Year: 2003

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) The good news are that most of the the overly gross moments of the first two films of the series have been removed; what remains may not be too tasteful (decapitations, paedophilia and dismemberment are featured here and there) but at least it’s more palatable than before. Veteran spoof director David Zucker overuses slapstick over more amusing silliness (witness the “seven days” exchange), but Scary Movie 3 still feels a lot more respectable for it. Alas, the bad news are that the comedic highlights of the first two films have also been filed off, with an overall result that is a lot more tepid than it should be. The film floats from one grin to another, with few belly-laughs in between. The visual and cinematographic re-creation of the parodies (Signs, The Ring, 8 Mile, etc) is irreproachable, but the film often does next to nothing with the material it’s given. Leslie Nielsen, continues to be obnoxious with his usual shtick, though I wonder how many will get the joke of his last appearance in the film. All in all, a rather mixed effort that feels somewhat lazy. Not the bottom of the barrel (and certainly a step up from the past five year’s worth of spoof comedies), but still far away from the genre’s best efforts. Catch it on TV late at night.

Runaway Jury (2003)

Runaway Jury (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) It doesn’t take much to make me happy at the movies, and this film has it all; a well-told plot, plenty of drama and action, taut pacing, good characters, a superb cast, interesting direction and top-notch editing. It’s adapted from John Grisham’s good novel, and “adapted” is the word; substantial changes made to the storyline end up delivering a better, more interesting plot. The cast is filled with great actors, from John Cusak to Rachel Weisz (woo!) to Gene Hackman to Dustin Hoffman: All of them have their standout moments. Particular props must go to director Gary Fleder, whose snappy style allows the film to steamroll any objection through sheer momentum. It’s rare enough to see a legal thriller so confidently helmed that it’s an extra-pleasing surprise to find out that Runaway Jury is actually quite good indeed. Only the ending sort of peters out, with a rather obvious revelation being dropped with the sound of a splat and a too-touching moment that distract from an otherwise quite cynical film. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a rare example of slick escapist entertainment, a completely successful attempt at suspense with none-too-obvious elements.

Out Of Time (2003)

Out Of Time (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) There’s not a lot that’s special about this film, but frankly there is no need to be fancy when you’re doing a Florida crime story. In this case, director Carl Franklin simply lets his stars do the work, whether it’s the always-dependable Denzel Washington, ladies Eva Mendes and Sanaa Lathan (both scorching hot) or the lush Floridian scenery. The story of an adulterous sheriff manipulated in a very risky situation, Out Of Time depends on an ever-increasing pit of lies, a plot device which usually drives me nuts but doesn’t actually work out too badly here. The tension increases as a basically decent protagonist allows one mistake to drag him deeper and deeper in trouble. Some of it gets ridiculous (Fax machine thrills! Scanning software-fu! Power cable action! PDA-GPS denouement!) but the film as a whole moves swiftly to its formulaic conclusion with nary a pause. No crime classic, that’s for sure, but there’s more than enough here for good old-fashioned thrills and entertainment.

The Last Day, Glenn Kleier

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Warner, 1997, 609 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60598-0

It’s very, very rare to see a novel so flawed as Glenn Kleier’s The Last Day manage to keep my interest through (most of) its duration. From the risky initial premise to the botched character development and the ridiculous conclusion, there is a lot of stuff to dislike here… but somehow, it all manages to hold together. It may be a triumph of concept over execution, but at least it’s worth a look.

Dating back from long-ago 1997, The Last Day deals with the much-feared millennium, except with a supernatural twist. On Christmas 1999, a meteorite smashes through a top-secret Israeli military compound and destroys it. The only survivor is a beautiful young woman, “Jeza”, who soon appears to have supernatural power.

But have no fear! Intrepid WNN journalist Jonathan Feldman is here! In a matter of weeks, even as the Jeza phenomenon sweeps the globe, Jonathan finds the truth and reports it live! It turns out that the top-secret Israeli project was trying to develop a better breed of soldiers; humans cloned from the same source and augmented with neural computers fed with reams of knowledge. Is Jeza a human experiment gone live or the second coming of Christ herself?

As I said; risky premise. For centuries, people have reflected upon the New Testament, maintaining that its story is still as relevant, as extraordinary even today. In The Last Day, Glenn Kleier wrestles with a contemporary re-telling of the scriptures, to varying success. Some of the philosophical musings are fascinating, but some of them (like the made-up “parables from the book of Jeza”) also tend to be blindingly obvious. Chances are that your reaction to the novel will depend on your own relationship with faith. For jaded atheists like myself, it remains a story; I’m likely to shrug at the concept of a female messiah even as this may shock a few more fundamentalist readers.

But back to literary considerations, the biggest flaw of the book is that Kleier is still an inexperienced writer. His prose is utilitarian, ham-fisted and not particularly elegant. His characters aren’t particularly well-handled, and are usually undistinguishable from one another. It doesn’t help, of course, that the reader can roughly guess where the story is going; taking the New Testament as a source book obviously leads to obvious developments.

But whereas more conventional readers may reject this book on those grounds alone, I -as a Science Fiction reader- was taken by Kleier’s inventiveness in describing the repercussion of the second coming in a rough analogue of 1999’s world. There’s plenty of material here, a lot of it revolving around the Vatican, to digest and enjoy. There’s a pretty spectacular demolition of Roman Catholicism midway through, if you enjoy that type of thing. Kleier’s use of an international correspondent as a protagonist is a good way to quickly deliver a lot of information, though some of the author’s infoblurbs sometimes end up killing tension by delivering pieces of the conclusion even before the suspense has begun.

There are too many rough edges to make The Last Day more than “interesting” on a “bad-to-good” scale, so readers without much tolerance for clunky prose and dull characters may want to pass up this one. But for refugees from the SF field, or merely curious thriller readers, there just may be enough here to keep anyone busy for a few hours. While it’s not a page-turner per se, there are more than enough reasons to keep reading, if only to see what else Kleier can pull out of his hat.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) Given that this is the first part of a single work, it’s probably best to wait until Volume 2 to comment on the whole work. But for those Tarantino mega-fans, there’s no doubt that Quentin is back doing what he knows best. Tons of references, oodles of cool, plenty of unusual thrills and a love for flashy cinematography makes even this first volume a breath of fresh air in a mainstream landscape dominated by hack directors and by-the-numbers movies. It speaks volumes, I think, that the imagined reality of the film feels completely comfortable. I’m a film geek and this half of Kill Bill makes me happy because I’m a film geek. I’m still not convinced that splitting the film in half was a good decision, but the measured pace at which Kill Bill unfolds makes the anticipation and the suspense of the direction work in its favour. Otherwise, well, there are plenty of nice things to say about the acting, the action, the gore (or black-and-white abstraction of gore), the self-indulgence, the soundtrack and/or the very black humour. But we’ll wait until Volume 2 to do that. One thing is sure, though, and it’s that I’ll be there opening day for the second half of it.

Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) The Coen Brothers doing a romantic comedy? Believe it… and it’s just about as quirky as their other films. George Clooney scores another great performance as a teeth-obsessed attorney who comes to be fascinated by a beautiful woman (the luminous Catherine Zeta-Jones) who’s out to get as much money as she can. Will they get together? Will it last? Will it have a happy ending? I can’t seriously answer that without spoiling the fun. Suffice to say that this is the Coen Brothers’ funniest film since The Big Lebowski. While Intolerable Cruelty isn’t particularly high on belly laughs, it’s amusing throughout and plays without too many false notes. The supporting characters alone are worth seeing. Some particularly witty sequences are built around the script’s cynical take on relationship, with the result that this romantic comedy feels rather more comedic than the usual puff-fluff rom-com. Good stuff.

Foolproof (2003)

Foolproof (2003)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, October 2003) It’s amazing to see what a competent screenwriter will do with a few good actors and next to no budget, and so Foolproof‘s cheap price tag doesn’t have much of an impact on its effectiveness. The setup is mildly ridiculous (three friends with a knack for making up “foolproof” theoretical plans to rob real places are blackmailed into executing a real caper), but the execution works well despite a few obvious setups. Ryan Reynolds is suitably smart and funny as the protagonist and Kristin Booth makes herself attractive through pure attitude, with a consequent effect on the motion picture as a whole. We’ve seen a lot of caper thrillers in the last few years, but Foolproof manages to stay with the rest of the pack. (It helps that it’s so distinctly Canadian, complete with the good money, car plates and Tim Hortons coffee) I have a few problems with some scenes that try to be either too dramatic or too misdirecting (Rob’s Evil Goatee!), but the overall package… holds up quite well.

Grunts!, Mary Gentle

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

ROC, 1992, 464 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-45453-7

There is no doubt that J.R.R. Tolkien did something magnificent when he created (“wrote” seems such a weak word) The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, in doing so he also ended up unleashing a copycat genre of derivative medieval fantasy. From “Dungeons and Dragons” to Terry Brooks, from KULL THE CONQUEROR to countless Fat Fantasy Trilogies, modern fantasy has all too often depended exclusively on rewriting Tolkien. Battles between good and evil can only be thrilling so many times…

In considering Mary Gentle’s satirically affectionate Grunts (subtitled “A Fantasy With Attitude”), I started at a disadvantage: Not only am I functionally illiterate in medieval fantasy, but I also started with a significant prejudice against the genre. While her novel is accessible enough, it remains a genre send-up and so contains elements that certainly work better on anyone with a good knowledge of the heroic fantasy’s faults and clichés.

It starts, interestingly enough, from the grunts’ point of view. Those poor Orcs forced to do all the fighting against the Army of the Light while their dark masters are busy scheming and torturing heroes in their citadels. But things take a turn for the weird when those Orcs slay a dragon and capture his hoards of weapons… all of them stamped “United States Marines Corps”. What might have been slightly amusing turns very amusing given that the dragon has cursed his hoard with a dastardly spell in which the looters become what they steal…

Before long, the Orcs are swearing like Marines (literally so), target-practicing with rifles and training themselves to execute squad tactics. Initial success against the forces of light is middling (turns out those pesky “neutralize weapon” spells do work against M-16s), but there’s no turning back from a modern army… even the fall of the Dark Empire proves to be only a hiccup in the plot as the Dark Lords comes back and argues… for elections! (On a platform of universal health care and high taxation, naturally.) From evil fantasy satire, Grunts moves on to tackle military fiction, and then science-fiction as the Orcs must fight invading extraterrestrials. A human is transported from our world to this fantasy universe, and that proves to be… utterly unimportant. There’s a wedding. Funerals. Harsh language. Sex. Plus rejoicing by all.

Yes, Grunts is a funny book. Plenty of jokes are sprinkled throughout its pages, tweaking the nose of everything from high fantasy to military fiction and Starship Troopers. (And it’s not a gentle tweaking, thanks to the rather sustained violence exhibited by everyone from orcs to humans) Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as interesting as you could imagine it from the above synopsis. Every humorous moment seems stuck in a duller wrapping of turgid prose that doesn’t do much in sustaining interest. I did love the descriptions of the protagonist’s attitudes toward the self-important “goody-goody” characters, but -oh- did I have a hard time slogging through the rest of the novel to get there. (Great cover illustration, though)

I won’t be the first one to stress the importance of pacing and brief wit when it comes to comedy. Alas, Grunts is definitely not a brief or a zippy novel. At more than 400 pages, it’s overlong by at least a quarter, features too many characters and includes half a dozen indifferent subplots.

Granted, lack of familiarity with the parodied genres may account for a distinct indifference to the spoof. Your mileage will certainly vary if you carry along a deep and unshakeable love for heroic fantasy. Critical comments elsewhere on the web suggest that many readers just went nuts for the book as it is. Still, even the non-fantasy elements of the book don’t seem to work or to free themselves from the morass of the surrounding prose. I certainly hoped for more than I ultimately got from Grunts, and that’s too bad. I just may give it a shot in a few years. After all, it’s not as if typical medieval fantasy —with all of its clichés and its stock situations— is going away anytime soon, right?

Hannibal, Thomas Harris

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Dell, 1999, 546 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-29584-X

When Hannibal was first published in 1999, critics were flummoxed. Some suspected a practical joke. Indeed, Salon.com prefaced its spoilerful synopsis with the warning “this is not a parody”. Many speculated that Harris was having fun screwing around with Hollywood. After the success of Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, Harris had become, despite himself, one of Hollywood’s darling authors. It turns out that all of his novels have been adapted for the silver screen at one moment or another: For a man who writes a novel per seven years or so (Black Sunday, 1975. Red Dragon, 1981, The Silence of the Lambs, 1988), that makes any of his books very hot stuff indeed. It’s no surprise if Red Dragon has been adapted twice in twenty years, once in 1986 (as Michael Mann’s MANHUNTER) and another in 2002.

The mystery persists to this day; Has Harris deliberately played a trick on Hollywood by writing a novel that was almost unfilmable, or did he simply go off the deep end of sanity? Or was he simply having fun at his fans’ expense, writing a novel that was sure to piss them off?

Transforming protagonist Clarice Starling from her goody-two-shoes persona in The Silence of the Lambs to a bitter, disillusioned woman on the verge of a break-down in Hannibal was just the first step. The second was to take the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS portrait of Hannibal as a popular hero and make him even more so, by refining his qualities and showing someone even worse than he was in comparison. Here, Lecter turns out to be a charming man of considerable talents and erudition, able to work his way in an academic job in Florence, play the piano, enjoy life’s beautiful things and second-guess Stephen Hawking on advanced physics. (!) Meanwhile, the character of Mason Verger is introduced, and he makes Lecter look like a perfect gentleman. For starters, Verger is one of Lecter’s old victims; years ago, blown on drugs and encouraged by good old Hannibal, he cut off most of his face, fed it to the dogs and somehow survived, looking a lot like a faceless corpse. While that would be enough to cramp anyone’s style, Verger has one tiny advantage, being the inheriting heir of a massive meat-packing industrial empire. (An empire which thrived on such innovations as feeding animal remains to pigs, in an oh-so-subtle symbolic detail.) Flush with money and driven by revenge, he’s still looking for Lecter, snooping over the FBI’s shoulders while not handcuffed to mere trivialities such as ethics and the rule of law.

If you’ve seen the film version of Hannibal, you will recognize our three main characters -the damaged heroine, the charming killer, the ultra-rich monster- more or less intact. All of the film’s insanity is to be found in the pages of the novel, from Clarice’s contrived difficulties with the FBI to Krendler’s last supper. What you can’t know is how much more silly stuff wasn’t shown on-screen. Verger’s bodybuilding lesbian sister, who wants to impregnate her partner using her brother’s genetic material (even though he abused her during childhood). Lecter’s memory palace (see DREAMCATCHER for that, or better yet—don’t!), along with the central trauma that caused him to turn evil (hint; sisters are big in this book.). The story of Florence’s Il Mostro, because you can never have enough serial killers in one single Harris novel. And so on…

The biggest change, of course, is the ending. While the film wussed out and presented sort of a happy ending, Hannibal goes to the end of Clarice’s perversion and… well, I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you, right? Suffice to say that Jodie Foster had her reasons to decline playing the character again after she read the book. Her fate is much, much worse that simple death.

But you know what? Even if Hannibal is the longest-running, most straight-faced prank played by an author on his public, it’s still worth reading. Much like the film was schlock horror directed with mastery, the book is schlock horror written with an impeccable sense of style. The book is playful, telling passages in the past, other describing the present and sometimes even warning the reader about what could happen if it went any closer to the characters. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to read, and Harris’ gift for research makes the end result always fascinating to read, even if it’s totally insane. You’ve been warned. But then again, so was I.

Against All Enemies, Harold Coyle

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Forge, 2002, 412 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34169-7

Whenever the United States get around to fight their second civil war, I want it to be like in Against All Enemies: Dull, pointless, with few casualties and lasting only a few days. But what works for me in reality certainly isn’t what I’m looking for in fiction. Harold Coyle’s latest novel is, quite simply, a bore and to bore readers is the most unforgivable thing a so-called “thriller” writer can do.

The good news is that Against All Enemies brings back Scott Dixon, the hero of many of Coyle’s best novels (Sword Point, Bright Star, The Ten Thousand, etc.) The bad news is that there was absolutely no reason to do so. In fact, given the amount of material that Coyle voluntarily ignores in re-establishing his character and his family, it seems even worse than useless. While the “adventure in Mexico” (Trial by Fire) is very briefly mentioned, almost no mention is made of Dixon’s previous adventures in Iran, Egypt and -very importantly- Germany. Like with Clancy and Brown’s latest works, the perils of juggling an imagined military history concurrently with our “real” history get to be a strain. Best to play in an entirely new universe every time, otherwise the amount of material to conveniently forget gets to be too obvious to ignore.

Given that the emphasis, this time around, is on Dixon’s son (a brand-new army man by the time the novel gets underway) one would have thought that this would have been a perfect opportunity to get a brand new cast of characters. But no, and the contrivances are annoying. Here, Dixon’s wife (the always-beautiful-and-perfect Jan Fields-Dixon) is depicted as having a national-class TV show from the American Midwest. By sheer coincidence (of course), she finds herself part of the catalyst of the political crisis which will precipitate the Idaho uprising her husband and son will have to fight. As if that wasn’t enough, another returning character, Nancy Kozak, conveniently happens to be around (as a reservist, no less) whenever the action heats up. Ah, the curse of too much character background… Beyond “kill your darlings”, some writers need to be told “ditch your universe.”

Now here’s the interesting part: The previous Dixon novel (Code of Honor) dates from 1994. While Against All Enemies is copyright 2002, Coyle mentions in his afterword that it was originally written in 1996. What happened next in Coyle’s career is well-known: a detour through civil war fiction, followed by a return to contemporary military fiction in the late nineties. (Alas, with works such as the wretched Dead Hand) One can speculate as to why it wasn’t published in 1996. And one can speculate very nasty reasons indeed…

But why speculate when we can read the result? Even with years of revision, Against All Enemies still feels like a half-hearted attempt at a military thriller. While the premise is fantastic (A second American Civil War! What else do you need?) and so is the thematic intent to explore the conflict between serving one’s country versus the needs of one’s community, the result falls short of expectations. Any expectations.

While you’d think that the rebellion of a state against the federal government would be caused by something big, something worth fighting for, Against All Enemies gives the impression that this comes from a governor’s oversized ego and a botched raid by the FBI. While you’d think that Coyle could milk a lot of juice from this type of premise (USA fights a war with itself! Films of modern weaponry at 11!), it ends up being a few planes and a bunch of tanks against a militia. Not very impressive, not very interesting. Even as the sort-of-antagonist governor eyes Dixon’s wife, you’d think that there could be some place there for very personal stakes. Naah. Coyle! You wuss! I accuse you of holding back! If there’s one more rationale for ditching the old universe, it’s this: With brand-new characters, you can blow them all up if you want.

I really wanted to like this novel, and there are in fact a few passages I like here and there. But overall, Against All Enemies is just a snore, and that’s the worst thing I can say about a thriller. I can’t even work up any kind of hate for it like I did for Dead Hand (which was a much, much worse novel, though). At best, I won’t remember any of it in a few weeks. And that’s just too bad. I want my fiction to be striking and my reality to be unmemorable, not the other way around.

The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Putnam, 2003, 431 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-399-15079-X

The most encouraging thing about Tom Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger is how comparatively slim it looks. After years of bloated 800+ pages novels with severe pacing problems, one could hope that Clancy had finally wizened up. Unfortunately, the length of this book ends up being one of the most deceptive things about a very disappointing novel.

I wanted not to bury this novel, but to praise it; after all, I have all of the Clancy novel in hardcover on my bookshelves, and despite our increasingly diverging political views, I have always kept a soft spot for his no-nonsense style of writing and his gift for plotting.

Sadly, little of that ends up in The Teeth of the Tiger, a novel that ends up smelling as if it escaped from those infamous “Tom Clancy’s” derivative lines. The setup seems depressingly familiar; as more evil middle-eastern terrorists plan a dastardly attack on America, a top-secret group of intelligence operatives fights to keep them away. It really does end up feeling a lot like Clancy trying to second-guess 11/09/2001, with all the predictable plotting that ensues.

Had Clancy moved away from his Ryanverse, it may not have been too bad, but unfortunately enough, this novel takes place after the end of Jack Ryan Sr.’s presidency and features Jack Ryan Jr. taking his father’s initial role as an analyst in the intelligence community. The big, big problem is that Clancy has to juggle twenty years of Ryanverse events with real-world history. So September 11 is somewhere in the background, along with Afghanistan and Homeland Security, but also the Ebola attack that led to a ground war in Saudi Arabia (Executive Orders) and the whole Red October business. Curiously, little is said of the plane crash on the Capitol (Debt of Honor) or the Chinese nuclear strike (The Bear and the Dragon), presumably because those didn’t fit. But the whole setup is increasingly far-fetched and Clancy would have been better off just scrapping the whole Ryanverse altogether rather than present an increasingly problematic “next generation”. A smaller problem is that the end of the Ryan presidency is glossed over, along with the dramatic death of one major fan-favourite character; most will feel cheated by the curt paragraph that describes what happened.

But wait! It gets worse! Clancy so loooves his characters that, guess what, those dastardly terrorists attack a mall where, as it happens, two of our main characters are shopping for shoes. Now, it just so happens that those two are members of the secretive “Campus” where, it just so happens, also works Jack Ryan Jr. Who, it just so happens, is not just also their cousin, but it also tracking down a guy who, it just so happens, is handling the finances for those very same terrorists! Wow! Some would call this series of links very convenient, but who knows—coming from Clancy, it just may be genius in disguise!

That’s bad enough, but what really hurts is the ideological position at the centre of the book. Basically, The Teeth of the Tiger is a book-length rationalization of why it’s quite OK for a shadowy agency, not controlled by the government, to go out in foreign countries and kill suspected associates of terrorists. No less. “The Campus” is an agency outside federal regulations —thinly protected by a stash of blank presidential pardons— which gets in the business of assassination as the novel begins. Oh, our two would-be-assassins do have a few doubts… but a convenient terrorist attack in which they witness the death of a little boy (awww) wipes out every possible moral qualms they may have kept from Sunday school. (“They’re the bad guys, bro!”) And so they go on their merry way, rubbing out people on the streets of Europe using information that may not be entirely solid.

Is this supposed to be good? Heroic? Lawful? Just? Am I the only one who still thinks vigilante-style retribution isn’t the sum of all answers? That it’s a simple-and-dumb solution to a complex problem? Is it perfectly acceptable to decree (without accountability, without recourse, without remorse) the death penalty on four targets whose tenuous support to terrorism was merely financial and logistical? Anyone who’s read Clancy for a while might justifiably ask whether this is from the same person who wrote Clear and Present Danger, a novel in which Jack Ryan Sr. went against his own government because it was involved in violent off-the-book operations which betrayed the spirit of the American Constitution.

It would be inaccurate (and libellous) to portray Clancy as a racist or an anti-Muslim. But his portrayal of the bad guys (“bad guys” and “good guys” are helpfully pointed out in the novel, so don’t worry about making the distinction for yourself) is crude enough to warrant special attention. (By far the most hilariously offensive moment comes as one of the terrorists lays, dying, on the floor of a sports-goods store. One of the Killer Catholic Twins has the decency to put a football in his limp hands and add “I want you to carry this to hell with you. It’s a pigskin, —-hole, made from the skin of a real Iowa pig.” [P.252] Touching; I could hear legions of Rush Limbaugh fans weeping.) Clancy even feels obliged to add two pages on how “terrorism had about as much to do with the Islamic religion as it did with Catholic and Protestant Irishmen” [P.383] (Ever the good lad, Jack Ryan Jr. comes across this stupendous insight by “googling his way into Islam”. And yet people keep saying that a good conservative education has no benefits…) Fair enough, but next time it may be helpful to actually have real and realistic Arab/Muslim characters rather than making all of his protagonists good-old Catholic-Irish boys mowing down terrorists through Europe. This, coupled with other typical conservative tics such as the knee-jerk euro-bashing (with a particular dislike for the French; one wonders if those slurs will be kept in translation), media bashing and a rather short-sighted view of politicians, finally makes me wonder if Clancy, for all his gifts, may just not be as smart as I thought he was. Or getting dumber by the book.

Certainly, other areas of the novel aren’t much brighter: The plotting also has its share of dumb moves; once the terrorists are identified and one lead is uncovered in the financial labyrinths of Europe, you would think that the best way to react would be to study the subject and identify his links to other terrorists. Naaah; Clancy goes gung-ho happy and immediately send his good little Catholic twin assassins to rub out the guy in a busy street. They do that in the hope of forcing other guys to react, calling it “recon-by-fire”. Uh-huh. Don’t let Clancy anywhere near the Organized Crime units, please. Other deeply dumb stunts abound, such as sending a team of fraternal twins (their mom “must have punched out two eggs that month”, as it’s delicately referred to on pages 32 and 89) as a tracking/assassination team. You’d think that a suspect might go “huh?” after seeing two eerily similar guys around (See P.74: “People often remarked on their resemblance, though
it was even more apparent when they were apart”), but apparently that doesn’t seem to bother Clancy very much. (Neither does the idea of sending an untrained ex-president’s son on an assassination mission, for that matter. Makes you wonder what Chelsea Clinton truly does in her spare time, doesn’t it?)

Once again, there are clear signs that Putnam’s editors have all given up on Clancy. Beyond the pacing problems, the bone-headed plotting, the flamboyant jingoism (anyone even considering an opposing viewpoint is accused of defending the devil), this novel (like the two before it) suffers from bouts of bad writing. Once again, every half-clever line is repeated at least twice in the course of the novel. (Some men may need killin’ more than horses need stealin’, but some novels sure need editin’) Some sentences have missing words. See if you can make sense of this comma-ridden one: “What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they’d even had them in the White House—at his father’s insistence.” [P.214]

Technical accuracy? Don’t make me laugh. The time during which Clancy was considered an authority has long passed. Since Rainbow Six‘s memorable “life detectors” blunder, Clancy doesn’t even try to fact-check his stuff. Here, the NSA routinely crack all electronic traffic as a matter of routine, and our characters can check not just their email, but everyone else’s too. Convenient, especially when the all-magical “Campus” can simply slurp off the traffic being exchanged (over the airwaves!) between the NSA and the CIA. Isn’t there anything a rogue operation won’t do?

Then there are the characters. Good little Jack Jr., praising his pop at every second internal monologue. The Killer Catholic Twins, who never seem to be any less than perfect. But then again, they’re all there to kill terrorists; no further development is needed. It’s certainly not as if we get to know them through adversity, because they just never fail. (Well, except for the odd occasional spilt wine, in a hideous plot cheat no one is going to forgive.)

All of which may have been forgiven if the book actually had some suspense in it. But save for a few moments of tension whenever the action is about to begin, The Teeth of the Tiger is a thrill-free thriller. The mid-book terrorist attack has its moments or two, but everything pretty much goes like planned for the rest of the book. It’s dull and linear with no surprises: there is nothing in here that even looks like “rising stakes”. The second half of the novel is pure eye-for-an-eye neo-conservative wanking, as our two good little wisecracking Catholic Assassins joyride through Europe (driving brand-name cars), only stopping to kill the next terrorist-by-association. It brought back to mind a similar trip in Nelson deMille’s The Lion’s Game… except that in deMille’s case, it was a terrorist travelling through America to kill American servicemen. Hmm…

Suffice to say that there is no heightening tension in The Teeth of the Tiger. It ends when there are no more easy targets to kill. The first half reads like a watered-down mixture of The Sum of All Fears (terrorists plan an attack in excruciating detail) and Rainbow Six (secret terrorist-killing unit is put together) while the second all brings to mind a thin rehash of Red Rabbit with Ryan Jr.’s contrived arrival in the field and his rite of passage where he proves his all-American manhood by killing one of the terrorists. But if you truly want to compare this latest novel with something bearing the Clancy name, you’d have to go and check the awful “Tom Clancy’s” derivative work; this latest novel feels as contrived, as lazy and as dumb as anything in the “Net Force”, “Op-Center” or “Power Plays” series. (Indeed the idea of a “good guy” rich conservative having his elite force of operatives ready to kill people around the world is a direct riff on Politika, the first “Power Plays” book.) The derivatives have finally tainted the main stream of Clancy’s work: Once you start playing with easy money…

Worse of all is the realization that the end of the book is merely a customary one that solves nothing and simply sets up a sequel —or, goodness forbid, a series of sequel. (Last lines: “The enemy could not possibly know what kind of cat was in the jungle. They’d hardly met the teeth. Next, they’d meet the brain” [P.431] Oooh!) Don’t believe the length of the book; this is merely part one of a bigger (but maybe not all that greater) work. It’s not exactly a cliffhanger, but all that’s missing is a “to be continued”.

If I take a deep breath and temporarily disengage my liberal/pacifist/Catholic ethical module, I’d still like to point out that the book is clearly written and that Clancy’s depiction of the military/espionage world (aside from all of that “Campus” garbage) still feels much more credible than most of his colleagues. You can easily read The Teeth of the Tiger in a single quiet afternoon, though the question arise whether you really want to do so. I certainly would have been pleased to savage the book even more if I hadn’t read The Teeth of the Tiger right after Joe Weber’s truly wretched Primary Target, another Middle-Eastern-terrorist book that -in comparison- clearly shows the difference between a hack like Weber and a flawed-but-competent novelist like Clancy.

In Science Fiction fan circles, the gradual slide in mediocrity of a once-great author is often explained away by saying that “the brain-eater got him”. One can reliably track the careers of such luminaries as Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein to that point where every successive book gets worse, and worse, and worse. I think that with The Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy has confirmed the trend of his last few books, and may even have entered the final, terminal part of his career; the brain-eater has got him, and the results are spectacular.

(While doing research for this review, I came along this rather telling quote from Clancy himself, posting on alt.books.tom-clancy (June 30th, 2003): “For those of you who think you can do it better than I do, please give it a try. If my pride can go before the fall, you own it to your intellectual integrity (chuckle) to expose yourselves as I do. You know, as I approach -gasp- 60 I find myself becoming less tolerant of critics. Perhaps this is because they are like reporters, or-worse-politicians.” Well, what can I possibly add to that?)

Ashes of Victory (Honor Harrington 9), David Weber

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Baen, 2000, 560 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-57854-5

I had been warned, early in my quest to read all ten novels of Honor Harrington’s saga, that the series took a sharp downturn in the last few volumes. It seemed difficult to believe during the first few books; how could such an enjoyable series turn sour?

Well, after reading the ninth book, it’s now more than possible; it’s obvious. What started as a fun romp through classical military fiction in zippy three-hundred-pages instalments with plenty of overdone space battles has now degenerated in a contest of endurance with overwritten behemoths that tell the story in a self-satisfied manner that belies way too much overindulgence.

When we last saw omnipotent Honor Harrington and her magical treecat Nimitz (I’m not beyond sarcasm at this point), she had successfully managed to escape the galaxy’s most secure prison, freeing half a million political prisoners in the process and destroying a sizable fraction of the enemy naval forces. No less.

The previous novel, Ashes of Victory, ended as Harrington ran back to friendly territory, leaving all the tedious mopping-up work to be done—we assumed—during the two novels. Er, not so. Almost half of Ashes of Victory is spent tying the loose ends of the previous volume. As Honor meets and greets practically every single member of the Harrington household, she engages in a tedious series of insufferable discussions in which both parties do their best to be as smug as possible. Trivial points are explained in excruciating details, well past the point at which any reasonably patient readers cries uncle. Meanwhile, the treecats’ capabilities are expanded once more (this time, they’re learning language. Quantum physics research can’t be far behind.) and Harrington gradually becomes queen Elisabeth III’s trusted confidante. The only upside to the whole sequence (indeed, the whole novel) is that we’re saved most mentions of the icky Harrington/Alexander romance.

That’s because Alexander (“White Haven”, whatever) is off grabbing the latest Manticoran technology and kicking Havenite butt. The war (launched all the way back in volume 3) finally ends here, though it ends with a abrupt twist: Rather than fight it out like men, those evil cheese-eating Havenite actually surrender! Those perfidious monkeys! How can they dare?! Heck, by that time even the readers are applauding, as the war seems to be won through large scale space battles… that are never shown on-screen. Weber’s tendency to explain useless things and gloss over major events is never clearer than in Ashes of Victory, where even the fate of several major antagonists are briefly explained away in a sentence or two even as treecat minutiae takes pages to resolve. When the ending finally arrives after chapters and chapters of self-satisfied armchair bon mots between Harrington’s best friends, Weber rushes through dozen of dramatically important events in mere pages in order to wrap up the novel.

Worst of all is that while all of this is going on, Honor Harrington is safely back home, managing her stead and setting in her new job as… a teacher. That’s right; the war ends without her. In fact, the only heroics are late, late, late in the book, and seem tacked-on to contrive Weber’s pre-determined conclusion. Those who have been charting Harrington’s ascent through the ranks will be pleased to note that she ends this particular novel on quasi-kissing terms with the Queen.

But that’s not much of a relief for everyone else who had to slog through the novel. The tell-don’t-show style of plotting is bad enough, but when you couple it with the grating dialogues and the overall lack of energy, well, suddenly it’s just as well if this is the penultimate volume of the series as it currently exists. There’s only one more Harrington book left on my bookshelves, War of Honor, and that’s more than enough for me. At this point, I don’t care all that much to see what happens to her next.

When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bantam Spectra, 1987, 276 pages, C$5.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-25555-X

While I’ll be the first to champion SF’s many virtues and defend it against all unbelievers, I’m not blind to its many fault and won’t pretend to ignore them. One of the biggest of them, for instance, has always been SF’s lack of cultural awareness. Borne out of the social homogeneity of early SF writers (most of which were male, young and Caucasian), the genre’s cultural horizon has always been firmly Anglo-Saxon, from copious references to Shakespeare to a religious outlook that was seldom other than Judeo-Christian. Heck, women had to wait until relatively recently to be granted access to this boy’s club, let alone people of other ethnicities and religions. For a genre that claims a stake to all of humankind’s destiny, science-fiction has often assumed that the future would be all-WASP.

Things are getting better nowadays, thanks to an increased diversity of authorial voices and the slow realization that you can’t get away with such outrageous simplifications in a world where the North-American readership itself is becoming more heterogeneous. Still, the length of the distance to cover can best be demonstrated by the continuing impact of George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails.

In many ways, there’s nothing very special about the plot of this novel. Here, our protagonist is a private investigators (stuck between the criminals and the police, as usual) who is asked by a shadowy crime lord to investigate a series of gruesome murders. Save for some of the background details, the first half of the novel is familiar to everyone with a taste for noir mystery fiction. Only at mid-novel, when the protagonist has to undergo radical body modifications, does it become obvious that, yes, this is true cyberpunk science-fiction, where the street is almost a character and where the future turns out to be much like today… except with more lethal gadgets.

It reads well and feels great, mind you: Effinger’s prose is perfectly compelling and it doesn’t take a long time to be sucked into the story, as familiar as it may be. The prose is simple, stylish, accessible and full of local colour. Indeed that “local colour” ends up being the novel’s main claim to fame.

Because When Gravity Fails takes place in a future where both the United States and the Soviet Union have imploded in dozens of splinter states, essentially wiping them out of the global geopolitical map. For other countries, this means that they get to run their own affairs, without political power plays by one side or another (or, in today’s post-Cold War world, without American influence). The novel takes place in the Budayeen, a dangerously decadent section of an unnamed Arabic city on the south shore of the Mediteranean sea. (Effinger isn’t particularly forthcoming as to the location; I thought some clues may point to Tripoli, but there’s nothing I can refer to in the novel to bolster this claim)

Our narrator is Marîd Audran, a young Algerian/French Arab whose religious convictions vary according to the person he’s dealing with. His girlfriend Yasmin used to be a boy (not that there’s anything unusual with that in Marîd’s world), his liver is bullet-proof and his contacts are to be found anywhere between the police station and the sewer.

Thanks to him, we get to visit the Budayeen and immerse ourselves in a completely foreign culture that’s as fascinating as any of the alien worlds to be found elsewhere in SF. What makes this novel work is the environment in which the story takes place. Even as Bruce Sterling was developing his globalhead, Effinger was right there, showing us that the future wouldn’t necessarily be Americanized. The fun of When Gravity Fails is in large part in hearing Marîd bitch against other ethnicities and explain the particularities of the world he lives in. Here, age-old Arabic traditions meld successfully with high-technology and the result is so memorable that we can only ask why Effinger’s cycle (there are two sequels to this volume) has remained a curio even more than fifteen years later.

No matter; thanks to the cultural content, When Gravity Fails remains relevant, readable and enjoyable even as other cyberpunk novels of the era feel like tired clichés. It’s a good story, but the atmosphere is just terrific: seek out the novel if you have to… it’s well worth it.

[October 2007: The sequel, A Fire in the Sun, is more of the same: The crime plot is standard SF/mystery, but it’s the setting that captivates. On the other hand, it’s more familiar and not quite as fresh. Worth a look for fans of the first volume, but don’t expect to be bowled over.]

Knight Hawk, Pat O’Connell

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Leisure, 1997, 358 pages, C$6.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-8439-4253-3

If you’re looking for a quick trash techno-thriller, hop on board, because Knight Hawk is all guns and few brains, a guilty pleasure that’ll leave your mind half-satisfied.

This is a novel that doesn’t dawdle, even at its very beginning. By page 50, a “statuesque and shapely dark-haired woman” called Kim Kenada (Brief AKIRA flashback: “Tetsuo!” “Kenada!”, etc…) has commandeered a top-of-the-line F-15 armed with two nuclear weapons and taken off, leaving behind burning trucks, a few crashed planes and a trail of bodies. As the entire US Air Force scrambles after her, it’s obvious that she’s got scores to settle… and enough nuclear explosives to reduce, say, New York or Washington to glowing cinders.

But who is that woman and what does she want? Knight Hawk‘s only deviation from its tight pacing occurs as we flashback and see Kenada’s younger years, and the cold calculating way in which she murders her cheating husband. (See? Nothing to worry about; merely one run-of-the-mill psychotic terrorist!) Otherwise, the novel seems paced in real-time, taking place between 19:05 and 23:00 on one clear January night. Impressive conceit, and it actually does work quite well.

How well? That would be judged by the number of fun scenes O’Connell manages to cram in a few hundred pages. It’s obvious from the get-go that Knight Hawk is an action novel through-and-through. The dogfights quickly accumulate as Kenada manages (from a plane she’s never flown before!) to shoot down dozens of expert fighter pilots. (What can we say? According to the novel, she learnt it all on her IBM PC.) One gets the impression that most of O’Connell’s research was performed using Microprose’s “F-15 Strike Eagle III” flight simulator. On the “ridiculously easy” setting.

The centrepiece of the book is undoubtedly a massive dogfight above and between Manhattan’s skyscrapers, as dozens of jets cause untold damage to the New York skyline while trying to catch that one PC-trained rookie terrorist. Missiles fly, jets explode, windows shatter from sonic booms, Central Park gets hit a few times and it all culminates both with a fly-between the World Trade Center and a nuclear detonation above the city. Whew! I’d pay good money for a movie version of this novel, only for this crazy sequence alone. It’s exhilarating in its go-for-broke willingness to ignore most of what we’d consider to be normal physics. Most of all, it’s tremendous fun. The rest of the novel is downhill from there despite a nifty climax above Washington DC landmarks.

I would be less than forthright if I didn’t point out the superbly over-the-top quality of the ending, which manages to run all the way through the very last paragraph before revealing the grand bogeyman behind this whole fiendish plot—our good old friend Saddam! If by that time you’re not shrieking with laughter, well, I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do for you. Knight Hawk just isn’t the kind of novel you’re likely to enjoy.

On the other hand, it is true that not many people are likely to enjoy Knight Hawk, if only because it’s such a terrible novel. Evil protagonist Kenada is significantly more appealing than any of the other cardboard characters only because she actually has a personality of sorts, as clichéd as it may be. The rest are essentially names and pay grades, with scant place in the plot but in shouting orders and exclamations of astonishment. One pilot manages to accidentally destroy sections of the Staten Island Bridge, an oil tanker and at least two other aircrafts (including his own), and the best the novel can do is the equivalent of an embarrassed grin—and damn the dead civilians. The quality of the writing isn’t much better than adequate, and is frequently dull when not describing action scenes.

And so it comes to pass that even though Knight Hawk contains more honest mayhem than any five randomly-selected techno-thrillers, it’s still a very disappointing book. A better writer could have done miracles with those insane action scenes or even the bare outlines of the plot. As it currently stands, though, Knight Hawk‘s only literary merit is in the compressed pacing. It’ll be of interest to military fiction-fans with an unquenchable penchant for Cool Scenes, but few others. Too bad; there’s a lot of wasted potential there.

Yamakasi – Les samouraïs des temps modernes (2001)

Yamakasi – Les samouraïs des temps modernes (2001)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In French, On TV, September 2003) Luc Besson has turned in a one-man co-producing machine these days, and like with most people who overreach, the quality of his films has spiralled downward. Yamakasi is one of the lesser work attached to his name, a satisfying crime story starring disenfranchised inhabitants of the French suburbs but not much more than that. The problem is that for all of its “The Modern Samurais” tagline, Yamakasi stars petty thieves, and there’s not much that’s noble in stealing rich people to pay for a medical procedure. (C’mon: it’s really cheap emotional manipulation!) In many ways, it’s a thinly-veiled “extreme sports” film with a thin plot covering action scenes, in this case “urban climbing” where people simply grab the nearest building and go to the top. Unfortunately, it’s curiously tepid when comes the moment to show some action: one sequence involving hopping thieves and attacks dogs in a two-floor lobby sticks in mind, but the rest isn’t all that memorable. Once again, the Besson-penned script features dumb dialogue and knee-jerk populist rich-bashing (including the requisite digs at politicians, always a popular target in France) which gets to be tiresome when there isn’t much substance elsewhere in the plot. There’s a certain narrative energy, mind you, and a somewhat satisfying conclusion. I also quite liked the ethnic diversity of the cast, especially when it mean we get to look at Tunisian-Egyptian hottie Amel Djemel. But none of this makes Yamakasi worth a bother, so you might as well just wait until it plays on TV one weekend and just avoid changing the channel.