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Video Reports
The Video Guy
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'Bad' guys and gals up the ante
Anti-heroes, bad boys and ne'er-do-wells always have been the kind of characters that grab our attention.
Through the years, they have gone from being fringe characters to leads in the majority of films released.
Why? Because it's much more fun to imagine ourselves as the "bad" guy or girl doing things rather than some milquetoast person who passively watches the action.
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Flying home from Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I decided to buy "Bringing Down The House" to read on the flight. It's a perfectly good airport book that doesn't require a lot of effort to finish.
On the other hand, watching 21 (PG-13 .1/2) is a chore -- the kind of movie that if you were to watch it on the plane, you'd be searching for the exit. None of the intrigue in the book about MIT-trained card counters is present. It's instead been replaced with generic cliches that make it entirely too predictable.
I know the book always is better than the movie, but some of the curious choices make things even worse. First off, changing the race of the characters from Asian to (mostly) white eliminates a key piece of the strategy in the true-life tale: the fact that the players' indeterminate race made them easier to avoid detection.
Jim Sturgess -- fighting his British accent all the way -- stars as Ben, a brainy senior recruited by his college professor (Kevin Spacey) to join a super-secret club of card counters that uses math skills to beat the house at blackjack in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
In the book, the Ben character is a normal kid who decides to join the crew for kicks. Of course, that's not "heroic" enough, even for an anti-hero, so in the film he's been recast as a poor kid trying to earn money for medical school instead of going into debt like the rest of us.
Of course, Ben can't even enjoy his bad-boy status. The story arc finds him living the high life, forgetting about his old friends, and angering other members of his team with his mad skills.
It all gets so ridiculous, with Laurence Fishburne showing up as a punch-happy heavy and the crew wearing insane costumes. Any visceral thrill of the scheme devolves into silliness generally reserved for Circus Circus.
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"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" was a modest success when it was released in 2004, but it was on DVD where the stoner comedy became a cult hit. It took four years for the inevitable sequel to arrive.
Unfortunately, HAROLD & KUMAR: ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY (R/unrated ..) is a comedown from the high of the first film.
The film picks up from the conclusion of the last, with Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) preparing to head to Amsterdam for a smoke-filled vacation, only to be arrested on the plane when they are mistaken for terrorists.
The titular escape takes no more than five minutes. The rest of the film details the pairs' misadventures as they try to clear their names and avoid capture by an overzealous FBI agent (Rob Corddry).
Cho and Penn have great chemistry, but they are done in by an unbelievably lazy script that finds our heroes taking on the Klan, joining in on a "bottomless party" and meeting up with a (poor) George Bush look-alike.
Hey, The Video Guy doesn't expect subtle, sophisticated humor from a movie that features a giant bag of weed, but this feels slapped together -- inexplicable, when you have four years to work on a script.
The saving grace turns out to be Neil Patrick Harris, who reprises his role as a man who loves sex, drugs, rock '•' roll -- and unicorns -- in copious amounts. They went back to a gag from the first film, but it works.
This made $38 million, three times its budget and $20 million more than the first. It's no surprise "Harold & Kumar 3" recently was announced. I'm hoping for more of the inspired wackiness of the first film or else this franchise will go up in smoke.
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Neil Marshall directed two of the most innovative horror movies in recent memory with "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent." His latest, DOOMSDAY (R/unrated, 3 stars), didn't get any of the critical acclaim of those films.
Yes, it's incredibly derivative, ripping off "Mad Max" flicks, "28 Days Later," "The Warriors" and any number of other apocalyptic movies, but it sure is a load of fun.
One of my all-time crushes, Rhona Mitra (who got her start as a Lara Croft model), stars as a bad-ass cop in futuristic London tasked with an unenviable assignment: travel to plague-infested Scotland in search of a doctor whose cure could prevent all of Great Britain from being infected.
The military crew gets a surprise when mohawk-wearing, pierced cannibals mount an ambush. (You know, I'd like to see a film where the crazed cannibals are dressed and coiffed like preps.) They are forced to head toward the country where the mad doctor (Malcolm McDowell) has set up some sort of fiefdom, complete with 17th-century attire and weaponry.
For an action/horror junkie such as myself, this is a fast-paced mix of two genres that certainly doesn't let up when it gets started. It's over the top and off the wall at the same time, but given the situation, the tone is perfect.
For her part, Mitra plays the tough-as-nails heroine perfectly, barking out pithy one-liners and taking out bigger foes with ease. She seems much more believable in this than in some of the eye-candy roles she usually takes.
You need an appreciation for the 1980s-style exploitation films Marshall is riffing on to truly appreciate this. But if you go in with an open mind, this is a near-perfect popcorn movie.
Elliott Smith is a former Olympian reporter who lives in Seattle. He can be reached at ejsteeler@hotmail.com.
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Flicks for chicks, kids fail to amuse
Most of the time, The Video Guy can rig the schedule to create themes that are appealing to both you, the reader, as well as me, the critic.
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