Movie Review

  • Red Tails (2012)

    Red Tails (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand, August 2012) It’s nonsense to discuss multi-million-dollar movies in terms of earnestness, but Red Tails is difficult to approach otherwise.  It’s a well-intentioned, often spectacular attempt to restore glory to the story of the Word War 2 all-black Tuskegee Airmen, but it’s marred by a terrible script with flat characters, gag-inducing dialogue and dramatic arcs that couldn’t be closer to cliché.  This mish-mash between good intentions and flat execution makes the film frustrating to discuss, as one threatens to overshadow the other.  Admirably, the film was conceived, financed, produced and partially directed by George Lucas, using his Star Wars money to do some good and tell a story that deserved wider recognition.  As a piece exploring racism during WW2, Red Tails is far more entertaining than the ponderous Miracle at St-Anna even as it scrupulously avoids getting too unpleasant in the details.  Also worth praising are the air combat sequences, shot with crackling energy and showcasing the best of what special-effects technology can now offer to such stock sequences.  There’s a lot to enjoy here, even the somewhat pop-corn treatment of the situation: it’s OK, from time to time, to have a movie in which African-American whoop it up while burning Nazis alive.  As for historical accuracy, well, this is a Hollywood(ish) movie, after all, where “based on a true story” itself can be fiction.  No, what hurts Red Tails a lot more is the amateur script, which doesn’t bother itself with distinctive characters or refined dialogue: everything is on-the-nose obviousness, heard countless times in similar films.  The dramatic arcs are all copy-and-pasted from other movies, without too many surprises.  Even more disappointing is the film’s fuzzy structure, ending on a note that isn’t anywhere near the triumph it should have been.  (“Hey guys, why the funeral?”)  Red Tails really comes alive when it’s up in the air, and even then when characters don’t say anything.  While the dog-fighting sequences are state-of-the-art, everything else feels far too old-fashioned to be satisfying.  But, at least, you can feel that it’s trying really really hard, and kicking the film for what it’s not feels like being unkind to a particularly happy puppy.

  • Mirror Mirror (2012)

    Mirror Mirror (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand, August 2012) What a strange film this is. Playing off the elements of the Snow White fairytale, it teeters between fantasy archetypes subversion, camp humor, beautiful visuals and oddly stilted locations.  In the hands of director Tarsem Singh, Mirror Mirror is, at the very least, beautiful to look at: Nearly every frame looks polished to perfection, and imaginative visuals are featured throughout.  There is some inventive costuming, the actors all seem to have some fun (Armie Hammer’s take on puppy-love is hilarious, while Julia Roberts seems to relish the antagonist role) and some of the funny moments are, in fact, pretty funny.  Unfortunately, the flashes of cleverness and humor are intermittent: the script seems to lurch from one mode to another without coherency, and the humor seems sprinkled randomly rather than coming from a unified approach.  (As it is, a significant portion of the gags embarrassingly fall flat.)  Mirror Mirror remains amiable throughout, but it seems to be trying a lot of things without understanding how they fit together.  For a big-budget film, it does seem to take place in a mere handful of locations.  The inclusion of modern idiom and hipper-than-thou cynicism seem particularly out of place in a fantasy setting.  Thematically, I’m not sure that the stated feminist ideals of the film are actually upheld, especially once the antagonist seems dispatched with a superfluous amount of cruelty.  Mirror Mirror’s lack of tonal unity makes it hard to really get into the groove of the film, and easier to notice its flaws.  There have been plenty of similar and far more successful takes on such material (Enchanted springs to mind) and what sets them apart is cohesion, not scattered cleverness.  [September 2012 Update: This review is a bit too harsh.  At least Mirror Mirror is better than Snow White and the Huntsman.]

  • Shark Night 3D (2011)

    Shark Night 3D (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Cable TV, August 2012) I wasn’t expecting much from this killer-shark movie, which makes its disappointment even more palpable.  Formula monster-movies can’t really hope to impress on the force of their premises, so it’s usually down to the quality of their execution.  Alas, while director David R. Ellis has had a few successes in his career, Shark Night won’t rank as one of them: While there are a few interesting moments in the film, those are drowned in flat characters, dumb plotting, mean-spirited deaths and a third-act reveal that adds a useless human component to the shark threat.  It all amounts to a curiously tepid “thriller”, one that quickly fades in mind as soon as the credits roll.  (It speaks volume that the best part of the film is a dumb post-credit music video in which the cast pokes fun at the film itself.)  None of the actors distinguish themselves in interchangeable roles, and while the direction has occasional stuff-jumping-at-you 3D moments, it really isn’t enough to compensate for the missing fun component.  As I get farther and farther away from the 18-to-34 demographic profile, my tolerance for meaningless horror movies is quickly fading.  While far less offensively gory than last year’s aquatic-threat Piranha 3D, this Shark Night is almost completely empty of anything that could distinguish it, or even make it enjoyable in a trashy fashion.  Sometimes, a film is remarkable even in being terrible.  Shark Night doesn’t even earn this distinction.

  • Real Steel (2011)

    Real Steel (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Cable TV, July 2012) I’m not betraying any big trade secret when I reveal that SF nerds love to slice-and-dice SF movies to find out whether they are true examples of True and Good Science-Fiction rather than cheap sci-fi knockoffs made for the rubes.  Films like Real Steel are good fodder for such conversations, because while it unarguably depends on a science-fiction premise (Boxing Robots! How much more SF can you get?  Plus, it’s adapted from a short story by real SF writer Richard Matheson), it’s somewhat lazy in working out the second-order implications of such a premise on the rest of the world.  Real Steel is a kid’s film, mind you, and it’s far more interested in showing father and son bonding over rock’em-sock’em robot fighting than in offering a convincing portrait of the near future.  While SF nerds will be disappointed to point out the flaws in the film’s chronology (which posits vast institutions build around boxing robots by 2020, which seems like a ridiculously short time) and the lack of robots in non-boxing roles, most of the film’s audience will be satisfied by the father-son drama, the fights and the superb rural scenery.  (I don’t recall ever seeing that many farms and two-lane roads in a SF film.)  This nostalgic attachment to a quasi-mythical Americana extends to the safe thematic concerns of the script, which blends fatherhood, populism, scraping by and punching things into a crowd-pleasing mix.  It seems all very calculated, but Real Steel is successful because it’s very good at what it attempts to do: the cinematography is luminous, the soundtrack is peppy, the plot is cleanly delivered, the special effects are impressive, Hugh Jackman is charming as a hustling ex-fighter learning how to care for his son and director Shawn Levey keeps the film moving at a good pace.  Only the abrupt ending, missing an epilogue, seems to miss a beat.  Still, the film is all about pleasing audiences, and there’s a lesson or two to be learned here in how a movie can humanize a technological gimmick into something that even the broadest crowds can love. 

  • Man on a Ledge (2012)

    Man on a Ledge (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, August 2012) There’s a comforting familiarity to genre exercises that makes it easy to forgive them for, well, being genre exercises.  Man on a Ledge may benefit from an unusual premise (man goes on a ledge as a diversion for a heist), but it quickly becomes just another thriller with the usual palette of elements: clever virtuous thieves, corrupt cops, framed hero, rapacious journalists, and so on.  To its credit, Man on a Ledge plays its thriller cards well, especially in the first act of the film while all of the plot strands are being set up.  It’s the second third that hits a bit of a lull as the same situation is re-threaded for about 15 minutes: thrillers live or die on narrative energy, and there’s a sense, as the thieves goof around their target, that time is being wasted.  At least the last act of the film speeds up again, leading up to a nice appropriate moment of stunt-work.  Some dynamic camera work helps keep up interest throughout, but some thanks must be given to the good cast assembled here for the film: Sam Worthington as a scruffy protagonist, Ed Harris as a rail-thin villain, up-comer Anthony Mackie as a partner working at cross-purposes, Elizabeth Banks as a damaged police officer and Genesis Rodriguez as a wise-cracking rogue.  It plays reasonably well as a genre thriller, and that’s fine if that’ all you really want to see.  Where it falters is in comparison with other better movies of this kind –specifically Inside Man, Spike Lee’s far-better “New York crime thriller” entry which felt as if it had some connections to contemporary reality rather than just being a somewhat showy thriller.  The far-fetched nature of Man on a Ledge’s plot could have used a bit more grounding (so to speak, ahem) and that’s probably when genre exercises can go astray, by being more focused on their own plot convolutions rather than spending just a bit more time on making it feel even more credible.

  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) As the Cold War recedes from popular consciousness, it’s slowly taking on a nice historical patina.  Judging from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the color palette of that patina is going to be made of dull browns with the occasional flash of garish orange foam.  Well-adapted from John le Carré’s classic novel about the hunt for a Soviet mole within the British spy establishment, it faithfully sticks to the author’s portrayal of English spies as dull grey bureaucrats fighting for the realm from little drab offices.  It’s a refreshing antidote to the overblown portrayal of spies as action heroes, but it does require a willingness from viewers to adjust their entertainment expectations.  This is a slow film, and it doesn’t have much in terms of conventional thrills: The biggest suspense sequences of the film (sneaking documents from the archives, waiting for the mole to show up) are moments that would have been glossed-over in an action film.  So it’s no surprise if Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy works best as an atmospheric period piece, featuring two handfuls of capable actors and a mature view of the reality of the intelligence game that is far closer to reality than most other films.  Information here is far more important than bullets. Gary Oldman is mesmerizing as George Smiley, a spy who does his best work by interviewing people and then thinking really hard about what he has learned.  The surrounding cast is very strong, from Mark Strong’s atypical performance as a wounded ex-spy to Colin Firth’s unrepentant seducer to Toby Jones’s slimy ladder-climber.  The adaptation from the novel is skillful, as it seems to completely re-structure the chronology of the story while keeping much of the plot points intact.  The result may not be up to everyone’s favored speed, but it’s a skillful film, and one that does wonder in terms of pure atmosphere.  It works much like the novel does, as a counter-point to espionage fantasies.

  • Transit (2012)

    Transit (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) Straight-to-video genre movies seem on an upward quality swing lately, and Transit seems to be a perfectly good example of the form as it exists now: Reportedly shot with a paltry five-million-dollar budget, the film looks relatively good and progresses quickly, featuring a few action sequences along the way.  Jim Caviezel stars as an ex-con father whose family car is unwittingly used as a mule by thieves.  The opportunity for the family to reconnect through a camping trip is tested once the criminals come back to claim their stash: Mayhem ensues.  This isn’t more than a straightforward B-movie thriller, but recent advances in digital filmmaking lend a visual polish to the film that earlier examples of the form couldn’t match.  While the cinematography is far too saturated to be called beautiful, it is a striking example what is now possible on a modest budget.  The plot is just interesting enough to keep viewer’s attention, although a number of plot holes will strike the attentive viewer as distracting.  (It sort-of-helps that the contrivances are the kind that keep plots moving.)  Transit is not, to be clear, a good film.  But it’s entertaining enough given the modest expectations that come in tackling a film that has never played widely in North-American theaters.

  • 21 Jump Street (2012)

    21 Jump Street (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) I really did not expect this movie take on 21 Jump Street to be any good: Eighties nostalgia leaves me cold, I’m still dubious about Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum never struck me as a comedy lead.  But the film’s reviews were generally positive and I was in the mood for some silly stuff… So it is that, surprises of surprises, 21 Jump Street proves to be a clever and hilarious action-comedy, perhaps the most satisfying take on the 21 Jump Street concept possible given today’s movie-comedy zeitgeist.  Crucially, this movie version acknowledges the shortcomings of the original’s concept and then proceeds to maneuver away from it by taking on a quasi-parody of high-school movies and inverting traditional archetypes.  So it is that the jock discovers that the nerds have taken over, that the nerd is forced in a jock role, and the old rules don’t apply.  The screenwriters clearly have fun with the source material, going as far as casting Ice Cube as a police sergeant, put together a hilariously un-heroic car chase, and killing off characters from the TV show.  Mind you, the comedy isn’t all hilarious: in keeping with today’s current R-rating comedy shtick, profanity is pervasive and a significant fraction of the film’s gags revolve around male genitalia.  Still, there’s enough humor delivered at such a fast pace that a good joke will almost always follow a lame one, and the snappy direction accounts for much of the film’s fun and forward momentum.  Channing Tatum proves himself to be a charming straight man, while Jonah Hill gets one of his least-annoying roles to date here.  The rapid-fire end credit sequence suggests a number of cut subplots, but the result on-screen is more than fun enough… even for people with no affection or knowledge of the original series.  A surprise comedy hit, 21 Jump Street is a bit more than just a nostalgic re-hash of a familiar concept: It succeeds best once it becomes its own comedy vehicle.

  • Chronicle (2012)

    Chronicle (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) I’m (still) not a big fan of found-footage films, but Chronicle knows how to use the conventions of that sub-genre in order to make the familiar feel fresh.  The story of three high-school students discovering telekinetic powers, Chronicle could have been just another dull superhero-origins-story rethread if it had been executed with more mainstream sensibilities.  Here, though, it takes on a harder, almost horror-centered approach and filters it through the unpolished lenses of consumer-grade cameras.  The result feels a great deal more visceral than objective filmmaking, exactly what found-footage is meant to achieve at its best.  The slow ramping-up of the film’s SF content is handled well, and leads to an impressive climax that manages to tell a superhero-sized story through limited technical means.  Writer/director Max Landis and Josh Trank do much with a low budget, and the result is an impressive calling card heralding promising creative talents.  The tone of the story, filled with impulsive self-destructive acts and casual violence, is miles away from the usual heroic tone of similar films, and the result feels much more involving as a result.  The teenage cast does a fine job at delivering the material, but the real star here is the way Chronicle is told, transforming a generic experience into something far more interesting.  It all amount to a small triumph of form over content, but an enjoyable experience nonetheless.  Despite my own misgivings about found-footage films, I welcome it as a pleasant surprise.

  • Wanderlust (2012)

    Wanderlust (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) This mostly-innocuous mainstream Hollywood comedy may feel familiar, but it’s in the service of a decent film.  Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston star as a couple forced to leave New York after professional setbacks.  On their way to relatives in Atlanta, they discover a commune and are seduced in staying.  Of course, the reality of living in a commune doesn’t match their first impression… and there lie the laughs.  The rest may use (as is the norm with Judd Apatow-produced comedies) pervasive bad language and a few edgier moments, but let’s not fool ourselves: This is a classically-structured comedy, with the expected plot beats, character quirks and familiar humor that we’d expect from this kind of film.  Rudd and Aniston are fine (Rudd may be developing as the more dependable straight-man in comedies: it helps that he’s so effortlessly likable), but the laughs belong to the large number of quirky supporting characters.  Not every joke works (the film is marred by an overextended dirty-talk scene, flat references to outdated technology and an inability to cut away scenes on high notes) but much of the film is just good-natured enough not to mind.  While Wanderlust could have been better, faster and a bit less predictable, the end result is quite enjoyable, and will whittle away a nice evening as long as you have some tolerance for profanity and brief naturalistic nudity.

  • The Artist (2011)

    The Artist (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand video, July 2012) The Artist’s success at the 2012 Oscars may, at first, have seemed like a fluke: A silent film featuring French lead actors and director?  What would be the odds?  But it doesn’t take a long look at the actual movie to understand why Hollywood would embrace the film so enthusiastically.  It is, after all, a celebration of one of cinema’s golden age, a painstaking recreation of a time best remembered through a haze of nostalgia.  Set during the last years of silent film, The Artist really doesn’t trouble itself with a complicated plot: It’s a straight fall-from-grace tragedy for the protagonist, mirrored by the rise of another type of performer.  The subplots and plot beats are all familiar, but they’re not the reason to see the film.  Jean Dujardin makes for an exceptionally capable lead (with Bérénice Bejo as a capable foil) , but The Artist’s greatest asset is the way director Michel Hazanavicius apes and recreates the style of silent cinema in all of its jittery glory, occasional dialogue cards making intelligible what the over-acting can’t establish.  By going back to the old, The Artist feels like something new, or at least something sufficiently different from routine that it’s hard not to be charmed.  It has a few lengths (especially in the dog-days of the protagonist’s fall on hard times) but it’s a crowd-charmer throughout, and it ends as it should –on a very high note.  No wonder that Hollywood propelled it to the top of the Academy Awards—along with Hugo, which also featured a mixture of French exoticism and early movie-making nostalgia. The Artist is that kind of film-for-film-lovers, designed to reward cinephiles for doing nothing more than watching a lot of movies.  It’s a curio, but a pleasant one.

  • Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

    Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2012) Romantic comedies tend to live or die on the strength of their cast, so it’s a relief to see that nearly everyone headlining Crazy, Stupid, Love is at the top of their game.  Steve Carell anchors the cast as a recently-separated middle-aged man seeking lifestyle counsel from a capable womanizer, but he’s surrounded by more great performances by a variety of known names in a variety of large-and-small roles, from Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, Marisa Tomei, Kevin Bacon and Ryan Gosling, alongside newer names such as Jonah Bobo and Analeigh Tipton.  Veterans Tomei and Bacon are hilarious to watch in small but effective roles, but Gosling is particularly noteworthy, charming his way through a character that could have been immensely repellent in less-capable hands.  After focusing on the protagonist’s attempt to recapture some of his male seductive powers, Crazy, Stupid, Love soon expands into a mosaic of romantic subplots, occasionally palming a few cards in order to deliver a few almost-cheap twists along the way.  No matter, though: it leads to a relatively pleasant conclusion despite the overused (but subverted) graduation-speech plot device.  Such genre-awareness is a crucial component of Crazy, Stupid, Love’s moment-to-moment interest: Beyond the well-used soundtrack (including a striking usage of Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La”), the sharp dialogue and the snappy direction, Crazy, Stupid, Love is just a joy to watch: so much so that even the tangled subplots and tortured twists seem cute rather than annoying.  And that, one could argue, is a measure of the film’s success.

  • Die (2010)

    Die (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2012) You can almost picture the meeting in which this film was greenlit: “We need a low-budget thriller for cable TV… something like Saw II, but not as gory and with a bit more class.”  Months later, there it is: Die, a thriller in which six people find themselves locked up and subject to a deadly game with a slight possibility of redemption.  It plays about as well as this kind of made-for-cable derivative film ever does: it’s entertaining only if your expectations are set low, but it’s not offensively bad.  What really works well is the visual polish of the film, draped in green and gold beams of light.  Director Dominic James has occasional visual flourishes, and the film makes the most of its dark and mysterious locations without indulging in trash aesthetics.  Otherwise, though, the film is so similar to Saw that the viewer comes to ask what’s different about it.  While Die will strike most as being thankfully not as nihilistic as the Saw films, it doesn’t do much with its various innovations to the formula.  In fact, as the third act blunders into a large-scale development that robs the film of its intimate power, Die becomes more and more pretentious, putting questions of personal control over one’s destiny that the cheap and mean thriller mechanics of the film are ill-served to illuminate.  It ends up feeling cheap, and at odds with the care with which the film is presented visually.  The quality of the script itself isn’t transcendent: the dialogue feels flat while the actors don’t get to elevate the material.  Die is, in so many ways, exactly the kind of film that Canadian cable TV chains feel forced to produce in order to meet their Canadian Content requirements.  It’s not, in this light, terribly bad.  But it plays things safe by aping familiar formulas, and falls flat on its face once it tries to push that formula a bit farther.  At least it looks good while doing so.

  • One for the Money (2012)

    One for the Money (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand Video, June 2012) If shouldn’t be a surprise if a fluffy romantic crime-comedy novel ends up being adapted as a fluffy romantic crime-comedy film.  Janet Evanovich’s “Stephanie Plum” series is a formulaic blend of criminal laughs and romantic thrills, and this big-screen adaptation generally operates in the same vicinity.  Katherine Heigl looks good as a curly brunette protagonist who turns to bounty-hunting, and her attitude is more or less faithful to the novel as well.  (Heigl won’t allow Plum to be anything but glammed-up, though: no baggy clothes on display here.)  Plot-wise, One for the Money can’t escape the limitations of the original novel, which conveniently has the heroine chasing after an ex-flame and repeatedly meeting him thanks to the flimsiest of coincidences.  The plot is filled with contrivances and happenstance (which doesn’t really matter), as well as sudden shifts of tone and casually dismissed violence (which matters considerably more).  There are also a few issues of stereotyping and sexism that don’t work as well on-screen than in an unabashedly romantic novel.  To be fair, tone is tricky in a criminal romantic comedy, and novels operate on slightly more forgiving grounds than films.  What seems OK on the page can feel silly on-screen, and that’s where One for the Money loses some credibility.  While the film is intended to launch a franchise based on the seventeen other novels in the Plum series, that project seems like a non-starter at the Cineplex: There isn’t enough going on here, and a TV miniseries may have served the project better.  What is on-screen isn’t terrible, but it’s not much either: it’s almost instantly forgettable, leading one to suspect that there will never be a Two for the Show.

  • African Cats (2011)

    African Cats (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2012)  It’s hard to resist a well-made nature documentary, and African Cats has the added appeal of combining both the irresistible visuals of big cats with the technical innovation of digital filmmaking.  This means that we don’t just get to see cheetahs and lions standing still: we get to see them in high-resolution slow-motion tracking shots.  It doesn’t sound like much, but the first few minutes are spectacular, especially when seen on a high-resolution TV.  The narrative, pieced together from two-and-a-half years’ worth of footage, centers around a cheetah single mom raising her cubs and a weakly-led pride of lions being threatened by a pack of stronger males.  It’s compelling ways-of-nature stuff, helped along with splendid visuals.  Samuel L. Jackson’s narration on the American release, curiously enough, doesn’t bring much to the film –It may be interesting to compare it with Patrick Stewart’s narration for the UK release.  As a product of Disneynature, the film is kid-friendly without being too disingenuous about the bad things that happen in the story.  Strongly structured around a basic plot, African Cats may not be as visually diverse as Disneynature’s previous Oceans, but it seems to have a bit more heart, even when this sentimentalism becomes a bit anthropocentric.  (The cub sequences have been optimized for maximum awwws, and there nothing wrong with that.)  The cinematography is gorgeous, though, and the end credits have quite a few laughs.