Once upon a time Brendan Fraser was a real actor. Years before he discovered the financial benefits of acting in front of a green screen—being chased by mummies or journeying to the center of the earth, in 3D no less, has been very kind to his bank account—he made smaller character driven films. That was then, this is now. Inkheart, the new special effects opus is the latest in a string of movies that sees him as the square jawed hero battling creatures from another realm. Not since Orson Welles voiced commercials for a frozen pea company has one actor squandered his talent so flagrantly.
Based on the 2003 German novel of the same name by Cornelia Funke Inkheart is the story of Mortimer “Mo” Folchart (Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter, Meggie (Eliza Bennett). Both are bibliophiles but he is a book nut with a special gift… or curse depending on how you look at it. He is a “silver tongue,” someone who can bring books to life simply by reading them aloud. Of course over the years this has caused problems. When Meggie was just three years old Mo read aloud from a novel called Inkheart, a story filled with evil kings and a mysterious creature called The Shadow, made from the ashes of all his victims. As the words tripped off his tongue he mistakenly brought some of the characters from the book to the real world. Worse, his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) vanished into the book’s mystical world. For nine years Mo has tried to track down another copy of the rare book with the hope of bring her back. When he finally finds a copy he must first deal with the book’s evil king who has decided he likes the real world and doesn’t want to be sent back to the pages of the novel.
Inkheart should have been romp through a whimsical world fun enough to give Harry Potter a run for his money. The idea is sound—fantastical creatures doing battle with Fraser and the other humans could be fun. Remember the first Mummy movie?—but director Iain Softley drops the ball. The pace is turgid, the action sequences have no bounce and even good actors like Paul Bettany as the enigmatic Dustfinger and Helen Mirren as feisty Great Aunt Elinor can’t elevate the proceedings to even a notch above dull.
The characters just aren’t very compelling. Fraser walks through the movie looking like he’s wondering when he’ll get paid; Paul Bettany’s Dustfinger, a character from the book who desperately wants to get sent back to his old life in the novel, is far too sullen and Andy Serkis’s supposedly evil Capricorn is a villain who seems grumpy rather than truly evil. And honestly, the sight of Dame Helen Mirren riding a unicorn, whooping like a blood crazed warrior from hell, is as ready a Razzie Awards moment as I have seen for some time.
Inkheart encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Brendan Fraser’s career. It’s another forgettable performance from him in a forgettable movie that allows the premise and the CGI to overshadow everything else. Let’s remember Fraser for the good ones—The Quiet American, Gods and Monsters and Crash—and hope that he gets over his green screen addiction sooner rather than later.
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D is a throwback to the action adventure movies that used to run on The Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night in the 60s and 70s. You’d watch the show and then plan your vacation to take the ride based on the show at Disneyland or, even better, Disneyworld.
It recalls the family friendly romps of yesteryear, but with its appealing “Gee whiz, we’re going to the center of the Earth!” enthusiasm I think today’s kids will eat up the adventure story and the impressive 3-D effects.
The story is pretty simple; this is, after all aimed at tweens and not the sci fi geeks who would have read the Jules Verne book it is loosely based on. Set in present day, Brendan Fraser plays a scientist who travels to Iceland to search for his missing brother and to prove his theory that there are giant volcanic tubes that connect the Earth’s surface to its center. In tow are his nephew (Josh Hutcherson) and a beautiful Icelandic mountain guide (Anita Briem). While exploring a cave they become trapped and their hunt for an escape route leads them closer and closer to the center of the Earth and the wild landscapes—and creatures—that exist below the surface.
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D is jammed with corny jokes—“Haven’t you ever seen a dinosaur before?” asks nephew Sean as a T-Rex chases them. “Not with skin on it!” says Fraser’s character Trevor—and has cool phosphorescent birds, vicious man-eating plants and treacherous sea creatures all of which should appeal to youngsters, but parent’s don’t have to worry, there’s nothing too intense here or that will give them nightmares. The approximate thrill level is akin to an amusement park ride, which, no doubt, this movie will inspire.
Brendan Fraser anchors the cast as Trevor, and while I miss the actor who once made movies like Gods and Monsters, when he actually tried to act rather than rely on charm to skate by, he still has the chops to out shine the special effects and bring some humor to the film.
I‘m not sure that anyone over the age of twelve is going to want to sit through Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D more than once, but the 3-D effects are good, there’s a strong female role model, the story is exciting and kids will enjoy the adventure.
We’ve been lucky this year. The summer season has provided a bumper crop of blockbusters from Iron Man in May to July’s mega chartbuster The Dark Knight which shattered every attendance record known to man. The good times had to stop sometime, though, and with the release of The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor they come to a screeching halt. Seven years after the last installment of the Brendan Fraser franchise The Dragon Emperor proves that bigger and louder is not necessarily better when it comes to summer entertainment.
In the new Mummy movie treasure hunter Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and family—wife Evelyn (Maria Bello taking Rachel Weisz’s place), their son Alex (Luke Ford who is actually only 13 years younger than Fraser and 14 years younger than Bello) and hapless brother-in-law Jonathan Carnahan (John Hannah)—are in Asia and once again run afoul of ancient supernatural forces when Alex awakens a wicked 2000 year-old Emperor Mummy (Jet Li). The evil one’s plan is double-pronged; he wants to use his army of undead warriors to conquer the world while getting revenge on the sorceress who cursed him two millennia ago.
Very loosely inspired by the 1932 Universal Boris Karloff classic the first two Mummy films were actually comedies disguised as horror. In the place of real scares were family-friendly thrills more in line with vintage Saturday-matinee horror-adventure classics than anything that’ll really send shivers down your spine. The third installment follows suit, except the jokes aren’t funny, the thrills are non-existent and worst of all, there’s no actual mummies. I guess that saved on the movie’s tissue budget but a movie titled The Mummy should have at least one character wrapped head to toe in toilet paper.
As big a waste of money and effort as we have seen on the big screen for some time, The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor fails on almost every level. Usually Brendan Fraser can muster some goofy charm as he walks through these low-rent Indiana Jones rip offs, but here he’s so disengaged you can almost see him reaching for the pay check while spouting bad one liners and battling blue-screen baddies. Maria Bello does a bad Rachel Weisz impression featuring the worst faux English accent since Kevin Costner created his own unique dialect in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Top billed star Jet Li has very little screen time and the rest of the cast are so bland they barely rate a mention.
In a summer where computer generated images on screen have become passé—both The Dark Knight and Hellboy favor practical effects to baffle the eye over CGI wizardry—The Dragon Emperor relies too heavily on fake looking binary code fabrications. The “wow factor” of CGI dried up long ago and the movie’s cheesy looking, but helpful Yetis and other computer created creations leave the film feeling old-fashioned and out-of-date.
Just like the evil mummies who cause so much trouble in this franchise The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor proves that some things should never be resurrected.
I haven’t seen The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the latest entry in the jocular action adventure series starring Brendan Fraser as a treasure hunter who constantly runs afoul of ancient supernatural forces yet—you’d get cranky too if Fraser woke you up after a 3000 year nap—but to get primed I did check out first two parts of the trilogy, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, now out on deluxe editions DVDs.
Inspired by the 1932 Universal Boris Karloff classic both films are actually comedies disguised as horror. In the place of real scares are family-friendly thrills more in line with vintage Saturday-matinee horror-adventure classics than anything that’ll really send shivers down your spine.
In both films Brendan Fraser, with sidekicks Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) a clumsy yet intelligent Egyptologist and Jonathan Carnahan (John Hannah, the only actor other than Fraser to appear in all three Mummy movies) as Evelyn’s bumbling, but money-hungry older brother, unwittingly unleash a 3,000-year-old Mummy’s curse and must, like a poor man’s Indiana Jones, do battle with the Wizard of Gauze and his minions.
As Rick O’Connell Canadian-born Brendan Fraser’s mission is to “Rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world,” and he anchors the film with a goofy charm balanced with just enough heroic swagger to effectively echo the Saturday matinee stars the film pays tribute to.
The jokes are on the level of Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy but on the upside both films feature outlandish, but lavish special effects.
On the downside both films are a tad too long and occasionally veer into cheesy melodramatics, but both are thrill rides that will keep the eye entertained—the bad guy transforms into a sandstorm!—even if they don’t engage the brain.
Movies like “Extraordinary Measures” are what happens when other films like “Lorenzo’s Oil” and “Patch Adams” sneak away for a dirty weekend. Starring former hunks Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, this red-haired step child of a movie, born, probably, out of passion, is, however, destined to be ignored in favor of other, more legitimate films in the Ford / Fraser family.
Based on a true story “Extraordinary Measures” centers on John (Fraser) and Aileen (Keri Russell) Crowley, parents of three young children, two of which have a deadly form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe. Desperate to prolong the lives of their afflicted kids they seek out the help of Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), a researcher with a viable theory about enzyme treatment for the rare genetic disorder. Together the ego-centric scientist and the earnest, yet determined father go into business, first building a private lab in Nebraska, then merging with big pharma, to create a cure for the disease.
We have “The Mummy” and “Indiana Jones” to thank (or not) for “Extraordinary Measures.” Without the success of those two franchises there is no way Ford and Fraser could have gotten this cliché ridden clunker off the ground. It’s also further proof that the world has gone crazy. How strange a place is our culture when someone can raise 30 million dollars to make a movie like this, but the real life Crowleys had trouble raising even seed money to find a cure for their kid’s disease? Seems like skewed priorities.
At its best “Extraordinary Measures” comes off as an overwrought TV movie-of-the-week. At its worst (which is most of the time) it plays like a parody of a “Disease-of-the-Week” television movie.
Ford skates through much of the muck unscathed—although there could be a drinking game involving how many times he unnecessarily mentions going to the bathroom—but Fraser really gets conked on the head by the Cliché-O-Tron.
It’s bad enough he has to say lines like, “I want to find a miracle as much as you do,” and “perform” the standard slumping-to-the-floor-in-uncontrollable-sobs scene, but the height of ridiculousness comes when director Tom Vaughan stages a scene where Fraser tries to get Ford’s attention by shimmying up a wall to bang on a small window even though there is a HUGE glass door located a few feet away.
“Extraordinary Measures” is a movie that was likely made with the best of intentions, but clearly no extraordinary measures were made to make the script coherent or the performances big-screen worthy.
Hogwarts, a school of magic founded more than a thousand years ago by a quartet of the greatest witches and wizards of their age, will once again be front and centre when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 opens on Friday. It’s the screen’s most famous private school, but it isn’t the only cinematic bastion of readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic.
The granddaddy of the modern prep school movie is 1972’s A Separate Peace, a dull film, based on a not-so-dull book by John Knowles, starring Parker Stevenson which was later remade as a better than average grade made-for-TV movie. Without the original film’s portrayal of Devon Academy, we might not have had Dead Poet’s Society (set at “the best prep school in America”) or any other classroom drama that teaches life lessons alongside the three R’s.
For instance the all-star students—Brendan Fraser, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chris O’Donnell—in School Ties learn a lesson not on the curriculum—the power of prejudice. Fraser plays David Greene, a Jewish student at a WASPy prep school in the 1950’s who becomes the victim of vicious anti-Semitism. Most noteworthy because of its soon to be famous cast—this came out five years before Good Will Hunting made Affleck and Damon superstars and a year before Chris O’Donnell was nominated for a Golden Globe for his other prep school drama, Scent of a Woman—the movie’s message of tolerance resonates when set against today’s recent news stories about school bullying.
But don’t think all private school movies are about “carpe diem” and uplifting messages. Cruel Intentions sees a group of good-looking learners engage in a dangerous game of seduction and betrayal, and the only lesson Chris O’Donnell learns in Scent of a Woman—whose all male boarding school scenes were actually shot at one of the America’s oldest all-female boarding schools—is how to avoid being crushed by the weight of Al Pacino’s overacting.
Most vapid, however, is Private School, starring Phoebe Cates and Matthew Modine as star-crossed students from the Cherryvale Academy for Women and the Freemount Academy for Men. Completely devoid of merit, it most famously features gratuitous topless horseback riding and a female shower scene; behaviour Albus Dumbledore would certainly frown on. Critics too frowned upon the movie. One writer said “hardcore porn has a better reputation” than this teen sex comedy.
Critics used to love Brendan Fraser. Early on Roger Ebert called him “subtle and attuned” and Barbara Ellen in The Times raved that he was “a revelation — so measured, suave and intrinsically watchable.”
That was then. This is now.
Lately the tone of his reviews has taken a turn. “Noticeably uninvolved” and “worn out” are just two descriptions of his current work in movies like The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. One blogger even wrote, with simple hatful eloquence, “His face makes me angry.”
I thought of this as I watched Inkheart. A big budget fantasy adventure, it encapsulates everything that’s wrong with Fraser’s career. It’s another forgettable performance in an unremarkable movie that allows the premise and the CGI to overshadow everything else. According to avclub.com in recent years this guy has spent so much time in front of a green screen “his children probably have traces of CGI in their DNA.”
Of course Fraser would counter that he’s not making films for the critics, but judging by the gross of the last Mummy movie, he’s not making them for audiences either. But let’s put the snarkiness aside for a moment and remember a time when Fraser was actually considered a real actor. Years before he discovered the financial benefits of emoting in front of a green screen he made small, interesting character driven films.
For example in Gods and Monsters Fraser played Clay Boone, a young straight ex-Marine who forms a bond with James Whale, the elderly gay director of Frankenstein played by Ian McKellen. Fraser’s take on Clay is complicated but sympathetic as he forms a platonic relationship with the older man who becomes the father figure he never had. In this film Fraser holds his own against the masterful McKellen.
The Quiet American sees Fraser as Alden Pyle an idealist who must learn to deal with moral ambiguity. Again his work is well crafted and thoughtful.
Further acting high points include the image obsessed District Attorney in Crash and Journey to the End of Night’s Paul, a degenerate gambler who double-crosses his father and tries to run off with the cash.
Not since Orson Welles voiced commercials for a frozen pea company has one actor squandered his talent so flagrantly, so let’s remember Fraser for the good ones—the ones listed above and also 1997’s Still Breathing—and hope that he gets over his green screen addiction sooner rather than later.
