Movie Review

  • Double Impact (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) You can see in Double Impact the intention to make Jean-Claude van Damme a more respected actor – through the now-familiar trick of having him play two roles as estranged twin brothers. It’s not that much of a stretch – and there’s enough fighting action to reassure viewers that he’s still an action star even in playing two roles. The messy plot relies on a familiar blend of criminals, smugglers, drug shipments, clubs, triads, explosives and a shipping containers climax. The Hong Kong location adds atmosphere to the story and bodybuilder Corinna Everson brings something interesting to a henchwoman role (although – weren’t bodybuilding female villains a flash-in-time kind of trope back then?), but this isn’t a particularly memorable action film. Even the love scene is… a jealousy-powered dream sequence? Weird. The twins-gimmick is surely more memorable than many other early van Damme films, and there’s some stunt work to bring this somewhere else than a straight-up fighting film. In the end, though, Double Impact is a serviceable action film for fans of the lead actor… and something substantially duller for anyone else.

  • South of Heaven (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Look, filmmakers: You can’t just declare your film to be neo-noir and expect that everyone will agree with you out of sympathy – you have to put some work into it, and make sure you at least understand the aesthetic and thematic core of noir. Or you can do like writer-director Aharon Keshales does in South of Heaven and just throw up stuff in the movie without really caring whether it’s tonally consistent, whether it undercuts other parts of the film, whether it’s the best use of the actors or whether it’s more than a blend of predictable tropes and incoherent plotting. You can, sometimes, see the glimpses of a more successful film in South of Heaven… if only it could stick to an approach for more than five minutes, or at least try to execute the familiar clichés in an engaging fashion. Instead, we get an ex-felon returning to his dying wife, getting embroiled in a criminal overlord’s sombre schemes out of sheer happenstance (even though there are plenty of hints about him being tempted by criminal activity), reacting in interesting ways, but seeing his plans unravel in dark comic fashion. There are about five and a half genres in that brief plot summary alone, and the film itself is no better when watched one minute after another. Featuring Evangeline Lily in the worst imaginable haircut and a miscast Jason Sudeikis acting tough, South of Heaven makes too many mistakes to avoid being ridiculed. At some point, everything the film does, every choice it makes simply feels like a wrong one. It whiplashes from comedy to tragedy to suspense to indifference faster than you’d think possible. From time to time, it gets a good idea (such as the protagonist kidnapping his enemy’s son to turn the tables) but blows that lead with something stupid. An unimaginable coincidence powers much of the plot, and the film goes for a moody ending that just screams pretentiousness once we’re already done caring for whatever happens during the action-driven climax. There are misfires and then there’s South of Heaven, a constant far-too-long parade of mismatched script pages glued together. That it’s not a complete failure (thanks to Mike Colter, an audacious one-shot, or occasionally shifts in power relationships) only makes the result feel worse. Skip it – there’s only frustration here.

  • Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) Is it a valid criticism if the film itself hits you in the face with it? Looking at its title, Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse promises a team-up or a fight (or probably both) between the Teen Titans Go! crew and the DC Superhero Girls. Alas, the wilder Teen Titans primarily end up being sarcastic commenters on a story that involves the superhero girls. This is an issue, especially since fans of the anarchic Teen Titans Go humour may be bored by the far more conventional (and non-comedic) antics of the Super Hero Girls. But here’s the thing: poking at the fourth wall as they usually do, even the Titans comment on their lack of involvement in the show. Sure, there’s a coda that gets them fighting to save the multiverse, but it feels like a half-hearted contractual obligation. The result is a disappointment no matter how you slice it: the Superhero Girls feel undercut in their own films, while the Titans feel overly constrained. They will probably attempt something a lot like it again in a few years – let’s just hope it will be better.

  • The Mutations aka The Freakmaker (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) It’s going to take a specific kind of viewer to stay interested in The Mutations, even if having Donald Pleasance running around as a mad scientist does have its own unarguable charm. There’s some cool plant-growing footage over the opening credit sequence, but any interest in the film goes down whenever the plants are replaced by humans. The plot is a lazy mad-scientist shtick with the antagonist having plans to create human/plant hybrids by experimenting on young female college students. Partially inspired by -and aping- the classic horror film Freaks, the film can be gross at times as it unrolls a literal freak-show, but these little shocks can’t come close to making the rest of the film feel any better. Bah – nobody has to like 1970s low-budget British exploitation. Except for those who do.

  • Gold Diggers in Paris (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) The Gold Diggers series had five or six films, depending on whether you consider the silent film part of the series. Given that only a few minutes of the 1923 and 1929 instalments have survived to this day, you can argue that twenty-first century film viewers should consider this a four-film series. No matter the minutia, what’s certain is that Gold Diggers in Paris is the last of the series – and it feels like the least. The 1933 one had some brilliant moments for that era of filmmaking; the 1935 and 1937 ones had Dick Powell and Busby Berkeley. This one? It does have Berkeley helping out on the dance sequences, but not much else. The story is a snooze involving a Parisian cabaret that dispenses with the gentle battle-of-the-sexes (or rather battle-of-the-classes) that had been a gentle but persistent theme of the series so far. Heck, even the female casting feels non-existent. The Parisian sets are unconvincing (despite some stock footage), the novelty Schnickelfritz Band is shoehorned in, and even the climactic Berkeley number feels rote. It’s a bit too well-natured to be dislikable, but Gold Diggers in Paris just feels like a redundant film. One so useless that it killed off a series that went out of steam during its duration. Too bad, because the previous instalments each had their own charm and interest.

  • Bons baisers de Hong-Kong [From Hong Kong with Love] (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Oh boy, what a film. Bons baisers de Hong-Kong is certainly not the only, the first or the wildest James Bond parody, but I defy to find another such film that has… let’s see… a plot based on the kidnapping of Queen Elizabeth II by a lovelorn villain played by Mickey Rooney; no less than Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell playing their own Bond roles (how did that happen?!?); cameos by Groucho and Harpo Marx (or lookalikes?); car stunts from Remy Julienne’s team; and noted 1970s French comedy team Les Charlots, for which this is a star vehicle. The film itself is not necessarily successful: you can see it desperately make jokes, but it’s not a given that they’re funny. Still, the film is something wild to watch. Quite a bit of it depends on Elizabeth II impersonator Huguette Funfrock (whose career was solely limited to playing QEII or lookalikes) and her being a reminder that Our Majesty was a little hottie in her prime – and this isn’t baise-majesté as much as an essential plot point when it’s revealed that the villain kidnapped her out of sheer lust. Much of the film takes place in Hong-Kong and borrows liberally from 1970s martial arts films. Having this being a showcase for Les Charlots is a double-edged sword: while the film is an out-and-out comedy, Les Charlots’ humour styling has not aged well, and the film is guilty of quite a bit of “You already know these guys and you’re expecting to laugh, so laugh already” without building a coherent foundation for the comic set-pieces. But that’s hardly the point – most of the fun of Bons baisers de Hong-Kong is simply in waiting for the next wild thing to come out of the film.

  • Having Wonderful Time (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Oh sure, you can go watch Having Wonderful Time, lured in by a cast that features pre-stardom Lucille Ball and Red Skelton (doing a skit about dunking donuts) supporting well-known 1930s figures such as Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. You can even be taken in by the film’s cozy setting of a mountain vacation camp, with people relaxing enough that romance blooms. But even the cast and environment can’t save the film from one fundamental flaw – it’s rather dull. Well, “mediocre” would be a better word – an undistinguishable summer-camp romance with bits of humour thrown in. Not bad (although some will find Skelton insufferable), but not really remarkable either – Rogers is nice but bland, and that applies double for Fairbanks. Even Ball is far from her later screen persona. Reading about the film reveals that it’s based on a play that took place at a Catskill resort with a largely Jewish cast of characters and – aaaah, that version of the film (even if impossible to shoot due to the censorship standards of the time) could have been much, much more interesting to watch. What we have instead is a white bread film equivalent: blandly bland stuff that’s not unpleasant, but leaves little impression.

  • Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m not one for celebrity worship or performative displays of grief when a famous figure dies, but Anthony Bourdain’s suicide in 2018 felt different. I first knew of him as an author than a TV personality, and I’m significantly more attached to writers than other kinds of celebrities. Then there’s the idea that Bourdain seemed to be the kind of person who was more alive than most people. From being a middling chef and a failed novelist, he wrote the literary equivalent of a Grand Slam with Kitchen Confidential and parlayed his notoriety in becoming a TV star with globe-trotting shows. He remarried, became a father and seemed to enjoy what life had for him. Much of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain revolves around the big question left behind by his suicide in a small French inn: how did he end up there, doing that? The film asks itself the question early on, but completes a whirlwind overview of his last twenty years before getting back to it. Documentarian Morgan Neville (who scored notable hits with such films as Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) has a wealth of material available to him in telling Bourdain’s story: archival footage (including incredible footage of Bourdain as a chef in the late 1990s), friendly testimonials, behind-the-scenes material from his TV shows and quite a bit of writing/narration from Bourdain himself. (If you find yourself watching the film and having an instinctive alert that “this doesn’t sound quite like his voice” or “how did they get access to that narration?”, pay attention to your knee-jerk reaction – Neville used AI technology to -imperfectly- recreate Bourdain’s voice from some of his writing and let’s just say that this raises huge questions about documentary ethics.)  As an overview of Bourdain’s rise to fame and his many years spent travelling the globe, Roadrunner offers evocative material. While this is a very friendly biography, it doesn’t stop itself from commenting on Bourdain’s very dark outlook on life. By the time we get to the end of the film, we have layers to unwrap – Bourdain killed himself because he was depressed, yes – he was depressed partially because of a whirlwind romance and breakup with Asia Argento that affected his character, yes – but in the end, the impression left by Neville is that Bourdain spent a life being self-destructive, and his sudden fame, family life, and ability to do what he wanted were a reprieve from something that could have happened years earlier in different circumstances. Roadrunner shows the oft-unglamorous toll that his lifestyle took, spending months away from home every year, but also how Bourdain refused to make it easier on him… perhaps because he suspected what would happen if he stopped running. Neville is a crafty filmmaker in many ways – in addition to re-creating Bourdain’s voice, he also stages a mural defacement as a punk middle-finger of a conclusion. Both of those excesses are regrettable, largely because they’re futile: he had more than enough strong material here to avoid resorting to such manufactured theatrics. They end up harming a film that would have been much better without them. Still, for Bourdain fans, Roadrunner is quite a film – a perspective to his work that doesn’t contradict as much as it complements it.

  • L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres [The Probability Factor] (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Near-obscure French comedy/thriller L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres is not a particularly good movie, but it has a few period quirks that make it intermittently interesting. For one thing, it improbably makes its protagonist an insurance actuary, used to compute death percentages. For another, it describes how the protagonist comes to use his skills for evil, whipping out a lovingly portrayed Hewlett-Packard calculator to plan the most statistically probable accidental death for his unbearably shrewish wife. This being accomplished, well, what are a few more “murders” to keep improving his life? All well and good until he moves in with two very different women (each of them satisfying him in different ways) and finds out that they’re using his methods against him. As a dark comedy, the film is often a glorious paean to the mid-1970s, sometimes a constant madcap reversal of expectations, and sometimes something that feels more modern than it is. Jean-Louis Trintignant does a good job in a role that blends sympathy with pathos, while director Gérard Pirès (who would go on to direct two of the biggest French blockbusters of the turn of the century: Taxi and Les Chevaliers du Ciel) here turns in a relatively early effort. (There are also car crashes that come from – who else?—the legendary stunt coordinator Remy Julienne.)  At a bare 75 minutes, L’ordinateur des pompes funèbres doesn’t waste too much time even if there’s a noticeable gap between the initial joke, and the last big conceptual laugh. (Some of it is intentional – in tweaking expectations, the film has fun showing the financial toll and eventual dullness of a ménage à trois.)  I liked it quite a bit better than I expected – I went in expecting a naïve comedy about the early computer age and got a substantially more complex dark satire.

  • Lights, Camera, Romance (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m certainly not above watching a few low-end romantic comedies when they have an interesting hook, and the idea of a lighthearted romance set in Hollywood appealed to my movie nerd self. Alas, that would presuppose that the result would have something, anything to say about its setting, because Lights, Camera, Romance is about as unremarkable a film as can exist. Bland lead actress (Monica Moore Smith), bland script, bland directing, bland sets… it’s a film set in Hollywood (even if filmed in Utah) that doesn’t do much with the idea of being set in the world of movies, with a plot that riffs from Jane Austen as if no one had ever had that idea before. The only surprise is that this wasn’t broadcast on Lifetime or Hallmark – it’s seemingly made to ape those kinds of films, but can’t be bothered with a single spark of interest. As I said – I’m usually a forgiving audience for such films, but Lights, Camera, Romance struggles to make an impact in any way. It’s far too innocuous to be incensed about, though – but I would be surprised if I recalled anything from the film in a few weeks.

  • Old (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I have long held that M. Night Shyamalan is a much better director than he is a writer (although the nadir of his career features films where he fails at both), but his last few films, while an improvement on the poisoned two-slaps of After Earth and The Last Airbender, have revealed a far more scattered Shyamalan – and one that seemingly lost his touch for credible human moments. Old, like his previous “Renaissance” films, is filled with high concepts, striking scenes and visual ideas, but seems woefully incapable of maintaining a consistent tone, remaining remotely credible, or wrapping things up in a satisfying package. The story, simply put, sees a few tourists stranded on a beach where they age a year each thirty minutes. While the original French graphic novel on which the film is based offered no explanations for this, Shyamalan crams a science-fictional (ish) explanation in the third act, to unclear success. Over and over again, highly contrived and artificial scenes take the place of plot development, with some ideas very quickly developed. Logic and physics are merrily ignored despite a few half-hearted explanations that aren’t really sustained. Characters are puppets to vehicle ideas, while the direction has an uncanny artificiality to it. Furthermore, chunks of Old are deliberately upsetting, which doesn’t do anything to paper over the film’s more substantial filmmaking problems. The result is a thoroughly mixed bag – don’t be surprised to flip back and forth on whether you like the results, sometimes in the span of mere moments. It’s ambitious, though, and I’d rather see Shyamalan get half-successes than the complete flops that characterized an earlier phase of his career – after all, it’s nearly a miracle that he survived that episode to write and direct again.

  • F/X2 (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, May 2022) Amusingly enough, I had much clearer memories of F/X2 than the first film, even though I last watched both sometime in the early 1990s. That doesn’t make sense – the second film is clearly inferior to the first, and even the set-pieces aren’t quite as good. Here’s to the unpredictability of human memory. One of those sequels that clearly tries to ape their predecessor, F/X2 picks up a few years later, as our protagonists are a bit older and still definitely richer from their previous adventures. Our protagonist (a still-likable Bryan Brown), now independently rich, is now a freelance toy/illusion designer, while his ex-police partner (Brian Dennehy, wisely reintroduced in the first few minutes rather than waiting out an entire act) has purchased a bar as a hangout. The inferior nature of this sequel can be felt from the opening sequence, a vast pile-up of contrivances that eschews logic and simplicity in order to show-off the renewed premise of the film (a practical special-effects designer fights a small conspiracy in order to clear his name) and get the plot going on a shaky foundation. We’re supposed to be too wowed by the FX tricks to care, but it doesn’t work that way: instead, we spend the sequel aghast at the leaps of logic, unimpressed by the contrivances and underwhelmed by some curious choices – such as bringing back a very sympathetic character only to kill her off. There are two upgrades here – a bigger budget (most clearly shown in the opening and closing segments) and the beautiful Rachel Ticotin as the female lead. Otherwise, F/X2 is notable for a few proto-Internet thrills (in showing a suspense sequence revolving around the successful transfer of an electronic file) and a plot that takes us from a stalker murder to bits of business reaching all the way to the Vatican. There are, clearly, some memorable moments here – including a clown puppet – but I wouldn’t trust my teenage self as an authority on this film: it’s not bad if you’re looking for more of the same material found in the first film, but that doesn’t make it much of a thriller on its own.

  • La boum 2 (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) Feeling more like an episode than a sequel, La boum 2 takes us back to the family of the first film two years later, now with one extra family member (a mostly-inconsequential baby) and our teenage heroine ready for some serious romance. A young Sophie Marceau (with better hair) plays a fifteen-year-old who, coming back to school after a summer in Germany, gets more serious about dating, even as her parents undergo the sequel-mandated chill in their relationship. Clearly focused on breakout star Marceau, this sequel skimps on the titular parties as well, only awkwardly shoving one such sequence near the end as it to fulfil contractual obligations. Once again, Marceau is likable, Brigitte Fossey looks amazing and Denise Grey steals her scenes. (There’s even a young Lambert Wilson in the cast.)  Still, La boum 2 isn’t much of a film – it pleasantly continues the adventures of the characters from the previous film, so you need to be a fan in order to get the most out of this sequel.

  • Blonde Inspiration (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) As someone who spent a lot of time reading about pulp fiction magazines of the 1940s–1950s (albeit of the Science Fiction genre), I had a favourable predisposition toward Blonde Inspiration: After all, it’s a romantic comedy set against the world of western pulp fiction magazines, with a writer protagonist (John Shelton) trying to make it big as an author. It does help a lot that he’s the heir to a sizeable family fortune, as his worth to the magazine publishers he works with is more as an investor than an author. But don’t fret—thanks to the intervention of the lovely Virginia Gray’s character, he’ll manage to expose fraudsters, make his name as a fiction writer and get the girl. All the way to writing an entire issue of a magazine for himself when the usual writer flats-out refuses to work until he’s paid. Alas, this plot summary sounds better than the film as it exists – despite a decent amount of potential and some rather charming period detail for anyone who once dreamt about the life of pulp fiction writers (if you’re curious about that, have a look at the adventures of Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg as short-fiction writers in 1950s–1960s Manhattan – able to finance a modest urban lifestyle by writing a stream of short stories and throwing them over the transom of locked publishers’ doors.), Blonde Ambition struggles to create enough narrative rhythm. Director Busby Berkeley doesn’t have his usual tools here – the film isn’t a musical and doesn’t feature any dance sequences—so he falls back on a serviceable directing style that is undistinguishable from many other for-hire directors of the time. I enjoyed Blonde Inspiration, but I didn’t love it, and considering the potential hook that the film had for me, that’s not exactly a ringing recommendation.

  • F/X (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, May 2022) I last saw F/X back in the… early 1990s? and didn’t recall much of it (the sequel, for some reason, was fresher in mind) but the premise was distinctive enough to stick: what if you had a rather standard thriller, but with a hero that was a practical movie special-effects wizard? With a central idea like that, it’s no surprise if you occasionally have to be indulgent while the film puts its set-pieces together: things are manipulated so that the hero gets the chance to demonstrate his skills rather than evolve naturally. But that’s cool, because part of the film’s pleasure in being fooled by a trick, then seeing how it was executed. Bryan Brown (not disguising his Australian accent) is quite good in the lead role, whereas Brian Dennehy sports a distracting moustache and comes into the film far too late. As far as contrived thrillers go, though, F/X is quite enjoyable. The protagonist shows sparks of intelligence in how he deals with the situation, even when the film anticipates Home Alone in a final act that has the protagonist fatally pranking the bad guys in their own house. The special effects material remains the most fascinating part of the film, but it still moves at a decent pace and still keeps our interest despite a mixture of familiar elements and outlandish gimmicks. The conclusion is not bad, with a spirited use of Imagination‘s “Just an Illusion” as envoi over a sweeping helicopter shot. Somehow, I don’t think CGI specialists are quite going to make as compelling a kind of hero in any future remakes.