Take Names.

About a year ago I took an interest in comic books. It didn't really last long and it only started because I read Watchmen and brashly assumed that there would be other books that might meet that standard of quality. I was wrong, but I did observe an interesting phenomenon spending so much time talking to strangers in the comic book store. Obviously there's only so much you can mine out of the superhero genre before it's totally tapped, but these people go back to the comic store every week and buy more comics supporting an industry that's thrived for almost a century. The limited story possibilities lead to a lot of formulas and retreads in the comic world, to the point where almost nothing is interesting or original. Only when someone like Alan Moore writes a book, not out of unconditional affection for a character but out of the creative aspiration to do something interesting with the medium do we get anything interesting. Comic book fans, therefore, tend to lead an existence of bare incident, where everything is preordained and they don't even expect the entertainment that they invest so much in to surprise them. Take All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for instance. If I had to guess at Frank Miller's feelings towards comic book fans, it would be that he went into the industry optimistic that he could shake things up and move comics away from their formulaic qualities by introducing a darker imagining of Batman, but all this did was change the standard Batman comic into a gravel road of violence and homoerotic frankness. Depressed and/or a little bit blinded by his success, Miller spent the intervening years applying his skills to graphic novels that he at least had artistic control over. When asked to return to Batman and write something with universal appeal, though not as a continuation of his Batman series, he went balls-out, playing fast and loose with canon and turning Batman into a malevolent thug and having him abuse the fuck out of Robin and Alfred. It was genuinely interesting, well-written, subversive and offensive in the way that good satire should be, but comic fans lost their shit. Knowing they could easily go back to the warm comfort of lukewarm writing, they instead decided to buy the book in massive quantities and complain endlessly that their patron saint, Frank Miller, had abandoned them. And he had. Still has. The demands of the comic world are too shallow for someone with creative ambition to stay in the industry more than a few years without becoming resentful. (There's an argument for Frank Miller being one of the best living satirists here, but it's not an argument that's terribly pertinent to Kick Ass).

That's the feeling I got from Kick Ass, the new film from Matthew Vaughn, who still hasn't convinced me that he should be helming feature films or if he should be chased through the streets and punched to death by a dumpster. It's the most standard formula, dressed up and spun around and fed tequila shots a bit, but in the end it's a perfunctory action film with very little to distinguish itself from the dozens of similar films pumped out every year. Actually, I take that back. This film is more bland and standard than almost any major action film, because they at least have the decency to shake things up even a little bit, but Kick Ass is dicey and poorly executed in ways that the most atrociously bland movie one could assemble wouldn't be.

The film concerns a teenager named Dave played by Aaron Johnson, who's going through the "why aren't I a superhero?" stage of puberty that comes after the pubic hair but before the nipple worms, but he takes it a step further and actually dresses up as a superhero, buys himself some batons and manages to get himself knifed in broad daylight the first time he tries to fight some crime. When he recovers, he dresses up again and quickly encounters a group of men beating the fuck out of some pussy. Dave steps in and a brilliant action sequence ensues. It's exciting, tense, perfectly staged and scored (to a Prodigy song called Omen) and Johnson gets a little speech that really builds up the audience's emotional involvement in the scene and gets them hopped up and ready for a triumphant, crowd-pleasing action scene and then...it ends. Like that. The bad guys just walk away. It was a tremendous disappointment that set the tone for the rest of the film, and really, after all the hype about how it was going to be porn for action film fans, I wanted to push an active volcano into the theater and erupt it all over your seat. YES, YOUR SEAT AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The only truly excellent action scene is a short one that falls in the middle of the film and doesn't add much to the plot, but it's shocking for its frank use of violence, whereas earlier in the film people were getting legs sliced off and things like that, which really took away from the "normal people as superheroes" angle, and it was nice to see an action scene that wasn't cartoonish but contained some shocking violence. Oh, and it's on Youtube. So you can send me whatever you were planning on spending on a ticket. Paypal is okay, but I'd prefer cash in an envelope left under a tree in the park. You know the place. The one where you left your girlfriend's ransom money last summer. I MADE HER INTO A HAT. I believe the success of the scene has a lot to do with its status as a throwaway scene, most likely inserted into the film to keep it moving along at a steady pace and not really subject to Vaughn's recurring aesthetic. It's simpler, and it works a lot better for that.

The film also concerns a few other heroes, specifically Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) who introduced retardedly late in the film so that they won't outshine the main character for the entire film. Without those characters, not only would the studio not have its retarded marketing campaign, but it wouldn't have a film. The entire film is so dependent on them to work and so disinterested in Dave that the entire thing could have not only been successful, but been greatly improved by the exclusion of Dave, who only seems to have been included to give the 18-35 demographic an easy point of reference. His arc is done after he meets Big Daddy and Hit Girl, when he realizes that he's fooling himself and that he'd rather be a Myspace celebrity (really, Hollywood? Myspace?) and the film suffers greatly from his stupid narration. While I've never seen the original cut of Blade Runner, I'd imagine that the narration sounded like this, underlining every little thing that happens, spelling out motivations and themes for stupid people, and generally being a useless asshole.

Most people I know were pretty into the Hit Girl thing, but I don't see how a little girl killing people and saying fuck is very original. You guys should come hang out at my parents' house or something. At least Moretz plays the role with straightforwardness as opposed to the jokiness that I thought she'd employ, and it gives her a bit more credibility as a character who's meant to be a human being made out of flesh and blood and not titanium alloy and wizard poop, which is what Vaughn seems to have been going for.

So what did I think? It sort of sucked. It missed almost every possible opportunity and even Nicolas Cage wasn't that good (which, going by the Cage Curve, should earn him an Oscar). The humor, which really got hyped up by the ad campaign, really fucking bugged me. Most of the jokes were totally throw-away or "little girl says fuck". The only thing that made me laugh was the guy in the back who thought the movie was fucking hilarious, and when a cinema audience on a Tuesday night is more interesting than the movie, go fuck yourself.

4/10

Hate Him Back

There's a fork in the road of responsible criticism. There may be no way for me to know that Louis Leterrier was trying to make a bad movie, but I suspect he was, and with some subtlety. But does Clash of the Titans' badness transcend the traditional definition and put it in a class of the bold and unique? No, not at all. So I can saunter down giving it props for achieving its goals road or I can amble down state road fuck this movie. Either way, I imagine this entire review will be me wrestling with my opinions, dumping an arbitrary numerical score at the bottom of the page and taking a nap, because all roads lead to napville. I'll give Leterrier this much: the badness of Clash of the Titans is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is Sam Worthington's bizarre performance, ranking among the weirdest things born of laziness I've ever seen in a production of this size.

I'll give you guys a quick once-over with the plot, and you tell me what it sounds like. Innocent pile of mashed potatoes living an idyllic life with his super fantastic family is thrust into a situation where the good people of the land are facing a magical nemesis of God-like strength and who they cannot hope to defeat. For poorly explained reasons, our hero can do what thousands of trained, organized men cannot and break into the villain's house, jump him on the toilet and throw the elderly butler down two flights of stairs on the way out. On the way, he encounters dangerous beasts and servants of the villain with huge, glaring weaknesses that they're just begging you to exploit, and acquires many divine tools and weapons, one being a lightsaber, that help him out of overly specific situations.

For those of you who stay a step behind, that's also the plot description for all the Zelda games. Part of what makes this such a fascinating piece of shit is that it's a movie made for people who don't like movies, and would rather spend their time playing video games. Though the execution of this is sloppy because, like all video games, it's only possible to create awkward, stilted characters and narratives out of interactive media, I'm frightened that this will actually work, either now or in the immediate future, and that this is the trend that my beloved blockbuster will follow for the next decade. Not that my relationship with blockbusters has always been a good one. I'm not unaccustomed to bags of oranges reorganizing the layout of my stomach organs or finding myself in a club bathroom snorting cocaine off the ass of a willing woman, but this is a step down a path I'm not willing to follow, especially if Clash of the Titans is any indication of what to expect.

For instance, Sam Worthington was also in the much better Avatar last year where he also played a character whose middle name was Tabula Rasa. In Avatar, Jake Sully was a simple character who went through a simple arc and was like that so that any schmuck could relate and James Cameron could fuel his money-powered robohookers. In Clash of the Titans, Perseus is a personalityless blob because he's a player-controlled character and you want the player to project their own personality onto the character. The writers try to sidestep giving him human characteristics by making him stand for ideals that he has no basis to believe in, but everybody claims to believe in. In one scene he stands up to Zeus of all fucking people and tells him that he will not join the Gods because man stands together and their powerful sense of morality will prevail in the end. He makes a whole speech about brotherhood, clearly forgetting that the first fifteen minutes of the movie established him as sort of a shut-in who just hung out with his immediate family all the time. Yeah, his dad seemed like a pretty good role model, but his whole family was just four people, and they were all killed by the fifth person Perseus ever saw. He doesn't know shit about humanity, unless his fishing rod picks up public access and he's been watching soap operas on a pool skimmer.

So Perseus, as written, is a terrible character, but while the character is bad in an interesting way on paper, Sam Worthington's performance gives it an entirely new dimension of badness. If you remember the beginning of the Zelda games with any clarity, you remember that you always start as a nubile innocent, generally a child in tights whose route to the potion shop always involves skipping through a field of flowers, who never harms a thing and who has a song and a smile for all the creatures of the earth. But when that same player controlled character looks like a five o'clock shadowed, cigar chomping Sam Worthington, you've taken a candy-colored fun slide into a lysergic fever dream. Or maybe a Scandinavian art film. But it only ever gets stranger. For instance, the character and the performance are casually anachronistic, specifically in the face of elements of the production that actually give a shit. Like the silly ancient Greek hairstyles the entire cast sports, except for Sam Worthington who apparently buzzes his hair in the mornings. Or the Greek accents most of the cast makes a passing effort to adopt, except for Sam Worthington who perpetually sounds like he's on the lookout for a mob of kangaroos whose pouches he can hitch a ride in.

When I first heard about this project I got pretty excited. An action film set in Greek myth? I think there's an untapped vein there (though I have a new one to get excited about), and when Liam Neeson was cast as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades and Danny Huston as Poseidon, I thought this could be an incisive, well-acted film with a strong action filmmaker calling the shots. All three of those excellent actors are wasted in this film, though. Liam Neeson gives it a shot but can't act through all the effects and deliver the broad performance the script calls for, Ralph Fiennes, the best "villain character actor" we have in American commercial cinema (except maybe Mark Strong these days) shuffles around wheezing but otherwise acts exactly like Ganondorf, and Danny Huston, who has one line, actually manages to make it out of the film without a scar on his resume. The only person I actively liked in this film was Mads Mikkelsen, a brilliant actor in the European arthouse who played Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and quickly became my all-time favorite Bond villain. His presence was a small consolation, but the man deserves better than this, like a job at the county fair.

I suppose the last six paragraphs I wrote could be rendered moot if the film delivered on the basic levels it's meant to, but it doesn't. I almost missed the slow-motion copper dude porn of 300 during Clash of the Titans' action scenes: at least you could see what was happening in those. People bitch about shakycam ruining movies and giving them a headache (pussies), but they're cool with something like this, where the action is a series of things flying by the camera too close for us to tell what the object actually is, cut together with a maddening disregard for things like blocking and topped off with a shot of Sam Worthington standing on a pile of corpses playing air guitar.

I find it hard to believe that Louis "Hose Fighting" Leterrier directed Clash of the Titans and that movie where Jet Li played a kung-fu fighting dog. You know, the one with Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, the one that got the art crowd to pay attention to martial arts movies for a minute. I thought The Incredible Hulk was pretty mediocre, but I was still enthusiastic about this guy. His directorial choices are baffling here, though. His production design is awful; one scene, for instance, looks like 10% of the original Dagobah set was salvaged, filled with green floodlights and stuffed into frame. It shows a jarring lack of care when all the CGI shots are framed and composed so carefully and the live-action shots are stationary cameras on a flat angle encompassing the whole set so that the actors can wander around during dialogue. That's called a play, it looks boring on a big screen and more green floodlights won't change that.

It also has some of the worst CGI I've ever seen, so no mild consolation for those of us who like to absentmindedly stare at CGI. Many of the CGI shots are textureless, and even more have a an ugly sheen to them, specifically Zeus. I saw it in 2D, but I wonder if this is an effect that the 3D upconversion had on the film. Zeus has an awkward flatness to him when he's glowing, as if he's meant to be popping out and the people responsible for the upconversion used that scene's lighting as an excuse to really fuck with the depth.

So it's bad, yeah. But it's certainly interesting. I wasn't angry walking out of it like I was walking out of Alice in Wonderland. I was pumped up and benign, excited to discuss its tremendous failures with my friends. For now, it has the unmistakable gloss of the CGI boom and is something to be looked at with contempt. But someday, when it has aged badly, it may make a good midnight film.

2/10

Portrait of a (Vampire) Killer

Watching From Dusk Till Dawn has helped me realize why horror films so rarely work. Things need to change and evolve, become new and connect with a new audience. Horror hasn't changed since the 80s, even today when we go see a horror film, nine times out of ten we're watching teenagers get hunted by a murderer of some sort, or maybe we're just watching a person meet a slow demise. People don't actually shake in terror from these things, it's just gore-porn with no real ideas or intentions behind it. Because Hollywood has been lazy and audiences have been even worse, we've been trapped in a revolving door full of mutilated corpses for about thirty years.

That's not a new criticism, but it's a fucking relevant one until someone does something about it. It means a lot to me that From Dusk Till Dawn exists for that reason, even if no one understands its intentions. You see, a major change in any artform has to come in a package that's easy to consume for the public, and after that the truly great genre films will appear. By nature, true horror films are not easy to consume for the public. When something that's truly horrifying but lacking the defining genre stereotypes that make it identifiable as movie horror arrives, people do not know what to do with it and tend to discard it. We're left with truly exceptional experiments that succeeded in more ways than they had any right to that were left totally ignored by the public, and whose reputation has less to do with the actual intentions of the film and more to do with the self-conscious kitsch it wrapped itself in and the reputations of the creative team involved.

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino succeeded more readily than any other filmmaker in trying to do something new and different with horror. I can understand how heartbreaking and disappointing the film's failure was and how that could have driven Tarantino to never touch the genre again and to return to what made him popular in the first place with the nice but forgettable Jackie Brown. If you ask me, and you may as well because you're reading this, From Dusk Till Dawn is Tarantino's strongest screenplay of the 90s, if only because it pulls off such bizarreness so flawlessly.

I can't even begin to summarize the film's plot, so I will say this: it is about two bank robbers slash brothers in Texas. There's a preacher and his family in there somewhere, a bar, a few shootouts and the film may or may not have something to do with vampires. All those plot points and secondary characters are peripheral, though. If you're determined to think of it in these terms, you could call the bank robbers the "monsters" of the film, specifically Richie (Quentin Tarantino) a character that the film lives and dies for. Everything truly important and edgy happens in the first thirty minutes of the film when the secondary characters are just barely introduced and just barely defined.

Which inelegantly brings me to another point. The lengths the film goes to to define characters most people would see as stock (murdering bank robbers) are interestingly contrasted with the film's half-hearted attempts to define the preacher, Jacob (Harvey Keitel, clearly the most professional and actorly of any of these actors), who receives a glazed over characterization in one scene where Seth (George Clooney) prods him for information on his life. The preacher gives him all the typical character bites: his wife died a painful death, he lost his faith, quit his job, he's taking his children with him as he runs away out of grief and the two criminals that have kidnapped him are pushing him to the edge, and he's willing to kill for revenge should either of his two children be hurt. In that one scene we're given a character who is often seen as an interesting, compelling character, but Tarantino shows him to be more a stock character than the murdering bank robbers that he loves with all his heart.

There's a story that Tarantino started writing this film the night that he won his Academy Award. If Tarantino said that in an interview or something he intentionally gave his film another layer of meaning. Tarantino regards Jacob's character with respect, but is far less interested in holding his hand through his routine arc than he is with showing a deranged killer with no capacity to change run into obstacles that he can't wrap his child-like mind around. I hesitate to say Tarantino spits in the face of Oscar bait, because I don't think that he would have included Jacob in the film and given him such rich dialogue and hired an actor he respects as much as Harvey Keitel if he didn't love the character, but I certainly think his presence in the film is a commentary on what was happening in the world of film at the time and how critics and audiences were lumping his films with stuffy domestic dramas just because Pulp Fiction won an Academy Award. Tarantino's love of film has always been B-Movies and exploitation and trash, whereas the sensibilities that the critics fawn over, like his dialogue and his careful characterization, are derived from art and life in general.

In more ways than the blatantly obvious, this film is Tarantino's statement on winning an Academy Award. The clearest evidence that this film is all about Richie is that Tarantino himself plays the character, seemingly untrusting of another actor to take on a character he holds so close to his heart. If we were to list all the movie psychos, my hard drive would probably fry and I'd crash Google's servers, but Richie Gecko is a totally different beast. The movie doesn't relate to him on our terms, it relates to him on his own terms. In many scenes, we're literally inside the head of a murderous psychopath, and that world's similarities to ours make it all the more seductive. The differences are painfully subtle, but perfectly captured in my favorite shot in the film. At one point, Kate, the daughter of Jacob (played by the uniquely sexless Juliette Lewis) turns to Richie and says "Richie, could you do me a favor and eat my pussy? Please?". The suddenness of this statement keeps us wondering if it's really happening for about a second too long, and Richie is totally transfixed by her in all her sexless glory. How the great Guillermo Navarro shot her is a mystery to me, but the effects may be the purest little nightmare I've ever seen. Her eyes are different colors, one a harshly lit green, the other much darker. Her hair is a texture that you would be afraid to touch or that you might have nightmares about being suffocated by. The way her face dominates the frame suggests the powerful sexual urges Richie feels when near a woman he finds sexually desirable. It's interesting to see this scene in context, too, because the two best scenes in the film, featuring the Geckos and a hostage named Gloria, shows Richie's sexuality in a different mode, perhaps fueled by a lack of physical attraction to Gloria.

These two scenes, as I've said, are the best in the film. At the beginning of this post I suggested that From Dusk Till Dawn had a very new brand of horror up its sleeve and it's mostly expressed in those two scenes. In fact, they're so dark and so suspenseful and so perfectly realized that as I watched them this most recent time, I found myself sweating in terror. My point about modern horror is that the novelty of slashers and such has worn off after thirty years, and while I'm well aware of many horror films without men in hockey masks, so few of them work without eventually selling out and becoming just another cheap horror film. An untrained eye could accuse From Dusk Till Dawn of the same crimes, and it wouldn't be a totally unsubstantial argument, but I would argue that Rodriguez and Tarantino aim to make a large statement not only about horror, the history of horror and the optimistic future they have in mind for horror, but the direction that horror is going in thanks to lazy filmmakers and audiences. Their new brand of horror is self-contained and featured in just a few scenes. After that, as is typical of Tarantino's writing, he bounces around from style to style, quickly getting bored with one, but always moving seamlessly.

In fact, Tarantino's genre infatuation (and I'm a man who loves his genre films, so Tarantino is really right up my alley) has never more blatantly been the foundation on which is film is built. Observe: most every character in this film is a genre stereotype who behaves with the logic of that genre "world". I already discussed Harvey Keitel's character, but Seth Gecko, George Clooney's character, is clearly super-slick action hero type, perhaps even a James Bond type. You'll notice he's the only one in the film who can kick a shelf full of bottles and have the exact one he wants fall right into his outstretched hand. He's the only one who can punch someone standing right behind him and cartoonishly knock them unconscious, and you'll notice that he's the one who gets all of Tarantino's trickiest dialogue. Richie is a bit harder to peg, but as I watched the film I got the feeling that his character was mostly derived from screwball comic relief characters. Of course, the twist is how unhinged that person would be, always tagging along with his slick, handsome older brother and watching everything he does fail in comparison to his brother's casual successes.

Now I think it's time we address the elephant in the room: vampires. The fact that it's vampires is incidental, and there's a lot less going on in the second half where Tarantino and Rodriguez indulge their love of B-movies, but there are a few things of note. I'm always taken aback at Tarantino's death scene no matter how many times I see this film. He's become more sympathetic since he murdered Gloria and it's become more and more clear that he's just a child. His death scene has an air of tragedy, and I think that has a lot to do with the filmakers' love and sympathy for the character. Also, Seth makes a statement about the vampires that has a lot behind it:

"I know why you lost your faith. How could true holiness exist if your wife can be taken away from you and your children? Now, I always said God can kiss my fuckin' ass. Well, I changed my lifetime tune about thirty minutes ago 'cause I know, without a doubt, what's out there trying to get in here is pure evil straight from hell. And if there is a hell, and those monsters are from it, there's got to be a heaven. There's just got to be."

There's a lot happening in this speech, but I'd like to direct your attention to the bolded statement. Richie was the monster in the film's first half, and when the vampires are introduced, he is killed. I'm inclined to say the reason the second half exists at all is to mitigate Richie's actions by comparing him to creatures of pure cocksucking evil (there's also a line at the very end about psychos that has a similar effect). Richie may have been a bad person, but he certainly wasn't pure evil straight from hell.

I admire Tarantino's tenacity more than anything about him, but I can't bring myself to commend his performance here. I think it might be a symptom of two major personalities working together so shortly after becoming big fucking deals and not being able to be completely honest with each other. If Tarantino had directed this film and had viewed the dailies, he would have understood why his performance wasn't working. I understand that he's protective of the role, but he's just not right for it because he's not an actor. It's absurdly clear when he's interacting with Clooney, who's doing some of the best work of his career in this film. Tarantino understood that he has an awkward screen presence, but he did not understand that an awkward screen presence is not the same thing as an awkward presence in this film. I think Tarantino learned his lesson here, too, because to illustrate my point, it's very easy to point to Frederik Zoller in Inglourious Basterds. His very presence disrupts the flow of the film with its awkwardness without ever once taking you out of the film with stiff expressions and movement and stilted speech.

Aside from Clooney, my favorite performance in the film is Brenda Hillhouse (who I just discovered was Tarantino's acting teacher) playing the hostage Gloria. She only has a few lines, but the camera is unwilling to stop looking at her, and she gets the most interesting character moment in the film that isn't given to Richie. When Richie innocently and disarmingly invites her to watch TV in the other room with him, she spends a few moments hesitating before she and the audience begin to understand that he's genuine and that he is truly a child. We understand his capacity and penchant for violence, but we are as yet unaware of his capacity for sexual violence. We know something bad is happening, and there's an ominous fog over the whole scene, but we root for Gloria and hope that she survives and that we've just misread Richie. How much Hillhouse communicates just with expression is one of those acting marvels.

I can't express how badly this film has been misjudged. Hopefully history will be kind to it, but its only reputation is as the midnight movie that it sort of is for about thirty minutes. It's given no thought or credit outside of that and I blame audiences too lazy to engage with it on a level outside of exploding vampires. It's not unusual for a brilliant genre film to be ignored for everything but its cheap pleasures, but the disservice done to our fucking culture by ignoring From Dusk Till Dawn is head-spinning. The beating it took critically and at the box office may not have been your fault, peers of mine who were six years old when this film came out, but it's your fault for not rediscovering this film for more than its trashiness.

10/10

The Devil May Care

Like so many movie faggots, I have a specific area of interest. Some are interested in crappy horror films, some love middlebrow Oscarbait, and I love action films, so when I see an action film I may have a completely different reaction to it than most people. For most people, the worth of a film isn't teetering on the edge a cliff above a fiery abyss made of cancer, and they judge action films on weird garbage like "is the story original", but they all run screaming from the room when I pull out a David Lynch film, but I digress.

My point is, for me, action films are graded on a curve. I have to use every bit of strength in my body to resist giving Spider-Man 3 a 10/10 based on its action sequences, some of the best ever filmed, and remind myself of that film's narrative nightmare and the fact that it's an hour too long and features some really shitty performances. I'll dismiss an entire film in minutes if the action is done poorly, despite whatever assets it may have.

And Sherlock Holmes has assets pouring out of every orifice. The most obvious is Robert Downey Jr., if not, surely, the best working actor, at least my favorite. I can name a dozen actors that could out-act him in community college reproduction of Transformers 2, but not one man alive that is cooler than him. And casting him as Holmes was a stroke of absolute genius. Plus, we get Jude Law as Watson? And Mark Strong as the villain? How could this go wrong?

Guy Ritchie is how it can go wrong. I quite like Snatch., despite my pretentions towards serious film criticism and even Rocknrolla was a fun movie, so initially it didn't seem like such a problem. There was even a totally awesome, hyper-stylized chase scene in Rocknrolla that made me think Ritchie was a man who could handle action. But we'll get back to that in a moment.

Sherlock Holmes is a character I know you're all familiar with. When you're lazily insulting people for being unobservant, you're probably conjuring the great detective's image. In this instance, he's being filtered through Robert Downey Jr.'s persona, which is to say "eccentric genius", so it's a spectacular fit. He's being rewritten as an action hero, which is okay, because it was bound to happen eventually. And Watson, the original sidekick, is played pretty spectacularly by Jude Law, giving the film two excellent central performances that it doesn't deserve. Holmes and Watson play a bickering old Jewish couple who spend a lot of time getting into fistfights and stopping evil plots like most dynamic duos do. In this particular instance, we get that hoary old trick of establishing them as best buds in the whole world while they casually bring down a terrifying menace, only to send them home and into some lame marital problems. The whole opening is lazy and poorly realized, and it's probably the best part of the film overall.

The evil menace in this case is a certain Lord Blackwood, played by the brilliant Mark Strong who sadly doesn't get to be that brilliant in this film. He's been dabbling in black magic and murdering young women and thanks to Holmes and Watson, is hanged for his evil deeds. But before being hanged he promises to rise from the grave and take England for his own, and when he does it's up to Holmes to use logic to stop this seemingly supernatural menace.

So there's your plot, and it sounds okay. The only real question I have is why the filmmakers didn't get their teeth into the "logic vs. superstition" thematic territory that the film flirts with, but Sherlock Holmes commits worse crimes, so I won't dwell on that.

I know this is bad blogging (holy shit, I'm a faggot), but allow me to return to some earlier points, specifically the action scenes and the opening. From the first fight scene I thought that they had taken the action too far. For turn-of-the-century England it was far too bombastic and explodey, and was totally inappropriate for the story. The first fight scene in an action film generally serves as a teaser, usually being the tamest fight and as the film goes on the action will get bigger and more bombastic and explodey. I knew the film was going to fuck everything up from the outset, then, when the opening would barely be appropriate for the climax. The film would have been best served by a series of Indiana Jones-style brawls between Holmes and a small number of combatants. And maybe some fast-paced footchases. The action scenes are way too big a deal for a film like this, and I couldn't stand some of the setups. For instance, the climax is set up on a bridge under construction, but the characters don't go up there for any fucking reason. They just go up there. And then they fight. It leaves us with characters uninvested in their environment and looking like they're swordfighting between shots of absinthe.

The biggest violator of everything great about action films, though, is what's meant to be the showstopping setpiece at the center of the film. Holmes and Watson run into two men and a bloody giant in the slums of London. From its setup, it promises to be an exciting brawl as Watson fights the two men and Holmes uses his brainpowers to outwit the skyscraper. But the film's definition of "outwit" is "pick up a magical electric device that zaps the enemy to death and zap the enemy to death". That is, of course, until the redwood starts running away. Imagine the giant guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark running away from Indiana Jones and Indiana Jones chasing after him, rubbing sand in his eyes and taking his lunch money, and you'll get an idea of how this scene plays. Except he only runs away to set up a boring fight at a dock in the most contrived manner possible. So let's break this down really fast: exciting setup that has all its suspense sapped from it when we give our hero a magic weapon, and then the suspense is further sapped when the rhinoceros he's fighting fucking runs away and then we're supposed to be invested in the fight again when the tyke starts smashing everything for ten minutes while Holmes daintily steps out of the way. As a general rule of thumb, don't have your Robert Downey Jr.-sized man chase down a behemoth if you want the audience to be invested in your film.

And I haven't even commented on the insane editing yet. As I said before, there's an action scene in Rocknrolla that is some sort of post-modern action masterpiece with all its camera shakes and crazy angles, cameras mounted on the actors, etc., and the editing is the glue that holds the whole scene together. In this case, the editing is loose and confusing and serves only to sap any suspense or excitement from the fights. I can't say enough about how bad the action is, but I'll move on because there's so much more to discuss as it is.

The most obvious error the film commits is to include Rachel McAdams, who's a doll for sure, but has no business in this film and who I still harbor ill will towards. Aside from her character being totally useless to the plot and only being present so the teenage boys the film is targeted at can have something to look at (which is fine, she's great to look at), her primary function is to drop Moriarty's name. Moriarty's presence in this film could be fun, but it's so unsubtle and stupid, which could also be fun if played as affectionate kitsch, and unnecessary in doing anything but setting up the inevitable sequel. I'm surprised that they didn't look to another recent film that namedropped the universe's main villain in a way that was subtle and exciting and set up the film for a sequel without being overbearing.

Argh. This movie just has so much wrong with it. It's such a fucking shame because they hired the coolest man alive to play the part of the coolest man of the turn of the century, a time period with really cool clothes. The only parts where the film gets to shine are where it totally focuses on Downey Jr., namely the bits where Holmes explains his deductive method, and even more specifically, a scene in the opening where he plans out in his head exactly how he's going to take down an adversary and then executes it flawlessly.

There's no reason that this shouldn't be the best action film of the year, but it just fumbles on every occasion. It's worth seeing if you have the same homoerotic feelings for Robert Downey Jr. that I do, and especially if, like I do, you think that Jude Law is a certifiable badass and would consort with gypsies and dabble in the black arts to put them in a movie together. I get so frustrated thinking about this film because it's such a waste of such talented people.

But I have one shiny ray of hope. Guy Ritchie, in the past, has responded well to criticism. After the success of Lock Stock and Snatch and the subsequent failures of Swept Away and Revolver, he turned in the very fun Rocknrolla that was an answer to all his fans' criticisms. I hope that he heeds the critics' warnings in preparing his sequel, because there's no reason that this film shouldn't be the most fun thing in theaters.

4/10