POMO

A cheaper, blue-filtered version of Van Helsing that becomes ever more predictable as it draws closer to the end credits. Thanks, however, to the shorter runtime and Kate Beckinsale’s great image, I found this less boring than Van Helsing.

Harrison Ford is the exemplary and wealthy head of a “perfect family”, which he must now fight for… This American thriller promises more than it delivers. The first half is very routine, dull and drawn-out. The second half gains dynamism with the arrival of a twist stolen from a Mel Gibson thriller that shall not be named and alternates between good scenes and clichéd filler. Harrison plays Harrison, while Paul Bettany’s bad guy is surprisingly one-dimensional. The other characters are just makeweights. Overall, this is a relatively entertaining, occasionally suspenseful and sometimes unintentionally comical genre flick. Personally, I enjoyed the old car and the sunny rural locations in the final sequence, which brought both a warm nostalgic memory of Hitchcock’s adventures and a pleasant contrast with the preceding high-tech (blue filter) visuals. You simply can’t condemn Firewall for that last shot. :-)

Mature in its opinions, Syriana is an intelligent political thriller involving the business machinations carried out among oil tycoons. However, most of the connections escape ordinary viewers (i.e. those who are not familiar with the given issue) and only the decent atmosphere, the cast and the impressive ending are memorable.

Three gangsters on the run terrorize a group of young girls in a secluded beach house. The Seventh Woman is an entry in the category of nasty-euro-trash, specifically revenge flicks (such as The Last House on the Left and the American movie I Spit on Your Grave) with typically terrible actors and dialogue. The camerawork is done well and the locations around the house are fine. The nasty bits are adequate for weaker stomachs, but they are delivered in the form of strange hypnotic slow-motion shots that spoil more than they improve.

One would expect that the protagonist would spend the first hour coming up with an invisibility serum and that the drama would come after he drinks it in the last half hour. However, the screenplay by R.C. Sherriff draws us into the drama of the scientist’s efforts to rid himself of invisibility in the initial seconds of the film and it is so packed with ideas and exciting scenes that it could fit in with contemporary genre productions. With great actors and incredibly good effects for its time, The Invisible Man is a treat for connoisseurs.

On Cate Blanchett’s part, Veronica Guerin is a superbly acted one-woman show which, however, leaves a somewhat flat overall impression, though the last ten minutes don’t leave a dry eye in the house. That the screenplay tried to remain as complex and faithful to the actual events as possible is fine, but in order for this to work as a truly compelling film, it needed to settle more comfortably into the personal lives of the protagonist and the two main bad guys (instead of familiarizing the audience with the other five insignificant ones). From Veronica’s investigation, which doesn’t come to any point (so it is not as important as in sophisticated fictional thrillers), only what is essential for the build-up of a film should have been used. After all, a film is constructed according to different rules than television journalism. Joel Schumacher made Veronica’s story into an honest, cold deposition. Ron Howard would have made it into a fine Hollywood tear-jerker. I would have preferred something in between.

The characters and the conflicts between them are not great, but the horror storyline is excellent. Neil Marshall moves skillfully in the limited setting, conjuring from it a dense atmosphere of isolation and opening a new door every ten minutes. The scares are perfect, the “bad guys” are terrifying and repulsive, and the quick-motion filming is impressive. And the final action posturing is less awkward than you would expect. Plus a few nice nods to horror connoisseurs (music from The Thing, eye gouging from The Evil Dead...). The Descent is an above-average genre flick conjured up from an average screenplay and a big step forward for the director after Dog Soldiers.

The Producers is colorful, but in terms of screenwriting, it is a severely bungled musical-comedy “farce” in which the inordinately slow pace and lack of humor greatly outweigh any wit and there are a few uncool characters (particularly Will Ferrell’s SS officer). The central duo often wallow in spasms and Uma Thurman is surprisingly only a nicely dressed decoration. If someone wanted to build on the success of Chicago here, they blundered mightily.

I didn’t mind the depiction of Slovakia; on the contrary, I genuinely enjoyed it. But I was rather surprised by how this turd is packaged in a campaign with great posters, the slogan “Quentin Tarantino Presents” and 20 million dollars in box-off receipts in the US alone. Hostel could have been made in the same quality by an average Slovak director with one-tenth of the budget. Some scenes follow each other as if they were improvised, without a screenplay. There is zero atmosphere and the build-up is killed by the film’s dull predictability. We wait an endlessly long time for the scenes of cruelty, of which, incidentally, there are far fewer than were promised. Films like this were made as if on an assembly line in the 1980s and there is really no call for them now. History repeats. The only benefit of Hostel is the degree to which it shines a positive light on the directorial and screenwriting qualities of films like Saw.

Casanova is unexciting at first, coming across as a routine work wrapped in the strains of classical music, with a bland Heath Ledger. But as the pace pickups with the artful screenwriting and the entrance of Jeremy Irons and Oliver Platt (especially the latter!), it starts to heat up and the film turns out to be a tremendously entertaining, almost crazy, modern, joke-laden comedy treat. Director Lasse Hallström excels, while Irons and Platt expose their characters to cartoonish situations. This had to have been a memorable case of hilarious filmmaking for the crew.