At the Movies

The long awaited comic-to-screen superhero flick Ironman is here and it is destined to pack a punch for the box office. This comic book hero is unlike most superhero’s in that he has no super powers, instead his powers are found in his technologically advanced iron suit, a creation born of his high intellect.
Tony Stark Robert Downey, Jr. is Ironman, a creation born in an Afghanistan cave when he is captured by terrorists after demonstrating his latest weapon technologies to the U.S. Army. Forced by Raza (Faran Tahir - 24, JAG) the terrorist leader to duplicate Stark Industries new weapon, the Jericho missile, Stark instead builds a suit of iron in which to make his escape. Once back in the states he turns his attention to duplicating the iron suit and Ironman is the result.
Keeping the billionaire head of Stark Industries in line, on time and providing a little romantic tension is the job of Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow - Shakespeare In Love, Bounce) Starks personal assistant. Jeff Bridges (Starman, White Squall) is magnificently cast as the bald and bearded Obadiah Stane, Stark’s business partner with a hidden agenda.
Ironman is a good fun film. As with all first films with superheroes - it takes a little while to introduce and develop the hero’s character and his history - something the sequels can dispense with. Early word is that the next edition of Ironman will likely appear in the summer of 2010. As is always the case, action movies are best enjoyed in the theatre on a big screen so don’t wait for the video to come out at Christmas, check Ironman out now.

    While a lot of the humor of Drillbit Taylor may be juvenile, this latest film from director Steven Brill -(Mr. Deeds, Joe Dirt) is a success for every person who was ever the outcast nerd picked on by malevolent upperclassman bully’s in high school. Drillbit Taylor also succeeds because it doesn’t succumb to the temptation to use crass and vile jokes about butts, excrement or farting (although there are a couple of scenes that involve bullying at the urinals that work well in telling the story).

    Drillbit Taylor (Owen Wilson - Wedding Crashers, Starsky & Hutch) is a career vagrant, living in secluded wooded areas that are next to civilized society. By day he panhandles and begs for money in traffic. When three boys who have been bullied at school post an ad online for a body guard, Drillbit is one of the responders and agrees to be their bodyguard for a paltry sum. The problem is that Drillbit is only after money and makes pretenses at protecting the boys from bully Filkins (Alex Frost). Frost’s role as the sociopathic 18 year old bully is frightening. His ice-cold dead stare and ability to transition from evil to sympathetic is chilling and foretells a promising career in film.
    Drillbit Taylor is predictable in plot, yet fresh. And being that it is a story of the weak triumphing over the powerful it will have a successful run both in theaters and on DVD.

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    The year is 2008. The place is Scotland. The killer is a deadly virus called the Reaper Virus and it has no cure. In order to contain the virus the whole of Scotland is blockaded and a massive impenetrable wall is constructed so that no infected person might escape. Within months all humans in Scotland will be dead.
    Fast forward thirty years. England is on the verge of collapse and intelligence has discovered that there are survivors beyond the great wall and if there are survivors there must be a cure. The government sends in a team to secure a survivor and possibly a doctor who might still be alive and also determine how many survivors there are. The team, led by a one-eyed beauty named Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra - Shooter, Skinwalkers), discover the survivors only to find that they are a vile, cannibalistic group straight out of hell and far worse than anything ‘Mad’ Max Rockatansky might have encountered in his post-apocalyptical world. What is left of the team makes their way north and they eventually find Dr. Kane (Malcolm McDowell - Hidalgo, A Clockwork Orange) who has re-invented himself into a whole new reality.

    Doomsday is a wicked combination of Mad Max and Children of Men but the frightening part is that the depiction of England teetering on the precipice of self-destruction is not so far fetched in today’s world. Director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers) has made a name for himself as one of the notable directors who have been tagged as the “Splat Pack,” a label designated for the modern wave of directors making brutally violent horror films.

    Doomsday is rated R and with good reason. The brutality and savagry depicted in this film are not for the gentle of spirit or children.

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    10,000 BC, The latest blockbuster attempt from director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day), takes you back to a time before recorded history, a time when mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and giant ostrich-like birds inhabited earth. It is a time when the great civilizations of Africa are in their infancy, a time when the isolation of different tribes of people are succumbing to curiosity and exploration. With a cast of unknowns 10,000 BC director Emmerich has created a film about an era that has largely gone ignored by Hollywood and has done so in excellent fashion.

   Steven Strait is D’Leh, a young man whose people, including his woman Evolet (Camilla Belle) have been carried off into captivity by the “four-legged beasts” (men on horses). D’Leh and three other hunters who have survived the attack set off across the snow-capped mountains and enter a world they never new existed. From lush verdant jungle to the arid sand-swept desert the hunters encounter danger and discover new allies as they chase the marauders who have captured their people. Belle’s presence in the movie is mainly as eye-candy, but Strait’s performance as the angst riven D’Leh is engaging and gives promise of a stellar future on screen.
    The plot may be cliched from a hundred western films, but the setting of pre-history gives it new life. The CGI mammoths are spectacular to watch as they stampede but the sabre-toothed tiger is disappointing. It looks flat and two-dimensional as though it were cut and pasted into the film. Never-the-less, 10,000 BC is an intriguing film with wonderful action and a fresh setting for a movie.

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    The Bank Job is exactly what it sounds like - another heist movie, but don’t expect the glitz, glamour and action of other heist movies like 2003’s The Italian Job. What you can expect is a well orchestrated telling of a true story that has been kept under wraps by the British government for nearly 35 years.
   In the late 60’s Britain’s Princess Margaret is on holiday in the Caribbean, frolicking on the beach and between the sheets with black locals. Unknown to her someone has taken photos of her in the throes of passion. The photos come into the possession of radical activist Michael de Freitas (who took the name Michael X) who plans to use them as leverage to stay out of jail. Having secured the photos and negatives in a bank safety deposit box Michael X believes he is secure. Enter the British Secret Service who hatch a scheme to hire a group of thugs led by Terry Leather (Jason Statham - The Italian Job, Transporter) to tunnel under and into the vault to rob all the safety deposit boxes and thus retrieve the photos and negatives.

   The Bank Job superbly interweaves the story of the heist with moments of high tension, suspense and anxiety. The characters, especially the villainous Michael X played by Peter De Jersey and David Suchet who portrays a moralless purveyor of pornography, are seething with perverse attitudes and actions as they try to reclaim what has been taken from them.
    The role of Terry is perfect for Jason Statham, who seems to just roll from one film to the next in the same persona. Even so, his on-screen presence is magnetic and always enjoyable to watch. The Bank Job is an engaging film at a time of year when there are too few films in the theater that can capture your attention so well.

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    Likened by some critics as the Silence of the Lambs for the 2000’s, Untraceable falls short of that acclaimed movie. That doesn’t mean that Untraceable isn’t good - it is - it just gives too much away too soon so that the suspense subsides too quickly.

    Diane Lane, one of the best and loveliest actresses on screen today, plays FBI agent Jennifer Marsh, a third shift cyber crimes special agent who surfs the web in search of nefarious activity. One evening she is tipped off to a website that lets the online audience watch as a kitten is tortured to death. When the sadistic cyber killer kidnaps his first human victim to torture the FBI gets serious. The killer has devised a “Rube Goldbergesque” method to kill - streaming a live feed over the web, the victim is secured to an upright bed springs with the web site carved into his chest and an intravenous solution of heparin (a blood thinner) that is controlled by the number of viewers. As each new viewer logs in to watch it triggers more and more heparin causing the victim to eventually bleed out. With each new victim there is a different killing contraption - all triggered by the online audience.
    There is ample suspense throughout this film, it just should have waited longer to reveal the killer. Untraceable is a quality suspense film based on a very viable technological premise that is even scarier than the movie itself because it could very well happen.

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    Cloverfield, the new monster flick from J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias), is an intensely crafted work of art that succeeds on every level of keeping you on edge and tense. Filmed entirely from the point of view of a hand held video camera (a la 1999’s Blair Witch Project), Cloverfield begins with filming a going away party for Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David - The Black Donnellys) at his New York City apartment when a sudden violent shaking of the building and subsequent blackout sends everyone to the roof top to see what’s going on. From there the mayhem ensues and the camera continues to roll as Hud (T.J. Miller) leaves the camera on throughout their frightening night.

    The creature that has suddenly appeared in New York, lays waste to the big city in horrible fashion, knocking buildings over, beheading the Statue of Liberty, destroying the Brooklyn Bridge and on and on. The monster is not seen clearly through all of this, though it’s size is definitely on an astronomical scale. Not until the very end do we get a good look at the behemoth and then not in its entirety due to its size.
    The one downfall of Cloverfield is that the filming style can become annoying at times and can cause you to feel nauseous. Even with a cast of unknowns it is largely due to the style of filming that this movie succeeds. You “feel” the tension, the anxiety and the fear as the creature and its smaller “offspring” devastate and devour.

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    In The Name of the King - A Dungeon Siege Tale starts off badly and barely improves, which seems to be the trademark of director Uwe Boll whose previous outings have all similarly tanked. But the biggest surprise of all in this film is that Boll managed to sign on some prestigious names for this sorcery picture: Jason Statham (The Transporter, The Italian Job), Leelee Sobieski (The Wicker Man, Joy Ride), Claire Forlani (Meet Joe Black), John Rhys-Davies (Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark), Matthew Lillard (Scooby Doo), Ray Liotta (Goodfella’s), and Burt Reynolds (Mystery, Alaska). All the actors perform as though they are trying to get through the shoot so they can get home and watch American Idol. As an action buff I was looking forward to Jason Statham who plays “Farmer,” the hero of the story, but even his fight scenes were shot in such a way that you see very little of him fighting. Ray Liotta as the evil sorcerer Gallian delivers his lines as though he is playing a bad actor reading straight from a script. But perhaps the worst performance of all is from Burt Reynolds as King Konried, his acting in this film seems more plastic than his plastic surgery. If there is a bright spot in this action/adventure movie it would have to be Claire Forlani as the wife of Farmer. But even she cannot save this movie that will easily go down as one of the worst films of 2008 and likely on my all time top ten worst films.

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    It is inevitable that comparisons be made between remakes or new adaptations of old movies and so it is with I Am Legend the new sci-fi thriller starring Will Smith (Hitch, I,Robot). The original storyline for Legend was the 1964 Vincent Price (Edward Scissorhands, The Fly) film The Last Man On Earth followed in 1971 with the Charlton Heston (Planet of the Apes, Ben-Hur) film The Omega Man. Probably because The Last Man On Earth was black and white and because of the mere presence of Vincent Price, it seems the better film of the three. That is not to say, though, that Legend is not good. Will Smith, always a fan favorite, is fast becoming one of the top acting talents in Hollywood. Smith gave the world a glimpse into the depths of his acting skills with last years The Pursuit of Happyness and with Legend he shows even more.

    Legend is set in New York City in the year 2012. In 2009 a virus wipes out almost all of humanity - and as far as Smith’s character, Dr. Robert Neville, knows - he is the only human left. But he is not alone. The virus did not kill all, instead it turned many into creatures who cannot stand the daylight and must drink blood to survive. The creatures are more terrifying than traditional movie vampires. Neville, who confines himself to home by night - the time when the creatures roam - is also a scientist and is actively seeking to find the cure for the virus.
    Filmed almost entirely in New York City, Legend is worth the ticket price just for the sheer spectacle of seeing the masterful set design of the deserted metropolis.

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    National Treasure - Book of Secrets, the followup to 2004’s National Treasure, is one of those rare instances when the sequel is even better than the first film in the franchise. This time out all of the principle players from the first film reprise their roles for an even bigger and better adventure as they seek to find Cibola, one of the fabled seven lost cities of gold.
    Adventurer-historian-patriot Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage - Ghost Rider, ConAir) is out to prove that his great-great-grandfather was not one of the conspirators involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. With the aid of Riley (Justin Bartha - Failure To Launch), Abigail (Diane Kruger - Troy, Narco), and his father Patrick (Jon Voight - Transformers, Glory Road), Ben sets out to set the record straight and of course the truth happens to lie in the discovery of the lost city of gold. The quest for Cibola is at best a contrived plotline with the sole purpose of providing an excuse for the adventure, but surprisingly it works! National Treasure - Book of Secrets is a fast and exhilarating ride in the tradition of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (though not quite as good as that film).

    Ed Harris (The Right Stuff, Pollock) has a supporting role as the villain but his performance, though good, is not nearly deep enough. But the void made by Harris’ characters lack of depth is more than made up for by the mere appearance of Helen Mirren (The Queen, Raising Helen) as Ben’s mother - a professor of anthropology - who of course is one of the only people able to decipher the ancient language that leads to the lost city of gold.
    National Treasure - Book of Secrets is at the top of the box office for the second week in a row with good reason - it is a fast-paced, action-adventure that keeps the heart pounding with every new twist and development.

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