"The Gunman": Too Many Cooks Will Spoil The Plot

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The Gunman is a perfect example of how too many cooks can spoil a broth.  Or rather, how too many authors can ruin a film.  The Gunman has three screenwriters, one of whom is also the star of the film, Sean Penn.  And I’m sorry to say it, Mr. Penn, but you’re the primary reason why this film doesn’t work. 

The film’s plot is a tricky one to describe for this very reason, as it is nearly incomprehensible for the film’s first hour.  Penn plays a former hitman named Terrier who, in his glory days, assassinated the Minister of Mining of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  While atoning for his sins in a self-imposed solitude digging wells in Africa, an attempt is made on Terrier’s life, forcing him to head to Europe to investigate why and how it connects to his violent past.

Don’t expect to gather most of that from the film’s establishing scenes, though.  Most of it is explained in exposition later, and even then, not very well.  In the meantime, the film spends its first hour lingering on Terrier’s slow investigation in a painful attempt to weave an unnecessary and incomprehensible subplot about humanitarianism and African exploitation into what has been billed as an action flick.  The action does eventually pick up, but by the time it did I was so bored that I didn’t care about Terrier, the political backdrop of the story, or the token supporting cast that he inevitably has to save.

This is a real shame, too, as the action scenes are adequate, particularly those in a climactic scene in a bullfighting arena.  Directed by Pierre Morel, who is best known for directing the Taken franchise, the action is at its best when it is focused on cramped environments, and walls and doors only function as impediments to the hero’s and villains’ close action combat.  But when the film momentarily gets good, it only showcases how uncomfortable Morel is with anything other than violence, as the context for the fighting is so confusingly plotted so as to be instantly forgettable.  I still don’t completely understand who every character was or what the stakes were, and I don’t really care to.

If one is to assign blame, I think the most obvious culprit is Sean Penn.  Knowing Penn’s proclivity for African humanitarian activism, it isn’t hard to deduce that the political elements are largely his contribution, and though he is a decent actor, he is not a decent screenwriter.  Not only are his politics completely lacking in intrigue, but they feel shoehorned into someone else’s film, almost as if a condition of his involvement was to attempt to educate the audience about his pet issue.  And while I think humanitarianism is a worthwhile cause, selling it in an action movie where the protagonist is an assassin is not only misguided in its conception, but was horribly bungled in its execution.

Sean Penn’s pretentions are well known in Hollywood, and while the man has his heart in the right place, he should leave his politics separate from his acting career, at least to the extent that his choice of projects don’t already revolve around his pet issues.  By writing in such a poorly realized political angle to what could have been an otherwise passable action film, the whole project was sunk through a combination of being unintelligible and just being downright boring.  If you want a Grandpa-with-a-Gun flick, watch the recent Run All Night.  My memories of that are much fonder after seeing this garbage.

Do actors’ personal politics have a place in the creative process?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

"'71": Appreciation Harmed By My Own Ignorance

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I don’t know about you, but I’m not terribly up on my British and Irish history.  Because of this, I don’t know a whole lot about The Troubles, the urban war between the IRA and the British military over the national status of Northern Ireland.  If ’71 is any indication, the conflict was complex, factionalized, and not necessarily the will or in the interests of the average Irish citizen, and my ignorance of this topic may have harmed my appreciation of the film.  However, that doesn’t totally prevent one’s enjoyment of this tense action thriller.

The story follows a young British soldier named Hook who becomes separated from his unit in a hostile Catholic part of Belfast.  Alone, with hostile factions of the IRA warring all around him for the right to fight off the British, Hook must rely on the assistance of civilian strangers in order to survive the night.  Any of the people he meets would stand something to gain by turning him over to the IRA, but it is ultimately compassion that wins out amongst the constant threats of violent outbursts.

This is a vastly simplified explanation of the plot, and that is because, quite honestly, some of the greater intricacies escaped me.  The film is decidedly minimalist on dialogue, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but it does mean that exposition is scarce, and consequently that the significance of all the film’s major players can get lost in the shuffle without a clear understanding of who they are and what their motivations are.  Again, I think this may have a lot to do with my personal ignorance of the political circumstances of the underlying conflict, but some greater explanation would have generally been better appreciated.

However, at the end of the day, ’71 is not trying to be a political drama.  It doesn’t really have anything poignant to say about either the Irish or the British or those caught in between.  Rather, this is a straight-up action thriller, and at that is succeeds marvelously.  Never quite knowing who is friend and who is foe puts Hook in constant survival mode, desperately struggling against anyone and everyone, even against those who patch his wounds or shelter him against his pursuers.  Despite the complex political climate, the film deals with its characters in a very black-and-white morality, but many characters remain shadowed in shades of gray until it comes time to make their move.  This makes for a very tense and very engaging experience.

So, on the whole, I quite enjoyed ’71.  It seems to fashion itself as a more sophisticated alternative to the likes of American urban action pieces, and while I don’t think it succeeds to that extent, it certainly manages to engross with its bleak survivalist attitude.  Check it out if you get the chance.

Am I alone in not knowing a whole lot about The Troubles?  I was certainly aware of its existence, just not the political intricacies.  Validate my ignorance in the comments below.

"Maggie": Schwarzenegger's Quiet Zombie Flick

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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.