The Wolfman

My dad is a big werewolf fan. I wrote a book on werewolves. So the notion of bringing the Wolf Man back to the screen is near and dear to my heart.

This version is actually a new incarnation of the classic Wolf Man movie of 1941 from Universal Studios, which in turn was preceded by Werewolf of London. The new version incorporates elements from both movies. From Werewolf London, we get the origin of the werewolf originating in Tibet, dueling werewolves, and death by gun. From the Wolf Man we get the Talbot family line, the "wolfbane" poem, and the silver wolf-headed walking stick. Perhaps the biggest inspiration is the makeup itself, which eschews the now standard gorilla-werewolf transformation for a form that looks distinctly like the original Wolf Man makeup.

Shakespearian actor and American Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) returns to his family manor after a long separation at the bequest of his dead brother's fiancé Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt). Conliffe is central to the plot; she enamors Lawrence as well as his father, Sir John (Anthony Hopkins), and it is her presence or lack thereof that drives the lycanthropes to murder. As the body count rises, Francis Aberline of Scotland Yard (Hugo Weaving) arrives to solve the mystery. The hunt is on, but who's hunting whom?

Benicio del Toro is undeniably wolfish-looking, but he seems wooden and out of his element compared to Blunt, who uses her big soulful eyes and gothic Victorian attire to good effect. Unfortunately, they lack chemistry. More imposing but erratic is Hopkins, who lends a cold menace to the cast. Weaving doesn't have much to do but glare and shout orders, but then that's what we're accustomed to by now. He does add "horrified stare" to his trademarked expression.

Interspersed throughout the mystery is the family rivalry between sons and father. The best part of the movie takes place in an insane asylum. It provides an ironic take on lycanthropy as a mental disease and contrasts Victorian logic with the lurking world of magic and curses.

The Wolfman stays true to its roots. This is not a remake as much as it is a reimagining, filled with lush backdrops, gloomy settings, ancient moors, and a Tim Burton soundtrack that pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. This incarnation is a gothic period piece set in Victorian times

Unfortunately, you get the sense that this new version is very insecure about its choices. The movie isn't particularly scary -- the horror is meant to be from the doomed plight of the protagonist -- but it nevertheless resorts to random shrieks and jump cuts. The Wolfman, while undeniably violent, transforms into an over-the-top death machine capable of tearing off heads and limbs with one swipe of his claws. This isn't just a new version of the Wolf Man, he's the Wolf Man on steroids.

Like Dracula, The Wolfman does not end well for any of its characters. As a gothic romance the best we can hope for is a resolution, not a happy ending. And that's exactly how it should be. The Wolfman respectfully carries a legacy of violent beasts on its hirsute shoulders, but mainstream audiences will probably hate it.

9

At a glance, it's hard to figure out what 9 is all about. There are ragdolls fighting in a post-apocalyptic landscape, but beyond that the trailers don't convey much. It probably didn't help that 9 was released amidst a swirl of movies with "nine" in the title.

9 takes place in a steampunk cross between Terminator and Little Big Planet, where the soulless Fabrication Machine known as BRAIN has destroyed all of humanity in an alternate history version of World War II. 9 is a Tim Burton tale of good and evil, as evidenced by the soft cloth of the "stitchpunk"-style green-eyed homunculi and the soulless red eye of BRAIN (Binary Reactive Artificially-Intelligent Neurocircuit). Similar to the premise of the sci-fi flop Virus, BRAIN sees everything as raw material, including organic remains. It fashions a series of increasingly lethal scouts, all with the sole purpose of absorbing and retrieving the souls of the heroic homunculi.

These poor little dolls are in for a world of hurt. Not much larger than a human hand, they embody all the traditional survivalist tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre: the power hungry leader (1), the befuddled but kind scientist (2), the innocents (3 and 4), the apprentice (5), the crazy prophet (6), the tough chick (7), the muscle (8), and of course or titular hero (9) who bucks the system. In this little slice of hell, the homunculi battle for both dominance and survival.

But really this is about fights between little stitch dolls and cyborgs. And what fights they are! There's the Cat Beast, the Winged Beast, and the Seamstress, and of course the BRAIN itself. The battles are as much symbolic as they are exciting, contrasting human vs. machine, soul vs. soulless, emotion vs. logic.

There are problems however. The biggest issue being that 9 is as much responsible for the plight of the homunculi as he is the solution. There are twists along the way, but the emotional heft lent to the struggle of these human-analogues is weakly supported by its simplistic setting. Because the ending is largely open to interpretation, a viewer's level of satisfaction depends on his perspective on evolution, faith, and the meaning of floating green dots in a drop of water. 9 is more metaphor than movie and certainly not for children, but it's a story worth watching.

Jennifer's Body

You might think, judging from the commercials, that Jennifer's Body is about some high school queen bee that uses her unholy popularity to cut a bloody swath through cliques and clichés of all types. Alternately, you might think it's basically soft-core porn featuring Megan Fox. None of these marketing approaches served Jennifer's Body well. Please note: this review contains spoilers!

Diablo Cody, who earned a reputation for smart dialogue from Juno, isn't interested in writing a horror flick. She wants to delve into the issues of friendship and sexual maturity, as viewed through the lens of demonic possession.

Right, about that. In a fashion similar to Ginger Snaps (which combined lycanthropy with puberty), Jennifer (Megan Fox) is now the sexiest girl in high school. Her best friend, helpfully identified as "Needy" (Amanda Seyfried), has nothing in common with her. In a twist on the old trope, it's Needy who has the boyfriend (Chip, played by Johnny Simmons).

The two end up at a dive bar for an emo band, Low Shoulder. Low Shoulder is actually a band of amateur cultists who believe, on the strength of Jennifer's transparent lie, that the hot chick oozing sexuality is in fact a virgin. This leads to a hilarious misunderstanding with hell, in which Jennifer is sacrificed only to return from the dead as a succubus.

Jennifer's Body waffles between horror tropes of stupidity – the band believing Jennifer's lie; Jennifer's ability to get away with murder; victims doing really dumb things – and mood-killing reality checks. The murders are drawn out over time, such that the high school deals with them in a realistic way reminiscent of other real-life high school tragedies. Midnight vigils are held, jocks cry, and camera crews roll tape.

Although Jennifer's Body is supposed to be about its namesake, we get precious little insight into Jennifer's thoughts. The film is actually about Needy, who is a typical "Final Girl" of horror movies. Like the legions of Final Girls that have gone before her, Needy is psychically connected to Jennifer in a way that's never explained. This movie is much more about Needy, her boyfriend, her "nerdy" persona that's never convincingly portrayed, and her awkward relationship with Jennifer. Jennifer's Body tries hard to imply there's some chemistry between the two of them, but it just doesn't click. Jennifer comes off as uniformly one-dimensional and Needy as a disconnected cipher.

The pacing in this film is incredibly jarring; at various points, Jennifer just jumps out the window and exits a scene. The movie starts to feel more like a series of vignettes than an actual plot. Cody uses the Lovecraftian technique of "I was there!" that is no longer in favor because it saps a film's momentum.

The ending, such as it is, is something of a foregone conclusion – we know that Needy is committed to an insane asylum because as narrator she tells us in the beginning of the film. But don't worry, Jennifer's condition is some kind of super-virus (you can "get succubus" on you, apparently), which destroys any pathos around Jennifer's transformation and turns our Final Girl into a superhero who can fly. That's right, fly.

Still, Jennifer's Body isn't terrible. Slickly produced, with competent special effects, the movie tries hard to be both sexy and cool. All the navel gazing around why it "failed" is unwarranted; Jennifer's Body made back twice what it cost to produce. It's just that Jennifer's Body, despite using lots of "hip" dialogue, wants you to like it so much that it throws everything at you: a contrived horror plot, prolonged seduction scenes, a lesbian kiss, and a superhero revenge sequence. In the era of the Internet, that's not enough to make a great horror film anymore. It could just have been easily called Needy's Movie.

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is a vastly underappreciated film that mixes martial arts swordsmanship, a post-apocalyptic setting, and a biblical narrative.

A war, over thirty years ago, killed off many people in the United States. Others were blinded from the blast. This creates an interesting disparity between those over thirty years of age who received an education and those under thirty who know nothing of the modern world (at one point, one of the thugs asks, "What's a television?").

This is an unpleasant world. Cannibalistic brigands ambush unwary travelers, identifiable by their shaking hands. Water is at a premium. Batteries are hard to find. The Book of Eli makes it clear that there's no currency, only barter.

Roaming the land is Eli (a subdued Denzel Washington), carrying a book with a cross on it. This book is greatly desired by Carnegie (a greasy Gary Oldman), who is also old enough to remember the power such a tome can have over the people. While Eli has been wandering for thirty years in pursuit of such a destination, Carnegie has been sending illiterate henchmen to retrieve every book he can find. The encounter between the two has all the fire and brimstone of a battle between heaven and hell.

Thrown into the mix is Solara (played beautifully by Mila Kunis, who finally sheds her trademark accent), a young, attractive girl who has grown up under Carnegie's protection but, as she flowers into womanhood, is about to become a bargaining chip, a piece of meat, and a lure. When there's no one left to protect her, she becomes a wanderer in Eli's footsteps.

From a religious point of view, it's educational to understand who Eli was in the Bible. In the Bible, Eli's children are cursed for behaving wickedly, a parallel for the war that destroyed civilization in the movie. God's curse assures that all men will "die by the sword" – in the movie Eli expertly cuts a bloody swath through his enemies with his machete. In the Bible, it was the job of Eli's sons to guard the Ark of the Covenant – the pact God made with man – just as Eli guards the holy book in the movie.

There's a twist ending that's not a twist of all if you read up about Eli in the Bible. But don't – watch the movie, then do some research, then watch the movie again. Like Eli, the experience will be rather eye-opening.

Sherlock Holmes

I am not a Sherlock Holmes scholar.

I KNOW of him, in the sense that I know that he's the fictional father of forensic science, was often portrayed with a deerstalker hat, pipe, and cape, and had a well meaning if bumbling sidekick known as Watson. He was also very British, a fact that looms large in this new interpretation of Holmes.

Holmes skill, and by proxy his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, orbited around the fundamentals of British society, something I think we Americans don't always appreciate. The notion that you can tell something about a man by the way he dresses, by the stains on his shirt, by the way he walks, by the inclination of his head or how he swings his arms, all feed into the insidious belief that one does not rise above one's class. This is part of Holmes' brilliance in penetrating disguises and deceptions – the bad guys can pretend to be someone else, but their true nature gives them away.

Viewed through this lens, this latest incarnation of Sherlock Holmes (played with beleaguered smugness by Robert Downey Jr.) gives us glimpses of the society that helped shape him. We understand that Holmes can spot a tobacco stain, chalk dust, or a shoe scuff – but not the reasons that such details are intuitively obvious to a man of Holmes' intellect and perception. He's paying attention to things that the society of his time took for granted.

The plot revolves around Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), a cultist capable of manipulating a secret society into believing that he can survive even the hangman's noose. The name is reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood, the author of the horror classic, The Wendigo, and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn manifests in the film as "The Temple of the Four Orders." Blackwood's sinister influence is perhaps more appropriately attributed to Aleister Crowley. The secret society is significant, because it blurs the social boundaries, with members from across high society (even Americans!). This is simply intolerable, and we look to Holmes to set the social order straight once more.

Guy Ritchie is no fool – he knew that to make Holmes palatable to Americans the Holmes myth would need to be punched up (literally). So all the vices, all the physical prowess, and all the eccentricities of Holmes are in full display here – his lack of tidiness, his familiarity with the marital art bartitsu, and his obsession with Irene Adler. There is evidence that all these elements existed in the Holmes canon. They were of course revealed gradually, whereas the film throws them all into the pot at once. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your appreciation for pulp.

The pulp film style – non-stop action interspersed with little explanation – is in full force. Victorian England isn't explained; it's simply on display in all its gritty glory. The extras are really ugly, brutish caricatures while the leads are almost luminescent in their cleanliness and pearly-white teeth. Adler being the prime example (played by the delicious Rachel McAdams).

McAdams seems woefully out of her depth. While her character is supposedly so wily as to be the only woman to give Holmes a run for his money, it's established very early that Holmes has the upper hand. In fact, their relationship comes off as something of a schoolboy crush – understandable, but not quite a worthy foil for Holmes.

Downey is his usually disheveled, recovering-addict self. It's clear Downey's become the new go-to man for playing characters that closely parallel his own real-life troubles, and the actor inhabits them ably. Maybe a little too much so – the infernal "Downey mumble" is in full effect here—sometimes I can't make out a single word of what he was saying.

The real standout is Jude Law as Watson. Law's refined yet frustrated Watson grounds Holmes, as he should. He also upstages Downey with his easy British eloquence. This version of Watson is no fool but a worthy equal, establishing a buddy-cop vibe to the film.

Ritchie's cinematography is practically a character unto itself. Whether he's showing Holmes' calculating his attacks in slow motion or zooming through carriage and across cobblestones, he manages to encompass all of Victorian England with a sweep of the camera. It's a testament to Ritchie's skill that the film doesn't drag despite its long running time.

Loud, violent, fast-paced, and a little too blasé in its forensic explanations, Sherlock Holmes is nevertheless entertaining enough to make it worth seeing for fans who know of Holmes by reputation only.

Moon

Judging from the advertisements, Moon seemed to be about a man going slowly insane on, well, the moon. I assumed it was more of a movie like Event Horizon, where a lonely person stumbles on some mind-blasting truth. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Actually, that's an accurate description of the film – it's jut that the mind-blasting truth is eminently relatable and human. Moon's a lot more complicated than it looks.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole inhabitant of a moon base dedicated to mining Helium-3 for Lunar Industries. His companion is GERTY (Kevin Spacey), a ceiling-hung robot that expresses itself through emoticons. For three years, Sam has overseen the various mining robots, worked on his wooden models, talked to his plants, and longed to be reunited with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw). With his time up, he's ready to go home. The catch is that Sam perceives everything through a filtered lens – even his transmissions to Earth are delayed. Sam isn't just alone for three months; he's alone without any synchronous human contact.

Red herrings abound. It's easy to focus on the HAL-like robot GERTY, a major character and foil for Sam. How can you trust something that sounds so benign as Kevin Spacey? Ironically, GERTY is one of the most human characters on the base.

Moon's twist isn't in the revelation of The Truth, but in its implications. Moon questions who Sam is, what he represents, and what makes him – and us – human. We are, the director seems to say, defined by our memories, and that's enough to fuel us in our daily grind. Sam is every worker who has been at it for years, always waiting for the next big break, the next reorganization, the next lotto ticket that will get him out of the crappy dead end job. It's a lot like Memento, high praise for a film that cost just $5 million to produce.

The fun is in watching Sam deal with the truth of his situation and how he rises above it (or succumbs to it). Moon is littered with clues, making it worth another view. This is a tightly crafted, smart film that takes a single science fiction element and explores it thoroughly.

Public Enemies

On the surface, Public Enemies seems to be about bank robbers. But it's actually about the triumphs and travails of celebrities in a time of great upheaval – which is to say, it's about Hollywood today.

Johnny Depp, playing Dillinger, is charismatic, masculine, bold, even reckless. He seems unwilling to admit that his lifestyle is a dead-end, preferring instead to live in the moment. And yet he seeks human companionship in Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), swooping in to claim her as his "girl" without really asking her permission. He is a titan among men, striding into her humdrum life to sweep Billie off her heels and, throwing caution to the wind, seek his own fortune.

Christian Bale, playing Special Agent Melvin Purvis, is the man tasked with taking Dillinger down. He navigates the world of public opinion and the bumbling incompetency of a young FBI task force not yet hardened by adversity. Purvis has a lot to prove, balancing his own morality with a new era of government ruthlessness.

This movie isn't really about facts, though. A trip through Wikipedia shows the number of liberties – and there are many – that the movie took with actual events. Instead, Michael Mann tries to craft a narrative out of the battle between these two sides, creating the classic duality where two actors at the top of their game face off.

Purvis is the principled, dark, brooding character that bucks authority and follows his own noble path by being smarter and more dedicated than the authorities in charge. Dillinger is the wild man that criminals turn to, pushed to the edge because of the Great Depression and the law. Both men have nothing to lose but their very souls. If this sounds familiar, it's pretty much the same plot as The Dark Knight, only with gangsters instead of comic book villains.

For all the great action sequences, close-ups, and monologues, there isn't much we know about the characters in the end. Without the benefit of a prequel like The Dark Knight, Purvis is as much a cipher as Dillinger. Missing is the exploration of the environments that helped craft the careers of both men, and it becomes clear that Mann is more interested in making modern analogies (about torture, about wiretapping, and government abuse in general) than sharing a sense of history.

And that's the problem. While Public Enemies retells the tale, more or less, of the rise and fall of Dillinger, it fails to provide the backdrop for why it happened. We get occasional insights into the evolution of the FBI, but not of public sentiment, of the Great Depression, of how society helped create cops and robbers. At one point Dillinger provides a veiled reference to his past that's just as cryptic as the Joker's – because it doesn't really matter. This movie isn't about why things happened; it's more about giving two actors their chance to shine.

In that regard Public Enemies is a success. It's long, filled with philosophical dialogue and occasionally improbable shootouts. Although there's a stab at some kind of pathos, connecting Dillinger's own devil-may-care lifestyle with his romance ("blackbird"), it feels contrived. The most compelling character is steel-eyed Charles Winstead, played by the awesome Stephen Lang. I'd rather see a movie just about him…and got my wish with Avatar.

Waxwork II: Lost in Time

Quick, what movie features a murderous disembodied hand, zombies, buckets of blood, possession, projectile organs, time travel, and Bruce Campbell getting tortured? No, not Evil Dead II…Waxwork II: Lost in Time!

Picking up immediately where the first Waxwork left off, Mark Loftmore (still Zach Galligan) and Sarah Brightman (replaced by the considerably hotter Monika Schnarre) attempt to return to their normal lives. Sarah creeps back to her abusive stepfather's home where he berates her for ruining her dress. After she goes to bed, the zombie hand (also from the first film) murders the abusive stepfather because…let's face it, he had it coming.

In the typical Waxwork aside into "that makes perfect sense" territory, Sarah is blamed for her stepfather's murder, claims about murderous zombie hands not withstanding. She will likely be condemned to death unless she can prove her innocence. And that's where any semblance of realism ends, because Sarah and Mark concoct a scheme to find ANOTHER zombie hand by traveling backwards in time through a magic mirror. Because of course, that's where zombie hands hang out, right?

Waxwork II is of course not about time travel at all. It's about whatever the director (Anthony Hickox) feels like parodying, beginning with Frankenstein, alternating between Alien and The Haunting, and then throwing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla, Jack the Ripper, Nosferatu, and Dawn of the Dead for good measure. And oh yes, a long fantasy sequence that has nothing to do with anything.

Waxwork II establishes a couple of things: They are NOT time traveling, but more dimension traveling, or perhaps film hopping. Mark and Sarah have stumbled into the world of Cartagra, "God's video game," as Sir Wilfred explains – in the form of a crow (it's complicated). Cartagra is a universe where good and evil duke it out for supremacy, apparently in the form of movie plots. Mark and Sarah are now Time Warriors, inhabiting the protagonist roles of each movie and ensuring the good guys win. Or something like that.

It is also a different form of dimension hopping than the pocket dimensions seen in the first movie. When Mark, facing down Igor the hunchback, attempts to disbelieve, he gets socked in the face for his trouble.

It's clear that Hickox a real fondness for all things Evil Dead and for swashbuckling romance. He has his cake and eats it too here (like he did in the first film) by including a long fantasy sequence involving what must be the first sword fight across movie genres. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

FRANKENSTEIN: Mark manifests as the butler, while Sarah is Frankenstein's wife. They are caught in the moment when villagers are about to set the place on fire. It takes awhile for Sarah to remember her true nature, during which time Mark battles it out with Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Monster, Igor, and angry villagers. Using a weird compass he found amongst his uncle's belongings, Mark can usually find the exit out of each movie by running in that direction, regardless of all apparent obstacles. Once he figures this out, Mark and Sarah are split up as they escape…

THE HAUNTING: Filmed in black and white, it's clear Hickox is a fan of The Haunting. And so is Marina Sirtis, collecting a paycheck. But the biggest winner here is Bruce Campbell in a hilarious series of slapstick. This is the funniest part of the movie. It's also the most overt homage to Evil Dead.

ALIEN: Sarah has taken on the role of Ripley. She faces down a giant Alien-rip-off – literally, the Aliens look terrible, with huge, lumbering heads. The Facehugger-equivalents are much more disturbing, with tentacles probing orifices. This scene drags on far too long, seeking to emulate the terrible silences and long pauses in Alien. Fortunately, Mark shows up and ends the madness just in time.

RANDOM FANTASY SETTING: Hickox may be a fan of horror movies, but what he really wants to do is write a swashbuckling romance. So stuck in the middle of the rest of the horror homage is this sloppy collection of Monty Python jokes, subpar special effects, and confusing elements. The best part is George (Michael Des Barres), a powdered, effeminate dandy who isn't afraid to murder people with a garrote. There are some laugh-out-loud jokes here, but they don't save the piece. Oh and David Carradine (?). There's also the aforementioned appearance of the talking crow, which is in fact Sir Wilfred reincarnated. His appearance presages a huge exposition dump explaining Cartagra. No matter, all is forgiven as Mark engages in a no-holds-barred sword fight with the villain, Scarabis (Alexander Godunoy) across the universe. In no particular order, their cross-dimensional brawl leads them to…

GODZILLA: A giant, poorly made puppet. The most hilarious part being that Mark is badly dubbed in English.

JACK THE RIPPER: Okay, not really a movie per se. Poor Jack gets kicked into…

NOSFERATU: Silent and with intertitles, Hickox nails the entire feel of a silent movie. And we get to see Nosferatu gnash his teeth after The Ripper.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: Sarah takes a sneak peak at people running from a train. And alien pods.

DAWN OF THE DEAD: 1970s style attire, a funky beat, and a bunch of people bristling with guns shooting at zombies in a mall. It also conveniently provides a disembodied zombie hand, that flimsy "evidence" our heroes were looking for.

The swordfight ends back in Fantasy-land, but only one person can go back through the portal. Mark pushes Sarah through.

Sarah, with evidence of a zombie hand CLEARLY confirming her innocence, receives a note from Mark in the "past", attempting to establish that he was indeed time traveling. Yeah, right.

And the lovers are reunited. Eventually. The End.

Cue a gonzo song about the film, complete with rap lyrics that narrate the entire ridiculous story and 1980s style dancers.

Less horror and more a tribute to films Hickox happens to like, Waxwork II never seems to make up its mind as to what film it wants to be when it grows up. But that's part of its charm.

Crank

Definition of the word "crank": [KRANGK]:

1) An unbalanced person who is overzealous in the advocacy of a private cause. Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) is a hitman charged by West Coast Crime Syndicate boss Carlito (Carlos Sanz) with assassinating a rival gang leader, Don Kim (Keone Young). In a fit of revenge, Chelios' rival Ricky Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) injects him with a "Beijing Cocktail" while he's sleeping. Verona really, really hates Chelios – the kind of hate that goes beyond simply murdering his foe. The Cocktail will kill Chelios in one hour if he doesn't keep his adrenaline up. As the movie cheerfully explains, there are three ways to keep said adrenaline up: fear, rage, and sex. So Chelios sets out to destroy the man who destroyed him, buying himself just a little more time through a series of increasingly reckless attempts to keep his adrenaline up.

2) A nasal decongestant used illicitly for its euphoric effects. The most obvious, and the first tactic Chelios resorts to, is drugs. He snorts them. He injects them. He snorts them again, all under the orders of his Mafia doc. This may be the first action movie that has a pro-drug message: Hey, at least it's keeping your heart rate up!

3) To increase the volume of an electronic device. Crank is loud. Big, dumb and loud, filled with kicking beats, whip cuts, video game flashes, surreal moments reminiscent of Naked Lunch (Chelios is, after all, under the influence of a great many drugs). Sometimes it's hard to make out what's going on over all the swearing and the explosions. Statham awesome martial arts talents are completely wasted here, with a few punches and a neck-break or two. Even his reputation as a driver is underplayed, although perhaps smashing a car through a mall and landing it on an escalator counts.

What's not quite as cool is the homophobia, misogyny, and racism on full display. Chelios' flamboyantly gay contact Kaylo (Efren Ramirez) doesn’t know how to fight even when he tries to help and then gets tortured, all the while being spat on with homophobic slurs. Chelios' girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) who never picks up her cell phone because she doesn't have one, hangs around her apartment all day stoned out of her mind, and stupidly believes Chelios' claim that he's a video game programmer. Throughout the escalating attacks that Chelios tries to keep from her, Eve blathers on about shopping and her nails and her clothes. When Chelios sexually assaults her (remember that third way to keep his adrenaline up?), Eve gives in. Then they rut in the street before an alternately horrified/curious crowd of Asians. Because apparently it's not as squicky if you do it in front of people of a different race who don't speak the same language as you.

4) To turn and twist; zigzag. Chelios carves a murderous path towards his foe. In the process he picks fights with thugs, robs a convenience store, and hijacks a hospital. But there's a twist, you see: Chelios never KILLED the Tong leader! See? Chelios is actually a nice guy! Shouldn't we forgive him for all the killing and the attempted rape?

Instead of sharing this plot twist at the very last moment, it telegraphs the whole scene much too early. We already know Kim is alive well before the "twist" happens. Which concludes, thankfully, with Chelios grappling Verona as they plunge to their deaths from a helicopter.

4) Bogus; false; phony. But the movie's not over yet. Oh no, not yet. Instead of splattering like a bloody pancake batter when he hits, Chelios BOUNCES off a car, landing in front of the camera, nostrils still flaring, eyes still blinking, as his heart beats once more.

And that's when we know this is a joke. If it wasn't clear, the credits concludes with a badly pixilated video game sequence of Chelios shooting bad guys, picking up power-ups, and his digitized beating heart. So all those drugs Chelios took? Power ups. All those bad guys Chelios killed? Points. That time limit on his heart? That was the time limit on the video game.

Chelios bounced off the car because the movie is a commentary about what a video game in real life might look like. Or rather, what a certain style of video game might look like. Except nowadays, even Grand Theft Auto has more pathos and plot than this tripe.

Crank earns an additional star for the irony. But that doesn’t make it a good movie.

Avatar

Judging from the name, you might think Avatar is about a young martial artist reincarnated in a series of spiritual warriors destined to save a world of kung fu magic. But that's a different movie. You might also think that Avatar is like Gamer and Surrogates, where a three-dimensional character acts on behalf of a real person in a virtual world. That's not Avatar either.

Avatar is everything James Cameron learned in Aliens and his undersea documentaries rolled into one.

On the one side we have an above-land version of all those beautiful underwater documentaries. The land is truly alien, colorful glow in the dark flora and plenty of six-limbed fauna. Inhabiting this land are the Na'vi, giant blue-skinned cat people with tails and neural fibers in their always-plaited hair braids. These blue critters most certainly didn't come from one of Cameron's documentaries. More likely, they came from a lot of furry art on the Internet – there's no discernible reason for how the Na'vi, who are surprisingly humanoid, evolved from anything else on the planet (remember those six-limbed monstrosities?). They look like they were completely made up. The weird neural fibers sticking out of their hair doesn't make much sense either, but Cameron's much more interested in the special effects of the IMAX experience, so whenever you start asking questions like this—

LOOK! 3D! OOOH PRETTY!

On the other side we have the United States Colonial Marines, embodied in this film by ex-Marines who are now working for profit. Their job: safeguard and if necessary cleanse Pandora for its precious metals. Specifically, "Unobtainium."

Now ya see, the term "unobtainium" is a joke. It's a reference to an exotic material in a plot to make some other plot-moving element work. Without it, the plot doesn't move forward. But Cameron, who is at this point demonstrating an interesting disdain for his audience, makes it clear that it's not important what the hell Unobtainium does. What matters is that people will kill for it. If that doesn't make sense to you, then why are you wearing funny glasses in a movie theater anyway?

The Marines are decked out with actual mechs (just like in Aliens), heavy weapons (just like in Aliens), flamethrowers (just like in Aliens) and oh yeah, Michelle Rodriguez as a snarky pilot…just like in…oh you get the idea. The Marines are led by the best character in the movie, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

He's so badass…
* he kicks open an airlock door, braving Pandora's lethal atmosphere just to shoot somebody.
* he jumps out of an exploding ship while piloting a mech with one hand.
* he would rather die in one-on-one knife combat with a Na'vi than give up.

In short, Quaritch makes the movie. I would watch an entire film of him kicking alien butt any day.

On the side of the aliens we have Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who has lost the use of his legs. He's replacing his brother, who died in a mugging, and because of their shared genetic ancestry Sully is uniquely suited to pilot an avatar – a Na'vi body, basically. So Sully gets shipped for FIVE YEARS across the universe to Pandora and promptly gets lost. Why doesn't this incredibly expensive avatar have some sort of tracking mechanism built into it?

LOOK! 3D! OOOH PRETTY!

I'm not sure why Worthington keeps getting these lead roles. It's not that he's a bad actor; it's just that he's terrible at disguising his Australian accent in roles that either obfuscates where he comes from or where he's not playing an Australian. Sigourney Weaver is radiant here, but her character is largely wasted. In fact, the movie is stuffed with so many characters that it's a relief when Cameron finally starts killing a few off.

Oh yeah, the killing. See, the Na'vi preach a love for all forms of life. When they kill a beast, they thank it for giving up its spirit, etc. etc. If you've ever seen any movie about noble Native Americans, Avatar hits all the important points. But apparently, this doesn't apply to greedy Marines, even those just doing their job in a war. Instead of allowing some moral ambiguity, Cameron makes it pretty clear who the bad guys are. He's also quite good at telegraphing exactly what will happen by foreshadowing certain events with a sledgehammer to your forehead. Every single plant and animal that appears in the movie has an important role later.

But you might not care about all that. Avatar's graphics are incredible. The Na'vi are giant, living, breathing beings. The bizarre life forms are terrifying precisely because they're so lifelike. The special effects are unparalleled. As for the plot…

LOOK! 3D! OOOH PRETTY!

Waxwork

You might think that a movie titled "Waxwork" is about some guy who kills people and turns them into wax mannequins, like in House of Wax starring Vincent Price. And for the first half of Waxwork, you'd be right.

But Anthony Hickox, who directed Waxwork, wasn't content to just direct a horror movie. He wanted to direct ALL of them. So he dreamed up this idea (he's also the writer) of a waxwork display serves as a gate to a pocket dimension, where unsuspecting visitors are put in the roles of the victims. If the victim dies, their dead bodies become part of the waxwork. Clever, huh?

Of course, this being an 80s movie, Waxwork is stuffed with characters from The Breakfast Club: the slut (China), the virgin (Sarah), the confused protagonist (Mark), miscellaneous female sidekick (Gemma), her "cool" boyfriend (Tony) and the prankster moron (James). They're all there to die of course.

Why? Does anyone really care? Oh all right if you insist…

Mark's grandfather was a benevolent adventurer who, for reasons that make sense only in movie-land, collected trinkets from eighteen of the most evil people who ever lived. Mr. Lincoln (David Warner) has sold his soul to the devil and plans to bring about a zombie apocalypse by feeding victims to the wax effigies of each of the villains. Lincoln kills Mark's grandfather in the first few minutes of the movie, stealing his artifacts and embedding them in his wax effigies. This makes no sense, but Waxwork is unconcerned by your petty notions of plot and narrative. It's only out to show cool monsters killing people.

What we get, then, is a bunch of vignettes where some poor unsuspecting idiot stumbles into a waxwork display and, discombobulated and suddenly in the role of the victim, struggles to survive. Let the Battle Royale begin (this review contains spoilers)!

DING DING!

TONY VS. WEREWOLF: Actually, it's Tony vs. John Rhys-Davies as the werewolf, who must have been hard up for work. No matter, he promptly becomes a werewolf after sending Tony out for firewood. Tony, confused and thinking this is a trick (because that's of course what victims do), plays along until the werewolf bites him. Seconds later HE'S a werewolf and two hunters come in to finish the job. So actually it's TONY VS. OLD GUY WITH SILVER BULLET. Two guesses who wins.

But that was just the warm up act. What we really want to see how China, ahem, handles herself.

CHINA VS. DRACULA: Oh this is going to be good. China is in a gothic-style mansion where Dracula and his host as eating raw meat. What ensues is an oddly slow, creepy dinner scene that features no violence whatsoever. Until China goes to bed, a vampire tries to eat her, and as she flees she stumbles upon her fake fiancée strapped to a table. That's when the fun starts: the vampires have kept him alive while they feast on the bloody remnants of his leg. This leads to China fighting off a whole host of vampires, until she finally meets Big D himself. Does China "can't a girl get laid around here without being burned at the stake" have a chance? That's foreshadowing folks.

The movie then injects an odd dose of reality as Sarah and Mark go to the police to plead their case. Detective Roberts is unimpressed but decides to check it out on his own along with his silent partner (the one in the bad Miami Vice getup). But who cares about him? What we're really here for is…

DETECTIVE ROBERTS VS. THE MUMMY: Roberts, unlike the other idiots, knows how to handle himself. Roberts is thrust into the role of an adventurer along with his helpless female sidekick and a Howard Carter stand in. They open the tomb, only to release a black-ooze drooling mummy, who proceeds to kill fake-Carter and throw everyone else in the sarcophagus. See, even kick-ass cops get killed in Waxwork.

Of course, Sarah and Mark then have to investigate things themselves. Which leads to…

MARK VS. ZOMBIES: Mark ends up in Night of the Living Dead. He escapes by shouting that old D&D maxim, "I disbelieve!" And it actually works. Except for the whole dismembered zombie hand…

ZOMBIE HAND VS. WAXWORK: This zombie hand actually launches its own franchise later. Seriously, this has to be the first case of a zombie hand becoming so pivotal to a plot that it launches a sequel.

SARAH VS. THE MARQUIS DE SADE: Now don't get me wrong, de Sade is pretty villainous but…really? The Marquis de Sade? Fine. Sarah, virginal, sweet Sarah, falls under his hypnotic spell, whereupon R-rated tortures take place, including a prolonged whipping scene with lots of moaning. In fact, this whole scene drags for a while and starts to get a little uncomfortable. Eventually, Mark shows up to rescue her. The Marquis de Sade, who we didn't realize until now is apparently the main villain, promises revenge.

JAMES AND GEMMA VS. PLOT DEVICE: Lincoln needed four victims (poor Roberts doesn't count, I guess), so James and Gemma have gotta go. They take Sarah and Mark's place as corpses in the waxwork displays.

BABY FROM IT'S ALIVE!, AUDREY FROM LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, RANDOM AXE MURDERER…YOU GET THE IDEA VS. EVERYBODY: Mark's wheelchair-bound uncle Sir Wilfred, his butler, and a bunch of guys with pitchforks and guns come in and burn the place down in a grand, awkward melee. Rubber masks are smashed with bats, miscellaneous extras are hurled through the air, and much mayhem is made. In the fracas, de Sade has a sword fight (?) with Mark, who wields his grandfather's magical saber (?!) bestowed upon Mark by his uncle. And then somebody falls into a vat of wax, because this movie is named Waxwork and somebody has to.

The end.

Waxwork was made by a horror buff that loved all these old horror movies but didn't feel like they had enough gore, so he went and filmed his own versions with a bigger special effects budget. By far the best effect is the dimensional transition between the scenes.

Oh sure, the acting is terrible, the jokes aren't all that funny, and the plot makes no sense whatsoever. But you know what? This movie is so fully of cheesiness, special effects, and gore that it rises above it all to turn into some kind of monumental tower of waxy, cheesy awesome.

And for that this movie gets four zombie fingers.

Planet 51

When my wife and I went to see Planet 51, it was a Sunday night in the pouring rain. We were the only people in the theater. And that was apt, because we're probably the only adults who actually bothered to see the movie and got all the jokes.

On Planet 51, things are looking up for Lem (Justin Long), an aspiring assistant manager for the local planetarium. He just got the job and he's about to ask out the girl next door, Neera (Jessica Biel). Until an "alien" shows up. And that alien is Captain Charles (Chuck) T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson), a human astronaut.

Chuck, you see, has landed on a planet he thought was uninhabited. His job was to plant a flag, play a few rounds of interplanetary golf, and then get back to his ship and report home. But all those plans are threatened by the military that wants to dissect him, embodied by the sinister General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and the resident mad scientist Professor Kipple (John Cleese).

On the one hand, Planet 51 wants to entertain the kiddies. It features a computer-rendered world full of lush retro-futuristic landscapes rendered through a 1950s lens. It has rocket ships, aliens both benign and belligerent, and not one but TWO cute dogs-that-aren't-dog characters.

On the other hand, Planet 51 wants to be an action homage to the sci-fi of yesteryear. It features characters smooching, gunfire, 50s-style nostalgia, 50s-style paranoia, and references to genitalia.

The problem is that Chuck's kind of a jerk. Put in the role of the kindly extraterrestrial, Chuck can't pull it off – he's not above intimidating people, playing into their worst fears, lying to get what he wants, and his cries of "not having the right stuff" are hard to believe given that he's, ya know, an ASTRONAUT. Lem spends most of the movie whining about not getting the girl, Chuck spends most of the movie whining about not getting home, and the only reason the plot moves forward at all is because Rover (one of the two aforementioned "dogs") saves the day.

In fact, Rover steals the show. Cleverly designed to look like a cross between the Mars rover and a dog, Rover propels the plot on his tiny wheels alone. If the movie was more about Rover and got rid of Chuck, it would have been a much more entertaining film.

Instead, Planet 51 teeters between tedious characters arguing, simplistic moralizing (Lem explains to the General that he's "afraid of the unknown." Really?), and lame side plots that are just mean-spirited (two citizens have their brains removed…hilarious!).

If you're a twelve-year-old boy who happens to remember 1950s science fiction movies, E.T., Populuxe architecture, Aliens, and The Right Stuff, then this movie's for you. But since the odds of that happening are about as realistic as a planet full of half-dressed English-speaking aliens, adults will likely find Planet 51 too childish and the shout-outs to older sci-fi will go over the kids' heads.

Godzilla 2000

I was a big Godzilla fan in the 80s, when the Monster Movie of the Week seemed to play every hour of every day of the week. Although I can't precisely remember every monster and every battle, I fondly remember "Godzy" (as my mom would call him, both of my parents are sci-fi fans) beating the rubbery stuffing out of his opponents. Sometimes he had allies (Rodan), sometimes he had recurring enemies (King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla) and sometimes he just blew stuff up a lot.

Appreciating a Godzilla movie requires the viewer to adjust his expectations. Godzilla movies aren't about great acting, linear plots, or special effects. The Japanese movie industry understands its audience--if you're going to buy into a gigantic atomic-breathing humanoid lizard, pretty much anything goes. "Anything" includes robots, aliens, robots built by aliens, size-shifting robots (Jet Jaguar ROCKS!) and tiny singing faeries. And don't forget the giant moth.

Trying to make the Godzillaverse make sense is a huge mistake, as evidenced by the failure of the American version of Godzilla in theaters. There's nothing quite like creating a titanic lizard and then not giving him atomic breath because "that just wouldn't make sense." Godzilla 2000 is the Toho studio's response to the American movie. Which is to say it is both better and worse.

By the time we get to Godzilla 2000, the big lug has been around long enough to create two rival investigating forces. On the good guy side we have the Godzilla Prediction Network (GPN) led by Shinoda (Takehiro Murata) and his daughter Io (Mayu Suzuki). The GPN team (if you can call them that) is accompanied by Yuki (Naomi Nishida), who is trying to get a good picture of Godzilla for the local newspaper. Ironically, nobody can get a good close-up of Godzilla because he emits enough radiation to ruin photography. Which really does make one wonder...shouldn't just being in proximity to Godzilla fry every human being in a hundred mile radius?

The bad guys consist of the Crisis Control Intelligence (CCI) agency, led by Katagiri (Hiroshi Abe). The two groups have a bit of history: Shinoda used to work for the CCI before he left due to their "violent tendencies." Where GPN seeks to examine and understand Godzilla for the good of mankind, the CCI wants to blow him up into big, radioactive chunks.

Much of the movie centers on this philosophical argument as to how to treat Godzilla. It's pretty clear that Godzilla doesn't care either way, as he comes rampaging ashore in a quest to find Japan's power sources. Why? Because in a not very subtle way, Godzilla is a parallel for the dangers of atomic weapons. At least he was, when Godzilla first graced the screen. Godzilla is the result of our warmongering and he retaliates with a vengeance by attacking atomic plants.

The CCI takes the direct approach, accepting any human casualties that might be necessary to take Godzilla head on. Tanks, mines, armor-piercing missiles...none of it works, because Godzilla regenerates at incredibly high speed. That little tidbit of information greatly interests the GPN, who names Godzilla's DNA (Regenerator-1) and seeks to use it to save humanity. Well, maybe eventually. In another movie.

The unearthing of a meteorite by the CCI eventually interrupts Godzilla's rampage. Sure enough, the meterorite, which is millions of years old, awakens when touched by light. And that meteor is in reality an alien spacecraft with DNA mimicking capabilities. It immediately makes a beeline for Godzilla.

This alien being/ship is known as Orga, and it goes through several phases. First it starts out as a particularly feminine looking saucer. Then it transforms, for about thirty seconds, into a large jellyfish. This scene is so short and irrelevant to the movie that it seems like something was cut. Finally, Orga turns into a big guy in a rubber suit. And then we're back to the Godzilla movies from the 80s, where guys in suits slap each other silly until one of them falls down.

Godzilla has been redesigned for this film to make him look more feral looking. For the most part, it works. His dorsal spikes are particularly vicious, his fangs jut out over his lips, and his eyes are perpetually fixed in a cruel glare. Orga, on the other hand, looks ridiculous. He's a big, floppy-fisted monster with barely enough motion to move his gigantic oversized claws.

I never appreciated the physical acting required for Godzilla. When it's a rubber suit, the emotion that can be conveyed must be over-the-top pantomiming. This actor doesn't have it.

Godzilla has arms. Past Godzilla movies have made sure Godzilla ripped things apart with his claws, mauled his opponents, or twitched in agitation. This version of Godzilla doesn't have much to do but sort of wave his arms around slightly. It makes him look pretty foolish when he's trying to be scary or in pain.

The other problem, and this is a big one, is how Godzilla uses his breath weapon. In other Godzilla movies, he reared backwards and you got the sense that breathing atomic fire took a lot of effort. When the flames blew out of his mouth, it seemed like a true exhalation of atomic destruction. In this movie, Godzilla looks vaguely constipated, waves his head about, and then the flames sort of fall out of his mouth.

Throughout the first half of the movie there is some amusing dialogue (or at least, amusing translations), some real moments of tension, and a lot of human stupidity. During the second half, the humans stand around and watch the city get blown up real good.

Of all the characters, Katagiri steals the show. When staring down Godzilla eye-to-eye, Katagiri simply lights a cigarette and says "I've never been this close to Godzilla before." But as well all know, nobody stares Godzilla in the eye and walks away without glowing.

The movie spirals into bizarre territory at the end, with Orga trying to absorb Godzilla, who strangely complies (there's a whole Orga/female Godzilla/male thing going on too, ICK). Scientists spout about Regenerator-1 genes, military generals philosophize about aliens from outer space, and Shinoda tells his daughter in a voice over about how Godzilla keeps protecting humanity because there's a little bit of him in all of us...

Meanwhile, in the background, Godzilla sets the entire city ablaze with his radioactive breath.

This movie is more like two movies, bridging the original Godzilla film with the later Monsterama battles that Godzilla has become known for. In fact, it's more a homage to all the Godzilla films that went before. All in all, a worthy successor to the Godzilla series and certainly more respectful of its origins than the American version.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The original movie version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of my father's all time favorite movies. A science fiction classic that permanently embedded the catch phrase "klaatu barada nikto" into the geek lexicon, the first film was a parable about the Cold War. Both the producer and director were criticized for the liberal themes of the film, which promoted world peace and a draw down of military hostilities. The "standing still" of the world was a reference to all electrical systems on Earth freezing for a half hour, with the exception of critical systems. In short, the movie's message was thought provoking, intended to begin a discussion about American policies.

The remake is no different (spoiler alerts abound). This new version features a hostile military led by Regina Jackson (the stalwart Kathy Bates), the monotone human-like alien (Keanu Reeves as Klaatu), an aggrieved scientist widow (the beautiful Jennifer Connelly) and her angry son (played by Jaden Smith). This new version pokes viewers with a stick: the Benson patriarch died in Iraq; the president's response to an alien invasion is openly hostile; and the Message is no longer about the Cold War but Global Warming. In other words: the movie's message is thought provoking, intended to begin a discussion about American policies.

But is it a good movie? Overall, the film bulks up special effects, smoothes over some of the rough edges from the original, and does its best to translate the original to modern sensibilities. GORT now stands for Genetically Organized Robot Technology, is a giant nanotechnology war machine, and the descending globes of light are arks to save the Earth. The computer graphics are outstanding.

The acting, not so much. Reeves sleepwalks through his role, which, while not inappropriate, doesn't stretch his acting chops either. Klaatu is suitably creepy as a blank-faced drone, but difficult to sympathize with as he becomes more human. Connelly has little to do besides plead at the camera with her eyes. Smith comes off as recalcitrant and unlikable, a weakness in the child actor who represents the sum of humanity's relationship. The sole stand out is John Cleese as Professor Karl Barnhardt, projecting a level of warmth and kindness that's we rarely see on screen. If I had to pick a person to argue for humanity's survival, Cleese would be an excellent choice.

The ending feels sloppy. GORT transforms from a giant robot (scary!) to a hissing swarm of metal locusts (biblical, but not as scary). The biblical parallels continue with Klaatu's birth and sacrifice, but the film seems conflicted as to how to wrap things up. The movie concludes with the Earth standing still, permanently – hospital machines and airplanes be damned.

Whether or not you agree with the movie's tenets is moot. If you're nodding your head or rolling your eyes then this version, like the original before it, did its job. But in comparison, the original has better acting and a tighter plot.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Quick, what movie features Britain in turmoil, three young children growing up under the tutelage of a sorceress, invocations of ancient demons and wizards, curse spells, and a modern school of magic that's not what it appears to be? Nope, it's not Harry Potter…it's Bedknobs and Broomsticks!

It's the beginning of World War II and Miss Price (Angela Lansbury, looking suitably spinsterish) has been saddled with three British war orphans: Charlie (Ian Weighill), Carrie (Cindy O'Callaghan) and Paul Rawlins (Roy Snart). Although she prefers to keep to herself, Price has no choice but to take them under her wing, at least until a more proper home can be found for them. As it turns out, Miss Price is a witch, a witch who hopes to help the British war effort if only she can master the final level of her training and thereby learn the spell "substitutiary locomotion."

The three orphans eventually stumble upon her secret. In an unlikely series of deals and skullduggery, Price bargains with the orphans to keep her secret in exchange for some magic, a bed knob that transforms any bed into a dimension-traveling device. Soon after, Price discovers that her tutoring via post from the mysterious Professor Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), headmaster of the College of Witchcraft, has come to an abrupt end. Using the bed knob, Price and the three children track down Browne, who is in fact a con man that doesn't know much about magic at all.

Thus begins a quest to find the elusive substitutiary spell, first via double-dealings with a bookseller who has the other half of a mysterious spellbook, and then to an animated world of talking animals in pursuit of an amulet with the magic words inscribed upon it. Along the way, the motley band will face down the King of the Beasts, a razor-wielding thug, and of machinegun-toting Nazis.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks shows its age, both in its narrative speed and its approach to mature themes. The musical numbers often meander, with the characters speaking their lines and dance routines that are far too aggressive for the two older protagonists. There are a few misogynistic references (met with a frown by Miss Price) and…well, it's all very British, as it should be. The movie also isn't afraid to threaten the children with real harm, be it from a charging lion or a Nazi wielding a machinegun. Bad people in this movie are really bad, and there's a refreshing honesty about the whole thing.

By the time film gets around to its climax, young children will likely be bored. But what a glorious climax it is, complete with unrealistically numerous legions of animated suits of armor arrayed against the Nazis, who are there to "teach Britain a lesson." Although at times jingoistic, Bedknobs aims high and rarely sugarcoats the harsh realities of war.

This is as much a war film as it is a flight of fantasy, and in that regard Bedknobs and Broomsticks has some important lessons to teach young children. And in that regard, Miss Price and friends could teach Harry Potter a thing or two.

The Happening

There's a lot wrong with The Happening.

At base, The Happening is a nightmarish parable about our crowded society in modern times. We threaten the world, director M. Night Shyamalan seems to say, with our sheer numbers. On the other hand, being completely isolated isn't the solution either, creating a suspicious, isolationist attitude that leads to a self-destructive spiral.

But The Happening is mostly about watching people commit suicide in terrible ways. This ranges from terrible echoes of 9/11, when workmen jump from a building to their death, to the cartoonishly absurd, when a zookeeper taunts a lion and it tears his arm off. Anyone who watches the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet knows that big cats go for the neck first.

Anyway, The Happening's premise is spooky: what if something in the wind made people commit suicide in the most immediate and awful way possible? Where would you go? What would you do?

Night has all the elements of a good horror story: the aforementioned disaster, the strained relationship between Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and even an innocent little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) thrown in for good measure.

The Happening should be a great horror film. It's spooky. The premise that a gust of wind could bring about a fatal, nightmarish end lends an ominous shadow to the events. We can expect plenty of drama, morally ambiguous choices, and desperate survival tactics as our protagonists flee for their lives from an alien foe.

Actually, I was just describing Spielberg's War of the Worlds, which took the same premise and made a creepy, nuanced film about parents, children, and the distance between them. The two films have a lot in common: the insidious enemy that pops up out of nowhere, the little girl in distress, the long journey against all odds to a haven that might already have been destroyed.

The Happening follows the same script but fails miserably on almost all counts. Oh, Night's got the scary part down. But what carries a film like this is the emotional heft of characters brought to the brink. Wahlberg does a workman-like job of trying to be clever and sarcastic, but the script forces him to spew mouthfuls of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook at a rapid fire pace that he can't keep up. Deschanel, never a strong actress to begin with, is comedically awful. There isn't the slightest romantic tension between her and Wahlberg. And the little girl? She barely says a word.

The list of what's wrong goes on and on: citizens leave New York in an orderly fashion without snarling any mass transit; victims go to inordinate and improbable lengths to kill themselves; a father abandons his only child in a vain quest to find his wife; nobody seems to think traveling with a gas mask might be a good idea except two old ladies sitting at home.

They're the smart ones.

State of Play

State of Play has received much attention for its spin on the plight of today's newspapers. The story pairs up a veteran journalist (Cal McAfferey, played by Russell Crowe with an odd accent) with a newbie blogger (Della Frye, played by Rachel McAdams). The plot is technically about the death of Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer) who just happens to be working for Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who just happens to be a former roommate of Cal. It seems there's something rotten in the state department, or in this case the private military company they hire: PointCorp, an analog for Blackwater.

State of Play has two different agendas, one more overt than the other. At its heart, the movie postulates what would happen if the U.S. military had largely surrendered its operations to freelance military operations that are not accountable to the American people. This is no theory. In fact, Blackwater received so much negative publicity that it changed its name to Xe. The supposed hue and cry that would be raised by this revelation didn't amount to much, deflating the entire premise of State of Play.

The other main theme is the tension between supposed cub reporters who only blog on the web and real journalists who aren't afraid to pick up the phone or make a deal. Frye is a foil to make Cal look smart. At no point do we see Frye actually blog or the consequences of her blogging, besides reporting on something Cal felt was private. Or to put it another way: bloggers are self-serving, unethical morons who don't know how to report the facts. The movie feels decidedly lopsided in favor of beat reporters. Oh sure, there's tension and drama and a few surprises along the way. But Frye is completely unnecessary.

In the background is the looming threat of the newspaper being closed, but these occasional reminders (falling from the foul mouth of Helen Mirren, no less) feel forced. To assume one breaking story would save the newspaper is to fundamentally misunderstand the downfall of the newspaper industry.

State of Play was based on a 2003 BBC serial of the same name. And that's the problem. Too long and creaky in places, it feels like a movie drawn from subject matter that's six years out of date.

Surrogates

Let's get a couple of things straight: Surrogates is not a bad movie. It is not anything like Gamer, and yet Rotten Tomatoes has a spread of under 10 points between the two. This is a crying shame. With Gamer and Surrogates coming out within months of each other, it's almost like Hollywood wanted desperately to make a Second Life movie but realized too late that Second Life is no longer cool.

Surrogates has a lot in common with I, Robot and yes, Gamer. Implausibly, the world is dominated by remote-controlled robots, a parallel to Internet avatars. Thanks to these robots, known as surrogates, crime is unheard of and the dream of a utopian society beckons. Of course, not everyone is okay with the status quo, including a radical group known as the Dreads. The Dreads are the underclass, people who don't believe in a robot-filled reality. Everyone else has become shut-ins, hiding in their bedrooms in their pajamas, living life through perpetually beautiful twenty-something robots.

FBI agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) investigate a pair of murders in which the operators died too. There's just one problem: there are safeguards to protect operators from being harmed by the death of their surrogates. If word got out that surrogates were not immortal, the social fabric of modern society would fall apart.

On screen, the surrogates are disturbingly perfect. Their teeth is pearly white, their eyes without any hint of veins, their stubble-free skin cheeks are as rosy as a newborn's. The robots (and thus, the actors portraying them) only move their heads when they talk, even when angry. Sights and sounds are softly muted. Until the real world hits and Greer is forced to come out of his shell.

Willis' skill playing a sad sack and a scruffy loner are on full display here. Surrogates is as much about the increasing isolation of technology as it is about the wreckage of a marriage. As the stakes get higher, the movie becomes about the broken relationship between a husband and wife who were disconnected from each other long before surrogates were invented.

If along the way it happens to involve some amazing special effects and a lot of cool action sequences, that's not such a bad thing.

Bolt

Take Homeward Bound's tale of three pets drawn together on an epic journey across America, mix in Toy Story's winking sense of irony at the faux world of toys, shroud it in the artificially-created world of The Truman Show and you've got Bolt.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a clueless acting dog who truly loves his "person," Penny (Miley Cyrus). In the movies, Bolt is a superhero, but Bolt doesn't quite grasp that he's actually in a movie. When audiences begin to tire of Bolt's heroics, the network decides to throw in a twist and separate Penny from Bolt. Distraught and determined, Bolt escapes the studio in a quest to rescue Penny from Hollywood.

Along the way, he meets a street savvy cat named Mittens (Susie Essman) and a chubby fanboy gerbil named Rhino (Mark Walton). Rhino's a lot like Kung Fu Panda's Po – overweight, hopelessly consumed by fandom, and relentlessly optimistic. Mittens, on the other hand, is the Bones equivalent; a beaten down cynic who thinks Bolt is completely insane.

Bolt is at its best during the film-within-a-film sequences; the motorcycle chase scene is just as thrilling as the one in Terminator Salvation. The catch is that though it's not real, the violence takes place on screen. In other words, does it really matter if CGI actors are pretending to be CGI dead? Helicopters explode, motorcycles flip, and bad guys don't get back up. In that regard, Bolt's pretty violent.

Where Michael J. Fox voice perfectly embodied Chance in Homeward Bound as a young pup, Travolta's throaty whisper seems an odd choice for Bolt, who's at least as clueless as Chance. He does a great job, but occasionally you can hear the weariness and maturity in his voice.

Occasionally, the movie glosses over its own moral arc; although it's critical for Bolt to reunite with his person and Mittens still nurses her own emotional wounds over the loss of her family, Rhino leaves his old lady without nary a look back. It's never mentioned that she might miss him.

But those are minor quibbles. Overall, Bolt's an entertaining, fast-moving action picture. It's just not on par with Toy Story as a parable that younger kids can enjoy.

Gamer

Dear Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor,

We appreciate your recent attempt to create a movie that would appeal to gamers by naming it after us. Really, we do. But now that we've stopped throwing up from all the motion sickness and our pupils have finally refocused from the flash cuts, we thought you might appreciate some tips to help you farm XP faster.

Stop with the static: Seriously guys. Stop it. Apparently in your version of the future all video games have terrible reception. We have lag, we have crashes, we have all kinds of problems, but the one problem we do not have is static. That's because our video games are not television screens. You'll also notice that our television do not have static either, and haven't had static for about a decade since they invented this thing called cable. Look it up.

Speaking of Kable: Cable is the name of a time-traveling cyborg in the Marvel Universe. Kable is the name somebody thinks gamers think is cool. Nobody thinks Kable is cool. Nobody believes Kable is the best killer in the gaming universe. You didn't even use 133t speak, so…fail.

Making Michael C. Hall an evil genius is…a stroke of genius. Go Dexter!

Stop with the red/blue colors: Ludacris is cool and all, but even his cyber cred is sorely tested by a blurry 3-D image on screen.

The teabagging gag was funny.

Your jump cuts suck: We notice when you replace rapid jump cuts with actual fight choreography. It's the movie equivalent of shouting and pointing, "LOOK! A KITTY!" every time a fight starts. You just look stupid and we feel embarrassed for you.

Dancing convicts are hilarious. Dancing to a Frank Sinatra song is vaguely creepy. But still hilarious.

Why is there still lag in the future? Bad guys can control other human beings by changing their brain cells into [INSERT STUPID MADE UP NAME] but we haven't solved lag? Is this future made of stupid?

Evil Villain Tip #58: Next time around, you might want to consider not making the guy who holds your deepest, darkest secret an international broadcast superstar.

Don't insult us: No offense, but portraying the gaming universe as nothing but "deviants and murderers" doesn't really make us want to watch your movie. Yes, the Internet has a dark side. But since you called the movie "Gamer" and not "All Gamers Are Disgusting Fat Perverted Slobs Who Watch Porn All Day," we'll assume you actually want us to buy a ticket. Please consider this the next time you name a movie after us.

And finally…

Thank you for killing John Leguizamo: That's not a tip. But thank you.

We hope that these tips prove useful the next time you level up as directors and writers. Incidentally, multiclassing as both might not be such a good idea.

Watchmen

Thanks to a string of successful comic book movie hits, directors are finally showing some respect for their original source material. In the past, it was clear that the director's vision eclipsed any fan interest, which resulted in the Batman series kicked off by Tim Burton eventually circling the toilet bowl before being flushed by Joel Schumacher. The tide has reversed, with fanboys-turned-directors like Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez, and Guillermo del Toro showing an almost slavish devotion to the source material. Zack Snyder can now add his name to that list.

Watchmen takes place in an alternate reality where the threat of weapons of mass destruction looms large, thanks in part to superheroes who range in sanction from government agents to violent outlaws. They are gods among men, these superheroes, but they are also deeply flawed human beings. Watchmen is their story.

There's remarkably little superhero-action in Watchmen. When you strip away all the distractions like the altered timeline and the murder mystery, it becomes clear that Watchmen is actually a character study. The film ping-pongs between each character's backstory, slowly peeling back each layer until we get to the conclusion: that people do terrible things for good reasons. Unfortunately, some characters are fleshed out more than others.

Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the Question-like stand-in, is the most interesting character, an anti-hero filled with the rage of moral absolutism, right at home in a repressive society. He also provides noir-style narrative throughout Watchmen.

Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), who has an uncanny resemblance to a young Chevy Chase, is basically an alternative Batman in search of a cause. He's largely a cipher here, cast primarily as the potential love interest of Silk Spectre.

Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) provides the emotional center of the film but unfortunately doesn't do much for women's rights – she comes off as emotionally conflicted and petulant.

The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a Punisher analogue whose death at the beginning of the film provides much of the movie's structure, is also a relative unknown. His nickname is derived from his sociopathic detachment, killing with glee. Unfortunately, he just comes off as a murderous thug.

Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is perfect as a mildly contemptuous superhuman, more alien and powerful than Superman. His mere existence can cause nations to go to war. Unfortunately, the film struggles with defining the limits of his powers – I half expected Manhattan to change time and space (like Superman did in the 1978 film) to "fix" things.

Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), perhaps the most important character in the film, is inexplicably both the most brilliant man on earth and a supreme martial artist. There's nothing in Ozymandias' background to explain why this is. His complete lack of development compared to the other characters is where Watchmen stumbles.

Watchmen is a really interesting take on superheroes. Unfortunately, it is no longer revolutionary as it might have been, because the 80s comic laid the framework for serious superhero comics that came later, which in turn spawned serious superhero movies like The Dark Knight. In other words, Watchmen might have been a genre-shaking film ten years ago. It's less successful as an entertaining film today. It's a museum replica of comic book history, faithful to its medium and appreciated more as a reference than a movie experience.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds is supposedly about Nazi-hunting in World War II, a revenge fantasy where Jewish-American guerillas (or terrorists, as the Nazis point out) are tasked with spreading fear and loathing throughout France. Led by the rustic Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the Basterds have but one task: to each collect 100 Nazi scalps. Please note: this review contains spoilers.

One might think, given the title and the trailers, that this is an action film filled with the occasional machinegun dialogue Quentin Tarantino is famous for. It's quite the opposite: a series of measured vignettes in which the tension is ratcheted up to feverish heights, then explodes in quick, messy violence.

The opening scene sets the stage: Han Landa (Christoph Waltz), AKA "The Jew Hunter," does what he does best in France. As such, he is the nemesis of spies and revolutionaries hiding in plain sight. Landa hunts down Shosanna's (Melanie Laurent) family in a terrifying exchange that culminates in the death of her family. Out of mere whim, ego, or simply being true to his hawk-like nature, Landa lets Shosanna escape. Her survival will have grave repercussions for the German war effort.

These two plots, the Basterds and Shosanna's revenge, eventually intertwine when Hitler and his entourage arrive to view a special showing of a Nazi-propaganda film (Stolz der Nation) in Paris. The film stars Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi war hero who singlehandedly killed dozens of enemies from a sniper tower.

Tarantino never just makes a film to tell a story, as evidenced by the obvious digressions from history he takes with Basterds. He films a vibe, an expression -- in doing so, Tarantion comments on the nature of the cinema and our own humanity. And this time, he's aiming his camera at the audience.

You see, this film isn't just about Nazi hunting, or Pitt's funny accent, or the tension between agents who know their social repartee will end in blood; it's about violence in the movies and how we glorify it. And Tarantino is merciless as he judges every person involved with the film guilty:

The producers are guilty: Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) is a simpering suck-up who is far too enamored with the approval of his audience to see how vile his film is.

The actors are guilty: Actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) is a duplicitous murderer who shoots an unarmed man in cold blood. Zoller, the star of Stolz der Nation, has no stomach to watch his own murders taking place on the big screen but is only too happy to bully a woman with his affections.

Even the projectionist is guilty: Shosanna is so consumed with her revenge that only in killing a man does she finally see his humanity.

But the most guilty of all is the audience in the theater watching Stolz der Nation. They are shot, burned, and blown to bits at the end. That was the goal, of course – to kill as many Nazis as possible, right? It's just a goal that doesn't seem quite so laudable if you happen to be a member of the audience.

From the images of soldiers dying in the Nazi propaganda film to the graphic scenes of Nazis being scalped, Tarantino holds up a mirror. Are you enjoying this, he asks? Because if so…

You're the basterd.

District 9

While searching for alien encounter videos, I discovered a little clip titled "Alive in Jo'burg" on YouTube by Neill Blomkamp. Fortunately for us, Blomkamp's ill-fated Halo movie was delayed, so he went back to his roots with the film that started it all: District 9.

If you've seen Alive in Jo'burg you know much of what's going on in District 9 (this review contains spoilers!). In essence, a giant alien saucer lands on Earth and its citizens are repatriated in Johannesburg. However, the aliens are ugly, uncivilized squid-like monstrosities and thus integration attempts (when they happen at all) go poorly. The movie begins with a battle with a telekinetic mech and ends with riots in the streets.

District 9 adds meat to the bones of this highly original film. The aliens are no longer blurry actors in masks but crustacean-like beasts in fully-realized CGI. The ship and the conflict in Johannesburg is still a major plot point, but it is explored through Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley). Wikus is a bigoted but cheerful company man who just happens to be married to the daughter of the head of Multi-National United (MNU). He documents the task of relocating the "prawns" (a racial slur for the aliens) to a concentration camp through video, with frequent asides asking the producer to remove particularly embarrassing shots in editing.

In this tightly scripted film, every detail is important: the fact that the aliens have powerful weapons technology only they can use; that the Nigerians take advantage of the prawns by selling them prostitution (and all that implies) and cans of cat food in exchange for said weapons; and that the Nigerians believe they can acquire the power of a prawn through cannibalism.

Blomkamp quickly achieves a sense of rising dread through documentary-style clips where various experts expound on "what Wikus did." The special effects used in creating the prawn are a critical part of making them utterly alien. This is counterbalanced by a horrifying scene where Wikus destroys prawn eggs by setting them ablaze, comparing the popping sound of the roasting babies to popcorn. As a new parent, when Wikus threatens a young prawn, I flinched. And just like that, I was now on the side of the aliens.

An important but unlikely plot twist brings Wikus around to the alien side of life. Betrayed by his company and his father-in-law, he has no choice but to work with Christopher Johnson, an alien who knows more than he lets on. Together, they unveil the depth of corruption in both the squalid slums of Johannesburg and the clean corporate offices of MNU. No organization or race walks out of this film unscathed.

Combining elements of Alien Nation and Enemy Mine, District 9 adroitly balances political commentary on apartheid with Peter Jackson-ian levels of violence. The movie ends with more questions than answers and the certainty of a sequel. I can't wait!

The Mothman Prophecies

It took me years to see The Mothman Prophecies. I was in the midst of a switch from VCR tapes to DVD player and The Mothman Prophecies was an unfortunate victim of the transition, a tape with no player for it. I promptly forgot about it, but Netflix didn't.

In a somewhat eerie parallel, I recently started prepping the Dark*Matter adventure "The Killing Jar" for my D20 Modern conspiracy game. The Killing Jar has quite a bit of information about the Mothman and provided a helpful backdrop to The Mothman Prophecies.

What's interesting is that this movie actually makes a lot more sense than the book of the same name by John A. Keel. Keel covers a wide range of paranormal phenomena, from UFOs to Men in Black, from ghosts to the bizarre Mothman. The Mothman itself even has a name, Indrid Cold, and isn't afraid to make phone calls late at night.

And that's what's so unsettling about The Mothman Prophecies. The film flagrantly violates movie tropes by having its apparition not only adopt a name but make dire prophecies at length over the phone.

John Klein (Richard Gere) is the perfect foil for an exploration of the beyond, a haunted man who cannot move on after the death of his wife. Klein has an entire conversation with Cold, testing its knowledge of the present and the future. He even tapes the phone call.

But Cold's paranormal abilities extend well beyond phone calls. It can adopt other peoples' voices, both dead and alive. Ghosts show up in the flesh. It can leave messages for you at the front desk. And you can tape it all you want – vocal analysis will show it's an actual voice. Your voice. Only you didn't make the call.

If you know anything about the original Mothman Prophecies, you know how all this ends. But that's beside the point. The Mothman Prophecies is largely about grief and recovery. But it's also about the burden of the future, knowing that there is an inevitable conclusion to all things that we simply cannot control. Death brings that knowledge into terrible perspective.

Unfortunately, the movie drags. And drags. The eerie sounds are a bit overplayed; in some cases, silence would have been more effective than the relentless sound effects. The aural assault may have been more effective in the theater, but on television it's just annoying.

That doesn't detract from Mothman's overall sense of dread. If you have an interest in paranormal procedurals, watch The Mothman Prophecies. It will leave you Cold. And that's a good thing.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie's premise – the plot to kill Hitler – was practically scripted for a movie. Preparing for my Delta Green role-playing game campaign meant researching Nazis and Project Valkyrie, a major historical but oft-ignored event by the American public. Until now.

Because the movie is based on a historical account, typical models of assessing a film – like a twist ending, for example – aren't possible. We know how things turned out. In fact, doing research on how Valkyrie came about and ended somewhat tarnished the movie for me. Valkyrie's not bad, but it wasn't the great drama I hoped it would be.

Tom Cruise is perfectly serviceable as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and the surrounding cast does an excellent job of showing what amounts to a typical bureaucracy. The more apparent it becomes that Germany might lose the war, the more urgent the plans to overthrow him.

But there were other factors motivating these desperate men, factors that are somewhat lost in the film. My understanding – and I admit this is limited, as I'm no WWII scholar – is that the nobility that led warfare in olden times, and specifically World War I, felt that there was a "wrong" and "right" way to conduct a war. Hitler didn't so much offend this old guard's sense of moral responsibility as it did their sense of following the rules according to an educated upper class. In a sense, Hitler's war was a peoples' war, waged at whatever cost and using whatever resources necessary and, at times, ignoring the right of the nobility to determine how a conflict was conducted.

This is important because Stauffenberg, and some of the elites involved in the attempted coup, were members of this aggrieved ruling class. This isn't to say that Stauffenberg didn't find Hitler's policies reprehensible, but as a large group, it helps explain the framework for why a coup would even be conceived. This entire thrust seems to be deemphasized in the film. It's almost as if Singer was concerned that playing up Stauffenberg's nobility might be a comment on Cruise himself.

The other part that seems to be lacking from the film is the miserable ending for the conspirators. Stulpnagel, the German commander in France, tried to shoot himself several times before being captured by the Gestapo. There is a brief scene where the surviving conspirators are put on a mock trial and holding their pants up; this is because they weren't given belts, to humiliate them more. The scene flashes by so fast that, to a viewer who is unaware of those circumstances, it just seems like the defendants lost a lot of weight and are holding up their pants.

And that sums up the problems I had with the movie. The tension is ratcheted up, there are little known scenes drawn from actual history that further enhance the film, but it all seems to be disconnected from the greater war. It's like Valkyrie took place in a hermetically sealed film universe. This adds to the claustrophobia of the conspiracy, but doesn't quite satisfy those looking for a historical context.

Splinter

Splinter is an indie horror movie inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II. Like any good horror film, Splinter achieves the right balance to terrify its protagonists: 1) psychological tension between the characters, 2) isolation, and 3) a creature. This review contains minor splinters—I mean spoilers.

On the surface, our happy couple and soon-to-be-victims Seth Belzer (Paulo Costanzo, last seen on the failed Friends spin-off Joey) and Polly Watt (Jill Wagner, who took Jessica Biel's place in the Blade television series) plan to camp out in the woods for a romantic evening. The in-joke is that they are the reverse of a typical horror couple: Seth is a wussy botany student and Polly is a rugged outdoorswoman. Unfortunately, this difference is a little too extreme – Polly seems too sexy for a guy like Seth.

Another couple is thrown into the mix, and this is where the parallels between Evil Dead and Splinter begin. Dennis Farrell (Shea Wigham) is a convict on the run with his junkie girlfriend Lacey Belisle (Rachel Kerbs). They hijack Seth and Polly's car, ratcheting up the tension. We're never quite sure how trigger-happy Dennis is or how crazy Lacey will get in need of her fix.

The quartet runs over an oddly infected raccoon, which blows a tire. Seth pricks his finger on a strange splinter while changing it out and Lacey goes nuts when the dead raccoon she confuses with her long lost cat begins to move. The car repaired, they tear off, only to have the vehicle overheat. Polly stops at the nearest gas station, which just happens to contain an infected gas station attendant. We now have our isolated location.

All that's missing is our monster, a plant-thing that co-opts its host's body. The monster has a very specific biology that's integral to the plot; it's up to the survivors to figure out how the creature works. Which is why, when you're being attacked by a plant monster, it's good to have a botanist on your side.

Splinter never moves beyond the gas station and doesn't need to. The characters make dumb decisions, but they do so for good reasons – the convict and his junkie girlfriend are unstable enough to begin with. There are plenty of other parallels to Evil dead, which similarly confined the action to a handful of characters in an isolated location with killer plants (among other horrors), but that's a good thing.

There are some weeds in the plot. It takes awhile before the action really gets started as Splinter struggles mightily to convince us that Polly and Seth are a real couple. Wigham mumbles all of his lines, making some of his delivery impossible to understand. And the ending, while satisfying, is a bit off in its timing.

Still, Splinter shouldn't be missed by monster horror aficionados. It has all the ingredients of a great horror film – and a great salad.

Wanted

The beginning of Wanted plays out a lot like a scene from the Matrix, with a dangerous-looking man in a suit tracking down the source of a special bullet. What ensues is an over-the-top special-effects laden battle in which said man launches himself out of a skyscraper to engage snipers on an adjacent building and manages to kill them all, only to himself be taken out by a sniper's bullet in glorious and disgusting 3-D. Then we're back to a narrative by office drone Wesley Gibson's (James McAvoy), prone to panic attacks and harangued by his overweight boss. Warning: this review contains mild spoilers.

It's easy to make the parallels between The Matrix and Wanted, given the opening scene, but it's the second scene in the office that really gives the film its heart. This is Fight Club by way of Equilibrium, amping up the fisticuffs in the former with the gunplay of the latter.

Gibson suffers frequent panic attacks and medicates himself heavily in an effort to cope with the insults of everyday life: the stupid job, the unfaithful girlfriend, the backstabbing coworker. He is destined for something better, something that involves the sexiest mentor a man could ask for: a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). Jolie looks a little too gaunt here, but she hasn't lost her aura of dangerous cool and she uses it in spades to bring poor Gibson into his own as an assassin.

Gibson is, in fact, a member of a secret society known as The Fraternity, who in turn are descended from a medieval order dedicated to interpreting God's will via a loom – that's right, a loom. After translating the threads into binary coded orders, The Fraternity kills people who might alter the world's destiny for the worse.

Once Gibson transitions from office worker to gun-fu martial artist, complete with curving bullets and hyper-time senses, the movie really takes off: Gibson is out to kill Cross, the man who, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells him, killed his father.

Unlike say, The Transporter series, which started out semi-realistic and slowly devolved into action parody, Wanted grounds us in a completely altered reality from the start. It makes some of the gun-ballet and insane acrobatics performed by the characters easier to swallow, in the same way we accepted Neo's superheroic feats in the Matrix.

What's surprising is that Wanted is committed to its tale of revenge and betrayal, willing to sacrifice a potential franchise to tell a good story. It asks the question asked of all religions: how long before the speakers of God's will begin twisting it to their own ends? And what is God's will anyway? Heavy stuff, considering the premise involves shooting lots and lots of people.

Wanted is a surprisingly good action movie that transcends the bullet-time genre without seeming too derivative. Along the way, it tells a tight little story that leaves just about everyone dead. And that's not such a bad thing.