Sense and Stupidity: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES

Did anyone really read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I guess I’d always assumed Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 mashup of Jane Austen’s classic book with zombie schlock was a gag gift at best, built for a quick smirk at the title the first few times one saw it, but destined for remainder bins and yard sale stacks. Now it’s a movie, so I guess someone had to get around to cracking the spine. I was surprised to find that its Hollywood incarnation has been made by filmmakers who have taken its premise rather seriously. The title makes it sound like a joke, but in practice it is both a Regency zombie movie hobbled by an overreliance on Austen’s novel’s structure, and a passably earnest Austen adaptation constantly interrupted by lowest Comic-Con denominator brain-munching action. What an odd mix. Odder still is that writer-director Burr Steers almost gets away with it.

I suspect it’s far too much zombie for Austen fans and far too much Austen for zombie fans. It is possible, though, that you might be like me and sit closer to the middle of that particular Venn diagram, in which case you might find some small diversion here. After all, what with most Austen novels having been adapted several times over, and Pride and Prejudice in particular getting at least two essentially perfect cinematic expressions (last in 2005, from Joe Wright), and the modern zombie Romero-knockoff apocalypse now a walking dead subgenre, it’s worth indulging an experiment in trying something new. I’m all for period-piece monster movies and reimagined classic literature, and everyone involved in this particular idea seems reasonably committed to seeing it through. But this high-concept blending serves to slowly eat away at both halves of its genre mashup.

The story of the Bennet sisters and their mother’s desire to marry them off loses a good deal of sociological fascination when the war is not with France but with the undead, and the young ladies are not merely a reflection of 19th century English mores but are trained in the art of fighting zombies. (They're treated like classic lit pinups in the process.) We see Elizabeth (Lily James, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella) and her sisters (including Dark Shadows’ Bella Heathcote and Insurgent’s Suki Waterhouse) cleaning guns and sharpening blades, tucking them in leather holsters under their skirts. They’re combat ready. But a story of zombie destruction loses a great deal of urgency when so much narrative space is given over to the relationship dynamics and developments Pride and Prejudice’s narrative of romantic negotiations requires.

All this straight-faced seriousness makes for an often monotonous film, balanced between loud bloody jumpy horror violence and tony emotional appeals. It’s a Pride and Prejudice from an alternate universe. As Elizabeth Bennet, James, who is constantly shot to show off cleavage just about heaving out of her dresses, nearly makes her emotional journey work in the midst of this nonsense. The movie’s cleverest moments come from literalizing Elizabeth’s verbal sparring by turning it into actual combat. There is a Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley), a clenched, standoffish rich bachelor whose heart is destined to melt for her. This time he’s an expert zombie hunter in a leather tailcoat. Other suitors include the usual: a sincere young Mr. Bingley (Douglas Booth), a proud George Wickham (Jack Huston), and a comic relief Parson Collins (Matt Smith, pretty funny, too). And Lady Catherine (Lena Headey) is also a zombie slayer, wearing an ominous eyepatch and sporting two swords.

The result is neither a successful Austen adaptation nor a satisfying zombie story, the inclusion of each a detraction from the other. But however poor the fit, it mostly held my interest as I watched Steers – whose past work with high concepts has gone both surprisingly right (17 Again) and horribly wrong (Charlie St. Cloud) – and crew keep the film’s central disjunction from tipping over into camp. The cast acts like they’re in a serious literary adaptation, and Remi Adefarasin (also cinematographer on handsome British historical dramas like Elizabeth: The Golden Age) shoots glossy period detail, old buildings, and beautiful green fields without a wink. But then, shambling hordes of undead drip into the frame and it’s back to the decapitations and shots to the head that the horror crowd wants to see.

The idea of putting a zombie movie in a historical setting is a clever one, and the Regency period, so rich with literary and cinematic antecedents is as good as any. It enlivens the old tropes somewhat to see them enacted by people in period costume and preoccupied with centuries old concerns. But this potential glimmer of inspiration is largely squandered as the movie slowly loses energy to its plodding plot. If you’re going to make such a mashup, why not cut loose from the source materials and let the imagination run wild? Instead, it sticks awfully close to zombie clichés and the structure of Austen’s original story. Still, Steers’ film may very well be the best one could do with such an inherently broken premise. It’s a swing and a miss, a dumb idea done blandly. I just wish they hadn’t dragged Pride and Prejudice into this, though it’s at least more respectful of it than Mark Twain, who wrote, “Everytime I read [it] I want to dig [Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Now there’s an idea for a literary zombie movie.

Blood and Sand: 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE

In many ways, 300: Rise of an Empire is just more of 300. Set before, during, and after the ancient Battle of Thermopylae as slowed-down, amped-up, and all around exaggerated in the first film, this sequel has the same rhythms in cluttered battle sequences, obviously fake CGI backdrops, and unwavering focus on masculine bodies in motion. It has the same attention to chiseled abs, bulging loincloths, big swinging swords, and geysers of digital blood. The Greeks are still presented as wholly good, dudes fighting for nothing more than freedom itself. Their Persian foes are still the darker-hued, effeminate others who want nothing more than to kill because they hate freedom. Setting up such divisions as essentialist markers of good and evil obliterates nuance and grows awfully queasy.

Last time we watched Persians slaughter 300 Greeks, Spartans making a doomed stand for their country. So dedicated to their dunderheaded ideal of authentic masculinity as combat alone, the film was a loud and monotonous gargle of stylized bloodlust. Noam Murro (whose only other film is the 2008 Sundance movie Smart People, for whatever that’s worth) may have taken over the director’s chair from Zack Snyder for the sequel, but Snyder remained co-writer and producer on the project. There’s a consistency of vision here. It’s easy to imagine cutting both 300 films together into one long four-hour slog. Both are almost perversely head over heels in love with martyrdom to the point where the insistent glorifying of war is hard to take.

But where Rise of an Empire manages to best its predecessor, slipping past some of the inherent ugliness, is in its marginally better modulation. The violence is spread out enough to create some emotional dynamics. It’s not all blustery machismo and stop-start slow-mo. We have time to see the new characters, some of which actually stand out from the sea of bare chests and scruff. A blandly noble Grecian naval officer (Sullivan Stapleton) gathers men and boats to meet a Persian fleet heading their way. Eva Green of Casino Royale and The Dreamers plays his Persian counterpart. She’s given a bloody awful backstory and dressed in stylishly flowing battle gear. She storms through every scene she’s in, slicing and dicing her enemies while chewing up the scenery and scene partners with equal vigor. I knew intellectually that she was the villain of the picture, hell-bent on burning Greece to the ground and impaling our freedom-loving heroes to the masts of their ships. But there’s such a delight in watching her storm about, ready to behead anyone who annoys her, quick to snap and growl her threats and strategic decisions with equal venom. I wanted to be on her side.

If the film was leaner and more focused on the clash between the wild-eyed Green and the beige Stapleton it would’ve been quite a kick of bloody artificiality. You’d think it’d be harder to mess up something as simple as bland good guys plus interesting bad guys equal big battle scenes, especially when the screenplay isn’t leaning so heavily on its root xenophobic political undercurrents and embracing its homoerotic visual interests. Instead, we have to sit through endless convolutions. We see the backstory of Persian king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), as if we were all yearning to see how he was a shrimpy, stubbled heir who mourned his father by taking a dip in a magic hermit cave pond and emerged a waxed and bejeweled giant. We also have to listen to Lena Headey grieving husband Gerard Butler by giving a pep talk to her troops in voice over exposition that seems to last about half the movie before finally disappearing, only to return near the end.

But if its greatest sin is boredom, that’s still a great deal better than its predecessor. It’s still an amped up expression of pure violent id, but it’s not as ugly. Because there are characters who are more than reductive warmongering symbols, it’s easier to get invested in their plights. The gender dynamic is far more palatable, even gripping at times in its breathy intensity. Green and Stapleton have a scene of tense negotiations in the middle of the picture that has a curious sensual charge, a spark of physical attraction between them that then filters into their armies’ clashes over the rest of the movie. It’s a love-hate magnetism that’s a welcome undercurrent to the sometimes-exciting over-the-top action surrounding it. And because both armies are balanced in this way, all the shouted prejudices don’t seem so icky. Murro shoots it all in imitation-Snyder style, all gleaming filters and gauzy grain, but instead of simply copying 300’s brownish sludge he invites a bit more color to the palate, using the film's trading the desert location for ocean to his advantage. If we must have a sequel to 300, at least it’s easier on the eyes and not quite so hard on the intellect.

Franchise Nonstarter: THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones had all the raw material for a decent fantasy spectacle, but somehow managed to fumble putting it all together. Based on the first of many books in a series by Cassandra Clare, the story follows a young woman who learns that she has secret powers and is drawn into a world of Shadowhunters, an elite race of beings who are sworn to protect the world from demons. It’s a full mythology full of theoretically interesting paranormal lore, but the film gives off the distinctly flat feeling of presenting only the tip of the iceberg. Much like Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters from earlier this month, Mortal Instruments seems like the work of a studio desperate to start up a Harry Potter­-style franchise without feeling the need to put forth the effort needed to properly set up the world. It plays like a movie that may require a read of the book to decode, or at least to see what all the excitement is about.

The plot that’s built to rocket an audience into this fantasy world takes off right away, launching into fantasyland before even orienting us in the “normal” character’s “reality.” A teenage girl (Lily Collins) finds that her mother (Lena Headey) has been kidnapped by mysterious forces. A young man (Jamie Campbell Bower) that only she can see steps in to welcome her into the world of the Shadowhunters, introducing her to the Institute, New York City’s branch of the worldwide organization of demon hunters, armed with magical weapons, dressed in leather, and tattooed with powerful spell-casting runes. The group decides to help her track down her missing mother, who, it turns out, was actually a Shadowhunter who years ago fled the group, hiding a supernatural artifact (a “mortal instrument”) from the villainous Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who had been in hiding, but is now back and causing trouble. Collins is a great every-girl at the center of all this, cute and capable, totally in over her head but willing to sit patiently while the much-needed Jared Harris (late of Mad Men and Fringe) steps in as the requisite Older English Exposition Machine to explain all of the above and provide a dose of appealingly-accented gravity.

This is one of those fantasy movies in which a seemingly average person experiences wildly fantastical events with a surprising sense of calm. It’s bad enough the girl’s mother was kidnapped, but learning that she’s now been drawn into a centuries-old conflict between Shadowhunters and demons, complete with various neutral factions of vampires, werewolves, and warlocks, among other legendary beasts, seems to be something that should at the very least surprise. All things considered, she takes it in here with a remarkable degree of calm, especially when she learns her downstairs neighbor (CCH Pounder) is really a witch and her mother’s boyfriend (Aidan Turner) is a wolfman. She’s willing to go with it. Her best friend (Robert Sheehan) gets drawn into all this as well and seems to be more or less agreeable to what’s going down around him, matter-of-factly asking a veteran Shadowhunter (Jemima West) how to kill a zombie. (Turns out they don’t exist in this fantasy world. That’s a nice joke.) The sense of urgency drains away along with the characters’ sense of surprise.

It’s all so blandly presented. Director Harald Zwart doesn’t try anything too cinematic, simply capturing the production design in a flat, unadorned and inexpressive way. He fills the screen with appropriately gross CGI beasties and assorted worldbuiling paraphernalia, but it’s basically the CliffNotes version of the YA series. There’s a lot of backstory left on the table, inelegantly excised or clumsily shoved in. I appreciated a funny little moment in which we discover Johann Sebastian Bach was a Shadowhunter, but that’s a rare moment mythology is allowed to take a breath before zipping along to the next plot point. (It also doesn’t matter much in the long run, aside from providing a rare bit of poking fun at its own premise.) The screenplay by Jessica Postigo grows muddled and slow, even as it rushes along. It avoids overheating romance subplots and keeps its expansive backstory strangely small. The movie ends up feeling cautious and generic, unsure how to bring forth its source material’s best assets.

There’s no good sense of the size or scope of this fantasy world. How many Shadowhunters are there? We hear references, but it’s unclear how the organization operates. Why does the fate of the world seem to come down to a small group of teenagers hiding out in New York City? The movie is filled with the kinds of questions that I’m sure fans of the books could answer for hours, but that’s the kind of stuff that could have and should have ended up on screen. I’m not asking for a movie that sits around explaining its world for hours at a time. But wouldn’t it be nice if the world unfolded with the narrative instead of clumping along, introduced only when necessary to get us to the next scene with as little context as absolutely needed? The main thrust of the narrative frays until the movie becomes less of a story and more a collection of events recreated from the source material in more or less the appropriate order. It’s not always clear what the connective tissue is from one scene to the next, because the world feels half-realized.

In the end, it all comes down to a typical climactic conflict of good versus evil, but because the world has been so sketchily built and the ensemble so vaguely characterized it’s hard to tell what exactly is at stake. What are we to make of a warlock (Godfrey Gao) who sails into the story, speaks a few lines that conveniently push things along, and then disappears from the film without a trace? (“Oh, by the way, you’re being invaded,” he basically says, before never appearing again.) Or what about a pack of werewolves that speak ominous references to “breaking the accords” and then proceed to scamper around helping our heroes despite having no introduction and who disappear before the dénouement? The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones seems like it knows what it is talking about, but maybe next time (if there is a next time) it should figure out how to tell it in an entertaining way.

Panic Attack: THE PURGE

The Purge is a sociological thought experiment in the guise of a home invasion horror movie. That wouldn’t be so bad if the central thesis weren’t so ridiculous and obvious. The film imagines that by 2022, the United States will have dropped crime rates down to record lows by instituting an annual catharsis. For the next twelve hours, as of the start of the movie, all crime is legal. (“Including murder,” the emergency alert broadcast helpfully (?) reminds.) And just what does writer-director James DeMonaco think would result from this hypothetical time of total immunity? Nothing good, that’s for sure. This imagined world accommodates a night of chaos in return for a completely peaceful 364 days. The movie posits not so controversially that a society without rules of any kind would probably be bad.

Ethan Hawke stars as a wildly successful home security salesman. That makes sense. I guess if the country is going to explode in looting and murder one night a year, the sales of home security installations would naturally skyrocket. As the movie starts he and his wife (Lena Headey) have holed up in their large home with their daughter (Adelaide Kane) and son (Max Burkholder) to wait out the purge. It’s an issue of class. Those who can afford the protection ride out the night just fine. Those who can’t afford to keep themselves safe – the homeless, the poor, and the marginalized – are the ones who end up dead by dawn. Talk about class warfare. As you might suspect, things inevitably go wrong for Hawke and his family.

It all starts when the son shows some compassion and opens the steel barricades to let a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) hide from a roving band of purging youths. The clean cut, prep schoolers stride up to the front door and demand the return of their prey. Their blonde, blue-eyed leader (Rhys Wakefield) presses his face into a security camera and says it’s their right to kill the man. He’s not contributing to society and they have pent up violent impulses. Win-win. The young man speaks with the entitled swagger of a spoiled kid who it’s easy to imagine thinks reading Ayn Rand has explained the way the world actually works to him. The crowd stalks around the mansion’s perimeter, banging on windows and steel doors. They shout an ultimatum: give up the homeless man or they’ll come in and kill them all.

The tidy plot quickly grows tedious as DeMonaco tries to wring much tension out of the power getting cut and the family and their unexpected guest wandering around in the dark, hiding from each other, getting separated, and fretting about what to do. It feels like much of the runtime is given over to Hawke and Headey apparently getting lost in their own home running down dim hallways, waving flashlights, and shouting endlessly for one or both of their children. Charlie! Zoey! After awhile I felt like maybe if I shouted too we could find them and get on with it. (Only a sense of good theater manners kept me quiet.) The danger should feel real. It would be terrifying to be trapped in your own home with a total stranger hiding somewhere in there with you, consequence-free violence and certain death awaiting you just outside your own front door. But the whole thing feels so ephemeral, a clearly ridiculous concept embraced only as an inciting incident without thinking through the total implications of the central idea.

What kind of government would set up this purge? We hear fleeting references to “the new Founding Fathers” and see widespread acceptance of the purge. How did we get here? Whose purposes does this really serve? There’s all kind of intriguing political allegory that could easily be found, but instead the whole thing grows muddled. Hawke grabbing increasingly more powerful weaponry to fend off the purging hooligans gathering outside feels like a stand-your-ground apologia, where armed good guys struggle against, well, armed bad guys, and no matter what anyone does, the cops won’t care come sunrise. Meanwhile, the us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots subtext that rapidly becomes simply text reads as a hyperbolic argument against total deregulation. This is nothing more than a dimly lit, repetitively dumb little thriller that fails to satisfy politically or on its own genre terms.

All Rise for the Honorable Judge: DREDD

Whither the recycled-food robot? He roamed Mega City, the post-apocalyptic metropolis in Judge Dredd, the otherwise terrible 1995 Sylvester Stallone adaptation of the cult comic. His sole duty was mechanically reciting his great sales pitch: “Eat recycled food. It’s good for the environment. And okay for you.” Irresistible. Such levity would be much welcome, if entirely out of place, in this new iteration of the Judge. The approach this time around is signaled by the new title: Dredd. Shorter, simpler, it’s a blunt, violent, grimy smear of an action movie. Director Pete Travis, working with Danny Boyle regulars screenwriter Alex Garland and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, creates a brute-force sci-fi thriller, a confined, claustrophobic din that pounds forward with an ugly relentless energy.

The conceit of this fascist futurist pessimism involves the law officers of this concrete wasteland of high-tech weaponry and low-tech social unrest. They’re known as judges, but really they serve as judge, jury, and executioner. They wear tight leather suits with dull gold badges and heavy helmets with dark shaded visors that obscure the eyes entirely, the better to fix a gaze unknowable at their impending victims while fiddling with voice-activated guns that can shoot all manner of projectiles. They’re basically Robocop without the winning personality.

Our hero, such as he is, is known as Judge Dredd, of course. He’s played by Karl Urban who, after playing charismatic supporting characters in all sorts of sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters from The Lord of the Rings to Star Trek, uses his leading role to speak all of his lines in a growly monotone. Even when he gets to utter the character’s famous tagline, such as it is, his line reading of “I am the law!” feels strangely underplayed. Still, he fills the suit and seems menacing enough, I suppose. The plot concerns one day in the life of this futuristic lawman. He’s given the task of letting a pretty young psychic (Olivia Thirlby) tag along. She applied to be a Judge, but failed the exam by only three points. Why a psychic would fail an exam is beyond me, but that’s the case. Anyways, the higher-ups give her the opportunity to go out judging with Dredd and see if she can perform in the field.

It’s a bad day for that. A routine drug bust in a 200-stories-high slum goes horribly wrong when the tough gang leader who runs the building (Lena Headey) decides she’d rather not have her drug-dealing operation discovered. She puts the tenement-turned-headquarters in lockdown and orders her underlings to kill her some judges. When this happens, the psychic asks Dredd “What’s going on?” You think she of all people would know. If you saw the action film The Raid: Redemption earlier this year, you’ll recognize the broad strokes of this movie. The two movies are built upon essentially the same shootout-up-and-down-a-skyscraper structure, although this time around there are way more future guns and little to no martial arts.

The movie’s best visual trick is the representation of the high offered by the gang’s future-drug. It’s called Slo-Mo and makes the user feel like time has slowed to a crawl. Travis and Mantle use it as an almost clever riff on modern action filmmaking’s love of using slow motion to amp up would-be super-cool moments. When a character plummets from a large height and falls very slowly for a very long time, it’s a funny little visual flourish. Unfortunately, that’s the best the film has to offer. The rest of the time, it’s just running and gunning in ways that quickly grow tiresome. Rather than using the plot’s confinement to the advantage of the fight choreography, the whole thing grows dimmer and uglier as it goes along. The violence is amped up beyond all reason, especially when it spills out in grotesque slow motion splatters. The terse characters grow only more uncommunicative and monosyllabic finding less and less time for their flat exposition and unworkable one-liners.

Now, I’ve never read the original comic books about Judge Dredd, but based on the evidence of two films now, maybe he just doesn’t work cinematically. The world is interesting, a wasteland of brutality and mutation that’s held barely in check by a brutal police state. And yet Dredd himself comes across as such a dud. He’s a bland action figure posing his way through feats of elaborate CGI violence and destruction. Stallone’s version was too goofy and nonsensical. This time around it’s way too dour, with monotone simplicity taking the place of narrative interest and characterization of more than the barest kind. The concept screams for propulsion, but at its core this movie’s all about slowing things down and taking it to its lowest possible levels of simplicity. It should work far better than it does.