Blog Archives
Daredevil (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released February 14, 2003:
Not as bad as it could have been. That’s the best way to sum up Ben Affleck in tights.
Nate’s Grade: B-
——————————————————
WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS
For many years, 2003’s Daredevil has become my handy threshold for assessing superhero cinema: if I liked the movie better than Daredevil, it was likely a good movie, and if I liked it worse than Daredevil, then it was a bad movie. It’s also fascinating to think back to a time after X-Men but before the behemoth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where superheroes could be cheesy while trying to be edgy and cool. This is a time before Ben Affleck was Batman, before Jon Favreau kickstarted the MCU by directing 2008’s Iron Man, before the gritty Netflix TV series of the same character, and before Colin Farrell became a widely respected actor. Behold the cheesefest that is the big screen Daredevil, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, previously best known as the writer of Simon Birch and Grumpy Old Men. Johnson is an avowed superfan of the comics and blind crime-fighter from Hell’s Kitchen, but in a recent 2023 interview on Yahoo, even Johnson admits his fandom sank the movie. The director admits to trying to cram in too much to appease fans and hook new audiences, and then there’s the obvious studio notes trying to make Daredevil into more popular and well-known super folk.
In the age of dour, gloomy superheroes that are held to unreasonable standards of gritty realism, or the creative control of the MCU, it’s fun to look back and see something stand out, even for some of the wrong reasons. Daredevil is still, to this day, a cheesy delight that you can have fun with or you can laugh yourself silly. Early into my re-watch, I settled into the kind of movie I was in for, with a smile on my face and the knowledge that things were going to be goofy. Young Matt Murdock is looking for his dad when he comes across him shaking down someone for money. Oh no, his dad really is a mob goon, and after he swore to his son it wasn’t so. Matt runs away from this traumatic realization only to get magic toxic waste sprayed into his eyes, but before he does so, he drops a paper in the alleyway, and it just so happens to be his report card with straight As that he couldn’t wait to show his not-a-goon dad. I laughed out loud. Daredevil cannot be taken seriously and that’s okay. He leaves a calling card of two criss-crossed D’s written in flammable liquid on the ground, which is a mystery how someone would discover this and even funnier thinking of Daredevil writing this signature after his work. Another fine example is the entire introduction to Elektra (Jennifer Garner) where adult Matt smells her before she arrives, becomes infatuated with her enough to use his blind status as an excuse to hit on her, then grabs her hand and refuses to let her go, which corresponds to the two of them flirt-fighting on a playground. It is an absurd, and occasionally creepy, sequence from start to finish, and that’s not even accounting for the blood-thirsty children chanting against the fences for the adults to fight. I was smirking or chuckling throughout Daredevil, and while I doubt that was Johnson’s artistic intention, it’s his movie’s best selling point from an entertainment standpoint.
There is too much going on here, which makes all the storylines feel clipped, underdeveloped, and ultimately also worthy of derisive entertainment. We get two scenes with Elektra before she’s fallen in love with her blind man in shining leather, and then the next moment she blames Daredevil for her father’s death, and then the next moment she’s seeking vengeance, and then she’s dead, but she’s not really dead because she’s been resurrected… somehow… and spun off into her own solo movie that will be released in 2005. In this regard, being over crammed with side characters and storylines with the intent on setting up later movies, conflicts, and commercial chains of characters is very in-keeping with today’s overburdened, interconnected IP universe. It’s the same with the villains. We have two; Kingpin, the hulking crime boss played by Michael Clarke Duncan, and Bullseye, a hired killer with killer aim played with gusto by Farrell. It’s not enough to make the Kingpin the big boss of crime, the movie has to also make him literally the one responsible for the death of Matt’s father in Act One. Jack Murdock (David Keith, not to be confused with Keith David) is a washed-up boxer who wants to try again but be legit, so he ignores the warning to take a dive and is murdered for his pride. Seriously, I know his kid wanted him to win, but I think Matt would rather have an alive father with wounded pride. Bullseye is a contract killer from Ireland but why would Kingpin hire him and fly him across the Atlantic to just bump off one of the man’s subordinates? Surely there are any number of more efficient and less time-wasting manners to eliminate an underling. I guess he’s another of those comic book villains that just gets so involved in their overly complex schemes. Maybe it’s really the schemes that bring him to life (Evanescence nod) and keep the big guy from getting bored.
The action vacillates greatly from decent to ridiculous. I am absolutely positive that the Fox executives saw those 2002 Spider-Man box-office records and said, “Hey, put some of that building jumping stuff in there too.” This is a Daredevil where he just dives face-first off of buildings and plummets to the ground. Remember, he has advanced hearing and other senses, but he’s still supposed to be a human being, not a mutant, not a meta human, not a god. Diving face-first off of high buildings seems like a sound way to practice your eventual suicide. He also leaps and kicks like he’s in The Matrix, including dodging bullets too, which seems like his skills are pushing the “faster than a speeding bullet” realm of other heroes. In fact, Daredevil’s abilities seem to rival that of Superman with his intense hearing. Apparently, the man can lock in on a specific conversation blocks away. It’s these heightened moments of super impunity that make him less vulnerable even though the movie also wants to highlight his scars and bruises. This is the guy that needs to sleep in a water-filled sensory deprivation chamber (so pruny) but will throw himself into battles with multiple points of competing gunfire. The fight choreography has some slick moves but is also fairly mediocre, and it’s worse when the rubbery CGI Affleck is slotted into action to make even more preposterous moves (never dodge when a glorious backflip could do). I was beside myself when Bullseye collected broken stained glass, that he plucked from the air like snowflakes, and then piled into his hands like a server balancing stacks of plates, and then he started hurling them at Daredevil. For a guy whose notoriety is not missing, you think he would readjust or figure out that a guy flipping backwards is always going to have a turning middle of mass.
The movie is struggling to juggle all these characters, all these storylines, and all of its would-be brooding themes and Catholic imagery of sacrificial bloodshed. It makes the movie feel like you’ve accidentally sat on the remote, speeding up the process of its 105 minutes. Johnson had a longer cut of the movie with a whole subplot of lawyer Matt Murdock, but that’s not what the people come to see. The character arc of Matt finding love and losing love is rushed and feels insufficient, more of a checkbox for the studio. Given the material, it’s surprising that Affleck and Garner would fall in love in real life and get married in 2005 (and then divorced in 2018). The arc of him learning restraint, to not be “the bad guy,” is laughably simplified to the point where just not killing the big crime lord is supposed to qualify as applause-worthy character growth. It’s enough that the crusading journalist (Joe Pantoliano) trying to bring light to this case decides to become part of the conspiracy and withhold information, enough so that he stares out of his home, jacket slung over his shoulder, and sees Daredevil watching from atop the street (how would he know?) and says, “Go get ‘em,” like he’s Mary Jane Watson cheering on her web-slinging beaux. It’s moments like this that you can’t take seriously but can appreciate as goofy mid-level supes entertainment. Daredevil is not great but it could have been much worse.
After the reception of this movie, it’s surprising that Affleck would want a second chance to suit up as a superhero, but then again being Batman is like playing Hamlet in our modern society. With Daredevil, he does seem uniquely qualified as a handsome man staring blankly. Garner was ascending thanks to her breakout role in J.J. Abrams’ Alias, and Farrell was becoming a Hollywood It boy in 2003 before finding a higher artistic ceiling with 2008’s In Bruges. He’s a hoot in the movie but he might have twenty total spoken words. It’s more a performance of grunts and scornful growling. Duncan was a controversial casting but an early example of race-blind casting traditionally white comics characters. It’s rare to find an actor of imposing size and stature that can still, you know, act well. With respect to Vincent D’Onofrio, who was my favorite part of the Netflix Daredevil series, but if the Kingpin were cast today, it would be Dave Bautista (Knock at the Cabin) hands down. Johnson was given another chance at superhero franchise-making with 2007’s Ghost Rider, which was also enjoyably goofy but also bad. I feel for the guy because he was fighting battles for genre credibility and superhero universe logic that most of the filmmakers in the MCU today take for granted. He walked so that James Gunn could run.
Twenty years later, Daredevil still kind of works as my superhero movie grading threshold. It’s not traditionally good but it has a nostalgic charm, an artifact of a time before the eventual boom. It’s so goofy and so early 2000s-edgy (the hard rock soundtrack is its own contribution of hilarity). With the right mindset, I think Daredevil can be fine albeit dated and cheesy passing enjoyment.
Re-View Grade: C+
Share this:
Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore (2010)
Obviously this movie is bad. A sequel to a lukewarm family film from nine years ago, the chances were slim that Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore would have ever worked. They don’t even have the temerity to have the subtitle read “Pussy Galore” for fear that repeating the most famous Bond girl name might cause parents discomfort. It’s a live-action talking-animal movie that posits that cats and dogs have been fighting an ages-old feud and they all have secret lairs and technology at their service despite lacking opposable thumbs. Really, premise alone you’re already lowering the standards, and with standards firmly and securely lowered, you may even laugh once or twice (that’s probably about it). It depends on how susceptible to puns you are because that is the primary joke vehicle. The film makes an attempt to throw animals into a Bond-styled action thriller with, pardon me, shaggy results. The character animation is poor, the dialogue feels like it was stitched from one groan-worthy pun after another, and yet Cats and Dogs 2 doesn’t offend with its sheer badness. Premise alone, you sort of watch the thing in a vegetative state.
Nate’s Grade: D+
Share this:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)
It’s not every day that Jean Claude Van Damme gets some marginal level of redemption. The original 1994 Street Fighter film took the classic arcade fighting game and took it as seriously as possible, which meant it was incredibly silly. Van Damme was Colonel Guile and entrusted to rescue hostages from the evil dictator, Bison (Raul Julia). The big screen adaptation rewrote entire characters but managed to keep the stuff fans really care about, like catchphrases, costumes, and super moves. God forbid that audiences see Cammy (Kylie Minogue, yes that Kylie Minogue) make the wrong victory pose. It’s always the unimportant things that somehow matter the most to execs. Street Fighter is a campy blast. How could you despise a movie that has its villain say, “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.” Though the movie does have the depressing distinction of being Julia’s last film before he died. Let this be a lesson to all actors looking to take a paycheck role. Years later, in the wake of a writer’s strike, the execs at Fox thought they could pump new blood into a Street Fighter franchise. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li purports to tell the back-story of one of its most popular fighters, the diminutive fireball-tossing lass with Princess Leia’s haircut. This movie proves that you don’t need a Van Damme to make a boring and mediocre action movie.
Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) is trained to be a master pianist and also a master martial arts warrior. You don’t realize the kinds of dangers classical pianists constantly run into. Her father is kidnapped by the crime lord Bison (Neal McDonough) for some reason or other. Three years later, a mysterious scroll falls into her possession. She travels to Bangkok to find her father. Bison has the ingenious plan of buying waterfront property, introduce high levels of crime, and then making money on lowered property values, which is simultaneously confusing and stupid. Bison has a few evil henchmen, notably the giant boxer Balrog (Michael Clarke Duncan) and the masked warrior Vega (Taboo from the Black Eye Peas), who help wipe out his criminal competition. In Bangkok, Chun-Li is mentored by Gen (Robin Shou, who played Liu Kang in two Mortal Kombat movies) and together they attempt to thwart Bison and his dastardly real estate scheme.
For a movie about streets and fighting, well there’s a clear shortage of the latter. Much of the movie is structured around Chun-Li conducting her own private investigation and achieving some level of inner peace. She decides to try and make it on the streets of Bangkok. There are forgettable training exercises with forgettable platitudes disguised as wisdom (“You’re hurting me,” “No, you’re hurting yourself”). There are a handful of lackluster fights and chases, some of them through streets even, but the movie has a scarce amount of action until it revs up for a climactic showdown. The action is also poorly shot and poorly edited, distracting the senses and making it downright impossible to understand. The choreography is nothing special. When the movie suddenly introduces a supernatural element the other characters don’t even bat an eye. Screenwriting neophyte Justin Marks has too much revenge-seeking father drama and real estate scheming and not enough brawling. The Legend of Chun-Li has zero respect for the intelligence of its audience. It has flashbacks to flashbacks that just aired minutes earlier. How hard would it have been to just actually base a Street Fighter movie on a fighting tournament?
Director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Doom, Romeo Must Die) shoots the movie in such a dull manner that the fight sequences fail to even elicit any interest. There’s one scene in the middle of the film that serves as a testament to the lack of care put into this movie. Chun-Li has battled a Bison henchwoman in a women’s bathroom. The bathroom set design includes partition walls with portholes. Chun-Li is on one side and the henchwoman tries to punch her through the porthole. Chun-Li grabs the woman’s arm and squeezes. The camera angle is from the side of the actresses, so it would make the most sense to have the henchwoman’s right arm caught, that way her expression could be seen. Nope. Chun-Li is gripping the woman’s left arm, meaning that her raised arm and shoulder block any view of the woman’s face, and yet she talks through this scene. How difficult would it have been to just switch arms? Why purposely obscure an actor’s face, especially in a scene that doesn’t require a stunt double?
Here’s a curious item. Chun-Li has always been a full-blooded Chinese woman in the history of the video game. When we see her as a child, baby Chun-Li and child Chun-Li are very obviously Chinese in features. Flash forward a few years and she’s transformed into looking like Kreuk, who is half-Chinese. Apparently, one of the less common side effects of trauma is becoming less Chinese looking as you age. Along these same strange ethnic lines, we’re told that Bison was the child of Irish missionaries and was left behind in Bangkok. And yet, the child grown up completely in Southeast Asia manages to sport an Irish accent. Anybody want to explain that particular linguistic loophole?
Kreuk (TV’s Smallville) is one of the film’s biggest handicaps. The script saddles her with great amounts of pointless voice over, to the point that half of her performance is listlessly explaining what is literally happening on screen. Kreuk is a dead-eyed robot in this movie; she displays some glimpses of human emotion, like sadness and rage, but they never feel remotely credible, like someone who only knows the definitions of emotions and not proper application. Her lesbian seduction dance is a small moment of absurdity. She thrashes on the dance floor and her “dancing” reminded me more of a bird’s mating dance without the excessive plumage displaying. Kreuk can run and flex well enough, which is also a nice benefit for a martial arts action flick.
The acting is terrible but there is one bright spot in a most unexpected location. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the best worst performance of the year, brought to you by Chris Klein (American Pie). Klein plays Interpol agent Charlie Nash who is conducting a parallel investigation into Bison’s Bangkok activities. He’s partnered up with a local gangland homicide detective (Moon Bloodgood) who takes extra care to showcase her cleavage thanks to work outfits with plunging necklines. Klein is awful to a powerful degree but here’s the thing — I’m fairly certain it’s one hundred percent intentional. Being a conosoire of trashy cinema, I feel that I’ve adopted the skill of being able to deduce when an actor is hopelessly serious or just goofing off. Klein comes across like a self-aware man; he knows this is a crummy movie with crummy dialogue, so he’s going to have as much fun as possible. His performance is all forced swagger, from the way he constantly swivels his head to the way he cannot purposely walk in a straight line. He overemphasizes lines, chewing over the faux hard boiled detective talk and spitting it out in a singsong delivery. He grimaces and furrows his brow, widens his eyes to comical levels, and when he crouches in a gunfight the man spreads his legs as far apart so that he looks like he could have effectively doubled as a backup dancer in an MC Hammer music video. It’s obvious that Klein has given a staggering performance, but the observant will note that this is not an inept performance. This man knows exactly the kind of movie he’s in. I always tabbed Klein as a wooden actor that came across like Diet Keanu Reeves, but I must credit him for making a bold acting choice to knowingly dig deeper when it comes to being bad.
Hero of this movie, Chris Klein.
Readers know that I am skeptical and dismissive about the prospect of a good movie ever being born from a video game adaptation. Games call for interactivity and movies passivity. But if you’re going to make a movie called Street Fighter than stick to the script. This borefest wants to be a gangland drama with a tacked-on buddy cop side plot. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is an awful work partially redeemed from the sheer amount of unintentional hilarity. Kreuk is extremely miscast as a warrior woman. The acting is bad, the direction is bad, the writing is bad, and Chris Klein tries to outdo them all in badness, and I admire the chap for trying something different in an admittedly abysmal movie. To be fair, I was never a big fan of the original video game. The special moves always seemed much more tricky to pull off. How many different incarnations of Street Fighter II were there before they eventually mastered basic math and released Street Fighter III? These are the things I was thinking about wistfully whenever Klein or Bloodgood wasn’t on screen.
Nate’s Grade: D
Share this:
Talladega Nights (2006)
When it comes to clowning around, no one does stupid more smartly than Will Ferrell, a man perpetually in a state of arrested development. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby succeeds both as a satire on uplifting, redemptive sports movies and on the culture of NASCAR. The product placement is obscene in this movie, but then again, the same can be said with NASCAR racing. PowerAde had a contractual obligation to be cited at every family meal prayer, which itself turns into a competitive sport. Title buffoon Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) is so arrogant that he gets an ad for Fig Newtons on his windshield (“This ad is dangerous… but I do love Fig Newtons.”). Even the title is a perfect send-up. The redneck riffs are never very mean-spirited, but I like that the Southern bar keeps disco on the jukebox to “profile.” The sports clichés are picked apart, like the absentee father (Gary Cole) reappearing to learn the error of his ways. There’s a heavy reliance on slapstick and pretty much everyone in the movie is either a cad, a buffoon, or a jackass, so there are limits to that comedy.
True to 2004’s Anchorman, this movie hits its high points with the spontaneous moments of tangential weirdness, from sports announcers explaining how to put out invisible fire to Ricky Bobby learning to drive with a live cougar as a co-pilot. Talladega Nights doesn’t quite hit the absurdist highs of the infinitely quote-able Anchorman, and the movie spins its wheels all too often, but it’s got a greater number of solid belly laughs than most any movie out there today. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Jean Gerard, the gay, French Formula-One driver that upsets the stock car world. Cohen has great fun in an English language mangled performance Peter Sellers would have loved. When Ferrell and Cohen are face to face, you feel like anything can happen between these two quick-witted comedy titans. Ferrell has assembled another game cast of gifted improvisational artists and their blend of loony comedy feels like jazz. The downside with such a huge cast of very funny people is that not everyone gets the face-time they deserve (Oscar nominee Amy Adams comes to mind).
Talladega Nights is a big broad comedy with a great cast and some inspired chuckles. What other movie this summer could climax so perfectly with a man-on-man smooch and the observation, “You taste like… America”? Only one, baby, and it’s Ricky Bobby.
Nate’s Grade: B
Share this:
The Island (2005)
To many film critics, director Michael Bay is the devil. He’s the man behind such ADD-edited hits like Armageddon, both Bad Boys, and Pearl Harbor. Each film was more or less savaged by critics and each film was a hit. Bay has always said he makes popcorn movies for audiences and never listens to the critics. That would probably be a good thing since they don’t exactly have a lot of nice things to say about Bay and especially his editing techniques. But how would someone like Bay, who dreams about blowing stuff up with every night’s sleep, handle material a little more subtlety than, say, corpses filled with drugs being thrown at oncoming traffic (see: Bad Boys II or better yet, don’t)? The Island is Bay’s first film without uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and it’s also Bay’s first encounter with science fiction. Can he make The Island into another popcorn miracle or will his blockbuster tendencies get the better of him?
In the year 2020, the Earth has been contaminated by pollution. The survivors live in a series of isolated towers and are monitored, given strict diets and jobs, and even matching white jump suits. There is an upside to this life; every so often there is a lottery where the winning inhabitant gets a trip to The Island, the last uncontaminated spot on Earth. They’ll spend the rest of their days living it up in paradise, or so they think.
Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) has been at the facility for three years. He has questions for the good doctor Merrick (Sean Bean, your go-to guy for villains when you can’t afford Al Pacino), the man in charge of the place. Lincoln questions his purpose and wonders why he keeps having recurring nightmares with images he can’t place. He’s also been having a very close friendship with Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), though they?re not allowed intimate contact and the living quarters are separated by gender. One day Lincoln finds a butterfly on a different level of the facility and investigates the higher levels. In a few minutes time, Lincoln discovers the truth about the facility: it’s a station harvesting clones to keep rich people going when they need an organ or two. There is no Island but there is an operating room that you won’t return from. Lincoln escapes back into the facility’s population but springs into action when he learns Jordan has been selected to go to The Island. He fights the facility’s staff, grabs his girl, and the two are off to learn the truth of their world and to live.
McGregor is on autopilot with this one but still manages to have some fun, especially when he’s playing two different versions of himself (“What’s with all the biting?”). Johansson looks more beautiful than ever but does little more than stare vacantly. It doesn’t help that a majority of the dialogue after the half-way mark consists of one-word shouts like, “Go!” and “Move!” and of course, “Lincoln!” The best actor by far in The Island is Michael Clarke Duncan who plays a clone who wakes up on the operating table. His mad rush of screaming, tears, confusion, horror, and betrayal may be some of the finest two minutes of acting from the year. Duncan’s cries will hit you square in the gut.
The fish out of water scenario does provide some fun moments of humor, like Lincoln being confused by the phrase “taking a dump.” The Island also asks how people who have never known sexuality deal with their expressions of sexuality (plus it doesn’t even come close to viewer discomfort of something like The Blue Lagoon). The always welcomed Steve Buscemi provides the biggest laughs in the movie as the wise-cracking outsider who helps the runaway clones.
It’s comforting to know that in the future product placement will be as large as ever. I?m normally not too offended by product placement in ads, but The Island seems like it’s contorting to show company names. In one scene, Jordan gazes at an image of herself in a perfume ad, and it’s a real ad Scarlett Johansson did. This got me thinking, what if The Island‘s villains were really today’s actual flesh-and-blood movie stars that wanted fresh parts. The real McGregor and Johansson would become the bad guys. Unfortunately, it seems a little too meta to pull off for a Bay film.
The Island is an intriguing sci-fi movie that doesn’t know what to do once it gets to the surface. As soon and our clones go on their Logan’s run, the movie devolves into a series of bloated, mediocre chase scenes. If the first half is Bay at his potential best, the second half is Bay at his lazy, expected self. The chase scenes aren’t too lively and, except for a late subplot involving McGregor playing dual roles, The Island wilts as soon as it turns into an action movie. There doesn’t seem to be enough plot for this overlong 140 minute movie. Bay’s requisite chaotic grandeur and spectacle has a ho-hum feeling and dulls the viewer right when they should be racing with excitement. Bay’s done this all before and better, and that’s why the first half is so exciting a change for him. It’s thoughtful, tense, interesting, well plotted and visually fun, and then we regrettably hit the second half and it all goes downhill from there.
The movie limps to its over-extended climax and saps all the potential from the opening. The Island really is two disjointed movies slapped together. The first hour is a classic science fiction setup and we are given morsels of information like bread crumbs, which heighten the tension. The second half is an unimaginative, plodding thrill ride that never seems to take off. Sure, the first half may be derivative of a hundred other sci-fi films (most notably Parts: The Clonus Horror) but the second half is derivative of a thousand other action movies. I’ll take smart sci-fi over dumb action most days, even during the bombast of summer. It feels like The Island began as a scary sci-fi film and in order to make it to the big screen the studio had to piggyback a lifeless action movie on top of it. The Island‘s action sequences feel like Bay fell asleep at the wheel.
It may seem like I’m being over cruel about The Island, but the reason I lambaste the second half is because I was so thoroughly entertained by the first half. For many The Island will be enough to quench their summer thirst, but for me it only showed flashes of life in the first half. Once all the explosions, noise, and flying debris kicked in, The Island transforms into any other dumb action movie. Such promise, such vision, all quickly flushed down an embryonic feeding tube. Even if someone prefers the noisy second half they would still take issue with the first half, calling it slow and boring. Fans of Bad Boys II and Logan’s Run don’t exactly mix well. How can a movie possibly work this way?
Bay may be a master maestro of explosions and gunfire, but The Island flat lines when it transitions from thoughtful, eerie sci-fi parable to rote action flick. This feels like two very different movies slapped together, and most audiences are going to like one half stronger than the other so the film won’t work. The action sequences feel unimaginative and all of the film’s potential gets stranded by its about-face in tone. We’ve seen all of these things before, and that’s what’s most regrettable about where The Island leaves you after flashing an iota of glossy potential. Bay may not be the devil but he’s certainly losing his edge, and The Island would have been all the better for it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
Share this:
Sin City (2005)
Like film noir on steroids. Director Robert Rodriguez has made the most faithful comics adaptation ever; giving life to Frank Miller’s striking black and white art. The visuals are sumptuous but the storytelling is just as involving, a perfect mix of noir/detective elements and subversive, highly memorable characters. Sin City may be the most violent studio film … ever, but the over-the-top tone keeps the proceedings from becoming too nauseating, even after limbs are lost, heads roll (and talk), and dogs pick away at living bodies. This is a very ball-unfriendly movie; lots of castrations. The blood even looks like fluorescent bird crap. The stories become somewhat repetitious (anti-hero saves distressed woman), but Miller and Rodriguez keep their tales tight, pulpy, comic, and unpredictable. My friend turned to me after it was done and said, “That was a great movie.” I could not argue.
Nate’s Grade: B+
Share this:
Brother Bear (2003)
Kenai (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is the impulsive younger brother in a tribe of Native Americans living in Northern America. Where exactly? Well, I don’t know but someplace where Kenai and his brothers can surf wicked glaciers dude. Kenai wants to be accepted into his people more than anything. Too bad hes a screw-up. Some fish he leaves out attracts a bear that inadvertently kills Kenai’s older, wiser brother. Kenai swears revenge against the bear and kills it. But lo, this upsets the spirits of nature and they turn Kenai into a bear himself. Oh the irony. Kenai must learn all about coping in the animal kingdom while looking after a young cub Koda, whose looking for his lost mother. Take a guess what happened to his mother. No, seriously, go on and guess. I’ll sit here and wait. Done? Okay then.
The story of Brother Bear has as much life as a bearskin rug. Once again we have a hotheaded jerk that walks a mile in someone else’s paws and learns valuable life lessons through their bizarre transformation. The only thing this movie is missing is Rob Schneider in the main role.
I don’t know what the makers of Brother Bear were intending. Is this for young kids? Well there is endless slapstick and cutesy woodland creatures. However, the first part of the story is quite dark and all about family loss. Great way to start a family film huh? With some family killings? If this is also intended for kids I’m pretty sure they’ll be bored at the preachier moments talking about animal cruelty and tolerance.
Disney once again plays it too safe and by trying to please everybody they end up likely pleasing nobody. This is 20,000 leagues below the artful Finding Nemo. Why does it seem like when the Diz does things in-house theyre so adverse to risk? What the audience is left with is a formulaic piece of fluff thats only memorable attribute is being extraordinarily ordinary.
The ending is so bad that its beyond belief, so allow me to spoil it. Kenai transforms back into a human after hes learned his valuable lesson. He then chooses to remain a bear to watch after Koda. What? Why dont they turn Koda into a boy? Or turn everyone into bears? Or why not turn everyone in the audience into people watching a different, better movie?
The animation of Brother Bear is clunky and awkward amidst a crayola-colored backdrop. The visuals often seem drab or like the templates for a better movie. The human characters appear so stocky. The best element of Brother Bear is the voice work of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis doing a moose variation on their McKenzie brothers.
Phil Collins provides the painfully monotonous pop claptrap thats cued whenever a montage is needed. How the hell did this man win an Oscar for Best Song over the likes of Aimee Mann, Sarah McLachlan, and the creators of South Park? The best way to describe Collins collection of unmotivated ditties is that theyre like soup for the ears: runny, bland, forgettable, and dreadfully unsatisfying. If you cant tell, I dont really care for soup (Soup is too a food!).
Brother Bear is yet another half-hearted effort from the Mouse House. The story, animation, and voice acting are all sub par. Its the same sing and dance al over again, except this time its in the woods, and this time the sing and dance is your senile grandfather with his pants around his ankles doing the jitterbug. Yeah. You get the idea.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
Daredevil (2003)
Not as bad as it could have been. That’s the best way to sum up Ben Affleck in tights.
Nate’s Grade: B-
Share this:
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Taking a storied, and for the most part successful, franchise like Planet of the Apes and trying to rework it is frightfully difficult. You don’t want it to turn off the original’s fans but not be different enough to have its own voice. When I heard that Tim Burton was going to helm this reworking I became optimistic about the prospects of a Burton Planet of the Apes and began to eagerly anticipate its release. What I got, despite some stellar visuals, is a disappointing low point for many people involved, and that does include the man that gave us “Good Vibrations.”
Capt. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is a trained pilot inhabiting a space station orbiting the rings of Saturn. The members inside are performing tests on the intelligence of apes (foreshadowing poking you in the eye) and seem to be coming back with optimistic results. A cosmic energy storm erupts near the station and Leo’s chimp is sent out into a pod to investigate. When the ape disappears (oh the foreshadowing is starting to hurt) Leo decides to venture out himself to save his monkey despite the instructions of his superiors. He gets pulled into the energy field and crashes on a distant planet where he discovers that apes are on top of the food chain and humans are the sport. Captured by the ape commander Attar (Michael Clark Duncan), he is taken to Ape City. He is sold into slavery but wins the attention of a human rights activist Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) who agrees to help him escape and get to his crashed vessel. General Thade (Tim Roth) still carries a torch for Ari but has an entirely different viewpoint when it comes to humans. At one moment he grabs Wahlberg and pulls apart his mouth to murkily inquire “Is there a soul in there?” When Thade begins to learn about Ari’s assistance to the human escape he mounts a full army to travel to the Forbidden Zone and annihilate the humans once and for all.
Burton’s Apes remake, excuse me… “re-imagining,” lacks the social commentary, originality, and heck, even entertainment level that its predecessor possessed. Burton adds his usual great touches of style and the sets are vast and a wonder to see, but what movie is all set watching? This isn’t the simian Home and Garden channel. Burton dresses his players up nice thanks in part to Rick Baker’s fantastic makeup but the components in Apes redux are all dressed up with nowhere to go.
The script is credited to four writers but I wonder why anyone would want to take any credit for it. The story is not only half-baked it seems to never have come out of the oven. The tale is full of numerous incongruities that make this new Apes feel stagnant, especially during its middle portion. The story never gives us any real characters or an exciting line to follow. It’s more like a story pitch than a full story. There are many moments where dialogue is paraphrased from the original in an attempt at a humorous wink, but it’s worthy of more groans than applause.
Unlike the first Apes series, the humans of Burton’s ape world can speak… they just don’t have anything interesting to say. Estella Warren fills in as the good looking and useless heroine that spends her days frolicking about in ripped rags. She’s supposed to be the love interest for Mark but she fails at that (even though she’s the planet’s only attractive female) with Carter getting more googly eyes cast her way. There’s something weirdly natural seeing Kris Kristofferson as a scrubby post-apocalyptic dweller. It seems like he was made to lurk through caves and grunt. Wahlberg himself seems to sleepwalk through the entire film and speaks in only one monotonous tone.
Roth gets to huff and puff a lot and does quite a good menacing job. Every expression of his has a dominating glare of power and every piece of dialogue spoken in a gruff snarl. He has total capture of a great villain and serves his end well enough as the story provides. Carter gives a light touch as the sympathetic human defender but the long awkward moments where her and Mark gaze at each other gave way to great howls from my audience. Giamatti hams up his role with verve and provides some of the best moments of levity for this overwrought film.[
The original Planet of the Apes ending was one of the greatest twists of cinema. It was entirely logistical and packed a great punch. The ending of Burton’s “re-imagining” packs as much punch as a wet noodle. The ending is TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE given the set-up of the events in the film. Not only is it a disappointing head-scratcher but ]it also manages to rip off the first film’s ending with no shame. It truly may be the worst ending possibly ever. I bet a room full of monkeys could have written a better ending, and I’m willing to put money on it.
Let me explain why it’s impossible through the use of spoilers. So Mark is in the future. He follows his little monkey friend and crash lands on a separate planet IN THE FUTURE. On this planet, Mark’s space station has been looking for him and crash landed. Their monkey experiments get loose and bing, bang, zoom, we got fully evolved monkeys ruling the place (don’t even bother asking where the horses came from). Now, after learning all this, Mark takes a space pod and zooms his way back to present day Earth. He crash lands against the Lincoln Memorial steps only to discover that Lincoln has been replaced with General Thade and Earth is populated with highly evolved apes that still speak English. What? How? What? This cannot be because the film establishes a frame where Earth already has a long history of non-evolved monkey rule. Wahlberg crash landed on a DIFFERENT planet in THE FUTURE that should, therefore, have no bearing whatsoever on what happens to Earth or its past. The Apes remake rips off the most famous twist ending ever by serving up an incongruous version that makes no sense and cannot happen.
Planet of the Apes had all the right components for an exciting and sleek sci-fi ride but falls far short. Burton adds enough of his Gothic vision but this will likely go down as the weakest film on his resume. The usually reliable Danny Elfman’s score is nothing more than hyped up symphonic white noise. Burton may go home with a large check but I pray they don’t do a “re-imagining” of the next Apes picture. Marky Mark and the Furry Bunch are stuck in a hollow, head-scratching bore. Fans of the original series may find interest in comparing and contrasting, but if that’s cause enough to make a film then give me 100 bucks and I’ll make my own versions in my backyard. And they’ll at least make more sense than this monkey mess.
Nate’s Grade: C
Share this:
The Green Mile (1999)
A prison in the heart of the deep South during the era of the Great Depression is not usually the locale you’d find a somber tale of earnest discovery and passionate awareness to the follies of life. Yet here arrives the long anticipated The Green Mile, the second in tag-team efforts from director Frank Darabont and novelist Stephen King in their own genre creation of nostalgic feel-good prison flicks. All the swelling hype could manage to make the movie seem overbearing, but if you’ve got a free afternoon and a butt made of steel then try The Green Mile.
Darabont seems like the perfect visual interpreter to King’s epic narrative spinning of good, evil, and all that fall between. The movie moves at the pace of molasses and clocks in at over three hours in length. Not exactly audience friendly fodder but one and all will be grateful for the decisions taken to build character development and tension instead of blindly rushing through.
Tom Hanks plays a prison guard on the Death Row block of a Southern penitentiary. Despite the bleak and grim surroundings his humanity still shines through. He escorts and oversees the final moments of many men’s remaining breaths along the final walk of green linoleum tile to the electric chair. Enter one mysterious morn John Coffey (Michael Clark Duncan), a towering giant that seems to break all the rules each of the guards on cell block E has come to realize through their years. Coffey has been convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls, but as Hanks soon learns things aren’t always what they seem. The 7-foot miracle worker displays scenes of empathetic healing like to Christ himself. Hanks views are turned and his eyes open, and that’s just the beginning of the heartstrings being pulled. To release anymore of the plot would be a crime punishable by Ole’ Sparky himself in the Green Mile.
The pacing is smooth and wrings out every droplet of mystery and drama needed. The Green Mile‘s comprehensive fable quality transcends the period just like The Shawshank Redemption did as well prior. ‘Mile’ should be expected to be a front-runner for Oscars when balloting begins.
The ensemble acting is magnificently eclectic and truly inspiring. Hanks’ name is so synonymous with Oscar that he might as well shave his head and paint his body gold because come nomination time this man’s name is going straight to the ballot. Other stars give thoughtfully deep and refreshing performances guaranteed to turn a few heads. Duncan’s gentle child-like giant is serene and a benevolently touching figure of innocence and warmth. But one can not forget the presence of a very special rodent by the name of Mr. jingles that deserves billing above the credits itself for the quality performance it puts on.
The Green Mile is a sad, touching ,and rather powerful movie that speaks to the viewer’s emotions and gladly earns every one of them. In the end The Green Mile is nothing beyond a long yarn of a fairy tale; but one told so exceptionally, one performed so extraordinarily, and one directed so deftly that you’ll gladly journey down that mile with ease.
Nate’s Grade: B
nathanzoebl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.