Piranha 3DD

The remake of Piranha that came out a few years ago was a bloody good time. Filled to the brim with crazy gore, comedy and a competent understanding of 80s low-budget horror movie tropes, Piranha 3D reveled in it’s excess of blood and boobs thanks to the talents of director Alexandre Aja.

The inevitable sequel, Piranha 3DD, attempts to double the amount of violence and nudity while pulling back on the scale of its predecessor. Instead of taking place on a resort lake like the first film, this one takes place primarily within the confines of a water park. Yes, a water park. Water slides, snack bar and a wading pool for the kiddies. Feeling underwhelmed yet?

Lake Victoria has become a ghost town due to the eradication of the prehistoric piranha leaving the water uninhabitable. However, a nearby water park is hoping to draw big Spring Break crowds due to the owner opening an “adults only” section that features strippers and all the alcohol the tourists could possibly want. With dollar signs on the brain he doesn’t seem to care that the water being pumped into the park is coming from Lake Victoria, and with it a new strain of piranha that are hungry for flesh.

I understand that the film is being played for laughs and it’s all supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but I just don’t like the sense of humor that writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan infuse into their horror comedies. The original Feast I consider a minor classic. The sequels, Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds and Feast 3: The Happy Finish, are some of the worst pieces of insulting crap I’ve ever seen. They go out of their way to, in my eyes, infuriate the audience with some of the dumbest shit ever typed into Final Draft. The tossing of the baby scene? The never ending monster’s bodily fluids scene? The catapult scene? Seriously, who thought these were good ideas? I do enjoy their Saw sequels and The Collector series, but when they try to be funny they fail like no one can.

I also blame director John Gulager, who also directed the Feast films. When he made the first Feast, he was under the guidance of the Project: Greenlight crew and had some quality back-up to keep him on track. Without them he seems to go off the rails. His embellishments and attempts at comedy just don’t seem to jibe. I will admit that he has talent, but maybe he should try to make a serious film, be it horror or otherwise, next time because the sense of humor he displays seems to be in a style only he and the writers find funny.

There are some ideas that I did find pretty hysterical, like the baby piranha swimming up Katrina Bowden’s chach. During sex it emerges and attacks her boyfriend’s member, which he promptly chops off. Her “Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina!” line is classic. I also liked the scene where, during a panic at the water park, David Koechner accidentally runs over the head of a grieving boy’s mother with a golf cart, and while trying to console the boy he accidentally backs over it again. David Hasslehoff’s “You little ginger bastard!” cracked me up too. The rest not so much.

The whole production looks cheap and bargain basement. I’m aware that the budget decreased when compared to the original since this was supposed to be a direct-to-video release that ended up receiving a limited theatrical run, but I’m sure the production could have done something to make this look more professional. I mean, come on! James Wan took $1.5m and made Insidious look like it cost $50m! Put some effort into it!

The acting is pretty bad too. I do like the fact that Danielle Panabaker is emerging as one of a new line of scream queens (Mr. Brooks, Friday the 13^th, The Crazies, The Ward), but this is her Terror Train. She doesn’t add anything to the film at all, and neither does any of the cast except maybe the return of Ving Rhames as the legless Deputy Fallon (“Get me my legs!”).

I wasn’t able to see this in 3D due to my renting it on VOD, so maybe I was missing something that added an extra “oomph!” to the film, but from what I could tell the effect was barely used in any effective ways except for the random shot of something flying at the camera.

There is a blooper/outtake reel that plays over the end credits, and when this ends up being more entertaining that the film that precedes it you know something is wrong. While I do think this is a step up from the Feast sequels, this is still a far cry from the vastly superior remake. I can’t fully recommend it except to those who actually enjoyed the Feast sequels because this treads on some of the same ground as those festering turds. I was not one of them.

1.5 out of 5

Django Unchained

Being that I’m not a fan of westerns, be it of the standard or spaghetti variety, I am always hesitant to see a new one when released unless it has something new to offer. Sure I love Tombstone, The Quick and the Dead and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, but it’s a rare event when I’ll actually rush out to see one. Django Unchained is one that I’ve been anxiously awaiting mainly because I’m a huge Quentin Tarantino fan and I always look forward to his films. Even though this is being called a “Southern”, it’s still a spaghetti western at heart, going as far as to include Franco Nero in the cast.

Taking place two years before the Civil War in the deep South, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a dentist-turned-bounty hunter, frees Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave that has seen the faces of three men he’s hunting down. They form a partnership and once Django tells Schultz that he wants to track down his wife, a slave named Broomhilda Von Shaft (Kerry Washington), they embark on a journey to rescue her from the clutches of the infamous plantation owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

We all know that Tarantino has a knack for amazing dialogue, entertaining characters and gruesome violence. He goes for broke here and adds in an element that he has only sparsely used in the past… comedy. One would think that a movie that involves such dark subject matter as slavery and racism would be dead serious, but Tarantino turns that conceit on its ear by creating some of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a movie this year. For instance, there’s a scene involving a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob that is planning on killing the heroes, but before they do they have a meeting where most of them complain about how they cannot see out of the eye holes in their hoods and it just keeps escalating into ridiculous territory, with one guy paraphrasing South Park’s Eric Cartman by yelling “Fuck you all, I’m going home!”  I nearly died form laughing. There are more hysterical scenes that come out of nowhere like this that I won’t ruin here, but trust me, it’s a brave choice on Tarantino’s part to go this route with this material and he pulls it off in style.

Tarantino’s writing here is as confident as ever. The characters are all interesting and the situations they find themselves in are as effed up as always. The plot is simple and there is no timeline shifting like he’s done in his previous films. I’d say that this is his first truly straightforward film, and other than him commenting on the evils of slavery there is nothing going on under the surface. He made a movie to genuinely entertain his audience that just so happens to take place during a dark time in history. Although I do have to admit that I’m getting tired of his movies being about revenge.

The acting. Where to begin? Christoph Waltz owns this movie whenever he’s on screen. He seems so relaxed in his craft that it takes no effort to slip into the skin of a character, and I never once saw him as anyone other than Dr. King Schultz. He’s now one of my favorite actors. He shares an amazing chemistry with Jamie Foxx as Django. They form a father/son sort of bond that I totally bought, and when Django begins to talk about wanting to rescue his wife I knew that his character would feel honor bound to lend an assist. If there was just one reason to see this movie, he’s the one.

Jamie Foxx is a mixed bag. I’ve never really been a fan of his cocky shtick and I think a lot of his dramatic work is overrated. However, when he’s sharing a scene with Waltz there is an energy that I don’t think I’ve seen from him before. This energy is lacking whenever the two of them are apart and he seems to fall back on his comedic side to compensate. He does seem to be trying his damnedest to pull off his character and I give him points for trying. Maybe Tarantino should have fought harder to convince Will Smith to take the part. Foxx is good, but he could have been better.

The main villain part of Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, goes to further prove how far this dude has come since Titanic. There’s something fascinating about watching an actor who is known for playing mainly good guys switch over to play truly despicable character. But he plays this character as much more than a one-note baddie. He’s a suave, somewhat likable Southern gentleman who doesn’t see anything wrong with promoting mandingo fighting, throwing his servants into hot boxes or even having his dogs rip slaves apart on his property. He certainly plays his character’s dark side with a sort of childish glee which I thought made him all the more interesting than the average baddie. The fact that his character, who so obviously has no problems with treating people as property, would so readily accept Django as a free man and an equal was even more intriguing. When the time came for him to go into full on asshole mode it came as a sort of a shock, and he pulls it off with aplomb.

But the big surprise is Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, Candie’s head house slave. His character is even more contemptible than his master due to his complete acceptance of slavery as a preferred way of life and his innate willingness to turn against his own people to preserve it. In many ways he’s the film’s main villain since he proves to be more of a threat to the heroes than Candie for the most part due to his noticing how Django and Broomhilda act around each other and how he manipulates his will upon his master, who is actually nothing more than a loudmouthed ignorant dunce. Jackson goes all out in the part, and even when the character attempts to be funny his words are laced with venom. He is so unlikable that he makes his master seem like a playful child in comparison. I haven’t seen Jackson throw himself into a part like this in a long while, and while his character is a complete “muthafucka” I just couldn’t take my eyes off him.

The movie is just shy of three hours, but never feels that long. The plot moves along at a brisk pace and even the standard Tarantino dialogue scenes are constantly moving the story forward. I was never once bored. I was consistently entertained by what Tarantino was throwing at me, be it some overly gory shootout (cartoon violence is this movie’s bread and butter), a perfectly chosen song to play over a scene, some off-the-wall humor or some long forgotten actor taking a clever cameo role for no other reason than to work with this truly gifted writer/director.

My only complaints are minor. Why put someone like Zoë Bell in your movie if you’re going to give her absolutely nothing to do? The Candie resolution was slightly anticlimactic and Tarantino’s bit part as an Australian slaver was overly distracting. Other than that it was all good in my book.

This is the second part in what is being called Tarantino’s “Revisionist History Trilogy”, Inglourious Basterds being the first and his proposed African American WWII battalion revenge story (tentatively titled) Killer Crow being the third. The first two parts are winners, and I hope the third part continues that tradition. All I know is that after watching this movie I have the need to track down and watch the original Django films from the 70s. I just hope they’re as good as this current version, which I’m considering one of my Top 5 Films of the Year. It’s an amazingly fun and entertaining film filled with awesome characters, witty dialogue and sublime acting (for the most part). Don’t let the time period the story is set in turn you away, it’s a fantastic film. I just hope that you have a high tolerance for hearing the “N Word”. It’s said probably 15 times per minute which can be a bit much for anyone to handle.

4.5 out of 5

Jack Reacher

I’ve never read any of Lee Child’s novels which serve as the basis for this film (it’s based on book #9 in the series, “One Shot”), but after seeing this impressively entertaining thriller I plan to start.

After a horrific sniper attack in a public park an ex-military man is blamed for the incident, and in turn requests that the mysterious Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) be brought in to prove his innocence. Reacher, an ex-military police officer, teams up with the defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) appointed to the case to look into the facts and discovers a conspiracy that could get them both killed.

The trailers made this procedural thriller look like an entry in the Mission: Impossible series and I am here to tell you that it is anything but. I was surprised, and gladly so, that this ended up being the former. Basically it’s a big budget feature length version of the first half of an episode of Law & Order which follows the police investigation of the shooting which kicks off the story.

Tom Cruise downplays the character as a gloomy loner who would rather just do his thing and be left alone, but due to his insane talent for performing thorough investigations he has developed a reputation for being the man to look up when someone wants to find out the truth about any given situation. While Reacher does share some of the same talents as Ethan Hunt, be it ass kicking or stunt driving, he diverges from that in the way his character interacts with others. Often quick with a sarcastic, or even insulting, quip on the tip of his tongue as well as being able to size up and formulate a plan to deal with any situation in a matter of seconds, Reacher is basically an autistic genius. Whip smart and no social skills sums up the character in a nutshell, and Cruise plays the part to the hilt. He continues to impress me even at age 50.

Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who penned most of Bryan Singer’s non-X-Men films (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack the Giant Slayer) and directed the crime thriller The Way of the Gun, has always had a knack for creating sharp and snappy dialogue. He excels in that department here. There are scenes that feature such clever rapid fire dialogue exchanges that I was in hog’s heaven (one in particular reminded me of the opening scene of The Way of the Gun, only with 100% less profanity). He also creates interestingly flawed characters, and even though Jack Reacher is a creation of Lee Child and I don’t know anything about how he was originally written, I can only imagine that McQuarrie added a few details of his own to round out the character and make him the fascinating person I saw on the screen.

Unfortunately he doesn’t really have any particular style to his direction. Sure he gets his actors to turn in uniformly good performances (although Rosamund Pike has a tendency to stare wide eyed into space for no reason at all), but the horrific sniper scene aside there were no standout shots that took my attention. It was a basic “shoot and move on” type of film. Something a little more flashy would have gone a long way to sell certain scenes. The car chase is a prime example of this. Sure it’s shot in a way that’s easy to follow and is exciting, but a few crazy angles or something to spice it up could have made it classic. As it is it’s just an average action scene.

The story takes a nice amount of time to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, and while I did enjoy the investigation aspects of the film the finale left a lot to be desired. Sure there’s a pretty cool gunfight and an overly short fistfight with the main henchman (Jai Courtney from Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the upcoming A Good Day to Die Hard), but the final scene with the main villain, a creepy acting turn from director Werner Herzog, just isn’t completely satisfying. Sure the character gets what he deserves, but the scene just ends. I understand that in reality that’s most likely the way it would’ve gone down, but for a movie it’s slightly anticlimactic. However, the following scene more than makes up for it in emotional content.

I know I’m making the movie sound bad, but I am just nitpicking the flaws I saw. I actually really enjoyed it; the character of Reacher is interesting and the investigation story sucked me in and held me for its entire runtime, lame ending or not. I like McQuarrie as a director even though I think he needs to step up his visual style before moving on to his next directorial gig, Mission: Impossible 5. As it is I am excited by the prospect of this becoming a feature film franchise. I can’t wait for the further investigations of Jack Reacher.

3.5 out of 5

The Dark Knight Rises

Batman Begins, the reboot of the Batman film franchise, took me completely by surprise. After the travesty that was Batman & Robin I had zero expectations for anything about this character, so when this ended up being amazing I was not prepared for it. Christopher Nolan was now a made man in the geek community.

With expectations riding high on Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight, we all feared that he would somehow drop the ball and give the fans something to complain about for the next few months following its release. He delivered and then some. It ended up being more of a crime thriller than a superhero movie and was elevated to the Nth Degree by the outstanding performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker.

Now that the hype was at a fever pitch for the final film in the trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, the fan community had little doubt that Nolan would knock this installment out of the park once again. As far as I am concerned he did, but there are some who think otherwise. Sure it’s not a perfect movie, but few are. The previous films in the series were far from perfect, but like I said, this was being held up to unrealistic standards by the fans. I was just looking for an entertaining film and that’s what I received in addition to some perks only Nolan can provide.

Picking up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, we find that Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has retired The Batman in the wake of the deaths of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes. Now a reclusive hermit with extensive injuries sustained in battle he has allowed the police to take care of the remaining criminal elements in Gotham. When a militant revolutionary named Bane (Tom Hardy) comes to town and begins waging war on the wealthy alongside a notorious cat burglar (Anne Hathaway), Wayne revives The Batman in order to save the city. The only problem is that he may have to sacrifice his life in order to do so.

As with all the other films in this franchise the acting is phenomenal. Every single cast member is at the top of their game and treats the material as if it were Shakespeare. We all know that Christian Bale excels as both Bruce Wayne and Batman, and that Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are all amazing in their roles.

But what of the actors who are new to the franchise? I will go on the record to say that from here on out I am a fan of Anne Hathaway. I haven’t been able to sit through a movie she’s starred in for years mostly because she has terrible taste in projects, be it Bride Wars or Ella Enchanted. Her “aren’t I adorable?” shtick just irks me in all the wrong ways. But after seeing her fierce turn as Catwoman I am firmly in her camp. Not once did I see a wannabe Julia Roberts, I saw only Selena Kyle. I believed that she could do all the crazy acrobatic fights as well as threaten somebody’s life just by looking at them. She put her all into this part, and even though I was extremely skeptical when I first heard of her casting I now feel that she is the Heath Ledger of this film. This is her big breakout in my eyes.

Tom Hardy, whose performances I’ve admired for years starting with Star Trek: Nemesis all the way through Inception, had the daunting task of taking on the odd role of Bane. In the comics he’s a massive hulk of a man that injects himself with a poison to gain super strength. In Nolan’s more realistic universe he’s a damaged man who needs to constantly inhale an anesthetic to function via a facemask. In the trailers and the preview that was shown some six months prior to The Dark Knight Rises’ release his voice was completely muddled through this mask, and understanding anything he said proved to be a task worthy of Job. With a little tweaking on Nolan’s part his performance manages to not only come through via his body language and expressive eyes, but by his gentlemanly voice. It was a strange choice to have this brute, who is not only supremely intelligent but is always two steps ahead of his competition, to speak like a member of British royalty. It works wonders for his character’s somewhat contradictory nature. This is most evident in his character’s final moments in the film.

Marion Cotillard is the only weak spot. She is a fantastic actress and I cannot fault her for the problems with the script, but I thought her big reveal to be completely predictable even before the clues started to pop up (once they started talking about a certain character’s child I knew I had predicted correctly). One rule I’ve always bet on is that “If you’re going to cast a major star in what amounts to a bit part, you know that down the line they’re going to end up being the villain”, and that I saw coming a mile away in her case. I felt she sort of gave it away early in the movie via her body language and the looks she throws Bruce’s way. Plus, her death scene is one of the worst I’ve ever seen and is almost laughably hokey.

Enough about the acting, what about the plot? It definitely borrows heavily from the “Knightfall” comic book storyline wherein Bane breaks Batman’s back, but it’s the class warfare arc that intrigued me the most. We have Catwoman on one hand stealing from the rich so that she can survive as well as serve Bane’s cause, and when she tells Bruce Wayne that “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us” she pretty much lays out the overall plot for the film. Gotham is a decadent city rife with corruption and Bane wants to wipe it off the map to make a point to the world in the name of the League of Shadows. For someone of my own monetary situation I can definitely sympathize. When I saw the trailers that showcased this thematic choice I felt it was somewhat prophetic since at the time it was released the “Occupy Wall Street” movement was just beginning. Nolan saw it coming and took full advantage. Kudos sir.

Hans Zimmer’s fantastic score makes even the most dialogue driven scene more epic, and while James Newton Howard’s presence is sorely missed (his quieter moments of the previous films’ scores were just as awesome as Zimmer’s bombastic themes) I have to give credit that Zimmer pulled off yet another amazing musical coup.

There are some plot holes which I assume cropped up due to pacing, like how Bruce managed to get back into Gotham after the lockdown was in effect, or why Lucius didn’t just flood the reactor facility when Bane was holding him hostage. I can only assume that Bruce still has his methods and contacts to allow him to sneak into Gotham and that if Lucius attempted to flood the facility Miranda would have broken her cover and stopped him. A lot of people had issue with Alfred choosing to leave Bruce because of his choice to become Batman again. People I know said that he would never leave Bruce no matter what, but this isn’t the Alfred from the comics. I totally bought that this version of Alfred, an ex-military man, would abandon Bruce to show him just how opposed he was to him putting his life in danger again, and the last time he did it people he cared for lost their lives. He even went as far to use the death of Rachel as leverage to prove his point. The bottom line is that this is a movie based on a comic book and there’s bound to be issues like this that pop up from time to time. It didn’t bother me at all and seems like needless nitpicking to me.

My main issue is the action scenes. The fight scenes are filmed in extreme close-up again (like in Batman Begins) and they are so short, darkly lit (in the sewer scene) and badly choreographed that at times I couldn’t tell who was hitting who. I can understand Nolan not being skilled at filming scenes of this nature, or maybe not even being confident enough to pull them off properly. In that case he should stop being such a control freak (he directs and oversees EVERY scene in his movies with no second unit as back-up) and bring in people who are comfortable shooting stuff like this.

My other issue is minor, and that’s the “Robin” name dropping in the epilogue. I had heard in interviews that Nolan would never utilize that character in any of his films, but then he goes ahead and has one character turn out to be him in the end. Sure he most likely will not be the character when all is said and done, but I still felt it was silly and unnecessary.

A satisfying conclusion to Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises hits all the right notes and themes to close out this series on a high note, minor quibbles be damned. The sad part is that we will not get another film in this series. Well, we might, but not from Nolan. I just hope that the person who takes over the franchise has a vision that compliments the characters just as perfectly.

4.5 out of 5