jackmoss88 Reviews

Commando (1985)

THE 80s Action Movie

[9/10 · 25 October 2009]

When I watch Commando, I am reminded of Entertainment Weekly's review of Uwe Boll's disastrous video game adaptation, Alone In The Dark:

"When the giant, intelligent bees of the future sift through the ashes of our civilization, they will find Alone in the Dark, and they will understand. It's so bad it's postmodern." - Scott Brown

We are the giant bees of the future sifting through the remains of the 1980s, and when we find Commando, we understand. Traditional boundaries between "good" and "bad" are demolished, and the concepts blur until they become one. Commando is good because it's bad, bad for exactly the reasons that make it so good.

Only in the 80s could a film like this have been taken at face value. In fact, the film acts as a sort of shadow play of the tackily neon, terribly hairstyled soul of 1980s American culture. In these more enlightened times, it's easy to laugh at Commando's 80s terribleness: the homoerotic undertones, the ridiculous dialogue, the implausible stunts, the comically excessive violence, the simple right-wing ideology underpinning the slaughter. But Commando transcends the tropes of the 80s action genre by embracing its own ludicrousness. It's almost as if the film-makers knew that the genre they were operating in was absurd, and decided to embrace the absurdity and push it to its very limits. They were making the film for the evolved future generations of movie fans.

Probably the biggest clue is in the film's plot, which I'll summarise: former commando John Matrix (!) has his daughter kidnapped by Arius, former dictator of a fictional Latin-American republic, who Matrix helped depose from his seat of power. In an ironic twist, Matrix is forced to assassinate the same president he helped to install, or his daughter dies. His character must struggle through an inner moral battle, with the life of his daughter weighed up against the freedom of a nation.

Except none of it ever happens. Arnie's character resolutely ignores the plot: he kills every bad guy who tries to talk to him, until they resort to strapping him down on a table just to tell him the plot essentials. Having been put on a plane to begin his mission, Arnie kills the goon watching over him and exits the aircraft mid-take-off in a scene that's completely implausible for at least three wonderful reasons. From there on, he spends the rest of the film murdering every bad guy in sight with a resolute lack of moral concern.

This is a film where the hero almost literally shoots the plot in the head until the film is over. It's as though another, much smarter film is in there, only for John Matrix, the essence of 80s action distilled and coalesced into one character, to symbolically shoot it in the head in favour of the quip-filled, hilarious, utterly stupid madness that actually makes it onto the screen.

The film acts out its generic meta-dialogue within its own screenplay. It becomes 80s action multiplied by 80s action. The 80s squared. The 6400s, if you will. This is why Commando isn't just an 80s action movie but THE 80s action movie, why the quips are funnier, the body-count higher, the bad guys more comical, the action more satisfying, the celebration of the hero's uber-manliness so over-zealous. The film-makers saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was the muzzle flare of a minigun.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

A Categorical Disaster

[4/10 · 17 August 2009]

James Cameron's stock rises with every passing sci-fi action movie that is released these days. The man who practically invented and certainly perfected the genre with Aliens and the first two Terminator films has watched his legacy be steadily diluted by today's imitators, and Terminator Salvation is a grisly reminder of just what Cameron did to make his films so special.

There's not much wrong with Salvation in technical terms. McG may deserve the cries of "MTV director" simply for his ludicrous, gimmicky alias but his style is competent enough, reigning in the whizz-bang editing and over-processed shots. The film looks nice enough: the special effects are very good, the action well staged and the overall look and feel of the film is pretty-yet-gritty. It's certainly better to look at than your typical, overblown Michael Bay product.

No, what makes Terminator Salvation so poor is not in how it looks, sounds or moves. This is, quite simply, a film of colossal stupidity, stupidity that is rendered even more starkly because it has to stand up to Cameron's films.

Where to start? How about with its utter disdain for continuity? In the original Terminator film, Cameron managed in a couple of simple monologues from Kyle Reese to provide both crucial exposition and paint a bleak picture of a future where humanity is enslaved by the machines and on the very verge of extinction before John Connor's intervention. McG spends a whole film carefully trashing Cameron's vision. Humanity isn't enslaved in a high tech circle of hell, it's a fully functioning resistance force with worldwide forces, aircraft and submarine command centres. John Connor doesn't lead the stragglers out of machine death camps to fight a desperate guerrilla war, he's a bizarrely mythologised sergeant in a cliché-spouting military unit, complete with stereotypically uncooperative superiors running the show.

Even worse, the entire mise en scene of those future flashback sequences from Reese's hallucinations and the intro to Terminator 2 is thrown out of the window. Gone is the perpetual dark of nuclear winter, the bed of human skulls and the desperate struggle by ill equipped survivors. Instead the film looks more like Mad Max meets Black Hawk Down.

McG commits the obvious mistake of putting his ego over the wants of the fans. Terminator fans don't want some snotty upstart director trying to impose his ill-fitting creative vision on their iconic series. Why is this behaviour tolerated by Hollywood studios? The practise is so common we have a term for it now: retconning. McG retcons the backstory and feel of a winning and much-loved formula devised by a much better director in a display of either colossal naivety or extreme arrogance. And he fails.

What's really insulting, however, is how he attempts to wean the fanbase onto his new direction for the Terminator universe not by compromise or humbleness but by feeding the fans endless references to previous films, in the thick-headed belief that meaningless echoes to the old films will placate the fans. From repeated dialogue to carbon copy shots to You Could Be Mine blasting out of a boom box, McG lathers the film with self-referentiality and prays that the audiences are too busy fist-pumping and cheering at these moments to care what he does to the parts that matter.

Of course, it's possible I'm being too cynical. Terminator Salvation references, imitates or just plain rips off so many other sci-fi films it's possible that McG is simply a postmodern magpie who has so few ideas of his own he can only get by through creating a collage of nods to other, better films. These nods are especially weak when you put them against Cameron's intelligent subversion, expansion and development of key moments and motifs from his original film in Terminator 2. In comparison, McG looks nothing better than a film student smugly quoting lines from his favourite movies.

Special mention must go to the plot, which is so laughably bad I'm giving this review spoilers so I can properly skewer it. Set aside all the aforementioned retconning and inconsistencies and just marvel at the dumbness of a plot that rips off the Matrix Reloaded as hard as possible and falls short even of that.

A "chosen one" figure leads a human resistance against an oppressive machine hegemony in a post-apocalyptic future, only for it to be revealed that the entire plot of the film is a carefully laid trap by a controlling machine intelligence, you say? And where Reloaded's climactic twist was merely the end of intelligent plotting in that particular franchise, Salvation's twist is the revelation that the plot you've been following is actually considerably more stupid than previously suspected. It turns out Marcus Wright is resurrected by Skynet to set an elaborate plan to lead John Connor to Skynet, through the bait of a captured Kyle Reese. Watch this film again and consider just how much chance, coincidence and sheer luck is involved in Marcus Wright even meeting John Connor, let alone leading him to Skynet and you'll scoff at the very notion that Skynet could possibly have planned for the events you witness. And that's before you even question why the machines don't murder Reese on sight and end the whole shambolic mess 30 minutes before the closing credits.

I'd love to tell you how my friends and I laughed out loud at Christian Bale's delivery of several lines, how we're still making jokes about how a 300 ton giant robot ninja'd its way across open desert to ambush the protagonists in one scene and about the clumsy retreading of those tired man/machine subtexts we've been wearing into the sci-fi carpet since before Blade Runner, but this review is already too long. James Cameron will smirk yet again as we're reminded that it's not set pieces and special effects that make a good sci-fi action film: it's all about good writing and smart directing.

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

Superior horror remake

[8/10 · 30 July 2009]

Remakes of classic horror films are being released all the time, and although they provoke plenty of screams from horror fans, that's generally because they desecrate the originals, rather than due to any intended shocks they contain. George Romero's influential Living Dead series is no survivor of the remake plague either: there are now remakes of the first three films.

The NOTLD remake is an exception to the trend for several reasons. Firstly, it was released in 1990, a few years ahead of the curve. Secondly it was remade by George Romero and Tom Savini as opposed to an unconnected Hollywood director working for a major studio. Thirdly, most importantly and perhaps a result of the aforementioned, NOTLD '90 doesn't suck.

The original NOTLD has a lot of fanatics, and plenty of them would argue that the original never needed remaking. The fact is, however, that NOTLD was made on a shoestring in 1968 and its zero-budget, amateur roots shine through in the dodgy acting (where they simply couldn't afford to reshoot scenes over and over), the stock music and the necessary use of limited narrative techniques (NOTLD is possibly the only critically-acclaimed film I can name where the characters sit and watch an exposition-spouting TV for long periods). As a result I can understand why George Romero wanted to go back when he was an experienced film maker and give his classic the treatment it always deserved.

NOTLD succeeds where it doesn't tamper with a winning formula. This is an update intended to smooth out flaws in the original, not attempt to make it trendy. Although the film's setting remains contemporary, Romero and Savini go to great lengths to maintain the 1960s feel of the film. Using the "middle of nowhere rural house" setting to their advantage, they model everything from the wallpaper in the house to the clothing design and the black and white TV to fit a creepy mise en scene that evokes shades of haunted houses and the classic American Gothic tradition without ceasing to tingle the paranoia of modern audiences.

For the most part, the script is a scene-for-scene recreation of the original film, although Romero and Savini prevent it from being a yawn-fest for fans of the original by adding crucial twists and subversions to the original that ensure you're never QUITE sure what will happen next. An iconic scene near the beginning is cleverly reworked into a moment that will jolt new viewers and long-time fans alike.

The biggest change comes to the ending, which is now much closer to George Romero's original vision, and its worth giving this review Spoilers to discuss these changes. The escalating conflict between Cooper and Ben now concludes with a shootout between them, where Ben retreats to the basement and Cooper to a previously undiscovered loft-space. Barbara, who is now a much stronger character, finally flees the house as she's threatened to do all film, and is found by the rednecks we flew over in Dawn Of The Dead. They return to the house, and Ben emerges zombified from the basement, while Cooper lives, only to be unceremoniously killed by Barbara.

Now, there are crucial changes to the subtext here. In the original, Cooper talked a lot of sense, and for all his flaws he was a highly stressed man concerned for his daughter, as opposed to a genuine villain. In this film he's a coward who hits his wife, refuses to help and ultimately murders Ben. He has very few redeeming features and it's much easier to see him as the antagonist, a view Romero rewards by having him killed off at the end by Barbara, a rather naked enactment of the cosmic moral code in many films where good guys live and bad guys die for their sins.

The original NOTLD was powerful and original precisely because it did away with binary good/evil distinctions that most films sport. There are no heroes and villains in NOTLD '68, just highly-strained and flawed humans, any one of which can and will die: from a little girl to the film's most obvious candidate for hero. Romero's message is clear: humanity's own flaws and tendency to self destruction are far more threatening to the species than even the most outlandish act of God. The zombies are a mirror he holds up to our dark side. In the remake this subtext is expressed directly by Barbara: "We're them and they're us", and yet it takes on a radically different spin in a film where there ARE obvious heroes and villains.

NOTLD '90 seems to be saying that not everyone is a monster deep down, and it is only clearly identifiable villains who threaten to destroy us. It ends with a note of justice where there was exactly the opposite in the original. For all its technical improvements, the remake is held back by finishing on this ray of optimism where Romero originally communicated utter darkness.

Dead Set (2008)

Clichéd but still recommended

[8/10 · 2 November 2008]

For such an incredibly pervasive cultural icon (who doesn't have a Zombie Survival Plan?), the zombie is incredibly poorly represented by cinema. Most zombie films are terrible. In fact, the only zombie films that can really rank as classics even in horror movie terms are the first three Romero films. Beyond that you've got a band of competent efforts: some of the remakes of Romero, the comedy zombie films (Return of the Living Dead, Braindead etc.), the variations on the theme (Dario Argento's Demons, 28 Days Later, Versus) and Lucio Fulci's Zombie. All told that's less than a dozen films. Just about everything else has been terrible and I mean really terrible. Some of the worst cinema ever made is about zombies, most of it either zero-budget American dross or the worst Italy has to offer.

With that in mind, Charlie Brooker's mini-series-cum-TV-movie Dead Set stands out from the pack by miles as a treatment of zombies which is actually very good. It's very well written, mixing realistic dialogue, spot-on satire of reality TV contestants and dark humour without ever getting the tone wrong. It's gory enough to please any splatter fan, with the first competent "ripped apart by zombies" scene in ages, and it manages to create an authentic mood of apocalyptic despair, with the collapse of society sharply depicted. Brooker even manages to fit some decent social commentary into the mix, and does it in a far more holistic and subtle manner that George Romero's latest attempt. Zombies-as-metaphor has always been the preferred way to impart depth onto the death, and Brooker puts in enough subtext about the braindead masses and their mindless consumption of TV and cinema to give you something to talk about afterwards other than the gore effects, should you so wish.

What holds Dead Set back somewhat is its acquiescence to cliché. Like most 21st Century zombie outings, it's packed full of references, most of them to Romero, and the ultimate direction of the plot should be familiar to anyone who's ever watched a zombie film. Many of the shocks and outcomes to scenes will be utterly sign-posted to any fan of zombies, and even the gore effects are content to merely copy the work of Savini et al rather than strike out in his spirit of finding ever-more innovative mutilation of the human form. The over-use of shaky-cam is a more stylistic example of its unoriginality: using wobbly hand-held cameras to create that gritty documentary realism may have been original in 1998 in Saving Private Ryan, but in the decade since then it's been done to absolute death (excuse the pun).

While it does nothing new, Dead Set is still a triumph because it does the old far more proficiently than most have managed. And it's nice to see a British backdrop to the nightmarish apocalypse once again.

RocknRolla (2008)

Yeah, we've seen it all before, but...

[8/10 · 6 September 2008]

I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Guy Ritchie's mockney gangster films. I don't know what it is. I know that they're not very profound and have nothing to say, I know that they're a pure fantasy vision of British crime and I know that if you've seen Lock Stock, you've pretty much seen them all. And yet, as Ritchie returns for a third iteration of the only formula with which he's tasted success , I still find myself walking out of the cinema massively entertained.

RocknRolla does absolutely nothing new. A quick list of things it shares with Lock Stock and Snatch would read thus: fast paced, witty dialogue; complex, interwoven plot threads; central McGuffin driving the mayhem (#1 antique shotguns, #2 huge diamond, #3 a lucky painting); smart, rapid editing; a mountain of Cockney crime stereotypes. Even things such as hard-as-nails Russian henchmen return. It completes the upward curve of scale in Ritchie's crime films: from a rigged card game to a rigged boxing circuit to rigged property development. The crime lords get larger in stature, the sums of money owed have more zeros on the end and the capers required to resolve the situation more grand, but it's still the same concept.

You'd think this was a list of criticisms, and if you found Snatch wearingly familiar you shouldn't need it spelling out that this film won't impress you. Looking for originality? Look elsewhere. RocknRolla may be pushing the formula a little bit, but if you accept that it's still enormous fun. Ritchie's directing is as proficient as ever, it moves at a merry old pace and the plot just about stays on the rails. The characters are endearing and there's plenty of laughs to be had. Other than its dearth of invention, the only real flaw with the film lies in the opening fifteen minutes, where Ritchie sets up the plot strands which will then unravel. Whereas previous films did this in a smooth, unforced way, here Ritchie lathers it with a liberal helping of voice-over narration so there's absolutely no confusion possible as to who is who and what they're after, which on many occasions extends to pointing out the bleeding obvious. Show don't tell- it's the first rule in the book Ritchie! It may be getting to the point where RocknRolla must go down as a guilty pleasure, but guilty pleasures are often the most fulfilling kind. And so it is here.

Hamburger Hill (1987)

Realistic depiction at its artistic limit

[9/10 · 16 January 2008]

Hamburger Hill is all too often compared cruelly (and unfairly) to Oliver Stone's Platoon, a film that predates it by a single year and marked a return to Vietnam by American cinema, almost a decade after Cimino and Coppolla set the bar for celluloid commentary on the conflict. In following Platoon's realistic approach as opposed to the stylised, more artistic nature of these earlier films, as well as Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (another film Hamburger Hill was forced to compete with), John Irvin's film was seen as an inferior copy and is not remembered alongside these aforementioned films as a definitive Vietnam War film.

In truth, Hamburger Hill deserves to stand apart from Platoon as having its own approach and method. Hamburger Hill outstrips any other Vietnam War film in its pursuit of realism, going beyond Stone's fictionalised characters with their spiritual and ideological battles. It tells the true story of the bloody assault on Hill 937, from the perspective of a platoon of mostly new recruits (FNGs or F**king New Guys) lead by a core of experienced troops, headed by Dylan McDermott as the weary but passionate Sergeant Frantz. Irvin spends plenty of time letting us be introduced to the characters, their quirks, their cliques and their internal feuds before letting them see meaningful combat. As the film progresses, so does their relationship to each other and to the war they're fighting.

Hamburger Hill's god is resolutely in the details, and it in these details that most of the film's best moments lie. The little scenes, lines and moments have the air of true anecdotes: often brief, insignificant moments in the larger picture yet they stick in the mind and add up to create a collage of impression. Hamburger Hill is probably the most realistic Vietnam film yet made, and the wealth of details give a sense that this film is the closest we've seen to actually being a soldier in Vietnam. There's none of the involved psychological exploration of a single character like Apocalypse Now, none of Full Metal Jacket's black humour and archly artificial dialogue and none of Platoon's symbolic drama. The most important and impacting moments are always those of the actual conflict: from the headless corpse to the half-filled canteen to the agonising friendly fire scene.

Hamburger Hill is primarily a combat picture, concerned with the ugly vicissitudes of the battlefield and its impact on the people involved, and Irvin captures both the drama and the horror of combat effectively. The combat sequences are never short of either excitement, pathos or intensity. Off the battlefield, the film doesn't have the philosophical meditation that gives Apocalypse Now its enduring resonance, but it is not completely without things to say. The film is utterly anti-war but at the same time pro-soldier: it celebrates the men who fought through the horrific conditions, showing us what they had to deal with, from the anti-war protesters at home who convince a soldier's girlfriend to stop writing to him because it is "immoral" to the faceless Blackjack who conducts the bloodshed from afar and through the simple physical conditions they endured. Irvin's message is that whatever your stance on the conflict, the men there deserve respect, particularly because almost none of them are there to consciously represent any moral or political position.

Hamburger Hill's utilitarian design may prevent it from really being a cinematic classic, but the only chief complaint is that it is dramatically unsatisfying on occasions. The climax, in particular, does not feel suitably impacting compared to the violence that preceded it, and the film simply slows down to an end without any significant flourish. This, ultimately, is a product of its realism: the battle of Hamburger Hill did not have satisfying dramatic structure because it was a real event and Irvin deliberately maintains this reality right to the very end, an admirable gesture. Unfortunately, the director's fulfilment of his own artistic manifesto comes at the sacrifice of audience satisfaction: Hamburger Hill is ultimately too realistic to reach the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Flawed but highly entertaining

[7/10 · 25 May 2007]

The POTC franchise reminds me a lot of the Matrix, and POTC 3 reminded me in many ways of the final Matrix film. Those of you who can remember my lengthy rant/essay about the Matrix films on GD will know that's an ominous sign. The chief similarity is that the first film was essentially stand-alone (and also the best), while the second and third films were essentially one large plot-arc chopped in two, complete with tantalising cliff-hanger ending. Both also involved characters returning from the dead, new villains being introduced, an avalanche of special-effects, and... importantly... a ridiculously large amount of plot, none of it particularly sophisticated.

The Pirates films are not subtle in how they appeal to their core demographic. Unfortunately, when you make sequels you need to keep upping the ante, and when your product isn't subtle or intricate that seems to involve making everything ridiculously excessive. At least in Hollywood it does. The excess is everywhere: the film is ridiculously long, with many completely needless sections; there's a huge roster of characters, including endless side-kicks and sub-plots; the star cameos are endless and the plot is needlessly convoluted and over-cooked, with a seemingly endless series of betrayals as everyone double-crosses everyone else, and then reverts back again. We're not talking about Where Eagles Dare (surely the daddy of ridiculous double-cross plot lines) either, as few of the double-crosses seem necessary. I'm not even sure why half of the plot was needed at all beyond providing an excuse for the set-pieces. There are also countless moments where plausibility is bent to fracture-point in order to make sure the good guys won through.

Of course, when you cut past all that, there's a lot of fun to be had in the film. What particularly struck me is how it provided such a sharp contrast between humour and darkness, with both pervading every scene in an almost Oscar Wildean absurdist inversion of values. Comic interludes were often jet-black in their humour: the frost-bite scene is the kind of visual gag you'd expect from George Romero, not a Disney film. Meanwhile, moments of life and death and key plot progression are shot through with tongue-in-cheek comic touches, even when you'd expect all emphasis to be on the plot. There were also moments of gruesome brutality that made this film dark enough to separate it from the saccharine fluff you associate with family films.

And really, it's the humour that carries the film, far more than the action, which is as frequently as over-cooked as the film's plot. Johnny Depp chews up the scenery as much as he ever did as Jack Sparrow, while his motley crew also chip in lots of good laughs. The film was also capable of being at its most clever with the humour: the post-modernism that was evident in POTC2 gets stronger than ever here. Keith Richards' cameo was a good moment of self-awareness, while I appreciated the running sea-turtles gag, which is thinly-veiled metafiction at its daftest.

Oh, and the music. Hans Zimmer is rapidly elbowing in on John Williams' territory as Hollywood's premier composer of crowd friendly and versatile scores. The main themes are as epic as ever, while this time round there's an infusion of Oriental influences and some more modern touches. It also, bizarrely, channels Ennio Morricone in Spaghetti Western mode at several moments: the parlay scene's music was surely a homage to Once Upon A Time In The West. Good stuff.

So it's far from perfect and no classic, but it's still worth seeing, particularly if you're a fan of the series.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Not worth the hype.

[3/10 · 3 September 2005]

Friday the 13th has become one of the most recognisable franchises in horror, and Jason's hockey-masked, machete wielding killer a firm cinematic figure. However, stripping past this high-profile reveals one of the most bafflingly successful horror films of all time (I put it down to the freshness of the idea), as this really is a poor movie.

For a start, it's terribly directed. There's an incredible over-use of extended shots (lasting several minutes) entirely on hand-held cameras, which start far away and draw slowly closer towards the characters. This was probably intended to build the tension, but it's so over-used you stop caring who's behind the camera. The film also uses that classic of cheap slasher films everywhere- the "eyes" of the killer. It's also incredibly badly paced. The film is over 100 minutes long, and yet that time seems to evaporate without explaining any of the background or developing a solid narrative. People start getting killed off very early, with no explanation. By the time anyone realises there's a serial killer on the loose- there's only one person left alive! Constant, drawn-out tension shots burn through the minutes, and the characters talk the usual filler that we're supposed to breeze over because we're clinging to our seat edges wondering what the killer's going to do next. The clincher is some very suspect editing- with shots lingering on long after anything left in the frame.

Essentially, this is a cheap rip-off of Halloween, and it lacks John Carpenter's direction, John Carpenter's score, John Carpenter's knowledge of how to work the audience up and Donald Pleasance's brilliant armed doctor, who is that film's crucial source of important information. What's left lacks any suspense, and many scenes are even taken pretty much straight from Halloween. The fact that we never know who's killing everyone (they remain a pair of hands and a knife for the most part) destroys the point of the film. Even Tom Savini's gore effects are decidedly tame compared to his still impressive work on George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead a couple of years earlier.

Does anything save this film? Well, ironically the best thing about it also removes the remaining good reason to see it. The acting in this film is actually reasonably good. I've seen countless zero-budget horror flicks and for such an amateur film, the acting is believable and consistent. Only trouble is that none of the characters are developed at all, so you really couldn't care less whether they die or not.

This straight-faced acting actually removes the "so bad it's good" possibility from this film- even though it almost qualifies with perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious scene in movie history. We meet the generic superstitious old man (Ralph) at the beginning, but after he's done his customary "you'll all die" bit he re-appears later on. Apparently he walks twenty miles across country, into the camp without anyone noticing, and goes into a store cupboard, shutting himself in and standing in the darkness, waiting for someone to open it up so he can warn them again for all of five seconds before ambling off into the woods. Absolutely brilliant.

Sadly though, even Ralph doesn't make this film worth watching. If you want a genuinely scary no-budget horror flick set in the woods- then I give you The Evil Dead.