October 05, 2009
The Human Centipede
(out of four)
What has 12 legs, three heads and a single digestive tract? The disagreeable creation at the center of Tom Six's The Human Centipede: First Sequence, a beyond-twisted body horror experiment in which a mad surgeon, renowned for separating Siamese twins, kidnaps and conjoins three unlucky tourists mouth-to-anus for no reason other than to satisfy his own sadistic whims (and the morbid curiosity of a certain type of moviegoer). Only real payoff is seeing the monstrosity assembled, and though that will surely earn the Dutch writer-director a cult reputation on the genre circuit, "going there" does not a movie make.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on October 5, 09 at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2007
Rush Hour 3
(out of four)
Rush Hour 2 opened one month before America was attacked by terrorists, and like all pre-9/11 Hollywood franchises, it suggests more innocent times. The sequel is no different. Rush Hour 3 is downright oblivious to everything that's happened since. For audiences in search of escapist entertainment, that probably comes as a relief.
There's something old-fashioned about both the story and the sense of humor on display here. It's as if the script were freeze-dried in the mid-'80s and thawed out only now to leaven the mood at megaplexes (at a time when even Larry the Cable Guy's latest romp, Delta Farce, comments on U.S. foreign policy).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on August 10, 07 at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2007
Hot Rod
(out of four)
It worked for Will Ferrell in Anchorman and Talladega Nights: Devise a cocktail-napkin sketch of a character and hope the movie falls in place around it. But by the time Hot Rod reached the screen, Ferrell had stepped aside, leaving Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg to play amateur stuntman and accident magnet Rod Kimble. Those hoping for feature-length doses of Samberg's "Lazy Sunday" wit will have to settle for just plain lazy, as Hot Rod aims low and still manages to miss its target. Even if pic crashes and burns at the box office, it should emerge unscathed on DVD.
Continue reading "Hot Rod" at Variety.com
Posted by Peter Debruge on August 3, 07 at 10:11 AM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
Day Watch
(out of four)
Like Russia's answer to The Matrix and Lord of the Rings trilogies, Day Watch offers the second chapter in an epic battle between the forces of Light and Dark, the result of which is a gaping gray area where nothing much makes sense. That's right in keeping with Timur Bekmambetov's original Night Watch, a contemporary vampire story that served as a jaw-dropping sampler reel for Russia's special effects houses, virtually all of which worked on the film.
Posted by Peter Debruge on June 15, 07 at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2007
Downtown: A Street Tale
(out of four)
As writer, producer and star of Downtown: A Street Tale, Joey Dedio wants the world to know just how hard it is to be homeless. Dedio himself survived the street, but instead of the searing eye-opener he had in mind, Downtown amounts to little more than a downbeat soap opera as half a dozen squatters — hustler, junkie, stripper, queer, fallen Madonna and skank, with a mentally challenged roomie thrown in for good measure — try to hold their lives together in a grungy New York loft just days before Christmas. Think Rent without the music.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on May 18, 07 at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007
The Invisible
(out of four)
A high school golden boy is beaten and left for dead while his spirit sticks around to spy on the assailants in The Invisible, that rare mystery in which auds know everything upfront and the characters, rather than investigating, simply wait for the culprit to turn herself in. Previously adapted as Swedish thriller Den Osynlige, Mick Davis' script brings out director David S. Goyer's emo side. His take, more star-crossed romance than Matthew Shepard-inspired ghost story, plays like a very special episode of The OC. Approach could work for teens, though The Invisible will surely go unseen by others.
Continue reading "The Invisible" at Variety.com
Posted by Peter Debruge on April 27, 07 at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)
Year of the Dog
(out of four)
In Year of the Dog, director Mike White willfully violates one of the great unwritten rules of Hollywood screenwriting: Kill as many human characters as you want, just spare the dog. Take a movie like Independence Day, a textbook example that entertains by wiping entire cities off the face of the Earth, but in one key scene, concentrates all the audience's emotions on the fate of a single pooch.
Three dogs die in Year of the Dog, and White genuinely seems to care about each one. The movie, in fact, marks an ambitious attempt on his part to wrestle the challenges and contradictions facing those who empathize with animals, tackling all causes, from hunting and pharmaceutical testing to wearing furs and eating meat. The problem is that White shows considerably less respect toward people.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on April 27, 07 at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2007
Meet the Robinsons
(out of four)
Meet the Robinsons introduces an ensemble the likes of which only the late Robert Altman could manage. Not counting the singing frogs or time-traveling T. rex, the Robinson house crams 17 eccentric personalities under one roof (technically, two of them, twin uncles, actually live in giant flower pots outside the front door).
For little orphan Lewis, that's heaven -- the lonely boy inventor wants nothing more than a family of his own, which is exactly what he gets when a kid in a time machine shows up at his science fair and whisks him to the future. For the audience, it's an acute form of torture, with all 17 family members constantly competing for their fair share of screen time.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on March 30, 07 at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2007
Gray Matters
(out of four)
For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before. Sam (Tom Cavanagh) and Gray (Heather Graham) are the perfect couple. They ballroom dance like pros, love old movies and ditch their friends to cuddle up on the couch and watch a DVD. There's just one tiny problem: They're siblings. Ick, right? But you gotta admit, it's original.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on March 9, 07 at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
January 05, 2007
Happily N'Ever After
(out of four)
Opening the first Friday in January, Happily N'Ever After marks a New Year's resolution of sorts, kicking off 2007 with a shift away from talking-animal toons. Yet, this underwhelming entry is a kind of equally overused fairy tale revisionism, this time depicting what might happen to all such tales if Cinderella's wicked stepmother took control. Happily even shares a producer with Shrek (John H. Williams). Still, this colorful, crowd-pleasing toon is likely to deliver, if Lionsgate can take a page from the Weinstein Co.'s Hoodwinked playbook by adding marketing muscle and a wide release to its modest investment.
Continue reading "Happily N'Ever After" at Variety.com
Posted by Peter Debruge on January 5, 07 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2006
The Grudge 2
(out of four)
The curse never dies, so unless The Grudge 2 bombs at the box office (and there's no reason to think that it would), expect theaters to be visited by still more nonsensical installments in this intermittently scary series. Pic already marks the sixth time director Takashi Shimizu has exploited same gimmick of ghostly mother and child who hunt down anyone foolish enough to trespass inside their Tokyo house, except this time, Sarah Michelle Gellar (who helped drive the 2004 remake to a $39 million opening) appears just long enough to ensure she won't be back.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on October 13, 06 at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2006
Open Season
(out of four)
Finally, after all these years, generations of kids who wept when the hunter shot Bambi's mother can get their revenge with Open Season, in which a pack of resourceful forest animals turns the tables on the humans. Armed with brassieres, marshmallows and other unlikely weapons of resistance, these chatty critters organize a rebellion to save their skins and reclaim the hunting ground for themselves.
I wonder if Hollywood has ever considered making a computer-animated movie in which the animals don't talk. Instead of rounding up a crowd of recognizable actors to crack jokes in silly accents, they might rely on body language and other tricks to let the audience in to the emotional world of these creatures. How daring might that be?
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Posted by Peter Debruge on September 29, 06 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2006
The Protector
(out of four)
"Forget the story forget the plot and sub-title," advises an eBay auction for the 140-minute version of The Protector. "Watching the action sequence itself is enough lots of cool & great Muay Thai actions."
"Plot and sub-title" aren't exactly the strong points of stuntman-turned-actor Tony Jaa's movies, so it's fair to guess that The Weinstein Company has actually done audiences a favor by releasing a radically abridged 84-minute cut of The Protector instead. The American version distills the movie to just the setpieces connected by minimal exposition. After Ong Bak, what audiences really want is more of Jaa's hyper-kinetic showmanship, and the movie delivers one jaw-dropping fight scene after another while minimizing everything else.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on September 8, 06 at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 31, 2006
Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School
(out of four)
Life never turns out the way you expect. That's the message of Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, and you can bet when writer-director Randall Miller made the 35-minute short of the same name at the American Film Institute back in 1990, he never imagined that he'd spend the next 15 years directing movies like Class Act (with Kid 'n Play) and Houseguest (with Sinbad).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on March 31, 06 at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2005
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(out of four)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is more than just a mouthful, it's a franchise killer. Disney has spared no expense in bringing the first installment of C.S. Lewis' beloved seven-book series to the screen, but they've given us no reason to want to visit Narnia ever again.
Fantasy franchises have certainly gotten off to rockier starts before. The first Harry Potter movie was slavishly faithful to the novel and not nearly enough fun in the telling, but at least there you had a series that only gets stronger with each successive book. Meanwhile, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is far and away the most entertaining of the Narnia adventures, not to mention the best known. If handled correctly, the movie might have enchanted audiences into returning again and again to this same wondrous land of mythical creatures and religious allegory (the reason, believe you me, that Disney ponied up Lord of the Rings-worthy dough for the adaptation).
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Posted by Peter Debruge on December 9, 05 at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2005
Chicken Little
(out of four)
Disney has a long tradition of mucking about with classic children's stories, from giving Snow White's companions seven dopey names to transforming all fairy-tale forest creatures into singing, dancing ninnies. Now, Disney's gone and committed its most flagrant literary violation yet: a twist on Chicken Little in which it turns out that not only is the sky falling, but there are angry aliens invading, too.
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Posted by Peter Debruge on November 4, 05 at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Saw II
(out of four)
There are no saws in Saw II. Well, that's not entirely correct. The hacksaw from the first movie makes a cameo late in the game, when Detective Eric Mathews (Donnie Wahlberg) finally locates the grimy bathroom (about six months too late from the state of the corpses he finds chained to its walls) where Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell debated sawing off their limbs to save their lives in the first movie.
Posted by Peter Debruge on October 28, 05 at 02:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Doom
(out of four)
Ten years ago, one of the most disappointing movies of my teen years opened with one of the coolest stunts I'd ever seen – and then promptly sank beyond all redemption. I'm talking about Waterworld, and the effect was a twist on the usual Universal logo where shortly after earth came into view, the ice caps melted, the continents disappeared, and the camera swung down into the endless ocean to find Kevin Costner drifting at sea (and drinking his own urine, if memory serves).
Doom opens with a shot like that (the globe trick, not the urine), only this time we see the Universal logo wrapping around the Red Planet before zooming in to the Martian surface, where dead-meat doctors in soon-to-be-bloodstained lab coats demonstrate how genetically altering convicted killers to accept a 24th chromosome that makes them "super-strong, super-fit, and super-intelligent" more or less proves Darwin's point.
Posted by Peter Debruge on October 20, 05 at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2005
Domino
(out of four)
"This is a true story. Sort of." So begins Domino, which ranks alongside Confessions of a Dangerous Mind as one of the least trustworthy biopics of all time. Yes, The Manchurian Candidate star Laurence Harvey had a daughter named Domino who went on to become a bounty hunter, but that's basically where the truth ends and the Hollywood hokum begins.
Posted by Peter Debruge on October 14, 05 at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 07, 2005
Waiting...
(out of four)
Stop me if you've heard this one before: An unknown filmmaker sets out to make a name for himself with a filthy day-in-the-life comedy in which a bunch of listless minimum wage earners grouse about life, sex, and how much they hate their jobs. Yep, 11 years ago this month, a Jersey boy named Kevin Smith upset the Hollywood order with a little movie called Clerks. Clerks was a breakthrough, so much so that you could easily forgive the fact that Smith shot his movie in black-and-white on low-grade digital video. Smith had a knack for capturing the way real people talk, giving voice to potheads and slackers everywhere.
Posted by Peter Debruge on October 7, 05 at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)