Battles that go on and on
By Roger Moore
FILM: I, Frankenstein
CAST: Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski, Miranda Otto
DIRECTION: Stuart Beattie
Aaron Eckhart bears a distressing resemblance to the not late/not great Christopher Lambert in I, Frankenstein, a graphic novel movie goof on the man-made monster. Gaunt, scowling, covered in scars and sporting fingerless gloves, a tattered hoodie and biker boots, this “I” is an avenging brawler, sort of “Blade” in a blender, with “Underworld” and “Highlander” elements tossed in.
Rejected by his creator, we meet the Big Guy in a striking, Gothic past in which he avenges himself on Dr Frankenstein. And just as he’s burying the guy, demons and then gargoyles show up to fight over the corpse — his corpse.
Why would they want this creation “of a dozen used parts from eight different corpses”, this living thing without a soul? The demon legions and their boss (Bill Nighy) have in mind some sort of demon reanimation project, a factory.
And the gargoyles, led by Leonore (Miranda Otto), aim to stop them. Their battles are special-effects extravaganzas.
The idea of a seemingly immortal monster, wandering the forests of central Europe, shedding the archaic English or German accent or whatever he would have learned to speak for the modern vernacular, is abandoned for non-stop battles and endless, tedious pages of exposition.
Adam, as the monster is named, mentions a bit of his past. Then the gargoyles spend the rest of the movie explaining who they are, what the demons are, how their world works and how much they love explaining things.
Most of this endless story takes place in a modern-ish EveryCity, where Adam stomps the darkened streets, an angry monster pawn looking for another demon or gargoyle to fix.
Yvonne Strahovski is the fetching doctor who presides over modern-day efforts to replicate the late Dr Frankenstein’s reanimation work — pretty enough to be a “companion” to Adam, an actress given nothing to play, just a wardrobe. It’s great seeing Otto all these years after Lord of the Rings, and Nighy does his usual well-dressed villain thing, only less so.
Eckhart? His only job is to keep the makeup stitches from popping, to maintain a straight face when Leonore intones, “You’re only a monster if you behave like one.”
Sounds like a job for ... Christopher Lambert.
Mel Brooks had a lot of fun with this story, once upon a time. The humourless, generic and chatty Frankenstein served up here makes you wonder if the good doctor, in all his patching-together of parts, didn’t forget the brains. — MCT
DVD courtesy:
Kings Electronics, Doha
A jazzy crime melodrama
By Kenneth Turan
FILM: Easy Money
CAST: Dragomir Mrsic, Joel Kinnaman, Lisa Henni, Matias Varela
DIRECTION: Daniel Espinosa
Easy Money is a fine title for a film, but to truly feel the tasty flavour of this top-drawer Scandinavian thriller, try rolling its original Swedish title off your tongue. Say hello to Snabba Cash.
This jazzy crime melodrama is engrossing and exhilarating because of director Daniel Espinosa’s impressive command of a wide range of filmmaking skills.
As you’d expect from a film about an ambitious young man who gets involved in the drug trade because of the prospect of, yes, easy money, the director has a mastery of the mechanics of motion picture action, up to and including depicting strong violence, plus a facility for building tension and keeping viewers off-balance.
But Espinosa has what’s less looked for, an eye for small details as well as a facility for psychological complexity and quiet personal moments.
The filmmaker also has the confidence — and the nerve — to start things all in a rush, to throw us right into the middle of a pair of chaotic situations without initially letting us know who is involved.
Met first is Jorge (Matias Padin Varela), a Chilean living in Sweden (the director is half Chilean). He’s no sooner introduced inside a Swedish prison than he makes good his escape and promptly goes into hiding, from other local bad guys as much as from the police.
One of Easy Money’s briefs is to present a more polyglot Stockholm than we’re used to seeing, so we switch immediately to the movements of Mrado (Dragomir Mrsic), a violent enforcer for a ruthless Serbian drug cartel that controls the cocaine traffic in Sweden and is willing to do whatever it takes to stay on top.
Though Jorge and Mrado are central to the plot, the film’s protagonist is JW (a compelling Joel Kinnaman), a handsome young man from a poor country family who’s smart enough to have gotten a place in Stockholm’s top business school.
JW may have started out without money, but he doesn’t intend to stay that way. As clever as he is handsome, JW has to scramble to make ends meet, secretly working for a cab company and selling term papers to wealthier, lazier students. JW is careful not to let his classmates know his economic status, even, in a small but deft scene, replacing the buttons on his shirts to make them appear more expensive.
While masquerading as a moneyed type at a weekend house party, JW meets and falls for the beautiful and wealthy Sophie (Lisa Henni), which only increases his need for ready cash.
Just at this moment, fate throws an opportunity his way in the form of Jorge, who is not only on the run but the key to a way to get cocaine into the country in such huge amounts that it will threaten the livelihood of Mrado’s superiors.
Before he quite realises what he’s doing, JW is involved in the business, advising his bosses about the specifics of international money laundering and feeling the headiness of being on the inside, a feeling the audience gets to share. — Los Angeles Times/MCT
An old-fashioned
combat spectacle
FILM: Stalingrad
CAST: Pyotr Fyodorov, Mariya Smolnikova, Thomas Kretschmann
DIRECTION: Fedor Bondarchuk
Stalingrad is a huge, old-fashioned combat spectacle, a war story told on a vast scale. It’s Russian — oh so very Russian, an epic of The Great Patriotic War that mixes vivid, blood-and-guts combat with chest-thumping patriotism and pathos.
In late 1942, Soviet reinforcements cross the Volga River and storm, literally, through a wall of fire to seize an apartment building on the front lines. They rescue a young rape victim, Katya (Mariya Smolnikova), and struggle to protect her from the Germans, led by a mournful, war-weary captain (Thomas Kretschmann), who are on the brink of throwing the Soviets out of the city.
Kapitan Gromov, played by an emotional Colin Farrell look-alike (Pyotr Fyodorov), worries that his tiny band will be too busy saving Katya to save Mother Russia. But in the symbolism of the cinema, she is both girl-victim and Mother Russia — traumatised by war, clinging to vestiges of civilisation in her parents’ art- and piano-filled apartment, hell-bent on hanging on and having her revenge.
Director Fedor Bondarchuk (the fine Afghan war thriller 9th Company was his) stages the room-to-room, hand-to-hand fighting with a brutal, bloody brio. The thoroughly ruined sets, from the riverfront with its improvised rafts floating troops across, to the everything-is-burned-bombed-and-broken apartment blocks, put us inside the battle.
But this film is plainly built for the Putin-esque Soviet - sorry, Russian - market. Every excess has an old fashioned hint of Soviet-era propaganda about it. — By Roger Moore MCT
DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha
