robocop4 Reviews

United 93 (2006)

The Must-See Movie of the Decade

[10/10 · 30 April 2006]

I would love to have Hollywood finally make a film (or twenty!) that shows jihadists, in all their demented villainy, being opposed and defeated by, say, courageous U.S. and/or N.A.T.O. special-ops forces.

However, in the meantime, I'll gladly take "United 93." The faux vérité approach -- which has been used and abused since at least "N.Y.P.D. Blue" in the early '90s -- is old hat to audiences, but never has it been more effectively employed than here by Greengrass. During the last 10-20 minutes of the movie, my heart was pounding so fast and my hands were shaking so much that I feared I was going to have a coronary. I found myself trying to WILL from my theater seat the passengers of Flight 93 to make that last, final, desperate push over the terrorists, into the cockpit, and to the plane's controls. Of course, the passengers don't make it. And, of course, I knew this when I walked into the theater. But that didn't make it any less devastating when I saw it on screen.

I implore everyone to see this film early and often. If we don't send Hollywood the message that we're adults and that we're tired of mindless, P.C. escapism, we'll have no one to blame but ourselves when Hollywood continues to shovel celluloid junk (e.g. "R.V.") at us.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

In Defense of AVP

[8/10 · 21 October 2005]

While most critics have dripped acid on Paul Anderson's "Alien vs. Predator," apparently due to prima facie objections to the very idea of a non-courtroom-drama with the word "versus" in the title, I was pleasantly surprised by AVP.

Is AVP as great as 1986's "Aliens"? Nope. But I think comparing AVP to "Aliens" is to employ the wrong standard. AVP is not competing with that film, in much the same way that "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" was not competing with the sensational "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." No, "Star Trek VI" was competing with the largely reviled "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier." Similarly, AVP is really competing with the oppressively dark, fundamentally unappealing "Alien 3" and the strangely goofy, utterly unexciting "Alien Resurrection"; the last Predator movie, 1990's "Predator 2," was released so long ago and did such middling box office that it hardly figures in the popular imagination anymore.

Some have complained about AVP's characters, arguing that they're mere sketches compared to the colorful, indelible personalities that James Cameron provided us in "Aliens," and John McTiernan gave us in "Predator." While true, it's worth pointing out that the original "Alien" "suffers" from the same "problem," so much so that a defensive Ridley Scott once said, "The characters in 'Alien' are as defined as they need to be, no more and no less." Just as the characters in "Alien" were largely, nay, archetypically defined by their professions and their professionalism (or lack thereof), the characters in AVP are defined by their jobs and the proficiency with which they do them.

Some have also complained that many of AVP's characters are dispatched too quickly. However, that's part of what makes AVP interesting. It's a real throwback to horror films of yesteryear, films that weren't afraid to toss virtually everyone to the wolves. Just when you begin to think, "Oh, Anderson's spent too much time developing this character, giving him/her good lines and telling us stuff about his/her past, to just off him/her," that person buys it. It's delightfully perverse, and it's what the horror genre has historically been all about.

Then there are the complaints about the film's storyline, with some asserting that it's too simple (e.g. humans find buried pyramid; humans enter buried pyramid; sh*t hits fan) and others arguing that it overshoots the mark (e.g. humans enter buried pyramid and discover that it's remarkably complex, revealing all manner of information about the origins of human civilizations, namely that the titular Predators, much like the Monolith from "2001: A Space Odyssey," made a marked impact on the future course of man long ago). But I had few problems with the film's premise. Even the rather silly, pulpy quality of AVP's grander narrative conceits didn't bother me that much. (Then again, such conceits didn't really bother me in "Stargate" either.) And the simpler aspects of AVP's plot were its strongest suits, for they grounded the movie in a kind of gritty, easily understood "reality," the kind of reality that was very effective in John Carpenter's better action movies, from "Assault on Precinct 13" to "Escape from New York." Yes, it's true that AVP never achieves the epic heights of "Aliens," the best film from either franchise, a film so complex and dynamic that it required a running time of 137 minutes to tell its tale. But "Aliens" was, and remains, an exceedingly special film. "Aliens" is the like the cinematic equivalent of one of those out-sized rock songs from the 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"; AVP, at approximately 100 minutes in length, is more like a Ramones tune: short but sweet.

In fact, two of AVP's biggest problems seem to be the result of breakneck-speed sloppiness: 1. the Alien life-cycle is inexplicably abbreviated, with chestbursters making their nasty debuts in tens of minutes rather than tens of hours; 2. the Predators' long-range weapons (e.g. spears and throwing stars) are acid-resistant, yet their close-quarters matériel (e.g. wrist blades and body armor) are not.

Regarding Issue One: I've read that Anderson accounted for this in the film, explaining that the Predators had injected bizarre hormones into the Alien Queen they'd captured to seed their battlegrounds, causing the eggs she produced to contain embryos that matured far more quickly than usual. This expository material was allegedly ordered cut by Fox because they felt it needlessly slowed the pacing of the film. If true, Anderson must be given a pass by the legions of angry fan-boys who've ripped him a new one over this.

Regarding Issue Two: According to fan-boys familiar with the AVP comic books, this is explained therein thusly: the Predators must earn every acid-resistant armament they receive. So if the Preds in the AVP movie didn't have acid-resistant wrist blades or body armor, that's on them. But it's also on Anderson to have somehow explained this in his film. However, I'm willing to let Anderson slide here, as the best characters in AVP to have provided this explanation were the Preds themselves, a decidedly taciturn group of individuals.

All in all, AVP did its job. With the exception of a handful of (de rigueur) overly-jittery/super-slow shutter-speed shots in otherwise well-made action sequences, AVP is a polished piece of work. Thanks to Anderson's direction, the ADI FX Workshop was forced to abandon the Mr. Hanky-looking design of the creature from "Alien 3," as well as the beastly, overly slimy appearance of the extraterrestrials from "Alien Resurrection," and provide the silver screen with its best looking aliens since 1986. Moreover, if you can't bring yourself to buy it when Sanaa Lathan's Lex throws in with and throws down alongside the last-standing Big Ugly Mother, nor get certifiably juiced when the Alien Queen finally extricates herself from Predator-imposed bondage and goes on an angry rampage worthy of a T-Rex in a "Jurassic Park" movie, then I'm afraid AVP simply isn't for you.

Buffalo Soldiers (2001)

Yawn.

[1/10 · 25 July 2003]

Another (way past) post-Vietnam era Hollywood film that gleefully trashes the American military and its soldiers?

My, how original!

If IMDB.com would allow me to give this film zero stars, I would.

RoboCop: Prime Directives (2001)

Prime Dissatisfactions

[1/10 · 6 May 2001]

On the first two RoboCop feature films, the producers hired renowned mime artist and choreographer Moni Yakim to help Peter Weller, who played the title role in those pictures, get a handle on the role's intense physicality, and the investment paid off handsomely. On "Prime Directives," however, apparently such expenditures were deemed superfluous and eliminated from the budget. Yet, considering that RoboCop is the miniseries' main character, the character needing to be lavished with the most attention--especially with regard to issues of movement and ambulation, so as to ensure precise execution and verisimilitude--such an oversight on director Julian Grant's part is simply beyond the pale. The sad result: Page Fletcher, who plays RoboCop in "PD," spends most of his time stumbling and bumbling about in the RoboSuit, fists eternally and inexplicably clenched, wildly swinging his arms to and fro in a bizarre echo of Rock'em Sock'em Robots, and walking as if there were a warm, freshly laid dump permanently ensconced in his RoboDrawers.

To add insult to injury, RoboCop's makeup FX in "PD" really leave something to be desired. They are so bad, in fact, that the RoboHelmet-less Fletcher looks like Mandy Patinkin from "Alien Nation," replete with what appears to be a shopworn Tupperware bowl spray-painted a drab gray and hastily slapped onto the back of Fletcher's ridiculously enlarged noggin. What's worse, as the miniseries goes on, Fletcher's RoboSuit seems to fit him less and less snugly. At one point, when RoboCop visits his own gravesite, the suit's chin-guard seems to be floating independently from the rest of the RoboHelmet, careening away from Fletcher's jaw by several maddening inches.

Furthermore, those who are familiar with Julian Grant's decidedly unimpressive B-movie oeuvre (most especially the utterly dreadful direct-to-video "Airborne") know all too well his pronounced limitations as an action filmmaker. Grant fancies himself an ace action director, in the mold of George ("Mad Max") Miller and James ("The Terminator") Cameron. However, unlike those esteemed cinematic kineticists, Grant has absolutely no sense of timing or geography when it comes to arranging action set pieces. To be perfectly candid, his "style," as it were, is actually more in line with that of an unadorned hack like Roger ("Battlefield Earth") Christian. Grant's action scenes go on and on and on, in a way that oscillates between being boringly redundant and spatially confusing. Grant will repeat the same information time and again, such as having a procession of nameless, faceless bad guys meet repetitive, cookie-cutter deaths at the hands (or rather guns) of the good guys, and all the while within settings where it's difficult to tell where the bad guys are positioned at and/or coming from with respect to the good guys.

The verdict: 2 out of 4 stars.