'Oz' the Mild and Mediocre

by Brett Parker

The Wizard of Oz is such a universally beloved classic that there are those who find the existence of Oz the Great and Powerful, a big budget special effects-ridden prequel to the classic tale, to be something of a sacrilege.  As for me, I don’t mind it so much.  Author L. Frank Baum wrote 14 novels about the land of Oz, proving that mythical landscapes are usually too vast and fruitful to be limited to one story.  What if Tolkien put Middle-Earth to rest after The Hobbit?  And those that accuse the new film of being a transparent excuse to roll out bloated CGI candy for cash forget that the original Wizard of Oz was also a display for Hollywood bells and whistles of its time (ponder when Technicolor was new and musical numbers were the norm).  The allure of the Oz universe mixed with director Sam Raimi’s adolescent need to deliver a popcorn genre’s giddy jollies had me sorta, kinda looking forward to the movie in the vain of growing an unexpected craving for a hot fudge sundae.

So it’s somewhat disheartening to the child inside of me that I found Oz the Great and Powerful to be a disappointment.  While the rainbow-soaked visuals give your eyes something to do and star James Franco’s reeking luncay is an entity to behold as usual, the plot turns out to be pretty flimsy stuff.  It’s obvious the film is pitching the story at a children’s tale level, but when you consider the richness of the original classic story, this film’s vapidness truly grows unnerving.  

The film opens in 1905 Kansas where we meet Oscar Diggs (James Franco), a sideshow con artist who uses slight of hand tactics and grand illusions to fool normal folks into thinking he is a powerful magician.  Aside from being a calculating huckster, we also learn that Oscar is a heartbreaking cad who has torn through a string of beauties, including the kind-hearted country girl, Annie (Michelle Williams).  Upon discovering that one of the circus strongman wants to hurt him for flirting with his wife, Oscar races to escape unharmed by hopping into a hot air balloon and flying away.  Yet seconds after doing so, the balloon comes up against a deadly tornado and Oscar gets sucked right up into the center of it.

Instead of dying, Oscar discovers that he’s been mysteriously transported to a magical land called Oz, a bizarre and beautiful hallucinatory landscape filled with singing munchkins, flying monkeys, dark forests, giant bubbles, and a yellow brick road to help guide him around.  The first person he meets in this strange land is a beautiful witch named Theodora (Mila Kunis) who believes that he is a prophesied powerful wizard who has been sent to save a kingdom from doom.  Theodora takes Oscar to an extravagant Emerald City and introduces him to her witch sister, Evanora (Rachel Weisz), who informs him that all the riches in the city will be his if he travels to the darker part of the land and kills a Wicked Witch.  Realizing he’s out of his depth but yearning for endless gold, Oscar decides to take the mission.

Guided by a talking winged monkey (voiced by Zach Braff) and a tiny porcelain girl (Joey King), Oscar travels to the darker forests of Oz and discovers not a scary, wicked witch, but a beautiful, pure witch named Glinda (Michelle Williams).  Since Glinda is a dead ringer for the sweet-natured girl Oscar knew from Kansas, he suspects that she may not be the evil witch he was led to believe and that the sisters back in the Emerald City may be up to something sinister.  This all leads to revealing motives and an epic struggle that will cause Oscar to rely on his wits and tricks to convince an entire kingdom that he has what it takes to be a mighty wizard. 

With all the dreamlike sights and capable actors on display, you keep wishing that the script would do evocative things with them, but things are kept achingly simple-minded and devoid of such things as complexity and creativity.  It’s a mystery why this written-from-scratch prequel didn’t dive more into Baum’s other Oz novels, which went to richer and darker places than the first story did.  Walter Murch’s Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel to Wizard of Oz which followed Baum’s novels much more closely, may have been too disturbing to become beloved family entertainment, but it was uncompromising and fascinating in the way it explored more troubling depths within Oz’s logistics.  I don’t feel like it’d be too daunting to find a middle ground between children’s entertainment and edgier mythic drama, and it would certainly make Oz the Great and Powerful miles more fulfilling than it actually is.

That’s not to say that potential isn’t hinted at in the film’s membrane.  One of the many pleasures of the Oz universe is how it’s an exuberant fantasy playground to work out human morals and values.  The eventual trajectory of Oscar’s journey of redemption evokes neat ideas regarding realizing one’s potential, the scrappy resourcefulness of oddball simpletons, the strength of ordinary people when they unite in a crisis situation, and the salvation one can find in camaraderie.  If only the screenplay by Mitchell Kapner (The Whole Nine Yards) and David Lindsay-Abaire (Rise of the Guardians) knew how to make these things pop with emotional power.  Plus another reason this prequel is so disappointing is because for some cinephiles, seeing the Evil Dead filmmaker at the helm of an Oz film is something of a beautiful oddball triumph.  One review pointed out that this flick has more in common with Army of Darkness than the original Wizard of Oz.  While some may find that infuriating, I find that some kind of awesome.  Raimi has always been a director in love with the simple, primal pleasures of popcorn movies, especially their corniness (which I mean as the sincerest compliment).  As a beloved fan of all things Oz, you can certainly sense Raimi’s childlike joy in dishing out his merry set pieces, especially in scenes where monstrous threats lunge at the camera with some of that old Evil Dead pluck.  The enthusiasm is certainly there, it’s just a shame a smarter screenplay wasn’t there to guide Raimi through his candy-coated passion.

While some people raised their eyebrows at the casting of James Franco as the man who would become the wonderful Wizard of Oz, I must admit that I was looking forward to the performance.  Franco’s puckish nature and curated weirdness seems like the perfect fit for a calculating conjurer in a mythical kiddie land and I feel like original choice Robert Downey, JR. would’ve been too overqualified to put yet another spin on his whole irreverent-oddball-seeks-redemption act he curated to magnificence in Iron Man (while were at it, I think Bruce Campbell, a Raimi all-star who turns up in his trademark cameo here, would’ve made a phenomenal Oz).  In practice, Franco isn’t as commanding or possessive in the role as you wish he could be, but his naturally oozing strangeness easily makes him the most interesting thing in the whole movie.  By the time he reaches his eventual destination as a gigantic floating head surrounded by smoke and flames, I smiled.  What’s really a let-down with the cast is seeing some of the most beautiful and talented of today’s actresses being wasted in watered-down witch roles.  Weisz and Williams look stranded in roles that are pure cardboard and Kunis is especially a gigantic fumble.  While her radiant eyes are certainly the most memorable visual from this trip to Oz, the eventual nature of her role has her overselling it way too much.  It’s annoying to ponder that she probably developed laryngitis from her performance.   And speaking of vocals, I found it extremely amusing that Zach Braff, voicing a talking monkey, sounds uncannily like Billy Crystal.

Lord knows this movie barely had any shot at toppling the original Wizard of Oz, but as much as I tried to conjure up my inner-child like the kidnapped tyke from Poltergeist, I honestly couldn’t make myself care that much about anything happening on the screen.  The best thing I can say about Oz the Great and Powerful is that I found it more enjoyable than Tim Burton’s misguided Alice in Wonderland, which more or less demonstrates the same plot and idea.  It’s been reported that another Oz adventure is in the works and I hope that this time the writers delve further into Baum’s novels and realize that a lot more was going on than just cutesy kiddie stuff.  And if for some reason James Franco can’t return for the lead role, they better get Bruce Campbell on the phone immediately.  

A 'Man' Who Knows His Noir

by Brett Parker

Dead Man Down is a neo-noir thriller which marks the English-language debut of director Niels Arden Oplev, and the film really signifies how much the genre and Hollywood needs people like him right now.  At a time when a lot of tough guy crime thrillers feel like copies of a copy of a copy of watered down ideas, Oplev dazzles us with his economical bag of tricks, which includes slow-burn narrative layers, rich characters who make you feel the ooze of their torment, and a relentless feeling of dread that never stops reminding us how this movie world has too many scary things in common with the real world.  All of these things come together in the end to create what has to be one of the most gripping and involving crime thrillers I’ve seen in many a moon.

As the film opens, we meet Victor (Colin Farrell), a rising player in a crime syndicate led by the ruthless Alphonse Hoyt (Terrance Howard).  Someone has been sending Alphonse and his flunkies ambiguous clues that hint towards a deadly game of revenge in which the crime lord is at the center of.  What starts off as distorted pictures and notes soon leads to the death of one of Alphonse’s comrades with the promise of more violent deeds.  This sends his crew of trusted thugs scrambling to solve the mystery of who could possibly be trying to wipe out the entire gang, although Victor knows more about the situation that he hints at.

Things grow complicated as Victor meets Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a facially-scarred woman who lives in an apartment building directly across from him.  The two have been exchanging glances from their living room windows across the distance, and Beatrice has decided to break the ice and get to know him.  Yet what starts out as a harmless courtship turns into a dark plot of revenge once Beatrice reveals that she knows a dark secret about Victor and tries to blackmail him.  She wants him to kill the man responsible for the death of her husband or else she goes to the police with his secret.  As Beatrice tries to course Victor into her seething desire for retribution, what she doesn’t realize is that Victor himself is already deep into his own complicated plans for vengeance.  

Oplev is perhaps most famous for directing the original-Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the version that wisely knew how to make its troubled world terrifying while David Fincher unnervingly fetishized it in his American version.  The joy in watching Dead Man Down is the way Oplev allows his foreign values to nest right into a dependable Hollywood genre.  His characters hold a fascinating way of being both paralyzed and driven by concealed pain.  While his protagonists take direct lines of action towards vengeance, it’s that very thirst for revenge that numbs them out from making normal human connections.  This is felt in the way the early courtship scenes between Victor and Beatrice hold the quiet delicacy of trying to munch on potato chips in a library.  Most thankfully of all, Oplev knows how to conceal depths of duplicity and moral decay in his plot and allow them to spring up like baby sharks as the plot rolls along.  The smart script by J.H. Wyman (The Mexican) is ingenious in the way it ties everything together throw hidden motives and sneaky agendas and Oplev makes it burn with a vivid resonance of wistfulness and corruption.   

One of the biggest treats Dead Man Down dishes out is the pleasure of seeing an ultra-cool cast giving expert performances in roles they soar best in.  Colin Farrell gets to employ his action movie smarts and inward nuances to make you feel every inch of Victor’s haunted core.  As Beatrice, Noomi Rapace once again plays an emotionally and physically scarred woman for Oplev, but this time she is allowed more of a feminine vulnerability that is quite heartbreaking.  Terrence Howard finds the perfect villainous role to make great use out his dapper suaveness, smoldering masculinity, and distinct voice.  One of the great mysteries of the current Hollywood mentality is why a unique smoothie like Howard isn’t more of a marquee movie star.  And the cast doesn’t even slum it in the supporting roles, for Oplev is generous in giving us seasoned veterans who could crush these roles in their sleep.  Dominic Cooper, Armand Assante, and F. Murray Abraham bring such color and verve to supporting parts that it helps shade in the reality of this pulp world.

Dead Man Down hits so many right notes that it’s kind of a let-down to find that the film’s climax descends into the usual shoot-em-up and blow-things-up finale that Hollywood is known for.  This bang-bang ending really skewers the painful relish of revenge the characters have been itching for, all while reducing Alphonse from a complex demon to a bumbling baddie.  But I still must admit that I haven’t seen an ending with a car crash and an explosion like this in quite some time.  Still, Dead Man Down is a welcome antidote to the numbskull mentality of Hollywood’s action thrillers and easily the strongest film to come out of this popcorn-trash winter season.  If this film is indeed the first of many in a long, Hollywood career for Oplev, then I hope he shows us many more flicks like this one where pulp formulas are given expert dramatist flourishes towards fascinating multiplex entertainment.  

'21 and Over': Ho Ho or No No?

by Brett Parker

Its peculiar how a comedy can have all the right moves yet be devoid of the consistent laughter you'd expect from such an enterprise.  Such is the case with 21 and Over, an irreverent, college-age bromantic romp that serves up a talented cast, plenty of zingers, and endless slapstick gags, yet never really delivers the side-splitting belly laughs you yearn for.  If its any indication, the audience I watched the film with didn't turn out to be the laugh-on-cue sitcom audience you usually get with a flick like this.  Still, the film has its likable side.  Like a chubby, weird kid doing a stand-up routine during an elementary school talent show, you smile at the effort while secretly wishing that Richard Pryor-level laughs were being dished out in waves.

The film follows the drunken mishaps and chaotic mayhem that erupts on the 21st birthday of Jeff Chang (Justin Chon), an overly-studious college student.  When his big legal-drinking holiday finally arrives, that attracts a visit from his old high school buddies Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin).  The fellas can’t wait to take Chang out and get him drunk beyond belief, but they soon receive a dire warning from Chang’s stern and intimidating father, Dr. Chang (Francois Chau): Jeff has an early morning med school interview the day after his birthday and if he misses out on it as the result of a bad hangover, there’s gonna be hell to pay.  Although terrified at the prospect of Dr. Chang’s wrath, the gang decides to move forward with their pub-crawl plan all while being mindful of Chang’s early morning appointment.

As nighttime falls, the fellas hit the town and hit up every bar in sight, pounding endless beers and an obscene amount of shots.  Chang seems to be enjoying his own drunken exuberance right up until the moment he pukes his brains out and passes out.  As Chang lays unconscious, his friends discover a problem: they have no idea where he lives or how to get him home since they’re not familiar with his college town.  This sets off an epic quest to get Chang back to his house safe and sound so he can be fresh and ready for his interview, a perilous adventure that throws everything at our heroes from a wild buffalo, a sociopathic jock (Jonathan Keitz), a hostile sorority, a video-game style frat party, and disturbing revelations about Jeff Chang’s college life.  

21 and Over is brought to us by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the same frisky shenanigan-mongers who wrote The Hangover, and your heart sinks a little knowing that the duo is more or less just ripping off their own formula.  This plot also turns out to be a booze-soaked journey towards saving a fellow bro filled with outrageous detours and a near-identical climactic twist.  Yet the duo's work on this flick and The Change-Up proves that maybe The Hangover’s success was due more to the beautifully incongruent chemistry between its stars and Todd Phillip's knack for finding soulfulness in zaniness than the simple-minded script.   Perhaps this movie would've worked a lot better if it focused less on raunch fest hand-me-downs and more on actual situations faced with going-out as a 21-year-old, such as pub formalities, awkward pick-ups, dance-floor silliness, drunken fist fights, tacky sartorial choices, and bizarre conversations.  A little less of The Hangover and more Swingers, if you know what I mean.

Whatever saving grace this movie has comes from the more-than-capable cast.  Like the young crew of the Starship Enterprise on their first mission, you sense that these cool cats are destined for greater things.  Miles Teller proves here as he did in the Footloose remake that he's a charming comic actor, especially as this film pushes him towards becoming the next Vince Vaughn.  Skylar Astin is like watching a young Dane Cook trying to be a young Tom Hanks, which he makes miles more appealing than that sounds like.  And even if Jeff Chang skids dangerously close to being an Asian stereotype, Justin Chon sure plays him otherwise, which is a wildly optimistic observation considering the drunken Wookie his character is made out to be. 

On a spectrum where comedies are either wildly funny or mind-numbingly awful, there are those that fall in the middle of being occasionally funny with a few laughs here and there, which can sometimes be more frustrating than downright terrible comedies.  21 and Over falls into that middle category, with yearning eyes staring towards the top.  I'm really back and forth on whether or not the movie works for me, and I suspect that watching it at home after a few beers may enhance its appeal.  I'm reminded of how I saw Anchorman in theaters and disliked it, until I watched it again on DVD in college and laughed hysterically at it.  In the end, I’ve decided to give the flick a mild recommendation because the cast is likable, the soundtrack is rather fun, a party scene with video-game style levels is a cool idea, and the film's final moment had me smiling and laughing enough to think, "oh, what the hell....I'll tell people to go and see this."

The Top 10 Movies of 2012

by Brett Parker

I love movies more than you can possibly imagine and I always vowed to stick up for the medium in all shapes or forms.  That’s why I’m usually weary of the more grumpier cinephiles who constantly grumble about the troubled state of movies.  Like the Kryptonian High Council with a very bad hangover, I’m sure most of you have heard their sing-along cynicism at some time over the past few years: “Hollywood keeps putting out mindless garbage, everything is pointless reboots or remakes, only superhero movies get greenlit these days, it’s all formulaic trash, TV smokes movies in content,” and so on.  I’ve never been down with such arguments because 1) dumb-minded romps have been present since the dawn of cinema, 2) most film snobs never realize that trash can unwittingly say more about how we live and how we think than most art house flicks, 3) every film era is filled with bitter killjoys who complain about the movies they’re getting until realizing years later that they actually had it pretty good at the time.

So I’m somewhat bewildered to admit that even a crusading optimist like myself has felt a bit of a mind-numbing strain with Hollywood products in recent years.  I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment I felt something was amiss in my moviegoing pleasures.  Was it when the Footloose remake fumbled with it’s own musical identity?  Was it during Ryan Reynolds’ climactic surfer-dude monologue in The Green Lantern?  I’m actually pretty sure it was when I witnessed in horror as the Total Recall remake smugly neglected the original’s wit, creativity, and reason for existing.  Mind you, I’m one who doesn’t mind checking his brain at the front of a theater lobby, but recently I’ve been feeling so separated from my mind that I feared I was turning into a scarecrow.  It was during a recent viewing of Sylvester Stallone’s macho shoot-em-up Bullet to the Head, a candy-shop of old-school testosterone treats, where I wistfully realized that they don’t make trash like they used to.

That’s why I felt my frown turn upside down in 2012, a year in which primal generic pleasures reclaimed their intelligence and miraculously dazzled both the popcorn muncher and intellectual in all of us.  As we dabbed in the worlds of superhero flicks, historical love letters, crowd-pleasing dramedies, cutesy indie flicks, and sci-fi mind-benders,  the movies of 2012 gave us plenty to think about and stayed with us a lot longer than we initially suspected they would.  Mind you, I’m not saying that an artistic revolution kicked into high gear, but it seemed that a lot of flicks caught on to the Right Idea.  And in a town filled to the brim with Wrong Ideas, I’ll take multiple Right Ideas straight to the bank anytime.  So without further ado, I give you my Top 10 Movies of 2012:

1) Silver Linings Playbook

On paper, there’s a ton about Silver Linings Playbook that sounds cutesy and ridiculous, but the way director David O. Russell brings it all together makes the final product a cocktail of heart and hilarity that’s damn near impossible to resist.  Using a tenderly funny Bradley Cooper and sensationally smart Jennifer Lawrence as sympathetic guides through the world of mental illness, Russell finds lively juice in exploring his usual themes of wildly dysfunctional families and the ways human behavior can allow unhinged wackiness into the real world.  While the story appears to hold the usual trappings of a quirky dramedy, it’s old-school slapstick energy and surprising warmth towards the darker shades of life truly grabs you.  In a world where preposterousness has become the new normal and it seems like every person has something internal eating away at them, it’s Silver Linings Playbook’s acute understanding of this world, and the sensible optimism it offers up to deal with it, that helps it score a touchdown in our hearts.

2) The Master

With his usual ideas regarding hustlers and outsiders latching onto each other to find purpose in an unpredictable universe, Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a difficult dazzler that explores the ways in which man’s spiritual and animal sides try to uneasily co-exist with each other.  With Joaquin Phoenix giving the performance of the year (and the performance of a lifetime) alongside Phillip Seymour Hoffman displaying a scorching reptilian charm, Anderson teases the curious ways in which preachers and worshippers need each other to exist.  Using the origins of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology movements as a cryptic starting point, Anderson discovers the fascination in how religious institutions can bounce between sneaky hope and suspicious skepticism simultaneously.  This all makes The Master a spellbinding study of the cracks in created belief systems and the backhanded ways we can use them to deal with our lives.

3) Looper
While most time travel stories get caught up in their own metaphysical logistics, Looper is a refreshingly imaginative sci-fi tale that uses time travel as a backdrop to evoke bigger ideas about the troubling habitual mindsets that wreak havoc upon mankind and how we could even hope to repair such negativity.  As an assassin who kills human targets sent from the future, a smoldering and intense Joeseph Gordon-Levitt faces off with an implosive and conflicted Bruce Willis playing an older version of the young assassin as he dives into the past to repair a disastrous future.  Writer/director Rian Johnson’s script is a model of intricate and contemplative sci-fi writing that leads to a shattering climax in which hope and gloom are reconciled in brilliant form.  Looper is a welcome reminder that big ideas can always trump big special effects when given the most attention.

4) Argo
Riffing on the spellbinding true story of how Hollywood created a fake movie to rescue American hostages during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, Argo became one of the most unlikeliest and generous crowd-pleasers of the year.  Relying on his growing knack for vivid surroundings and rich character details, actor/director Ben Affleck showed off a relaxed straight-forwardness in molding a tale of nail-biting danger and Hollywood insider humor that proved to be surprisingly fluid.  With all of its expert storytelling and great evocation of its time period, what makes Argo ultimately engaging is the adventurous kick it gets in showing both the U.S. government and Hollywood proving to be heroic in a time of great crisis.

5) Lincoln
What was initially assumed to be a lumbering and sentimental portrayal of one of our country’s most beloved presidents turned out to be one of the most illuminating and absorbing movies about the political process ever made.  By focusing primarily on Abraham Lincoln’s quest to abolish slavery at the end of the Civil War, the film highlights  great fascination in the shrewd dealings and grand emotions behind the difficult business of passing an amendment.  Helping matters is the work of top-of-their-form experts who spare this tale from being a lumbering history lesson: Daniel Day-Lewis is mesmerizing at evoking Lincoln’s homegrown warmth and intelligence, the model screenplay by Tony Kushner finds surprising poetry and suspense amidst a political ordeal, and Steven Spielberg uses his lyrical gifts to find peculiar beauty in our nation’s past.  It’s rare to find a film so honest about our nation’s inner-workings that lifts our spirits about the institution at the same time.

6) Celeste and Jesse Forever
Female-driven films can feel like a rare entity at times, especially ones that don’t peddle cliches and stereotypes.  That’s why Celeste and Jesse Forever is such a gem, for it offers a rare glimpse of a woman dealing with a divorce, and the various emotional bases that includes, in a way we barely see handled well at the movies.  Armed with a script she co-wrote with Will McCormack, Rashida Jones turns in my favorite female performance of the year as an emotionally-imploding woman who proves to be hilarious, contemplative, challenging, tender, and heart-wrenching all at the same time.  It’s rare to find a movie about a modern woman packed with killer-funny laughs and deep, eye-opening insights into the female psyche.  

7) Moonrise Kingdom
While most filmmakers offer us unique visions of the world we live in, Wes Anderson offers us a portal to a whole new universe, one in which retro styles, candy-coated locations, peculiar pop, and internalized yearning emotions collide within a delightfully whimsical canvas.  Moonrise Kingdom is yet another worthwhile trip inside Anderson’s head, this time exploring the innocence of young love and the deep ways 1960s America rationalized its choices.  Fusing subtle touches of a hippie rebellion story and an age-old tale of adolescent romance across opposing summer camps, Anderson hints at how institutions of sanitized structures are no match for appetites of the heart and exuberance within the human spirit.  Filled with his trademark deadpan humor, european flavorings, and childlike vision of the world, Anderson offers one of his most heart-poking and bright-eyed landscapes yet.

8) Django Unchained
If Inglorious Basterds re-wrote the book on what historical war movies are good for, then his latest opus, Django Unchained, re-imagines the birth of blacksploitation to fit a time when black culture probably needed it the most.  Playing around once again with his favorite cinematic delights, Tarantino creates an epic fusion between the Western and blacksploitation, although the film is more an incarnation of the latter than most people realize.  Through the super-cool cowboy that is Jamie Foxx as the title character, Tarantino offers us troubling glimpses of the atrocities white people have committed against the black race during slavery and hints at the smarts and bad-ass resourcefulness blacks can possess to stick it right back to The Man.  While some people have trouble dealing with the fact that  a white filmmaker has used the horrors of slavery to get his moviegoing jollies off, it’s important to remember that Tarantino isn’t trying to solve the problems of racism.  He’s merely demonstrating how B-Movie formulas can be used evocatively to suggest the darker aspects of humanity and offer up release anxiety fantasies to deal with them in our heads.  It’s an important cinematic reminder and one that I’m thankful shows up in an exciting Tarantino package.  

9) The Dark Knight Rises
With this final installment in Christopher Nolan’s take on the Batman legend, the filmmaker pushes the series’ comic book themes to their absolute breaking point and the result is compelling entertainment on a grand scale.  The success of The Dark Knight allowed Nolan to pull out all the stops this time, and one can’t help but marvel at the epic scale in which this comic book tale is carried out.  Adding electric interest is the wonderful perceptions of Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway, who take popular villains Bane and Catwoman, respectively, and dazzle us endlessly with their theatricality.  Yet it’s Christian Bale’s weary and tortured take on the legendary caped crusader that holds us the entire way through this troubling world.  Throughout the trilogy, he’s been alert to every complicated nuance the hero demanded, and he brings it all home here with piercing resonance.  In the end, we realize that The Dark Knight Rises isn’t just unlike any superhero film we’ve seen before, it’s unlike any film we’ve ever seen before period.

10) Chronicle
While hand-held “found footage” and superhero flicks feel like they been overdone to death in Hollywood, Chronicle meets both genres halfway and the result creates one of the most intimate and involving takes on each medium I can remember.  As three teenagers (the wonderful Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan, and Alex Russell) obtain superpowers from a mysterious glowing substance, the film offers a unique bridge between a superhero origin story and a teen angst tale along with the scary, dangerous ways those two ideals can threaten each other.  The hand-held footage gimmick is actually used provocatively to bring a real sense of emotional discovery to scenes of superpower awakenings and a white-knuckled impending doom when those powers begin to fuel troubling juvenile emotions.  Everything comes to a head in a heart-stopping climax which is like a clash between the endings of Superman II and Rebel Without A Cause.  Your head reels from the fact that the film is overstuffed with exuberance, terror, and excitement until you catch on that being a teenager also bounces feverishly between those very same feelings.  

HONORABLE MENTIONS

-Amour

-The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

-Seven Psychopaths

-Zero Dark Thirty

A 'Warm' View of Zombies

by Brett Parker

In an age where it feels like every possible angle on zombies has been done to death (no pun intended), along comes Warm Bodies, which offers up the wildly incongruent perspective of the zombie as anguished romantic hero.  Seeing as how zombies are inherently rotting human carcasses who can’t exist without devouring living human flesh like a fat kid at a pie eating contest, having them fall helplessly in love with their food John Hughes-style sounds too ridiculously implausible to work.  But in an age where nonsense like Twilight has proven to be a smash, anything is possible, right?  So it’s bewildering as much as it is refreshing that Warm Bodies actually works as a film miles more than you’d expect.  No one ever really suspected that a shotgun marriage between George A. Romero and Cameron Crowe could gel, but maybe it’s just what this genre’s doctor ordered.

The film opens in what appears to be the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in America.  We meet R (Nicholas Hoult) a teenage zombie who can’t remember what his first name was when he was human, but he thinks it began with an “R.”  We see R as he conducts his daily routine of scrummaging through the North American wasteland with other decaying zombies looking for live humans to feast on.  He considers M (Rob Corddry) his best friend, but they’re too dehumanized to muster up a coherent conversation.  R has made an abandoned airplane his home, which is filled with relics of former civilization that include a record player and a vinyl collection.  Listening to what music used to be (which includes Bruce Springsteen amongst R’s records) causes R to pine for human feelings that he used to feel.  R spends his days wondering whether or not he could ever overcome his undead condition to act like a normal, full-blooded person ever again.

Things change dramatically for R when he goes out one day to hunt for flesh with his fellow zombies.  He meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), a pretty blonde fighter for a band of uninfected humans trying to survive in their post-apocalyptic world.  As the other zombies feast on Julie’s friends, R is hit with feelings of romanticism instead of feelings of hunger for her.  R tries his very best to convey a sense of human decency through his rotting exterior and he’s miraculously able to convince Julie that there’s remnants of a spirit inside of him.  Pretty soon, a peculiar courtship develops where R tries to convey his surprising romantic feelings towards Julie while she hopes to find a way to bring whatever heart and soul remains in him to the forefront.  Julie’s Dad, Grigio (John Malkovich), is the leader of the human resistance against zombies and R has the blonde warrior hoping to convince her father that zombies aren’t hopeless demons that have to be exterminated but could probably become human again with traditional feelings of love.  

What’s so enduring about the zombie genre is how shrewdly oozing corpses have consistently served as the perfect metaphors for the trials and tribulations of American society.  Since Romero’s pioneering heyday, zombies have kindly offered us reflective commentaries on post-war trauma, consumerism, nuclear anxieties, social unrest, government corruption, mob mentality, and even crackpot Americana resourcefulness when depicted as comedy.  Perhaps Warm Bodies never feels as fully preposterous as it should because the repressed zombies on display perfectly depict present-day American people: numbed-out slugs trudging through a compromised existence yearning unconsciously for an emotional connection and nourishment of the heart.  The story gets its juice from the realization that if you were to ask a random zombie “what’s on your mind?,” then you’d probably get the same cryptic answers as any disillusioned American of today asked the same question.  To say that all a zombie needs is a lot of tender, love, and care to cure his problems may seem like a hell of a theoretical stretch, but the fact that most of the audience watching the film could use the same kind of medicine these days gives Warm Bodies an emotional connection that spares it from being completely vapid.

Warm Bodies is perhaps as surprisingly engaging as it is because director Jonathan Levine sees this tale as just another one of his trademark riffs on young men trying to find solid emotional ground in an increasingly confusing world.  Like a teenager trying to deal with youthful angst (The Wackness) or a young man battling cancer (50/50), Levine depicts R’s view of his own zombie condition as an inconvenient affliction that can perhaps be overcome with the right emotional mindset.  If Levine’s heroes are males trying to retain a strong sense of self as they fight for normalcy amongst bewildering circumstances, then his themes are put to the ultimate test here since zombieitis could be considered the ultimate threat to those very ideals.  Of course, reducing the entire zombie experience down to a young man’s coming-of-age quest to find emotional fulfillment sidesteps a ton of hellish circumstances naturally inherent in the basic concept of a zombie tale, but it sure does bring a lot of empathetic juice to a lunatic cinematic concept.  Plus it offers moments of cockeyed beauty rarely felt in this genre, as when R is drawn to the positive vibes he feels when he plays his vinyl records or when R’s newfound romance inspires the other zombies around him to feel all tingly at the sight of a poster depicting a romantic couple on a beach.  

To whatever extent this crackpot tale actually works, most credit can be given to Nicholas Hoult and the tricky sympathy he blasts through the guise of being a rotting corpse.  The trouble with a zombie being a romantic hero is the inherent lack of romanticism in their appearance, for ultra-pale skin, decaying flesh, and demonic eyes are hardly considered dreamboat traits.  Yet Hoult is able to make all of those things feel like it’s part of a disheveled, lonely teenager package and is able to generate a Quasimodo-style sincerity with it all.  His voice-over narration has a charmingly down-to-earth quirkiness about his ordeal, kind of like a post-apocalyptic Lloyd Dobler.  A scene in which Julie and a friend give him a shower and cover him with make-up offers up a rare moment in the zombie genre: one of heart-warming uplift.  As the lady love R pines for, Teresa Palmer proves here as she did in Take Me Home Tonight that she is a suitable throwback to that ancient Hollywood tradition of having a pretty blonde with inklings of spunk as the ultimate romantic holy grail.  If Julie is lacking in the personality department, then that makes sense seeing as how R would have a hard time dealing with a real ball of feministic fire.  Katherine Hepburn, for example, would make him give up and just start eating her out of inadequacy.  Julie feels like the perfect starter girlfriend until more of his lost humanity kicks in.  If their tender courtship scenes seems like pretty basic stuff, then they feel all the more impressive once you grasp the unlikely bizarreness they grew out of.

It’s not hard to suspect that a work like Warm Bodies was most likely concocted as a result of the Twilight series wild success, but I couldn’t help but notice that this zombie tale smokes the vampire one on its own ideological grounds.  My biggest qualm with Twilight is its heavy reliance on numbskull logistics and overdone romantic pulp to distract from the hard answers to the premise’s central question: why would a monster fall in love with his own food?  From where I sit, Warm Bodies answers such a preposterous question with a lot more tenderness, humor, and level-headedness.  Twilight makes the mistake of taking its ridiculous world so dreadfully seriously while the joy of Warm Bodies is its comic curiosity and gaga hopefulness about whether or not a zombie could actually fall in love.  That you can kind of halfway believe they could is the film’s ultimate success.

'Skyfall': God Save The Drama Queen

by Brett Parker

Skyfall, the latest installment in the seemingly-immortal James Bond series, once again pits the phenomenal Daniel Craig in a 007 adventure that looks to reflect on the damaged emotional depths of the famous character’s world.  While overwhelming praise for the film has reached the heights of “one of the Best Bond Movies Ever” talk, part of me can’t help but think that this whole trend of grittiness is starting to show a bit of strain.  Don’t get me wrong, Skyfall certainly makes good on everything we want from a Bond film: the action scenes are slam-bang, the women exude gorgeousness, the villain delivers sinister glee, and Bond pounds on baddies in the most debonair of suits.  While I wouldn’t at all say that the film’s loving reception is undeserved, you must forgive me for suspecting that the character is being taken a little too seriously these days.  The masterpiece Casino Royale proved that a bit of seriousness can mix wonderfully with the franchise’s more sparkling elements, but the somber angles we’re given this time don’t feel terribly urgent, perhaps because we’re starting to realize that Bond was never that decidedly urgent to begin with.  

The film hits the ground running as we open on Bond (Craig) and a fellow agent named Eve (Naomie Harris) chasing a bad guy through a Turkish city and atop a speeding train to recover a confidential computer disk.  Even though she doesn’t have a clean shot, Eve is instructed by MI6 headquarters in England to try and shoot the villain dead while he battles with Bond atop the train.  Eve misses and Bond is shot, falling from the train into the waters below and presumed dead by the agency.  Little do they know that Bond washes ashore alive and decides to go off the grid to enjoy a holiday with his newfound “deceased” status.  

Yet once news of a terrorist attack on MI6 makes headlines, Bond is ready to return for action.  He learns that a scorned former agent turned cyber-terrorist named Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) is holding a psychotic grudge against M and plots to wreak deadly havoc on her agency in the worst of ways.   Bond fights to combat Silva’s violent attacks, but it becomes apparent that this crazed opponent is a tech genius who can hack into the agency’s system and run afoul of their advanced innovations.  Making matters worse is the fact that Bond is not in the best of physical shape, for the rough and tumble nature of his job has worn him out quite a bit.  With Silva’s threats growing more violent and MI-6 running out of technological defenses, Bond and M team up together to find whatever resources they can to put a stop this rouge madman.  

The most inspired ideas in Skyfall show the Bond franchise’s most entertaining implausibilities coiling back on themselves in the face of logic.  If Bond in the past has been an action figure who can take endless beatings, dodge countless explosions, knock back massive amounts of booze, and keep on ticking, then this time he can feel the wear and tear of his dangerous job taking a crucial toll on him.  As Bond fumbles with target practice and struggles to maintain his agility, the assumption that Bond is an infallible super-agent goes out the window and the acknowledgement that he’s an aging, injury-prone human brings a unique subject of tension into the formula.  One qualm moviegoers tend to have with Bond flicks before Craig’s reign was how the plots get too caught up in technological overkill.  Yet this time out, the story wickedly plays with that by introducing a villain who can turn MI6’s tech-savvy gambits against itself, forcing Bond to resort to a bare-knuckled resourcefulness not exactly typical of the series.  This leads to what is perhaps the franchise’s most stripped down climax ever as Bond relies on vintage guns and homegrown objects in a significant Scottish mansion to fend off Silva’s thugs.  By action movie standards, the climax isn’t terribly innovative, but it holds a spit and sawdust rawness that feels particularly flesh for a 007 picture.

Since the current style of Bond films is deep dramatic reflection, its not hard to see how this project appealed to the dramatist in director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead), especially in the way the script touches on his usual ideas of turmoil and disorder erupting in environments rigorously constructed to be devoid of such things.  The big problem with Bond’s dark musings this time is that the script really doesn’t have anything new to say about him.  Mendes’s showmanship suggests we’re in for big dramatic revelations, but Skyfall pretty much tells us things we’ve already firmly grasped from the previous two installments.  For instance, we already knew that Bond was an abandoned orphan and that M has a strict adherence to her duty in spite of her maternal feelings for him.  Lord knows giving Bond some dimensions has made him more exciting, but scraping away at his depths has its limits since the character is essentially a pulp escapist concoction.  

At a time when gloves-off realism and no-nonsense edginess appears to be the primary taste for blockbuster characters, I must admit that part of me yearns for the kind of Bond flicks that were predominantly smirking adventure fantasies.  I’m not asking for another Moonraker, mind you, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Craig show up in, say, a Goldfinger or a Thunderball, if you catch my drift.  Most Bond films usually place themselves on a spectrum between steely gloominess and light-hearted fluffiness, and my idea of a perfect Bond picture is one that meets both of these ideals in the middle.  That’s why my unapologetic vote for Best Bond Movie Ever still goes to Casino Royale.  Director Martin Campbell still dished out the glamourous and fantastical fixings of the series while superbly fusing them with unexpected real world stakes and feelings.  It’s not just that Craig, in his first 007 outing, nailed the charismatic and heroic aspects of the famous agent, but he also showed us how those cooler Bond traits were spawned by the most brutish and despairing of emotions.  The smoldering transcendence of Craig’s performance was such an electric jolt of discovery that the sequels have been struggling to keep up with it amongst their dramatic pretenses.  

Yet Skyfall isn’t totally devoid of traditional fun, for the time-honored genre’s treats do feel considerably prominent enough, especially through the supporting performances.  Ben Whishaw is pitch-perfect as MI-6’s gadget maestro, Q, totally sustaining the self-contained genius and playful jabbing perfected by the original Q, Desmond Llewelyn.  Berenic Marlohe seductively honors the Bond girl tradition of being memorably disposable, especially in a steamy shower scene.  When the eventual natures of Ralph Fiennes’ bureaucratic overseer Gareth Mallory and Naomie Harris’s playfully observant Eve are revealed, you realize they are the perfect fit for certain vintage staples in the series.  Yet the film’s most satisfying throwback, as well as the most entertaining thing in the entire film, comes from Javier Bardem triumphantly hurling theatrical flamboyance back into the Bond villain position.  Armed with pearly white teeth bearing a gruesome backstory, puckish homoerotic urges, and bleach-blonde hair that evokes Christopher Walken in A View to a Kill, Bardem swings for the fences to put himself in the colorful-Bond-foe-hall-of-fame and achieves that goal with a demented pathos.  In a movie that slightly overcooks the solemnity, Bardem brings the stylish playfulness this kind of enterprise cries out for.

At the end of the day, very little can detract from the fact that Daniel Craig makes for a wonderful Bond.  He does the best job of any actor since Sean Connery of reconciling all the crucial shades of the appealing character into a graceful, effortless package.  I’m prepared to follow Craig into any 007 enterprise, no matter how dark or how preposterous.  Besides, it doesn’t really matter what is revealed about the character, for the style of the Bond movies themselves are usually a statement about the eras they’re made in.  So perhaps it makes sense in these crazy times that the current incarnation is striving to have fun, but can’t quite shake traumatized weight and festering poignancy.  But hopefully Bond, and the audience watching him, can get back to a place of uninhibited jolly good fun someday.  

A Performance That Takes 'Flight'

by Brett Parker

In an era where cinephiles grumble about how Hollywood is only investing in CGI-ridden blockbusters, pointless reboots, and Superhero flicks, Flight is some kind of refreshing triumph.  Here is a major Hollywood production with a big marquee star helmed by a veteran hitmaker that is essentially a quiet character study.  Despite an epic disaster sequence in the first act, most of the film is devoted to dialogue and quiet moments that circle around an alcoholic’s internal struggle with his demons.  Although movies like this tend to pop up all the time, it’s usually more so through the independent world and rarely in the weekend multiplex battles.  Although this is a hyperbolic assumption, it feels like its been since the 90s since a studio assembled its big-boy Hollywood tools for even a disposable release based solely on subtle drama and a nuanced central performance.

The film focuses on Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a veteran commercial pilot for SouthJet Airlines.  When we first meet Whip, he is waking up in a hotel room surrounded by empty booze bottles and a naked flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) smoking a joint.  After dealing with an argumentative phone call from his ex-wife (Garcelle Beauvais), he does some lines of cocaine and is heading out the door towards his next flight.  But as he tries to nurse a hangover while flying an airliner flight out of Florida, the plane spins into a chaotic nose dive, making a deadly crash seem imminent.  Thanks to Whip’s risky instincts and experience, he is able to roll the plane upside down and crash the plane into an open field rather safely, saving a majority of the passenger’s lives.  

As Whip is pulled from the wreckage and hospitalized, the media hails him as a hero for saving the lives of all but 6 of the passengers, for the crash would’ve surely killed everyone on board if it weren’t for his quick-thinking skills.  However, big problems loom after the crash once its revealed that Whip’s blood tests in the hospital show he was intoxicated on alcohol and cocaine while he was in the cockpit.  An airline union leader (Bruce Greenwood) and an attorney (Don Cheadle) inform him that if they all don’t mine their way around this investigation carefully, he could go to jail for a very long time.  Whip tries to keep a low profile by avoiding the press and keeping all information about the crash on a carefully-plotted need-to-know basis, but the stress of the investigation causes his alcoholism to kick into high gear, and it becomes apparent to everyone that he has a serious problem that needs treatment.  Can Whip keep things together enough to avoid jail time?  Is there no turning back from his dark decent into alcoholism?  

Robert Zemeckis probably isn’t exactly the first filmmaker you’d nominate to helm an intimate portrait of addiction until you catch on that the script fits in perfectly with his usual taste for putting a human face on the unpredictability of the universe.  Of course the film’s opening depiction of a plane crash--undoubtedly one of the best and scariest plane crash scenes ever put on film--is right up Zemeckis’ FX-expert alley, reminiscent of the familiar skill he showed with Cast Away’s pivotal plane crash, yet Whip’s emotional torment in the face of catastrophe recalls similar struggles Zemeckis’s protagonists have faced in the past.  Whip’s ordeal greatly reminded me of the way medieval chaos forced Beowulf to confront his grandoise ego (Beowulf) or how injustice in a freakish cartoon world caused Detective Eddie Valiant to deal with his prejudices and haunted past (Who Framed Roger Rabbit).  Plus, the way Whip gradually is forced to reconcile the mess disaster has wrought in spite of himself reminded me of the ways Marty McFly and Chuck Noland had to work through their indifferences and hangups to try and make an out-of-whack world make sense to them again.  While most filmmakers rely on pulp plotting to guide their way through earthbound cosmic fantasies, Zemeckis has always favored humanist drama to pull great moralistic values from hectic movie-world concoctions.

Although Flight is a considerably exceptional depiction of addiction, some parts of the film can’t help but have some Hollywood corniness.  With some scenes that depict the harrowing side of drugs and alcoholism, you have a hard time telling whether it’s truthful or Hollywood puffing things up.  The very worst thing about the film is the soundtrack selection, which selects the most obvious of pop songs to hammer home emotional cue points in the plot with the upmost clumsiness.  While using Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright”  to express Whip high on cocaine isn’t too bad, using The Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil” for the entrance of Whip’s drug dealer and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” to show Whip dumping out alcohol really made me cringe.  Rule of Thumb for Future Filmmakers: if you’re making a movie about Alcoholism, opening the film with a song called “Alcohol” is the opposite of elegant.

In spite of the film’s small flaws, it’s Washington’s superb performance that sustains your interest all the way to the bittersweet end.  Washington is a treasured movie star who has earned our sympathy through an image of great command, confidence, and spontaneity.  The electricity and wallop here comes from the way Washington uses those gifts to try and bury a desperate vulnerability below the surface of a troubled character.  Washington shows great precision in his depiction of an alcoholic by relying on quiet reactions and careful physical unease as Whip wrestles with the bottle.  The best scenes in the film are when Whip tries to rely on his arrogance and assured demeanor to put a mask on the alarming struggle so obviously eating away at him.  Everything comes to a head in a final scene in which Washington allows a poignant release for Whip that hits the audience like a gut-punch and Washington’s expert lyricism makes us feel like its the perfect outcome for the character.

In spite of some of its fluffier parts, we feel for the most part that Flight is an admirable depiction of its central character’s demons.  Credit for this is due to the way screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel, Hard Ball) sees Whip’s journey to a logical, cathartic end instead of easily tidying things up for a labored happy ending.  Some will probably condemn Zemeckis for the way he makes a man’s struggle with addiction entertaining-- a freakish contradiction the more you ponder it--but I admire the way Zemeckis harkens back to the ancient Hollywood tradition of centralizing big moral themes on a large Hollywood canvas.  While an indie version of this same concept would probably hold more true grit, I admired the way this Hollywood vehicle isn’t afraid to discover its own damaged soul.

You Won't Be 'Taken' With This Sequel

by Brett Parker

The accomplishment of Taken 2 is to make us strongly realize that this slam-bang action series is the most over-the-top fantasy release for divorced, middle-aged fathers that Hollywood has ever produced.  Lord knows that Liam Neeson busting skulls is an appealing commodity, but maybe the story of a square American who beats the crap out of half of Europe to become a hero in the eyes of his ex-wife and daughter has more personal homegrown resonance that we realize.  What’s telling is how smart grown-ups treasure Taken way more than teenage action junkies ever could.

I happen to fall into the category of those who were wildly thrilled by the first Taken.  Essentially, the sight of a dignified Irish thespian becoming a brutal kick-ass machine more impressive than Jason Bourne was all kinds of awesome.  That’s why it kind of pains me to report that Taken 2, while certainly not boring, fails to deliver the same kind of thrills and tension that were in full force the first time around.  While the script actually produces a promising idea for a sequel, it never builds on its clever ideas but tries for more of the same from last time without bringing the same thrilling effect this time.

Taken 2 continues the story of Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), a retired U.S. government agent who we last saw rescuing his daughter from sex traffickers in Paris, killing countless villains and wreaking havoc in the process.  The film begins with the Albanian relatives of the traffickers Bryan killed holding a funeral for all their murdered loved ones in their homeland.  The family patriarch, Murad Krasniqi (Rade Serbedzija), knows that Bryan is responsible for the death of his kin--including his son--and declares to all around him that they will have their revenge.

As Bryan vacations in Istanbul with his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen) and his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), Murad and his clan carry out their vengeful plan.  Bryan and Lenore are kidnapped and taken to a shabby holding house, whereas Kim is able to escape from her hotel room before trouble arrives.  Bryan is tied-up and told that he will have to watch Lenore die for all the lives that he took.  But Bryan is too skilled a survivor to just sit back and let that happen.  Using his highly-skilled government training, along with help from Kim on the outside, Bryan is able to untie himself and fight his way out of his holding area.  Once he’s free, Bryan wastes no time in getting his daughter to safety and trying to rescue Lenore, letting absolutely no one stand in stand in his way.

Things start interestingly enough with the Albanians-seeking-revenge angle, for it’s not only the most logical way to continue the story, but it also put a devilish twist on Mills’ idea about protecting your family at all costs.  Yet things go right out the window once we realize that the Albanians attack Mills with the same ineptitude as their fallen relatives.  If a guy single-handedly shot up half a country, killed half your family, and headed home untouched, wouldn’t you come up with a smarter plan of revenge than just tying him to a pipe and surrounding him with oafish thugs?  As Mills tears through his first batch of henchmen, the air goes out of the movie when we realize that this is all child’s play to him.  The first movie wonderfully conveyed a strong sense of nightmarish danger and impossible stakes that sustained suspense throughout, but this time we feel like Bryan will fight his way out of this situation just fine.

Director Oliver Megaton (Transporter 3, Colombiana) pretty much bungles all of the finer points that made the first movie rather distinctive (not to mention shamelessly steals songs from the Drive soundtrack to amp up this film’s coolness factor).  The sequel’s check-in with Bryan as a divorced family man feels more dopier than the last time around, probably because the screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (who also wrote the first Taken) doesn’t provide the weight and confessions we’d expect from a family who suffered a great crisis and is trying to move on.  Even the delicious exhilaration of watching Neeson pound on bad guys gets diminished here by shaky-cam work and frantic editing that’s among the most fast and furious I’ve seen recently.  Most of the action here feels a lot harder to make out than the last film, with jump cuts distorting a clear view of action.  This is especially frustrating in an alley scene where Mills is pounding on two thugs at the same time.  The camera shakes about so much that you wish it’d lean back and remain still so we can see all of Neeson’s impressive fight work.

One of the most interesting star image evolutions of recent memory has been Liam Neeson’s journey from distinguished, thinking-man’s actor to kick-ass action star.  The success of the first Taken made Hollywood realize that Neeson’s authentic combination of intelligence and toughness could create action gold, allowing him to churn out explosive thrill rides ever since.  If he keeps at it, then he could solidify a tough guy image every bit as memorable and reliable as John Wayne: a tall tower of masculine toughness peppered with no-nonsense gruff and straightforward smarts.

Whatever pleasure there is to be had in Taken 2 naturally flows from Neeson’s weathered gifts.  A Sherlock Holmes-like scene where Mills tries to figure out his surroundings in a van with a hood over his head nicely shows how his brains are just as exciting as his fists.  Yet when it does come time for some hand-to-hand smackdowns, Neeson delivers the goods.  My favorite scene is where Mills faces off with an Albanian who’s (almost) as good a brawler as he is.  It’s one of the few moments where the camera calms down and we can admire Neeson’s skilled yet brutal attack technique.  And while the screenplay tries to turn Mills’ strategic assessments into a kind of schtick, Neeson delivers a poignant speech towards the end about endless cycles of violence that brings the only moment of dramatic electricity within the violence.  

Taken 2 isn’t necessarily a bad product for the action junkie crowd, but it truly does elicit the usual criticisms one heaps upon weak sequels: “it’s not as good as the first one,” “it tries to be like the first one but fails,” and so on.  It’s far from being one of the biggest “sequel-letdowns” I’ve ever seen, but you’d have to be pretty damn delusional to think this flick is as good as the first one.  If anything, this film made me realize that if you or a loved one shoots up half a European country at some point, then perhaps its wise for you and your family to stay the hell out of Europe for the rest of your lives.