Is It Really That Bad?

Writers and critics tend to make, sometimes shameless, use of hyperbole. That's what calling the summer of 2010 the worst summer at the movies ever is. Strangely, I've read, if not exactly that statement, something close to it more often than not. Even many reviews of Inception seem to need to first provide some context by letting readers know that this movie has come out in an awful summer. But what are people basing this on? We need some context for the context. What are you defining as a "bad summer?" Is there another bad summer which we are using for a comparative starting point, or is there a clear definition of what a good summer at the movies needs to look like? If anything, this summer is no worse than last summer. Actually it may be a little better, and it's not even over yet. Sure, not many of the titles will go down in history, but how many of them actually ever do? The summer is about kicking back, having fun, letting the critical safety net slip a little and just enjoying yourself. Sure, Hollywood is phoning it in this summer but who cares that few of these movies will stand the test of time? The point is, as Pauline Kael once wrote to not consume great art, but to enjoy ourselves. And enjoy myself I have been. Sure the box office is down on a lot of films and maybe next year Hollywood will have learned their lesson and give us less films edited in blenders on full speed and more big budget entertainments made by competent craftsmen who know how to walk the line between commercial and quality. But on that note, we work with what we have not what we want, and what we have, when you look at the titles, isn't half bad. Sure there were some big stinkers. Sex and the City 2 is about as bad a movie as I can think of, The A-Team was just about the worst made action movie of the year and Twilight:Eclipse was bad, but who thought it wouldn't be? And even with the latter titles, there were some out there who sincerely enjoyed A-Team and argued that Eclipse was the best of the three movies thus far, whatever that means. Also Marmaduke and Killers crashed and burned and although Shrek 4 raked in the dough, Shrek hasn't been good since the first film. And oh ya, The Last Airbender. 'Nuff said. And then, there were a lot of good ones. The Losers opened the summer to embarrassing numbers but was still a highly enjoyable action movie with a nice performance from Jason Patrick. Both Get Him to the Greek and The Karate Kid were sequels/remakes with no expectations that delivered on the goods. Iron Man 2 didn't quite work for me but it did for a lot of others and even though I think Toy Story 3 is more minor than many have given it credit for, Pixar still managed to deliver again. Although some of the more cynical and jaded skipped Knight and Day because it's star once jumped on a couch, it was a genuinely well made, funny action flick and now Salt is supposed to be even better, getting a four star review from Roger Ebert. Even kid flicks Despicable Me and Ramona and Beezus with Selena Gomez are getting surprisingly good reviews. Not to mention the smaller charmers that snuck through the cracks like the wonderful basketball romance Just Wright, Cyrus with Jonah Hill and The Kids Are Alright with Julianne Moore. And, of course, Inception, which was praised by critics, loved by audiences and was certainly the kind of large scale entertainment that every summer needs. And look, we still have a whole month to go. August, which used to be the month where studios dumped their leftovers has some very promising titles. Will Farrell will maybe redeem his last two or three bad movies against Mark Whalberg in The Other Guys; guilty pleasure series Step-Up will be hitting 3D; Middle Men about the start of Internet porn looks like a teen sex comedy meets Goodfellas; Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables will hopefully bring back the 80s action movie hero aesthetic and give action movies exactly what they've been missing all these years; and Scott Pilgrim doesn't quite have me sold because Edgar Wright still hasn't proven himself to be a great director but many are foaming at the mouth waiting for it. There's also Eat Pray Love, a human drama with Julia Roberts, a new Nanna McPhee movie, a new Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with the always charming Justin Long, Takers, an interesting looking heist movie and could The Last Exorcism be the new Paranormal Activity? I'm looking forward to finding out.

The A-Team

The best shot in The A-Team is the very first one. The camera flies over some barren Mexican landscape. The shot is smooth, clear, and most importantly, continuous, being allowed a duration of what feels like 5-10 seconds. What’s on screen hardly matters because it is being captured so well. This shot is an ideal one to call out in the argument for the importance of smooth, uninterrupted takes in action films. When the camera is tracking it’s best to allow it the freedom to move without interruption because a long take means movement, which is inherently kinetic, which is inherently exciting. Think about a roller coater ride. The reason they are so exciting is because they involve one unbroken stream of action in a single, controlled, straight forward direction. You understand what is coming with complete clarity and the movement makes it exciting. Imagine a roller coaster ride with jagged edges coming from every angle, meaning you can't see or know what is ahead of you? Sounds more sickening than exciting no? The A-Team is a film built on jagged edges. What is becoming one of the film's most quoted lines is one where A-Team mastermind Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson) declares that overkill is underrated. He’s right; it can be, if it’s filmed right. The A-Team, despite a plot that is convoluted, hard to follow and not easy to care about, is not, to say the least, filmed right at all. There’s a helicopter chase sequence at the head in which schizoid pilot Murdock (District 9’s Sharlto Copley) not only spins his chopper 360 degrees around to avoid incoming fire but also avoids two heat seekers by flying the craft upwards until it’s on a 180 degree angle and then kills the engine, sending it into a free fall. It would be an amazing feat of ridiculousness, if you could see it happening. Instead director Joe Cranahan (Smockin’ Aces) and his editor kick it into overdrive and lose the entire focus of the stunts. Before Murdock can even get the chopper all the way flipped the film starts cutting away at a pace so rapid it veers way past unintelligible and into the realms of the unbearable. Instead of seeing a wicked trick the audience is subjected to cuts from above, below, right, left, and what seems like every degree between 1 and 360 and back again. The fourth wall isn’t shattered here, it’s vaporized into extinction before the audience can even decipher that they are missing something important. Did Cranhan actually sit in an editing room at some point, looking at this and think that he had something great on his hands? Producers raise millions of dollars so that these films can have the best special effects on the market. The least Cranahan could do is let us catch a peek of them as they happen. I’ve just described ninety percent of all the action in The A-Team, which, in and of itself, is about ninety percent action. But this is not an action movie: it’s a headache. It’s a loud vomit of random images strewn together in a blender at an inhuman pace. Fist fights happen but you can’t see who is landing punches or if anyone is even throwing them; bullets are shot but God-forbid we get to see who is shooting them and who they are being shot at in one continuous flow; and the handheld camera not only films in close-up most of the time but shakes uncontrollably in the wake of action. There’s a scene where the A-Team are on wheels and the bad guy is in a bank. He runs, shooting through glass panels to make it to the road in time to intercept them. It would have been an exciting moment, but the cameraman runs after him, losing complete focus of the character as he bobs in and out of view and also losing the excitement of a man with a machine gun shooting out glass panels at random. Another good sequence down the tubes. This is unnecessary overkill. The sequence could have been perfect were a track lain and the camera pushed along behind. Maybe that would have required too much thought? It’s a shame because there’s nothing all that inherently wrong with anything about The A-Team besides that it was directed, shot and edited by mad men with no respect or knowledge of the filmic conventions of an action picture. The story is typical: a group of soldiers are betrayed by their government and seek revenge to clear their name. Ya know, The Losers kinda stuff. The acting is all as good as it needs to be with Bradley Cooper and mixed martial artist Quinton “Rampage” Jackson heading out the other half of the team. They are funny and work well together and Copley shows that there might even be a great character actor in him as he takes most of the films laughs. It’s funny to ultimately end up mentioning The Losers which was a much better film with just about the same story. It’s proof that nothing about The A-Team would have needed to change outside the key technical players to make a good film. All of the elements are there, the special effects are great and the action sequences are inventive and exciting. You just can’t see them. I sincerely believe that in the hands of a better director the exact same film could have been made well. Cranahan has the wrong hands and the film, thus, is a disaster.

The Losers

The Losers is based on a comic book but it looks and feels more like an action movie. It’s big, loud, violent and dumb. God bless it. It recalls a time when action movies were allowed to be fun. Remember that? When they were just as much about personality as they were action, which The Losers has plenty of regardless? It has running, jumping, fighting, shooting, and, gasp, explosions that are created through the combination of gasoline, heat and oxygen, not a mouse and a keyboard. Remember that too? The Losers doesn’t go so far as to give rebirth to the classic days of the action hero, but it does manage to wrestle the genre away from the high tech, artificial flashes of light, sound and colour that have become a mainstay as of late and give it back to the characters who occupy it. Hey, it’s a start. The Losers are a group of skilled military men, employed by the CIA to, oh I donno, kill bad guys. But when a mission is botched by an evil insider who goes by the name of Max, the group pretends they are dead and set up shop in Bolivia where they hide away and live their new lives. The team is made up of leader Clay (Jeffery Dean Morgan), the tech guy Jensen (Chris Evans), the knife guy Roque (Idris Elba), the bomb guy Pooch (Columbus Short) and the marksman Cougar (Oscar Jaenada). The team are getting along and getting by but deep down Clay wants to find Max and take him out for blowing up 25 innocent kids with a missile that was meant for him and his team. Max, it might as well be stated, when he finally appears, is played by one-time heartthrob turned character actor Jason Patrick who manages the wonderful feat of creating a completely original villain just through the nature of his presence. A lesser actor would have flown way over-the-top in the same role but Patrick always keeps both feet on the ground. He’s so good at creating evil men that he takes the role one step further into comedy instead making him both A) the film’s most amusing character and B) all the more shocking when his violence suddenly erupts. Into the mix comes Aisha (Avatar’s Zoe Saladana) who hunts The Losers down in Boliva and is first mistaken for a foe so that, oh I donno, the film can justify setting a hotel room ablaze. Fair enough. Turns out Aisha has one concern: killing Max. Why she wants to is unknown to the group but hey, she’ll cop the tab and they get their names cleared. Sounds good. That’s the plot; the rest is all attitude. It’s kind of funny, kind of exciting, and all around, you know, kind of enjoyable in its glee for pulling out all of the stops for no better reason than to pull out all the stops. You’ve got to admire that. Action movies have been so mindless and hollow for so long that you’ve got to flag the ones with good senses about themselves. There’s a scene towards the end, during the big final shoot-out between Max and The Losers where a motorcycle becomes the prop at the centre of a wonderful action sequence. Many people who value their hearts and their minds will take issue with this. They’ll call it ridiculous. I don’t know, I call it kind of inspired because for one, there’s a certain danger, and therefore excitement, in ramping a motorbike off a high incline, second, motorbikes represent speed and speed somehow always translates into excitement and third, it’s something original. Good action movies take a certain degree of creativity to pull off successfully. The Losers has just enough of it to spare. Maybe that has something to do with the script, which was written by Peter Berg whose own The Rundown was another staple of silly action filmmaking of the highest order. Here, like there, Berg creates actual characters out of personality types which is then elevated into fruition by the actors, while director Sylvain White goes into hyper-stylist overdrive trying to make everything look as delicious and exciting as possible. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s good trash and you know what Pauline Kael said: if we can’t enjoy good trash, why bother going to the movies in the first place?