Jake Gyllenhaal: Prince of Wales

I didn’t know Jake Gyllenhaal was British. He must be though, because putting on a Cockney accent to play a Persian is to normal stupidity as a claymore is to a can opener. Ok – fair’s fair – all the other actors were British, so it made sense for Jake to put on the accent so he wouldn’t stand out. He even did a decent job of it. Credit must be given for the talent, but here endeth the bravos.

I remember Prince of Persia being a side-scrolling PC platformer that I hated because I could never time my jumps correctly and fell to my death on a bed of spikes every fucking time. Years later, the series of console games that bear little resemblance to the original are supposedly very good, but I haven’t played any of them because I still hold a grudge against those stupid mistimed jumps and spikey deaths. And that’s just what the film is like: a leap of faith out into the abyss, followed by a long drop, and then a painful finale by impaling. For a response to complaints about how I can’t possibly understand necessary details of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time without playing the games, please refer to my Twilight: New Moon review.

The problem is the script. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written on butcher paper with a box of crayolas. The characters are flimsy and the dialogue is choc-full of thick monologues and clumsy theme references, when it’s not plainly expository. It took three screenwriters and they still didn’t avoid the rookie pitfall of having their characters talk the entire plot. For example, we see Danstan use the dagger to turn back time. He does it four times in quick succession, but still feels the need to say “The dagger turns back time” to a character who already knows what it does. In a later scene, he says “I’m going to my father’s funeral.” Great, but we can see that when you get there. The screenwriters don’t seem to understand that a film has moving pictures. Maybe they thought they were writing a radio play.

Without delving too deep into Persian history, the etymological origin of the word assassin supposedly comes from Hashshashin, the name given to the Nazari Shia Muslims after they split from the Fatid Empire. Alternate spellings include Hashishin, Hashashiyyin or Hashasheen, none of which were good enough for the screenwriters, who settled on the name Hassansin. I imagine the conversation running something like this:

Doug Miro: Throw another n in there.

Boaz Yakin: Fuck off Miro; you and your extra n.

Carlo Bernard: I think an extra n sounds good.

Doug Miro: Suck it, Yakin. Two against one.

Boaz Yakin: This is bullshit.

Carlo Bernard: Have either of you guys seen my red crayon?

I’m liking this dialogue so much I’m thinking of adapting it into a screenplay.

At this point in the review I would normally give a run-through of the plot, but as far as I could tell, there wasn’t one. Instead, I’ve developed a helpful Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time DON’Ts list, of pitfalls to avoid when making your own film.

DON’T have assassins use explosives. It’s not subtle, which is kind of what assassination is all about.

DON’T immediately follow on-screen text with voice-over narration. It’s like giving someone a book and then saying “you know what? I’ll just read it to you.”

DON’T have a main character who runs, climbs, leaps and swings from ropes more than a pirate trapeze artist. He can walk sometimes.

DON’T hire set designers who build castle interiors that look like they were left over from a school play.

DON’T hire an actor like Ben Kingsley and then put so much eyeliner on him that he looks like a bald Liza Minnelli, which makes it very unsurprising when he winds up being the bad guy.

DON’T write a scene about a character being poisoned if you don’t know how poison works. It doesn’t burn people to death.

DON’T have the only black guy in the movie be an indentured servant. It’s not very PC. Also, DON’T kill him at the end. It’s clichéd. Oh, and DON’T let your costume department give him a head full of thumb tacks. It’s stupid.

DON’T shovel in overbearing amounts of exposition halfway through the film. It’s not coal in a steam engine, and it won’t replace plot.

Here endeth the lesson.

From Paris with Love

As you may have noticed (you clever-clogs, you), I normally opt for a silly title that’s somehow loosely related to the film I’m reviewing, but in this case it’s completely unnecessary. From Paris with Love isn’t so much a bad title as it is exceptionally generic - almost any film that features La Ville-Lumière could be called From Paris with Love. As I had to explain to every person who asked me what film I was seeing that day, it’s not a bad rom-com – it’s a worse action movie.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, aka Mr Roboto, whirs and clunks his way along, playing boring-as-a-biscuit James Reece; aide to a U.S. ambassador in France. He’s also a low-level spook for some inexplicable reason, whose dream of dreams is to play with the grown-up spies. Meyers puts on a very mediocre American accent for the part, but the guy is Irish so we’ll cut him some slack. No slack shall be cut for Travolta however, who has enough experience to know that if a character didn’t work for The Taking of Pelham 123, the same character with a different name (Charlie Wax – hahaha…. bahahahahaha…) won’t work the second time around either. Einstein once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It’s also the definition of stupidity.

From Paris with Love is a film flawed from the get-go. The opening is an uninteresting driving scene that has nothing to do with the film. The set-up is weak, leaving the viewer with no interest in the hero or his journey. Technically this hero is Reece, but he’s inactive and just follows Wax; a rookie filmmaking mistake. The act break is sloppy, and then we immediately jump to a random shoot-out in a Chinese restaurant that leads to a series of random shoot-outs, each one more derivative and uninspired than the last. For a couple of spies, Reece and Wax do very little intel/recon work. Fortunately for them, the location of the next shooting gallery falls magically from the sky time and again, they wander in, Wax empties a clip of bullets into every living thing, and they go skipping off to the next place. Someone (presumably the screenwriter) has tried to thicken the plot by adding a couple of turns, but it comes out like packet gravy; thin with lumpy bits, and ultimately unappetising. Such lumpy examples are: ‘Actually, we’re not chasing drug-dealers. We’re chasing terrorists!’ and: ‘Hey Reece, your girlfriend is one of those terrorists!’

Both the dramatic tension and the comedic relief are supposed to come from the odd-couple relationship between the methodical, straight-as-a-Baptist-preacher Reece and the wacky, loose-cannon Wax. Obviously it doesn't work because I used the phrase ‘supposed to’ and I’ve already mentioned that this movie is bad. There’s practically no screen time devoted to setting up the character of Reece and literally none for Wax; we meet him when Reece does, half-way through verbally abusing a French customs officer. (As a side note, French customs officers are no joke. I’ve seen them give a guy a proper kicking for yelling at an airline attendant.) Reece and Wax aren’t characters; they’re cut outs – flimsy ones that have been left out in the rain overnight. I’d prefer to believe that it was an issue of casting, and make no mistake, the acting was all sorts of bad, but I have an inkling there was a slight oversight in letting a complete unknown write the screenplay. And what the fuck has happened to Luc Besson? He made Leon and Nikita, both absolute genius films, so why would he hand his story over to a pleb and request that he make it into a screenplay? Besson must have done something really bad, like run over Sarkozy’s dog, and his punishment is this strange brand of public humiliation.

In the end Reece gives his terrorist fiancé a lovely engagement gift – a new hole in the head, courtesy of his 9mm. She gives him a ring that belonged to her father and he reciprocates by shooting her through the frontal lobe. It seems uncalled for. Then again, the ring did have a tracking device in it, and it’s very likely the fiancé was lying about it belonging to her dad in the first place. The scene that follows the fiancé head-shoot is my absolute favourite, not only because it’s the last scene of the film, but because it’s hilarious, albeit unintentionally. Wax hands Reece a paper bag containing ‘something to remember her by.’ It’s a strip of passport-sized photos showing an intimate moment between Reece and his fiancé… the one he just murdered.

I’d like to end on a positive note by saying that there was one thing I liked about From Paris with Love. As someone who's lived in Paris, I really appreciated some of the little touches of authenticity. The only problem was that they were limited to an apartment building exactly like the one I used to live in, an alleyway and a Chinese restaurant. Oh, and the suburbs. Big up the 93!

Lamer

In a dystopian future, real humans are used as video-game avatars by the people who can afford to pay to play them. One could claim that this is a clever allegory for the widening class divide, but that would require a cohesive representation of an idea, which Gamer does not have. Sinister game designer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has created Slayer, a game in which player-controlled death-row inmates murder each other. Kable (Gerard Butler: manliest Scotsman in Hollywood) and his controller, Simon (who cares?), are the stars of slayer, having only four more games to play before Kable is released to go see his wife and daughter, whom he has little dream sequences about. Even with his unkempt appearance and murdering of others for personal gain, deep down Kable’s a wrongly-imprisoned softy, and so we’re supposed to love him. Gamer is basically The Green Mile, only Kable is white and someone in the federal penitentiary system decided that the best way of exercising death-row inmates was to arm them with automatic weapons and send them outside for a bit of a frolic. In case you’re wondering, future prison is a white chalk quarry where prisoners wear white outfits and no-one understands the concept of camouflage. Prison guards wear black fatigues with breathing apparatuses that they don’t need because the prisoners breathe just fine without them, but wardrobe evidently got confused between looking cool and looking stupid.

Gamer actually starts out quite well: Kable introduces himself by shooting his way through a few dozen men and then gets blown out of a window. Unfortunately, someone decided the expression “start as you mean to go on” should be taken literally, and just copy/paste this same action sequence three more times into the first forty minutes of the film. This creates an issue with the pacing, and the four battle sequences all blur together into one. No time is left between shootouts to develop the character of Kable, and so seeing him on-screen feels like a trip to Madame Tussauds. The battle scenes themselves are glitchy and punctuated by static and time lags to create a sense of being in the game, but it’s annoying after the first few minutes. In one particular scene a guy’s leg blows clean off. I mean literally clean – there’s no messy blood or exploding bits, the foreleg just separates from the knee joint like it’s made out of bread pudding.

Gamer gets progressively worse as it goes on. The third act turn: Ken Castle has Kable’s daughter. Fuck off! Since when do child services let creepy, sociopathic game developers become legal guardians for children whose mothers are still alive? Unnecessary, clunking plot devices like this are peppered throughout the film, but this particular one stood out worse than Bootsy Collins at a KKK rally. So Kable goes to Castle’s bad guy lair to get his daughter back, and finds Castle and his remaining henchmen doing a dance number to I’ve Got You Under My Skin by Cole Porter. This is not a joke – they do a choreographed dance routine and Castle mimes along and pretends to be a puppet, just to ram that symbolism down your throat in case you missed it. Kable dispatches the henchmen, has a chat with Castle instead of just killing him, and they then relocate to a basketball court (that’s right) for the real showdown. Hackman (Terry Crews), the super-henchman is back, and even though bullets and a cement wall at 100km/h couldn’t kill him, Kable does so by breaking his neck – twice! I want to know which pillock writer decided that would be a cool thing to put into the script: for a character to have his neck broken once, by twisting it one way, and then broken again by twisting it the other way. I’m sure the writing team gave congratulatory high-fives and Dutch rudders all round for that one.

It’s unfortunate that Gamer was such a terrible film, because it had the potential not to be. It’s an original idea, mainly, but piss-poor execution let it down. If the film was half an hour longer, not only would it be standard-length, but they would have had time to fit in some real character development. Gamer was written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the dynamic duo who brought us such cinematic greats as Crank and Crank 2. Things came into much clearer focus after I realised this, like my favourite bad scene, in which a woman seated at a table, wearing an oversized, white afro wig, catches a bullet in the head. Instead of slumping over, dead, as a head-bullet is prone to make one do, she goes flying up, out of her seat, across the table, and lands in a heap on the other side. It must’ve been one of those magic bullets, like the one that got JFK.

Randy Jackson and His Tightening Briefs

A mouthful of meaningless tripe, isn’t it? Of course it is, but no more so than Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief; a film that I hate not only for its clunky, long-winded name, but also for just being altogether bad. To be fair it is a book title, so it makes sense on one level, but on a far more sane level the book should have just been given a better title in the first place. Percy is an awful name for a boy. No matter how devilishly good-looking, nor what special powers he has, he will always be the subject of gay jokes throughout his teenage years. I should know – my name is Theodore. Why do parents not think of these things when naming their kids, even if they are fictional?

Percy is your average teenager, except that he looks like a Calvin Klein underwear model and his father is Poseidon; a piece of news that he takes surprisingly well. In fact, Percy seems to take everything in his stride, from killing minotaurs to becoming the most popular kid at his new school/camp-thing within fifteen minutes of walking into the place. It’s as though his difficulty curve is the function y = 3, with infinite time on the x-axis. Percy just casually strolls from place to place, collecting magic pearls in exchange for severe beatings and internal haemorrhaging. Nothing is a challenge for Percy, so he doesn’t develop in any way. He doesn’t even get a scratch on that pretty face of his. Percy does have help on his quest, in the form of a best friend; the token minority comic-relief character, and Athena’s daughter; the love interest. I would love to say that any one of these young actors is a real up-and-comer to keep an eye on, but that would be a lie more horrendous than ‘delicious, low-fat yoghurt’. Percy and his pals are like a string of wooden ducks, quacking and waddling back and forth for the camera – they’re cute and fun to watch for a bit, but you don’t care where they’re going or why. The only real acting done in the entire film is by Steve Coogan, who plays a Keith Richards-esque Hades. Job well done, Sir.

The plot of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief runs thus: Zeus gets his lightning bolt nicked and blames Poseidon and his son for no apparent reason. Poseidon doesn’t mention this to Percy because he’s an irresponsible dick and a terrible father, so Percy has to find out from his best friend who’s actually a satyr and his favourite teacher who’s actually a centaur. These two then sit Percy down and explain everything in about twenty seconds, while Percy stares fixedly with an expression on his face much similar to a china doll. Bravo for chopping through the thick, book-like exposition, but they’ve overdone it to an extent that makes it glaringly obvious. It’s like giving a hippie a crew cut – it just doesn’t work with the beard and mandalas. Hades comes into the picture to abduct Percy’s mum, demanding the bolt in exchange for her, which Percy doesn’t have. Percy’s ‘plan’ is to go to the underworld and explain this to Hades, who we all know is a reasonable and empathetic chap. For Percy to have access to the underworld he has to find some special pearls, so instead of spending the majority of the film looking for one lightning bolt, or just finding his Dad and telling him to kick Hades’s teeth in, he travels across the USA and back looking for multiple pieces of fucking jewellery! The plot goes on from here, but you’ve already lost interest, as have I in re-telling it.

What I disliked most about Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is that there’s too much stuff crammed in. It feels rushed. With limited screen time, the characters and their reasons are left by the wayside, and so we don’t care about either. It’s unfortunate, because Percy has wonderful potential to develop as a character, but the script doesn’t allow for that anywhere. Everything is glossed over to such a high shine in an attempt to cover the fact that underneath is nothing but a deep chasm of who-could-care-less.

Oh, and Pierce Brosnan plays Chiron, the centaur teacher. Initially he’s paraplegic but that’s just a cover up, and somehow he can fit his entire horse body on a wheelchair and conceal it with a blanket. He fulfils the role of Percy’s mentor, and because creating a real character is too difficult someone thought it easier to just cut/paste Dumbledore and take a long lunch break. At the end of the film Chiron seems to scold Percy for running off from camp half-blood, and then …BAM! Right out of left field, he congratulates Percy for being a total prat and tells him that he’s his favourite student. The man who sat in front of me had trouble tying his own shoelaces, but he still saw that one coming.

Not All That Complicated, Really

It’s Complicated is the newest rom-com claptrap from Nancy Meyer – that delightful woman who brought us The Holiday (which I haven’t seen and have no intention of remedying any time soon) and Something’s Gotta Give (which I have seen. Bill was in it. Or was it Ted? Enough said). Maybe delightful is the wrong word for our dear Nancy. I’ve always pictured her as an amalgamation of the heroines of her films: a sexy older woman, in a pearl necklace, expensive hotel room kind of a way; the kind of older woman whom I’d like to sleep with – that was until I looked her up on IMDb.

The plot of It’s Complicated, considering its title, is surprisingly straightforward. Jake (Baldwin) and Jane (Streep), divorced for a decade, start up an affair. Jake is currently married to the woman who used to be his mistress back when he and Jane were together. Jane feels conflicted, in the sense that she is able to feel two whole emotions at once, and one of them is horny. Things get complicated (I couldn’t resist) when sopping-wet Adam (Steve Martin) arrives and turns on his lukewarm charm.

With our string-bean plot already underway it becomes exceedingly necessary to tie some tinsel onto it, spackle a bit of glitter, and hope that no-one will notice that it’s all for show. Into the mix we throw three adult children, who look conspicuously like cut-outs taken from an Aryan Union advertising campaign; a quirky fiancé for one of the kids; some comic relief, in the form of Jane’s friends; Jake’s current wife; her annoying kid; blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What comes out is a stodgy mess of co-stars, which is surprising, considering the fact that Jane is supposed to be a pastry chef. With limited film time, none of these secondary characters are fleshed-out, and we start to wonder what they’re all doing there in the first place. The gay-looking son should have actually been gay. Keep one other kid, cut the boring one and the fiancé. We can also afford to roll Jane’s three friends into two, and lose the annoying son of Jake’s new wife, whose sole function is as a joke reference point. There - I just saved Universal about a million bucks in actor’s fees.

So, we need to keep Jane, Jake and Adam for the love triangle to work. (Why do writers never experiment with other shapes? Any odd-number-sided shape will do. Love pentagon – ooh, that’s a great title! It could be set it in the Department of Defence headquarters. Military commanders having sexy liaisons with one-another. Not a lot of exterior shots, though. Anyway…) It’s Complicated butt ups against another glaring problem when it comes to the main characters. There’s no hero! Jane is purely reactionary; she just cooks food, feels conflicted and gets wet every time a man accidentally brushes up against her. If she got that horny 20-year-old look out of her eyes for just a moment she might see that the two guys chasing after her are an overweight douche and an arm-flapper with all the personality of a Sayo biscuit. Jake drives the story, and he’s got charisma, but we don’t love him because deep down he’s a narcissistic prick. He loves the idea of his family back together more than any of the actual people in it. Our only other contender for hero is Adam, and it’s not him because, well…he’s Steve Martin. Of the two men vying for the affection of plain Jane, we don’t know who to root for – the dishcloth or the gorilla.

Blake Snyder affirms that good scenes make good films. The reverse is also true. There’s one particularly bad part in which the three children huddle up under a blanket together and have a little cry. It seems that their parents having a bit of slap and tickle is confusing to a bunch of twenty-somethings because, as the youngest one says: ‘We’re still getting over the divorce (sniff).’ It happened a decade ago! And who the hell snuggles up under a blanket with their grown siblings and waits for Mummy to come by and make it all better with a Full House-style talk and a group hug, where even the redundant fiancé gets to join in? All that was missing was Bob Saget.

In the end Jane ditches Jake (Jane and Jake – really?), and we fade out with her having a nice little reconciliation chat with lovely-as-pie-but-boring-as-a-wooden-clothes-peg Adam. I guess nice guys really do get the girl, but only when they’re in their mid- to late-50s. It’s Complicated isn’t a bad film, just mediocre, and filled with excess scenes and characters, and the whole thing is a little flabby, much like Alec Baldwin.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond-Encrusted Vampire

First things first: I’m aware of the fact that everyone from Roger Ebert to Roger Ramjet has already thoroughly lambasted Twilight: New Moon. Some would say that by writing a review of it now, I am simply flogging the proverbial deceased equine. However, as I had a pretty good idea that New Moon was going to be terrible before I saw it, I decided that instead of shelling out seventeen bucks to see it at the cinema, I would wait until an illegal Balinese DVD was given to me by a friend who doesn’t know me very well. As always, my prediction was bang on. I’m like Nostra-frigging-damus. Or Ashley Geene.

I know what you’re thinking and I’m already way ahead of you. No, I didn’t read the book, or the one before it, nor do I intend to. I know that makes me a heathen in the collective hive mind of you true believers out there, but before you start complaining about how I can’t possibly understand blah blah because of nyar nyar blah blah blah, (that’s how you sound) I must remind you that a film and a book are different things. Each should be able to stand alone, which is why a novel is adapted into a screenplay, and why I don’t get an instructional video with every book that I purchase. I didn’t read the books for the same reason that I don’t have braces and pigtails: I’m not a 15-year-old girl. And yes, I know that adults can read the Twilight books too. But that’s not to say that they should.

Bella is back to stutter her way through another adventure with Edward, so get ready for two hours of heavy breathing and brooding, pained stares. Edward, being far prettier than his female counterpart, just has to stand up straight and look dreamy, while Bella (Kristen Stewart), has to do all the real acting, and winds up having a fucking anxiety attack every time. This first act is actually quite tight - Edward breaks up with Bella and leaves town to protect her. The film should have ended here, but instead they let it wobble along through plot points shakier than an Alzheimer’s ward built on a fault line. Bella gets depressed because she’s 18, and will never be this in love ever EVER again. She has a bunch of screamy-dreams; catches a film or two with her sort-of friends; then gets into adrenaline rushes, which somehow allow her to see a smoky version of Edward, who gives her sound advice that she promptly ignores. While this is happening, Jacob and Bella spend a montage and multiple other scenes building motorbikes together that they ride just the one time. Jacob goes through a bit of a rough patch when someone cuts his hair off and steals all his t-shirts, and the poor lad has to run around in sneakers and cut offs for the entire second half of the film. As if the Native Americans didn’t have it hard enough. Oh, and he’s a werewolf, as if you couldn’t have guessed from the nose-on-your-face-obvious foreshadowing from the first film. I could go on, but you get the general idea: it’s a bunch of choppy exposition taken directly from the book, combined with random, unrelated sequences that are joined together with adhesive tape and twine. What we wind up with is a stroboscopic view of a story, instead of the smooth narrative line one would hope for.

The most frustrating aspect of New Moon is the contrived Romeo and Juliet parallel. The film opens with a quote from the play. Bella wakes from her dream moments later and the book is on her bed. She then goes to school and her friends mention the play in the parking lot. They watch the film in class. The list goes on. All of these references to Romeo and Juliet are squashed into the first ten minutes of the film, and jammed right up in your face. Theme, like a good Pinot Noir or a proper blowjob, is all about subtlety. Someone (I’m not naming names) needed to give the viewer more credit in their ability to recognise that New Moon is exactly like Romeo and Juliet; only there’s vampires instead of Montagues, and no real Capulets. Also, Romeo and Juliet were successful in killing themselves.

On a final note, while I’m not implying that product placement occurred in this film, I would like to remind you to take your JanSport backpack with you when you fly Virgin: the official airline of vampirism.