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.”
In “Machete Kills,” the further adventures of Robert Rodriguez’s titular vengeance seeking ex-Mexican federale, the director comes up with new ways to cut a person in half. For the first time (in my memory anyway) a human being is bisected down the middle from cranium to crotch.
Unfortunately it’s the only new idea in a movie that slavishly pays tribute to el cheapo grindhouse flicks.
Danny Trejo is back and badder-than-ever as Machete. The man with the deadly machete is on the biggest caper of his career. Recruited by the President of the United States (Carlos Estevez)—with the lure of a green card—his mission is to find Marcos “the Madman” Mendes (Demian Bichir), a mentally unstable man turned terrorist who lives in an Aztec ruin along with a private army and a rocket aimed at Washington. “You know Mexico,” POTUS says to our hero. “Hell, you are Mexico!”
The trail to Mendes is littered with colourful characters, including a “man eating” madame (Sofía Vergara), a mysterious bounty hunter called El Cameleón (no spoilers here!) and billionaire arms dealer Luther Voz (Mel Gibson).
“Machete Kills” echoes the arch performances, over-the-top violence and cheeseball dialogue off the grainy old grindhouse movies that inspired Rodriguez in the first place. He nails the look and feel of those not-so-classic films—although he relies a bit too heavily on computer-generated gore over good old-fashioned special effects—but this time out he misses the spirit that made them great. I guess it’s harder to make a good bad movie than I thought.
It starts strong with a wild action sequence jammed with spraying splatter and gory gags. Stretch that out to a tight eighty-five minutes and “Machete Kills” would have been a fun guilty pleasure Saturday afternoon matinee. At one-hour-and-forty-five minutes, however, it feels drawn out, filled with scenes that seem to exist only to wedge another celebrity cameo into the story.
Trejo oozes grindhouse cool, but the movie itself commits an exploitation film sin—it’s dull. Scenes lumber along, blandly bereft of wit. Worse, the kitsch value that made “Grindhouse” and the first “Machete” movie so much fun is almost completely absent.
The movie begins with a grainy fake trailer for “Machete Kills Again… In Space,” the proposed third part of the saga. It’s a campy throwback to a simpler time and it’s a bit of fun. But at 2 minutes it also hammers home the point that a little Machete goes a long way.
Signs takes a great deal of time and creates a very elaborate context to teach us one simple, and not very original idea: everything happens for a reason. Mel Gibson is Graham Hess, a former minister who left the church after the tragic death of his wife. Everywhere he goes his former parishioners call him “Father,” even though he vows “not to waste one more minute of his life on prayer.” You see, Hess lost his faith when his young, beautiful wife was taken from him, cut down in her prime. When giant crop circles appear in his corn field and then start popping up all over the world, it seems his faith is to be tested once again. Are these bizarre configurations a hoax, or a sign that an alien invasion can’t be far behind? Bet on the latter. When the tall green ETs do touch down Hess fights for the survival of his family, and learns more about the complex nature of fate. In the end he realizes that life is not just a series of coincidences, but a carefully arranged pattern that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle – everything happens for a reason. Director M. Night Shyamalan handles the material with his usual incredible visual style, but unfortunately the story is too thin to sustain interest. The aliens are not the focal point of the movie, but simply used as a plot device to help Hess learn about himself and his beliefs. Shyamalan has an almost Hitchcock-like ability to build suspense, unfortunately, unlike the late-master he doesn’t follow-up the anticipation with any thrills. Signs is limp – all fore-play and no sex. If you’re in the mood for an exciting alien invasion movie skip Signs and rent the 1953 Byron Haskin directed War of the Worlds, you’ll have a better time.
Stand aside Oprah, Jodie Foster must be the most powerful woman in Hollywood. Possibly in all the world. Not only did she get The Beaver, a difficult script, long thought to be brilliant but unfilmable, to the big screen but then got the movie released in spite of her star, Mel Gibson turning into a public relations nightmare.
Gibson’s recent notoriety threatened to derail the film—three release dates have come and gone—but Foster fostered on, and the movie, about a depressed man who communicates through a beaver puppet hits theatres this weekend.
In a recent sit down in Toronto I asked Foster if Gibson’s baggage would prevent her from working with him again. The two have been friends since meeting on the set of 1994’s Maverick.
“I would work with Mel Gibson every day of my life if I could,” she said without hesitation. “He is the most beloved and easiest guy I have ever worked with. He is the least neurotic actor I’ve ever worked with and incredibly inspiring to work with.”
She goes on to call him “one of our greatest American directors” and says that whenever she sees him she asks, “Don’t you have a part in your Viking movie for a little blonde girl that’s about five foot three?”
Gibson and Foster came to The Beaver after it had languished on the Hollywood Black List, a compendium of great unproduced scripts that has featured titles like Juno and Lars and the Real Girl. The director – actor combo of Steve Carrell and Jay Roach considered making it but passed the script along to Foster instead.
“I can only imagine it would have been a very different film with them,” she says, “maybe a fantastic movie as well. There’s many ways of treating this story. When I read it I was just so moved by the drama of it. I warned everybody up front, ‘I just want you to know, for me, this is a drama. It needs to be moving and we need to work backwards from there.’
“In some ways we had to curtail a lot of the lighter sides and really pull down the comedy.”
She says several scenes were left on the cutting room floor because they were too funny.
“The great professional challenge of this film was trying to figure out the tone. It is a tone that is all over the place. It is light in the beginning and little by little turns darker and you kind of have to embrace that. It’s also a film that is chatty and witty and has a strong intellectual side and yet it is a very raw and primitive film as well.”
The Beaver is a passion project for Foster who says as a director she can’t work on anything she doesn’t feel in her gut.
“Just as you are well cast for certain roles,” she says, “you’re well cast as a director for certain roles. What a director has to do is wake up at three o’clock in the morning and say, ‘I’ve got an idea!’ I don’t know how you do that in a buddy cop movie about Martians. I don’t have any ideas unless I’m inspired. Unless I have an emotional connection to the material I know my limitations. I know that as a director that’s what I bring to the table. I don’t have any interest in doing a big event release CGI movie. The good news is I don’t really have to because I have another identity as an actor.”
“Well,” I say, stating the obvious to the most powerful woman in the room, “you’re Jodie Foster.”
In the movie Parker Jason Statham, British actionman and Hollywood star, plays the title character. He’s a ruthless career criminal with a twisted sense of ethics—he doesn’t steal from the poor or hurt innocent people.
Sound familiar? Well it should, as the character is the star of 24 books written by Donald E. Westlake (under the pseudonym Richard Stark). In the books Parker is a man of mystery, who has never had a given name. Westlake never gave a first name to the character, once joking, “I don’t know what the hell it would be, maybe Frank.”
Many films have also been made from the books, with Parker played by everyone from Lee Marvin to Mel Gibson to Robert Duvall.
If the movies don’t ring a bell, however, it’s because on film Parker has often been renamed.
For instance in 1967’s Point Blank (based upon the novel The Hunter) Lee Marvin played the character named Parker in the book but changed to Walker for the film. In Marvin’s version Walker is a tough, hard man, a characteristic the actor may have taken too seriously. Legend has it that in rehearsal Marvin hit co-star John Vernon so hard Vernon burst into tears.
The next year The Split (named The Seventh in print) saw Parker played by Jim Brown but called McClain. This movie is most notable as the first theatrical release to receive an R rating from the brand new MPAA’s film rating system.
In the 70s and 80s the Westlake Parker novels remained popular Hollywood source material. Robert Duvall switched the name to Macklin in 1973s The Outfit, one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films, while the excellently named Slayground with Peter Coyote in 1983 featured a character called Stone.
The best-known Parker adaptation is Payback in 1999, the second film made from The Hunter. In this revenger story Mel Gibson as Parker (switched to Porter) plays a man shot by his wife and best friend and left for dead.
So many actors have played the character, but who would Westlake, his creator, like to have seen in the role? “Usually I don’t put an actor’s face to the character,” he said, “though with Parker, in the early days, I did think he probably looked something like Jack Palance. That may be partly because you knew Palance wasn’t faking it, and Parker wasn’t faking it either.”
Stand aside Oprah, Jodie Foster must be the most powerful woman in Hollywood, possibly in all the world. Not only did she get a difficult script, long thought to be brilliant but unfilmable, to the big screen but then got the movie released in spite of the disgraceful shenanigans of her star Mel Gibson. Gibson’s recent notoriety threatened to derail “the Beaver”—three release dates have come and gone—but Foster fostered on, and the film, about a depressed man who communicates through a beaver puppet hits theatres this weekend.
Not since Anthony Hopkins grappled with a vicious ventriloquist dummy in “Magic” has a puppet been such an effective dramatic device.
Gibson plays Walter Black, a man crippled by depression. His business and marriage have fallen apart, but after a failed suicide attempt he discovers an unconventional form of therapy. He finds a furry brown beaver puppet in a dumpster, which becomes his alternate personality; his only form of communication with the outside world. The change in Walter is miraculous; unfortunately one person’s miracle is nothing more than another person’s puppet and Walter’s newfound state of wellbeing isn’t appreciated by everyone.
Of course the big question here is: Will audiences be able to put aside Gibson’s recent cycle of loopy, offensive behavior and sit back and enjoy the film? If they can judge the art and not the artist they’ll find much to like here, but if not “The Beaver” will wither and die because Gibson (and his hand puppet) hogs the spotlight.
In light of all the well deserved bad press he’s received lately it’s hard to remember that once Gibson was a top box office draw and a charismatic screen presence. The bad press hasn’t diminished that. What it may have done is add a few worry lines to his face which are very effective reminders of Walter’s state of mind.
Gibson is very good, but he doesn’t steal the show. A side story to the puppet’s spiritual journey comes from Porter (Anton Yelchin), Walter’s eldest son. Porter is struggling not to be like his dad, and discovers a way out when he meets and falls for Norah (Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence), a pretty cheerleader with a perfect GPA but an imperfect life. Both hand in understated but effective performances, high on naturalism, which ground the more fanciful aspects of the story.
“The Beaver,” despite some funny visuals in the trailer is not a comedy. It is a dark exploration of mental illness and its effect on the family unit. Director Foster (as opposed to star Foster; she plays Walter’s wife) occasionally struggles with tone—it’s hard not to when your star speaks with a cockney accent through an ever present Beaver puppet—but in the end presents a unique and compelling look at a subject the movies don’t usually approach.
It’s easy to find reasons not to go see the new Mel Gibson film. His transformation from lovable leading man to movie mogul has been rocky, marked by incidents of anti-Semitism and strange behavior. In discussing Apocalypto I’m choosing to put aside the filmmaker’s controversial behavior and file this review under “Judge the Art not the Artist.”
shares some of the characteristics of Gibson’s last film, The Passion of the Christ—the violence, the dialogue in a long extinct language and exacting period detail—but most of all it offers up the same passion. Gibson takes the conventions of a Hollywood action movie and transports them back to pre-Columbian Central America with gusto. Instead of a standard car chase a jaguar tracks the hero. Gone is the urban jungle replaced by a real one. Apocalypto really is a thrill ride from frame one until the end.
The film starts with an ominous quote from Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The internal rot that quote refers to is a tribe of vicious Mayans who pillage villages, destroying entire communities before kidnapping the survivors to use as human sacrifices. One strong willed captive, Jaguar Paw, narrowly escapes a grisly sacrificial death and is pursued through the jungle by a team of killers hell bent on capturing him and “wearing his skin as a suit.”
The bulk of the film is taken up by the chase as Jaguar Paw races to return to his homeland, rescue his pregnant wife and son who were left hiding is a giant crater and avoid capture.
It’s a bloody and nail-biting sequence. Gibson doesn’t shy away from the violence—there are decapitations complete with rolling head point-of-view shots, a nasty jaguar attack that could have been featured on When Animals Go Crazy and lots of cutting and jabbing followed by spurting blood. It’s strong stuff, but in amongst the blood and guts is a strong eco message and some timely political comment about leaders who lie (Rumsfeld anyone?) and don’t always act in he best interests of their people.
By Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus
