action

Fast & Furious 6: exciting chases, silliness and two strong women

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Michelle Rodriguez in FAST & FURIOUS 6

Driven to an air-conditioned theater by a weekend heat wave, I surprised myself by seeing Fast & Furious 6 (just “Furious 6” in the title sequence).  Now you do not go to a franchise action thriller for strong characters, profound themes or plausible stories; instead you’re looking for fights and chases (and, in my case, air conditioning).  Fortunately, Fast & Furious 6 delivers the cool chase scenes, doesn’t take itself too seriously and offers a couple of strong female performances to boot.

In a smoldering performance, Michelle Rodriguez steals the movie whenever she’s on screen.  I was also delighted to see Gina Carano, whom I liked so much last year in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. Carano is a mixed martial arts star in real life, so she adds authenticity to an action picture. 

Then there’s the dialogue and the plot. One team member says, as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson approaches unseen from behind, “Why do I smell baby oil?”.  That is the ONLY line in Fast & Furious 6 that I hadn’t heard in a movie before.  The movie’s climactic set piece is over 20 minutes of frantic action as an airplane is trying to take off, and I calculated that the runway needed to be at least 68 miles long.  But, because Furious 6 shows the good sense not to linger on anything for longer than a second or two, we don’t mind.

Some female viewers will gag at a male fantasy aspect of Fast & Furious 6.  It’s not a sexual, but a gender behavioral fantasy – the women characters always release the men from any emotional drama.  When a guy opts to leave his wife and their baby for a totally unnecessary suicide mission, she accedes, affirming that he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.  When the hero finds and rescues his old girlfriend, his current girlfriend is a good sport and steps aside with no hard feelings.  It’s a Low Maintenance and No Drama world for the guys. This is the most implausible part of Fast & Furious 6.

Rodriguez: outstanding.  Chases and Carano: good.  Everything else: silly but harmless.

The Dark Knight Rises: Unfortunately, over 2 hours when Catwoman is not on the screen

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Well, there’s 2 hours and 44 minutes that I’ll never get back. First, the good news about The Dark Knight Rises.  Anne Hathaway excels as the best Catwoman ever, and the banter between her and Batman crackles.  There are some exceptional CGI effects of Manhattan’s partial destruction. There’s a cool personal hovercraft, the Bat, and an equally cool combo motorcycle/cannon, the Batpod.

Unfortunately, that’s all the good stuff in director Christopher Nolan’s newest chapter of the Batman saga.  The problem is the screenplay, dotted with the corniest of dialogue and laden with pretentious Batman mythology.  When Catwoman tells him “you don’t owe these people any more! You’ve given them everything!”, Batman solemnly replies, “Not everything. Not yet.”

The plot simply exists to transition from action set piece to action set piece.  There are too many times, when a good guy is in peril, that another good guy pops up utterly randomly and just in the nick of time – too many even for a comic book movie.

With her bright wit and lithe sexiness, Hathaway fares far better than her colleagues.   Christian Bale continues his odd husky growl as Batman.   As the villain, an uber buffed Tom Hardy glowers from behind a fearsome mask.  The hackneyed screenplay wastes the rest of the extremely talented cast:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman.  We barely glimpse Liam Neeson.  The captivating Juno Temple is apparently dropped into the story just enough to set her up for the sequel with Gordon-Levitt.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises in IMAX, which worked well for the long shots of NYC and made the fight scenes more chaotic.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: blood-sucking, irony and not much else

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OK, so the filmmakers turned the most revered statesman of the 19th Century into an action hero.  I am a Lincoln buff, and I chose not to be offended and to go with it, but…  Seth Grahame-Smith adapted the screenplay from his best-selling novel about Abe avenging his mother by running amok through the vampires with a silver-edged axe. 

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter  has two things going for it.  The first is vampire-killing action scenes and lots of ’em.  The second is the silly irony of putting Abraham Lincoln in a vampire movie.  The silliness is enhanced by the vampire-killing Lincoln being as stiff and humorless as the marble statue in the Lincoln Memorial.  (The real Lincoln was earthy, down-to-earth and very funny.)

Unfortunately, that’s just not enough.  I’ll save you some time and give you the abridged version.  Vampire pops up, gets killed by Abe.  Repeat.

3D or not 3D?  If you MUST see this movie, eschew the extra cost and see it in 2D.