Movie Review

  • Hostel (2005)

    Hostel (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2015) Given my reluctance to even acknowledge the existence of a sub-genre as noxious and nauseating as torture horror, I had deep misgivings about watching sub-genre exemplar Hostel.  But there it was on my list of essential movies I’d missed, so I checked my expectations at the door and dared to enter.  To my surprise, Hostel is a bit more interesting than I expected it to be.  While the first half of the film certainly plays to expectations (three American tourists are tempted to visit an eastern European town, where they are abducted and used as raw bodies for sadistic rich men paying for the privilege of torturing and killing someone else), the second half of the film is a bit twistier, leading to a conclusion where we’re asked to re-evaluate our sympathies for the protagonist.  I’m not a bit fan of writer/director Eli Roth, but he does well here, and it’s no accident if Hostel remains his best-known film.  There’s nihilism and gore and torture aplenty, but there is also something else; a bit of suspense, a few good set-pieces and an effective sense of dread.  It is torture horror in the grossest sense, but it’s also more than that, and it’s that extra bit more that distinguishes the film.  I’m still not entirely pleased of having paid for the film (even at bargain-bin prices), but I’m not entirely embarrassed by it either, and that’s probably the best I could ask for given Hostel’s subject matter. 

  • Hooligans aka Green Street Hooligans (2005)

    Hooligans aka Green Street Hooligans (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2015) Fans of subcultural anthropology by way of mainstream movies will love Hooligans for its accessible look at the inner workings and meaning of English gangs.  Anchored by Elijah Wood as a disgraced American journalism student who gets caught in football hooliganism while visiting London, this is a film that’s part gang drama and part action violence.  In some ways, it’s not terribly different from other stories in which an innocent is seduced by criminal activities and then pulls back after as climaxing trauma (usually the death of a good friend) – but setting and execution makes Hooligans feel somewhat fresher than another update about Los Angeles gangs.  It’s also a bit more interesting for the way it dissects football hooliganism as stemming from territoriality, boredom, unemployment, class status and good-old rivalry.  As far as performers go, Wood is his usual doe-eyed self, which works in his advantage in portraying how an average guy can get sucked into the violence.  Charlie Hunnam is a bit of a revelation here: After seeing him in a very dull performance in latter big Hollywood movie Pacific Rim, here he seems animated and almost charismatic.  Director Lexi Alexander keeps things moving and the action scenes feel a bit better than they ought to be in a film of this caliber.  While Hooligans won’t make it near to top of any top-ten list, it’s an interesting look at a particular subculture, it’s seldom dull to watch, and it has a few good scenes.  Not too bad for a film that barely made it to North America.  

  • Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

    Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2015) Watching Zack and Miri a few years later, knowing the trajectory of mainstream American comedy films toward the Judd Apatow model, becomes an exercise in pinpointing the passing of the torch from Kevin Smith to Apatow, with Smith basically capitulating and trying to ape Apatow’s style.  There’s some logic in this evolution: Smith is, after all, largely responsible for normalizing bad language and sexual references in mainstream comedy.  Seeing him pass the baton to Apatow feels like a natural succession.  It doesn’t help that Zack and Miri feels a lot closer to Apatow’s films than to Smith’s ones.  From the raunchy subject matter to the chaste execution, passing by the presence of Seth Rogen in a lead role and some improvisation breaking through Smith’s usually tightly-scripted style, this is a film that would look undistinguishable as part of Apatow’s filmography.  For Smith, Zack and Miri is something strange: A not-so-good, now-derivative script combined with what is perhaps the slickest direction of his career so far.  There are a few laughs, but much of the film’s emotional arc is predictable, although viewers will be asked to suffer through other people’s misery for a rather long time on the way to a happy conclusion.  The wall-to-wall profanity gets tiresome and feels like endless immaturity; the sexual content is handled in a way designed to neuter it of anything but comic value.  It’s not a bad film, but it now probably doesn’t feel as edgy or clever as Smith originally intended.  The torch, as I said, has been passed.

  • Wild (2014)

    Wild (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2015) I will admit that over time, I have gotten used to Reese Witherspoon’s innocuous screen persona to the point of never expecting more than blandly likable performances in the vein of Legally Blonde and Walk the Line.  Maybe I’ve been watching the wrong movies, but memoir adaptation Wild feels different.  Obviously a passion project for the actress, it features Witherspoon in the role of a young woman walking the Pacific trail in an attempt to reboot her life after the crushing loss of her mother and an aimless hedonistic period.  Shot in nearly cinema-vérité style by Jean-Marc Vallée, Wild feels raw and honest, a true-life odyssey walking north the West Coast.  The scenery is spectacular, the way the flashbacks are structured as impressionistic bursts is effective and Witherspoon herself is captivating through the entire film.  It feels like a far more likable version of Into the Wild, and the mechanics of how the protagonist manages to master hiking and deconstruct herself to her satisfaction is both uplifting and poignant.  Both a thrilling adventure story and an effecting character study, Wild works far better than expected, and will remain a milestone in Witherspoon’s filmography. 

  • The Lazarus Effect (2015)

    The Lazarus Effect (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2015) Sometimes, it’s tempting to go back in time, grab a particular filmmaker by the shoulder and say “This project you’re thinking about?  Forget it.  It’s not worth it.”  Why anyone would want to make another movie about scientists finding ways to bring back the dead to life is beyond me: it’s not as if we don’t know what’s coming, and Flatliners still looms large as the flawed but definitive statement in this area.  I’m sure that there’s something interesting left to say about resurrection and demonic possession, but The Lazarus Effect is not the film that will achieve that: It’s exceptionally formulaic, uninterested in any kind of rigor and not particularly well-executed on a moment-to-moment basis.  There are no surprises and almost nothing to look forward to.  At best, there’s something to be said about seeing young capable actors such as Olivia Wilde and Donald Glover; alas, they are stuck in a basement-grade horror movie of the kind most often seen as filler on cable TV late-night schedules.  The plot is pointlessly dull, with its most promising edges shaved away to irrelevance by the end of the film.  There’s something particularly exasperating in the way the resurrected (predictably) turns evil, but also comes back with telepathy, telekinesis, super-strength and whatever other unfair advantages a psycho-killer possessed by a demon may have.  The Lazarus Effect is just not very interesting, and feels too long even under 90 minutes.  If it wasn’t worth making, it’s certainly not worth watching.

  • Joe (2013)

    Joe (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2015)  By now, a substantial number of critics have almost given up on Nicolas Cage: Despite a quasi-legendary filmography, Cage seems to have lately retreated in a succession of dull roles in low-budget exploitation films that don’t give him any chance to stretch as an actor.  (His purported problems with the IRS may have something to do with this “grab any paycheck” phase.)  Where is the formerly-great Cage?  Fortunately, Joe may tide a few pundits for a while, given how it’s easily Cage’s best role in years.  Fully bearded and dispensing with his usual nouveau-shamanic acting tics in favor of a much more restrained approach, Cage plays an ex-con with anger issues, making a meager living in a small Texas town where he has complicated relationships with the police, an ex-wife, old enemies and recurring flings.  Joe’s life changes when he meets a teenager made wise beyond his years due to his father’s abuse.  Becoming an unlikely role model to the young man, Joe has to choose how deeply he should involve himself in his affairs.  But Cage isn’t the only one redeeming himself with Joe: Director David Gordon Green also goes back to more respectable roots after a detour in dumb comedies.  Other good performances abound: Tye Sheridan is once again remarkable, while non-actor Gary Poulter gets a great role as an abusive father.  The result is slow-paced, meditative, almost oppressive in its low-class small-town atmosphere, but it’s respectable and poignant, definitely the kind of movies that Cage should be doing more often. 

  • Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

    Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2015) As someone who pretty much gave up on Tom Clancy after Teeth of the Tiger, I certainly took my time in watching Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, an attempt to reboot Clancy’s best-known character for a younger generation.  Derived from an original script that had nothing to do with Ryan, Shadow Recruit nonetheless ends up being a serviceable piece of entertainment, and one that does share a passing similarity to Clancy’s work.  While the film remains an action thriller in which Ryan gets to run a bit and savagely beat down an opponent along the way, it does have a pretty good sequence in which Ryan proves his analytical creds as “the smartest guy in the room”, and the film does hint at the kind of geopolitical machinations so well-executed in Clancy’s thriller.  Chris Pine is very likable as Ryan, and the broad strokes of his character are indeed those that Clancy gave to Ryan back in the eighties, updated to a post-9/11 generation.  Director Kenneth Branagh gets to have some fun by playing the bad guy, while Kevin Costner is unremarkable in a mentor role.  Still, Shadow Recruit is a reasonably entertaining thriller, despite a rather long introduction and the overall silliness of the scheme at the heart of the film (hint; the US dollar is a reserve currency.  It can’t be brought down by simplistic financial manipulation, and any attempt to maintain otherwise will be met by laughter by Canadians watching their dollar sink relative the USD).  While the box-office results suggest that the Clancy franchise won’t be rebooted, Shadow Recruit isn’t too bad as a standalone thriller – there have been far worse examples of the form lately.

  • The Weather Man (2005)

    The Weather Man (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2015)  From afar, the premise of The Weather Man seems like the most generic drama possible: A middle-aged man has an existential crisis as he applies for a new job, realizes that he will never reunite with his ex-wife, has trouble relating to his kids and faces the imminent death of his father.  The list of movies and novels covering more or less the same idea seems infinite.  But what about the execution?  This is where The Weather Man shines, because from the first few moments, the film is a sardonic, more-interesting-than-expected take on a familiar subject: Nicolas Cage distinguishes himself as the protagonist, and this despite not overusing the over-acting tricks he’s best known for.  The script is relatively witty (the repeated motif of food being thrown at the protagonist becomes funnier and funnier), Gore Verbinski’s direction is assured and the film manages (not flawlessly) to navigate a tricky path between dark comedy and straight-up drama.  It works, although I suspect that as I age I’m getting more and more sympathetic to mid-life-crisis movies.  Regardless, I was surprised by The Weather Man and liked it rather more than I thought I would.  Chalk one up for execution over premise, and Cage’s unpredictability in the roles he picks.

  • Heist (2015)

    Heist (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2015) Not only are there better heist films than 2015’s Heist, but there are better heist films named Heist than 2015’s Heist: Have a look at the 2001 Heist for a David Mamet take on a familiar topic.  (But don’t look at 2015’s American Heist, which is even more generic than this one)  Actually, a good question would be why Heist is named as such, given that it pokes around a river casino, a bus chase inspired by Speed (Heist was originally far better titled as Bus 657), and the unbearably American plot device of a sick kid needing costly care that can only be met through criminal activity.  Robert De Niro headlines the film but remains constrained in a fairly small role, while Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the one doing most of the dramatic work here.  De Niro is good but doesn’t stretch anything on his way to his exit; Morgan is quite a bit better as an opportunity criminal who gets caught along some less savoury characters.  In smaller roles, David Bautista does fine, but Gina Carano continues to display her thespian limits as a police officer who mumbles a lot.  The plot is an old thriller staple (heist goes wrong; truants are challenged in their attempt to escape) and while some of the script and Scott Mann’s direction show promise, Heist struggles to distinguish itself from countless other similar movies.  It’s too ponderous to be enjoyed as an action thriller (despite doing best in that mode), and by the time the story gets interesting somewhere in the third act, it’s far too late to care all that much.  At the very least, Heist will do as one of those movies you catch on cable TV when there’s nothing else on… but it’s likely that there will be far better choices available on other channels at the same time.

  • Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)

    Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2015) The Night at the Museum series has its own unlikely formula perfected by this third installment: Magically-reanimated members of the New York museum exhibits get to travel to another museum on some irrelevant pretext, meet the local magically-reanimated characters, have special-effects-heavy adventures and go home.  Director Shawn Levy is well-used to the formula by now and it shows in the strengths and weaknesses of the film.  Ben Stiller mugs for the camera, everyone else hams it up, cheap jokes abound, there’s some Egyptian woo-woo to hold the jokes together and the movie ends before anyone gets exasperated.  It’s familiar to the point that this third installment doesn’t get to try very hard to be witty or clever: Despite taking place at the hallowed British Museum, Secret of the Tomb seems rote and lifeless, coasting on familiar shtick (including a last vigorous Teddy Roosevelt performance by the late Robin Williams) but not pushing the envelope with any of its new characters — except, fitfully, Rebel Wilson’s security guard.  The Hugh Jackman cameo is amusing and so is the M.C. Escher-inspired sequence, meaning that the film isn’t entirely on auto-pilot.  But it does feel like a re-heated attempt to extend a concept past its prime, and this feeling that it’s about time that the show ends means that the final moments of the film aren’t as poignant as anyone would have liked.  There are, thanks to the generous budget and the high-concept, a few things to see.  But those aren’t quite enough to make Secret of the Tomb feel worthwhile as more than another attempt to rely on what worked in the previous films of the series.  There may or may not be another installment –who cares at this point?

  • A Life Less Ordinary (1997)

    A Life Less Ordinary (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2015) In trying to explain the mess that is A Life Less Ordinary, I’m tempted to say that one doesn’t become a daring visionary director without making a few mistakes along the way, and so Danny Boyle didn’t become Danny Boyle without making a few less-successful films on his way to Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours.  A Life Less Ordinary could have been a frantic star-crossed crime romance between an arrogant heiress and an oppressed blue-collar worker, but the script felt that it was necessary to frame this romance in a fantasy involving angels tasked in making two very different people fall in love.  You can see here the various frantic methods that Boyle often uses to shake things up, even though they’re not always successful.  Depicting heaven as a police station where everything is in white?  Great visuals, all the way down to the white stockings.  Spending an interminable time with characters signing Beyond the Sea in a redneck karaoke bar?  Oh, shoot me now.  Ewan MacGregor isn’t much more than simply OK in the lead role, while Cameron Diaz gets an early borderline-unlikable role to play –far more interesting are Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter as angels on a mission, even though the particulars of their plot-line are increasingly ridiculous.  A Life Less Ordinary is a film less ordinary, and it suffers from its own quirkiness, trying to blend romance with fantasy with bloody violence.  The tonal shifts are severe and the whole thing becomes some something to be appreciated more than to be experienced: I suspect that I would have liked the film more had I seen it fifteen years ago.  I also suspect that the film suffered from comparisons to Boyle’s earlier Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.  Not, it’s not as good as those two.  On the other hand, it does have a considerable amount of (misguided) energy, which isn’t too bad.  If nothing else, it can still claim, more than a decade and a half later, that there still isn’t anything quite like it.

  • Winter’s Tale (2014)

    Winter’s Tale (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2015) Oh, what a mess.  A problem with urban fantasy is the tendency to just keep stuffing the story with magic without pausing to reflect on whether it all fits together, and Winter’s Tale has a bad case of dumb world-building piled upon nonsensical mythology.  There’s something about stars being people and not stars, something about Satan and his demon knights, something about having one miracle to spend in one’s lifetime, something about being amnesiac for a century… or whatever.  It barely fits together even as a summary, let alone in the details.  I’m told that the novel on which the film is based is far more coherent, so the blame here would go entirely to writer/director Akiva Goldsman, proving here that almost two decades of bad reviews since Batman & Robin can’t entirely be blamed on directors mangling his scripts.  Interestingly enough, little of the film’s problems affect the actors in it: Colin Farrell is OK as the lead, while Jessica Brown Findlay is very good as the romantic lead despite being burdened with an awful role.  Russell Crowe and Will Smith are curiously enjoyable as the villains of the story, despite (again) not making much sense as such.  Jennifer Connelly looks lost in an underwritten role –one of the many issues with Winter’s Tale is that it jumps forward in time, but can’t be bothered to decide whether the circa-2014 story is a third act or an epilogue.  (But then again, the film is so bad at math or elementary logic that in 2014, one of the non-magical characters should be 108 years old.)  Interminable digressions help make the film feel even longer than it is, while fairly good production values can’t paper over the dumb script.  It’s one of the defining characteristics of bad movies that whatever profound sentiment they try to express is met with eye-rolling and accusations of pretentiousness, but by the time Winter’s Tale last few moment try to smother viewers in a gelatinous gloop of unearned sentiment, you too will understand why the film is more laughable than interesting.

  • Mr. Holmes (2015)

    Mr. Holmes (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2015)  At a time when we’ve been served with no less than three recent muscular re-invention of Sherlock Holmes (from Sherlock to Elementary to the two Sherlock Holmes Guy Richie movies), it’s a noteworthy change of pace to see Iam McKellen play an elderly Holmes wrestling with early dementia and past regrets in Mr. Holmes.  Directed by Bill Condon, this is a film about a very human Holmes (far less fanatical than his three recent counterparts) and it plays in minor keys: the caper to be resolved doesn’t depend on outlandish deductions, and the real mystery here is Holmes struggling to recall events from his own life.  McKellen is a terrific Holmes, bringing both gravitas and vulnerability to the role.  A thoroughly de-glammed Laura Linney is there to provide another point of view, further challenging our view of Holmes.  It’s a fairly slow film, and one that may not hold your attention easily if you’re distracted by other things, but it does build to a finely-controlled finale in which Holmes accepts his place in life and the necessity of being close to other people.  Given that at least two of the three other recent Sherlocks are struggling with the same thing, Mr Holmes does have something more to bring to the character and should be admired as such.  Just don’t expect fist-fights, gun battles and ticking-clock deductions: it’s not that kind of film, and it’s probably better for it.

  • Addicted to Love (1997)

    Addicted to Love (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2015)  I heard about Addicted to Love long before it showed up on my noteworthy-films-of-1997-that-I’d-missed list.  This is, after all, the one where America’s-Sweetheart Meg Ryan ends up playing a short-haired psycho stalker with a fondness for riding motorcycles and making a reference to “a blast of semen”.  This is the one where Matthew Broderick turns out to be an equally-obsessed psycho stalker who can’t let an ex-girlfriend go and instead lives into an abandoned building next to her apartment to keep a constant eye on her.  This is the film where their characters team up to destroy the life of two rather nice people in the hope that they’ll either suffer or crawl back to them.  (I’m sure there’s a fantastic essay somewhere on the web that explains this film’s ludicrousness in excruciating details.)  Romantic comedy?  So it claims.  The bigger problem, though, is that Addicted to Love shows signs that if could have been much edgier, but deliberately holds back.  Did Ryan and/or Broderick impose limits on how dark their characters could be?  Did the script fall into the hands of a director unwilling or unable to follow the story where it need to go?  Did the screenwriter lose his nerve?  I’m not sure and while the result on-screen plays considerably better than what you’d expect from the above summary, there’s a sense that it doesn’t go as deep as it needs to.  Still, what we get is interesting enough: There’s some inventiveness to the light/voyeurism motif (the protagonist is an astronomer and one of the film’s big gadgets is a camera obscura), some of the scenes are crazy enough to be funny, Tcheky Karyo is good as the nominal antagonist of the piece (yet a more mature character than everyone else) and the film predictably wraps up with a big happy romantic bow.  Addicted to Love is not too bad, but it’s not quite what it could have been.  For a 1997 film, though, it doe still have some interest, especially considering how it plays off Meg Ryan’s once-unassailable persona as a romantic ingénue.

  • Catwoman (2004)

    Catwoman (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2015)  Ow!  Catwoman was almost universally panned upon release, which convinced me not to see it in theatres and then proceed to forget all about it.  But it still lurks in the basement-like depths of late-night cable TV channels, ready to pounce on anyone curious enough to have a look.  Yes, it’s just about as bad as you’ve been told: Executed at a time when it was finally possible to distinguish a good comic-book movie from a terrible one, Catwoman now looks, a decade later, like one of the last gasps of the pre-MCU way of making awful movies based on comic book characters.  This Catwoman stands alone, bereft of the DC comics continuity or even the privilege of taking place in Gotham City.  She shares a few traits in common with far better-appreciated media Catwomen (Pfeiffer and Kitt, most notably) but otherwise laboriously goes through yet another boring origin story as if we hadn’t seen enough of them already.  It doesn’t feel like a Catwoman film as much as a very forgettable action movie.  It’s all in the execution, of course, and while director Pitof has an ambitious eye for special effects (some of the sequences are well designed, even if the delivery now look far better in low resolution), he’s not particularly good at telling a story, or even maintaining a sustained tone throughout an entire film.  If you keep hearing about “the basketball scene” from reviewers, it’s because it’s a special scene… best seen than described.  The supernatural mythology of the film is all over the place without a bit of central focus, the plot holes are plentiful, the so-called feminist overtones of the film (Criticism against cosmetics! Female-versus-female showdown!) are petrified by the male-gaze aspect of Catwoman’s strutting and the costume is more puzzling than sexy.  Speaking of which, Halle Berry is just about the only person who emerges from the film with some dignity: She gives her performance some warmth early on, and some energy in the latter half.  Take away her performance and some of the special effects sequences, and Catwoman is barely better than a direct-to-cable action film, with mediocre dialogue, formulaic storytelling and muddled action sequences.  I should have listened to the reviewers and stayed away, even eleven years later.