Tag: Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Movie Review: A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)

In A Good Day to Die Hard, John McClane emerges from a taxi cab in Moscow as a man finally transformed into an action movie caricature. Sure, the three installments standing between this film and the 1988 original have done their part to dehumanize their hero, but even Live Free or Die Hard, where the boozing, troubled detective launches a cop car into a helicopter like a kid seeking an achievement trophy on the X-Box 360, knows its protagonist well enough to put something of his—a daughter—up as stakes against the megalomaniacal villain of the moment. Not here. As soon as McClane lands in Russia, he’s running and jumping and shooting through a procession of grey, vaguely Russian sets with his son, who has grown up to be a CIA superspy. John McClane in 1988 winces as he walks barefoot across a sea of broken glass. John McClane in 2013 leaps from a tall building and pinballs through chutes and girders, miraculously dodging machine gun fire from a helicopter before landing on the ground, where he pulls a hunk of rusted metal from his son’s abdomen without so much as a hint of concern.

John McClane is minimized in what’s been marketed as a tribute to his legacy, to the point that both his son (Jai Courtney) and daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, in a brief cameo) make light of or treat as a burden their father’s decades-spanning, if incidental, career thwarting large-scale terrorist plots. They seem resigned to the fact that his mere presence in Russia means that cars will be smashed, guns will be fired, and anything combustible will explode. McClane was formerly an interesting protagonist. He drank too much. He was estranged from his wife. He was distant from his children. Even with a machine gun in his face, the worst part of his day was waking up with a hangover. Now he’s been neutered. He’s just an ornery old man, but not in the way of so many Clint Eastwood characters. John McClane is Bruce Willis in The Expendables: an image meant to inspire nostalgia and given one throwaway joke. Here, it’s that he’s on vacation, a sentiment as truthful as it is funny. McClane repeats the phrase so often you wonder if director John Moore had Willis record it once in a soundbooth so it could be played whenever things got too quiet.

Despite every attempt to convolute things, the plot of A Good Day to Die Hard is stupidly simple. John McClane, hearing that his son is in some kind of unspecified trouble in Moscow, hops a plane and ends up making a mess of a years-long sting intended to flip a Russian dissident (Sebastian Koch), who has spent the last few decades in prison due to his connection to the Chernobyl disaster. Things between John and his son are pretty sour, which is reflected upon whenever the McClanes aren’t haphazardly massacring civilians: Jack refuses to call his father “Dad,” instead opting for his Christian name, and both men agree that they don’t come from a “hugging family.” It’d be tragic were not these macho platitudes meant to be celebrated.

Willis is often accused of not trying very hard in vehicles like this, letting his smirk and the accumulated dirt on his wifebeater do the heavy lifting, but movies like RED, Looper, and Moonrise Kingdom either work with or around Willis’ limitations, using him less as a featured attraction than as part of their palette. That’s impossible here, given that Bruce Willis is John McClane, and that a Die Hard movie without him simply isn’t a Die Hard movie at all, but there are ways of accounting for Willis—interesting villains, innovative action sequences, a non-standard plot—that A Good Day to Die Hard has no interest in. Sure, there’s a lot of smoke as to who the bad guy is, but when picking one out from a line-up of uninspired Russian mafia types, does the end result really matter?

No, and that’s exactly why the McClanes make a 12-hour car ride to Chernobyl in 30-minutes: so that the fallen statues and ruined hammers and sickles of the ruined city can once again beat the dead horse of Cold War nostalgia. Here, in the third act, things get implausible—the lightspeed trip to the city, the chemical spray that immediately de-radiates the area it’s sprayed in, the fact that the McClanes walk around Chernobyl wearing regular clothes when every Russian in the city is wearing a biohazard suit—but not in a fun way. There are thirty-something well-trained Eurothugs patrolling the city with an arsenal of guns, explosives, and helicopters. There are two Americans among them, loudly dispatching everything in their crosshairs. A Good Day to Die Hard is just another action movie asking its audience to believe and be invested in this scenario.

Every Die Hard movie, in an effort to somehow be bigger and badder—more Die Harder—than the first, has comicaly exaggerated McClane’s abilities or his wit. A Good Day to Die Hard is guilty of the former and largely abandons the later. Say what you will about any of Die Hard‘s sequels, but none of them have felt this unnecessary. A “Die Hard” movie in name only and a “Bruce Willis movie” insofar as it’s a movie Bruce Willis appears in, A Good Day to Die Hard could have been called anything, could have starred anybody but Willis, and would have been better off, if only for the lack of comparison. Do the movie a favor and cast the albatross around its neck overboard, and you’re still left with a sub par action movie, the kind that’s released early in the year not to grab a larger audience during the late-winter burial period, but because it’s one of the films being buried.

A Good Day to Die Hard. With Bruce Willis (John McClane), Jai Courtney (Jack McClane), Sebastian Koch (Yuri Komarov), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lucy McClane), Yuliya Snigir (Irina), and Cole Hauser (Mike Collins). Directed by John Moore and produced by Alex Young and Wyck Godfrey. Screenplay by Skip Woods, based on characters created by Roderick Thorp.

February 28, 2013
Movie Review: A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

The only explanation for a movie like A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is that America loves a good rehabilitation story, and few in that vein have been juicier than Charlie Sheen’s. For all the attention garnered by his very public firing from Two and a Half Men and the meltdown that followed, Sheen’s path back to respectability—whatever that means to him—is very different from that which has been encouraged by reality television. Instead of signing up for a session with Dr. Drew and engaging in public bloodletting, Sheen returned to work. He created and produced a one man show and toured around the country. He signed on to a new sitcom, Anger Management, and went on a marathon binge of filming, creating 90 episodes where once there was but a whisper of a show about a Charlie Sheen like character attending anger management courses. And now, with Charles Swan III, Sheen has made his long-promised return to film. He should have stayed away.

Sheen’s career over the past few years has been deeply rooted in his belief that people like him. This isn’t an unfair assumption. To tour as Charlie Sheen and to play Charlie Sheen on television is to court a certain audience—fans, mostly—who are willing to put up with a performer’s foibles in order to enjoy his vibe; his Charlie Sheenness, if you will. These are designed to be disposable units of entertainment, each installment as forgettable and vaguely pleasing as the last. Films, however, are different. They’re longer, obviously, but movies—especially art movies, which is what Charles Swan III desperately wants to be considered as—tend to be indelible, a side effect of being projected on gigantic screens. Even from a balcony, there is no mistaking the Charlie Sheen of Charles Swan III with a mere mortal. He’s a being of pure ego, a puppy demanding your love and affection with the force of a hurricane.

Director and screenwriter Roman Coppola caters to Sheen’s sensibility, casting him as a successful artist whose commercial prospects have made him a rockstar. His friends love him, women can’t get enough of him, and when life gets him down, the world stands still waiting for him to roar back to life. Charles Swan III spends a considerable amount of time in a funk. His girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick), enraged that he keeps a drawer full of candid nude Polaroids of ex-flings, dumps him. Depressed, he gathers her shoes into a garbage bag and attempts to throw them over a cliff. When he fails, his frustration leads him to crash his car in a record producer’s swimming pool, where he has a mild heart attack. Over the course of conversations with his sister (Patricia Arquette) and friends (Jason Schwartzman as comedian Kirby Star, Bill Murray as his accountant, Saul), and Charles’s elaborate fantasies about death, sex, and persecution, Coppola tries his damnedest to paint Swan—and Sheen—as a figure deserving of sympathy, but he fails his man at every turn.

Charles Swan III is a fairly detestable human being, and the world he lives in is a male fantasia where women are either sex objects, ball busters, or savages. Murray, Schwartzman, and the rest of the cast play down to Sheen’s level, presenting caricatures of the personae they’ve developed in the films of Wes Anderson, which is appropriate given that Coppola—who co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited—has chosen to make a cardboard Wes Anderson picture. Beyond the early notion that Swan has an overactive imagination, there’s no reason for him to have a couch that looks like a fully-dressed hot dog or for his car to have gigantic decals of bacon and eggs applied to the doors other than that it looks cool and whimsical in some modest, unexplained way. The production design of Charles Swan III is the only element of the film worth praising, but even that must be within reason. However dollhouse-like Anderson’s films often end up looking, at least his houses, schools, and trains feel lived-in. Coppola’s, on the other hand, tend to feel like a warehouse filled with kitschy “vintage” stuff he found on Etsy, like Juno’s hamburger phone if the point of making Juno was the hamburger phone.

Before accepting that he’s a likable, misguided, goofball lothario, Charles Swan III spends a lot of time fending off accusations of selfishness and laziness. Coppola’s film strikes this apathetic tone early, which may be proper of any movie where Charlie Sheen tap dances on his own grave. Though Coppola has said otherwise, positing his decision to cast Sheen as an opportunity for the talented actor of Wall Street and Platoon to once again make something of himself, the resulting movie looks, sounds, and feels like a too-late cash-in on the Year of Charlie Sheen, nudging his 60 Minutes interview and his Comedy Central roast into decidedly pretentious waters. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is excruciating, like watching a 90-minute press junket interview where Sheen pretends, albeit not very hard, to be a more likable version of himself. He’s already done that across several forms of media, many considerate enough to allow one to change the channel.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. With Charlie Sheen (Charles Swan III), Jason Schwartzman (Kirby Star), Bill Murray (Saul), Katheryn Winnick (Ivana), Patricia Arquette (Izzy), Aubrey Plaza (Marnie), Dermot Mulroney (Doctor), and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Victoria). Directed by Roman Coppola and produced by Coppola and Youree Henley. Screenplay by Coppola.

February 10, 2013
Movie Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, like Snakes on a Plane, tells you everything you need to know about it in the four words comprising its title. Timur Bekmambetov’s film gains or loses an audience based on how cool one perceives the sight of Abraham Lincoln chopping down wave after wave of CGI vampires down with a silver-lined ax as being. Whereas Snakes on a Plane suffered from bowing too much to the internet meme culture that got so much from the movie’s premise that they didn’t feel the need to see the actual film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is so dry and mirthless one wonders what the point is. Dour films about CGI bloodsuckers are released two at a time. One featuring a kick-ass, kung-fu president almost can’t help standing out among the crowd. Despite those easy expectations, Bekmambetov—whose Wanted neutered a comic book about a world overrun by Batman villains by becoming an uninspiring Matrix clone—does almost everything in his power to disappoint. In this, he succeeds.

But let’s forget about that for a moment. Forget, too, everything you think you know about Abraham Lincoln. Let’s say that his true passion in this world was the slaying of vampires, that, after witnessing the murder of his mother by a particularly nasty vampire, the young Mr. Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) puts down his law books and takes up his axe. Endowed by his creator with certain unalienable rights, among them the pursuit of bloody vengeance, Lincoln puts a ball squarely in the eye of Jack Barts (Marton Csokas), his mother’s killer, but Barts doesn’t die. When Lincoln is rescued by Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper), a man who observed the future president drinking furiously in preparation for his task, he’s let in on the secret history of the world: vampires exist, and, since the colonization of America, have used the vast plantations of the south and the country’s reliance upon slavery as a free buffet.

This sounds like the set-up to a pretty good genre flick but Lincoln’s vampire slaying origins are hashed out for half of the film’s runtime and involve all manner of uninteresting characters. There’s William Johnson (Anthony Mackie) and Joshua Speed (Jimmi Simpson), two of Lincoln’s earliest and closest friends, and Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), atypical one-dimensional love interest. Sturges himself is a glum tutor with a secret as obvious as the sunglasses he constantly wears, and Lincoln makes for a particularly uninspired chosen one, disavowing guns in favor of an axe he whips around at lightning speed. The antagonist vampires—Adam (Rufus Sewell) and Vadoma (Erin Wasson)—are distinguished mainly by their pointy teeth and flashy attire.

The movie starts rolling when Lincoln is in the White House. The Emancipation Proclamation is issued to deprive southern vampires of their main food source, Union troops are befuddled when they find that their bullets do little against the vampiric armies of the Confederacy, and the South seems poised to break through at Gettysburg. It’s at this point that Lincoln remembers that silver destroys vampires and orders the appropriation of every last piece of silver. As Roger Ebert points out in his review of this movie, it seems like Lincoln is able to gather, melt, and re-purpose every ounce of silver in the United States of America in a day. The better to reach the film’s climactic action sequence, of course. What’s more strange, to me, is that the protection, fueling, and conduction of the train falls upon Lincoln and his small band of friends. Even if you’re trying to sneak the train past an unsuspecting enemy, is the President of the United States really the best choice to pilot a speeding locomotive?

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter lives and dies by that sequence, pitting Lincoln and his friends against the vampire horde determined to derail the train bearing silver munitions to the front line. With the bridge on fire and the odds of survival against them, Lincoln, Speed, Johnson, and Sturges battle a veritable army of vampires, hacking, slashing, and shooting through wave after wave of them, hardly pausing to reload. The effectiveness of this scene is directly proportional to the number of murky, blue and grey lit, slow motion kung-fu action sequences you’ve seen lately. Considering that the market is absolutely saturated with such set pieces and that the only things distinguishing this one from the rest are the president and his ax, it’s rather unfortunate that Bekmambetov and screenwriter/novelist Seth Grahame-Smith didn’t approach the film with the same lightheartedness the mash-up genre was practically founded upon. The occasion of a president slaying vampires is treated as just another excuse for a group of characters to violently dispatch as many computer generated images as the budget allows. In this instance, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is late to the party: the genre has long been out of such excuses.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. With Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln), Dominic Cooper (Henry Sturges), Anthony Mackie (Will Johnson), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Mary Todd Lincoln), Rufus Sewell (Adam), Marton Csokas (Jack Barts), Jimmi Simpson (Joshua Speed), and Erin Wasson (Vadoma). Directed by Timur Bekmambetov from a script by Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Grahame-Smith.

December 9, 2012
Movie Review: The Thing (2011)

Forget, for a moment, that The Thing is a prequel/none-too subtle remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing, which was a masterpiece of latex and animatronics. The Thing, after all, was a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1951 The Thing From Another World, a McCarthian allegory for the secretly infectious capabilities of communism that had, at it’s source, the 1931 novella Who Goes There?, the elements of which have been mined again and again, often to rousing success. Yes, it’s moderately upsetting that, in a year where everything from Conan the Barbarian to Johnny English got a remake or a sequel, John Carpenter and Howard Hawks couldn’t escape unscathed, but if we want these things to remain sacred, we’re going to need to burn Hollywood to the ground. We can’t learn anything from that mindset.

Instead, let’s note how The Thing is representative of the nadir in American horror films, the product of some 30 years of devolution due to the mistaken belief that the isolation at the heart of terror wasn’t what moved viewers to the edge of their seats, but buckets of blood, focus-tested plot machinations and, oh yeah, ear-piercingly loud spikes in the music. All of these things happen in The Thing, to the point where it’s a relief when the film, already under the impression that everything old is new, moves into the kitchen of the besieged Antarctic research station, where the Thing stalks its prey as if it’d morphed into a velociraptor. For two minutes, it was nice be reminded that, yes, movies have the capacity for real fear.

Here, the discovery of an alien specimen and his (it’s never “her” in these instances) spacecraft below two miles of Antarctic ice is greeted with the sort of warm enthusiasm one expects from a classroom of bored students in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an American paleontologist, is asked along on a mission to the site by Dr. Sander Halverson (Ulrich Thomsen), who is unnecessarily built up as an unethical, slightly villainous dude with designs on unending fame for “his” discovery. You’d think that a movie aiming to massacre a group of people one by one in ways grotesque wouldn’t need a bad guy beyond the monster, but The Thing wants us to root hard for the American girl and the pack of misfits surrounding her, so Halverson is first a headstrong jerk, then a floating head awkwardly photoshopped onto a CGI conglomeration of limbs, stingers, and teeth. It is hard to register even a blip of sympathy for the men and women trapped in Antarctica; no matter how much blood flies: The word “prequel” renders the whole story non-essential, no matter which scientist is the megalomaniac with a questionable grasp on the scientific method. In fact, The Thing makes a strong case for The Thing as it’s hero. After crash-landing and taking a 1,000 year powernap, his crankiness at being woken up by an electric drill is nothing short of understandable.

There’s really not much to discuss when it comes to The Thing. Winstead is able as the plucky paleontologist, and some of the scenes, under different circumstances, would have been quite tense. Most of the movie, though, is spent deep frying The Thing, or on second guessing party members who don’t quite understand each other. I’ve read that Winstead’s character was inspired by Ripley, from Alien, but that transformation doesn’t take place until the very end of the movie, when we’re good and ready to see the baton passed to Kurt Russell’s gang. The movie’s two most effective scenes happen right at the end. Unfortunately, they’re among the film’s most inconsequential.

That’s a small part of why The Thing, despite the fact that it is by no means a terrible movie, represents the nadir of American horror movies. I suspect a large part of my misgivings ultimately has to do with my inability to separate The Thing and The Thing in one major department: The special effects. In a movie like this, special effects do the heavy lifting. In 1982, The Thing set a high watermark for special effects, and everything in that movie is more visceral, more convincing than what’s on display here. Having read a review or two, there seems to be the consensus that special effects today are better than they were in the 80s because of the advancements in computer technology, which has effectively rendered whole segments of special effects making useless.

I think the people who say that the special effects are better now are wrong, for one big reason: Special effects aren’t special anymore. This has been the argument since the special edition re-releases of Star Wars, and while I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into rendering a monster like The Thing, I’m less impressed by the ability to point and click something into existence than by the effort exerted to make that thing exist in real time and space. You can argue that a filmmakers’ imagination is no longer shackled by physical or monetary restraint, and, to an extent, that’s true. But movies like The Thing were special because filmmakers like Carpenter refused to let what was possible get in the way of his vision. You give a team of guys a computer and no limits, and what do you get? A wriggling, incomprehensible being assembled from spare, gooey body-parts; a creature who looks incapable of even a facsimile of life.

But this is where we’re at now. We’re over-saturated and overstimulated. Instead of doing something new, George Lucas has spent the better part of a decade adding bodies into crowd scenes and erasing puppets from his film prints. Instead of making his debut with something new and original, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has sucked the marrow out of something he idolizes, because old horror movies are the only ground studios are willing to allow new faces to tread on. And yet we, the audience, apparently clamor for more of this sort of thing, eating regurgitation after regurgitation, sometimes the regurgitation of a regurgitation. It’s like they see us, too, as The Thing, as if they’ve deemed us incapable of digesting organic material. Maybe they’re right.

Rating:

The Thing. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. With Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Dr. Kate Lloyd), Joel Edgerton (Sam Carter), Ulrich Thomsen (Dr. Sander Halversen), and Eric Christian Olsen (Adam Goodman). Released October 14, 2011, by Universal Pictures.

October 22, 2011