Saturday, April 9, 2011
Movie Review - Super
Super
2010
Starring: Rain Wilson, Ellen Page, Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler, Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker
Written and Directed by: James Gunn
Super, the latest film by director James Gunn, has some interesting ideas and goes to some dark places but on the whole misses the mark.
It is the story of a short-order cook named Frank, played by Rain Wilson, whose wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a local drug dealer played by Kevin Bacon. Distraught, Frank confronts his wife and Kevin Bacon and this leads to him getting his ass kicked by Kevin Bacon's thugs. While recovering, Frank watches a Christian superhero show on television and decides that he must become a super hero to correct the injustices in the world and the Crimson Bolt is born. He has no superpowers and instead decides that he must use a pipe wrench to beat people over the heads. He spends his nights prowling the streets and begins kicking the asses of drug dealers, child molesters and muggers. He decides that he must get his wife back and turns his focus on the Kevin Bacon character.
Along the way he teams up with Ellen Page, who is wildly fun as his sidekick Bolty. She is playing against her usual witty type and steals the movie as the not too smart, violence obsessed friend. Whenever she is on screen the film is actually fun and where I laughed the most. I wish I could have seen a movie about Bolty instead.
Super is an odd little film. I wanted to like it. The performances, other than the excellent Ellen Page, are fine. Kevin Bacon is good and there are some great scenes with Liv Tyler and Rain Wilson, but they seem like they all belong in different films. The dependency of their relationship is compelling and we see hints of something deeper in the scene where Liv tells Rain about her life and they kiss. This scene was made better because of the writing as well as the use of the great Cheap Trick.
But then the film tonally changes. It is this inconsistency in tone, not the over the top violence, that really sinks the film. In fact, I think this is a good study of how important a consistant tone is to your story. It is really all over the place, from the sweet and interesting scenes with Liv Tyler, to the dark realism of her getting injected with heroin and almost raped by a drug dealer, to the cartoonish violence that follows. Gunn needs to pick one or the other because both don't work.
I really enjoyed Slither so we know Gunn can do good work, but the film missed on not just the tone but the look. I think he was going for a lo-fi look to the film that comments on the character and the situation, but it was not nice to look at. There was nothing interesting in the images he put on the screen and at times they were almost gross. And I'm not talking about all the blood. That didn't really bother me. It just wasn't nice to look at, which wouldn't have been a problem if he would have picked a tone and matched the look of the film to what he was going for. The grittiness of the images just add to the confusion of what I was watching.
Super had potential and if it wasn't for the amazing Ellen Page, my grade would have been lower. I give it a C+.
Les
Here is the trailer:
Movie Review - Source Code
Source Code
2011
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright
Written by: Ben Ripley
Directed by: Duncan Jones
2009's Moon was in my top ten for that year. It was a brilliant little movie about a man who was sent to the moon, by himself, to oversee the mining operation. It was engaging and thoughtful and when I saw that Duncan Jones was attached to direct Source Code, I was intrigued. I had read the script on one of those script review sites, thought it was great and, although, I'm never excited about seeing Jake Gyllenhaal in a movie, this was one to mark the calendar for. And I wasn't wrong.
Source Code is a story about a former Afghanistan helicopter pilot who wakes up on a commuter train bound for downtown Chicago. His last images where on a mission in Afghanistan and suddenly he's sitting across from a beautiful woman, a friend from their daily meetings on the train. He is not who she thinks he is and it freaks him out. Then the train blows up. We find that the former pilot is in the Source Code, a program created by a physicist played by Jeffrey Wright where someone can go back and insert themselves into the echos of the past. In this case, right before a train is supposed to explode in order to find out who is blowing up the train. Jake finds himself going back and re-living the 8 minutes over and over until he can put together the clues he needs to find out who the guilty party is. This film is basically the action equivalent of the classic Groundhog Day. And it is pretty successful at fulfilling its premise.
As I already stated, I loved Duncan Jones' previous film Moon and while Source Code isn't as good, it still is pretty strong and solidly directed. When a film's gimmick is that it repeats itself over and over, it can be a challenge to keep that fresh. See the crappy Vantage Point for how not do tell that story. Duncan Jones does a great job at keeping us tied into the story. Visually, it is pretty standard fare for an action movie, which I guess is a good thing because he doesn't get in the way of the story, but there was never a shot that blew me away. Although, Chicago has never looked so bright and shiny.
The supporting performances were good, especially Jeffrey Wright. He added a mad scientist intensity to his role that wasn't over the top as it could have been. Vera Farmiga is once again fine and Michelle Monaghan is solid. My only problem was with Gyllenhaal. He was serviceable but I never get the feeling that he has the gravitas of someone like a DiCaprio, a Pitt or a Clooney to be able to sell a role of this type. If you would have plugged John Cusack in this role he would have made it more interesting.
Overall, I thought Source Code was solidly entertaining. Many have spoken about the confusing ending. It was a bit different than the ending of the script but I didn't find it confusing whatsoever. I credit this to my understanding of the Quantum Multiverse, which I learned about thanks to the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Parallels. If you watch that episode, the whole ending makes sense.
Source Code is a solid A-. You should check it out today.
Les
Here is the trailer:
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