis plays a rastafarian DJ, running a pirate radio station in a slum apartment in London, right above Vinnie Jones’ flat. Eriq LaSalle (from ER) is a violent heroin dealer, also a Rastafarian, living downstairs from Vinnie Jones’ flat. And Roger Daltrey plays the ringleader of a former IRA bombing organization. You see, Vinnie Jones used to be in the IRA. And he was a chemist…of some kind. He and his partner Flynn made bombs. Now Jones has been laying low in London for several years, hiding out and leading a quasi-normal life. Then Flynn breaks out of prison, and comes to hide out at his flat, which causes problems with the drug dealer living downstairs. Some stuff happens, a lot of it is violent, and then there is a conclusion to the movie, as there is in most movies.

Lewis, as a Rastafarian DJ, is less than convincing. I guess all you need to be a Rasta is the vocabulary. He says all the right things. “Jah”, “I and I”, and “Haile Selassie”. Apparently these are the only things he is able to say, because Rastas never have more than an eleven word vocabulary. His Jamaican accent is halfway decent, but his character is amazingly unconvincing (especially at the end of the film, when he shows up in a location he couldn’t possibly have known about, and does something that seems totally inexplicable). Daltrey is in the movie a bit less, and all HE has to do is look mean and talk tough. Which he does fairly well - at least he doesn’t have to fake a British accent - but again, his character is fairly implausible, and does a few completely inexplicable things as well. The least Johnny Was could have done would have been to put some Who songs on the soundtrack!

Johnny Was is so standard, so cookie-cutter, that they seemed to think they could just cram anyone they ran across into some of the bigger roles. Perhaps they were fans of boxing and the Who, and just wanted to work with these people. Also occupying a major role is Samantha Mumba, a hottie who is one of the biggest singers in Ireland. Also, not an actor. She plays a former nurse who is now a junkie, and she also is never convincing, and she also does some things that are inexplicable. The only actor in the movie who is convincing is Vinnie Jones himself, and even HE does some inexplicable things. Which is not to say the movie doesn’t make sense. It plods along, going from plot point to plot point, and you always know what’s going on. It isn’t confusing. It is merely the actions of the characters themselves that make no sense. No human being in the situations they are in would do the same things these characters do. Example: Roger Daltry tells Flynn he will transport him to a safe house. So he arranges to meet him at a deserted warehouse. But really, he wants to kill Flynn. And in order to do so, he has installed a sniper in that warehouse before Flynn got there. And then, instead of just having that sniper kill Flynn, which is why he’s there, Daltrey walks in with a massive machine gun, and announces that he is there with the intent to murder. Not only does that make the sniper totally useless, but one would question Flynn’s judgement for attending one of those deserted-warehouse-meetings to begin with.

Johnny Was is not a painful watching experience, just a profoundly dissatisfying one. Not only is it powerfully unoriginal, just about no one in the film is an actual actor, and you can see it right away. As for Daltrey-Lewis, I will give the acting title to Daltrey, simply because he is adequate. Lennox Lewis is not adequate. He is bad. For the best Roger Daltrey movie, check out “The Kids Are Alright” or “Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who”. At least he is good at playing himself. For the best Lennox Lewis movie, check out “ESPN Sports Century”. Don’t check out “Johnny Was”.

Going into Rendition, I was a little worried. I have read many many reviews suggesting that this film was not a good one. On rottentomatoes.com, James Berardinelli writes: “We are ambushed by a simplistic storyline that’s more interested in sermonizing and demonizing than existing in the real world where things aren’t as clear-cut as the movie would like us to believe.” Richard Roeper says: “I don’t fault Rendition for its liberal politics. I fault it for hammering home those politics in such pounding, slanted fashion.” And Todd McCarthy says: “Even [Reese] Witherspoon, normally the most spirited of performers who can inject even limited characters and blah scripts with her own spark, can do little but mope around and search for different ways to look worried.” Well, they are wrong. All wrong. Yes, Rendition tends to be a little melodramatic. And yes, it has left-leaning politics, but who can be upset by that? Other than Jerry Falwell? Those politics are indeed heavy-handed, and they are indeed pounded home in a slanted fashion, but then the movie ends, and…are they really?

The critics appear to be divided along the same lines that divide people over Meher Arar. The people who believe he was indeed unjustly imprisoned, and those who think “oh, the government’s just doing their job”. Rendition is basically a story about a guy much like Arar, who is detained by the American government after a terrorist attack and then extradited to another country to be tortured into giving up information. But does he really know this information? Or is he an innocent man held without trial without any recourse and with no access to a lawyer or a phone to call his wife to say he is OK? And frankly, if this is what happened to Arar, the 10.5 million dollars he got from the government is not even close to enough. People complain, like he won the lottery just for being tortured, but those people are basing their opinions on media reports which are of course conflicting. Very few people would know the real story there. Like, Arar and three government officials. Everything else is conjecture, and having an opinion one way or the other is more than likely based on the opinion of someone who really doesn’t know the whole story.

And while Rendition is certainly a condemnation of the American practice of detaining people without trial and throwing due process out the window. But it makes sure that by the end of the movie, there is a certain ambiguity, where the people watching the film can make their own decision about what took place, a decision that more than likely will be based on their existing prejudices. I don’t want to reveal the ending here, but it is far more ambiguous than you would assume. Rendition is not terribly complicated, but it treads along much the same ground as the very-complicated Syriana. Think of Rendition as the poor man’s Syriana. Whereas George Clooney’s movie was intricate and almost inexplicable, (and was, in fact, better than this one) Rendition is far more straight-forward, far easier to understand. But Rendition is thought-provoking in a similar way to Syriana. Even if a man is guilty, is it worth torturing him to find out? If the torture of that one man will create ten more who become enemies of your country?

I agree with Dennis Schwartz, who says that this movie deserves to be commended just for being made. It does. And Reese Witherspoon, who is one of my least favourite actresses, is terrific. As the pregnant wife of the imprisoned man, she hits all the right notes. Yes, she spends a lot of the movie just looking concerned. She’s pregnant. It becomes clear throughout the film that she has only so much energy. She works endlessly, but most of the time she is doing this by fighting through intense fatigue, which leaves her with no option but to sit and look despondent. And during the melodramatic scenes, she is believable in that she can all of a sudden get a burst of energy to confront her husband’s captors, and her emotions carry her away and she dissolves into a shrieking blubbery mess. But you know, I still believe that. After all, she’s pregnant. Jake Gyllenhall could have been better in his role as the American assigned to the interrogation, and I wish Meryl Streep had more screen time as the icy woman in charge of the rendition. And yes, the final scene between Gyllenhall and the torture victim is a little far-fetched and melodramatic.

But these are small quibbles with an otherwise excellent film. I would guess that hard line right-wingers will hate this film, because they will see it as the terrorists winning, or they will see it as questioning something that ought to be beyond reproach. But thoughtful, regular people will just enjoy it for what it is - a thought-provoking, interesting, very good film. I definitely recommend watching Rendition. It comes out from Alliance Films on Tuesday, February 19th.

I have noticed many movie reviewers, when talking about Michael Clayton (and many other movies, of course), like to compare it to other movies. This can make it fairly easy to write a review. So I will attempt it now. Of course, this movie is magnificent. George Clooney is sensational as Michael Clayton, a “janitor” for a major law firm, a man who cleans things up before they get out of hand, whenever they may be screwed up. When a lawyer at that firm loses his mind, Clayton is sent in to clean up the mess. Sidney Pollack shows up in the film, as an actor this time, playing the head of that law firm, and he is good. Tilda Swinton is the litigator in charge of that firm’s biggest client, a company called uNorth. She is absolutely perfect as a detail-obsessed corporate functionary, as a suit-wearing battleaxe who is, deep down, insecure and in WAY over her head. And Tom Wilkinson gives a wonderful performance as the lawyer who has a breakdown in court and removes all his clothes in the middle of a deposition. Oh wait. I’m supposed to compare Michael Clayton with other movies. So, now that I’ve outlined the basic plot, here are some comparisons:

Michael Clayton is a lot like Erin Brokovich in that it involves a class-action lawsuit made by hundreds of “little people” against a major firm that poisoned their land. It is lacking two major things, however, things that made Erin Brokovich such a success. Those would be, namely, boob left and boob right on Julia Roberts’ wonderful chest. Erin Brokovich was a good movie, and Michael Clayton has no boobs. And yet, Michael Clayton is much, much better than Erin Brokovich.

Michael Clayton is a lot like Network, in that a man finally understands the world, and his place in it, and that knowledge drives him over the edge. He goes crazy, has a very public breakdown with hilarious results, and ends up fighting the good fight. In Network, that character was played by Peter Finch, who was terrific. And in Michael Clayton, that character is played by Tom Wilkinson, who is also amazing. Both characters meet a fairly similar end, for fairly similar reasons. Network, however, was about television news, and Michael Clayton is about massive corporate law firms. And Michael Clayton is better than Network.

Michael Clayton is a lot like The Firm, in that it involves a massive law firm, evil corrupt business types, and a plot to get one particular lawyer who can bring down that firm. And both movies involved Sidney Pollack in some way. He directed The Firm. And he stars as the director of the firm in Michael Clayton! However, The Firm had two things Michael Clayton does not. Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. I would take Gene Hackman in any movie. But I would choose George Clooney over Tom Cruise any day. And Michael Clayton is much, much better than The Firm.

Michael Clayton is a lot like The Verdict, in that the central character is a lawyer who must confront his personal demons in order to fight the good fight and defeat the odds. In The Verdict, that lawyer was played by Paul Newman. It was perhaps the finest performance (outside Cool Hand Luke) of Newman’s career. I would take Paul Newman over George Clooney. But Michael Clayton is still better than The Verdict.

Michael Clayton is a lot like No Country For Old Men. Both are films that are critically acclaimed, and both were released to theatres in 2007. They were both released to DVD in 2008, and both are nominated in the Best Picture and Best Director categories at this year’s Oscars. No Country For Old Men has a best supporting nomination, for Javier Bardem. And Michael Clayton has one for Tilda Swinton. And Clooney is nominated for best actor. Both films deserve all these awards. They are both unbelievable achievements. But Michael Clayton will not win best picture or best director. Because No Country For Old Men is better than Michael Clayton.

OK, Michael Clayton is not better than Network. I just threw that in because it fit with my comparison scheme. But Michael Clayton is a genius movie. There are two scenes in particular that are especially effective. One is in an alley where Clooney happens upon Wilkinson, the old friend he has been trying to reign in for the whole movie. The scene makes their relationship completely clear in a few short words, and also shines a light on Wilkinson’s “madness”. Perhaps he has not lost control of all his faculties, after all. And the second is a scene where Tilda Swinton is primping herself in front of a mirror, adjusting her buisness suit so it is just right. She does a fantastic job conveying both her obsessive nature and the fact that she really is completely lost in this world. She is in over her head, and you can read that in her face as she prepares herself to come off as confidant when she must address the board of uNorth. Both scenes are unbelievable moments in a staggeringly good movie. Michael Clayton would have been the best movie of the year in seven of the last ten years. However, this year, it just happened to be going up against the greatest movie of the millenium, No Country For Old Men. I suggest watching both.

The basic premise of Awake is a good one. A man is going in for open heart surgery, and the anaesthesia does not work 100% properly. You see, he is awake during the entire surgical procedure. He can’t move a muscle, he can’t speak, but he is aware of his surroundings and he can smell and feel and hear everything that is going on. Which leads to a very intense scene when he first realizes that he can hear everything that’s happening in the operating room, and he can feel the incisions. The scene is fairly graphic, in a surgery-channel sort of way, and my girlfriend couldn’t watch. Which means she missed the best seven minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie is maudlin, phony, and fairly irritating. And I blame two people in particular. The Star Wars Guy and the Bikini-Chick. Those two people are the stiff-as-a-board Hayden Christensen, and the sweet-as-pie-with-giant-eyes Jessica Alba.

The DVD cover for Awake has a quote from Frank Scheck, movie reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter. He says “Awake does for surgery what Jaws did for the beach”. If he means it will make people afraid to go under the knife, he is wrong. If he means it will send people screaming in droves from it, perhaps he is right. In fact, based on that logic, Awake does for Hayden Christensen movies what Jaws did for the beach. Maybe, just maybe, people won’t go back into the theatre for these things for a long time. Hayden Christensen is just painful. At best, he is a third-rate Christian Bale, which works fine for the acting-is-not-required Star Wars roles, but rarely is effective elsewhere in the movies. And Jessica Alba has the appearance, the charizma and the acting talent of a ridiculously attractive cabbage patch doll. Which makes these two the least believable screen couple this side of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Oh, they do the standard movie scene where he pulls her into the tub with her clothes on - get it? They are in love, and that’s what people in love do…

At any rate, while he is aware of his surroundings but unable to respond, Christensen hears a plot to kill him! An evil scheme that involves his murder while he is having a heart transplant! But how is he to stop it? Well, it turns out, he isn’t. He must hope that his loved ones piece things together before he comes out of his coma. And in the meantime, we watch him wander around the hospital in a completely ineffective out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, characters become their own narrators so that we know exactly what is happening. Dialogue like “OK, now you do exactly what we discussed. Take this syringe that I have prepared for you, put it into the heart he is about to receive, press down on the plunger, and then when the heart is placed in his chest, he will die, and we will collect the money. And remember, the reason we did this is…” If I was planning to kill someone for any reason at all, and I was conspiring with someone else, I don’t think I would have to explain the entire plan to that person more than once. But, it sure helps us (and Christensen) know what is going on!

Awake has seven minutes which are intense, exciting, and terrific. They occur when Hayden Christensen is in a coma and can’t act, and Jessica Alba is fretting in another room and isn’t a part of the scene. The other 77 minutes of this movie are either poor or awful. I suggest avoiding all the minutes in this film.

Anthony Hopkins should feel good about his new movie Slipstream. He directed the film, as well as starring in it, and I am going to go ahead and assume that it turned out exactly the way he wanted it to turn out. That is, weird. I respect the fact that as long as his movie fit his vision, he didn’t care at all whether the rest of us got it or not, and even may not have cared if we enjoyed it or not. Slipstream seems to be about a movie script-writer whose mind is going, and who lives half in reality, half in his mind. Somehow, when I watched the trailers, I got the sense that this movie was about time travel. Maybe it was supposed to be about time travel, and I just didn’t get it. Hey, for all I know, this film could have been about a rabbit and a butterfly. Frankly, there’s no good way to tell. I have the sense that if I watched this film five or six times, I would be able to figure out what’s going on. But I don’t feel like doing that. Frankly, I don’t feel like watching it twice. I also have the sense that if David Lynch was allowed to make an entire movie while on PCP, it would look something like this one.

It’s OK to make a movie that doesn’t make perfect sense. Look at Lynch - Mulholland Drive, for example. And some of the greatest films are almost as bonkers as this one. Like, Weekend, for example, or Fellini’s stuff. But you have to either go all out, or wrap things up in some way. Slipstream starts out with a bunch of scenes that don’t fit together, a series of weird moments, one after another, slight changes in scenes that seem to indicate there is something bigger going on…and all of a sudden we’ve hit the 40 minute mark. And we still have no idea what’s happening. At all. Then things start making a little more sense. But by then, no one cares. We’ve completely given up on trying to make sense of anything, and when stuff sort of starts coming together, we just want it to wrap up and the movie be over. And this one never really comes together at all. Individually, each scene is likely compelling. Hopkins is quite good at creating a memorable image, or phrase, or moment. But taken collectively, this is just too much for your average viewer. Or your sub-par viewer, or your above-average, gifted viewer. Any viewer.

There are some great performances in here. Hopkins is terrific, and John Turturro is awesome fun as a maniac movie producer. The film also stars Camryn Manheim, Christian Slater, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jeffrey Tambor, and in the most bizarre cameo of the year, Kevin McCarthy as himself. For some reason, Slipstream continually refers to the 1956 classic horror film Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers. And Kevin McCarthy, who was the star of that film, shows up as himself, now at age 84, in order to sit in a car with Hopkins. Since the movie ended, I have been trying very hard to understand the references to Bodysnatchers, but I have yet to figure it out. And I’m not willing to watch it again to help me understand. Slipstream is a ballsy film to make, it’s as experimental and avant-garde (if that’s even a real term) as anything made this year, but it doesn’t work. When it was over, I suspected that it was a movie designed specifically to confuse me, rather than to make me think. It’s like having one of those magic-eye pictures, the ones you stare at for a long time until you see a sailboat or a tiger or whatever. Only, this one has no underlying picture. So you can stare at it for as long as you like, but you’ll never see anything. And you will be frustrated and angry.

Ryan Reynolds has saved some tragically bad movies from being…well…tragically bad. Most notably Van Wilder and Waiting, where his sense of comedic timing and his fantastic delivery elevate those two movies from the level of “awful” to the level of “not awful”. Since then, Reynolds seems to be attempting to distance himself from the funny-guy roles, like Van Wilder, and he seems to be willing to take just about any movie that won’t force him to smirk and say clever cute things to clever cute girls. The latest movie is called The Nines, and it is weird. Reynolds plays three different characters. One is a David Caruso-type actor who plays a cop on TV. Another is a writer for TV shows, and the third is a video game programmer. But still, somehow, all three characters are part of the same guy, and…well, you’ll have to see the whole movie to understand. Melissa McCarthy also plays three characters, including herself. Hope Davis appears as three people, as does Elle Fanning, the younger sister of Dakota Fanning. Sometimes she’s a mute little girl, sometimes she isn’t…although imdb and allmovie.com don’t have this listed, I’m convinced she was the little girl in the overalls in Kindergarten Cop.

This movie really does keep you guessing right up until the end, but it’s the end that sinks it. It won’t make you feel cheated, like the end of Perfect Stranger (which I just finished watching and which made me very angry, so I thought I’d mention it), but it certainly isn’t the big bang you would hope for and expect from a movie this complex and layered. There are some great moments in the film. When the Caruso-cop character has a Robert Downey type meltdown, tries to buy crack, hires a hooker to show him how to use crack, and then starts imagining his other personalities, it’s hilarious and a lot of fun. Another scene where the TV writer attacks his network executive, it is also a lot of fun. Hope Davis is good, although she keeps playing a woman who is supposed to be incredibly hot. And while she is certainly attractive, she is an eight, not a ten. Melissa McCarthy (Gilmore Girls) is terrific as a woman who figures in Reynolds’ life in the biggest possible way in each of the three scenarios.

The Nines is well worth your while if you are into the supernatural side of life and you don’t mind a fairly boring ending. Or, if you are desperated to find out what happened to the little girl in the overalls from Kindergarten Cop. Otherwise, it’s just kinda neat for a while.

If you are going to make a movie starring just one actor, you could do worse than Will Smith. I Am Legend is a movie concept that isn’t exactly new, it’s basically a remake of the old Charlton Heston post-apocalyptic film, The Omega Man. The film opens with a cameo from Emma Thompson, who plays a scientist on TV announcing a cure for cancer. I suppose we are to believe that whatever that cure was is the same thing that unleashed the virus that wiped out humanity. The next thing we know, it’s three years later and Will Smith is the only man left alive, and he tears around New York City in sports cars shooting at deer, who apparently now live right in the city with the humans. He is accompanied by his faithful dog, Sam, and he lives a fairly quiet life. He has set up mannequins in the local video store to appear as though there are people around, and he rents movies there every night. He has to make sure he is home by sundown, and then he sits there with his dog watching the films.

The reason, it becomes clear soon enough, that he has to be home by sundown each evening, is that not everyone has died. There are strange, mutated human beings living in the darkness. Like vampires, they die in the sunlight, and therefore the daylight hours are perfectly safe for Smith and the dog Sam. Like the volleyball in Castaway, Sam becomes a very human character in the film, like a child who can’t speak. He helps Smith with his work - which is, basically, finding a cure for the virus. Because he is immune to it himself, he uses his blood to try to cure the infected mutants, which he captures by means of snares and traps, the kind one might lay for rabbits as a third-grade boy scout. He then takes them back to his underground lab and injects them with…something…that might cure them. All very experimental, all very high-tech.

But of course, something has to go wrong. And I don’t want to divulge the end of the movie, so I won’t say exactly what it is that goes wrong. But I will say it involves mutants, since that seems obvious, and it involves Will Smith, since that too is obvious. He behaves, toward the end of the film, exactly the way I expect I would behave were I utterly alone save for a dog for three long years. There are some good action scenes, and the mutants are suitably scary. They do seem old-hat by now, however. We have seen many similar scary mutants in movies like Blade II, The Descent, 28 Days Later, and so forth. But they work, and they serve their purpose, so I really can’t complain.

There are some problems with the plot. How come his house still has electricity so many years after the world disappeared? How do his various cars seem to have an endless supply of gas? How come he has those massive steel doors protecting every possible entry into his house, yet the mutants can so easily break in at the appropriate moments? How do the mutants remember where he lives when the time comes? And how can he have the lights on in his house at night if he is afraid those mutants may discover where he lives? Furthermore, if his lab is in the basement of his house, how can daylight get down there to protect people from the mutants when the need arises? And most of those deer-in-the-city shots are very obviously (and therefore poorly) computer-generated.

All problematic, but in the end, irrelevant. As I said before, a movie with (basically) just one actor needs someone like Will Smith, who can make his way through scenes completely solo and still keep our attention. We enjoy this movie because we enjoy Will Smith, plain and simple. And despite the fact I have seen it many times before, despite the problems involved, I did indeed enjoy this movie.

If a movie is going to be confusing, that is fine. If you have to watch that movie a second time in order to fully understand everything, that is fine. If you need a third or fourth viewing, I’m OK with that too. However, these movies rarely do great at the box office. Most of their money is made on DVD, where people can watch the film over and over in order to understand what’s going on. This worked very well for The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Memento…all great movies, all difficult to follow, all requiring at the very least a second viewing. But that is the key. If you are going to make a movie like that, make it worthwhile. Make it entertaining enough and cool enough and mysterious enough that people want to sit through it a second time. If you put a lot of effort into making your movie actually make sense, then you should make sure people will watch it enough to actually make sense of it. This is the problem with Slipstream, it is the problem with Southland Tales, and it is the biggest problem with Revolver.

Jason Statham stars in Revolver as a man who has just been let out of prison. He tracks down the guy who put him behind bars, Ray Liotta, and goes after him. Then he finds out that he has only three days to live, and meets two strange men (Big Pussy from The Sopranos and Andre 3000 from Outkast) who blackmail him into doing some bad things. Or are they actually bad things? Statham is the ultimate B-level star, a guy who will never make the jump to Bruce Willis status, but remain forever mired on a Jean-Claude Van Damme level of celebrity. The Transporter movies, Crank (where he has one day to live), War, just about everything he has done has made money, but they are, make no mistake, B movies. As is Revolver. Ray Liotta is a B-level actor as well. Some say the ultimate B-movie actor. And this movie is B class all the way. But it is trying SO HARD not to be. It tries SO hard to be the next Memento or Fight Club. Mystery upon mystery, layer upon layer, enigmas and red herrings and twists and turns and revelations. All the while, Statham does a voice over that smacks of self-satisfaction, analogies to chess and The Art Of War and philosophy and Machiavelli. However, these references are not nearly as smart as the makers of Revolver think they are.

And in the end, the movie does not sustain enough momentum to make it worth watching again. The end screwed me up the first time. I kind of got it, but not fully. And yet, the movie itself was not compelling enough to watch it again. His motivations seem clearly explained by his chess-related voiceovers, but if you look a little below the surface, nothing he does makes any sense, if he is as smart as he seems to think he is. Then there are these weird “artsy” animated bits thrown in, I can’t imagine why. This film is so self-satisfied and so obnoxious that even if the ending baffles you, you will never go back to check it out yourself. This movie is not smart, it is not deep, and it is not good.