Yeah, but I thought of it first.

At least io9 caught on to what is obviously a great idea. Let me introduce to you Deja Reviews first unwitting contributor, Cyriaque Lamar. Welcome!

http://io9.com/5601532/a-review-of-syfys-new-tv-line+up-based-solely-on-one-press-release

Predators - Take

When I was a kid, I would play a game. Every time I watched a movie like Alien or Predator, (and in the wake of those two movies, there were a lot of movies like them) I would try to guess the order of the characters’ deaths. Maybe that sounds a little morbid for a ten-year-old, but I got pretty good at it after a while. I haven’t played that game in years, but Predators got me off the bench. Thank you, Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal, for bringing out the troubled ten-year-old in me one more time.

As most people who care to know such things already know, Robert Rodriguez wrote a treatment for this movie like a kabillion years ago. The people who make decisions about stuff like this, in their infinite wisdom, threw it in a drawer and greenlit a series of movies that turned two of the most iconic movie monsters of the last generation into, um, well…jokes. And not the good kind. I mean, like Margaret Cho-level. Then some executive went digging through some dusty filing cabinets to see what 40-year-old King Features Syndicate cartoon they could copy-paste Kevin James into and went, “Holy crap!” Then he called his buddy, Ronnie Metzler, over in production.

GUY

Ronnie, it’s me!

RONNIE

Hey, man. What’s shaking?

GUY

What if I told you that we’re sitting on a 

treatment for a wildly popular genre property 

by a well-known and (usually) very talented 

filmmaker who has enormous pull and appeal 

with genre audiences?

RONNIE

I’d say throw that sucker back in a drawer and 

let’s throw a monkeyful of money at the crabfest 

(yes, crab) that will become known as AVP:R, 

because after seeing it, the audience won’t even 

be able to muster the will to speak whole words, 

let alone complete sentences!”

GUY

Did I mention the property is from the 80s?

RONNIE 

Try back after we run these franchises so far into the 

ground that they only come up to steal and eat Eloi!

And so the treatment sat untouched for another four years, until another young hotshot executive found it after a particularly uncomfortable bout of illicit lovemaking (filing cabinets got sharp edges) with Valerie, the girl from marketing. He didn’t even bother to put his pants back on, but stood there, his wrinkled, powder-blue dress shirt the only thing covering his Christian shame, and called Brent in Development.

BUD 

Brent! You’re not going to 

believewhat I just found!

BRENT

Buddy, she’s nailed every guy here. 

It’s like a game of Battleship with 

her. I wouldn’t get too excited.

BUD

No, no, no! Robert Rodriguez wrote a 

sequel to Predator that doesn’t suck like a 

Night at the Roxbury! Wait…Battleship?

And so it was that in quick order, it was decided the Rodriguez would serve as the godfather to the project and oversee a hand-picked group of filmmakers to revise and update his vision of a group of human killing machines who are abducted and airdropped onto an alien planet, where they’re hunted by Predators….for sport! And perhaps profit, but the films never really get into the commercial side of what I can only assume is the lucrative business of human disenspine-ening.

They don’t need to. This flick is what monster movies are supposed to be, and what they haven’t been since, oh, let’s say Pitch Black: this mofo is frickin’ fun.  I’m very much over the whole eighties nostalgia thing, but for this flick, I can make an exception. No disrespect to Danny Glover, but this is the sequel Predator should have always had.

Relative newcomer director Nimrod Antal demonstrated he could navigate tight, tense character relationships in the immensely solid, if underseen Armored, and he rises to the task here as well. This is the first monster movie I’ve seen in fifteen years where the filmmakers seem to have bothered to look up the meanings of “suspense” and “storytelling.” Not that the movie is high-falutin’ in the least. This sucker revels in its simple premise and B-movie roots. There’s plenty of action, blood, gore, and creatures (the Predator-world “dogs” are particularly thrilling to ten-year-old me), but Rodriguez and Antal are smart enough to know that that all means jack unless you give a shit about the characters. And to that end, they gave us actors (not that the original Predator needed them. Did just fine without, thanks). Adrien Brody is an unlikely leading man in any film (except The Pianist), but especially this one. The one sticking point for me is probably that he’s miscast. He does his full-on best, but he can’t not be him.

The end result of getting competent, invested people on both sides of the camera is that they know how to set up an immersive fantasy where you, as an audience member, aren’t yanked out of the story every five minutes by stupid filmmaking choices. In short, a good movie lets you forget that you’re watching a movie so you can just go along for the ride. This goes double for sci-fi, and triple for summer movies. They’re supposed to be the epitome of escapism.

And it so it goes with Predators. We follow Brody’s character, Royce, as he literally appears out of thin air and falls to the jungle floor, where he meets a motley crew of killers, assassins and murderers from all different backgrounds. It’s like a model U.N. of badasses. From there, I get to start playing my game as the entire cohort tries to figure out where they are, who they can trust, and how they can escape while trying to avoid being turned into macho nachos with biceps sauce. Yes, even the token lady is macho. Topher Grace, on the other hand, not so much. It’s a great mix of antiheroes, a bunch of gritty, gruesome solo artists who have to come together and form a supergroup to keep their spinesnskulls from ending up on a laquered wooden panel in some alien’s rec room. It’s the Dirty Dozen in a spacejungle. This flick is a pure, unabashed testosterone fantasy, and it is a blast (from shoulder-mounted laser cannon).

Four out of five future Governors!

Toy Story 3: Take

Take the hankies out of the toy chest, you're going to need them for Pixar's third (and final?) outing with the toys that launched them into sky, eclipsing and redefining what it meant to be a Disney animated film for the last decade.

Often with sequels there comes the dubious sink in the soul, that worry that the movie you loved so much the first or second time is going to be pimped out and under-produced (I'm looking at you, "Cinderella II: Dreams Come True"!), but I had faith that Lasseter, Unkrich (his hand-picked directing successor) and co. would never sell out their beloved toys. Sometimes in this life, faith is rewarded. "Toy Story 3" is every bit as charming, smart, exciting, and heart-true as its predecessors.

It's been 11 years and nothing's skipped a beat. There's no sign of fatigue or age in the work done or in the source material. In fact I found, and think much of the audience may as well, that more than the previous entries, "3" elicits a unique and less-explored emotional landscape. The strange land of growing up. The bridge between the ages; burned to ensure maturation or preserved at the risk of stagnation/ostracization?

Which is not to say the movie is some sort of top-heavy rumination on times and things lost. "Toy Story 3" is as much if not more adventurous a yarn than the predecessors. The toys' donation to a local daycare (and if this film is anything to go by I'll never be setting foot in one of those again) pops the cork on the wellspring for new characters that so closely resemble the fuzzy memories of my youth I found myself wondering if indeed perhaps my sister HAD owned a Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear.

I may have to sit on this notion for a while to stand behind it but as of this writing I think that the "Toy Story" trilogy, thanks to the amazing third installment, may go down as my all time favorite and creatively fulfilling film trilogy of all time.

Get Him to the Greek: Doubletake

I was probably the only person in the world who didn't like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. When I saw Mike Myers's opus I was frustrated because the movie didn't seem to know what it was. Was it a James Bond Parody, a skewing of the '60s, or was it just a wacky romp? I needed the film to make the decision.

I felt very much the same way with Get Him to the Greek. The trailers led me to believe, and get excited for, a crazy, over the top, manic ride of the insane Aldous Snow tormenting poor music intern Aaron Green, with one scene of P. Diddy chasing them down a hallway. What the movie was, unfortunately, was a the tale of a sad rock and roll star who, yes drinks and at least talks about doing heroin, but is also extremely verbose and reasonable. We also are offered up a lot of characters who say "this is crazy" and then just go along with whatever. And some extremely unbelievable rock songs which are both tepid and too wacky to be believed. (The hit song is the "The Clap"? Really?)

In the end the one scene that satisfied was Sean Combs chasing Aldous and Aaron down a hallway, because it was actually funny, wacky, and interesting. The rest of the movie, which leads to Aldous learning a lesson about himself and his sobriety, can just go die.

Lessons don't take the place of comedy, Judd Apataw -where ever you are.

I give this movie one Bedtime Bear.

Get Him to the Greek: Take

“Get Him to the Greek!”

If I have to hear that phrase one more time I might but quit movies forever. You know those trailers that trick you with scenes that don’t make it into the final move? Well, welcome to the mother of them all. The trailers for “Get Him to the Greek”, make it seem like there is dialogue: Lizzy Moss talking about Gossip Girl, P Diddy asking about Cher, but it’s all a lie. The only words spoken, I repeat, THE ONLY WORDS SPOKEN IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE ARE: Get. Him. To. The. Greek.
Sure, they are said by a variety of different characters (Jonah Hill, Sean Combs, Russell Brand et al), in a variety of different tones and emoting different meanings ala:

“Get him to the Greek!”
“Get him to the Greek?”
“GET him to the GREEK!!!!”
“get him to the greek…….”

Over and over again.

No one ever questions why this phrase seems to be all the characters in THIS MOVIE can utter, it’s just accepted along with the raucous good time Aldous Snow is having. I suppose it’s mean to show us that words are meaningless and actions are the only things you should judge a character on- but for this reviewer it was nothing more then living torture.

Thanks a lot Apatow. Who ever you are.

I give this movie one frustrated Archie.

Sex and the City 2: Carrie That Weight

Poor Carrie. A lack of drama does not a movie make. But at least she gets away with just having one illicit kiss with ex-whatever Aiden. (Am I the only one who never bought that relationship?) So, Sex and the City 2 doesn’t find Carrie and her girls “happily ever after”, but, what the hell, the drama is short and the glamour is long.

The point of Sex and the City, to me, was never to be realistic, to explore feminism, to show a true-life exposé of single women in the city. It has always been a grown up Archie comic with silly dialogue, unrealistic plots and glorious colors. So with that in mind, I loved Sex and the City 2. I loved Stanford and Anthony’s Big Gay wedding, loved Liza singing “Single Ladies”, loved the gals walking through the desert in Couture, loved Samantha screaming at Muslim men that she has sex and humping the air to illustrate. The scenes make the movie, not the story. If anything I wish that Michael Patrick King had just gone all the way with the lazy plot and tossed it out the window of the first class airplane to Abu Dhabi. The movie would have been even better if it had been presented Archie Digest style with a different story every few pages.

Which I guess would be a TV episode.

Fuck it. So, Carrie has to learn what marriage really meant. So, Miranda learns to be appreciated. So, Charlotte is threatened by her Nanny. So, Samantha loves dick AND is going through menopause. It’s another two and half hours I got to spend in the reality defying “real” world of Sex and the City. I know in my heart that it was a bad movie, but even deeper in my heart I wished it had gone on 10 hours.

You just have to be the right kind of girl I guess. Was that sexist? Some people would think Sex and the City and Archie are too. Those people don’t know what fun is.

I give this movie 4 Drag Beyonce’s.

Sex and the City 2: Like I Carrie

Sex and the City was the greatest TV show all time after The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and several thousand others. Like Sex and the City: The Movie, 1, Carrie and Big are still having relationship problems. It's been 12 years. It's depressing. But this time instead of Big being a jerk, Carrie decides she "bored" and starts an affair with mushy ex-fiance Aiden. That would all be normal if the movie didn't take place in the middle of the Afghanistan conflict!

Here's what happened: Miranda takes on a teenage middle eastern client who is suing for parental emancipation. She flies with the girls to the desert country and in a dramatic scene, disables a dirty bomb, showing an natural talent for the ol' hurt locker. The term "the ol' hurt locker" is thrown around a lot in this movie, and it seems to refer to bombs, the act of dismantling bombs, bombs going off, and happy hour. Not sure what the real meaning was.

Miranda (AKA the smart one) now has to lead her friends out of the desert armed only with a M16 and a bomb suit designed by Gucci. Carrie, Samantha, and Charlotte still spend the movie gossiping about their sex lives, in an attempt to distance themselves from the horrors around them, which include camel murder, mirages of oxygen bars, friendly fire deaths, and a disastrous garden party.

All in all I think the Sex and the City team really grew up. I walked away from the movie realizing I needed to send less time worrying about my sex life, and more time simply being grateful for being alive.

I give this movie 4 Liza's out of 5.

Rockin' Robin: Robin Hood Doubletake

 I’m puzzled by the dearth of positive reviews of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. I held off on reading Owen Gleiberman’s Entertainment Weekly review until after I saw the film, but perhaps his frustration may offer some insight. He complains that the film isn’t fun and that it doesn’t reshoot all of his favorite scenes from other Robin Hood movies. Apparently, O.G.O.G. (because Owen Gleiberman is nothing if not an Original Gangsta) kinda missed the boat on the concept of this particular film, which was to take a different approach to a well-worn character. And in that, it succeeds.

EW's Original Gangsta

But Ogog (as he shall henceforth be known, forsooth) may be agog with good reason. While the marketing for the film does convey that the movie is a revisionist take on Robin Hood, it still promises the audience the adventures of a brave outlaw, which is something you don’t really get (SPOILER) until the last five minutes. No, Oggie, he doesn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. Instead, Director Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, 976-Evil) strive mightily to make a Robin Hood for grown-ups. They more than half-succeed, trading simplistic good Underdog vs. evil Simon Bar Sinister ideology for a complex web of political intrigue that finds France’s King Phillip as the main antagonist, rather than the prideful and inept King John. While the story’s framework is more mature than the traditional Robin Hood story, this movie is not short on cartoonish caricature.

Robin Longstride starts the film as an archer in the army of King Richard the Lion Heart who, through a fairly ludicrous set of coincidences ends up posing as Sir Robin Loxley, the King’s man-at-arms. One of the film’s faults is that it’s hard to get a bead on Robin’s character. In the space of 3 scenes, he goes from having an “every man for himself” attitude to feeling an obligation to return the dying Loxley’s sword to the man’s estranged father, taking on Loxley’s identity along the way. Through another rather amazing set of happenstances, Loxley’s elderly father takes the man posing as his son to his bosom, and Robin suddenly finds himself a landowner rather than an itinerant vagabond.

It’s a convoluted path to take, rather than just have the actual Loxley return home and take up his father’s cause of trying to get the King to ratify a charter that would guarantee fair taxation. For whatever reason, though, I kind of liked it. Here, Robin Hood fights King John not by bombarding him with Merry Men, but by making an inspiring - if anachronistic - speech about the right to taxation with representation. And while King John is certainly an ass who wants to keep raising taxes, the real villain is the French agent who keeps egging him on in an effort to drive England into civil war so France can invade more easily.

Mark Strong, as Godfrey the French double agent, is at once deliciously and eye-rollingly evil. The brilliant Cate Blanchett is saddled with making Lady Marian into the second coming of Eowyn, the Princess of Rohan from Lord of the Rings in a bit of writing that seems not only anachronistic for the period the film is set in, but almost old-fashioned even by today’s standards. It’s a forced display of feminism that’s pretty distracting and unnecessary. I have nothing against strong women in film, I just doubt she would be very useful in full chainmail with a broadsword. The filmmakers even give her a scene early on where it’s clear how difficult dealing with mail can be. Crowe does fine with what he’s given, but Robin’s character is fairly mercurial. And contrary to what friend Gleiberman would have you believe, there are a few Merry Men, even named as such, in the film, and we do get to see them carousing unabashedly with drink, song, and women.  This is personal bias, but I have to say that casting Kevin Durand (Lost’s Keamy, Wolverine’s Blob (?!)) as Little John is inspired. He got the crazy eye.

It’s a flawed film, to be sure, and I would have preferred that it either go completely cartoony, a la the Costner version (remember when Kevin Costner used to be one of America’s leading actors (?!)), or go whole hog into historical drama. But it takes it’s time, and after the amazingly coincidental set-up, allows its events to unfurl naturally and at their own pace, which I deeply appreciate. I wasn’t blown away, but I was able to take this one on its own terms and appreciate it as a rather workman-like stab at bringing something fresh to an old, old story.

Those title cards, though? They gotta go.

And so the legend begins…

Three out of four Keamys strapped with explosives.

1400 Words on Iron Man 2: Movie Review or Cry for Help?

Two years ago, Robert Downey, Jr. finally found a mainstream audience and simultaneously nailed the crap out of embodying genius lothario Tony Stark. His inimitable ability to blend the comic and the dramatic sucked you in and made what could have been a rote exercise in comic-book action filmmaking into a ginuwine work of supreme pop entertainment. That’s what the first “Iron Man” was: entertaining. Fun.  Another actor probably could have executed the role just fine, but in Downey’s ridiculously well-suited hands, the movie ceased to be another slam-bang FX-laden kick-off to the summer movie season – although it was that as well – and became about the characters. Stark in particular, and Downey as Stark especially.

So, after waiting two years to get another couple of hours to hang out with our rich, eccentric, acerbic buddy, obviously the first thing the audience wants to see in the sequel is…Mickey Rourke’s elderly father dying in a Russian slum?

I wish I could put my finger on the problem with this film. Structurally, there are some odd choices, like the aforementioned burial of the lead, and there are a couple of truly bizarre tonal shifts – the event that gets Rhodey (now played by Don Cheadle as a man would believes cracking a smile is tantamount to treason) is at once nail-bitingly scary and utterly laughable. But I think ultimately the movie’s true flaw is that everyone involved succumbed to the standard blockbuster sequel mentality that more is more. Too much is crammed into one story. The fact that I’m not entirely sure that’s the problem with it is a testimony to how good everyone involved is – with the possible exception of alleged wunderkind screenwriter Justin Theroux. Some of the dialogue is Saturday morning cartoon-level bad, and a number of scenes are downright dull (thrill as our villain watches TV and types on a keyboard!). Despite that, this thing comes so close to working, it’s more frustrating than if it had been a “Batman and Robin”-style catastrophe.

My main problem is that I want to go up to Favreau, give him a cigar (to soften him up a bit; he’s a big dude with a lot of money), and say, “Hey, man, where’s the fun?”  The first Iron Man opens like a party. Here we open on poverty, vodka, and a gnashing of teeth as genius madman Ivan Vanko (Rourke) embarks on a quest against Tony Stark for crimes Stark’s dad committed against his dad (a plot point I speculated about and nailed, by the way, thank you and you’re welcome). From there, we do go to a party. A huge one. Stark is soaking up the limelight in the center ring at Stark Expo, where he seems to have reverted back to the callous prick he was at the top of the first movie. This is the storyline that is played most elegantly by Downey. He makes Stark’s bravado is more aggressive than before. Tony’s still trying to be glib, but there’s an edge to it. Unfortunately, since the devil-may-care attitude of Tony Stark was largely what made the first film fun, if he’s grouchy and out-of-sorts, it kind of throws everything else off as well. If you can’t count on Tony Stark to be a smart-ass and bed a supermodel while saving the world, who can you count on?

As we soon find out, there is a reason for his inability to fully embrace the lightheartedness that made him so endearing in the first movie: he’s hiding a fatal secret. There’s some great stuff here. In fits and spurts Downey gives us glimpses of a man who can conquer anything except his own mortality. This would be enough character meat for any movie, but this one largely ignores Stark’s quest for a cure in favor of looking at what imminent defeat does to the ego of a man like Tony Stark. Apparently, it makes him promote a valiant Gwyneth Paltrow to CEO of Stark Industries, hire a woman half his age as a personal assistant because, well, she’s kind of there, and fly to Monaco, where he humiliates competitor Justin Hammer (a mincing Sam Rockwell, who I hope to God intended to come off as a pale, awkward imitation of Downey’s Stark, because otherwise he was just playing a dick) and races, unannounced, in the Grand Prix, where the disgruntled Vanko sneaks onto the track and tries to turn him into flanksteak with laserwhips. My favorite action sequence by far in this flick is Happy Hogan (Favreau), Stark’s driver, squaring off against the exoskeletoned Vanko in hand-to-hand laserwhip-to-Rolls Royce combat.

Long story short, Hammer, like the tool that he is,  goes into business with Vanko as Stark spirals out of control and pushes away everyone who actually cares about him. This prompts two interventions.  The first is the aforementioned scene that puts Rhodey in the War Machine armor – and makes the danger of drunk driving seem like the safety of sleeping on a bed made of Peeps.  Just imagine a drunk driver whose car can fly and shoot lasers and can only be opened from the inside. Now imagine he’s driving down a block where a group of high school kids are waiting on the corner for their bus, and you’re almost to the level of gut-churnity the first half of this scene evokes. Then comes the second half, where it devolves into ILM-abetted slapstick. It’s not Peter Darker sleaze-dancing his way down the streets of Manhattan, but it’s close.

The second, and understandably more effective intervention is delivered at the hands of Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury. I love Sam in this role. But I do kind of wish that between Theroux and Favreau, somebody would have pointed out that just because Downey is in the film, that doesn’t mean all the other male characters have to match his lackadaisically glib attitude and delivery (“Sir,I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the donut,” is a funny line, but so out of character for Fury as to be distracting). Their meeting leads to a number of revelations, some interesting and some unnecessary. I have no idea why Black Widow is in this movie, other than that more is more thing – and the fact that it provided the filmmakers the opportunity to squeeze Johanssen’s “more” into “less.” From a story perspective, she’s slutterly extraneous.

The interesting side of these revelations, however, leads to one of those weird structural things I mentioned earlier. The first movie found Iron Man suit’s power failing during the climactic battle, which added danger and suspense to the physical side of the confrontation. Here, he becomes more powerful than ever in advance of the climax. It’s sort of OK given that he’s facing off against superior numbers, so he’s still at a disadvantage, but you never want your hero to have a leg up on the bad guys going into the fight. He’s supposed to be on the ropes, and then find the thing that revitalizes him, so he can triumph over impossible odds. Even the solution to his fatal problem happens in two parts, diminishing the dramatic impact of both. By the time he finds the permanent solution, he’s conveniently already been given a temporary one. At that point, his success and survival is never in doubt, utterly sapping whatever drama there could have been from those scenes. In the movie as a whole, Stark’s emotional and physical low-points come at two different times as well, making the resolution of each less cathartic, and, ultimately, making the entire enterprise nowhere near as exciting as it should have been. Sorry as I am to say it, in places this sucker drags like Pete Bogen did junior year right after he found out the stuff his dad was growing in the basement under the fluorescent light wasn’t rosemary. For cryin’ out loud, the movie has the audience watching C-Span for five minutes 3 scenes in.

While there are a number of positives, mostly in the performance category, this movie really could have used a couple more passes on the script to trim away some of the fat and make the remaining meat a bit more flavorful. In the end, it’s much closer to what the first film would have been sans Robert Downey, Jr. – a pretty standard summer action flick. Bummer.

Two-and-a-half Batrocs.

Robin Hood: Rebooted, Retighted, Retunicked, etc., etc.

Having already dressed Russell Crowe up as a gladiator and a cop, to say nothing of vacationing with him in Italy’s wine country, Ridley Scott decided he was finally ready to take the next step with his go-to leading man, so he put him in tights and surrounded him with “Merry Men.”

Just kidding.  If anything, Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” exists to explode the parts of the myth left over from the days of Errol Flynn, like the feather in the cap and the idea that England used to ordain bears as friars. This new iteration of the classic tale serves as the next entry in two different cinematic series. First, it’s a de facto sequel to 2000’s Gladiator, reuniting star, director, and leather leggings. Second, it‘s the latest milepost in Hollywood’s seemingly unending race to “reboot” every property that’s ever been registered with the WGA. “MacGruber,” for instance, comes out in a couple weeks.  Louis Letterier’s “reimagining,” however, is already set to open 4th of July weekend. It will star Will Smith as Will Forte and Ryan Gosling as Shia LaBeouf. Forte’s love interest will be played by Jason Sudeikis getting kicked in the throat. 

The point is, rebooting something is no guarantee of improvement – Bond, Batman, and Star Trek worked just fine– but it does seem to be an effective marketing tool. Even when the end product is questionable, initial audience curiosity gets enough butts in seats to make make the whole rebooting thing a viable business model (I’m looking at you, “Incredible Hulk.” Also, Louis Letterier likes punching orphans. Because, apparently, I like taking jabs at people for no good reason. Like my hero, Louis Letterier: Orphan-Puncher).

So, Robin Hood: worthwhile revision, or cynical, Letterier-style cash grab?

As a matter of fact, this Robin Hood is pretty refreshing.  It’s the grown-up version of a story that easily lent itself to being cast with talking animals. In the 70’s. So…yeah. The film is strangely timely as well, although that timeliness is actually sometimes borderline disturbing. Robin Longstride is no longer a random, happy-go-lucky brigand, but essentially a grizzly, unemployed vet. But with a title. If you can call “Earl” a title. He’s recently returned from fighting for his country in the Crusades to find the bureaucratic fatcats at home toying with both his livelihood and that of his fellow little guys. So Robin rallies the villagers to throw off the yoke of their oppressors in what is probably the most thrilling movie that can be made about income tax reform.  The semi-disturbing bit is that whole thing about a disenfranchised proletariat fighting a seemingly all-powerful imperial regime using whatever means necessary in the name of a cause they see as just and righteous. It just used to be a lot easier for us Westerners to get behind underdog vigilantes before real-life underdog vigilantes started beheading Westerners. Regardless, it’s still tough to abandon that “noble outlaw” ideal altogether. Thanks a lot, American Revolution. 

The worst thing I can really say about the film is that it doesn’t stay with you. Had this been the first Robin Hood film, or even the first in a generation, it would probably leave more of an impression, and maybe even set a bar or two. As it is, it’s a fine summer film with a few sublime moments that ultimately feels pretty disposable. It’s just one more option on your Robin Hood menu: would you like your Merry Men Old Hollywood style, Disney style, Iowa style, Serious Filmmaker style, or Szechuan style? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s really a damn good movie. The performances are engaging, the action well-staged and exciting, the locations and visuals striking, and the script is more than competent. But one expects true excellence from the like of Scott, Crowe, and Cate Blanchett. For a group so experienced and compulsively talented, you get the feeling that they can turn out a film of this quality without breaking a sweat.  This movie could have been quite a proving ground for some young, hungry talent, a la Star Trek, rather than a group of grizzly old vets (I know, I know, I used the term twice. Just pretend that for one of them I was talking about bear doctors).

While it’s great to see a new take on some well-worn material (and I certainly prefer the film that ultimately came to be over the original revisionist pitch that spawned it - turning the Sherriff of Nottingham into the protagonist), at the risk of sounding like a knee-jerk cinephile, it would also be nice to see this level of time, money and talent thrown into a bucket full of new ideas at some point.

To borrow Phaea’s ratings system, I give this one 3 out 5 Quints.

The Bounty Hunter: Double take

The costumes in “The Bounty Hunter” are horrible. Gerard Butler is dressed in a $20 plaid gap shirt, ill-fitting khakis, and chunky sneakers. Jennifer Aniston spends the movie in a skirt so tight that it gives her a pooch the entire time. That’s right. Jennifer “90 pound” Aniston appears to have a belly because the costume designer was too concentrated on making her boobs look good.

My passion about the costuming is about as much emotion I can scrounge up about this romantic? Comedy? I admit I was expecting it to be bad, really bad, Godzilla (1998) bad. I now see that this was actually wishful thinking because at least bad is something. The Bounty Hunter is nothing.

Gerard Butler is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter. Jennifer Aniston is a hard-hitting reporter who skips bail for a minor crime to pursue a story involving a suicide/murder/police cover up. Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston wrestle and get back together and break up. And there is also a bookie looking for Butler to collect $11,000 in kneecaps. Yar di yar yar.

It reminded me, in some ways, of a screenplay I wrote when I was 18 about rival gangsters crews in Boston. It was a terrible screenplay because I didn’t know anything about gangsters, but I did know a lot of clichés. This holds true for screenwriter Sarah Thorp as well.

Cheap is the best way to explain this movie. Cheap clothes. Cheap lines. Cheap plot. Cheap acting. Gerard Butler appeared to be in a drunken black out for much of the movie. And for his sake I hope it’s true.

Christine Baranski was really great though. She mostly talking on the phone to Jennifer Aniston (her daughter) and made jokes about drag queens. Her name was Kitty Hurley.

Can we please have a movie about her?


I give this movie 1 Michael Douglas’s out of 5.

Repo Men - Doubletake: Actually, I don't feel so good after all...

Until I saw “Repo Men,” I had completely forgotten Forest Whitaker was in “Battlefield Earth.”

Not that he’s the worst thing about either movie. No, that blame in both cases has to lie with the script. But he signed on to those scripts, and frankly, he knows better. Forest Whitaker, you are actor-grounded until after actor-prom. Which I guess is the Oscars. And since they just happened, you’ve got about eleven months to think about what you’ve done.

Jude Law, I’m disappointed in you, but I’m sorry to say I’m not surprised. This is about what I’ve come to expect from you.

Liev Schrieber, you were a beacon of light in the midst of this mess, making a meal out of a morsel. Thank you for being so deliciously despicable.

The truth is that “Repo Men” is an enormously frustrating movie, amounting to a massive mismanagement of an intellectual property. I can’t write it off as just bad, because it is such a great concept. Oh, wait. Yes I can. In ridiculously appropriate fashion, I would very much like to surgically open up the movie, remove its vital organs, and transplant them into a body that makes sense, isn’t riddled with plotholes, and isn’t getting into absurd and unnecessary fist, gun, and knife fights every ten minutes because it’s so afraid its audience will get bored with it and go wander into “The Crazies.” “Repo Men,” you don’t need the popcorn theatrics; just be yourself. You are the codependent girlfriend of movies: the more desperate you are to keep us with you, the more you scare us away.

The themes and premise of this flick are intriguing and timely. There are flashes of absolute brilliance. The first five minutes set up a gritty film noir future, and the last ten showcase the most unique sex scene I’ve ever seen. Everything in between, however, made my brain roll its eyes.

The morality of the universe never makes sense for an instant. It’s very hard to swallow that even if the business of forcibly repossessing delinquent artificial organs existed, that the “repo men” entrusted with the job would do it out in the open. Or if they did, that anyone would use their product. The movie tries to wipe this inconsistency away with Frank Mercer’s (Schrieber) pitch to a potential client that “What you’ve heard about us on the news almost never happens.” But with as indiscrete as Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are, it seems likely that not only has this client heard about this on the news, but he probably witnessed one the murderous reclamations for himself on his way up the escalator (In a clever move, the offices of The Union - the sinister corporation behind all these shenanigans – are located in a suburban mall, presumably between a Hot Topic and an Orange Julius).

It’s not that I don’t think a corporation wouldn’t stoop to murder to make a buck, particularly in Movieland, I just think they would have to cover it up a bit better. As we learn from a scanner scene in an airport (remember how I said there was a ton of timely thematic material?), not only is it not covered up, but the FAA must be in on it too. The scanner is geared specifically to pick up these delinquent artificial organs. Since the FAA is a federal organization, that must mean that the government knows about all this casual civilian murder as well. I know this is the future, but I don’t think society is going to change so much that folks stop giving a crap about murder. 

I’m a real “glass half-full” kind of guy.

So I didn’t buy that part of the premise. But the underlying bits, that in the world the filmmakers set up, people enter into unsustainable financial contracts in the name of obtaining the health care they need, that human beings are becoming overly reliant on technology and get suckered in to buying things they don’t need. and that corporations are after profit at the expense of everything else…that stuff I buy. The bones. The blood, the muscle, the tissues, the organs. What’s wrong with “Repo Men,” is the treatment of the potent thematic elements it’s got floating around inside. Ironically, for a movie about people replacing their failing insides, the surgery the film itself needs most is a facelift.

Repo Men: The Feel-Good Family Film of the Spring! - Take

Buried deep in the recesses of “Repo Men,” somewhere beneath the action film with pretensions of social commentary, beats the dark, ugly heart of a poetic and intriguing film noir. Unfortunately, the quartet of strong performances from the likes of Jude Law, Forrest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber and Alice Braga never quite manage to drag the movie up from the B gutter into the light of an A picture.

“Repo Men” grows from a fertile premise. In the future, every type of artificial organ has been perfected. Their distribution, however, has been completely privatized under the auspices of a company known as The Union. Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) are two of The Union’s “Repo Men,” assigned to repossess organs whose owners have fallen behind in their payments. As all good sci-fi does, “Repo Men” meditates on and extrapolates from concerns that are thoroughly grounded in modern-day reality. The universe crafted by screenwriters Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (Garcia wrote the novel the film is based on) provides a thematic sandbox filled with issues like health care, unchecked capitalism, and privacy rights. The movie does indeed touch on all these, but too often devolves quickly into knifefights. Because you know what’s great to do with a phenomenal actor like Forrest Whitaker? Give him lines like, “I had him. Didn’t you see I had a knife in his side?”

Liev Schrieber, however, can use his nasal Bronx drawl on the line “Gimme yer feckin’ hyeart,” all he wants.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a good, enjoyable action thriller. But it had the potential to be something truly great and original, a mix of “Gattaca” and “Dirty Pretty Things.” For all the gleaming, futuristic production design, the actual production values rarely rise above a cable TV drama. The spine of this thing cries out for bold, uncompromising direction. The casual violence done to human bodies calls to mind Cronenberg. Unfortunately, in the hands of relative newcomer Miguel Sapochnik, it all ends up feeling rather pedestrian. One can almost hear the executive producer saying “No one gives a crap about existential moral fables. Can he taser two more guys in this scene?”

After the basic set-up, the story kicks into classic chase mode when one of Remy’s repo jobs goes awry and ends up costing him his own natural heart. The Union generously implants one of their own “artiforgs” (the clunkiest, fakest possible colloquialism for artificial organs) for which Remy can’t come close to paying. So he goes on the run, meeting up with Beth (Braga) a multiple implantee in similarly dire straits. Predictably, they fall in tragic love and set out to bring down the corrupt and evil corporation that Remy had no problem with until it decided it wanted to carve him up into flank steak and serve him with a side of country fried potatoes.

“Repo Men” is a fun, testosterone-charged night out at the movies, with enough of an intellectual bent to keep you from putting a fork through your own eye for shelling out nine to twelve bucks to see it. But it really is a shame that in the end it doesn’t amount to more than that.

The Bounty Hunter: Take

A lot of people are probably guessing that Jennifer Aniston’s upcoming Rom Com “the Bounty Hunter” is terrible title, terrible premise, and a terrible movie. What those people don’t know is everything.

“The Bounty Hunter” starring Aniston and hunk of the moment Gerard Butler starts out as a cookie cutter story. Butler is a down on his luck hunter of bounties and is surprised to learn that feisty ex-wife Aniston is his latest target. Blah blah blah Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But just as we are gently lulled into a feeling of security screenwriter Sarah Throp (formerly of TV- good for her) puts our head in a trash can and bangs the outside with a fucking pipe wrench in the form of SPACE WARS!!

That’s right. 17 minutes into the movie the whole tepid “bounty hunter” bullshit is thrown out the window as Jupiterians (of Jupiter) invade the lower 48 states and and start killing everyone with marrow in their bones. It’s up to Butler and Aniston to come together and fight these evil monsters for the sake of the human race!

The last third of the movie takes place entirely in the silence of space, a bold move for Sweet Home Alabama director Andy Tennant, forcing his two leads to communicate non-verbally and for the audience to truly learn what those secret looks between lovers are really about.

Sadly, they both die trying to save the lower 48 states. And sadder still, the lower 48 states are also lost to the Jupiterians. Is this a metaphor for the futility of love? Or the devastation that space exploration has wreaked on our economy? Only Frosty Lawson (Racetrack Attendant) knows, and he ain’t telling.


Frosty Lawson.

So much for the 21st Century - Cop Out Doubletake

The title “Cop Out” is no accident.

Man, is this a bad movie. Like, roll-up-a-newspaper-and-swat-it bad, because this movie does to your mind what a new puppy does to grandma’s Persian rug.

It’s the first movie Kevin Smith has directed without also serving as a writer, and it actually makes clear what a good writer he is. There are several very Smithy flourishes in “Cop Out,” but what’s missing is his truly unique voice. In a lot of ways it seems that everyone involved set out to do a by-the-numbers buddy picture – Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis emphatically debate the pronunciation of the word “homage” inside the first five minutes - it’s just that it’s tough to parody a genre that’s already pretty much a parody of itself. Despite a number of clever, and even laugh-out-loud moments, “Cop Out,” puts its run-of-the-mill, generic, borderline racist story ahead of the funny at almost every turn.

It says something that the most shining moments in the movie are the most incidental. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but everything gets a hell of a lot shinier whenever Seann William Scott is onscreen. His bizarre, over-the-top wackball pours a little juice into this jalopy, but he only gets a total of about ten minutes onscreen. The other standout supporting player is the lady who catches him while he’s trying to burgle her house. Her string of self-censored curses is the funniest scene in the movie. Which makes me a sad rabbit.

The structure is all over the place. There are extraneous relationships and plot strands that go nowhere (my only problem with Radha Mitchell in lingerie on a nanny-cam is that it was in this movie, where it both wasn’t funny and didn’t add anything to the story). The first twenty minutes is a nigh-unwatchable mess. Once Jim (Bruce Willis) goes to sell a baseball card to finance his daughter’s wedding, things pull together a little bit. The card gets stolen and voila, a clearly defined goal. For one of the two characters who are onscreen for ninety percent of the movie.

The other character, however is Tracy Morgan’s Paul. I suppose the level to which you enjoy “Cop Out” will depend largely on how you feel about watching a grown man behave like a developmentally challeneged middle-schooler for an hour and a half. He manages to channel the same shtick to more productive ends on 30 Rock, where at least there’s a bit of a wink, but here…man, childish histrionics is not the same as comedy. Like everyone else here, he’s got a few choice lines, but by and large he’s the biggest nail in the lid of this turkey. Maybe it’s my elite East coast liberal education talking, but on top of his general lack of funny, watching a grown black man behave like an idiot for money for 90 minutes just feels kind of dirty. But you know what? Who am I to tell Tracy Morgan he can’t be the next Adam Sandler? It is the 21st century, after all.

Shutter Island: Double Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of something I like to call “captain obvious makes an experimental film.” But because it’s Scorsese, girl, it works. We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, as Marshal Teddy Daniels, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic murderer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

The stilted acting, heavy handed dialoged, and too-loud dramatic music of the first five minutes were a stunning choice by Scorsese. It was like watching a 1950’s movie where Marlon Brando never happened to acting. But such deliberate direction could only mean that something mysterious was going on. Were we about to watch a honest to gawd B Horror movie? Were the characters just pretending to be who we thought they were? The first moment of “natural” acting didn’t occur until we meet the patients of the asylum. Yes, they were crazy, but they were real people compared to wooden Marshall Teddy Daniels.

It doesn’t take long to realize that there is something very wrong with Shutter Island. And it takes even less long to learn that Marshall Daniels is not just there for business. He has been damaged both by WWII and the death of his wife in a fire set by a patient he suspects might be hidden on the island. By the second day a hurricane hits, disabling the mainland ferry, of course, and more and more people seem to be telling Daniels, he ain’t ever leaving this island. His desperation and devotion to his wife’s ghost make Daniel’s head a horror film as much as the real horror film going on around him.

Although, to call Scorcese’s move a horror film is not accurate as much as you could call “Age of Innocence” or “Raging Bull” horror films. There is suspense; of course, quick pans revealing disturbing things, people jumping out at you, a wall of rats, and many, many…too many…images of dead children. But the best part about Shutter Island is, that as mediocre as I found the story to be, Scorsese’s wonderfully heavy-handed direction makes everything even lame seem like a bold production choice: His metaphors that involve showing you something, and then explaining to you what you were meant to get out of what you just saw…his many dream sequences and flashbacks to (thanks Scorsese!) piles of dead Jews…and children…the three big info dump scenes, which could easily be called “exposition crypt” “exposition cave” and “exposition light house”…well I just feel like I am watching a goddamn good ole’ American picture. I can’t bristle under that kind of enthusiasm.

Mini Spoiler alert: In the end there is a major twist, of course. And it’s not like the audience wasn’t expecting SOMETHING, but rather… which one of these three more obvious twists it will be? Thanks to “exposition light house” we knew the answer. Because Ben Kingsley told us in a lot of detail. And then Scorsese showed us a flash back of it. Which was just the way it should be. I give it 4 Daniel Day Lewis’ out of 5.





(This x4)






Just don’t see it if you have kids. Seriously. There a lot of dead kids.

"Cop Out" - Take-lette

I hate buddy cop comedies and smart people acting stupid. I can't deny that I laughed...but I felt bad doing it due to the levels to which people I like stooped to make them happen.

"Cop" a Feel - Take

“Cop Out” is the first feature feature film directed by Kevin Smith that is not also written by Kevin Smith. It proves beyond a doubt that he is a very talented...writer.

In a related story, I built a time machine, went back to when I was working at the sub shop and ordered a sandwich from myself – a 6-inch tuna with cheddar, no mayo – thus opening a hole in the fabric of space-time to a dimension where Kevin Smith and M. Night Shyamalan team up to make a movie that is both decently written and visually appealing, since neither one of them seems to be able to pull that off over here.

The level of enjoyment you will get out of “Cop Out” will be directly proportional to the level of enjoyment you get out of Tracy Morgan acting(!) stupid and Bruce Willis acting like Kevin Smith has his beloved German Shepherd, Ulrich The Untamed, tied up in the trunk of his car somewhere.  Between Morgan and Seann William Scott, who is still paying off his Karmic debt for indirectly dragging a growing succession of struggling young actors into roles as Stifflers (I caught 2 minutes of “American Pie Presents: Band Camp” on Comedy Central last week – and I do mean caught. My doctor says if I apply the ointment 4 times a day, the rash should clear up in a week or so), there’s more mugging in this movie than there was in the stairwell of my apartment building before they started putting pepper spray in the vending machine.

The movie is “written” by TV veterans Robb and Mark Cullen, but if I were them, I would probably just go back to sticking extraneous consonants onto the end of my name. The alleged “plot” follows Paul Hodges (Morgan), an NYPD detective who has to recover a stolen baseball card to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Bruce Willis plays a jaded, hardcase, wisecracking, bald-headed, seemingly invincible, borderline sociopath who is somehow also gainfully employed by the NYPD.  He is playing that part, however, in a Renny Harlin movie about killer traffic lights when he accidentally wanders onto the wrong set and Hodges, believing him to actually be John McClane, hits him over the head with a sack of nickels. He then spends a full three minutes of screentime cooing into Willis’s ear, “We’re buddies and we’re cops.” It’s pretty weird.

Over the course of the movie, Willis comes to appreciate Hodges’s unorthodox and inept brand of police work, while Hodges just keeps bugging Willis about the time he shot that guy even though he had diplomatic immunity. Eventually they get the baseball card back from the mobsters who stole it, but its corner gets bent in the climactic gun battle, downgrading it from “mint” to “very good” condition. So Hodges’s daughter has to settle for having her wedding in the alley behind Gray’s Papaya, which is really just as well because she was getting kind of all Type A about everything anyway.

The Wolfman - Doubletake

"The Wolfman" is clearly a labor of love for the director (and, I'm guessing, the star - Benicio Del Toro - as he's listed as one of the producers). Monster movies, the classics from the 1930's and 1940's, are the kind of art-cinema classic that endear themselves to the minds of those who watched them as young children. In a lot of ways, Joe Johnston's "Wolfman" mirrors Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of "King Kong." But where Jackson was painting on a myriad of canvases -- 1930's Hollywood culture, the foreboding Pacific, Mysterious Islands that time forgot, and the spangley new world metropolis of New York City, Johnston's story has a lot less fun ground to cover. Which in essence sums up "The Wolfman" -- less fun, or at least not as fun as you want it to be.

The film opens on the gray/blue, brown/gray village of Blackmoor (a place we're stranded for most of the proceedings). Lawrence Talbot (Del Toro) is called home from a very long absence to help search for his missing brother, only by the time he gets there his brother's status has been upgraded from missing to dead (oh, what did we ever do without cell phones?). Upon tersely reuniting with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and consoling his brother's grieving fiancée (Emily Blunt), Lawrence sets out to avenge the death of his brother by finding and killing whomever or whatever rent him into an unrecognizable pile of meat.

The plot moves briskly through these beats. Save for one strange stroll down memory lane in which Lawrence recalls his mother's suicide, it's not long before we get to the gypsy camp (at which many of the townspeople's fingers are pointing and where Lawrence's brother was known to have been brokering deals) and we get our first full encounter (well, at least in swift-moving darkness) with the beast in question.

And what an encounter it is! While the movie faithfully (ploddingly, at times) reproduces the stuffy Victorian business of it's spiritual (and literal) namesake, the one place where the stakes go up is the gore factor. Dismembered limbs, heads torn from their shoulders, gaping wounds of ribbon-slashed faces, the movie pulls few punches in this department yet saves from lingering too long on any particular horror, so as to artfully supply the wall between gore and fetishism (the latter being the purview of more say the "Saw" franchise and the like).

The beginning of a running theme that all but the completely un-cynical would have already guessed before entering the theater begins here -- the movie tends to get markedly better when there's a wolfman on the prowl. I'm not giving too much away, given that the title character must be bitten in order to be infected ("lycanthropy" they whisper) that there are more than one wolfmen in the film, and each iteration is lovingly rendered in both the oft-highly scrutinized transformation sequences and in full form - hairy brutes that owe much, if not all, in terms of design to their 1940's inspirations. Gone are the hulking wolves of the "Underworld" or "Twilight" movies. These here are gen-u-ine wolf MEN. A great credit is due the effects team in particular, as each wolfman bears eerie resemblances to the actors from whom they transform.

Things don't go well for our hero, as you can imagine, and it isn't long before the action takes a welcome and dramatic shift to London. Everything is better in London, and here is where the movie shines brightest. The stakes are higher, the streets are clogged, and it's the one point in the film where we start to feel maybe we don’t know exactly how these dots are going to connect. The somewhat surprising revelations delivered by the not-so-surprising villain (there's a very early bit of foreshadowing that will likely tip you off, though some gender reversal is involved to make it work and don't read too hard into the allusion or it falls apart) isn't exactly what we expected, and adds a layer of convolution and confusion to what had been, up until this point, fairly staid and two dimensional characters. Genre films populated entirely by cardboard emotions can work, and while we all love to see more fleshed out reasoning and depth in our film's villains and protagonists the worst is when that transformation from 2D to 3D gets mangled along the way and we wind up with a lot of deformed, partially realized dramatization and emotional plot holes.

A combined failing of the actors and the director. The former problem is most particularly perpetrated by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who misses a lot of opportunities to sink his teeth in (no pun intended), instead eschewing towards the subtle. Understandable given the period of the piece (the lips of the British have never stiffer) but lamentable for the film as a whole. The latter failing from the director comes from a clear focus on style and the beast over a more coherent emotional message from the actors. At no point are we confused by certain revelations, but they fail in raising the stakes emotionally and as such only serve in wasting the filmgoers' time. Del Toro is notably restrained but still manages to occasionally smolder, the flip side of the extroverted types he tends to be known for. Emily Blunt is the best of the lot, putting a lot of fresh and real into a film that feels, in many ways, like it belongs in another time.

Shutter Island: Take

Scorsese’s newest movie film, Shutter Island, sticks close to the director’s strengths of exploring the darker sides of human nature. Surprisingly, it is also the most cheerful film he has made to date! We start out with Scorese’s man-boy muse, Leonardo Dicaprio, investigating the disappearance of a psychopathic killer from Shutter Island, home for the criminally insane.

Dicaprio’s investigation seems pretty slow until you realize that it’s all an allegory to the 17th century Holland Tulip Wars. Believe me, that little factoid adds much appreciated clarity to all those times Ben Kingsley stares off in the distance for waaaaay to long and whispers “tulpengekte”.

Dicaprio is terrified at first at all these mentally deranged human beings, especially that balding chick with the crazy eyes (the character is called Lady Cuckoo Beans, typical Scorsese laziness), but then comes to realize that in this 1950’s world the people of the island are just the progressive thinkers, homosexuals, feminists, and future folk artists of the future! When Lady Cuckoo Beans performs a rock ballad about freedom and tulips (OK Scorsese we get it!), Dicaprio realizes that he is actually home.

The love story between Jackie Earle Haley and Dicaprio is disgustingly beautiful.

As the movie progresses, the viewer begin to feel as though they themselves are crazy. Crazy for looking at someone like Lady Cuckoo Beans, or Mad Jack Simpleton, or Black Guy (I swear, that’s his name! Scorsese!!!!), and thinking “that person is awful because they want to murder me”, when we should have been thinking “That person is SANE because they want to murder the OLD me and make way for the new, better, progressive me! Thank you!!”

Spoiler Alert!!!! You probably guessed it, but I was very surprised to learn that Ben Kinglsey and Leonardo Dicarpro’s characters were actually the same man, himself a “looney” confined to a cage in 18th century Paris along side the Marquis De Sade. But Daniel Day Lewis’s surprise monologue in front of black as the credits rolled was the real gem of the picture. Yes, it is in dutch, but you understand what he is talking about. And that is the ravages of alcoholism.

The Wolfman - Take

Benicio Del Toro's "The Wolfman" (because no one is going to call it Joe Johnston's "The Wolfman") thematically emulates all the traits of its namesake. A throwback, an evolutionary stepping stone trod upon decades ago in the history of cinema. A dark, lumbering, brute of a film that harkens back to the Universal Monster Movies of yore with a dogged devotion.

A bit too much, as the film eschews the finer points of character and acting in favor of gotcha shots in the darkness and gruesome transformation sequences. In this one, unadulterated sense, "The Woflman" is a complete success. It gives audiences a big, hairy monster, wraps it up in a bit of mythology, and drops it on an unsuspecting populace. Themes include: the beast within us all and the arrogance of man. Been there before? So have I. There's nothing wrong, per se, with going back to the well on themes like this, but "Wolfman's" diligent and tweakless rerendering of something we've seen time and again leads to very few surprises, despite the innumerable scenes in which characters sneak or run about in dizzying near-blackness.

Is that such a bad thing? We all get on roller-coasters, time and again, knowing exactly where the twists and turns are going to be, yet thrilled all the same. Sure a new and different roller coaster might makes us think more critically about roller coasters -- all right, this metaphor is going off the rails, but you get my drift. If you're looking for a post-modern, hip reimagining of the Wolfman, Wolfmen, or monsters in general, look elsewhere. If you still get excited about the pure visceral thrill of the monster movie, then "The Wolfman" just might suit you.

Just try not to put too many expectations on the actors who are -- unfortunately in the cannon of monster movies (save for a rare few) -- all but gasp and gore fodder for the titular beast(s) they face. Hopkins wears a creepy grin for much of the proceedings, and you can almost see him spending the paycheck in the back of his mind. Del Toro and Blunt are serviceable yet secondary to the director's true star, Wolfy himself. Both play their parts with rudderless aplomb, but clearly the love goes to the Werewolf. Transformation scenes abound, gratuitously long sequences in which there is much running and off-screen rending (a minor quibble -- despite it's R rating, the camera seems a bit shy of the gorier money shots) pick up the pace of the second half. The first half, as is the tradition, being a bit bottom-heavy with the weaving of mica-thin themes and characters -- a paper house being built for the sole purpose of being destroyed later.

"The Wolfman" is, in reality, more of a Zombie movie. Resurrected and gussied up for modern times, yet with no more substantial changes from the films of the 1930's save for the gore factor, this movie will appeal to hardcore monster-movie buffs and few else.

Ironing Out The Details

When I was growing up, “sequel” was a dirty word. It was the heyday of Rambo, Rocky, Jason, Freddy, and “Police Academy.” I could count the number of sequels worth even a passing glance on one hand: “The Godfather, Part II,” “Evil Dead II,” “Star Trek II” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Aliens.”

These days, I need a couple extra hands. "Toy Story 2." "Spider-Man 2." "X-Men 2." And more recently, "The Dark Knight." Especially for comic book and fantasy movies, once filmmakers have divested themselves of the obligation to cram an origin story and an actual story into the same movie, sequels offer the chance to build on an established narrative foundation. Lately it seems it's that third “I” that’s the kiss of crap: witness “Batman Forever,” “Spider-Man 3” and “X3.”

So…Iron Man 2: eighties sequel, or oughts sequel?

The story picks up where the first one left off. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) has made his double-life public, flaunting his alter ego at every opportunity. Without a righteous moral struggle, Iron Man has gone from avenging hero to marketing tool. He’s a hero, but a hollow one, a shell. Stark himself is riding high, not realizing how close he is to sliding back into his former narcissistic nihilism. Where the first movie was - in some scenes literally – a battle for Tony Stark’s (electric) heart and, in a way, the story of Stark’s war against himself, the second begins with him finally feeling whole.

So you know that won't last for long.

As in the first film, the unintended consequences of Stark’s actions are the engine that drives the plot. In this case, those consequences take the form of formerly-imprisoned Russian genius scientist and Bond-villain-level crazy guy Ivan Vanko, played by a metal-toothed and bizarrely accented Mickey Rourke. Stark’s father stole some of Vanko's ideas years earlier, then had Vanko deported to keep him from challenging the elder Stark’s patents on his inventions. So when Stark’s mysterious industrialist rival Justin Hammer (a wonderfully slimy Sam Rockwell) approaches Vanko with stolen Stark Industries blueprints and asks him to build a prototype that can compete with the Iron Man armor, Vanko gets to work building himself an ugly but effective exoskeleton complete with 12-foot-long laser whips.

Naturally.

By the time Vanko unveils his creation in the most visceral of the movie’s action set-pieces, a Formula One race Stark is competing in for charity, Stark’s world has already started unravelling. A seductive new employee, Natasha Romanov (a crimson-tressed Scarlett Johansson) is turning Stark’s head at the office and arousing the suspicions of his ever-faithful girl Friday Pepper Potts (a returning Gwyneth Paltrow, again adding warmth and depth to a role that could easily have been thankless and demeaning); he discovers that the arc reactor in his chest, the thing that’s supposed to be keeping him alive, is actually killing him; and while he’s still reeling from the race track attack, he’s assaulted by a squadron of soldiers in armor eerily similar to his own. After barely escaping with his life, he finds out the attack is a direct result of his refusal to turn over his Iron Man technology to the DOD. Instead, Defense went into business with Hammer, who used the same stolen Stark technology he gave to Vanko to land a contract for an army of armored supersoldiers. This information stokes Stark’s moral fire and his goal comes into focus: to regain control of his technology and to track down the mole who has been delivering it into the proverbial “wrong hands.”

Now on the defensive against Vanko, Hammer, the U.S Government, and an internal mole, Stark enlists the services of his estranged friend, James “Rhodey” Rhodes to help him dig his way out of the morass he find himself in. In the film’s one recast role, Don Cheadle, a fine actor, ably replaces Terrence Howard as Rhodey, although I personally preferred Howard. Cheadle has great range, but is almost too sympathetic to play a career military officer – even one who goes out drinking with Tony Stark. Against Rhodey’s protests, Stark convinces him to don a souped-up version of the silver Mark II armor from the first film. Because if one Iron Man is good, two is better. Right, Movie?

While this “more is more” approach has been the downfall of many a sequel before it, Iron Man 2 avoids many potential pitfalls by following the model of its immediate predecessor and embracing its own “pop-ness.” This is not a movie that pretends to be anything more than a pleasing distraction, and benefits massively from that lack of pretension. The tragic tendency of the tentpole franchises of the last ten years is that over time, they begin to take themselves too seriously. The maudlin histrionics of Spider-Man 3 and the over-explanation of Jack Sparrow come immediately to mind. While Iron Man 2 ups the stakes from the first movie significantly, and the pathos is enough to keep the audience invested in the characters, Favreau and crew never skimp on the gee-whiz-pop-boom-bang pyrotechnics. In short, it’s a B-level movie with an A-level treatment, just like the first film. It’s popcorn entertainment – but with real butter, not concession stand gasoline.

-Aaron


Iron Man 2: Secret of The Ooze comes out 5/7/2010