One Iconic Scene Does Not Justify The Lackluster Spy Film Mission: Impossible

The Good: Smart protagonist, Generally good acting
The Bad: Special effects, Obvious plot reversals, No real character development, Dumb peripheral characters, Overbearing soundtrack
The Basics: When Ethan Hunt’s team is burned, he learns there is a conspiracy within the Impossible Missions Force and he is the prime suspect.


With so many reviewers going gaga for James Bond in celebration of his 50th Anniversary and the accompanying Blu-Ray/DVD collection for that milestone, I thought, “Now’s the perfect time for me to review Mission: Impossible.” What can I say? I’m a contrarian at heart. Actually, I have a thing about having sensibility in my reviews and I vaguely recalled seeing Mission: Impossible III (reviewed here!) and being disappointed by how derivative of Alias (reviewed here!) it was. Conversely, I enjoyed last year’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (reviewed here!), so I thought it was time to go back and see the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film.

I am not impressed. Within the film and as a professional reviewer, there were too many conceits utilized by Mission: Impossible that made it problematic at best. As a viewer who understands how Hollywood works (at least in general terms) the fact that the film opens with a shot of Emilio Estevez, whose name does not appear in the opening credits, is a disturbing nod that informs the viewer they should not get overly attached to his character. In the film itself, Mission: Impossible features one of the dumbest criminal masterminds of all time in that the “diabolical genius” who is behind the film’s conspiracy (which he has apparently been planning for some time) stupidly tells the truth at key moments which allow the protagonist to easily reason who is behind everything. Obviously, if one is a mole in a government agency, they should be used to lying and working covertly. The villain in Mission: Impossible does so so poorly that it is hard to believe that the person gets as far as they do.

Following a mission in Kiev, Jim Phelps assembles an Impossible Missions Force Team in Prague. With the stated mission being to recover a disc that has the aliases and mundane names of every IMF operative working in Eastern Europe, Phelps’s team, which includes Ethan Hunt, Claire Phelps, Sarah, Jack and another operative, infiltrates a party. The mission, however, goes sour and everyone but Hunt appears killed. Contacting command, Hunt is put in contact with Kittridge, who happens to be in Prague and is able to extract Hunt. Meeting with him, Kittridge reveals that there is a mole in the IMF and because Hunt’s family farm has suddenly come out of debt, he is the prime suspect.

Evading Kittridge’s men, Hunt makes it to a safe house, where he attempts to find the people who gave the IMF the mission and he discovers Claire is still alive. Claire and Hunt assemble their own team of former IMF agents to get the list which was used as bait to draw out the real mole. As Kittridge closes in on his team, Hunt learns the identity and motivations of the enemies of the IMF.

To the credit of Mission: Impossible, Ethan Hunt is characterized as a realistically smart protagonist. He asks – immediately – one of the key questions of Kittridge when he learns that the other agent is in Prague. Hunt is operating on a level that makes him seem like a credible, realistically-seasoned spy. He might not be a good son (why would he let his family farm stay in debt if he had such a good job?!), but he is a realistically competent spy protagonist.

The acting in Mission: Impossible is fair. Tom Cruise is credible, if young looking, for a superspy action hero Ethan Hunt. On the character front, Ethan Hunt and his family ties make less sense for a spy of his caliber (obvious weakness), but Cruise gets into the role after the opening meeting scene (in that, none of the performers seem to be taking the briefing seriously enough to be actual intelligence agents. The scene is fun, but not at all believable). The only other truly credible actors in Mission: Impossible are Emilio Estavez and Ving Rhames. Jean Reno, who can usually be counted on for a great performance, plays Krieger as clumsy at a moment when the character cannot afford to be and he does not sell the moment. Similarly, Emmanuelle Beart, who plays Claire, is a pretty generic pouty-lipped, Hollywood ideal who has no presence or gravitas on the screen. Henry Czerny, at least, has the excuse that he isn’t given much to do with Kittridge as a generic antagonist.

Several of the shots in Mission: Impossible do not work in a rational sense. Coming off the iconic scene in the record’s room, Ethan Hunt catches a bead of his own sweat to prevent it from setting off the alarm. The shot looks marginally good, but it is so obviously an insert shot that it is distracting to the seasoned viewer. In other words, there is no way the hand could be at the angle and placement it is shot in, especially catching the sweat, in the reality of Hunt’s body position in the shot. In fact, the movement needed to make it work would have caused the suspended character to pinwheel.

Director Brian De Palma sacrifices rationality for the cool look in several key moments. The finale of the film involves Ethan Hunt laying inches away from a helicopter blade and he looks mildly startled. That helicopter blade should have been exceptionally hot; regardless of it missing slicing open Hunt’s neck, he should be pretty uncomfortable from the heat. De Palma hopes the viewer will not notice this. Furthermore, he uses an incredible reliance on the soundtrack to telegraph the emotions and tension the viewer is supposed to feel.

They do not.

As well, De Palma makes several obvious cuts - most obviously with Jack's demise - where he is obviously laboring to keep the film PG-13 and it looks and feels sloppy at those moments.  The result is a spy film that strives to be even average, but is so preoccupied with creating the next “surprise” twist that the viewer is left bored for much of the movie.

For other spy thrillers, check out my reviews of:
Skyfall
The Bourne Identity
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

3/10

Check out how this film stacks up against others I have reviewed by visiting my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Turnaround on U Turn, Oliver Stone's Directing School Art Project

The Good: Some decent acting, Moments of character/intrigue
The Bad: Stone's directoral toying, Terrible characters, Feels long
The Basics: With violent, mean and unredeemably bad characters, U Turn tells a story of a man trapped in a backwater town that Oliver Stone sloppily creates.


When I was in college, possibly when I saw The Usual Suspects (reviewed here!) in the theater, I saw a preview for Oliver Stone's U Turn. Ever since then, it has been on my list to see and I was thrilled to find it on DVD (albeit a no-frills version) and I was excited to sit down and watch this movie. If anything, I was biased toward it from the previews I barely remembered. As the movie stretched on and on, the anticipation faded and the reality sunk in; there's a reason U Turn is almost never mentioned with Stone's classic works JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Bobby Cooper is driving through Arizona en route to paying off a gambling debt that has already cost him two fingers when the radiator tube in his car's engine ruptures and he is forced to get it repaired. In the desert, he finds the small town of Superior and a crazy hick mechanic named Darrell. While Darrell is repairing Bobby's car, he goes into the town where he encounters Grace. Grace is nice enough, recognizes his flirting and brings him back to her house. Bobby is attacked by her husband, Jake, who then approaches Bobby with a proposition; he'll give him money to kill Grace, a proposition Bobby rejects. Unfortunately for Bobby, he's at the site of a stick-up and the money he's carrying to pay off his debts gets shot up by a store owner who kills the robbers. As Bobby is tossed between Darrell and a psychopath named TNT, attracted to Grace and avoiding the law in the form of Sheriff Potter, he finds himself desperate to get out of Superior and in need of money he does not have.

U Turn has a number of elements that seem to set it up for greatness. It has a respected director (Oliver Stone), it has a decent cast that includes Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez (remember when she was primarily an actress?), and Billy Bob Thornton. It has characters that are, at the very least, intriguing. It even has some truly brilliant lines. The problem is, almost none of them all come together at the same time.

Possibly the best moment - and this is in the trailer, so it's not revealing anything too big - is when Bobby, played perfectly in the scene by Sean Penn, turns to Darrell - played with gruesome perversity by Billy Bob Thornton - and with uncharacteristic wit says, "Forty thousand people die each day, how come you're not one of them?" Now that's an insult! Penn delivers the line well, to the right character at the right moment. It's a nice moment of cinematic quality that is not necessarily indicative of the rest of the film.

Bobby owes people money and they've lopped off some of his fingers so from the moment Bobby comes into the picture, the viewer knows we're not dealing with the morally upstanding citizens of the world. Writer John Ridley does not keep the viewer waiting long, with Darrell being the first character the very impatient Bobby encounters. Whatever sympathy we have for Darrell who is immediately insulted by Bobby, fades with his shifty ways and underlying meanness (to say nothing of his rotted smile).

In short, U Turn features a cast of almost entirely unlikable characters. Superior, Arizona is populated by rogues, killers and psychopaths who bully, bribe and sex their ways through life. And it gets old pretty quick. Unlike a movie like Payback (reviewed here!) where the viewer roots for the antihero because they have been, in some way, wronged and has some redeeming quality to them, U Turn has no such luck.

Throughout this movie, characters tell Bobby that they see within him the killer instinct, the ability to kill, something he claims he has never done before arriving at Superior. The thing is, whether they see it or not, Bobby's sense of desperation leads him to exercise what he's never seen within him before. It's that kind of weak characterization where there's no integrity that turns the viewer off to empathizing with him. Instead, the viewer shrugs and says, "Don't care what's coming to him now."

Even the abused Grace has moments where the viewer thinks her character might be redeemable. Alas, Ridley and director Oliver Stone mortgage that by making Grace even more shifty than her abusive husband Jake. To his credit, Stone chose well to cast Jennifer Lopez as Grace and Nick Nolte as Jake. Nolte is appropriately menacing as Jake and almost every moment he's on screen makes the viewer's skin crawl. Similarly, Powers Boothe is decent as Sheriff Potter.

What's unredeemable is Stone's directing. Stone plays with the camera like a film school student, cheapening almost every vital moment of the film by using camera techniques. A good (or great) director figures out how to use the medium to effectively tell the story they want. While I applaud experimentation, Stone's camera experiments fail to illuminate the story or more importantly the characters in U Turn. Instead, the abrupt clips are distracting, sloppy and annoying.

Whatever potential the rogues gallery of U Turn had of surviving the unlikability of the characters and the somewhat predictable (or standard) criminal underworld plot is mortgaged by Stone's direction which sinks this film out of being watchable. At least now, it's off my list. If it's on yours, you might want to take it off before you, too, are disappointed.

For other works by Oliver Stone, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Platoon
Wall Street
W.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

4/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Oscar Pandering Season Comes Early With Pride And Glory This Year's Latest Police Epic.

The Good: Acting
The Bad: BOOM MIKE!, Stale plot, Nonsensical character elements, Obvious stereotypes.
The Basics: Predictable, obvious and riddled with problems a first-year film student knows to avoid, Pride And Glory flops when it could have coasted by as average.


This is entirely a retro-review. Written from an advanced screening back in 2008, I was floored when the film – days before it was set to be released – was plagued with technical problems. As I did not enjoy the movie, I have not since gone back to re-view it. So, I opted to keep the original language – all of it – for the transfer of the review to my blog. Enjoy!

Usually, right before the Oscar nominations are released, there will be a rush of movies put out that are the qualitative best films the studio feels they have to offer. These are the movies with the big stars doing dramatic things and trying to impress the nominating committees to win the big awards. This season is usually later in the year and it never fails to amuse me how most of the Summer Blockbusters are almost always automatically disqualified from the running simply because they arrive outside the rather short memory span of the nominators.

I mention this as preface to my review of Pride And Glory because as part of the drive to get nominated for Oscars, there is usually at least one big police epic and this year, it certainly appears that this is trying to fill that niche. Let's face it, Edward Norton was not going to be nominated for any acting awards for The Incredible Hulk (reviewed here!). So, he's here with Collin Farrell doing their best to prove their acting worth to get the nominations both they and the film want. It's a bit early, but Pride And Glory has all of the elements that nominators seem to look for when it comes to considering people and films for nominations.

Ray, Francis, and Jimmy are three brothers (Jimmy is a brother-in-law) working in the NYPD under their father, Francis Sr. when four officers go into a drug kingpin's apartment and are shot and killed. Francis Sr. begs Ray to come off Missing Persons and spearhead the investigation, an investigation that quickly becomes a hunt of Angel Tezo, the drug lord whose apartment was being raided when the officers were killed. Ray enters the investigation to do right and put to rest the demons of his past and finding Tezo and avenging the deaths of the officers seems a reasonable way to do that.

Jimmy has his own reasons for wanting to find Tezo; as part of a quartet of corrupt cops, Jimmy and his three partners dispose of Tezo's getaway car and mull over the deal they have made with a rival druglord to move product on their own. In the process of both the law and the lawless law officers hunting Tezo, there is another shooting while three officers look into a misparked car. As Ray's investigation progresses, it gets him closer to Jimmy's corruption and Francis Junior's complicity and puts his own life in serious jeopardy.

I did not set out to pan Pride And Glory. Indeed, I like a good cop story as much as virtually every other American. Pride And Glory started out as a pathetically average cop story. The allegiances were known early on, so like recent Best Picture winner The Departed (reviewed here!), this is more a story about the process of one protagonist getting to the place the audience is from the second scene. We're watching Ray piece together everything to get to Jimmy's corruption while we watch Jimmy ordering him men to do heinous things.

Why, then, is Pride And Glory rated so lowly by me and I am baffled by the praise heaped upon it by the "professional" reviewers? Well, it's pretty obvious when you see the movie, at least the print I saw tonight. The potential weakness of seeing a movie through the studio at premiere screenings is that when they learn of a problem a few days before the wide release of a film, they are sometimes able to fix it. In the case of Pride And Glory, they've got a lot of work to do before this Friday. Why?

The boom is visible. A lot. In key scenes, the microphone is seen bopping around at the top of the screen. It's not a subtle thing, either; it moves, it shakes, it's there. It's there and the first time I noticed it, I was surprised, made a note and brushed it off. By its tenth appearance, I was thinking a boom operator and an editor ought to be fired. In key scenes where emotional and crucial dialogue is being given, all eyes in the theater were drawn to the moving boom and mike and people began laughing. Sadly, the most fun we had tonight at Pride And Glory was not, in fact, the engaging story (it wasn't), but rather "spot the mike!" It is ridiculous that any prints went out like this and if it's not fixed, anyone who rates this five stars was simply not paying attention. I estimate at tonight's showing the boom and/or microphone was visible in approximately 10% of the shots. That's pathetic and director Gavin O'Connor should be mortified that anyone saw the movie looking as shabby as it did.

Then again, director and co-writer O'Connor has enough to be mortified about as far as the script goes (though there he can share the blame with co-writer Joe Carnahan) to be sweating the crappy editing of his movie. O'Connor and Carnahan ask the viewer to swallow one too many ridiculous conceits and rather than go through the entire laundry list of them, I'm just going to jump to the most grievous. These two writers ask the viewer to believe that one honorable cop and one mostly-good career cop whose dying wife begs him to be a man and do the right thing would let their sister go to bed the night they become certain their brother-in-law is a murderous creep with that man. Come ON! But Francis Jr. decides to take a night to sleep on it, AFTER Jimmy is pretty much outed by Ray. So, in addition to being two startlingly lousy cops, Ray and Francis Jr. pretty much fall down as being complete losers when it comes to being a brother or husband.

This is not a nitpicky thing. I mean, you don't even have to like your sister all that much to not want her in bed with a murderer who frames you!

Pride And Glory is filled with a lot of swearing (which helps us know right off the bat who the bad guys are), a requisite amount of blood and all sorts of brutality. Jimmy is not a nice guy and throughout the movie, as his agendas become more and more clear, he and his associates do what they feel they need to in order to stay one step ahead of Ray. The problem here, though, comes near the resolution when character is sacrificed for yet another conceit; the fistfight between two cops.

In other words, if you've seen it in a police drama before, it's in Pride And Glory. In fact, there is little in the way of the title attributes in the film: no one seems particularly proud of being a police officer in this and there is certainly no glory in it either. What there is is a boom mike, hovering dangerously low in oh so many frames, eliminating a whole lot of credibility from the movie. There is also a weird editing technique in the police funeral; a color shift that makes the American flag appear to have green stripes and I'm not sure what the point of that was, to be honest.

I was quite glad I took Spanish back in high school as there are no subtitles in the scenes where Ray interrogates Spanish-speaking witnesses. Finally, Ray's broken marriage kills time that did not need to be there. While watching Pride And Glory, I was detached from it enough to realize that the allusions to Ray's soon-to-be ex-wife worked equally well without the scene and the shot that were in the film that showed her.

This leaves one asking what did Pride And Glory do right? Well, the Tierney family Christmas dinner has a pretty decent and realistic family dynamic. Sure, Francis Sr. is an aging police administrator and therefore something of a lush, but when he drunkenly talks about his children, it makes quite clear the order of the kids and how they ended up the way they did. Even seeing the way Francis Sr. treats his wife explains why Megan would be with Jimmy.

What Pride And Glory does have is the acting, though the billing is way off. Collin Farrell gets top billing and I'm unsure why; his performance is pretty straightforward and remarkably monolithic. Actually, he's doing a pretty decent resurrection of Bullseye, his character from Daredevil (reviewed here!), though slightly less over-the-top . . . for the most part.

I do understand why Noah Emmerich is given billing well below Farrell; he's not a draw. He is, however, an impressive actor, at least in the role of Francis Jr. If he's not nominated for Best Supporting Actor, the nominators seriously missed their mark. Emmerich has a great physical sense to him that allows him to telegraph his character's emotions perfectly, especially in the film's final scenes when he plays Junior with real resolve.

But it is Edward Norton who carries much of Pride And Glory and while his character is disturbingly conflicted at points, Norton sells him well. Norton is able to play both low-key and intense and the moment he begins to portray Ray as a detective piecing things together, he has complete credibility. In other words, when Ray begins asking questions and deducing things, Norton seems completely like a detective without any hint of any of his lesser roles in his portrayal of Ray.

On DVD, many of the technical faults are fixed, but there are still the huge character problems in the film that make it difficult to watch and respect. There is a commentary track and behind-the-scenes featurettes, none of which add anything of significance to the film.

But ultimately, Pride And Glory is a movie that needs some serious fixes and it should not be out in the marketplace in its current state and it certainly doesn't deserve any real consideration in this form either.

For other works with Noah Emmerich, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Super 8
The Walking Dead - Season 1
The Truman Show

4/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the films I have reviewed!

© 2012, 2009, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A Trip To A Pathetic Zoo: Zoolander Doesn't Impress Me!

The Good: Moments of humor, David Bowie cameo
The Bad: Lame characters, Idiotic plot, Utter lack of decent acting
The Basics: A pathetic mockery of slave labor and a pointless male modeling industry, Zoolander puts dimwitted model Derek Zoolander in a precarious position of being brainwashed to kill.


[Note: Three times is not a charm. This morning, to cleanse our palates after watching "Citizen Kane" (reviewed here!), my wife and I watched "Zoolander" again. This was my third time watching it and we picked it off her shelf because while reviewing "True Blood" Season 3 (that's here!), I learned that one of her favorite actors from the show - Alexander Skarsgard - was in "Zoolander." So we watched it again. Yes, he's in it. No, it does not make the movie better. I stand by my original review, which I wrote almost a decade ago now! Enjoy!]

I don't think I realized how terrible Zoolander was until I watched all of the extras on the DVD. If one wishes to, one may watch the VH1 Fashion Awards sketches Ben Stiller did in which he originated the character of Derek Zoolander. Between those two sketches and the trailer for the film, the entire movie is presented.

Zoolander follows the dimwitted male model Derek Zoolander, as he loses his established success in the modeling world to a new, grungier-looking male model, Hansel. Zoolander becomes the target of an international fashion industry conspiracy to kill the liberal Prime Minister of Malaysia. Betrayed by his agent, Maury, to the infamous Mugatu, Zoolander is brainwashed to become an assassin with the Prime Minister as his target. And the only one who can figure all of this out is investigative reporter Matilda Jefferies.

The laundry list of problems with Zoolander begins with the problem of trying to take a pair of five minute skits and extending them into a feature length film. I watched the sketches and laughed. All of the best jokes in the Zoolander were from the two Fashion Award skits. And that's just plain pathetic. It's a tough thing to realize that the best moments of humor were done before the film ever began.

It's even more unconscionable that those going through the effort of making this film would not develop it with the goal to expand on the skits, rather than anchor the film with the jokes that were already out there.

The high point of the movie was easily the surprise cameo by David Bowie who appears as himself to judge a runway contest between Hansel and Zoolander. It takes the viewer out of the film and allows us a moment of genuine humor.

But even the David Bowie cameo is indicative of the problems of Zoolander. Too many of the characters are actors either doing rolls they have already done or actors playing themselves. Jerry Stiller, for example, plays Maury Ballstein is acting almost identically to his portrayal of George Costanza's father in Seinfeld. It's disturbing that no one bothered to utilize his talents as an actor, instead forcing him to recycle another character he played.

Similarly, Will Ferrell is used in an excessively disappointing manner. Ferrell does not act as Mugatu. Instead, he's playing Will Ferrell. Ferrell is a screwball comedian and his acting talents either are not used or are used poorly as the outtakes where he flubs lines are almost identical to his performances in the film. They are also identical to his performance in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. Therefore, he's not acting. That's not to say he's not funny, but he's not doing anything he hasn't done in anything else he has ever done.

Even Ben Stiller fails to deliver after the first five minutes of the film. Alas, he can't sustain the complete idiot that Zoolander appears to be. And he can't sustain the idiocy that is this film.

The parody of fashion models is a one trick pony. That is, once you've played the "male model is an idiot" card, it's played. Zoolander attempts to make the same joke over and over again. Within fifteen minutes into the film, the same joke is repeated no less than a dozen times. It's simply not funny after a point.

Zoolander is an idiotic attempt to extend two skits into a feature film wherein a prejudice against male models is played out with a ridiculous plot involving genuine social issues being mocked. The issue of Malaysian slave labor funding a pointless American fashion industry is made fun of, but never intelligently addressed. It's insulting that Zoolander uses this forum to even mention it.

For other works with Will Ferrell, please be sure to check out my reviews of:
The Other Guys
Step Brothers
Family Guy - Season 4

3/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011, 2002 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Living In An American Nightmare: Why Midnight Cowboy Is Overrated.

The Good: Moments of acting
The Bad: Unlikable characters, Lack of plot, Nauseating camera work
The Basics: Drawn out, difficult to watch and largely unlikable, Midnight Cowboy is a character study in misery and not worth the viewer's time or attention.


I watch a lot of movies and in recent years, I have learned to differentiate the difference between great films with disturbing subject matters that are presented well and movies that are just bad. A great example of a film that is disturbing and done well that I would never like to see again, for example, would be Requiem For A Dream; it is populated by characters living in miserable conditions in heartbreaking lives, but the story is told well, despite how troublesome the tale is. I am able to admire the artistry of it without loving the content and the distinction is important. I mention this at the outset of my review of Midnight Cowboy, the 1969 winner of the Best Picture Oscar because I want to establish that I can tell the difference between a well-made movie and one that is not; that films with a disturbing subject or presentation can still make wonderful films.

Midnight Cowboy is not a wonderful film. Among the most overrated films I've ever seen (right up there near the boring Citizen Kane!) , Midnight Cowboy is one of those films that I finished watching and just shook my head and asked aloud, "What was the Academy thinking that year?!" And yeah, I'll ask, "Geez, what is it about movies of that era and anal rape?!" (Deliverance was a nominee for Best Picture three years later and lost to The Godfather.) Is this what truly passed for entertainment in the late 1960s/early 1970s? I'm suddenly quite glad I missed that whole period! Midnight Cowboy is not only populated by unlikable characters making tremendously stupid and annoying-to-watch decisions, but it is filmed erratically. Director John Schlesinger seems happy to "freak out" the viewer with fast camera movements and editing choices that are creative, but put an emphasis on style over substance and that wears thin the longer the film progresses.

In Texas, Joe Buck decides to tell his boss to shove it and he takes a suitcase and heads up North to New York City to be a "hustler" (a gigolo). Once there, he finds it almost impossible to connect with women, especially as he goes everywhere in a cowboy getup and carries a transistor radio. As he wanders around New York City, he tries to get the attention of women who might want to hook up and he largely fails. When he finally does manage to score with a socialite, he ends up paying her money for the experience instead. Vulnerable and alone, Joe falls in with crippled con man Rizzo (derogatively called "Ratso" frequently), who cons him out of some money on the scheme to hook Joe Buck up with a pimp.

As time goes by and Joe Buck recalls traumatic events from his past - most notably being neglected by his grandmother and gang raped with his girlfriend - he finds himself locked out of his hotel room. Joe encounters Enrico again and despite his anger at the con man, he moves in with Enrico and the two begin working the streets together. While the pair struggles to survive into a terrible winter, they go to a party and this changes everything as Joe gets his first legitimate job as a gigolo and Rizzo is wounded.

Right off the bat, the failures of Midnight Cowboy come not in the fact that both of the main protagonists are somewhat dim and difficult to watch, but rather that they have no real redeeming story arcs. I'm happy to watch people who are down who rise above or to watch a film where people try so hard to persevere against the odds, but the world crushes them provided that the story and the characters are interesting. Midnight Cowboy - the cinematic version of it, anyway, is a study of two men making all of the wrong decisions and suffering the consequences of those poor choices. This is hardly entertaining to watch - two people who generally deserve to fail failing - and one has to wonder why so many people would find watching such an unpleasant movie to be such a great use of time. I, for example, had to watch this for my current movie endeavor; but who is expected to watch the failure of miserable people making bad choices time and time again for entertainment purposes?!

Take, for example, Joe Buck. Joe Buck wants to be a slacker and have sex for a living because . . . well, it just appears he's sick of washing dishes. It could be he wants love, but while his backstory indicates he has never truly been loved well before, this is not a love story (though he and Rizzo have a fairly loving relationship, especially comparatively). Joe isn't searching for love, he's searching for a mealticket and surprisingly early in the film, he is offered one; he can take a dishwashing position if he just wants it. This is not like an artist (or reviewer) fighting capitalism for a sense of principles; it is a lazy guy trying to do the one thing he's good at in order to survive and not going about it in any reasonable way.

A great contrast to this would be Hard Eight by P.T. Anderson. In that film, the protagonist is a bit dim, but he is trying to do a good thing when he is taken in by a much smarter man. His lack of wits play into all of the decisions he makes, but he generally has a kind heart. Joe Buck may be a little dim, may be traumatized or he may just be lazy and hoping to get by without having to do anything other than bed rich women. But he doesn't have a plan and he doesn't have a clue and when he falls in with Rizzo, it is hard to care about him. Rizzo, regardless of his physical ailments, is an unlikable con man and if Joe is hapless and generally likable (from a certain point of view), it becomes impossible to like Rizzo from the way he treats Joe from the outset. Rizzo is a classic user and despite his bum leg, he is hard to sympathize with, much less empathize with.

Stylistically, Midnight Cowboy is audacious, but in terribly annoying ways. This is the film we get the classic, oft-parodied man walking through days and nights in New York City montage as well as the cowboy in New York City towering above the crowds. But to get those allusions, one has to sit through innumerable annoying camera whiparounds and zoom in/zoom outs that are stomach-turning. And while I love themes and the recurrence of ideas, the almost constant "Everybody's Talkin'" becomes grating once one decides they do not like the protagonist. Yes, Joe feels like a fish out of water, rightfully so. But he's come to the North on a lark without a clue and it's tough to care about him or his fate. "Everybody's Talking'" at him because he has no clue! Grumble.

As for the acting, here I'm quite split. The direction might be different (if troubling and trippy), but the acting is arguably the closest to redemption this film gets. Jon Voight is good as Joe Buck, at least at portraying a somewhat dim, shell-shocked guy. His costuming, however, has almost more character than he does and while his initial scenes easily draw the viewer into the film, the longer Midnight Cowboy progresses, the more it seems like Voight found a note and is singing the same note the whole film. Even so, his final moments in the movie are extraordinary and he performs well when he is not required to speak.

It is Dustin Hoffman whose acting is the standout in Midnight Cowboy, though. Hoffman plays Rizzo and he sneers through all of his lines with a delivery unlike any in any of the other works he has been in. He is consistent at embodying Rizzo's physical impairment and he plays dark remarkably well. Hoffman has Rizzo constantly thinking and constantly looking for an edge and he does it with a great sense of physical control as well as delivery of his lines. In fact, in some of the film's fantasy sequences where Rizzo is seen running in the sun, it is such a shock in part because of how well Hoffman keeps him crouched over and filthy the rest of the time.

On DVD, the two disc version comes packed with bonus features. In addition to having a commentary track on the disc, there is a second disc which has two documentary featurettes on the impact and filming of Midnight Cowboy. As well, there is a featurette on the films of John Schlesinger and a photo gallery. These do not make the source material any better in my view.

Midnight Cowboy was originally rated X and it is disturbing even though now it is only considered an R-rated film. Cinematically, it may have been a big deal at the time, but now with other works experimenting with camera and lighting, I'd say hold out for something with good characters and a great story as opposed to this. It's just troubling and the lack of catharsis is just the final kick in the teeth to the viewer.

[As a winner of the Best Picture Oscar, this film is part of W.L.'s Best Picture Project, available here! Please check it out!]

For other works that heavily use weird camera movements, please check out my reviews of:
District 9
Firefly
The Blair Witch Project

3/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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Nothing Extraordinary About The Rain: The Rainmaker Is Utterly Unmemorable!

The Good: Good acting, Good characters, Good pacing
The Bad: Idealistic themes and plot
The Basics: Simple and predictable, The Rainmaker doesn't fail to please, but it does little beyond meeting our expectations.


There are some novelists who write one or two good novels, then spend the rest of their careers churning out the same two stories over and over again. Their works populate every bus station, airport and drug store. John Grisham, Tom Clancy and V.C. Andrews are three such authors who have written enough garbage such that their paperbacks will always be available in any grocery store that has books.

So, as you may figure, I went into John Grisham's The Rainmaker with pretty low expectations. It turns out that The Rainmaker is one of Grisham's two works that were pretty good, one of the two that established him, it appears, as a paperback staple.

The superlative aspect of this film is the acting. Four actors especially give extraordinary performances. They are: Matt Damon (rather predictably as his character Rudy Baylor, is the lawyer protagonist), Danny DeVito (the loser lawyer Deck Schifflet), Claire Dane (as an abused wife) and Danny Glover (as the strangely uncredited Judge Tyrone Kipler). The real standout of the four is Claire Danes. Danes plays Kelly Riker with amazing versatility. She is vivid as a broken, lost, hurt and depreciated human being. Her acting took me by surprise. She's truly quite fabulous as Kelly.

The Rainmaker focuses on Rudy Baylor, a newly bar-approved lawyer. He is taking on an insurance company for denying the claim (and payment) of a youth with leukemia. With the aid of the sloppy Deck, Rudy makes and tries a case against a corporate law team that seems to have all of the advantages. Interspersed with his big trial, Rudy comes to the aid of Kelly, a victim of domestic abuse by her alcoholic husband. Rudy's special interest in the young woman comes from the fact that he grew up watching his father beat his mother.

That's the type of character fact that is slipped into The Rainmaker throughout. Usually, the details involve Rudy. Occasionally, we get a fact about Deck or Judge Kipler that flesh them out as viable individuals. Character is something sufficiently built up in The Rainmaker and that's refreshing.

What isn't is the plot. It plods along without any real intensity or passion. It's slow and it feels slow. The idealism gets tired early on. The sense of hope throughout the film is labored.

In all, I'd recommend the film for a rainy afternoon where you're bored and want a film you don't have to think much about. Outside that . . .

For other films involving lawyers, please check out my takes on:
The Verdict
The Social Network
Philadelphia

5.5/10

For other film reviews, please check out my lists of movie reviews by clicking here!

© 2011, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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Before The Next Sequel Bombs, Why Transformers Is So Very Bad.

The Good: Special effects, General attempt to create a larger sense of the world.
The Bad: Terrible acting, No real character development, Direction, Light on plot
The Basics: In an often-ridiculous special effects film, Transformers shows the appearance of giant robots who camouflage themselves as vehicles bringing their war to Earth.


As I entered the last few hours between when I have to "fish or cut bait," as it were, on an opportunity to journey down to see Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen at the Smithsonian IMAX with director Michael Bay (it was a VERY cool offer and given I had a free ticket to the event, it was very tempting), I found myself considering the original film Michael Bay released for Summer Blockbuster Season two years prior and that I saw for the very first time the night before the special event in order to prepare myself for the sequel. I was surprised to realize that I had never actually watched a Michael Bay film before seeing Transformers, so that might have been cool. In fact, it turns out the only film I had seen where Michael Bay had a big role was Friday The Thirteenth, which Bay produced. So, with one strike against Bay, I sat down and watched Transformers on DVD in my home theater. This, though, made the decision to drive six hours to see the director and the newer film in IMAX very easy. Arguably the best deterrent to wasting my time and money (and possibly just asking "Really?! Are you serious? This is the best you've got?" to the director), is seeing the film upon which the sequel was based. And, before any potential trips arise for Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, I think it’s good for me to be thinking of this film.

That might seem like a cruel assessment for a film based upon an animated series which was built around a popular toy line, especially when one considers that films like Masters Of The Universe were nowhere near as successful as Transformers, what made my stomach sink after this boring, overbearing special effects flick was seeing who wrote it. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are responsible for the reboot of Star Trek (reviewed here!) also have the indistinction of writing this trainwreck. Where they were creative and clever for the Star Trek reimagining, here they are a strange mix of overly ambitious as storytellers and cliche in the dumbest possible ways with their few attempts at making character. All of this is eventually for naught, though, as the final act is devoid of even the pretense of character and instead devotes itself to huge special effects battles that soon become repetitive and unimpressive. And the easy bottomline here is this: this is very much a "guy's movie" with utterly unrealistic women, a boy living out pretty much the male fantasy for a seventeen year-old, cars (where the very act of driving is supposed to be impressive or cool) and big explosions.

In the desert of Qatar, a United States military installation is attacked and the target of the attack seems to be a classified database. The mechanical assailant, cut off by a hard-line cut, appears to be searching for an object in U.S. custody. In the wake of the attack, Defense Secretary John Keller mobilizes every possible resource to determine who the attacker is and how to disable the new weapon system that seems invincible. Meanwhile, in the United States, Sam Witwicky is a high school junior who is trying to sell his grandfather's relics on eBay to afford a car for himself. His father takes him to purchase a car and he leaves the lot with a little yellow jalopy that he is not truly wild about. The car soon begins to cause problems for Sam, communicating through the radio and doing its best to hook Sam up with an attractive, but snooty popular girl named Mikaela.

The storylines rapidly converge as Sam is hunted by giant robots who realize that his grandfather's glasses contain an imprint with the coordinates to the mysterious object that is being sought by two mechanical armies. As the military forces flee the active Decepticons who are searching for an object known as the All Spark, Sam - and his car, a robot named Bumblebee - is rescued by the leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime. The Autobots are seeking the All Spark to try to save Earth from the war they inadvertently brought here. The problems multiply, though, when the special teams that converge at the Hoover Dam - where the Decepticon leader, Megatron, has been kept cryogenically suspended for decades - and Megatron is reanimated and the All Spark is left in the hands of a boy.

I feel like I have been running low on synonyms lately, so perhaps simplicity is what Transformers truly demands, given the way the film degenerates into a simple shoot-em-up popcorn flick; Transformers is bad. Transformers is so bad that the only reason theaters are currently packed with people checking out the sequel is that it made so much money. And by the end of Transformers, there is only truly one character who is "franchise" who actually has to be returned for the sequel. Seeing as though that character is played by Shia LaBeouf - whose acting career as the star of summer blockbusters seems to prove that miracles can happen and talent is not necessary for Hollywood success - one suspects that the relative expenses of the sequel were fairly low. In other words, no one is tuning into Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen or Transformers: Dark Of The Moon for the storyline or characters, they want to see a big special effects film and to be dazzled without having to think about much of what is going on.

Sadly, that is where Orci, Kurtzman and Bay put the viewers of Transformers as well. The film is remarkably busy and stupidly simple before it becomes a fairly lame special effects flick. I say "fairly lame special effects" even though the special effects are arguably the best thing this movie has going for it in the end because while director Michael Bay employs some ridiculously talented people for the special effects, he has little in the way of eye for making it interesting. As I watched Transformers, there was a shot in the film where missiles are being fired and giant robots are running that looked ridiculously familiar. I realized that it was because I had seen the exact same shot - framing, movement, explosions, etc. - in the trailer for the new G.I. Joe film (reviewed here!). This is not Bay's fault, but then I realized the shot was pretty much the archetypal running gunfight shots, just with bigger guns.

Where does Transformers go right? The movie starts fairly well, with the idea that there is something of international consequence going on and that no single group can figure it out. The Secretary Of Defense reasonably calls in all possible analysts in order to try to evaluate the weapon's system that attacked the U.S. in Qatar. But by the time "Sector Seven" emerges, though, the sense of reality has already been mortgaged by too much time spent with Sam Witwicky.

Sam is a pretty dull high school student who is interested in girls and cars and that's about all. He slides by doing the least possible work and that his teacher bumps his grade from a botched oral report up because of "What Would Jesus Do?" would be decent farce if only the rest of the movie were nearly as smart. Instead, though, Bay's Transformers quickly becomes less about character and any sense of how real agencies would react to an attack from giant robots to a ridiculous chase around the world with little sense of consequence or character.

In the special effects, Bay and his people get the film very wrong by an almost complete neglect of basic physics. One Autobot, Jazz, does a few funky dance moves before sliding onto the hood of a car. The last time I saw one car or car-weight/car-material object strike another car the result was not a robot leaning back looking the robot equivalent of urban funky. It was a mess. Okay, Bay wants viewers to turn their brains off. But there is turning one's brain off and there's lobotomizing oneself. Sam and Mikaela get bumped around quite a bit, falling great distances only to be caught by giant metal hands. Yet, they never react like they are in pain or that there is any consequence to the dives they take.

This brings us back to the acting in Transformers. When the cast is led by actors like Shia LaBeouf, whose acting differed very little from the virtual version of LaBeouf used in special effect sequences in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (reviewed here!), one has to cringe. Megan Fox and Rachael Taylor are cast for the obvious salivation factor that the average viewer of this PG-13 will bring to the theater. Taylor is asked to play an analyst and while that might be plausible, the fact that she picks up an accent halfway through the film is just terrible. Josh Duhamel is plausible as Captain Lennox, though he had more dramatic gravitas back when he was on All My Children. Lennox's cliche "soldier waiting to meet his baby girl back home" is so canned that one suspects Duhamel was cast for the role because he was the only actor who could pull off the lines with a straight face, whatwith his background on soaps.

But the mystery here is how Bay managed to snag John Turturro and Jon Voight for Transformers. Turturro, more than any other performer in this film, is used in a way that completely mortgages his credibility as a great actor. Turturro performs well with the virtual characters, but arrives in the film long after most viewers will care and will be looking for anything remotely about performance.

On DVD, Transformers is accompanied by Transformers: Beginnings, which is a seventeen minute, poorly animated feature that spells out the complete backstory of Transformers. Illustrated - where the film merely tells - the program shows Bumblebee sending the All Spark away from Cybertron (the planet of the Transformers) and the pursuit by Megatron. After Megatron arrives in the primordial soup and is sucked under the surface, ages go by until Captain Witwicky finds him and sets off the events in the feature film. This is all covered in the actual film, so it is pretty much a waste of time.

Then again, I suspect that for most film buffs, watching the Transformers Beginnings disc and then the trailer for the film will be more than enough to entertain them. The trailer contains many of the big special effect battles, a few shots of Megan Fox and the shots of the Transformer as ordinary cars and trucks driving along a desert road. That's about the substance of the film in a nutshell. Life is too short for more.

For other big budget special effect-driven films, please check out my reviews of:
Battle Los Angeles
2012
Tron Legacy

3/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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"Mistletoe!" I Beg To Be Let Out Of Four Christmases!

The Good: Opens well, surprisingly
The Bad: Guts all character, Previews ruined virtually all of the humor, Not extraordinary acting.
The Basics: What could have been an average Christmas comedy is brought down by a smart beginning that develops into a predictable, formulaic comedy that makes no real sense.


Christmas movies tend to fare poorly with me because I have a low tolerance for schmaltz. Indeed, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (click here for that review!) and How The Grinch Stole Christmas (click here for that review!) remain some of the movies I have been especially critical of. In fact, the only movie centered around Christmas that comes to mind that I love is Love, Actually (click here for that film's review!) and that, arguably, is not for the Christmas elements of the film. So, seeing an insufferable number of previews for Four Christmases did not help its chances of getting a favorable review from me.

So, if anything, I went into Four Christmases knowing I was a bit biased against the movie, but I took my brother because I knew it was his kind of movie. The thing is, Four Christmases begins with enough humor, character, and fun that I found myself smiling. I found myself actually thinking - literally, the words! - "This might be like Sex Drive, I might be pleasantly surprised!" Instantly, the characters were engaging - they had character! - the humor was general and worked and I was having fun. Then came the first joke that had been in one of the many trailers, right around the same time as the first noticeably bad editing cut and the movie took a sharp right turn to Disappointmentville (you know its Christmastime when it's the train to "Disappointmentville" as opposed to . . . )

After a particularly invigorating role playing exercise out at a bar where Brad and Kate pretend to have anonymous sex with a stranger (when, in fact, they've been dating for three years and this is one of their many activities together), the couple prepares to avoid their families for Christmas by vacationing together in a spa in Fiji. Unfortunately for them, all flights out of San Francisco are postponed for the day because of fog. Kate gets caught by her mother, who sees the pair on the news and Brad and Kate are suddenly stuck cramming four Christmas celebrations into one day.

The pair visits Brad's blue-collar father, Kate's born again mother, Brad's new age mother and finally, Kate's nonentity father, all the while interacting with family members and children who torment them and challenge their ideas of what being parents might be like. After firmly rejecting marriage and parenthood for so long, Kate begins to think that she might want to settle down with Brad and this leads to tension between them.

"It's that kind of movie." Let's just start there. It's that kind of movie; it's a Christmastime romantic comedy where the point, of course, is to reinforce the importance of family and help the selfish happy couple realize that their lack of conformity to social mores is ultimately unacceptable and they can only derive real joy from falling into the same rut as most Americans. We get that going into the movie, but Four Christmases did two things to try to make itself appear like it wasn't going to be like that. First, all of the press. If you've been to a Regal Cinema for the past month (or two), you've seen previews for Four Christmases and in their "First Look" screensaver show before the movie, this is one of the movies that Regal (especially) has been plugging with interviews about the movie. In one of those, actress Reese Witherspoon makes a point of saying that what makes Four Christmases different from other movies of the type is that while Kate and Brag experience all sorts of humiliations at the hands of their respective families, it brings them together and they bond over the course of the day, as opposed to being torn apart by that.

Ms. Witherspoon: I hate it when celebrities lie to me! Far from being as reassuring and different as the star claims, the day is not about Kate and Brad comforting one another and sticking with one another through the hells that are their families. Kate abandons Brad to be beaten up by his brothers and nephews, never using their safe escape word ("Mistletoe!") to help him, instead expecting he might be able to do that while having the crap kicked out of him by his family, as she watches. Similarly, Brad leaves Kate to her own devices while she is trapped in the "jump jump" with children who are attacking her and then again on stage at an evangelical nativity play. Far from it, Four Christmases is about the Christmas Brad and Kate almost didn't make it.

The second thing that made me believe that this might be a different movie and actually surprise me was the vehemence of the arguments Brad and Kate have at the outset of the movie against having children or getting married. They were convincing, they were funny, it worked! I sat in my seat and I believed the lies . . . until the first bad cut.

The problem with Four Christmases is that it starts out with character and a decent message/theme and then it utterly abandons it in the most nonsensical way possible. After three very funny scenes wherein the viewer is treated to just how much in love Kate and Brad are and how adamant they are that marriage will ruin what they have, the movie launches into the whole idea of spending the four Christmas celebrations with their various families. Like Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back where Kevin Smith talks about how he had a vision of what the movie was when he wrote and directed the movie, only to be told by the studios that no, he had written a road movie, so get the characters on the road as quickly as possible, director Seth Allen is suddenly directing a Christmas movie, so get them to the Christmas celebrations as quickly as possible. This is done by Kate taking ONE phone call and suddenly, they are locked into FOUR visits. I sat in my seat and said, "What?! He didn't even answer HIS phone, how did they get committed to anything but one?!"

But let's boil it down to its simplest elements because I'm beginning to actually dislike the movie more, the more I write about it: I can deal with it being "that kind of movie," but it still has to make sense. Kate and Brad do EVERYTHING together and have a loving, healthy relationship where they love and respect one another and WANT to be together and stay happy and loving, so they have decided to not have children. They loathe children and in the process of their day, they meet with family who humiliates and abuses them, they see children who commit acts of violence against them, act like brats, and spit up on them and this makes them decide they WANT to have kids! Now, admittedly, I have a little bias here: I'm happily childfree (yes, there are those of us in the world). I was thrilled because for a moment Four Christmases looked like it might advocate a positive, childfree position. But no, all it takes is Kate seeing Brad holding one baby before her reserve cracks.

So, here we have two very intelligent, well-employed people who have love and have made a conscious decision based on logic, reason AND emotions and all it takes for them to change their minds is abandoning one another to the wolves that are each other's families and the reinforcement of all of their worst fears about having children (and, to a lesser extent, marriage). Call me crazy, but whenever I witness my worst-case scenario for something I decided against in another person or couple, it doesn't make me think "wow, I should try that," I think, "Wow, I sure dodged a bullet!" So, even if it's "that kind of movie," it still has to be good at being "that kind of movie" and Four Christmases is not.

And yes, it is appropriate to rail against it being "that kind of movie" even at the holidays. Your single or childless friends don't need yet another Hollywood film coming along and trying to convince them that they are selfish or miserable for not having or wanting children (we tend to have parents for that). Here are two DINKs who are able to have fun, provide their loved ones with fabulous things and treat one another beautifully: why should they suddenly want children, especially when they see how rotten other people's kids have turned out and know about their own boatloads of issues?

The marriage issue is dealt with somewhat better than the child issue, though there's an irritating tendency in Four Christmases to push the two hand-in-hand. At no point do either of the protagonists say "Okay, maybe children, but we were right about not getting married." Instead, the idea of marriage working for the couple comes out in a particularly witless scene where Brad's brother Denver and his wife mop the floor with everyone in a game that proves how well they know one another. The reason this scene doesn't work like it could in virtually every other movie is that Kate and Brad do everything together and love doing things with one another. You don't have that level of interaction with someone without picking up on what they like, dislike, etc.

In other words, Four Christmases sacrifices any sense of character for a dumb, obvious comedy that is just plain troubling. Indeed, much of the movie is violent physical comedy that will largely appeal to the under 13 crowd or slapstick and gross-out humor like babies spitting up on people. All of this is in the trailer and rather than go on my usual rant against preview trailers that show all of the movie - this one did - I'm going in a different direction. Mr. Gordon: watch the preview trailer for your movie Four Christmases. If that doesn't make you want to fire your editor, I don't know what would. The editing for the trailer has an actual sense of comedic timing, lines like Witherspoon talking to her mom about Brad giving her a hug are actually funny (at least the first time) in the trailer. In the movie, it is cut together with such speed that there is no joke there. As well, there are elements in the trailers that did not make the final cut, so this is bound to be loaded with deleted scenes for the DVD. One suspects, again that there is some pressure here to get the Christmas visits started because some of that humor might have slowed down the film. But with only 82 minutes to the movie to begin with, it's tough to wonder why they weren't included at least to get it up to the requisite 90 minutes most films are held to (matinees only, people!).

The soundtrack in Four Christmases is annoyingly overt through most of the film as well, with background music being up-tempo Christmas remixes, as if to remind the viewer before the visits begin that they are watching a Christmas movie. The whole editing problem persists throughout the movie and if comedy is based upon surprise, virtually all of the best moments once the Christmas visits begin are ruined by the trailers. Actually, the only real laughs to be had outside what was in the trailers is all dialogue-based - ahh, geriatric sex jokes! - and the overall feeling of the movie is that this is a sloppy movie. Yes, those of us who watch even "that kind of movie" for details will be shocked at how poorly put together this movie is. For example, after being vomited on by a baby, Kate is forced to wear clothes her sister has for her at her mother's house despite the fact that her luggage would have been in the car they came in (all of the gifts were mailed beforehand and if the couple was that eager to get the day over with, they would have gone right from the airport . . .)

The pacing is also terribly off in Four Christmases, with the first two families taking a disproportionately long time. Family visit number three is essentially a setup for a single joke (it's in the trailers) and the final one isn't funny at all, merely the chance for everyone to come around to their obvious and predestined revelations.

As for the acting . . . Jon Voight might as well have walked off the set of Pride And Glory and onto the set of Four Christmases for all of the differences in how he plays the two parts I've seen him in the last month. Kristin Chenowith plays yet another perky, ditzy woman and Jon Favreau is yet another Neanderthal type man. It turns out that this is actually the first movie starring Vince Vaughn I've sat through but he plays the role of Brad exactly as I would have expected given the few supporting roles I've seen him in or in previews for other dumb comedies in which he starred.

As for Reese Witherspoon . . . Merry Christmas: I'm not going to go into how poorly she was boxed into an obvious role and relegated to passing off her smile and a look of cautious intrigue as comedy. Please, just don't lie to me again.

Four Christmases is exactly the movie is appears to be from the trailers, only the process of getting there is nowhere near as funny, clever or sensible as it could have been. And no one needs their intelligence or values insulted for Christmas.

For other Christmas movies, please check out my reviews of:
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Batman Returns
The Nightmare Before Christmas

3.5/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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