Spaced: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets blasts off with more invention in one sequence than many blockbusters manage in their entire runtime. So chockablock with dazzling gee-whiz whiz-bang sci-fi detail and swooping techno-swashbuckling space opera derring-do, it’s an overload of pulp eye candy. Spaceships soar through the skies, asteroids pelt planets, energy pulses from being to being, viewscreens and robots light up with commands, a multitude of creatures jostle side by side in a universe cascading every direction in and out of the colorful 3D frame, and a hero and heroine pose in rippling red-blooded choreography. Too bad the movie slowly runs out of steam, hitting its peak around the midpoint, then slowly dragging to an underwhelming climax, each sequence a little less involving than the last. But, goodness gracious, how eye-boggling the film is from top to bottom and beginning to end, worth marveling at even after the rote plot and clunky dialogue’s throwback novelty appeal wears off. What preposterously dorky-cool retro-future space serial silliness! It’s good enough to make me wish for a whole bunch more of these, a big, glowing, fully-inhabited fantasy universe worth exploring. After all, marry the look and movement to a tighter, wittier script consistently involving throughout, and you’d really have something here.

Springing from the mind of French trash-master Luc Besson, inspired by a classic French comic book, the writer-director steers into his strengths. Always a tonal eccentric with a brilliant design sense, he’s made a career out of stretching and pulling at genre conceits in unexpected ways. His films aren’t always worthwhile enterprises – he’s made more than his fair share of clunkers – but there’s an earnest appeal to his attempts. Valerian, like Besson’s best films – from the similarly colorful sci-fi Fifth Element to hallucinogenic super-lady actioner Lucy – is built around enjoyable visual tricks and hurtling energy. Familiar in the best sense of the word, here’s a gleaming CG space movie built around geometric ships, rocket suits, laser guns, and glowing screens, and with striking figures – our leads with features more delicate and movements more fluid than we usually get out of stock brutes and babes – flying and posing in elaborately constructed phoniness and quick, chaotic, episodic cliff-hangers. Here we follow interplanetary secret agents Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne), a flirtatious working partnership played with low-chemistry, flat-footed, dopey love/hate obviousness, as they get pulled into a conspiracy involving duplicitous colleagues, secret redacted information, and a bevy of nasty underworld characters on sidetracks and side quests. 

Our heroes’ journey begins in an action sequence with the movie’s coolest idea – an inter-dimensional bazaar where a stakeout turns into a chase sequence that phases in and out of different planes of reality, an inventive transporting genre idea – before returning to Alpha base, where a thousand planets have built a hodgepodge floating city in deep space. They’re meant to be working together in harmony, but amidst the bulkheads and geospheres and capsules of this galactic Zootopia, darkness grows. This leads to Valerian and Laureline’s encounters with their stern commanding officers (Clive Owen, Kris Wu, and Herbie Hancock), heartless robots, a ruthless alien gangster (John Goodman), gossiping duck-billed beings, massive aquatic beasts, memory-unlocking jellyfish, a sexy shapeshifting blob (Rihanna) and her bejeweled cowboy pimp (Ethan Hawke), a tiny rodent that poops magic pearls, and an ethereal race of doomed blue androgynous stowaways (Elizabeth Debicki and others). Through it all, Besson keeps his images spinning with elaborate expensive detail. It’s like the best sci-fi paperback cover paintings you’ve never seen. He had a huge budget and a good imagination and is intent on displaying as much as he can. The heroes crash through dazzlingly rendered visual delights, lingering mere minutes or even seconds in environments so rich with possibility that you could set up shop in just one for an entire feature. But we’re always rushing to the next episode, the next dramatic escape, the next conflict in an unfolding mystery. By the time the plot forces itself to congeal and resolve, petering out in rote villain monologues and tedious flashback explanations, it’s not only with the sad sense of a narrative running out of steam, but with the deflating knowledge that that’s how we’ll have to leave this memorable world.

New Model: THE TRANSPORTER REFUELED

The Transporter movies, a B-level series of action pictures produced and co-written by busy French genre impresario Luc Besson, have simple goals. They just want to provide exuberantly ridiculous car chases and clever hand-to-hand combat, a man in a fine tailored suit handsomely in the middle of it all. They’re mostly enjoyable on that level, but are otherwise best known for coronating Jason Statham an action star, casting him in the role of a black-market driver, a tightly controlled, expressively competent, vaguely bemused, adeptly violent man with a code. He spent three movies saving kids, stopping polluters, freeing captives, and rescuing refugees, more often than not by engaging in high-speed precision driving and by punching people in creative ways. My favorite involves his use of a hose to take out half a dozen baddies in Transporter 2, the franchise’s high-water mark, so to speak.

So when The Transporter Refueled decided to recast (a TV spin-off already had, but nevermind) the filmmakers had a difficult task. On the one hand, the character has little backstory, few attachments, a stock personality, and almost no continuity. But on the other hand, The Transporter has been affixed almost irretrievably with Statham’s screen persona, to the point where the actor turned up this summer in Furious 7 and Spy playing what were two very different variations on his most famous role, with an audience expected to be instantly in on the joke. Here we have a relatively new face, Ed Skrein, most famous for a handful of Game of Thrones episodes, stepping into the shiny black Audi gleaming in fawning product placement sheen, ready to make the part his own. He doesn’t, really, but the movie zooms ahead anyway.

Refueled is a strange sideways reboot, expecting us to already know who The Transporter is: an excellent driver following a strict set of rules for his behavior and protection. But we’re not expected to care about any particular past story beats or backstory. Everything old is new, and vice versa. Skrein’s first scene involves beating back prospective carjackers, a feat he accomplishes drolly and quickly. Then he’s off to pick up his next fare. He fits the part like he fits the suit. He’s slim, fit, pretty, and capable of throwing a convincing punch. He lacks Statham’s charisma, or his knack for wryly spitting bad dialogue, and using casually athletic improvisation melded to a stubborn persistence. But screenwriters Adam Cooper, Bill Collage, and Besson have written a slightly softer Transporter. He ices his bloodied knuckles, gives in to romantic overtures, and loves his dad. He can still use a jet ski to throw himself out of the water and into a moving car, though.

The plot is this. The Transporter’s father (Ray Stevenson) is kidnapped. The only way to save him is to cooperate with a mysterious group of women (led by Loan Chabanol) who wear identical platinum blonde wigs and tight black dresses, the better to confuse security cameras when they pull off daring capers. It turns out they’re prostitutes determined to rob their evil pimp (Radivoje Bukvic) before ridding themselves of him for good. What follows is a diverting revenge-fueled heist. It provides an excuse for a variety of competently executed action sequences, director Camille Delamarre (Brick Mansions) allowing his stunt crews and fight choreographers just enough space to show off. There’s a car chase down tight streets, several bouts of close-quarters fisticuffs, a silly smash through an airport, and a standoff on a yacht which conveniently has a room full of antique weapons.

It gets the job done. This programmatic production is a reasonably well-made minor distraction. It’s slickly photographed, jumpily edited, propulsively exciting, and violent in a mostly bloodless way. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, bits and pieces of action movies past recombined in sleek packaging. The father/son dynamic is straight out of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, pops calling him junior a lot. The action moves like any car chase picture with pauses for Jackie Chan-inspired footwork. And the women’s fairly clever plan rolls out in an attention-holding way despite operating like any and every movie heist. It would be more than vaguely empowering if they weren’t also trophies, like Fury Road dragged down a mad Maxim road. Still, the end result is fast enough and silly enough to hold together and work its B-minus magic. I’ve seen better; I’ve seen worse. It’s stupid, senseless, and unnecessary. But that’s not entirely the same thing as bad.

Once, Twice, Three Times a Taking: TAKEN 3

Taken 3 is the least in its series, which in turn has been among the least of star Liam Neeson’s recent spate of action roles. Unlike his good to great films of late (The Grey, A Walk Among the Tombstones, Non-Stop), these movies are only about how many people Neeson’s Bryan Mills, an ex-special ops guy with a particular set of skills, has to kill to get a member of his family back from the bad guys. The first had a single-mindedness that worked for it more than not, especially if you can ignore its uglier vigilante tendencies. The second wasn’t even that good, but at least had its moments of committed goofiness, like grenade-based echolocation. This third time around, it’s just lazy, requiring bigger jolts to get less effect. Now he has to kill a whole bunch of people just to feel better about losing a loved one, this taking being of a more permanent kind.

After much throat-clearing exposition, Mills discovers the murder of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen, turning up for a cameo that’s half corpse). He just got back to his apartment after buying fresh bagels and finds her dead in his bed, bloody knife left dripping nearby. The cops aren’t far behind. Naturally, they think he did it, so he goes on the run to clear his name, protect his now-college aged daughter (Maggie Grace), and find the people responsible. As the detective on the case and on the chase, Forest Whitaker, who hilariously eats the fresh bagels out of the active crime scene, interviews the ex-wife’s husband (Dougray Scott) who asks if this has to do with those two times Mills got caught up in nasty business overseas. Whitaker’s reaction to the question is so underplayed to be nonexistent. It’s like he hears about suspects’ serial vigilante killing sprees everyday. Maybe he’s seen the earlier movies too.

Neeson spends the entirety of the movie on the run in a sleepy riff on The Fugitive. The reasons for this are protracted and stupid, easily the stupidest plot co-writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have yet concocted. It’s not just absurd. I could handle that. It’s wholly unnecessary. Neeson flees the authorities, pursuing his own sense of justice despite A.) a solid alibi, and B.) almost immediately discovering video evidence that, if turned over to Whitaker, would point cops directly to the real baddies. I mean, I know Neeson’s the best of the best, but wouldn’t he rather clear his name and let the police arrest the clearly guilty bad guys? I guess he prefers the collateral damage implied in a reckless chase down a freeway, an explosion on a college campus, and a shootout in a skyscraper. It makes it hard to disagree when, late in the game, Scott turns to Grace and says, “Your dad’s a homicidal maniac!”

This superfluous running, jumping, shooting, punching, and chasing (all PG-13 bloodless, naturally) would be better off if we could at least enjoy it. But there’s a sense of mercenary profit-based laziness involved, as if everyone did the least they could to get the paycheck by pumping out another entry in the brand. Barely comprehensible action scenes are a perfect compliment to the dumb connective tissue between them. This is director Olivier Megaton’s sloppiest deployment of chaos cinema, quick edits and haphazardly framed shaky cam hiding most effects and many causes in the dimly imagined action. Worst, it obscures how Neeson gets out of most of his close calls. At one point he backs his car down an elevator shaft, plummets several stories, and groans. Then the car explodes, elaborately and with many angles. After an edit, we find he’s on the phone in a different location. How’d he do that? I get the feeling no one knows and, worse, no one cares. I know I don’t.

LUCY in the Sky with Superpowers

I’m tempted to say Luc Besson’s Lucy goes enjoyably off the rails, but it’d be more accurate to say it operates blissfully without knowledge of any tracks whatsoever. It’s a sci-fi thriller that evolves as it goes along, sliding exuberantly into a metaphysical tangle. By the end it is tugging apart the very fabric of existence. So many movies go down familiar tracks it’s a delight to see one that heads off in its own direction. Soon we’re following wild unexpectedness with a protagonist who finds herself increasingly unable to connect with the world in the way the rest of us perceive it. She goes above and beyond quite literally and suddenly, throwing standard thriller plotting into grand, silly loops. It’s a trip.

It all starts familiarly enough. Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American in Taipei who gets kidnapped by a drug lord (Choi Min-Sik). His organization knocks her out, cuts her open, and sticks a bag of experimental synthetic drugs just underneath her stomach. She’s told to smuggle the substance into Europe or else. What no one expected was to have the bag burst, flooding her system with a massive overdose. One of those swoopy CGI fantastic voyage sequences reveals little blue jolts pinballing around her cells, crackling her neurons, and jumpstarting rapid changes. Here’s where the sturdy, if standard, thriller premise bursts open as well, flooding the film with a sci-fi conceit that explodes in unexpected and continually evolving ways.

Because this early overdose sequence is intercut with a professor (Morgan Freeman) lecturing on the untapped capacity of the human brain, a lecture intercut with wildlife stock footage, it’s clear where this is going. Lucy twitches, levitates, and yelps as her eyes turn neon blue, before an eerie calm washes over her. “10%,” says an alert that fills the screen. That number will grow throughout the film as Lucy sets out to stop the drug ring, save herself, and discover what happens when she reaches 100%. The old we-only-use-10%-of-our-brains is a fake fact that circulates now and then, but this movie isn’t interested in the falseness. It takes the idea and runs with it, taking it to a gleeful extreme, exploiting its stoned dorm-room concept for all it’s worth.

The drugs coursing through Lucy’s system give her extraordinary cognitive abilities. She panics until her brain speeds up to accommodate all the new processes it’s running. She’s high, spitting out deep thoughts and staring into space as the substance works through her, preoccupied by her new ability to see matter and energy, visualized as streams of Matrix data and writhing info blasts. She can see to the very foundations of the universe as her brain expands. She’d be a superhero if her power didn’t put her so far above petty human concerns. We can’t see what she sees, though Besson throws her subjective experience on the screen when he’s not holding back to surprise us with a power later. It’s appealingly off-kilter. Still, enough of her humanity fights through to allow her to multitask, trying to unravel the mysteries she’s unlocking and fight her way to the drug lord and bring him to justice.

This being an action film, and a refreshingly fast and economical 90-minute one at that, there are shootouts and car chases. They’re bright and clear, presented with a dash of humor and playfulness. Lucy’s powers allow her to manipulate the world around her. She can stop an assailant in his tracks or anticipate the movements of the cars around her so that she can weave in and out, leaving pursuers crashing and grinding gears blocks away. Besson – a Frenchman who loves American genre filmmaking – has always been interested in films about forceful women who go through changes. There’s little Natalie Portman’s bloodily orphaned girl in The Professional and Milla Jovovich’s reconstructed person in The Fifth Element. But with Lucy, Besson has written and directed a film that becomes engrossingly, excitingly one with its lead.

This is the third film in the last year that plays on Scarlett Johansson’s bombshell qualities and manipulates them to eerie and provocative effect. She’s doing great work maneuvering her screen image, turning it around and inside out for memorable roles. Her Lucy starts as a woman with personality, but her overactive brain threatens to pull her into a mix between Johansson’s disembodied operating system from Her and her icy, inquisitive alien in Under the Skin. She grows more confident, colder and more cerebral as her brain enhances unceasingly. She has to fight for every bit of humanity she manages to express. There’s a scene in which she gets impromptu surgery without anesthesia and makes a phone call at the same time. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie. But she plays it so naturally, a conversation so delicately played, a balance of half-baked philosophizing and heart-rending nostalgia as waves of long forgotten memories are reactivated in her. A single tear rolls down her cheek. It’s pulpy, but moving, too.

This is Besson’s best, most imaginative and entertaining film in quite some time. It’s silly, but everyone commits intensely and the movie willingly builds and shifts into surprising deep visual and cheap philosophical territory, it’s thrilling. The film views Lucy not as threat or even hero, despite retaining rooting interest throughout. She’s a source of curiosity and awe. The movie matches her pace, blasting her percentage points on screen to let us track her evolution. The story frays and shifts as it keeps up with her, as conventional cops and smugglers plotting resolves itself parallel to the thought experiment that’s followed to dazzling heights of strangeness and surprise.

Divorcing the Mob: THE FAMILY

Luc Besson’s The Family is an odd mix of tones, a dark comedy played lightly with violence laughed off right up until we’re supposed to take it seriously. The premise is a fish-out-of-water goof about a Brooklyn family with a mobster patriarch (Robert De Niro), his mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), teenage daughter (Dianna Agron) and son (John D’Leo) put in witness protection under the watch of an FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) who begrudgingly relocates them every time good old dad reverts back to mob rage and blows his cover. Their latest stop is in a small town in Normandy, France. It’s clear right away that the family doesn’t fit in. Their first day involves lying (dad’s), arson (mom’s), and run-ins with bullying classmates (the teens’). How to fit in? The FBI’s official suggestion is to throw a barbeque and invite the neighbors. But of course the real danger is the team of hitmen on their trail, sent to kill the four of them by a mob boss who sits in jail because of their testimony. One hitman guns down a family in the opening scene, emerging gun-first out of a cloud of smoke. We know these guys mean business.

And yet this threat sits on the outskirts of the story as the movie concerns itself mainly with the family’s earnest attempts to stay out of trouble. De Niro can’t shake the need to get things done by threatening those who refuse to execute his demands in a timely and respectful matter. His wife scolds him, thinking he’s killed the plumber, but he assures her that he merely broke some bones and took him to the hospital straightaway. See? Better already. He spends his days at a typewriter, writing a memoir of his mob life that Jones gravely informs him should never be published. It’s not about an audience for this patriarch. It’s therapeutic. Meanwhile, his wife and kids try their hardest to live normal lives in unfamiliar surroundings. His wife goes to church, his daughter gets a crush on a student teacher, and his son schemes his way into his school’s black market. It’s a film about a wacky big city American crime family clashing with a slow-paced European country town and all the stereotypes you’d think that implies.

We’ve all been down this road before, including some of the cast. De Niro, so good in so many crime pictures from Heat, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part II to tongue-in-cheek spins on his gangster persona like Analyze This, here plays out a character that coasts on this recognition. He’s the wise guy who may be retired, but he still powers through every situation with intimidation and four-letter words. Pfeiffer, no stranger to being Married to the Mob, has great composed frustration bubbling beneath the surface, a complicated indignity towards her current situation she sublimates into motherly instincts. She even makes food for the agents watching the house. When she finally agrees (after assurances of confidentiality) to let the local priest hear her confession, she seems to surprise even herself by that decision. Jones can do the wrinkled stoic exasperation required of him in his sleep, which he might be here for all I could tell. The younger actors, as mob teens playing out scheming and beatings in otherwise typical teen scenarios, acquit themselves nicely.

The characters are purely cardboard, but at least the cardboard is painted with vibrant colors. The leads are appealing and, though the supporting cast doesn’t pop as much as I would’ve liked, there are still plenty of funny little asides coloring in the details. The FBI minders debate the respective merits of French and Italian cuisine. Two mobster hitmen solemnly debate killing a dog they find at a crime scene. “Boss said no witnesses,” one reasons. The priest asks Pfeiffer to leave church property saying, “Your confession has haunted me all week.” The best moment is a bit of metatextual silliness that finds De Niro sitting in a French theater watching a Scorsese movie in which De Niro is one of the co-stars. It’s not only a sequence of nested winks, but a plot point that (in conjunction with a montage of strained coincidences) kicks off the climax. In the end, it’s a movie about how the family that kills together stays together, or how you can take the man out of the mob, but not the mob out of the man. Or something like that.

For a long stretch, the film has too many plates spinning, if only because it often forgets a subplot and lets it drop away, but the likability of the ensemble and eccentricity of the off-beat plotting keeps the proceedings amiable enough. It’s all cheeky, violent, and with largely slipshod comical stakes until the climax when the action kicks up in earnest. French director and co-writer Luc Besson has always been a director better with creating concepts than fleshing them out. His visual energy carried sometimes-flimsy material early on in his career (like The Professional or especially The Fifth Element). It makes a certain amount of sense that he’s spent the last decade or so working mainly as a producer and co-writer on an astonishing number of projects. He’s serving as a sort of cultural ambassador and mentor for French action filmmakers (Louis Leterrier, Pierre Morel, Olivier Megaton, Chris Nahon) attempting to import themselves to Hollywood. In The Family, France and Hollywood are explicitly bumping into each other and that’s fun, but isn’t explored to its full potential. Besson gives the film a sense of off-kilter energy, but the plotting ultimately feels familiar and a tad too slight, no matter the nice-enough work of the cast and occasional splashes of darkly funny dialogue and visual playfulness. I can’t quite recommend it, but have some appreciation for what it does well.

Grudge Report: TAKEN 2

Taken 2, like Taken before it, delivers on its promise. These movies can do so simply by not promising all that much to begin with. These are nothing more than well-made junk, advertising and providing relentless forward momentum, parental vengeance, and Liam Neeson’s grade-A gravitas. The first time around, his ex-CIA agent punched, kicked, shot and shocked his way through the Parisian underground after his vacationing daughter (Maggie Grace) found herself kidnapped by human traffickers. The movie didn’t have much in the way of plot or character, but it was short and fast, blessed with an unstoppable force of a protagonist in Neeson, whose every growl and scowl landed strongly. He used his height and seriousness to create his menacing demeanor. It doesn’t hurt that he also got to rumble out an instantly iconic action movie monologue, one that finds him calmly, gravely informing his daughter’s kidnappers that he has “a particular set of skills…” warning them of swift retribution that sure enough comes to pass.

Now, in the grand tradition of Die Hard 2 and Speed 2 and Death Wish 2, a movie about a more or less regular person in an extraordinary action-thriller scenario is followed up by a movie about that same exact regular person ending up in a shockingly similar scenario. This time, Neeson, vacationing in Istanbul with his daughter and ex-wife (Famke Janssen), finds himself taken. He recognizes this inevitability soon enough to call his daughter back at the hotel and tell her the bad news in a pale echo of the first movie’s great monologue. “Your mother…and I…are about to be…taken.” This time the daughter has to rescue the father, who in turn must rescue his ex-wife. He wiggles out of his restraints soon enough that most of the movie he gets to fight his way to his wife and daughter while trying to take out the threats in between.

But who are the kidnappers this time? They’re none other than aggrieved friends and family of some of the bad guys Neeson maimed, killed, or otherwise hurt in the first film. Led by Rade Serbedzija as the scowling father of the guy Neeson electrocuted, this band of anonymous vengeful others are out for Neeson’s blood. I like the idea of a sequel to a movie of mostly consequence-free violence basing its entire plot around providing consequences to that film’s actions. That this movie continues and expands upon its predecessor’s slight case of xenophobia, in which all foreigners are both undeveloped characters and mindless plot-device aggressors, is disappointing. The film is filled with stage-setting shots that linger on burqas and mosques while the sound of an unseen muezzin filters through the background noise and the villains make their way towards our protagonists. Instead of using its locale as a picturesque backdrop for action, the film feels like nothing more than cheap exoticism as code for threat in ways the feel awfully tired.

Still, the grudge-driven plot seems fitting, even if writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen ultimately have once again used their narrative hook only to provide quick, satisfying bursts of action sequences sprinkled with a moderate amount of connective tension. Director Olivier Megaton (with a name like that, you hardly have to go on to describe him as a French action director) films the car chases, shootouts, explosions and hand-to-hand combat with a slick competency (and with strangely sanitized PG-13 brutality). The benefit of the movie being little more than one long chase scene is that there’s no wasted time and there’s no reason to feel cheated. It is exactly what it wants to be and no more than what little it promises. And there’s still some time for occasional moments of mild invention, like when Neeson manages to call his daughter and walk her through the details of using a map, a shoestring, a pen, and a grenade to pinpoint his location.

Taken 2 doesn’t live up to the modest surprise of its predecessor. For one thing, the novelty is gone. Neeson’s character is hyper-competent, so much so that surprise is not really in the cards. When the situation is at its most dire and he tells his wife that everything is going to be okay, of course I believed him. And that’s really all that matters here. The movie is dependent entirely upon how willing the audience is to see Neeson run through the streets of a foreign city, fighting bad guys every step of the way in order to restore safety to his family. As a sequel, narratively speaking it’s an afterthought. As a movie unto itself, there’s just not much to it beyond what little it promises. But I guess that’s the point.

Prisoners in Space: LOCKOUT

If you want to see a modern B-movie that feels half-heartedly assembled out of a jumble of influences (that sounds kinder than rip-offs without going so far as to say homage), you could do worse than Lockout. Of course, you could do better, too. It’s been cobbled together by the directors Stephen St. Leger and James Mather and their co-writer, French genre auteur Luc Besson, into something that could be called Escape from Con Air…in Space! (Or how about Die Hard on a Penal Space Station?) Anyways, it’s a futuristic hostage situation aboard an orbital prison. Even the main character, a sardonic, loose cannon special agent named Snow, seems derivative, a mashup of John McClane and Snake Plisken with a sizable helping of just about every Harrison Ford character.

Guy Pearce plays him as a wiseacre who barely seems to care that he’s framed for the murder of a fellow agent and, when the movie starts, is being interrogated by a puffy, goateed Peter Stormare. Turns out Snow might have a way out of this trouble coming right up. As he’s being beaten in an undisclosed location, the president’s daughter (Maggie Grace) is on a humanitarian mission to see if this whole space jail thing is on the up and up. A member of her security detail hides his gun rather than check it at the door, so it’s no surprise when a particularly creepy prisoner (Joseph Gilgun) manages to grab it and go. Somehow he can then single-handedly blow apart the security of the supposed maximum-security institution and release all his fellow nasty convicts to run amuck and hold the guards (and their presidential-adjacent guest) hostage.

So there goes Snow, rocketing up to the orbiting space prison where the plan is that he’ll sneak in, find the president’s daughter, and launch out with her in an escape pod. There are a few complications along the way to execute said plan, but it’s as straightforward as it sounds. Hostages are menaced, the law enforcement control room is filled with fretting and communication difficulties, and Pearce and Grace run up and down clanging gunmetal-grey corridors. Guns are waved, buttons are pressed, one-liners are wisecracked, and my interest slipped away. Sure it’s derivative and simple-minded, but the premise is good enough that Leger and Mather’s dull-but-frantic direction and the bungled script are still disappointing.

The idea of a prison in space is kind of irresistible though. I wanted to know more. At one point, a breathless tech explains that, since the man with the job to somehow keep the whole thing afloat has been killed by the escapees, the place is falling out of orbit. We’re treated to a scene in which the space station collides with the falling prison and rips open a wall, flash-freezing a prisoner caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why would you need someone to keep the thing in orbit? Surely by 2070, this is something that could be automated.

The prison is also equipped with seemingly automatic machine gun turrets that interfere with rescue attempts by an orbital police station. A portion of the finale is devoted to quick scenes of police spaceships zipping around the exterior of the space prison dodging bullets and returning fire, even barreling down metallic trenches to fire off missiles into the construction’s weak spot like it’s some kind of Death Star. Now why would the space station have this weaponized security system? We only see governmental spaceships in this movie, so there’s no reason to believe there’d be anyone attacking this thing from the outside.

But who cares, really? This is a movie that promises a certain modest level of dumb spectacle and serves it up. (Don’t even get me started on the climactic heavy-duty parachute scene, which is so stupid I kind of love it.) It’s mostly flavorless and sometimes confusing, but served up nonetheless. Characters don’t really come into focus. Beyond Pearce and Grace, it’s barely possible to tell the prisoners apart or to pick up on their strategy, let alone their goals or desires. How, exactly, do they plan on escaping? Who knows what they’re planning to do? Meanwhile, the agents feeding Snow directions just sit around wringing their hands and gathering their space fleet. It’s just tepid chaos on both sides battling around a space prison I could barely understand. The movie never sinks all the way to terrible, but can’t get up near good either. After a while I wasn’t watching it so much as simply waiting it out.

Flower Power: COLUMBIANA

Columbiana is an action movie that starts with a child sitting at the kitchen table as the goons of a slimy drug lord gun down her mom and dad. She then escapes and grows up to become a skilled killer out for revenge. It doesn’t sound too notable, does it? It sounds like countless other vengeance-fueled thrillers that have slunk across multiplex screens over the years. Indeed it is derivative and fairly predictable. But what makes Columbiana an interesting film, and sometimes a fairly enjoyable one, is the gritty sensuality at its core provided by its star Zoe Saldana.

After stealing scenes in genre movies both good (Avatar) and bad (The Losers), Saldana has finally been given a leading role. This time she’s not helping the action sequences. Here she is the action sequences. Playing the grown up version of the little girl we first meet fleeing her parents killers, Saldana keeps the pain of this trauma close under her skin while slinking through her days plotting out violence against those who have caused her family so much harm.

When we first see Saldana, she gets in a car crash with a police officer and stumbles out onto the pavement. Arrested, she’s thrown in the drunk tank to sober up. This can’t be the same little girl we just saw moments earlier mourning while arriving at the house of her uncle (Cliff Curtis), looking at him with a quiet fury and declaring that she wants to be a killer. In fact this is the same person. She’s only faking the drunken party-girl act. The instant she’s left alone she stylishly wriggles out of her cell to gun down the man the next cell block over, a man with Columbian drug connections. She marks him with the sign of an orchid, a Cataleya, her name. She’s sending a message to the drug lord’s empire, and especially his head killer (Jordi Mollà), the murderer of her parents. She’s coming for them.

The screenplay is by Luc Besson, the French genre specialist behind the likes of Le Femme Nikita and The Fifth Element, and Robert Mark Kamen, his longtime collaborator. It’s filled with the dusty old tropes of the genre, like the clueless lover (Michael Vartan) who wants to know more and the only F.B.I. agent (Lennie James) who can piece together what is really going on, all the while becoming sympathetic to the killer’s cause. But what the film lacks in originality of plotting and dialogue, it mostly makes up for in the sheer low pleasures of the way it sets up its action sequences. The aforementioned jailhouse murder is a stylishly complex sequence of meticulous plans, shimmying through ducts, and a tight-fitting bodysuit. Later, a Ponzi-scheming fat-cat casually mentions the danger of his pet sharks and, wouldn’t you know it, Cataleya makes sure he gets to experience that danger up close before the movie’s over.

All the slick action would be for naught if it weren’t for Saldana. She successfully inhabits the physicality needed for the action and she can more than pull off the emotion, like in a scene in which she allows a single tear to run down her cheek as she explains the reasons driving her towards these violent tasks. But most of all, French director Olivier Megaton (not his real name, but the fact that he chose a perfect name to scream French action director shows where his ambitions are) allows his camera to regard Saldana with a reverence to her beauty, her textures, and her physique. There’s a little adolescent objectification going on here, to be sure, but the way Megaton allows the camera to be so in awe of her incredible feats of destruction goes a long way towards letting the film feel more respectful than mere ogling. (Megaton’s Transporter 3 treated Jason Statham in much the same way). Saldana brings freshness to Columbiana that it would not otherwise have. This is a slick, stylish, Euro-flavored actioner that feels as fresh as its lead and as stale as its script, but that more or less works out to an enjoyably dumb time at the movies.