I have been watching movies for the last several months, but I’ve been entirely unmotivated to write about them. So here is the first part of a metric crap-ton of capsule movie assessments to purge the hopper.
I Am Vengeance (2018) – Ex-commando reacts to the death of an old comrade-in-arms by coming to his rundown English town and causing trouble for the drug gang run by active duty military. Unfortunately, the climax is really galling: Knowing that Gold is coming for them, do the evil military guys set up a competent defensive perimeter around their headquarters and easily take out one man? Nah, they decide to space their people outside and inside the building so they can be shot one-by-one like a first-person-shooter videogame.
Chaos (2005) – Rube-Goldbergian heist movie starring Jason Statham and Wesley Snipes. Entertaining while it happens, but these things rarely hold up to examination after you’ve hit “the twist” and try to make earlier scenes make sense in light of later revelations.
Portal (2019) – Starts out as a competent but unremarkable “TV ghost hunters looking for their big break” supernatural thriller, but the second half piles on the stupid so thickly that the 3.9 rating on the IMDb is actually too generous. And can we all admit that Heather Langenkamp can’t act?
Jonah Hex (2010) – Definitely a movie-shaped processed entertainment product. Evidence that AI has been “creating” middling entertainment fodder for longer than we thought.
District B13 (2005) – Wall-to-wall French parkour. Almost as good as actually exercising yourself.
Seized (2020) – Scott Adkins is a former military badass whose son is kidnapped by drug lord Mario Van Peebles to blackmail Adkins into taking out all his cartel rivals. Not memorable, but decent action. And of course, Van Peebles is gregarious and chatty on their constant telephone calls, because that’s just how bad guys be.
Bent (2018) – Karl Urban is an ex-cop who did time for being dirty, even though he claims innocence. Now he’s out and trying to find who set him up and killed his partner. Sofia Vergara is a pretty European face whom some casting director mistakenly thought could act, thus setting up a completely passion-free affair (sorry, Urban’s a good actor, but even he can’t do all of the acting for two).
Asteroid City (2023) – A visually stunning movie, very meta. I’m still not sure what it’s all about.
Villmark Asylum, aka Villmark 2, aka Dark Woods 2 (2015) – Five contract workers examine an old abandoned Norwegian asylum for hazardous materials before it’s scheduled to be demolished. But it’s not as abandoned as all that; the old caretaker is extra-super-creepy, and he’s not alone. (How could a huge asylum be built somewhere so isolated that they have to be helicoptered in? “Shut up,” he explained.)
The Devil’s Rock (2011) – Two British commandos try to infiltrate an isolated Nazi outpost in the Channel. Unfortunately, the Nazi manning it is also a demon-summoning occultist. The production is a little too impoverished and minimalist to be good, but points for trying. (Also, see my earlier comments about the “twist” invalidating prior scenes.)
The Losers (2010) – Off-brand A-Team is still fun.
American Ultra (2015) – Jesse Eisenberg is a sleeper agent, disguised even to himself as a dead-end small-town pot-head. Kristen Stewart is his CIA handler turned girlfriend, who’s inexplicably devoted to the dead-end small-town pot-head version of him. (Yes, that’s where the suspension of disbelief breaks down.)
Man on Fire (2004) – Sure it’s the “ex-military badass rescuing the kidnapped child” trope (see Seized, above), but done with depth and character. And ten-year-old Dakota Fanning is spooky good.
One-Percent Warrior, aka One Percenter (2023) – A Japanese martial arts actor who’s something of a purist goes with his student to a deserted island to film an action flick by camcorder, where he runs afoul of yakuza ne’er-do-wells. This tries to be more than a simple action setup, but those above-and-beyond story elements pretty much fall flat for me.
The Brides of Dracula (1960) – “What if Hammer made a Dracula movie, but Dracula wasn’t in it?” Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing goes up against a much younger, much blonder vampire with a winning way with the ladies. (Hammer brought Christopher Lee back as Dracula in 1966’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness, but then forgot to include Cushing in it — d’oh!)
The Raven (1963) – The least Poe-ish of Corman’s Poe movies, but still fun — exactly what you’d expect if you put Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and a young Jack Nicholson on one set and said, “Enjoy yourselves.”
Black Noise (2023) – Another one of those “starts of standard but competent, ends up awash in stupid incompetence” movies. A security team beelines to an island of the rich and famous because a transponder stops working; then they do stupid things, while the script sets up foreshadowing and then forgets to follow up. And it’s like the last fifteen minutes were directed by the credit director’s kid nephew who said, “You know what this movie needs? ALIENS!”
Part 2 coming soon…
“Man on Fire” is a Denzel remake of an earlier film with Scott Glenn, titled (wait for it) “Man on Fire.” Honestly, I thought that the Glenn version had a different title, but I guess that’s my senility popping up. I preferred the Glenn version, FWIW.
Vis-a-vis Losers: I really like that movie a lot. I think it was undervalued by most. I’d say that they equate to the usual A-team (B Team!) category and all the actors did well, even that pint-sized lady actress whose name eludes me. All the time. (Although, as a woman of decent height, 5’8″ and background, military and martial arts, both, I really can’t abide seeing a 90lb, 5’0″ lady throw a 6’2″ man around the room. Sorry, but…BTDT and **it does not work.** Sorry, men who think that looks cool. I used to be able to do a lot when I was young and fit, but…nyah.)
I thought American Ultra blew chunks. Not to be too blunt.
BENT, yup, with ya there; she was wooden at best. And the ending, the denouement…who didn’t see that coming from about 100 miles away???? Sheesh.
Hitch
I doubt A.I. was doing any writing of movie scripts back in 2010, but old storytelling formulas have been around for probably as long as storytelling itself has; A.I. merely helped automate the process that used to be done manually. Case in point: I remember back in the 1990s when I was a teenager seeing a Mad magazine feature showing a screenwriter’s formula matrix for writing any kind of movie based on a one-sentence premise. The premises were at the head of the rows, while the genres were at the head of the columns; match the premise with the genre, and—tada!—you get a summary of the entire plot in usually just one sentence.
To give an example, one such premise was “A young man goes to meet his prospective fiancee’s family.” Run it through the genres, and…
Slasher: …her family turns out to be a bunch of deranged killers he has to try to escape.
Romance: …he gets an awkward but enthusiastic welcome from her oddball family, whom he learns to accept (or at least tolerate).
Action: …her family gets taken hostage by terrorists and he has to rescue everybody.
Comedy: …he’s so clumsy and nervous that he ends up accidentally setting her family’s house on fire.
Porno: …the gal’s lustful mother decides to “try out” her prospective son-in-law (in the family’s sex dungeon) to see if he’s “hot enough” for her daughter.
Disney: …her family is impressed to learn the guy’s studying to be a missionary.
While I may be remembering some of the details wrong (since it has been some three decades since I read that issue and I don’t remember which issue it was), the same matrix could be applied to any premise and any genre now. For instance…
Superhero: …the guy’s secretly a masked vigilante, and has to come up with a plausible excuse to step out on his fiancee during the family dinner when his archenemy picks this evening to attack; or the gal and/or her family are all secretly superheroes and they have to come up with plausible excuses to keep stepping out on their family dinner to fight the bad guy(s); or both.
So again, maybe Jonah Hex was a rather formulaic movie, but I don’t think that means A.I. wrote it. If A.I. is being used to make any of these movies now (which would explain some of the more head-scratchingly bizarre turns we’ve seen some movies’ stories take lately), it’s only been to speed up one of the industry’s age-old well-worn practices.