Haywire

Let's cut to the chase.  If you are the sort of person who watches zombie movies just to enjoy one awesome headshot, if you watch martial arts movies just for that final scene where the hero beats up a dojo, or if you watch crappy action movies in the hopes of a single awesome sequence, you need to watch Haywire.  Like, right now.  There is one really good fight scene and a fantastic fight scene (so, that's two recommended fight scenes) in this movie.  If that's all you need to know, go rent it now; both take place in the first half of the movie, so you can catch before the 45 minute mark.

...but if you love cornrows, you'll have to wait until the end

If you're the sort of person who cares about little things like plot and acting, here's the rest of my thoughts.

Meet Mallory (Gina Carano).  Mallory is a a spec ops contractor who takes dirty jobs for the American government.  She's not an assassin, because that would make her unsympathetic; she is the person you put on a high difficulty job to save lives and kick asses.

Kicking ass in 3...2...1...

Mallory worked a job in Barcelona with, amongst other people, hunky Aaron (Channing Tatum).  There, they saved a dissident of some sort from mean people.  When she arrived home, her boss/ex-lover/soulless ginger, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), coaxes her into another job, one where she and an agent she had never worked with, the hunky Paul (Michael Fassbender), have to assure the safety of a VIP.  While babysitting isn't her favorite thing to do, Mallory complies because plot advancement.  At the end of their mission, though, Paul tries to kill Mallory.  What the hell is going on?  Is it a double-cross?  A triple-cross?  It's a suspenseful/thrilling mystery!

Haywire's lead actress, Gina Carano, is not a professional actress.  She's an MMA fighter.  In other words, she performs her own (awesome) stunts, but she hasn't exactly been to acting school.  That doesn't necessarily mean she's a bad actress, but...well, calling her mediocre would be generous.  This is the sort of film where the heroine's dialogue is terse and tough.  Carano's delivery is tough, but tough like wood, instead of tough like MMA.  How important is that to the overall quality of this film?  I'll get back to that later.  The rest of the cast is solid all around, with a few impressive performances.  I can't believe I'm writing this, but Channing Tatum was pretty good in Haywire.  He delivered is lines in a pretty natural way, had some solid conversational humor, and a really good fight scene.  When I see Tatum in a film, I assume he's going to be the dumb twin of the Matt Damon puppet in Team America: World Police, but I was shocked at how much I didn't hate him here.

"Maaatt Day...Day...***sigh***  LINE?"

Michael Fassbender was even better.  Fassbender has charmed onscreen before, but his fight scene with Carano was completely awesome.  Sure, he did the whole "acting" thing beforehand, but he looked really good in a very physical way here; his scenes were definitely the highlight of the film. 

Not as sexy as it looks, trust me

After those two, the bad-assness of the supporting cast takes a definite dive, although the acting is still good.  Michael Angarano gave a fantastically genuine performance as a fairly superfluous character --- he wasn't quite useless, but Angarano's line delivery was some of the most natural I've seen in a long while.  Michael Douglas shows up and reminded me more of his character in Traffic than of a corpse, which has been my experience with him for the past decade.  Ewan McGregor was surprisingly good as a bureaucratic jerk; it's been a while since I've actually enjoyed McGregor in a movie --- and I don't know if this role really enters into "enjoyment" for me --- but it was refreshing to see him playing against type.  Who knew he would make a good heel?  Antonio Banderas was solid in a limited role, but he did have an impressively dense beard.  So there's that. 

"The password is 'Nasonex'"

Bill Paxton played Mallory's father and, aside from having a mustache, was about what you should expect from Paxton.  Oh, and if you're an Amélie fan, Mathieu Kassovitz makes a rare English-speaking appearance.

The supporting acting was pretty good, I think that's pretty obvious.  How about the direction?  Steven Soderbergh was the man in charge of Haywire, and he brought with him some definite stylistic choices.  Are you tired of Paul Greengrass-type action movies, where the camera is a little shaky and the fight scenes have a lot of close-ups cuts?  Soderbergh apparently was.  Haywire is filmed primarily in long shots with minimal editing.  That means you definitely can tell that the actors do most of their own stunts (and Carano almost all of them), and that is extremely impressive.  Soderbergh also takes pains to not over-explain the plot; this isn't as dense as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but the lack of exposition can make it a bit hard to follow at times.  I liked that Haywire was told in an intelligent fashion that respected the audience.  Unfortunately, Soderbergh's style for the film led to a lot of the non-action scenes to drag.  It's one thing to watch a cool fight sequence that was clearly made without edits, it's less enthralling to see Mallory walk into a store and buy a cell phone from a distance. 

Soderbergh's stylistic choices could have worked.  It's a ballsy play, making a movie that treats espionage in a moderately realistic and unexaggerated way; there is a fine line between suspenseful intrigue and monotonous staring.  Casting Gina Carano was another interesting choice.  Unfortunately, the film's style and the actor's talent didn't quite mesh.  Don't get me wrong --- Carano was absolutely the correct person for the fight scenes.  My problem is that Haywire has far too many non-fight scenes to make up for Carano's awful delivery.  To put it in plain terms, she was clearly out-acted by Channing "I'm a freaking coin" Tatum.  That's a sick burn.  Maintaining the longer scenes with fewer obvious editing cuts made the film feel fairly realistic, but this also emphasized Carano's lack of charisma.  I also felt bored by the excessive chase scenes in this movie.  Again, Soderbergh's choice to film scenes from farther away took away some of the immediacy and scenes that should have felt tense or quick were puzzlingly dull (the car chase scene in the snow, for instance).

So...much...running...with...so...little...payoff...

Without the two early fight scenes, I would probably rip into Haywire with pleasure.  However, those scenes are totally awesome.  She even punches a guy in the dick with his own gun!

Yeah, that was my reaction, too

Aside from the final fight scene on the beach (which looked especially staged), all of the hand-to-hand combat was stellar.  It just doesn't really fit the tone of the rest of the film; Carano was performing like she was in The Expendables 2, but everyone else thought they were making The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.  Both styles have their charms, but they don't make for a tasty sandwich. I will grant that it does have a good supporting cast that gives an otherwise overlong (even at 93 minutes) and sterile plot life.  I also appreciated what Soderbergh was going for --- an intelligent bad-ass spy story --- but he didn't have the talent (or, honestly a script) that could make that happen.

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

While I wouldn't ordinarily consider myself mean-spirited, there is something about failed movie franchises that I find extraordinarily amusing.  I'm not talking about the movies that kill a franchise (Batman and Robin), but the movies that were supposed to have sequels, but never did.  Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros., The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, Godzilla (1998) --- and that's not even counting every comic book or video game movie that never spawned a direct sequel.  While Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles was, eventually, followed by Queen of the Damned, nobody from the original film reprised their role and the film was pretty loose with its continuity; Queen was more of a reboot than a direct sequel.  Still, it's hard to believe that such a successful movie --- it grossed almost four times its budget --- with such an ambitious subtitle didn't wind up being a tent pole film.  Maybe audiences just weren't that interested in Hollywood heartthrobs wearing frilly shirts.

"Doth he besmirch our honor, bro?"

Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles is, essentially, the 200-year life story of Louis (Brad Pitt), as told to a reporter (Christian Slater) in --- you guessed it --- an interview.  In colonial New Orleans, Louis was a plantation owner who was mourning his late wife and child.  He had lost his taste for living, and spent his time tempting death; as it turns out, he got more than he bargained for.  Thanks to his deliciously suicidal tendencies and hunky good looks, Louis attracted the attention of the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise).

Hickeys hurt so good

Lestat turned Louis into an undead creature, but Louis had more in common with the grunge scene than just his hair; he had angst, which meant that he refused to take the life of another person.  Sure, watching Louis drink the blood of rats is fun for a while, but Lestat transformed Louis to be a companion, not a novelty.  He needed something to force Louis to stop moping and get on with his un-life.  Enter Claudia (twelve year-old Kirsten Dunst).

Adorable + Horrifying = Adorrifying?

Would turning an innocent child into a natural predator be enough to keep Louis by his side?  Is giving a child the power of evil a good idea?  Will Louis ever get over his whining and start killing people?  And where the hell do vampires come from, anyway?  Most of these questions get answered as Louis tells his tale, whether explicitly or not.

Perhaps the most impressive parts of Interview With the Vampire are the productions aspects.  The sets are pretty awesome throughout, peaking with Armand's ridiculously Gothic underground catacombs.  The soundtrack is pretty good, although occasionally over-dramatic; in a movie that has so many emotional bromances, though, that can be expected.  The costumes are also excellent period pieces, although the hair and make-up for the vampires was hit-and-miss for me.  I liked that the paleness of the vampires would depend on how recently they fed, and I thought Brad Pitt's vampire eyes were pretty cool-looking.  However, I couldn't get past some of the crappy wigs and Lee Press-On Nails used by some of the cast.

"Available in Natural or Glamor lengths!"

Production values don't make a movie, though.  Since this is, essentially, a vampire biopic, it needs a compelling lead and a solid story arc.  I enjoyed Brad Pitt's performance as the eternally morose Louis, but his character was not really one of action; everything he did was a reaction, which makes him less interesting than some of the other characters.

Louis, in action

The headlining actor in this film is Tom Cruise, and it's easy to see why.  While Lestat is not the main character in this film, he is the most active character.  Whether he is playing a villain, trying to fight loneliness, or merely gazing at Louis with his jaw hanging open in a not-at-all-homoerotic fashion, Lestat is the wheel that propels this story.

It's too bad that Tom Cruise isn't very good here.  I normally don't have a problem with Tom Cruise's acting, but this just felt like a poor match.  He wasn't scary when he was being evil and his wicked laughter felt forced.  He improved dramatically after Claudia plays her trick on Lestat, but it was a little late for that improvement to matter much.  Kirsten Dunst was actually pretty good as the spoiled vampire child, which shocked me, since she's generally pretty awful.  I thought Christian Slater was fine in his small part, too, although it wasn't too demanding.  Antonio Banderas was less impressive as the mysterious Armand; he might have been mediocre if his wig wasn't ridiculous, or if his character's scenes weren't almost entirely devoted to subtext.  Stephen Rea was a little more fun as Santiago, but he should have been more terrifying.  You also might recognize Thandie Newton as Louis' main house slave; she wasn't particularly impressive, but she wasn't bad, either.

As cool as some parts of Interview With the Vampire are, they just don't add up to an entertaining or horrifying whole.  I felt that director Neil Jordan focused too much on the look of this picture (which is admittedly great) and not nearly enough on the main actors.  Brad Pitt can play tortured in his sleep, but I thought he wasn't given enough to do in this movie.  Tom Cruise, on the other hand, had a much wider range of emotions to play with, but never came close to meeting all the demands of his character.

Tom Cruise emotes

Thanks to those to flaws, the film's pacing seems extraordinarily slow.  I remembered liking this movie when I first saw it, because the tortured and moody vampire was a novelty.  This movie does a great job with that desolate loneliness, but with the current influx of vampire characters in popular culture, it no longer feels special.

Maybe my problem lies with the source material.  I remember reading the first few volumes of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles when I was younger, and I enjoyed the first couple of books (of which, Interview... was the first).  After a while, though, I realized just how annoying most of her characters are.  Take this story, for instance.  You have a wicked vampire (Lestat), a Goth-inspired depressed vamp (Louis), a bratty child (Claudia), a maybe kind of manipulative or maybe just bored blood-sucker (Armand), and another wicked vampire without a back-story (Santiago).  Who am I supposed to give a rat's ass about?  By default, it becomes Louis, but he is far from an entertaining storyteller.  Even what makes him initially special (his refusal to kill humans) is eventually brushed aside with barely a comment when he finally gives in to his nature.

Why so serious?

For all the technical prowess Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles has to offer, it's lacking in drama and interesting characters.  That's not a deal-breaker for an entertaining film, but this movie isn't much fun to watch and isn't gruesome enough to scare.  If you're a fan of Gothic horror, this might be up your alley.  I'm not, so this one definitely earns a "meh" rating from me.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Why do I do this to myself?  Sure, I have a healthy interest in movies that are so bad they're good (I call them Lefty Gold), but sometimes I knowingly just put my mind in harm's way.  Case in point: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. I had heard that the movie was supposed to be bad, but when I found out that it had a 0% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I was shocked; even Battlefield Earth earned a 2% "rotten" rating.  Zero percent is virtually unheard of.  Maybe I just had to see it to believe it, or maybe I'm just a sucker for pain, but I chose to dive into B:EvS all by my lonesome.

If you are fortunate enough to have avoided this movie so far, here's the trailer to give you an idea of what I was working with:

This is one of those movies where the less you pay attention to the plot, the faster the nosebleeds will stop.  For reasons that are left unexplained for a while, Sever (Lucy Liu) takes it upon herself to kidnap the son of Robert Gant (Gregg Henry), the director of the DIA (which is apparently a real government agency).  As the son of a prominent military intelligence man, the kid was pretty well-guarded.  Not that it matters to Sever; she just waltzes right in and pulls some some serious Keanu Matrix shit, and suddenly, the guards are all down.  And by "Matrix shit," I mean the sequels.  Basically, she wore sunglasses at night and a long leather (hooded) trench coat while she beat up some guys who treated her like she was the damn bogeyman and not just a moderately athletic actress. 

Because trenches are made for hand-to-hand combat.

To find the boy, the FBI digs into its "super awesome former agents that can easily be talked into rejoining" files and finds Ecks (Antonio Banderas), who is busy drinking, smoking, and growing stubble at a nearby bar.  Two agents try to strong-arm him, he predictably beats their asses despite being theoretically drunk and out of practice, and he agrees to find Sever and the boy.  Why?  Apparently, Ecks' boss (Miguel Sandoval) has information on the death of Ecks' wife --- who might not really be dead!  Gasp!  I hope he's not playing with Ecks' emotions, because I can tell from his three minutes of screen time so far that Ecks is still hurting from her presumably untimely end!  So, Ecks is chasing after Sever with some FBI guys while the DIA team (led by Ray Park, who was totally third-billed in the movie and not wearing extensive makeup for a change) tries to reach her first.

From that synopsis, you might have noticed that the microscopic killer robot isn't as prevalent in the story as it is in the preview.  That's kind of odd, right?  Well, that's because it appears in the scene shown in the trailer and then again at the end.  And no, the robot thing is not called "Ballistic."  In fact, there is no reason at all for this movie to have "Ballistic" in the title.  Furthermore, aside from their initial meet-and-greet fight, Ecks and Sever are allies.  Their one fight is about as exciting as you might imagine, though:

It looks like he's going to puke from being tickled too much.

This is a movie where every character mentions that Ecks and Sever are the best at everything, as long as it's deadly.  Naturally, the film builds up to their painfully choreographed fight scene.  The result is...well, less than thrilling.  I never thought I would say this, but it made me look back on the hand-to-hand combat scenes from The Hunted --- where Benicio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones scuffle around for half an hour in an uncomfortable man-hug --- and think "not bad."  The Ecks vs. Sever fight (the only time the "Ecks vs. Sever" subtitle is actually appropriate) is so slow and awkward that I wouldn't be surprised if the stunt coordinator was audibly shouting instructions just below the blaring soundtrack.

Okay, fine.  The title of the movie is pretty awful.  What about the acting?  Honestly, it's a little hard to judge.  The script is atrocious, definitely one of the worst major motion picture scripts to have been made into an actual movie in the past decade, so that should be taken into consideration when judging the actors.  Even with that in mind, I'm going to give the cast a universal thumbs down.  Or up.  Whichever one means they all die by Roman gladiator.  Antonio Banderas, even with his sexy cartoon bee voice, is out of his element here.

Nason-Ecks?

When Banderas is in his comfort zone (giving a smoldering glare at the camera and speaking heavily accented English), he is a decent actor.  Here, he is asked to look tired, haggard, and be an incredible bad-ass.  It doesn't work to his strengths.  Lucy Liu is better known for her semi-comedic roles than her dramatic chops, and this movie is completely without humor.  As for her action movie skills, she was definitely on par with Angela Lansbury in this one.  Miguel Sandoval just looked bored with his lines and Gregg Henry turned in one of the most MWA-HA-HA evil performances I have ever seen in a movie that did not involve world destruction.  I wouldn't say that Ray Park's performance was good, but he is definitely the only person in the cast that can pull off a convincing fight sequence.  Talisa Soto and Terry Chen also lend their charisma-free talents to this film.

Dull, uninspired acting isn't always the cast's fault; the director usually has a share in the blame.  And the first sign that this film's director should be blamed?  Wych Kaosayananda calls himself as "KAOS" in the credits.  And all this time, you thought McG was the most obnoxious director name.  Kaosayanandahas has no subtlety or any sort of rapport with his actors, or else we might have actually seen human emotions in this piece of crap.  I'm guessing that he is supposed to be more of an action director than anything else, since this is allegedly an action movie, but this is one of the worst uses of $70 million I have ever seen.  And that's taking Dragon Wars: D-War into consideration.  Nothing looks good in this film.  Nothing.  In fact, this movie was directed so poorly (and flopped so badly) that KAOS hasn't directed a movie since.  And when you consider how M. Night Shyamalan keeps getting work, that is saying something.

Okay, so this might sound like just an uninspired movie, and not a truly awful one.  Don't be deceived like I was.  This is a bad, bad movie, and it's so incompetent that it's not even fun to ridicule.  Why?  For starters,the movie takes place in Canada.  Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the FBI doesn't operate on foreign soil.  And yet, they form a "trans-national strikeforce" to track down Sever.  How did that get past a copy editor?  And it apparently never occurred to anyone that the Canadian police, armed forces, intelligence community, or the damn Mounties might show up and say "Hey, what's all this aboot you fellas destroying thirty city blocks up here?"  Seriously, they blow up a lot of shit in this movie (without any noticeable fatalities) and leave about a hundred FBI and DIA agents dead on the streets of Vancouver, and there isn't one Canadian cop in this movie.

Pictured: no injuries.

The worst part about all that action is that it's not entertaining.  At all.  Liu and Banderas are uncomfortable (at best) in their action scenes and the best scene (Liu vs. Park) still sucks.  Ray Park is an awesome stuntman, and he looks good in this, his only fight scene in the movie (just another reason this movie is stupid), as long as the action is being shown in real time.  Unfortunately, to make Liu's moves look any good, the scene is shown in slow motion, which just makes Park look incompetent when he doesn't hit her.  There is a lot of hand-to-hand combat in this movie, and that's the best scene.  Even the shoot-em-up scenes are boring and stupid.  If the DIA needs Liu alive to find the boy, why are they using live ammunition on her, including a turret gun and snipers?  And wouldn't snipers be smart enough to take cover when somebody's shooting at them?  Not in this movie, my friends.

And what about the DIA?  In this movie, they're like a rogue CIA offshoot at best, and a bunch of assholes at worst.  Why does anyone want to be in the DIA?  They're filled with men who are cannon fodder to Lucy-freaking-Liu and specialize in twitching after they get shot.  And do you know what happens when they botch a job?  They are encouraged to commit suicide.  That's right, a government agency with a government pension plan is supposed to have its members kill themselves if they screw up.  I'm not buying into that.

To top it all off, the super secret and undoubtedly expensive killer microscopic robot is the stupidest spy weapon I have ever heard of.  And that's saying quite a bit, because I have seen all the Roger Moore Bond movies.  Let's just say that having a microscopic robotic killer that you can inject into your enemy is a good idea, okay?  If that's the case, wouldn't it take millions of dollars to make each mini-bot?  And then what?  You just leave it in the corpse after you use it to kill?  That's not terribly economical.  "But these things would be untraceable, Brian!"  Actually, they wouldn't be, since the DIA performed a thermal scan (for a microscopic robot?) at the airport to prove that the mini-bot hadn't been taken aboard any planes.  So, it is detectable, if you know what to look for.  And since you still need to inject it into your target, that means you either need to stick them with a syringe or hit them with a blow dart for it to enter the bloodstream.  At that point, wouldn't it be just as easy and a few million dollars cheaper to just use poison?

Available for kids parties, Bar Mitzvahs, and assassinations.

What I'm trying to tell you is that this is a film abomination.  It has no redeeming value, not as a target of ridicule or even as a beer coaster.