2006 / 150 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

Hollywood seems increasingly eager to churn out fun summer blockbusters. The studios have sunk all their money into making these franchises and remakes and action-packed spectacles…and yet they seem to have completely forgotten how to make one of the damned things.

Take, for example, the second film in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. I loved the original film precisely because it was one of the few summer blockbusters that remembered and embraced the summer blockbuster’s original mission statement: to provide fun at any cost. The original pirate had a unique, wonderful creation of a main character (Capt. Jack Sparrow played with droll wit and audacity by the incomparable Johnny Depp) a streamlined plot that took itself just seriously enough, fun special effects, plenty of action and a romance that while not revolutionary worked within the framework of the film. It also had charm, wit, a delightful swashbuckling flair and a lush, romantic, storybook production design. It was fresh. It was exotic. And it was a hell of a lot of fun.

The exotic flair of the first film is now standard operating procedure as the second film opens. I am happy to report that the baroque production design and visual flair that made the original “Pirates” such a feast for the eyes remains in tact. There are portions of this film that are achingly gorgeous. The production designers are to be commended for each and every set.

Sadly, the members of the production design team are the only ones working up to the par of the first film.

Everyone else seems to have forgotten what made us love “Pirates” in the first place. The plot of the first was simple, breezy and a little silly. But that was all right. The plot did its job, providing a perfect framework for such eccentric goodies as Depp’s performance, a great deal of swashbuckling action, and some nifty special effects. This time the filmmakers have provided both too much plot and not enough. I will explain. The film’s plot is a convoluted, labyrinthine exercise involving baddies from the East Indian Trading Company, an enchanted compass, a chest containing the heart of a diabolical otherworldly fiend, a special key, a disgraced commodore, and a paternal reunion. This is too much plot, and the film spends way too much time untangling it. I understand that they felt the need to devise a plotline complex enough to run the course of two sequels but, like “The Matrix Reloaded”, they seem to have gone overboard and smothered any sense of fun the film might otherwise have been able to generate. The movie has no time to be fun because it has to spend so much time explaining what the hell is going on. The movie founders under the weight of exposition, which wouldn’t be so bad if the exposition was interesting. Unfortunately, it is not. I, for one, did not care about a single element of the film’s storyline. It just didn’t grab me. There’s no hook here, nothing original or emotionally compelling.

Also, the film takes too many diversions that aren’t very diverting. Too much screen time is wasted on the Island of Wacky Cannibals. This is material we’ve seen in a thousand similar films (white man becomes god of backward tribe, tribe is full of cannibals, said cannibals are complete morons) and the film does nothing to distinguish this material. The only reason it exists is to provide a pointless, yet admittedly amusing, action sequences involving large round cages. The characters imprisoned in these cage balls make an escape that reminded me of watching a hamster manipulate one of those big exercise balls. This part is amusing, but it does absolutely nothing to further the plot, which wouldn’t be such a problem if the filmmakers hadn’t made the plot so damned important.

A large part of screen time is also, unfortunately, devoted to the villains aboard The Flying Dutchman, a cursed ship captained by Davy Jones. Neither Davy Jones nor any of his crew is very intimidating. Even worse, the special effects used to bring them to life look downright silly. How scary is a guy with a conch shell for a head? Not very. Neither Davy nor any of his crew manage to generate much menace (Davy does the best, with his “Phantom of the Opera”-style organ playing and his tentacled moustache). They’re about as intimidating as Looney Toons villains. In the original, Geoffrey Rush managed to generate a real sense of menace. Also, Rush’s Capt. Barbossa had actual motivation. His character was well developed. Davy Jones is evil because…well, he’s evil. There’s some mumbo-jumbo about a failed romance or something, but that it’s never developed. Maybe it will be developed in the sequel, but that doesn’t help this movie any.

The heroes don’t fare much better than the villains, I’m afraid. What little interest we in the audience had in Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner character is now gone. He got the girl at the end of the first movie. Watching a guy try to keep the girl isn’t all that exciting. The filmmakers don’t give us much reason to root for him. Keira Knightley is also underused and underdeveloped. She comes off as unrealistic (though, considering her lack of breasts, the fact that she’s able to pass herself off as a male crewmember is entirely too believable) and shrewish. She’s irritating. But the biggest shock is Johnny Depp’s Capt. Jack Sparrow. He just isn’t given enough to do. Unlike the first movie, he has no great lines to wrap his droll accent around and he’s barely a participant in the plot. His dialogue is a series of overly ornate, overly complex nonsense that has no point and little in the way of flair. His mannerisms are meant to be the joke, but we all got used to those the first time around. Perhaps the movie’s biggest flaw is that it gives Depp nothing new to work with. He’s the star of the movie and he’s largely pushed into the background.

The last ten or fifteen minutes are actually quite good. They’re so good that I’m actually looking forward the next “Pirates” sequel. Hopefully that movie will eschew the exposition and dense plotting altogether and just provide the fun and action that is sorely lacking in this movie. There are a couple of action sequences, but they’re few and far between and, when they do come, they’re not as exhilarating as anything in the first film. There’s none of the invention and kamikaze glee that “Pirates of the Caribbean” so elegantly demonstrated. The first movie had a certain spring in its step. That carries over to the beginning of this movie and resurfaces at the end but is mostly drowned by excessive length and too many dull subplots. The movie is as ornate and convoluted as most of Captain Jack’s dialogue and just as hollow.

The last fifteen minutes left me wanting more. The preceding two hours and fifteen minutes left me wanting less.

2006 / 154 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

After at least ten years of starts and stops, with directors like Tim Burton, McG, and Brett Ratner all taking turns at development, Superman finally returns to the big screen. And though the results aren’t bad (I’ll get to that in a minute) I sorta wish this film would have gotten off the ground back in the late 90’s, with Tim Burton at the helm, Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel, Linda Fiorentino as Lois Lane (in my opinion, she’s the ultimate choice) and Kevin Spacey as Luthor. From what I’ve heard, the script involved a gay robot and a polar bear fight…but at least it would have been fascinating in a deranged, shitty-movie-night candidate fiasco sort of way.

After ten years of development and several complete personnel changes (except for Spacey, the best choice for Lex Luthor and the only one who weathered all the changes) the Superman we get can’t help but be rather disappointing. Then again, I’ve never been the biggest Superman fan. He’s too invincible to be really interesting. Batman has that dark revenge streak. Spider-Man has the trouble of trying to juggle a normal life AND be a superhero (with all the romantic and financial problems that lie therein). And Aquaman…well, okay, Aquaman sucks. At least Superman can do more than talk to fish. Superman can stop bullets, fly, and all that other stuff. The only thing that puts a crimp in his day is a green rock. That’s inherently cheesy, and it’s the reason Superman has never previously gelled for me.

The most pleasant surprise of this Superman film was how vulnerable Superman is. First of all, he’s in love with a woman who only wants him when he’s in a cape (and wants nothing to do with him as Clark Kent). It’s always seemed to me that Lois is kind of a superficial, career-centric bitch. Kate Bosworth really doesn’t do anything to change my opinion there. But by emphasizing this problematic love affair as well as Superman longing to know more about his roots (it’s what prompts his five year absence from Metropolis and Planet Earth) the movie gives us a more interesting Superman than we’ve seen in a lot of other movies. Though, even without this emotional baggage, Christopher Reeve did a much better job with the character. The best thing I can say about Brandon Routh’s portrayal of Superman/Clark is that he reminds me of Reeve. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do much to make the role his own. His portrayal of Superman reminds me of one of those TV shows where an actor dies or leaves and they plug another actor into the character and have him act identically to the man who left. They may do their best, but they never erase your memory of the other guy, unless they are allowed to put some unique stamp on the role. Routh doesn’t put his stamp on the role. He gives it a good shot, but he mostly makes us miss Reeve. Tom Welling, on TV’s “Smallville”, actually does a better job of owning this character. Still, the movie makes Superman a lot more vulnerable, and that gives us a little more interest in him.

The movie spends so much time making him vulnerable, unfortunately, that it forgets to make him heroic. It skimps on the exciting set pieces and dangerous situations that make us care about Superman in the first place. Moments of this film really work well. Superman’s first heroic rescue, for example, is amazing. It’s a literally crowd-pleasing moment. It’s almost as good as something from the original “Superman”. But too many of the action sequences have a “been there, done that” feel. It’s almost as if the filmmakers dusted off the original Superman script and just decided to update the effects. Big real estate scheme? Check. Entire city in jeopardy from earthquake thing? Check. The setup is great, and the first hour really gets things flowing nicely. Kevin Spacey does admirable, nuanced, creepy work as Lex Luthor but his villainous plot sucks. It’s nowhere near as good as Hackman’s ingenious scheme from the original movie. He has the best moment of the movie (it involves Superman being put in really big trouble) and Spacey gives the role a more sinister slant than Hackman. Spacey’s Luthor is a great example of a great actor taking a character and completely making it his own. Parker Posey is better than I expected as his moll, but I was annoyed that, once again, Luthor’s girlfriend brings his whole criminal empire crashing down. It’s the same thing that happened in the first film. You think the filmmakers could have done something new. If there’s a sequel to this film (and there probably will be) I hope that Luthor learns to swear off women altogether.

It was in the second half, however, that the movie started getting on my nerves. For one thing, nothing happens. The film is largely about character development, and it does well with that…to a point. But for character-driven material to work, you need to have some conflict between the characters. For example: in Superman’s absence, Lois has had a kid and is involved with her editor’s nephew Richard (James Marsden, best known as Cyclops from the X-Men films). Superman comes back, and Richard can clearly see that Lois wants him. He subtly asks her if she likes him, but that’s it. His character is too nice of a guy to get in his face about it. Gee, that’s great if he’s an actual guy. But this is a movie. Shouldn’t he confront her about that? That’s what we like to call drama. Hell, he could even confront Superman about it. That’d be cool. Superman could take a verbal bitching from Richard and not fight back because, well, Richard’s just a regular dude. Plus, he and Lois aren’t officially involved anyway. But, no, Richard just puts up with it. He should at least be pissed that he’s been seeing this woman for five years and they aren’t even talking marriage. I know that women are generally seen as the ones who want a rock on their finger, but guys occasionally want it too. And if she doesn’t, that means she really doesn’t want to be there and she wants to be with Superman. See what I’m saying here? This is real drama. The proceedings would’ve been a lot livelier.

Aside from the stagnant domestic stuff, the action stuff is rather lame. Superman doesn’t do all that much, not really. He picks up a big rock, stops a couple people from getting squashed, and stops some bullets. No big deal. We’ve seen this already. The first action sequence, where Superman saves a plane from being dragged into outer space, is a cool set piece and it’s original. It’s the best of the movie. The rest are bland rehashes of things we’ve already seen. Hell, the stakes on his other rescues aren’t even all that high. We don’t really get the sense that anyone or anything is in jeopardy. After all, if the screenwriters can’t make drama out of a relationship as soap-opera ready as the Lois/Richard/Superman love triangle (there’s even a kid whose paternity is in question!) then how are they going to make us give a shit about billions of lives hanging in the balance? Well, they could have…but they don’t. Bryan Singer’s direction is good enough that it distracts us from a lot of logistic questions for a while (one of them being: Hey, isn’t that thing made out of Kryptonite? How the hell is this happening?) but not for long enough. There’s a lot of flash and rumbling and a lot of things shaking (there are at least three sequences where things vibrate from something akin to an earthquake) but, plot-wise, virtually nothing is going on. Hell, action-wise nothing much is going on. I never got the sense that anything was really at stake here, and that essentially kills all the potential drama.

A lot of money has been spent on this movie (Ben’s big question was: “This cost 200 million?”) and it certainly looks real good but a lack of truly exciting heroics, a lame villainous plot, and some bland storytelling eventually destroy any momentum the movie manages to generate. The performances aren’t bad (Spacey is really good) and the effects are impressive (boy, that’s a huge rock Superman is lifting). But none of that matters if the filmmakers forget to make us care.

The movie did do one thing, though. It gave me a whole new appreciation for the first two Superman films. Sure, they were pretty cheesy and the effects haven’t aged well. But, damn it, they were sure exciting and fun.

2006 / 104 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

Comic geeks are going to hate this movie. I can say that with absolute certainty. One of my friends is an avid X-Men reader (well, he has read way more issues than I have) and gleefully pointed out the inaccuracies of the film the moment it had finished (or, how it varied from thirty years of comics, at any rate). But he still said he enjoyed the film, and I heard him laughing gleefully at many points during the Midnight screening we attended. The average comic geek, on the other hand, will probably not be so kind. I understand why a person would be pissed off that a film based on a certain property just up and changed the rules and plot of that property, which has been established over thirty-odd (maybe even forty-odd) years. On the other hand, as a man who has barely glanced at an X-Men comic ever, I can say without hesitation that this film is a blast. So if you’re like me (and I’m thinking that thousands, perhaps millions of you are) then you’re bound to have a good time.

I appreciated the first two X-Men films because they not only provided excellent comic book action, they also dealt with issues that most comic book movies disregard. The X-Men films are about racism and non-comformity and the use/misuse of power, heady subjects for a movie whose characters dress in skin-tight leather and fight crime. And though director Bryan Singer, the sure and steady hand behind the first two films, went off to direct some silly “Superman” movie, that sense of moral relevance remains intact. This third film deals with a pharmaceutical company that has discovered a “cure” for the mutant gene. Any mutant who takes this cure will immediately become a regular person. There are some in the mutant community who are thrilled by this prospect (who wants to be ridiculed, ostracized and terrorized for their entire life?) but most of them are horrified. “They’re nothing wrong with us,” Storm says, “ANY of us.” Magneto (played once more to absolute perfection by Ian McKellan) uses this as the platform to rally hundreds of mutants to his cause. He decides to destroy the pharmaceutical labs (based on Alcatraz Island of all places) and end the “cure” debate his own way, once and for all. Because Magneto doesn’t care about killing a bunch of people in order to do this, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and the other “good mutants” or “X-Men” decide to protect humanity and themselves by stopping this “cure” nonsense in their own way.

As a director, Brett Ratner is generally something of a hack. But he’s done a pretty effective job of it here. Sure, I miss Bryan Singer’s moody, dark atmosphere, but Ratner keeps the pace lively and stages some impressive action sequences. Magneto’s attack on Alcatraz, for example, is awesome. Ratner lacks Singer’s visual poetry and finesse, but he gets the action beats right and works in a lot of subtle social commentary, as Singer did. The lines outside the mutant “cure” facility, for example, and the mob protesting it across the street are eerily reminiscent of the lines and protesters that flock outside abortion clinics.

The best thing about the film (which is probably best attributed to the screenplay by Zak Penn and Simon Kinsberg) is its willingness to up the stakes. The film has a lot of darkness to it, mainly having to do with the resurrection of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) who doesn’t come back exactly as she was. Though I had never gotten this sense from the first two films, apparently Jean is the most powerful mutant on record. And in this film, boy, is she ever. She can destroy things and people at the molecular level, which is freaky and yet great fun to watch. Plus, she exhibits a heretofore unexplored bad attitude. Famke does a great job with her newly complex character and the effects that bring her rain of destruction to life are the best of the film. Not only that, but I was shocked (and, yes, sometimes a little pissed) at the number of major characters that either die or are significantly changed by the events of this film. Not only do they die but, unlike Jean, I get the distinct sense that a lot of them ain’t coming back. Though there are the usual hints at a sequel, I get the feeling that the filmmakers aren’t screwing around. This movie certainly feels like a last stand.

Unfortunately, the film has some major problems as well. Character development, for one. There really isn’t any. Jean Grey and Magneto are nicely explored in this film, but the good guys are pretty much glossed over. Wolverine and Storm are cool, and they kick a lot of ass, but the movie doesn’t really explore the emotional side of what they’re going through. We don’t get a sense of what makes them tick. That’s not too bad, since we’ve had two movies in which to get to know them, but the film gives us very little back story on the new mutants either. Kelsey Grammar’s blue Beast character is neat and all, but what’s his deal? He talks a lot, but we never get to the heart of why he does what he does, as we did with guys like Nightcrawler. And Beast gets the best time of it. A couple of the new mutants aren’t even given names! The first two films had a lot more major characters and didn’t have the luxury of devoting a lot of screen time to them, yet they made every moment of that time count. They developed the characters quite well in a limited span of time, something this movie barely bothers with.

Also, the film feels rushed. I understand why that is, however. After all, the movie has a lot of ground to cover fairly quickly, but I wish it would have been even ten minutes longer. Slow things down a little and you’d still have a fast paced film. Take your time to explore this world, Ratner. Getting more of a flavor of this world would immensely add to the proceedings.

Still, “X-Men: The Last Stand” is solid, action-packed entertainment with a bit of social commentary thrown into the mix. It’s not quite as effective as the other two (“X2” remains my favorite thus far) but it’s generally well-acted, fast-paced and potent stuff. I get the feeling it’s one of the better films we’ll be seeing this summer. But, then again, the slate of upcoming films doesn’t exactly fill me with a lot of faith.

2006 / 126 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

According to the calendar, summer starts on June 21st, but each year Hollywood pushes it up a little earlier. I remember a time (not so long ago) that the big summer popcorn flicks didn’t start rolling out until Memorial Day weekend. But since the start of this millennium, Hollywood has advanced the start date earlier and earlier. Hence summer this year officially began on May 5th, when “Mission: Impossible 3” burst into theaters.

“Mission: Impossible” movies have never been all that amazing, so it’s really no wonder that this film was released first, as though Paramount were just trying to get this over with. Sure, it has Tom Cruise and even with his last couple of wacky shenanigans he still guarantees a large box office take, but otherwise these movies have always been “also-rans”. In 1996, the big summer flick was “Twister”. “Mission: Impossible” just happened to be there (and be cool-looking enough so that people went to it when they weren’t able to get “Twister” tickets). In 2000, “Gladiator” was the big dog in the kennel of May. “MI:2” was, again, just there to soak up some of the overflow. And now here we have “MI:3” which was sprung early into the box office summer sweepstakes so that it has a chance to make money before movies like “The Da Vinci Code” and “X-Men: The Last Stand” have a chance to get going. At least Paramount, the studio that always releases these movies, seems to know exactly what they’re dealing with.

But all of this is just market strategy. The real question is this: is “MI:3” any good? It may seem irrelevant from a monetary standpoint, but some of us are still concerned with the quality of our big, dumb explosion-filled summer zombie entertainment. Well, I am anyway…most of the time. And the answer to that question is: yeah. “MI:3” is pretty good. But if you haven’t seen the other Impossibles, there’s no real reason to care about this one either.

However, if you’re at all curious, this is a good place to start. Those who haven’t seen the other two have no continuing plotlines to understand or character motivations to get caught up on. The good(?) thing about these movies is that they seem to exist in a vacuum. They don’t really connect up. Aside from the presence of Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames (apparently the turnover rate in the spy industry is even worse than fast food and retail) none of the characters carry over. Nothing from one movie carries over into any of the others. Nothing transfers. They may as well have completely different titles.

As the film begins, Tom’s character (Ethan Hunt) is retiring from the spy game. He still trains new agents for the IMF (it stands for exactly what you think) but he gets to go home to his fiancée (Michelle Monaghan) at the end of the day. Unfortunately (as in all of these movies) this situation is not meant to last. Trouble is brewing in Germany. One of his protégés (Keri Russell, looking foxier than ever) has been captured by an odious arms dealer named Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Because he likes the girl, in a non-romantic, sensei/kohai sort of way, Hunt agrees to head the team that goes to Germany and tries to save her. Their efforts are intense but ultimately futile since Davian has implanted a small explosive in her brain and sets it off just when it would suck the most. This understandably pisses Tom/Ethan off, so he helps the IMF hunt Davian down, keeping the operation off the books just in case someone would object (their superior, Laurence Fishburne, really ripped into them over Keri Russell’s death). They capture Davian in an elaborate sting at the Vatican but before they can get any information out of him or have him brought to justice, he is rescued in a sequence that reminded me both of “True Lies” and “License to Kill” (an excellent Bond film from the unfairly maligned Timothy Dalton era). Soon, Davian has turned the tables on our hero, kidnapping his girlfriend and holding her hostage until Ethan acquires something known as The Rabbit’s Foot for him.

This is all rather routine, really. If you’ve seen a spy movie before, nothing here is going to stun you. But the film rises above most spy films because of its excellent command of suspense. Even when I knew what was coming, I was on the edge of my seat during this film. The action sequences are staged with flair and heart-pounding immediacy. The movie even avoids the tired, erratic, “You are there” style of filmmaking that marred the last Bourne film…until the two-thirds mark. The actors all invest their roles with enough emotion that we care what happens to them, which is all that is necessary in a film like this. Cruise is particularly good. He’s so good you manage to forget his couch jumping antics for the entire movie. And he gets solid support from Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Laurence Fishburne and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. But the real reason to watch this movie is Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman gives one of his finest performances here, and I’m not even kidding. I was more impressed by his performance here than in the overrated “Capote” of last winter. He’s a classic bad guy. He doesn’t go overboard with this character either. He plays Davian with a naturalism that is chilling. How chilling? Well, let me put it this way: it’s easy for a villain to be intimidating when he’s got the good guy tied to a chair, but Davian is even intimidating when the hero has HIM tied to a chair! He’s always one step ahead of our hero, he oozes a sort of evil charisma, and he kills without compunction and without even making a big deal out of it. He’s simply bad news all around, and Hoffman is better at this than anyone in recent memory.

Hoffman is better than the rest of the film, really. Aside from him, this stuff is good, potent even, but the movie pretty much goes in one eye and out the other. It’s not as unique as the “Bourne” films. It uses great suspense, visual flash and chronological trickery to hide a fairly routine plot and standard issue characters. Plus, as in most of these films, there is a mole within the spy agency. After five seasons of “24” and countless spy movies, this particular plot point should probably be retired. It’s not even shocking anymore.

Also, Michelle Monaghan and Tom share zero chemistry, something that really sabotages the plot of the film. If we don’t buy that Tom and Michelle really love each other, how are we supposed to buy all the stuff he’s doing to save her? He shares more chemistry with Russell’s character early on than he does with Monaghan. In fact, that would have been an interesting angle for the film to explore. Say Cruise was tired of field work and wanted to settle down with a nice girl (like the current plot) and yet he finds himself irresistibly attracted to Keri Russell, a great fighter young enough to actively enjoy and long for work in the spy field. This, of course, creates friction between them. Tom could explain why he can’t act on his love for her, why it will never work out…and then great drawn into the field to save her when a mission goes wrong. Then, of course, she gets killed and Tom gets pissed and then it would basically turn into a spy Mel Gibson movie. Now there is a film I’d like to see. There is a plot that doesn’t adhere to all the usual conventions. It’s not Shakespeare, but at least it isn’t by the numbers. It’d be a lot more interesting than Tom’s bland love affair with Michelle Monaghan, who looks a little too much like Katie Holmes for comfort. None of this is Tom’s fault. Tom tries to make us believe he loves Michelle in this movie, but for some reason they never quite click.

I don’t know, maybe he should have jumped on a couch or something.

2006 / 132 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

One man’s revolutionary is another man’s terrorist. In and of itself, that idea makes “V for Vendetta” quite possibly the ballsiest and boldest big budget Hollywood film in more than a decade.

But there are other reasons that “V” is so potent. For one thing, it takes George Orwell’s “1984” future (and, more extensively, the Thatcherian nightmare that was Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1980’s graphic novel) and adds elements of the current Bush administration to it. It steals elements from other bits of popular and classic fiction, but the way it seamlessly references modern problems and developments to use as the “history” of its particular future are very unnerving. For example: the problems in this film’s futuristic version of Britain spawned almost directly from a big, messy war started by America. The Wachowski brothers (who scripted this movie) clearly have important business on their minds, and they’re not about to let anyone off the hook by removing their world too far from our own reality.

Another bold move: making a film this big and this expensive about a masked terrorist intent on blowing up buildings and killing government officials. This was a bold enough move back when Alan Moore and David Lloyd wrote the graphic novel. But in this post-9/11 atmosphere, the film hits like a slap to the face. It’s as much a wake-up call as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”, and it’s a lot more entertaining.

“V”, the mysterious lead character voiced and probably performed by Hugo Weaving, has had his life and body destroyed by the fascist regime that controls this future Britain. He’s mad as hell and he wants everyone else to be the same way. Not only that, but he has nothing left to lose so he really doesn’t care anymore. He’s willing to do things that no one else has the balls to do and he’s willing to expose uncomfortable truths in a manner that is alternately bold and subtle. Hugo essays a surprising range of emotion here with just his voice and mannerisms. He’s a great and wickedly subversive presence. It’s a nice reminder of his fine work in the original “Matrix” before his character became a joke in the sequels.

But he’s not alone here. Every actor in this ensemble delivers fine work. Stephen Rea is excellent as the man investigating V’s crimes. He’s a cop with a conscience and a haunted past we are never told about. We don’t need flashbacks to know that Rea’s character has had a rough life. It’s all there in his eyes and his mannerisms. I also love Stephen Fry’s great performance as a much more subtle revolutionary than V. He invests his role with quiet dignity and genuine heart. There’s a mischievous twinkle in his eye that puts you on his side almost immediately. On the other side of the coin, John Hurt is at his most intimidating and malicious. He looms over every frame of the film and inspires the dread necessary for the viewer to appreciate this desperate and desolate situation. He’s not very pleasant, but he’s definitely necessary.

But the best performance in this film belongs to Natalie Portman. Watching her here, I have decided once and for all that she is the best actress working in film today. She’s so natural with what she does. She can take a thankless role in a film like this or one of the “Star Wars” prequels and invest it with quiet humanity. She is the emotional core of this film. She is the “ordinary” person who V takes under his wing. She undergoes the most emotional journey of anyone in this film and she sells the emotion in a mesmerizing fashion. Near the end of the film, there is a lengthy sequence where she is imprisoned and tortured and everything she has ever believed, every opinion she has is challenged and then shattered. I can’t think of an actress beside Portman who could sell this sequence as effortlessly and powerfully as she does. She is simply astonishing here and when she finally breaks down, when these emotions finally reach their crest and break upon you, you will sincerely feel her pain. Had this film been released last year, and had the Academy chosen to view it, Reese Witherspoon’s mantel would be a pretty empty place. She’s our window into the world of this film. She’s the heart and soul of this movie. And she will break your heart and make you care.

Then again, it helps that the film has such a strong, clever plot to work with. The Wachowskis were wise not to mess too much with Alan Moore’s source material. Aside from updating it to more greatly reflect the times in which we are living (there’s even a reference or two to bird flu) and making V’s revolution more widespread, they haven’t changed much except to make it fit within the standard film running time. The direction, by first-timer James McTeague, is solid and assured. The color pallet and look of the film is perhaps a bit too sleek (the panels of the comic were a bit grittier) and polished, but that can also work in context. After all, the government in this film has gone to great trouble to remove anything it labels “dirty” and “subversive” so the film’s sleek and polished look might be a good reflection of that.

There are a few moments of the film that sort of drag, and one of V’s speeches toward the beginning of the film felt just a little silly to me. But, for the most part, this is bold, emotional, witty, intense and haunting filmmaking. It argues for the power of revolution and the necessity of it and the importance of remembering such virtues. It’s filled with gutsy, powerful ideas. But they’re ideas that should never be forgotten.

1991 / 143 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

There are certain things that are weird to think about, in retrospect, things you can’t believe actually happened. If you think back on the way the world was in the early 90’s, then you’ll have a sense of what I’m talking about. In the early 90’s, the world was a completely different place. I’m not just talking about the whole “nobody outside a high school computer class actually had a computer” thing or the explosion of grunge music thing or the smoking on airplanes business. No, no. The two weirdest things to remember about the early 90’s are these: Guns and Roses was the biggest band on Earth and Kevin Costner was the biggest movie star in the universe. We’ve come a long way in the past sixteen or fifteen years.

Now, far as the Guns and Roses thing goes, I’d say we’ve made some tremendous cultural progress. Sure, Slash plays a mean guitar and their songs are actually pretty good when you get past Axl Rose’s voice…but getting past Axl’s voice is a tall order. I’ve never strangled a cat. I’ve never talked to anyone that has. But the sound it makes cannot be any worse than the sound made by Axl Rose’s vocal cords. It’s almost like the rest of Guns and Roses were TOO good. It was like “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child of Mine” were sonic lightyears ahead of anything that any other band could do so a Hard Rock Committee forced them to take the world’s least listenable person as their lead singer. Guns and Roses didn’t want Axl on board. But the alternative was Death. Otherwise, the entire Hard Rock genre might have collapsed in on itself, and we all know that would have had terrifying ramifications on the space-time continuum. They truly had no choice but to be shackled with this bastard who sounded like supernova on the verge of collapse (that’s how supernovas sound, ask a scientist!) and had the worst hair in the history of rock (that shit was ratty, stringy…just plain bad). But they rocked so hard DESPITE the presence of Mr. Rose that they were STILL the biggest band in the universe. Makes you wonder what they could have done with a halfway decent vocalist (until you listen to Velvet Revolver, of course).

On the other hand, this was also the era of Costner. People like to take a shit on him nowadays, but those people are idiots. They’re the same idiots who bitch about “Titanic” in retrospect but still saw it three times in the theater. They are fickle douschebags whose opinions are of little or no value. But they are everywhere. They seem to dominate the mass media. And all they can do is decry and poo-poo the cinematic legacy of Kevin Costner, as though anyone cared or was still listening. Well I’m listening, dammit, and I don’t appreciate your crap. What these people don’t understand is that “Dances With Wolves” was a three hour movie that had no big battles (there are a couple action sequences, but they’re not really big enough to qualify as “battles”) or hobbits or flashy special effects and it STILL made all the money in late 1990. “Dances With Wolves” was one of those movies that was legitimately a phenomenon. It revived interest in Native Americans. It won all the major Oscars (and no, it did NOT steal Best Picture from “Goodfellas”, you can’t steal something that belongs to you). It made studios realize that three hour movies could turn a profit. (Where would “Braveheart” or “Lord of the Rings” be without it, I ask you? Still trying to get greenlit, that’s my guess.) And it made Kevin Costner into the biggest box office draw in the world.

In the wake of this success, Costner turned around and made two risky movies whose success solidified his box office clout (though, sadly, his career didn’t last much beyond them). First of all, he did “JFK” with Oliver Stone. “JFK” was nominated for Best Picture, made a respectable pile of money, and revived the controversy surrounding the JFK assassination. When you think about “JFK” in terms of what a blockbuster it was (I was anxious to see it and I was only 13) it’s kind of incredible. I won’t say that Costner was the only reason it did well, but he was a vital component of its success. People liked him. He seemed like a regular guy, yet women were drooling over him. That’s a lethal combination. Guys liked him because he played baseball and shot gangsters. Women liked him because he was frequently pants-less and he was charming as all hell. Plus, like Tom Hanks in the mid-90’s and Harrison Ford in the 80’s, the man chose great material. Costner had a hell of a run: “The Untouchables”, “Field of Dreams”, “Bull Durham”, “Dances With Wolves”, and “JFK”. These are great films, films that most normal Hollywood stars can only dream of. Costner chose good stories that people wanted to see, and people loved him for it.

They loved him so much, in fact, that nobody batted an eyelash that he played Robin Hood.

Robin Hood is British. He skulked around England about 900 years ago, robbing from the rich and giving back to the poor. And I’m sure he didn’t sound like a Midwestern corn farmer or a California surfer when he did. But that’s how Kevin’s Robin Hood sounds. It’s really quite amazing. Near the beginning of the movie, Costner attempts a hint of a British accent (a really subtle, barely discernible one) but then he abandons it about fifteen minutes in. And you know something? The story is so compelling, the atmosphere of the film is so rich and the villain is so good that it DOESN’T EVEN MATTER. Yup, that’s right. It doesn’t hurt the film at all. Not at all.

Those who bitch about Costner will not agree with that statement. They will say that it hampers this film, that it hamstrings the movie’s artistic integrity. And that would be a problem if this film actually HAD any artistic integrity. But it doesn’t. If this were “Schindler’s List” or even “Braveheart”, that would be a problem. If it were a movie with something important or vital to say, Costner’s lack of Britishness would be a major stumbling block. The film would crash and burn and nothing on Earth could revive it. But Costner’s lack of an accent barely registers. If anything, it actually helps the film.

I will explain.

You see, Robin Hood is an outsider. He’s been in a Turkish prison for the past five years, thanks to his involvement in the Crusades. He’s mad, he’s dirty and all he wants is to go home. When he gets home he finds that the same sort of shit he’s had to put up with for the past five years in Constantinople is now going on right at home. People are being oppressed, imprisoned, accused of satan worship and killed. It’s like the Scouring of the Shire part of the “Lord of the Rings” books, the part all the Costner-hating geeks complained was missing from the movies. Well, watch “Prince of Thieves”, geeks! Picture Costner as a hobbit. There. All better. At any rate, he comes home and it’s not home anymore. Some evil bastard (we’ll get to him in a minute) has ruined everything he once loved. It’s not even his country anymore. So the fact that he talks differently from them just adds to that dichotomy. He doesn’t belong here. This is not his beautiful country. Following this line of logic, at the end, once he’s vanquished evil and restored Good to his world, everyone should start talking just like him…but oh well.

Another reason Costner’s performance works is that he comes off as a genuine prick. When he messes with the Sheriff of Nottingham’s goons, you get the sense that he’s doing it just to show how cool he is. When the goons don’t immediately piss themselves after finding out Costner used to own this land, Kevin looks pissed and gets all bitchy. The bitchiness continues when he gets to his father’s castle. His father is dead, sure, and that’s a tough break. But does he really need to chew out a blind guy for not cutting down dad’s corpse? Even in the face of such emotion, that seems a tad harsh. Costner’s Robin Hood continues to act like King Swagger Cock for the majority of the film. He can’t believe Maid Marian doesn’t immediately want to bed him. He talks down to the peasants that have given him refuge. He even inspires them to revolt, even though they’ll probably all get killed, just so he can get things back to normal and start lording it over everyone again. Five years in Turkish prison have changed the guy…but not as much as you might think. When you get right down to it, Costner’s Robin Hood is still the same rich prick he was before the Crusades. He’s helping the common people, but that’s only a side benefit. Really, he’s just trying to get his land and gold back, and he’s using whoever he has to in order to get that done.

Either Costner really was a prick who thought the sun shone out of his ass…or this is a brilliant performance.

Fortunately, this film has Costner’s rich prick face off against an even bigger prick. Alan. Rickman. Rickman is a golden GOD in this film. Errol Flynn will always be the definitive Robin Hood; that’s not even a question. But it’s hard to remember any other Sheriff of Nottingham. Basil Rathbone was good in the 1938 version of this story…but Alan Rickman is the guy who, in fifty years time, will forever be identified with this role. Costner has no accent, so Rickman compensates for that fact by having a British accent that even deaf people can hear. I have never seen scenery chewed such infinite gusto. No wonder everyone thought Costner was sleepwalking through this movie. Even Jim Carrey would be forced off the margins of the screen by Rickman’s portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham. The guy is brilliant. He was understated and cool as Hans Gruber, bad-ass terrorist, in the first “Die Hard” movie. Here, he’s a man constantly on the verge of an aneurysm.

At the start of the film, however, he is unflappable and cool. And why shouldn’t he be? The king is gone and the Sheriff of Nottingham is the closest thing the country has to an authority figure. (I’ve never figured out how the country could go from King to Sheriff though. Was literally EVERY other nobleman out of town?) He has all the money, he can have anyone he doesn’t like killed and he gets any woman he wants. He’s got the world swinging from his nuts. In short, he’s got everything that we sense Robin Hood used to have. But instead of being satisfied with that (like Robin apparently was), the Sheriff (whose real name we never learn) wants more. He wants it all, baby, and he wants it now. The King is coming home soon, the party is almost over, so he’s got to grab everything he can while there’s still time…including the throne of England. When Robin Hood stumbles back into town, he’s still not worried. Another pansy nobleman comes home, no big deal. The Sheriff maintains his cool.

As it becomes painfully obvious that Robin isn’t just another effete British noble, however, Rickman starts to panic. He goes from cool to nervous to what can best be described as a full-on mental breakdown. If you watch Rickman’s performance and bear this in mind, his work is simply genius. And it’s hilarious. Rickman walks a fine line in his portrayal. If he played it just a little bit broader he could be in a Monty Python sketch. His eyes bug out, his nostrils flare to grand effect, his voice goes through strange new octaves…he’s so panicked at the thought of losing all the cool shit he’s got that he starts to re-experience puberty. Even near the end, when he gets control back for a few shining moments, he’s too far gone to really appreciate it. Costner’s Robin Hood has gotten under his skin and he’ll never be the same again.

Like the original “Batman”, this is an action movie where the action barely matters. It’s really a psychologically fucked up character study of two men that are like shadows of one another. Robin Hood is a man who once had the world on a string and wants to regain that power…but learns the value of freedom and respect for the lower class along the way. He’s like a millionaire who lost everything and has to live with bums. The Sheriff of Nottingham, on the other hand, is a guy born with nothing who gets it all in a really short span of time and gets addicted to it. He wants more, and he doesn’t care who he has to kill to get it…or keep it. He’s like a British version of Scarface in the Dark Ages. And, like Scarface, he simply refuses to go down. When Robin Hood finally corners him, you just expect Costner to roll right over him. On the contrary, the Sheriff fights tooth and nail, putting up one hell of a sword fight. Rickman would have completely owned Robin’s ass if Robin Hood hadn’t fought dirty. You can’t help but love this prick, even though you’re still rooting for Robin Hood (at least a little bit). The Sheriff is a bastard, but he’s so damned good at it. This is further proof of Rickman’s genius. We despise him, we’re rooting for his eventual downfall, but we can’t wait for him to show up on screen again. Even though he worships Satan and threatens the lives of children, we still sort of want him to win. (You want further evidence of this? In the DVD extended edition, all the added footage is of Rickman.)

Unlike the original “Batman”, however, the action sequences are better. The final forty-five minutes of this movie simply rock. You’ve got flaming arrows, hangings, daring rescues and escapes, people riding catapults, Celt attacks, zesty swordfights and people hurling through windows. In the last forty-five minutes, this movie shows you everything that a Robin Hood movie can be. Its pulse pounding, rip-roaring entertainment and it doesn’t even need fancy digital effects. It’s why this legend has endured so well, it’s just a damn good story.

Unfortunately, there are some slow moments getting to this primo stuff (and Morgan Freeman is largely wasted…he looks like even he is wondering what the hell his character iis doing here), but it scarcely matters. Thanks to Rickman’s artfully over-the-top performance and Costner’s believable outsider/asshole antics, this movie is never anything short of fascinating.

Unlike Axl Rose, Kevin Costner deserved to rule the world. This movie may not be the Best evidence of that, but it’s a good Exhibit C.

2005 / 135 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

“The New World” is the sort of movie that you just bask in. It’s a highly visual experience. You could watch it without any sound and still understand everything that’s going on. The dialogue is almost inconsequential. Not to say that the dialogue is bad, not at all. Some of it is quite poetic. It’s just that the film is a primarily visual and emotional experience.

Terrence Malick and his collaborators have created something truly magical in “The New World”. They’ve created a haunting, mesmerizing spectacle of the early days of American colonization. At the heart of the story is the arrival of English explorers to the shores of America (Virginia, I think, though I’m not entirely sure and the movie doesn’t really specify as far as I can remember). The explorers’ captain expressly tells them to establish a good relationship with the indigenous people on these shores. After all, if things don’t go that well, they will have no one but these people to rely upon.

The settlers and the “naturals”, as Christopher Plummer’s captain calls them, establish a fragile, uneasy peace that is doomed from the start. The barrier of language as well as the natural animosity of these Europeans toward a culture so different and intimidating to them soon sabotages their best efforts and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) is sent up the river to broker a more permanent sort of peace. At first, things go badly. Most of the crew accompanying him is killed or lost (the movie is rather vague on that point) and Smith himself is soon captured by the naturals. He is sentenced to death and the sentence is nearly carried out until a young woman (Q’Orianna Kilcher) steps between him and the weapon meant to kill him and pleads for his life. This is the beginning of an intimate friendship between the two of them. The young native princess falls in love for this strange brute from across the sea but Smith warns her (and probably himself) not to become too attached. He senses that there are too many barriers and obstacles between them for the relationship to last, though he longs to abandon his responsibilities and take up with this charming, amazing young woman and flee into the paradise of the new world he and the others have discovered.

America is portrayed as paradise in this film. It is a place unspoiled and majestic. It is a Garden of Eden where the white men come to introduce the concept of Original Sin. The film offers a fascinating take on this subject matter and I don’t think I’m going too far when I say that no filmmaker could have pulled this off like Malick. He makes the plot simple to follow without explicitly spelling too many things out. He portrays the relationship between Smith and Kilcher’s princess with a charming innocence, yet there are hints of something more carnal, sexy moments that hint at a physical relationship that may or may not have taken place. This relationship haunts and affects every other aspect of the film and the plot and it is well done. Farrell does a good job as a dreamer who is ultimately a harsh realist. And Kilcher is simply stunning as Pocahontas (though she is never called by that name in the film, perhaps to evade any images of the earlier Disney film with its wacky raccoons and talking trees). I’ve never seen her in anything else but I can’t wait to see where her career takes her from here. Her work in this film, though largely silent, is nothing short of amazing.

“The New World” is, ultimately, the story of this young woman. After Smith meets her, the film mainly focuses on her. The experiences Pocahontas undergoes are the same as those thrust upon the country itself. The settlers marvel at her natural charms at first and then go through great pains to remake her as just another English woman. When I first saw her in a dress and heels in this movie, my heart broke a little bit. There is no going back for Pocahontas. With the simple act of putting on new clothes, we know that a whole chapter of her life, a simpler and more wondrous chapter, has irrevocably closed.

She eventually becomes the wife to another settler, a kind man played by Christian Bale. And while he is good to her and almost unnaturally understanding, she is still haunted by her early relationship with Farrell’s Captain Smith. After all, she sacrificed everything she knew for this man who so harshly cast her aside. Smith seems to feel that there are too many obstacles for them to ever live happily ever after, one of them perhaps being his own insubstantial nature. What he doesn’t understand is everything that Pocahontas has sacrificed and done to overcome such obstacles and render them moot.

“The New World” uses this relationship to illustrate the relationship of the settlers to the land itself. They marvel at the world they have found, this perfect world, and then begin defacing it for their own gain and in order to make it more like the world they have just left behind. It’s a fascinating theme. Malick’s usual theme, the interaction of man and nature, is explored here, and it is explored with his usual poetic grace and visual splendor. This is the kind of movie that deserves to be seen on the grandest possible screen. The visuals will overpower you, stimulating your eyes and overwhelming your mind. The film delights in small treasures: the sight of water rushing over rock, the sight of ships gliding into a harbor, the wind passing over a field of grain, the sun shining through trees, a beautiful young woman playing in tall grass. Such things are Malick’s forte. He makes movies that truly capture the beauty of nature and mourn much of its passing. As long as there is still an untouched corner of the world, Terrence Malick will put a camera there and capture its beauty. I was not a huge fan of his last film, “The Thin Red Line”. I felt that his themes of man and nature were an ill fit with the story of soldiers fighting World War Two. “The New World”, however, is a completely different story. “The New World” is, perhaps, his masterpiece. It is the story that Malick was born to tell. It’s a movie that only he and those he has chosen to collaborate with could have made. Malick appreciates the natural beauty that the English settlers found and he displays it magically, making us mourn its loss and savor every minute this movie places us within that world.

“The New World”, like Jackson’s “King Kong”, is the reason movie theaters will always need to exist. “King Kong” was big, bustling, action-packed spectacle at its best. “The New World”, on the other hand, is more subtle, more intimate, but no less staggering in its visuals or its wealth of heart. I will buy this movie on DVD, of course I will. And I will savor it in the comfort of my own home. I will still love it. I will love Kilcher’s magical performance, its glorious cinematography, its wondrous scenery, and the dark themes and hints of tragedy within it. I will forever cherish Terrence Malick’s singularly beautiful history lesson. But each time I watch it, I will wish I could experience it once again in the theater, where such amazing visuals dwarf me, enchant me, and make me feel insignificant. That is the magic of cinema, not to mention the magic of Malick at the top of his game.

2005 / 98 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

I’ve never read a book by Truman Capote (unless, as some claim, Capote actually ghost-wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird”, which I doubt). I’ve only read his biography on Wikipedia, so I have a brief overview of his life and nothing more. Therefore, I cannot say how accurately this film captures the flavor of his life or work. I can only judge the film on its own merits.

As a film, “Capote” is quite good. It gives us a fascinating glimpse at the process of making art by allowing us a peek into the process by which Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) researched and wrote “In Cold Blood”, the book which is largely considered to be his masterpiece. Other than “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, I’ve never heard of another Capote novel. Capote reads of a grisly mass murder in a small Kansas town in the New York Times and is intrigued by it. The effete novelist decides that the crime, those who perpetrated it, and the effects of it, will be the subject of his next novel. This is a decided departure from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, the story of a self-absorbed flake, the writer who loves her, and her poor cat, who uses every opportunity to escape her flaky clutches.

Accompanied by Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener) he journeys to the small Kansas town and chronicles the crime’s aftermath, starting with the investigation by the town’s sheriff (played by Chris Cooper). When the criminals behind this unspeakable crime are captured, Capote interviews them exhaustively. He forms a close relationship with the more shy, withdrawn of the murderers, a man named Perry Smith (well played by Clifton Collins Jr.). Does he strike up a genuine friendship with Perry or is he simply using the man and his information to shape a better novel? That is one of the main questions raised by this film. The film gets even more complex as Capote struggles to write the ending to his novel. Does he help the boys get a better lawyer and a lesser sentence or does he let them go to their deaths and ensure a better end for his novel?

“Capote” is fascinating because it explores such complex issues. It’s a dark film and a neat slice of life about a writer who has done a good job of keeping his demons at bay who suddenly finds himself face to face with them and unable to turn away. Hoffman and Collins deliver great performances here, filling these characters with dimension and life. Hoffman’s great, but he’s ALWAYS great. I’m not going to say that he’s better than he’s ever been. I will, however, say the fact that we’re not completely annoyed by his Capote speech patterns and mannerisms shows that Philip does a dynamic job. It would have been easy to be turned off by such a flamboyant performance. But Hoffman reigns it in and plays Capote as a three dimensional character rather than simply a caricature. It’s the same sort of magic Tom Hanks pulled off with his Forrest Gump character. Collins, on the other hand, gives a breakthrough performance. He humanizes the killer he plays without sacrificing any of the dark corners of the man’s personality. The only other thing I can remember seeing this guy in was “The Rules of Attraction” (where he made quite an impression as a loony drug dealer) but he’s worthy of an Oscar nomination here. He’s superb. Keener and Cooper are good, as always, but they don’t really do anything they haven’t done consistently in every film they’ve appeared in.

If not for the great performances of Hoffman and Collins, I believe “Capote”, for all its darkness and exploration of “the life of the mind” would fall apart at the seams. It’s got interesting characters and themes…but, really, the film is nothing more than a series of cocktail parties and prison visits. If not for the strength of the material, it would have gotten old fast. Even with the strength of its material, there are only so many scenes of Hoffman being the life of a literary cocktail party that a person can sit through before they want something else. It’s a good movie, to be sure, but it’s little more than an actor’s showcase. Hoffman and Collins rise to the challenge, and the others give able support, but the film still feels a little hollow. The direction is stagy, giving the film very little flair or flavor. The period costumes and details all seem dead on, but the camera work is fairly pedestrian and the editing is kinda slow in spots. The director, Bennett Miller, has only done one documentary prior to taking on this effort, and that shows in the construction and appearance of the film. I’d love to see what a more visually oriented director would have done with this material. I’m sure a more experienced director would have found a way to mirror Capote’s emotional and mental state through the composition of shots and the overall production design.

But “Capote” is still an interesting film about an interesting subject. It’s not perfect (it may even be a tad bit overrated) but it’s a good film, well worth seeing, and another testament to the strength of Hoffman’s acting prowess. It also signals Clifton Collins Jr. as a performer to watch. And it offers a fascinating meditation on what a human being can sacrifice (perhaps even his soul) in the simple act of committing words to paper.

2006 / 106 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

This past weekend, Madison finally caught up with the rest of the nation. We finally got the latest from Woody Allen (“Match Point”) and Terrence Malick (“The New World”), two films that have been enjoying critical acclaim and awards speculation since opening in Los Angeles and New York in mid-December. According to most critics, these two offerings are among the best that modern film has to offer, towering and intelligent achievements. And yet, I wasn’t in the mood for either of those films. No. I was in the mood to see a woman dressed in skin-tight leather fight vampires and werewolves.

I wasn’t a big fan of the original “Underworld”, though I must admit that I didn’t hate it as much as my roommate did. For some reason, Ben has a vendetta against that movie. True, it’s not the hottest. It’s rather slow for an action film and it spends a lot of time on a plot that isn’t as ingenious and spectacular as its writers and director must have assumed it was. But it wasn’t terrible. It was simply mediocre. And yet…something about the trailers for its sequel intrigued me. It looked like the sort of brain-dead, action-packed fun that I have, frankly, missed. Maybe I’m tired of seeing movies that are actually good, who knows. I guess I’ve sat through too many well-written, well-directed films about people wrecking their own lives in the pursuit of some loftier goal (“Capote”, “Munich”, “Squid and the Whale”, et al) recently, because it was nice to just turn my brain off and let walls of noise, gore and action spill over me.

And yet, for a movie of this kind, “Underworld: Evolution” is still somewhat over-plotted. That was the main problem of the first film. It’s a movie about a secret war between vampires (known in these movies as “Death Dealers”, apparently because the word “vampire” sounds stupid) and werewolves (known as “Lycans” because someone probably thought that was clever) and yet, from the attention and time spent on the plot of the first film, you’d think director Len Wiseman thought he was adapting a Shakespeare play. There were betrayals and shocking revelations (which weren’t all that shocking, really) and all kinds of stuff that wasn’t as interesting as it should be. “Underworld: Evolution” provides more of the same. This time, however, we in the audience are given a better feel for this world. We are given a greater insight into the war between the Lycans and the, ahem, Death Dealers (it gets lamer every time I type it). We get a better understanding of the beef that exists between these two species. Unfortunately, after we get this understanding, the werewolves kind of fade into the background. This new film is more concerned with the politics of vampires. There’s a hierarchy to vampire society and “Underworld: Evolution” (since I’m sick of typing that we shall henceforth refer to the movie as “U:E”) has a lot of fun exploring it. It does so better than most films of its kind, though not as well as the original “Blade” which is the end-all, be-all of this kind of movie. I thought the original “Underworld” did quite well at establishing the atmosphere of this world and “U:E” shares that strength.

The reason I like this movie better, however, is simple: it kicks a lot more ass. None of us have come to a movie like this to see expert plotting and superb character development. If we get it, sure, we’ll take it. It’s an extra bonus. But first and foremost, a film like this exists to provide thrilling action sequences. For the most part, the original “Underworld” neglected this part of the equation. It wanted to be “The Matrix” with vampires and, well, it wasn’t. “U: E” doesn’t seem to possess such lofty aspirations. It seems to me that “U: E” just wants to be a better movie than the original. In this, it succeeds. The bad guy is better, for one thing. Though Bill Nighy is a cool actor and the perfect guy to play either a vampire king or a Keith Richards-esque rock fossil, he didn’t really get to go for the throat as he should have in the first “Underworld”. We get a few flashbacks of him here and he’s more menacing in those flashbacks than he was in the whole first movie. But the main bad-ass here is Marcus (played to the hilt by Tony Curran). Marcus is the original vampire, the one who started it all and spawned all the other bloodsucking freaks. Initially, Selene (Kate Beckinsale, with her ass thankfully turned toward the camera as often as possible) wants to resurrect Marcus from hibernation so she can explain why she slaughtered most of the head vampires in “Underworld” (or…something, her reasons are fairly murky). However, it soon becomes apparent that this was a boneheaded move. Marcus, you see, barely even bothers looking human. He just flies around impaling people with these wickedly cool wing things of his and generally looking like the worst nightmare of the guy who draws Meat Loaf’s album covers. He’s a pretty imposing bad guy and though we’re not sure what he hopes to accomplish by resurrecting his imprisoned brother (who, incidentally, was the world’s original werewolf) we’re instantly rooting against it. Anything this guy wants to do has just GOT to be bad news.

The plot is fairly murky and it’s made worse toward the beginning because “U:E” assumes you have the ability to remember specific moments in “U” and understand their meaning. Having seen “U” two years ago, once, in a slightly drowsy state, I was rather lost by much of this. It all clicked for me by the forty-five minute mark, however, and from then on I had a blast. This movie doesn’t neglect its plot, but it moves more quickly and it has a lot more action in it. There’s a cool chase between Marcus in full demon mode and large, commercial truck. There’s a pretty bad-ass scene where Marcus is so hungry for blood that he drains a stable full of horses (I guess humans just didn’t have enough nourishment, horses must be the Old Country Buffet of the vampire set). There are some cool gunfights. There are many daring escapes and altercations with various enemies, both Lycan and D.D. And, just when I was about to bemoan the lack of werewolves in the film (for some reason, I enjoy werewolf movies) the ending really amps up the number of lycanthropes and provides an even higher level of menacing, bad-ass, glorified B-movie entertainment.

The actors are basically irrelevant in this film, but some of them are worth mentioning. Tony Curran, as I already mentioned, is nicely intimidating. Bill Nighy rocks in his limited screen time. Kate Beckinsale does about as well as she can with what she has to work with (and she displays a lot more flesh this time which is worth the price of matinee admission in and of itself). And Derek Jacobi brings some welcome class to the enterprise in a rather regal role. Scott Speedman isn’t all that great (I’ve never seen him in anything where I thought he was too spectacular) but he isn’t distracting, so it could’ve been worse. Still, I think the movie might have had more of an emotional resonance if a better actor had occupied Speedman’s role. (This may have been the major stumbling block of the first film, come to think of it.) As is, it feels like Beckinsale has risked a little too much for a guy whose best attribute is that he’s handsome in a generic sort of way.

All in all, it’s not a great fantasy adventure (like “Sith” or “Serenity”) but it’s never boring, it’s got some fun action sequences, and it’s got more plot than most action movies. It’s not as good as “The Matrix” but it’s better and a lot more coherent than the hollow Matrix sequels. It ain’t Shakespeare but, unlike “U”, “U:E” doesn’t pretend to be.

2005 / 164 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

In my “King Kong” review, I mentioned that Peter Jackson had filled the gap that filmmakers like Spielberg and, despite one great film in his recent resume, George Lucas had long left vacant: making the sort of big, imaginative entertainment that makes you forget everything outside the borders of the screen for a little while. Well, while Peter is doing the sorts of movies that Lucas and Spielberg used to make with such regularity, Spielberg is busy doing something new, something completely different. There is a reason that Steve isn’t making those sorts of movies anymore. Steve has more important things on his mind.

With all its flaws, “War of the Worlds” had more intensity and went to darker places than any movie of its kind ever had. And, while that movie no longer rocks me the way it did early last summer, it’s still a potent, intense film with interesting notions that disguises itself as a Hollywood blockbuster. The difference between that and a movies like “Close Encounters” is what makes Steve such a continually amazing filmmaker. His sensibilities seem to have drastically changed. And while he still works a little sentimentality into each film (like the ending of “War of the Worlds”, the part that works the least) he has been making some of the darkest Hollywood fare in recent memory. There is a grit and muscle to his recent work that is only occasionally evident in his early stuff. “Minority Report” isn’t as good as “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, but it has a dark thread running through it that the earlier film did not. There is a grit and menace to “Minority Report”, “A.I.” and, most of all, “Munich”. That darkness has always lurked beneath the surface in Spielberg’s work, even his most cheerful. Remember that menacing image of the “astronauts” invading a suburban home in “E.T.”? That image still holds the power of a potent nightmare. But in his recent crop of films, Steve has brought that facet of his talent to the forefront. It’s the reason his recent films live and breathe, and the reason I’m so glad he stopped trying to suppress that instinct as he seems to have done in the “Jurassic Park” films. The reason the “Jurassic Parks” don’t work as well as most of his other work was that his heart didn’t seem to be in it. He seemed to be going through the motions. Starting with “Schindler’s List” Steve has turned into a more mature, thoughtful filmmaker, doing only the movies he feels truly called upon to make…and I love him for it. Had he kept making hollow spectacles like “Jurassic Park”, he would have remained a technically proficient filmmaker, but his films would have been lifeless. The difference between Spielberg and other filmmakers working in the fantasy realm is the difference between “War of the Worlds” and a movie like “Independence Day”. Technically, “Independence Day” works, but it doesn’t speak to the real world, it doesn’t really matter. “War of the Worlds” is challenging and thought-provoking and, above all, it matters. His movies still have the spark and energy of the old Spielberg. It’s just that, now, he puts his imagination and technical artistry to the service of more challenging fare. The more he challenges himself, the more he challenges us in the audience, and the more I, for one, love him for it. He’ll never be the guy who made “Raiders of the Lost Ark” again, but at least he won’t be the guy trying to make “Raiders of the Lost Ark” again. He’s not a formerly great filmmaker struggling to regain his touch by making clones of his greatest achievement (which is sort of how Lucas’s recent work seems to be…except for “Sith” which finally beats with the vitality of his early imaginative work). And, as much as I love the current work of Peter Jackson, I wonder if he will have the ability to put his tools and talents to such daring work and keep reinventing himself the way that Steven Spielberg has.

I set out to write a review of Steven’s latest film and, instead, I have written an essay on why Spielberg (whose biggest recent flaw is that he does not quite know when to bring a movie to its end) remains such a vibrant force in the world of cinema. Well, the reason I felt motivated to do that is simple: “Munich” is just that damned good. And the reason it’s so damned good is the reason that a movie like “Syriana” isn’t. “Munich” is about politics and terrorism and the geo-political landscape. And yet it is a decidedly human epic. “Syriana” used its characters as mouthpieces for the political points it was trying to make, as puppets to move along a complex narrative of greed and global corruption. “Munich” is, first and foremost, about the people involved in such global actions, the foot soldiers called upon to carry out the agendas of governments and entire peoples. It deals with politics and issues like morality, cultural identity and the spider web effects of revenge, but it gives those issues a face. It makes those traits identifiable by giving us characters to which we can relate. And it does so often in little moments that carry the weight that an hour of film could: the opening scene of “Munich” illustrates geo-political politics in a way most movies only dream about, simply by showing a terrorist attack and the reactions of a diverse group of people watching that attack progress on television.

“Munich” is tangentially about the 1972 terrorist attack by Palestinians on Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich, Germany. But it is mostly about the aftermath of that attack. It is the story of a small group of Israeli agents (led by the magnetic Eric Bana) assigned to track down and kill those most directly responsible for the Munich attack. It is fitting that the film is called “Munich”, though very little of it is actually about the Munich attacks. The events of “Munich” are the catalyst for everything else that happens, and they are the ghosts haunting each man involved in this story.

First of all, “Munich” is surprisingly entertaining. The acts of revenge brought about by the men at the center of this film are staged with the flavor and taut efficiency of such great 1970’s thrillers as “The Parallax View” and “Black Sunday”. As a simple thriller, the film works amazingly well and beats with the distinct flavor of those 70’s thrillers, right down to the costumes and the camera work. The killings are incredibly tense and powerful, the suspense here is palpable as the men hunt down and destroy each man on their list. Particularly strong is a sequence near the beginning of the film when the Israeli assassins plant a bomb to kill one of their targets, only to have his young daughter get in the way. Their efforts to stop the bomb in time had me perched on the very edge of my seat.

Within the framework of this effective, absorbing thriller, Steve explores the personal aspects of the assassins and their mission. Are they really doing the right thing? Are they doing it for the right reasons? Are they being set up? Are they, themselves, being hunted? Can they even live with what they are doing? The external conflict is fascinating enough, but Spielberg heightens it and enhances the tensio