The movies have looked to the news for inspiration almost since the first time film was projected on screens.
As far back as 1899, a film called Major Wilson’s Last Stand dramatized scenes from the First and Second Matabele Wars, including the death of Major Allan Wilson and his men in Rhodesia in 1893.
The trend of reel life emulating real life continues this weekend with The 33, an Antonio Banderas film based on a famous mining accident. In 2010, 33 men spent 69 days trapped underground in a copper-gold mine located near Copiapó, Chile when a rock the size of the Empire State Building blocked their exit.
“I can’t think of a better story than this one to bring to the screen,” says producer Mike Medavoy.
The trick is getting the story right. Director Patricia Riggins worked with the miners, Medavoy and screenwriters to create a story that, according to everyone involved, features more fact than fiction.
That isn’t always the case.
According to IMDb the Jim Sturgess movie 21 calls itself a “fact based” story about a group of MIT students who used a complicated card-counting system to fleece Las Vegas casinos for millions of dollars.
The bare bones of the story are true — blackjack was played and MIT students counted cards — but Hollywood diverged from reality when casting the leads. In truth the main players were mainly Asian-Americans, including ringleader Jeff Ma who consulted on the movie.
Ma called the controversy surrounding the casting of Sturgess and Kevin Spacey “over-blown,” adding “I would have been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an Asian playing me.”
The Michael Bay film Pain & Gain is listed as an action-comedy and stars Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie certainly play up the jokes. Everyone laughed, except for Marc Schiller, the real-life inspiration for the film’s kidnap victim.
“It wasn’t that funny when they tried to kill me,” he said. “They did run me over with a car twice after trying to blow me up in the car. The way they tell it made it look like a comedy. You also gotta remember that not only I went through this, but certain people were killed, so making these guys look like nice guys is atrocious.”
Last year’s Oscar winner Whiplash saw Miles Teller as a young drummer driven to extremes by a fanatical music teacher played by J.K. Simmons.
The movie draws parallels to the famous story of Jo Jones and Charlie Parker. The legend goes that Jones threw a cymbal at Parker’s head after a lackluster solo, prompting the sax player to go away, practice for a year and return as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. Trouble is, the story isn’t true. A cymbal was let loose, but according to eyewitnesses it was dropped on the floor at Parker’s feet and not at his head.
“Not attempted murder,” wrote Richard Brody in the New York Times, “but rather musical snark.”
How does Hollywood get away playing fast and loose with the facts? Black Mass director Scott Cooper says, “I don’t think people come to narrative features for the facts, or for truth. I think you go to documentaries for that. What you do come to narrative features for is psychological truth, emotion and deep humanity.”
More people die in the first five minutes “The Expendables 3” movie than in any other two war movies combined. There is death by bullet, bazooka and bomb. It’s a wild but oddly bloodless beginning to the movie. Perhaps its because they have scaled back the rating to PG1the from the hard Rs the last two Expendables enjoyed, but removing most of the over-the-top violence leaves an absence of the over-the-top fun of the originals. Why arm Stallone and Company up the wazoo and then skimp on the fake blood and faux carnage?
A mission to stop a shipment of bombs brings grizzled mercenaries Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), Toll Road (Randy Couture) and Caesar (Terry Crews) face to face with their toughest adversary yet, arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson). Determined to bring down Stonebanks, Ross retires the oldtimers—“We aren’t the future anymore,” says Ross, “we’re part of the past.”— and recruits a fresh group of soldiers—Kellan Lutz, Ronda Rousey, Victor Ortiz and Glen Powell—but just may find that his old dogs have some new tricks.
“Great plan,” says Luna (MMA fighter Rousey) of Ross’s old-fashioned bulldozer approach to mercenary work, “if it was 1985,” and this might have been a great movie if it was 1985. Despite the lack of overly gratuitous blood and guts, it feels like one of those direct-to-video action movies from the Reagan years. With no sense of nuance and clichés aplenty, it ploughs ahead, relentlessly reveling in its own stupidity. Kind of the like everything, but especially the action movies, in the 1980s.
But for much of the movie, that’s OK. How could you not love Wesley Snipes saying that his character was put in jail for tax evasion? It’s art imitating life! Or something.
Most of the other performances aren’t so much performances as they are action star posturing. Kelsey Grammar, as a recruiter for a new batch of Expendables, stands out because he does some actual acting. So do many of the obvious stunt doubles. The rest are all bulked-up chunks of machismo floating in a sea of testosterone.
Still, as an old-school action movie, it works well enough, despite the lack of gallons of fake plasma. I liked the attempts of creating new catchphrases—which are a must in these kinds of films—like Crews yelling, “It’s time to mow the lawn,” before spraying thousands of bullets into a dock packed with baddies. Also, the action scenes are shot clearly and effectively, and unlike last week’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you can actually see who is shooting-punching-blowing up-kicking-garroting-etc who. It makes it easier to cheer for the good guys when you can tell who the bad guys are.
For the most The Expendables movies have been met part with critical disdain. The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane christened the first film, “breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination,” while reviewer James Kendrick said the second installment, was “a better concept than it is a movie.”
Both films star a who’s who of 1980s actions movies—Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more—and have exterminated the competition, collecting an average of $289.9 million at the worldwide box office.
The new movie, inventively titled The Expendables 3, adds vintage action stars Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford to the mix and doubtless will add big bucks to the franchise’s overall gross, whether the critics embrace it or not.
The Expendables movies appear to be bulletproof to critical missiles but they aren’t the first films to be lambasted by reviewers and then clean up at the box office.
Meet the Spartans, a parody of sword and sandal epics from the creators of Scary Movie, currently sits at a 2% Tomatometer rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but that didn’t stop it from taking the top spot at the box office, narrowly edging out Stallone’s Rambo reboot, on its 2008 opening weekend. In the end it made $84,646,831 worldwide despite being called “one of the most painfully bad comedies I’ve ever had to endure,” by Garth Franklin of Dark Horizons.
Finally, Adam Sandler is a fan favorite, but finds little love from the critics. Jack and Jill, a 2011 comedy that saw him play twin brother and sister, earned a whopping $149,673,788 worldwide, but was dubbed “relentlessly witless” by the Daily Star while New Zealand critic Liam Maguren wrote, “Burn this. This cannot be seen. By anyone.”
Brian DePalma’s latest is steeped in his usual mythology – misogyny, double crosses, and voyeurism. Femme Fatale dips heavily into the film noirs of the 40s for inspiration, particularly Double Indemnity, a classic brew of duplicity, murder and adultery. But after a breathless first twenty minutes DePalma throws logic out the window and allows the movie to wander implausibly through Paris’s seedy underworld. Like the giant photo collage that the Antonio Banderas character constructs in his apartment, this movie feels like a collage of sexy (and or violent) scenes cobbled together to make a whole. It’s incomprehensible eye candy. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Laure the vampy thief who steals $10 million in jewels before taking off with another woman’s identity, however, is one of the best scoundrels to come along in a while. She’s a long legged bad girl who laughs with glee as two men beat each other up over her. She’s a nasty piece of work who really means it when she says, “I’m a bad, bad girl.” DePalma’s use of split screens and other visual tricks keeps Femme Fatale interesting to look at, making it a work-out for the eyes, but not the mind.
“Haywire,” a new action film from “Ocean’s 11” director Steven Soderbergh isn’t so much a movie as it is a showcase for the lithe athleticism of its star Gina Carano. Imagine an MMA match with a storyline and you get the idea.
Carano, the former champion mixed martial arts fighter, plays Mallory Kane, a mercenary who specializes in the dirty jobs that governments like to freelance out. Her idea of relaxation is “a glass of wine and gun maintenance.” Following a successful hostage rescue in Barcelona her handler Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) dispatches her to Dublin. There she teams with an MI5 operative (Michael Fassbender) only to discover she has been double-crossed. Angry, she Muay Thai’s herself back to the United States searching for clues and revenge.
Does the story mater? Nope. Not one bit. It’s the usual medium to complicated undercover spy tale—the kind that wraps up all the loose ends with a bit of exposition and some well chosen flashbacks at the end—but you don’t go to see “Haywire” for the story.
The movie is at it’s best when Carano is on the move, running, jumping, and kicking the snot out of her opponents. Soderbergh tosses in an action scene every ten minutes or so, but the violence here feels different. Sure necks get broken and people get shot in the face but unlike most action flicks Soderbergh doesn’t amp up the sound to go along with the punches, kicks and gunshots. Many films exaggerate the combat noises to add excitement, “Haywire” doesn’t. It trusts the fight choreography and because the violence isn’t particularly cartoony it doesn’t need to be juiced up.
The fights feel authentic—no CGI, few stunt people—a testament to Carano’s obvious fighting skills and Soderbergh’s wise decision to underplay the violence.
“Haywire” feels like a grrrl power version of a mid-80s Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Of course it is elevated by the presence of actors like Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton but at its heart it is a scrappy action movie that would play best in drive-ins and grindhouses.
The Legend of Zorro is a sequel to the popular Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones Mask of Zorro film of 1998. Like its predecessor the new film is an action adventure romp that blends romance, outrageous stunts and slapstick humor. It feels like a throwback to the Disney films of the 1960’s—lots of bloodless action to keep the kids interested; the bad guys are really bad and get their deserved comeuppance and there’s even a bit of a history lesson in there as well.
Sometimes less is more. Often a supporting character who flits in and out of the action, brightening up every scene s/he is in, is the cat’s meow. But promote that same character to center stage and the results can be as much fun as coughing up a hairball.
In “Puss in Boots” Antonio Banderas gives the character Puss in Boots, the plucky ginger cat, a tenth life as the leading feline in an all new animated spinoff to the popular “Shrek” series. This is a prequel, the origin story of how an orphan cat became a boot-wearing legend, and how his curious friendship with Humpty Alexander Dumpty (Galifianakis) almost killed the cat.
“Puss in Boots” is more an action movie than a comedy, more cute than good. The sharp writing and the fairy tale in-jokes of the “Shrek” series are both MIA, replaced with a standard story with some romance, some intrigue, some action and even a quick lesson in why you shouldn’t declaw your cats.
There are some inventive, fun scenes, like a Sergio Leone inspired cat dance fight featuring a move called the Litter Box, and Banderas has a great character voice, but too often the movie is content to take the easy route story wise. Also please, can we call a moratorium on “The first rule of Fight Club” jokes?
Puss in Boots brightened up the “Shrek” movies, but here, a weak voice cast–Zach Galifianakis and Salma Hayek bring little more than name recognition to the roles of Humpty Dumpty and Kitty Softpaws–and an even weaker script render a once effective character neutered.
The best thing you can say about Take the Lead is that it is what it is. Once you have seen the trailer with its stylish fast cut shots of attractive young people dancing up a storm, Antonio Banderas smoldering for the camera and beat-heavy dance music you know what’s going to happen in the movie. Usually I hate that, but in this case I found myself caught up in the story about a ballroom dance teacher who decides to help a group of misfit inner city school kids learn about teamwork, respect and trust by teaching them the waltz, the rumba and the tango. This is an “inspirational coach movie.” Think of it as Cha Cha Chariots of Fire or Dancing with the Stars with slide rules.
Banderas plays Pierre Dulaine, based on a real-life dancer who ventured into rough schools and helped transform the lives of kids through dance. Banderas brings his trademarked passion to the role, and it is that enthusiasm that helps sell this movie. The storyline is predictable but touching and the filmmakers have done a good job of setting up the backstories of the characters so we actually care about them. By the time we get to the big dance-off—you know there has to be a big dance-off—we have left all preconceptions of reality behind and are simply rooting for the kids to win because by this point ion the movie we have come to know and like them.
Take the Lead is an after-school special elevated by endearing performances and some pretty snappy dance moves.
