"Hercules": Inherently Flawed, Inevitably Likeable

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This is one of those films that many people felt was a betrayal of their expectations, primarily because the trailers made it seem as though The Rock was going to be taking on mythological creatures as the mighty Hercules.  Instead, the film uses most of the trailer footage within the first five minutes, as a voiceover narration tells the tale of Hercules’s birth and epic feats, only to have the rug pulled out from under our feet to reveal that those myths were merely embellishments of more realistic feats pulled off by the “real” Hercules and his band of misfit mercenaries.  This left a lot of movie-goers with cinematic blue balls, as it became clear that traditional army warfare was going to supplant their high fantasy expectations.  And frankly, that’s a bit of a shame, because the film taken on its own merits isn’t all that bad.

See, I understand wanting to misdirect the audience in order to get their butts into the seats on opening weekend, but if you are going to subvert their expectations, you need to do so in a way that makes what they were expecting miniscule by comparison.  Turning the Herculean feats into the marketing tools of a misfit band of blades for hire is a neat idea, but there’s no way that it can provide the level of spectacle that modern blockbuster audiences have come to expect.  This isn’t helped by the fact that the violence is kept relatively bloodless in order to maintain a PG-13 rating; a hard R might have been able to deliver a level of excitement that would elevate the film’s action out of the depths of mediocrity.  It’s not bad action, mind you, just very obviously restrained.

What makes the film work, though, is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays a very likeable and humble Hercules, and he has an eclectic cast of supporting characters that, while archetypal to an ever predictable fault, are still fun to watch.  My personal favorite was Ian McShane’s warrior seer, who may or may not be able to predict the future, and yet almost always seems to be right.  Everyone has humorous quips at just the right moments to break the tension, and because of that, what would otherwise have been a slogging, by-the-numbers affair shows a bit of personality.

Alas, it’s still not a great movie.  The film teases that the opposing army has centaurs, and given that the film has already shown its hand that mythological creatures don’t actually exist in this narrative, the revelation that the “centaurs” are just soldiers on horseback is more than a little predictable.  The climax of the film also has a huge plot-convenient event take place off-screen, and it robs Hercules’s character arc of some of the gravity necessary to really pull together.  That said, it’s not as if you’ve never seen this type of story before, so the fact that it’s so familiar may be enough to pull some viewers through to the point of catharsis.  (Think Kratos’s backstory in God of War, and you basically have the broad strokes of Hercules’s tragic origins.)

All in all, Hercules is something that I’m definitely glad I didn’t go to see in the theater, but didn’t mind spending an evening with.  For what it is, it’s a decent action film with some likeable performances and a plot that, while pretty brainless, does its job at entertaining.  Give this one a rental, and then promptly forget everything about it while still retaining positive feelings about the experience.

This was the second Hercules film this year, and both were box office flops.  Have people just had enough of sword-and-sandles myth-making?  Or is that simply indicative of the films’ quality?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Maleficent": Disney Flinches At The Trigger

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Can we all just take a moment to acknowledge how weird it is that a film like Maleficent even exists?  Seriously. Disney, one of the most stringent companies when it comes to their image and the fairy tale charm of their properties, produced a film that not only revises the history and backstory of Sleeping Beauty, one of their keystone stories, but also portrays Maleficent as a tortured anti-hero.  Even on paper this sounds insane.  After all, Maleficent is practically Disney lore’s equivalent to Satan, being evil just to be evil, and that’s what has made her such an eternal character; she was designed to scare the shit out of you.  And now we have a film that portrays her as the good guy?  It’s a hard pill to swallow, but here we are.

The film starts off by telling you that everything you think you know about the tale of Sleeping Beauty is a lie.  The first film is essentially a piece of anti-Maleficent propaganda, and this is the real history as it should be told.  Maleficent is a winged fairy in a magical forest kingdom sharing a border with a human kingdom.  She meets a young man named Stefan, and the two grow close and develop feelings for one another.  Fast forward a few years later, and an overzealous king seeking to invade the fairy kingdom offers his throne to anyone who can kill the fairy queen, who just happens to be Maleficent.  Stefan returns to the fairy kingdom, drugs Maleficent, and cuts off her wings while she sleeps.  He then becomes king, and a broken, grief-stricken Maleficent vows revenge.

The rest of the film recounts the supposed true events of the Sleeping Beauty story, following Maleficent’s character arc from revenge-driven villainess to sympathetic mother figure.  If that last sentence gives you pause, it should, because it really makes the whole film fall apart.  See, Maleficent for some reason decides to watch over the young Aurora as she grows up, presumably to make sure she survives long enough to have the sleeping curse take hold over her.  Throughout this process, Maleficent begins to develop maternal feelings for the child, essentially becoming her “fairy godmother.”  This has the effect of gradually sapping away any sense of fun that the film ultimately has.  The best moments are when Angelina Jolie shows off just how evil Maleficent is or just how tortured Maleficent feels, but as the maternal instinct takes her over, the film becomes a bland by-the-numbers redemption story.

I was intrigued by the concept of Maleficent, but I didn’t think it would be something that Disney would be willing to follow through with.  And I was right.  It would be fine if Disney wanted to tell a dark tale from the perspective of one of their iconic villains, but it almost seems like the film’s producers started to get just that and decided to back-pedal into more comfortable and conventional territory.  Instead, this reimagining ends up feeling like a half-hearted attempt at making us sympathetic to what was originally a deliciously evil monster, and that’s something that nobody was asking for.  Don’t bother with this one.

Partially due to the commercial success of Maleficent, Disney has commissioned live-action reimaginings of Cinderella and The Jungle Book, as well as an Alice In Wonderland sequel.  Share your thoughts in the comments below.

"Life of Crime": Competently Un-Noteworthy

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Life of Crime suffers a handicap right out the gate by featuring many of the same characters as the Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.  While not a direct prequel to that film, it is based on the same series of novels written by the prolific Elmore Leonard.  Mos Def (here credited as Yasiin Bey) replaces Samuel L. Jackson as Ordell; John Hawkes takes over the role of Louis for Robert DeNiro; Bridget Fonda’s Melanie is swapped out for Isla Fisher’s take on the character.  All three are capable actors, but they don’t bring the same charisma that Jackie Brown’s cast brought to the table, and the inevitable comparison makes this film a little hard to judge in a vacuum.  However, despite not living up to Tarantino-level standards, the film works in its own right, even if it is fairly standard in the process.

Ordell and Louis are just starting out as a couple of criminals, and they decide that their first big kidnapping should be of Mickey Dawson (played by Jennifer Aniston).  Mickey is the wife of Frank Dawson (played by Tim Robbins), a wealthy man with a secret bank account full of funds he has embezzled from his company.  After the crooks nab Mickey, though, they hit a snag in the negotiations: Frank was planning on divorcing Mickey anyway, and is now with his manipulative girlfriend, Melanie.  Now it’s up to Ordell and Louis to figure out how to still turn a profit on this criminal enterprise.

Now, this is mostly a lighthearted affair, not so much in that it’s a comedy, but that the characters are generally casual and there’s never really a sense of urgency to any of the conflict.  Scenes mostly exist to simply allow some well-written characters to interact with each other and the plot takes a backseat to the banter.  This isn’t really a bad thing, but the film is missing a creative edge to put a distinctive stamp on its product.  It could be that the script needed more comedic or dramatic tuning; it could be that the acting was too generic and safe; it could be that the cinematography and overall direction were lacking in the stylized finesse we’ve come to expect from the crime genre.  The unfortunate side-effect, though, is that the finished product feels incomplete, or rather unremarkable.

That isn’t to say that Life of Crime is a bad film by any stretch of the imagination.  It’s perfectly competent.  For all that the film lacks, that shouldn’t really be a judgment on what is there.  Unfortunately, though, the good stuff isn’t so good that I feel like I can adequately comment on it.  If ever a film were just “okay,” this one is it.  I’d say that you can give this one a rental, especially if you want an unofficial Jackie Brown prequel.  But I don’t think it’s anything you can’t live without seeing, with so many much superior versions of the same premise and genre.

Have your own favorite crime comedy?  Let me know in the comments below.