Film Review | The Dark Knight Rises

Dark and Stormy Knight

by Thomas Delapa

Holy overkill, Batman!

In The Dark Knight Rises, the Caped Crusader flies out of retirement, loses all his money and Alfred, gets the guano beaten out of him, and has to save Gotham City from a masked madman with an atomic bomb. 

Whew, all this for one superhero with no real super powers. Where are the Avengers when you need them?

In the final installment from the dynamic box-office duo of director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, Batman seriously loses his mojo, again. The operative word here is ”serious,” as Nolan morphs his brooding comic-book incarnation into a hooded Hamlet. To agonized alter ego Bruce Wayne, to be Batman or not to be Batman, that is the lofty question.

Hobbled and a recluse after his epic battles with the Joker, Bruce Wayne falls to a new low before he’s roused out of semi-retirement. First his mother’s pearls are stolen by a crafty cat burglar and then a mysterious, hulking mastermind orchestrates an uber-hostile takeover of Wayne Enterprises. In these dire and depressing times, neither Wayne nor Batman is too big to fail. 

Zeitgeist watchers will note that Batman’s capital new bane is Bane (Tom Hardy), whose new boss may or not be Bain Capital’s Mitt Romney. This Bane is a Humongous-like thug (see: Road Warrior) who mellifluously speaks through a metal muzzle. When you can understand what he’s saying, he comes across like a campy Darth Vader minus the cape and charm. Except for the prospect of Chapter 7 bankruptcy, he’s Bruce Wayne’s biggest, baddest stress test yet.  

For all the millions (reportedly upwards of 250) squandered on this production, Batman’s swan song looks and sounds pretty much like a clone of any elephantine action movie. Long gone are the moody gothic designs and lighter touch of the Tim Burton series, replaced by a blandly modern Manhattan and cardboard villains. The only new toy in Batman’s arsenal  is a “Bat” fighter jet that looks like, yes, a big metallic bat. Despite the ultra-modernistic design, its options don't include an auto-pilot, an oversight only flown in as a plot gimmick. 

In this B(r)at Pack entry, Hollywood ageism is the greatest stealth enemy. Not unlike the Harry Potter series, talented pros like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are pushed into the wings while the spotlight switches to minimal millennials like Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, cast as an idealistic cop who wants to see Batman flap back into the swing of things. In skin-tight black leather and leading with her rear end, Hathaway is neither cat nor sexy kitten, only a kid actress who couldn’t carry Michelle Pfeiffer’s high heels. Reprising his throwaway role as the super-hapless Commissioner Gordon, Gary Oldman’s American accent is so forced he always seems to be throwing his voice from inside the Bat Cave. And if you’re looking for romance from this errant Knight, the best you’ll get are the bromantic weepy-eyed looks that Caine’s Alfred shoots at Master Wayne.

In the ups and downs of Batman’s last flight, not only must he battle the baddies and his own demons, but also Manhattan’s nasty 99%, who are unleashed as part of Bane’s suspiciously pinko plan of mass destruction. Once the urban masses take over the city, they set up kangaroo courts that send the rich and powerful hopping to their deaths across a frozen river. During the anarchy, Batman finds himself hurled into a prison hell-hole—literally—where his Herculean task involves an extreme messianic ascent that might go over big at the X Games. 

It’s all batty and super-pretentious, and any snickers that may arise will be muffled by the noise and Bale’s obliviously earnest performance, equal parts Dirty Harry and Jane Eyre’s Rochester. If this movie is a tragedy of sorts, as it so wants to be, it’s only because of the horrific real-life events that will forever shadow it. Otherwise, the joke is on the audience. Seriously. 

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8/19/12

Film Review | The Fighter

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Half-Brother

by Thomas Delapa


Some labors of love are just labors.

It took actor/producer Mark Wahlberg five long years to wrestle The Fighter to the screen. In the story of welterweight boxer “Irish” Micky Ward and his drug-addict half-brother Dicky, Wahlberg sparred with a tag-team of directors (like Darren Aronofsky) and co-stars (including Brad Pitt), before settling on David O. Russell and Christian Bale. To his credit, Wahlberg never did throw in the towel, though that doesn’t mean dazed audiences won’t want to.

Any boxing movie made since champs like Rocky and Raging Bull faces long odds. On one hand (or fist), there’s Rocky’s ethnic blue-collar, underdog formula to contend with. On the other is Raging Bull’s brutal naturalism and superbly choreographed fight scenes. While The Fighter battles to be its own movie, it ends up on the ropes, done in by a lightweight plot and a flabby midsection.

In this 1990s biopic of Boston-area blood brothers and foul-mouthed family feuding, Wahlberg’s Micky should be the main event. Instead, The Departed star steps aside for Bale's Dicky, Micky’s crack-addicted, sometime-trainer brother. Gaunt, wired and wild-eyed, Bale is a moving target, rarely standing still long enough to connect with the audience. An ex-boxer himself who once fought the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard, Dicky now takes his blows at the local crack house, giving new meaning to the phrase “rope-a-dope.”

While Bale answers every bell with madly Methodical intensity, the soft-spoken, near-ascetic Wahlberg always seems to be shadow-boxing with the gloves on. Russell and Wahlberg so knock themselves out building this movie from the outside with streetwise cred, they give Micky a pedestrian treatment. Yo Adrian, this Fighter is short on fight.

Outside of the ring, Russell takes some amusing jabs at Micky’s crass, loud-mouthed mother (Melissa Leo) and her entourage of seven shrewish daughters. But even these big-haired harpies are too grotesque to be funny, except as lumpy punching bags. The catalyst for Micky’s break from his family is Charlene (Amy Adams), a tough, straight-shooting bartender whom he slowly wins over to his corner. Beside the flurry of family squabbles, Bale and Leo do score a few points for a running gag that shows Dicky defenestrating himself out of the crack house to escape his mother’s wrath.

Though The Fighter wears its blue-collar squalor around its neck like a medal, there’s nothing fancy about its footwork, least of all in the obligatory rock-music montages celebrating Micky’s boyhood roots in the ‘hood. Round 1 of his rise to the top kicks off with the ubiquitous (and misdated) “How You Like Me Now?” by the Heavy. Answer: Not so much.

Even more routine is Micky’s Rocky road to triumph once he beats down his Freudian baggage and pounces back into the ring with the eye of the tiger. With a leaner, punchier script, maybe The Fighter could have been a contender. However you score it, it’s no heavyweight.

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1/2/11

Film Review | Terminator Salvation

Odds and Ends

by Thomas Delapa


OK, we get it. Christian Bale can play super-intense. But like the song goes, Is that all there is?

The Welsh-born actor went batty in American Psycho, screwy in The Machinist and then swooped into the box-office stratosphere as the brooding new Batman. Bale’s 2009 Herculean labor was to resurrect the rusty Terminator series, which last said “Hasta la vista, baby” seven years ago, right before Arnold Schwarzenegger morphed into the California Governator.

In Terminator Salvation—now on DVD—The Arnold is missing in action, and series creator James Cameron is long gone. The B-list substitutions are Bale, Charlie’s Angels director McG (a.k.a. Joseph McGinty Nichol) and semi-robotic Aussie newcomer Sam Worthington. If anything saves Salvation from total self-destruction, it’s the superb visual effects, which almost had me saying, “I’ll be back.”

When Bale enlisted in this sci-fi sequel about a futuristic war between man and machines, he may not have known he’d be demoted to virtual co-star, given that Williamson surprisingly gets a huge chunk of screen time. Not that the casting had anything to with Bale infamously blowing a fuse on the set, which was captured on audio and went viral faster than the swine flu.

As John Connor, leader of the resistance in the post-apocalyptic 2018, Bale puts his mouth in overdrive, shouting his lines in apoplectic fury. The computer-network Skynet and its army of monster machines have got humanity on the run, while Connor and his comrades are set to test a secret weapon designed to make the machines crash and burn.

Though the script (by John Brancato and Michael Ferris) goes back to the future again, the prologue is in the present, where a condemned man unsuspectingly donates his body to mad science. Inexplicably, Marcus Wright (Williamson) pops up in Connor’s present, teaming up with a sexy fighter pilot (Moon Bloodgood), and launching himself on a mission to find a youth named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Like the movie, Wright suffers from an identity crisis, uncertain of his past and purpose, betting he’ll find answers within Skynet’s fortress command center in derelict San Francisco.

To program new life into the series, the writers dubiously ignore the present, setting the story almost exclusively in a drab dystopia that’s relieved only by Martin Laing’s exceptional production design. Instead of giving us a new generation of Terminator robots played by humans, the 2009 version is uploaded with generic CGI goons with demonic red eyes. The battle this time isn’t as personal (or as scary-funny), however peppered with high-impact thrills.

The final (de)termination comes early. In the mid-movie attack by a Godzilla-sized “hunter-killer” machine accessorized with motorcycles, the effect is pure shock-and-awe, revved up with a crescendo of heavy-metal sound effects. But after that, Terminator Salvation winds down like a dying Energizer bunny, ending on a whimper instead of a big bang.

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