In “The Dilemma,” the latest from director Ron Howard, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James star as car designers trying create a new, sporty hybrid automobile. It’s a fitting job for them as the movie is kind of a hybrid itself, two parts screwball comedy to one part drama.
Vaughn and James are Ronny and Nick, best friends and business partners who relate to one another mostly by speaking in football metaphors. By day they work together, creating a new hybrid car for Dodge; at night (in the beginning of the movie anyway) they and their significant others, girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) and wife Geneva (Winona Ryder), hang out, tight as peas in a pod. Everything changes one day, however, when Ronny sees Geneva kissing another man, the muscle-bound stud Zip (Channing Tatum). Enter the dilemma. Does he tell his best friend that his wife is having an affair and risk ruining their marriage and adding stress to Nick’s life when they are on the cusp of the biggest business deal of their careers?
At the heart of “The Dilemma” is Vince Vaughn, once the charming actor of “Swingers” and a series of comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” now a one-trick-pony who relies a bit too heavily on his uncanny ability to string together long uninterrupted phrases of hip back talk. It was funny in 2005, amusing in 2007 and has now worn out its welcome. What happened to the actor capable of interesting work in movies like “Into the Wild”? He’s become guilty of recycling the same character from movie to movie with only small variations.
Here he plays a self-centered meddler who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong. Sure there are a few laughs — and only a few — along the way, but they come with a been-there-done-that feeling of déjà Vaughn.
Otherwise it’s an adult sit-com whose idea of humor is to have the stocky Kevin James deliver lines like, “Love can be very filling, like a warm stew.” The serious stuff, and there’s more than you would expect in a movie marketed as a comedy, doesn’t really ring true, but at least Jennifer Connelly brings an air of authenticity to the relationship end of her story.
Most of “The Dilemma’s” best moments are in the trailer, a two-minute synopsis of the story, which benefits from the lack of Vaughn’s motor-mouth riffing. Come to think of it, the entire movie could have benefitted from less Vaughn and more jokes.
The DaVinci Code is finally in the theatres after months of anticipation and hype. No movie in recent memory has generated the kind of controversy and column inches as this one has, but like Public Enemy used to say, “Don’t believe the hype.” The Ron Howard adaptation doesn’t live up to expectations. Howard has crafted a handsome 2 ½ hour movie that is faithful to the book—for better or worse.
The coded symbols and secret messages are here, all of which are crucial to the understanding of the convoluted story, but unfortunately the slavish adherence to those story conventions slows the whole thing down to a crawl, draining most of the excitement out of this provocative material.
Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman edit the story, removing some of author Dan Brown’s superfluous story tentacles, but still get bogged down.
For what is essentially a chase movie it is awfully talky. The story is a multi-faceted juggernaut with Howard balancing a police procedural with a scavenger-hunt and religious intrigue. Add in a few mad monks, an eccentric English Lord and a deadly butler and you should have the basis for a ripping good tale, the 45 million or so readers of the book thought so, but the filmmakers are more interested in getting from one place to another in the story to worry too much about the characters. The actors appear to be there to support the story instead of being an organic part of the story. They all have heaps of dialogue but little in the way of actual characters. The result is a clumsy screenplay that doesn’t move along as quickly as the book.
Of the international cast, featuring French superstars Jean Reno and Audrey Tautou and Brits Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen only the latter seems to be enjoying himself. As the crusty Leigh Teabing, a Holy Grail obsessive, McKellen seems to have grasped the pulp fiction roots of this piece and actually calibrates his performance away from the terribly serious tone of the rest of the film.
Anchoring the cast is a morose Tom Hanks as Harvard Professor of Religious Symbiology turned murder suspect Robert Langdon. Hanks doesn’t do much with the character other than act as Mr. Exposition. He is the guide to the mystery of the DaVinci Code and as such has to deliver a great deal of information about symbols and the movie’s revisionist view of the life of Jesus Christ. These long speeches aren’t particularly cinematic and Hanks’ flat delivery of the material makes them even less so. Even when the pace of the film is more upbeat, the script lets him down. In a rare moment of passion he must deliver one of the least thrilling lines in the history of thrillers. “I have to get to a library—fast!” Hitchcock or any other good thriller director would have ditched that line at the first read through.
The movie does soft peddle some of the book’s more controversial claims. “We’ve been dragged into a world of people who think this stuff is real,” says the cinematic Langdon who is more of a Doubting Thomas than his literary counterpart. The filmmakers have added a sequence that stresses the influence of Jesus Christ in the modern world but these concessions to political correctness actually undermine the story, stripping it of some of its drama. Whether the history presented in the book and film is hokum or not, we need the characters to believe in it to make their search compelling. If they don’t believe, then why should the viewer care?
The DaVinci Code is a drama without much drama, a thriller with few thrills whose biggest sin is a failure to entertain.
Ron Howard, the flame-haired actor turned director of The Da Vinci Code, wasn’t surprised by the success of his adaptation of the best selling Dan Brown suspense novel.
“The idea at the centre of The Da Vinci Code was so provocative and such a hot button issue it really lived at the centre of popular culture for almost two years,” he said this week in Rome before the premiere of Angels & Demons, the follow-up to the record-breaking Da Vinci Code.
“Angels & Demons is a popular novel,” the director says, although he acknowledges that it isn’t as notorious as the other book. “What I’m finding, however, is if you like The Da Vinci Code you’re going to really like Angels & Demons. I feel like it could be a thrilling and exciting experience for audiences in of itself; separating itself from The Da Vinci Code movie or the novel.”
The new film, starring Tom Hanks in a reprise of his Da Vinci role as symbologist Robert Langdon, sees the Harvard professor work to solve a murder, unravel the mystery of an ancient secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican.
The mix of intrigue and religious may sound familiar to Da Vinci Code fans but Howard maintains Angels & Demons is a different beast. “If I felt like it was a cookie cutter situation and I was being asked to repeat myself then it wouldn’t interest me,” he said, “but I just didn’t want to miss this next Robert Langdon adventure.
“I like the uniqueness of these Dan Brown stories. Sure they use the murder mystery genre, but in a way that is so fresh that these films stand on their own as something brand new.”
Something that certainly is new in Angels & Demons is the setting. Shot on location in Rome, the movie is a love letter to the Eternal City.
“For scheduling reasons we had to shoot in June,” Howard says.
“Everyone in Italy kept saying that we couldn’t have chosen a worse month but I’m very glad in a way it was so hectic and intense because it energized everything.”
• Angels & Demons opens across Canada next Friday.
Ron Howard’s mostly true story of Jim Braddock is a depression era Rocky. It follows Braddock’s career from his early days as a contender for a light-heavy weight title through to the dark Depression years when injuries and age prevented him from making a living in the ring right up to his amazing comeback in the ring when he became a symbol for courage in a country “that had been brought to its knees.” This is a big, good looking movie that seems to scream Oscar, except that it is a bit too long and relies too heavily on boxing movie clichés that we have seen before. The performances, however, are quite good. Paul Giamatti plays Braddock’s manager Joe Gould with a lot of energy, while Renee Zellweger redefines the term “mousey” in her portrayal of Braddock’s wife Mae. At the heart of the movie is Russell Crowe who shines as the humble, but driven Braddock. Crowe could be nominated for Best Actor for just one scene in this movie–where he goes back to a club frequented by his old boxing associates to beg for money from his former friends to pay his electrical bill.
John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematics prodigy won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. He was also a troubled bisexual who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The true story of his life is hard hitting stuff, too bad barely any of the nitty gritty made it to the screen in Ron Howard’s puffy bio pic. A Beautiful Mind cleans ups Nash’s story, softening the edges and failing to provide any insight into the inner workings of this complex man. By the time we get to the third act things have degenerated into true Ron Howard hooey. The saving grace of this movie are the performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. They share real chemistry, and make for convincing viewing. It is hard to believe that this is the same actor who last year was brandishing a sword and fighting tigers in Gladiator. As for Connelly, well, she’s not only uncommonly beautiful, but is also capable of delivering an intelligent polished performance.
FORWARD: I’ve never written a forward to a review before, but because of the large amount of mail I have received about this movie I felt it necessary. In response to the people who have e-mailed me with long tracts regarding Dan Brown’s book, the movie, The Illuminati and the veracity of the book, I point you toward the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano review of the film. They described Angels and Demons as “harmless entertainment which hardly affects the genius and mystery of Christianity.” Calling the movie “a gigantic and smart commercial operation” the review noted that it is filled with historical inaccuracies but went on to suggest that one could make a game of pointing out all of the film’s historical mistakes. I’m with them. This is a movie, not a history lesson, so there is nothing in my review about the historical accuracy of the film. It’s simply a review of a big summer thriller that a lot of people are interested in.
REVIEW:
Harvard Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is back in action. Three years after he uncovered the complicated personal life of Jesus Christ in The Da Vinci Code he’s once again using his knowledge of symbology to unravel the mystery of a secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican. What’s more, he’ll do it all in just one night. Sounds thrilling, yes?
Unfortunately it isn’t.
Most of the elements from Dan Brown’s bestselling book Angels and Demons are in place, although several characters have been omitted and story lines reconfigured and condensed in the name of brevity.
Summarizing the story, however, brings a simplicity that sucks most of the mystery and colorful details contained in the novel from the movie. Langdon seems to be able to unravel clues, some hundreds of years old, with such ease that Angels and Demons becomes simply an elaborate game of connect-the-dots rather than a fully fleshed out story.
It’s a big summer movie, so we shouldn’t really expect sophisticated North by Northwest style intrigue, but since the suspense lacks the action should take up the slack. Unfortunately though, while A&D wants to be an ecclesiastical National Treasure, it contains few of the thrills of those popular Nic Cage movies. For example, one long action sequence in the Vatican Archives is about as breathtaking as you would image an action scene set in a library to be.
Director Ron Howard fills the screen with handsome images of Rome but every time the movie works up a head of steam Robert “Mr. Exposition” Langdon steps in with a long winded explanation of the history behind the various clues and symbols that sucks much of the movie’s momentum.
Angels and Demons isn’t as talky as Da Vinci Code, but its fatal flaw is the Langdon character. In the books he is the historical tour guide who provides the facts to bind the story together. On film, however, he comes across as a windbag who simply supports the story instead of adding to it.
That being said, Angels and Demons is a vast improvement over The Da Vinci Code. The pace has been ramped up and the running time chopped but even though these Dan Brown adaptations are Hanks and Howard’s most successful movies, they aren’t their best. If they choose to work together again I hope it’s in Splash 2 or Apollo 13: Off to Mars! and not another tepid Langdon adventure.
In “The Dilemma,” the latest from director Ron Howard, Vince Vaughn and Kevin James star as car designers trying create a new, sporty hybrid automobile. It’s a fitting job for them as the movie is kind of a hybrid itself, two parts screwball comedy to one part drama.
