Sunday 14 December 2008

Movie Review: Volcano: Fire on the Mountain (1997)


A fledgling California ski resort is built on a long-dormant volcano that has not seen an eruption in 200 years, but things are about to change.

As made-for-TV movies go, this one ticks-off all the boxes. Not a single character has more than one dimension. Check. The only geologist in the United States to forecast the eruption is the former boyfriend of the local mountain ranger. Check. The local mayor does not want to cause panic during tourist season and has never seen Jaws. Check. The heartless local entrepreneur is desperate to sign a business deal with a rich investor to develop the resort into something beyond a couple of shacks. Check. The local sheriff's wife is pregnant and about to give birth amidst the chaos. Check. The re-united lovers will cheat death a half-dozen times, including having to walk across a thin log with a raging lava inferno below them. Check. And a local boy will become a man by committing a heroic deed. Check.

The acting is reassuringly wooden, the script (five different story-writers or teleplay authors are listed, which is five too many) appears oblivious to the amount of dripping cheese around the edges, and the directing by Graeme Campbell is devoid of any flair or creativity.

Dan Cortese is the geologist who overnight becomes an expert mountaineer, and Cynthia Gibb is his former and once-again girlfriend mountain ranger. Together they spend a good chunk of the movie trudging through the wilderness, exchanging glib one-liners as they somehow avoid incineration or even dehydration while all the snow around them melts instantaneously as the volcano erupts.

This TV movie passes the time as it touches all the routine bases, but it's not necessarily time well spent.



Sunday 7 December 2008

Movie Review: Guns Of The Magnificent Seven (1969)

The second sequel to 1960's The Magnificent Seven re-treads the by now tired story of seven loner mercenaries with special skills, in this case assembling to help Mexican rebels free their captured leader from a well-defended evil-army fort.

All the characters wander in from other, better movies where they were played by other, better actors. The leader of the seven is still Chris Adams, portrayed here by George Kennedy. He is supported by six mercenaries who bring their luggage along, including physical and mental frailties. The one-handed quick-draw with a racist attitude of course clashes with the black strong-man in the group. The old guy who is good with a knife wants to put the violent life behind him and focus on his family, while the fading gun-fighter suffers from a persistent cough. They are brought to life by the likes of James Whitmore, Joe Don Baker, Reni Santoni, and Michael Ansara, sturdy actors all, but a significant downgrade in star power.

The good Mexican villagers believe in their revolutionary cause, the ugly Mexicans drink a lot and pretend they are rebels, and the bad Mexicans run the army and torture the good villagers. The film builds up to the final assault on the army fort, which is a reasonable climax but hampered by startling inconsistencies (we just found all this dynamite!). Overly dramatic death scenes fail to inspire any emotion as the seven gradually dwindle to a number much less than seven.

At least the well-worn music survives from the original, and is one of the better reasons to endure this sequel. Directed by Paul Wenkos from a colour-by-numbers Herman Hoffman script, Guns of the Magnificent Seven mildly entertains but never ventures into challenging territory.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Thursday 4 December 2008

Movie Review: Prom Wars (2008)

Back in the early 1980's, a sub-genre of the teenage movie featured nerds and jocks one-upping each other for 90 minutes before the nerds inevitably triumphed and proved that smarts defeat brawn. This built-in bias is understandable since real-life nerds are much more likely than real-life jocks to become movie producers, directors and script-writers. 

Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and a host of sequels and imitators kept easily amused teens entertained and personified the era. Someone forgot to tell the makers of the Canadian production Prom Wars that this is 2008. Even the movie's tag-line "Love is a Battlefield", is stuck in decades past. 

Screenwriter Myles Hainsworth and Director Phil Price dust-off the concept of nerds facing off against jocks (mixed-up with preppies, in this case) from the nearby school, this time set against the framework of a half-baked competition to win the right to take the girls from yet another nearby school to the prom. 

A cast of relatively unknown young actors, lead by Ricky (Raviv) Ullman and Alia Shawkat, work hard to re-create ancient stereotypes and a positive impression that would hopefully lead to much better roles, to no avail. The usual assortment of characters is here: the really rich and snobby kid; the cool nerd; the girl-obsessed nerds; the pretty but snooty girl; and the less pretty but smarter girl; the strict headmistress; and the requisite black character. 

There is also a lame and unconvincing romance rattling around somewhere among all the heavily recycled ideas. If Prom Wars had been made twenty years ago, it would have been stale. In 2008, it positively reeks.

 

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Movie Review: Get Smart (2008)


It's always quite painful when a movie is desperately trying to be funny, and yet nothing is working. There were maybe two moments in Get Smart that were funny enough to crack a small smile. The rest of the movie is just sad, because watching blatant failure unfold over a long 110 minutes just hurts.

It actually does not matter what the plot is, but here goes, for the record. Intelligence analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), working for the super-secret agency Control, is pressed into action as a field agent and is teamed up with super Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) to thwart the latest dastardly plot by the evil KAOS. If this sounds extremely tired, that's because it is, and unless you bring something new to the table, why exactly is everyone bothering?

So what goes wrong here? Let's start with a script by Tom Astle and Matt Ember that has almost no comedic wit, cleverness or sharpness. Maxwell Smart is somehow both inept and brilliant. Agent 99 is supposed to be the best field agent but yet needs to be saved by the inexperienced Smart more than once. The romance that supposedly develops between Smart and Agent 99 is contrived enough to cause inadvertent puking. And let's add one of the worst collection of bad guys ever assembled: each one has been swiped from another movie. In fact, Get Smart shamelessly rips off an entire parachute scene from James Bond's Moonraker movie. Finally, the movie falls into the infantile trap of believing that Big Scenes with Lots of Action will cover for the complete lack of interesting characters or any semblance of believable plot developments.

Carell seems to realize the script is nowhere near good enough for him to play Smart straight and come across as funny, and he is right. There is nothing that any of the cast members can do to rescue this dog, and Hathaway in particular will hopefully have learned to steer away from such stinky material next time she is sent a role for the "sexy super secret agent with a troubled past who falls in love with the bumbling nerd in a laugh-out-loud comedy".

Old famous faces like Alan Arkin, James Caan, Terence Stamp, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (ok, some not so old nor famous) are rattling around in the background of this movie, and hopefully they enjoyed their pay cheques because they will not enjoy having this title on their resume.

Director Peter Segal demonstrates no deft touches, and just hustles the action along as the movie lurches from one set piece to another, stitched together with awkward tin-eared dialogue. He may as well have phoned in his instructions.

Get Smart is a movie that makes you appreciate other movies, you know the ones, where the action scenes are actually exciting and the comedy scenes are actually funny.






All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.