[Film Review] Spartan

Spartan is a spy movie of the kind all too rare, that which prizes intelligence over spectacle and tactical chutzpah over gadgetry and kung fu. That the agents here fumble their assignments far more often than they complete them successfully adds a further spin to the story, which starts out with so many standard tropes that I was worried that the next couple of hours were going to be straight-up genre rehash. Instead, the narrative moves us through that familiar territory just long enough for us to get comfortable with what we think is going to happen next and then begins throwing so many curveballs that we completely empathize with a protagonist who begins to doubt everything around him.

Val Kilmer didn't quite sell me on his character, though he was only off by a degree or two. He plays haunted very well, of course, but in scenes where he's supposed to be intimidating and bullish, he just seemed to be talking faster and louder than he does elsewhere rather than exerting a greater presence. Thankfully, there aren't a lot of these scenes, and he nails the difficult task of conveying his character's unwilling transformation from self-described drone to a person forced to take agency into his own hands. That he manages to do so without making major changes to the outward demeanor of his character, but rather by hinting at what that demeanor is an inward reaction to, is a pretty fantastic trick to pull off.

The film keeps things moving at a brisk pace, not slowing a bit to explain what's happening, either in terms of plot or social setting. Though it's unlikely that Mamet assumed that his audience would be familiar with the working techniques of Secret Service actions, it's mighty refreshing to watch characters who don't need to tell each other things that they already know as a way of clueing in the audience. More than that, though, not getting bogged down in operational or hierarchical details helps to give the story a more universal quality, the importance of which becomes more and more clear as the film progresses.

There are plenty of tasty bits of the particulars of tradecraft, but we're spared the kind of elaborate flash-forward-with-voiceover sequences that tend to characterize this sort of skullduggery in films that have less respect for their audiences. Instead, we get to see the kinds of unglamorous but critical actions that James Bond never has to bother with, presented without a lot of flash. Mamet's workmanlike camerawork serves him in good stead here, acting as a visual reminder that this sort of subterfuge is second nature to the people in this subculture rather than anything for them to get particularly excited about.

That's not to say that it's all brush passes, cut-outs and false flag ops at the expense of any action sequences. There are action scenes, very well-crafted, which punctuate the more talky and political intriguey plot arcs with just the right amount of frequency. These aren't the extended setpieces of a Bourne or Mission: Impossible film, though. Mamet keeps the gunplay on a scale small and fast enough that we can't help but wince at every gunshot. Every single shootout is an ambush rather than a firefight, and every bullet is potentially lethal, which perfectly suits the film's unstated conceit that safety is nothing more than another lie that we tell ourselves so that we can get on with our lives. The principal characters in the movie know this, which is why they're so terse and objective-oriented. Being so aware of just how quickly life can end leaves them no time for argumentation or angst.

The various characters serving the Secret Service act as slight variations on the theme of personal sacrifice to ideology, though interestingly, we never learn why any of them have chosen such dangerous lifepaths. That suits me, as I'm happy to file that under "trusting the audience" rather than needing to hear yet another speech about god, country and flag. There's just one wrinkle to that, though, which is that the only truly mercenary character in the film seems to be just as ready to die for the mission as any of the more obviously indoctrinated characters. There are any number of fanwank explanations for his readiness to die - we never even learn his name, let alone why he's willing to risk his life for an operation that he's got zero personal stake in - but it does undermine the theme of soldiering for a cause, at least a bit.

The final question, which the film never answers directly, is the meaning of the title. There are a few throwaway references to it in one scene, but whether or not the opinions expressed are those of the characters or those of the film are left ambiguous. Certainly, the idea of the Spartan warrior, whose life is devoted to his (or her, as the film is happy to point out) cause and has no meaning outside of that devotion, is central to most of the characters depicted. We get only glimpses of the lives of characters who live in normal society, who are presented as little more than a very thin justification for the quiet wars that the primary characters wage. Our protagonist is shown to have a double life, but it's one with no personal meaning to him, nothing more than an temporary escape from the front as a means of rest. In his interactions with the townspeople who know him only as a mostly-absent businessman, we see that he's entirely unable to connect with them. Though he expresses some self-derision at how easy it is for his secret identity to be penetrated, it's clear that what he really feels is relief at having a reason to be drawn back into the fray.

That good fight is the only thing he knows now, and whether or not he's able to remember why he started fighting is left an open-ended question. What complete dedication to a cause means, and what its (sometimes surprising) consequences are, is the central question of the film. But because it's so densely populated with fanatics who can no longer comprehend such a concept as a "normal life," Spartan excellently takes apart the assumptions of the Cold Warrior genre, pushing its audience to question why they haven't experienced the same revelations about the hollowness of that kind of politically-generated conflict which its protagonist is forced to confront. It's very much in the vein of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, updated for an era even less sure of the rightness of its own causes.

[Film Review] Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Two of the guys from my boardgaming group and I were talking about Riki-Oh and Ninja Scroll, and how the plots of those movies are really just excuses for their protagonists to fight a bunch of differently-gimmicked opponents, yet manage to be kind of mystifying at the same time. As one of my pals put it, there's no real plot to speak of, but there are a stultifying number of events.

Two days later, when my wife asked me if I wanted to go see Scott Pilgrim, I kind of assumed that I'd be seeing the same kind of movie. I haven't read any of the books, but from the trailer I knew that there were going to be seven boss battles, and that seemed like a lot to string together and still have time for anything more than the barest excuse for connective tissue. In retrospect, I was such a fool to have thought that Edgar Wright might fail me so spectacularly.

Instead, Wright made yet another romantic comedy that I didn't realize was a romantic comedy until after I was finished watching it. Neither half of that sentence should be read as a criticism. Though Wright doesn't seem interested in projects that aren't rom-coms, he mostly ignores the form and tropes of the genre and instead sticks to its most basic idea - a romance of some kind between two lead characters which is stymied and complicated by their own hangups and issues as well as wacky circumstances outside their control, which circumstances at some point get used by our plucky protagonists in order to fix their personal problems. That those circumstances tend to be more outsized than is standard for the genre is absolutely to Wright's credit, given how badly the normal formula needs some new ideas pumped into it.

Michael Cera does his normal Michael Cera thing, although the character of Scott calls for him to replace Cera's normal shyness with selfishness. If you're familiar with his usual onscreen persona, this probably means you already know whether or not you're going to find the character funny or annoying, but Cera does pull out an unexpected emotional beat: righteous fury. It only happens twice in the movie, as most of the time Scott displays his anger as petulance rather than wide-eyed rage, but Cera surprised me by totally selling me on Scott's triumphant anger those few times that the character worked his way up to it.

Not all of the jokes work, but the film is edited so sharply and proceeds at such a breakneck pace that you won't have time to dwell on the ones that didn't make you laugh. So much of the material is exhilaratingly funny that the few bits that don't work are mostly welcome as a quick break for the facial muscles, anyway. There's a particularly great device that the story uses just enough to not become tiresome, whereby a character will make an absurd statement about the world which works as a sarcastic commentary on another character but is later revealed to be an actual piece of the setting. Since none of what's going on here is explained, that technique serves as a novel way to turn humor into worldbuilding.

The action is good adrenaline-pumping stuff, and though the videogame style of the fights does make them feel a bit light, that ultimately works in the film's favor. It's not particularly visceral stuff, which is fine, since the model here is River City Ransom rather than Thrill Kill. Keeping the tone light by adding helpful onomatopoeic captions to the blows and avoiding the splatter that characterized Wright's previous two films works because the fights happen for a reason, and effectively removing the physical danger from these confrontations focuses our attention on the emotional stakes that fuel the motivation for the throwdowns in the first place.

Scott Pilgrim isn't doing well in theaters, which is a shame. Is it targeted at too specific a niche? I can remember when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out and was greeted by rapturous reviews from an arthouse crowd who probably didn't normally care much for wu xia/kung fu stuff, and that film certainly seemed to rely more heavily on knowledge of genre expectations to achieve its story than Scott Pilgrim relies on video game tropes. There are a lot of little Easter eggs sprinkled throughout, obviously, but there were definitely little nods that I recognized happening but didn't understand the full import of, yet that ignorance didn't harm the film for me at all. It may also have suffered from a paradoxical lack of overt exoticism, especially in its opening scenes. By assuming that what we are seeing is a somewhat stylized but mostly normal depiction of our real world, some viewers may have been irrevocably thrown for a loop when the weirdness began. If the film had been set in an fantasy land or even another real-world culture or historical setting, I'm betting that the supernormal elements would have gone down a lot more smoothly.

[Film Review] Predators

Predators is smart about one thing: it doesn't bother to weigh most of its characters down with names, because it knows that we're not going to care. Instead of attaching signifiers that we're immediately going to forget in lieu of our mental tags of Tough Guy, Sniper Lady, Big Gun Dude and the like, it skips past the middleman and just starts calling them by those tags. I imagine that at some point in the process of drafting the script, the scene in which the two protagonists finally proclaim their names to each other was meant to be a triumphant revelation, a moment in which we finally see these dirty soldiers transcend their baser natures and become fully human for the first time since we were introduced to them. In its final form on screen, the exchange instead plays out as an afterthought, one of the many nods to Aliens which hasn't earned its own weight. Thankfully, the movie is also smart enough to not be bothered by that lack of heft, instead embracing its stupidity with cheerful aplomb.

This is a very dumb movie, but that doesn't mean it's not fun. That guy you used to go drinking with in college, the one who wasn't all that bright but knew better than to take himself seriously and was always a blast to hang out with as a result? Predators is that guy. It doesn't waste any time announcing its intentions in this regard, kickstarting with a sequence of some guy falling out of the sky and yelling a lot, blasting through his punishing landing, slamming the title card on screen briefly and then revving up the minigun. This is somewhere higher on the antiexposition-o-meter than standard in media res, brushing away all those details like setting and character as completely unnecessary. It acts as a kind of mission statement for the movie, which is curious in that Nimrod Antal's first film, Kontroll, also opens with a similarly upfront short scene in which the tone of the film to follow is introduced. I haven't seen Armored or Vacancy, the two other films Antal has directed, but now I wonder if they also feature tenor-setting mini-prologues of this kind.

There are a lot of unselfconscious throwbacks to the '80s Predator on display here, rather like the people creating this movie wanted to put all of that xenomorph-related nonsense behind them as if it had never happened. These callbacks don't play out the same way that they did in their earlier iteration; it's not spoiling anything to say that Schwarzenegger's beefcake-based endgame gambit from the original is no longer enough to defeat the alien menaces from another galaxy, for example. The score particularly stands out as merrily awful, heavy-handed enough to make sure that we can't help but know The Hero Has Arrived, You Should Be Wowed, and so on. It's been a while since I've seen the original, but the music here sure sounds like it pays heavy tribute to the music from the original film, if it wasn't lifted entirely from it.

Predators knows that it's got to hit all the items on the action/sci-fi checklist, but it also knows that it doesn't have to slavishly follow the playbook on how those scenes play out. So of course there's the inevitable ammo-counting scene, but here we skip past even the brilliant shortcut that Rodriguez came up with in Planet Terror ("How much ammo do we have left?" "Not enough.") to bypass the fetishistic pointlessness of this scene. Instead, here the scene acts as a reminder that guns fire bullets, a reminder that's actually kind of hilarious given that those same guns don't seem to need ammo throughout the rest of the movie. There's just enough of this twisting of the end of any given formula scene that the audience isn't ever quite sure whether Hollywood tradition will be followed or abandoned during a given sequence, which isn't quite the same thing as smart writing, but at least serves as a discount means of keeping attention focused on what would otherwise be a completely color-by-numbers plot.

There's less intra-group conflict here than is normal for the kind of movie in which a bunch of alpha-personality strangers are thrown into a high-stress situation and forced to work as a group in order to survive. Aside from a few squabbles, the humans here work together quite well and look after each other in times of danger, in spite of a general verbal agreement amongst themselves that they really don't care about one another. There are two excellent exchanges in which Convict Guy is played for humor, which are immediately followed up by disturbing disclosures of just how wrong it is to laugh along with him. Both of these are lampshaded by the obvious discomfort that the Hapless Doctor feels about the people he's found himself surrounded by, and the low-grade animosity these characters feel towards each other is reinforced by the growly complaints of the Tough Guy Leader as he finds himself reluctantly helping the people he supposedly doesn't care about.

The one overt exception to the ill-defined dislike that each character feels for the others is the only female character in the film, the Sniper Lady whom the film obviously wants to depict as tough and capable but who comes across as a confirmation of the stereotypes women normally portray in action films. She's the only character here with any real compassion, and while that trait is normally a positive one, it doesn't make much sense to ascribe that characteristic to a combat veteran whose specialty is killing individual targets in a manner that's mechanically intimate enough that it should trigger any feelings of empathy that she possesses. She also needs to be rescued almost as many times as the Hapless Doctor, which doesn't jibe well with her background as a battle-hardened warrior who's an expert at operating on her own. This portrayal is unfortunate, as action films could really use better representation of women, and Predators would have been a perfect vehicle for that, given that all of the characters except one could easily have been of either sex. Had there been another female character, these indications of weakness on the part of Sniper Lady could have been written off as being traits specific to her character rather than women in general, but since she's forced to shoulder the burden of representing her entire gender, it's difficult to avoid drawing some unpleasant conclusions about the film's attitudes towards women.

The highlight of the movie is definitely Laurence Fishburne's turn as a long-term survivor who's gone Colonel Kurtz in a big way. Fishburne obviously had a great time chewing the scenery in that utterly over the top mode that's only called for in action films which don't care at all about character, but which celebrate the barely-held-together looniness of that particular character type when he does appear. Fishburne's character represents an interesting alternative direction that the movie could have taken, one in which gunfire and stuntmen might have played a less prominent role, but I respect that Predators stays true to the brief that it set out to accomplish. By keeping its goals humble, it avoids stumbling over any potential pitfalls that might have marred its otherwise purist approach to action film methodology. It's not going to illuminate any hidden facets of the human condition which were heretofore uncharted, but it's a solid piece of mindless entertainment which throws just enough curveballs to keep even genre-savvy audiences alert for what unexpected turns might come next.

[Film Review] Iron Man 2

The makers of Iron Man 2 decided not to go with a subtitle, but if they had, they could've chosen Echoes. Or Reflections. Or, maybe more in keeping with the rest of the movie, Super-Gloss Mirror Finish. As you can see from where I'm going with this, there's a lot of iterative doubling in Iron Man 2, all of it serving as a very tasty way to put together a sequel that actually has a reason to exist beyond asses-in-seats.

Virtually every major character in the movie is set up as a kind of what-if version of Tony Stark. Superhero stories are largely about what we would do if we had cool powers and the will to ignore the laws of the land, so it makes great sense for a sequel to explore other versions of the protagonist by using side characters as surrogates without sullying the integrity of the character we came to know in the first movie.

There's a character who embodies Tony as military-compliant. Rhodey, Stark's military buddy and tactical conscience, is thankfully given more to do in here than he had in the first film. Rhodey is still the most heavy-handed character in the franchise, a tendency taken to its logical-yet-annoying extreme when he first puts on one of Stark's suits to break up a party that Tony is throwing. Granted, the scene does an excellent job of creating the feeling that a drunken, power-armored Stark is about to make a huge mistake which will cost people their lives, but Rhodey acts in ways that aren't much safer. While this helps to establish Rhodey as the man Stark would be if he were disciplined enough to want to follow orders rather than write his own, it also felt a whole lot like Movie Logic, as Rhodey can't quite seem to figure out his motivation here.

Don Cheadle takes over for the role that Terrence Howard filled in Iron Man, and though no one is likely to notice it, Cheadle quietly pulls off the best acting in the movie. He manages to play Howard playing Rhodey, replicating Howard's verbal and physical mannerisms completely, while also managing to slip effortlessly into the verbal give-and-take that Howard seemed to have some difficulties with. There are some great character moments between Cheadle and Downey Jr., particularly during the climax, when the audience is reminded just how much fun it might be to pilot a personalized flying tank once you've worked through your angst at the consequences of doing so.

There's a version of Tony that explores what he'd be if he were less competent and, coincidentally or not, ethically bankrupt. Justin Hammer wants so hard to be as smart and capable and shmoove with the ladies as Stark that it's tough not to feel at least a little bit sorry for him, even when he's being a totally immoral scumbag. Being so comparatively pathetic keeps him out of the realm of mustache-twirling villains and puts him closer to being someone with whom the audience can empathize. He's not an everyman - the only character in the entire Iron Manverse who comes close to that label is Happy the chaffeur - but keeping one of the two antagonists grounded in mundanity helps to emphasize that this isn't a narrative about good and evil so much as it's one about conflicting agendas. That's a nice improvement on the first movie, which attempted a similar feat but failed due to its villains being, well, totally villainous rather than simply possessed of an opposing set of goals to the protagonist.

Sam Rockwell wears "slimy, somewhat desperate sleazebag" very well. He sells Hammer's inadequacy and arrogance at the same time, managing to pull off the latter at the same time that he makes it obvious that Hammer doesn't realize just how much he's compensating for a lack he can't recognize in himself. In every scene in which he's matching wills with other characters, which is every scene in which he's talking to anyone other than his personal toady, he's entirely incapable of getting his way and just as incapable of understanding why that is. It's not a super-nuanced performance, but Rockwell clearly has fun with it without needing to wink at the audience.

There's a third character who shows us how Tony would be if he hadn't been born with so much privilege and, definitely not coincidentally, in a country other than the United States. Iron Man 2 isn't as blatant about its exploration of the theme of America-as-world-cop as the first film was, but through the character of Ivan Vanko we get to see that Stark's proclamations about the ease with which he has ensured United States supremacy on the world stage aren't as true as he claims, even beyond the personal difficulties that he's experiencing as a result of his stint as Iron Man. Thankfully, we don't get any simple answers to the questions raised here, and the ramifications of what Stark is doing continue to ripple outwards. For every problem he solves, he creates at least two more, a principle which Vanko is more than happy to embody. Vanko's role here neatly buttresses that of Stark's father, both of whom serve to show that Stark's world extends beyond charisma and racecars and supermodels, despite how much he'd prefer it otherwise.

Mickey Rourke is pitch-perfect as Vanko, making what should be a completely ridiculous character seem like the most naturalistic person on screen. The secret to this is his choice to eschew any kind of theatricality; we only get to see small hints of what's going on under the surface, a display of emotional control that's much more frightening than any amount of bombast would have been. It's easy to believe in the methodical, elaborate plans for revenge which he eventually unveils. Rourke also injects a few lighter moments into the character, particularly with the restrained smiles he shows when other characters are trying to intimidate him. Really, after this, it seemed like the most obvious move in the world to cast Rourke as a supervillain, something which should've happened much sooner than it did.

The characters from the first film haven't changed much here, and the overall narrative feels like another story arc in a continuing series, neatly picking up where the last episode left off and moving the characters through different relationships with each other in a mostly organic fashion. That makes sense for a comic book movie. What's interesting is how little the rest of the movie follows comic book tropes.

War Machine, Whiplash and Black Widow are never referred to by those names. Iron Man is only referred to as such for the purpose of using the weight of that name to manipulate people and the press. Very little of the plot revolves around anything to do with hidden identities, and when it does, it doesn't matter much to the protagonist. We don't even see Iron Man doing anything heroic until near the end of the film. The theme of how much being a superhero costs the person behind the mask is important for a good chunk of the film, but here it sidesteps the usual focus on how having a secret identity affects the hero's personal relationships and skips straight to the physical cost, something which most superhero stories gloss over. All of this shifting of focus does a good job underscoring that the Iron Man of this movie franchise isn't like other superheros, in that he inhabits a larger world than most heroes and has a more troubled role in that world. He's more super-soldier than Superman, the kind of hyper-deterrent that Watchmen tried to make of Dr. Manhattan and failed, in spite of seeing just how godlike the scope of the latter's power is. Iron Man is the more believable protector-cum-superweapon, precisely because we see how the aftereffects of his actions affect the world rather than zooming in on his superpowers themselves.

All in all, Iron Man 2 succeeds at hitting virtually every target it aims for. It's an action movie that keeps the scenes between its action sequences at least as much fun as the 'splosions, a comedy that keeps its pacing tight between its dramatic beats, and a special effects fest that bursts with charisma and fun writing. It's not quite as perfect as its predecessor, which is still the finest example of the straight-ahead superhero film that's yet been produced, but it works its additions to the franchise into the story without needing much in the way of dull exposition or Movie Logic. It's not trying to be momentous or literary, but there's just enough pain under Stark's metal helmet to keep the character compelling in the face of all the lighthearted banter and robot action.