The Mechanic (2011)

Being a dumb action movie star is a double-edged sword.  Sure, you're pretty much guaranteed to have one scene with a topless actress per film and the Spike network will probably run your films in three movie blocks on weekends, but the fun doesn't go on forever.  Just ask Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, or even Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.  By including Statham in his over-the-hill action star vehicle The Expendables, Stallone seemed to pass the torch onto this generation's only career dumb action hero, but is that a good thing?

This could be a scene from any Jason Statham movie.

The Mechanic is a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson movie of the same name.  Remaking a Bronson film actually isn't a bad idea; it's not like anyone is going to have their acting compare unfavorably to him.  Anyway, Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is an assassin-for-hire.  He's not an ordinary assassin, though.  He's so good at his job that he can make death look like an accident, or he can implicate a specific person in a murder, or he can make a hell of a lot of things go boom --- it just depends on what the job calls for.  His handler and mentor, Harry (Donald Sutherland), is his next target.  Bishop doesn't want to kill his (basically only) friend, but his boss, Dean (Tony Goldwyn), gives him some files and information that are quite damning.  Does Bishop kill Harry?  That's actually not very important or, surprisingly, very interesting.  What is important is that Harry dies and his son, Steve (Ben Foster), wants Bishop to teach him how to be a Statham-level assassin.

Step one: walk slowly away from explosions.

I don't think anyone is going to be surprised by the acting in this movie.  Jason Statham is, as always, a scowling bad-ass.  He still has his accent, and he undresses with little provocation.  He's a little less convincing as the guy who thinks six moves ahead in this movie, but whatever.  I have no real complaints about his work.  Ben Foster, on the other hand, has been better.  I usually enjoy Foster, but he doesn't really add anything to the movie, aside from receiving a reasonably realistic beat-down.  Donald Sutherland is in the movie for about five minutes, and he stopped challenging himself years ago, so he's fine.  Perennial bad guy Tony Goldwyn is, not surprisingly, unsympathetic.  Both men fill their roles adequately, but neither is particularly memorable.  And, for fans of gratuitous nudity, Swedish model Mini Anden is very convincing as she shows off her dislike of clothing.

Director Simon West is not known for introspective think pieces --- he directed Con Air, ferchrissakes --- so you pretty much know what you're getting when his name appears on the credits.  There are some pretty sweet murders in this movie, and it has some solid action sequences, but I felt the pace in this movie was all wrong.  I wasn't expecting a Jason Statham/Simon West collaboration to have fancy camera angles or interesting characters, but I was hoping to be consistently entertained.  The problem isn't with the story, which requires Bishop to train Steve.  The problem is that the movie drags between assassination jobs.  Go figure, movie that focuses on action isn't as good at dialogue, right?  While that's certainly true, I just didn't have fun watching this movie; the script was deadly serious and the filmmakers didn't have any fun with some of the more ridiculous moments in the movie.  When you add that to the characterization of Steve as a complete idiot in life-or-death situations, you get an annoying action movie.

They're probably hiding from critics.

I went into this with pretty reasonable expectations, I think.  I was hoping for an awesome action movie, or at least for something dumb and fun.  I got an action movie that was dumb and serious.  Not the most satisfying mix.  I actually consider myself somewhat of a Statham fan, but if he keeps making movies like this, we're going to start seeing him on the direct-to-DVD market with his dumb action forebearers soon.

30 Days of Night

I've never been  a huge fan of vampire movies; the Anne Rice vamps are too mopey, the Twilight ones are too teen-friendly.  Even when Hollywood went back to basics with Bram Stoker's Dracula and got the incredible Gary Oldman to play the title role, it was underwhelming and bizarrely oversexed.  Even the Blade movies, which succeed as action flicks, fail by making vampires stupid rave kids.  Don't even get me started on the Underworld trilogy.  The vampire, as a cinema monster, has lost its effect.  It is no longer the stuff of horror, but a metaphor for undying love.

And that's a steaming pile of crap.  Vampires should be scary.  They drink blood to live, ferchrissakes!  They are unnatural abominations that take joy in the pain they cause.  In 30 Days of Night, Hollywood finally got the vampire right.

Based on the comic book miniseries of the same name, this story takes place in Barrow, Alaska.  Barrow is so close to the Arctic Circle that the town has one month out of the year where the sun does not rise at all.  Hence the movie title.  Not surprisingly, many of the townsfolk leave for the month, because missing daylight can make people go a little crazy sometimes.  In fact, the town does not sell alcohol during that month to keep the troubles to a minimum.  A relative few remain behind, including the sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett), the surly town snowplow driver, Beau (Mark Boone Junior), and assorted townsfolk.  This year, Eben's estranged wife, Stella (Melissa George), also happens to get stuck in town after the annual exodus; a storm is heading toward Barrow, and she manages to wreck her car on the way to the last flight out of the area.  She's not the only visitor, either.  A strange, hoarse, dirty man (Ben Foster) appears on the first night, coincidentally the same night when all the town's cell phones have been stolen and burned,  and all the town's dogs have been killed.  This stranger is soon taken into custody by Eben and Stella for acting crazy in the town diner, but he just laughs at them, claiming that death is coming to Barrow.  The power goes out, so Eben and Stella investigate, only to find that the telecommunications/power center for the town has been sabotaged and the operator killed.

So far, the vampires haven't really been seen yet.  They are fast blurs in the shadows, and they are messy; you can tell where they have been because there's usually a headless corpse and a circle of blood-stained snow.  Then they attack, and you get your first look at them.  They speak a guttural foreign language, possibly an ancient one, so their dialogue has subtitles.  Their eyes are wide and entirely black.  They are pale, yes, but they are monstrous; their fingernails are claw-like, their noses elongated, and their teeth are all sharp.  These aren't the type of vampires that feed on you by leaving two fang marks behind, they tear out your whole throat.  There is no mistaking that these are vampires, and they have come to kill the residents of Barrow. 

Predictably, the human population in Barrow takes a swift nose dive after the vampires move in.  While there are two or three visually distinctive vamps, there is a clear leader, played by Danny Huston, that is commanding the rest.  Under his leadership, all communications have been lost, and all transportation has been disabled.  Still, a few survivors remain, including Eben and Stella.  They manage to sneak into a house that has a hidden attic, where they wait until they come up with a plan: the people of Barrow deliberately live there, so they know the cold like no others, and they can use that to their advantage and fight back.

As far as the acting goes, it's decent, with a couple of particularly awesome performances.  I found it noteworthy that I didn't dislike Josh Hartnett for a change.  Melissa George is okay, but not extraordinary.  This is probably the most heroic role I have seen Mark Boone Junior play; he usually is cast as a corrupt cop or a sleazeball.  Ben Foster once again takes a bit part and makes it memorable; you can argue that he overacts, but I love seeing him take boring roles and making them distinct characters.  Most of the vampires do little in the acting department, save tilt their heads and hiss.  Danny Huston, though, is terrifying.  He's basically the only vampire that speaks, and his makeup, combined with his inhuman mannerisms and his croaking voice, combine to make him the best vampire I can remember. 

I really liked the creative choices that director David Slade made with this film.  The first draft of the script was written by the comic's writer, Steve Niles; Slade made the choice to have his screenwriter from Hard Candy, Brian Nelson, do the rewrite.  Basically, they chose to make the script less over-the-top and more scary, and yet still remain basically true to the comic.  That is so smart, I wish they did this with all comic book movies: have a comic guy write the script that captures the feeling of the source comic books and have a screenwriter make changes so it works better on film.  It's a very simple concept that comic movies rarely follow.  And the vampire language?  That was totally a Slade/Nelson idea.  Visually, the film is surprisingly detail-oriented.  Beards grow with appropriate speed, chapped lips get worse over time, and the survivors look hungrier and dirtier as the film progresses.  The direction isn't flawless; the acting is only decent and the scenes where the survivors hide should have been claustrophobic.  Luckily, the sheer scariness of the vampires makes up for those not-quite-awesome attributes.

From a writing perspective, the story stays pretty true to the comic book.  There are some differences, but nothing major.  In fact, some of the changes are for the better, like the invention of the vampire language.  Still, the writing isn't great.  The plot is kind of predictable and there are some scenes that you just know will happen eventually, if you bother to think about it.  For instance, there has to be a scene where we get to see someone start to transform from human to vampire.  It's obvious, really, but the pace was brisk enough to keep me immersed in the moment, so I didn't think ahead.  That sort of pacing should be common in movies, but too often is overlooked, so I am grateful for its presence in this film.

The more I think about 30 Days of Night, the less impressed I am with it. I've seen it three or four times, and this happens every time I analyze it. It's not a bad movie, by any means. It just has a lot of things that aren't objectively great about it. But then I watch it again, and its awesomeness is renewed for me. There is something in this movie (probably scary vampires, if I had to guess) that satisfies me in a very basic way, and it is immune to any cliches or mediocre performances this film may contain. The important thing is that it has vampires, and they do not suck. And that makes me smile.

Pandorum

You would think that the science fiction and horror movie genres would be mixed together more often.  The core audience for both genres are roughly the same, right?  However, I can only think of a few films (notably Alien and maybe I am Legend) that actually have a hefty dose of both horror and sci-fi.  This might be due to the fact that it's easier to write a horror movie about dumb teens being way too curious about a creepy basement abandoned house murder factory for their own good than it is to write a script that has monsters and takes the time to logically plan out a future world or spaceship or whatever.  I like the idea of the sci-fi/horror hybrid, though, because a well-executed hybrid has a lot of potential.  So, with an optimistic heart, I watched Pandorum.

The movie starts out just fine.  Despite the credits, Ben Foster is the lead actor in the movie and Dennis Quaid plays a key supporting role.  Both men awaken from some sort of hibernation sleep to find themselves in a spaceship.  They don't remember their names, their jobs, what ship they are on, or why they are there.  Details start to come back to them, but only small details, and they come very slowly.  The only thing they do know is that there should be other people around, helping them get their bearings, but there are not.  The room the men awoke in is sealed off from the rest of the ship and the ship is experiencing frequent power surges.  Foster realizes that he is a technical somethingorother for the ship, so he has to find his way to the reactor core to reboot the ship's reactor and get power everywhere.  So far, it's a little dry, but there is a mystery established: what happened and where is everybody?  Ben Foster's pretty good and Dennis Quaid is the same character he plays in every movie.  Not fantastic stuff, but not a bad start.

Things start to get worse quickly.  Foster has to climb through some ventilation ducts that seem to have a lot of foam "We're No. 1" hands growing in them.  At this point, Foster asks Quaid over their walkie-talkie about the symptoms of Pandorum.  Hey...that's the movie's title!  It must be important!  Pandorum is basically the space version of cabin fever, where paranoia and homicidal aggression meet and cause ordinary folks to go crazy.  Symptoms include hands tremors (which both Foster and Quaid show) and hallucinations.  When Foster finds his way out of the ducts, he encounters two things: first, a survivor that attacks him and second, a monster that attacks them both.  Sure, the monster eats the survivor immediately, but Foster was able to learn that the survivor (Norman Reedus) had no idea what the monsters are or what happened to the ship, despite being out of hibernation for a few months.  These kind of things start to happen to Foster regularly.  He meets a survivor, they try to kill him (because...um...he is clearly not a monster?) and then the monsters attack, forcing Foster and his new friend to run.

Let's talk about the monsters for a quick second.  They are very bald, pale, and have beady eyes and sharp teeth.  They move like werewolves in the slow-motion scenes from the Underworld series.  They wear bizarre spiky armor (or is it part of them?) that covers their back and/or shoulders, like they went armor shopping at a Mad Max-themed discount store.  They don't talk.  They eat humans, live or dead, as well as their own wounded.  Basically, they are C.H.O.D.s: Cannabalistic Humanoid Outerspace Dwellers.  While nobody in the movie actually uses this phrase, that is only because they never thought of it.  When C.H.O.D.s are on the screen, ready for action, scenes have a strange habit of becoming dimly lit, poorly shot, and generally blurry.  I'm sure that's just an insight into their character, though, and not a lame way to disguise a low budget.

While all the monster chasing is going on with Ben Foster and friends, where's Dennis Quaid?  Right where we left him, in the room he awoke in.  He spends most of the movie sitting down, trying to walkie-talkie Foster (who lost his walkie-talkie about twenty minutes into the movie).  Quaid fills the time by finding another survivor (Cam Gigandet) in the same air vent that Foster escaped through.  This survivor claims to have killed his two crew mates because they had big time Pandorum.  Obviously, you don't want to restrain that guy.  So Foster is on the run from the CHODs and Quaid is killing time with a crazy.

This just isn't a good movie.  It''s trying to be two different things at the same time.  On the one hand, it is trying to be a creepy mood piece, like Alien.  On the other hand, C.H.O.D.s are eating people's faces.  The two styles don't go together.  All the subtlety of a suspense/mystery is lost as soon as albino cannibals show up.  The biggest problem with the movie is the title.  When the title happens to be an illness, one of the main characters is going to be afflicted.  If you make a movie called "Irritable Bowel Syndrome," it's not going to be an action flick...at least not one I want to watch.  But which which character has Pandorum?  The one that is trying to restart a nuclear reactor and save everyone, or the first billed actor that has been sitting around for most of the movie?  Hmm...tough call.

 The movie is not devoid of merit, but there's not much.  It's nice to see Ben Foster in a leading role for a change.  And...um...they had a pretty cool futuristic razor.  The first twenty minutes of the movie (basically, until the monsters show up) is promising, but then again, any movie can look decent for twenty minutes.  The acting isn't terrible here.  You know what you're going to get when you give a Quaid a role, but the rest of the cast (including Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue, Cung Le, and Eddie Rouse) was inoffensive.  If Quaid's role was played by an unknown like the rest of the cast, the movie's suspense would have been much more effective.  I will admit that it was a nice change of pace to see Norman Reedus playing a part that was not explicitly Irish.

Those somewhat positive accomplishments are nowhere near enough to salvage this film.   The writers and director have worked primarily in Europe until now, and it shows.  The dialogue is mediocre at best, and the explanations given for the key plot points (What are the monsters?  What happened to the ship?) are so poorly expressed, it feels like they've been mistranslated. I honestly don't think that the lead actors have anything to be ashamed about here (well, except for taking these roles), but the director is another story.  Christian Alavert not only directed this film, but he co-plotted it.  That means that he could have, at any time, said "Wait, that doesn't make much sense...let's try something else," but he never did.  Or, worse, he said that and this movie is the result.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

Let's be honest, Westerns don't appeal to everyone.  The action is usually bunched together in the beginning (sometimes) and ending (always) of the film.  John Wayne made about two hundred Westerns, and he always plays himself...and sometimes, he isn't even convincing in that.  The golden age of Westerns ended in the 1960s and many have aged poorly.  With the improved special effects in modern movies, the Western action scenes often looks tame by comparison.

3:10 to Yuma, however, doesn't suffer from any of these problems.  The action is sprinkled throughout the entire film, so there is rarely more than ten minutes that pass without someone being attacked or killed.  Since the action is spread so evenly throughout the film, this is probably the most consistently action-packed Western I have ever seen.  No one in the cast attempts to channel John Wayne; this movie follows the post-Western attitude of Unforgiven and The Wild Bunch by having a movie with bad men as main characters and no shining hero in the bunch.  There isn't any blatant racism in the script and women are treated in a manner more in line with today's tastes; Gretchen Mol quietly controls her home and Vinessa Shaw...well, okay, she's treated as an object.  But that's a pretty good percentage for a Western!  The gunplay is fast and frequent throughout the movie, and they even figured out a way to include an explosion.

While Russell Crowe's character, Ben Wade, is what you will remember from this movie, the main character is actually Dan Evans (Christian Bale).  Evans is an ordinary guy that can't get a break.  He lost his foot in the Civil War, his Arizona farm needs water and is the middle of a drought (really?  In Arizona?), he is hopelessly in debt and will lose his farm within weeks, he has a young boy that needs expensive medicine, and his older son has no respect for a father that just lets it all happen.  On the bright side, he's married to Gretchen Mol.  Evans finally gets a break when he helps a posse capture the infamous robber/murderer Ben Wade.  Catching a criminal is just the first step in bringing him to justice, though, especially in the Old West.  Since the towns are few and far between, with only a few having courthouses or prisons, that means that Wade has to be escorted to prison, or in this case, to a train that will take him to prison.  Evans joins the posse for a hefty fee.  The trip is several days long, but the real danger begins when Wade's loyal sociopathic right hand man, Charlie (Ben Foster), learns that Wade has been captured.  Ultimately, all that stands between Wade and freedom is Dan Evans.  And all that stands between Evans and death is his determination to bring in Ben Wade.

If this film was just about Christian Bale's character, it would be a depressing psychological piece on a stubborn man that has reached his breaking point.  It might be good, but not in the hands of director James Mangold.  Mangold is the kind of director that does a pretty good job with a movie's overall story, but he doesn't have a noticeable impact on his actors; good actors deliver good performances, while bad actors do not.  Luckily, this story has Russell Crowe's character to balance the moroseness of Bale.  Crowe turns in a performance that is both charming and filled with a sense of imminent danger.  For most of the movie, Crowe does not shoot a gun, but there is always the promise of violence when he is in a scene.  While the plot throws a lot of supporting characters into the mix, the story basically boils down to these two men.  As evil as Ben Wade clearly is, both the audience and Dan Evans have a hard time not warming to him.  For his part, Wade enjoys the company of Evans, but keeps reminding Evans that he can and will kill him, just the same.  For most of the film, the audience (and Ben Wade) assume that Evans is going through all this trouble in the hopes of a big payday, but it is really a matter of pride for a man with nothing else to be proud of.

There are a lot of supporting characters in this movie.  Most function as cannon fodder, but a few stick out.  Peter Fonda plays a Pinkerton agent that has a long history of chasing Ben Wade.  The character is more of a hired goon than a hero, but Fonda gives him depth.  Most of the other actors and characters just serve their purpose.  Alan Tudyk is servicable as a jumpy veterinarian that is out of his element.  Logan Lerman is a little obnoxious as the son of Dan Evans, but his character spends half of the film with a my-dad-is-SO-lame attitude, so it's probably not his fault.  Luke Wilson makes a cameo as a guy with bad teeth.  Dallas Roberts is fine as a cowardly railroad man and Kevin Durand is good as the same jerk he plays in every movie.  Ben Foster, though, turns in a great performance as Wade's loyal second-in-command.  Foster usually chooses supporting roles that require him to be over the top, but they're always fun to watch.  Here, he gets to have another weird accent, some odd mannerisms, and a frequently used fast draw.  The reason he is good here is that he is able to balance a clear affection for Wade with a complete disregard for the lives of everyone else.  When done right, sociopaths can be fun to watch.

This is a remake of a 1957 classic of the same name.  The original stays truer to Elmore Leonard's original short story, but this update did a good job.  The story's core is still Wade and Evans spending time together, waiting for the titular train to arrive.  The primary difference is that this movie spreads the action (and their interaction) out over a greater physical distance.  That was a smart move, because so many remakes fail when they try to imitate what made the original great.  This film manages to stand on its own, even if it does so by making Crowe's and Foster's characters, the meanest in the movie, into the most fun to watch.