X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

“I’m The Juggarnaut, BITCH!”

The original X-MEN, released in the summer of 2000, was a relatively important movie in a few ways. It revived the boom of film adaptations of super heroes. The genre had declined severely after Warner Brothers released BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997, which was considered by many to be the worst movie in a long time. The film brought in a little over $100 million in the U.S., a little more than half of it’s predecessor BATMAN FOREVER’s take two summers before. The question arose in Hollywood, if Batman, arguably the most famous of super heroes, could not be sold, then who could?

Director Bryan Singer took over the X-MEN project, and it was a gutsy choice by Fox. He had two movies under his belt, and THE USUAL SUSPECTS was the only memorable one (it was also made five years ago). The executives at Fox handed him a $75 million budget, modest for the time of film, and gave him a cast of mainly unknowns. How Singer made such a mark in Hollywood without receiving hardly any credit for it is somewhat stunning. His casting of Hugh Jackman as the morally conflicted and immeasurably cool Wolverine paid dividends. The film was a success, and it spawned a sequel three years later that delved deeper into the story of the X-MEN and gave the fanboys what they wanted: more action.

A universal sigh of despair hit the internet about about two years ago as Bryan Singer decided to leave Fox and the X-MEN series, which had already began production on a third film, to head to the Superman camp. A replacement was hired in spring of 2005, but yet another replacement was needed as the would-be director had to leave the project. Fox chose Brett Ratner, whose credits include the RUSH HOUR series, to take over the reigns of the unsteady film. His instructions were to just not screw up what Singer had started, and do it quickly; he had eleven months to finish the product for a Memorial Day 2006 release.

Not being an X-Men fan myself, I went into X-MEN: THE LAST STAND without expectations other than wanting a visual feast and nothing too hard to understand. If this was Ratner’s goal, he succeeded. The film is a lean hour and forty-four minutes, a half-hour shorter than X2. The fact that the film is only 104 minutes is surprising considering how much more Ratner and screenwriters Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg bit off than they could chew.

The biggest of X3’s story line features a cure being found that eliminates the mutant gene found in every single mutant in the world. Yes, every single one, no matter what type of mutation they have (be it if they can run through walls or walk on water). Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his X-Men want the good intentions of the antidote to be seen by everyone: the treatment is voluntary and is intended to do good (such as curing a man covered in blue skin and fur). Magneto, the X-Mens’ archenemy, believes that there is nothing to cure in mutants and that the government is trying to exterminate the mutants.

Another plot arises when Jean Gray rises from the grave. She returns to THE LAST STAND as Phoenix, a mutant whose powers are greater than anyone can imagine. Her powers have been harnessed up until this point, but now she just wants to have some fun I guess. She lifts a lot of things up, makes a lot of things explode, and has a detached psychotic look in her eyes. I sat back and took it in, absurdity and all.

The film doesn’t really have an intelligent bone in its body other than Magneto’s story line. I wondered while he was moving the Golden Gate Bridge to connect it to Alcatraz (no joke), whether or not he was a terrorist. He goes against everything the government says violently, and he kills anyone who gets in his way of destroying the “cure”. Other than that, the story is lacking. Human touches are sprinkled on the movie throughout, and in all truthfulness spread out a little too far (again, Ratner bit off more than he could chew in 104 minutes). The shaky script is easily forgotten when the tremendous action scenes burst on to the screen. They are nothing mind-blowing conceptually, but they are too damn good looking not to enjoy.

The warm weather is just around the corner, and that is Hollywood’s cue to release their biggest, loudest, most absurd, and most entertaining movies of the year. I am but a simple sixteen-year-old, and I can’t help but love them. X-MEN: THE LAST STAND is everything an action movie should be (sorry for the cliché): big, loud, absurd, and entertaining.

B+

THE DA VINCI CODE

"You ask for what would be worth killing for. Witness the biggest cover-up in human history."

About a year and a half ago rumors started flying around about bringing THE DA VINCI CODE, Dan Brown’s ludicrously popular recent novel, to the big screen. The book had been as controversial as any in the past half-century, and it was exceptionally entertaining as well. The news started trickling in about the cast a few weeks later, and I became extremely interested in the project. As it turns out, Tom Hanks, whose popularity I don’t have to delve into, was to play the lead role of Robert Langdon, alongside two of France’s most popular actors, Jean Reno and Audrey Tautou. It was to be directed by Ron Howard, who won a Best Director’s Oscar for 2001’s A BEAUTIFUL MIND, and would be penned by Akiva Goldsman, who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for bringing A BEAUTIFUL MIND to the screen. All the pieces were there to make a great movie, a controversial movie that could reach out and grab hold of the masses’ minds due to being based on the single most popular novel of its time. The fact that the film fails on almost every level is even more disappointing due to the years of buildup.

The plot is well-known by now, with the story starting with a bang. The curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle), has been viciously murdered in one of the museum’s most famous rooms, where the Mona Lisa and the Madonna on the Rocks hang. Robert Langdon (Hanks), a Harvard professor of Cryptology and Symbology, is teaching at a seminar in Paris and has been called by the police to help in their investigation of the murder. It seems that Sauniere, who apparently “had about twenty minutes to die after being shot” has left clues to inform who his killer is. Langdon has been called in not only to try and crack the codes but because Sauniere wrote in his own blood on the floor to find Langdon. He is now the most wanted man in the world, and Captain Bezu Fache (Reno) of the Paris Police Department feels it is necessary to take every possible measure (legal or illegal) to find him. Langdon then escapes with the help of a French investigator named Sophie Neveu (Tautou), who was the granddaughter of Sauniere.

This is the point where the film falters. Where the novel hit the ground running and never stopped after Langdon and Neveu escaped the Louvre, Howard’s film feels the need to stumble on to the ground, run for a few minutes, and then spend ridiculously long stretches of time making historical monologues. Hanks may be the most disappointing part of the film, as he lists off these monologues without emotion and not trying very hard to cover up the fact that he knows these lines of the top of his head (that is what acting is, right?). His character has no back story other than that he fell into a well as a child and has been claustrophobic ever since, and this event is played back in a grainy, dreamlike memory sequence. Neveu isn’t given any justice either, with the only back story she receives being a few memories of how her parents died when she was young and how she went on to live with her grandfather for a time.

The biggest ray of light in the film comes when Langdon and Neveu reach the house of an old friend of his, an eccentric old man living in a magnificent French mansion named Leigh Teabing. Teabing is played by Sir Ian McKellen, who is the only one in the picture who shows any sign of life or emotion, and the only one involved who looks like he isn’t about to crumble under the pressure of being in the dullest adaptation of the greatest thriller in years. Teabing is a Holy Grail historian (The Grail is one of the central plot lines), who tries to help Langdon and Neveu figure out who murdered Sauniere and why he would leave such extravagant clues about a seemingly unbreakable code in his last minutes. If you don’t want to read one of the biggest controversies in history, please don’t read the rest of this paragraph. It seems that, according to Langdon and Teabing, that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, and had a daughter. The Catholic church has covered this event up throughout history in fear of Jesus’ divinity being questioned and Catholicism possibly dying out. It is also believed by Teabing that the Holy Grail is not a cup or goblet as many people believe, but rather the sacred tomb of Mary Magdalene herself. This was the point of the book where my jaw dropped and my eyes grew wide. In the movie, though, this was the point where I was slapping my face to keep me awake. Langdon and Neveu look on at Teabing as he relates to them the biggest cover-up in history, and they do so with glazed-over eyes and a look on their face that says “Ohhhhh. Okay.”

A little life is then injected into the story as the albino monk (yes, an albino monk) who was assigned by the Vatican to kill Sauniere reaches Langdon and Neveu in order to kill them and destroy all information that could be used to exploit the Catholic church. He is promptly beaten up by Teabing however, who I have to say is about seventy years old and on crutches. Again, this part of the story was thrilling in the novel and kept its readers on the edge of their seat for pages, while the suspense is reduced to almost nothing in the film. There is a hint of action, and then Langdon and Teabing continue to throw historical monologues back and forth at each other while on the run, while Neveu sits back patiently and waits her turn to slap the murderer of her grandfather.

I won’t delve any further into the plot, because it does reach a climax, and a good one. However, I will say that the climax in the book will make one’s palms sweat, the hair on their back stand up, and their jaw drop. In the movie the only thing standing up will be the viewer trying to not fall asleep. Perhaps in my opening paragraph I criticized the movie too much. I said it fails on almost every level, which isn’t really true. It disappoints on every level. Where there was mass controversy in the books Howard has chosen to go with the controversial angle, but dumb it down a bit and take some of the edge off (the fact that the acting is wooden and there is no awe in anyone's eyes doesn’t help either). Where there was a romantic spark between Langdon and Neveu in the novel there is a kiss on the forehead and a hug. When there was gripping suspense at every turn of the page, there is boredom. It’s just very disappointing.

C

CITY OF GOD

"It was like a message from God: 'Honesty doesn't pay, sucker'."

Once in a great while an entertaining movie hits you with the dramatic force of a punch to the face. Fernando Meirelles’s CITY OF GOD (CIDADE DE DEUS) is such a film. From the incredible, frenetic, eye-popping first scene involving a gang of teenagers running after a chicken (and yes, shooting at it as well), the film never stops moving. Meirelles has crafted one of the finest first feature films in all of history, a film whose entertainment values are as equally resounding as its dramatic values.

City of God takes place in the slum outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The main character and main character is a boy who grows into a man over the course of the film. His name is Rocket, and the world he knows is one of crime. He comments in the beginning of the film that ‘while the slum was only fifteen miles from Paradise (Rio), you could feel the heat from hell walking through every street, sitting in every building, and looking at every person’. This statement becomes truer than anyone watching would have suspected. Meirelles covers dozens upon dozens of characters over the course of the film, cutting back and forth in time to reveal the back stories of every major player in the City of God. Because of this the audience feels a connection with that is rare in today’s cinema. It is hard to mold characters who seem alive in a movie, characters who reflect life on Earth perfectly. Meirelles not only does this, but he does this for dozens of characters spanning two decades.

Rocket tells the story of life in the slum starting with his brother. The two of them and the kids in the neighborhood are playing a simple game of soccer when Rocket’s brother and his two friends ditch the game and rob a gas truck, really for the fun of it. Things get out of hand that night when the gang goes out with a boy named Lil Dice, who is Rocket’s age. It is clear from his introductory shot to the film that Lil Dice calls the shots in the CITY OF GOD. He, at the age of seven, organizes a plan that has the four of them robbing a hotel and making sure nobody leaves the building to inform the cops. Lil Dice shows his uncontrollable bloodlust by executing everyone in the hotel, and then takes off with the cash.

Rocket and Lil Dice first cross paths a few months later when Lil Dice murders Rocket’s older brother, who is trying to leave the slum in hopes of a better life. They will run into each other again, years later, but not after walking down very different paths in life.

After stepping back and taking a look at the film, one can see that the two main characters are really quite like most other teenagers, living everywhere in the world. They both have hormones that control their actions, but to different degrees. They are both given opportunities thanks to the CITY OF GOD, but accept these opportunities in different ways. Rocket wants to become a photographer so he and the city can receive some recognition for what is happening in the slum; how the gangs rule the streets, the cops abandon them, and how most people want to leave the violence for a better life but can’t. Lil Dice, who now demands to be called Lil Ze, is similar to other hotheaded teenagers who want things their way. Ze just happens to have an unending supply of guns and money from drugs, and doesn’t shed a tear when he kills anyone.

Lil Ze’s rise to power begins by killing off his competition. He goes to a dance club with envious eyes one night, seeing the diamonds, gold, and women that are all over the biggest drug dealers in the slum. He tells his friend that he wants this, all of this, for himself. By the same time the following night, he has killed off all the men he had so enviously watched and is now more powerful than anyone else in the CITY OF GOD.

Meirelles’ shaky camera-style of cinematography works extraordinarily well in CITY OF GOD. Often times this style is used to make jaggedly-edited action sequences seem more realistic, but in CITY OF GOD it serves a better purpose. The viewer feels as if they are another person living in the slum, and everything that happens there affects them. The violence is hard-hitting, brutal, and comes often. Sometimes we feel it is justified, while other times we hate it but know that it is something that we just must accept. A thought crept through my head after a particularly hell-like scene involving Lil Ze. I said to myself, “somebody has to kill that guy”. It was then, I believe, that the film was its most transcending and had reached its dramatic peak. I cared for the characters safety as much as they did, and I felt like I had been drag through hell, as the characters living in the slum feel like throughout life.

On a technical level CITY OF GOD is breathtaking. Every performance is spot-on accurate; many of the actors used in the film were from the slum itself. The frenetic, kinetic direction is mind-blowing and adrenaline-pumping (I’m sorry to use the cliché, but it really is), and the shaky camera-style cinematography captures the essence of hell that all the characters in the film feel. What may be most impressive about the film is its screenplay, and how it encompasses the lives of dozens of people from childhood to manhood, and manhood to death in the CITY OF GOD over more than a decade of time. It chronicles how violence affects them and establishes its characters well, making them three-dimensional with relatable personality flaws (they may be of greater proportion, but they are the same flaws most other people share). I can not say any bad words about City of God. It is an exemplary, incendiary, and heartfelt film that will be considered one of the greatest crime pictures of all-time one day, and that day may not be far off.

A+

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3

"Who are you? Do you have a wife? A girlfriend? Whoever she is, I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna hurt her. And then I'm going to kill you right in front of her."

The first two installations of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE series were a kind of revelation in themselves. Neither was gushed over by critics, nor by audiences. Neither boasted extraordinary budgets, and there were already and have since then been bigger marketing campaigns. For some reason or another though, they make money. Boatloads. Truckloads. The first two “M:I” films each broke the record for largest opening weekend gross at the time of their release, and because of this, their parent company, Paramount Pictures, is able to throw a lot of money around on the third Mission: Impossible movie, and it shows. In fact, they gave director J.J. Abrams (the creator of TV’s LOST and ALIAS) the biggest budget in history for a first time director, $150 million. It shows.

What I’m trying to get at is that M:I 3 is very like its predecessors. It has Tom Cruise in the role that may define him, IMF Agent Ethan Hunt, has extraordinary stunt work, attempts (not particularly valiantly) to add a three-dimensional love story, and overall, its a hell of a lot of fun while it lasts. Oh yeah, it too will make truckloads of money.

The scenario in M:I 3 is that Hunt is now settled down. He has had enough of the glory days (for the first ten minutes of the film, that is), and is in love with a Virginian nurse named Julia (Michelle Monaghan). He tells her that he is a traffic control engineer, and she buys it, sort of. Meanwhile, he is really training future IMF agents, his protégé being a girl named Lindsay Ferris.

Ferris is kidnapped while on a mission in Berlin, investigating a weapons dealer named Owen Davian. Davian is the best at what he does, as is Hunt, and it is very entertaining when either is on screen (although Davian is given very little actual screen time). Davian is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who gives a terrific performance similar to that of the vintage James Bond villains: genius, crazy, rich, cocky, and always planning. He brings an intensity and class to the performance that could have easily been turned into a self-mockery, and may be the brightest light in the entire film (as well as the only memorable performance).

It should be common knowledge though that not many people go to the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies looking for great performances, and neither do I. The stunts, explosions, and the sight of Tom Cruise running around while everything that could go wrong does is why millions of people see them. The film is technically superb, with several action sequences that will leave people riveted to their seats. The pinnacle action scene is a battle of sorts of a bridge, featuring Hunt duking it out with a helicopter full of guys with machine guns, several explosions, upturned cars, an inconvenient fifteen-foot hole in the ground, and a drone plane. What impressed me most was Abrams’ ability to weave through these scenes with a sense of continuity instead of the usual several-cuts-per-second style used by most directors in modern Hollywood. He lets the audience see the action unfold from one perspective instead of causing nausea with jagged editing.

The plot, other than the basics that Julia is kidnapped by Davian, and that Cruise has to find her and make a deal with Davian to get her back, is rather hard to explain. The surprisingly stellar and entertaining supporting cast includes Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames), who returns as Hunt’s partner in action, the tech whiz who makes sure Hunt doesn’t do anything to crazy without telling him first. Maggie Q, Jonathon Rhys Meyers, and Simon Pegg all play roles as fellow partners, and Laurence Fishbourne and Billy Crudup are Hunt’s bosses. As the number of plot twists mounted I remembered the saying that says “to fool someone once is good, to fool them twice is bad, and to it three times is genius”. This quote does not say what happens after the third plot twist. There are also enough plot holes in M:I 3 to drive every truck, car, helicopter, and boat that explodes through.

Overall though, I really have no complaints. The story may lack a strong emotional backbone, which is an element Abrams really wanted to touch on, but that is forgivable. M:I 3 delivers exactly what it promises, which is a good time that has a story line that is easy to understand but not stupid, terrific action, a menacing villain, and some very good looking people. This is the perfect film to start off summer, and it will reflect in the box office.

B+