I’ve never been a big fan of the “Inspirational Based-on-a-True-Story Sports Dramas”, honestly. They’re usually pretty formulaic from beginning to end, and Invincible is no exception to the rule. Still, I’m a guy who writes 99% of his reviews about Slasher flicks, and it’s hard to get more formulaic than that, so I went into this movie doing my best impression of an open mind. And, really, for what it was, Invincible was rather good.
In South Philly, 1976, the Eagles’ new coach, Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear), held open team try-outs for anybody who felt they had what it took to be an NFL player. A 30 yeard-old down-on-his-luck bartender with no college football experience, Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), attended the try-outs and proved to be the only contender Coach Vermeil would select to go to Eagles training camp. Older and less experienced than all the other players gunning for a spot on the team, Papale would prove to be a valuable asset to the Eagles through shear heart and force of will.
Yeah, it sounds like any other inspirational sports movie, like “the Rookie”, “Miracle” or “Without Limits”, and there honestly isn’t much setting it apart from those aforementioned titles. Yet, considering the genre, there honestly isn’t anything wrong with the movie. If you like football and sports movies then there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy Invincible.
During the “big game” against the Giants at the film’s finale, they pulled a “Without Limits”, having people watch the game on TV in-between cuts of Mark Wahlberg playing on the field. Just like in “Without Limits”, the footage they showed on the television was the actual archived game footage. I’ve always liked that effect and it’s a nice nod of respect to the real athletes the movie was based on. Also, Greg Kinnear played a spot-on Dick Vermeil. It’s almost scary how much he resembles the man both in appearance and presence.
So Invincible was formulaic and predictable, yet that’s what you expect from these sorts of movies and it delivered everything it advertised. Can’t say it really went wrong anywhere. It gets a B-. It’s not my kind of movie but I’m sure the people within its target audience will enjoy it.
Grade: B-
The Wizard
The Wizard, made in 1989, was a movie that tried to realize every kid of the era’s wet dream: traveling the open road, free from your parents, doing nothing but playing video games and earning cash. This movie is remembered best for its numerous video game references and blatant product placement and commercialism, but in all honesty, video games only factor into a portion of the actual plot.
Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) is a little boy with a strange fixation on “California”. He continuously runs away and gradually withdraws deeper and deeper into himself. Jimmy’s parents want to have him institutionalized, but Jimmy’s older brother, Corey (Fred Savage), won’t stand for it. Corey and Jimmy run away and head for California. Corey’s older brother, Nick (Christian Slater), and their father (Beau Bridges), chase after them across country, but have to contend with a bounty hunter who specializes in catching runaway children. While on the road, Jimmy and Corey meet up with Haley (Jenny Lewis), a streetwise young girl who helps them along their way. While traveling the open road, they discover that Jimmy is a video game prodigy (or as they call him, a “Wizard”) and decide to enter him into the Video Armageddon tournament in Los Angeles, where the prize is $50,000. But Jimmy has a lot of stiff competition, and getting there won’t be easy.
The video game angle is really just a backdrop for all the personal drama and family troubles, giving the impression that this is more than just a Nintendo commercial, as most people think of it. The talent assembled for the flick is really pretty good, to be honest. He may get a lot of jokes hurled his way these days, but in all sincerity, Fred Savage was a genuinely *good* child actor. Christian Slater does his usual “Jack Nicholson-lite” while Beau Bridges plays the determined and caring father nicely. It isn’t until the second half, really, that things start becoming heavily focused on spotlighting video games.
And, of course, that’s the real draw of this movie; the video game nostalgia. There’s Double Dragon, Ninja GaiDAN!!, Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, Super Mario Bros 2 and plenty more. Also, there’s the one game people remember most from this movie, the world premiere of Super Mario Bros 3. The Super Mario Bros 3 sequence at the end is a little irksome, mostly because they keep getting several facts wrong (this coming from a guy whose played the game about a million times), like calling World 1 Level 3 “World 2”, or Jimmy just somehow knowing exactly where the warp whistle in the fortress was (the only way people found THAT out was by reading Nintendo Power). And speaking of Nintendo Power, there are lots of references to it and the Nintendo Tips hotline.
But who could forget possibly the most dated video game element of the movie, the Power Glove. One of the movie’s “villains”, a rival video game pro named Lucas, uses the Power Glove to demonstrate how badass he is. He even goes so far as to say “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.” Oh, it was bad alright. *Real* bad.
The Wizard is a good kid’s movie but with limited appeal. Even with the recent DVD release it still falls below the radar of most sane human beings, only being remembered fondly by the gamer crowd. Still, if you’re a video gamer who was around during the reign of the NES and the existence of actual arcades which didn’t cater solely to the DDR crowd, then you’ll get a kick out of this movie. And even if you weren’t around at the time, if you like retro gaming then you’ll enjoy this.
The Wizard gets a B-. The story is pretty good for a kid’s take on “Rain Man”. The video game references are a great bonus.
Grade: B-
The Punisher: Review
No Punishment for The Punisher
Children of the 90’s may not have grown up with cinematic anti-heroes, but their presence is still felt in the vernacular. When you’re about go nuts on someone, you say that you’re going to go all Rambo on them. And Eye of the Tiger is still the universal theme song of the underdog who’s about to whoop someone. And hey, we even elected The Terminator as the governor of California. There is something to be said about our Charles Bronsons and Chuck Norrises who have defined the manly-man of the 1980’s. They are sort of like the boogiemen of cinema who punish evildoers in a world that is clearly black and white, and we praise them unashamedly.
We do not have a 90’s equivalent of that, so leave it up to director Jonathan Hensleigh and actor Thomas Jane to give us a whole new gun-toting vigilante for the 21st century.
The Punisher delivers. Plain and simple, the movie is a straight-up revenge tale that is not sugarcoated in CG effects, memorable fight scenes, or even a funky techno beat. No: The Punisher is a raw and gritty tale of one man’s war against those who murdered his family. It is not wrapped up with a pretty bow but rather a washed-out skull. Like an obituary, this is the type of film that does not leave a memorable impression but a morbid awareness.
Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) is an FBI agent who happens to kill the son of mob boss Howard Saint (John Travolta) on his last assignment. While at a family reunion, Castle’s entire family is slaughtered in a mob hit conducted by Saint’s men. Castle is left for dead but survives, only to return to Tampa to payback the Saints for what they did to his family.
Again, the movie is devoid of any real moral dilemma outside of the rhetorical question of how far a man can be pushed before he goes off the deep end and ruthlessly takes down his aggressors. It is a black and white issue: either you would cross the line, or you would not. Frank Castle definitely crosses the line and for the next two hours, we feel it too. It never justifies his actions or gives him the right, but it does follow him behind the shoulder to give you a feel of what it’s like to be a man so absorbed with justice that he would extend it to everyone outside those responsible for his family’s death. Thomas Jane is a perfect choice for Frank Castle, a deep-voiced stoic who delivers grim one-liners and whose gaze betrays a man driven to the edge. John Travolta takes a backseat as Howard Saint and is your run-of-the-mill villain who is just waiting to be offed at the end. Everyone else is just cannon fodder.
The movie succeeds in its apparent mediocrity but ends up feeling as if it has taken a banal plot and turned it into a paradigm of how revenge movies should be. Does it advocate violence? Not directly, though it gives us the guilty pleasure of following a man’s quest for immoral retribution. In its good guy versus bad guys return to basics, The Punisher has definitely given us an anti-hero for our day and age.
Grade: A
Unleashed: Review
Awesomeness Unleashed
Jet Li has not had a decent American movie since Kiss of the Dragon, and even that was not a decent example of the martial arts showmanship he is known to possess. We will forget Cradle 2 The Grave. And Hero was not an American movie.
Unleashed is a welcome return for Jet Li. Written by Luc Besson, you know that the plot will involve something rather simplistic and not your usual over-the-top intrigues that action movies are often fond of. The Hong Kong title of this film is Danny the Dog, which is probably more telling of its plot than Unleashed is. Bob Hoskins plays the bad man who happens to have a most unusual ace up his sleeve: a young man, Danny (Li), who has been trained from youth as a dog, conditioned to tear into people with ferocity and efficiency. Danny does this for the first part of the movie until he stumbles into a blind Morgan Freeman, the only person to show him any sense of human dignity. Oh, and how to play the piano. Something goes wrong and Danny finds himself under Freeman’s care, trying to fight off his conditioning and embracing humanity. And Freeman’s daughter.
There is a lot of extremely raw fighting. Unlike Li’s previous work which involves beautiful choreography and a ballet of punches and kicks, Unleashed gives us extremely brutal street-fighting that is not afraid to get down and dirty. Danny and co. are not ahsamed to resort to hair pulling, stomping, and pulverizing an opponent even when they’re down. It is only at the end that we see an outrageous close-quarters kung fu fight in an enclosed space (a bathroom stall). But the action of the film would not be complete in a Besson work if it was not accompanied by calm moments of character development. The familial love between Freeman, his daughter, and Danny is genuinely there for a reason. The master-and-commander relationship between Danny and Bob Hoskins is there for a reason as well. And to bridge both is Danny’s struggle for humanity and some pretty wicked fight scenes.
Unleashed is a welcome staple of Jet Li’s work for both the uninitiated and fans alike.
Grade: A-
The Hulk: Review
HULK Slap!
Marvel was having a good streak of movies beginning with 2000’s X-Men and reaching its climax with 2002’s summer slobberknocker, Spider-Man. In fact, the teaser trailer for Hulk debuted with Spider-Man and floored audiences with the prospect of seeing the angry, timid Bruce Banner finally revealing his cinematic colors.
It’s just a shame that this movie sucked the way it did. You thought Daredevil was bad? This movie makes Daredevil look like an Oscar winner.
Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) adds definite star power as the director of this Geek Tragedy. Forget Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, and Sam Elliott: this movie has that dude who directed that Chinese movie with the flying monks and the shallow love story! It’s too bad that most audience viewers didn’t know that the reason Ang Lee is here is because Chinese cinema has been using over-the-top special effects and roof-jumping superhumans for years now: Ang Lee was so low on the totem pole that he had to come here to make it seem new and innovative. His directing style leaves something to be desired, but for Hulk he does manage to toy with the self-awareness that this is a comic book movie. The entire movie utilizes shots that involve side-by-side panelling (like they did in the 60’s and 70’s, though this time it’s supposed to mimic the panel work in comic books) and the clever use of cuts and sweeps to transition from one scene to the next. It is entertaining for awhile but gets annoying rather quickly… that is, until Josh Lucas gets blown up and they hold his impacted body in a freeze frame for all of us to laugh at.
Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly have great chemistry and Sam Elliott is great as always, but their performance is lost in the ridiculously confusing storyline. As we all know, scientist Bruce Banner was caught in a blast while testing a bomb in the desert and was bathed by gamma radiation. Whenever he gets angry, he turns from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and morphs into the unstoppable, mentally retarded, destructive green machine known as the Hulk. Simple enough? The makers of this film thought that this was too archaic for modern sensibilities, so they decided to give it the same tune-up that was given to Spider-Man in 2002 (if you remember, Peter was bitten by a genetically altered spider instead of a radioactive one). In this modern spin, Bruce Banner has always had a messed up past and weird flashbacks. He’s experimenting with radiation and Nanomeds (?) to accelerate the healing factor in animals and something goes wrong, bathing him in gamma radiation. He’s not killed, though, and the rest is history… until we find out that Nick Nolte’s his dad, that he was experimented upon years ago in the desert, that daddy still loves him, that there’s killer Hulk dogs after him, that the military wants to stop him from jumping all over the American west, and yeah, the film gets pretty weird after that. The last twenty minutes have the most overly dramatic, forced dialogue I have heard in the last five years and is utterly painful to watch. And Nick Nolte as the Absorbing Man? Ugh.
The special effects are decent but not perfect, as the Hulk still runs like a green Roadrunner and stands out as a saturated behemoth framed against a stark desert background for most of the scenes. When the movie does shine, it’s due to the empathy we feel for the Hulk as a gentle giant, not due to clever special effects or an opportunity to present a comic book movie as a work of cinematic brilliance. Too bad we’re going to have to wait for a remake before we can see the Hulk finally made right.
Acting: B
Effects & Entertainment: B
Storyline: C-
Recommendability: C