Tale Retold in Time: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Disney’s latest attempt to spin box office gold out of affection for their old masterpieces is Beauty and Beast. Less alive and animated than the 1991 drawings, which added up to a film of lovely, romantic elegance, this new live-action effort nonetheless fashions its own charms. The foundation is sturdy, and the elaboration is vivid, in the grand old Hollywood tradition of lavish widescreen song-and-dance epic spectacles. It has the same ornate backlot flavor, the voluminous colorful production design, the matte paintings (albeit now as CG swooshes), the masses of extras, pokey pace, and earnest sentiment that the lumbering musicals of the 1960’s accrued. Here, like in, say, Gene Kelly’s 1969 Hello, Dolly!, is the charmingly stiff sweetness of eagerly putting on a show, of making sure every penny of a massive budget glitters on screen as famous faces sing their hearts out and dance as best they can, while the soaring score and witty lyrics make up for any doubts you may have about their performances. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the big-hearted gleaming nostalgia factory on display.

Differing from other recent Disney remakes, they haven’t enriched (Cinderella), reshaped (Maleficent), tinkered with (The Jungle Book), or overhauled (Pete’s Dragon). They’ve simply brought it back to the screen in new fashion. Despite the evident charm and ageless brilliance of the old music and lyrics, I remained skeptical that we’d be seeing anything other than an expensive reiteration, an animated classic unnecessarily elaborated into a glittering live-action repetition. The music bursts to life with the performers’ joy, and yet what is it but corporate karaoke at the highest level? And then, the real magic happened. I got totally swept up in the experience. The filmmakers rise to the challenge, using their evident love for and serious approach to the material to make something at once old and new, a concoction that hardly bests, and certainly never replaces or improves upon, Disney’s original telling, but instead finds a fine widescreen compliment to it.

Director Bill Condon, whose energetic and affecting Dreamgirls is one of the best theater-to-screen musicals of recent memory, invests in the heart and the spectacle, swooping the camera as its characters swoon and yearn. There’s poignancy and melancholy here, and even a touch of playfulness to its phantasmagoric romance, which contains a touch more backstory than its streamlined inspiration. Unlike the much-performed Broadway adaptation, this hugely crowd-pleasing film is never lethargic and rarely ridiculous in transposing the original’s vibrant visuals into something approaching live-action visualization. It’s loaded with glamorous visions decked out in resplendent production design and slathered in CGI accoutrements, real people and photo-real(ish) talking dishes and knickknacks investing in the emotion to this fantasy.

As the movie begins, past a brief prologue in which an enchantress’ curse turns a callow prince (Dan Stevens) and his servants into a Beast and his castle’s objects, respectively, it settles into the familiar rhythms of its inspiration. Small-town French girl Belle (the bookish beauty is played by Emma Watson, her casting surely a wink to cinema’s other great recent bookish charmer) laments her provincial life. The villagers chime in “Bonjour” for the big ensemble opening number that so quickly and wittily sketches in their small-minded attitudes and stuck-in-a-rut-routines, even bull-headed Gaston (Luke Evans), who mistakenly thinks Belle will fall for him.

Soon enough, Belle’s eccentric father (Kevin Kline) is stuck in the forgotten castle in the wild forests outside their town, a captive of the beast, and she trades her freedom for his. This becomes the slowly thawing story of connection as empathy and romance as understanding that you’d hope to see. Belle and The Beast (here a CG-assisted buffalo man, not as crisp as his drawn counterpart or as haunting as Cocteau’s makeup version in the forties, but nonetheless the right balance of handsome and perverse) come to realize they’re both outsiders. Yearning for acceptance they fear the town will never give them, they therefore have to find it for themselves. A great added detail to the curse has made explicit the townspeople’s lost memories of the castle and its inhabitants, lost to suffer alone. Crisply making sense of the simple emotional beats, the movie plays nicely in the familiar while providing an emotional texture that is different enough without distracting.

The story of the curse and the potential for true love’s kiss to life it is told through the usual boisterous musical brio – “Be Our Guest” and “Something There” – and the soaring title ballad, the late Howard Ashman’s lyrics as sparklingly clever as ever. Composer Alan Menken returns to the mix as well, stirring in lovely additions to the score and terrific music-box gentle numbers that add to the film’s emotional underpinnings. Now Belle gets a chance to sing mournfully and wistfully of her childhood, and her dead mother. The cast of animate inanimate objects (French period detail speaking with the great voices of Emma Thompson, Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Stanley Tucci) laments their lost “days in the sun.” And, most moving of all, The Beast thunders out a ballad brushing up against Brief Encounter depths to what he sees as a bittersweet potential end to his story.

Sturdy, solid, industrial-strength studio craftsmanship, the film stretches out with a reliably enjoyable and transporting balance of faithful recreations and sweetly subtle new grace notes (an extra sigh, an added look, slightly richer subplots for the objects and the villagers). These moving considerations serve up exactly the movie its audience of pre-sold fans expects while noodling around the edges for new emotional terrain on the margins. It's doesn't all work. A few of the classic numbers are a touch clumsy as reimagined, usually through awkward attempts at rooting it all in gravity and probability. Did we need to know where the spotlight in “Be Our Guest” came from? Not really. We’re already buying a talking candlestick. So the movie loads up the airy fantasy with some over-explaining. But in other ways, the film’s core is strong, and the intoxicating tug of fairy tale logic is embroidered with appealing new embellishments, and the production is lavishly phony, a blend of theatrical fakery and computerized production design melded in velvety cool blues and gold cinematography. It borrows its best moments, but pulls off a likable, even transporting, new entertainment, with the music magnificently flowing, the images a picture book theme park, every big emotional beat landing, and the moving finale misty and warm in the best way.  You’ve seen it before, but, oh, how it works again!

Track Changes: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

The Girl on the Train has all the right ingredients for a polished tawdry thriller, but it never really gets cooking. There’s a missing woman. There’s a cast of talented performers assembled to play suspects. There’s a glossy, handsomely photographed look, like its upstate New York setting is a high-end furniture catalogue with roiling undercurrents of jealousy, abuse, addiction, and intimate crime. There’s a solid, dependable director at the helm in Tate Taylor, whose previous films The Help and Get on Up also had some interest in complicated women’s roles. And there’s Emily Blunt acting her heart out in the center of the movie as a depressed, alcoholic, unreliable witness at her wits’ end, who either did or did not see something integral to the investigation. The stage is set for something interesting, but the movie is instead a total snooze. Its mysteries are haphazardly developed, its tension is erratically sustained, and its characters remain flat types.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson adapts Paula Hawkins’ bestseller with a scrambled chronology and shifting points of view. It’s a Three-card Monte plot, shuffling back and forth in time and perspective while withholding key information just because it can. By the time the pieces finally stop moving the picture comes up empty. Its central character’s confused mental state motivates the jumbled telling, which takes the idea of an unreliable narrator to its least helpful illogical conclusion. Blunt’s girl on the train is depressed. The dual shocks of learning she can’t have a baby and being left by her husband (Justin Theroux) for their realtor (Rebecca Ferguson) haven’t helped. Nor has incessant drinking improved her life, leaving her stumbling, slurring, blacking out, and missing time. It’s not uncommon for her to ask her roommate (Laura Prepon) what she did last night, a habit that carries over from her ex. She’s used to being out of control and not remembering. But she’s sure she saw the missing woman (Haley Bennett) on the night of the disappearance.

There is a dusting of interesting thematic work here. Blunt is playing a woman who is told stories about her life she has no choice but to believe given her condition. She, in turn, enjoys looking out the train window during her commutes, making up little stories about the people whose lives she glimpses for a few moments a day. That’s how she feels she knows the missing woman enough to try to give a statement to the detective on the case (Alison Janney) or approach the woman’s shocked husband (Luke Evans) or therapist (Edgar Ramirez) to slip some of her information or delusions into their narratives. Ah, but how to do that while seeming sane? It’d take a sharp mind and sober social skills to pull that off, and she can only fake it for so long. Besides, she’s not totally sure she didn’t have something to do with the vanishing. The movie takes us into flashbacks narrated by the missing woman describing her sad life, then back to Blunt wringing her hands over the state of things. This interest in the stories people tell to convince themselves of one thing or another is a good enough hook to make the lackluster execution all the more disappointing.

Taylor handles this material with some confidence. He trusts his close ups of Blunt’s tear-streaked face and woozy booze-soaked flashes of memory to carry across the haze through which the facts can be glimpsed. He’s also sure his oblique references to horrible things – a character’s tearful monologue about the death of her infant; a bludgeoning; a pattern of emotional abuse – are worth springing as surprises and then cutting away before the visuals get too rough. But ultimately there’s just not enough there there. The twists are artificially delayed through obfuscation, stretching out obvious developments for the sake of the story’s deliberately frustrating structure. (We can’t be sure of anything until late in the picture, by which point it’s hard to retroactively care.) And the whole ensemble of terrific performers (down to two scenes for the always great Lisa Kudrow) are stuck playing slight types whose actions are determined by the circuitous plotting and whose decisions and developments hinge only on the dictates of the surprises. Worst, there’s never any compelling question pulling it along. I was so frustrated by the film’s thin psychology and unforthcoming shiftiness I simply didn’t care where the missing woman went and whodunit. I was merely waiting out the runtime.

The End: THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the weakest of its trilogy, and by far the worst of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies. It’s all climax, an endless battle that does nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished with an extra fifteen or twenty minutes in the last one. And yet, this is likely the last time we’ll get to visit Tolkien’s fantasy world through Jackson’s eyes. For those of us who’ve liked that feeling, it’s bittersweet to see it go. That it’s not as rousing and wistful as the first finale, eleven years ago with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, is almost beside the point. It’s one more chance to go there and back again, to see these landscapes and creatures, marvel at the prodigious attention to detail, and hear the strains of Howard Shore’s melodies, a feat of film scoring nearing John Williams’ Star Wars work for its web of themes. In other words, it’s worth seeing for those who’ve already made it this far.

So maybe it’s helpful to think of Battle of the Five Armies less as a self-contained movie, more as a way for Jackson to create this place on the big screen for the last time. It’s a bestiary: Hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, horses, elk, giants, wizards, goblins, evil spirits, war bats, giant eagles, bears, a dragon, and more. It’s a map: CGI armies marched around a game board battlefield. It’s an armory: swords, shields, helmets, hammers, clubs, battering rams, bow and arrow. It’s a drawn out conclusion from a creator who doesn’t want to let this story go, who wants to linger in Middle Earth for just five more minutes, then five more, then more. Good thing, then, that Jackson’s skilled with whipping up blockbuster spectacle, splashing his vivid visuals across the wide screen in ceaseless fantastical imagery so big it betrays how small the thinking is of so many of our tentpole directors. Sure, he’s a filmmaker who errs on the side of too much of a good thing – endless stalemates, overdone comic relief – but so be it.

This last Hobbit picture picks up right where the last left off, with the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) emerging from his mountain lair, flying angrily toward the nearest village and leaving his vast stockpiles of gold unattended. In the mountain are the dwarves (led by Richard Armitage), who have a historical claim to the site, and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the Hobbit who helped them get there. Eventually, the riches are the target of attack by an army of men (led by Luke Evans) and an army of elves (Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, and Evangeline Lilly among them) who want their fair share. The army of orcs right behind them just wants to kill a bunch of people for some reason. I know that’s only three armies, four when you count the dwarves reinforcements, but I must confess I’m not exactly sure how the title’s math works out here.

For the first half of the movie, those computer-animated armies line up behind character actors as everyone argues about who gets the gold and how the fighting’s going to start. Then, the fighting starts, and the armies collide repeatedly in anonymous garbles of digital noise across rocks and fields, up and down the sides of cliffs, and across an icy lagoon. We dip into personal conflicts between recognizable orcs and our big heroes, follow the king of the dwarves and his battle with curse-induced greed, and check in with Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who has important Lord of the Rings foreshadowing to take care of before joining the main battle. Some moments of combat are nicely done – the bit with ice is clever, as is a neat trick involving an elk – but it grows awfully repetitive. You can almost hear the small material as it’s stretched thin to fill time.

The film loses the emotional thread, and its central narrative momentum along with it, as it gets tangled up in the clanging swords, stabbing and bludgeoning. But when the camera comes to rest on Bilbo Baggins, with Freeman's performance as good as always, the film finds its center. He’s taken aback by the developments, is ready to help his friends even when they disagree with his strategy, and bravely stands in the thick of it even when danger is great. When it’s all over, he is happy to have had this experience and even happier to go home. And so Five Armies brings him there, eventually. It wraps up dangling plot threads, resolves its cliffhangers, and joins up with the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring quite nicely. Along the way we have to slog through some colossally uninvolving battle business, but Jackson brings it home, to the Shire and the Hobbits, the coziest corner of Middle Earth, safe and sound. He asks your indulgence, tries your patience, but eventually delivers some small rewards.

Sad Vlad: DRACULA UNTOLD

Do audiences really enjoy seeing movies about famous characters in which little of what makes said characters famous appears? We’ve been living with the glum and ponderous self-serious “gritty reboot” for at least decade now. We’ve had a mortal Hercules, a non-journalist Man of Steel, a Robin Hood without his Merry Men, and a King Arthur without a roundtable or a wizard. That it works marginally well about half the time is probably why they keep coming. Now we can add Dracula to the pile of iconic figures stripped of some iconic ideas.

We have Luke Evans, previously a Musketeer for Paul W.S. Anderson and a Middle-Earthling for Peter Jackson, playing the famous vampire in Dracula Untold, except he’s not a vampire and would rather not drink blood, thank you very much. He’s really Vlad the Impaler, so named for impaling his enemies and leaving them stuck in the battlefield on spears, the better to intimidate his enemies. We see this sight a few times, but silhouetted and shrouded in fog, the better to maintain a PG-13. Vlad was a real historical figure, and the movie tries for some token amount of Dark Age verisimilitude. It looks muddy, people are poor, and Vlad’s head weighs heavy with worry that Turks will bother his Transylvanian kingdom so peaceful he doesn’t even bother having a standing army.

But, sure enough, Turks, led by their villainous king (Dominic Cooper), show up demanding 1,000 boys for their army. When Vlad refuses, the Turks demand 1,000 and one more, his son (Art Parkinson). Vlad kills the messengers and prepares for battle, promising his wife (Sarah Gadon) he’ll do anything to protect their family and citizens. Anything, in this case, involves climbing an impassably craggy cliff to a cave where a vampire (Charles Dance) lives. Here the pale, fanged beast – more Nosferatu than Lee or Lugosi – offers Vlad a deal. Drink some vampire blood and have the powers of one for three days. If he makes it to a third sunrise without succumbing to the desire for human blood, he’ll return to normal. Drink, and he’ll be a vampire forever. He makes the deal.

At first this is all rather deftly handled, historical portent and creepy legend freely mixing in a dumb fun sort of way. It seems poised to be something like David Lean epic meets Hammer horror. Instead, it ends up closer to a Peter Jackson knockoff with long shots of characters wandering over hills and CGI armies marching across fields, the better to pad out the runtime I suppose. Characters are barely fleshed out, worldbuilding is half-hearted at best, and the production design is cramped and dark, the better to keep costs down I suppose. All the while, vampirism is exploited for effects shots and atmosphere, but is served up as a choose-your-own-metaphor. Sacrifice, temptation, grief, power, take your pick. It’s a painfully thin script telling a simple story with woefully underdeveloped motivations and undercooked characterizations. Gadon and Dance, especially, are wasted in one-note roles that start intriguing and go nowhere fast.

And yet, there’s potential here, and it’s the actors and art directors who get close to finding it with the sturdy competence of first-time director Gary Shore and no help from screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. Evans’ Vlad is a sad dad who’s just protecting his family, and we can see the pain of the responsibility in his eyes, as well as the exhilaration of vampiric powers that allow him to take on the entire Turkish army single-handedly. He can heal from his wounds – save sunlight, or a stake in the heart – and see in the dark, control creatures of the night, and turn into a swarm of bats if he moves really fast. He’s intimidating his enemies but he’s scaring his people and, hoo boy, does he vant to suck some blood. There’s a dollop of tension there, sitting beneath Evans eyes as he poses like a fantasy illustration in armor and flowing red cape. It’s impractical, but looks pretty cool, like most of the action and effects, which swirl around somewhat confusingly, but look striking from time to time.

There are plenty of reasons not to see this movie. But if you go hoping to see an impossibly large flock of bats slam into a massive army like a fist, or a vampire get staked in the heart so forcefully all his skin falls off, or a villain look across a CGI landscape full of ominous storm clouds and lightning and intone, “It’s the prince. He is coming,” you won’t be disappointed. If you get on the right flimsy B-movie fantasy wavelength, it’s not too terrible a way to pass 95 minutes, even better if you leave before the wholly unnecessary tease for a sequel that may or may not ever exist. Dracula Untold barely has enough to it to support itself, let alone a franchise.

Into the Fire: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

Peter Jackson returns yet again to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical Middle Earth with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second of three films devoted to the comparatively slim novel that precedes The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some find that reason enough to dislike the film, but why get hung up on what it isn’t and miss the chance to luxuriate in what it is? To dismiss the expansion of Tolkien’s smaller story is to miss the rich detail Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro find. This is filmmaking as worldbuilding, a creation of a space that’s fun to visit with new characters and sights around every corner. When we wander into the home of a giant man who is also sometimes a bear, there is a sense of discovery and history. It feels somehow right that such a person would exist in this world, and as he sadly admits to being the last of his species, there’s a real sense of loss. We could follow him out into his own film and probably find something interesting. We won’t, but the sense of a fully realized world is impressive and goes a long way to selling the movie’s colorful adventure plotting.

When last we saw our Hobbit friend Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), he was with the once and future dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his band of dwarves on a journey to enter the Lonely Mountain and reclaim their home and their gold from Smaug, a powerful dragon. They’re continuing their quest here, getting into one scrape after another, each only a danger for as long as the plot requires (and sometimes longer) until the next danger pops up. Here there be giant spiders, packs of angry orcs, aloof wood-elves, and, of course, one large fire-breathing dragon. He stretches across the entire screen that only captures his full wingspan in wide shots. (The beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, words rumbling out with booming augmented bass.) Expert spectacle, the film is filled with elaborate action sequences overflowing with visual gags. In one early scene, an elf shoots two orcs with one arrow. Later, a barrel pops up out of roaring rapids and rolls over baddies on the shore, Rube Goldberg serendipity aiding our heroes.

Also helping (and sometimes threatening) our heroes are two elves – one, Orlando Bloom, a familiar face from The Lord of the Rings, the other, Evangeline Lilly, added to give the film a gentle wispy subplot about a dwarf who has a crush on her and maybe, just maybe, vice versa. Together they happen to form a reason to have a few more action sequences. One, a tight, claustrophobic nighttime fight in a tiny house, is a nice break from the sweeping New Zealand vistas and cavernous caves. Speaking of subplots, there’s much to do about a dilapidated lake town where the dwarves find help from a human (Luke Evans) who, it’s quickly apparent, has made a habit of defying the orders of the town’s grumpy, selfish ruler (Stephen Fry). Between the elves and the lake town, the quickly sketched politics and history of this fantasy world is a pleasure. Each new location we step into feels fully formed before we got there, and has the surety that it will continue long after we leave.

There’s always something. Compared to The Lord of the Rings end-of-Middle-Earth stakes, this Hobbit, much like the last Hobbit, is lighter fare, bouncier and zippier. But the mythic resonance of these displaced dwarves and archetypical character types – the strong one, the silly one, and smitten one, the brave one – give the whole picture a fine kick. Freeman’s Bilbo is especially sympathetic, in over his head, but trying so very hard to stay brave and get braver. Our heroes are so very likable, we want to see them succeed. And the sights Jackson shows us are so wonderful and varied, it’s clear Middle Earth is a place worth fighting for. At one point Bilbo sits atop a tree, hundreds of butterflies taking wing around him as he looks across a sun-dappled skyline, a shimmering lake in the distance and, further on, a misty mountain. I’d go there and back again any day.

Rarely diverting its attention from the one-thing-after-another journey of the dwarves, Jackson occasionally drifts away with the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen). I’m not sure what sidetrack he’s wandering down, but that he at one point appears to be fighting a big black cloud tells you everything you need to know about just how seriously to take this. That is to say, enough to feel it, but not so much you can't smile at sillier touches, sometimes both at once. It’s a grand sweeping adventure built out of mythic components, a sense of its own history, and ripe B-movie fantasy. I had to smile when the king of the wood elves (Lee Pace) shows up wearing a crown made out of branches. It just makes sense. Best approached by responding to the surface pulpy fantasy and letting the big emotion underneath grow and bubble, The Desolation of Smaug is all about creating a world, giving space to get lost in it, and allowing plenty of time to do so.

This is epic, light-hearted fantasy as bustling adventure. Jackson’s a sharp enough visual filmmaker to give us movie pleasures of the highest order. A big highlight is that dragon Scrooge McDuck-ing it up in a pile of gold, slowly revealed in his enormity through coy editing. But even simple visual moments, like a shot that finds a worried little girl in the foreground, unaware of the orcs prowling the rooftops behind her, silhouetted in the background, is a great punch of imagery, simple and true. This may be a film that paints in broad strokes, but the surface details are colored in beautifully. It actually delivers the blockbuster exhilaration, the immense pleasures of expansive spectacle, so many films promise, but so few deliver. Jackson, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron, knows how to build gigantic special effects and cohesive worlds into something that carries real weight and lots of fun.

Souped-up: FURIOUS 6

The Fast & Furious movies are some kind of modern Hollywood wonder: a scrappy franchise built improbably out of humble B-movie origins into one of the most popular and most reliably entertaining series currently running. From its origin in 2001 as a modest B-movie that was an appealing reworking of Point Break that swapped SoCal surfing for street racing, through two largely free-standing follow-ups that drifted away from the central premise, the series has shown a resilient capacity for trial and error and confident course correction. Producer Neal H. Moritz, who has been around since the beginning, and director Justin Lin, who has made four of these in a row now, have been unafraid to try new things – new locales, new characters, new hooks – while keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. The series finally hit upon the exact right combination with 2011’s Fast Five, a satisfying fast car spectacle of a heist picture that pulled in all the best aspects of the previous four films to casually create the kind of multi-picture mythology Marvel worked so hard to build leading up to The Avengers. It’s all the more appealing for feeling serendipitous, the product of continual underdog status.

The franchise’s growth continues in Furious 6, which is once again bigger and better than anything that’s come before. The series has been honed once again. This time the exposition is tighter, the emotional arcs are crisper, and the action set pieces are more outrageous and insanely gripping. The plot’s as ludicrous as ever, but it makes perfect sense on its own terms. The single-minded agent played by Dwayne Johnson, sweat and muscle personified, hunts a crew of drivers led by a mysterious new villain (Luke Evans) and a mysteriously returning face (Michelle Rodriguez), striking military targets throughout Europe. He decides the only people who can help him capture these bad guys are the very drivers who stole a massive safe out from under his watch in Rio and who he’s sworn to bring to justice. He seeks out their leader (Vin Diesel) and offers to wipe the criminal records clean if he’ll get the gang back together to help Interpol stop these villains. It takes a team of drivers to stop a team of drivers, or so the logic of these movies goes.

Diesel agrees, and so the whole family of series regulars – Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot – comes flying in from all corners of the world to participate in this globetrotting film in which the good guys chase the bad guys through sensational sequences of vehicular mayhem. New to the group is Johnson’s second-in-command, played by Haywire’s Gina Carano, proving in only her second major role that she’s the best action star on the planet. She’s just as hyper-competent and self-assured as the cast, which otherwise joins the chase already crackling with charming chemistry carried over from last time. The group has grown to be terrifically appealing and refreshingly causally diverse. And they’re easy to root for. It’s funny how a series in which all of the leads are so very good at their jobs (and progressively richer for it) can maintain their underdog status. But that’s a key to the films’ success. There’s always a sense that they’re one wrong step away from prison and one wrong turn of the wheel away from death. Keeping Johnson close this time is a good way to keep the threat of the law alive, while Evans provides the most purely threatening villain the series has had yet.

As screenwriter Chris Morgan studiously finds the series loose plot threads that I hadn’t realized existed, pulling the whole initially haphazard enterprise into something of a beautifully retconned coherence, director Lin offers up scenes like an early chase through London streets in which the bad guys have souped-up racecars built with angled armored plates that allow them to hit a police car head on and send it spinning through the air while they zoom away unscathed. It’s an encouraging sign that six movies in there are still new fun, exciting ways to send cars smashing. Later, a spectacular sequence will grow to include helicopters, motorcycles, and one tough tank. And if you thought Fast Five’s extended sequence of two cars dragging a two-ton safe through city streets was something, wait until you see what happens with a cargo plane here! Just when I thought the film was stalling out, it finds another gear. I shouldn’t have doubted.

I haven’t always liked this franchise. It first appeared when I wrongly thought its car chase simplicity was beneath my burgeoning cinephilia, but Fast Five was so entertaining it prompted me to revisit them all in the run up to Furious 6. Doing so, my opinion of them improved (somewhat) and served to reinforce how successfully the filmmakers responsible have gotten the potential out of even the lowest points of the franchise – for me the dull, table-clearing and setting fourth effort – and pulled it all together into a coherent whole. The series has only ever promised dumb fun with fast cars and some minor cops-and-robbers intrigue. Now that it has figured out how to deliver all that as well as gripping heist plotting, satisfying fan-service, unexpectedly emotional arcs, bruising hand-to-hand combat, and gleefully, absurdly, joyfully over-the-top action, I figure this series is downright unstoppable. Furious 6 is not only the best one yet, it’s sequence for sequence up there with the most enjoyable action movies in recent memory.

Note: Be sure to stick around for the rewarding scene in the middle of the end credits that features a killer surprise cameo and a tease of more Fast & Furious to come.

Almighty Tarsem: IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh burst onto the feature filmmaking scene with the 2000 serial-killer phantasmagoria The Cell, which followed Jennifer Lopez on an investigation into the mind of a serial killer. It is a wild and striking film, if a whiff derivative on a plot level. Eight years later, his self-financed masterpiece The Fall, a dizzying film with a mannered yet improvisatory and sumptuous fantasy told by an injured stunt man to a young girl who is in the same hospital. It’s a singular work of imagination, overwhelmingly heartfelt and impressive to behold. These two films marked Tarsem as a filmmaker to watch.

His latest, Immortals, is a bombastic film that uses Greek myth as inspiration, thundering forth with the brute force of legend and myth. It doesn’t feature characters; it features types. It doesn’t feature mere swordplay and togas; it creates deliriously gorgeous tableaus of crushingly beautiful visions that manage to skirt the edge of camp and arrive at somewhere closer to a particularly busy and gory perfume commercial. It’s a film that is consistently visually alive, yet can’t escape the inert forces of its genre that threaten to drag it into monotony.

The plot involves evil King Hyperion (an impenetrably mumbling Mickey Rourke) who wishes to find a legendary bow that was long ago lost during the conflict in the heavens that resulted in the Gods locking the Titans away in a gold cage in the dark rocky depths of Mount Tartarus. Hyperion’s army rages across the land, slaughtering and pillaging its way towards his ultimate goal of freeing the Titans and unleashing chaos on the land he could then easily conquer with this magical weapon. He kidnaps a group of oracles, among them the one true psychic (Freida Pinto) who will be able to find the bow, and continues towards the small cliff-side village where Theseus (Henry Cavill) lives.

This village is evacuating, but the peasants are left behind. Theseus objects but is left behind anyways. So, he is there when Hyperion shows up to kill as many as he can. Theseus fights back but is unable to prevent his mother’s death. Distraught, Theseus is captured and ends up in the same group of prisoners as the oracles. Under the cover of darkness, a thief (Stephen Dorff) helps Theseus and the psychic escape and head off to find the bow before Hyperion can, in hopes of using it against him and saving the world.

Tarsem employs a mix of CGI and practical sets to create a kind of magical middle ground between the glistening flesh and blood, the rippling muscles and smooth skin of the human actors and the arresting, colorful landscapes. At key moments, movements slow, sometimes accompanied with a warping or fading of the sound, so that we can more appreciate the gravity of the situations or the fluidity of the movements. Sumptuous in color, but dull in mood, these humans have little to say, but much gravity in their voices with which to say it.

Above it all, lounging in their marble castle in the clouds, are the Gods. They’ve told themselves that they wouldn’t interfere with the humans for some reason or other. Though a smirking old man (John Hurt), Theseus’s mentor, is revealed to be a divine proxy, and therefore seems to ignore the Gods’ own laws. But anyways, Zeus (Luke Evans), Aries (Daniel Sharman), Athena (Isabel Lucas), and Poseidon (Kellan Lutz), who are smoother and cleaner than their human subjects, brood about and occasionally zip down on shiny gold beams of light to offer help to our heroes.

This all sounds like a lot of fun, and it often is, especially in Tarsem’s most brilliant moments of mind-bogglingly beautiful spectacle or mind-bogglingly brutal gore. It’s a film that plays best when we’re only required to sit there in awe of the strength of the images, through its intensity of action and its warm, ornate, computer-embellished sets. Though the look of the film is tremendous across the board, my favorite aspect has to be the way the characters look.

The costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka are luscious and memorable. Tight togas and elaborate headgear fit nicely on the Gods while the good mortal men are all leather and armor and the good mortal women all flowing robes with low necklines, when not in red bedazzled burqas. The villains wear ferocious animalistic masks and helmets. My favorite of all the costumes is a close call between the tall, shining spikes on Aries’s hat and the dark Venus fly trap helmet that appears to be this close to chomping down on Rourke’s face as he glowers menacingly towards anyone who gets in his line of vision.

Where the film falls flat is when it feels the need to get some storytelling out of the way in order to move us from spectacular image to spectacular image. (Still, it’s far better than other recent loosely Greek-myth-based nonsense like the Clash of the Titans remake and 300, since at least it has some honest spectacle to give us.) The script by Charley and Vlas Parlapanides is awfully belabored at its start, slack and shapeless as it sets up conflict and introduces characters. Theseus has to suffer through an introductory why-don’t-you-find-a-nice-girl? scene of maternal worry that I feel I’ve seen in too many movies of this type. By the time the villain is made appropriately hiss-worthy and the heroes have assembled, the pace picks up and the clunky talky bits don’t clog up the way with quite the same frequency, though it still has trouble sustaining tension in any of the subplots.

This is a movie about poses and shouts, glamour and gore. It’s about the bludgeoning power of myth. There’s no time for subtlety or emotional engagement. If it had pushed itself into further abstraction, relying solely on the power of its striking imagery, it could have really been great. This is a terrific, expressionistic silent film nearly ruined by the need to succumb to contemporary narrative convention, setting up storytelling expectations it has no desire whatsoever to fulfill. It should be a primal story of epic stakes, but it underwhelms, especially when compared to the style. It still may be worth seeing, but without Tarsem’s visual sense, this movie wouldn’t be worth considering.

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.