(Note: this contains spoilers for every movie mentioned. Be warned).
I saw LORD OF WAR the other week. Nicholas Cage plays a guy who decides he can make a boatload of green by dealing in weapons of death — after all, he reasons, people want to kill people and someone has to supply the pistols, rifles, grenades, and tanks so that they can fulfill their dreams, doesn’t someone?
The film is visually spectacular, sadly, that’s about the limit of what it has going for it. I’m not neccessarily not a fan of narration, but in this case, the film relies too heavily on telling the audience what’s going on as opposed to showing the audience (although showing over telling was a big concept in every writing class I ever took, you’d think movies — a visual medium — would be pretty down pat at it. Guess not).
There’s no moral lesson in the story — even after his brother is killed, his family disown him, and his wife leaves him and takes their kid, what lesson does he learn? Oh, right: gun running is good!
One thing I notice when folks don’t want others to think poorly of their taste in movies is that they’ll defend it as “a great popcorn film.” Michael Bay’s THE ROCK is a great popcorn film. LORD OF WAR is a great “Why’d I waste a rental on this?” film.
**
FOUR BROTHERS was a good popcorn film. It’s heavy on the “shoot the shit out of a lot of people” but at the center it’s a story of four brothers who have to do some wrong to do some good. Do two wrongs make a right? No, but multiple wrongs — most relating to people falling out of windows and firearms in use — do indeed make for a good film. Terrence Howard is an underutilized scene-stealer, although I did have a problem with how his character ended up — why the eff’ didn’t he think to search Josh-y boy for a second weapon?
**
I rented IN COLD BLOOD from Netflix. Based on Truman Capote’s book, the producers actually filmed scenes in the same house the Clutter family was shotgunned to death in. That’s fucking creepy.
**
Speaking of “great popcorn films”, Michael Bay’s last good popcorn film was ARMAGEDDON. That, THE ROCK, and BAD BOYS are great examples of what make good popcorn flicks — action, adventure, great characters, snappy dialogue, beautifully shot with a semi-intelligent script and a great score.
Michael Bay’s been a little off the mark — let’s face it, PEARL HARBOR, BAD BOYS II, and THE ISLAND were all steaming piles of shit, which is dissapointing, because I was really hoping Bay knew that it takes more than flashy action sequences and moving cameras to make a film work. If Michael Bay could go back in time to the edgy dude he was when he filmed the original BAD BOYS (”…and some skittles!”), then maybe his films would be ready to be dubbed “popcorn ready.”
With THE ISLAND, there was a huge stumbling block in the script that I just couldn’t get my brain around. I’d like to say, first off, I think most films require a certain suspension of disbelief, without which the audience would say, “Wait, so, Bruce Willis just jumped off a one-hundred story building, shot his UZI wildly, killed fifty-hundred-billion terrorists — all with head shots — and landed on his feet, all while shouting ‘Yippiee-cayee mother fuckers!’ Wait, what? That could never happen!”
But there’s no suspension of disbelief powerful enough to get around the big one that is the center of THE ISLAND’s premise. So, let me get into that right quick:
In the future, a top-secret and highly illegal cloning facility exists where duplicates of the rich, famous, and important are kept in preparation of their organs being harvested. Some of the clients of this facility choose to use their clones to carry their natural children to term.
Get that? What makes the facility illegal is that the clones have consciousness (they’re supposed to be brain dead) and think they’re in some sort of “post-nuclear-war” contained society, waiting via lottery to be taken to “The Island” where the world is As It Was Before Everything Blew Up. In reality, “The Island” is a scam meant to cover up the dissapearance of clones as they’re taken to have their organs harvested. When new clones are introduced to the facility, quite a big hupla is made about how “new survivors” have been located in the barren wasteland that is, in the self-contained fiction, earth.
Here’s where THE ISLAND fell apart for me. A pregnant clone enters into labor, delivers, and is executed by the attending doctor. What? Okay, so I get they can harvest all her organs so that the “original” can still benefit if her heart or liver fails, but what if the “original” and the original’s husband want to have another kid? The clones in the facility think this woman went to THE ISLAND, how could another be introduced into the population without blowing the whole cover?
I know, right? An absolutely ridiculous thing to ruin my enjoyment of the film, but there you have it. Well, that and the uninspired script — I think they did this story several times in STAR TREK — and over-reliance on special effects, but there you have it.