The Taking of Pelham 123

Posted on November 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

This third version of the story of a hijacked New York subway car may be superfluous but it still delivers some zip thanks to Tony Scott’s music-video flash and even a bit of heft thanks to Denzel Washington.

The 1974 version had Robert Shaw (“Jaws,” “The Sting”) as the leader of a group of trigger-happy thugs and a bitter ex-subway motorman and Walter Matthau as the transit cop working for the safe return of the hostages. The film’s great strengths were its nicely twisty plot, its superb cast of character actors (including Jerry Stiller), and its gritty feel for the city at a time of great economic turmoil and municipal decay. Then there was a made-for-TV version in 1998 with Vincent D’Onofrio and Edward James Olmos. This time, it is updated for the era of cell phones, laptops, and failing financial markets. The leader of the hijackers is John Travolta, with a 70’s porn star mustache, a prison neck tattoo, and a whole lot of attitude. He starts out at the top of Mount CrazyAngry and pretty much stays there the whole time. At the other end of the phone is transit guy Garber (Denzel Washington), who has depth of expertise and some complications in his work situation.

Director Tony Scott knows how to deliver a cinematic adrenaline rush, and there are some impressive car crashes and chases. James Gandolfini is superb as the mayor, a cross between Giuliani and Bloomberg, and there are some nice up-to-the-minute touches for the era of cell phones, wifi, and Wall Street collapses. It sacrifices some of the original’s craftiest switch-ups for action but the biggest problem is that Travolta never really connects and Washington’s fully-realized portrayal of the troubled but heroic Garber makes even more obvious Travolta’s struggle to make his character work. Travolta may steal the subway car, but it is Washington who steals the movie.

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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Posted on October 27, 2009 at 8:00 am

This third in the Ice Age series is a bit sweeter and gentler than the first two, perhaps less ambitious in scope than the first but much more engaging than the second. The 3D animation is beautifully immersive and the story is exciting but so low-key that everyone, even the scary dinosaurs with the big teeth, ends up happy.

Again this is the story of woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), sloth Sid (John Leguizamo), and saber tooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary), now joined by Manny’s mate Ellie (Queen Latifah), who is about to have a baby. Everything seems settled and happy, but of course we would not have a story unless everything got unsettled pretty quickly. Diego is feeling left out and worried about getting older and less powerful, so he decides to leave the makeshift “tribe” they all think of as family. Sid finds three huge eggs and immediately adopts them, his nesting instinct so over the top that he insists he is their mother. The eggs hatch, and at first the little dino babies happily follow Sid around like ducklings, though they are not entirely on board with the idea of vegetarianism. But then their mommy dinosaur comes to get them, grabbing Sid along with her chicks, and pending childbirth or not, Sid, Manny, Ellie, and Diego go off to rescue him.

They end up in an underground portal to a place where the weather is temperate and the dinosaurs still rule. “I thought those guys were extinct,” one of our heroes comments. (Note that in real life the last Ice Age was about 20 thousand years ago and the last dinosaurs were about 65 million years ago, but what the heck, animals do not talk or build playgrounds, either.) There they meet up with an off-beat piratical weasel named Buck (Simon Pegg), who teaches them some survival skills and leads them to Sid. Along the way, they have a number of adventures, and yes, that baby decides to arrive at just the wrong place and time, but despite some chases, several falls, and one near-ingestion by a hungry plant, everyone ends up happy and healthy.

Children and their parents will enjoy the portrayals of family life. “You’re trying to childproof nature,” Ellie chides Manny as his approaching fatherhood brings literally home to him the dangers of the world. And they will enjoy Buck’s rakish antics and the traditional subplot about the prehistoric squirrel Scrat and his perpetual quest for the elusive acorn. This time, his biggest impediment is a long-lashed female, who outsmarts him at every turn.

Scrat’s romantic confusion is a lot of fun, but there is a sense that the folks behind this movie are not evolved enough to think of the female characters as anything other than wise and nurturing — and a little bossy. Ellie’s job in the movie is to be the grown-up; apparently even in pre-historic times the females were more, uh, evolved. Not as funny, however.

But the sweet nature of this film is engaging and the adorable characters designed by illustrator Peter de Seve make this movie both satisfying and fun. The squirrels’ tar pit dip, romantic tango, and post-romantic home-decorating session, Sid’s efforts to mother the adorable dinosaur babies, and a nimble balance of action and humor make this one of the best family films of the year.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on October 20, 2009 at 8:00 am

Oh, dear. #TransformerFail

I truly loved the first Transformers movie. It was everything you need in a big summer explosion movie, with stupendous special effects, shot through with heart-thumping adrenaline, with just enough character and storyline to allow us to catch our breath and keep us interested. Our hero, high school senior Sam (Shia LeBeouf), is befriended by a car that turns into a friendly robot called Bumblebee, one of a cadre of good-guy transforming robots who fight against the bad-guy robots, called Decepticons. He is aided by a beautiful girl who is very good with cars (Megan Fox) and an armed services division led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel).

This sequel has some great special effects, but the story and the characters are poorly handled and the pacing is a mess. When the robots give a better performance than the humans, we have a problem. When the action is so complicated we can’t figure out who is where and in some cases why they are there, we have a bigger problem. When the characters are so irritating we begin to consider rooting for the bad guys, well, you know what kind of a problem we have. And when the racial humor gets so completely out of hand that it becomes uncomfortable at best and genuinely disturbing at worst, it’s a serious problem.

LeBoeuf is always appealing, Fox looks good stretching over machinery, and the movie briefly takes an interesting turn when both human and transformer characters show that they can learn from their mistakes and switch over to the side of the good guys. A stop at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum leads to Jetfire, an engaging junkpile of an autobot.

But it is too loud and it all goes on much too long. The bloated running time is well over two hours, overstuffed with pointless and increasingly annoying attempts at comedy — Sam’s mother accidentally gets high and talks about his sex life, Sam’s father doesn’t get high but talks about his sex life, good guy robots talk like the end men on a minstrel show, and Sam’s college roommate is a loudmouth who wants to get with some ladies and shrieks like a little girl when he is scared, which happens a lot. There’s another series of confrontations between a clueless bureaucrat and our know-better heroes. But the last movie’s clueless bureaucrat somehow switches sides. I would complain that this is not adequately explained, but I don’t really care. By this point, I began to think the Decepticons might have a point about how they could do better with our planet than we could.

Land of the Lost

Posted on October 13, 2009 at 8:00 am

“Land of the Lost” features two funny actors and a criminally underused actress tramping around an alternate reality in search of comedy but not finding much for us to laugh at.
Too raunchy for kids, too dull for anyone else, this over-budgeted and under-scripted film wastes everyone’s time, especially the audience’s. The original television series about a forest ranger and his two teenage children in a time warp land with dinosaurs and lizard people called Sleestaks was best known for effects that could hardly be called “special,” even for the 1970’s. But it had innocence and charm, while the remake has neither. It is so carelessly written that when the humanoids don’t understand English but the dinosaurs do it feels more like laziness than an attempt to be funny. It is too busy coming up with a reason for Ferrell to douse himself with dino pee to try to, for example, give the female character any — what’s the word? — character.
Will Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a discredited scientist whose theories about the particles that control space and time are not taken seriously by anyone. Then Holly (Anna Friel), a young scientist from England, tells him that she has some proof that his theories are right. Led by Will (Danny McBride) a guy who sells fireworks and lives in a trailer, they go into a cave and find themselves catapulted into an alternate universe where they are chased by dinosaurs and befriended by a missing link ape-boy named Chaka (Jorma Taccone). Ferrell’s job in the movie (big surprise) is to vibrate between neediness, panic, and arrogance and run around in his underwear. Friel’s job is to know the answer to everything (she even speaks Chaka’s language), allow herself to be (literally) pawed, look very fetching in tiny little shorts, and gaze adoringly at Ferrell. The best moments in the film come from the always-hilarious Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express,” “Tropic Thunder”), the songs of “A Chorus Line,” and, surprisingly, from Matt Lauer, playing himself.

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Battle for Terra 3D

Posted on September 22, 2009 at 12:02 pm

The animation may be three-dimensional but the story is one-dimensional in this dull saga of humans invading an alien planet — from the perspective of the aliens. I suppose it is actually the humans who are the aliens in this story, so from now on I will refer to the characters who look like fish-lizard creatures as Terrans. The humans long ago destroyed not only Earth but the surrounding planets and for more than a generation they have been roaming the galaxy looking for another place to live. Their ships are barely able to sustain them. And all of those years without a home, battling to stay alive, has made them desperate and unable to think about the rights of other beings.

Mala (voice of Evan Rachel Wood) is a spunky teenager from the peaceful planet Terra. When the human military invade in search of a place to settle, she finds herself sort of stuck with a crashed human pilot named Jim Stanton (voice of Luke Wilson). They gingerly begin to trust one another.

Terra’s atmosphere is poisonous to humans but the humans have the capacity to switch it to oxygen, which will wipe out the Terrans. They feel they have no choice. And when Jim resists, the harsh general (Brian Cox) makes him prove his loyalty by forcing him to make a life or death decision between Mala and his own brother.

Despite the 3D effects, the visuals are dull and unimaginative. None of the characters have much by way of facial expressions or distinguishing characteristics. Apparently the Terrans are way ahead of the humans in the treatment of females and minorities as almost all the humans we see are square-jawed white males who just came off the GI Joe assembly line. The strongest voice performance is from David Cross as Jim’s little robot navigator and even he is a pale imitation of R2D2. The script briefly raises some intriguing issues but its darkest moments are too disturbing for its intended PG audience and its execution is too superficial for other viewers.

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3D Action/Adventure Animation