Movie Review: Extreme Prejudice (1987)

Genre: Modern Western  

Director: Walter Hill  

Starring: Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironside, Maria Conchita Alonso, Rip Torn  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: Jack Benteen (Nick Nolte) is the Texas Ranger in El Paso. Across the border, his childhood friend Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe) is controlling the illegal drug trade, protected by an army of thugs. A shadowy group of ex-soldiers under the command of Major Hackett (Michael Ironside) arrives in town on a bank heist mission. Jack warns Cash to abandon his criminal ways, but instead Cash targets Jack's girlfriend Sarita (Maria Conchita Alonso), leading to violent showdowns.

What Works Well: Director Walter Hill transposes traditional Western fundamentals to a more modern setting, with The Wild Bunch a main source of inspiration. This is an action-packed macho-dominated world of few words and much intimidation, Nick Nolte, Powers Boothe, and Michael Ironside forming an uncompromising triangle of good, bad, and ugly. The history of friendship between Jack and Cash adds a layer of regret, and Powers Boothe cuts a dashing villain in a white suit that gets increasingly soiled as his soul surrenders to evil.

What Does Not Work As Well: The emphasis on cool visuals and an elegiac definition of manhood as stripped-down willingness to engage in one-on-one death duels abandons a cluttered plot overstuffed with sweaty characters. The ex-soldiers and their plan to rob a bank consume an inordinate amount of time, and illogical incidents serve as wallpaper to the main objective of staging blood-soaked shoot-outs.

Key Quote:

Cash: You know, Jack. I got a feeling the next time we run into each other, we gonna have a killin'. Just a feeling.



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Movie Review: Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone (1983)

Genre: Science Fiction  

Director: Lamont Johnson  

Starring: Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson, Michael Ironside  

Running Time: 90 minutes  

Synopsis: A tourist spaceship explodes in a faraway galaxy, and an escape pod carrying three surviving women crash-lands on a dangerous planet. Space adventurer Wolff (Peter Strauss) is interested in the reward money and races to rescue them, but after partnering with scrappy local girl Niki (Molly Ringwald), he faces competition from fellow-rescuer Washington (Ernie Hudson). The planet is full of dangers, but the biggest threat is Overdog (Michael Ironside), a half-man half-machine crazed scientist who rules over the forbidden zone and wants the captured women for his pleasure.

What Works Well: Some of the garage-level hardware is imaginative, and Elmer Bernstein's music score deserves an entirely different movie. Sidekick character Chalmers (Andrea Marcovicci) enlivens the opening 20 minutes.

What Does Not Work As Well: Filmed in 3-D, this soulless mix of Star Wars and Mad Max is hampered by a low budget and the mis-casting of Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwald: he is charisma-free, and she is whiny and annoying. The flat script lacks wit and anything that resembles character depth or a thematic arc, surrendering instead to a choppy episodic structure overwhelmed by cheesy sets and stiff derivative action. The three captive women are vacuous non-entities, while Michael Ironside as the antagonist looks impressive but barely features apart from some cartoon-level villainous hollering.

Key Quote:

Niki: Us loners got to stick together.



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Movie Review: Top Gun (1986)

A glitzy drama and clunky romance set in the world of elite navy aviators, Top Gun has all the slickness of a polished sales pitch, and all the emotional depth that can be expected when hardware is the subject of worship.

Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is a cocky, instinctive naval pilot, living under the cloud of his father, also a Navy pilot who died in mysterious circumstances. Maverick flies F-14A Tomcats with his Radar Intercept Officer (RIO) Nick "Goose" Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards). After a close encounter with enemy MiG 28s over the Indian Ocean, Maverick and Goose are chosen to join the elite "Top Gun" aerial combat training school at Miramar, Florida.

The intense training features numerous flights to sharpen dogfighting skills, overseen by the legendary "Viper" (Tom Skerritt) and "Jester" (Michael Ironside). Maverick finds himself in an alpha male competition with Tom "Iceman" Kazanski (Val Kilmer), a more cerebral pilot, for the prize of top graduate. Maverick also starts a steamy relationship with Charlotte "Charlie" Blackwood (Kelly McGillis), an astrophysicist and civilian instructor. With the course drawing to a close and Maverick locked in an intense competition with Iceman, tragedy strikes, severely shaking Maverick's self-belief.

A thrilling piece of 1980s confectionery, Top Gun is ridiculous, mindless fun. Every man has a hokey nickname, every woman melts in front of the military uniforms, and every line of dialogue is cringe-worthy. The romance is klutzy, Kelly McGillis puts herself in the running for least convincing astrophysicist in film history (have there been others?), and the music serves as a reminder about how terrifically awful 1980s soundtracks could contrive to be. The geopolitics are at kindergarten level while the manly competitions make it all the way to Grade 8 maturity.

And yet. There is something about the unabashed gloss of Top Gun that allows it to rise above. Director Tony Scott displays a genuine flair for transforming lethal machinery into objects of desire, and Top Gun is filled with quite magnificent aerial photography. The glistening sun, the open skies, the golden silhouettes, and the roar of overpowered fighter jets designed to manoeuvre and kill with maximum efficiency are combined to create an irresistible aesthetic. As an advertisement for life as a navy pilot, the film is an undisputed winner.

Which all means that the story is utterly irrelevant, and serves as a distant backdrop to the sexually charged engines and people. And it's really best not to look too closely at all the decisions made by the military brass, culminating in sending young men off to war on their graduation day and shoving a pilot into combat while he is in a near catatonic state. It's drama torn from the pages of ideas too foolish to be considered as comics.

Tom Cruise continued his rapid rise to the very top with a magnetic performance as the moody, motorcycle-riding, Ray-Ban wearing Maverick. He does not need to act as much as be present and allow his natural pizzazz to glow, and he just radiates energy on the ground and in the sky. Val Kilmer displays a different kind of intensity, still charismatic but adding a snarly meanness. The other guys range from marginally goofy (Edwards as Goose) to pure macho (Skerritt and Ironside, taking it all too seriously).

The black hole is Kelly McGillis, and she threatens to swallow up the entire film with a stunningly unconvincing performance that screams vapid love interest, with Charlie reduced to a ten year old's idea of a fantasy woman. Deep in the cast, Meg Ryan shows up as Goose's wife and Tim Robbins makes a late appearance as a co-pilot.

While most of the individual elements fall flat, as a whole Top Gun amounts to a nonsensical success story. The film rides a crazy, unapologetic energy, buying into its own boyish joy, taking the breath away and inviting all to be swept into the thrill of the danger zone.

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Movie Review: Starship Troopers (1997)

A satirical humans-versus-bugs science fiction action epic, Starship Troopers is ridiculous fun.

In the distant future, the entire world is governed by The Federation. Citizenship and voting rights are bestowed on those who serve the government, preferably in the military. The rest of the population are merely civilians. Earth is under threat from massive bugs who reside in the distant world Klendathu and its surrounding planets. With the war heating up, high school lovers Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) graduate and join the military. She is smart and joins the starship pilot training program, where she is paired with fellow trainee Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon). Johnny is athletic and joins the Mobile Infantry, where he reconnects with classmate Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer). Dizzy has a crush on Johnny, but his heart is set on Carmen. Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) is another friend of Johnny's, and he joins Military Intelligence.

The humans woefully underestimate their enemy, the war against the bugs takes a bad turn, an entire Earth city is destroyed, and Johnny's Mobile Infantry unit loses a lot of soldiers. A new aggressive battle plan is formulated, and Johnny is re-assigned to the Roughnecks, a battle-hardened division under the command of the tough-as-nails Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside). The humans drive towards the heart of Klendathu to try and understand the intelligence behind the bugs and annihilate their threat.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven with an A-budget of over $100 million but occasionally donning a saucy B-movie ethos, Starship Troopers fluctuates between wildly enjoyable and cringe-worthy creakiness. Vaguely based on the Robert A. Heinlein book of the same name that Verhoeven claimed to have never read, the film carries a mean satirical streak that celebrates unifying neo-Fascism with a friendly face as a natural destiny for an Earth embarking on interstellar battles. Verhoeven litters the movie with public service announcements that evolve Orwellian domination into the corporate culture of good-for-you information, all ending with the itchy friendliness of a "would you like to know more?" question.

The scenes that attempt to develop the characters, and therefore require acting, are cheesy and sometimes step into dreadful territory. The one thing Verhoeven did not spend money on was acting talent. The young actors were selected to look good in a multi-ethnic society that only breeds beautiful and athletic offspring, but their lack of ability in front of a camera is almost painful, matched only by often inane dialogue courtesy of screenwriter Edward Neumeier.

The film's ending appears rushed, the gory war seemingly coming to a sudden pause with an unexplained capture. Either the budget was exhausted or sequels were being planned, but in any case the conclusion is unsatisfying, other than the enduring image of Neil Patrick Harris in on overcoat straight out of the Nazi SS closet. No serious sequels were forthcoming, other than straight-to-DVD level low budget knock-offs.

But it's the second half of Starship Troopers that really shines. Most of the clunky romances are set aside as Verhoeven focusses on the war, and the film excels as a humans against bugs action extravaganza with expert special effects deployment. Verhoeven loves his gore, and within the high-adrenaline combat action he lets loose with numerous scenes of broken bodies, the huge arachnids impaling and decapitating en-mass, and even engaging in old fashioned brain sucking. None of it is for the faint of heart, but the slick visuals and elevated levels of excitement are quite thrilling.

Starship Troopers falters when the humans have to talk to each other, but soars on the killing fields of insane interplanetary wars.

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Movie Review: Total Recall (1990)

One of the last non-digital science fiction adventures, Total Recall is a combustible combination of director Paul Verhoeven's ultra-violent tendencies and Arnold Schwarzenegger's bulging brawn in a brisk adaptation of a thoughtful Philip K. Dick story.

It's the year 2084, and Mars is colonized and being actively mined for a precious mineral. On Earth, construction worker Douglas Quaid (Schwarzenegger) is having inexplicable nightmares about Mars. He tries to convince his wife Lori (Sharon Stone) that they should relocate to the red planet, but she is not interested. Instead, Quaid hires the Rekall company to implant false Mars vacation memories into his brain, and requests the special "secret agent" package to spice up his fake recollections.

But something goes wrong during the process, and Quaid is catapulted into a seemingly real life-and-death struggle, finding himself the target of vicious assassins led by Richter (Michael Ironside), who is taking orders from the ruthless Vilos Cohaagen, the governor of Mars. Quaid receives a message from himself recorded in the past: he used to be government agent Hauser, working for Cohaagen, before switching sides and joining a rebellion against the governor. Subsequently his memory was erased and he was given a new identity as Quaid. Now he must travel to Mars, connect with resistance fighter Melina (Rachel Ticotin), and help the mysterious rebel leader Kuato.

An army of screenwriters including Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon laboured for years to adapt Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale story, and the result is a chase movie filled with wild wit and woolly violence. But amidst the dangerously high levels of kinetic energy, Total Recall remembers to build tension around fundamental conflicts, such as defining life's value either through past actions or present decisions, but not both. What makes Quaid human becomes a core challenge, since his rational mind can no longer be necessarily faithful to over-written memories, but his heart can chart a path back to commitments made but not necessarily understood. None of the philosophical aspects of the film are belaboured, and Verhoeven manages to incorporate the interesting queries without causing long pauses in the action.

Total Recall's visual effects won a Special Achievement Academy award, and the look of the film is admirable. The Earth of 2084 is not as grim as the world of Blade Runner (1982), but Total Recall's modernity is infused with a kitschy undertone that keeps the future in its place. The movie brazenly leaves plenty to be desired in the technology of the future, the cars looking clunkier than their twentieth century counterparts, Mars conquered but its climate-controlled spaces apparently not worthy of equipping with shatter-proof glass, and the weapons, outfits and hairstyles of 2084 don't look that much different than the styles of 1990. The Mars colonization is imagined as an austere early industrial age outpost, red mountains being systemically strip-mined, the motif of suffering completed with the Venusville red light district where mutants try to hustle a living.

Meanwhile, Verhoeven is busy finding innovative ways to throw globs of violence, blood and gore onto the screen, outdoing himself with an escalator gun battle in which Quaid defends himself by using an innocent bystander as a (very dead) human shield, the lifeless body repeatedly punctured with ever more bullets. Not able to resist a gruesome exclamation mark, Verhoeven ends the scene with a bad guy taking a squishy step on another dead body. The level of violence in Total Recall is beyond anything necessary, but excess is Verhoeven's calling card, and here he works it to his advantage.

Arnold Schwarzenegger continued his upward career trajectory as an action hero, reaching new heights with Total Recall. Although still nowhere near able to convey subtle emotions, Schwarzenegger brings a confident swagger and good comic timing to the role of Douglas Quaid. His physicality is still by far the dominant feature of the performance, but Schwarzenegger convinces in a role notably more complex than his more typical revenge operas, and filled with necessary confusion.

The supporting cast is comparatively bland, but a pre-stardom Sharon Stone catches the eye as Quaid's supposed wife Lori, mixing kittenish seduction with kick-ass martial arts, not to mention negotiating a most violent divorce. When Verhoeven meets Schwarzenegger, even marital conflicts get settled with a bullet.

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Movie Review: The Perfect Storm (2000)

Inspired by real events, The Perfect Storm is a melancholy ode to fishermen and a life spent battling the hidden dangers of the ocean in search of a livelihood. Director Wolfgang Petersen combines nature's fury with a human-centred drama that keeps memorable characters ahead of the raging special effects.

It's 1991, and the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts has for generations served as the home base to a fleet of swordfishing boats. Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney) has been riding a recent streak of rotten luck, his boat the Andrea Gail bringing in a lot less fish than expected for owner Bob Brown (Michael Ironside). Although it's late in the season, Billy decides to set out for one more run, hoping to turn his luck around. His crew members are unenthusiastic about another exhausting fishing excursion, but they need the money. Among them is Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg), who is planning to settle down with girlfriend Christina Cotter (Diane Lane), and although she begs him not to leave her again, he joins Billy for the extra cash.

With the Andrea Gail far out on the water as Billy searches for the perfect spot to snag the big fish, three different weather systems collide in the North Atlantic, creating a mammoth storm. Billy and his men make the decision to attempt a return home through the storm rather than wait it out at sea and watch their catch rot. Meanwhile, the leisure yacht Mistral is caught in the storm, and the three crew members need to be rescued in treacherous conditions by the Coast Guard. A Coast Guard helicopter subsequently runs out of fuel, ditches in the stormy seas, and the rescuers themselves are in need of a rescue.

By necessity, The Perfect Storm fills in a lot unknown gaps about the last journey of the Andrea Gail. Little is actually confirmed about what transpired on the boat's final journey, and given the relative freedom afforded by the absence of a historical record, the William D. Wittliff script, adapting the book of the same name by Sebastian Junger, imagines a moving scenario of tension, errors, conflicts, heroism and sacrifice.

The wisdom of including the story of the Mistral and the subsequent ditching of the Coast Guard rescue helicopter as part of The Perfect Storm's narrative is debatable. In real life the yacht that serves as inspiration for this incident was called the Satori, and of course a lot more is known about its rescue, and the subsequent drama of the Coast Guard needing to rescue their own after the chopper ditching. But in the context of The Perfect Storm, the Mistral story is introduced deep into the movie, almost as an afterthought, and generally takes away from the tragedy unfolding on the Andrea Gail. The crew of the Mistral (despite the presence of Karen Allen) and the Coast Guard rescuers remain largely faceless, stock characters, compared to the depth afforded to the crew on-board the Andrea Gail.

When the focus is on the fishermen and their lives, The Perfect Storm benefits from a stellar cast bringing to life the passion and yearning of the men and women who live and die by the sea. George Clooney finally found his breakthrough big-screen role as Captain Billy Tyne, a desperate man determined to risk everything to triumph over a devastating losing streak. Clooney's achievement is in making Billy likable despite him being down-on-his-luck and not very sociable. Both Clooney and Billy spring to life when the ocean demands the highest level of attention, and Clooney brings to the role the raw humanity of a most imperfect man facing his most cataclysmic challenge.

Mark Wahlberg as the young rookie Bobby Shatford provides able support as a willing and more than capable crew mate looking to make a few more dollars to kick-start  his domestic life. John C. Reilly as Murph is the veteran presence, perhaps what Bobby can look forward to several years on. Murph stokes a nasty feud with another crew member on board the Andrea Gail, in another example of The Perfect Storm not shying away from portraying the crusty edges of men who live in tight quarters for weeks on end in search of large smelly fish. Captaining a sister boat is Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Linda Greenlaw, delivering a touching performance as Billy's soul sister and the last person to make radio contact with the Andrea Gail.

Back on shore, Diane Lane as Bobby's girlfriend and Janet Wright as his mother (and local inn keeper) represent the home front, and they add greatly to completing the fabric that defines a fishing community.

The cinematography by John Seale and the special effects crew masterfully recreate an angry ocean full of mountainous waves, furiously seeking to destroy any ship that dares to stray into the path of the hurricane. The Perfect Storm creates an intimidating canvass, with the fierce chill and threat of watery death flooding off the screen. The Andrea Gail battled against the odds and against gigantic waves, and she helped provide a lasting memorial for the power of nature and the men and woman who routinely venture into the teeth of danger.

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Movie Review: Terminator Salvation (2009)

The good guys are very macho, the bad guys are very macho, the women are very macho, and the machines are (of course) very macho. In the post-apocalyptic Terminator vision, those who do not drip machismo will be dropped dead and abandoned among the carnage of broken buildings, broken cars, and just plain broken civilization.

The fourth episode of this franchise that started all the way back in 1984, Salvation takes us for the first time into the future that was only hinted at in previous episodes.

The year is 2018, and human soldiers lead by John Connor (a macho Christian Bale) are fighting the war for the survival of the human race against the SkyNet machines that launched Judgement Day on the planet. A mysterious stranger called Marcus (a very macho Sam Worthington) drops into the battle, and we know from the movie's opening sequence that Marcus was a death row inmate who donated his body to science back in 2003.

You would need to be very new to the Terminator concept not to suspect that some re-incarnation of Marcus has been sent through time, this time forwards, probably with some ill intentions towards Connor.

The overall battle between humans and machines then becomes the backdrop to the evolving tension between John and Marcus, with the usual complications thrown in such as major disagreements between Connor and his submarine-dwelling commanders, and a bond that develops between Marcus and one of Connor's soldiers, female (but still macho) pilot Blair Williams (Moon Bloodgood).

Bloodgood has probably the most interesting character and performance on display, but unfortunately she fades away due to neglect from the final third of the movie.

Terminator Salvation does only a few things, but it does them well. Director McG ensures that things blow up with big bangs. The war equipment looks authentically grimy, and the set-design is quite brilliant. Those familiar with the computer game Fallout 3 will instantly recognize the striking similarities in the look and feel of the movie.

Terminator Salvation does not pay too much attention to characterizations or any attempts at developing much of a emotional centre of gravity. The characters remain for the most part cardboard cut-outs with dialogue lines inspired by comic books, or previous movies. Michael Ironside as the overall leader of the resistance mails in a performance -- and dialogue -- that he has mass-produced a good dozen times in much worse productions. And there is even a mute long-haired kid here who seems to have time-warped straight in from the set of Mad Max 2 (1981).

Taken as almost a straight-ahead war story with a bit of routine human drama tossed in, Terminator Salvation certainly delivers, but do expect a bit of a hollow spot where the soul of the movie usually resides.







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