"Maggie": Schwarzenegger's Quiet Zombie Flick

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

It’s a little bit bizarre seeing legendary action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger scale back his larger-than-life acting persona.  Known primarily for his action beats and his poor attempts at comedy in the previous century, one would think that a Schwarzenegger zombie flick would be a more gun-heavy, mindless affair.  And yet, what we have here is a film much more concerned with providing a simple subtextual tale than it is about killing zombies.

Maggie takes place in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, where the government has mostly contained the zombie threat, but some stragglers still manage to bite and infect new victims.  Schwarzenegger plays Wade, a Midwestern farmer whose daughter Maggie (Abigail Breslin) is caught in the city after curfew when a zombie bites her, leaving her to gradually transform into one of the monsters.  Wade brings her home, much to the fear and disdain of Maggie’s stepmother, and treats her as the virus begins to destroy her body and corrupt her mind.

As any aficionado of zombie films will tell you, zombies are rarely representational of just flesh-eating ghouls, but are generally used to convey human experiences through supernatural allegory.  In Maggie’s case, terminal illness is the go-to human condition, as Wade helplessly watches Maggie fall victim to her disease; all those muscles can do nothing to combat the virus in Maggie's veins, so he must cope with a decision to either turn her in for quarantine or end her suffering himself.  This carries an unfortunate implication of euthanasia advocacy if you take the allegory to its furthest extremes, but this is mitigated somewhat by Maggie’s insistence that it is necessary to save her and others.  Speaking of which, Breslin plays a fantastic Maggie, whose subtle transformation is full of fear at what she’s becoming, yet a distinct humanity that she doesn’t so much cling to as exude naturally as it is slowly chipped away.

Yet all these trappings tend to feel a little hollow if you start looking too closely.  As I try to come up with character traits to describe Wade and Maggie, I find myself mostly at a loss, as their characters seem to exist solely for their place in the plot.  They don’t feel like real people, but rather puppets acting out a simple story with broadly drawn archetypes.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the point of the film is not to be a character study but an allegory, yet it feels like a wasted opportunity, particularly given how subdued stoicism is new acting territory for Schwarzenegger, and Breslin doesn’t seem to have much opportunity to flex her acting muscles these days.

All in all, though, I found that I liked Maggie, even if it was a bit disappointing in some respects.  If it had insisted on stretching its runtime beyond ninety minutes, I might have felt differently, but as an exercise in light zombie parable, it’s not too shabby.

Is Arnold Schwarzenegger too old to keep up the action shenanigans of his youth?  Is this a good direction for his career to go?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Request Review: "Eastern Promises"

Knowing David Cronenberg’s fascination with telling stories through the transformation of his subject’s bodies, it’s not hard to imagine that what originally drew the famed director to Eastern Promises is the notion of Russian convicts labelling themselves with tattoos to signify rank and advancement within the Russian mob.  And yet, whether because this is Cronenberg’s later career or because the script simply didn’t call for it, much of the brutality that made the director famous is absent from this installment in his filmography.  This isn’t by any means a bad thing, but it subverts expectations somewhat, and without Cronenberg’s signature flair, you have what amounts to a fairly good, yet unremarkable film.

Anna (Naomi Watts) works as a midwife at a London hospital, when one night a fourteen-year-old girl is brought in, gives birth to a premature child, and dies.  Her only belongings include a purse with a journal inside, written in Russian, and a card for a Russian establishment run by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl).  Anna asks both her Russian uncle and Semyon to translate the journal to see what it contains.  Meanwhile, it turns out the Semyon is the head of the local Russian mafia, and the journal contains secrets that he would rather remain buried.  Enter Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a low-ranking chauffer to Semyon’s idiot son.  Semyon begins eyeing Nikolai for advancement within the mafia, and a parallel story develops as Anna tries to find a family for the newborn child and Nikolai battles his conscience to move up the ranks.

The plotting itself is very well written, with a plot twist in the final scenes of the film that genuinely caught me off-guard, though in retrospect I probably should have guessed it.  It is a solidly directed mafia film, full of intrigue and solid performances to tie everything together.  Viggo Mortensen in particular provides subtle nuances to Nikolai’s soft-spoken character that are much appreciated.

However, despite its good qualities, I can’t help but feel that its lack of any sort of individual identity holds it back.  Cronenberg’s penchant for blood only shines through in one major scene, and though that particular fight is satisfying to watch, it only emphasized how empty the rest of the film felt by comparison.  The film is primarily composed of one-on-one conversations that communicate vital plot information, while the actors only portray their characters through the exposition, rather than having room to breathe and develop naturally.  Some key scenes take place off camera, which was done intentionally to set up the ending twist, but the plotting can sometimes feel like a formality to get to that twist, which isn’t so ground-shaking as to justify the experience.

I don’t dislike Eastern Promises, but it’s hard to point out much about it that is especially likeable.  All the film’s components are assembled adequately (though the distinct lack of a background score did not particularly help some scenes) and that is precisely the problem; by merely being an adequate film, it feels safe and devoid of the kinds of risks that could have propelled it to greatness and memorability.  But as it stands, this is just another addition to the malaise of pretty good gangster films that I’ve seen before.

So, whatever happened to Viggo Mortensen?  He hasn’t been as prominent an actor lately.  Would you care to see him make a career comeback?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"Get Hard": Racism and Rape Aren't Funny

Now Available on DVD and Blu-ray

I do not like Kevin Hart.  I find him to be obnoxious and irritating, only ever yelling and screaming in order to get a laugh.  I sometimes like Will Ferrell, but his cinematic track record is very mixed, often reliant on how far his avant garde improvisation makes its way onto the screen.  So I was not too enthusiastic to realize that in a slow film week at the beginning of July that I would be watching Get Hard, a buddy comedy where I already don’t like half of the starring duo, and the premise raised so many red flags that I didn’t see how this film could be any good.

Ferrell plays a stock market broker who gets sentenced to ten years in a maximum security prison, despite protestations of his innocence.  To help him survive on the inside, he enlists the help of his car washer (Hart) in order to train him in being tough.  Now, to the film’s credit, the obvious racial and socioeconomic clichés at work here are addressed head-on, as Ferrell only assumes that Hart has gone to prison based on the color of his skin, when in fact Hart is a lower middle class man who has never been to prison.  This thankfully means that Hart isn’t so much Ferrell’s actual savior but is only pretending to be for the compensation he’ll receive.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the film actually finds funny situations to put its two leads in.  There are only two jokes repeated ad nauseam in the entire film: Ferrell doesn’t understand black culture, and prison rape is scary.  The first of these is handled with about as much tact as you could expect, with Ferrell making an ass of himself trying to be tough and dressing faux urban.  In other words, not usually very funny.  The second joke, though, is just never funny, treating the thought of grown men getting raped merely as a perpetual punchline, when it is in fact a serious real world problem that leaves physical and emotional scars.  Joking about rape perpetuates rape culture.  And this film isn’t helping.

But even setting the stale and offensive jokes aside, neither actor is given much room to comically breathe.  Like I said, Ferrell’s acting strength comes from his ability to improvise insanity, but his character is so tamely written that we rarely get to see his improvisational strengths shine through.  This may have been because Hart is not a great improviser himself, but that only highlights the fundamental weakness of pairing these two performers.  They have no chemistry, and the film suffers greatly for it.

It should be pretty obvious that I did not enjoy this movie.  I hate the tactlessness with which it handled its problematic subjects, I hate how the pairing of its two leads feels forced for maximum box office draw, and I hate sitting through a supposed comedy and never once laughing.  Don’t watch Get Hard.  It will leave you feeling disgusted with cinema and those who buy tickets to this slop.

Am I too hard on Kevin Hart?  Are there redeeming qualities to his performances?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.