BEFORE: With another Anna Kendrick film in a couple of days, it's tempting to follow that thread and maybe knock off "Pitch Perfect 3", which is available on PPV. BUT, I don't want to spend that money, I think I can wait until it's on one of the premium channels, and also any time I'm perusing the On Demand channels, there's a promo for it that's about 15 seconds long and is currently being run about once every minute, and I'm quite damn sick of it. Whoever edits those things manages to pick the worst possible scenes, the ones that are hard to understand what's going on, or features people slurring their lines or saying them really quickly, and then after about 1,700 views you realize that you still know almost nothing about the movie, and you're dreading the next play of this hacked-together preview, which seems like it will start about 12 seconds after the last airing ended. So I think I'm good on holding off on "Pitch Perfect 3" for a while.
Instead, I'm going to take this opportunity to cross another "near-unlinkable" off the list, as Tim Roth carries over from "Mr. Right". With a cast of only three name actors and a bunch of stuntmen (I presume), this one's been on the list for quite some time, after missing a few opportunities to link here over the last year, I thought maybe I'd never be able to get to it and just have to randomly watch it at the end of everything (assuming that there is an end to all this, someday...)
THE PLOT: Henry is resurrected from death with no memory, and he must save his wife from a telekinetic warlord with a plan to bio-engineer soldiers.
AFTER: I've got my BFF Andy in town for a couple days, and after we went out to dinner I invited him to join me for my nightly movie, which he's done several times in the past. Now, if I'd been all caught up I would have watched my Friday movie late on Thursday night, but after missing a day earlier this week, I still hadn't watched my Thursday movie. He had the option to decline, of course, but when I told him the first-shooter premise of this film, he was IN for that reason alone. And after about 15 minutes of movie had gone by, he said to me, "Wow, you really undersold this movie."
I'd seen bits and pieces of it while dubbing it to DVD, and it didn't appear to make much sense (still doesn't, really) but the main attraction here is the first-person perspective in an action film, which ties together several modern internet-age trends: action video-games like "Call of Duty" and "Half-Life", internet videos like the ones made from Russian dashboard-cam footage, superhero-type villains, and sports-related GoPro videos. Now I'm not a big fan of GoPro footage, because half the time a person either puts the camera the wrong way so we see THEIR reaction to riding on a zip-line, rather than the experience itself, or they move their head so much that it gives off the feeling that they're standing still and the world is revolving around THEM (literally and figuratively...) while they're doing parkour or whatever.
Now, real hardcore gamers might find this movie rather boring, because it's like an action-packed first-shooter game, but you only get to WATCH it this way, and not play it. Relatively speaking, where's the thrill in THAT? But I'm being told that watching videos where someone else is playing that video-game you like is also a current trend. Go figure.
Somehow this film got the balance just right, the GoPro effect is still disorienting for the first 20-30 minutes of the film, but eventually I got used to the shaky-cam and the jump cuts and found my center, and just let the story and the stunts wash over me. And it is a very stupid, muscle-headed story, which I totally expected, but it's got some clever bits in it, and a good twist or two at the end. Still, we were right on the edge with the story, thinking that it's all about sticking the landing in the finale, like if we find out that this is all a VR adventure for someone and none of it's "really happening", that's going to be a big narrative cop-out. Thankfully, it's not that.
But man, the effects are good. Since the whole thing's being "transmitted" as a visual feed from some cybernetic-enhanced warrior, I think they could probably cover up a lot with jump-cuts and digital blurring that looks like the signal's distorted or cutting out for a second. But most of the rest of the time, I couldn't tell how the effects were done, and that's high praise. Like, Henry was riding in a motorcycle sidecar with a chain-gun attachment, and somehow the cycle went up into the back of the van, shooting the chain-gun the whole time, and somehow blew enough of a hole in the FRONT of the van for the motorcycle to break through and continue forward on the road, how do you even START putting that stunt together? What combination of real-world props and digital technology even allows a shot like that to happen? It's mind-boggling, and it's one of about a hundred things that my brain wants to analyze and pick apart until I figger out. What's real, what's faked and does that even matter any more?
(ASIDE: This chase scene sort of combines bits of the two famous chase scenes from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", where Indy's on a horse, then on this truck, that truck, then he's UNDER the truck, jump to the tank, etc. But imagine all that, shot from Indy's POV...)
I mentioned last week after "Spiderwick Chronicles" that playing dual roles in a film must be like total catnip to an actor, a challenge worth taking, even if it comes off as cheesy or contrived in the end. So for one actor here to play about a dozen (?) characters, including a parody of Dennis Hopper's trademark burn-out from "Apocalypse Now", that must have been much too good to pass up. Like most things this starts out very confusing, like how can THAT guy be Jimmy, when I just saw another guy named Jimmy get his head blown off, and they look a lot alike? What's going on here? Does any of this make sense, or does that even matter any more?
Again, the story is a throwaway, something about an albino villain straight out of James Bond territory, who's going to take over the world - somehow - with an army of cyber-zombies, or something. How involved was he with Henry's creation? What's his end-game? Why isn't having telekinetic power enough for this guy? And why does he still feel the need to hit people with baseball bats, while informing us that in Russia, they sell about 500,000 times more bats than balls? OK, good to know, don't go to Russia without a helmet...
And yeah, the violence is way over the top here. I lost track of the body count (211, by one estimate) and the different ways people were maimed or blowed apart, but after so many violent deaths, a weird sort of comic timing developed, as in: 1) pick up the grenade, 2) throw the grenade, 3) pause for timing and 4) well, four's not very pretty. I think "Deadpool" made good use of the same sort of timing, walking a very fine line between graphic violence and essentially, slapstick. We like our heroes invulnerable or quick-healing so that there are no permanent repercussions when they get injured themselves, along the road to taking out a couple hundred enemies who thankfully have the good sense to attack one at a time, and not all together.
Henry doesn't have the verbal patter of Deadpool or even Wolverine, because he doesn't talk at all. Conveniently his voice software didn't get installed before the enemy attacked, in fact there are a lot of things that get interrupted by the enemies attacking here. When someone says, "I've got something very important to tell you..." you can pretty much figure there's a clock counting down to the next attack. This film keeps up that frantic pace for the full 90 minutes, and if it doesn't make you nauseous or exhausted, it should be a pretty fun thrill ride.
Also starring Sharlto Copley (last seen in "The Hollars"), Danila Kozlovsky, Haley Bennett (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Andrei Dementiev, Ilya Naishuller, Will Stewart, Sergey Valyaev, Dasha Charusha, Svetlana Ustinova.
RATING: 6 out of 10 topless prostitutes
No comments:
Post a Comment