Action and Adventure films - 2013
| A Good Day to Die Hard | The Last Stand | The Raven |
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Perhaps encouraged by the success of Expendables 2, the stars of that movie have issued solo efforts in the early months of 2013. Schwarzenegger "was back" in The Last Stand. Stallone staged another comeback in Bullet To the Head. Now Bruce Willis releases his latest installment in the Die Hard series.
The reviews for Die Hard 5 or A Good Day to Die Hard (isn't this based on a Klingon saying?) have been overwhelmingly bad. But sometimes bad reviews are like an avalanche - one stone rolls and none of the others want to be left behind.
The basic plot is that officer John McClane is told that his estranged son Jack has been arrested in Moscow for an assassination. John resolves to go there and help any way he can. Pretty much as soon as he is within shouting range of his son, the action begins. There is a lot of shooting, jumping, falling, chasing, crashing and so on. Father and son join forces, pursue and confront the bad guys, and ride off into the sunset. (I don't really think that's much of a spoiler.)
So, in light of all the complaints and condemnations, where did this film fail? Most of its failings were for missing elements from the prior films. All of the previous Die Hard movies had a more clearly defined plot. This one always seemed vague. Previous films bothered to flesh out their characters a bit more - relationships between the bad guys with each other, relationships McClane would form with primary as well as secondary characters. For example, I expected the Russian cab driver character to re-appear at some point. In one of the previous films, he probably would have. In previous films, McClane was never the bringer of trouble but it always seemed to find him. He just didn't run from it, especially when he knew there was something at stake. Here, he is more of a violence-loving guy, looking for payback without knowing why. There was also a shortage of humor in this film, which is odd, since our heroes acted as if their only reason for pursuing the bad guys was revenge because they liked doing it. There is a particular gunfight where I saw an obvious opportunity for someone to re-utter the simple, but memorable phrase, "shoot the glass." But that moment was wasted. In what should be the final Die Hard, there should have been multiple nods to the previous films, but neither the writer nor the director thought of this or was willing to make the effort.
Jai Courtney as Jack McClane is mostly uninteresting and not that likable. He came off as just another muscley guy with a crewcut. There wasn't much depth to his character. If you say it can't be done, Liam Hemsworth had us caring a lot more about him in Expendables 2 with half the screen time. I also couldn't help comparing him to Joseph Gordon Levitt's superior portrayl of a younger Willis in Looper. The estrangement between the father and son is mostly unexplained other than Dad "working a lot" and they appear to bond through the ensuing mayhem. Really?
One also wonders at several points - are there no cops in Russia? All the car crashes and gun fights and I don't recall a single Russian constable. In The Bourne Supremacy, if Matt Damon sneezed he was mobbed by Russian cops.
It seems I'm on the "hated it" bandwagon. Not entirely. The previous films in the Die Hard series set expectations pretty high. It holds this film up to a standard that is hard to live up to. The main things many people go to a Die Hard movie to see are improbable escapes, stuff blowing up, fist-fights, desperate chases, and gunfire. If that is all you require, the film delivers that in spades.
When this movie makes it to Netflix, I will probably watch it again over a bowl of popcorn just to marvel at all the great stunt work and see Willis in his signature role one last time.
- JC
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Escalation. Over the past decade or so, once we really embraced fantasy, once cgi made things possible and believable onscreen that never had been before, old-fashioned action started to fall out of fashion. The blockbusters of the 90s would be hard-pressed to compete with the superheroics of the Marvel universe, the epics of Tolkien, and the wonders of future worlds as depicted in Avatar and The Hunger Games. The Last Stand brought us a good old-fashioned action hero movie. It's really too bad more people didn't see it.
The Last Stand was released in January of 2013. It was director Kim Ji-woon's first American film after a successful career in South Korea and Arnold Schwarzenegger's first starring role in 10 years. It didn't lose money, but it was not a big hit, even though it received reasonably good reviews. There seems to be a growing consensus that January isn't a good month to release one's movie.
In our story, a mexican crime boss escapes FBI custody in Las Vegas and with his murderous, well-equipped gang of killers clearing his path, he decides to make for the border in a supercar that can outrun nearly anything. Unfortunately for him, his route takes him through a town where the sheriff is a former LAPD cop with quite a bit of experience with bad guys.
In many ways, The Last Stand bears several similarities to Die Hard. We have a group of sophisticated international ciminals with a charismatic leader and a murderous main henchman, outwitting the police at every turn. But this unstoppable force meets an immoveable object. In Die Hard, it's a New York cop at an LA corporate bash where he is totally out of place - the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Last Stand, the bad guys make the same mistake. They plan for the cops they know about and totally - fatally - underestimate the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the bad-ass cop you should have gone around.
The hardest to buy single aspect in the whole movie: You really expect us to believe driving 500 miles to Mexico from Las Vegas is smarter than just taking a jet? Especially considering all the vehicles, equipment, and work they put into this little drive. The only plausible explanation was that it was the choice of a bloodthirsty raging ego-maniac who just wanted to do it that way. You have to admit though, the Corvette and the Camaro were really hot cars.
There are a lot of good character portrayls in The Last Stand. It's hard to pick just a few. Jaime Alexander (Sif in the Thor movies) is good as a deputy who can do beautiful, tough, funny, and vulnerable. The girl has a future. Johnny Knoxville is good as the comical mayhem-lover who turns out to be essential to the town's defense. Luis Guzman is both funny and badass as one of the other deputies. And a note to romance fans - the guy in the smalltown jail, Rodrigo Santoro, played Karl in Love Actually. I didn't recognize him, but ten years should have that little effect on all of us.
Arnold has come a long way since Conan. He learned humor in making movies. And age and experience have seasoned him a bit. He carries his age well. He does a fine job playing a tough, principled sheriff in a cinematic age of superheroes, wizards, and martial artists who defy gravity. Let's remember to save some room for these guys.
- JC
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While growing up and making my way through those gloriously awkward years of junior high and high school, I was introduced to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe as so many of us were. Likewise, as so many of us, after having been subject to years of wholesome stories of family, friendship, and nature, tales of extreme emotions, madness, and murder were a thrilling change. Poe was one of the first great American writers, as poet, story-teller, critic, and even philosopher. He is acknowledged as a pioneer in detective fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and in science-fiction by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Knowing all this, one has many expectations upon seeing The Raven. The concept is so simple and almost blatantly commercial it reminds one of the ABC Movies of the Week from the 1970's - the writer of dark tales, Edgar Allan Poe, is forced to pursue a killer using his stories as the basis for a series of grisly crimes.
One can guess that the success of the recent Sherlock Holmes films encouraged the making of this film. The sights and sounds of 1840's Baltimore did bring to mind the settings depicted of 1890's London. We seem to have a romantic nostalgia for that age, since the Phantom of the Opera, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and Jack the Ripper stories all come from similar times and places.
The critics weren't kind to this film. It only holds a 22% approval rating at rottentomatoes.com. I have to agree with many of the criticisms. The look of the film was good. I particularly liked Luke Evans as the police inspector and Alice Eve as Emily, Poe's romantic interest. However, John Cusack was simply not the right actor for this role. His specialties have usually been more towards everyman characters in comic dramas. He was less the intellectual, brooding type a Poe would need to be but instead came off as a bit of a vain literary huxster.
The director also chose to include in the film a graphic depiction of the most gruesome Poe-styled death. One keeps expecting the view to cut away (no pun intended), but instead they show every last moment. It's possible to brutalize one's audience without achieving any additional dramatic benefit. That was the case here.
In spite of these flaws, I still found the film entertaining and interesting. It took liberties with a historical literary figure, but no more than Sigmund Freud in The Seven Percent Solution or H.G. Wells in Time After Time. If only a better casting choice and some others had been made, Poe could have been launched as a fictionalized version of himself - the originator of the detective story as an actual detective in early America. If only . . .
- JC
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