Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003): adapted from the Patrick O'Brian novels by Peter Weir and John Collee; directed by Peter Weir; starring Russell Crowe (Captain Jack Aubrey), Paul Bettany (Dr. Stephen Maturin), Billy Boyd (Coxswain Bonden), Lee Ingleby (Midshipman Hollom), and James D'Arcy (1st Lt. Pullings): Only the prohibitive expense of filming on water kept Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World from being the intended start of a series of adaptations of the naval adventures of Patrick O'Brian's Captain Jack Aubrey and Surgeon Stephen Maturin -- this movie was a hit, but not a big enough one. It's a bracing, detailed, and beautifully photographed and directed naval story set in the Napoleon era of the early 19th century.
Russell Crowe's Aubrey pursues a much-more-powerful French ship across half the world, ending up near the Galapagos Islands. There, some comic business with Dr. Maturin nearly discovering evolution before Darwin reminds one a lot of some of the business in the film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
The naval battles win the day, giving one a sense of strategy and tactics on the high seas with only sails and oars to rely upon. Crowe and Paul Bettany shine as the two leads -- Crowe's beefiness seems perfectly suited to playing a hero of a bygone era. The supporting cast is fine all the way through. Are there any speaking parts (or indeed parts) for women in this movie? Well, no, not really. A female South Sea islander appears on screen for about ten seconds. Otherwise, manly men do manly things on the manly waves. Highly recommended.
Warcraft (2016): adapted from the video game by Charles Leavitt and Duncan Jones; directed by Duncan Jones; starring Travis Fimmel (Lothar), Paula Patton (Garona), Ben Foster (Guardian Medivh), Dominic Cooper (Llane Wrynn), Toby Kebbell (Durotan), and Ben Schnetzer (Khadgar): Not the worst fantasy movie I've ever seen. The talented Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code, and son of David Bowie) stages some decent set-pieces and also manages to make the Orcs of Warcraft into compelling beings. What plotting the movie has, however, makes it resemble an assembly of cut-scenes.
And the game-based musculature of the Orcs looks ridiculous, a problem no amount of CGI money could possibly fix.
The truly striking problem lies in the casting of the human forces, though. While Paula Patton is fine as a human-sized female Orc and the motion-capture actors do decent work as the rest of the Orcs, the humans are not so fortunate. Never have a couple of mages, a king, and a mighty warrior seemed so lame. I mean, Ben Foster in the Gandalf/Saruman role of Guardian? Seriously? The best thing in the CGI is the giant griffin one character flies around on. Get that beast its own movie. Still, not nearly as annoying as those three godawful Hobbit movies. And hey, China likes it! Lightly recommended.
The Visit (2015): written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring Olivia DeJonge (Becca), Ed Oxenbould (Tyler), Deanna Dunagan (Nana), Peter McRobbie (Pop Pop), and Kathryn Hahn (Mom): A decent thriller from M. Night Shyamalan... with a twist! This movie only cost $5 million, which is why it was considered a financial success despite grossing almost exactly the same amount of money domestically as the universally reviled M. Night Shyamalan bomb The Happening, a.k.a. The One where Mark Wahlberg Runs Away from Wind.
The Visit is blessedly short and gifted with four out of five decent actors in the main roles. The non-decent actor playing grandson Tyler isn't necessarily a bad actor -- he's just been burdened with a cutesy rapping obsession that probably looked a lot better on the page than it plays on screen.
The plot is simple -- the two children of a mother estranged from her parents since before the kids were born go to visit the grandparents for a week, mostly against their mother's wishes. Meanwhile, Mom goes on a cruise with her new boyfriend. The oldest grandchild, the granddaughter, is filming everything because she's obsessed with film and hey, this is yet another 'found-footage' horror movie. Shyamalan wrings a few new shocks out of the first-person camera. Certainly not a great movie, but enjoyable. Recommended.
Priest, written by Cory Goodman, based on the graphic novel series by Min-Woo Hyung, directed by Scott Charles Stewart; starring Paul Bettany (Priest), Karl Urban (Black Hat), Cam Gigandet (Hicks), Maggie Q (Priestess), Brad Dourif (Salesman) and Christopher Plummer (Monsignor Orelas) (2011): If the writing on this movie were a lot better or a lot worse, it could be pretty interesting. However, all dialogue was written by the Dialogamatic 3000, which means that you won't actually hear a line of dialogue you haven't heard a hundred times before in other movies. That's an impressive feat of dialogue writing for a movie set in an alternate, steam-punky universe in which super-powered Catholic priests fight a species of eyeless vampires that look like the reimagined Pig-monster from the rebooted Doom video-game franchise.
I'm assuming Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, and Christopher Plummer all had bills to pay. They all do what they can with this amazingly derivative piece of junk, which is not much. Movies this movie rips off for plot, characterization, visuals, set design, and monsters include (but are not limited to!) The Searchers, The Matrix series, Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy, Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, the Alien movies, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and pretty much the entire steampunk genre.
In what must be an alternate universe, thousands of years of war between humanity and vampires (which are not, I repeat, not human, and not derived from humans, a fact the movie doesn't really establish fully until there are only ten minutes left) are seemingly over. The remaining vampires are on reservations, which must have been a hell of a relocation effort given that at no time are the vampires shown as being able to reason, much less talk.
They are afraid of the sun, however, which is a good thing given that they don't have eyes, meaning that they know the sun's there when their skin starts burning. These vampires really are nature's cruelest mistake. Move over, Bottomless Pete!
The super-powered ninja Catholic Priests who won the Great Vampire War have been decommissioned and given menial jobs, because when you have superpowered people around, it's always a good idea to piss them off by having them clean toilets and shovel coal. The church hierarchy now denies there's any vampire problem. Pretty much everybody lives in walled, smoke-filled cities, though there are settlements out on the endless desert that surrounds these cities. The citizens in the cities all dress like urchins from a road company production of Oliver. They have invented the elevator, the television, and the computer, but not soap or fashion.
Oh ho! Vampires kidnap the Paul Bettany Priest character's niece (the only name he gets is Priest, which is really a title, isn't it?) and kill his brother and sister-in-law. Like John Wayne in The Searchers, off he goes. The Church doesn't want him to go, but he goes anyway. Because that's what a man does when vampires kidnap his niece.
He knows it's a trap because otherwise the vampires would have just eaten his niece, but he goes anyway. The Church recommissions four other priests to follow him and stop him. He teams up with a young sheriff to hunt the vampires. The vampires, meanwhile, are all riding around on a train headed straight for one of the cities. Or maybe The City.
Yes, the villains are all riding around on a train. This makes for a pretty linear chase narrative, as there appears to be only one train line in the whole world. If this civilization had radios, cellphones or even telegraphs, the movie could end around the 45-minute mark. However, this does not appear to be the case.
While the city (or The City) is a smoky Blade Runner industrial dystopia, the country appears to be the 1850 Old West with motorbikes instead of horses, but otherwise invested in oldey timey clothes and phonographs and 19th-century cotton dresses. I would love to know how history ended up here, but I'm not sure the writers of either the movie or the comic book know the answer to that any more than I do.
Priest instead really seems more like an intentional mash-up of visual styles without any attendant brainpower devoted to figuring out how such visuals could ever have occurred. One shot shows the keen intellect at work here. After Priest intones portentously that there's no sun in the city any more, we see a shot of the city as seen on the horizon. It's no wonder that the city has a smog and smoke problem because its designers didn't invent an industrial district -- instead, there appears to be a gigantic smokestack looming over ever city block. And you thought your city was badly planned!
Much chasing of the train ensues on the solar-powered motorbikes everyone seems to ride when they're not riding the train, cars also apparently not having been invented. Also, I can't think of a better vehicle to ride across a rock-strewn wasteland than a motorbike travelling at 300 miles per hour. Can you? Karl Urban shows up, looking pretty much exactly like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Much CGI ensues.
I didn't NOT enjoy Priest. Like Terminator Salvation but at one-tenth the budget, it offers a rich array of swipes, steals and homages to mull over. Okay, laugh over. Paul Bettany struggles manfully to invest his ill-written role with something remotely actorly -- with this and his role in the equally bad and derivative Legion, Bettany is threatening to become the Peter Weller of the 21st century. We know that, like Weller, Bettany can act. But we don't want to see him acting in movies like Priest or Legion (or in Weller's case, Screamers and Shakedown. Note how all these movies have one-word titles?).
Christopher Plummer does his old hambone in a bad movie routine, and Karl Urban does about what he can with a character who doesn't even have a proper name or in lieu of that, a title. He's Black Hat. Brad Dourif is Salesman! Maggie Q is Priestess! And Priest is Movie! Paradoxically recommended.
