Film reviews, part 1
So I seem to be having a Weekend of Watching Movies, and I plan to see two more today. This post contains spoilers for all three films I'm about to talk about, Taken, Wolverine and Australia.
Taken
The more accurate title for this film would have been "Liam Neeson is a Bad Ass Motherfucker." It was very straightforward. It was advertised as a film about a man whose daughter is kidnapped who then kills roughly eleventybillion people to get her back and that's exactly what it was. One of the things I liked about it was that it was tight. Liam has to track his daughter's kidnappers through Paris, and it isn't easy, and there are many steps, but the film allows for the intelligence of the audience that we can get how he did some of them without showing everything. Liam must get from A to E, and there are steps B, C and D in there, and the film does not show those steps but in such a way that we can see for ourselves how he got there. The character is pretty ruthless, in a way that makes you sympathize with him but also kind of see why his wife left him.
Wolverine
I heard this film described as "uninspired" and that's the most accurate adjective I could choose. It wasn't bad at all. It was fun. There were lots of hot guys and cool powers and fights and things that went asplodey but it all felt a bit...ho hum. After hearing fanboys bitch about the shredding of Logan's origin story I was surprised how much of it was intact. His relationship with Silverfox, the Weapon X program...a lot of it was mostly there, if massaged a bit for this film. Deadpool was kinda...not Deadpool, but within spitting distance, and of course Gambit and Wolverine had nothing like this kind of history but we'll let that slide. The only bad thing about Gambit here was that there needed to be MOAR PLZ. A few times I noticed that the effects were...not good. The scene when Logan's examining his new adamantium claws (I was glad they kept the comic backstory that his claws are bone underneath) in the old farm couple's bathroom, the claws just looked SO CGI.
Australia
Boy. Where to start. There is the skeleton of a good movie in here somewhere, but it's hard to see it underneath the thick layer of cheese that's been liberally applied. About halfway through it hit me what this was...a 1950s movie musical without the songs. Frankly, it could have used some songs. Its tone was a little disjointed. The music was bombastic and jarring, some of the performances were campy while others were more realistic, and film cliches were being tossed about right and left. Some of the "big moments" were only surprises if you've never seen a movie in your life, ever. Lady Sarah must attend the fancy ball with people she hates, and the Drover refused to attend, and she has to dance with the big bad cattle mogul, and gosh, do you think the Drover will show up all handsome and in the tuxedo she got him? Take a wild guess.
This was marketed as some epic love story like "Out of Africa" and it really wasn't. I mean yeah, there was a love story, but it was more about the damn kid, who was possibly the most irritating kid in the history of cinema. By late in the film when the Japanese are coming to bomb the island where the kid's been taken I was cheering them on. Get him! He's over there in the bushes! Oh my GOD. And David Wenham was practically twirling a mustache as the dastardly guy after Lady Sarah's land, which she initially wanted to sell but then inexplicably wanted to keep about six hours after arriving.
Hugh and Nicole did pretty well despite being given caricatures to play. The only problem is that Nicole was playing her character as a caricature and Hugh was playing his straight. Oh, she's the proper English lady who finds her heart in the outback and he's the rough and tumble cattle drover who won't be tied down, as he'll tell you at every opportunity, until he falls for the surprisingly feisty English lady. I went back and forth over whether I liked Nicole's performance or not. She was laying it on a bit thick at times, but at other times (I'm thinking of one scene in particular when she's trying to sing "Over the Rainbow" to the kid) it was very convincing. I'm not sure they did enough to support the love story aspect. It's almost like we were supposed to believe they fall in love because that's what characters in a movie like this do. I always wonder about characters like The Drover, who are fabulously handsome, if mangy, while every other man of similar age and profession in a fifty mile radius looks like he went ten rounds with the Ugly Stick and lost. Hugh was actually really affecting in the last section of the film when he believes Lady Sarah dead, especially in his barely-sketched-in-but-effective friendship with his Aboriginal brother-in-law, and I admit I got kinda emotional when the little family is eventually reunited...yes, even the kid, too.
The scenery was fantastic at times, and made me wish I were seeing it on a big screen, but at other times there was some jaw-droppingly awful greenscreening. In the end it dragged in places, and seemed like a mashup of some better movies, and I wished it had been done more as a straight drama/romance and less as a self-consicously Big Epic Film, but I kind of enjoyed it.
Taken
The more accurate title for this film would have been "Liam Neeson is a Bad Ass Motherfucker." It was very straightforward. It was advertised as a film about a man whose daughter is kidnapped who then kills roughly eleventybillion people to get her back and that's exactly what it was. One of the things I liked about it was that it was tight. Liam has to track his daughter's kidnappers through Paris, and it isn't easy, and there are many steps, but the film allows for the intelligence of the audience that we can get how he did some of them without showing everything. Liam must get from A to E, and there are steps B, C and D in there, and the film does not show those steps but in such a way that we can see for ourselves how he got there. The character is pretty ruthless, in a way that makes you sympathize with him but also kind of see why his wife left him.
Wolverine
I heard this film described as "uninspired" and that's the most accurate adjective I could choose. It wasn't bad at all. It was fun. There were lots of hot guys and cool powers and fights and things that went asplodey but it all felt a bit...ho hum. After hearing fanboys bitch about the shredding of Logan's origin story I was surprised how much of it was intact. His relationship with Silverfox, the Weapon X program...a lot of it was mostly there, if massaged a bit for this film. Deadpool was kinda...not Deadpool, but within spitting distance, and of course Gambit and Wolverine had nothing like this kind of history but we'll let that slide. The only bad thing about Gambit here was that there needed to be MOAR PLZ. A few times I noticed that the effects were...not good. The scene when Logan's examining his new adamantium claws (I was glad they kept the comic backstory that his claws are bone underneath) in the old farm couple's bathroom, the claws just looked SO CGI.
Australia
Boy. Where to start. There is the skeleton of a good movie in here somewhere, but it's hard to see it underneath the thick layer of cheese that's been liberally applied. About halfway through it hit me what this was...a 1950s movie musical without the songs. Frankly, it could have used some songs. Its tone was a little disjointed. The music was bombastic and jarring, some of the performances were campy while others were more realistic, and film cliches were being tossed about right and left. Some of the "big moments" were only surprises if you've never seen a movie in your life, ever. Lady Sarah must attend the fancy ball with people she hates, and the Drover refused to attend, and she has to dance with the big bad cattle mogul, and gosh, do you think the Drover will show up all handsome and in the tuxedo she got him? Take a wild guess.
This was marketed as some epic love story like "Out of Africa" and it really wasn't. I mean yeah, there was a love story, but it was more about the damn kid, who was possibly the most irritating kid in the history of cinema. By late in the film when the Japanese are coming to bomb the island where the kid's been taken I was cheering them on. Get him! He's over there in the bushes! Oh my GOD. And David Wenham was practically twirling a mustache as the dastardly guy after Lady Sarah's land, which she initially wanted to sell but then inexplicably wanted to keep about six hours after arriving.
Hugh and Nicole did pretty well despite being given caricatures to play. The only problem is that Nicole was playing her character as a caricature and Hugh was playing his straight. Oh, she's the proper English lady who finds her heart in the outback and he's the rough and tumble cattle drover who won't be tied down, as he'll tell you at every opportunity, until he falls for the surprisingly feisty English lady. I went back and forth over whether I liked Nicole's performance or not. She was laying it on a bit thick at times, but at other times (I'm thinking of one scene in particular when she's trying to sing "Over the Rainbow" to the kid) it was very convincing. I'm not sure they did enough to support the love story aspect. It's almost like we were supposed to believe they fall in love because that's what characters in a movie like this do. I always wonder about characters like The Drover, who are fabulously handsome, if mangy, while every other man of similar age and profession in a fifty mile radius looks like he went ten rounds with the Ugly Stick and lost. Hugh was actually really affecting in the last section of the film when he believes Lady Sarah dead, especially in his barely-sketched-in-but-effective friendship with his Aboriginal brother-in-law, and I admit I got kinda emotional when the little family is eventually reunited...yes, even the kid, too.
The scenery was fantastic at times, and made me wish I were seeing it on a big screen, but at other times there was some jaw-droppingly awful greenscreening. In the end it dragged in places, and seemed like a mashup of some better movies, and I wished it had been done more as a straight drama/romance and less as a self-consicously Big Epic Film, but I kind of enjoyed it.