Fatal Flaw: MORTAL KOMBAT

Here’s the thing about Mortal Kombat: it’s really boring. Maybe it always has been. My fond memories of the original game extend solely to hearing its catchy theme song — the driving electric beat building to the always enjoyable sound of a man hollering the title at the top of his lungs — booming out from the darkest corner of the arcade. If you walked by, you’d always see memorably baroque kung-fu cartoons bouncing on their heels, fists up, ready to fight. Sometimes a geyser of blood would erupt if it was demonstrating its excessive animated gore — really the thing setting it apart from the other games in the place. I never played it, but hearing the thing sticks with me. And, although I’m sure the fighting game has reams of complicated canon by now, having extended through multiple platforms and iterations, I never much care about its knotty character feuds and connections. The thing is just plain silly, a mechanism for video game violence. Not even reliable genre craftsman Paul W.S. Anderson could make a wholly successful feature film out of its simple rounds of fantasy combat. But at least his 1995 attempt was short, exuberantly silly, quickly paced, heavy on stunts and effects, and reasonably committed to just doing a simple tournament story.

This new one, from debut feature filmmaker Simon McQuoid, has maybe a half-dozen minutes of cool fight choreography stretched across a slog. There’s an early moment in medieval Japan where a guy who can make icicles grow erect from his palm has killed a woman and her child, freezing them in a Pieta. That’s sledgehammer clever. The grief-stricken father hacks at the attackers with a trowel on the end of a rope, sending it sailing straight through the back of a head and toward the camera in a way that had me wishing this was in 3D. That’s a neat moment. Later, a guy in an icy cage match will be thrown hard against the metal bars, the force of the blow knocking the frost off the frigid structure. That’s kinda cool for a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flourish. The rest, though? My goodness, is it just dimly lit sets or flatly presented landscapes in which a blandly directed cast stands around pontificating and plotting and mumbling and doing their level best to not nod off or crack a smile through pages of backstory and exposition while heroes and villains gather up the fighters and train for the next round. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to make a good movie out of this material, but I will say the only time I was most satisfied was the end credits, because at least I got to hear the theme song in full. At least Paul W.S. Anderson had the wisdom to give that to us over the first seconds of his version.

Features Creatures: LOVE AND MONSTERS and MONSTER HUNTER

Love and Monsters is a post-apocalyptic creature feature lark with the tone of a PG-13-ized Zombieland. But Dylan O’Brien is no Jesse Eisenberg, if you catch my drift. When he, looking as he does like his photo should be in the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, jokes about not being in shape, or affects an aw-shucks shyness of an in-his-head loner, it doesn’t exactly land. Nevertheless, the movie just doesn’t give him the scaffolding to be convincing, so I won’t place all the blame on his shoulders. The movie has this weightless, airless, derivative bent that never sparks to life. Maybe the problem is the tone, a light la-di-da hand-waving the end of the world as we know it that lands differently today than it would’ve, oh, thirteen months ago or so. It kicks off with a jokey expositional voice over that quickly lets us know that, some years before the start of the story proper, radioactive chemicals rained down on our planet and turned all the bugs and lizards into big monsters. Watching a chart fill up the loss of 95% of the world’s population hits a bum note for how it is glossed over and shrugged off. Oh, well. We pick up with O’Brien, having spent several years in a bunker where everyone else is a couple. He misses his pre-apocalypse girlfriend (Jessica Henwick) and decides to trek across the monster-filled land to find her hideout. This takes him through a variety of episodic encounters with said monsters—drooling mega-ants, massive frogs, towering snails—and a survivalist (Michael Rooker). Director Michael Matthews, in his Hollywood debut, gives the critters a slick look — somewhere between cheap 50’s B-movie chintziness and Spiderwick Chronicles YA semi-real gloss — and serves up Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson’s slight screenplay with rote professionalism. But it also reminds one of so many other, similar, better movies, that it’s never more than underwhelming.

Even simpler, yet easily more satisfying, a monster movie is writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter. It’s a spare, stripped-down, no-frills, effective and efficient tale of action and survival. Anderson has always been expert at making more out of less, building out suggestions of baroque worlds and staging plots of sincere simple genre vision. Once again starring his wife Milla Jovovich — the capable anchor of his flagship franchise, Resident Evil — this new based-on-a-video-game fantasy actioner finds a military unit searching the desert for a missing platoon when, zip-zap-zoom, an other-worldly lightning storm sends them to an alien landscape. There they must battle enormous creatures — swarms of enormous spiders laying gross parasitic egg sacks, or gigantic gnarly lizards of one dinosaur variety or dragon-like others — and find a way to get back home. That’s really all there is to it. Jovovich’s soldier makes a quick study, adapting her combat to fight back the beasts, getting an assist from a mysterious monster hunter (Tony Jaa), whose lengthy getting-to-know-the-interloper sequences play out like John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific was transposed to a pulp sci-fi paperback’s painted cover. Eventually, we circle back to the sand pirates (led by Ron Perlman, whose gravely voice, stony face, towering physique, and earnest affect are always perfect for this sort of thing) who made an appearance in the cold open, as the line between this world and ours grows perilously thin. The hectic monster battles are fun, and Anderson knows his way around quickly sketching an immediately understandable nonsense world. The picture is a neat, short, economical little big movie that’s exactly what it promises and no more.

Vial Video: RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER

In Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter he brings his six-film franchise to a suitably nonsense end. It started back in 2002 as a humble little sci-fi horror film, loosely adapting the video game of the same name into a high-tech haunted house movie with the final girl (Milla Jovovich) dodging death traps and zombies in an underground bunker. By now, though, it has piled up a rococo tangle of double crosses, conspiracies, and surprise twists involving: the evil Umbrella corporation’s machinations, a revolving door ensemble of action ciphers, endless mutated monsters, and a host of clone bodies enabling any and every character to die horrible deaths only to pop up later as the “real” one (for the moment). It’s a heck of thing to track, but luckily the latest installment not only attempts to bring the whole unwieldy B-movie mythos to some sort of conclusion, but also once again provides a quick recap at the beginning.

Maybe it’s the pessimistic mood of being in the midst of a national breakdown, but a movie about the apocalypse that attempts to bring some order to its chaos is a welcome sight. Anderson reveals the bombed-out zombie pandemic was no mistake. It was an Umbrella corporation plot to bring about the end of the world in order to have the monopoly on whatever came after. This means Jovovich’s Alice fought her way out of their bunker all those years ago only to belatedly realize the baddies had a cure there all along. Now she must drive and shoot and kick and punch and slice her way back to where it all began, in search of the glowing green MacGuffin vial that’ll heal the world. It’s a pretty neat U-turn of plotting, and an acknowledgement that the movies’ game-inspired levels and bosses are still endlessly and self-consciously modeled after the iterative nature of working through levels. They are the same techniques and same models in recombined sets and motifs. It’s familiar and obvious, with some fresh new twists. This one has a flaming barrel of gasoline flung by trebuchet into a mass of zombies chasing a Death Race tank. That’s not nothing.

Like every Resident Evil Anderson directed (all but two), this is an exercise in nutty genre plotting only insofar as it is an excuse to create stunning spaces – he’s always at his best working out architecture and symmetrical labyrinths in which to stage his gore – and stare in awe as Jovovich flips through a series of tough tumbles and scary scrapes. She’s a cool hero befitting the icy somber silliness on display. The only real problem is the movie’s retcon contortions and late-breaking stabs for emotional character development in what’s otherwise been a self-amused vacuous pit of clones and CG beasties endlessly replicable. They drain the weightless chopping and shooting of its insubstantial panache. Why overly and overtly stress the story when the series has always been merely a treadmill of plot, perpetually moving but never seeming to get much of anywhere? This is far from Anderson’s best work, or even the best Resident Evil. It cuts too quickly to savor the striking spasms and spaces. But his consistent commitment to lightning-fast B-movie trash is admirable. Passable fun is seeing a truck outrace a mutant pterodactyl, or finding our heroine hung upside down off a crumbling overpass spinning and kicking at her assailants. Less fun is tearfully considering which clone is the real original person and how it all ties into a possible contrived panacea.

Do You Like Movies About Gladiators? POMPEII

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insert Coins to Continue: RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION

After five movies in ten years, Paul W.S. Anderson has these Resident Evil movies down to some sort of science. Each installment, of which he’s written and directed three, moves forward with constant motion, but little movement. The plot advances just enough to be called a movie, ending with nothing more than the promise of more. Based on a similarly long-lasting video game series, the movies eschew resolution of any kind at every turn as they tell the futuristic, action-packed sci-fi horror story of Alice (Milla Jovovich), a superwoman of sorts who again and again runs afoul of the nefarious Umbrella Corporation. This company has unleashed an apocalyptic virus onto the world, a virus that creates all kind of shuffling zombies and slimy creatures. Not exactly undead, these zombies can operate weapons and heavy machinery and have sharp, snaky tendrils that slide out of their mouths in place of normal teeth and tongues. They’re creepy obstacles for Alice to mow down in acrobatic ways.

Each of these movies starts concurrent with the end of the one prior, which you think would be a problem for someone like me who can barely remember the four that come before Resident Evil: Retribution, the latest in the series. It’s not. The opening here is striking. It’s an elaborate action sequence running backwards in slow motion over the credits, breaking down hyperactive continuity into an abstraction of physical movement. Before you think that Anderson’s gone fully aesthetically experimental on us, he treats us to a longwinded monologue in which Alice explains the continuity of all that has come before. Does it help familiarize a non-fan like me? Maybe. It helped me remember that once Alice punched a zombie dog. That was something.

But enough about the past. This movie is in a constant state of present tense, a whirl of narrative conceits that double in on themselves. It’s a game inside a deus ex machina inside a dream inside a clone’s implanted memories inside an experiment inside a chase sequence. Anderson finds moments of unexpected visual pleasures, symmetry of light and shadow, of color and blank white space, of bold geometric shapes and expressive splashes of CGI viscera. He’s pushing the movie into an abstract sense of chaotic movement, layering the screen with digital readouts, picture in picture, and side-scrolling nonsense. The plot that contains all this finds Alice trapped in an underwater bunker in which Umbrella continues to test the virus in recreated cityscapes like convincing replicas of Time Square, a Moscow thoroughfare, a Tokyo intersection, and a slice of suburban sprawl.

Her escape finds her constantly on the move, collecting allies (Boris Kodjoe, Bingbing Lie, and Kevin Durand among them) and enemies (like Michelle Rodriguez and Sienna Guillory). As the characters move through each environment, annotated by Umbrella’s menacing computer that scans a green schematic of the sprawling bunker’s architecture, it’s clear that the movie functions as a video game. In each new space, the computer unleashes hordes of faceless zombies and monsters for the heroes to fight past on their way to the flesh-and-blood villains who are the ultimate final foes. Each environment cleared of obstacles, they literally move to the next level, working their way through tasks of increasing difficulty as they try to fight their way to safety. In a series that last time included coin-shower aftermaths of injuries, this new entry is the fullest expression of the material’s video roots.

Maybe that explains why the series is perpetually running in place. There’s no need for any variation beyond weaponry and creatures when the characters can just show up, fight, and leave the plot dangling until next time. Press pause. Reboot. Play the levels again. I like Anderson’s style here. He makes the movie all about nonstop action expressed through interchangeable physical details, textures of colored lights and foggy debris fields. Anderson’s visual imagination is notable, but that’s not quite enough to make this a satisfying movie. The film grows monotonous and deadening, a series of repetitive sequences in a series that is endlessly repeating itself.

The one glimmer of humanity here, cribbed from James Cameron’s Aliens, is the addition of a little girl for Alice to protect. It’s a thin compelling thread that makes the movie probably the best of this particular bunch by a slim margin, but even this is undercut. There’s a telling scene late in the movie in which Alice stumbles into a massive warehouse of clones containing hundreds of copies of many of the franchise’s characters. No matter the outcome of this game, we can play this again and again and again with new expansion packs and new character options. Maybe with Resident Evil 6, Anderson can win a higher score.

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.