Directed by: John Turtletaub
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Jon Voight, Ed Harris, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Helen Mirren, Harvey Keitel
Rated: PG for some violence and action.
Parental Notes: This is a fairly idiotic film, but it is innocuous for most youngsters. There's a little violence and some peril, but it is not at all graphic and is in the grand dumb-action-movie style.
"National Treasure: Book of Secrets" is a second helping of everything 2004's "National Treasure" offered: over-the-top conspiracy theories, historical relics and ruins, and impossibly idealistic heroes out to do What Is Right. Everyone's back, from director John Turtletaub and writers Cormac and Marianne Wibberley to Nicholas Cage, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, and the rest of the main heroic characters. Whatever you thought of the first film will almost certainly be what you think of this new one.
The story is once again about United States history and a race to complete an archaeological treasure hunt. This time, our hero Ben Gates (Nicholas Cage, "Ghost Rider") is out to prove that an ancestor of his was innocent of conspiring to assassinate President Lincoln. Doing so requires that he find a lost Native American treasure by solving clues such as a secret code sent to the Confederate Army by the Queen of England and recorded on a lost page of John Wilkes Booth's diary.
Along the way, Ben and his friends kidnap the President of the United States of America from his own birthday party. They find the titular secret book -- one handed from President to President and containing such secrets as the truth about Area 51 and the moon landings. And they (once again) wind up in an underground ruin hanging precipitously over a very long drop from equipment just aged enough to provide suspense without failing altogether and ending the movie early.
One thing lacking from "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" which was present in the first film is a consistent bad guy. Ian Howe (Sean Bean, "Silent Hill") was an over-the-top baddie consumed with greed and bent on finding an enormous treasure. This film's antagonist is Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris, "Gone Baby Gone"), an over-the-top baddie who vacillates between a conniving schemer and a not-all-bad guy capable of self-sacrificing heroics. In one rather intense scene he flips back and forth about five times. It's very annoying. Films like this should be populated by folks who are simple and easy to understand, not ones with any shades of grey.
Otherwise, this is a solid recreation of the inspired lunacy of the first film. If you loved that, don't miss it. For newcomers to the franchise: this is not a flick for those who like character development, realism, or surprises other than the shock of what new improbability the filmmakers have come up with. Folks who enjoy scenery chewing, cartoonishly good heroes, cheesy dialog, and incredibly wild plots will be in popcorn movie heaven.
Directed by: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener
Rated: R for graphic bloody violence.
Parental Notes: This film deserves its R rating -- there is plenty of gore spraying about here, and lots of dead bodies, body parts, and gaping wounds. Not for youngsters or the faint of heart.
The tale of Sweeney Todd, the barber who murdered his clients and gave the corpses to an associate to bake into meat pies, has been around since at least 1846, when it was published as a penny dreadful serial novel. In 1979, Steven Sondheim (composer of musicals like "West Side Story") turned the tale into a Broadway musical. Now, Tim Burton has adapted Sondheim's work for the big screen, and the result is a beautiful nightmare of a film that will send Burton fans into ecstasies and may please fans of Sondheim's work, but will likely be too peculiar for most others.
The story is one of revenge: many years ago, there was a barber, his wife, and their baby. A wicked judge was in love with the wife and had the barber sentenced and transported to Australia on a false charge. The judge ravished the wife, sending her mad, and adopted the infant as his ward. The barber manages to escape from the penal colony and returns to London as Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp, "Pirates of the Caribbean"), a man bent on vengeance. He returns to the site of his old barber shop, an upstairs room above a pie shop, to find it still owned by Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"), who makes the worst meat pies in London. Mrs. Lovett has kept his set of razors, so Sweeney sets up shop again and schemes to get one of his beloved blades against the throat of the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman, " Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix").
The entire film is a goth wonderland, full of shades of black and gray. The characters are pale and wan, with crazed hair and deep circles under their eyes. This is the London of Dickens' nightmares, a place of thick smoke and fog, and filthy streets filled with filthy people. The lovely period clothes are dirty and covered with questionable stains. When things go well, it is usually a prelude to something nasty.
Sweeney is driven to distraction by the difficulty of getting at the cunning judge and decides that everyone deserves to die, not just the wicked Turpin. But how to dispose of the bodies? Well, Mrs. Lovett observes, they could always bury them -- but it seems like such a waste, especially with the price of meat what it is these days. The song that follows is a veritable orgy of black humor, as the pair consider the possible flavors of various individuals outside the shop. The entire film is filled with the darkest of humor -- corpses falling through a trapdoor Sweeney rigs in pratfall poses that would be fatal if they weren't already dead, Mrs. Lovett's pie shop enjoying booming business as people discover how tasty the pies are, and so on.
Of course, this is a musical as well, which makes the darkness even more delightful. It also means that there must be romance, and not just the doomed fantasies Mrs. Lovett has of herself and Sweeney moving to the seaside and settling down. Evildoers must be punished, even if they are doing evil as a means to punish the wicked. Fortunately, there is Sweeney's daughter Joanna (newcomer Jayne Wisener), now sixteen, and a young sailor named Anthony (newcomer Jamie Campbell Bower) to fill the role of young lovers struggling to live happily ever after.
"Sweeney Todd" is a dark delight, sure to please Burton's fans and those fans of the Broadway show who are not purists (Burton cut a number of songs and set pieces, presumably for cinematic and length reasons). It is not recommended for those who find Burton's style not to their liking -- it's becoming more stylized and distilled with every film the man makes. Those who find plot holes aggravating and have difficulty suspending their disbelief are also recommended to stay away. This is a musical, after all, and one in the hands of a man not renowned for his plotting skills. But those in search of a darkly comic nightmare will doubtless have a bloody good time.
Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Will Smith
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence.
Parental Notes: Most teens and preteens should be fine -- this is a suspenseful movie and youngsters who are already afraid of dark places may find it too intense, but it is not terribly graphic.
"I am Legend" is the third adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel of the same title, but it's very losely based on the text. Matheson's bacteria-laden vampires have been replaced with the Infected, "Resident Evil" style quasi-zombies who have succumbed to an engineered virus meant to cure cancer.
The film is strongest in its opening hour or so. We meet Robert Neville (Will Smith, "The Pursuit of Happyness"), the last uninfected man in New York -- and, as far as he knows, the world. Through long sequences of his daily life and flashbacks to the chaos immediately following the infection's escape from the lab, we get to know him and his dog, Sam. We learn that he can only go out during the day, because at night the Infected come out, and they are too strong and fast and great in numbers for him to defend himself. We follow him through the ruined city, its weed-infested streets and slowly decaying skyscrapers an eerie backdrop. The city is a masterpiece of set design, from the skyline, some of its buildings still shrouded in fraying quarantine wrap, to the places Neville searches for supplies, their walls covered with personal articles and newspaper clippings from the disaster.
Robert is working on a cure -- before the virus, he was an Army scientist entrusted with finding a way to contain the spread, and even now that it is too late, he keeps working with single-minded purpose. He also rents DVDs from a store he has populated with mannequins, some of whom he talks to. He's still trying to get up the courage to talk to the attractive lady mannequin in the adult films section of the store. Robert, you see, is not doing too well after three years having nobody but his dog for companionship.
Smith is a solid actor, and he is at his best in the scenes by himself, talking to his dog, hunting deer in the streets of Manhattan, barracading his house at night to keep out the Infected, and sleeping curled up in the bathtub with his gun and his dog. The first half or so of the film is a wonderful character piece, examining the way that a brilliant man might fray around the edges when dealing with this kind of horror.
The second half of the film becomes a bit more predictable, and full of holes, as a lovely young woman with a boy in tow appears -- how she got onto the island, its bridges blown out by the military, is never explained. There are indications that the Infected are developing a sort of animal cunning, but they are never examined. There's plenty of fighting the CGI monsters, and the requisite Hollywood ending, complete with synchronistic symbolism and a divine Plan. It's a disappointing finale to the promising beginning.
Overall, "I Am Legend" is a decent Hollywood horror/sci-fi movie. It's not great, but fans of Will Smith or of zombie films shouldn't miss it. Those who demand attention to detail in a script and not just in set decoration will want to give it a pass.
Directed by: Chris Weitz
Starring: Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig
Rated: PG-13 for sequences of fantasy violence.
Parental Notes: The violence is, with one exception, fairly standard fantasy fare -- there are battles with little blood. The exception is a battle between two armored polar bears which ends with one killing the other with a move the observant may find shocking but the unobservant will probably not notice as particularly violent. There is very little blood, however.
Adapting a book into film is a dangerous business, but Hollywood keeps trying. "The Golden Compass" is a slightly-watered-down version of the first book in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, a text on religious philosophy written as a beautiful fantasy story. The books work very well on both levels, but so much of Pullman's nuance has been left out in the page-to-screen transition that the film comes across as a somewhat rushed, rather shallow fantasy tale with hints of philosophy in it.
The story follows our heroine, Lyra (newcomer Dakota Blue Richards), an intractable orphan being raised in a paralell universe to ours, in a college much like Oxford. Children are disappearing from the streets, and when one of her friends goes missing, Lyra is determined to find him. The alluring Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman, "Margot at the Wedding") invites Lyra to join her on an expedition to the frozen North, but Lyra soon discovers that Mrs. Coulter is connected to the missing children, and sets off with a small company of Gyptians, a sort of cross between pirates and gypsies, to see about rescuing her friend. Along the way she meets Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Ian McKellan, "Stardust"), an armored polar bear, and Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott, "Ghost Rider), the pilot of a sort of hot air balloon. They join her on her quest as well.
"The Golden Compass" is visually stunning, like any big-studio fantasy film ought to be. The CGI animals look astonishingly real, presumably because they are all CGI rather than an unnerving blend of real and computer-generated. There are a lot of CGI animals because every human character in the film has a daemon, an animal-shaped, talking companion who embodies part of that person's soul. The daemons of children can shapechange, which leads to some wonderful effects sequences.
The actors hold their own against the special effects -- especially young Richards, who is a gem. Her Lyra is an unrepentant liar, faithful til death to her friends but unconcerned with everyone else. Kidman embodies Mrs. Coulter's frightening mixture of seductive warmth and icy soullessness perfectly, and leads one to hope that the other books will be made if only so that we can see the depths of depravity and tenderness of which the woman is capable. A wide collection of character actors make appearances and lend a wonderful air to the film.
There are, of course, plenty of issues with "The Golden Compass," as there are in any adaptation of a complex book. Some details have been changed, such as who exactly tries to poison Lyra's uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig, "The Invasion"); other details have been left out entirely, such as the cloud pine branches the witches use to fly. The villainous Magisterium, which in the book is unquestionably a mirror of our world's Catholic Church, has been somewhat watered down so that it resembles a faintly religious-toned Big Brother. And nearly all the philosophical discussion about free will and the nature of the human spirit is gone. Fans of the book will likely be disappointed by the omissions, and those folks the changes are intended to appease are no less upset about the film. One can't help but wonder how the philosophy- and theology-heavy second and third books can be adapted to follow this film.
Ultimately, "The Golden Compass" is a shallow retelling of a complex book. It is a good adventure story, but the stripping down of the complex plot leaves holes and strange hints behind. Newcomers to the trilogy who long for more should check out the books. Fans of the books, on the other hand, are well advised to chant a little mantra before watching the movie: "there is no book, there is no book, there is no book..." That more or less worked for me.