Today's Mini-Review: Black Hawk Down

Black Hawk Down

Rating: ****/*****, or 7/10

Ridley Scott's account of the U.S. Marine incident in Somalia of October 3, 1993. Scott provides the drama, producer Jerry Bruckheimer ensures the expected carnage and explosions (plus a bunch of actual Black Hawk helicopters!). A wonderfully diverse cast of both top actors (Tom Sizemore, Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard) and former unknowns (among them, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Tom Hardy, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and Orlando Bloom) portrays the various Army Rangers and their commanding officers, who set out to perform a mission that soon spins out of everybody's control, resulting in a spectacular but horrific onslaught. Dispatched to arrest several high ranking officers of a vicious local warlord in Mogadishu, their objective swiftly turns into a basic fight to get out alive as the soldiers find themselves severely outnumbered when confronted with thousands of angry Somalis. All hell breaks loose on the city streets as a humongous firefight ensues that will witness several Americans gutted publicly and not one but two Black Hawk helicopters taken out. Not to mention the hundreds upon hundreds of Somali footsoldiers that got themselves killed in their attempt to simply overrun their highly trained opponents instead of going about their business with any tactical sense. Starting things at a surprisingly slow pace, an eerie calm before the storm you know will follow, Scott introduces the platoon of sympathetic young soldiers at his leisure, portraying them as fairly naive and rather bored by the lack of action, clearly not entirely grasping the gravity of the tense political situation they're in. But then, how could they predict things would get this bad, considering it wasn't supposed to go down the way it ended up doing? The moment they go in, there's no more time for levity and laughs since what follows is two hours of non-stop action where these boys have to deal with everything their military education had hoped them to avoid. Scott proves completely uncompromising, revealing the absolute brutality of the events in all its graphic horror, resulting in a harrowing viewing experience that's clearly not suited for everybody: if you're uncomfortable at the sight of bloody operations without sedatives or any type of gory dismemberment, you had better stay away from this film. As sudden as it started the fight is over and we're simply left numb and combat fatigued, wondering how things could have gotten so terribly out of hand so fast (even though the mission wasn't actually a failure by definition, as its goal was secured!). Despite its powerful punch, the movie tends to feel monotonous after 80 minutes of relentless gunfire, while it's a shame the Somali point of view is only briefly adressed (since 90% of the Somalis in this film end up as cannon fodder, it would have been nice to know what they thought they were fighting for). Nevertheless, Sir Ridley has clearly proven he's just as adapt at making daring, gripping war movies as he is at historical epics and science fiction pictures. Though there's little doubt audiences will prove as adapt at sitting through this cinematic battle from hell without any sense of shock and horror.

Starring: Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett

Directed by Ridley Scott

USA/UK: Revolution Studios, 2001

Shooting people up, Advanced Class

The Expendables 2: ***/*****, or 7/10

Tony Scott may have jumped off a bridge, thus leaving the movie industry with one less capable action director, but fortunately there's still some of those left. Simon West for example. Though generally not as well known, nor as experienced in shooting pure action judged from the number of action films in his repertoire, with movies like Con Air (1997), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and the recent Jason Statham flick The Mechanic (2011), it's far from unreasonable to state the guy has some knowledge of things that go boom. So when Sylvester Stallone decided to stick to writing and acting while letting go of the director's chair that seemed to fit him well enough for his ultimate action movie The Expendables two years ago, hiring West for the job wasn't the most illogical decision. However, judging from the final product, Stallone would have done well to encourage West to get more innovative, considering The Expendables 2 improves little upon its predecessor: a solid action movie is West's contribution to the franchise, but considering the sheer number of renowned action stars participating in Stallone's second ode to the action genre as a whole, the sequel's approach to things feels like a routine is being established instead of new routes being taken. That routine apparently revolves around action stars getting together and shooting people up.

The movie's main focus seems to be the expansion of bit parts of characters from the first film played by screen icons Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Wilis, plus the introduction of several new characters played by muscle movie veterans Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris to the already impressive line-up of (near) legendary action stars from the first film, to further support Stallone's hypothesis that old dogs can still pull off worthwhile tricks that manage to draw huge audience numbers. His point was well proven by the success of The Expendables, making The Expendables 2 feel more like an obligatory Hollywood cash-in than a sincere attempt to outdo what was done before for the audience's entertainment. Nevertheless, The Expendables 2 at least succeeds in delivering ample amounts of gun fights and screen violence paired to often successfully timed moments of humor and referencing the action classics the movie means to pay homage to, which is what most spectators will expect, and what they will get.

The movie starts in medias res, as we follow Stallone's pack of mercenaries – and it's really Stallone's, since few people will ever remember the names of the characters after leaving their theaters, considering they are played by so many larger-than-life people – on a job rescuing a wealthy Chinese entrepreneur from the clutches of nameless Nepalese thugs, in a spectacular raid on their heavily fortified facility involving heavy machinery and man sized artillery, opening the film with a huge bang as our heroes shoot down and blow up endless rows of antagonists in an expected and desired orgy of gun violence, followed by an adrenaline rushed jungle river chase (which saw one stunt man dead and another one crippled) ending in a decently sized explosion to round things up. If you were wondering, the movie is rated R where the previous installment was only PG-13, thus allowing the director more freedom to insert appropriate levels of gore and blood into the film, all for the better. At this point the film has only run for about 15 of its 103 minutes, so it takes a moment to re-establish the characters, introduce some new ones and specify their upcoming mission, plus giving the viewers a much needed moment to catch their breath.

Centerpiece of the first half of The Expendables 2 is rookie team member Billy the Kid (played by Liam Hemsworth: despite his role in The Hunger Games, this is really his first action film, making him feel as much out of place in this movie judging from his experience as an actor as his character feels out of place on the team for his young age), protegée to team leader Barney Ross (Stallone, mumbling his lines as unintelligibly as usual), who despite his excellent sniper abilities decides this is not the life for him and tells his mentor he means to retire soon. However, when the band of extremely broad shouldered brothers find themselves with a new assignment, courtesy of shady CIA operative Church (Wilis), who they owe some money after the events of the first film, to retrieve a brief case from a downed plane in Albania, Billy's loyalty compels him to join them. They are also accompanied by Maggie, an expert on Church's payroll: Chinese actress Yu Nan gets the seemingly thankless job of representing girl power amidst the humongous amounts of testosterone going around, but manages to keep up surprisingly well, giving the occasional witty rebuttal when confronted with near sexist remarks from her new team members. The brief case is easily found, but soon lost to the villain of the piece, a bad guy simply named 'Jean Vilain', played enthusiastically by Jean-Claude Van Damme despite his character's feeble screen name: fully in tone with Stallone's straightforward way of thinking, why bother with intricate designations when you can call a spade a spade? Vilain makes it clear he's not to be messed with and lives up to his name when he takes the team's prize and leaves Billy dead, thus setting the stage for the veterans' quest for vengeance.

Revenge alone is too ignoble an objective for such a notable group of exemplary action stars, so the plot raises the stakes by revealing the brief case contained the exact location of a former Soviet depot in Bulgaria that houses five tons of plutonium Vilain intends to sell despite its threat to the world's balance of power. To make him even more of a ruthless bastard, he utilizes slave labor to dig out the plutonium, so the Expendables' mission is to free the slaves, secure the goods and avenge their comrade. In truth it matters little what the exact mission is, so long as the stage is set for a large string of overly loud gun fights, some neat display of martial arts and general fisticuffs and a decent amount of one-liners mixed in, most of them acknowledging the actors' former entries into the action genre (with the most obvious and funniest remarks referring to the Die Hard and Terminator franchises). In a moderately epic, drawn out conflict staged at an air port the team of good guys, now joined by Wilis, Norris and Schwarzenegger, square off against the legion of bad guys, culminating in a vicious mano-a-mano confrontation between Stallone and Van Damme, kicking each other's teeth in like two Roman gladiators. Needless to say who wins the day, since The Expendables 3 has already been widely announced.

In the middle of all the action, the main attractions of The Expendables 2 regrettably also turn out to be its main flaws. Since the success of the first movie was based mostly around the large number of famous action stars getting together for a mother-of-all-action-films flick, The Expendables 2 clearly needed to outdo its predecessor by gathering some more noted heavyweights to join the fun. The full line-up of action stars of the film now consists of Stallone, Van Damme, Wilis, Schwarzenegger, Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Randy Couture and Terry Crews and with so many vets gracing the screen, it'll come as no surprise not everybody gets an equal chance to shine. Li, an established team member in the first film, exits the movie immediately after the opening mission has been completed, not to be seen or even mentioned again, while Couture, Crews and Norris are left with little to do during the whole piece, and Lundgren largely has been reduced to comic relief (which thankfully he pulls off well). It makes you wonder why the movie needed an action virgin like Hemsworth at all, considering his role could have gone to one of the older and more accomplished actors, thus offering a chance to make the narrative feel more poignant upon the moment of his death. The same can be said for Yu Nan's role (though it's laudable West and Stallone provided the opportunity for her big break on the international market), which could also have gone to one of the other actors in favor of balancing the existing amount of characters properly instead of relegating them to the side line in favor of even more characters joining the stage. Wilis and Schwarzenegger are no longer restricted to playing mere cameos as they were before but are finally offered the chance to get their hands dirty: they do so vigorously, but their status as (former?) A-list superstars is mostly applied to referencing their most memorable movies more often than feels appropriate, at times making their presence feel forced despite generating a few more laughs. At least Van Damme gets the opportunity to explore Vilain's savage villainy in much more detail, making his climactic final fight with Stallone work on the intended levels. As was the case with the predecessor, at the heart of The Expendables 2 still lies the camaraderie between Stallone and Statham, with the pair of them exchanging both witticisms and drama, acknowledging the fact the torch has successfully been passed from Stallone's age of action stars to Statham's more recent generation, with relentless love and understanding for the genre and its conventions clearly driving the both of them. The more things change, the more they stay the same after all, and both sides of the coin are amply represented in West's The Expendables 2 as much as they were in Stallone's own The Expendables.

The Expendables 2 is a double confirmation of the age gold adage that more of a good thing isn't necessarily better. First, it's good to see more familiar faces from past glory again, but if the talent we all know to be underlying said faces remains underused, little has been accomplished. The movie is running for an entertaining 103 minutes, but could have benefited from another 15 or 20 minutes fleshing out the likes of Norris, Couture, Crews, Li and Lundgren some more, especially considering that, second, like the first Expendables film, the movie still feels lacking something in the action department, even though that sounds incredible. Fact is, the first 15 minutes of the film basically say it all, showcasing the Expendables' efficiency as a team to great effect – with each team member getting the opportunity to display his fighting skills more or less equally – in an ever expanding rollercoaster ride of an action sequence, with a big explosion to tie it all up. The rest of the movie simply can't live up to this opening, despite throwing in more stars, more gags and more action, and even more plot (which makes you consider just how much, or how little, of that is needed in a film like this). Though it still entertains tremendously, the audience keeps waiting for a staggeringly huge motherfucking explosion that never comes.

Director West can't be blamed for his film's shortcomings, which simply lie in the movie's changing intentions as it finds itself transformed into a franchise trilogy – which it didn't start out to be – changing from paying homage to past glory, to a series of films revolving around ever greater numbers of action stars joining each other in referencing eachother's oeuvre as they dispatch large scores of bad guys. With The Expendables 3 already in the pipe line, Stallone would do well to take a closer look at the direction the franchise has taken and the effect this has had on both the audience's expectations and the overall coherence of the films proper, before signing on more colleagues the likes of Nicolas Cage and Steven Seagal to further relive the good ol' days. After all, the audience is not expendable, and it's still craving that giant stupendously big-ass explosion...

And watch the trailer here:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/lions_gate/theexpendables2/

Someone please sink this battleship...

Battleship: Rating **/*****, or 3/10

It seems the alien invasion subgenre of science fiction is in full decline as far as quality is concerned, though when it comes to quantity, it's rarely done better. The last few years numerous alien invasion films have invaded our movie theatres trying to rule the box-office, but most of them failed due to humanity's natural resilience against bad movies. Last year's examples include Skyline, Cowboys & Aliens, The Darkest Hour and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but on the 'badness' scale none of these were a match for the stupendously dismal World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles, which chronicled the fight of a rag-tag group of marines against a vastly superior extraterrestrial intelligence. It was a complete defiance of logic and a total waste of everybody's time and money, particularly for the audience – okay, so I can get in for free, but I'd still like those two hours back...– Now Battleship comes sailing into the cinemas to pull off the same trick (i.e., bore the audience some more at the expense of their no doubt hard earned cash that had better be spend on something more worthwhile), except it takes the fight to the seas instead of rehashing the land based routine. And in the process it manages to defile the name of a classic board game, on which it claims to have been based, though the connection is hardly ever present, other than in the simple presence of a battleship.

Apparently using the concept of one fleet of ships being pitched against another and taking each other out was either not politically correct in the current climate, or the studio executives considered it too boring. So the line of thought seems to have been that if there's no human adversaries to combat, the threat must come from outer space. Battleship opens with an expositional scene explaining the existence of large radio telescopes on Hawaii which are used to send signals to a distant solar system that might contain an Earth like planet. Lo and behold, the signals are received and the resident aliens return our call of hospitality by sending in an invasion force which crashes into the Pacific – except for one starship which hits downtown Hong Kong instead, resulting in the typical levels of destruction à la Armageddon, spectacular but devoid of emotion – around the same time a huge international naval exercise is underway in that area, featuring participants from many countries, and of course led by the good ol' United States ready to gallantly defend our freedom from foreign agressors seeking to take it from us (think Independence Day, except with less impressive results on all fronts).

Naturally, a face must be put on the heroic side to make the resulting drama (what little of it there is amidst all the action anyway) feel compelling, and that face belongs to Taylor Kitsch, in the role of Lieutenant Alex Hopper. Kitsch recently managed to save Mars from internal political turmoil by uniting warring factions against a common enemy in the epic space opera John Carter, so this next task should prove easy enough for him. Alex is kind of a rebel, a loudmouth screw-up with problems adhering to authority, who is about to get kicked out of the navy, much to the chagrin of his more responsible and successful older brother Stone Hopper (portrayed by everybody's favorite True Blood vampire actor Alexander Skarsgard, no fangs) who hoped the navy would provide some much needed stability for his loose gun kid sibling. To complicate matters, Alex is madly in love with the daughter of Admiral Shane (Liam Neeson in a typically commanding performance, something we're used to in his case), so the admiral holds him in great contempt and is all too eager to dismiss him from the service. Fortunately for Alex, aliens conveniently come and provide an opportunity to prove his worth and set things right, saving his love life and his career.

Warning! Here be spoilers! During the navy war games, strange objects are spotted in the ocean, at which point the admiral dispatches three vessels to investigate, including Alex's. Upon closer inspection, the objects turn out to be (very digital) alien spaceships which immediately deploy a huge force field, which envelops the Hawaii islands, and cuts the fleet off from the three destroyers locked within, after which a cat and mouse game ensues between the human and alien warships involving a lot of gunfire and explosions. Why the aliens can't simply protect themselves with separate force fields instead of proving to be all too easy to destroy with simple cannon fire is just one of the many questions the conflict raises over the next hour and a half. Within ten minutes two out of three navy ships have been destroyed and all officers including bloodsucker Eric Northman have been killed off, so Alex gets his chance to shine and kick some alien ass, accompanied by his distrusting crew who give him the benefit of the doubt only to find he can do the job after all. Among the ranks we find the recording artist Rihanna, offering some female empowerment in her first film role. Don't worry, she doesn't sing, and neither does she do much acting.

The aliens' interest in the Hawaii islands, other than their stunning natural beauty and fantastically sensual beaches of course, is focused on the presence of the aforementioned telescopes, which the aliens mean to commandeer so they can call in reinforcements from their home planet, since their space craft downed in China apparently was the only ship capable of communicating with home base (yeah, that makes perfect sense, if you take your audience to consist solely of morons). The action of Battleship therefore is not limited to the ocean, but also witnesses a struggle on land between the aliens and a small group of valiant braves consisting of Alex's girlfriend, a local telescope scientist and a crippled marine with prosthetic legs, attempting to foil the evil schemes of the invaders. Of course the girlfriend is total eye candy, the scientist is a stereotypical hairy nerd who turns to cowardice (after all, science created this mess which the navy must now clean up) and the ex-marine feels like an uncomfortable attempt to give credit to the many battle scarred troops in the armed forces who might not be compatible with the hard business of soldiery anymore but can still prove to be useful human beings when it comes down to it. A noble sentiment, but not the best time to express it if you want the audience to take things seriously.

The movie proceeds to press the latter point too much when the plot calls for a new ship to save the day after the three destroyers have met the fate their class name suggests they should have done to the enemy. Only one true battleship remains, the near legendary USS Missouri, and though it's a museum piece she's still ready for action, as is the sturdy crew of very old veterans who preserved her and get called upon for active duty once more. And so the movie reaches its lowest point when we see these seniors walk down the decks in excessive slow motion as truly heroic characters, reporting for duty in order to save the day. Any sense of seriousness this movie might have offered before this point now gets completely undone in a single moment of utter camp, while it remains unclear whether this is what director Peter Berg (also responsible for the not so funny superhero spoof Hancock) intended.

And so the final battle for the fate of the planet begins, when the Missouri squares of against the vile extra-terrestrials all by itself guns fully blazing. It proves to be as tiresome and overly loud a confrontation as the rest of them, and all too soon forgotten when the lights in the theatre go on. In fact, though the action might deliver some minor entertainment during the course of the movie, none of it proves memorable, also due to the obvious levels of computer generated imagery that never makes the invaders, be it the aliens themselves or their vessels, feel convincingly real. What's worse, in the heat of battle even the battleships feel overly pixelized at times. The design of the extra-terrestrial aggressors is also lacking originality, except for the silly beard like appendages on their face which makes the threat and thus the film itself that much harder to take seriously (if the platoon of old folks hadn't ruined it completely yet). And when you take into consideration that their motives for attacking humanity are never explained and clearly badly executed, it's obvious Battleship is yet another pointless addition to the plethora of lame alien invasion films that have plagued moviegoers for the last few years. Being based on a much beloved board game does not excuse studio executives to regurgitate their recent failures.

The original Battleship board game was a game of wits and skill, but the resulting movie employs neither and appears to be nothing but a haphazard attempt to out-Bay Michael Bay by applying his noisy and irritating style of action to yet another Hasbro owned toy franchise (as if the Transformers trilogy wasn't headache inducing enough), undoubtedly also intended to sell more Hasbro products. The latter might not be a bad suggestion, since saving the money for two tickets for this film can buy you the board game instead, which is guaranteed to make for more fun for two than watching the Battleship movie could ever hope to achieve.

Oh well, at least we still have The Avengers to remind us alien invasion films can still be done right occasionally...

And watch the trailer here:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/battleship/

Armageddon

Rating: **/*****, or 4/10

Overly noisy and bombastic action spectacle featuring the imminent demise of our planet by a giant asteroid, so an unlikely group of oil drillers is send into space to drill a hole in this threat and plant a nuclear bomb into it so it can be blown up in space before it kills us all. Though the movie features a deliciously good cast and plenty of action, its at times completely asinine plot, cheesy jokes, focus on loud explosions and abundance of annoying moments of blatant American patriottism clearly betray this film to be yet another obnoxious Michael Bay product, dragging on for 150 minutes from one silly catastrophe to another until we simply cannot care about the characters' plight any more. Too bad, since the film starts out pretty good with a convincing and spectacular action scene of small meteorites hitting landmarks around the globe. After that, the movie only goes progressively downhill, despite the solid score and the many fine actors involved.

Starring: Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi

Directed by Michael Bay

USA: Touchstone Pictures, 1998