I’m not a kangaroo, mate.

Rise of the Guardians

(2012)

I held a slim hope that this DreamWorks effort, a relative misfire at the box office, might diverge from their cookie cutter animation formula. I suppose it is less “laugh-a-minute” than usual, which is no bad thing when audiences are expected to lap up a Kung Fu Panda 2 that is impossible to differentiate from the original. But first time helmer Peter Ramsey has nothing to fill that hole; the hook of Rise of the Guardians is all there is to it. Once you’ve seen the poster’s character line-up you don’t actually need to see the movie. Most likely a much better version will have already played out in your head.

Guillermo Del Toro is on-board as DreamWorks animation’s executive producer these days, presumably in charge of making it a-little-bit-but-not-too scary and injecting a-little-bit-but-not-too-much atmosphere. You’d certainly be hard-pressed to divine his sensibility at work (God knows what he claims his contribution to Turbo was). This is the blandest version of “dark and moody and poetic” conceivable (to use his proclamation for the picture). Yes, some of the design elements are quite neat. Well, Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Sandman are (the latter looks like a more docile Toby Jones). There’s a conscious decision to ground some of the aesthetics with a foot in the past, a Nordic 19^th century children’s story by way of CGI gimmickry. Unfortunately, the main human characters are as generic as they come.

Jack Frost is the lead; he’s the hero in search of his past, and his purpose. None of the kids he brings joy to can see him, and it makes him sad Shrek. Inevitably, self discovery and the little scamps noticing him go hand in hand.

David Lindsay-Abaire (who also worked on the less than remarkable Robots and Oz the Great and Powerful) is adapting a story by William Joyce (who was a producer on Robots, and also wrote the book Epic was based on) and ensures every character and plot beat has the distinctive flavour of processed cheese. The one source of inspiration, admittedly an okay one, is the idea of making a super team of familiar fairy tale characters (Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman, the Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost). Inspired in a not dissimilar manner to Alan Moore and his super team of Victorian freaks in the Extraordinary League of Gentlemen. Like the film version of that comic book, Guardians is rendered as a series of deeply generic set pieces and stand-offs against a deeply uninteresting villain.

The bad guy is Pitch Black (Jude Law), the Boogeyman, who isn’t remotely scary (scary isn’t really DreamWorks’ forte, and I doubt that Del Toro will be able to make much headway there) and comes across like a bargain basement Odin. Law gives a miscast vocal performance and is unable to provoke any interest in Pitch’s pedestrian goal of divesting the world of children’s belief in the Guardians (that’s the five mentioned, with Jack a recent addition). You can see where it’s heading; sugary-yet-cynical messages about the power of belief culminating in Jack discovering his place in the world and the bairns seeing off Pitch (cos everyone’s a hero, even the cowardly kids!) Far too much attention is paid to showing off the moppet characters, a frequent mistake of animators who cluelessly assume kids want to see kids acting like kids in movies.

DreamWorks would get points for trying if only they hadn’t got hold of something a bit different and tried to shove it through their studio blender. Weird failures are at least interesting (Disney’s early ‘80s “dark” period, for example). But this has nothing. It’s diluted through and through. Chris Pine, who is generally quite decent, barely registers as Frost, so his limp lead is an appropriate match for Law’s weak villain. Isla Fisher does better as the Tooth Fairy, and her character has a slightly pixieish Jane Wiedlin quality. But only Alec Baldwin, as an unrecognisably Russkie Santa (called North) given to using famous composers as expletives, and Hugh Jackman, as a great goofy Easter Bunnymund, offer a taste of what this might have been. Alexandre Desplat’s limp score follows the general course, hitting all the predictable notes.

There was probably something truly weird and interesting to be made from this concept, rather than a movie where four super mythic characters team up to deliver Easter eggs or exchange money for teeth. Every punch is pulled; there’s a moment where all the faithless kids, who now experience nightmares, have become fearful and haggard, but this isn’t a picture to actually show such terrors as anything other than tangible anthropomorphic (safe) creatures. I know, it’s a kids’ movie. You can’t go too far. But that doesn’t mean running nervously from anything imaginative. Rise of the Guardians is mostly witless and uninventive. Ideally this would have been some kind of twisted CGI toon, making capital from its embrace of pagan mythology; Terry Gilliam by way of Jan Svankmejer. Instead, it is utterly safe and generic.

And so I come back to the lack of laughs; there isn’t nearly enough of Jackman’s comedy bunny to distract from everything else that isn’t going on (predictable comedy characters are often the saving grace of even the weakest Disney or DW animations). Still, there’s nothing quite like a movie made to a soulless formula asking kids to believe in magic.

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

You guys sure like watermelon.

The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

You can have it. Make the edits.

Little Women (2019)
(SPOILERS) It could be argued, given Little Women’s evergreen popularity, not least as a go-to text for Hollywood adaptations, that Greta Gerwig isn’t exactly stretching herself or giving us a better idea of the kind of directorial career she envisages. Hers is a likeable, intelligent, well-rendered sophomore picture. As such, the awards plaudits are probably no more or less deserving than for your average prestige period piece. Which is to say that Little Women is handsomely mounted and consummately performed (at least, by some of the cast), but it doesn’t absolutely feel like this umpteenth version of Louise May Alcott’s novel demanded to be told, even with the Gerwig’s innovations of experimentation with time frame and metatextual use of its author.

We need somebody to walk the clones.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)
(SPOILERS) Not so much the banality of evil as of taking pot-shots at easy targets, Taika Waititi’s typically insubstantial, broad-brush, sketch-comedy approach isn’t the best of fits for the formulation of this self-styled “anti-hate satire”. The issue isn’t so much that it’s inappropriate or insensitive to broach material of Nazi persecution of the Jews comedically as that the manner in which it has been done here is so obvious as to be redundant. Waititi said his inspiration for making the movie was partly the statistics on those Americans who had never heard of Auschwitz; Jojo Rabbit is as cack-handed a way of going about informing them as Life is Beautiful.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

This popularity of yours. Is there a trick to it?

The Two Popes (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes joke, in which he dropped The Two Popes onto a list of the year’s films about paedophiles, rather preceded the picture’s Oscar prospects (three nominations), but also rather encapsulated the conversation currently synonymous with the forever tainted Roman Catholic church; it’s the first thing anyone thinks of. And let’s face it, Jonathan Pryce’s unamused response to the gag could have been similarly reserved for the fate of his respected but neglected film. More people will have heard Ricky’s joke than will surely ever see the movie. Which, aside from a couple of solid lead performances, probably isn’t such an omission.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

I'm reliable, I'm a very good listener, and I'm extremely funny.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
(SPOILERS) When I wrote my 23 to see in 2019, I speculated that James Cameron might be purposefully giving his hand-me-downs to lesser talents because he hubristically didn’t want anyone making a movie that was within a spit of the proficiency we’ve come to expect from him. Certainly, Robert Rodriguez and Tim Miller are leagues beneath Kathryn Bigelow, Jimbo’s former spouse and director of his Strange Days screenplay. Miller’s no slouch when it comes to action – which is what these movies are all about, let’s face it – but neither is he a craftsman, so all those reviews attesting that Terminator: Dark Fate is the best in the franchise since Terminator 2: Judgment Day may be right, but there’s a considerable gulf between the first sequel (which I’m not that big a fan of) and this retcon sequel to that sequel.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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