Love is Strange

Alternate Title:  Hunting for Apartments and Plot

One sentence synopsis:  An elderly gay couple in New York lose their condo in Manhattan and must separately move in with friends and family.


Things Havoc liked: You can't see as many movies as I do without getting familiar with the work of particular directors or screenwriters, yet despite my best efforts to indulge in Indie cinema whenever practicable, Ira Sachs is one I've missed, his most mainstream film to-date being a 2007 Chris Cooper/Rachel McAdams romantic comedy by the name of "Married Life", which I had strictly never heard of until about two minutes ago. Openly gay, Jewish, and a proud New Yorker, Sachs has introduced himself to me by means of a film that has been raking in the critical acclaim from every critic known to man, a labor of love he both wrote and directed starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as an elderly gay couple whose lives fall apart after they get married.

I haven't seen John Lithgow in the better part of a decade, though he's been around, on television and in the occasional film. I've always liked him, even when he's chosen not-so-good things to appear in, such as the awesomely-terrible Sylvester Stallone action flick Cliffhanger. Alfred Molina meanwhile, whom I have seen recently in roles as varied as Spiderman 2, The Da Vinci Code, and the voice-cast for Elder Scrolls Online, is an excellent actor I always enjoy watching. It should not, therefore, be any surprise that the best moments in this film come when these two are on the screen together. They don't play stereotypes, nor even the standard stereotypical non-stereotype gay guys (yes, that exists), but an elderly couple who have been together for nearly forty years, and have nothing, any longer, to hide. Now elderly, and both maintaining as much of a quiet dignity as their strained circumstances afford them, both of them (particularly Lithgow) are absolutely at home in these characters, be it the fussy nervousness of their everyday morning routines on a day that is anything but routine, to a night on the town livened by Lithgow lying his way shamelessly into free drinks, to a sequence midway through the film when Molina's character, pushed to the breaking point by the dislocation his life has suffered, appears on the doorstep of Lithgow's family at the point of tears, desperate simply to see his husband after their enforced separation.

And why are they separated? Because of a series of circumstances stemming from Molina's character losing his job at a Catholic high school for being openly gay, a situation the Church was willing to ignore until the two of them officially married, and then suddenly decided was unacceptable (I believe this instantly). Unable to afford their Chelsea condo any longer, the two of them are forced to move separately into the houses of friends (Molina) and family (Lithgow), with all the awkwardness and irritation that entails. Molina's character winds up moving in with a pair of younger, gay cops, whose apartment is the hub of a never-ending party (a sequence midway through where an exasperated Molina walks in on them all playing tabletop role-playing games is awesome, though it would be more awesome if, instead of being driven out in a tearful huff, he were made to join in and roll up a character). Lithgow meanwhile winds up with his niece-in-law, played by Marissa Tomei (in a decent role at last) and her family, including his rebellious grand-nephew played by Charlie Tahan (the kid from I am Legend). Tomei is a writer who works from home while her workaholic husband is absent, and her teenage son is surly and makes trouble in the manner that all teenagers of that age do. The awkwardness that ensues as Lithgow tries his best not to interfere in the affairs of the family, despite the fact that he has no choice but to do so given his very presence, is very true-to-life, almost to the point of being hard to watch. I cite this as a positive because that is plainly the intention of the filmmaker.

Things Havoc disliked: I cite what follows as a negative because the rest of his intentions make no sense to me.

This film works, when it works, because the two leads are compelling and well-acted characters whom we care about. It stops working when the director, who is also the scriptwriter and one of the producers (VANITY PROJECT ALERT!), decides to trip himself up by failing to actually tell us a story about these characters. The problem isn't that the director wants to tell us a different, unrelated story, for that at least could have potentially worked if the other story was compelling enough. The problem is that the director has nothing whatsoever to tell us except that he seems to regard the very concept of "story" with unbridled contempt.

Everything, everything this movie brings up, be it plot-lines or character arcs or whatnot, every single narrative element in this film is a red herring, left without even the most cursory nods towards a resolution. Bad enough that that Sachs decides to leave our two headlining main characters aside in favor of focusing on the troubles of young Charlie Tahan, whose relationship with his friend Ivan is ambiguous (the film hints towards them both being gay before suddenly backing off of that), and who seems to be acting up at school (stealing books on French Literature, of all things). He then compounds the issue by not resolving any of those things. We never learn whether Tahan or his friend Ivan are gay (or rather, while we learn they are not, we never learn what they were up to together). We never learn why he stole the French Literature books. We never learn how, if at all, Marissa Tomei's problems with her absent husband are resolved. We never learn anything, and given that the entire film is comprised of us watching the characters dealing with these issues, this is something of a problem.

Indeed, there's an argument to be made that the entire film is one huge bait-and-switch after another. Early on, we are introduced to an abrasive relative of Lithgow's (I think), who lives upstate in Poughkeepsie, and who violently insults anyone who suggests that Lithgow and Molina might not want to live upstate with her. The film shines a prominent spotlight on this character, lets her behave abominably to a number of other characters, and then drops her entirely as soon as they decide to live elsewhere. In the back of my mind I was assuming that this character's offer to take them in would be brought up as at least a possible solution to the tension at Tomei's house, but the film seemingly forgets that any of that happened or that this character ever existed. Similarly the loud and obnoxious party-cops, the best friend Ivan, the workaholic father, all of these people are introduced, set up for a storyline, and then dropped seemingly at random when the movie gets distracted. Worst of all is the one bit of payoff we do get, the ultimate resolution for the primary plot of the film, which is such a Deus Ex Machina resolution that the movie practically calls our attention to that fact, dropping a heaven-sent solution on the heads of the characters by pure chance, only to then turn around and turn the film on another right angle spontaneously, deciding with ten minutes to go that the movie was actually about something else entirely. This is not a plot twist, but an incoherent swerve of focus, a distinction I maintain if only because, in order to have a plot twist, you must first have a plot.

Final thoughts:   One is tempted, at this juncture, to chalk up the foibles of Love is Strange as simply being the product of a (forgive me) strange writer and director, and judging from the universal acclaim this film has been garnering, that's precisely what most critics did. Not me. The subject matter here is very contemporary, extremely well-acted, and handled well, when it's handled at all, but the problem is that it simply isn't handled very much. Rather than tell us a story, or many stories, or even a broken, fragmented story, this director and writer has decided to tell us the beginning third of about six stories in turn, then write an abrupt, almost laughably anticlimactic ending just to wrap things up, and run out the door before anyone can question him on it. Perhaps my taste is bad, or perhaps no other critic was willing to criticize a film about gay men, of which there are very few, but the rightness of a subject does not excuse one from the need to actually tell a freaking story. And no excuses to the contrary, not pithy explanations about how life is unstructured or artful protestations about the purity of unstructured thought, can erase the fact that film, as a narrative medium, does not reward those who have no use for narrative as a concept.

Four times now, with Boyhood, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Under the Skin and now this, I went to see an indie film purely on the strength of absolutely universal acclaim it was generating, and three times now I have been fantastically underwhelmed as to the result (a dramatic understatement in the case of Under the Skin. It's tempting, upon further reflection, to decide that the problem is with me, and not with the other critics, for they are legion, and professional, and I am neither. But ultimately, I do not accept that I am wrong about these films, as I suspect there is something else, perhaps self-censorship, or perhaps simply the jadedness that comes from seeing 300 films a year instead of 50, that renders the major critics unable to accurately judge a movie like this one, or other indie darlings such as those above.

Ultimately, I don't mind a movie that takes risks or chances, and I don't even mind one that does so and fails. But I really don't like it when a movie decides, whether because its subject matter is so pure and right, or because life has some ineffable quality that cannot be reproduced accurately in narrative form, that it's therefore okay to waste my time with incoherent rambling instead of telling me the story I asked, and in fact paid them to tell.

Final Score:  5/10

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Alternate Title:  Miller Time

One sentence synopsis:  Three tales of betrayal, sin, and revenge intertwine within a stylized noir city.


Things Havoc liked: I adored the original Sin City, 2005's sordid, stylized tale of cops and dames and hoods and giant, lumbering psychotics doling out bloody retribution to a host of worthy targets. It was gritty and uncompromising, striking and bold in style and horrifically violent in execution, and while it was something of a mess at points, I was, and remain, convinced that it was a beautiful mess, buttressed by the many, many fine actors who joined its cast, and I enjoyed it considerably more than I expected I would. I knew that the film was based on a series of comic books that legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller created in the early 90s, and I wondered, then and as the years went by, when we might see another installment.

They say that good things come to those who wait. Nine years after their first success, Miller and director Robert Rodriguez have come together to give us more violence, more stylization, and more noir, with a fresh set of adventures in the eponymous Sin City. With much of the original cast returning, and those not being replaced by actors of equal skill, I had high hopes for this one.

Let's start with the positives then, shall we?

A Dame to Kill for, like Sin City before it, is a masterpiece of style and cinematic artistry. The trademark black-and-white-and-color-burst palate is still intact here, complete with gorgeous shots of such mundane things as the light reflecting in the lenses of someone's glasses, or a skylight casting a pool of illumination down on someone's bed. The sax-heavy score, also by Rodriguez casts exactly the right tone as well, a pastiche of hard-boiled noir detective and crime stories from the 30s through the 50s, the sorts of things that Dashiell Hammett and his imitators might have imagined after an all-night bender. Through the relentless voiceover narration, a staple of noir from German Expressionism to Max Payne, we get a sense of a massive, sprawling city, each corner of which contains its dirty secrets, where heroes and villains are much of the same, and people flow through one another's stories with impunity and total disregard for such things as a reasonable continuity. Combined with the Pulp Fiction-like temporal dislocation, the film obtains an almost timeless, ethereal feel to it, much as the first one did, as the narratives wind around one another, coming into and out of focus before moving on to another, unrelated tale.

Based on a fresh series of stories, both from the original 90s run and new material created specially for the movie by Miller himself, A Dame to Kill for, as I mentioned, uses a combination of new and old actors for its purposes. Many of these are excellent, such as small roles for Ray Liotta and Christopher Meloni, as respectively a businessman and a cop undone by their irresistible attraction to one of the many dangerous dames to be found in the city. Dennis Haysbert, filling in for the late Michael Clarke Duncan, evokes casual menace with the same facility that his predecessor did. But one of the standouts is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an actor I've finally decided I was wrong about and embraced, and who here plays Johnny, a young gambler and cardsharp who manages to get himself in a heap of trouble with returning arch-villain Senator Roarke, played as before by the inimitable Powers Boothe. Boothe's role is substantially increased this time 'round, an excellent decision as it allows him to do what he does best, play a snarling, growling villain of ferocious presence, a perfect match for the cast of over-the-top characters that surround him. I've been an immense fan of Boothe's since 1993's underrated Tombstone. The same can't be said of Gordon-Levitt, but his character, a cocky smart-ass who gets in way over his head, also strikes just the right cord. A dextrous, preternaturally-lucky gambler, he and his story of hubris and revenge fit into the overall look and feel of Sin City like a hand in a glove, to the point where this story could easily have come from the original film.

Things Havoc disliked: The rest of it, though...

I had some sense that something like this might happen, as this project was the lovechild of Miller and Rodriguez, neither one of whom has had a particularly good run of things lately. Miller, who was always something of a fringe character in comics, has spent the last two decades going progressively more insane (Holy Terror and All Star Batman & Robin proved that much), while Rodriguez, once a fiery young director who created such brilliant blood operas as El Mariachi, Desperado, or the gleefully schlocky From Dusk Till Dawn (to say nothing of the original Sin City), has recently gotten into the habit of badly aping his own material in disasters as varied as Machete Kills, the endless parade of Spy Kids sequels, or, it must be said, here.

Indeed, the parallels to Machete 2 are disturbing here (as they are to Miller's 300: Rise of an Empire, but that's another story), and not simply because this is another movie with over-the-top violence. Rodriguez is a director with no sense of restraint, it's something I've always admired from him, but that lack can only be justified if combined with the skill to pull off the absurdities you choose to put on screen, and while Rodriguez used to have that skill, I'm becoming increasingly hard-pressed to find it. Like with Machete 2, wherein he somehow got the idea that the popularity of his first film was due to its plot, Rodriguez seems to have missed, somehow, what it was about the first Sin City that made it so popular. It wasn't because we were engrossed in the labyrinthine plot (or rather plots), but because of the style and the characters that he populated his world with. And while Rodriguez does make an attempt to conjure lightning a second time for this installment, the results are simply not up to par.

Consider Eva Green, who is fast becoming my favorite actress in otherwise bad movies (Rise of an Empire again). Her character, Ava Lord (word to the wise, never name a character after the actor playing them, it's distracting), is a femme fatale who manipulates and discards men like a spider devouring her mates. Good idea in theory, and yet Green is allowed to play the character so far over the top that even Sin City's stylized format can't handle it. Sin City worked, despite wooden dialogue, because the stiffness of the characters fit in perfectly with the style of the film. Green seems to be constantly winking at the audience, as though acknowledging that her character makes no sense, which of course means that it does not, and that we don't have the attractive pull of the world at large to cover for it.

Green isn't the only one. Josh Brolin, reprising a role originally played by Clive Owen, is simply not up to the task of emulating his predecessor. Owen's character looked and felt special, a noble killer who partnered with the heavily-armed whores of Old Town to destroy corrupt cops and mobsters out of principle. Brolin feels all wrong for this task, a tired, old, weatherbeaten paparazzo who gets roped into a situation far beyond his control. Not a problem were the character a new one, but not only is this supposedly a returning character, but his story is heavily tied into the original. So is Jessica Alba, whose damsel-in-distress is elevated this time around to a booze-soaked killer, seeking to revenge herself and Bruce Willis' deceased Sgt. Hartigan on the aforementioned Senator Roarke. The issue here is that Jessica Alba is incapable of taking on a role like this, something Rodriguez was unaware of in Machete and remains unaware of here. But the worst of it is Marv, the centerpiece of the original film, played to absolute perfection by a barely-recognizable Mickey Roarke. Marv was a fascination in the first film, an unstoppable, psychotic murder-machine, whose internal monologue revealed depth, vulnerability, and unbending self-awareness as he tried to do what he thought was right in a world of violence and sleaze. He's here in this movie, as unflappable as he was in the previous one, but as a side character, he gets no internal monologue, no insight into his motivations or character. We only see the exterior, which is that of a comic book pastiche of a hero, invincible and wisecracking, denying us everything that made the character unique and interesting in the first place. This is a catastrophically bad decision, one which robs the original film's most memorable creation of its nuance, leading me, once again, to wonder if Rodriguez even understood what he was doing in the first place.

Final thoughts:   Looking back at A Dame to Kill for, I am left with the question of why? Why was this movie made? I know the literal answer (to make money), and that's fine, but I mean the artistic one, which must exist, even if alongside the financial one, for any movie to be good. The first film existed to be awesome and stylish, which is its own justification, but this movie exists because... because the first one did, I guess. Unfortunately, neither Rodriguez nor Miller, at this point in their careers, are up to the task of making something as great as their original film, Rodriguez because he has lost the plot, and Miller because his latent tendencies towards angry misogyny (not an accusation I make lightly) have been getting the best of him for more than a decade. It's no co-incidence, I suspect, that none of the characters I liked in this film are female, not even Rosario Dawson's Gail, a valkyrie mother-hen/warleader in the first film, reduced here to stripperific eye candy.

But I'm not here to heap yet more scorn on the already marginalized Frank Miller. I'm here to review a film based on his work. And that film, I'm sad to report, is simply not as good as its predecessor, not by a wide margin. Flashes of the original shine through, in the style, in the tone, in a handful of scenes or characters who retain the sensibilities of the first film. But by and large, those of us who appreciated the original Sin City are reduced to watching the antics of characters that resemble those we remember, but are not them.

Perhaps, expectations and memories being what they are, you can simply never go back to something like Sin City. But in that case, it might behoove someone to warn Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller before they decide to try their luck at re-inventing another one of their classics from long ago. Trust me, the world does not need a Planet Terror 2.

Final Score:  5.5/10

The Admiral: Roaring Currents

Alternate Title:  Zerg Rush!

One sentence synopsis:  Admiral Yi Sun-Sin leads a hopelessly outnumbered fleet in a desperate battle against a massive Japanese armada. 


Things Havoc liked: In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Shogun of Japan, launched a massive invasion of the Korean Kingdom of Josoen, intent on conquering the peninsula, and using it as a base with which to invade and conquer Ming China. For seven years, this war raged on and off, as Japanese forces sought to subjugate Korea, and the Koreans, with their Chinese allies, sought to drive them back. Locally called the Seven-Years-War (a name which would be used for a different conflict in the West), this war remains almost completely unknown in Europe and the United States, but not in Korea, where it is justly regarded as one of the finest hours of the Korean nation. And front and center in the midst of this epic conflict is one of the towering figures in the annals of naval warfare, the legendary Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, a man who, despite a lowly background and no formal training in warfare or sailing, fought twenty-three major naval battles without once suffering defeat, almost single-handedly turning the tide of the war against Japan, and becoming in the process, along with Horatio Nelson himself, one of the greatest Admirals in all of history. It was therefore probably inevitable that a Korean film studio, in this case the Korean media giant CJ Entertainment, would seek to make a blockbuster film about Admiral Yi, choosing for a subject, as was also probably inevitable, his most famous and awe-inspiring victory, the 1597 Battle of Myeongnyang, in which Yi, with thirteen battle-worthy ships, stood against a fleet of a hundred and thirty three Japanese warships, and defeated them.

This is history, guys. Spoilers are gonna happen.

The highest-grossing film in Korean history, the Admiral is clearly a product of a culture simultaneously nothing like Hollywood, and yet exposed nonetheless to a century of Hollywood's works. It is a big, sweeping epic, in the vein of recent Chinese films such as Red Cliffs or more standard (to us westerners) Hollywood fare like Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Samurai. Historical epics are a particularly favorite genre of mine, and this is a good one, bright and colorful, with a cast of dozens and swarms of extras and warships filmed with lush camerawork and painstaking detail. East Asia in the sixteenth century was a flamboyant place, and this film captures every loving detail of it all, from military uniforms that approach superhero costumes in their levels of complexity and symbolism, to banners, temples, statuary and architecture, reveling in a time when even the design of warships and cannons was rife with artistic touches. Entire pagodas tower above lumbering flagships, rifle barrels and sword blades bear engraved calligraphy and religious iconography, and the styles of armor seem to grow more extravagant by the hour, including embossed masks, plumed helmets, woven inscriptions, and bright streamers. How much of all this is actually true to life, I don't know. My guess is most of it. But even if not, the film thereby earns a richness that ensures there's never a moment when we're not staring at something beautiful, even as people die by the tens of thousands.

And oh boy do they die. Battle sequences in this film are where director Kim Han-Min, whose previous credits include other historical war epics, shows off his Hollywood influences, for they are as frenetic, chaotic, and violent as anything from Ridley Scott or Oliver Stone. Warships thunder with broadsides of cannons (yes, cannons, Korea was arguably the most advanced cannon-using power in the world in 1597), volleys of musketfire, and clashes of sword, polearm, and more outlandish weapons. Ships smash through one another with bone-shattering impact, as masses of soldiers and marines engage in bitter combat until the blood runs freely through the gunwales. And yet unlike some action films that go so far beyond the point of reason that the military-connoisseur in me begins choking on my own tongue, this film manages to push riiiiiiight up to the limit of what's plausible without pushing past it. Epic battles are sanguinary affairs for all sides, and do not consist of the virile armies of right and good slaughtering wave after wave of incompetent foes without taking a scratch (yes, 300 did that, but 300 was a different movie). Instead the battle comes visibly down to tactics, strategy, misdirection, and a whole heap of backs-to-the-wall last-stand bravery on the part of our heroes, as they face down legions of Samurai warriors, all of whom are allowed to be just as lethal as we've all come to expect Samurai to be.

But what of the acting and plot, the things with which I usually start my reviews? The difficulty with foreign films, even for those unafraid of subtitles, is that cultural conventions in Korea (or wherever) are completely alien to those in the US, which can render it difficult to follow complex narratives, as things that a Korean audience would pick up on automatically are opaque, or even completely invisible to us. Yet this film manages well, telling a straightforward military story of an Admiral on his last legs with a fleet falling to pieces, standing against an overwhelming force and trying to best it by any means necessary. The Admiral himself, played by Oldboy's Choi Min-Suk, is very well-characterized, a driven, calculating man, ruthless when he needs to be, yet self-sacrificing when the occasion demands it, who recognizes the exact position he is in with a faultless eye, and constructs a plan to give himself the finest possible chance of emerging victorious. He is not portrayed as some divinely-inspired super-human genius of faultless calculation, nor a Xanatos-style ultra-schemer, whose every failure turns out to be actually all according to plan. Instead the film portrays him as a man who is simply very, very good at what he does, and utterly committed to doing just that, come what may. Surrounded by lieutenants of greater or lesser ability and loyalty, and sailors and soldiers who vary from the brave to the cowardly, he sets out to do battle in a fight he knows he has done everything to prepare for, and leaves the outcome to the designs of fate. There's more than one director of Hollywood epics who could stand to take a lesson here.

Things Havoc disliked: At the risk of sounding racist, watching a film starring an ensemble cast of hundreds of Korean actors I've never seen before playing characters whose names I do not know can get... unavoidably confusing. Several times I got lost as to just who was doing what and what relationship a given character had to whom. This is not helped by several characters who would appear to be major ones suddenly disappearing from the film for the duration while others come to prominence. When one follows history, this is the sort of thing that can happen, but it did leave me wishing that Kim had tightened things a bit around the main story.

Indeed, The Admiral is not a long film (a hair over two hours), but it definitely feels like one. The battle sequences are relentless, with lengthy crowd shots of killing and beginning-middle-end structures that give us hope of a false dawn before the Japanese send in the next wave of forces. Three separate times, I thought admiral Yi had finally won the battle, only to discover that everything that had so-far happened was merely a pre-battle skirmish and that the real meat of the fighting was about to start. This unfortunately robs the film of some of its epic feel, as it gets a bit ridiculous when you have five consecutive "shocking turning points that suddenly enable our heroes to win" within forty-five minutes. I grant that the real battle of Myeongnyang was such an insane upset victory that it may well have involved this sort of thing, but we're here to watch a movie, and even if you wanted to keep all of the various hinge points in the battle, structuring the film such that not every one of them is treated like the climax to Return of the King might be a good idea.

There's also the issue of Melodrama, something that I've noticed happens with fair regularity in Korean film and television. There are moments in the film when the director lets the reins slip a bit, and allows characters to vent full reign of their most King Lear-like emotions. These can be fun, but some of them go so far over the top that we start to question whether they make any sense at all. A moment midway through the film when Admiral Yi's turtle ship unexpectedly catches fire and burns to the waterline involves him running screaming into the night in a nightgown, tearing his hair and crying to all and sundry that he will crush the Japanese with the very ship being reduced to ashes in front of his face. That the ship is a loss and the admiral distraught at its destruction, I understand, but the reaction is so over the top one might expect that his entire family was aboard, plunging wild-eyed into the water and being held back by his loyal subordinates from hurling himself into the flames. And yet the next morning he is sober and controlled again, prepared to revise his battle plan to account for the ship's loss, a change so stark that I suspected his performance the night before would eventually be revealed as a cunning act of theater designed to misdirect his enemies or somehow inspire his own men. There are a handful of such scenes, where the tight logic and control of the film suddenly deserts it in favor of Gone-With-the-Wind melodrama, each time dragging me back out of the film and into reality. Perhaps Korean audiences have a better tolerance for such things.

Final thoughts:  The Admiral is a wonderful film, not an epochal triumph along the lines of Marvel's outings, but a great movie in its own way, the biggest ever in Korean history, and justly so. Sweeping, epic, and beautiful, it sheds light on a period even I knew almost nothing about, highlighting one of the greatest captains in history in the way he deserves to be highlighted. A foreign film in limited release stateside is obviously only going to be available to a select audience, but insofar as it is on offer, I would unhesitatingly recommend it to war, history, and foreign cinema buffs alike.

After all, with the September slump upon us, your alternatives are not encouraging...

Final Score:  7/10

The Expendables 3

Alternate Title:  The Dying of the Light

One sentence synopsis:    A group of elite mercenaries must defeat the private army of an arms-dealing madman who once helped found their organization.


Things Havoc liked: There's a certain innocence to the Expendables project, a series of films that cobbles together all the great action stars of yesteryear for one massive blockbuster extravaganza. Seeing all of the greats from the 80s and 90s and today mashed into one film under the flimsiest of pretexts for the purposes of action, action, action, is exactly the sort of thing I go to the movies to see. And since damned few people are willing to go with me to see Indie flicks anymore (despite my assurances that we probably won't wind up sucked back into the temporal vortex of Under the Skin), once in a while it's good to drag everyone into a big-time film that the whole family can enjoy.

Once again, the Expendables are back, with Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham and Dolph Lungren and Terry Crews and Randy Couture shooting, hacking, and blasting it up in the accustomed manner, and as before, with a host of new classic action stars added in, along with some newcomers of unproven talent. As with the last film, which included Jean-Claude Van Damme as a scenery-chewing camp villain and Chuck Norris as a Sergio-Leone-style man-with-no-name whose appearances were complete with theme music, the new additions of classic stars are the best things in the film. Wesley Snipes, a man I've not seen since he was arrested and jailed for Tax Evasion some time ago, plays, appropriately enough, a psychotic escaped convict whose performance seems like an over-inflated pastiche of his classic turns in movies like New Jack City or Passenger 57. Harrison Ford, who starred in many action movies in his day, but different ones, takes on the role of a stern CIA chief-turned Helicopter pilot with the gruff, seen-it-all grumpiness that he has so often used as a replacement for giving a damn turned up another five notches. Better still is Antonio Banderas, an actor I can never see enough of, who this time is playing a hyperkenetic over-talkative wannabe ladies' man whose desperation and patheticness is clearly visible. Banderas is incredibly awesome in this movie, slaughtering hordes of faceless mooks in what looks like rapturous glee at having been allowed to come along on the adventure, striking exactly the right note for a film like this one.

But the best thing about this movie, unquestionably, is Mel Gibson, who may be insane, but whom we should not ever forget is a talented and immensely entertaining actor. Since his well-publicized foibles in the news and tabloids, Gibson has taken to playing camp, scenery-chewing villains in various movies, including the otherwise underwhelming Machete Kills. Here he doubles down, playing a ranting, screaming, maniacal mercenary arms-dealer who, of course, has personal history with the Expendables and intends to see it resolved violently and through the most ridiculous manner possible. This is clearly an excuse for Mel to play a Bond villain, but that's not exactly a bad idea, as GIbson's strong point has always been playing characters on the edge of psychotic breaks (Lethal Weapon, Braveheart, Mad Max). That he does the same thing here in a movie designed to be over the top and absurd is precisely the correct choice.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, it's nearly the only one.

Let's get this out of the way right now, the Expendables is the male equivalent of a chick flick, a film series designed to appeal to the nostalgia primarily of adult men (and some women, I suppose) who remember the glory days of pure action movies in the 80s and early 90s and wish to revisit such things along with the icons of the day. They have, up until this point, satisfactorily aped the conventions, foibles, tropes, and feel of these films of yesteryear, in no small part because they were made by the same men responsible for the above matters. And yet whether because the success of the previous two installments went to Stallone's head or because someone else interfered, this time round, the filmmakers decided they had to "modernize" things, not merely with a new cast (we'll get there), but by making the movie PG-13.

Yes that's right, The Expendables 3 is PG-freaking-13, something I had considered so unthinkable I didn't even bother to check ahead of time. And like the tired Die Hard movie sequels of the past decade, the result of this is to completely neuter a film series whose entire purpose for existing is to be completely over-the-top and absurd. No blood. No cursing. No moments of "Oooooooh" as a villain is dispatched in a particularly inventive manner, in short no artistry whatsoever is permitted to enter this film, and if you dare respond to me that artistry is impossible in an action movie, I will never let you read one of my reviews again. The film feels castrated without its R rating, eschewing all of the elements that made the first movie good and the second one very good in favor of tired dialogue, boring exposition, bad acting, and lazy stuntwork. There are simply only so many times that you can watch the heroes shooting bloodless mooks from long range without becoming bored, which is the whole reason why the classic action movies existed in the first place.

Oh and speaking of the above dialogue, exposition, and acting, I give you the "new" generation of Expendables, shoehorned into the plot for reasons so stupid that I won't recount them here. With ONE exception, all of these people are both entirely unknown, being drawn variously from the UFC (which at least makes sense) to the stars of romantic teen dramas and even cast members from Twilight, and with that same one exception every one of them is WRETCHED. It's not that they're wooden and unable to emote, that's a requirement to get into this film after all, but it's that they don't know how to recite bad dialogue well, which like it or not, was always a strong suit for the action stars of the 80s and 90s. Particularly bad honors go to Rhonda Rousey, an MMA champion in her first role who, based on this performance, has a long career ahead of her as an MMA champion. She may actually be the worst actress I've ever seen, but reflecting on that list is likely to lead to madness, so let's leave it at that. Rousy however can at least walk the necessary walk. Kellan Lutz, of freaking Twilight, can neither act nor fight, and is so bland that I forgot which character he was supposed to be playing. The rest of them are also unremittingly awful, save only for the slight exception of, of all people, championship Welterweight boxer David Ortiz, whose performance and fighting skills are actually about on par with that of the rest of the cast. It's not that Ortiz is a good actor, mind you, but he knows at least how to act well in a bad movie, and be entertaining. Action careers have been made on less than this.

But there are simply no action careers to be made here, for this film is simply incompetent. After a pair of reasonably interesting action sequences on a train and in Mogadishu (?), the film applies the brakes for about an hour as Kelsey Grammar (?!?) shows up for an extended "let's go recruit the team" sequence. Grammar has no action credentials behind him, but he does a fine job and is not the problem. The problem is that the movie seems to want to pack ALL the action into a single ludicrous fight scene at the end of the film, which would be at least a defensible choice if we weren't all half-asleep by that point. And when the action comes, it is boring. Waves of mooks, each unable to shoot straight to save their lives, which I recognize to be a staple of the genre but not to this extent and not to this length. This isn't over-the-top, this is a parody of over-the-top action, until we enter what I call "XXX" territory, wherein characters start doing stunts and "radical" things not because it makes any sense in the fight, nor even because it looks awesome, but because it will provide a nice trailer shot. Without recourse to the creative freedom offered by an R-rating, this film is therefore reduced to spending damn near an hour-long action fight just watching our heroes mow waves of soldiers down with automatic weapons with the occasional grenade thrown in to liven things up. How Stallone, who made the originals and dozens of other action films in his day, could possibly have produced something this boring, this bland, this tired from his once-vibrant franchise boggles the mind.

Final thoughts:   I assume that nobody is shocked to learn that Expendables 3 is a bad movie. I wasn't. But what astonishes me is how tired it is, how unlike its predecessors, how brittle the fun and hollow the laughter is that it engenders. Coming at the tail end of a series of action films I was highly eager to see, this movie is a shattering disappointment, and may, I fear, draw closed the last moments of the era of the great Action movie. A failure like this cannot help but make me nostalgic for the loss of such a titanic genre, in the way that other critics lamented the death of the Western, for this film, moreso even than such futile efforts as Escape Plan or Machete Kills, indicates to me that this genre, at long last, may be finally dead.

But then, movie genres have their day, as directors and actors do. And if we have lost the action film of yesteryear, perhaps it was only to replace it with the Superhero film of today. The tastes and whim of Hollywood evolve, and leave us with new sights and memories of the old. Perhaps it's simply time to let this genre go, and look to what lies ahead. Perhaps next time, when Stallone or Schwarzenegger or whoever else declares they're going to beat on, paddling against the tide, in some effort to recapture the spirit of a bygone age, it might serve us better to curl up in a chair at home, pop in Aliens or Rambo or Terminator 2, and as Fitzgerald would put it, bear ourselves back ceaselessly into the past.

Final Score:  4/10

A Most Wanted Man

Alternate Title:  Diablo Ex Machina

One sentence synopsis:    The head of a secret German counter-terrorism team tries to entrap a terrorist financier by manipulating a Chechen refugee and his lawyer.

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. There was little option but to employ them given the issues that arose. You have been warned.

Things Havoc liked:  Phillip Seymour Hoffman's passing earlier this year caught him in the midst of his customary massive workload, allowing us the next year or so to watch him in the various films that were still under production when he died. I've contrived to miss a number of these, boring indie fare as they seemed to be, but this one I was interested in, as John le Carré spy thrillers have a decent pedigree on film, and the subject of this one looked particularly interesting. Hoffman plays Günther Bachmann, a dumpy, middle-aged spy, as are basically all of le Carré's protagonists, head of a secret group of clandestine bagmen tasked with penetrating networks of terrorist cells both domestically in Hamburg and elsewhere. As anyone who has ever seen a John le Carré film or read a book of his can tell you, Hoffman was made to play a leading role in one of his books. Wandering about in a perpetual half-stooped slouch, Hoffman looks like nothing but another governmental middle manager of the type that seems to grace all the bureaucracies of Europe (and elsewhere). His character almost never raises his voice, doesn't scream or chase people, not even in the midst of enhanced interrogations, and looks ill-at-ease when called upon to report to formal superiors. His techniques rely on patience and surveillance, turning one asset after another to exert pressure against the next one. The skill with which he manipulates people caught in compromising circumstances is impressive, and by the end of the film, when four people are in a room discussing crime, three of whom are actually working for Hoffman, it all seems perfectly natural.

But Hoffman's merely one of many in this cast. Rachel McAdams, an actress I have successfully avoided up until now, actually does a fine turn as Annabelle Richter, a young immigration lawyer who allows ignorance and idealism to drag her way too far into a case she does not understand the particulars of. Watching her squirm as Hoffman plays her like a violin is exquisite, but not as exquisite as Willem Defoe, one of the weirdest men in Hollywood, here playing perhaps the most normal character he has ever touched, a bank manager whose father was involved in unscrupulous business, and who must do what he can to cover himself and his institution against liability and governmental interference. Iranian veteran actor Homayoun Ershadi, of Zero Dark Thirty and Agora, plays Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a seemingly-pro-Western Arab of means and influence whose secret funneling of money towards terrorist cells touches all of this off, his character only ever betraying bare hints of what he must actually be plotting. But the best of the bunch is unquestionably unknown Russian actor Grigoriy Dobrygin, whose character Issa is a scarred, skittish, half-Chechen trauma victim, who seems to be up to no good when we first see him, and only slowly do we realize is nothing but a scarred, broken refugee, scared and confused by his surroundings. The film plays a brilliant game with this character, using shot construction and expression to give us Westerners the unmistakable impression that we are looking at a Terrorist, only to pull the rug out from under us when he proves interested in nothing of the sort.

If I sound like I'm just reciting actors and their roles though, bear in mind that this film basically IS the actors and their roles, and the situations that such characters are inevitably going to be placed in by virtue of being around one another. We watch as Hoffman watches, as the characters are slowly ensnared in his web, turning them one by one into "assets" to be employed in the furtherance of his cause. And what is that cause? Not the destruction of his enemies nor the death of the aforementioned people, but information. We see Hoffman and his coterie use the Lawyer to get to the Banker, the Banker to get to the Doctor, and the Doctor to go on and get to others, penetrating further and further along until he can reach the actual source of the evil he seeks to fight. Along the way, as best he can, Hoffman does try to do his best for his assets, if nothing else because a carrot and a stick have more persuasive power than the stick alone. The Lawyer wants her client given refugee status. The Banker wants to have his past unexamined by society at large, and as these are things that are secondary to Hoffman's goal, he can get them in furtherance of it. Le Carré's stories are usually like this, procedural spy thrillers that eschew the Bond-esque escapades for realistic investigations on just how intelligence work is properly done.

Things Havoc disliked:  The problem though, is that this is not the only thing that le Carré's stories are usually like. And here's where we unavoidably get to the spoilers, because one of le Carré's other conceits, from as far back as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, is that everything to do with the United States is evil.

I mentioned spoilers above. I'm serious.

No, I'm not trying to turn this into another nationalist screed. I'm well aware of US intelligence's less-than-spotless record when it comes to the work we have done, both in the Cold War and the War on Terror. But there's a difference between wishing to point out the CIA's failings, and being obsessed by them. Zero Dark Thirty did the former, showing enhanced interrogations, unapologetically, and showing that they were useless wastes of time and effort to torture undeserving people for no gain. But this film has nothing whatsoever to do with the CIA, save only for the character of Martha Sullivan, the German Station Chief for the CIA played by Robin Wright. Initially this character is somewhat mysterious, as she appears only once in a while, and there mostly to bring up backstory about the main character and bounce ideas off of him, as well as provide the audience with some sense of the ticking clock going on back in Berlin. Fair enough. But in the last ten minutes of the film, this character suddenly morphs into Snidely Whiplash, who swoops in to wreck the operation, beat up everyone with goons, kidnap and destroy people's lives, and all for no conceivable gain whatsoever.

It would be one thing if this trainwreck were the product of ignorance, mistakes, or other elements established somewhere in the film, but it's not. It's instead the inverted equivalent of a Deus Ex Machina, wherein an outside element not previously established suddenly shows up in the middle of nowhere to ruin everything, irrespective of what any of the characters have and have not done up until this point. And why is this somehow an acceptable thing to throw into a movie that had been so scrupulously realistic until this point? Because the element in question is the CIA, and the CIA is axiomatically evil. They need no establishment, no motivation, no background, no characterization, nothing. To le Carré and his filmmakers they may as well be the Nazis, a plot device assumed by all to be evil without need for any such detail-work. A film interested in showing off the ways in which the CIA interferes with domestic intelligence would be one thing, as would one where the interplay between Hoffman and Wright led them to this state. This film however, is so intent on ensuring that the CIA gets mud thrown in their eye, that ultimately, the film would rather do that than actually tell its story, and literally breaks the entire narrative just so that they can make a cheap, smug point about how dumb, stupid, and recklessly evil the Americans are. So evil, in fact, that there's no need to even establish them as so. Their nationality does that well enough. The movie goes on as normal until an evil American who has nothing to do with anything suddenly destroys everything, and then it is over. Curtain up. Credits roll.

Final thoughts:    I don't hate this film. Indeed I quite liked this film up until the very end. What I hate is the underlying assumption behind it, that the need for ideological pie-throwing in the direction of the CIA is sufficient, by itself, to absolve the film from actually telling its story. It's as though le Carré, or Dutch director Anton Corbijn (whose last film, "The American", also suffered from this defect), feel that all they need do is stand on stage and say "Americans, AMIRITE?!" in order to get independent or European film critics to praise his daring exposure of the corruption that lies in the heart of those barbaric cretins from across the ocean. That said, as I once mentioned to a friend of mine whose hatred for a failed ending on an excellent video game was getting the best of him, a film that does everything right except for five minutes of its runtime is still a good film, even if it picks the worst possible five minutes to screw everything up in.

A few years back, I reviewed le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a film that I thought was highly confusing and erratic, albeit good despite. This film is considerably clearer than that one was, but all that managed to reveal is that sometimes an author's proclivities are best left opaque.

Final Score:  6/10

Guardians of the Galaxy

Alternate Title:  Your Move, DC

One sentence synopsis:    A human outlaw, an assassin, a literal-minded warrior, a genetically-engineered raccoon, and a sentient tree team up to save the galaxy from a raging, genocidal maniac in search of a superweapon.


Things Havoc liked: Do I even need to recap the Marvel films now? This is the tenth film in the Marvel cinematic universe, seven of which (counting this one) I have now reviewed, and if there's anybody left who doesn't know what this madcap insanity project that Marvel has been on for the last six years is, then they need to go find someone else to tell them about it. Ten films and more to come, and the only question remaining here was whether or not Marvel, having maintained their momentum through a series longer than the great run Pixar had in the late '00s, or either of Disney's masterpiece periods, or even those of Ridley Scott or James Cameron, could possibly do it again, this time with a series and a concept so insane I thought they'd lost their minds when I first heard about the film.

Well of course they did. Who the hell do you think this is? Warner Brothers?

Guardians of the Galaxy rocks. It is a fun, explosive, irreverent space-opera, that proves, yet again, that Marvel seems to be incapable of doing wrong. Taking a series of characters I know nothing about, and shoving them into a film that seems to be comprised of equal parts Star Wars and Galaxy Quest, this film is the cherry atop Marvel's sundae of never-ending success that has attended their entire "Phase 2" output, and if it is not the best Marvel film of this year, that is simply because Winter Soldier was one of the best Marvel films of all time, and this one "only" manages to give it a run for its money.

Part of the secret to Marvel's success throughout these films (other than the pacts with Satan) has been the quality of the crews they have assembled to produce them. It's not merely that the films have had excellent writers and directors, but that each film has been painstakingly paired with a production team tailor-made to do the type of film that Marvel had in mind to do. So it was that the original Thor somehow managed to kidnap and drug Kenneth Branaugh into directing it, Iron Man was the work of snark and slice-of-life master Jon Favreau, Arrested Development and Community's Russo Brothers were brought in to modernize Captain America, and writer's director Joss Whedon was handed the reins when it came time to do the big ensemble piece in Avengers. For Guardians, Marvel called an audible, pulling in Indie Director James Gunn to take on the writing and directing duties in his first big-budget effort. Gunn was a weird pick for a film that would appear to demand someone with hardcore science-fantasy chops (John Carpenter, J.J. Abrams, or Matt Reeves all come to mind), and yet what Marvel wanted here was not a traditional Space Opera feel, but a much more indie-take on big-budget scifi. And Gunn, whose credits include Super, Slither, and Dawn of the Dead, somehow came up this time with a script and a film that is simultaneously everything and nothing like the films it is aping. The movie is riotously funny, even with the central conceit of the characters not being taken remotely seriously despite their pretensions of awesomeness having been spoiled by the trailers. Banter between the characters, each of which is immediately given their own style and archetype of speech, meets anything to be found in the Avengers, while the design, look, and feel of the film is distinctive and colorful, as befits a space opera and yet recognizably Marvel-esque, as befits the series. I've not been a big fan of Gunn's before this, despite all the critics who rave about his potential, but Gunn has now finally made good in all the right ways, and I can't praise his efforts enough.

But what of these characters, about whom, for the first time in the history of the Marvel franchise, I knew practically nothing going in. To my astonishment, every one of them is not only characterized well, despite this really being a five-way origin story, but portrayed expertly by whatever combination of actors and animators were involved. Starlord, AKA Peter Quill (the movie insists on calling him Quill throughout, despite his best, hopeless efforts) is played by Moneyball's Chris Pratt like a cross between Han Solo and Marty McFly, a hopelessly immature child of the 80s (his music obsessions are amazing) who was kidnapped by space aliens at the age of about eight, and seems to have taken the opportunity to become every eight-year-old's vision of what a wisecracking space outlaw is supposed to be. I've never had occasion to like or dislike Pratt before this, but he is amazing in this role, as perfectly cast as Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth were for their respective Marvel characters. Only slightly less amazing is Zoe Saldana, of the new Star Trek among other things, who plays cold-eyed assassin Gamora. Her character has the unenviable role of playing the brooding badass in a movie that slathers liberal ridicule upon the concept of brooding badass, but she pulls it off mostly by heaping unending ridicule right back on everyone else. The only shaky element among the live-action cast is WWE wrestler Dave Bautista, who despite his turn in Riddick is plainly not a professional actor. And yet here, the writing comes to the rescue, as his character of Drax the Destroyer is of a race of beings who lack a concept of metaphor, and speak in absolutely literal terms at all times. That's right, they took the fact that Drax was being played by a wrestler without acting experience, whose lines would therefore sound stilted and unnatural, and wrote it into the script. Those beautiful bastards.

But the CG characters are the ones that really steal the show, a duo that should not, under any circumstances have worked, and yet. Rocket Raccoon, a contemporary of Bucky O'Hare, one of the most ludicrous concepts that even Marvel's comic line has to offer, is by far and away my favorite character of the entire film. An anthropomorphic, genetically and cybernetically-enhanced raccoon voiced by Bradley Freaking Cooper of all people, this character is awesome itself. A foot and a half tall gun-fanatic who spends most of his time either blowing shit up, piloting warships what blow shit up, or serving as the dry, comic wit of the entire group preparatory to blowing shit up. A sequence halfway through the film has Rocket get drunk and belligerent, only to be talked down by Starlord into a puddle of tears, and just as we fear that a dreaded "narrate your own backstory" scene is about to raise its head, he responds to his crushing depression by whipping out an assault rifle larger than he is and preparing to, you guessed it, blow more shit up. Rocket is done perfectly, riding the line between Joe Pesci and the Voice of Reason, and surprisingly enough, may actually be the character with the most face-time in the entire thing. But just as amazing is Groot, Vin Diesel's turn as a walking tree, whose limited vocabulary belies rather surprising depth. Supposedly Diesel demanded that the writers translate all of his dialogue into English so that he could put the exact right tone on the... Grootish... version. It shows. Groot is the perfect counterpart for Rocket and for all the others, and if baby-dancing-Groot does not become a toy line, then someone at Marvel will have lost their damn mind.

On and on I could go, from the side-characters and cameos to the soundtrack. Lee Pace, Thranduil himself, having decided that his turn in the Hobbit was insufficiently campy, plays Ronan the Accuser in the best traditions of Ming the Merciless. So over-the-top that he winds up screaming defiant villain-speech at his own boss (when you're out-scenery-chewing Thanos, you're doing quite a thing), his character is the perfect foil for our completely nonchalant heroes, and the moments when they manage to flat out confuse the hell out of him are priceless. Michael Rooker, one of the finest character actors of all time, gets to hick it up as Yondu, Starlord's abductor/enemy/ally/father figure/pain in the ass (it's that kind of film). This is a man who once played himself in a call of duty game. He's right at home here. Smaller roles go to Djimon Honsou (who reportedly demanded a role in a Marvel film because he felt there were insufficient black characters), Glenn Close (who manages to do better than Judy Dench did in the Riddick series), John C. Reilly (not as annoying as he customarily is), and, of course, Benicio del Toro, who plays some kind of deranged outer-space Liberace with the aplomb I have come to expect from him. I don't usually mention cameos in these things, but this movie is STOCKED with them, from the obligatory Stan Lee appearance to momentary spots by Nathan Fillion, Josh Brolin, Seth Green, and Rob Zombie, all atop a pile of in-jokes and nerd-references that should keep the internet buzzing for weeks.

Things Havoc disliked: I'm sure Marvel will tell you that they knew this movie was going to be a hit from the get-go, and that nobody was nervous in the slightest about this thing, but that would almost certainly be a lie, as I think most of us are well aware, and in fact that's something of the problem this time around. The movie is well-structured and well-written... except when the Gunn's nerve fails, and he suddenly feels the need to explain to the audience what they have just witnessed. There are several points, riven throughout the film, where sentiment or concepts that are perfectly clear to the audience are ruined by the script deciding that a character needs to spell the obvious out, just in case the audience fails to get beaten over the head sufficiently with the standard Marvel themes of "friendship and teamwork conquers all". Several of these incidents hit at absolutely the worst possible moment, spoiling, among other things, one of the bigger dramatic payoffs of the film. This tendency annoyed me more than my viewing companions, but given that the Marvel films are famous for, among other things, the quality of their scripts, it was a serious disappointment.

There's also the issue of sequel-bait. We've all come to expect and accept that the Marvel films, contained within their own universe like episode of a TV show, will continue on and on, but the sequel-baiting for this film is clunky in the extreme. Not only are obvious plot hooks for the next film dragged up out of nowhere in the last ten minutes of runtime (never a good way to do things), but the same problem as before afflicts even the sequel-baiting, meaning that the hooks in question are dragged up many times, each time out of nothing whatsoever. It's awkward and ugly, and mars a film that otherwise is none of these things.

Final thoughts:   DC Comics has had a rough time of things at the movies in the last few years. Not only have they put out half of the raw output that Marvel has, but their offerings have been mixed in tone and quality, and lacked utterly the cohesiveness that is Marvel's towering cinematic universe. DC's poverty of imagination in realizing its properties on film has been palpable, and this is coming from someone who liked both Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel. The best point of comparison from DC for this movie is likely 2011's Green Lantern, another high-concept space opera film that misfired drastically in every way that this movie aims true. And yet the point isn't so much that that movie was mediocre while this one was excellent, but that DC, having failed to do a space opera properly, retrenched themselves in the old-standbys of Superman and Batman, and will be doing so yet again in 2016 (having pushed the release date back from their original 2015 opening). In response to questions about greater diversity of characters, a Wonder Woman film perhaps, or simply anything not done by the Zack Snyder/Chris Nolan combo, DC has made many excuses, including that audiences were not ready for such things, and that the risks of doing anything but what worked in 1973 are too great. Marvel, meanwhile, just finished making a space opera about a raccoon and a walking tree, one of such qualities that I was forced to praise it immodestly, explicitly torpedoing every excuse DC has made or will make in the future regarding what is and is not possible in comic book films.

A day may come, must come, friends, when the skill of Marvel fails. When they forsake care and break all standards of quality, in favor of the mediocre and the stupid. An hour of laments, and shattered dreams, when the age of Marvel comes crashing down around us, when they revert, at last, to the mean, and go the route of Pixar or Michael Bay.

But it is not this day. This day we watch Guardians of the Galaxy. This day, we get to smile.

Final Score:  8/10

Hercules

Alternate Title:  And the Rock Feels No Pain

One sentence synopsis:    Hercules and his band of adventurers seek to save a Thracian kingdom from the depredations of a horde of centaur barbarians.


Things Havoc liked: My process for choosing movies to watch is not terribly sophisticated. Trailers, posters, the occasional bit of rumor overheard from here or there, as well as my own biased opinion of what I do and don't want to see all factor into it. Some movies I will see despite the fact that I have strong suspicions that they are going to turn out terrible (Godzilla, Pacific Rim, Suckerpunch). And some, despite excellent trailers and decent word of mouth, I simply have no interest in watching whatsoever (the entire Planet of the Apes series). I do not explain all this to defend my decision to see Hercules, for that was an easy choice, but rather to explain why I was so excited to see this movie. And for that, we need to discuss another movie, specifically 2004's Troy.

Troy, for those who haven't seen it, was an epic all-star blockbuster based on Homer's Iliad, and it was also one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Not because it was badly written, acted, or had poor action, but because it completely missed the point of its source material, turning the Iliad into a modern parable about a conflicted hero (Achilles) who doesn't want to war, but does so anyway, reluctantly, to satisfy the whims of a thoroughly modern tyrant who seeks to conquer all Greece and rule it in a modern Empire. Not only is this completely antithetical to the story of Achilles and the Trojan War, it was also completely Antithetical to the reality of it, of Mycenean pirate-kings raiding hill forts in Asia Minor with their retinues of soldiers. And being as the Iliad is kind of my thing (Ancient History, etc...), this pissed me the hell off.

Why am I bringing this all up? Because Hercules gets it right.

No, I don't mean they're scrupulously faithful to all elements of the Hercules legend (for one thing, that would require calling the movie Herakles), in fact they junk a considerable amount of it, but it doesn't matter, because the essence of the story is right, or at least of some version of the story. Indeed, the whole point of the movie, to my surprise, is the gap between the legend of a figure like Hercules, and the (likely) reality of that situation. Hercules, like every other legend in the world from Gilgamesh to Spring-Heeled Jack had to come from somewhere after all, and this film posits one such place that it could have been, all without trying to "revise" the legend itself. This is not a movie like Ridley Scott's Robin Hood which seems almost contemptuous of its own mythology, nor one of those tired elements wherein the hero is buried by his own legend and must find the strength to live up to it. Instead we actually get to sit down and discover where such a story as that of Hercules might well have come from, and why, consciously or otherwise, it might have been embellished to the point it was.

Or was it? The movie plays a rather cagey game all the way through as to what's actually going on here, how much of Hercules' mythology is actually myth and how much is not. This game is helped by the casting of Dwayne Johnson, the Rock, who is a figure of such almost comedic mass and power (to say nothing of his natural showmanship) that he manages to believably blur the line between a real person and a legendary figure. I've been a big fan of the Rock's since I first came to know him, even in bad movies, and his turns in things like Be Cool or Pain & Gain have long-since proven that he's a far better actor than he's given credit for being. Hercules doesn't exactly stretch his range, but he certainly looks and feels the part, a man just at the edge of what is possible, whose legend goes well beyond. Not many guys can walk into a room wearing a lion skin and loincloth, carrying a club the size of a tree, and have nobody laugh at them.

And a lot of why this duality manages to work is the presence of several of Hercules' co-stars, particularly Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter's Rufus Sewell and Deadwood's Ian McShane. Friends and long-time battle companions of Hercules (the very existence of a crew of fellow badasses with Hercules is fed directly into the theme above), both Sewell and McShane take on the role of cynical commentators on the goings on, as Hercules' legend is embellished and burnished. There are none of the tired cliches here, the resentment of the leader or contempt for legends or wide-eyed adoration turned to mockery when the hero fails to stand up to the legend built for himself. Instead we simply get action, piles of it, violent and bone-crushing and quite expertly done (the scythe chariots in particular were a nice touch). All in all, what we have here is a fun adventure romp in the classical style, and if that's what you were looking for going in, as I was, you'll have a great time with Hercules.

Things Havoc disliked: Shame about that plot though.

Yeah, I know, action movie, plot optional, but that's not really true and never has been and you all know that. It's not so much that the plot is bad as it is horribly dated, and treats itself like it isn't. And I hate to lay the blame for this on a particular actor, but John Hurt, of all people, deserves a particularly dishonorable mention, for whatever reason (bad script, bad directing, brain aneurysm). His King Cotys goes through several massive personality transplants at points throughout the movie, providing whatever the movie needs at that particular moment, be it a screaming, puppy-kicking villain, a wise, beleaguered ruler, a dedicated family man, a merciless tyrant, or (ultimately) a complete idiot. As a result his character, and all those associated with him, including his daughter and grandson (Rebecca Fergusson and Isaac Andrews) are utter cyphers, saying and doing whatever the director needs them to say or do to hammer home the "point" of a given scene, or push Hercules into reaching the next action setpiece.

Inconsistencies in the writing, or rather the quality thereof, also serve to confuse the issue, to the point where I began to wonder if there weren't multiple screenwriters involved. The opening sequence, a battle against Aegean pirates, serves so transparently as an "let us introduce the team of badasses by name one by one" sequence that I thought for a moment we'd switched into a Japanese Sentai show, and several of the characters, particularly Atalante (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and Tydeus (Aksel Hennie) are wooden and flat. Not as wooden and flat however as Joseph Fiennes' turn as King Eurystheus, a completely useless character brought in at the last second for no reason other than to try and desperately undo all of the good ideas the movie had about Hercules and replace them all with more standard cliches. This character has editorial meddling written all over it, and seems to have been conjured out of nowhere so as to suddenly give Hercules a more standard Hollywood arc at the last second, accompanied by a thunderously out-of-place "buck the hero up" speech at a moment when there is no reason to have one.

Final thoughts:   Still, half a daring movie is better than no daring movie at all, and Hercules, despite its manifest flaws, is still a rock solid action piece with more to say than I had expected it to. I won't be remembering this film for all time as a classic of the silver screen, but it's a fun, competent, highly-serviceable action flick starring fun actors making witty commentary on the goings on. Classics have been made from less than this, and while this film isn't one, it's still definitely a worthwhile endeavor.

And if you need more convincing, this movie also possesses the coveted "Raging Hatred" award from noted film connoisseur Alan Moore. If that doesn't make you want to watch this film, I don't know what will.

Final Score:  6.5/10