Unlikely sequel ignites unlikely heroine

James Bond doesn’t misfire his gun at his desk. He doesn’t stutter his way through an interrogation. He definitely doesn’t awkwardly eyeball potential suspects in chic French cafés. For all these reasons and many more, James Bond is a capable spy, but this isn’t a story about James Bond. It’s about Sarah, a super spy’s clueless girlfriend.

Sarah is played by Mary-Louise Parker in one of those roles that’s too refreshing for the movie that contains it. Sarah is still coming to grips with the events of the original Red, in which her boyfriend Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a retired government assassin, kidnapped her in an overly complicated, yet whimsical, plot concerning lots of government secrets. Here, Sarah is again bound into an even more complex plot, with even more whimsy. If you liked the first Red, you’ll find this sequel’s delivery enjoyably familiar.

Red 2’s rambunctious spirit, darting from one high-octane encounter to another, is a strange mixture of grim government paranoia — with lots of murder — and trivial slapstick at its goofiest. These competing tonal shifts frequently work against each other, even as scenes of contract killers executing secretaries with silenced pistols transition into mid-gunfight lovers’ quarrels. I didn’t like these opposing forces, mostly because I preferred Red 2’s sillier side over its bloody other half.

And by silly, I mean Sarah kissing her captives because … “well, it works in the movies.” Or Sarah begging for Frank to take a new spy contract from the baked beans aisle at the nearby Costco. Or Sarah launching a European car down a narrowing alley until it’s so wedged in that the scene sent claustrophobia-induced shivers up my arms. I like Sarah, and I love how Parker plays her: flighty, ditzy, maniacally eager to use a gun and jealous of Frank’s spy conquests, especially that curvy KGB spy with hipster bangs (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Willis, for his part, plays into Parker’s manic giddiness. They often reminded me of the cheery-fun Rock Hudson and Doris Day movies, except with lots more guns and murder.

Once again joining the RED team — “retired, extremely dangerous” — are Marvin (John Malkovich), the LSD-bred yahoo, and Victoria (Helen Mirren), the ice queen whose sexualized prowess with guns and killing machines seems to contradict her polished, queen-like nature. Yes, the joke here is that Helen Mirren, a frequent film queen, is a plucky killer. Red 2 beats this motif over your head, but I couldn’t help but smile as another spy (Brian Cox) finds titillating amusement out of Victoria’s sniper stance: flat on her belly with a stocking’d foot raised, arched and twinkling like a ballerina’s.

Between Willis, Parker, Malkovich and Mirren, Red 2 is a full house. But then it feels compelled to add a bunch more stuff, including the Zeta-Jones character and other double-, triple- and quadruple-crossing spy agents. Neal McDonough turns up as a hired gun, as does a mini-gun totin’ Byung-hun Lee, who never forgives the theft of his private jet. Anthony Hopkins turns up as a crazy scientist who was locked up in an insane asylum decades earlier. There is a government oversight committee, CIA, FBI, NSA, senators, generals, competing hitmen, the KGB, MI6 … it all gets very convoluted very fast. Making matters worse is director Dean Parisot’s noticeable lack of coverage; in some sequences, it’s as if there were shots missing, or maybe the editing was a rush job. This small detail has a noticeable effect on the action, but also on the jokes. If the camera could only linger a little longer on punch lines, their payoffs would get bigger reactions. Instead, the film is in too much of a hurry to appreciate the more subtle and priceless gags.

Mostly, though, the movie has too much going on, especially considering that its core components — Willis and Parker, and Malkovich and Mirren — mix so well together. Why dilute that down? 

I like silly spy capers like this. Red 2 joins a long list semi-serious comedy capers, from North by Northwest to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie version about an unbelievably compatible spy couple brought closer together by their competing espionage gigs. Red 2 reminds me most of True Lies, another movie about a bland woman dating a Bond figure. True Lies is a better movie, and forever in the pantheon of great action extravaganzas, but Red 2 is no slouch in comparison. And it succeeds in exactly the same way True Lies did: it gives its female hero a reason to be heroic and she bravely lives up to the challenge.

 

 

 

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

Deep within a summer of frayed edges and missed connections — Superman destroying Metropolis, Capt. Kirk’s failure to delegate, Iron Man’s panic attacks, Lone Ranger (‘nuff said) — I really had to sit back and admire Pacific Rim’s overt simplicity: it is a movie about giant monster-fighting robots, and that is precisely what it delivers.

No detours, no origin stories, no unnecessary exposition. No fat or gristle, either; just lean strips of robot-carved monster meat. Pacific Rim knows what it’s about and it goes to great lengths to maintain that steadfast course. Even the robots have names, like Gypsy Danger and Crimson Typhoon, as if they’re characters in the film — and they sorta are.

The robots were created after giant skyscraper-sized monsters, called Kaiju, began bubbling up out of a breach deep in the Pacific Ocean. The robots are called Jaegers, German for “hunter,” and they’re controlled by human avatars standing in cockpits inside the robot’s empty skulls. They control a Jaeger (yay-gurr) in tandem with another pilot via a “neural handshake” called a drift; essentially, they’re driving the robot with their linked brains. Two pilots are required because a single brain would get overloaded and likely explode. And those crab fishermen thought their job was dangerous.

I’ve explained to you the general idea, but it only does service to about half the film many charms. The other half is its rich style and deft tone, touchstones to the dark fantasy realm that usually accompanies director Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican visionary behind the Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies. Here, once again, he creates a fantastical world with an uneasy relationship between its tech-savvy humans and its monstrous new residents. It’s not quite as fascinating as the last Hellboy movie — with its eyeball wings, talking tumors and giant seed pods — but it certainly holds its own with its towering Jaegers, the robot jocks who pilot them with brain-hacked Wii devices, and those lizard-like monsters with their radioactive-blue blood and basketball-sized scale lice.

If I had to describe the look of the film in a single word, it would be rivety. Rivets everywhere. Rivets all up and down the Jaegers, rivets inside the deep caverns that serve as the Jaeger bases, rivets all up in the giant walls designed to protect coastal cities from hammerheaded Kaiju. When Bethlehem Steel was liquidated I know where it all went, to the Warner Bros. lot. The abundance of rivets isn’t a complaint, just an observation of Rim’s mechanical gear-punk aesthetic. I liked the look of the film, rivets and all, although I did find the monster design to be a teensy bit lacking. By the end of the film, they all started to look alike aside from a monster that could fly and another with a big rhino horn on its face.

The film stars Charlie Hunnam, that aggro-star from TV’s Sons of Anarchy. He plays Raleigh Becket, a defeated Jaeger pilot 11 years into the Kaiju invasion. His former commander, with the command-worthy name of Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), calls on Raleigh to come back to the Jaeger program before its funding is shut down. Raleigh is reluctant to return because he lost his perfect drift companion, his brother, in a Kaiju fight many years before. “Die in a Jaeger or die here on the wall … your choice,” Stacker tells him. Guess where Raleigh goes next.

Back at Jaeger HQ, we meet more characters, including other drifters, a brainy analyst with pilot aspirations (Rinko Kikuchi) and two bumbling scientists with competing theories on the Kaiju’s origins. The scientists provide the comic relief, especially the spastic Newton (Charlie Day), who has a fanboy obsession with the Kaiju. It’s not an outright comedy, but there are several playful sequences that show off the film’s whimsical underbelly, including one with Newton wandering Hong Kong slums looking for Hannibal Chau, a black-market dealer in dead Kaiju organs. “I took my name from my favorite conqueror and my second-favorite Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn,” Chau tells Newton. The actor playing Hannibal is a joke in itself, one I will let you discover.

Mostly, though, Pacific Rim is about robots and monsters pummeling each other into pieces. If that sorta thing interests you then you will be very pleased with the rock’em-sock’em nature of the fight scenes, which do drag on and on, but are clever and well choreographed still. The movie does exploit that troublesome issue I’ve been having with popcorn movies’ incessant overuse of post-9/11 imagery, including crumbling buildings and civilians fleeing dust clouds on city streets. Certainly Pacific Rim, which is essentially a tech-heavy Godzilla remake, earns the right to show these shots more than a movie like Star Trek Into Darkness, but it’s still a worrisome trend. Del Toro does make a point to show humans evacuating safely into underground shelters, which leaves the unpopulated city above free for an alien-robot title bout. So it’s not a complete killfest in those toppling skyscrapers.

The effects are nifty, the characters are likeable and have rewarding story payoffs, the action is dizzyingly frantic and well designed, and director Guillermo del Toro proves yet again that he is a capable big-budget storyteller. I enjoyed Pacific Rim probably more than I should. But after so many constipated, overly-complex movies this summer, it makes complete sense that I find stupendous enjoyment out of this, a movie that knows exactly what it is and is never embarrassed to admit it.

Western remake lacks heart, literally

Walt Disney had a clear vision: to make boys and girls happy.

So I found myself appalled — and a wee bit frightened for the Disney culture — in The Lone Ranger when, contrary to the entire history and tone of the Lone Ranger mythology, a villain slowly plunges a knife into a ranger’s belly, reaches up into his quivering guts, removes his heart and eats it in front of him as he chokes to death on his own blood.

I hope that description shocks you. It shocked me and I’ve seen some terrible, terrible violence in movies over the years. But never straight-up cannibalism in a picture made by the House of Mouse, the studio that brought us bottled innocence The Little Mermaid, Tinker Bell and a theme park attraction called Toontown. Not since Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) took her boobs out in S.O.B. has the Disney audience been so cruelly betrayed.

Violence or not, though, The Lone Ranger is a horrible misstep for Disney, which is clearly trying to jumpstart some magic akin to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The Pirates movies, the good and the stupid ones, always understood their tone; even the grimmer episodes, with squid hearts in treasure chests and Jack Sparrow in the afterlife, had a cheery bounce to their step. Here in The Lone Ranger the action is lifeless, the characters are obscenely flat, and the style and tone ricochet off everything, like buckshot fired into a blacksmith’s shop. It’s as if Disney, with its eternal legacy of great storytelling, had suddenly forgotten how to tell a decent story.

The film makes no promises with its titles. You’d think a movie titled The Lone Ranger would be about the Lone Ranger, the masked cowboy who sets out to save the Old West from cattle rustlers, banditos and silver barons. No, it’s more about Tonto, a Comanche Indian with a dead bird on his head that he feeds corn meal as if it were alive and squawking. A clue to who the real protagonist is can be found in the casting: Tonto is played by Johnny Depp, eternal scene-stealer and movie bandit. The guy can’t make a cameo without getting his name above the title.

Sure enough, Depp, caked in mud and warpaint, has the best lines here — including a great line after his partner says his famous “high ho, Silver” catchphrase — even as the film continuously wanders through very mediocre territory. The whole thing is told from Tonto’s perspective and even uses his unreliable narration from 1933 to embark on a story that takes place in 1869. His audience is a peanut-chomping boy at a Wild West exposition. Depp is in old-man makeup and it’s remarkable how cheap old-man makeup still looks in films.

The Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer, who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network), is the film’s dopey afterthought. He enters the film as a weakling, and maintains that posture for 120 minutes. “This is the first time I’ve fired a gun in nine years,” he tells Tonto during a gunfight. (“Best keep that to yourself, Kemosabe,” Tonto says back.) By the end of the film, though, especially in that mayhem-scorched final 20 minutes, the Lone Ranger suddenly becomes a seasoned pro, galloping his trusty steed Silver through train cars, hurtling off saloon rooftops and winging bad guys from hundreds of feet away. He is the least heroic character until the movie requires him to be the most heroic character, and then he becomes Bruce Willis on overdrive.

The plot involves a mish-mash of western motifs — including a heavy homage to Once Upon A Time in the West — but it mostly boils down to a railroad tycoon who is willing to launch an Indian genocide if it means his trains get to steam right up to silver deposits on Indian land. This stock Old West archetype (played by Tom Wilkinson) uses the deformed monster and heart nibbler Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) to whip up an Indian panic scary enough to get the cavalry to show up with sabers rattling.

Between the rail tycoon, Butch and the cavalry captain, these are some bad dudes. First, let me reiterate this: Butch eats a guy’s heart. In a Disney movie! This can’t be repeated enough. Elsewhere, the villains and their henchmen shoot priests, murder a posse of rangers, use a crank-driven Gatling gun to exterminate a tribe of Comanche, they kill two of the movie’s three black characters (one of them is scalped), threaten to rape a woman twice, skulls are crushed in with wooden beams and questionable jokes are made about what is most definitely a gay cowboy. All totaled up, this is one violent and profoundly upsetting Disney movie, one that goes against the very spirit of the brand. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised from a director whose first name is Gore.

These are unforgivable errors on Verbinksi and Disney’s parts, but their impacts would have been lessened if The Lone Ranger were simply better in other departments, but it fails at nearly every aspect. The jokes are either laugh-out-loud funny (Tonto literally kicking a dead horse) or chronically immature (a burping Silver). Many of the sequences are too long and end with little payoff, including one scene at a campfire with vampire bunnies. The entire film lacks any real momentum, and every time it picks up speed the narrative pauses to bounce us back to the 1933 storytelling framework. It’s all simply too long, too slow and often downright boring.

The Long Ranger’s only redemption is its unearned, unjustified finale, which blasts us with Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” the Lone Ranger’s official theme song. It cues up for the last 20 minutes or so, with Tonto and the Lone Ranger bringing their A-game to a rather epic two-train chase through Old West locations. This music and the action it’s set to — even after all the heinous violence this movie tortured me with — lifted my spirits immensely. The Lone Ranger rides Silver atop a moving train, and then in the train, as he shoots through windows and gallops past gunslingers. Tonto has a slapstick bit with a ladder balanced precariously on a train rail. The mood is light and fun, the music is thumping, the action is serious but never gross or violent, the movie is actually accelerating … for this very brief moment, The Lone Ranger finds its groove. If only the whole movie would have been like this.  

I recommend that last sequence, but I can’t in good conscience recommend the two hours that gets you to that point. I especially urge you to think twice before taking your young children.

Imagine that: a Disney movie too violent for your children. Sad stuff.

(So yeah, I didn't like this movie, but check out some of the publicity stills. They're quite good.)