Kray Kray: LEGEND

It’s never a good idea to call time of death on an entire subgenre based on the evidence of one movie, but Legend sure makes it look like the gangster movie is on its last legs. The last gasp of a concept out of ideas, it takes the late-90’s Guy Ritchie-led British crime capers, themselves Tarantino-inspired take offs of Scorsese’s virtuosic R-rated updates of 30’s era Warner Bros gangster pictures, and pushes further into airless artifice. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, who sometimes makes good movies, like the anachronistic jousting comedy A Knight’s Tale and Jackie Robinson biopic 42, takes as his inspiration the real story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray, twin brothers who ran organized crime in the East End of London during the 1960s. Out of real conflict, violence, and crime, Helgeland spins a hyperbolic, stylized tale of colorful blood and scheming so tediously clunky and playing like lukewarm leftovers of gangster movies past, it might as well be completely disconnected from reality.

That’s the point, I suppose. It’s not named “legend” for no reason. It’s exaggerated with a self-satisfied swagger, beholden only to an outsized larger-than-life perspective. It opens on a blatantly false CGI skyline, before hopping straight into narration from a character we’ll eventually realize is speaking cheekily, and incongruously, from beyond the grave. She (Emily Browning) is the wife of a Kray, telling us the story of their rise – consolidating power through their violent tempers and a confluence of strategy and luck – and their fall – taken down by a combination of hubris and the law. Fitting a true story neatly into generic formula is a good way to strip specificities and eccentricities from the moments and individuals at play. We get tracking shots into nightclubs straight out of Goodfellas, macho posturing like Cagney lite, and random acts of violence tonally carbon copied out of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. All the while, the colors drip like a faded Technicolor musical, actors pose and chew, and the two-hour-plus runtime stretches forward with leisurely laziness.

Tom Hardy plays both Krays in a double role, showy for its variety of doubled positions and encounters it demands. The effects work is passable, but not nearly as convincing in look or performance as Armie Hammer in The Social Network, or even Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap (nearly 20 years ago!). Hardy doesn’t do much to differentiate between the men, other than Helgeland making sure one is wearing glasses and a bit more unhinged, while the other doesn’t need glasses and broods. One of them is gay, which the movie takes as an amusing side-detail instead of characterization, just one more affectation to saddle Hardy with, instead of a window into an actual person’s life. There’s never a sense that the movie has any perspective on the men, other than reciting biographical facts and reenacting moments from their criminal careers in conspicuously artificial and mildly winking style. At one point a Kray gets very upset an opponent brought a lead pipe to a fight, ruining his fantasy of getting in a shootout. “Like a Western!” he whines.

It’s annoying how much Legend knows it’s a movie. Most discouraging is how repugnantly cavalier all this falseness becomes. It takes a lot of pleasure in displaying violence, whether someone’s getting a beating, is stabbed to death, or tortured for information. Even the inevitable hand-to-hand rumble between the Krays – a clumsy feat of blocking and visual trickery – is treated as a lark, instead of a breaking point in a relationship. Collateral damage is breezed over with token cringes from onlookers. Stylish splashes of debris and blood are aesthetic displays more than narrative elements. Phony period detail and glossy slick visuals are one thing; it’s another entirely to use real pain and death as grist for goofy genre play so feather light and dull. Helgeland stocks the movie with interesting actors (Christopher Eccleston, David Thewlis, Chazz Palminteri, Paul Bettany, Taron Egerton) and flashy incident, but that none of it brings any spark of life or imagination to a routine and gratingly misjudged gangster picture makes it all the more disappointingly empty.

Out of Tune: GOD HELP THE GIRL

Is there a talented young actress who has been in more well-intentioned misfires than Emily Browning? From Zack Snyder’s muddled metaphorical Sucker Punch to Julia Leigh’s misguided objectification parable Sleeping Beauty to Brad Silberling’s good, but franchise-nonstarter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Browning has an admirable adventurousness in selecting projects. It’s too bad that the final products can’t live up to the artistic impulses behind them. But even in bad movies, she’s good. She’s too compelling a screen presence to go unnoticed, with her small frame, wide eyes, and an ability to slip easily between controlled intensity and cool passivity, often drawing attention even as a film might crumble around her.

God Help the Girl has her latest lead role in a misfire, though it’s not as spectacularly failed as some of her other films. It has its charms. This is a sweet and simple little indie rock musical written, directed, and scored by Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian. It casts Browning as a Scottish girl hospitalized for mental problems, including an eating disorder revealed in a startling shot as she stands on a scale, her sides tight against her ribcage. She escapes from the institution into the welcoming arms of a maybe-love-interest, a benignly friendly shaggy-haired guitar-playing young guy (Olly Alexander). Together, they meet another musical young person, a sweet girl with a nice voice (Hannah Murray). The aimless trio decides to form a band.

There’s not much to the story beyond the shuffling coming-of-age, self-discovery, puppy-love, let’s-put-on-a-show tropes it so delicately and simply deploys. To Murdoch’s credit, his directorial debut showcases (with cinematographer Giles Nuttgens) a fine eye for sun-dappled imagery and an even finer light touch when it comes to plotting. He’s not hitting the emotional beats too terribly hard, trusting in his music and his performers to get the idea across. It’s structured around simply staged musical sequences in which the actors turn towards the camera and pose in twee music video blocking as they sing fragile, melancholy melodies that lilt pleasurably. The songs have twinkling sing-song patter stuffed with wordy syncopation and spacey hippies-by-way-of-Hallmark metaphors.

These plaintive moments of emotion and connection through musicality, with characters twirling their way through soft, colorful sets, are gently strung together with wisps of narrative. Little happens by way of plot, Murdoch preferring to hang out with the characters as they fumble towards quiet revelations and sweet connections. That’s fine in theory, but in practice the characters are so undercooked that the flavor of those endless moments turns out fairly bland. Scenes of conversation and montage exist only to get us to the next musical number.

In song, it is best, but the longer we poke around in the limp drama and mumbly dialogue, the more the movie’s modest charms slip away. If you’re as starved for new musicals as I am, these sweet, forgettable tunes might be worth it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling of disappointment as the movie failed to cohere into something greater than the sum of its notes.

Do You Like Movies About Gladiators? POMPEII

Hardly the first bit of fiction to spin a yarn about the final days of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city infamously swallowed up by its nearby volcano’s eruption, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii is a sturdy evocation of old B-movie energy and pleasures. Its ties to cinema past – a little prestige Roman epic here, a little trashy sword-and-sandals actioner there – are earnest and sometimes exciting. This is a film with actors walking around lavishly fake sets in flowing togas and militaristic leather, speaking in vaguely English accents to denote their existence in the past. It features a love-at-first-sight slave boy/rich girl romance, Ancient Roman Empire intrigue, plots for revenge, threats of slave revolt, gladiatorial combat, and a subplot involving the funding for a new construction project. There’s something for everyone. Because Anderson never condescends to the material, throwing himself into making fine use of widescreen spaces and crackling effects work, it’s an empty diversion that comes by its schlock honestly and unpretentiously.

In the past fifteen years or so, Anderson has become one of our most reliably vivid visual storytellers, whether it be in a horror film (Event Horizon), an actioner (Death Race), a swashbuckler (The Three Musketeers), a sci-fi splatterfest (Alien vs. Predator), or all of the above (the Resident Evils). Now, those aren’t all great films or even good films, though I have a soft spot for some of them. But what they have is commitment to style and design that turns out terrific genre imagery and occasional fluid sequences of impressive action. They’re hardly what you’d call prestige pictures. They're the kind of mid-range studio fare that’s easily ignored or written off indiscriminately as nothing but garbage. But there’s a difference between lazy trash and artful trash and Anderson almost unfailingly brings the spirit of artful visual play to any project. In Pompeii, he designs a gloriously fake ancient city, a mix of shiny CGI equivalents of matte paintings and studio sets not too far removed from the kind Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper used for their Last Days of Pompeii in 1935. Within this overtly movie-ish setting, he lets his framing and staging pop with enjoyable momentum, pleasing symmetries, and striking shots.

One striking shot occurs right at the beginning, when a young Celtic boy wakes up after being knocked out cold while Romans slaughtered his entire village. He finds the corpses of his father and other rebels dangling by their feet from a lone tree in the center of a vast field. The boy grows up to be an enslaved gladiator (played by Game of Thrones’ Kit Harington) who is taken to Pompeii to compete in their tournament. He’s the slave who’ll catch the eye of the rich girl (Emily Browning). She’s the daughter of Pompeii’s leaders (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss), and spends her time fleeing the unwanted advances of a Roman senator (Kiefer Sutherland). That senator happens to be the man who led the massacre of the slave boy’s village (small world) and happens to now be in Pompeii to pay an imperially threatening visit to the town which is simmering with potentially rebellious undercurrents.

These plots are all stock elements put together by screenwriters Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, and Michael Robert Johnson with dutiful coincidences. After all, how better to make us care about the town that’s about to get buried in lava than populate it with characters engaged in colorful cardboard historical melodramas? I haven’t even mentioned the champion slave (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who will get his freedom if he kills the boy in combat. There’s a lot of conflict in this little town. Something bloody was going to go down here even without the volcano blowing its top.

The characters and plots are engaging in a rote way, but what really makes them click is the casting. Harington walks into the picture abs-first, swaggering down a dungeon corridor and into the arena in a fine entrance. He’s a chiseled hero and good match for his foe, who Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays as a tough guy you just know will come to team up with the man he’s forced to fight and attempt to get back at their enslavers. It’s a long time coming, but fairly satisfying when it does. Then there’s the romantic co-lead, Browning, who doesn’t speak so much as breathes every line from between perpetually parted lips. Harris, all gravitas, and Moss, all tough caring, lend a fine sense of parental authority to the proceedings, while Sutherland is all patrician slime. They do good work with thin material, much like their director, who makes them look great and, working with cinematographer Glen MacPherson in their fourth collaboration, brings his considerable visual interest.

It’s the rare movie that’s never fully convincing, sometimes almost laughable, and yet grows more urgent and involving every step of the way. It ends on a high downer note as the gladiator movie turns into a rumbling disaster movie. Rolling walls of acrid smoke, oozing lava, collapsing pillars, crumbling ground, and crashing waves fly off the screen (the 3D is flinchingly good in this department) as extras stumble around, smacked by debris, spilling down cracking staircases, and flailing about in flames. Pompeii is falling apart like there’s no tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of time for the stock subplots to finish off in predictable but largely satisfying ways in sword fights, chariot chases, thundering comeuppances, sacrificial acts, and a kiss. There’s not much to Pompeii in the end – or much to Pompeii in the end, come to think of it – overall nothing more than shiny schlock. But because Anderson stages the material earnestly, confidently, with a nice cast and visual appeal, it’s endearing schlock all the same. 

Once Upon a Bad Dream: SLEEPING BEAUTY

Australian novelist Julia Leigh makes a strong, but ultimately fairly empty, provocation of a filmmaking debut with Sleeping Beauty. It’s a stereotypically artsy film, filled with long, quiet master shots that let disquieting monotony slowly drip by. The opening scene finds a young, broke college student (Emily Browning) showing up to a sterile campus lab to earn a little extra money as a human guinea pig. The scientist thanks her for coming and proceeds to slide a plastic tube deep down her throat. It’s a nearly silent scene, save for her sudden neck spasms, her eyes clenching shut with accompanying, horrifying, gagging noises. That’s the film in a nutshell, a cold, quiet film with intermittent reasons for gagging.

Aside from participating in these experiments, the girl, a pale, thin, smooth waif of a young woman also works sorting papers and making copies in an office and in a third job waitressing. She’s a girl of fragile strength. She’s behind on her rent and struggling with her finances. She sets up a job interview at a secretive company. There, the owner tells her that they have young women dress up in lingerie to cater and serve at exclusive events. The company pays their girls hundreds of dollars an hour. “Please don’t make this a career,” she’s warned. She takes the job.

She does her job well, made up and dressed up to look like a perfect objectified female figure. She looks creepily vulnerable and so very young. But she pleases her bosses. The clients must be happy. The company offers her a promotion. She’ll drink some tea laced with a compound that will cause her to enter into a deep sleep. Then she’ll simply lie in a bed while men pay for the privilege to sit in the same room as a sleeping beauty. It’s all perfectly harmless. There will be no physical intimacy. The boss has already assured her that her “vagina is a temple.”

It is lines like that that had me half sure the film was just a biting, straight-faced satire of economic conditions and societal pressures of the young, beautiful and aimless. How could anyone write, let alone say, such a line and not expect it to be greeted with a the kind of half-laugh that sticks on the roof of the mouth in an attempt not to break the silence in the theater? The film is so deadpan and calm with its long master shots and dialogue spoken at a volume just this side of a whisper that it’s sometimes hard to puzzle out the intent behind the clinical compositions that are hardly hiding the underlying upsetting nature of the events presented. 

It’s clear that Leigh is making a statement against objectifying women, against commodifying beauty. If it were presented any clearer it would be bludgeoning and the restraint shown is certainly preferable to the leering male gaze burlesque of something like Sucker Punch (which, coincidentally, also stars Emily Browning). Leigh has a remarkable sense of the visual space of the screen with her just-so compositions that the camera holds steady, regarding for minutes at a time. There’s so little cutting going on that each scene plays out with total stillness in what are more or less unbroken takes. It’s the banality of the unease that make it all the more chilling.

The problem here is that the anti-objectification message is ultimately obfuscated by the way that the film itself treats Browning as an object, as just another piece of the art puzzle slowly pulled together with every passing scene. She’s not playing a character; she’s playing an idea. Who is this girl? She’s going to school, but what for? She seems to know her landlord. How? Her mother calls her office job and we hear only the daughter’s side of the conversation. She’s reciting her credit card number. Why? We never learn anything more than superficial things about her, much like we never learn anything more than the bare bones of the nature of the company providing her unique services, and we certainly don’t get access to the inner lives of any of the clients or the other girls in their employ.

Clearly, such emptiness is intentional. I don’t bring it up as if it were a mistake. I didn’t sit there saying “Oh no, they forgot the characterization!” I bring it up to object to the approach itself. Browning attracts sympathy towards her character with her open face that seems to carry a heartbreaking vulnerability with a dark secret stewing underneath and a matter-of-fact acceptance of her lot life that makes you hope she’ll find her way out of her situation. But the film is only interested in exploiting this performance instead of utilizing it. She could be a great asset to the film, a psychologically wounded beauty, but she’s only used for the visual element she brings to the film. She’s there to have a tube shoved down her throat, for creepy old men to loom over her, for the dull, gray city, and secretive business, the very mechanisms of commodified femininity, to oppress and take advantage of her. Which makes the film’s point, I suppose, but I wish I could have cared more about the plight of the character instead of spending the run time questioning and growing angry with the film’s approach.

Fight for Your Right (To Look Good Fighting): SUCKER PUNCH

For several years now, I’ve had Zack Snyder in my mental list of directors with untapped potential. He has a great command of visual style and seems to be continually on the verge of a masterpiece. In fact, some days I might go so far as saying that he’s a good director but not yet a good filmmaker. That is to say, he can create the visuals with incredible technical precision, but he can’t make them add up. For every film of his that truly succeeds in its own way – be it his zippy, surprising Dawn of the Dead remake or his fascinating, if a bit stiff, Watchmen adaptation – Snyder turns out a bloody mess like 300 or a ridiculous headache like last year’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. That’s quite a mixed bag, but it is perhaps his most recent film, Sucker Punch, that finally marks him as a major talent. No, it’s not because it’s a cinematic marvel, but rather because it’s a film of such all-encompassing awfulness that it has to take major talent to conceive, create, and execute. It’s out of the ordinary, and it even has a faint glimmer of mad genius hidden somewhere, but it’s hardly good.

Sucker Punch plays out like a sticky, feverish doodle in the margins of a teenage boy’s notebook. It’s about a creepy insane asylum (run by Oscar Isaac and Carla Gugino) with an inmate population that consists seemingly entirely of sexy schoolgirls. One of these girls, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), imagines that it’s actually a kind of burlesque brothel and then further escapes from even her own imagination by going deeper inside her mind. She pretends that she and some of the other girls (Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jena Malone, and Jamie Chung) are actually fighting giant ninja statues wielding machine guns and zombie steampunk Nazi robots and dragons and other robots! They, of course, are armed with samurai swords, biplanes, jet-packs, and flying rock-‘em-sock-‘em jet-pack machine gun robots and take advice from a walking fortune cookie who takes the craggy human form of Scott Glenn. Coherence is not a high priority here.

It’s a film all about escaping the constant threat of sexual violence by retreating into video-game violence, about removing the threat of being objectified by objectifying yourself before anyone else can. As you can probably tell, the movie sends mixed messages. It’s unforgiving and odd, all too willing to leer at the pretty girls in tight clothes and short skirts, and then scold you for looking where its camera points your attention. Sure, it pushes in for slimy close-ups of the male figures as well (even someone as square-jawed handsome as Jon Hamm comes across as looking seedy), but the constant tension of being on the brink of horrible abuse never shakes free. This is a nightmare world of a movie that is all too content to sit on the surface and offer up nothing but dime store philosophizing as a potential escape.

Fittingly, the first thing the audience is presented with is a proscenium and a closed curtain. After the logos, the curtain pulls away, drawing open the world of the film. Snyder announces right off of the bat that this will be a film of arch theatricality, of base emotions writ large. Indeed it is, but this is a film that, pardon the pun, pulls its punches. It’s various settings (asylum, brothel, battlefields) are never utilized for their dramatic potential; the cuts between the various levels of reality are never not jarring, always carrying the feeling that important plot level detail has been skipped. We’re meant to be digging further and further into the psyche of these imprisoned and abused young women and yet every fantasy sequence takes us further and further from them.

In the end, this is a film that wants to invite you to leer and then scold you for it. It’s a film that wants to sit on the surface level of “Isn’t that cool?” and then pretend that it’s all about “you being your own key to freeing yourself” or some such ponderous claptrap that fills the concluding voice-over. It wants to have its skimpily clothed warrior chicks and respect them too (a feat that wouldn't be impossible under more capable directorial hands), much like that doodling teen might be able to draw a girl, but might not have a clue about who she really is. Sucker Punch is just a sleazy exploitation film that thinks itself too serious and moralizing (or maybe just too big-budget) to have the convictions to stand behind its barely buried id.