January 2014 – Page 2 – Christian Sauvé

The Colony (2013)

ByChristian Sauvé 2014-01-022014-11-04 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, January 2014) “It starts snowing… and never stops” is a particularly Canadian nightmare, so it’s no surprise if low-budget Canadian SF/horror film The Colony starts with that premise as an excuse to justify its post-apocalyptic premise. There is some intriguing world-building in depicting self-sufficient underground bunkers, and some of the underlying universe surrounding the Colonies would have been fascinating to explore. Unfortunately, The Colony eventually degenerates into nothing more than a zombie cannibal schlock-fest: couldn’t anything been more interesting than yet another one of those? And yet, The Colony isn’t to be dismissed entirely, mostly for the way it stretches its budget and for the chilling atmosphere it sustains from beginning to middle. Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton are the featured actors and do fine work, although their screen presence is more limited than you’d think. Otherwise, there isn’t anything particularly noteworthy here: the meagre plot is dull, derivative and barely manages to be stretched over to nearly 90 minutes. The thrills are familiar, and the conclusion could have used a ray of sunshine. Direct-to-VOD fodder it is.

Movie Review

White House Down (2013)

ByChristian Sauvé 2014-01-012014-08-14 Movie Review

(Video on Demand, January 2014) Director Roland Emmerich is a consummate entertainer, and showing White House Down alongside Olympus Has Fallen, the other great White-House-siege film of 2013, only serves to list why he’s so good at what he does: Good balance between action and humor, clean editing, just-enough character development and a willingness to go insane at appropriate moments… along with self-acknowledgement of outlandish material. The numerous points of comparison between both films only serve to highlight what White House Down does best: Channing Tatum is credible enough as the accidental hero (he’s got confidence without swagger, making him relatable), Jamie Foxx is just fine as a “47^th president” clearly modeled after the 44^th one, the “threat matrix” idea for the antagonist is ingeniously-executed, the action sequences are vivid without being gory, and the film manages to navigate a tricky line between national symbolism and overblown jingoism. White House Down‘s crowd-pleasing dynamism means that the film as a whole feels like one big competently-executed formula and that’s just fine: the film is easy to watch and enjoy, the only sour note coming late in the conclusion as another wholly-unnecessary antagonist is revealed with a Scooby-Doo-level lack of subtlety. The film is possibly never better than when it acknowledges its own presidential-lawn car chase absurdity with a well-placed “Well, that’s not something you see every day.” –although the “just like in Independence Day” quote comes close. Good turns by numerous supporting players (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Richard Jenkins, James Woods and a remarkable Jason Clarke whose character is best imagined as being exactly “that guy” from Zero Dark Thirty) add just enough to make the film even more enjoyable. While White House Down comes with the usual action-blockbuster caveats (formula all the way, and don’t think too much about it), it’s a remarkably successful example of what it tries to do, and it’s hard to give a better recommendation for this kind of film.