I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 45
The film stars Sean Penn, in a convincing performance all the more admirable for being pointless. He plays Bobby, a man who has had bad luck up the road (his bandaged hand is missing two fingers), and will have a lot more bad luck in the desert town of Superior, Arizona. He wheels into town in his beloved Mustang convertible, which needs a new radiator hose, and encounters the loathsome Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton), a garage mechanic he will eventually be inspired to call an “ignorant inbred turtleneck hick.”
While Darrell works on the car, Bobby walks into town. Superior is one of those backwater hells much beloved in the movies, where everyone is malevolent, oversexed, narrow-eyed, and hateful. There are never any industries in these towns (except for garages, saloons, and law enforcement) because everyone is too preoccupied by sex, lying, scheming, embezzling, and hiring strangers to kill each other.
Bobby quickly finds a sultry young woman named Grace (Jennifer Lopez), and is invited home to help her install her drapes and whatever else comes to mind. Soon her enraged husband Jake (Nick Nolte) comes charging in, red-eyed and bewhiskered, to threaten Bobby with his life, but after the obligatory fight they meet down the road and Jake asks Bobby to kill his wife. Soon Grace will want Bobby to kill her husband (the Red Rock West bit), and the film leads to one of those situations where Bobby’s life depends on which one he believes.
Superior, Arizona, is the original town without pity. During the course of his brief stay there, Bobby will be kicked in the ribs several dozen times, almost be bitten by a tarantula, shot at, and have his car all but destroyed—and that’s all before the final scenes with the vultures circling overhead. Bobby comes across almost like a character in a computer game; you wipe him out, he falls down, stars spin around his head, and then he jumps up again, ready for action.
The film is well made on the level of craft; of course it is, with this strong cast, and Stone directing, and Robert Richardson as cinematographer. But it goes around and around until, like a merry-go-round rider, we figure out that the view is always changing but it’s never going to be new. There comes a sinking feeling, half an hour into the film, when we realize the characters are not driven by their personalities and needs, but by the plot. At that point they become puppets, not people. That’s the last thing we’d expect in a film by Oliver Stone.
Unforgettable
(Directed by John Dahl; starring Ray Liotta; 1996)
In the long annals of cinematic goofiness, Unforgettable deserves a place of honor. This is one of the most convoluted, preposterous movies I’ve seen—a thriller crossed with lots of Mad Scientist stuff, plus wild chases, a shoot-out in a church, a woman taped to a chair in a burning room, an exploding university building, adultery, a massacre in a drugstore, gruesome autopsy scenes, and even a moment when a character’s life flashes before her eyes, which was more or less what was happening to me by the end of the film.
What went wrong? The movie has been directed by John Dahl, a master of noir, whose Red Rock West and The Last Seduction were terrific movies. Seduction starred Linda Fiorentino, who is back this time. Her costar is Ray Liotta, from GoodFellas. The supporting cast includes the invaluable Peter Coyote and David Paymer. It’s a package with quality written all over it. But what a mess this movie is.
The premise: Liotta is a Seattle medical examiner, working with the police. Everyone in town believes he murdered his wife, but he got off on tainted evidence. “Wear a crash helmet if you go out with him,” a woman advises Fiorentino. She is a university researcher whose experiments with rats indicate that the brain stores its memories in a clear fluid which, if transferred to another rat, gives that rat the first rat’s memories—but only in the presence of a strong stimulus to trigger them. A cat, for example, to chase it through a maze.
Liotta hears Fiorentino explaining her theory, and sees a way to clear his name and discover his wife’s murderer. He will inject himself with his dead wife’s brain fluid, mixed with Fiorentino’s secret elixir, while he’s in the room where his wife was murdered. The stimulus will kick in, and he’ll witness her murder through her memories.
How does he obtain her brain fluid? Well, luckily, it’s stored in a clear vial in the evidence room of the police department, so he can simply steal it. Good thing this stuff has a long shelf life at room temperature, eh? And so Liotta is off on his quest. Soon he’s joined by Fiorentino, who warns him that 30 percent of the rats in her experiments have died of heart attacks. No problem-o: He takes a nitroglycerin pill right before injecting himself.
The plot careens through an endless series of astonishing developments. Fans of those old horror films of the 1930s will remember that all a Mad Scientist has to do is inject himself with a miraculous substance, and it works perfectly, almost every time. That’s what happens here. Liotta drains brain fluids from corpses. From comatose cops. From a victim of the drugstore massacre (she was an art student, so he learns he can draw—and sketches her murderer). And the fluids kick in right on time.
It’s never really explained how he deals with four or five conflicting sets of memories, all sloshing around in his brain. No matter. His mental life resembles a human channel-changer. All he needs is a stimulus, and whoosh!—he has a flashback. Sometimes he thinks he is a killer, and repeats old crimes. Meanwhile, the list of suspects grows shorter, because, as we all know, the secret killer has to be someone in the movie, and there are only so many possibilities.
Fiorentino played one of the most forcible women in recent movies in The Last Seduction. As her punishment, she now plays one of the least. Get this. The movie’s device for keeping her in the picture is that, since Liotta may have a heart attack, she’ll follow him around to be sure he’s okay. That puts her on the scene for a series of amazing revelations, and gives us someone to explain the ending, which functions as without any question the single least appropriate intro in history for Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.”
The actors play this material perfectly straight, as if they thought this was a serious movie, or even a good one. That makes it all the more agonizing. At least in the old horror films, the actors knew how marginal the material was, and worked a little irony into their performances. Here everybody acts as if they’re in something deep, like a Bergman film, or Chicago Hope.
I have nothing in principle against goofy films. Hey, I’m the guy who liked Congo. But Unforgettable is truly strange—a movie that begins with an absurd premise and follows it doggedly through a plot so labyrinthine that, at the end, I found myself thinking back to Fiorentino’s experiment. The first rat couldn’t find its way through the maze, and was cornered by the cat. The second rat, after an injection of brain fluid, zipped through the maze. Trying to find my way through this plot, I felt like the first rat.
Universal Soldier
(Directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Jerry Orbach, Jean-Claude Van Damme; 1992)
One of my favorite parts in science fiction movies is the explanation of the science, which is usually very heavy on the fiction. In Universal Soldier, for example, we are given two Vietnam-era soldiers who are killed in action (by each other) and then packed in ice so their bodies can be used in a secret government project to create “UniSols”—android fighting machines. Twenty-five years later, not having aged a day, they go into action.
How did this scientific breakthrough take place? It’s up to the brilliant Dr. Gregor (Jerry Orbach) to explain. As nearly as I can recall, he “hypercharged their bodies to turn dead flesh into living tissue.” So now we know. The refitted UniSols look like muscular human beings, but wear funny little monoculars that send out a TV signal (of startlingly low quality). They are strong, acrobatic, and versatile, and can be controlled by their leaders, but wouldn’t you know that two of the units have combat flashbacks to Vietnam and remember that they hate one another.
The wayward units are Luc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Scott (Dolph Lundgren). In ’Nam, Luc wanted only to go home, and Scott wanted only to kill, and when Luc saw Scott conducting a one-man My Lai massacre, he tried to stop him and then both wound up on the recycling heap. Their minds are supposed to have been wiped clean of all memories, but when the flashbacks begin, each man’s orientation has been defined by his strongest motivation at the time of his death.
Enter now the most interesting character in the movie, a TV newswoman named Veronica, played by Ally Walker with style and personality that would grace a much more ambitious movie than this one. Walker, fired by her network, goes freelance and discovers the secret of the UniSols, leading to a long series of action scenes in which Van Damme tries to protect her and Lundgren tries to kill them both.
The centerpiece of the action is a chase between a prison bus and the armored UniSols van, along narrow desert roads on the edge of deep precipices. I suppose there is a market for this sort of thing among bubblebrained adolescents of all ages, but it takes a good chase scene indeed to rouse me from the lethargy induced by dozens and dozens of essentially similar sequences. I have got to the point where the obligatory climax (vehicle hurtles over edge, bursts into fireball) is exciting only because it means the damn chase is finally over.
So back to Ally Walker. If you see this movie, watch her carefully. She is given an absurd character to play, but she has a screen personality that implies wit and intelligence even when the dialogue provides her with nothing to work with. She has some of the same qualities as Debra Winger, and brings scenes to life simply through the energy of her presence. To my astonishment I found myself interested in what she was saying, and if she can sell this dialogue, she can play anything.
As for Lundgren and Van Damme: It must be fairly thankless to play lunks who have to fight for the entire length of a movie while exchanging monosyllabic idiocies. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, the two stars found themselves on the same red carpet, going up the formal staircase to an evening screening. They exchanged words and got into a shoving match, right there in front of the world’s TV cameras. Some said it was a publicity stunt. I say if you can do one thing and do it well, stick to it.
Very Bad Things
(Directed by Peter Berg; starring Cameron Diaz, Christian Slater, Daniel Stern; 1998)
Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things isn’t a bad movie, just a reprehensible one. It presents as comedy things that are not amusing. If you think this movie is funny, that tells me things about you that I don’t want to know.
What bothers me most, after two viewings, is its confidence that an audience would be entertained by its sad, sick vision, tainted by racism. If this material had been presented straight, as a drama, the movie would have felt more honest and might have been more successful. Its cynicism is the most unattractive thing about it—the assumption that an audience has no moral limits and will laugh at cruelty simply to feel hip. I know moral detachment is a key strategy of the ironic pose, but there is a point, once reached, that provides a test of your underlying values.
The film involves five friends who go on a bachelor party to Las Vegas. Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau), is on the eve of marriage to the wedding-obsessed Laura (Cameron Diaz). His pals include a Realtor named Robert Boyd (Christian Slater), the antagonistic Berkow brothers Adam (Daniel Stern) and Michael (Jeremy Piven), and a mechanic named Charles (Leland Orser) who doesn’t talk much.
In Vegas, there’s a montage showing them gambling, tossing back shots, and snorting cocaine. A stripper named Tina (Carla Scott) arrives, does lap dances, and is steered into the bathroom by Michael. He lurches drunkenly about the room with her until her head is accidentally impaled on a coat hook. She’s dead. (When I saw the film at the Toronto festival, the audience laughed at a shot showing her feet hanging above the floor. Why?)
Some of the men want to dial 911, but Robert takes charge. How will it look that a hooker has turned up dead in their suite? “Take away the horror of the situation. Take away the tragedy of her death. Take away all the moral and ethical considerations you’ve had drummed into you since childhood, and what are you left with? A 105-pound problem.”
His solution? Cut her up and bury her in the desert. He browbeats the others into agreement, but then a black security guard enters with a complaint about noise. The guard (Russell B. McKenzie) sees the dead body, and Robert stabs him with a corkscrew. Now there are two bodies to dispose of, and the guys stride through a hardware store like the Reservoir Dogs.
The movie makes it a point that some of the guys are Jewish, and uses that to get laughs as they bury the bodies. Jewish law, one argues, requires that the body parts be kept together—so they should dig up the dismembered pieces and sort them out. “She’s Asian,” says another. “Do they have Jews in Asia?” The answer is yes, although surely such a theory would apply to anyone. They start rearranging: “We’ll start with black. Then we’ll go to Asian.”
My thoughts here are complex. The movie is not blatantly racist, and yet a note of some kind is being played when white men kill an Asian and a black. Why then make it a point that some of them are Jewish? What is the purpose, exactly? Please don’t tell me it’s humor. I’m not asking for political correctness, I’m simply observing the way the movie tries to show how hip it is by rubbing our noses in race.
The events described take about thirty minutes. There is not a single funny thing that happens once the men get to Vegas (Diaz has some funny early stuff about the wedding). Nor is the aftermath funny, as the men freak out with guilt and fear. Robert makes threats to hold them in line, but more deaths follow, and the last act of the film spins out a grisly, unfunny, screwball plot. By the time of the wedding, when potentially comic material crawls back in over the dead bodies, it’s way too late to laugh: The movie’s tone is too mean-spirited and sour.
Very Bad Things isn’t bad on the technical and acting level, and Slater makes a convincing engine to drive the evil. Peter Berg shows that he can direct a good movie, even if he hasn’t. If he’d dumped the irony and looked this material straight in the eye, it might have been a better experience. His screenplay has effective lines, as when Robert coldly reasons, “What we have here was not a good thing, but it was, under the circumstances, the smart play.” Or when he uses self-help platitudes to rationalize murder (“Given the fact that we are alive and they are not, we chose life over death”).
But the film wants it both ways. At a Jewish funeral, the sad song of the cantor is subtly mocked by upbeat jazz segueing into the next scene. Mourners fall onto the coffin, in a scene that is embarrassing, not funny. When a widow (Jeanne Tripplehorn) struggles with Robert, she bites his groin, and as he fights back we hear female ululations on the sound track. What’s that about? I won’t even get into the bonus material about her handicapped child and three-legged dog.
Very Bad Things filled me with dismay. The material doesn’t match the genre; it’s an attempt to exploit black humor without the control of tone necessary to pull it off. I left the theater feeling sad and angry. On the movie’s Web site, you can download a stripper. I’m surprised you can’t kill her.
Virus
(Directed by John Bruno; starring Donald Sutherland; 1999)
Ever notice how movies come in twos? It’s as if the same idea descends upon several Hollywood producers at once, perhaps because someone who hates movies is sticking pins in their dolls. Virus is more or less the same movie as Deep Rising, which opened a year earlier. Both begin with small boats in the Pacific. Both boats come upon giant floating ships that are seemingly deserted. Both giant ships are inhabited by a vicious monster. Both movies send the heroes racing around the ship trying to destroy the monster. Both movies also have lots of knee-deep water, fierce storms, Spielbergian visible flashlight beams cutting through the gloom, and red digital readouts.
Deep Rising was one of the worst movies of 1998. Virus is easily worse. It didn’t help that the print I saw was so underlit that often I could see hardly anything on the screen. Was that because the movie was filmed that way, or because the projector bulb was dimmed to extend its life span? I don’t know and in a way I don’t care, because to see this movie more clearly would not be to like it better.
Virus opens with berserk tugboat captain Donald Sutherland and his crew towing a barge through a typhoon. The barge is sinking and the crew, led by Jamie Lee Curtis and William Baldwin, want to cut it loose. But the barge represents the skipper’s net worth, and he’d rather go to the bottom with it. This sequence is necessary to set up the skipper’s avarice.
In the eye of the storm, the tug comes upon a drifting Russian satellite communications ship. In the movie’s opening credits, we have already seen what happened to the ship: A drifting space cloud enveloped a Mir space station, and sent a bolt of energy down to the ship’s satellite dish, and apparently the energy included a virus that takes over the onboard computers and represents a vast, if never clearly defined, threat to life on Earth. Sutherland wants to claim the ship for salvage. The crew board it, and soon are fighting the virus. “The ship’s steering itself!” one character cries. The chilling answer: “Ships don’t steer themselves.” Uh, oh. The methods of the virus are strange. It creates robots, and uses them to grab crew members and turn them into strange creatures that are half man, half Radio Shack. It’s up to Curtis, Baldwin, and their crewmates to outsmart the virus, which seems none too bright and spends most of its time clomping around and issuing threatening statements with a basso profundo voice synthesizer.
The movie’s special effects are not exactly slick, and the creature itself is a distinct letdown. It looks like a very tall humanoid figure hammered together out of crushed auto parts, with several headlights for its eyes. It crunches through steel bulkheads and crushes all barriers to its progress, but is this an efficient way for a virus to behave? It could be cruising the Internet instead of doing a Robocop number.
