Colette Arrand

Tag: Michelle Rodriguez

  • Movie Review: Furious 7 (2015)

    Movie Review: Furious 7 (2015)

    Furious 7
    Let’s start here: Furious 7 is the latest in a growing list of action movies that I found myself simultaneously awed and troubled by. While I am continuously surprised that a franchise as pleasurable as this one frequently is came from the same film that spawned listless spinoffs like Torque and Biker Boyz, the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious‘s now thankfully untangled universe spends a not insignificant amount of time arguing that, in the right hands, global surveillance is a good thing. You’ve seen this before—Batman, needing to find the Joker, convinces his tech guy, with little more than a shrug, to let him jack into every phone in Gotham City. Superman flies up, up, and away so that he can listen very carefully for the heartbeat of the one specific person in Metropolis he’s looking for. Professor X builds a machine that can let him listen to the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of human beings at once so he can identify the mutants in the crowd, show up on their doorstep, and give them a hug. The Avengers spent half a movie trying to fix a flying boat that was being used to spy on the world and only got upset about it later. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is a superhero, too, perhaps the 21st century’s first original one, and here, in 2015, when a government agent named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) tells him that there’s a flash drive that’ll let him or whoever has it tap into every Internet-ready device on the planet, he is completely unfazed. Hell, that kind of thing might even be useful.

    Furious 7 means nothing by its MacGuffin, of course. Mr. Nobody promises that it can be used to track down Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a shadow who has been hunting Toretto and his makeshift family for crippling his brother in Fast & Furious 6, but Shaw is never exactly hiding, unless that’s what he’s doing by showing up on a mountain pass with a specially rigged car designed to force Toretto and his crew off the edge of a cliff. Dom’s proposed alternate plan of hanging out and drinking Corona until Shaw found him probably would have worked, truth be told. But as all the fancy computers in the world bleep and bloop until they’re locked on to the face and voice of a computer hacker who is trying to bring this spy system down with a prayer and a digital readout screen, one can’t help but wonder how important these big, dumb, exciting action spectacles will be in normalizing the already near-constant state of surveillance we live under.

    Director James Wan, taking over for Justin Lin, is taken by quick-edited establishing shots of Furious 7‘s many foreign cities and rapid-fire montages of female anatomy just, you know, standing around during the series’ now perfunctory drag racing and beachfront sequences, a somewhat goofy throwback to the series as it was before Lin made it a canvas for spectacle. That nostalgia serves both narrative and extra-narrative purposes, though, as the film is at least nominally about the creation and evolution of a makeshift family, and is absolutely about giving deceased star Paul Walker a final bow. As Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) struggles with her memory and her place in the crew, Furious 7 wrings the most tension out of the action sequences revolving around Walker’s Brian O’Conner, a new father who would be struggling with his adjustment to the domestic life if Deckard Shaw’s revenge plot didn’t involve cutting every branch of the Toretto family tree. The Fast and the Furious has struggled in the past to make Walker and Jordana Brewster’s domestic quibbles seem relevant to the business of whipping around exotic cities in cars capable of lightspeed, but if Furious 7 isn’t focused on these characters (and Brewster has been relegated to pregnancy and staying back at the fort for some time now), then it is at least dedicated to giving them a real ending, a thing not often afforded to the main character of a decade-spanning action franchise.

    The attention paid to the core characters from The Fast and the Furious means that there is less for the ancillary characters to do, Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) getting their tech guy/comic relief licks in from the fringes of the film so that Kurt Russell can wax sarcastic about the shadowy government organization he works for. Dwayne Johnson, whose character completely changed the scope and tenor of the series, spends most of this installment hospitalized. When he’s in play, though, he’s in play: flexing, waggling his eyebrows, spouting catchphrases—Hobbs is Dwayne Johnson in “The Rock” mode, pure brain candy. With each film he appears in, it’s clear that Johnson is on another level as an action star, bringing together physical presence and charisma in a way that suggests peak Schwarzenegger or Stallone, if either of those men were capable of having fun with themselves as living action figures. He and Diesel are compelling foils to each other and to the Schwarzenegger/Stallone rivalry, Johnson’s best vehicles being those where he is all mega-watt charm and Diesel’s being those where he can brood and menace. Diesel is forever the philosopher-king of the quarter-mile, and it’d be easy for a movie with Furious 7‘s purpose to get lost, gazing into its own navel. If Furious 7 is the last film in the series that suggests a family barbecue and a return to normalcy is ever going to be possible for these characters, Toretto is going to need his buddy Hobbs around to remind him that there’s a whole world out there to simultaneously save and destroy, one car at a time.

     

    Furious 7. With Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Paul Walker (Brian O’Conner), Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty), Jordana Brewster (Mia), Tyrese Gibson (Roman), Ludacris (Taj), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs), Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody), Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey), Tony Jaa (Kiet), Djimon Hounsou (Jakande), and Ronda Rousey (Kara). Directed by James Wan, from a screenplay by Chris Morgan.

  • Movie Review: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

    Movie Review: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

    Like a video game character bestowed the gift of an infinite lives cheat code, Milla Jovovich‘s Alice, the hero of the incredibly long-running Resident Evil franchise, cannot die. Yes, the Umbrella Corporation, her faceless nemesis, has killed her several times, but Alice, she keeps coming back. Why? It’s impossible to say. At this point, she’s saving a world that was effectively ended several films ago. The Umbrella Corporation are the ones to blame, of course, but their motives are also unclear. If their aim was profit, at least one sane individual in the boardroom would’ve pointed out that killing the entire human race was bad for business. If they want merely to kill Alice, then perhaps that same sane person should point out the benefits of not cloning, reviving, and granting superpowers to their otherwise dead and powerless enemy. It’s a fruitless, twisted war the two fight. Sometimes, extra lives are a curse.

    Resident Evil: Retribution offers no relief for either party. Instead, it shuffles the deck chairs before a presumable final encounter between humanity and the rogue biomedical corporation hellbent on its (and its own) destruction. It wisely figures that not everybody has seen the four previous Resident Evil movies and recaps them to the point where the last one left off: on a boat, with our intrepid heroes under attack. Like this year’s Underworld: Awakening (a franchise helmed by another wife/husband actress/director combination), Alice wakes up from that attack in a mysterious medical facility. She is interrogated by Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), a friend turned brainwashed-foe, until the facility’s computer systems are compromised. This frees Alice, who is bound and determined to escape.

    The compound is, of course, impregnable. Buried in a polar ice cap and comprising several impossibly large reconstructions of major cities, this is the Umbrella Corporation’s home base, a place where clones are churned out and monsters run amok, all so the company can test how a given populace would react to an outbreak of its zombie plague. Why Umbrella deems the facility necessary after successfully launching humanity’s biological Armageddon is unknown, but the different settings (Tokyo, Times Square, Moscow, and “Suburbia”) offer Alice and those trapped in the facility with her a rich tableau of creatures to pump full of lead, from a fetishized Japanese zombie to giant, hangman-looking mutants wielding massive hammers to a humanoid of rippling musculature whose brain is unfortunately exposed. It also offers Alice a cute kid (Aryana Engineer) to protect, because it’s not enough that she escape Umbrella’s arctic hellpit on her own.

    Paul W.S. Anderson—the unchallenged master of video game adaptations—uses Resident Evil: Retribution as an excuse to gather the franchise’s most popular characters in the same building. There’s Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), a secret agent dressed for a better occasion than a zombie plague; Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the former head of Umbrella and current smarmy leader of the human remnant; and the crack mercenary team of Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), who all function pretty much in the same way, but give fans of the video game different characters whose survival they can pull for or root against. The Umbrella Corporation’s taste for cloning provides for the return of Michelle Rodriguez in various forms—from anti-gun suburbanite to bad-ass, gun-toting company woman—joined from the first Resident Evil by the Red Queen, a computer program bent on snaring Alice in one of any number of elaborate death traps.

    It goes without saying that none of those death traps work, and that, while some characters die, none of them are particularly essential to the resolution of the series. Resident Evil has long been the action genre’s most needlessly complicated franchise, and that tradition continues here. Several characters change allegiance on a whim, and Anderson’s sequel-bating reveal at the end of the movie creates large gaps in logic that otherwise would have passed as setpieces. If the Red Queen is truly on the verge of eliminating the human race, as is her stated goal, why go to the trouble of endlessly cloning a wide-variety of them? If you have the last remaining human beings on Earth pinned to the White House lawn, why bother with the undersea arctic medical facility, its staff, or its prisoners at all?

    I admit, even those questions qualify as “over-thinking it” when it comes to a movie like Resident Evil: Retribution. Everybody who has stepped to the plate to review this film has pointed out that, five installments in, you either like or don’t like the series, and that everything else is either fan quibbling or noise. Fair point. Resident Evil: Retribution sets out to be a Resident Evil movie, and in that regard, it succeeds. The characters are paper-thin, the actors inhabiting them aren’t trying particularly hard, and the script they’re given isn’t good by any means, but if Resident Evil dealt in anything more challenging than archetypes, all that ambition would get in the way of Paul W.S. Anderson’s snazzy action sequences.

    Thinking about Resident Evil: Retribution and Underworld: Awakening again, that’s the main thing that distinguishes the two. For all their similarities (heroines in tight leather bondage gear, CGI monsters, impossible physics, convoluted backstories, expendable side characters), Anderson’s franchise has Len Wiseman’s beat out in sheer terms of clear, decipherable gunfights and martial arts expositions. The colors pop brighter, the bones crunch louder, and the heroine sasses her way through wave after wave of the undead, has no time to sulk or ponder the deeper significance of her existence as a superpowered killing machine. My only issue with Resident Evil: Retribution as a time-waster is that it’s the fifth of its kind. If you’ve seen Milla Jovovich kick one zombie in the head in slow-motion, you’ve seen her kick dozens of zombies in the head in slow-motion. And there’s a dozen more shambling down the hallway.

    Rating: Resident Evil: Retribution. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. With Milla Jovovich (Alice), Michelle Rodriguez (Rain), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Aryana Engineer (Becky), and Bingbing Li (Ada Wong). Released September 14, 2012, by Screen Gems.