Source Code

It took me a while to get around to it, but I finally sat down to watch Duncan Jones' follow-up to Moon, Source Code, this week.  If I had put a little more thought into my timing, I could have watched it on Groundhog Day and had myself a very poignant moment.  Hindsight, people, hindsight...

Source Code opens with a very disoriented Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up on a commuter train, heading for Chicago.  The woman sitting across from him, Christina (Michelle Monaghan) is talking to him and calling him "Sean."  The last thing he remembers is piloting a helicopter in Afghanistan, so Colter is just as mystified as the audience is.  Things get weirder when he runs to the bathroom and sees an unfamiliar face in the mirror.  What the hell is happening here?  And then the train explodes, killing everyone on board.

The end.

Colter wakes up in a military facility, in some sort of testing chamber or something.  There, he gets a little background on his situation (via a monitor) from Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga).  A terrorist has bombed the Chicago Metra Commuter Rail and contacted the authorities; this is just as an opening act for his next attack, which will be the detonation of a nuclear device somewhere in Chicago.  That's awfully sporting of the terrorist, to give authorities a heads-up.  That's not completely idiotic in the least.  Thanks to a highly experimental program run by Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), the authorities may be able to stop the next bombing, but the clock is ticking.  Rutledge's program allows Colter's consciousness to hop into the mind of Sean, one of the victims of the bombing, and relive the eight minutes prior to the explosion.  Colter isn't bound by Sean's actions, though; Colter can make different choices and do different things in those eight minutes.  Basically, Colter is being sent into a close-looped alternate reality, where the same people will do the same things, unless Colter influences them differently; after the eight minutes, Colter awakes in his metal pod thing, reports, and is sent back over and over, until he catches the bomber.  But what about Colter?  What makes him the one person who can stop the bomber?  And what about the people on the train?  If Colter is creating an alternate reality, couldn't he affect the future outside of those eight minutes?  Couldn't he save everyone?

I ask the tough questions, Jake

That may sound a lot like a plot-heavy science fiction story, but director Duncan Jones manages to make this into a fairly taut thriller.  There is a sense of urgency here that the whole "reliving the same moments over and over again" concept should probably negate, but strangely does not.  Kudos to Jones for that.  I thought the movie looked and felt fine, with solid performances from the cast and some clever choices (like not having the science in this fiction explained) that made this cerebral concept into a bit of an action movie.  And I mean that in an unexpectedly good way.

Jake Gyllenhaal heads up the cast of Source Code, and I liked him just fine.  I'm not a big Jake supporter, and this isn't his best work, but he handled an interesting character with unconventional stresses well enough.  I thought Michelle Monaghan was charming as the secondary character; she was stuck repeating a lot of the same things, but her character grew on me as the film progressed.  The same cannot be said about Jeffrey Wright's character, who is comically shallow and abrasive.

Funniest moment is when Wright fastidiously parts his bald spot

I like Wright, but his character would have been 200% better if he acted sympathetic or vaguely human; his choices would have had dramatic impact then, instead of simply being the inevitable move of a villain.  Vera Farmiga is okay in a fairly limited role, if only because she shows evidence of an inner conflict.  The rest of the cast was largely inconsequential, but I did recognize Michael Arden and Russell Peters in shallow roles.

On the one hand, I really want to like Source Code.  It manages to pull off a cool science fiction concept without a huge budget, and its charm comes primarily from the characters and not the plot.  I wasn't bothered by the science in this movie, either.  Sometimes movies try to explain their ridiculous concepts too much, and sometimes they opt to keep the audience completely in the dark, but I thought Source Code did a good job of straddling the line between those two, and I think the story was better for it.

Wait...why is it cold...wherever he is?  Um...science?

I did have some major issues with this movie, though.  First and foremost, I found myself irritated by the repetitious nature of the story (in the first half, anyway).  Jake Gyllenhaal is no Bill Murray, and Source Code is definitely not Groundhog Day, so this movie needed something to keep the viewer interested in the rehashed scenes.  The intention is clearly for the mystery of the bomber to keep your attention, but it's pretty obvious from the start who the bomber is.  SPOILER-ish ALERT: I mean, we know that the bomber has plans that don't involve the train, so we're dealing with either a suicidal terrorist with excellent planning skills that dies on the train, or someone who leaves the train to better bomb Chicago.  If it was me, I would investigate the people leaving the train first.  But that's just me.  Since I solved the mystery on my own with about two seconds of thought, I was less than enthralled by the scene reduxes. 

Attempt 137: testing the effectiveness of rap battles in drawing out the terrorist

The second half of the film is much better, but there are some disturbing (and probably unintentional) repercussions that are left unaddressed.  DEFINITE SPOILER ALERT: So Colter is able to replace the consciousness of Sean with his own, right?  That only works because both men are, essentially dead.  But what happens when Colton changes reality?  Sean is now alive, but his consciousness appears to be gone.  Did Colton just steal the life of a totally nice guy?  Worse, did he do it with a smile?  What a dick!  And now, he will have to fake being Sean for the next fifty years, feigning recognition of friends and family and having to figure out how he's going to bluff his way through being a history teacher.  Seriously, what kind of a happy ending is that?  He even refers to it as "fate."  Jerk.  And then there are the paradoxes.  Is this an all-new "prime" reality, or is it an alternate one?  I would have really appreciated a little speculation on this subject in the script.  According to the the story's logic, Colton rewrote history in the prime timeline, but how can Colton's consciousness be invading Sean's noggin when it is also in his useless body at the Army base?  That seems problematic to me.  And then there is the logic of the terrorist.  I am willing to buy into a villain being dumb enough to explain his evil plan to the good guys before he has enacted said plan.  It happens all the time in comic books and movies.  I would have preferred for this villain to not be that dumb, but I understand the plot's need for that moronic behavior.  What I don't get is his cover plan.  He's planning to explode multiple trains in a jumble of fire and twisted metal, so his alibi is to SPOILER ALERT: leave his wallet on the train?  Really?!?  What are the chances of that being found?  And why does he care?  If he's writing manifestos, this is a person who wants a soap box opportunity, not somebody who will fade into the night.  It's not even like that is a rock-solid alibi, either.  If the police find it --- and that's a huge "if" --- it's not like he's off the hook for the bombings.  At best, he confuses the police for a little while...months and months later, as people poke through the rubble of a post-nuclear Chicago. 

Here's the funny thing, though: I would have been really impressed with Source Code if it had made just one or two small changes.  I wish Colter had to fight off Sean's personality from time to time; it would have added an extra layer to the story (perhaps the eight minute window is because that's how long Colter can stay in control?) and it would have given Colter a moral choice to make in the final act of the film.  Or, of course, the writer could have found a way around having the terrorist be pudding-up-the-nose stupid.  Either one would have gone a long way.  Still, this was a pretty cool science fiction idea that was executed well.  It was unfortunately written by the guy whose highest profile writing gigs before this were the third and fourth entries in the Species series.  Good direction and solid acting wasn't enough to make Source Code awesome, but even crappy writing doesn't make it bad.

Brothers

Beware movies that take their inspiration from classic literature or foreign films.  In this case, Brothers is a remake of the Danish film, Brodre, and both are inspired by the epic poem The Odyssey.  If you aren't familiar with Danish cinema, rent some Nicolas Winding Refn movies and you've pretty much caught yourself up on their last 20 years of international impact.  Ooh...are you just going to take that sick burn, Denmark?  Probably.  Anyway, when movies cite The Odyssey as an influence, it usually just means that a husband has been away and returns to a wife that may or may not have moved on without him.  To give you an idea of how different Odyssey-based films can be, O Brother Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain both claim it as a source of inspiration.  So how will Brothers handle this age-old plot structure?

Shortly after his nogoodnick brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), is released from prison, US Marine captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is set to leave for yet another tour of duty in Afghanistan.  Sam is a loving husband to Grace (Natalie Portman) and father to his two daughters, Isabelle (Bailee Madison) and Maggie (Taylor Geare).  Tommy is having trouble adjusting to life outside of prison, spending his time drinking and arguing with his father (Sam Shepard).  Shortly after being deployed, Sam's helicopter is shot down, leaving only him and one other solider (Patrick Fleuger) alive; they are "lucky" enough to be taken prisoner in a remote Afghan village.  After weeks and even months of being starved and tortured, Sam is rescued by incoming US soldiers; his helicopter-mate did not survive.

Meanwhile, Tommy had finally decided to stop being a bum and remodeled Sam and Grace's kitchen and had become a constant help with Isabelle and Maggie.  When Sam's "death" was announced, Tommy and Grace bonded over their mutual mourning over Sam.  Their friendship deepens over the ensuing months, and Tommy takes on more of a fatherly role with the girls.  When Sam returns home, everyone is ecstatic --- except Sam.  He's still on edge after his months of trauma.  He alienates his daughters (who don't understand his problems) and tries to get Grace and/or Tommy to confess to an affair.  Well...he uses language a little coarser than that, but you get the picture.  Time passes, but Sam isn't getting better; he's just one careless remark away from snapping.  What kind of remark?  How about Isabelle getting angry at the dinner table and shouting that Mommy and Uncle Tommy have sex all the time?  Congratulations, kid, you're grounded for instigating homicide.

Before I go on about the acting in this film, let me state how nice it is to see Tobey Maguire in a drama again.  I know, he made two in between Spider-Man movies, but Spidey 3 was so bad that I almost forgot why I liked him in the first place.  He's really, really good in dramatic roles.  And he handled not only a high-strung and dangerous character here, but an impressive physical transformation into an emaciated wreck.  It would have been even better if Sam actually had a personality before he left for his tour of duty, but this was some impressive acting anyway.  Jake Gyllenhaal was also good, but he definitely had the easier role; all he has to do is act reasonable, and he's doing his job.  Similarly, Natalie Portman did what was asked of her, but her character didn't have a whole lot of depth; Portman did a great job handling the variety of emotions that her part demanded, but you don't really learn much about any of these characters enough to truly like or feel sorry for them.  The supporting cast is solid, but they don't offer a whole lot that is interesting.  The kids were pretty good (for child actors), Sam Shepard can still play a hard-ass, and Ethan Suplee is still a bumbling but lovable friend character.

Jim Sheridan's direction is pretty okay.  I thought there was a pacing issue in the film, but more on that later.  I thought all the actors were handled well, and Sheridan captured a lot of small moments effectively.  This movie is definitely carried by the performances of its stars, but I honestly felt that --- good as they were --- Gyllenhaal and Portman could have been better.  That's kind of an elitist gripe, I realize, but they've both played more well-rounded characters with more depth before, and this was a stellar opportunity for the director to get a smorgasbord of great acting.  It was an opportunity that was considered, but ultimately not seized.

At its core, Brothers is little more than a Lifetime movie of the week with some superior acting.  It's a pretty melodramatic story and the plot hits all the typical beats.  The problem with this movie is, unfortunately, the story itself.  The camera shows all the important things that happen during Sam's "death."  What messed Sam up in the head so much?  Did Tommy and Grace sleep together?  We already know, because we saw it happen (or not happen).  Where's the drama?  Where's the suspense?  In the end, when Sam finally tells someone else what scarred him so badly in Afghanistan, I was left indifferent because it wasn't a bombshell for me any more.  It would have been nice to see things through Sam's eyes when he got home, or at least shown his suspicions of Grace and Tommy growing over time.  Instead, whenever he got one of them alone, he started grilling them.  That made the post-Afghanistan part of the film feel very condensed, which in turn made the pacing of the whole film a little lopsided.

Here's what I would have done to make this film better.  I would have shown everything up until Sam being declared dead and then skipped forward however many weeks or months.  I would have shown Sam's Afghanistan experience mostly in flashback and the same for Tommy and Grace's relationship, leaving the ultimate answers to the film for the very end.  As it is, not edited by me, the movie struggles to rise above mediocrity despite some good acting.

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