Suspect Zero

To paraphrase the Buzzcocks' immortal question, have you ever fallen in love with something you shouldn't have fallen in love with?  I don't know why, but I really like the idea of the thriller movie genre.  That's unfortunate, because there are damn few good thrillers out there.  Like a love-sick moron, though, I find myself going back to the genre that has treated me bad, time and time again.  I thought that Suspect Zero might be different.  It has Aaron Eckhart, who has been pretty good in the few films of his I've seen, and Ben Kingsley, who is an acclaimed actor, even if I haven't seen him in much.  The director's previous film was the pretty clever Shadow of the Vampire, so that was a promising sign, too.  There are also warning signs that this might not be a good movie.  Tom Cruise produced the film, but had his name removed from the credits.  One of the writers co-wrote X-Men 3, Elektra, and Inspector Gadget.  Yeesh.  What will win, solid acting and directing, or poor writing?

FBI agent Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has found himself shuffled off to the Phoenix office, which is so lame that they don't have a Starbucks anywhere nearby (hmm...I seriously doubt the truth of that).  Despite the demotion (in stature, if not pay), Mackelway finds himself involved in a serial killer case right off the bat.  The weird thing about this case is that the killer is littering the crime scenes with clues that lead to other crime scenes.  One seemingly dull man is found dead and, at the place where he was last seen, the killer's car is found with another dead body in the trunk, and the body is the first breadcrumb of evidence that leads to several murders across several states.  The dead bodies all have their eyelids cut off and a circle with a line through it found at every scene.  Okay...pretty creepy, right?  Well, it turns out that the killer knows about Mackelway and he starts mailing and faxing him stuff --- seemingly random numbers, missing person reports, and hand-scrawled notes egging him on.  Will Mackelway be able to catch this killer?  Probably, since this is a movie.  The question is, rather, once he finds the killer, will the truth behind the murders lead Mackelway to arrest or help with the next kill?

At least, that's how the synopsis of this movie should go.  Instead, every review, preview, brief summary, and movie trailer for this film explains that the serial killer is murdering other serial killers. 

A killer targeting bad guys?  How novel.

Unfortunately for this movie, that defining plot element isn't revealed until almost an hour into the movie.  Sorry, plot twist, but everybody knows you're coming to the party.  That annoying reveal aside, how does the film fare?

Despite a decent cast, Suspect Zero feels like a B-movie.  As the serial killer, Ben Kingsley succeeds in making his character unsympathetic and inhuman.  Unfortunately, that same alien nature also makes his line delivery suspect, with occasionally shouted lines at inappropriate times.  To tell the truth, it feels like Kingsley is slumming in this role.  Aaron Eckhart is decent enough when he is playing detective, but his character is awfully cliched.  I normally find Eckhart to be inoffensive, but he is forced to overact in this role and I can only take so many shots of him with crazy eyes before I get bored.  Carrie-Anne Moss plays Eckhart's reluctant partner and the window to his "mysterious" past --- her character is more of a convenient way to fill in the character background for Eckhart than anything else, so I suppose she was fine.  The cast is rounded out by a group of recognizable character actors.  Harry Lennix plays the stereotypically not "with it" FBI boss, William Mapother is an inconsequential-to-the-plot FBI agent, and Frank Collison played his typical creepy role.

Collison says you just missed Kingsley, FBI man.  He R-U-N-N-O-F-T.

Director E. Elias Merhige tried to craft a standard thriller with the pieces available to him, but he was working with a pretty ridiculous script.  All the pieces for a crafty thriller are there, with surprising plot reveals that force the characters to make radical decisions, but I don't think Merhige knew what to do with the more Stephen King-ish aspects to the movie.

That's right, this script has some unexplained supernatural phenomena in it, a la Mr. King.  Surprisingly, the script is not based on one of his books, though.  You see, Ben Kingsley's character has the psychic ability to "see" serial killers, but he can't stop "seeing" them, so he has gone off the deep end.  And he apparently can "see" Aaron Eckhart's character, even though he is not a serial killer.  And Aaron Eckhart can kind of "see" things, too.  And sometimes, this "sight" lets them glimpse the future.  Ponder that for a few moments and let it sink in.

Are your detective skills warning you about a bad movie?

Suspect Zero is a surprisingly dumb movie.  The filmmakers took the concept of a serial killer --- and I think we can agree that they're scary because they look like normal people, right? --- and makes the primary killer (Kingsley) very abnormal with his mental abilities.  That's missing the appeal of the concept in a very basic way.  And how about those mental abilities?  Kingsley sees into the minds of serial killers --- except when he's looking at a good FBI agent! --- and can see into the future, which nothing to do with connecting his mind to another person's.  I get it, I get it, if you're willing to swallow the clairvoyant serial killer bit, it's not much more of a stretch to add "prescient" to his resume.  It's still silly and lame.  And I absolutely love that Eckhart's apparent psychic power is never explained and nobody seems very interested in it.  Ugh.  This movie stirs up my bile.

The worst thing about Suspect Zero is that it fails with even the most modest of goals.  It never tries to be terribly interesting or competent, it just wants to be a mediocre thriller that will periodically wind up on SyFy at 3AM.  If the whole psychic thing was played up a bit more as the reason this movie is special, then I might have another opinion, but the film was emphasizes the whole serial killer killing serial killers bit.  That seemingly can't miss formula --- twice the crazy killers = twice as awesome --- can't succeed if the killers are free of personality and/or believability.  On the bright side, there is a scene that implies bestiality with a donkey, which most serial killer movies don't have.  There are also a few idiotic timing/editing mistakes that I found very enjoyable; the best was Kingsley's first kill, where he left a building after his prey and still managed to sneak into the back seat of his victim's car without the victim (who walked directly to his vehicle) noticing.  These occasional lapses in quality control are really the only things that entertained me in this movie.

If you're not familiar with the Buzzcocks, here's a video of the band in their late-70s prime.  It doesn't really have anything to do with Suspect Zero, but it kept popping up in my head while writing this review, and that's all the excuse I need.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Hmm...Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time...well, since there is a subtitle to the film and it's not a sequel, I guess we can conclude that this movie was meant to launch a new film franchise.  The good news is that there is plenty of source material to base this and future movies on; the bad news is that this is a movie based on a video game, and I've made my opinion on that pretty clear.  And, since it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer --- who has produced everything from the Beverly Hills Cop films to the National Treasure movies --- you can be sure that the movie is a suitably huge and probably dumb action movie.  That's not a bad thing, since dumb action movies are as American as apple pie, rednecks, and anachronistic social conservatism.  Sometimes, it's fun to turn off your brain and watch pretty people do impossible things.

Right off the bat, you know this movie is going to have you rolling your eyes.  You could take the street rat song from Aladdin and it would fit suspiciously well in the opening sequence as a young orphan avoids apprehension by authorities.  That young orphan earns himself an adoption by the good King Sharaman (Ronald Pickup), King of Persia, when he stands up to a royal guard that was abusing another street rat.  So let that be a lesson, orphans; if you're not cute enough to get picked by normal people, try attacking a powerful person's security detail.  You will be buried in an unmarked grave for your actions earn their trust and affection.  

Jump ahead in time a bit, and Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) is now the fun-loving, rough-and-tumble, but hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold-type Prince of Persia.  His two older brothers (and real Princes) are Tus (Richard Coyle), the eldest and one that tries his best to earn his future crown, and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell), the most aggressive of the family.  On their way to a war that is so important that it is only mentioned once, a spy arrives with information that the sacred city of Alamut is secretly supplying the enemies of Persia with high-end weapons.  American audiences have heard that one before, right?  The brothers and their uncle/advisor Nizam (Ben Kingsley) hold a war council to decide what to do; Dastan votes to continue on to the war their father assigned, but Nizan convinces the others that this weapons threat is important enough to take action immediately.  Through some moderately unlikely and acrobatic heroics, Dastan manages to sneak into the fortified city of Alamut and open the gates, allowing the Persians to take the city with nary a casualty...on their side.  During the brief battle, Dastan defeated a man that was on a mission from the Alamut ruler; his (failed) mission was to guide a particular dagger out of the city and toward safety.  Dastan snagged the dagger and all the props for capturing the city.  As a reward, his father offers him the hand of Alamut's ruler, Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton), in marriage.  It is customary to give the King a gift when he enters a new city, but Dastan is no good at that sort of thing, so he gladly takes some fancy robes that Tus offers him for the gift.  However, when King Sharaman dons the robes, it seems that the robes are tainted and the good King dies from what appear to be severe chemical burns.  Who gave the King the robes?  Why, it was the Prince that has no hope of ever being King, but should be pretty happy with his lot in life, since he's not a street peddler!  Blame him!

So, Dastan and Tamina go on the lam.  Why does she accompany him?  Well, Tamina is the guardian of the Sands of Time.  When placed in the glass handle of the dagger Dastan is holding, they can rewind time for the holder.  It's pretty cool, but the dagger only holds a minute's worth of sand, so if you need a mulligan in life, you better act fast with the dagger.  Theoretically, if someone found the sacred cache of time sand in Alamut and used the dagger with it, the time limit would be irrelevant and the user could go back to any part of their life --- of course, that would anger the gods, who would destroy the universe if that ever happened.  Dastan figures out the power in his dagger and realizes that this is the reason for Persia's attack on Alamut, and that the King's men will never find the weapons of mass destruction the spy told them about, because they don't exist.  Someone wants that dagger very badly.  Is it Tus, who has the most to gain and handed the robes to Dastan?  Is it Garsiv, who would need to do a little more additional killing to be king?  Or do the filmmakers think we're idiots?  Seriously, why would Ben Kingsley be in this movie, looking like Jafar, if he wasn't the villain?  And why would the brothers even need to master time?  But no, we're supposed to play along with Dastan as he walks his way down logic street.  Once Dastan's train of thought finally leaves the station, he has to stop the mysterious evildoer from wrecking time and the world.  And maybe, if he's lucky, he'll learn a few things about himself, life, and love.

I'm not much of a Jake Gyllenhaal fan.  Yes, I liked Donnie Darko, too, but I haven't been impressed with anything I've seen him in since (although I haven't gotten around to Brokeback Mountain yet).  He's okay in this movie.  As far as the physicality of his role went, he did a pretty good job.  He appeared to be quite the swashbuckling little Persian and, aside from the impractical haircut (if you're going to have fashionably long hair, you should probably keep it out of your eyes in sword fights).  As far as his acting went...well...he's not terrible, but he's pretty bad.  Specifically, he has a startlingly low supply of charm for a lead character and no chemistry with his romantic interest.  Speaking of whom, Gemma Arterton wasn't much better.  She has more to work with, since she gets to point out what a moron Dastan is for most of the picture, but she is just as convincing as Gyllenhaal when it comes to showing love on-screen.  The acting savior of this movie was Alfred Molina in the supporting role of Sheik Amar, a crafty entrepreneur.  He had energy, charm, and was funny --- all the things you would expect from main characters, but this movie lacks.  Ben Kingsley more or less mailed his performance in, but his uninspired work is still better than most actors on their best day.  Gisli Orn Gardarsson did a decent job as a creepy assassin, but the rest of the cast was just average.  Director Mike Newell continues his eccentric resume (Prince of Persia, Harry Potter, and...Mona Lisa Smile?), but this is definitely not one of his better outings.  I was impressed by the quality of his action sequence direction, but the obviously fake romance between his leads was disappointing from the director of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

But was anyone really expecting amazing acting from this film?  I certainly wasn't.  I was looking for some big, dumb action, and this movie delivers.  The action is pretty good, and it is plentiful.  Most of the more ridiculous action scenes (running up walls, anything remotely acrobatic, etc.) are taken from the video game; in its own way, this movie does a good job staying true to its video game roots and still telling a comprehensible story, "probabaly " better than most video game adaptations.  Aside from the time-pausing scenes, I couldn't tell what stunts Jake Gyllenhaal was doing and what was CGI, so the production values and editing were great.  There were far too many unnecessary slow-motion shots, but that happens in action movies nowadays.  While there was no gore in all this violence, I thought the action was handled pretty well.

Surprisingly, the action doesn't feel like it was the top priority in the movie.  I think they were trying very hard to make a sister franchise to Pirates of the Caribbean.   It's got swashbuckling action and a hero coming of age, it's got a sassy female lead who tries to embody Girl Power, and it even has an amusing and guylinered supporting character with questionable morals in Alfred Molina. How does it stack up?  Well, it's certainly worse than the first Pirates, but I think it was better than the other two.  So, not great, but not terrible.  Here's the thing: this is the story of a Prince of Persia --- my favorite character shouldn't be Alfred Molina.  In Pirates, Johnny Depp stole the show because he's a pirate and pirates steal.  Here, we have two princes in supporting roles that have little more than anger to define their characters; they're definitely not going to be the characters you enjoy watching.  That leaves us with Body by Jake.  His character is not smarter or funnier or stronger than his brothers; he is just supposed to have better morals as his defining trait.  And while that might be a great differentiating point when picking out a husband, it's not really a big deal in an action hero.

Of course, the ridiculousness of the film could be another reason why it falls short of its franchise-mimicking aspirations.  It would be easy to pick this movie's casting apart by accusing it of "whitewashing," but the deed is done, and now it's time to judge.  My overwhelming reaction to this movie is that there are more white people in Persia than in Illinois.  That is one whitebread, cracker empire.  And, apparently, English with a British accent is the language of choice.  Of course it is.  I bet this movie was a huge hit in Iran.  On the other hand, it's not like Aladdin was a multicultural buffet, and this film borrows a lot from the animated classic.  The whole race thing is silly enough to ridicule for the entire running time, but there are ample opportunities to mock this film.  I bet you didn't know that there Persian ninjas are called Hassansins, probably because it rhymes with "assassins."  Oh, and the lead ninja is from Norwegia, which makes him probably the least ethnically-correct ninja ever.  Oh, and did you know that you could take a booby trap to safety?  That is stupider than Indiana Jones finding a doorway to hide in as the giant boulder rolls past him.  And I'm not even going to go in detail about the ostrich jockeys --- here's an actual quote from this movie: "Did you know that ostriches have suicidal tendencies?"  What?  WHAT?!?  How does that line find its way into a $150+ million dollar movie?  And that's the best line in the whole movie.

Prince of Persia has solid action and an amazing plot (by video game movie standards), but pretty awful characters and a cliche-ridden script.  In my eyes, I call that a wash.  However, the ending (hello, deus ex machina) is bad enough to tip this into sub-par territory.  Not that I expected anything less from a plot device that goes back in time, but it was pretty bad.

However, this is a great movie to laugh at.  It's very watchable and the enormous budget just makes the film's failures even more amusing.  I grant this film Lefty Gold status, as it is easily the most entertaining bit of Hollywood fluff I have ridiculed in the past year.  As Lefty Gold, The Sands of Time deserves

Shutter Island

It's difficult to write about a thriller or mystery movie because nobody wants to be That Guy who reveals that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's Keyser Soze.  This presents me with a challenge: to ramble on at length without being That Guy.  I think I can manage that, but this is a mystery movie, so it has a twist.  That's as much of a spoiler as I'm going to give you.

Adapted from Dennis Lehane's best-selling book of the same name, Shutter Island has more than a few similarities to Lehane's Mystic River.  Boy, that Lehane has a tough life; a best-selling author who gets his books optioned into movies that are directed by some of the most talented directors in the world.  You would think he'd write happier tales.  Anyway, both Mystic River and Shutter Island are mysteries that rely heavily on their characters' secrets to reach their logical conclusion.

Here, we have Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a US Marshall that volunteered for a case that would give him an excuse to poke around Shutter Island, a maximum security mental hospital for the criminally insane.  On the ferry ride to the island, Daniels meets his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), and they enter the facility together.  They are ostensibly there to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer), a patient --- not a prisoner! --- that managed to escape the facility, despite a locked door, barred windows, no shoes, rugged terrain, and several guards stationed throughout the building.  That doesn't sound like an inside job at all, does it?  Rachel was incarcerated for drowning her three children.  The real reason for Daniels' visit is to learn the fate of Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), the pyromaniac that burned down Daniels' home with his wife (Michelle Williams) inside.  Laeddis was assigned to the facility after going to jail, but his paper trail ended on Shutter Island...but no one admits to knowing him.  Once inside the facility, Daniels and Chuck meet Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), a practitioner of humane treatment for the mentally ill, and Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), a member of the old-school of psychiatric treatment that prefers lobotomy over patience.

From the start of the investigation, nothing goes Daniels' way.  The facility guards refuse him entrance while armed, so he has to give up his gun.  He asks for files that are clearly commonsense ways for him to get the essential information he needs, but he is blocked by the facility's bureaucracy at every turn.  He lost his cigarettes before the boat arrived at the island, and is forced to bum smokes from his new partner.  Orderlies and nurses are sarcastic and generally less than helpful.  The patients he interviews appear coached and seem afraid when he questions them about Andrew Laeddis.  When he faces the truth that the doctors are refusing to aid his case, Daniels can't even leave the island because a hurricane is on its way.  With nothing else to do, Daniels continues his investigation.  Clearly, there is some secret that is being covered up, and he is determined to discover that truth.  He eventually meets with an old informant (Jackie Earle Haley) that is now confined in the most violent ward of the facility, who seems to confirm Daniels' greatest fear; Daniels can uncover the truth behind the island and blow the lid off the whole conspiracy, or he can find out what happened to Andrew Laeddis.  He cannot do both.  The question is what is more important to Daniels: uncovering a terrible truth for the world to see, or finding (killing?) the man responsible for the death of his wife?

Martin Scorsese's direction really stands out in this film, particularly because of Daniels' dreams.  Daniels is suffering from a string of nightmares, hallucinations and waking dreams that are reminding him of his late wife and the Dachau concentration camp that he helped liberate in World War II.  In the dream world, identities are transposed, but the emotions are not.  Memories are shown, but they are spliced with his own subconscious.  At times, the imagery is a little trippy, like when his cigarette briefly smokes in reverse.  Other times, it is sad, as when his wife becomes ash in his arms while he professes his love for her.  And yet other times are the stuff of nightmares, with Holocaust children accusing him of not doing enough to save them.  Scorsese is given free reign to use a lot of symbolism in these scenes, and he throws a lot at the viewer.  In a lot of Scorsese films, he makes good use of camera angles and general cinematography to imply moods or hint at his characters' frame of mind.  He does that in Shutter Island, as well, but he has a lot more freedom to get creative, thanks to the dream scenes.

As far as acting goes, it is all pretty much above board.  Leonardo DiCaprio is consistently good, and working so frequently with Scorsese seems to have taught him the value of subtlety and nuance.  I'm not saying that he was ever an over-actor, but there are a lot of little things he does with his character that I appreciate, from the hunched shoulders and bold stance to the frequent (but not horribly obvious) reminders of his character's tendency for migraine headaches.  DiCaprio carries this movie on his own, but there are a lot of good supporting cast members that briefly pop up.  Mark Ruffalo does a pretty good job as the junior partner and his compassion shows through consistently.  Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow both play their parts well, but what else would you expect from two respected actors?  Ted Levine has a very brief, but frightening, cameo as the facility warden.  Jackie Earle Haley appears to be having a career renaissance playing disturbed characters, and that pleasant trend continues here with some of the more curious wound makeup I have seen in a while.  Michelle Williams was impressive in her small supporting role and was used effectively.  The rest of the cast (including Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, and John Carroll Lynch) is good too, but perhaps not as attention-grabbing.

Even with good direction and good acting, a mystery movie can still be underwhelming if the mystery is no good.  I really liked the story in Shutter Island, even though I was not particularly surprised by the ending.  Normally, if I guess the ending to a mystery correctly, it bothers me a bit.  Here, though, Scorsese drops a lot of hints that flesh out the story and the characters.  While one side effect of those choices was a less than surprising answer to the mystery, it was also satisfying because the twist made sense.  You still might not guess the ending correctly (or, at least, not entirely correctly), but you won't feel as if the end came out of left field.  Since the movie spent so much time on Daniels' subconscious mind, the mystery really takes a back seat to that as the primary plot propeller.  As such, the surprise-worthiness of the ending turned out to be a lot less important than I thought it would be.

This is the sort of film that college students love to write about.  It has excellent direction with a lot of stylistic choices and meaningful symbolism and imagery.  After the movie, you can revisit scenes in your head (or just re-watch the scenes on your DVD) and pick out important details that you missed the first time through.  This is a movie that I expect to be better the second time I watch it because being fully informed of the story will allow me to understand many of the scenes from a different angle next time.  While I completely understand anyone who enjoyed the movie less because the mystery's answer was a little predictable, I thoroughly enjoyed the story, acting and the film as a whole the first time through, and look forward to a repeat viewing.  I may be a little artsy fartsy with movies sometimes, but I appreciate good craftsmanship when I see it.