City Scrapes: SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is an exercise in style, but director Robert Rodriguez exhausted that bag of tricks the first time. Back in 2005 the man behind Spy Kids and Machete adapted Frank Miller’s black and white Sin City comics, taking stylized panels of smarmy, hyperviolent cartoonish noir and translating them into CGI images. It’s a striking effect. Actors are buried under Dick Tracy-style makeup then green-screened into pulpy tableaus, staging violence and sex between cops and robbers, thugs and strippers, gamblers and punks. Blood spurts white, but clots red. Eye colors and fire are the only other hues in this grimy, high-contrast nightmare city. It is always night. The streets are always wet. And there’s no such thing as an innocent person.

I grew tired of the affected intensity well before the first film ended, but here we are again. Sin City is a dully artificial place totally removed from anything resembling genuine feeling or fun. It’s grim, gory, exaggerated genre grime. Coming from a claustrophobically phony, clammily adolescent mindset, the movies think bullets are awesome, vigilantes’ perverse overkill is justified, and women are only as good as their aim or their bust. It might be fun to take a peek into such a shamelessly exploitative world, but wallowing in it feels uncomfortable pretty quickly. Worst of all, Rodriguez, working from a screenplay by Miller, doesn’t seem to care too much about the intent of his images beyond the striking surfaces. If it were coming from a genuinely ugly place, it’d be offensive, but more authentic. Instead, it’s just boring, reaching for shock value and finding nothing.

Like the first film, A Dame to Kill For features an episodic series of vignettes about bad people who want to hurt worse people. Gravely voiced narrators talk and talk, overexplaining the events in prose so purple it’s like a parody of hard boiled dialogue written by someone who never actually heard it. Some of the stories, like those involving a stripper (Jessica Alba) and her guardian angel cop (Bruce Willis), a bruiser with a warped moral code (Mickey Rourke), and a band of militant prostitutes (led by Rosario Dawson), carry over from the first film. Others are new, but feel of a piece with the monotonous tone. We meet a cocky cardshark (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who runs afoul of a corrupt senator (Powers Boothe). And in the best story we meet a dopey lug (Josh Brolin) who is roped into the schemes of an alluring femme fatale (Eva Green).

She’s easily the most captivating aspect of the film. Luckily, her story is the lengthy centerpiece, the only plot that runs uninterrupted. Her green eyes match her character’s greed. Her often-naked body is a lure leading men to their deaths for her benefit. Her shamelessness about her selfish predatory nature makes her the most honest person in Sin City, even if it means she’s reliably never telling the truth. Patchy and episodic, the movie flares to life around Green’s fine performance that manages to chew its way out of the artifice around her. Everyone else in the sprawling cast, which also features Dennis Haysbert, Jeremy Piven, Christopher Meloni, Ray Liotta, Juno Temple, Christopher Lloyd, Lady Gaga, and more, fails to make an impact in the monotonous dirge that is life in the Sin City.

The movie expires well before its end credits, with plotlines arriving at their obvious conclusions in obvious ways. There’s no wit or surprise to any of it. Rodriguez is always making films for his own amusement, playing around with filmmaking tools and B-movie concepts just because he can. When he forgets to let us in on the fun, his movies are passion projects for an audience of one. With these Sin City adaptations, he’s stretched a small interesting visual idea much farther than it could possibly go. We’ve been here before and there’s nothing new to see. This remains a strikingly visualized, but thinly imagined place.

It takes noirs' ugly underbelly, scrapes it down to its most exaggerated nastiness, and then shoots its images full of the whitest white and blackest black. A fine idea, but Rodriguez’s visual imagination has hit a wall, leaving the stereotypical surface ticks of noir – hard lighting, inky shadows, smoldering smokiness – without the room to find meaning behind them. Sin City can only exist as fake genre play, and yet for all the work to make it shine, it’s undercooked and stiflingly stylish, suffocating under its own brutish frames. Film can capture great fictional cities, from Gotham and Metropolis to Dark City and Coruscant, allowing us to live in a metropolis of the imagination. But I’ve spent two whole movies in Sin City now and it still hasn’t come to life.

Accessories Sold Separately: G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

In the latest based-on-a-line-of-toys action film, elite teams of American commandos known as the G.I. Joes are locked in combat with the worldwide terrorist organization known as Cobra. When one of Cobra’s master impersonators takes the President’s place, he implicates the Joes in an assassination and orders a strike that leaves all but three of them dead. The survivors, somehow able to immediately determine the cause of this betrayal despite being stranded in the desert, vow revenge. This kicks off G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, by having just enough really cool special effects shots to fill a two-and-a-half minute trailer, giving the rest of the runtime to endless exposition, repetitive action sequences, bad jokes, and haphazard characterization. It’s a movie that’s probably on the whole a bit less fun than watching a six-year-old play with action figures, although how much less fun exactly would depend on the six-year-old. All the movie’s best ideas seem to have come out of just such a scenario anyways, moments like protecting oneself from throwing stars by machine gunning them down or jumping off a motorcycle which then splits apart into several missiles and continues straight ahead to a target.

Retaliation’s surviving Joes out to carry out said retaliation are Dwayne Johnson, called upon to be his usual muscular but loveable self, D.J. Cotrona, a bland goodie two-shoes, and Adrianne Palicki, as the token G.I. Jane who at one point gets to wear a tight red dress for mostly no good reason. (The star of the first movie, the suddenly-everywhere Channing Tatum, puts in a glorified cameo, but is otherwise smart enough or lucky enough to sit this one out.) There’s also Byung-hun Lee as bad ninja Storm Shadow and Ray Park as good ninja Snake Eyes, who have an almost entirely peripheral side plot involving all kinds of ninja acrobatics that includes (1) an underground prison break, (2) a cliff-side, mountaintop sword battle, and (3) bit parts inhabited by Walton Goggins as a morally ambiguous warden and RZA as a grizzled ninja mentor. That’s where the fun, such as it is, is happening here, but once these characters join up with the central narrative, the glimmer of fun slips away from them too.

The script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick does what it can to salvage the colossal and bland confusion of the first film, but doesn’t improve upon a core concept that seems to be little more than living action figures acting out ridiculous scenarios for the benefit of little more than emptier-than-usual spectacle. Director Jon M. Chu, so good at staging fluid, visually energetic and sustained dance sequences in Step Up 3D, finds little in the way of coherent action, choosing instead to shoot it all in the quick flashes of bloodless bloodshed we’ve come to expect from our PG-13 shoot-‘em-ups. That it’s all a bit more disquieting than usual comes from the narrative that jumbles more than in coheres in the telling. Since the villain is impersonating the president, it makes the countless dead the Joes leave on their way to him uncomfortable. Sure, he’s clearly evil (and Jonathan Pryce is having a good time playing that up) and many of his staff positions are filled by Cobra agents, but it’s hard to tell if some of those around him are just good old army boys and Secret Service agents gunned down for no better reason than failing to spot the fake POTUS in their midst.

That it also happens to be one of those movies that ends on the kind of happy note that boils down to something like “who cares if a major world capital was just wiped off the face of the planet, the Rock got a medal?” is just indicative of the slapdash laziness of the plotting. When a movie can threaten the entire world with nuclear holocaust in its final climactic moments and completely fail to raise my heart rate, something’s gone horribly wrong. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is a slickly put together piece of Hollywood craftsmanship. It’s easy enough to stare at, but it’s empty to the core. The character who is most indicative of the movie’s approach is a retired Joe the crew picks up on their way to the final confrontation. He’s played by Bruce Willis in a performance so relaxed and weightless that if you told me he did the whole thing lying down somewhere and was green-screened into all his scenes, I’d probably believe you. He contributes little to the plot, besides providing the things that go boom for the finale, revealing in a montage that his house is essentially an armory with weapons of every kind hidden in every nook and cranny. It’s supposed to be funny and rousing, I suppose, but is nothing more than a sad prelude to yet more numbing exposition and endless gunfire, not a lick of wit or strategy in sight. I guess the only thing that can stop a bad Cobra with a gun is a good Joe with a gun.

Here Comes the Boom: A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s probably time to stop wishing for a truly satisfying Die Hard sequel. Oh, sure, Die Hard 2 and especially Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard are solid action movies with some fun sequences, nice special effects, and a sense of relaxed tension slowly escalating, but none of them match the elegant simplicity of the 1988 original, which matches a wry Bruce Willis performance with an airtight plot of ever rising suspense. It’s an impeccably timed nail-biter that holds up remarkably well, largely because of a smoothly unfolding plot in which every scene has a purpose and every scrap of characterization contains a sliver of setup that leads to big payoffs.  

Now we’ve arrived at a fourth sequel, A Good Day to Die Hard, which one could argue fails the least of any Die Hard sequel, but only because it tries the least. I’m not one to reward aiming low, so I’m more than ready to declare it the weakest of the bunch. It’s the shortest of the franchise by nearly half an hour, but is nonetheless a nearly instantly exhausting experience that starts with the gas pedal pushed all the way to the floor and the sound effects cranked up to eleven. It’s a barrage of noise failing to distract from the movie’s essential blankness, a void of purpose and pleasure from which only competently ground out setpieces emerge.

This is the kind of action movie so relentless and breathless that the more it explains itself, the more I wondered why I cared and why the filmmakers bothered. The simple plot quickly and dumbly told follows John McClane (Willis, of course) to Moscow, after he’s told his estranged son (Jai Courtney) was arrested there. When he arrives, he finds himself pulled into a plot in which some glowering Russians want to get a MacGuffin from some other glowering Russians, a process that involves a bunch of bombs, crunchy car chases, seemingly limitless supplies of human targets and endlessly expelled projectiles. It turns out McClane, Jr. is not in trouble for the shady reasons his father assumes. He’s a C.I.A. operative trying to sneak one of the good Russians out of the country before something bad happens. What that Bad Thing is, I’m still not sure. I’d tell you more but A.) I don’t need to spoil it and B.) I don’t quite know what’s going on with this plot that thins as it goes, springing twists with all the sad inevitability of a magician who is insufficiently hiding his slight of hand. The whole thing drones along, shedding complications as it goes.

The first car chase of the film happens more or less right away and is an overheated, nearly cartoonish thing of pinwheeling debris, endless rounds of ammunition, cars driving on top of other cars, trucks crashing down to the road from off of concrete overpasses. John McClane just saw his son rescue a good Russian from an assassination attempt while fleeing from heavily armed bad guys and decides to steal a car to chase after the chase. It’s such a strange character moment for a man whose defining characteristic over four previous films has been his reluctance, his smirking, can-you-believe-this-is-happening-to-me attitude of stepping up only because he’s the only one in a position to do so. Here he throws himself into a collateral-damage-catastrophe simply because he wants to. Later, he’ll gleefully talk about “shooting bad guys” and smirking at his son as they bond over their constant stream of action related incidents.

It’s directed by John Moore, who keeps the slam-bang action coming nonstop. He has spent the bulk of his career making serviceable B-pictures for 20th Century Fox, movies like Behind Enemy Lines (okay), a remake of The Omen (fine), and Max Payne (dull). When viewing this movie as simply another modest action effort, without considering the franchise baggage, it’s a bit better. That opening car chase that’s a mess of characterization is satisfactorily crusty and goofy and a climactic fulmination at an abandoned nuclear power plant has some CG-assisted stunt work that goes so far over the top, it provides us with a long, sustained bird’s-eye-view of the top as it sits way down below. But what’s inescapably strange and off-putting about this movie of intermittently minor pleasures is the way it just doesn’t feel like a Die Hard movie. Its thinly written script by Skip Woods is papered over in superficial plot complications that fade away so that, by the film’s improbable action climax and sappy Hallmark dénouement, it’s all too clear how empty it all is. It’s as fleeting and unpleasant as the acrid smoke that quickly drifts away from all the carnage the characters leave behind.

What Goes Around Comes Around: LOOPER

Time travel is tricky for both characters and filmmakers, a gambit filled with potential plot holes, paradoxes and butterfly effects well known to anyone even glancingly familiar with this sci-fi subgenre. These kinds of movies generally litter their runtime with unanswerable questions. With Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson (he of the great high school noir film Brick) has given the time travel picture a jolt of smart intensity, embracing the concept by making unanswerable philosophical time travel questions into an advantage. It joins the classics of the subgenre (from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, from Shane Carruth’s Primer to James Cameron’s Terminator series) as a film that, rather than getting overwhelmed by a need to explain and explain, simply uses its time travel rules, at once utterly simple and dizzyingly complex, in the service of a great story.

Johnson knows that great science fiction starts not just with world-building or dazzling effects, although Looper does both very well, but with ground-level characters, recognizable personalities who happen to find themselves in fantastical scenarios. Take for instance the man who will be both protagonist and antagonist in this film, sometimes even at the same time. His name is Joe. He kills people for a living. More accurately, he kills people from the future. The year is 2044 and although time travel has yet to be invented, it will be soon enough. In 2074, time travel is illegal and thus only used by a crime syndicate for the sole purpose of disposing bodies. That’s where Joe and his co-workers come in.

Known as Loopers, their job is to take their guns out to the middle of nowhere, kill the future people, and collect a paycheck until the time comes that their future employers decide to “close the loop,” forcing them into retirement by killing their future selves. It’s a complicated conceit that plays out with stunning simplicity, effortlessly explained and immediately the stuff of high stakes when the time comes for Joe to close his loop. He finds himself caught off guard by his older self, who fights back and escapes. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) is now on the run from his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with makeup and prosthetics that convincingly creates an approximation of young Willis) and both are forced to flee their fellow Loopers (Jeff Daniels, Garret Dillahunt, and Noah Segan among them) who are determined to set the future straight by closing up this temporal loose end.

By the time this happens, the world of the film feels sturdy, convincing. High-tech embellishments create a world that feels almost like our own, close enough to recognize, advanced enough to feel foreign. The characters are all world-weary men, doing a messy job with professionalism. This new wrinkle in their day-to-day grind of violence by day and hard partying by night is treated with a tired tension, an urgency that is both intense and unsurprising. Something like this was bound to happen. Indeed, we’ve seen that it has at least once, but that time clean up was relatively easy. Both Joes are hard to catch. The older Joe roams the cityscape – Johnson imagines a future with both hoverbikes and pervasive homelessness – on a mission to change his fate. The younger Joe hides out with a tough farm woman (Emily Blunt) and her little boy (the adorable Pierce Gagnon).

At first, I thought I had the film pinned down as simply a fantastic man-on-the-run picture with sci-fi influences, a sort of doubled, time-shifting version of The Fugitive. But suddenly, the movie slips away and grows deeper, darker, sadder, and more beautiful. To even suggest the shape the story takes from here would be a disservice to you, reader. This is most definitely a film that plays even better with a joyful sense of discovery. Let me just say that the film finds surprising, upsetting, exciting, and rather moving ways to circle its main thematic concerns about what makes a person become the person they will ultimately be. This is a thriller with plenty of gunplay, chase scenes, cold-blooded murder (most shockingly of total innocents), and seamless special effects, but Johnson treats these developments with a weight and seriousness.  The performances are completely convincing and, through the characters and the style, which is flashy and distinct without once overwhelming the driving story, the film feels grounded in a way that many films of its ilk don’t. Looper contains notes of deep darkness that are treated without sensationalism. Here, violence hurts. Injuries have consequences. Scars linger.

This film thrillingly skirts past all the usual pitfalls and creates an exciting and cohesive film that is violent and cynical, but romantic and humanistic as well. Johnson embraces these apparent contradictions to follow loops of plot to the kind of climax that feels at once startling and wholly inevitable. Looking back on its entirety, it’s easy to see how fully and neatly Johnson has led us to this point. This ingeniously structured movie, neat and tidy by the end, is skillfully complex, a movie that operates from a set of rules that seem fully thought through, inhabiting a world rather than using it as narratively convenient. With Steve Yedlin’s warm yet precise cinematography of great pictorial beauty, from the steel-and-concrete, graffiti-covered streets of downtown to the dusty fields of farmland, recalling the casual gracefulness in the down-to-earth sci-fi of early Spielberg, it’s a story of imagination and emotion set against a detailed futuristic environment that feels detailed in compelling ways that nonetheless remain in the background with minimal fuss. This is a world, not merely a stage.

And on this stage, inner conflict exploded outwards. The central drama of the film is nothing less than a man fighting to become a better man by changing his circumstances, an older man literally drawn into combat with his younger self. There’s a tense, funny scene between the two versions in a diner that brings new meaning to the phrase “talking to yourself.” Whether one realizes it or not, each second takes a person away from the person one is now and towards the person one will become. For Joe, time travel has brought this process into sharp focus. Both versions have a chance to regard the entirety of his life to date and decide how best to get out of this situation with their life (and maybe even the world) better off. But is this even possible with outside forces and circumstances crushing in on them (him)?

Johnson patiently complicates the scenario, sketching details of plot with camera moves that silently reveal new information and shot compositions that cement tension and power dynamics. He off-handedly introduces concepts that will come roaring back into focus later. Here is a movie about fate that feels inevitable but vibrant, a movie about choices that feels carefully designed. Like all the best time travel movies, when it ended I felt the pleasant confusion that made me want to see it again, to diagram the timelines and figure out what, in the end, remains real and what has been cancelled out. Best of all, I felt confident that I very well could do just that. Looper is a film so emotionally engaged and technologically accomplished, so confident in the rules of its universe, that there’s a feeling its implications resonate far beyond any given frame, beyond the focus of this particular story. Johnson has created the rare film that seems to expand.

Grumpier Old Men: THE EXPENDABLES 2

Instead of complaining that they just don’t make movies like they used to, Sylvester Stallone has gone ahead and made some like he used to. First came The Expendables, a surprise summer hit a couple years back that brought Stallone and a group of 80’s action stars back onto the big screen right next to a few relatively younger action icons for good measure. That was better than I thought it’d be, often earnestly straightforward, but it turns out that movie was just a feature-length warm up to get these old guys back in fighting shape. Now here’s The Expendables 2, every bit the aggressive, isolationist, simplistic, bloody, blockheaded action movie that its predecessor was, a determined movie that muscles its way through energetic action sequence after energetic action sequence. This time around, it lacks the surprise factor, but it’s tighter, funnier, and more self-aware. The explosions are bigger, the combat is louder, the choreography is more inventive, and the fun manages to outweigh the dumb.

In the fictional world of The Expendables, third-world countries are either saved or enslaved by aging mercenaries. This time a MacGuffin went down with a plane in the backwoods of Russia so Bruce Willis sends Stallone and his crew of Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Liam Hemsworth (the youngest of the bunch by twenty years), to retrieve it. Willis even convinces them to take along a woman (Nan Yu), the only character preventing the movie from becoming an all-male action revue. (She spends a lot of her screen time trying not to roll her eyes at these goofballs around her). The group better hurry and find that device so the evil villain Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) doesn’t find it first. So the script by Richard Wenk and Stallone himself is simplicity itself, a point-and-shoot search-and-find kind of movie that’s been done many times over.

What makes this version work is the way it goes all out with action that just goes on and on, finding greasy, bloody, brute-force slapstick in fun choreography and returns to the well of the quipping action one-liner so often it’s endearing. When the movie opens, the bad guys have captured a Chinese billionaire and the gang, grinning ear to ear, rolls over the horizon to the rescue in armored jeeps with messages like “Knock Knock” and “Bad Attitude” painted on the side. That detail made me smile, imagining these guys picking out stencils and laughing to themselves as they decorated their war machines. But anyways, not five minutes go by before Jet Li (in what is basically a cameo) runs out of ammo and beats down his attackers with a frying pan. This is a movie that’s just grabbing at anything near by and throwing it into the mix, but it manages to pull up short of spoofing itself. Somehow the whole thing never quite grows as crazy as it threatens to.

Simon West takes over for Stallone as director on this film, leaving the star more time to focus on enunciation. This sequel, unlike the rough-around-the-edges original, is a slick, professional film with shiny spectacle covered over in surface grit. West’s good with big, empty, R-rated blockbusters. He is, after all, the director of Con Air. He knows how to juggle multiple distinctive talents, giving them each fun little moments to do what they do best. That’s helpful since it’s hard to keep track of who the characters are. They’re guys with names like Lee, Gunner, Church, Troll, and Trench, but that hardly matters. They’re just generic tough guys gruffly bonding over combat exercises. What’s memorable about the characters are the personas behind them. By the end of the picture, Arnold Schwarzenegger has put in an appearance, Chuck Norris has walked through just long enough to tell a lame Chuck Norris joke, and dozens upon dozens of faceless Bad Guys are dead. There’s so much self-referential winking – “I’ll be back!” Willis yells, to which Schwarzenegger responds “Yippee-ki-yay.” – and machine gun rat-a-tat-tatting that it at times grows monotonous.

Still, I must say I enjoyed it. The action is well done, even suspenseful at times. When, for instance, one of Statham’s fistfights drifts closer and closer to a whirring helicopter blade, I was kind of worried for him. But the best part of it all is that there’s a sense that everyone involved was completely happy to be working on this big, dumb action movie. The picture is covered in oldies on the soundtrack, when it’s not filled with gunfire or explosions or mumbling, creating a party atmosphere. They’re having fun with this material, thin as it is, and that shines through. The best example is Jean-Claude Van Damme, who is hamming it up, having a great time as the villain, strutting around in a black trenchcoat, speaking heavily-accented, vaguely threatening nonsense, and glowering threateningly behind a pair of sunglasses that he delicately folds up and places on a table before his final fight scene in the movie. If you had told me even yesterday that this would be one of the most likable performances of the year, I might have doubted you. Oh, sure, there are lots of better performances this year, but few so plainly, appealingly, enjoyable. I knew I should theoretically want to see his character defeated, but more than a small part of me wanted to see him live to fight another day. 

All the while, the movie rockets forward with an unstoppable shoot-‘em-up energy. It’s the kind of movie where someone can kick a knife into a man’s chest and it’s not only goofy and intense in the same moment, it’s actually important to the story. (Well, sort of.) The whole thing’s so simple and eager to be an audience-pleaser that it mostly is. When it’s not bogged down in some of the dullest exposition you’re likely to hear, the movie is fast, explosive, and good enough. When it’s in motion, there’s fun to be had. The movie starts well and ends well with energetic set pieces and by the time it's finishing starting, it's time to start finishing.

Goodbye, Children: MOONRISE KINGDOM

During the summer of 1965, on a small island of the coast of Maine, a 12-year-old boy (Jared Gilman) slips away from summer camp to meet up with his secret pen pal, a 12-year-old girl (Kara Hayward) who lives with her family on the other side of the island. The boy and the girl, friendless and lonely, figure themselves romantic adventurers, meant to head off on their own and care for each other in the wilds of this island. He has learned much about surviving in the woods from his camp days. He proudly wears a coonskin cap and plans out their hike with itemized checklists and carefully studied maps stuffed in his bag amongst his compass and air rifle. She has learned much about adventure from library books about brave girls going off on their own to become magical heroines. She packed as many as she could fit in her suitcase, along with her favorite record, a portable battery-powered record player, a pair of left-handed scissors, and her pet cat.

These items reveal that their excursion originates from a particular childhood understanding of running away, but the new feelings stirring inside them, of curiosity, attachment, caring and, yes, perhaps even love, feel so strong and immediate. In self-confident, yet halting ways these kids begin to see their adventure writ larger and more passionately on their hearts. The boy is an orphan and the girl is emotionally troubled and from an eccentric family. To them, this is not just an attempt to flee lives they find inadequate and have a fun time together. They’re fleeing into their fantasies and the merging of their imaginations becomes not just a woodsy adventure or a lovely camping experience, but a grand romance with two budding lovers on the run. The boy’s peppy scout leader (Edward Norton, with a gee-whiz wholesome exterior) has marshaled his remaining campers and joined forces with the island’s sole police officer (Bruce Willis, bespectacled and business-like) to track down the runaways. The girl’s family – three small brothers, a worried mother (Frances McDormand, tightly-wound) and a slow-boiling depressive father (Bill Murray, looking through sad, tired eyes) – join in on the search as well, which is rather patient, considering the circumstances.

This is Moonrise Kingdom, the new film from the distinctive and consistent Wes Anderson who takes this opportunity to populate one of his terrifically realized dollhouse worlds to make a film with a simple, sweet, and emotionally open surface, and a beautiful, moving emotional complexity underneath. Unlike his earlier films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, which are in large part about people trying desperately in various neurotic ways to prevent the collapse of familial relationships, this is a film that locates its concerns directly on the border between generations, finding a little community trying to work together, a ragtag collection of flawed adults and precocious children out to find two of their own. (The group picks up small, funny roles for Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Harvey Keitel as it goes along.) It’s a situation in which adults might realize how childish they behave, in which children try on identities they imagine belong to more mature perspectives. Finding the humor inherent within, Anderson (who wrote the script with Roman Coppola) balances scenes of arch dialogue matter-of-factly stated and cartoonish delight elaborately staged – like a treehouse perched at the very top of a tall tree in a scout camp run with a regimented, militaristic structure – with scenes of striking emotional honesty and clarity.

This is a film full of delicate scenes, tenderly acted by Gilman and Hayward, the young leads. This is their first film and Anderson has helped them create such confidently, wonderfully drawn characters, located so precariously on the edge of childhood, but not quite ready to tip over into full-blown adolescence. Each of these kids has moments where they look straight-ahead into the camera in tight close-up and reveal such deep feelings, which only adds to their soft kindness and moments of adorable precociousness. Their relationship – love, or something like it – develops with an emotional truth that is often (unfairly) not associated with Anderson’s exacting mastery over the formal elements of filmmaking. Torn between the worlds of childhood imagination and problems of adulthood, these two troubled kids run away to the woods where the privacy of shared solitude allows them to become who they think they are, deep down inside. Here is a film world of real innocence and real potential danger. This is a film with a profound respect for childhood and the perspectives and feelings of the young. Music swells and the camera moves for big moments of emotionality; to the young, any event sufficiently impactful is worthy of a personal epic. After all, the young couple first met the year before at a local church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s ark opera, an appropriately ornate dramatic backdrop to spark puppy love. Their escape feels ripped out of the movies and informed by the adventures in the books they cart with them and the sophistication they think find in totems of adulthood (like French pop music or a pipe).

This is not a fussy film despite Anderson’s typically mannered approach and meticulous art design, which here makes the New England island setting appear to have leapt right out of a charming, slightly yellowed, mid-century storybook, a delicate world of children’s imagination nestled just-so in the midst of rugged natural terrain. The dollhouse qualities of the sets, props, and costumes are placed in a context of forest and bodies of water. The camera glides, finds stillness, and even shakes from time to time as Anderson puts delicate fantasy – heightened, but not fantastical – and relaxed farce right up against quiet scenes of intergenerational emotional connection. This is a sweet, sad comedy about comically confident children and comically flawed grown ups. Selflessly acted, but no less richly evocative, the adults in the cast allow deadpan ease to mask roiling turmoil, to blend so effortlessly with their young costars, who let turmoil settle in like they’re discovering it for the first time. The ensemble moves through the simple plot like a finely tuned orchestra, each striking different notes at different times, blending to become a whole moving experience.

Moonrise Kingdom is a deeply romantic film about change, about moving into adolescence, about the doubts, uncertainty, depression, and confusion that can follow into adulthood where such feelings can settle, creating miscommunications and dissatisfactions. It’s such an evocative portrayal of this collision of moods and sensations in a film that’s at once so contained, taking place over the course of only a few days on a small island, and yet filled with so many whimsical flourishes of Anderson’s imagination that it feels like a rich world, wonderfully, carefully designed. It’s a film full of liminal moments shot through with a potent melancholy of childhood’s end and the growing knowledge that adults have within them a deep sadness and uncertainty. Passions and interests seize the soul with intensity and then pass like an especially violent storm. And from the devastation comes new and unexpectedly fruitful growth.

Quick Look: RED

Red is a bludgeoning action comedy that, despite some small pleasure to be found in its fluid comic-book style, is most notable for its collection of slumming thespians that deserves much better. Bruce Willis is the most at home in this movie, starring as a recently retired CIA agent who is now marked for death by the very same organization. He figures out that it has something to do with an old mission, so he, and his mild-mannered kidnapping victim/girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker) set off to find the other agents who were with him at the time. This involves crossing the country to pay visits to other retirees from Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich to Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. It also has something to do with a scowling Karl Urban, a devious Richard Dreyfuss, and two scenes with Ernest Borgnine. Director Robert Schwentke brings some pizzazz to the early action sequences, but even that wears out its welcome before the movie is even half over. The fun of seeing senior citizens in action sequences only takes the film so far and the filmmakers have nothing else to contribute. This is just sound and fury signifying nothing. If you’re going to let a collection of capital-A actors wallow in this kind of junky action-comedy, at least have the decency to make it good junk. I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed. Red is entirely uninvolving, but at least it’s not flat out irritating.

Grumpy Old Men: THE EXPENDABLES

The Expendables isn’t quite the battle of the action has-been all-stars that the advertising seemed to promise. That’s just as well, allowing this action movie to escape the fate of seeming like a B-movie sponsored by Madame Tussauds. As a muscle-headed action movie directed, produced, and co-written by, and starring Sylvester Stallone, it can’t help but play like a throwback to bad, overblown 80’s action, right down to the bad. It has one-liners so terribly unfunny that they loop right back around into being funny. It has a certain junky flair, and one or two worthwhile action sequences, but it’s otherwise dead in the water.

Stallone starts things off well enough, leading a group of mercenaries in a rescue mission, saving captive sailors from menacing pirates. A mix of current and forgotten action stars, Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Jet Li, and Dolph Lundgren, join Stallone as he blasts his way into a captured freighter. And when I write blast, I mean blast. Lundgren uses a gun so powerful it splatters half of a pirate against the wall. A little later, Satallone and Statham will take out nearly a dozen anonymous baddies in seconds. It’s likably absurd, but in all the gunfire I lost track of whether or not the hostages are saved.

No matter. I think the movie forgot about them too, for soon enough we’re back in the States. Stallone heads over to an empty church to meet with Mr. Church (Bruce Willis), a shadowy suit who proposes a new mission. Another mysterious tough-guy with a team of mercenaries shows up too, but he decides he’d rather not take the job. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays him. Willis, Stallone, and Schwarzenegger trade awful wisecracks and wink at the camera while standing in an awkward semi-circle. Believe it or not, it’s the campy high point of the movie, which sooner rather than later turns into depressingly generic fare.

The actual plot kicks in when Stallone and Statham head to a fictitious Latin American island to do some reconnaissance. They have a kind of awesome action moment in which they blow up a whole bunch of stuff in a cool way. (I’d rather not spoil it, but let’s just say it involves an airplane and a really big fireball). The actual plot will involve the guys gearing up to take out a slimy Eric Roberts as a rogue CIA operative who has a vaguely defined grip on the island nation and who hides behind his right-hand-tough Steve Austen.

The acting is mostly pose-and-scowl, but Statham carries the picture. He’s also the most talented actor in the cast to get any screen time of note. He’s dynamic and exciting to watch, even though his fight choreography is miles from his incredibly staged fistfights in the Transporter movies or the kinetic gory free-for-all of Crank. The movie is essentially a buddy movie with Statham and Stallone front and center for most of the action. Stallone, for his part, doesn’t let his painfully obvious plastic surgery distract from his wooden delivery. He’s too tough a guy to let apparent facial paralysis get in the way of his emoting.

Mickey Rourke wanders through the movie for a few scenes, spouting dumb dialogue and one nearly effective monologue. (It’s the one that starts “Remember when we was in Bosnia?”) I really don’t know what he’s doing here, but he certainly adds to the mottled ensemble that’s been assembled, as well as personifying the movie’s lack of knowing how to use the cast well.

The action smashes forward in ways increasingly dumb and dull. Terry Crews gets a very loud gun that’s good for a few interesting moments. Jet Li gets an obligatory martial arts fight that’s shot in a way that undermines its visual interest. Eventually, the movie culminates in a non-stop explosion of a climax that gets more and more incomprehensible the longer it runs. The violence, which starts strikingly exaggerated in its gore, becomes routine. The action grows wearing instead of exciting.

Still, The Expendables makes for a diverting couple of hours. It’s uncomplicated and proudly excessively macho. It’s goofy, sloppy, and ridiculous while still becoming a little too self-pleased with its perceived awesomeness.  It has its moments. Not many of them, but enough to make the movie a perfectly adequate watch on, say, a sleepy wintery weekend when it’s the only movie playing on cable that happens to be starting while you’re channel surfing.

Lingering in the Multiplex: Wimpy Gervais, Robo-Bruce

The Invention of Lying comes from the mind of comedian Ricky Gervais (he writes, produces, stars and co-directs) and he has a great hook. What if the human race never discovered lying? At first, the results are hilarious with people dryly pointing out the obvious and sharing innermost thoughts (though why some form of rudimentary manners has also never developed is beyond me). Soon, Gervais discovers he can say something that isn’t (there isn’t even a word for lie) and the comedy moves to a stranger place where he can make just about anything happen because no one has cause to doubt what he says. Unfortunately, even with material this rich, the movie peaks about halfway through, devolving into a depressingly conventional love story that centers around a weak character inhabited by Jennifer Garner. The alternate universe itself becomes tiring, with incessant frankness becoming less tickling and more bludgeoning. To make matters worse, the style of the film’s imagery is nearly suffocating in its blandness. There are some laughs to be found (including one of the funniest scenes of the year) but that just makes the movie’s ultimate failure all the more depressing.

Surrogates is a slick sci-fi mystery from director Jonathan Mostow that takes place in a world where human beings live their lives with little risk due to mechanized humanoid devices that can take their place. But, as is always the case in these kinds of flawless-system movies, something goes wrong. The movie doesn’t chase down the tantalizing implications of its premise as thoroughly as it could have (though, given the barely 90-minute run time, that might have been edited down), but it’s still easily entertaining. It’s the motion picture equivalent of one of those cheap sci-fi paperbacks that can be bought to bring travelers distraction without leaving much impact. The special effects are excellent (especially the weird waxy complexion of the surrogates), as are the well-staged, well-lit action scenes that are often exciting. Plus, after all these years, it’s still a pleasure to see Bruce Willis run around fighting the bad guys. The movie's not at all as good as the similarly-themed Minority Report, but it's good enough for a lazy afternoon.