Movie Review

  • Shrek Forever After [Shrek 4] (2010)

    Shrek Forever After [Shrek 4] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) I practically wrote off the entire Shrek series somewhere during the third film (which I can barely remember seeing), so it’s a bit of a surprise to see that the franchise still had a enough life in it for a fourth instalment.  Shrek Forever After even begins on a self-awareness binge, as Shrek realizes the price to be paid in boredom for a “forever after” ending: Always the same days, always the same jokes, always the same comic frustrations.  His character and the series have become one in looking for something different.  One parallel-universe reboot later, we get a sideway look at a few familiar characters (including a Fiona that looks quite a bit like an R. Crumb woman), more action and enough sentiments to hopefully wrap up the series.  There are a few clever moments in the mix, including an energetic Pier Piper sequence that brought back the fun of the series’ musical high points, and an ingenious chain contraption late in the film that visually reinforces a partnership theme.  Also notable is the relative lack of pop culture jokes, even though the musical choices still sound like a mix tape.  The familiarity of Shrek Forever After (including its predictable character arcs) does little to bring it up above adequacy, but the result feels like a way to save the story’s dignity and just enough of an echo of past glories.  Now, can we agree that there’s no need for a Shrek 5?

  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

    Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) It’s hip to dismiss Hollywood summer blockbusters, but there’s nothing quite like the feel of a good well-made escapist fantasy.  Forget about the video game origins of the film, or the loose historical allusions in the title: this first Prince of Persia movie works best as an action adventure fantasy, any kind of verisimilitude joyfully sacrificed on the altar of entertainment.  Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer obviously aim to replicate the atmosphere of the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and while it’s not perfect, it works generally well at taking us from one action/effects set-piece to another.  Jake Gyllenhaal makes for a credible action hero while Genna Arterton is almost impossibly sassy/cute in the film’s only noteworthy female role, but it’s Alfred Molina who ends up the film’s standout oddball character as a quasi-modern parody of a libertarian.  Not that he’s the only charmingly anachronistic element in a plot that is based on a middle-eastern invasion motivated by false reports of weapons of mass destruction.  But never mind the politics when the film mixes swashbuckling adventure, an Arabian fantasy setting and an intriguing fantasy plot device.  You can see the end of the story coming from the film’s first twenty minutes (which is probably a good thing, given its reset-button nature), but it’s the telling that’s the charm here.  Not that it’s a complete success like its piratical predecessor: Prince of Persia sometimes feel a bit too long, sorely misses more female characters, could have used another dialogue re-write, has no cultural legitimacy (See “Persia, Prince of”) and often feels driven by incredible contrivances.  But, you know, I’m already looking forward to the sequel.  After all, I’ve just seen Robin Hood: I’ve had my inoculation shot against excessive realism.

  • MacGruber (2010)

    MacGruber (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) Incompetent secret agents are fast approaching cliché after Johnny English, Get Smart, OSS-117 and many others, so MacGruber has a few other issues to worry about aside from its thin inspiration from Saturday Night Live sketches.  Sadly, what we get is a coarse, violent and generally unpleasant satire on the action-movie genre.  It’s not exactly terrible (it certainly earns its share of laughs), but it could have been quite a bit better.  MacGruber, played by SNL’s Will Forte, is not just incompetent but blustery, crass and with few redeemable qualities: He’s a full-time annoyance and sadly he’s in pretty much the entire movie.  Bland co-star Ryan Phillippe does a bit better, although Kristen Wiig is so conventional in her portrayal of the obligatory love interest that I gladly would have seen her switch roles with the always-cute Maya Rudolph.  But character flaws aren’t the biggest of MacGruber’s problems, which betrays its SNL origins by padding 30 minutes’ worth of jokes into an hour and a half of lazy pacing, pauses for laughs and diminishing-returns call-backs to gags that weren’t funny in the first place.  (“I’ll do anything to get back on the case?”  Funny for ten seconds, not forty.  Celery?  Never funny.)  The direction is hampered by a low budget, which the disjoint editing seems to make even worse.  Fortunately, there is about one dumb laugh every ten minutes (how dumb?  Well, I was unexpectedly amused by subtitles on “You’re loco, man”), which still places MacGruber a cut above many other comedies out there.  It’s not a disaster, but the sense of missed opportunities here feels overwhelming.

  • Robin Hood (2010)

    Robin Hood (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) The chequered development process that led from a script called Nottingham to this stone-faced “historical” take on Robin Hood may explain a lot about the deadened result, but as viewers we can only see what’s on-screen and wonder what went wrong.  The first bad idea is the pretence of a “historical” look at a legend: It didn’t work in the dour and grimy King Arthur, and it’s not any more pleasant here. (To compare and contrast, the similarly-themed The Last Legion wasn’t very good either, but it had the good idea of being a lot more fun).  This isn’t director Ridley Scott’s first foray in pseudo-realistic historical action, and Robin Hood is just as dirt-dominated as similar sequences in Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven: you can practically feel the plague coming just by watching the film.  But the realism is just surface deep: By the end of the story, in which Robin Hood saves Maid Marian from unexplainable danger during a D-day like French invasion off the cliffs of Dover and then practically writes the Magna Carta from notes left by his lost-lost father, well, we’ve left realism buried somewhere in the copious dirt.  (It won’t take a military strategist to find something suspiciously wrong about an invasion force picking a narrow stretch of beach right in front of impassable cliffs as a landing area.)  While Russell Crowe is fine as Robin Hood and Cate Blanchett can do no wrong as Maid Marian, the film too often feels like a school assignment sucking all the fun out of reasonably entertaining source material.  After watching this joyless take on Robin Hood, I felt a sudden need to go and re-watch Costner’s now-old-enough-to-be-classic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves all over again.

  • Iron Man 2 (2010)

    Iron Man 2 (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) As one of, apparently, only half-a-dozen people who didn’t go completely crazy about the first Iron Man film, my expectations for the sequel were kept in check.  So I was pleasantly surprised to find myself nodding in agreement at this follow-up’s overlapping snarky dialogues, well-choreographed action sequences and pleasant character beats.  The force of the film remains the character of Tony Stark as played by Robert Downey Jr, one of the few superheroes around to actually enjoy the superpowers at his disposal.  Contrary to many of his brethren, this sequel tackles the responsibilities of power from another direction: while the parallels with alcoholism get heavy at times (in-keeping with the source material), it’s a neat bit of character affliction that keeps things interesting even when stuff is not exploding on-screen.  Add a little bit of honestly science-fictional content in how Stark manages to synthesize a solution to his problem (“That was easier than I thought”, the movie self-knowingly wisecracks) and there’s enough fun here to pave over the film’s less convincing moments.  Never mind how a single suit-equipped billionaire can apparently create world peace, or Sam Rockwell’s unconvincing grandstanding as another, dumber billionaire, or the shoe-horned intrusions by the rest of the Marvel universe, or the lengthier stretches in which Iron Man 2 occasionally bogs down.  At least the film has a good understanding of the character’s strengths, and works hard at maintaining them.  I can’t say enough nice things about the replacement of Terrence Howard by the ever-dependable Don Cheadle, nor of Gwyneth Paltrow’s adorable reddish bangs: director Jon Favreau is fine on-screen and even better directing the whole thing.  Iron Man 2 is, unlike other superhero movies often dominated by angst, about joy –and the feeling is infectious.  It may not be a classic, but it’s a decent follow-up.

  • Gunless (2010)

    Gunless (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) Canadians being politely nationalistic, we won’t help but feel a bit protective about this latest homage to the land of maple-flavoured beavers. Gunless is, conceptually, an attempt to upend the traditional US-based western: A lone American (played by Paul Gross) comes to town and looks for a fight. Unfortunately, he has wandered over the frontier in a quaintly Albertan village where everyone is polite, mild-mannered and unarmed. Through thin plot mechanics, he gets to woo a local widow, defend the village against even worse Americans and learn a few lessons about the value of peace, order and good government. It’s pure catnip for Telefilm Canada, but it’s not exactly the most satisfying film to ever earn government grants: The nationalistic winking gets old real quickly, and Gross seems to believe that enough square-jawed smiles will be enough to make us ignore that Canadian archetypes are often unstoryable. The traditional American western is a show of dominance, of guns as equalizers –serving storytelling needs by making up a difference between numerous evildoers and lonesome do-gooders. Making a movie that satirizes this plot structure is tricky, because it asks audiences to run against their best instincts. There’s seldom a way to bring this off to a satisfying conclusion without being hypocritical and Gunless is certainly no exception: Despite the film’s celebration of Canadian gunlessness, we know that a gunfight is coming: after all, it’s a western! When it comes, we also know that its consequences will be dramatically unsurprising: after all, it’s a comedy! The result is more interesting in how it confirms Gross’ reputation as one of Canada’s fiercest cultural nationalist (also see: Men with Brooms, H20, Passchendaele) than for its limp take on American-style westerns. In many ways, Gunless feels like a bit of cultural content made “because it’s good for you”: Expect to see it re-run often on Canadian TV stations as a cheap and unobjectionable bit of Canadian Content. The problem is not that we’ve seen better; it’s that it’s really easy to see better movies. Many of them were even made by Americans.

  • Män som hatar kvinnor [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] (2009)

    Män som hatar kvinnor [The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) Already a monster hit everywhere in the first world, Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy is slowly conquering the American market, the belated release of this first movie preparing the terrain for the release of the third volume in translation, and maybe even an Americanized version of the films.  It’s no fair betting that the eventual remake will be a lot less distinctive than the Swedish original, which does quite a few things differently from what we’d expect.  For one thing, it starts slowly.  Really, really slowly: While the mystery is suggested early on, there isn’t much of an investigation for the first hour of the film, and its main characters are kept apart for a long while.  The film later moves very leisurely, and takes forever to wrap up after the action climax of the story.  But those who have read the original novel know that it’s even worse at pacing than the film.  Fortunately, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo places so much emphasis on its characters that the plot doesn’t reign supreme: Instead, we can be fascinated by the odd pairing of a pudgy reporter (Mikael Blomkvist, appropriately underplayed by Michael Nyqvist) and a prickly hacker (Lisbeth Salander, incarnated definitively by Noomi Rapace) in unravelling a decades-old mystery by the slenderest of threads.  The thematic underpinning of the story is all about violence against women (the original title translates at “Millennium: Part 1 – Men Who Hate Women”), and the film finely upholds the original’s progressive political outlook.  The Swedish setting only adds to the interest of the picture, as we get to see the character dig through decades of local history and travel throughout Sweden.  It all adds up to a crime thriller that works in unusual ways, taking advantage of strong characters to paper over a weak structure and inconsistent pacing.  It all adds up to a fascinating thriller, and one that flows quite a bit better than its 158-minutes running time and slow pacing would suggest.  Bring on the sequels!

  • Labyrinth (1986)

    Labyrinth (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) Watching this film today is, in many ways, an exercise in nostalgia: As big-budget pre-CGI fantasy filmmaking, it visibly shows its age and the presence of puppets as creatures is a conceit that probably wouldn’t be allowed to go forward given today’s special effects technology.  So watching Labyrinth is, apart from seeing a young Jennifer Connelly in a first starring role, also a game of effect-spotting.  Fortunately, the story is strong enough to sustain scrutiny on its creakiest effects: As a fairy tale, it’s still strong and interesting after nearly a quarter-century.  What doesn’t work as well is the unwieldy mixture of scares and thrills in a film aimed to the younger set, as well as a few musical numbers and comic set-pieces that drag down the story for a while.  Still, Labyrinth’s not such a bad viewing experience, and seeing David Bowie in full goblin-prince attire is enough to compensate for a whole lot of other issues.

  • De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    De père en flic [Father and Guns] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) For such a small market, Québec cinema has proven uncommonly adept at finding the recipes required to get audiences in theatres.  In this case, take a respected actor with a good track record (Michel Côté), pair him off with a hip comic (Louis-José Houde), put them in a situation that combines family comedy with criminal intrigue and watch the results.  As is the case with nearly any other Québec comedy hybrid, the film is first played for laughs, and then for criminal thrills.  The movie’s entire middle third is spent yakking it up at a remote camp for estranged fathers-and-sons, with mud-wrestling, Gen-X/Boomer generational complaints and occasional reminders that there is a hostage drama going on elsewhere.  Only De père en flic‘s first and last minutes are concerned with the cops-versus-criminals premise, which is just as well given how it’s the comedy rather than the thrills that made this film such a success at the French-Canadian box-office.  It actually works pretty well: The script may occasionally indulge its stars in going for the cheap laughs, but the generational conflicts have more substance that you’d expect from a light summer comedy, and actually have something to say about today’s Québec.  De père en flic may be a far better farce than a criminal thriller, but that’s not much of a problem.

  • The Box (2009)

    The Box (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) Richard Kelly is a filmmaker to approach with caution, because his capable instincts often get the better of his rational mind.  The Box coming after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, it’s not hard to see him tackle projects that he doesn’t have the discipline to keep under control.  So it is that his latest film is, once again, an accumulation of strange and ominous portents that fail to cohere: We often see weirdness for weirdness’ sake, but our faith in whether he’ll be able to satisfyingly tie all of this together dwindles as the film slowly (very slowly) progresses.  It doesn’t help that the morality lesson at the core of the premise is so mind-numbingly stupid: Richard Matheson’s short story had the grace of being, well, short: at feature-film lengths, we get far too much time to be exasperated at the characters’ lack of suspicions.  It really doesn’t help that the nature of the latter moral dilemmas proposed to the characters is so arbitrary: From intriguing moral drama, The Box soon sinks into, basically, a demonstration of capricious powers beyond human ken.  Characters are mystified; so are viewers.  Some unsettling visions are likely to remain with viewers for a while, but the overall picture is so scattered that the pieces don’t fit together in a satisfying fashion.  Compare and contrast to The Prestige, where absurdity and ominous portents didn’t prevent the picture from making complete sense in the end.  But then again, Christopher Nolan is a far better writer/director than Richard Kelly: it’s unfair to compare the two.  Until Kelly learns some self-discipline, we’re stuck with films like The Box –not fun enough to be entertaining and not even deep enough to be intriguing except at small doses.

  • Black Dynamite (2009)

    Black Dynamite (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2010) Genre parodies often depend on the good intentions of its audience, and the concept of spoofing seventies blaxploitation pictures is no exception: Ideally, viewers are expected to be reasonably familiar with the object of the spoof, and be ready to play along with the deliberate mistakes and weaknesses inspired by the source material.  Black Dynamite is reasonably funny on its own (expect to quote bits of dialogue for a few days), but it’s far more amusing if you’re in the right mood for a film that intentionally apes ultra-low-budget shortcuts and mistakes.  Aware that the blaxploitation-parody concept runs a risk of wearing thin, the picture keeps throwing curves and adopting new plots every fifteen minutes: by the time the protagonist is kung-fu fighting with Richard Nixon in the White House, well, we’ve been led somewhere off this planet in a grandiose fashion.  Not every gag works, but they come at such a steady rate that no one has to wait a long time before the next one.  Michael Jai White is great as the titular lead character, while the rest of the cast looks as if it’s having a lot of fun as well.  Black Dynamite had a minuscule theatrical release, but it’s probably best appreciated at home –where blaxploitation films live even today.

  • The Losers (2010)

    The Losers (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, April 2010) Ensemble action movies are making a minor comeback in 2010, but sneaking in before The A-Team and The Expendables is this cheap, fast and grandly entertaining comic book adaptation.  The Losers isn’t that good a movie: The limited budget sometimes shows (especially for those who remember the source material’s hyperactive globe-trotting), coincidences abound and the action set pieces seldom make sense.  But those flaws are arguably what enables this film to be a fun throwback to the unapologetic Bruckheimeresque action movies of the late nineties.  The set-pieces make up in eye-popping originality what they lack in coherence, while the quips fly fast and sarcastic.  Thankfully for an ensemble picture, it’s the characters that bring The Losers above its B-grade material: Each one has a few things to do, and while Chris Evans and Zoe Saldana generally steal the focus away from Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s role as the leader of the bunch, Jason Patric has a surprisingly odd turn as the overwritten villain of the picture.  Sylvain White’s direction is hit-and-miss, but there are a few new tricks here and while the picture moves quickly, it doesn’t lose viewers in a flurry of incoherent cuts –which is another thing that The Losers does better than the rest of its recent action movie brethren.  Fans of the original comic book series will be disappointed to see that Andy Diggle’s geopolitical set-pieces have been toned down, pleased to note that the evil plot is completely different and generally amused to see dialogue bits, action moments and characterization details moved around: Most of what’s in this film follows the first two of the series’ five volumes, while the ending sets up at least another film in the series.  Box-office results may not guarantee that (it’s the kind of picture that generally appeals to a very specific audience), but I would certainly welcome a bit more time with the characters and their globe-trotting vengeance.

  • Date Night (2010)

    Date Night (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, April 2010) There’s something refreshing in seeing a comedy for adults that delivers entertainment while avoiding the crassest demands of teenage audiences.  It’s not that Date Night is short on violence, profanity, sexual references and overall bad behaviour, but it refuses to indulge in them for their own sake.  The result is, for lack of a better expression, well-mannered.  Date Night is seldom mean or meaningless; it features two mature comedians (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) at the height of their skills and it’s obviously aimed at an older target audience of long-time married couples.  Date Night has too many plotting coincidences to be a perfect film, but it does end up better than average, and that’s already not too bad.  If the script logic is often contrived, it’s far better at making us believe that the lead couple’s reactions are what bright-but-ordinary people would say or do in dangerous situations, rather than what the Hollywood stereotypes may dictate.  There are even a few particularly good sequences in the mix, including a deliriously funny car chase through the streets of New York City, and a thinly-veiled excuse for Carell and Fey to dance as badly as they can.  A bunch of recognizable character actors also appear for a scene or two, from the sadly underused William Fichtner to an always-shirtless Mark Wahlberg and a pasta-fed Ray Liotta.  Add to that the somewhat original conceit of involving a bored married couple in a criminal caper (rather than using the thriller elements to make a couple “meet cute” as is far more common) and Date Night is original enough, and well-made enough to be noticeable in the crop of films at the multiplex.  A few laughs, a few thrills and a few nods at the difficulty of staying married; what else could we ask from a middle-of-the-road Hollywood action comedy?

  • Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

    Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, April 2010) It used to be that high school jocks beat up nerds and took their lunches.  Now, in this kinder and gentler world, they’re just stealing their movie ideas and using them in frat-boy comedies.  I kid, but not much: for if time-travel is the conceit at the core of Hot Tub Time Machine, it’s about the least science-fictional science fiction film of the year so far. The time-traveling becomes a pretext for jokes at the expense of the eighties, in a plot generously watered in alcohol, crass language, loose morals and enough crude sexual material to fully warrant an R-rating.  Three middle-aged losers wallow at the core of the story, trying to recapture their youthful binge-drinking episodes.  While John Cusack does fine with his usual shtick, he’s almost the only likable character in-between other repellent lunatics and losers.  In-between a dumb-as-dirt fatherhood mystery, constant threats of amputation, plentiful swearing, superficial laughs at eighties fashion and unexplainably homophobic set-pieces, Hot Tub Time Machine isn’t much of a recommendation for R-rated comedies.  There are, to be fair, a number of chuckles along the way, from squirrel jokes to one reference to Hunter S. Thompson.  But little of this manages to patch up the unpleasantness of the rest of the film, which ends up leaving a less than pleasant impression.  If nothing else, consider that the film’s musical highlight is a cheerfully anachronistic performance of “Let’s Get Retarded” in 1986.  The future, as presented by Hot Tub Time Machine, is even dumber than the mid-eighties.  Now that’s saying something.

  • Clash of the Titans (2010)

    Clash of the Titans (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, April 2010) Sword-and-sandal epics are worthless without an overwrought sense of melodrama, and that’s the single best reason to recommend Clash of the Titans despite a weak script, inconsistent directing and lacklustre performances by actors who should know better.  Three words from Liam Neeson to convince you:  “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!” (Thesis: All movies are improved by a character shouting “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!”) I don’t recall the 1981 original in enough detail to make useful comparisons, so let us consider this remake on its own terms: a mishmash of Greek mythology, action-movie sequences, and blockbuster fantasy trappings.  Among several better actors playing the pantheon, Sam Worthington doesn’t have much to do drama-wise as Perseus (he gets a team and loses it almost as quickly), but after Avatar and Terminator: Salvation the film should do fine in polishing his niche as the guy to play non-entirely-human action heroes.  He gets to run around in a tunic, fight scorpions, cut the head of Medusa, and all the other things a demigod is expected to do.  Direction-wise, Louis Leterrier’s action scenes are uneven: The scorpion fight takes place in clear sunlight with decently long cuts, but the Medusa and Kraken sequence are a bit of an overcut mess even though the CGI feels a bit better than average.  Still, the fun of the picture lies in the arch leaden quality of the dialogue and the fact that everyone seems to be playing the material as straight as possible.  It’s not great art, it may not even be great entertainment, but it does what it has to do, and that should be enough.