A few people have spent time predicting the end of the superhero movie in recent months, but the genre-movement whose demise I’m anticipating (sooner and with more glee) is the children/teen-oriented fantasy film. The Lord of the Rings films were decent, but let’s be honest with ourselves here: how many similar films since then have been any good? Four out of five Harry Potter films are complete dreck, and you know when Hollywood starts tossing out adaptations of His Dark Materials and Eragon that the genre is in trouble.
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that “Eragon” is just “dragon” but with an “e”? That’s only one letter removed in the alphabet! Much of these films show a similar unimaginative laziness and reliance on convention. My case in point will be Disney’s latest attempt to nab Harry Potter’s success, Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. It matters little to me how revered or even good the source material is; these movies are no good. I’m predicting the genre’s demise around the time of the release of Harry Potter 7, Part 2.
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The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
I remember little of the single Narnia book I read as a young child, but I’m sure it wasn’t as wimpy and squeaky-clean as this slick Disney movie. In Ben Barnes, who plays the titular Prince, Disney tries transparently to cram an arbitrary sex symbol down our throat. I’m not a 13 year-old girl, but I found Barnes to be one of the most obnoxious parts in a film that does not skimp on obnoxiousness. Try Doctor Cornelius (Vincent Grass) on for size, a clumsy amalgam of every Dumbledore/Gandalf character ever written. Or Nikabrik (Warwick Davis), a clumsy amalgam of every character Warwick Davis has ever played. Don’t forget the cast of children with special, magical, super-human abilities and angsty personal lives.
Imagine a two-hour film made up of every Ewok scene from Return of the Jedi — plus whatever was left on the editing room floor — and you have something approaching the grating tameness of Prince Caspian. Here’s a movie with three or four epic battle scenes in which no one dies onscreen. I’m not demanding blood and guts, nor am I suggesting that Disney make a film with 40 onscreen deaths. I’m just suggesting that in this case, Hollywood can’t have its cake and eat it too. You can’t make a violent kid’s movie that isn’t violent. The violence is still there, its just that the attempts to disguise it just make it reek of phony Hollywood crap.
I really did not like this movie.
Wanted
Timur Bekmambetov, the director of crazy-cool Russian vampire films Night Watch and Day Watch, makes his English-language debut with Wanted, loosely based on Mark Millar’s comic books. The film is a hyper-stylized, hyper-goofy action flick with conservative gender politics and no depth to speak of — but it works. Thanks to an engaging, if not brilliant, performance from lead James McAvoy and sufficient sexiness and bad-assery supplied by Angelina Jolie and Mr. Bekmambetov, Wanted’s ludicrous plot and stunts manage to entertain better than most of the higher-budget films of this summer. Unlike other recent action-for-the-sake-of-action films, Wanted does not abandon character completely, remembering to provide motivation for most of its actions. In a time when post-modern self-consciousness has been warped into utter brainlessness, that’s something to be praised.
X-Files: I Want to Believe
I don’t agree with Roger Ebert on too many things these days, but I dug his 3.5-star review of X-Files: I Want to Believe. Lately, Ebert has been neglecting to actually offer reasons for liking or disliking films, preferring instead to equivocate. But he gives some good reasons for liking this film and, more than that, he agrees with me. The second X-Files movie was better than the reviews it got, for the most part. Most of America seems to have moved beyond the X-Files mania which once gripped the nation, but if you liked the show, there’s no reason not to enjoy this relatively short thriller. Compared to some episodes of the television show, the MacGuffin of I Want to Believe is a little mundane; but it’s a nice return for the characters a large portion of us used to watch on a regular or semi-regular basis.
Next Week on From the Box
Yours truly gets his hands on the 2-Disc release of British auteur Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a small independent film that did rather well in its limited release this summer. You probably haven’t heard of it. From the Box will tell you why, exactly, the film fanboys lovingly refer to as TDK is the greatest Batman film ever made, beating out even the perennial fanboy favorite Mask of the Phantasm. We may also have to discuss what is next for Batman: Will Chris Nolan return? Will Zack Snyder make a Dark Knight Returns adaptation? If so, will he find a way to insert racist Persian caricatures into the story of the Dark Knight? We can only hope, next week on From the Box.
