Love Hurts: OH, HI! and TWINLESS and SPLITSVILLE

Too often small movies these days have a concept or a premise and then leave it there, flatlining for the rest of the run time. I yearn for these movies to discover a second, let alone a third, gear. Take the acidic relationship comedy Oh, Hi!, for instance. Here writer-director Sophie Brooks delivers a fine hook. A young couple is on a weekend vacation at a sleepy rural cabin far from the city. She (Molly Gordon) is head-over-heels for him (Logan Lerman). After a nice day of boyfriend-girlfriend fun, they’re cuddled up in bed when he admits that he’s way less serious about this relationship than she is. Bad move. She leaves him handcuffed to the headboard and insists she’ll win him over. Visions of Stephen King (Misery meets Gerald’s Game, perhaps) dance in this darkly funny inciting incident. She’s desperate to keep him, and the literal vision of that neediness twists with a biting mania. Unfortunately, the movie’s exactly as stuck as the guy is. The initial provocation is startling and silly, and the early dialogue just past this development has a tense ping-ponging triangulation as each party tries to say the right things to unlock the next right step. But as it goes on, Brooks doesn’t quite know how to bring it to a resolution. Some late additions to the cast fall flat despite their appealing presences because the comedy grows sitcom loopy and the last lingering strands of emotional intelligence dissipate. The performances are committed, and the movie’s blessedly short. But it still runs out of ideas by the halfway mark and then just repeats itself until finding a pretty limp final beat to play. 

For a movie with more than a couple good moves past its premise to offer, there’s Twinless. Writer-director James Sweeney’s dark relationship dramedy has an even better hook. Sweeney plays a gay loner who meets a depressed straight guy (Dylan O’Brien) in a support group for people who are mourning the death of their twins. They become unlikely friends. At first I was worried the movie tips its hand with an obvious twist. I was dreading waiting the next hour or more for the reveal. Instead, it almost immediately lets us know that it knows we know that (mild spoiler) Sweeney doesn’t have a twin. The betrayal has layers of deception, and as he gets closer and closer to the other man so desperately and earnestly reaching out for companionship in his loneliness and grief, the movie’s tone is all the more filled with sickly sweet tension and a sensitive queasiness. Here’s a movie so tightly attuned to both characters in this situation that it doesn’t short-change the compounded psychological damage that brought them together and is brewing a sad reveal. We’re waiting for the characters to notice the twist we’ve already been shown. Sweeney gives it all a soft wit and sharp eye, developing the characters’ awkwardness and neediness and slowly developing connection. The writing has clever construction, and there’s intentionality in the visual flourishes, too, like a casually masterful split-screen journey through a party in which the halves of the frame separate, wander, and then rejoin. And the performances feel just real enough, from Sweeney’s cringing vulnerability and awkwardly hidden secrets, to O’Brien’s convincingly inhabited fumbling through pain in a hunched posture and tight jaw. (When flashbacks to his cocky twin make it a double role, it’s all the more impressive.) The picture’s all of a piece in a melancholic and unusual situation in which two people are too entangled to make a clean break. There’s no real satisfying resolution on the offer, but it’s decent enough to sit in the ambiguities of a situation that maybe can’t resolve without something tenuous and sad. 

It’s Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville, however, that offers the most robust indie relationship dramedy in quite some time. What a relief to see a movie that starts with a provocative idea and then keeps building through the implications and consequences until we arrive at a dizzy screwball finale as natural as it is surprising. It’s about time one of these actually gave us characters with places to go and people to see and changes to make. It not only has a meaty first act, it has a second, and a third, each more propulsive and entertaining than the last. It stars co-writer Kyle Marvin as a well-meaning dope blindsided when his stunning wife (Adria Arjona) asks him for a divorce. He runs, literally, to his friends’ vacation home, where, as he whines over glasses of wine, his best friend (Covino) tries to cheer him up by admitting that he and his wife (Dakota Johnson) have decided to be non-monogamous. Marvin laughs it off until, late at night, he wonders if it was an invitation. Later, upon returning to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, he wonders if they should try that arrangement, too, instead of divorce. What follows is a riot of modern befuddlement over gender roles, sexual mores, and relationship norms as what people find exciting or even just plausible in theory, is pretty complicated once real feelings and bodies get involved.

It follows a couple marriages that threaten to turn into the Marx Brothers routine in which too many people pile into too small a room. It keeps up a brisk pace of hilarious line-readings, brisk banter, clever reversals, and surprising, only slightly heightened, sight gags, and then gives it all an undertow of serious emotional stakes. It follows the twists and turns of its characters’ whims as they can’t get out of their own ways, double back to try to provoke jealousy, then scramble more as their plans end up manipulating themselves more than others. It’s a movie of anxious tap-dancing over inevitable confusion, constantly second-guessing if they’re with the right person or making the right plans for the future. How apt for a society that feels perpetually on the brink of pulling apart these days. The movie’s blend of nervy humanism, too-easy sex, and Millennial neuroticism matches well with its vulgarity and its anything-goes permissiveness that has a sharp spine of regret and bewilderment. The performances are as energetic and committed as its script, and, though it occasionally threatens to play like a vanity project to pair its writer and director as actors with gorgeous scene-partners, it’s ultimately too self-critical and breezily open to fleshing out even the bit players with meaty, complicated humanity to succumb. It’s a feat of writing and directing to kick up all this mess and keep messing until it lands with a relaxed inevitability that actually cares about the fates of these flawed and fumbling people. 

Miss Jackson: SHIRLEY

With Shirley, director Josephine Decker makes the rare good movie about a real writer because she pushes down on a psychologically stormy speculative script with a heavy thumbprint on the scales of style. No dull recitation of biographical incident or overly prescribed reading of biographical detail as direct literary inspiration, she instead takes one sliver of a moment in author Shirley Jackson’s life — the creation of her 1951 novel Hangsaman — and expands and contorts it until it is a quivery, moody, push-and-pull of fraught relationships and fevered inspiration, falsehoods capturing a Jacksonian mood. The camera subtly drifts, flits, or shakes, the light contours with stormy grain or searing spots, and the jittery performances roil with turbulent interiority. Like Decker’s last film — 2018’s Madeline’s Madeline — it’s a movie about creativity and the act of creation. There the camera danced around an experimental theater group with the spirit of communal tensions. Here the camera, always close to the performers, or drifting between reality and the imagination, digs into the process of Jackson’s writing, putting her live-wire center-stage behavior — gruff and mercurial, mentally troubled and passionately literate — in an ensemble cast, but in a role that nonetheless dominates the film. It matches the ice-pick precision of her frightening writing — typified by her most famous work, the perennially anthologized short story “The Lottery” — in the way it lets unusual detail accumulate and dark impressions accrue. The world of a Jackson story is sinister and unsettled, a cruel logic gripping an illogical world, a disturbed discomfort, a madness bubbling out of desires’ inability to contain life’s mysteries. The movie crackles with the hunger of these unknowable compulsions. It’s a film that makes this writer’s literary imagination so powerful, it bends the experience of others towards hers, and blurs the boundaries between her fiction and her failings.

We enter her anxious world through the eyes of a pair of graduate students (Odessa Young and Logan Lerman) who arrive to join Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) in their respective works. The novel-in-progress, a work of gothic fiction about a college girl, dovetails with themes and patterns as the older couple alternately attracts and repulses the younger one, together in conjoined downward spirals of despair and description, creation and envy. The gregarious older man brings in the younger as an assistant, and pushes him away as it looks as if he might be able to join the department, even as he draws him into his bad habits. The troubled older woman — Moss a fearsome force, bending whole scenes to her glowering unease or prickly poise, a storm of desires and disorders lending an unpredictable air to her every scene — hammers away at her manuscript, when she can manage it. Otherwise she marinates in her anxieties provoked by what she views as betrayals of her body, her agoraphobia, her visions of blood and sex.

The movie never exactly says Jackson’s dark stories were only possible because of her mind’s dark tracks, but merely that her fearfulness of her own mind was the same jolt of paranoia that threads through her prose, and that her writing is so controlled because she struggles to control herself. It avoids confining her, or the film’s startling, swooning, sumptuously sensual creepiness, to limiting biographical criticism. It’s far too artful, and tantalizingly interpretive, for that. As the film portrays her, Jackson knows too well how one’s mind could betray oneself, how one’s deep cruelty can project outwards and inwards in uneven proportion. As she pulls her new young assistant into her world, she places the seeds of their falling out. And so the movie is about the intensity of four character’s connections, a quadrangle of jealousies in cutthroat gamesmanship of tenure and manuscripts, appetites and apprehension, in a dance of disordered personalities. The quicksilver screenplay by Sarah Gubbins from a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell is one of intense feeling and sharp dialogue — consumed with simmering fears and bursts of manic work, of fleshly failings and intellectual aims brought to vivid life by Decker's filmmaking.

They Were Expendable: FURY

Set in and around an American tank in Nazi Germany during the final weeks of World War II, David Ayer’s Fury makes effective use of its small scope and limited perspective. It’s a war picture that’s down in the muck with a handful of soldiers. It hunkers down with them as they grimly follow orders from one place to the next, the tank’s treads trundling along, danger around every corner and across every field. There’s no rah-rah patriotism or righteous killing here, no “good war” pabulum. It says war is brutal, bloody, dirty, hell. And then it goes and proves it. This is hardly a new sentiment, but this movie goes about making you feel it all over again.

Ayer’s previous films, from his screenplay for cop thriller Training Day to his minor directorial efforts like End of Watch and Sabotage, feature ensembles of tough professionals, but the men of Fury are his best, most fully realized group. They’re men beaten down by war. They’re depressed, mournful, battle-hardened, and shell-shocked. Their gruff, scarred, paternal leader (Brad Pitt) bites off his words, reminiscing about starting out killing Germans in Africa, then France. Now they’re moving towards Berlin, taking one town at a time. A typical demographic cross-section WWII squad, there’s a devout Christian (Shia LaBeouf), a Latino (Michael Peña), and an itchy trigger finger (Jon Bernthal). But they transcend their types by not making a big deal about them. They blend as a team, brotherly, on-edge, and ready to kill.

It’s fine ensemble work, presenting a group of men who know one another from spending time in close quarters building relationships forged in battle. They’re trapped in a tank, taking and returning enemy fire for brief moments, but mostly sitting, anxious, ready for anything for long stretches of time. Camaraderie is as tangible as their pain. The film opens on a quiet battlefield littered with carnage. The tank is broken. One of their gunners is dead. Slowly the tank roars to life, moving across the smoking ruins of so many men and machines. The battle was won, but their friend was lost. Back at camp, they’re assigned a new team member, a fresh-faced recent recruit pulled out of the typing pool (Logan Lerman). They don’t quite know what to do with him. He’s inexperienced, and has clear distaste for violence.

The new kid is instantly sympathetic, and not just because the frightened, bookish, idealistic young solider is always the character I’m most certain I would be in these types of movies. He’s hesitant to shoot at suspected threats. He is intimidated by the tough guys around him. Yes, they’re worn out, violent, grey, and grimy, but they also have a mumbly, closed-off rapport that seems difficult for a newcomer to penetrate. They have their routines, their procedures, their shorthand. Lerman’s character arc is familiar, but compelling. The movie follows his discovery of war and his new brothers in arms as their tank moves to another skirmish, then into a small German town for some urban warfare, then on to another mission. All the while, they seem so worn out, exhausted by the war’s violent ending. They don’t know the war’s final conclusion is around the corner, but the sense of finality is pervasive.

Free of most typical heroics associated with World War II features, Ayer creates a movie rooted firmly in the tangible dirtiness of it all. It’s gory, bullets ripping flesh and explosions sending torn fragments of body and cloth through the air. The men are constantly covered in mud and grime, dried blood and sweat. They have cuts and scrapes, haunted looks in their eyes, and weights on their shoulders. The immediacy of the detail and sense of place is accentuated by Roman Vasyanov’s striking, often hauntingly gorgeous cinematography that alternates tight close-ups inside the tank with wide shots of foggy forests and fields. And the guys look like they’ve been cooped up for years, smelly, claustrophobic, and tense. One brief moment allows the group a dinner table, around which we see reflected in their behaviors who among them retains kindness, and who is lost in the brutality of war.

It’s undoubtedly a cynical movie, in which death comes unpredictably, where people lay down their lives and become just another corpse to be piled up, dumped off, or left to rot. Of course our team navigates the conflict in typical war film ways, but the sense of loss is palpable throughout. Even as the battle sequences are shot and edited in steady, propulsive action filmmaking, they’re as mournful and scary as they are exciting. The climax, especially, is gripping and thrilling, but is also the ultimate expression of the film’s obvious war-is-hell thesis. It’s a last stand at night, the only light from a raging fire, as smoke mingles with gunfire and blood splatter. It’s hellish, and the closest Ayer comes to the brutal poetry of a nihilistic Hemingway or grindhouse gravitas. Sorrow and fear are welcome notes in this masculine genre, creating a film that’s both hard-edged and ambivalent, painful either way.

Rainy Day: NOAH

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is abstract and literal, bombastic and tender, reverent and perverse, overwrought and undercooked, vindictive and compassionate, spiritual and silly. That may make it tonally and thematically more authentically Old Testament, but it also makes for a rather uneven movie. Aronofsky’s vision is one part Biblical epic, two parts digitally enhanced fantasy, both informed by an occasionally fevered approach to a quasi-environmentalist message. All of the above is then filtered through the Hollywood expectation machine, where you can’t be given over $100 million dollars and not throw in a third-act fight, an easily recognizable antagonist, and CGI rock giants. It’s nothing if not serious in the execution, faithful to the Biblical story about a righteous man told by God to build a massive ark to save animals (two of every kind) from an imminent worldwide flood meant to wipe out sinful hordes of humanity. The result is a film too glum to be of much camp value and far too ridiculous to take it all that seriously, but lingers with an odd power all the same.

At the center of it all is Russell Crowe, wearing the burden of Noah heavily on his shoulders. He trudges with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and sons (Douglas Booth, Logan Lerman, and Leo McHugh Carroll) to get advice from his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins). The old man gravely helps him to interpret his vision of the world underwater, corpses floating by, animals swimming up towards the sunlit ark above. It’s a nightmarish image that gives Noah the strength to move forward and do what must be done. As the plot moves forward, the film addresses some of the tale’s most preposterous elements with answers that seem at once gloriously symbolic and thunderously inane. How did Noah and his family get the wood to build the ark? It was a magic forest they grew from a seed grandfather gave them that ancestors saved from the Garden of Eden. How did the animals show up, two by two no less? They followed a magic stream that bubbles up from that same seed. How did the family deal with the animals once on the ark? They put them into deep, peaceful comas with a magic potion. Later they wake them back up with the antidote.

These elements are treated so seriously, with much weight and overworked awe that it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to take it. Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel wrestle with this simple story by turning the symbolic literal and back again. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, he’s quick to sketch vivid, epic imagery and slow to synthesize coherence. It’s a clear labor of love, but that’s what also makes it a bit of a mess. This pre-flood world is a sparse, fallen fantasy world, a sort of Lord of the Rings-esque place of magic and monsters, sin and scares. It’s all so serious despite those rock giants (voiced by the likes of Nick Nolte and Mark Margolis) who are fallen angels cursed to walk the Earth who decide to help Noah build his ark, magic stones – strike them and they become fire – and Hopkins made up to look like a white-haired cave-dwelling wizard.

The mythic fantasy Aronofsky constructs appears meant to be partly a vaguely historic reality and an obvious abstraction for us to think through the notion of the relationship between man, the environment, and the divine and the obligations they have to each other. The intent is serious. No kid-friendly animal antics here. (Would you expect it from the director of The Wrestler and Black Swan?) But in striving for both reality and fantasy, it’s often neither, a colossal bore that no amount of dramatic imagery and intense emoting from the cast can cure. It’s no help that the film has some real transcendence within it, rubbing up against cheap drama that feels out of place.

A magical sequence has Crowe intone the story of Genesis while Aronofsky cuts to a Malickian Tree of Life time-lapse creation of the universe, the Big Bang sending the cosmos rapidly spinning down to Earth, evolution, Eden, exile, and, finally, the flood. Elsewhere, much is made out of Noah’s middle son’s preoccupation with finding a wife. His older brother already has a woman (Emma Watson, quite good) and he thinks he better get one while he still can. This subplot takes up a fair amount of energy, although the film doesn’t seem too preoccupied with how humanity will grow post-flood. Still elsewhere, conflict comes in the form of a villainous Ray Winstone who wants to kill Noah and his family for being so holier-than-thou, then leads armies to attack the ark once the rains come.

What is all this conventional interpersonal melodrama doing in a movie about spiritual crisis and the end of the world? That’s where the film is best, growing poignant and provocative. Aronofsky, echoing his 2006 ambitious philosophical sci-fi film The Fountain, is best at locating the real test of faith and emotional strain in his characters. The first night the family spends in the ark, the howling screams of those left to drown are carried in on the buffeting winds. The weight of morality weighs heavily upon them. Who are they to choose who lives and who dies? Perhaps they, too, should perish, the better to let nature take its course unblemished by human hands.

The entire flooding sequence, as the wood creaks, the door slams shut and the water crashes down, is effective and stressful. Aronofsky cuts to a wide shot of their boat in the distance, a craggy rock closer to the camera covered in a mass of people, clinging for their lives before slipping, washed off the face of the world. It’s a harrowing image articulating the great paradox at the center of the Noah story, as scary and searching as a pious Renaissance painting. But the great paradox of this Noah is how deeply strange and yet how weirdly conventional it manages to be. It’s not particularly good, often straight-faced silly in its loosely Biblical fantasy. (When the snakes slither up to the ark, Noah’s wife gives him a look that says, “Snakes are coming, too?”) But it’s so ambitious and thought provoking it is hard to dismiss entirely.

Demigods and Monsters: PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS

The quickest way to communicate the feeling of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is to call it a Harry Potter film with half the budget, simpler plotting, less investment in nuanced characters, and on a smaller scale. The second in a popular series of children’s novels by the amiable Rick Riordan, this movie follows 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in adapting the adventures of Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman), demigod son of Poseidon, student at Camp Half-Blood, and the Chosen One of the story’s mythology. Circumstances conspire to send him off on adventures to save their magical world with the help of his two friends, a scared-but-courageous boy (Brandon T. Jackson) and a bookish, intelligent girl (Alexandra Daddario). (Sound familiar?) This movie finds Jackson on a quest that leads a group of his demigod friends into contact with a small collection of appealingly fake CGI monsters including a clockwork bull, a furry cat thing with a scorpion tail, and a deep sea Sarlacc, among others. We only see one at a time, of course. They don’t have Harry Potter money to spend.

There is nothing so wrong with Sea of Monsters that I can’t say they didn’t try, but there’s nothing so right that it’s easy to like. It certainly brings the monsters, bland and unconvincing though they are. The plot puts Camp Half-Blood, which is visually uninspired and feels as interesting and tiny an environment as an especially modest summer camp, in danger after Luke (Jake Abel), a villain from the previous feature, breaks through a magical protective force field by poisoning the tree from which it emanates. The leader of the camp (Anthony Stewart Head taking over for Pierce Brosnan as the top half of a centaur) decides to send the best demigod student (Leven Rambin) after the Golden Fleece, which we’re told will heal the tree. But Percy’s clued into a prophecy that makes him think he should be the one to find it, so off our main characters go – new character, a teen Cyclops (Douglas Smith), in tow – traipsing through simple secondary quests (find this God, use that Olympian object, escape this trap) that eventually lead them into combat over the object they so desperately need. Along the way, they’re constantly explaining Greek mythology to each other. You’d think these demigods would’ve learned something about it at that camp, but at least one of them has an app for that.

The movie is standard derivative fantasy creature feature stuff, but it’s all so chintzy, simplistic, and flatly expositional that it was hard for me to find much of a reason to get invested in the fantastical (but sadly none too fantastic) happenings unfolding on screen. I appreciated director Thor Freudenthal (of Hotel for Dogs and the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) taking such a brightly colored approach with calm camera work and unashamed embrace of the material’s cornball, bargain basement blockbuster mythos. I mean, someone has to be making this generation’s Beastmaster or something, right? The kids around me in the surprisingly packed showing last night seemed to enjoy themselves, some gasping in recognition at characters I barely recognized from the first film and giggling at some of the mildly amusing one-liners. There was even one kid who loudly exclaimed “It’s Castle!” when Nathan Fillion turned up in one scene playing Hermes. Fillion’s always a delight, here even getting a slightly amusing wink to his cult classic TV show Firefly’s gone-too-soon status, but he’s out of the picture before you can say “cameo.”

Speaking of welcome presences, Stanley Tucci pops up as a sad and distracted Dionysus who speaks exposition and has the kind of not-as-witty-as-the-screenplay-thinks dialogue that only someone like Stanley Tucci could make palatable. But that’s also a role that only floats around the margins of the movie. For the most part, we’re stuck with the talented young actors in half-convincing scenes of Gods and monsters. As written by screenwriter Marc Guggenheim, they are nothing parts, simply one-note characterizations: conflicted hero, comedic relief, sympathetic tag-along, smarty-pants, good-hearted rival, wise mentor, and snarling villain. (Maybe the books, unread by me, are better in that regard.) It doesn’t help that someone left a lot of dead air around every line reading, as if the characters are patiently waiting for each other to stop talking before chiming in. Even an early scene in which one character interrupts another feels off. No one on screen seems to display much energy or enthusiasm, but maybe I was just projecting my own feelings on that point. I went into this sequel neither resenting nor remembering much about Percy Jackson the first and left in much the same state of mind about the second.

Fun for All or All for Fun? THE THREE MUSKETEERS

Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers has been adapted for the movies many times. After all, the familiar story is a rich source of swordplay and intrigue. Musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with the help of young would-be musketeer d’Artagnan, try to protect the French monarchy from the dastardly coup being planned by the evil Cardinal Richelieu. It’s a great story, though it’s rarely made into good movies. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the story has never before been told in the way director Paul W.S. Anderson and screenwriters Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies have in this newest adaptation. They’ve turned it into a poor-man’s Pirates of the Caribbean, a swashbuckling 3D superhero movie with a thick layer of steampunk nonsense and genre tomfoolery ladled on top. (It’s greatest accomplishment is sure to be the exceptionally confused book reports that kids in the audience may be writing in the future.) Did I mention I kind of enjoyed it?

This is a film that starts off with a note of such high ridiculousness that it’s pleasing to find that it never climbs down. It all starts in Venice, where the Three Musketeers are introduced with splashy comic-book style freeze frames that spell out their names in thick ink, as if the screen has briefly turned to parchment. Athos (Matthew Macfadyen) bubbles up from underwater and attacks some guards with a multi-pronged crossbow. A cloaked Aramis (Luke Evans) dives off a bridge to smash into a gondola. A chained Porthos (Ray Stevenson) rips the shackles off the wall and beats back his captors. Meeting up, it’s clear that they are in the middle of heist. They, along with the sultry Milady (Milla Jovovich), are stealing secret plans to a warship hidden deep within Da Vinci’s vault that is accessible through a retractable staircase, the base of which is covered in Resident Evil by way of Indiana Jones booby traps. It’s this kind of wild invention and freewheeling genre stealing that will characterize the movie to come. We haven’t even really started yet. This is mere prologue.

The heist goes wrong care of an unexpected double cross, so the Musketeers are wallowing in their less than heroic status, nearly destitute on the streets of Paris, when sweet-faced, smooth-faced d’Artagnan (nicely earnest Logan Lerman) rides into town hoping to become a Musketeer like his father once was. Through some tortured scenes of sometimes-painful dialogue, the three become four as they begin to realize the extent to which France needs their help. The movie is top-heavy with thudding scenes of scheming and needling that move the characters with some degree of narrative bobbling into position for the forthcoming action sequences. Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz, always welcome) and Milady plan to break apart the French monarchy by creating distrust between the adolescent king (Freddie Fox) and his equally young bride (Juno Temple). Waltz, looking for all the world like a teacher disappointed in his students, regards the childish royalty with barely concealed disgust. He’s not much happier with the British envoy he’s planning to use as an unknowing patsy for his plan to work. That would be the Duke of Buckingham, played hammily and wonderfully against type by Orlando Bloom.

So the stage is set for some exciting action, and it arrives more or less on schedule. Anderson, shooting in 3D, creates some great crazy visuals that play with depth and space. As the film slips farther and farther away from Dumas, it arrives at an uneven, but terrific, sense of boyish adventure with an anything goes genre freedom. A woman in full period costume rappels down the side of Versailles and then wriggles in slow motion through a corridor filled with invisible trip-wires. Sailing ships with dirigible-like enhancements float across the sky. Flamethrowers and rapid-fire cannons shoot flames and bombs. And still, amidst this pile-up of unexpected imagery that plays like a head-on collision between Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki, we get simple, fun swordplay and gunfire that thrills as well. Like that other disreputable scholckmeister Michael Bay, 3D has sharpened and clarified Paul W.S. Anderson’s style. It was hard to glimpse in ridiculously terrible movies like Mortal Kombat and Alien vs. Predator, but with Three Musketeers there is a likable self-conscious feeling of playfulness. When Richelieu is confronted with an accusation, he responds, “Am I supposed to laugh maniacally and divulge my plans?” When a flying ship comes crashing down onto a steeple, the architectural flourish appears to slice up out of the screen. Moments like these feel irreverent, gimmicky and completely natural.

Does the whole movie work on this level? No. So much of the film is straining to reach a sense of light fun that remains just out of reach. Dialogue is clunky and strange. Scenes seem to pass with little consequence before suddenly becoming only stifling importance. By the end, it’s clear that the plot is burdened by its own possible future. Characters and events are left dangling just enough for a sequel, which has the unfortunate effect of leaving all the best villains on the sidelines during the climax, while the heroes do battle with some lesser evils. And it’s all so very strange, a movie at once completely derivative and utterly idiosyncratic. It’s both an exasperating and an enjoyable big budget oddity. It’s a movie that will play best to an open-minded audience prepared with patience, indulgence, and low expectations.

Nothing New Under the Sun: PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is the biggest hunk of indigestible, derivative fantasy-adaptation nonsense to hit the big screen since Eragon. That film played like a teenager got tired of having to watch both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and decided to just mush them together. If you know anything about the creation of that aberration, then you know that that’s pretty much how it happened. Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is a blatant Harry Potter rip-off based on a book by Rick Riordan that’s slightly better than the movie would have you think. Instead of a young boy with special powers discovering a world of wizards and Hogwarts in Europe, here we have a boy with special powers discovering a world of Greek gods and Camp Half-Blood in America. I guess it makes a certain kind of twisted Hollywood sense that Chris Columbus, director of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, got hired to direct this movie.

If nothing else, the existence of this movie confirms my suspicions that the first two Potter films succeed in spite of, not because of, their director. Take away the great source material, good scripts, excellent art direction, wonderful cinematography, and fun visual effects and there’s not a whole lot for a movie to stand on. Such is the case of Percy Jackson, although, to be fair, Harry Potter doesn’t have a montage set to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” You win some, you lose some.

Everything about this film seems priced at a lower level and pitched at the undiscerning. Sure, it doesn’t have great source material, but that’s no reason for Craig Titley’s script to contain dialogue that calls into question whether or not he’s actually heard human beings interact. With plenty of howlingly clunky lines, it often undermines the fairly impressive cast. In fact, it’s the cast that starts the movie on a good note. As the opening credits started, I had to smile seeing likable actor after likable actor listed. Once the movie proper started my smile slowly faded.

Logan Lerman is cast as Percy Jackson, a teenager who is unaware that his deadbeat dad is none other than Poseidon, god of the sea. Now, Lerman’s a promising young actor. He held his own on the screen with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in James Mangold’s very enjoyable 3:10 to Yuma remake a few years ago. But here, he’s not given much to do other than pose heroically or act as an audience for characters who are delivering exposition. But, at 18, he’s the youngest teenager in the cast, so he looks the part, at least. His fellow teenagers are a different story. As his sidekicks, Brandon T. Jackson (25, memorably seen as one of the hilarious cast of Tropic Thunder) and Alexandra Daddario (23, in her first major role) are capable but out-of-place playing the Ron and Hermione roles, respectively. It doesn’t help that they have the same lame dialogue as everyone else.

The script also does no favors to the adult cast performing as various mythical creatures and mythological characters. Pierce Brosnan is a centaur and head of Camp Half-Blood and he never fails to look ridiculous wearing half a CGI horse. Catherine Keener, fresh off of playing Max’s mother in the transcendent Where the Wild Things Are, puts in her time in the thankless role of Percy’s mother, wearing for the entirety of her screen time a look of desperation that only sets in when an actor’s paycheck vastly outweighs their understanding of ridiculous material. It’s nice to see Uma Thurman as Medusa, but the inspiration stops there. It’s also nice to Joe Pantoliano in two brief scenes, as Percy’s stepfather. He might have the most thankless role of the film, even including Sean Bean’s Zeus whose lines could be counted on your fingers.

Explaining the characters and actors in that manner might have seemed a little dull and clunky, but it’s a perfect emulation of the way the movie works, shuffling a character on screen just long enough for them to impact the plot, but just quickly enough so that no one character can leave much of an impact on the audience. This is the kind of movie that can barely keep its own plot straight and is therefore constantly informing us about what’s going on. The movie’s so generous with the exposition that nearly every character gets to spout some. I’m a little surprised there isn’t someone talking over the end credits, still explaining while the audience is out the door.

The movie sparks to life on occasion, like in a briefly enjoyable Vegas escape, but those moments are all too brief. Most of the movie is consumed with a tedious video game style of plot development wherein the characters repeatedly move to a new location, find a trinket, and battle something. There’s terrible dialogue and endless exposition around every corner, or, even worse, overly obvious music cues. Hey, our three protagonists are on their way to the underworld to confront Hades or to find something or other. Start up “Highway to Hell.”

Funnily enough, once they do reach the underworld, the movie reaches its greatest portion of sustained inspiration. The effects and design are fairly striking, as are the performances from Steve Coogan and Rosario Dawson, as Hades and Persephone, who play their gods as glam-rock egoists while pronouncing every line with just the right amount of bemusement. This good will carries into a modestly likable airborne swordfight amidst the rooftops of New York that brings a much needed energy boost. But even this late save doesn’t stop the thoroughly mediocre nature of the movie. It’s clunky, episodic, and lame. It goes by fast enough with a nice enough cast, but pacing and casting can only carry a movie so far before the production needs to keep up its end of the bargain.

Percy Jackson isn’t exactly disappointing because it’s not very good. It’s mostly disappointing because it’s subpar in entirely uninteresting and unsurprising ways. The biggest surprise of the movie is that it’s actually not terrible, just frustratingly mediocre and fatally confused.