Movie Box Review

The new remake of Tom Holland's 1985 FRIGHT NIGHT has a great set of credentials.  Craig Gillespie, the director, was behind the well-regarded indie Lars and the Real Girl, and has since been house director of United States of Tara for Showtime.  The cast includes Anton Yelchin, about to make a big splash in the wonderful Sundance prize-winner Like Crazy, along with Colin Farrell, the very talented young British actress Imogen Poots, David Tennant, and Gillespie's Tara star Toni Collette.  And most notably, the new script is by Marti Noxon, who cut her--sorry--teeth on the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has since worked on shows like Angel, Mad Men and Grey's Anatomy.

And with all that, mostly it's just another crappy horror movie with a supposed comic edge. Holland's picture (which grossed only $25M in 1985, so this is hardly a grab for the riches of a lucrative franchise) was an arch, even campy black comedy in which Charley (William Ragsdale), obsessed with horror movies and lore, came to realize that his new next door neighbor Jerry (Chris Sarandon) was actually a vampire, and enlisted the services of Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowell), host of the local low-rent, late-night horror TV show, to bring him down.  

That basic outline is still the plot of the remake, but there are quite a few shifts in detail and emphasis.  Most of the changes seem to stem from the idea of resetting the tale from the midwest to Las Vegas, which was a promising concept--a city that truly never sleeps--but because (for budget reasons, no doubt) the movie was actually shot in New Mexico, Vegas as a physical location plays virtually no part in the picture.  This time, Jerry (Farrell) isn't an old-world Dracula type like Sarandon; he's a contemporary douchebag who supposedly works construction on the strip, wearing tight t-shirts--Charley's mom (Collette) and even his girlfriend (Poots) can't help themselves from leering at him.  Peter Vincent (Tennant) is now the star of a campy, but higher-scale, horror-themed stage show at the Hard Rock Hotel.   Meanwhile, Charley (Yelchin) is now more of a post-nerd guy who, for reasons even the movie doesn't understand, has a hot, compassionate girlfriend, and he spends the first part of the movie not believing the vampire story at all, despite the efforts of his former pal Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to convince him.

You can see how all of this may have pitched well:  in these Jersey Shore days, the idea of a douchebag vampire could have been fun, and Charley, dumping his own friend for the sake of popularity and hovering on the edge of becoming a douche himself, could have been a complex match for Jerry.  In the movie, though, with its imperatives of getting to the 3D bloodshed, very little of this is developed.  Yelchin basically does his best Shia LaBeouf as Charley, and the movie turns into Suburbia with fangs. Farrell has some really good moments as Jerry--he's scary and funny as he preens in front of Collette and Poots, and when he hovers just outside Jerry's doorway, frustrated not to be invited in--but the script betrays him by turning Jerry into a crazy killing machine much too early on.  Tennant livens things up as Peter Vincent (he's basically doing Russell Brand in Get Him to the Greek), although even he can't do much with an extraordinarily clumsy chunk of exposition late in the story that's supposed to explain why he's helping Charley.  Poots, who's given very interesting performances in indie movies like Cracks and Solitary Man, is here just "the girl."  And although Collette grounds her mom character nicely, it's hard to see what she's doing in the movie, other than as a favor to Gillepsie.  

The movie is badly constructed even as a genre piece.  Apart from the sloppy vampire mythology, which introduces a late gadget into the story just to ensure a happy ending, all the set-piece action sequences go on forever, and at 106 minutes, the picture feels 15 minutes too long.  Gillespie has no particular feel for atmosphere or pace beyond the obvious quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG of horror cliches, and the picture is never at all scary.  There's nothing notable about the picture technically, either:  vampire movies aren't really ideal for 3D, since by definition, they tend to take place in the dark and the dim 3D image makes things even murkier; it's hard to tell whether Javier Aguirresarobe's photography ever had any distinction. 

In an era where we're inundated with vampire stories, a new entry in the genre really has to take some chances to make a mark.  (And if it does, as with last year's Let Me In, the audience may reject it.)  Fright Night sounded like it might be one of those, but it's just another late-summer grab for ticket sales, part of the August/September low-budget horror fest.  Next week's entry:  Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.  

As you may have heard, the new comedy-drama THE BEAVER stars a guy named Mel Gibson, who used to be a big-time movie star.  (It's actually a surprise to realize how long ago that was:  his last real hit was Signs, 9 years ago--to put it in perspective, that was also the year of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Star Wars:  Attack of the Clones.)  He followed that in 2004 with a massive, if controversial, success as director of The Passion Of the Christ, after which he steered his career, and his life, straight off a cliff (he became Charlie Sheen + heinousness).  The Beaver is his first step at an attempted comeback, and however disgusting one may find his off-screen behavior, it has to be admitted that while Beaver mostly fails as a movie, that's not Gibson's fault.  He gives a strong, even brave performance that ultimately the film can't match.

For those who've managed to avoid the extended hype (the film, which had been screening more than a year ago, was repeatedly held back from release as its studio, Summit, tried to deal with Gibson's deepening calamities):  The Beaver features one of the more oddball concepts of recent years.  Kyle Killen's script presents us with Walter Black (Gibson), a family man and business owner who is stuck in a profound, probably clinical, depression.  Nothing can bring him out of it... until he places a beaver puppet over his hand, and begins communicating strictly through the voice, and as the persona, of the beaver.  This causes the consternation you'd expect from his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed) and children (Anton Yelchin and Riley Thomas Stewart) and the colleagues at his toy factory, but brandishing his new beaver identity, Walter becomes dynamic and successful, at least for a while. 

It's frankly impossible to watch Mel Gibson play a man with mental problems, alternately sunk in lethargic depression and then manic with the persona of his hand-puppet, without thinking of his real life instability.  Gibson seems to be going very deep in plumbing the self-disgust and desperation of Walter; only he (and maybe Foster) know how much of Walter is his own direct psychodrama, but the fact is that it all works for the character.  Walking around with a ratty puppet on his hand, Gibson constantly skirts the border of silliness, yet you never see him play for the easy laugh or step outside the man's disorder.  (It's weirdly unexplained, though, why this American character would give his new persona a Cockney accent--somewhat amusingly, the beaver sounds like a cross between Ray Winstone and early Michael Caine). 

Everything beyond Gibson's performance is shaky.  The tone of Killen's script is all over the place:  it starts out as more or less a comedy, then it gets extremely dark as Walter's family begins to implode and he becomes almost possessed by the beaver puppet (it starts to turn into every ventriloquist horror movie you've ever seen), and then it resolves itself into a standard we're-gonna-get-through-this therapeutic family story.  It may be that another director more comfortable with the surreal could have handled these hairpin turns, but Foster isn't that kind of filmmaker.  As a director (her previous films were Little Man Tate and Home For the Holidays), she has a penchant for dysfunctional family dramas and a very straightforward, undistinctive style, which doesn't serve this quirky material well; it's a tale that could have used some visual or aural pizzazz, and Foster doesn't seem interested in that side of filmmaking (unlike, ironically, Gibson himself).  She doesn't bring out the best of herself as an actress, either--her character is never more than the "wife," supportive and puzzled.  She gets better work from Anton Yelchin as the troubled older son, and the luminous Jennifer Lawrence, almost unrecognizable from Winter's Bone, playing a cheerleader with her own troubles who becomes involved with Yelchin. 

Artistically, The Beaver is a risk that doesn't pay off, except in Gibson's performance--which probably makes it a bad test of his post-scandal commercial viability.  Summit is taking it slowly, opening this weekend in only 20 theatres and hoping for critical support as well as a bounce from a Cannes Film Festival screening, before expanding on May 20.  One can't really root for the man--he should have tried speaking through a puppet in real life, rather than revealing his true self--but that doesn't negate his talent.

(THE BEAVER - Summit - 92 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Jodie Foster - Script:  Kyle Killen - Cast:  Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Cherry Jones - 20 Theatres May 6/Expansion May 20)