Dull Instruments

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Directed by Harold Zwart
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

My experience of Mortal Instruments: City of Bones began almost ideally. I knew nothing about it. Hadn’t seen a trailer, hadn’t read a plot synopsis. I’d barely even seen a cast list (and was – at first – pleasantly surprised to see Robert Sheehan from the witty British show Misfits show up).

Keep Your Eye on the Ball that Never Was

Now You See MeDirected by Louis Leterrier
Two Stars

By Jon Fisher

Films about magic walk a perilous line. These usually go down one of two roads –they try to flummox the viewer by pretending to be a magic trick in and of itself (thereby trying to gain some ‘art’ cred), or they settle for being disposable, (hopefully) enjoyable ‘light’ options for the weekend trip to the movies.

Now You See Me is certainly fits into one of those categories. It’s unashamedly popcorn. It becomes clear after the opening scene or two that Now You See Me will have nothing underneath the surface. The camera swoops, swirls and dances. Pretty images of buildings and crowds are displayed on the cinema wall. A series of sarcastic, fast-talking, smug characters are introduced to us. They’re all excellent at fooling people. We catch on pretty quick that this movie will be about them trying, in increasingly ‘wow!’ing ways, fooling their hapless pursuant. It isn’t initially clear if this movie is trying to go the route of the vastly superior The Prestige in trying to one-up us as viewers, but as long as the shiny swooping images of city skylines and attractive cast members continue, we don’t much care.

The plot is stock-standard stuff for a studio heist/action flick – a group of illusionists and mentalists are brought together by an unknown figure. They are tasked with creating general mischief (stealing from banks, draining the bank account of a well-known Evil One-Percenter) via a series of glossy, slightly irritating magic shows. After they rob a French bank ‘during’ a show in Las Vegas (quotation marks very deliberate), police officer Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo in full “archetypical surly cop” mode) and Interpol agent Alma Drey (the luminous Melanie Laurent) pick up the case to nab these crooks. They find it difficult to manage because the perps appear to genuinely have magical powers etc etc.

Now You See Me has a tendency to be irritating, although it should be said that large swathes of the movie washed passed me harmlessly. As always with these movies, it’s fine for its protagonists and the events surrounding them to be completely vacuous and to fail to hold up to any kind of rational scrutiny – as long as the characters are likable and/or interesting. They are neither. They have irritating, contrived names like “J. Daniel Atlas” and “Merritt McKinney”. They speak unnaturally, consistently sounding like lines from the trailer for the movie they are in rather than real human beings.

Jesse Eisenberg takes the smug persona he invoked in The Social Network and ramps it up to ten, while the script he is given drains the character of any complexity. Morgan Freeman pops up in a bizarre, jarring role that only exists so that he can explain what is happening in the movie in his deep, sombre baritone.

The film’s female characters are routinely humiliated and degraded by the men around them. Their response seems to be to grovel more deeply, fall in love more madly, and to accept their roles as the sidekicks. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Now You See Me hates women, but it certainly doesn’t go out of its way to make them as intelligent, crafty and resilient as their male counterparts. Then again, Now You See Me presents everyone in it as a cardboard cut-out bereft of any real humanity, so best to go a little easy on the misogyny accusations.

As it turns out, Now You See Me is one of those magic movies that tries to turn itself into a magic trick. The finale, the big reveal, is… completely nonsensical.

Now You See Me is 'well shot' by director Louis Leterrier (who previously made the less-than-stupendous Clash of the Titans, but also made the benignly enjoyable Transporter films). Meaning that, even if the characters aren’t worth a minute of our time and the plot doesn’t add up, most of this film looks and sounds good technically. Some might say that’s reason enough to venture out to see it – it looks good, and when no thought is applied, even has a couple of satisfying twists and turns. But to concede that Now You See Me is a good movie is to concede that you only like movies to watch nice images projected onto a screen… and I can’t go for that.

A World a Little Too Much Like Ours

Elysium
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The metaphors and allegory of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” may just as effectively be conveyed in summary. In 2154, the earth is ‘overpopulated’ and ‘polluted’, overrun by the ‘poor’ and ‘impoverished’, while the ‘wealthy’ live on a Halo-style, Utopian space station just outside of our atmosphere, still plainly visible to those on earth. They literally live “above” the poor. A large underground market emerges to smuggle ‘undocumented’ citizens onto Elysium because of the quality of their ‘healthcare’, a sophisticated scanning bed that diagnoses and heals every ailment (this includes a man whose head is blown off by a grenade). This film is topical to the point of madness. Imagine a large, cardboard picketing sign that reads “Current Events!” rolled up tightly. Now imagine Blomkamp clubbing you with it relentlessly for 109 minutes. Hollywood liberalism is certainly not always noble.

Matt Damon in the lead role is Max, a citizen of earth who lives in a dilapidated mortar shack and had survived for some time as a formidable car thief. Now he works in a great manufacturing plant, building the ‘drones’ that serve as law enforcement officials both on Earth and Elysium, furthering a developing trend in Hollywood wherein the unemployed must settle for jobs developing the very harbinger of their inadequacy.

Following an accident at the plant involving radiation, Max is given a precariously short time to live and resolves to make it to Elysium for treatment at any cost. That’s effectively the entire story, which moves in a cumbersome, lumbering way because Blomkamp has so little material and a feature-length film to fill with it. Of course there is a girl, Frey (Alice Braga), and Max’s forthright single-mindedness and avarice betray the change of heart that will define the film’s climax. There are of course flashbacks, fleeting images of clichéd adolescence that would have been right at home in a Christopher Nolan movie.

At its heart, Elysium is an action movie, a prolonged, violent chase between the righteous fugitive and the corrupt authority in an unjust world. Having seen both his first feature, the intriguing but overrated “District 9”, and now this, I feel that Mr. Blomkamp is not a sure handed director. He struggles with tone. His presentation is inconsistent. In “District 9” he attempted a kind of pseudo-documentary/news reel approach that he elected to disregard when the action escalated.

The technique in “Elysium” is more conventional, but the same problem persists. Blomkamp is at his best when there is something to regard, rather than something with which he feels he must keep up. There seems to be a bizarre corollary between the shakiness and general incomprehensibility of the camera and the stakes of the action. An early shootout in an empty lot is staged with a much better sense of place and movement than a climactic fight in the bowels of a futuristic military compound on Elysium. Blomkamp is more effective when his characters are in a place he can admire.

“Elysium” isn't the first movie ever made to use conventional formula to serve an allegory. Hollywood made an art of the tactic during the years of the Production Code. But Blomkamp is hanging his laurels on the setup and not on the payoff. That’s why the back of the DVD cover will betray a generic film with hollow ambitions. In the end, this film is aware of our society’s shortcomings and expects that to be enough. The last twenty minutes are spent waiting for “Elysium” to return to its topical roots. Blomkamp can’t seem to tell you why he’s still swinging that rolled up sign.

The Lawless, Lackluster Limbo

R.I.P.D.
Directed by Robert Schwentke
One and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

Apparently in an effort to cash in on the “Men in Black” trend while it’s still fresh, Robert Schwentke’s “R.I.P.D.” employs the same lawless universe afforded to an irresponsible filmmaker making a film about the supernatural. “R.I.P.D” plays a bit like a Terry Gilliam film without the wit. Everything is thrown at the wall. No opportunity for the outlandish or the quirky is left on the table, usually at the expense of continuity or restraint. When I am told that deceased police officers acting as purgatorial gateway gunslingers must navigate the world of the living not as invisible phantoms but as randomly assigned avatars like bodacious supermodels or crotchety old Chinese men, I begin to suspect that the office in charge of rejecting bad ideas had sat empty for a day or two. Or eight.