POMO

Routine, uninteresting and boring wringing-out of a dry, storyless sponge. I laughed only once during the whole film, and even then it was only a chuckle. No emotions.

Though formulaic in the Hollywood manner, The Last Samurai is a beautifully made movie in which nothing surprises you, but which will make you feel like you are in heaven. It’s obvious how much care the filmmakers put into it. Including Edward Zwick. Whatever the scene, it’s either beautifully poetic harmony or agile force of action. Tom Cruise is better suited to his role than you would expect and Hans Zimmer’s music adds incredible power to the fight sequences, significantly more than those in Gladiator. Incidentally, The Last Samurai is in every respect a better, more well-rounded film that elicits more legitimate tears from viewers at the end.

This falls somewhere between one and two stars, but a film that insults the viewer’s intelligence doesn’t deserve any leniency. The best thing about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the gigantic submarine plying the canals of Venice. And the worst thing about the film is that not only the journalists at the screening were clutching their heads, but my 14-year-old brother was too. This is the dumbest and most bloated big-budget movie of its kind. Wild Wild West is a cinematic gem by comparison.

Everything that made the previous two films amazing is twice as powerful in the third one. A perfect drama and fantasy in one.

Reloaded is a completely different film than the first Matrix. It seems as if it wasn’t even made by the Wachowskis, but rather by James Cameron in cooperation with Paul W.S. Anderson. Cameron is brought to mind by the bombastic set design in Zion, Anderson by some of the excessively digitalized visual effects (Neo’s face during the fight with the Smiths is a bad joke). The content is for nothing – whereas the previous film’s dialogue got its charm from the interesting idea of a parallel world, the dialogue here just messes around with words in a pseudo-intellectual way. The fistfights combined with the exotic techno soundtrack are very elegant and all the action on the highway is fantastic. And the nice costumes and detached humor (Frenchman Lambert Wilson and his vaginoscopy) are also pleasing. Beyond that, however, The Matrix Reloaded is just a synthetic formalistic diversion and fashion bubble.

Matrix Revolutions has a more tangible and meaningful plot, less pseudo-philosophising and less gratuitous action for effect than in The Matrix Reloaded. I’m satisfied with that. You’ll find yourself yawning through the first hour, but the subsequent “war of the machines” is amazing. If there were more emotion in the final digital fight between Neo and Smith, Revolutions would have been a class better than Reloaded. The film’s ending has an appropriate amount of the pseudo-depth that the whole saga has been faking. Those who thought that there was something big behind everything will be disappointed. Unavoidably disappointed. Three and a half stars.

The Missing is not a bad film at all. The suspense works perfectly and the bad guys are truly nasty. Some of the scenes go overboard with their cruelty. Cate Blanchett is great from the first moment, Tommy Lee Jones as a long-haired Indian takes some getting used to at first, but you soon come to believe him and feel fine with him. Truly beautiful cinematography, dynamic action scenes, and very nice music by James Horner. The film’s weakness lies in the seriously intended yet comical shamanic scenes (the resurrection of the possessed Cate), as well as in the intermingling of the action-thriller and psychological levels, where the daughter gradually finds her way to her long-lost father. The closer the film gets to the climax and the more we long for the bad guys to be eliminated and the happy ending to come, the more we are denied this moment of redemption, and the pace is slowed by the quiet father/daughter passages. The film thus fails to build and often seems to drag. It would have been better if the subject matter had been conceived strictly as a western thriller.

In filmmaking terms, The Order is solidly made darkness for a very narrow range of (dark) viewers. Its plot is similar to that of Stigmata, but less focused on form and more on content. A film with minimal chance of commercial success.

The first third of The Recruit is great. The plot slows down in the second third and in the final third, it reaches a spasmodic and ineffective climax. It’s a thriller in which nothing is as it seems. And a thriller that doesn’t work the way it was intended. The fine cast can’t salvage it.

Purely superficial, self-indulgent entertainment. As a maker of music videos, director Marcus Nispel is capable of spectacularly filming things of zero narrative value. The camerawork and its colour filters are reminiscent of David Fincher and, together with the dark music, contribute to the film’s dense and bleak atmosphere. But the non-existent plot build-up, the ineffective scares and the absence of mystery are more reminiscent of the cheap assembly-line productions by 1970s Italian trash directors (Joe D'Amato, for example). On top of that, the film is extremely disgusting. Seven also disgusted me in its own way, but it also impressed me with its wonderfully over-the-top and polished screenplay and deep ideas. I simply found The Texas Chainsaw Massacre repulsive. Count me among its victims.