Movie Box Review

Here, in the end, is all you needed to know about TERRA NOVA:  in its entire 2-hour season--and very possibly series--finale, dinosaurs were sighted for a grand total of about 2 minutes.

Remember the original promos for Terra Nova, the ones that played on FOX for months while the show kept getting postponed?  The ones that promised a Jurassic Park experience in your living room, week-in and week-out, with blockbuster-movie level computer-generated dinos?  Well, after the big-budget series pilot, that show didn't exist.  What Terra Nova turned out to be instead was a story about good guys living in a colony walled off from some very disorganized bad guys (revolutionaries?  corporate dupes?) and prehistoric creatures that were more often talked about than seen.  (And when they showed up, they turned out to be the CG equivalent of cardboard cutouts.)

The Shannons, aka World's Most Uninteresting Family, were the leads, bested only by Skye, The World's Most Harmless Spy and, later in the season, by Lucas Taylor, The World's Most Insipid Villain.  Lucas was the son of Commander Taylor, who as played by Stephen Lang was the only one in all of prehistory to be a little bit interesting.  Lucas had been built up in early episodes as some kind of freaky insane genius who knew how to solve the mysteries of time travel and passage between universes, but he turned out to be the anti-Carrie Mathison, a pouting post-adolescent madman who became duller and more banal the more we saw of him, obsessed with daddy issues and what happened in Somalia.  Having him as Terra Nova's chief antagonist was like making a huge-budgeted superhero epic where the villain was Biff from Back to the Future.

There were so many awful moments in the finale that it's hard to choose just one:  daddy Commander not realizing his crazy son wanted a hug for the very first time just so he could stab dad?  The fuss about Jim Shannon vanishing through an unknown portal to the past, possibly lost in unexplored parts of the planet... only to have him turn up behind the nearest tree?  The idiot bad guy who thought he'd been injected with deadly microorganisms because someone told him so?  The big "mystery" for a purported next season of a 18th-century ship turning up in the desert (seen Close Encounters much?)?  Maybe it was the way every one of the villains believed Jim's ridiculous fake deafness and limp even as Jim was running all over the compound and having conversations with everyone in earshot.

Whether Terra Nova comes back next season will ultimately be determined by factors of no interest to mere viewers:  overseas sales, the network's slate of 8PM development, the possibility of reduced network license fees.  What the finale proved conclusively, however, is that the show deserves to be left in the distant past.

IN TIME:  Watch It At Home - The Clock Never Really Starts Ticking

Andrew Niccol wants to be a populist moviemaker of ideas, but he just doesn't have the knack.  Niccol's ideas are genuinely impressive:  he's the man who wrote The Truman Show and Gattaca, and less successfully, S1mOne and Lord of War.  Niccol's flair for high-concept originality bought him a seat at the directors' table, and he was behind the camera on the latter 2 films, but there's a reason Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, remains his most successful project--Niccol is far from his own best director.

IN TIME, his new film, confirms that.  As before, Niccol's premise is ingenious.  In a parallel more-or-less present (the wardrobe is a bit stylized and there are no cell phones, but cars and furniture are still recognizable), humanity has been genetically altered so that no one visibly ages beyond the way they look at 25.  However, at 25 each person's clock starts running with 1 year remaining, and anyone who doesn't earn more units of time beyond their 26th birthday, or who runs out of earned time after that, has an instantly fatal heart attack.  (People do still die before their time if they're murdered or suffer accidents, however.) Time thus takes the place of money--people are paid in hours or (if they're lucky) days, and the rich are 80, 90, over 100 years old (but still look 25) while the poor scrabble to live literally day-to-day or drop dead in the street.  The rich live in luxurious communities of skyscrapers and mansions, while the poor are confined to ghettos, unable to afford the time-tolls into the other districts.

Our hero in all this is Will (Justin Timberlake).  He's an ordinary workingman (although his deceased father was apparently some kind of revolutionary) and on one night, he both suffers a tragic loss and receives a remarkable gift:  a suicidal rich man (Matt Bomer) gives him 100 years of time.  Will uses his unexpected capital to visit the rich side of town, where he plays poker with a time-hungry tycoon (Vincent Kartheiser, oozing with his best Pete Campbell arrogance) and makes the acquaintance of the tycoon's daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried).  Will's sudden wealth hasn't gone unnoticed by the "Timekeeper" police, though, represented by the Javert-like Raymond (Cillian Murphy), and Will is forced to go on the run, taking Sylvia as captive.  In the way of movies, she's only briefly an unwilling prisoner, and before long they're playing strip poker together and robbing her daddy's time-banks in order to give years to the poor, an alternate-universe combination of Bonnie & Clyde and Robin Hood.

The trouble with In Time is that all this sounds like more fun than it actually is.  Even though the central conceit is worked out elegantly (a phone call costs 1 minute; a luxury car costs years), Niccol's dialogue is distressingly flat and, in its Occupy Wall Street-ish politics, repetitively obvious.  Despite a few decent action sequences, the movie as a whole--ironically for a story about the preciousness of time--feels languid and dreary, with too long spent on a (Cockney!) ghetto hood pursuing Will, and Will's talent for some kind of arm-wrestling challenge that serves for combat in the ghetto.  Timberlake and Seyfried are a very attractive couple, and their performances aren't bad, but neither has the ability to elevate their material (Timberlake is particularly lightweight), and they don't strike dangerous or romantic sparks off one another.  There's also an almost total lack of humor to the script.

Gattaca was also a cold fantasy of genetic manipulation and intrigue, but Niccol was smart enough to make detachment part of that movie's style (although with a $12M gross, that decision paid off with critics more than audiences).  In Time means to be more of a conventional Hollywood action-romance--watching it, you can see the story beats that were supposed to draw you in--and it succeeds neither as popcorn entertainment nor as a stimulating philosophical argument about aging, vanity or disproportionate wealth.

Fox knew what it had with In Time:  it's not an accident that the opening is on Halloween weekend, traditionally weak for the 18-34 audience the movie is aimed to attract, and just a week before Tower Heist arrives for the same crowd.  It's sad, really, because Niccol has more interesting concepts in his little finger than Heist director Brett Ratner has in his whole body.  As a filmmaker, though, Niccol lacks the down-and-dirty instincts of a popular storyteller; he doesn't seem to know the value of his every last minute in the spotlight.

REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of applause at the end, and no cheers at all for its supposedly titanic robot-vs-robot bouts.  That's the price the picture bears for being assembled out of a crate of movie spare parts.

In John Gatins's script (from an earlier incarnation credited to Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven, and based originally on a Richard Matheson short story), the time is very slightly in the future, which looks exactly like the present except that boxers have been replaced by giant mechanical robots who can fight endlessly and be repaired (usually) when their Rock-em-Sock-em pieces are knocked off.  The robots are "trained" by humans, one of whom is Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman).  Charlie is a figure out of a thousand movies:  an ex-boxer himself, he owes money everywhere, is completely irresponsible, especially to the sweet-yet-tough gym owner (Evangline Lilly) who loves him but knows she can't count on him, and still nourishes dreams of the big time.

Years earlier, Charlie had abandoned his wife and young son for his life on the road, and as Real Steel begins, he finds out that his ex-wife has died, and if he'll just sign the proper papers, his very rich ex-sister-in-law (Hope Davis, in a truly thankless role) and her tycoon hubby (James Rebhorn) will adopt the boy.  Charlie is happy enough to go along, in exchange for enough cash to buy a new robot.  BUT, because the wealthy brother-in-law wants an untroubled vacation in Tuscany, first Charlie will have to take in young Max (Dakota Goyo) for the summer.  Naturally, the two of them are unwilling companions at first; naturally, when Charlie's expensive new robot is blown up due to Charlie's greed, it's Max who finds Atom, a rusting wreck of a 'bot who can take a punch but has no skills; naturally, a reluctant Charlie is talked into training Atom; naturally, Atom begins to win.  And did I mention that early on, we're told that the number one unbeaten robot boxer in the world is Zeus, who's owned by a refugee from an episode of Nikita (Olga Fonda, I guess one of the lesser known Fondas) and trained by the sinister Tak Mashido (Karl Yune)?

All the cliches that were assembled to make Real Steel wouldn't be such a problem if the movie at least had some fun with them, but the picture is painfully earnest and undeveloped (Zeus's evil team doesn't even get to do anything dastardly).  The gradually thawing relationship between Charlie and Max follows its predetermined path (omigosh, what will happen when Max finds out Charlie took money in exchange for giving up custody?), as Charlie gains principles and becomes a better human being.  Even though the movie's entire reason for existing is that its fighters are made of metal instead of flesh, the fights themselves follow exactly the rules that go back (at least) to Sylvester Stallone 35 years ago:  our hero must take an unbelievable amount of punishment for round after round ("No one can survive this!"), until finally the feared opponent tires him/itself out, and that's when the hero has one shot, just one shot, to score a stunning knockout.  

Gatins' s script is completely uninspired, and the best that can be said about Shawn Levy's direction is that it isn't as egregious as the work he's done on sappy comedies like Cheaper By the Dozen and the Steve Martin Pink Panther remake.  His Night at the Museum pictures weren't classics, but at least they made some clever use of their gimmicks; this one is just loud, and it wears its sentimentality too much on its sleeve.  (The movie was produced by DreamWorks, and like a lot of movies and TV shows produced but not directed by Steven Spielberg, it often feels like a wannabe Spielberg picture.)

There are a lot of capable actors in this thing, none of them at their best.  Jackman just coasts on his star power, and Goyo's performance screams "child actor."  The robots do better, and there's some very effective melding of actual animatronic machinery with CG animation.  The picture has an A-list cinematographer in Mauro Fiore of Avatar, and Danny Elfman supplied the rousing score, so it all looks and sounds impeccable; however none of that can make it any less empty.

Real Steel is inoffensive, and it'll please some people and make some money (although it may well need foreign revenues to pay for its enormous cost).  It's an example, though, of that increasing Hollywood phenomenon:  an imaginative idea filmed with no imagination at all.

If you squint at the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland settings of PRIEST, I swear you can see the camera crews from The Book of Eli, Jonah Hex, Resident Evil and Ultraviolet trying to duck out of frame.  At this point, I don't think any self-respecting vampire would even consider stalking those sands; they may rip human heads off their throats and drink blood, but they've got some pride.  

Priest manages to make Legion, which was last year's religio-horror mash-up starring Paul Bettany and directed by Scott Stewart, look like a modern classic.  What, short of vampiric possession, could have made Bettany--a skilled actor in films like A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander, not to mention the upcoming Margin Call--want to work twice in two years with Scott Stewart?  Are there embarrassing photos of Bettany that Stewart is threatening to show Jennifer Connelly?  Is Stewart holding one or more of their children hostage?  It's a mystery more fascinating than anything in either movie.

Priest, for those who insist on knowing about it, is yet another terrible movie based on graphic novels, a genre quickly becoming the bane of coherent filmmaking.  In the backstory we're given via some opening animation, vampires have been fighting humans over the centuries, and were only able to be killed or driven out into that post-apocalyptic desert by specially gifted fighters who are ascetic, chaste "priests" abducted by the all-powerful church from their normal lives as soon as their powers are in evidence, and tattooed with giant crosses on their faces.  Once the vampires were disposed of, the church abandoned the priests. But now the vampires are back, even if the pompous Head Priest (Christopher Plummer) won't admit it, and they've killed Bettany's brother and kidnapped his niece (Lily Collins, who'll soon be Snow White in the movie competing with Kristen Stewart's version).  Bettany--who has no name in the movie other than "Priest"--sets off with the niece's boyfriend (Cam Gigandet) and eventually a Priestess (Maggie Q) to get the girl back or kill her if she's already been "infected" by the vampires (shades--very very pathetic shades--of The Searchers).  

Stewart and screenwriter Cory Goodman have no idea how to make this even guilty fun, and the picture lurches through its 87 minutes without the budget for decent CG vampires or a single original idea.  Bettany is glum, as well he should be, and only Karl Urban, as (spoiler alert!) Bettany's former colleague who's now the leader of the vampires, seems to be enjoying himself.  The picture has an advanced case of the dark, bleached-out ugliness we've become used to in 3D movies that aren't very carefully transferred, so even though Don Burgess (Spiderman, Cast Away) is behind the camera it doesn't help, and the music by Christopher Young is of the electronic quiet-then-SCREECH style endemic to modern horror movies.  (It is, by the way, quite graphically violent for its PG-13 rating.)

It's anyone's guess why Screen Gems, usually a canny studio (the lower-budget subsidiary of Sony), would release this cheap, unexciting thing just as the summer's blockbuster action movies are starting to arrive, but that's their accountants' problem.  Priest deserves to be buried out in that desert, with only its fellow post-apocalyptic fantasies for company.

They say that the definition of madness is repeating the same action with the expectation of a different result.  But that diagnosis doesn't allow for this:  a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up and finds himself on a train, where his reflection in the mirror doesn't look like himself, and the woman in the next seat (Michelle Monaghan) who apparently knows him doesn't address him as himself.  Eight minutes later he, the girl, and the train all blow up... and the man wakes up again, to find himself seemingly in the middle of a mad government experiment (under the direction of Army officer Vera Farmiga and scientist Jeffrey Wright), his mission to find out who planted that bomb on the train by reliving the last 8 minutes of that other man's life over and over again, hunting for clues.  That's the premise of SOURCE CODE, an intriguing sci-fi action movie twist on Groundhog Day.   

Although Source Code comes from director Duncan Jones, who last gave us the indie fantasy Moon (see review here), there's nothing esoteric about this genre exercise.  Ben Ripley's script isn't particularly interested in Groundhog Day-like existential comedy, either--despite its unusual premise, and the even more convoluted explanation of Gyllenhaal's actual place in the story, the picture is very much focused on solving its twin mysteries:  who bombed that train, and what's the experiment all about?  In truth, it's not all that hard to figure out either answer by the film's halfway point, but the picture is carried along by its brisk pace and the moderately clever way it works everything out. 

Although Source Code doesn't have a massive budget, it's certainly many times that of Moon, and Jones handles the digital explosions and thriller mechanics effectively (having proven his prowess, it would be sad if his next move is to a mega-budgeted superhero epic).  His technical team includes the very experienced Don Burgess (Spiderman) as cinematographer and Paul Hirsch (Mission Impossible) as editor.  Gyllenhaal, whose career has bounced around, has a part that's well suited to him:  not full-fledged action hero, but Hitchcockian ordinary guy thrust into a crazy situation.  Vera Farmiga, most of the time confined to a monitor screen in Gyllenhaal's testing area, proves that she can give a full-fledged performance in a box (it's like Beckett's "Happy Days" as a genre role), but Monaghan doesn't get to do much more than look attractive and be charming, and Wright is hobbled by having to play the most cliched character.

Source Code isn't a truly satisfying puzzle movie; the last reel, in particular, doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, and it doesn't have any ambition to "mean" something.  In a year where Sucker Punch represents Hollywood's idea of action fantasy, though--it'll do.  

(SOURCE CODE - Summit - PG 13 - 93 min.- Director:  Duncan Jones - Script:  Ben Ripley - Cast:  Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright - Wide Release)

Remember Ken Russell's movie of The Who's Tommy?  The scene where Ann-Margret's nervous breakdown was visualized by her television set vomiting out baked beans, chocolate and similar goo?  Watching Zach Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH is like having that TV on permanent DVR.

Sucker Punch, which Mitch Metcalf predicts will narrowly win the weekend, combines the worst parts of Snyder's 300 and Watchmen, being both narratively incoherent and utterly tedious.  The story attempts to exist on 3 different levels.  In the framing scenes, a girl known as Babydoll (Emily Browning) is committed by her evil stepfather to a New England asylum in the late 50s/early 60s, where she is to be lobotomized in 5 days; other inmates include Sweetpea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Cheung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), under the supervision of a doctor (Carla Gugino) and a monstrous orderly (Oscar Isaac).  Other than the opening and closing sequences, though, the bulk of the film takes place in what is purportedly Babydoll's fantasy of the ward as a nightclub/bordello where Gugino is the madam and Isaac the gangster who owns the joint.  Babydoll, helped by a mystical guide (Scott Glenn), organizes her fellow inmates into an escape.  Meanwhile, there is a third level of reality, as Babydoll's dances for the lecherous customers distract them from the escape preparations while she imagines the film's big-ticket fantasy sequences fearuring CG zombies, dragons, robots and assorted monsters.

None of this remotely makes sense as the fantasy of a young woman from that era; it's like saying Eat Pray Love was all taking place in the mind of an NFL linebacker.  And in all the levels, while Babydoll is briefly identified as being a 20-year old, she's very deliberately costumed and made-up to look like a 15-year old doing porn, so just whose fantasy are we in?   All of which might have been forgivable if there had been any wit or excitement in the execution--Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of his fetishistic, anachronistic set-pieces (and Sucker Punch owes particular debt to the Kill Bill films)--but Snyder, sharing screenplay credit with Steve Shibuya, proves himself to be virtually the anti-Tarantino, one of the worst writers of dialogue alive.  And although he can certainly construct an arresting image, all his ideas are cribbed:  when he's not stealing from Tarantino, it's from Peter Jackson, from Guillermo del Toro, from countless comic books, etc.

Snyder's been compared to Brian DePalma of the 1970s and 80s, and certainly DePalma was always willing to sacrifice drama and sense for the sake of an image or a virtuoso sequence.  But even in DePalma's terrible films, there was always a passion underlying the filmmaking, often a sexual kick that was funny and disturbing at the same time.  Snyder just loads on the CG, blasts out-of-era music on the soundtrack, and plays the kind of games with slo-mo and wire stunts that make one almost wish The Matrix had never been made.  In this context, most of the actors are wise not to try very hard, although poor Abbie Cornish, who really can act, attempts to do so here and just looks foolish.

Snyder's next film will be the Christopher Nolan-produced reboot of Superman, and since Snyder's approach to comic-book filmmaking thus far is almost exactly the opposite of Nolan's more realistic and character-driven Batman series, one has to wonder just what the hell they're thinking.  I guess we'll find out in 2012.  

Worth a ticket.

In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn't come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger's film, predicted to be the highest opener this weekend, manages to be enjoyable, if more than a little silly, fun.

Our hero is Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, in his first real leading role), who might as well have a huge "L" stenciled on his forehead. He's an aspiring writer who can't make himself actually write, a slob, a drinker, and he's already failed at marriage and is about to ruin his longterm relationship with the lovely Lindy (Abbie Cornish). Then one fateful day his ex-brother-in-law and sometime drug dealer (Johnny Whitworth) offers him a clear pill that will change his life. In 30 seconds, Eddie is using 100% of his brain's capacity: finishing his novel is a snap, learning languages no challenge, and mastering the intricacies of high finance his new calling. He becomes an advisor to one of the world's richest men, the wonderfully named Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro), on a giant merger... and that's when things start to go bad. Like Cliff Robertson's title character in Charly, Eddie finds out that drug therapy can't solve everything. But unlike that kind of moralistic fable, Leslie's Dixon's script (based on Alan Glynn's novel "The Dark Fields") is bracingly dry and cynical, with plenty of gratuitously effective violence--it becomes the PG-13 equivalent of a Crank movie--and scheming that starts with double-crosses and mounts from there.

Burger's previous films Interview With the Assassin, The Illusionist and The Lucky Ones, with their relatively indie sensibilities, didn't suggest how goofily effective a commercial moviemaker he could be, and Cooper has the movie-star knack of keeping his charisma on display even while his character is being dragged progressively down. DeNiro has relatively little to do, but it's a relief not to see him in a Focker movie, and Abbie Cornish and Anna Friel are good as the women in Eddie's life. Worthy of particular note is Andrew Howard, who takes the incredibly cliched role of an evil Eastern European gangster and manages to do something amusing wth it; it's like he'd wandered in from a Guy Ritchie picture. The title may be a bit overstated, but this is a picture that successfully exceeds its seeming limits.

--Mitch Salem