Movie Review

  • S.W.A.T.: Firefight (2011)

    S.W.A.T.: Firefight (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2011) At a time where the video rental business is crumbling, the Direct-to-Video market is undergoing a curious rehabilitation, even when it comes to cheap action movies.  Helped along with polyvalent digital cameras and cheaper post-production processes, DTV films now look better than ever, and manage to sport scripts, actors and direction that are well above the mediocrity we’ve gotten used to in movies that never played in theaters.  S.W.A.T.: Firefight looks like a perfect example of the form: Sequel-in-name-only to a better-known theatrical action film solely for marketing purposes (there’s practically no story link to the original), it’s a reasonably entertaining way to spend an hour and a half.  Part of the appeal is due to square-jawed Gabriel Macht in the lead role, as a Los Angeles SWAT leader sent to Detroit in order to train the local team.  Refreshingly, the first half of the film adopts a convincingly realistic attitude in portraying a competent SWAT team with minimal dysfunction: S.W.A.T.: Firefight is never as interesting as when it’s showing off the team training, bonding and working together in showcase sequences.  The choice to set the film in the ruins of Detroit is intriguing.  Shannon Kane makes a good impression as a tough new recruit.  Unfortunately, the second half of the film gets farther away from the SWAT rationale the longer it focuses on another improbably all-powerful antagonist who takes a personal dislike to the hero.  It’s not as it Robert Patrick isn’t good, but that the film becomes a lot more predictable once the plot is sketched, and far less interesting as a result.  (It also ends a bit too quickly.)  At least the film moves with energy; director Benny Boom uses his limited budget effectively, even though touches like a gun fastened to a camera give an unpleasant video-game jolt out of the film’s experience.  While the picture quality can’t escape a certain video softness, S.W.A.T.: Firefight looks good, goes by pleasantly, scores a few good scenes and exceeds the low expectation associated with a DTV film.

  • Porky’s (1981)

    Porky’s (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2011) For decades, Porky’s kept a place in film history as an unexpected answer to the question “What’s the highest-grossing Canadian movie of all time?”  It isn’t much of a claim to fame, but it got me interested enough to give it a look.  What has made it to 2011 isn’t much of a classic.  Porky’s isn’t particularly raunchy by the standards of the films it influenced, but it’s certainly unsophisticated, low-budget, scattered and badly structured.  The plot often goes away for a while, returning in-between practical joke set-pieces and other slice of 1950s life as seen from the early eighties.  Feeling a bit long even at 94 minutes, the film is almost pathologically male-centric (women characters are either jokes or cyphers), and feels bigoted even despite some lip-service paid to race-blind male bonding.  Still, there’s something almost endearing about the hormone-driven characters, the carefree atmosphere of movie comedy high-schools and the low-stakes nature of the subplots.  There’s also a pleasing quality to the abundant dialogue between the characters, and a nice fluidity to the way the camera moves in a few scenes.  As far as historical impact goes, Kim Cattrall makes a howling impression in a secondary role; more seriously, you can almost see in Porky’s the blueprint for countless other teenage sex comedies leading straight to American Pie and its ilk.  It’s neither particularly sophisticated nor memorable, but it’s not an entire waste of time.  The “25th anniversary Edition” DVD has no extra features (not even subtitles) and the picture often shows signs of digital over-compression, which is enough to make anyone wonder how bad the regular DVD edition can be.

  • The Hangover (2009)

    The Hangover (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2011) I’m just as surprised as anyone else that I lasted two years without seeing one of the cultural movie touchstones of 2009, the R-rated comedy that affirmed the dominance of the arrested-male-teenager as the comic archetype of the time.  I have little patience with the form and didn’t expect to like The Hangover much, but as it happens there’s quite a bit to like in its cheerfully anarchic approach to plotting, as it uses flashbacks, comic detective work and wild characters in one big pile.  Todd Phillips’ directing is assured and neatly guides viewers through a more complex narrative structure than is the norm for comedies.  It helps a lot that the characters are interesting in their own right: Bradley Cooper’s natural charisma transforms a borderline-repellent role into something nearly cool, while Ed Helms proves a lot less annoying than I’d initially guessed and Ken Jeong supercharges every single scene he’s in.  Small roles for Mike Tyson (not someone I’d hold as a role model) and Jeffrey Tambor also work well, although I still can’t think of Zach Galifianakis as anything but obnoxious (and discover retroactively that he played the same character in Due Date).  For all of the icky what-happens-in-Vegas immaturity, there are a few chuckles here and there: it’s hard to begrudge a film as likable as it is foul-mouthed.  Alas, I didn’t go completely crazy for the film: Fonder flashbacks to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (curiously unacknowledged) and the far funnier absurdist amnesia masterpiece Dude, Where’s My Car? held me back.  But comedy’s notoriously subjective, and it’s not as if I actually disliked The Hangover: I just found it a bit underwhelming, most likely conceived from assumptions that I don’t share.

  • X: First Class (2011)

    X: First Class (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2011) I wasn’t expecting anything after the underwhelming Wolverine, but this X-Men: First Class is a return to the strengths of the original trilogy: Some thematic heft, good acting performances, clever sequences and an sense of cool that doesn’t fall into self-indulgence.  Even as a prequel, it works just fine: There’s some dramatic irony at the way the characters come together and split apart, and the script is wildly successful at weaving the October Missile Crisis in the fabric of the plot.  James McAvoy may be good as Charles Xavier, but it’s Michael Fassbender who steals the show as Magneto, with plenty of good supporting roles for people such as Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence and Oliver Platt.  (Meanwhile, January Jones -for all she brings to the film by parading around in white thigh-highs and gogo boots- seems unacceptably stiff).  The initial X-Men trilogy worked well in large part due to its thematic ambitions about bigotry, normalcy and self-acceptance; if First Class doesn’t do much than rehash the same issues from “didn’t ask, didn’t tell” to “mutant and proud”, it’s still far more interesting than other recent meaningless comic-book films like Thor.  The idea to set the film in the early sixties has refreshing stylistic implications (despite the anachronism of late-sixties fashion) that carry through to the Saul-Bass-tinged closing credit sequence.  Director Matthew Vaughn manages to helm a surprisingly talky film with the right mixture of action and character moments, while giving some energy to the whole.  X-Men: First Class may be a small victory for style over rehashed substance, but even in repeating itself it seems quite a bit better than the norm –and in presenting itself attractively, it makes itself difficult to criticize.  Suffice to say that it’s an enjoyable film, and even one that may get viewers to watch the original trilogy again –something that seemed improbable after Wolverine.

  • Conviction (2010)

    Conviction (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2011) There’s something almost earnestly old-fashioned about Conviction, a film that has few scruples about belonging to the “inspiring story based on true events” category.  Here, a woman puts herself through law school for the express purpose of freeing her wrongfully accused brother.  It ends pretty much like you’d think.  Still, Conviction is more polished than you’d expect: the setup is handled efficiently, and the early structure of the film seamlessly meshes two levels of flashbacks to explain how the characters got where they are.  This is the kind of film that showcases actors, and Hilary Swank is very good in the lead role, with a strikingly transformed Sam Rockwell as her wrongfully accused brother.  I almost always, for some reason, enjoy seeing Minnie Driver on-screen, and she gets a lot of screen time as a sidekick to the protagonist’s legal investigation.  For a film of its genre, it’s curiously restrained until the very end, and clever about how it takes us from one detail of the case to the next.  It doesn’t necessarily spring Conviction up and away from typical TV-movie-of-the-week fare (it will live best on DVD than it did in theaters), but it does pretend to be a dramatic awards contender, and it’s not misplaced in those ambitions.  It all piles up to amount to a satisfying film, but not an overly memorable one.

  • Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

    Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2011) Expectations ran high for this spin-off to the swashbuckling action/adventure trilogy of 2003-2007, but few expected this follow-up to be this… dull.  Despite sporting the same screenwriting team than the first films, this fourth entry feels flat, unremarkable and even boring at times.  The scale of everything has been scaled back (there are noticeably fewer special effects set-pieces, and not a single sea battle), while the sense of fun that seemed so contagious in the first two-third of the series seems lessened as well.  The first few scenes show how off-track the film feels, with broad comedy that fails to amuse, familiar hum-drum action beats and incoherent plotting.  Those who couldn’t get enough of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow will reconsider as the series tries to promote him to protagonist status, putting far too much dramatic demands on a trickster/comic foil character.  While neither Depp nor Penelope Cruz as the feisty Angelica do badly, they’re not very well served by a script that feels noticeably uneven, even sloppy to the point of confusing the audience.  The film even feels cheap at times, its climax taking place on an obvious soundstage, three groups clashing without much of a sense of involvement.  There are a number of scenes that work well (the palm tree escape shows flashes of the madcap action sequences that made the first two films of the series so memorable), but they never sustain any kind of narrative energy.  (A sequence set aboard a perilously-perched derelict Spanish galleon ends up noticeably short, to the point of cheating viewers.)  In fact, the surprise about this film is how much intriguing material it squanders without care.  You’d think that it would take work to mess up something involving mermaids, Blackbeard, the Fountain of Life, bottled ships, Keith Richards, Gemma Ward and Judi Dench in a split-second cameo… and yet the film unspools without raising too much excitement.  Even the film’s link to Tim Powers’ fantasy novel On Stranger Tides is slight: the film is “suggested by” the novel, but it seems more like a case of retroactive acknowledgement of the first film’s debt than any correspondence to the written work.  This way, at least, Powers gets plausible deniability when people will ask him about the mess that is the film itself.

  • Tigerland (2000)

    Tigerland (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) Director Joel Schumacher’s public profile arguably peaked in the late nineties with his disastrous stint as the director of the two worst Batman movies ever made.  Upon its release, Tigerland had been hailed as a return to form for the director and it’s easy to see why even a decade later: A Vietnam movie set entirely stateside, this drama studies the gradual transformation of a cynical young man as he goes through infantryman training in anticipation of a foreign deployment.  The harsh reality of the training is well-depicted, but it’s really then-unknown Colin Farrell’s performance as Roland Bozz that holds all the attention.  Mirroring contemporary audiences’ mindset, Bozz knows that Vietnam is a prodigious waste, has read all of the anti-war books and has little patience for the charade of training.  He’s a free spirit stuck in a machine grinding down everyone to the same component pieces.  It would have been easy for the film to turn into a comedy in which an unrepentant Bozz knows best, or a crude anti-war statement in which the only way out is to get out.  But Tigerland is after something slightly different in putting Bozz up against other facets of morality and the logical consequences of his own compassion.  There’s a lesson in leadership there, in reluctant responsibility and in the humanity to be found in even the most inhuman structures.  It helps that Tigerland’s dialogue are a notch over the average, and that the film feels gripping even though solely set during the training phase.  The film earned some critical notice upon release but practically no commercial success, thus qualifying for an evergreen “hidden gem” recommendation.  Never mind the often too-grainy cinematography and the impression that half the actors look like each other: This is a decent Vietnam picture, and it has a bit more than the usual in mind.

  • Defendor (2009)

    Defendor (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) Let’s face it: “Canadian Superhero film” sounds eccentric already. It’s not much of a surprise when Defendor ends up being a very unusual attempt to explore a more realistic take on the idea of a superhero: a mentally challenged loner who reinvents himself as a superhero in a crime-ridden city.  Billed as a comedy and containing a few genuinely funny moments, Defendor is nonetheless a fairly dark and unglamorous take on the superhero idea: There are no magical powers here, and the superhero fantasy itself is arguably laid bare as a coping mechanism by a mind unable to conceive of better alternatives.  (That it actually works may be the film’s lone concession to the demands of popular filmmaking.)  Nonetheless, the film itself is well-paced, and benefits from a superb performance by Woody Harrelson in the lead role.  Other notables such as Sandra Oh and Elias Koteas round up the cast, with a flashy cameo by Lisa Ray.  Where Defendor may end striking a wrong tone is in matters of expectations: There’s little conventional entertainment here, and the end of the film plays a bit loosely with the idea that it’s a comedy.  It’s a challenging film in its own way, and viewer’s expectations should be calibrated accordingly.

  • Fly Me to the Moon (2008)

    Fly Me to the Moon (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) As a life-long fan of the American Space Program, I’m amongst the most sympathetic of audiences when comes the time to see a kid’s film about the Apollo 11 moon mission.  Teenage flies going to the moon by sneaking onboard an Apollo capsule?  Well, why not: There are dumber premises out there and some of them are even titled Space Chimps.  In bits and pieces, Fly Me to the Moon works at portraying the adventure of the moon expeditions: The launch and landing sequences are nice pieces of work, a few scenes stop to breathe and play with the premise, the overall atmosphere is reverential, and Buzz Aldrin even pops up at the end to point out that no flies ever really accompanied them to the moon.  Alas, there’s the rest to consider: The scripting of the film is strictly aimed at the kids, with enough questionable plot choices to dull the edge of what could have been an adult-friendly picture.  The humour is dull, the dialogue is weak (while “Oh my Lord of the Flies!” is funny once, it doesn’t work a second time) and the plot threads barely make sense.  My appreciation of the film dropped like a stone the moment it introduced a subplot about Soviet spies: little about it made any sense, and I could have done without the introduction of fisticuffs, national rivalry and even more unanswered questions about why Soviet flies would be interested in bringing down an American mission.  The film does better when it’s about humankind-united exploration than zero-sum cheap nationalism.  (Never mind the blatant “American this, American that” content in a film made in Belgium.)  There’s a lot more to criticize, but all of it leads to the same place: Fly Me to the Moon is, at best, a bargain-basement choice for kids and a mere curiosity for space fans.

  • No Reservations (2007)

    No Reservations (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) A number of Hollywood cookie-cutter romantic films work on two levels: First, the plot engine is based on tried-and-true formula, with few surprises to offer.  Then there’s the wrapping in which the story takes place, which can focus on just about any area of human endeavour.  So it is that No Reservations is far more interesting when it describes the world of restaurant chefs and the personality quirks that come with a certain kind of hard-driven cooking professional than in the familiar story it’s trying to tell.  The dramatic and romantic entanglements are routine, but the glossy look behind the scenes of a kitchen is interesting, and the film doesn’t skimp on the small scenes that aim straight for the foodie audience.  Which is just as well, because a lot of the film’s plotting is made of short narrative loops suddenly resolved (whenever it remembers to advance the plot forward rather than show some fine cooking).  The main romantic conflict is late in coming and is over before we even realise it exists.  But for those who like food, No Reservations isn’t without interest: pure Hollywood gloss can serve some purpose when it’s focused on something delicious.  At least the actors do well: As a quasi-neurotic French cuisine perfectionist, Catherine Zeta-Jones is playing a somewhat different character than usual in one of her rare 2005-2011 roles, while Aaron Eckhart is pure charm as a quasi-slacker Italian cuisine chef.  It doesn’t amount to much of a movie, but it’s pleasant enough as a Hollywood take on the romance of cooking.  The DVD’s sole special feature is a TV special on the film that contains interesting material, but repeats itself often enough to grate and distract from the content.

  • Streets of Legend aka Quattro Noza (2003)

    Streets of Legend aka Quattro Noza (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) It would be easy to be overly critical of this film.  The home-video graininess of the picture is matched by the script’s lack of focus, inconclusive ending and quasi-pretentious cinematography.  A hybrid between documentary and micro-budget romantic drama set alongside the Los Angeles street-racing scene, Streets of Legend often feels like a vanity project by someone who really, really wants to be taken seriously as an artist.  The result will be laughable to anyone looking for a straight-up action film.  On the other hand, there are a few things worth taking seriously here.  First would be the nature of the street-racing scenes, reportedly shot documentary-style on the streets of LA.  They would work better without the ridiculous amount of post-processing taking away from the visceral nature of the footage (some of the shots feel genuinely dangerous, but are too blurred to make an impact), but the movie shows some invention in how to shoot a racing scene with what I’m presuming was a minuscule budget.  There’s also a lot to like about the film’s characters, where they come from and where they almost go: as Street of Legends shows a car full of teenage girls bantering mindlessly while on their way to a street racing event, it’s not hard to realize that there’s a reality-based layer to the film that we haven’t seen in glossier pictures such as the Fast and the Furious series.  From time to time, the loose unscripted nature of the film’s young protagonist is almost endearing –which makes it even more frustrating when the film ends on a lazy note, barely tying up its loose ends.  Still, the end result is halfway between a documentary, a drama and an action picture without much cohesive material in-between.  The scant DVD supplementary material hints at a very unusual making-of process, but we barely get any of that on the disc.  A further alert: The film’s picture seems to have been stretched from a 4:3 aspect ratio to 1.85:1… which really doesn’t help in making the picture look any prettier.  While there isn’t much to Streets of Legend to satisfy conventional expectations, there quite a bit of unrealized potential underneath the lousy images.  It’s a shame that it wasn’t better-executed.

  • Fast Track: No Limits (2008)

    Fast Track: No Limits (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) As a Fast and the Furious clone, this isn’t too bad: Despite what feels like a low budget, Fast Track: No Limits cleverly tricks out what it has under the hood and delivers the honoured mixture of street racing, attractive young people, low-grade crime drama and automotive pulchritude.  Ignore the opening credits, which take the TV pilot approach of showing highlights from the film and headshots of the actors alongside their names: Within minutes, it’s easy to appreciate the glossy cinematography, European setting, likable actors and fast cars.  Fast Track doesn’t have many stunts compared to its inspiration, but they’re used effectively and make an impact when they’re on-screen.  While the rhythm of the film goes a bit flat during its second half, the attention paid to the characters is a bit better than what we could expect from a street-racing action film, and the direction is a bit nervier that one would expect.  There are a few vexing plot holes and missed opportunities (one love scene seems notably gratuitous), but it all amount to a better-than-expected action film, especially considering the low budget and straight-to-DVD pedigree.  Don’t expect anything more than the film from the DVD, which is so lacking that it doesn’t even feature subtitles –something that would have been appreciated given the bewildering salad of accents sported by the film’s actors.

  • Citizen Black (2004)

    Citizen Black (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) I’m not much of a hater, but few figures lead me to gleeful schadenfreude as surely as Conrad Black, a Canadian media mogul with a reputation for savaging newsrooms, promoting an aggressive right-wing editorial agenda, renouncing his Canadian citizenship when it stood in the way of a British peerage, taking money for personal benefit from his corporations and asking for his Canadian citizenship back when it looked like the only way to get clemency from the US legal system.  His recent stint in prison during seemed unusually well-deserved (although the legal manoeuvring leading to his release were another black mark against him), and Citizen Black, despite predating his 2007 conviction, lays the case for and against Black.  Filmmaker Debbie Melnyk portrays a highly-driven man, as charming as he can be arrogant; testimonies about Black are just as eloquent in portraying the man’s complex personality.  Melnyk makes herself a part of the story in pursuing an interview with her subject and exchanging emails with him.  What’s less fortunate is the film’s made-for-TV pedigree, with low-grade sound, sometimes-awful picture quality and scatter-shot approach: It makes the film less pleasant to watch than it should have been.  At least the curt conclusion is to the point: Like Icarus, Black started with the best of intentions and became corrupted with time, flying too close to the sun before crashing down to Earth.  Citizen Black now feels exceptionally dated in the missing material (Since 2004, Black has been convicted, jailed and released; he has also released another massive presidential biography), but it still holds true as a portrait of Conrad Black.  One could even say that time has proven Melnyk right.  The cheap DVD edition lacks just about everything (there aren’t even any subtitles, which is a shame given the variable audio quality), although it does feature some documentary footage that was later subpoenaed during Black’s trial.

  • Family Guy: Blue Harvest (2007)

    Family Guy: Blue Harvest (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2011) I’m not that familiar with the Family Guy series, so take my doubts about their Star Wars homage with a grain of salt.  Blue Harvest is a 45-minutes-long recreation of the original Star Wars, mixing in cultural references, commentary on the source film’s plotting and more usual comedy gags.  There’s some remarkable work in integrating CGI models with the Family Guy style of animation, and some of the resulting scenes almost look pretty.  Still, Star Wars fans are the primary audience here, as I’m not sure if the film can be equally appreciated by those without an encyclopaedic knowledge of the source film.  Blue Harvest is amiable enough to earn grins throughout… but it’s also far too loose to earn a recommendation.  It often seems content to recreate original scenes without making them funny, several gags are stretched far beyond their comic value, and the musical numbers outstay their welcome.  Part of the issue, we can learn from the commentary and DVD extras, is that this was a half-hour episode stretched to an hour: Some slackness can only be expected.  Other DVD extras include an interview with George Lucas (who approved of the production), and a clear sense that this way in many ways a labour of love for the creators.  (Trivial note: I end up watching this film 12 years, to the day, after The Phantom Menace’s release.)

  • Priest (2011)

    Priest (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2011) It’s not a good sign when you can feel the film’s final act locking itself into position, think “Already?”, look at your watch and find out that the film’s barely past the 65-minutes mark.  There may not be all that much to say about Priest, but at least it has the decency to wrap things up in less than 90 minutes.  Anything more would have been wasted, mind you: Even though the film seem very loosely adapted from a presumably richer Korean graphic novel series, there just isn’t a whole lot of plot here to gnaw upon: Setup, two dramatic confrontation and we’re already on to the third act.  At least there’s a bit of eye-candy to contemplate during that time: The techno-grunge atmosphere is a bit tired, but it’s reinvigorated with the somewhat less usual industrial-western feel of the film’s middle section.  Paul Bettany also gets a good role as priest with quasi-supernatural ass-kicking powers: After seeing him in so many dramatic roles (including Charles Darwin in Creation), it’s entertaining to see him re-team with Legion’s director Scott Stewart for action-movie credentials.  Otherwise, well, Maggie Q is fine as another renegade Priest, Karl Urban chews scenery like he enjoys it and Christopher Plummer earns a pay-check as the face of the shallow-but-oppressive Church.  But it’s all flash and pretty visuals here: no depth, little originality and even less substance.  That doesn’t make it a bad film as much as it makes it a very forgettable one. The future for Priest is clear: an unceremonious DVD release, and then onward to cultural oblivion.