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Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
The movie I’ve seen trailers for since last summer finally hits theaters in a summer full of hungry patrons all wishing for the biggest explosion and coolest effects. But with its star heavy cast and array of sleek cars can Gone in 60 Seconds propel itself to the front of the race with audiences?
Nicolas Cage plays a reformed car thief forced back into the fray when his screw-up brother (Giovanni Ribisi) botches a deal for a local toughie. To rescue his delinquent bro Cage must steal 50 cars over the next three days for the man. So Cage wastes two days assembling his team of usual stereotype frat kids who are “the best and brightest” to aid in the mission. That leaves 24 hours for Cage and company to steal 50 cars and save the day minding any moral objections over grand theft auto.
Gone in 60 Seconds is a living dream of testosterone with fast cars, sexy girls, and colossal explosions. But all the action is mercilessly loud yet surprisingly tame and empty. All the action lacks true tension or any real semblance of excitement. The director uses poor choices of rapid quick-cut edits that dull any build up of excitement. Most of the action doesn’t even center on the theft of cars, it just happens. Excluding one chase scene toward the end Gone in 60 Seconds is a popcorn movie with no flavor.
The script and characters take a back seat toward the effects and speeding cars but this to be expected from producer Jerry Bruckheimer, the man who gave us the equally boisterous Con Air and The Rock. This time the holes of the plot are easier to see and the dialogue no less cheesy especially when car talk turn innuendous. It’s easy to argue that story should be forgotten because audiences came to see cool cars and cool crashes, but it’s also easy to argue that those cool crashes and cars are distractions (as is Angelina Jolie) from the thinly strained story. When you have time to really analyze the plot in an action film you know the action isn’t up to par.
Gone in 60 Seconds could also serve as an apt description for Angelina Jolie’s running time. The recent Oscar winner dons bleached dreads and those pouty lips but is still seen less than Waldo – and that is a criminal mistake with someone like her. Gone in 60 Seconds has a bounty of Oscar winners with scant supporting screen time yet it can’t fool the crowd.
Gone in 60 Seconds may fit the criteria for a grand summer fireworks show but can never deliver the goods. It may be flashy, loud, and fast but this flick just isn’t running on empty, it’s past the “E.”
Nate’s Grade: C-
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House on Haunted Hill (1999)
There are some classic horror pics in haunted houses, and the Vincent Price cheese-fest original of House on Haunted Hill is one. The original was campy fun and worth rewatches, but how does the remake fare with a 40 year age gap between the two?
What House on Haunted Hill miraculously achieves what Jan DeBont’s Haunting had tumble through its sticky CGI fingers: the establishment of a true unsettling mood. All throughout Hill you can actually feel the seething, eerie mood inspired from the wonderfully creepy ambiance of the constructed sets. It has a darker component and launches into many sequences of frightening imagery that seem like left-overs from Jacob’s Ladder but are no less effective. So maybe the plot is basically a premise that once established pretty much thins out to non-existence. You will be thinking to yourself that half of the flick is people wandering aimlessly in the bowels of an asylum when they should have enough common sense to not be.
There is no relevant acting since the cast is regarded to fill out the standard stereotypes and yell cheesy zingers at one another with F-bombs spliced into every line. This ain’t yo’ daddy’s House on Haunted Hill! Geoffery Rush, who talked funny in Shine and won an Oscar and who talked funny in Shakespeare in Love and got an Oscar nomination, gleefully plays the host of the supernatural shindig. And he talks funny. Taye Diggs surmises the “funny non-white” character, Chris Kattan surmises the “goofy nutball” character, Famke Janssen plays the “bitchy wife… who can crush people with her thighs” character, and the rest of the cast are interchangeable blondes who actually do get a bit interchanged physically.
Hill is a good shift in your seat spooker up until the end which just really drops the ball beyond belief into a cheap cop-out. Everything up until the part where the “ultimate evil” cloud of charcoal or something is visually haunting and solid entertainment even if it has to run to gore well once too often. But this whole slow moving cloud descends the movie into mediocrity and it just gets more hokey as it goes. The effects for the “ultimate evil” are preposterously bad and wouldn’t frighten a 4-year old with a bladder problem.
Up until the final ten minutes or so, House on Haunted Hill is a guilty pleasure directed sharply to instill the correct senses one should bring out of the story and setting. Hill has moments of inspiration and memorable scenes of horrific faceless demons and hallucinatory flashes of the macabre and bizarre. But the absurdly thrown together ending drowns what could have been a real Halloween treat.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Haunting (1999)
Is this what passes for horror these days? Get an Irish Jedi, a Spanish sword fighting hot tamale, an indie queen, and the co-writer of Rushmore and Bottle Rocket in a creepy home and have curtains blow in the shapes of faces? Is there anyone out there truly terrified of curtains?
From Jan de Bont, the director most known for making cows fly, comes possibly the weakest horror pic ever assembled on two legs. This is no different than the weekend drive-in where they showed all the wretchedly corny movies of people in giant plastic costumes slowly walking and terrorizing young teenagers in love. Except now the costumes are far more expensive. Beyond that nothing has changed.
The story is a bit of a mystery. It’s light when there needs to be more meat, and heavy when it needs to explain itself. It even goes a step further into fulfilling the dreams of many by making Catherine Zeta-Jones bisexual. And of course then there’s the contrived happy ending that seems like something they tacked on from the outcome of a test screening.
The best asset The Haunting has is the utterly beautiful and breath-taking house and sets. You’ll hear it’s name around Oscar time for set designs, and most likely on the winner’s ballot as well. I was wrapped up in the scenery and fell in love with it. Maybe this is a trick by the movie so you don’t notice how bad it really is, well it almost worked. But this isn’t an episode of This Old House, though that might have been scarier.
With the aid of some cheap jump scares and splashy effects, The Haunting registers nothing in the world of frights and fear. It’s really unintentionally funny at many many parts. In fact the audience I saw this with was laughing far more than they were screaming. So you could label The Haunting as the funniest movie of the summer if you wanted. Some movies are just born bad.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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