Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Alternate Title:  Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Soviet


One sentence synopsis:  A retired british spy seeks to ferret out a mole within the British Intelligence service.


Things Havoc liked:  Ah, Gary Oldman. I love Gary Oldman. He can play insane, he can play straight, he can play supremely powerful, and he can play schlub. Whatever's going on, I always love watching him, especially when he's given interesting things to do. Here, he plays George Smiley, the protagonist of John LeCarre's famous set of cold war spy thrillers, who has been involuntarily retired and then approached by the British government to look into rumors of a mole working at the "Circus", British Intelligence. The Circus here is presented much as I imagine it really was, an office building filled with dumpy, paranoid English upper crusters, played by such awesome actors as John Hurt, Colin Firth, Cirdan Hinds, Mark Strong, and the man with the most British name ever invented, Benedict Cumberbatch (no, I did not make that up). Seriously, any one of the above men I could watch doing largely anything. A cast like that cannot place a foot wrong, and therefore does not.

The movie eschews the usual James Bond tropes (not that I dislike those) in favor of the grind and misdirection of an actual spy case. There are no car chases, no duels with machine guns or swords, not even dead drops in the middle of the night while being chased by agents of the Stasi. One does not catch moles by beating them like Jack Bauer, one catches them with careful deduction and research. This research in the hands of lesser filmmakers might get boring or tired, but it does not here, and there's actually a fair bit of tension when one man is trying to pull off a complex yet subtle scheme to steal documents from a secure facility. The story is told mostly in flashback, but without losing the audience in terms of where and when we are situation, and otherwise proceeds at an even pace towards the end.



Things Havoc disliked:  That said, while we never lose the setting of the film, we do lose more or less everything else.

I am not an idiot. I enjoy complex thrillers with labyrinthine turns. I have no fucking idea what actually happened in large portions of this movie. It's not that the movie obscures these things behind misdirection and twist, don't get me wrong, it's that I cannot follow the line of logic that leads our protagonist to sniff out the mole he is hunting for. Entire subplots of the film, such as everything Mark Strong does, and most of what Tom Hardy does, have, as far as I can tell, nothing whatsoever to do with anything, or if they do have something to do with anything, it's a complete mystery to me. The movie takes great pains to establish a situation where the Mole can be any one of a half-dozen men, all well-placed within the Circus. Yet how it is ultimately determined that the mole is This man rather than That man or Those ones is totally mysterious to me. Perhaps if I went back and viewed the movie several more times, I would be able to sort it all out, but the movie's pace was so slow and methodical that I frankly was not given any reason to desire to do so. But more importantly, there doesn't seem (to me at least) to be any major underlying logic to why one person is a mole and not another. Perhaps that's the point, I don't know, but it left me feeling like the movie had arbitrarily chosen somebody to be the bad guy.


Final thoughts:  The book this movie was made from is much longer than the film, as was the original british miniseries made about it. Perhaps those elements are in play here, as the movie seems like it forgot to actually include the important information of how we got from A to B. Still, I can't call this a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. It's shot well (if dumpily, but that's the point, I suppose), acted very well, and does hold together for a coherent viewing. There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie, certainly, but it didn't really leave me with a good sense of what had just transpired.

Final Score:  7/10

Hugo

Alternate Title:  Lights, Camera, ...


One sentence synopsis:  An orphan boy and the goddaughter of the first filmmaker try to solve the riddle of an automaton connected to silent films


Things Havoc liked:    Martin Scorsese is the great film director to ever live. That's not a statement I make lightly, but there you have it. I have literally never seen a film of his that I disliked, even if some were, of course, better than others. And while this movie was not what one might normally expect to see from him, such is his draw in Hollywood, that he contrived to pull an incredible cast together for the purposes of it. Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, and Sascha Cohen (yes) among others are in this film, and, as one might expect, every one of them turns in an excellent performance, even Jude Law, who almost never does. Particular acclaim should go to Ben Kingsley, who plays Georges Meliers, one of the world's first real filmmakers, now an embittered old man selling magic tricks and toys from a train station shop.

But the two stars of the movie are actually the kids, specifically Asa Butterfield as Hugo, an orphan who lives in the work spaces of the Montparnasse train station in Paris, evading security guards, stealing food, and keeping the clocks in working order (for reasons that actually make a degree of sense), and Chloe Moretz as Isabelle, adopted daughter of Meliers, who befriends him. I've been a big fan of Moretz since both Kick Ass and Let me In, both awesome films in which she stole the show as something you wouldn't normally see a kid doing. As to Butterfield, I've never seen or heard of him before, but if anything, he does even better than Moretz. Both kids hold their own in this movie, and when you're doing that while Ben Kingsley is on the screen, you know you're doing something right. Neither one is the steriotypical cute kid, and both do awesome jobs, including scenes with real dramatic requirements that both of them (particularly the boy) sail through effortlessly. Forget stars in the making, these kids are simply stars.

Nothing about this movie looks or feels like a Scorsese picture, but that's not a bad thing. The shots are gorgeous and full of whimsy and life, without lapsing for an instant into fantasy. Paris is one of the world's great cinematic cities, and whatever the CGI involved, it definitely shows in here. The film is set vaguely in the early 30s or so, but there's no Depression era nonsense involved. It's a gilded age of a gilded city shot lovingly by a spectacular director who knows how to establish every shot.

The story is nothing tremendously special, but that's because it serves as an excuse for the real subject of the film, a loving tribute to the wonder of film, via an examination of one of its earliest advocates. Georges Meliers, for those who've never heard of him, was one of the first people to use film to create stories and art, rather than just a sideshow penny arcade attraction. His films, of which there were nearly five hundred, invented everything from practical effects to narrative storytelling through shot selection. Everyone from DW Griffith to Sergei Eisenstein were inspired by Meliers, who practically invented an entire form of artistic expression. Scorsese is plainly using this movie to pay homage not just to Meliers, but to the medium of film to begin with, and this love for film and its magic infuses the movie so much that there's no need for overt fantasy, for the whimsical sense is there between the shots. This movie was a love story to its own medium, and it shows.




Things Havoc disliked:  The story in this film is pretty forgettable, due to the fact that it's not the main purpose, but merely an excuse for Scorsese to have his love affair with early cinema. This isn't my problem. My problem is the pacing.

The pacing in this film is awful.

You might think this is a bit of a nitpick. It's not. The entire first half of the film is so slow that it verges on absolutely unwatchable. NOTHING fucking happens. So much time is taken in establishing shots that the movie looks like a travelogue. So many subplots and extraneously un-necessary characters are brought into the mix that the film risks collapsing. The same damned chase scene occurs at least five times, and some of the characters, particularly the station agent played by Cohen, are given huge blocks of time to establish themselves. Normally that would be a good thing, but nothing fucking happens there either, and the character is not established further, simply placed on screen to act weirdly over and over again. Half an hour into this film, I was on the verge of walking out, something I didn't even do to The Last Airbender.

Now, granted, the film did get better as it went on, but never did it fully escape the almost unbearably slow pace that it had established. When I finally left the theatre, it felt like the movie had run for about two and a half hours. The real runtime was ninety minutes. Roger Ebert once said that no good movie is too short, and no bad movie short enough. This one feels like it's actually never gonna end. The pace is so slow that great stretches of the movie are simply... well... boring. No matter what effort the actors put in or how sweeping the imagery or lovely the idea of the movie, it fails to entertain. No failing is ever as bad as this one.


Final thoughts:  I really don't know where to go on this one. A movie I threatened to walk out of is definitionally not a good movie. And yet looking back, I don't feel any ill-will towards it. The parts of it that work really work, and there's something inescapably charming about the whole thing. The last couple days have softened my view on the thing somewhat, and while I wouldn't call it the masterpiece that most critics seemed to, I'm coming around to the idea that it wasn't as bad as I originally thought. The pieces are all here for a great movie. It's just a shame that Martin Scorsese forgot to make one.

Final Score:  6/10

Real Steel

Alternate Title:  Rock 'em Sock 'em Rocky


One sentence synopsis:  An ex-boxer and his estranged kid try to take a broken-down sparring bot to the championship of the World Robot Boxing League.


Things Havoc liked:    Hugh Jackman has been in his share of bad films (Wolverine and Swordfish come to mind), but I've never thought that he was bad, just unable to elevate the material. And when Jackman is good (X-men 2, The Fountain, the Prestige), he's quite good. Headliner as he is in this film, I have to admit that he's quite good. Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, who is a douchebag (no, not a lovable douchebag, a douchebag), an underground robot boxing promoter who scams and steals and does all the things movie douchebags do. Yet despite being a douchebag, unrepentantly, Jackson brings an excellent performance here, such that the movie doesn't have to soften him in order to get the audience to like him. I'm actually impressed.

But not as impressed as I am by Jackson's co-star, a kid named Dakota Goyo, playing Charlie's estranged 11-year old son Max. Child actors are dangerous in any movie, especially a movie that is transparently about cute kids and robots. Moreover, this particular kid has the unfortunate characteristic of reminding me of Jake Lloyd from the Phantom Menace (and we all know what a cinematic masterwork that was). Yet, to my surprise, Goyo nails the role (and it's a much bigger role than one would expect from the trailers) very well. The character fails to lend itself to particular adjectives, he's not "plucky" or "edgy" or "angry" or "cute" though he does at times hit all those notes. The performance, and the interplay with Jackson's character (and with the robot) just... works.

Speaking of the robot(s), the effects in this movie are excellent. That's par for the course these days, but they're excellent regardless, mostly because of the decision to use animatronics where possible and CGI only when necessary. It gives the robots weight and dimension, such that when they fight (or simply run about), we actually feel their existence rather than view video game images. There is none of the cinematographic bullshit that got in the way with the Transformers movies. Fight scenes are shot cleanly and with good lighting, giving us an excellent idea of what's going on. The robots themselves are distinctive, well-designed, and interesting, and their fight choreography (shaped by Sugar Ray Leonard of all people) is excellent and entertaining.

Soundtracks are a dime a dozen, but I did notice in watching this film that this particular soundtrack was excellent. There are some recognizable songs on it, but mostly its a mood-setter soundtrack that blends standard orchestral scores with, of all things, synthesized country ballads. That this is the work of Danny Elfman, a composer of great fame and skill, comes as no surprise, but the music fits the mood shifts of the plot much better than any film of this caliber has a right to.

Oddly enough for a story about pugilistic robots, the plot of this movie is derived in no small part from a famous 1973 movie called Paper Moon, starring real life father-and-daughter Ryan and Tatum O'Neal. An excellent film in its own right (it garnered an Oscar for Tatum), this movie basically blends it with Rocky to produce a movie that's simultaneously about an estranged father and son coming together and about robots boxing. All that I will say here is that the writing in the film is good enough to elevate it above what you would expect a ludicrous combination like this to result in, and the actors carry it off well enough to make it work...



Things Havoc disliked:  ... sometimes.

When I say that this movie is Paper Moon crossed with Rocky, I mean it. It is those movies verbatim, plot point by plot point, woven together to create something simultaneously new and completely predictable. I have never guessed right so many times as to what was going to happen in a movie as I have with this one. I said that the writing in the film is good, and it is, but the plot (as distinct from the writing) is really lackluster. Not only have you seen this all before, you've seen it before so many times that you know exactly what's going to happen. This makes parts of the film (towards the beginning especially, I found), rather painful to sit through

I know I praised the cinematography before, and I meant it, in that it's so rare we see good fight sequences in this age of over-processed CGI. But the reason the cinematography is good in the fights is because the movie uses a very old-school approach to its cinematography (see Paper Moon again). This is good in the fight scenes, but less good in the rest of the movie. It's not that the film is badly shot, far from it, but there is an unconscious language to cinema of inferences and shot constructions, and this movie abuses that language to the point of absurdity. Many shots were almost pretentious in their obvious desire to symbolize things like the gulf between two characters, to the point where I was just waiting for the director to get over his film school textbook and get on with it.

Some of the supporting cast is good and some is less good. The villains in this film are among the latter, stereotyped "evil terse asian supertechstar", "evil russian ice queen mobster" and "evil redneck racist hillbilly" foremost of all. Other than adding something for our audience to root against, they don't do a hell of a lot. This actually undercuts some of the effective design work that went into the bots, as it takes the attention away from the thirteen-foot armored monstrosity trying to beat the heroic underdog into the dirt with pile drivers. That's not an easy thing to do, mind you.

While the writing is good overall, the decision to stick so closely to formula hurts the movie in that there are some sequences that simply cannot work in a modern film, no matter how good your actors and how good your writing. Tearful apology scenes for instance are tremendously hard to do right without a tremendous amount of skill, and chaining the film to older movies with older sensibilities only guarantees that won't be the case here. These moments weren't that common, frankly, but they were still present, and almost cringeworthy when they popped up.

Finally, the product placements in this movie were egregious, even by today's standards. Guys, we get that Dr. Pepper and Budweiser (and ESPN and Droid and Toshiba and Red Bull and fifty others) paid you. At a certain point, enough is enough.


Final thoughts:  *Sigh*

To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to writing this review as I was taking the train home from the movie theater, and most of the reason for that was that, while I was able to portion out and characterize this movie's strengths and weaknesses, the way I have for every film I've reviewed here, I knew I was eventually going to have to come to this section, wherein I would be required to admit that I basically adored every second of this movie the instant I started watching it.

That sound you hear is the sound of my credibility disappearing.

I loved this film. I loved everything about this film. I'm not entirely certain I can explain why. Everything I said above, all the criticisms I made about the pretentious cinematography, about the outright theft of a plot, about the stupid villains and the cringeworthy moments, all of that is true and I don't give a damn. This is the movie I wanted Transformers to be. Fuck, this is the movie I wanted Rocky to be. Nothing here makes sense. Paper Moon crossed with Rocky (plus robots!) makes about as much sense as crossing Total Recall with Driving Miss Daisy, and yet something, something buried deep inside this movie just worked, on a level so profound that I completely forgot everything mean I had said about the film by about the 2/3s mark. Part of it is the acting, which from both Jackman and Goyo is just right. Part of it is the overall design. Yes I whined about the product placement overload, but the design work on the film is awesome regardless. It feels like a real near future, even with a premise this ludicrous. Part of it is the soundtrack, which I cannot rave enough about in doing a fantastic job of buttressing the movie emotionally. And part of it is the writing, which despite the hackneyed plot, feels completely real at all times.

But I think most of it is none of those things, or maybe all of them in aggregate, I don't know. Alfred Hitchcock said that the soul of cinema lies between the shots. Something lies between the shots in this movie, something real and intense and passionate and just plain childish fun. Somewhere along the line, someone associated with this movie loved it enough to insert blood and sweat into polishing it, and the end result shows up on screen. This film was everything a setup like this could possibly be and more, exciting, fun, appealing, everything I wanted the retread movies that trampled on my childhood to be, and were not. Watching this movie, I felt like I was ten years old again, watching awesome robots fight with wide eyes and an open imagination. I suspect someone making this film brought the same mindset towards its creation.

On paper (and maybe even in objective reality), this film should be around a 5.5 or a 6, a decent film but nothing spectacular. After all, everything here has been done before, and bigger, and louder, and more edgy, and more real, and with more cool jump cuts and CGI. All of those things may be true, but goddamnit, these are my reviews, and I will call them as I see them. Call me a sucker. Call me a nostalgic fool. Call me an idiot, I don't care. I loved this film. I loved everything about this film. This is what Transformers should have been.

This is what Transformers once was.

Final Score:  8.5/10

Killer Elite

Alternate Title:  Action by Numbers


One sentence synopsis:  A retired mercenary must assassinate several ex-SAS operatives to save his partner's life.


Things Havoc liked:   Clive Owen is a bad motherfucker. Jason Statham is a bad motherfucker. And Robert DeNiro is the original bad motherfucker. Between them all, there is a recipe for an excellent action movie here, and I'm pleased to report that what you see is essentially what you get. Killer Elite is a meticulous, complex action film wherein our heroes beat the piss out of one another in reasonably inventive ways.

As action is a relatively important element of an action movie, I must report with some satisfaction that the action here is of top quality. There's very little in the way of superhero tricks, no shaky cam or new-edge cinematography bullshit getting in the way, just basic, competent action camerawork, and the scenes that we get are executed well. The plot is serviceable, if not anything groundbreaking, but it does do a nice job of establishing the bad guys both as an effective force in their own right (we are talking SAS here, after all), and in giving them a more complex motivation than simply "we are evil and must do more evil." Clive Owen's character in particular (he plays a former SAS turned dirty-tricks man for a cabal of other former SAS men) is even given some depth.



Things Havoc disliked:  The word "formulaic" comes to mind here constantly, which is perhaps a bit unfair, as the movie really isn't that much of a formula. It does however have an astonishing lack of empathy to it, despite the aforementioned gestures in the direction of good characterization and villain establishment. First off, this movie continues to prove my assertion that Jason Statham should only play assholes. His attempts to emote things like regret and compassion are just not convincing, and never have been. The man is an excellent action star, but charisma is not his forte. By far, the best thing I've ever seen him in (Snatch), knew this. This movie does not.

Second, this movie is a complete waste of Robert DeNiro. His character is locked in a jail cell for the majority of the first and second acts. When he breaks out, he gets a couple of decent scenes, but they are only decent because he is in them, not because they're integral to the plot or well-written. It's clear that the filmmakers were trying to come up with something for him to do just so that they could headline him in the film credits.

The plot is labyrinthine and fairly absurd, but that I mind less. What's annoying is the third act "revelation" of how (surprise surprise) the government is evil and doing evilly evil things for the sake of being ever so evil. We did not need a ham-fisted recitation of the hard-bitten life of a mercenary or ex-soldier. This is not Platoon, guys, get over yourselves.


Final thoughts:  Honestly, this movie is about what you think it is, a reasonably well-executed action vehicle for Statham and Owen. There are some sequences (the whole section with the remote control truck and the following scenes in the container park for instance) that are elevated by good camera, plotting, and stunt work. The majority of the film however really never rises above "decent". Not a condemnation, certainly, but nothing to write home about.

Final Score:  6/10

Moneyball

Alternate Title:  The Agony of Defeat


One sentence synopsis:  The general manager of the Oakland A's turns to Sabermetric analysis to find a championship team he can afford.


Things Havoc liked:   Baseball is the great American pastime, and I am a great admirer thereof, particularly of my own home team, the San Francisco Giants. As a loyal Giants fan, not to mention a San Franciscan, I of course believe that everything even remotely related to Oakland, including their foul, diseased, putrid excuse for a baseball team (playing godless American League baseball, no less) should be summarily consigned to the lowest pit of Hell, where they shall be tormented by the devil with hellfire for ever and ever for the sin of having employed the Designated Hitter and thereby tarnishing the face of baseball for all time.

Er... sorry, where was I?

Er yes, the film. This is not a standard sports movie by any stretch of the imagination. For one thing, it's primarily about the back office. Brad Pitt plays A's general manager (and now minority owner) Billy Beane as a very rounded character, one whom I can easily see alongside the Steinbrenners and La Russas and the other lunatic personalities that baseball seems to generate. The movie focuses on him as general manager, a role entirely different from the manager (played in this case by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), one concerned with the details of personnel acquisition, high pressure player trades, and scout management. More time is spent looking at spreadsheets and computer models than at baseball players playing baseball. Pitt's character doesn't even watch the games.

Indeed, this movie is almost single-minded in its overturning of the general cliches of the sports movie genre. The players are shown almost as an afterthought (with the exception of Scott Hatteberg, an injured catcher-turned-first baseman whom the A's are able to pick up because nobody else wants him). No rag-tag team of plucky all-stars here, but a bunch of soulless, interchangeable parts, picked up and released without so much as a question. What we see therefore resembles more of a collectible card game than Field of Dreams, as managers call one another and enact byzantine strategies to outmaneuver one another for the players they think are undervalued. The movie takes what seems to be pathological delight in completely dispensing with notions of "fundamentals", "intangibles", "scout wisdom", or "small ball", all concepts that are usually used to give the plucky, ragtag group of movie baseball misfits a fighting chance against the big bad soulless ball team.

And yet, surprisingly, this doesn't make the film unwatchable, far from it. The focus instead is on Beane and on his assistant general manager, Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill in easily the best performance I've ever seen out of him). Brand is a 25-year old Yale-educated economics student, who also happens to be a fat baseball statistics nerd. Yet he brings an absolute conviction to his belief that baseball in general is doing it all wrong, valuing (and thus, rejecting) players for subjective reasons that have nothing to do with their actual performance. Through Brand, the movie throws massive amounts of data at us, but never in a fashion that feels infodumpish or bewildering, and the core tenet that teams are buying players when they should be buying wins, is one that underlies everything that these people do.

The effect is very weird, turning everything we normally see in a sports movie on its head. The plucky misfit players become almost background noise, the wise, sagely coach becomes the antagonist who nearly derails the team for the sake of his future employability. The sports commentators vilify our heroes when the system doesn't work, and credit the useless manager when the sabermetric analysis pays off with an unprecidented 20-game winning streak. And all that time, the penny-pinching, numbers-obsessed capitalistic moneyball players are our heroes.

And yet it works, more or less. Pitt and Hill deliver effective, realistic performances, as do many of the more minor characters (including, of all people, Robert Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, playing the owner of the A's). The movie generates investment for the idea that these people are working with, rather than for the players or the coaches. And somehow, none of this takes away from the majesty of the game itself. When the A's pull of their streak, it's no less effective than in any other well done sports movie. The movie looks the moneyed aspects of baseball in the eye, and still comes away with a love of the game.



Things Havoc disliked:  This movie is almost perverse in its focus, relentlessly, on failure, loss, and lack of success. We see many games in the film, almost all of them from the period when the system wasn't working, and nearly none from the period when it was. An even more pressing example is that the one game we focus on clearly. In this game, the A's take an 11-0 lead, and then lose it, returning to 11-11, before finally winning with a walk-off home run 12-11. We do not see any of the A's runs to take their lead, but we watch in abject, well-shot detail as they lose it, run by run, before an almost perfunctory victory sequence that glosses over their record 20th consecutive victory by following it up instantly with a lengthy speech indicating how it doesn't matter at all.

I don't mind that they want to turn sports movie cliches around, but the movie is so single-minded about showing us nothing but loss and failure that it becomes very awkward to watch, ironically because it's shot so well. This obsession spills over into the rest of the film as well. Even when people aren't on the field, we hear nothing about them except that they are going to fail, have failed, or have succeeded, but that their success doesn't matter because they're going to fail at something else. It's not maudlin or campy, but it does get old.

Finally, I have to say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is an excellent actor, simply does not do well in this role. His manager's an antagonist, I understand, but unlike the antagonistic scouts, the film doesn't give him an opportunity to make his case, instead simply having him hamfistedly refuse to play the new players and to adopt the new style for no reason other than blockheadedness. I can see why the real Art Howe had nothing good to say about this movie.


Final thoughts:  This is a very strange film, and a hard one to rate, frankly, as the tone and the writing are simultaneously very skillful and very subversive. Overall though, baseball fan as I am, I was entertained and fascinated by this look into the backrooms of the great pastime, and both Pitt, who is not my favorite actor, and Hill, whom I have never seen before, sell their roles really well in it. Hoffman's a letdown, and the emphasis is really too grim for a movie that's supposed to be about sport and a team that, frankly, was a great and shocking success, but the movie still tells quite an interesting story, and might be worth a look even if baseball isn't your particular thing.

Oh, and fuck the A's. And Oakland.

Final Score:  7/10

Cowboys and Aliens

Alternate Title:  Indiana Jones and the License to Kill ET


One sentence synopsis:  A drifter and a cattle boss must join forces with townsmen, bandits, and Indians to defeat alien strip miners.


Things Havoc liked:   I could watch Daniel Craig read a phone book. He's one of my favorite actors, who makes every movie he's in better, at least by my opinion. As to Harrison Ford, it really doesn't matter what other movies of low or high quality he's been in, as we are speaking of Indiana Jones and Han Solo, and therefore there shall be nothing ill said of him. While Ford certainly sometimes oversells his roles, he does reasonably well here. Both lead actors are helped by the addition of a sterling supporting cast, including Paul Dano (last seen in There Will Be Blood), Clancy Brown (last seen in the Shawshank Redemption, Carnivale, and as Lex Luthor in the DCAU), Olivia Wilde (last seen in Tron, but I will try not to hold that against her), and the incomparable Keith Caradine (last seen being generally a bad motherfucker).

With a cast this good, much that would otherwise be unbearable can be borne with ease. Daniel Craig in particular is given the task of playing an amnesiac drifter who appears to have been an outlaw before he lost his memory at the hands of the aliens. Acting-wise, this job is nearly impossible, but Craig pulls it off. Ford's character, a former army colonel who fought various battles in the Civil and Mexican wars, is given the task of expositing much of his own backstory, and with one or two exceptions, it works pretty well, proving once again that good actors can often elevate pedestrian writing.



Things Havoc disliked:   I think you know where I'm going here.

This movie is written badly. Very badly. Like long-exposition-scenes-strung-back-to-back badly. Like "I wish I had a son like you" badly. The actors, and they are excellent, do the best they can with the material given to them, but there is simply no salvaging some of this crap. I grant, it's not Last Airbender bad, but it does no service to the film. When even Daniel Craig can't sell a line, you know you've fallen off something.

Bad writing though I am used to. Movies like this are not sold on the strength of their writing. Unfortunately, the problems here go much further, into the entire making of this film. For one thing, the editing in this movie sucks. Continuity mistakes are everywhere. Daniel Craig pours the same shot of whiskey two or three times without emptying the glass. He is covered in dust by an explosion multiple times and is then clean in the next shot. Battle sequences are edited such that it is often impossible to determine where everyone is in relation either to one another or to the surrounding terrain (which is of some importance, given how much time they spend discussing the need for open ground).

Equally, the design and cinematography of this film is just bad. Lots of shots take place in the dark or in twisted, restricted tunnels, all of which are impossible to see thanks to terrible lighting and sloppy cinematographic shot selection. The alien ships look ludicrous, not flashy enough to be camp, and not interesting enough to get away without it. Entire set pieces for the film (such as the random steam boat they find in the middle of the desert) are badly designed and never explained reasonably. Why would the alien mothership have cavernous caves leading secretly to the surface? Didn't the aliens have to excavate all that?

Oh and speaking of the aliens, this movie presents us, in keeping with such films as War of the Worlds or Signs, with aliens who have mastered the interstellar hyperdrive, but not pants. Their design is totally uninspired, growling tooth-laden monsters who are sufficiently advanced to fly between the stars, but who talk by roaring, and fight naked on all fours by leaping on their target and tearing them apart with claws. Their master plan involves (spoiler alert) mining for gold, making this movie perhaps the only one I've ever seen to consciously rip off Battlefield Earth. Moreover, even this lame excuse is handled half-assed, as nowhere is it explained why the aliens are kidnapping humans instead of spending their time getting the one thing they actually are here for. Moreover, the physical capabilities of the aliens are completely inconsistent. They go from being bulletproof to susceptible to gunfire within the same sequence. At one point, bows and arrows are sufficient to kill them, while Winchester rifles are not. If you don't establish rules for your film, then the audience can't figure out what the hell to think.


Final thoughts:  A tired, cliched, poorly written film, elevated by the strength of its cast. The plot makes no sense and is hackneyed in the extreme, the direction and editing are awful, the design is lazy, and the movie overall is just a one-note bore. Even the action scenes are foolish and poorly cut together. The actors assembled for this project manage, just barely, to elevate it into mediocre level, but that's hardly a stunning recommendation. Avoid.

Final Score:  4/10

Captain America: The First Avenger

Alternate Title:  America!  Fuck yeah!


One sentence synopsis:  A 4F volunteer becomes a super-soldier to fight an evil Nazi mastermind trying to destroy the world with occult super-tech.


Things Havoc liked:  Take another look at that one-sentence synopsis above. If that concept sounds awesome, then have I got a film for you...

We live in an age when Comic book films are not merely good, but are actively some of the best movies available. While I could write a soliloquy on why that is so, the upshot is that standards for this sort of film have become higher and higher. Such movies can work because of excellent characterization, as in X-men First Class or Iron Man, or because of the inherent capability of movies to distill the essence of the fun and boisterous wonder of comics, such as Thor. This film is one of the latter.

Captain America is a pulp movie to its core. Note that I say Pulp, not Camp. It is a movie that does not in any way attempt to disguise what it is about, namely two-fisted pulp WWII fun. There is a sequence in this film where Captain America rides a rocket-propelled motorcycle while being pursued by Nazis with death rays, whom he evades by riding up an embankment, leaping onto a Leman Russ battle tank (Yes), knocking a Nazi super-soldier out with his shield, and destroying the tank with a satchel charge. If this sequence is not to your liking, find another film. The movie abounds with occult super-science, dastardly Nazis and square-jawed heroes doing epic battle for the fate of nations. It is not camp, and it is not silly (okay mostly not silly), but it is very much in the style of Gearkreig or Superwar or any of the other WWII pulp tales one might remember fondly (at least if one is me).

The cast for this film does an excellent job overall. Chris Evans, last seen being terrible in the Fantastic Four films, is, while perhaps not great, certainly good as Steve Rogers/Captain America. Cap's a hard one to get right, as he's basically a boy scout with a ridiculous costume who perpetually fights Nazism. Evans plays the character well without lapsing into schlock or flag-beating super-patriotism. He manages to make Captain America seem like a real person, which is more of a feat than it sounds like.

The rest of the cast however are uniformly excellent. Tommy Lee Jones steals the show as Colonel Chester Phillips, in which he essentially does a send-up to Patton. Hugo Weaving does an superb job as Red Skull, during which he does a send-up to Hitler. Dominic Cooper plays Howard Stark (father of Tony), who is essentially a send-up (and a hilarious one) to Howard Hughes. And Stanley Tucci plays Docter Erstein, which is essentially a send-up to Albert Einstein. It amazes me how strong our collective memories of the towering figures of that period are, such that one merely has to cite their names to get a fulsome idea of what one is dealing with, but that's neither here nor there. All of the above actors, particularly Weaving and Jones, do a spectacular job, as do those who are not performing send-ups, particularly Sebastian Stan, who plays Buckey, in the comics a kid sidekick for Cap, while in this film Rogers is his sidekick until the serum hits. Finally, while Haley Atwell is reduced to playing the token female love interest, she at least does a fine job with it.

One last line regarding the effects. Special effects are hardly special anymore, but the ones in this movie, particularly the mask for Red Skull, deserves a great deal of praise. Red Skull is an inherently ridiculous concept, and one that many versions of the mythos have struggled to get onto the screen. They found a version here that looked neither stupid nor (entirely) fake. Moreover, I don't know what method they used to make Chris Evans look like a wimp early in the film, but it was utterly convincing (except for his voice, which didn't fit a guy that small).



Things Havoc disliked:    The story for this movie is extremely formulaic, something that isn't helped by a needless "framework" story that actually manages to spoil the movie's ending in the first scene. Even without the opening gaffe however, I could have told you exactly what would happen with my eyes closed. Granted, the movie is fun enough to make the ride worthwhile, and there are even a few elements I didn't expect (Captain America the War Bond salesman!), but overall it goes pretty much exactly the way you would expect it to go.

Moreover, the thing that elevates most comic book movies is their razor-sharp writing. The material is always somewhat ludicrous, but excellent writing can redeem much. The writing in this film certainly isn't bad. Some lines verge on inspired, particularly those given to Tommy Lee Jones. But overall it's not quite at the level that some of the great works of the genre have been.


Final thoughts:  This movie was not X-men First Class good. It probably wasn't even Iron Man good. But it was Thor good, and Thor good is pretty damn good. It was a hot-blooded, funny, action-packed, two-fisted pulp action extravaganza, befitting the era that Captain America is derived from, and I personally enjoyed the hell out of it. It has all the things one should expect to see from a retro-40s action thrill ride. It has occult super-science, dastardly villains (Roger Ebert said in his review "You can't do better than Nazis", and I agree with him), beautiful dames, and clean-cut virtuous heroes. It has chases and death-defying stunts, it has courage and heroism, it has Dum Dum Dugan and Nick Fury, it has Patton and Einstein and Hughes and Hitler all under different names doing what Patton and Einstein and Hughes and Hitler all ought to do. This movie has Captain America, who throws his mighty shield.

What else can you really ask for?

Final Score:  8/10 

Additional note:  This didn't occur to me until after I finished the review, but a movie that this one reminded me of a great deal was 1991's pulp action classic "The Rocketeer", a movie that bombed horribly, but that I thought was an excellent movie, very much in keeping with the source material. Imagine my surprise to find that both movies were directed by Joe Johnson.