Robocop review

                   Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi action film “Robocop” has been canonized as a modern classic of genre cinema and a towering example of how a movie can approach satire by commercial means. It’s no surprise however that this property was not immune from franchitis: the crippling disease that has the Hollywood serpent chomping down on its own tail. “Robocop” is a beloved pre-recognized staple of American movies, so it only makes sense that after two bad sequels and a failed original television series, in the age of effects-driven hero flicks, a studio would try to revive the tattered legend with all new mechanics, intended to make him sicker, faster, and more efficient.

                  In this PG-13 reboot, directed by Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padhilha, The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman plays Alex Murphy, an undercover drug cop in a future Detroit. Unlike the first incarnation, instead of getting his body shot to pieces, he is nearly killed in a car bomb explosion set outside of his home. In order to prove that military drones can be manned with a sense of human compassion, a war-profiteering business called Omnicorp builds Murphy a stealthy cybernetic body designed for street battle. Though they have already been using drones freely overseas, it is the effectiveness of the Robocop prototype that will determine the use of robotic soldiers in the home states.

                What really distinguishes this remake from the original is the way the story is centered on Murphy as he is torn between all of the distinct influences in his life. The CEO of Omnicorp, played by Michael Keaton, wants stretch the ethics of the mutilated cop by messing with his mental autonomy, so long as the polls are raised in the companies favor.  The military jarheads, as embodied by soldier-turned-trainer Rick Mattox (played by the great character actor Jackie Earl Haley) are invested in Robocop’s failure, with the belief that cold, emotionless drones are superior to the unpredictable flaws in human morality.  Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), the engineer who has constructed Murphy’s new body, has genuine compassion for his wellbeing but is ultimately compromised by the monetary promises from his employers. Meanwhile, Robocop’s wife (the slightly underwhelming Abbie Cornish) and son (John Paul Ruttan) suffers the greatest from his near-death and his subsequence absence, as Omnicorp fills them lies while they continue to work out the kinks in his design.

                Though this is a remake nobody wanted or asked for, I am happy to say that despite the blatant commerciality that put this project into motion, the movie is actually satisfying on almost all accounts. Yes, it isn’t as biting or as clever as the original and it’s considerably less violent, but within the parameters set by the studio, Padilha manages to make a lean, gets-to-the-point action movie that isn’t afraid to share its insights on modern, post-terror paranoia. Obviously the movie’s core discussion of drone technologies is front and center of the text, but the movie also explores themes regarding media propaganda—with Samuel L. Jackson playing a Sean Hannity/O’Reilly type facsimile— the ignored rights of military vets, as well as broader topics like the nature of humanity and the obscurity of free will. And while almost every frame is jam-packed with ‘ideas’, it still makes time to highlight a great collection of fully realized performances from its ensemble cast.

                Original or not, this “Robocop” remake—despite what you might read on the internet—is a just a good little movie. And I say little because the scope of plot, while utilizing a large budget for special effects, is actually fairly contained within the internal goings on of Omnicorp and “Robocop” as he tries to solve his own murder.  Within this framework, the film moves along with clear attention to the character’s arc, the natural pace of the storytelling, and the thematic intentions of the narrative. Simply put, it just works.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014

The Monuments Men review

                Originally slated as a late 2013 release, Grant Heslov and George Clooney’s World War II heist dramedy “The Monuments Men” was pushed to the early months of this year, which rarely says anything good about the studio’s faith in the project. But hey, how could you go wrong with a cast like this one, comprised of strongly-identifiable, older-aged actors like Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon and Cooney himself. As it turns out, the same reverence towards these actors that recognized a yearning to see them together in the same flick might also be the same factor that placed them on an unreachably high pedestal, cased behind glass, where audiences are nervously asked to carefully observe the film from a safe distance.

                During the final stages of WW2, art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) is asked to put together a scrappy team of other artists, architects and scholars to enter Nazi occupied France, in search of stolen paintings and sculptures from Europe’s past. The team is assembled quickly and even rushed into a military basic training camp before sweeping the bloodied battlegrounds, in search of the timeless artifacts. As the story progresses some of them are injured, others are killed and America’s international relations are placed in an opportunity for profound cooperation.

                Concurrently, James Granger (Matt Damon) is courting a French curator played by Cate Blanchet, who once worked under the Nazi’s before ending up in jail. Though Damon’s character is a married man their relationship skirts between professional and flirtatious, but is ultimately never resolved or rewarded by the film, much like everything else that happens.

                Heslov’s screenplay and Clooney’s direction is so guarded and safe that this movie eventually suffocates among all its narrative floatation devices.  You can’t help but notice every box being ticked as the story moves along: humorous fish-out-of-water scenes about old guys trying to fit into military life, check, secondary unrequited love story, check, sad moment when a one of the two soldiers who have spent the entire film learning to get along dies in the other’s arms, check. When these familiar beats pass by they don’t exactly ruin the overall goal of the picture, but they never really hit with the intended force of their formal purpose either.

                Cliché’s in a film like this are acceptable as long as the cover band can really jam out the classics, but unfortunately Clooney doesn’t mine his cliché’s for their inherent entertainment.  Because this movie is so focused on its message about the importance of preserving our humanity through art during times of political and economic upheaval—seriously, Clooney explicates this theme in not one but three separate lengthy speeches—everything else is treated lite and brief and frustratingly vague.  The film is never as funny as it should be and the cast members, as fabulous as they are, never seem to be on same page.

                With some thoughtful attention to period set-decoration, crisp cinematography, and a handful of notable scene-bits, I suppose “The Monuments Men” isn’t all bad.  It’s cute and old-fashioned in a somewhat obnoxiously knowing way, and it’s important and politically conscious in an absolutely obvious way. However, as an ensemble piece, the characters are dreadfully incidental and secondary to the plot’s strict sequencing of events. One might expect seasoned comedians like Murray and Goodman to spice things up with some much-needed improv or some creative line-readings but their direction is so edgeless and their scenes are so repetitively one-note that this movie only becomes a monument to the film it didn’t have the wherewithal to be.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014

That Awkward Moment review

             In HBO’s hit television series “Girls”, when Lena Dunham writes about self-absorbed twenty-somethings who live in New York, but who spend most of their time complaining about the nuisance of acting in common consideration for others, it’s funny and full of interesting  contradictions. When “That Awkward Moment”—the debut feature from writer/director Tom Gormican—explores similar themes and characters, but with no trace of self-reflective irony and with an insidious, people-pleasing sense of lazy satisfaction, it only registers as sophomoric and gratingly cynical.

                Unlike Dunham’s “Girls”, crucially “That Awkward Moment” is a celebration of the post-college manosphere, and as the beer-soaked-Ping-Pong-ball adage suggests, Gormican puts the bros in distractingly misogynistic priority before the aforementioned hoes.

                The story centers around three young males who bond over their recent singleness. After Mikey (Michael B. Jordon) finds out that his wife (Jessica Lucas) is cheating on him with a lawyer, his friends Daniel (Miles Teller) and Jason (Zac Efron) decide to support him by staying single and happy along his side. This nonsensical and unwarranted pact begins to complicate when Jason falls in love with a girl that he meets in a bar named Ellie (Imogen Poots) that he first mistakes as a hooker because she dares to wear tall boots and keeps her prophylactics in stock, and with whom he eventually begins to work with professionally.  Daniel also falls for his friend with benefits named Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis) and begins dating her on the sly, all while Mikey is secretly still carrying on a physical relationship with his emotionally estranged wife. 

                The premise of this tale, I guess, is that these man-children are too proud to admit that they have found compatibility with someone of the opposite gender and they somehow feel the need to keep their relationships a secret, lest they be accused of betraying their brotherhood. What results in this manufactured plot tension is a series of inexplicable contrivances where characters lie to cover-up what shouldn’t even be a problem for normal thinking, rational adults over the age of 15.

                The other result of this set-up is an overwhelming wave of forced machismo and sexism that makes these protagonists impossible to like, even though the plot, as it is shoddily constructed, is designed in such way for these men to realize their behaviors are misguided. However, with this conceit in consideration, the movie forces the women to settle into passive roles, in which we are supposed to accept when they do inane things like date men who call them hookers the second time they ever meet, or when they show forgiveness when they have been lied about and hidden like a dirty affair, and when they let their boyfriends meet their parents with large prosthetics hanging out of their zippers—a scene that isn’t entirely played for laughs.

                Besides the outdated gender politics that hobbles this movie, what makes “That Awkward Moment” all the worse is that it is painfully unfunny and poorly paced. Many scenes begin as a visual gag or a conversation piece, but then devolve into wispy montages when Gormican can’t figure out how to cut the scene into a natural transition.  As evidenced by the blooper reel played during the credits, a lot of the dialogue between these actors is improvised or reworked on set, and as a consequence of bad scripting and direction the comedic tune of each character is pitched too similarly when left to the actors to devices.  Michael B. Jordon tries his best to keep his thankless nice-guy role understated and Efron and Teller know how to command a scene, but this sinking boat of a film only allows these talented actors to drown in its misconceived mediocrity.

               

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014
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I, Frankenstein review

               Like Frankenstein’s monster himself, “I Frankenstein”—brought to us by the creators of the “Underworld” franchise—is a soulless aberration made up of bits and chunks, sewed together from other pop-culture references and genre tropes. Trying desperately hard to be cool without any regard to logical plotting or coherent storytelling, this corpse of an action movie proves that the basin of Hollywood’s bad ideas apparently has no bottom.

                In the dark rainy city of god-knows-where Frankenstein’s monster, played by Aaron Eckhart, stumbles into a holy war between undercover demons and gargoyles sent to protect earth by the archangel Gabriel.  The gargoyles live in and protect a massive cathedral in the center of the unnamed city, where they decide, against their better judgment, not to kill Eckhart’s superfluous character—named Adam by the gargoyle queen—even though they know that he murdered his creator and that he doesn’t have a soul. You see, the demons need to build an army of animated corpses like Adam because in this universe they can only possess soulless bodies.  Though apparently they can’t just possess a regular buried corpse because that would be too simple and this movie never passes on an opportunity to toss a narrative hurdle in its path.

                Years into the future, in what I guess is supposed to be modern times, Niberious the prince of demons, played by Bill Nighy, is working to recreate Dr. Frankenstein’s results in a lab, ran by two scientists who are unaware of his evil conspiracy.  The lead physicist Terra (Yvonne Strahofsky) gets wind of her employer’s actions after she encounters Adam when he breaks into her lab to retrieve his master’s 19^th century journal.  Adam must then choose between protecting himself and joining the gargoyles in their battle against the possible threat of an army of demon possessed Franken-zombies.

                Overwrought and underwhelming this movie tries to stuff in every mistake made by every action-horror fantasy from the last 15 years. It attempts to balance myth and legend against genre tradition and bizarre Christian metaphors, resulting in a head spinning slosh of clanging production notes. And oh my god is this movie is stupid. I mean it’s bad… Like, really bad. It’s bad in a way I didn’t know movies could still be. But is it so bad it’s good? Not quite, though not for any lack of trying.

                  Practically every single thing that this movie wants to do it can’t seem to do at all. The performances all around are as stiff as a log and comprised of nothing but a series of slow-motion poses, but I can hardly the blame the actors when their characters speak in nothing but clunky exposition. The stylized violence, which should be fun in theory, is undercut by the fact that the angels/gargoyles are beamed up to heaven as soon as they are killed, while the demons explode into a badly rendered ball of CGI fire, sending them back to hell; a cheesy conceit that will make you nostalgic for the dated effects in “Ghost”. 

                There’s even an attempt to create a pseudo-romance between Adam and Terra the electro-physiologist. Of course when Eckhart bares his toned body, as he removes his war-tattered hoodie, we are immediately reminded that his character is a cadaver, patched together by other peoples dead flesh—hardly a sexy moment.

                Len Wiseman’s “Underworld” series, as stupid as most of it is, was occasionally watchable in all its pleather-clad monster brooding, but this mash-up mythology, directed by Stuart Bettie, only diminishes the good-will towards its antecedents. Designed to look like an Evanescence music video or a PS2 video-game cut scene, whatever campy joy one might want to find between the cracks of this schlocky mess is buried miles under a heap of dull self-seriousness.

Grade: F

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014