Warrior

Before I begin my review of Warrior, I would like to address the elephant in the room.  No, this is not the prequel to The Warriors.  Sorry to crush your hopes and dreams.

Warrior is the tale of two brothers, Brendan Conlan (Joel Edgerton) and Tommy Riordan (Tom Hardy).  The film begins with an angry and drunken Tommy showing up at his childhood home and confronting Paddy (Nick Nolte), his recovering alcoholic father.  It has been years since the two have spoken, and all we learn is that Tommy left with his mother, she died and he joined the Marines.  Unwilling to talk about his past, Tommy spends his time working out and manages to humiliate a top-ranking MMA fighter in a sparring match.  This gets him attention from the right promoters, and pretty soon Tommy is entered into an elite 16-man MMA tournament, Sparta, with a five million dollar purse on the line.

It's humiliating when the ref starts spanking you in the ring

Meanwhile, Brendan is in serious trouble with his home mortgage; his family will lose their home in three months.  Brendan is a high school teacher and his wife (Jennifer Morrison) apparently works in the short skirt industry, and Brendan even occasionally moonlights as an amateur MMA fighter for a couple hundred bucks a pop.  There's really no way for them to make much more money than they already are.  When Brendan shows up for school with visible bruises on his face, he is suspended from work without pay.  With no other real options, he starts to train full-time and winds up being a last-minute replacement for an injured fighter in the Sparta tournament.

Don't fighters usually show off their chests and abs?

You can figure out where the basic plot goes from there.  Yes, both men are unknown underdogs.  Yes, family is of utmost importance to both brothers.  Yes, they have the good luck of being in opposite sides of the tournament bracket, which will allow the climax of the film to have brother fighting brother to win the tournament.  What will win the day: Tommy's fury, or Brendan's desperation?

Despite the familiar and predictable plot, Warrior stands out with some excellent performances.  Joel Edgerton was quite good as the workhorse for the film; his was the character with the most relatable and understandable emotions, and he conveyed these emotions well.  Edgerton also gave an impressive physical performance; his character's style --- wear 'em down and make them submit --- matches his age and body type.  He was very convincing as an underdog that could, in the right circumstances, win.

Like Rocky, he blocks their punches with his face until they get tired

Tom Hardy's performance was much more visceral.  Thanks to the bulk he put on for the role and the crazy eyes he showed during the fight scenes, Hardy looked and acted like an angry violent man.  His non-fighting scenes were fine --- he certainly had more of a Philadelphia accent than Edgerton --- but it was how fully he threw himself into the furious physicality of his role that impressed me.

Where'd his neck go?

The rest of the cast was decent.  Nick Nolte had a fairly complex role and he showed off a bit; Nolte's the sort of actor that seems to meet the difficulty level of his role, so it was nice to see him playing a part that relied on hints and subtleties in the script.  Jennifer Morrison was fine, but her character's logic bothered me; she bounced too easily from being protective to supportive for my liking, and she switched over at the worst possible time.  Kurt Angle was cast to basically serve as the Russian MMA bogeyman, and he certainly looked fierce, although I don't think that required much acting.  Noah Emmerich made a brief appearance as a somewhat mean bank officer, which is not surprising, since he always seems to play heels.  Kevin Dunn was inconsequential as the principal at Brendan's school.  Rounding out the notable cast, Frank Grillo looked the part of a physical trainer, complete with stupid haircut, but I found him considerably less annoying than his character might have been.


Gavin O'Connor directed Warrior, and I thought he did a pretty good job.  At its core, Warrior is an extremely predictable film.  O'Connor makes sure to do it very well, though.  Better than simply telling the story competently, though, is the fact that O'Connor invests a lot of effort in the dramatic scenes.  The acting is very well done --- I would argue that it is far better than the script deserved --- and those scenes are powerful enough to make you forget that you know in your heart exactly how the film will end.  You will probably have at least a moment where you don't know which brother you want to win the championship, and that is a huge accomplishment for O'Connor's direction.  I also liked how he handled certain obligatory scenes.  Yes, there is a training montage, but it goes by faster because O'Connor splits up the screen to show both brothers training at the same time.  I thought the fight scenes were shot very well; my wife and I agreed that if real UFC fights were as exciting as these scenes, we might actually give a crap about MMA.  Honestly, I was not excited about this movie because I don't care about mixed martial arts.  I was pleasantly surprised to not only care about the characters in Warrior, but I genuinely enjoyed the fight scenes, too.

"Are you sure you want to fight this guy?"

Warrior certainly has its flaws, though.  The familiar story is the most obvious example, but the script isn't very good, either.  Even if you ignore some of the boring dialogue, the script is plagued with shallow characters with poorly explained motives (although the cast does a fantastic job of disguising that) and a climax that is missing falling action and explicit conflict resolution.  And it is pretty ridiculous to believe that two unknown fighters --- one considered too old to compete and the other apparently without a valid US ID --- would be able to enter a highly competitive 16-man tournament for a large prize.  Even if that was believable, none of the fighters are described as UFC fighters; I understand why Anderson Silva wouldn't want to play a loser, but the script references the UFC, and yet none of the fighters are supposed to be current UFC champions or contenders.  Really?  Not even for $5 million?  That makes no sense to me.

Despite some logical gaps, the emotional performances were enough to keep me engaged with Warrior.  Whenever I felt a knowing eye-roll coming on, the acting of Hardy and Edgerton drew me back into the story.  Knowing (or guessing) the ending doesn't hurt this movie --- it's all about caring for the characters, instead.

Super 8

Do you remember the original television advertisements for The Matrix?

Now, if you've seen the movie, that trailer more or less makes sense.  In 1999, though, that was just a string of random images and a sorry-ass excuse for not telling anyone what the story for the damn movie was.  I ended up seeing The Matrix on its first night in theaters, but only because my friend and I couldn't think of anything else to do with our time; I recall arguing that we had to have something better to do, when watching movies is all we did.  That's right, I argued against watching a movie to a friend who loves movies more than I do.  That's how much the trailer pissed me off.  Of course, the first Matrix was all kinds of awesome, so the story had a happy ending and I felt dumb for objecting, but I find myself reacting similarly when movie trailers purposefully frustrate potential viewers.


...and this was my first glimpse at what would become Super 8, the latest film from the producer of The Blair Witch Monster Cloverfield.  I was predictably unimpressed.  In the intervening year or so between seeing that trailer and watching the film, the only additional knowledge I had was that the movie featured child actors.  Awesome; kids and a trainsplosion.  But summer is upon us, and my lovely wife loves her summer blockbusters (and J.J. Abrams), so I ended up watching this movie, too, on its opening weekend.  I'm so weak.

Here's the good news: the story requires a certain amount of suspense, so I won't be giving away too much of the plot.  Well, it's good news for me, because it involves less typing.  Super 8 begins by focusing on Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a middle school-aged kid whose mother tragically died recently, and whose father, Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler), buried himself in his deputy sheriff work instead of consoling his only child.  Like most kids, Joe is surprisingly resilient and he intends to spend his summer vacation helping his loud-mouthed best friend, Charles (Riley Griffiths), film a short movie to be entered into a statewide competition for teenage filmmakers.  Charles is the director, Joe handles the makeup, Cary (Ryan Lee) is every single zombie in their movie (as well as their expert in firecrackers), and the other two friends are there to round out the cast.  After reading up on screenwriting, Charles decides that he needs a romantic interest in his zombie film, so he somehow convinces the very pretty Alice (Elle Fanning) to join the team.  The other thing that Charles realized was important to filmmaking was production value, so he decided to fake his; to get realistic background action, he gets the whole crew to sneak out at night and act at the local train station, so they can capture the train passing by in their shots.

Great idea, fatty.

As the trailer suggests, though, their evening at the train station was fairly eventful.  While the kids did their best to not die in train wreckage, their super 8 camera keeps filming, capturing something on film that they were never meant to see.

Super man, girl, monkey, dog, cat, horse, and that looks like mom and dad on the right: Super Eight.

That's all I care to say about the story of Super 8, but I would like to point out how silly the title is.  Yes, I understand that the kids were making a crappy short film on super 8 film, but does anyone really think that film is the focus of this story?  Of course not.  It's kind of like when a band writes a song with an obviously memorable chorus, like "I bathe in vanilla pudding," and end up naming the song something pretentious or obtuse, like "Onyx."  This is, in many ways, a monster movie.  It's deeper than that, I'll admit, but this title sucks.  Thank goodness producer Steven Spielberg didn't follow this model when naming his movies; I don't know how excited I would have been to see Raiders of the Lost Ark if it was called "Whip."

Whatever the title, I was pleasantly surprised with the acting in this movie.  Having child actors as the primary characters is always a risky choice, but these kids were pretty good.  Joel Courtney was very appealing in the lead role, projecting a natural awkward charisma that reminded me of Patrick Fugit.  Elle Fanning was flat-out awesome as his leading lady; I usually will give a grudging acknowledgement of good performances from child actors --- let's be honest, most of the time they get attention for just acting a little older than they are --- but she was very impressive.  This wasn't a powerhouse performance, but she showed a lot of natural talent and good instincts in the dramatic moments.  Keep in mind that this is basically a creature feature, so the fact that any actor had effective dramatic moments at all is impressive, much less one young actress having several.  And she's only thirteen!

The other kids were okay, but those two clearly carried the film.  Riley Griffiths was pretty good as the kind of obnoxious friend and Ryan Lee was occasionally funny as the group's resident pyromaniac, but that's about it.  Kyle Chandler was pretty decent as Joe's father, but I found his more heroic moments a little far-fetched.  Ron Eldard played Alice's drunken father and was serviceable, I guess.  Noah Emmerich was similarly okay, once again playing an untrustworthy character; maybe it's the pock marks, but I can never trust that guy to not be evil in movies.  Or in real life, probably.  Former 7th Heaven kid David Gallagher had a bit part as a creepy stoner, and that was good for a few chuckles.  Another child star, AJ of the jail-bait pop group Aly & AJ, played the fat kid's sexy sister.  Aside from the two child leading roles, the acting was fine, but not spectacular.

J.J. Abrams is better known as a producer and creative force than he actually is as a director.  Despite having twenty years of producer credits, this is only his third feature film directorial effort, after Mission: Impossible III and the Star Trek reboot.  Personally, I don't usually have strong feelings about Abrams as a director, but I thought he did a pretty good job with Super 8.  Working with kids is always difficult, but he got some very solid performances out of this group and he balanced drama, humor, and the occasional fright pretty well.  I'm sure more than a few people will notice a clear stylistic homage to co-producer Steven Spielberg in the way the film is shot and how the mysterious creature is revealed; it is quite possible that you might have flashbacks to E.T. or Close Encounters while watching this movie.  That's an okay choice, I suppose --- if you're going to make a movie that relies on the wonder of children, borrow from the best --- but I wish Abrams had put more of his own spin on things.  Instead, he did a very good job as a Spielbergian imitator.  Abrams' inexperience as a director shows up from time to time, as many of his dramatic shots are nearly identical.

I hope you like people looking anxiously at something off-camera, because it happens a lot.

No, seriously, a lot.  As in over...

...and over...

...and over...

...and over again.  Will this bother most people?  Probably not, at least in their initial viewing.  Besides, that's more of a stylistic shortcoming than an inability to direct.

I don't want to give the impression that I did not enjoy Super 8.  I did.  It was the most adorable alien/creature/monster movie I have ever seen.  It has been a long time since anyone made a movie in the vein of The Goonies --- an occasionally scary adventure for kids that adults can enjoy --- so it was nice to see that style revisited.  The action was well-directed, the special effects looked good, none of the child actors were terrible and most were actually effective, and the pace was reasonable.  The film's greatest asset is in how well the attitude and wonder of teenagers was captured.  It's hard to accurately depict teenagers in a positive light --- they are, after all, inhuman trolls, one and all --- but Abrams was able to make these kids likeable and believable.  As far as PG-13 movies aimed at kids go, this one was a lot of fun.

Aww...the one with the hat thinks he's a person!

My biggest gripe with Super 8 is with the writing.  It's not bad, but I wish it was a little less simple.  The bad guys are really obviously bad.  The good guys pull off some truly unlikely heroics.  And that whole trainsplosion...?  Really?  There has to be a better way to stop a train.  None of that makes a huge impact on the story at large, but for a movie that tries so hard to be rooted in the reality of 1979, moments like that (and the Walkman joke) receive a raised eyebrow from me.  I still like the movie, but I don't know if the writing will keep it from being the classic that it is obviously striving to be.

Another limitation of this movie is the setting.  For a movie presumably aimed at kids and filled with childlike wonder, it sure is pressing all the nostalgia buttons for people born in the seventies and early eighties.  Is a thirteen year-old in 2011 going to return to this movie, set almost twenty years before he/she was born, often enough to make this a classic?  I don't think so.  I think this film is a love letter to Spielberg in his prime, and that's okay.  It might not be as epic or as memorable as it wants to be, but Super 8 does a great job as an homage.

Windtalkers

Loud explosions, pyrotechnics, and bodies flying through the air come naturally to the modern war movie, even to the point that sheer devastation is no longer an effective selling point.  These movies need their own angle in order to avoid being seen as lame Saving Private Ryan copycats.  The hook for Windtalkers is the relatively unknown tale of the Navajo tribesmen that joined the army to act as code talkers in the Pacific side of World War II.  That actually sounds like an interesting premise; so many war movies go boom, while very few spend the time to think.  Sending and breaking codes sounds fairly cerebral, right?

Ooh...but John Woo directed this movie.  And he teamed up with Nicolas Cage as the lead actor and Christian Slater as an important supporting character.  So...the main character isn't Navajo, despite the hook for this movie being about the Navajo code talkers.  Great.  I will give credit where it's due; at least they didn't pull a Touch of Evil and give the lead actor an unconvincing ethnic makeover.  Well, if the story is not centering on a Navajo character, what is the story?

Joe Enders (Cage) begins the movie by holding his platoon's position on Guadalcanal at all costs, which means everyone died except him; he was injured, losing hearing in one ear, which also occasionally hurts his balance.  He recovers in a hospital, thanks in part to a nurse (Frances O'Connor) that is clearly attracted to him, despite the fact that he is played by Nic Cage in his "brooding" mode.  Enders gets a promotion and a new assignment as soon as he is well; his new assignment is to protect Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), one of the new Navajo code talkers.  Ox Anderson (Slater) receives a similar assignment, protecting Charlie Whitehorse.  The Navajo language is an unwritten one and is almost incomprehensible, even within its own language family, which makes it especially hard for enemies to translate; these code talkers were bilingual Navajo that transmitted important messages without the risk of being understood by the enemy.  If the Japanese managed to ever understand the Navajo language, though, the American forces would be in trouble.  Therefore, both Enders and Anderson are told that they must protect the code at all costs; their code talkers must die before being taken captive by the enemy.

That's pretty much the story basics, but there's plenty of stock subplots.  You've got the predictable awkward assimilation into the unit by the Navajo.  They are seen as savages at first, but their impossibly calm demeanor and passivity earn the respect of their squadmates and their practices become more acceptable over time.  Of course, there's one guy (Noah Emmerich) in the squad that is racist; of course, his life is eventually saved by a Navajo.  There's the nervous soldier (Mark Ruffalo) and the guy with the cool weapon (Brian Van Holt).  There's the commanding officer (Peter Stormare) that needs things done, no matter the cost.  There's the inevitable split between the two parallel plot lines; you know either Anderson or Enders will eventually have to kill a Navajo to protect the code.  Who will it be, the nice Anderson, or the bad-ass Enders?

This movie should have been so much better.  Obviously, the big problem is the story.  Why make a movie about the Navajo code talkers, if they are not the main characters?  I'm not crazy about Adam Beach as an actor, but using him as the POV character would have been much better.  Instead, we have a tortured white soldier to identify with.  Even better, it's Nicolas Cage in full-on inappropriate overacting mode.  Ignoring the poor choice of main character, this movie still has major problems.  Are you telling me that the Marines put two extremely valuable code talkers in the same squad, facing immediate danger?  There were only about two hundred of these guys in the war.  I'm pretty sure they would have been better suited for sending messages from wherever the local base was.  This movie barely even uses them for sending or receiving codes; they spend most of their time giving uncoded coordinates for air support.  That's really stupid.  What, are the Japanese (who are shown listening to the radio transmissions) going to hear their own coordinates and assume that whatever is coming their way is good?  Maybe the Americans are bringing them ice cream!  Stupid.  And how many Japanese die in this movie?  This is the Pacific war, where they were dug in and well-protected.  The Americans just run up the side of mountains, and yet I'd estimate that the dead Japanese outnumbered the dead American soldiers by a 4:1 ratio.  That is so far beyond stupid, it's insulting to stupid.

The acting is what you would expect from a John Woo movie.  It's barely there.  Nicolas Cage gets to make funny faces when he's in battle and sulk when he's not.  I'm sorry to say that he actually showed the most range in this movie.  Christian Slater, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, and Brian Van Holt were all one-dimensional caricatures of 1940s soldiers.  Noah Emmerich got to be the racist jerk that sees the error in his ways (well, he learns to accept one Navajo, anyway), but the character is so boring and predictable that you still don't care.  Adam Beach was a little better, but his character had no emotional arc, so there was nothing for him to do in this role.  Whose fault is all this?  Well, you can blame the writers, John Rice and Joe Batteer, because this story sucks, but I'm going to blame John Woo.  As the director and a producer on the film, he had ample opportunity to realize how crappy this script was and have it fixed.  He didn't, so the responsibility for this wreck belongs to him.

This movie doesn't even have the normal perks of a John Woo movie.  The action isn't good.  Woo is best known for his slow-motion, stylized action sequences, where impossible things happen and then explode.  Here, he tries to channel the destructive spirit of the Pacific war and fails.  The big battle scenes try to have a documentary feel to them (a la Saving Private Ryan), but the special effects in these scenes are far worse than any war movie released in 2002 should be.  Some of the smaller-scale battle sequences are fine, but it's not enough to make this movie watchable.

Let's see...bad story, bad acting, and bad action.  Yep.  This is a bad movie.