Total Recall (2012)

When I first heard that there would be a remake of Total Recall (1990), I was a little upset.  It might not be the most subtle movie (hint: Arnold), but it is a pretty awesome and ridiculous (hint: three-breasted lady) piece of action/sci-fi.  Why mess with a classic?  But then I thought it over.  This is a Philip K. Dick short story, so you could redo this film as a paranoid science fiction nightmare, like something Cronenberg would make.  Or you could play up the idea of someone not knowing their identity; it could be like The Bourne Identity, only in the future!  The only wrong way to remake Total Recall would be to try and out-action an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Hmm...that trailer makes it look like they made the wrong choice.

By the end of the 21st century, the Earth has been reduced to a wasteland, following large-scale chemical warfare.  Only England and Australia remain inhabitable, although they are a tad overcrowded.  The teeming masses of Australia commute to England to work low-end jobs, while native English get the higher paying leadership positions.  Naturally, that leads to some complaints from the Australian servant class, and some domestic terrorism/freedom fighting has broken out.  Times are tense, but I know what you are wondering.  How can people commute across the globe on a regular basis?  If you guessed via a tunnel bored through the center of the planet, you defied logic and guessed right!  Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) is one of these menial Australian laborers.  While he has a home, a gorgeous wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), and a job, he is unsatisfied.  He has recurring dreams of another woman, with them on the run together from the government.

He's married to Beckinsale, but dreams of Biel.  Quaid is an ungrateful bastard.

Quaid keeps hearing about a company called Rekall.  It's a place where they implant fake memories that seem totally real, but aren't.  Essentially, it's a way for a boring person to remember an exciting life that they never had the opportunity/balls to actually experience.  Quaid decides to give it a try, and opts for the "secret agent" special.  But that's when things get bad, very fast.  Quaid already had his memories tampered with!  Now he's on the run from the police for something he doesn't understand, his wife is trying to kill him, and it appears that dream girl is actually a real person?!?  Is this all in Quaid's head, or is it really happening?

I vote real.  My imagination wouldn't come up with that dumb hairstyle.

The acting in Total Recall (2012) is pretty mediocre.  Nobody is fantastic, but nobody hams it up, either (which is probably an upgrade from the original film).  In the lead role, Colin Farrell looked suitably confused and he was convincing in his action scenes.  This role doesn't play to his strengths (thick brogue and empathetic eyebrows), but he plays a generic hero well enough.  Kate Beckinsale took on the role of the primary villain, which is a change of pace for her.  She doesn't actually seem evil, so much as she is paramilitary with crazy eyes.

Exhibit A

More than anything else, Beckinsale was cast to look hot and perform action stunts, which she handles easily.  Her role isn't very deep, but she does run around a lot to distract you from that fact.  Jessica Biel plays the part of the "good girl," which for all intents and purposes has her running for her life whenever she's onscreen.  I keep wanting Biel to show off some acting talent, but she can't seem to get past "mild alarm" in this role.

ACTING!

Bryan Cranston once again plays an authority figure in a film, and once again underwhelms when he is given generic characters.  The man can obviously act, but his movie roles don't show it.  This is the first time I have seen Bokeem Woodbine in a role that wasn't obviously sinister; he was fine playing a character part, but I think he's got enough charisma to carry a more complex role in a big movie.  Bill Nighy makes an all-too-brief appearance, probably due to his history with the director.  I love Nighy, but he is awfully boring when he plays seemingly normal people, and that's what he was here.  Rounding out the noteworthy cast, John Cho played the owner/operator of Rekall, which is a surprisingly minor role that didn't really require a recognizable actor.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, they did bring back the prostitute character with three breasts.  She's played by Kaitlyn Leeb, and the extra breast appears to be fake.  Maybe.

This is only director Len Wiseman's fourth effort behind the camera (and his first since 2007), but it's hard to tell.  Wiseman (best known for the Underworld series) slips effortlessly back into glossy action movie-mode with Total Recall (2012).  There is a metric crap-ton of action in this movie, and it all looks great.

Although it sometimes seems like an excuse to check out his wife's butt

Wiseman is not known for his storytelling skills, though, and that shows.  Total Recall (2012) is effectively one long chase scene.  The smarter elements in the plot --- the mind games and the interesting science fiction aspects --- are lost among the countless shootouts and explosions.  When he slows down to play up some of the supposedly less exciting elements, they're pretty cool, but sadly underused.

A hand-video-phone?  That's awesome!

Wiseman is also not much of an actor's director, which can be seen by the fact that his entire cast is one-dimensional.  I can't blame him for the script, but any character development --- at all --- would have been appreciated.  Story logic would have helped out a bit, too.  I couldn't have been the only person who realized that Kate Beckinsale's character is a covert agent out to capture one man, and yet she destroys more buildings and cannon fodder characters than the entire cast of Terminator 3.  That was not terribly covert.

...but she apparently enjoyed every minute of it

Total Recall (2012) is definitely a well-produced film, and it is undoubtedly full of action.  None of that means anything if the characters suck, though.  Well, I suppose that's not entirely true; if the action is ridiculous enough, it can balance out terrible characters, but that's not the case here.  Let's take one of the many chase scenes as a for instance:

Okay, this is a little reminiscent of Minority Report, but looks exciting enough.  When you look back on the film, though, this scene just blends in with dozens more that feel just like it.  However, ten seconds of Quaid at Rekall plant a lasting image in your mind.

Planting courtesy of Rekall

That is the most frustrating aspect of Total Recall (2012) --- it has some very cool sci-fi ideas and moments, but exclusively emphasizes the dumb action movie parts. As far as dumb action movies go, Total Recall is decently made.  It's nothing special, but it moves almost fast enough to keep the audience from noticing plot holes.  It's not very original, though, even for a remake.  Generic action sequences give way to homages to Minority Report, Blade Runner, and the 1990 original, but none of them are particularly clever or fun (except for tri-breast, which still makes me laugh every time). 

Cue fight scene 27

It was an incredibly poor choice to try an out-do the action in a remake of a film starring THE action star of the last 30 years, but the filmmakers didn't fail.  They were just adequate and bland.  And when you're being compared to something that was --- whatever your take on it --- unique, being boring looks even worse by comparison.  I thought about knocking this movie down a few notches for falling short of the original, but it's really a decent mindless action movie.  It should have been more, but it's perfectly mediocre for what it is.

Seven Psychopaths

I'm a sucker for Sam Rockwell.  When you add in Christopher Walken and Woody Harrelson, you have just created a film that I will watch, regardless of the story.  So why try to get around it?  Check out the red band trailer for Seven Psychopaths:

Judging from the trailer, Seven Psychopaths is writer/director Martin McDonagh's attempt to make a fast-paced heist movie, along the lines of Snatch, but in English and with better dialogue.  McDonagh's first film (he is also a playwright) was the surprisingly enjoyable In Bruges; at first glance, it looks like he was trying to keep the humor, but up the pace with his follow-up.  And there is nothing wrong with that approach --- I bet McDonagh could make one hell of a great breakneck crime flick.  But that's not what he's going for with Seven Psychopaths, although it takes a little while for that to become clear to the audience.

Although there are hints that things will get weird

Marty (Colin Farrell) is a successful screenwriter suffering from writer's block.  The script he is working on is titled "Seven Psychopaths," but he's having trouble actually coming up with any characters.  That's where Billy (Sam Rockwell) comes in.  Billy is Marty's best friend, but he's not a particularly good influence.  Instead of working, Billy and Hans (Christopher Walken) kidnap dogs and then collect reward money when the owners post flyers around the neighborhood.  Billy is trying to help Marty finish his script, although nothing seems to be working.  That's why Billy puts an ad in the paper for psychopaths to contact Marty to tell him their stories.  

...which ultimately leads to Tom Waits carrying a bunny during a firefight

Meanwhile, it seems that Billy and Hans have made a mistake in their choice of dognappings.  Instead of a spoiled trophy wife's pet, they picked up a shih tzu belonging to a violent mob boss (Woody Harrelson).

That would be pretty bad, but they could theoretically give the dog back on the sly and hopefully avoid any violent repercussions.  Well, they could if Billy was a rational human being.  By holding on to the dog, the mob boss is able to identify the dognappers and send his underlings out to kill them.  Unless there happens to be some other psychopath on the loose, killing killers (and there is!).  So what do we wind up with?  A homicidal criminal out for revenge, a random killer on the loose, a confused and mostly drunk writer, an idiotic dognapper, and Christopher Walken.  And that is when the story takes an unusual turn, a metafictional turn that is better experienced than explained.

This is what you expect, but you get something slightly different

The acting in Seven Psychopaths is some of the better comedic work I have seen in a while.  As the mostly normal point-of-view character, Colin Farrell does a great job being surprised and helpless; he is mainly reacting to the other actors here, but he's refined the acting capabilities of his eyebrows as he's gotten older.  Sam Rockwell, as usual, was a bizarre delight.  Rockwell plays goofy exceedingly well, but he is exceptional when given a good script.  Christopher Walken was unmistakably Christopher Walken.  Some might argue that he's leaning into self-parody territory these days, but I love seeing him in good movies --- especially ones where his weirdness doesn't stand out more than anybody else's.

If I walked into my home and found Christopher Walken, I would expect him to look like this

Woody Harrelson clearly benefited from a script full of amusingly foul things to say.  Harrelson is a good actor, but he's at his best when playing up his comedy roots, and he does absurd comedy as well as anybody in mainstream Hollywood.

"Somebody cast me in a Coen Brothers movie!  A comedy, this time!"

The rest of the cast has what amounts to featured cameos.  Some of them, like Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Harry Dean Stanton, don't get to do much, although their parts move the plot forward.  Others, like Michael Pitt, Gabourey Sidibe and Kevin Corrigan, receive little screen time but compensate by having chunks of pretty great dialogue.  Even the actors playing straight roles, like Zeljko Ivanek, turn in quality character work.  Of all the supporting cast, Tom Waits has the meatiest and strangest role, although it is easily the least bizarre movie role I have seen of his.  It's always a pleasant surprise when you watch a movie and see only good acting in it, and it's a treat seeing an ensemble cast having this much fun.

More entertaining than it appears

Martin McDonagh clearly has a talent for getting the best from his actors, although the more readily apparent skill would be writing awesome dialogue.  Here's where McDonagh succeeds where Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarentino often fail: he actually develops his one-dimensional characters.  It would have been extremely easy to make Marty the soul of this movie --- he's the only remotely normal main character, after all --- but he went out of his way to show the pain of almost every goofy-ass character in this script. 

Exception noted, Mr. Harrelson

The technical side of the film was all done well enough (I liked the cinematography, although it was never too showy), but it is the writing that stands out the most. 

That is a good thing and a bad thing.  The good side I have already explained --- funny script, unexpected depth, etc. --- but the bad side comes into play about halfway through the film.  It gets meta.  I'm not a huge fan of metafiction, but I can appreciate when it is done well.  Thankfully, Seven Psychopaths doesn't screw it up or get too pretentious.  This is probably my favorite metafictional movie since Adaptation.  It's not that the movie has a metafictional aspect to it that bothers me --- it's that that aspect doesn't really come into play until the film is half over.  It felt like the script suddenly sobered up at the 45-minute mark and decided to put off the predictably silly and violent ending that it was so clearly heading toward in the first half of the film.  Had the meta been more prevalent earlier in the movie (or less prevalent later), this would have been far more effective.  Still, Seven Psychopaths is a blast to watch.

London Boulevard

Let's see what we have here.  London Boulevard is the directorial debut of William Monahan, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of The Departed.  That sounds good.  Of course, he also wrote Edge of Darkness, which included radioactive children, which is less good.  On the other hand, Colin Farrell is in it, and I've really enjoyed him in the last few things I've seen him in (Fright Night and In Bruges), which almost completely makes up for how awful he was at the beginning of his career.  The supporting cast includes the always reliable Ray Winstone, the considerably less consistent David Thewlis, and the adorable Anna Friel.  Keira Knightley plays Farrell's romantic interest, too; while I'm not a big fan, Knightley isn't a bad actress --- she just seems to act in movies I don't want to watch.  When you add all that up, London Boulevard sounds like a pretty solid movie, if not a good one.  And yet, it took a year after its European release for the film to have a limited theatrical run in America.  Is this a misunderstood diamond in the rough, or is this (in the parlance of the UK) just some shite that should have gone direct to DVD? 

After being released from prison, Mitchell (Colin Farrell) is immediately picked up and reintroduced to the shady criminals that got him in trouble in the first place.  Mitchell didn't rat anybody out --- in fact, he's a bit of a legend for being a bad-ass --- so he's not going to get snuffed, but he's tired of that life and wants to move on.  Somehow, Mitchell manages to get a job as a bodyguard for reclusive actress/British tabloid fodder, Charlotte (Keira Knightley).  Charlotte has developed a bit of an anxiety disorder thanks to the constant badgering she has received from the paparazzi; I would say she is paranoid, but they really are out to get her, since the worse she gets, the better their headlines.

She doesn't seem overexposed at all

Taking care of Charlotte is surprisingly rewarding for Mitchell.  Aside from developing friendships that don't revolve around secrecy and being paid --- hold on...okay, his new gig isn't that different from his days as a thug.  Whatever.  Mitchell and Charlotte fall in love, the end.  Or not.  You see, ever since Mitchell got spung from the pokey, local crime boss Rob Gant (Ray Winstone) has been pestering Mitchell to flex some of that infamous bad-assery on his behalf.  Mitchell has refused politely and less politely, but Gant isn't the sort who takes "no" for an answer.  So who will come out on top in the end, gangster Mitchell or reformed Mitchell?

None of the acting in London Boulevard was too bad, but the leads weren't especially impressive.  Colin Farrell did about as much with the role as the script would allow, but the story relies heavily on him being totally bad-ass, and we don't see a whole lot of that.  Keira Knightley was fine as the strung-out celebrity, but her role was surprisingly small, given the initial movie trailer.

Rumor is Keira gained 1.5 lbs to play this role; that rumor may be exaggerated

While I didn't care for the individual performances by Farrell or Knightley, they did show some chemistry together, mostly due to Farrell being understated.  Luckily, the lack of overwhelming charm and charisma from the two headlining stars is more than made up by two stellar supporting performances.  David Thewlis played a habitually stoned manager/hanger-on of Charlotte, and he was great.  What I liked about him was how well he played up the nonchalance of a habitual drug user, without being over-the-top at all. 

This is easily the best work I've seen from Thewlis, although considering his non-Harry Potter career, that's not saying much.  Ray Winstone is great at playing tough guys, and this role was right in his wheelhouse (sorry, I've been playing a lot of MLB12: The Show).  Loud, violent, and scary: that's all you need to know about his performance here.  There are a lot of recognizable faces in the rest of the cast, but the only one who stood out was Ben Chaplin as a sniveling and stupid crook; it wasn't a great part, but Chaplin was suitably unsympathetic.  Stephen Graham and Eddie Marsan were both underutilized in small parts.  Anna Friel was almost completely unnecessary in what could have been a fun bit part, but just felt out of place in London Boulevard.

As William Monahan's first directorial feature, London Boulevard does a decent amount of things right.  The best scenes in the movie --- basically any time Farrell shares the screen with Thewlis or Winstone --- are snappy, well-edited and pretty awesome.  The violence is also fairly raw and abrasive (in a good way).

"I'm an artist at my chosen craft"

And yet, London Boulevard is a huge mess.  The first thing you'll notice is the variety and thickness of the British accents in the film; I enjoy the Brits, but even I had a hard time figuring out what was being said at times.  Worse, Monahan's adapted screenplay is all over the place.  The trailer makes this movie look pretty promising.  A tough guy trying to get out of the criminal life and protect his new life with the woman he loves.  Nothing wrong with that, at the very least, and it has the potential for greatness.  But here's the thing: this movie really isn't about that.  It's more of an odyssey for Mitchell as he adjusts to non-criminal life.  The subplot featuring his sister was absolutely useless.  The extended subplot featuring Mitchell's homeless buddy would have been useless, if not for the cheap shot it provides at the end of the film.  But what is worse, a useless subplot, or a seemingly unimportant part of the movie coming back at the very, very end and suddenly being improbably important?  And then there is the bit about the crooked parole officer, and the technical owner of a certain house...there's just a lot going on, but not in a fast-paced crime caper kind of way.  Chunks of this movie work, but they don't actually connect to each other in a narrative or thematic fashion.

That disconnect is really at the core of what keeps London Boulevard from working.  There are some good bits (the familiar overarching plot, the snappy banter in key scenes), but the pacing of the film as a whole is awful.  The story gets sidetracked by subplots with little to no payoff, Mitchell is attached to certain characters for reasons the viewer never really understands, and the core of the story --- Mitchell and Charlotte falling in love --- is rushed and left mostly unexplored and unexplained.

That's enough of that!

How do you screw up a British gangster movie with so much talent in the film?  By not focusing on the "gangster" part and not letting the talent interact with each other, I suppose.  I was already sorely disappointed in the film when it suddenly sealed the deal and earned my ire. 

I'd be pissed, too, if I starred in this

SPOILER ALERT: Mitch has just gone out of his way to keep himself and Charlotte safe, and he's leaving her house to get on a plane and meet up with her.  And then he gets the shit stabbed out of him.  Not by any of the famous actors in the cast, or even someone with a speaking part up to this point, but by a kid.  You see, Mitch gave his homeless buddy a knife to protect himself, the homeless guy gets beaten to death, and word on the street is that a kid did the deed; Mitch tracked the kid down and was seconds away from murdering him, but he stopped, presumably because he made a choice to change.  And then that stupid kid stabs him to death with his own knife, out of nowhere.  That...that is just awful.  It may not be the worst ending I've seen, but it is, at the very least, complete bullshit.  If the movie had been good up to that point, I would have been seriously upset, so at least London Boulevard made sure you had lost interest before doing something so stupid. 

For the record, that is one star each for David Thewlis and Ray Winstone.  The rest of this movie can curl up and die, for all I care.

Fright Night (2011)

The horror movie genre is probably the most popular type of film to remake or update.  Why is that?  Well, what looks cool and scary in 1982 doesn't usually hold up after a decade or two, and foreign horror movies oftentimes throw in bizarre supernatural stuff that doesn't make sense to American audiences (Japan, I'm looking at you).  Personally, I don't mind remakes; my favorite movie of all time, The Maltese Falcon, was the third adaptation of the story in a ten-year span.  The important thing is for the remakes to take what works from the original and improve the rest.  I haven't seen Fright Night (1985) in about fifteen years, and I think it was heavily edited with commercials on VH1 or something; I remember the basic plot, but my overwhelming memory is of a fairly cheesy vampire movie with the guy from Planet of the Apes.  If there is a moderately famous 80s horror movie that is ripe for a quality remake, this is it.

Fright Night (2011) tells the story of former high school nerd and current cool kid, Charley (Anton Yelchin).  You can tell that he's a cool kid, because he has a hot girlfriend, Amy (Imogen Poots) and the guys he hangs out with are douchebags.  Charley wasn't always this cool, though; not even two years ago, he was making his own sci-fi/fantasy-inspired armor and goofing around with the school's biggest dork, Ed (the perpetually nerdy Christopher Mintz-Plasse).  When Ed comes to Charley with the news that a suspicious amount of their classmates have vanished, Charley blows him off.  After all, he's a cool kid.  When Ed elaborates, presenting an argument that the disappearances center around Charley's neighbor's house, Charley ignores him.  When Ed outright states that Charley's neighbor, Jerry (Colin Farrell), is a vampire, that's when things start to get interesting.  Because Jerry is a vampire, and he is responsible for all the disappearances.  What do you do when your next-door neighbor is a blood-sucking monster?

A sexy blood-sucking monster who...loves fruit?

Well, I suppose you would want to move out and maybe rent out your place to a stranger.  But what kind of a horror movie would that make?

Aside from the fact that the supposedly teenage actors are all in their twenties, I liked the cast.  Anton Yelchin is fine as the not-as-cool-as-he-pretends-to-be lead character; he's not amazing or anything, but his job is to stand in contrast to the bad guy, which he does pretty well.  It helps that Colin Farrell turned in a pretty awesome vampire performance.  I'm usually confused when vampires are portrayed as seductive and sexy --- and this is most vampire movies, not just the new wave of teen flicks --- but Farrell felt dangerous and sleazy every second he was on camera.  He's just that perfect blend of sex and violence; while not my favorite style of vampire (I prefer the monstrous Nosferatu-types), Farrell might be the best update to the classic Dracula vampire I have seen in a long while.

I love when evil personified just seems mildly annoyed

Imogen Poots was decent as Charley's girlfriend and it was nice to see her as more than just a damsel in distress, but some of her choices are a little odd.  I don't blame Poots' performance, it is just that her character didn't always make sense ("my boyfriend is acting bizarre...perhaps I should offer to take his virginity?").  On the plus side, I have been amusing myself by saying her last name out loud.

Whisper softly in his ear: "Poooooots"

Christopher Mintz-Plasse is as dorky as ever, so don't expect much new from him.  He's a fine nerd, and was a good casting choice, but you basically know what you're getting when he pops up in a movie.  Toni Collette was third-billed in the film and played Charley's mother, but she was a surprising non-entity in the story.  She was only okay (I guess) for the few scenes she had early in the movie, and then her character all but vanishes.  I did like David Tennant as the Criss Angel-ish vampire expert.  He wasn't a bad-ass or anything, but this is a story that is better with incompetent experts.  Oh, and you might recognize the eyebrows of one of the popular kids at school --- that's Dave Franco, little brother to James.  And, not surprisingly, Chris Sarandon makes a cameo as a nod to the original film.  Of course he does; what else is he busy doing now?

Is that the werewolf from Underworld?

I think what I liked best about Fright Night was the fact that it didn't waste my time.  A kid thinks his neighbor is a vampire, the audience realizes he's right, and there is no time wasted on him trying to convince his mother, girlfriend or the police. That is brilliant!  Instead of pussyfooting around for a half-hour, asking "Why won't anyone believe my insane theory?", we are instead treated to Jerry the Vampire immediately opting to attack Charley and his family.  No muss, no fuss.  And I loved the general attitude Jerry has; he doesn't care about having his secret revealed, he's a killing machine that solves his problems with murder.

...and he gets turned on by death.  Makes sense.

That means that this movie has a lot of action, something very few vampire movies can boast.  While I know that a lot of what I like came from the screenplay, I really liked the general attitude of the movie, and for that I credit director Craig Gillespie.  There is some pretty great atmosphere in Fright Night, and he balances it well with humor.  It never gets campy or stupid, even when some bits lean a little too much toward ridiculousness.  This isn't the work of an auteur, but it's competent and pretty smart.

There is one glaring flaw in Fright Night, though: the vampires.  While Colin Farrell is pretty great, the CGI used to make him and his vampire minions vamp out was awful.  The filmmakers toy with the notion of the vamps being literal monsters --- as in, only vaguely humanoid --- but they don't commit to it, and it is never important in the story.  Instead, we are given scenes with Colin Farrell's head bulging and cracking as he develops a Predator-style food hole for reasons I can't fathom.  The vampires are at their best when they are being seductive or surprisingly scary, not when they are doing a bad impression of Resident Evil creatures.  Oh, and the twist with David Tennant's character was pretty lame.  I would have preferred it if the world wasn't that small, after all.

Guns don't kill people.  Vampires do.  And guns...kill vampires...?

The lack of cool special effects, coupled with the presence of awful special effects, prevents Fright Night from being a modern classic, but it is still very entertaining.  If you are tired of romantic vampires or if you want to see how to successfully take the camp out of a story, this is a good place to start.  This is also a good place to get your "cool vampire" fix for the next few months.  Good vampire movies are rare, and even rarer when they include this much action.