The Disappearance of Alice Creed

I know it's wrong, but I had Eve 6's "Inside Out" running through my head while watching this movie.  "Tie me to the bedpoooooooost...!"  So naughty, those boys.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed opens with little fanfare.  No opening credits, no dialogue.  Just two guys shopping for things and setting up a room.  As they're assembling the room, it becomes apparent that this is not a Bob Villa project; the bed is bolted to the floor, with soundproof padding stapled to the walls, and several locks on the bedroom and outside door.  Since you know the title, it's obvious that this room is meant to hold someone (Alice Creed, perhaps?), but the setup is smart and clearly thought out to the last detail.  The next thing you see is the two men, masked and wearing identical suits of clothing, snatching a woman.  Her screams are the first lines of dialogue in the film, and their incoherence makes the lack of dialogue all the more apparent.  She is brought into the room, handcuffed to the bed, feet tied to some knobs on the bed frame (bought at the hardware store and drilled into place) with a bag over her head.  Her clothes are cut off and a pictures are taken, one of her tear-stained face and the other is taken of the day's newspaper next to her tattoo.  She is then dressed in a jumper and left alone, more or less clueless, frightened, and with a bag over her head.  The men strip, bag their clothes and her old clothes, and prepare to burn the evidence.  It looks like the perfect crime, butwhat's the fun in watching that?

I would love to go into more detail on the plot, but this is one of those movies where the less you know, the better.  I have to say that this is one of the most realistic and plausible crime stories I have seen on film.  What is more impressive than that is the fact that it compares favorably to Reservoir Dogs in the "who do you trust" game.  I was definitely impressed with the film's opening ten or fifteen minutes, they were mean and lean, with lots of detail and a lot of things left unsaid, but enough nonverbal clues to understand them anyway.  I love when crime movies assume that the audience is smart.

This movie could have been a play.  About 85% of the film takes place in the kidnap-ready apartment, and there are only three characters in the film.  Obviously, Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton) is the kidnap victim, and this is far and away the best acting I have seen from Arterton.  Granted, she spends a good amount of the film with a ball gag in her mouth, but she looks suitably frightened and determined, as the script demands.  I was surprised at the amount of nudity in this film (mostly from her), but I think her acting helped separate this film from soft-core bondage flicks.  Well, since I'm not into that sort of thing, I guess I'm assuming that her horror-film quality fear secured this as "non-erotic."  Martin Compston played Danny, the obviously dumb kidnapper.  Even though his character isn't too bright, I thought the part was played well and, when the proper moment arrived, Compston delivered on giving his character layers.  By far, though, the standout performance here was that of Vic by Eddie Marsdan.  I have never been impressed with Marsdan's supporting roles, but he was excellent here.  He was tough, vulnerable, forgiving, vengeful...I actually think this was one of the best performances of the last year.  Will it get Oscar recognition?  Absolutely not, but Marsdan was fantastic.  This was the feature film debut for director J Blakeson, who also wrote the film.  I thought he did a great job.  The direction and cinematography were pretty good, although not necessarily artfully done, and the script put put together well.  Overall, a very nice first film.

Is this movie revolutionary?  Is it a game-changer?  Not really, but it is lean and mean, and each character has their opportunity to shine.  The claustrophobic setting works for and against this picture, making the threats seem more immediate, but also limiting the number of conflicts that can arise.  Thankfully, the plot doesn't get terribly convoluted, but the story (which would have still been good if Marsdan had done a mediocre job) doesn't spend enough time on Marsdan's stand-out character for my taste.

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

Clash of the Titans (2010)

Judging from the title, you might think that this would be a movie about the Greco-Roman gods battling their parents, the Titans.  You might think that this film would feature epic battles and deal with the Freudian ideas of how children must usurp their parents in order to come into their own.  You might be a big, stupid moron.

This film is a remake of the campy 1981 movie of the same name.  Sadly, the stop motion effects of the original are replaced with actual special effects this time around (although the robotic owl from the original makes a cameo).  So, if this movie isn't about battling the Titans of Greek mythology, then what is it about?  The king and queen of Argos decide to topple their ridiculously enormous statue of Zeus, claiming that they need not worship the gods because now is the time of man.  Why anyone would do this when gods are known to walk the earth and smite mortals is beyond me.  Not surprisingly, Zeus (played by Liam Neeson) sends his brother, Hades (Ralph Fiennes), to spread some Hellenic-style smiting across the isle of Argos.  Hades does his damage and threatens to have his pet monster, the kraken, wipe Argos off the map unless Argos' princess is sacrificed to the gods.  Who will save Argos?  That would be Perseus, played by Sam Worthington.  Perseus' family was killed in Hades' attack, but it's all good; Perseus learns that he is a demigod and that Zeus is his father.  Perseus and a band of Argos' best warriors then decide to find a way to kill the kraken.  To do this, the crew must visit some witches, who send them to the underworld to kill (Or is that re-kill?  She's in the underworld already, right?  No!  Must...stop...thinking...) Medusa.  The idea is to cut her head off because any mortal (even a monster) that looks in her eyes will turn to stone.  Along the way, the men team up with a djinn, a warlock-like thing whose skin appears to be made of a cross between granite and tree bark.  They fight several giant scorpions and end up riding the rest across a desert, like camels.  In the end, we get what is promised:

***SPOILER ALERT***

the kraken turns to stone when it sees Medusa's head.  Consider yourself spoiled.

Huh.  How about that?  Yep.  It's a bit of an anticlimax.  You've got to give credit where it's due, though; you learn that Medusa's head can kill the kraken early in the film and it sure does.  Mission accomplished.  Who needs drama, anyway?  The plot fails to follow through with a lot of decent ideas here.  The hero has to kill a huge monster?  Awesome.  Instead of killing the monster just by showing up with the right tool, I would have rather...I don't know...had the monster eat the hero and have the hero cut his way out of the monster's chest?  That would have been cooler.  I would have had the witches be more threatening; they were only a cool-looking nuisance.  The giant scorpions were okay, but I had trouble figuring out who was fighting what scorpion; these were the most confusingly edited action scenes since Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  I pay attention when I watch a movie, and if I can't tell how many giant monsters are in a scene, there's a problem.  The subplot with the sacrifice of Argos' princess could have been decent in a different movie, but it's just filler here.  Of course, I don't envy the writer who has to justify destroying a populated island over sacrificing one person, so I see why they left the subject mostly untouched.

The characters were equally frustrating.  Sam Worthington has yet to prove himself as an actor, despite leading roles in Avatar and Terminator: Salvation.  He plays the same basic character over and over again.  I know, he's not the only actor that does this, but I don't think Randy Quaid is a great example for young actors to strive toward.  Liam Neeson is okay, I guess, as Zeus; it's hard to judge Zeus as a character because the mythological god was all over the place, in terms of logic and attitude.  In this movie, he's alternately a doting father and an attention-starved god.  Ralph Fiennes really irritated me as Hades at first because he whispered all his lines; this served a plot-related purpose, so I'll let it slide this time.  His forehead dandruff was unnecessary, though.  The other gods barely got speaking parts, including Danny Huston as Poseidon.  This movie is all about throwing recognizable actors at you and not giving them time or space to act.  Jason Flemyng is a somewhat effective man-monster who spends most of his time running away from Perseus.  Nicholas Hoult (the weird kid from About a Boy) proves that ugly child actors can actually grow up to be reasonably handsome...and that's about all he does here.  Gemma Arterton pretty much reprises her role from Quantum of Solace as a pretty face with no character.  Mads Mikkelsen is the only standout here, and he just did a decent job as the resident military expert, but somebody had to look good against the cardboard cutouts this script provided. 


And yet...it's a special effects movie.  Do we really watch these with the same expectations as a Charlie Kaufman-scripted film?  The answer is that we should, but we don't.  Sometimes, effects are good and fun enough to let us turn our brains off and bathe in the screen's warm glow.  The effects in Clash of the Titans aren't good enough to make up for its many shortcomings, but they are pretty good.  The character designs on the kraken, the witches, the djinn, and Hades' flying bat creatures are all great.  I don't know how many of the locations were shot in front of a green screen (the movie was allegedly shot mostly in Whales), but the panoramic shots of Pereus and company descending into the underworld were awesome.  The strange thing about the effects is that they don't seem to be enhanced by 3D.  I realize that these 3D parts were thrown in at the last minute after seeing how well Avatar did in theaters, but I expected them to be...well, not crappy.  In fact, the 3D effects were the worst in the film; it seems like they were forced to go 3D, but didn't have the time or budget to do it right, so they just did it fast.

Overall, the plot wasn't great and the actors just showed up.  Neither was terrible, though.  The effects were good enough to make this film visually appealing, but the real star was the character design for the creatures.  Is that enough to recommend a movie?  Tough call.