2 Stars

Seventh Son Review

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I grew up on fantasy movies. Movies like Legend, Willow, Conan the Barbarian or The Princess Bride. Not all of them are great, or even good movies, but I loved them all the same. Swords and sorcery was my jam. When I see something like Seventh Son in theaters, something that appears to be something of a throwback, I can’t help but get a little excited. Even though I had no expectation that Seventh Son would be a good movie, I did hope it would be a fun one. Even that hope was dashed. Seventh Son hovers uncomfortable between misplaced gravitas and campy fun. Its humorlessness and weightlessness dim its slight charms. Still, just enough fun shines through that I can’t be disappointed to have seen it.

The movie opens with Sir Gregory trapping a woman, Mother Malkin the witch, down a hole, then her escaping when the moon turns red. When Gregory, the Spook, a man who hunts witches and other such beings, loses his apprentice in another confrontation with her, he must seek out another one. Since only the seventh son of a seventh son can become a Spook, his options are limited. And he must train this new apprentice fast, since if they can’t defeat Mother Malkin before the Blood Moon is full then she will conquer the land. It should be a simple quest, but it gets rather muddled.

The sole reason to watch this film is Jeff Bridges. His Sir Gregory manages to be both off putting and charming, some ungodly mix of Gandalf and The Dude that sounds like Sean Connery. He drinks and struts and quips his way through every scene, while leading man Ben Barnes’ Tom takes everything so seriously. Really, his over serious romance with the ambiguously allied Alice is the unbeating heart at the center of this movie. Julianne Moore comes close to matching Bridges weird energy, but her underbaked but interestingly designed allies don’t have much to work with.

The real problem with Seventh Son is that no matter what fantastic thing is happening on screen, it manages to make it feel dull. One can becomes deadened to CGI effects, but Seventh Son’s are more than fine. But the fight scenes lack rhythm and weight. They just sort of happen. When a fight scene bogs down, then a convenient cliff is found for everyone to leap or fall off of, though this rarely results in any great harm. Moments that should be full of emotion are instead completely devoid of it. When a character’s loved one dies, you expect an emotional reaction, not just a cold acceptance of the fact of their death. Discovering a betrayal results in a few seconds of confusion. Somehow it makes an aerial battle between two dragons boring.

The film also lacks a comprehensible sense of geography. The bulk of the action takes place in misty green mountains, on the rocky crags and mirrored lakes. But they visit a city that is emebeded into the wall of a desert mesa. Yet this city seems to somehow be the one closest to the rest of the action. They ride horse a lot, but never seen to actually go anywhere. There is no progression to their travels.

Despite all the problems, Bridges almost carries Seventh Son to being worth watching. He clashes with everyone else in the movie, save Moore, but his take is much more entertaining than theirs. If his oddball charm had been complimented by something, anything exciting then I think I could recommend this as a piece of entertaining trash, something like Dragonheart’s enjoyable badness. There just isn’t enough joy to be had here. It squanders whatever charms it might have had and results in a movie that, while not as brain dead stupid as many blockbusters, is unfortunately dull.

**

Conan the Barbarian Review

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The new Conan the Barbarian movie does a lot of things right. It is a perfectly trashy, lurid, vulgar low fantasy. The movie makes no pretense of being anything else. It captures the look and feel and taste of that sort of pulp fantasy. Which makes the problems with the film a bit more devastating than they should be. There are two major flaws to Conan the Barbarian, and they nearly, but not quite sink the whole movie. Continue reading →

Sucker Punch Review

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If you have read the reviews of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch you have no doubt heard that it is insultingly bad, a complete failure of filmmaking.  While the glee some reviewers seem to be taking in eviscerating the movie is disgusting, there is some truth to them.  Sucker Punch is largely a failure.  But many of the reviews seem to miss the point entirely.  Roger Moore‘s, of the Orlando Sentinel, review called it “an unerotic unthrilling erotic thriller.” While I am sure he pleased with his wittiness, the quote exposes just how much he missed the point.  Sucker Punch is something of a thriller, it sits in between that and about five other genres, one thing it is definitely not, nor is it intended to be, is erotic.  Though someone judging the movie based on its trailers could be forgiven for thinking so.  Sucker Punch appears to be cotton candy; light and sweet and wholly insubstantial, but it is not.  It is cotton candy wrapped around a corn dog; there is substance there even if you maybe wish there were not.

Sucker Punch tells the story of “Babydoll”, a young girl whose evil stepfather has her committed to an insane asylum and scheduled for a lobotomy in order to get his hands on her inheritance.  With the help of some fellow inmates, Babydoll masterminds an escape attempt.  Instead of this simply occurring in the asylum, the movie takes place in two levels of imagination.  The first, which is seen through the bulk of the movie, is the asylum as a bordello.  The corrupt orderly becomes a ruthless pimp and the doctor trying to help the girls becomes the Madame.  When the women attempt to retrieve one of the items needed for their escape the world becomes a fantastic battlefield, where the characters become soldiers.

Problems arise with the exact relationship among the three levels of reality.  Sometimes it works great, like the lighter (with a dragon on it) needed becoming a fire-breathing dragon.  Sometimes the parallel is not clear.  In the bordello, Babydoll entrances everybody with an implied striptease, but what is she doing to draw attention in the asylum?  The concept is interesting, but the execution is less confusing than confused itself.

The missions, each set to a different song that it just too meaningful, are the films highlights.  Whatever problems Snyder may have with storytelling, he knows how to film an action scene, slow motion notwithstanding.  The mission’s settings are not believable because the settings are intentionally and inherently unbelievable.  They take place in fantastic, but coherent worlds.  These are the cotton candy.  The young stars, Emily Browning, Abby Cornish and Jena Malone, do a great job in the action scenes.  The enemies they face are delightfully unbelievable.  20 foot-tall samurais and clockwork zombie German soldiers.  They are beaten by barely more than teen girls, but these scenes are expressly fantasies, they are deliberately unreal.  Though the movie may falter in other places, the actions scenes are great.

The bordello/asylum parts are less good.  It seems like parts of it were not completely thought out.  Dr. Gorski’s position is particularly problematic.  If she is a doctor, shouldn’t she have a better idea of what is happening with her patients, especially is she is supposed to care.  It does play with the viewers expectations.  Positioned as a “geeky” movie, shown at comic conventions and whatnot, Sucker Punch is not what they expected.  While the characters are dressed in somewhat skimpy outfits, and I’m being generous to call them somewhat so (I mean really look at how much skin is showing), Snyder makes sure never to titillate.  While the setting and outfits may suggest sexiness, the movie is deliberately unsexy.  It is the same with Babydoll’s dances.  We know they are sexy due to everyone else’s reactions, but we never see her dance.  Babydoll and friends are put into the most powerless position possible, then take control of it.  We are supposed to know they are exploited, but not given a chance to revel in the exploitation.

The problem is not with these scenes empowering intentions, but with the clumsiness of their execution.  Snyder knows neither subtly nor irony, (I once heard that somebody tried to explain subtly to Snyder, but Snyder punched him the face until he exploded.  I assume that is why no one has had the courage to try with irony.) which is often a strength (the action scenes) but here it is a weakness.   The setting of the asylum and the bordello is poorly explained and poorly resolved.  Sucker Punch wants to be deep and meaningful, but its message is not particularly deep and its meaning is not clear.

Sucker Punch is admirable in its failure.  It could have just been the action scenes, and possibly been a better movie for it, but Snyder tried to do more.  It does spectacle, and does it well, but the depth it strives for just is not there.  It is that corn dog in the middle of your cotton candy; it may be more filling, but it clashes with the sugary sweetness of outside and is not particularly good on its own.  Still, you have to admire the audacity of trying to put a corn dog in the middle of some cotton candy.

**

Prince of Persia Movie Review

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Prince of Persia is not a very good movie.  It could and should have been better than it was, but due to some truly baffling plot points what could have been an entertaining summer epic is just a mess.  Many viewers will write this off as the inevitable consequence of basing a movie on a video game, but contrary to that this movie is better when is stays close to its video game roots and falls flat when it deviates.  The deviations from the game include obvious twists and drawing heavily on tired influences.  The result is that what could have been the first truly good video game based movie is instead an uninspired and uninteresting amalgam of better movies.

The parts of Prince of Persia that could have made it good are there if the plot had let them.  First, for a summer action movie the acting is actually very good.  The casting was dead on as well.  There were no outstanding performances but neither were there any noticeably poor ones.  The acting was better than expected for a blockbuster.  Also the action scenes were good.  They were clear and well choreographed.  The movie shines when the focus leaves the asinine plot and shows Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhal) performing acrobatic parkour feats.  This is something that hews closely to the video game, which was primarily about using the Prince’s acrobatics to traverse the trap filled wreckage of a ruined palace.  In the movie this translates into entertaining and unique action sequences.  Prince of Persia is a joy to look at as well.  The plot of the movie goes to some breathtaking and awe-inspiring places that really make the movie feel epic.  It’s bad that the adventure itself is so dull.

Prince of Persia starts by showing how the titular Prince became such.  Unlike the game, Dastan was not born a Prince.  For some reason the script writers or somebody felt that what PoP really needed was a big dose of Disney’s Aladdin.  In fact he is introduced in a near exact copy of the scene that introduces Aladdin in his movie.  It then moves to the Prince, his two brothers and their uncle debating whether or not to attack a castle that they have been told not to but appears to be conspiring with their enemies.  As soon as the uncle appears on screen he might as well have “villain” tattooed to his forehead.  He looks very much like “Aladdin’s” Jafar.  The uncle, who wants to fight, wins the argument and the battle begins.  During the well done battle scene Dastan acquires a dagger that can control the sand of Time.  He is quickly framed for the death of his father and escapes with the princess of the attacked castle.  This leads to about an hour of the Prince trying to get in touch with his uncle to tell him he was framed, even though it is obvious to everyone in the audience that the uncle is the one who framed him.  The movie plays it as though it is some big twist, but it is really just a waste of time.  How could anyone doubt that Jafar is the bad guy?

The Princess is a troubled character.  At the start she is capable of defending herself and even of killing the Prince when she catches him by surprise.  But as the movie goes along she becomes more and more helpless and useless.  Also introduced are Han Solo and Chewbacca.  Actually it is the leader of a band of gambling thieves and his faithful bodyguard.  Despite being somewhat pointless additions they are entertaining.  Though why it was thought adding Star Wars to an already confused plot was a good idea baffles.

The plot eventually takes the Prince and friends to a place where the dagger can be kept safe, though hit is not clear how considering it has already been found and destroyed.  It is revealed that Jafar wants to use the sands to go back and stop himself from saving his brothers life when they were kids.  The Prince is able to stop him, but only after he has rewound time to before all the bad things in the movie happened.  And he still gets the girl.  In the game it starts with the Sands being unleashed and it follows the Prince’s attempts to fix things.  Rewinding to before it happened is the goal and it costs the Prince his relationship with the Princess.  Instead of the goal, the rewind is a happy accident that was said to cause the destruction of the world in the movie.  It takes something that is convenient in the game and makes it stupidly more so.

Prince of Persia ends up as a messy combination of several better works; Aladdin, Star Wars and the game.  It feels longer than its already bloated runtime, with its stellar action scenes too few and far between when compared to the lame plot.  It is sad that the most glaring flaws of Prince of Persia will be written off as the remains of its video game heritage when in actuality those are the parts that stray furthest from the video game.

**