The age-old suggestion never to let reality interfere with telling a good story is one of my favorites, especially when it comes to the movies. The cinema serves countless functions, but in its century-long lifespan, ultimately the most important one is still entertainment, and Green Zone certainly emphasizes the entertainment rather than reality. I should mention, however, that the story the movie tells, about what really happened behind the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction thing, isn’t exactly implausible. In fact, it seems perfectly possible, almost natural. But the movie as a whole has a liberal slant that would make Oliver Stone blush, which leads to it all feeling a little like wishful thinking on the part of the Bush-haters.

For my own part, I just think that all governments everywhere in the world should govern with the understanding that the whole truth, the absolute completeness of it all, will come out eventually, and Green Zone is sort of like an effort to put that truth out before all the facts are available, or even declassified. The entire movie is bookended on George W. Bush’s infamous speech, where he declared – years too early, as it turned out – a successful end to the Iraq war. In fact, the movie pauses and even allows us to see half of the cast watching, and then celebrating, Bush’s actual news broadcast.

“Major military operations in Iraq have ended.” Bush announces. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States, and our allies…have prevailed.”

Retrospectively, it’s a catastrophic miscalculation, but the movie doesn’t ridicule its inaccuracy so much as it utilizes the drastic error in order to drive the plot forward. Hey, I have no problem with that. This is an action movie, not a documentary, and I like to think that most of us will go into it with that understanding.

You already know what the movie is about, so here’s basically how it’s structured. Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a soldier  who notices major discrepancies between the intelligence reports handed down from above and the reality that he is seeing on the ground. When his concerns are thwarted by his superiors, he starts to believe he may have stumbled on a major conspiracy and ultimately goes rogue in his efforts to discover the truth behind it all.

And that’s about enough of the plot, I think. You get the idea. The important thing is that the movie so clearly sets itself up as a scathing criticism of the American intelligence infrastructure, but just when you think it’s turning into a piece of liberal propaganda it turns its attention away from major targets, even from Bush himself. I still remember the backlash from conservatives when Richard Clarke wrote his book “Against All Enemies,” which was severely critical of Bush (and other Presidents) about the handling of the war on terror, and the road leading up to it, but Green Zone doesn’t seem to have as specific of a political agenda as you might think.

It should be noted that it was directed by Paul Greengrass, a British filmmaker who is behind two of the three Bourne films, as well as United 93, the outstanding film about what may have happened aboard the hijacked United Airlines flight that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. You may remember that Greengrass went to great lengths to avoid overt political statements in that movie, and that Bush, a likely target, was studiously avoided. It was about American heroism, not governmental screwups, and I think Green Zone is the same. It’s not about what went wrong, it’s a hope that the truth will be revealed, or at least the correct lessons will be learned, by people on all sides.

I will say it gets a little too obviously critical when it presents the “green zone,” (the protected area in Iraq, away from all the fighting) almost like a Las Vegas casino. Saddam’s Presidential palace has been turned into beautiful resort, complete with a gorgeous swimming pool, women sunning in bikinis (who would they be, by the way?), even a Domino’s Pizza. I think we get that high ranking officials keep themselves pretty thoroughly insulated from the violence in Baghdad, I don’t think we need to be smacked over the head with it.

But of course, above all else, this is an action thriller. Detractors are complaining that Damon is just playing the same character that he played in the Bourne films, that the movie doesn’t tell us anything new, etc, but the reality is that, believe it or not, it never really pretends to be anything more than an action film. It has powerful political implications, of course, but I don’t think many people in the audience are going, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that’s what happened.” Anyone who’s paid attention to the newspapers since the war started back in 2003 will notice immediately that the pace of the movie doesn’t at all follow the painfully sluggish progress of the war so much as it follows the breakneck pace of a good episode of 24.

It’s a movie, that’s all I can say. It will make a lot of people angry, and most of those people will probably be on a certain side of the political spectrum, but I think it emphasizes the need for truth and for lessons learned much more than it points fingers, and it should definitely be commended for that. There is, after all, nothing in the movie that we haven’t heard dozens of times before, but you have to admit that it’s never been this entertaining!

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The newest Nicholas Sparks adaptation reminds me first and foremost about how bizarre my own taste in movies is. I love gritty action movies and tasteless horror movies and good psychological thrillers and crime dramas, but somewhere in there I also have a deep love of romantic dramas, although this particular interest generally doesn’t reveal itself until I find myself watching a good one. It would require, for example, a unique set of circumstances for me to buy a ticket to a movie like Dear John rather than something else that seems a little more up my alley – like The Crazies, Shutter Island, Alice in Wonderland, Brooklyn’s Finest, The Wolfman, or even Cop Out – but years ago I noticed an ability to tolerate even the sappiest romance movies.

Fair warning, though – if you don’t believe in love at first sight, you won’t like this movie. I’m just gonna put that out there.

Dear John is, first of all, entirely a romantic drama, so it wastes no time in getting to the point of the central romance.  Channing Tatum plays John Tyree, a soldier in the Army who meets a girl named Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) while on leave in his hometown. Unfortunately, the movie goes wrong almost immediately. Some other guy has a crush on Savannah, but accidentally knocks her bag off of a pier into the ocean. As she laments that her “whole life was in that bag” (really?), the guy runs down the pier to the beach, promising the get it back for her.

Reminds me of myself in high school, except without all the muscles and rugged good looks.

But just then, John, who had been kickin’ it shirtless on the pier, staring into the sunset, leaps heroically into the water, swimming to the bottom and retrieving the lost bag.

This is a scene for the girls, so I shouldn’t be surprised at how unimpressive it was to me. Savannah is sufficiently impressed, and I guess that’s all that matters. Their growing relationship with each other is convincing enough, but only because of the chemistry between Tatum and Seyfried. The writing might be some of the worst I’ve seen from Mr. Sparks.

John comes to the rescue by hopping off a pier. He knows that the moon doesn’t change size no matter where it is in the sky. He can build a campfire. Amazing! “That’s so…primal,” Savannah says.

John and Savannah spend a lot of time staring at each other in this movie.

I guess I just feel like someone with his background should have some more impressive skills than these. I was a counselor at a summer camp in 2005 where I spent a summer with a lot of 11 and 12-year-old kids jumping off of higher cliffs and teaching them how to build fires and that the moon doesn’t actually get bigger as it goes down, it just looks bigger as it gets closer to the horizon.

But I digress. The conflicts are interesting enough, I suppose. John is on leave from the military and will soon be returning to Iraq. His father is lonely and seems to be struggling with gradually increasing mental illness. Savannah, meanwhile, is a conservative college student who is spending her vacation working on a home for Habitat For Humanity. The question is whether or not the two weeks during which they met and fell in “love” will be enough to overcome the yearlong separation after John is sent back to Iraq, but the 9/11 attacks suddenly change everything when John decides to re-enlist.

So Tatum and Seyfriend have to present likable characters, which they do for the most part, but the problem with the movie is that it tries to create the dramatic tension by putting John in an impossible situation but fails completely. I’m sorry, but choosing between a two week crush and serving his country and his fellow soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history just isn’t it. And Savannah’s temper tantrum when she finds out that he plans to extend his service does nothing but make her character irritating.

They also spend a lot of time staring at letters...

“Don’t ever tell me I don’t understand!” she blurts. What else could he possibly say?

But don’t get me wrong, I really didn’t hate the movie. It’s not bad, it’s just not great, and overall it just feels like there wasn’t much effort put into the setup or the payoff or much of anything else. The leads put in good performances, as does an abused Richard Jenkins, who is saddled with a childishly awkward character as John’s father, but the predictability factor is through the roof. If you find yourself surprised, for example, when Savannah writes John a “Dear John” letter, for example, there’s a good chance this is the first movie you’ve ever seen, in which case I hope you enjoyed it.  But if it’s not the first movie you’ve ever seen, then I can pretty much guarantee you’ve seen something better.

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See?

I may as well admit right off the bat that I went into Cop Out totally unaware that it’s a Kevin Smith film, and didn’t realize it all through the movie until the closing credits because the only thing it has in common with any other Kevin Smith films is Jason Lee. This might be because Smith didn’t write the script, but check this out – when Zack and Miri Make A Porno was released, Roger Ebert recalled a conversation with Kevin Smith where he made the following important statement, “I don’t know sh** about directing, but I’m a f***ing good writer.”

Should we be worried then, that he still signed on to direct a movie that he didn’t write?

Whatever the case, Cop Out is meant to be something of a spoof and something of an homage of buddy cop action movies in general, everything from Lethal Weapon to Blue Streak. I’ll admit that I have an almost inexhaustible love of these movies, and hardly ever find them repetitive, derivative or…ah…intrusive, but there is a way to make them (or any comedy) bad, and that’s to just not be funny. I know, that’s a little obvious, but the biggest crime for an unfunny comedy to commit is to have too many unfunny jokes that just go on for far too long, and Cop Out is full of them.

The plot is simple enough. Tracy Morgan and Bruce Willis are New York cops with a relationship the just begs to be made into a ho-hum buddy cop movie.  Jimmy (Willis) is an experienced cop struggling with his low salary while his daughter is getting married and his ex-wife’s new husband loves to taunt him for not being able to afford to pay for it. And Paul (Morgan) is Jimmy’s mouthy partner struggling with desperate suspicions that his wife is cheating on him. It won’t be any surprise when a sting operation goes wrong, a storefront gets all shot to hell and Jimmy and Paul end up getting chewed out by the police chief, who’s just about had enough of them. Personally I prefer the completely unintelligible chief in Last Action Hero. That guy was hilarious.

Needless to say, they get suspended for 30 days without pay, and just as I’m again wishing that I had a job where my boss would force me to take a month off, the movie has officially transformed into a giant cliché and it’s safe to look for your entertainment elsewhere. But just when Seann William Scott enters and you think you might have something to laugh at, he ends up being responsible for the majority of the movie’s lengthy, unfunny jokes. Scott plays Dave. Jimmy had a classic baseball card that he was going to sell so he could pay for his daughter’s wedding, but Dave stole it and sold it for drugs. Jimmy makes Dave lead him to the Hispanic gangsters that he sold the card to, and they tell Jimmy that he can have the card back if Jimmy can just get back a beloved, stolen Mercedes.

Oooohhh! Tough guy!

Anyway, you see where this is going. Jimmy needs to get that card back and pay for a wedding, Paul needs to find out if his wife is cheating on him, the gangster needs his car, and Dave needs to crack a lot of bad jokes at the expense of Paul’s vanity. Everyone puts in a sufficient performance, but there’s something missing that would have made the movie really memorable. It’s not a bad movie, just a run of the mill cop comedy that no one will argue is the best work from anyone involved. And it doesn’t help that the whole criminal element, the Mexican gangsters caricatures, involves a level of visceral violence that’s totally at odds with the comedy that the rest of the movie tries to convey. Seems that these two elements may have done better in separate movies. Fans of the leads will have a good time, but I recommend waiting for the DVD.

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Seann William Scott telling a joke, Bruce Willis not getting it, Tracy Morgan not caring.

By staying true to his form, Tim Burton has taken a classic children’s tale and turned it into a movie that’s probably too scary for the story’s original target audience. It’s starting to seem like every new adaptation of a classic children’s story that comes out these days seems to have been made a little too scary for younger audiences, most recently in A Christmas Carol. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. I loved A Christmas Carol, and few things could be so dangerous to the success of a Tim Burton film than by making it for little kids. This is part of the reason Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was such a disappointment. But considering that this movie is a book adaptation but consists mostly of invented material, Burton’s version is surprisingly good.

The movie takes place years after “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.” Alice is now 20 years old, suffering from recurring nightmares of her trip to Wonderland as a little girl, and struggling to live in the oppressively proper atmosphere of a young lady in Britain, where her imagination and sense of individualism simply don’t fit in. When an unimpressive suitor asks for her hand in marriage, she finds the passing White Rabbit much more interesting and follows it through the woods, ultimately falling down the rabbit hole. Here similarities to the plot of the book take a sharp turn, although the movie still feels faithful to the original material.

This time, when she arrives in Wonderland, it’s the same place but also years later (time passes in Wonderland just like here in our world, kind of like how we dream in real time), and all of Alice’s old friends remember and miss her. But the evil Red Queen has taken over control of Wonderland, while the White Queen is exiled and powerless. The Hatter and the March Hare are still having their strange tea party, but life has completely stagnated without Alice’s presence. When we first see the Hare and the Hatter about 30 minutes into the movie, the Hatter is snoozing at the tea table with his chin on his chest, and we can almost feel the life flow into him when he sees Alice.

A lot of people have complained about Johnny Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter, but the biggest problem for me about the movie was nothing more than an overabundance of battle clichés. Alice’s task in the movie is to slay the Jabberwocky – which you may remember from the curious poem in the book -  in order to restore power to the White Queen and put the wonder back in Wonderland. Unfortunately, like so many special-effects-heavy movies these days, this one also dissolves in the third act into uninteresting action sequences which are almost entirely devoid of any freshness, despite the talent involved in creating them.

It should be noted, however, that there is almost never any sense of disappointment that the movie doesn’t adhere very closely to the original stories, which is a testament to the quality of the filmmaking, and of Burton’s unique vision. There isn’t a frame of it that isn’t thoroughly recognizable as a Burton film, which is what makes this such a perfect story for him to adapt. Since Alice has been gone, as the Hatter explains, the Red Queen has taken over and spread chaos all over Wonderland, and Burton is exactly the man to show us a world that used to be breathtakingly beautiful but is now twisted under the burden of darkness. In the book, Alice looks through a tiny door and sees “the loveliest garden you ever saw.”  Here, she sees something straight out of a Tim Burton movie, and she immediately knows that Wonderland is in trouble.

Ah, and of course something must be said of the characters. The March Hare is mad as a hatter, as they say, flinging teacups at everything and everyone in sight, and is nicely presented. Alan Rickman lends his infamous drawl to the caterpillar who sits smoking a hookah on the mushroom and making bizarre statements (he’s probably most of the reason why there are so many rumors that Lewis Caroll was on drugs when he wrote the original stories), and while he never sounds like anything other than Alan Rickman, the character comes across well. Tweedledee and Tweedeledum, however, are thoroughly strange creations. Their clever playing on words from the books is sort of preserved, but they are now just a couple of freakishly fat British kids with cockney accents who I think far underplay the energy of the original characters. The Cheshire Cat, however, possibly the most famous character from the stories, is outstanding in both voice and animation. His appearances and disappearances are exactly what I imagined while reading the book.

Depp’s performance as the Mad Hatter is the most famous one in the movie, and the one that will probably receive the most complaints. I’m not always a fan of Depp’s roles where he plays a character with a bizarre personality (I thought his turn as Willy Wonka was among his least impressive performances of his career), but here I don’t think that he was at all over the top or annoying. I was worried he might come off as sort of a Jar-Jar Binks character, shooting for energy and eccentricity but just coming off as irritating, but I was pleased to see he was able to restrain his energy and give the Hatter just the right level of strangeness. Indeed, he seems like exactly the kind of person that one might grow up to be, living in Caroll’s Wonderland. But Anne Hathaway as the White Queen seems like a mistake to me. She just doesn’t look right.

But yeah, those battles at the end of the movie were just not my thing. Nicely rendered and animated and everything, but it’s too bad to see a movie overflowing with an almost uncontrollable level of creativity descend into a cliché of a battle right at the end, although this did give Depp several opportunities to show a different side of his character, which was welcome. There is a dancing scene with him at the end that feels like a strange homage to Michael Jackson, but the problem is that it comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere, like it was just dropped right into the movie simply to distract the kiddies from the sad and scary scene that immediately preceded it.

But all in all the movie was good, I’ll even admit even though Tim Burton is one of my favorite directors, I didn’t think the movie would be as good as it is. I just kept having bad feelings from memories of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which I had enormous hopes but which I just ended up hating. Mia Wasikowska gave a wonderful performance as Alice, she’s exactly what I would have imagined Caroll’s Alice to be as a young woman, and when a film can match what you imagined when you read a book it’s a pretty impressive thing. Definitely a movie that I would recommend seeing in 3D while you have the chance!

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Come on in...

It was by pure chance that I read Dennis Lehane’s novel “Shutter Island.” I was wandering around the Santa Monica public library a few years ago and noticed it on one of the new release sections. Crazy stories that take place in crazy houses tend to interest me, so I checked it out just to see if it would catch my eye, and I ended up reading almost the entire thing in a single afternoon. I seem to remember that the ending didn’t exactly knock my socks off, but man, that thing’s a page-turner if I’ve ever read one. Martin Scorsese lends his characteristic style to the proceedings and, by staying closely faithful to the novel, brings us a cracklingly good adaptation of it. The movie’s showcase twist in the final act is conspicuously unshocking, but there’s never a dull moment, and that goes a long way.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a federal marshal assigned to investigate a missing prisoner on Shutter Island, an old Civil War outpost that’s been refitted into a detention facility for the criminally insane. Mark Ruffalo is his partner Chuck, whose main objectives seem to be handing Teddy cigarettes and agreeing with him. No points for guessing that Everything Is Not As It Seems, but Scorsese’s skillful direction, outstanding performances across the board, and a totally fascinating location more than make up for the high predictability factor.

The missing prisoner is Rachel Solando (Patricia Clarkson). The circumstances of her disappearance offer no room for a reasonable explanation, from her inexplicable disappearance from a locked room to the entire security force’s inability to find her on an inescapable island. It isn’t very clearly explained why two federal marshals are brought in in the first place, but the movie never slows down enough for us to wonder much about it. Scorsese makes the most of the movie’s remote location, never allowing us to forget how isolated the asylum is, and how far removed they are from any help. The only way off the island, other than death, seems to be a ferry that never seems to show up, and events get weirder and weirder as the walls, the guards, and the very sky close in on us.

Ben Kingley plays the character of Dr. Cawley, a man who has masterminded what he hopes to be a ground-breaking method of treating mental illness. The movie takes place in the 1950s, as the controversial era of involuntary lobotomies was being replaced by the era of psycho-pharmacology – thorazine and whatnot (which you may remember not working at all on Michael Myers) – but Dr. Cawley’s convinced that there’s still something to be said for simply talking to the patients and trying to better understand them rather than pumping them up full of pills. Seems like an idea that should be given a little more credit way up here in the 21^st century. Dutton and his partner are faced with the task of figuring out what’s going on on the island, where every new discovery just leads to more confusion.

The cast of the movie is particularly memorable. It seems at first glance to be another Scorsese/DiCaprio movie, but closer inspection reveals an impressive list of notable actors. Mark Ruffalo delivers yet another outstanding performance, Ben Kingsley inhabits the ominous character of Dr. Cawley with astonishing, almost unsettling accuracy, and the 81-year-old Max Von Sydow appears as a ranking doctor with a dark past. Every time I see Sydow in another movie I’m amazed. The guy has looked exactly the same for a quarter century. And Elias Koteas, a highly accomplished actor who I nevertheless will always remember as Casey Jones from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, makes a small but welcome appearance.

But like I said, it’s the location that’s the real star of the movie. It opens with an aerial approach to the forbidding island between a stormy sky and a stormy ocean, setting the perfect stage for the strange events that are to follow, and Scorsese milks the atmosphere for all its worth. Besides a compelling story, the movie provides such a fascinating tour of the island that it made me wish I could be an orderly or a guard on a place like Shutter Island. I’ve never had an inkling of interest in being a hospital orderly or a security guard, but imagine the stories those guys must have!

It should be noted that Shutter Island is a huge movie, probably the most important one released in 2010 so far, so it’s sure to get dragged through the mud for some reason or other. You can be sure that some uppity critic or other is going to come up with a title like “Desert this Island” or “An Island You Don’t Want to get Marooned On” and then form their review around it, thinking they came up with something really clever, but Shutter Island is just a solid movie, hands down. The ending will be a little too much for many viewers, but come on, it’s made by the same guy that made Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, GoodFellas, and Casino. What did you expect, a romantic comedy?

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The Crazies takes place in a small American town where a few of the locals suddenly go crazy and start killing people for no decipherable reason, leaving the town sheriff, his wife and his deputy (Joe Anderson) with the task of solving the mystery. There’s a scene where the military has half a dozen or so of the town wives strapped to gurneys under suspicion of “being sick,” and one of the crazies walks in and methodically jams a pitchfork into their stomachs one after the other, watching them scream and squirm while the life drains out of them. This is a scene that should have been pulled out of the projector, cut up into slivers and jammed under the fingernails of idiot screenwriters Ray Wright and Scott Kosar. “Hey, why don’t you type that little scene up again now, gentlemen?” That scene alone cost the movie two full Beans, and still it’s reiterated on the movie’s poster. Go figure.

That being said, however, these talentless hacks have now teamed up with director Breck Eisner and come up with a movie that, despite a total lack of even a hint of originality, is at least an entertaining enough retread. This is the highest compliment that I can give the movie as a whole, but it’s not a small compliment, given the fact that the above-mentioned production team has yet to come up with a single good movie among the lot of them. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. Kosar wrote The Machinist, but he also wrote the recent, immensely stupid remakes of The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and those handily cancel out even Christian Bale’s astonishing dedication to his performance in The Machinist.

Timothy Olyphant is David Dutton, the town sheriff. When a local resident with a history of alcohol abuse walks into center field with a shotgun during a town baseball game, David is forced to use force, setting off a chain of events that transforms the movie into a giant cliché. Again, I remind you that it’s not necessarily a bad cliché, but a cliché nonetheless. His wife, the town doctor (Radha Mitchell), begins getting strange cases, and when David finds things like a man on a hospital gurney with his eyes and mouth sewn shut, he’s sure something’s wrong. Especially when the doctor, his friend, attacks him with a bone saw. That can’t be right.

The whole zombie genre got a nice boost from recent movies like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, the surprisingly good 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, and Pandorum, but The Crazies is proof that it takes more than zombies, shotguns, and a good looking sheriff to make a good zombie movie. But the real problem with The Crazies is that it focuses on what might be the least important element of a zombie movie as the centerpiece of the plot – what it was that turned your friends and neighbors into murderous crazies in the first place. This is generally something that’s tossed into the movie through dialogue since it’s little more than an excuse for the violent mayhem, but Eisner turns it into a whole government conspiracy.

Not that that’s entirely a bad thing. It actually gets pretty interesting at first, when a mysterious plane crash emerges as the probably cause of the whole thing, but as the hour mark passes and no one in the movie or the audience yet has any clue about what’s going on, it becomes clear that the movie is trying our patience far more than it has any right to. There are plenty of good performances in the movie, but also plenty of empty scares as things pop out on screen with unsettling sound effects. I enjoyed for a while the mystery involved in trying to come up with a reason why the American military would descend on a small American town, shoot its citizens on sight and then blowtorch their bodies, although part of my enjoyment stemmed from a futile hope that there was an interesting and not-quite-so-predictable cause behind it all.

Ultimately the movie is a ham-handed combination of Outbreak and your standard zombie movie, although not quite as good as you would hope an injection of Outbreak would make it. The performances are all impressive, including an underused Glenn Morshower, who plays one of my favorite characters in “24.” Given the fate of his character in this movie, I’m guessing he and Eisner ended things badly when they worked together on Tango & Cash in 1989. The movie is based on George Romero’s 1973 film of the same name, which I haven’t seen but, unfortunately, the new one has exhausted my interest in the genre far too much for me to go back and watch it like I normally would. I didn’t hate the movie, but it left a pretty shallow impression on me. I’ve probably just seen it too many times by now.

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There are generally not a lot of variations of the revenge movie, particularly the kind about the tough guy out to get revenge for the death/kidnapping or whatever of his kid. Mel Gibson already did it in 1996 with Ransom and I don’t have many complaints to lodge about that one. I think Edge of Darkness is a nice return to form for Mel. He’s best in gritty action movies and this is the first one he’s since Payback a decade ago. Gibson’s latest effort is slow and plodding at some points, and it has too much emotional setup designed to drive the vengeance that takes up the second half of the film, but there are some unexpected and very interesting plot twists in the last act that make it memorable.

Movies about avenging fathers or brothers or cheuffers or whatnot generally come with mixed results. Denzel Washington did it in Man on Fire and the result was not good. Mark Wahlberg did it in Max Payne and the result was not good, but not bad either. And of course, we can’t forget that Arnold Schwarzenegger did it in Commando and the result was totally freaking awesome. I doubt that Edge of Darkness will have the staying power of Commando, but as a definitely styled Mel Gibson action movie, it certainly delivers on the expectations.

So Gibson plays Thomas Craven, a veteran homicide detective. This is really the perfect job for him, because homicide detectives are generally not allowed to participate in investigations of the murders of their own family members. Emotional involvement can really cloud your judgment, that kind of thing. So when his daughter Emma (my own sister’s name, as it were) is gunned down on his front porch,

Never trust a man who has an office with a view like this.

he has no choice but to set off on his own investigation, as guys tend to do in movies like this. Before long he learns that his daughter may have been killed because of her attempts to blow the whistle on a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

Emma is played by Serbian actress Bojana Novakovic, a talented actress who doesn’t seem to have yet seen the recognition she deserves. She’s been acting for just over a decade but not really in anything memorable. You might remember her as the daughter of the scary old lady in Drag Me To Hell. Interesting that still here, she is in a major production with one of the most famous movie stars in the world, and still spends most of the movie dead. Too bad. Danny Huston plays Jack Bennett, the president of a shady corporation that Emma was working for. You know he can’t be trusted because his name’s Jack and he’s played by Danny Huston. And did I mention his office?

The movie was directed by Martin Campbell, who also brought us things like two Zorro movies with Antonio Banderas as well as GoldenEye and Casino Royale, two of the best James Bond films, in my humble opinion. Here is a guy who knows his actions movies. Campbell’s directing chops are helped along by the screenwriting talents of William Monahan, writer of The Departed and Body of Lies, and Andrew Bovell, who hasn’t really written anything of note but who now has some brilliant colleagues.

Bottom line, if you’re a fan of Mel Gibson and action movies in general you’re sure to have a good time. It gets a little sappy at a few points as scenes of Craven dealing with the loss of his daughter are stretched just a little too far. We get that he’s bummed, but the movie doesn’t balance the slow scenes too well so it drags occasionally. But once Mel gets his investigation going, it’s an interesting story with some cool twists at the end, and as always it’s great to watch Gibson distributing whoop-ass to those that deserve it!

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This is not a good time for the cineplexes. A quick scan of the top 10 movies at the box office at Rotten Tomatoes will reveal that eight out of ten are listed as rotten, including The Tooth Fairy, which has scored a whopping 15%. That’s even lower than Alvin and the Chipmunks’ 21%. I’ve been trying over the last several weeks to bring myself to watch and review the Chipmunks movie, but no luck so far, even though Jason Lee is in it. I did watch the first few minutes before caving in and leaving, but I can pretty much guarantee you that it is definitely not better than The Tooth Fairy. In fact, seeing The Rock prancing around in a tutu and wings like a big, airborne ballerina was much more fun than I had anticipated. I would venture to call this the first surprise of the year.

It must be understood, however, that The Tooth Fairy is a kids movie from beginning to end, but I’m not a kid and I didn’t watch it with kids, and I still had a good time. Most of the reason is probably because of Dwayne Johnson’s charming performance and the fact that he was clearly having a great time with the role, and you may very well find it difficult not to have a good time along with him.

Derek gets a dreaded summons to Tooth Fairy Duty.

The Spy Next Door was a kids movie that had pretty much nothing for anyone over the age of 9 or so, but The Tooth Fairy, while certainly childish, at least has some genuinely funny moments.

So Johnson plays Derek Thompson, a retired professional hockey player who now coaches kids. His nickname in the big leagues was “The Tooth,” in accordance with his tendency to remove the chompers of the opposing teammates rather than because of any inconsistencies in his own grill. In fact, I would argue that his finely crafted row of gleaming pearlies may be part of the reason that he was cast in the movie, which might easily be called a 90-minute Colgate commercial. Brush your teeth, kids!

So here’s a quick breakdown of the multitude of storylines. Derek is a retired hockey player coaching kids. He’s dating a woman named Carly (Ashley Judd), a single mother with two kids, a six or seven year old daughter, and punk 12-year-old named Randy.

"Hey, maybe this fairy thing isn't so bad after all!"

Randy doesn’t like her mom dating Derek, he’s figures Derek’s no different than any of mom’s other boyfriends. Kids his age tend not to like their mom’s boyfriends, but this reference to the single mom’s mysterious number of former boyfriends seems a little out of place in a movie so clearly meant for kids younger than Randy.

But no matter. Derek’s main belief in life is that dreams lead to disappointment, and so believing in things like the tooth fairy or your own ability to be successful later in life will only result in failure or disappointment, and so the best thing to do is to stop dreaming and believing now. For this crime of “disseminating disbelief,” Derek is abducted into Fairyland and assigned by none other than Julie Andrews to two weeks or tooth fairy duty. A gigantically tall British comedian (Stephen Merchant, 6’7”) named Tracy, who has been saddled with the lifelong disappointment of never being able to be a “winged fairy,” is assigned to be Derek’s trainer, while Billy Crystal reprises his role from The Princess Bride and introduces to Derek all the cool products like shrinking potions and memory powders and whatnot. Well, Crystal reprises the costume from The Princess Bride, anyway. That’s enough for me.

So clearly there isn’t much in The Tooth Fairy to make your predictability radar quiet down for a little while. It’s not hard to guess that Derek’s forced work as a tooth fairy will cause him to re-evaluate his thoughts on believing, but it definitely is surprisingly enjoyable. There are lots of cheesy and goofy scenes, but even the really cheeseball moments, while predictable, aren’t at all bad. There are, however, plenty of bad blue screens, particularly during the shrunken scenes where Derek is 6 inches tall.

Tooth Fairy duty waits for no hockey game.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of progress has been made in the shrinking department since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which at least put a lot more effort into it than The Tooth Fairy does.

But despite all of these shortcomings, I think this is the best of the bad movies in theaters right now. It’s light-hearted and enjoyable, and there are no forehead-slapping moments to be found anywhere, while in, for example, Leap Year or The Spy Next Door, there was almost nothing else. There is, however, no real reason to pay $10 to see it in the theater. As was pointed out in Hollywire’s Then and Now article, ticket prices are nothing to laugh about these days. But once The Tooth Fairy comes out on DVD, I’m gonna go out on a limb and recommend it.

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So Legion opens with the following short exchange between a devoutly religious mother and her young daughter – “Why is God so mad?” “I don’t know, I guess he just got tired of all the bullsh*t.” I got a good kick out of that beginning, and it sets the stage well for the little skirmish between mankind and God that takes place during the movie. Usually we get movies about people who have lost faith in God, but this time God has lost faith in man and sets Himself to the task of exterminating us. And how would He choose to execute such a mission? Why, by turning a lot of people into zombies and having us kill each other off, of course. Even the Almighty needs to be entertained!

So we meet a random group of people in some roadside truckstop in the middle of some American desert. Dennis Quaid plays Bob Hanson, the owner. He bought the place thinking a nearby shopping mall would turn it into a huge success, but the mall was built in the wrong county, so he was left with a struggling business in the middle of nowhere, the perfect location for divine retribution. Under his employ is a geeky mechanic who’s in love with the waitress, who’s single and pregnant with the Last Hope For Mankind, and he gets a small but regular stream of caricature customers. Sandra and Howard are a young, married couple on their way to Scottsdale, Arizona. Tyrese Gibson plays Kyle, who’s going through an ugly divorce and stops by because he’s lost. And Jeanette Miller, an actor with more than half a century of acting experience, plays a sweet old lady named Gladys Foster. And Mrs. Foster is…well, it’s best to let you find out about that on your own.

Before long an angel named Michael (Paul Bettany, who you’ll remember from The Da Vinci Code) shows up – this is just after the, ah, incident with Gladys – and warns the customers that more like her will be coming soon. He explains the situation with God, the impending extermination, and the fact that he used to be one of God’s exterminators but decided to switch sides.

Lord of the Flies

That seems unwise to me, but no matter. The movie comes dangerously close to turning into nothing more than another movie about some random cross section of humanity trapped in some store or whatever and holding off against the evil forces outside. In fact, it does turn into that, but at least there’s a little more to it.

Unfortunately, the little more there is to it is all about this Biblical battle between mankind and God, which doesn’t really seem like a fair fight, and the rivalry between Michael, the rebellious son, and Gabriel, the loyal son. Michael’s trying to help the humans and Gabriel is sent to do the job that Michael screwed up, and I guess God is just kicking it up there in Heaven rooting for the destruction of the race that He created.

The Good Son

My real problem with the movie might just be chalked up to incomplete religious education. But I always thought God was, you know, omniscient and all-powerful, that kind of thing. Yeah, I understand that He works in mysterious ways, but would He really have to send out angel/demons to do His bidding? Michael informs us at one point that he used to be “a general in God’s army.” This was before he defected and joined the side of the humans, going against God himself in the process. But if God were betrayed like that, couldn’t he just smite Michael down? I would’ve smoted him up good, man.

What'll it be, kids?

At any rate, the first half of the movie is not bad at all. The waitress is assigned the role of Mother of the Last Hope For Mankind for no good reason, but the incident with Gladys and the transformation of the ice cream man are both some images that you’ll not soon forget. Unfortunately, the movie gets pretty powerfully goofy about halfway through and never really recovers. The whole theological section of the movie is botched pretty thoroughly, but that’s still not to say that the thing isn’t entertaining. But the movie serves us a ham-fisted message about mankind’s propensity toward violence and war and the characters speak almost entirely in ancient clichés and platitudes. It’s got some entertaining gunfights and action, but in it’s efforts to save mankind the movie forgets completely to save itself.

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“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Not since Fallen in 1998 has a movie been made where God is so clearly on the side of Denzel Washington, and not since Kalifornia has such a violent road movie come along. Well, that may or may not be true. There has been an abundance of road films and post-apocalyptic films over the last decade or so, to the point where it has become quite a trick to make one of them stand out from the crowd. But directors Albert and Allen Hughes have done it with The Book of Eli, a film about a desolated future not all that far off, where the few remaining members of mankind are struggling to rebuild the world that they’ve lost. Or kill, rape, eat, or steal from each other. Whichever’s easier.

In the middle of this gigantic chaos of emptiness is the movie’s thinly veiled Jesus figure Eli (Denzel Washington). You’ll know which one he is because he’ll be the guy with the name-tag that says “Hi! My name is Eli.” He’s given that name because ‘Eli’ can be found in the word ‘religion,’ which means they can highlight it in red in that poster with Gary Oldman where it says “Religion is Power.” “Eli” can also be found in the word “believe,” as can “lie,” but I digress.

Gas. Food. Lodging. Turn around and drive 30 years in the opposite direction.

So anyway, Eli has been wandering west across the desolate landscape of America for, get this, 30 years, trying to find the rightful place for this book he’s carrying, which a voice in his head told him to take west.

I know, 30 years, right? Seriously? I’m not sure if this is meant to poke holes in the infallibility of faith, because that’s what was guiding Eli, but if he had been walking for 30 years, I’m going to go ahead and assume that he got pretty thoroughly lost more than once. Or maybe the Hughes brothers just wanted to throw in a little homage to Andrew C.K. (check Youtube for “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”). Personally I just thought it was a bit too much exaggeration in C.K.’s attempt to get a good laugh, but evidently the Hughes brothers were impressed.

So anyway, it’s strange that a description of the plot could sound so powerfully goofy, but the movie really is highly entertaining and brilliantly photographed. It also contains several outstanding performances, including from Gary Oldman as the thinly veiled Satan figure, who has dispatched all of his minions with the mission of recovering the Book. He’s also the passage across which the Hughes brothers deliver a scathing message to the religious masses.

“The book is a weapon aimed right at the hearts and minds of the weak and the desperate! It will give us control of them!”

Then again, Carnegie is the devil incarnate and can’t be expected to come forth with many glowing remarks about the Good Word, so I hope that most of our friends in the religious community managed to avoid any feelings of resentment.

I love the way the film is photographed probably more than anything else, by the way. It is shot all in dull blues and grays and browns, giving the deserted American landscape a perfect feeling of desolation and destruction. Mankind was wiped out by what Eli calls “the flash” (an unfortunate solar event that killed nearly everyone on the planet, adding new meaning to the name of Mila Kunis’s character Solara, and also destroyed all but a single Bible), leaving the remnants of mankind living in a soulless wasteland ruled by warlords like Carnegie, who send out gangs of scary bikers to do their bidding in between rapes and assaults and murders and such. The only good place to be in a such a world is in the movie theater with us.

Post-apocalyptic movies are generally rich with opportunities for catastrophic screw-ups, and the Hughes brothers manage to avoid mostly all of them. They can’t resist having a gigantic cliché for an antagonist, or populating his personal army with goofy tough guys taken right out of Mad Max, but you may very well be surprised to find some interesting and original additions to the genre, and these should be noted, despite other shortcomings like a bizarre ending that creates more questions than it answers. I really liked where they end up at the end of the movie, and what they discover there, but there are certain character developments that might have been just slightly overshooting in the symbolism department.

Nevertheless, let’s all remember that it’s still January, and January is famously the off-season at the movies. Did You Hear About the Morgans? and Leap Year are two immediate train wrecks already well on their way to oblivion, but I’m happy to say that in just the first few weeks of this year we have gotten Daybreakers and The Book of Eli, both much better than we have come to expect from Januaries. If this keeps up, 2010 may very well shape up to be a great year at the movies!

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