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

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

Schnell, you stinkers! Come on, raus!

Private’s Progress (1956) (SPOILERS) Truth be told, there’s good reason sequel I’m Alright Jack reaps the raves – it is, after all, razor sharp and entirely focussed in its satire – but Private’s Progress is no slouch either. In some respects, it makes for an easy bedfellow with such wartime larks as Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg (one of the slapstick funny man’s better vehicles). But it’s also, typically of the Boulting Brothers’ unsentimental disposition, utterly remorseless in rebuffing any notions of romantic wartime heroism, nobility and fighting the good fight. Everyone in the British Army is entirely cynical, or terrified, or an idiot.

Isn’t it true, it’s easier to be a holy man on the top of a mountain?

The Razor’s Edge (1984) (SPOILERS) I’d hadn’t so much a hankering as an idle interest in finally getting round to seeing Bill Murray’s passion project. Partly because it seemed like such an odd fit. And partly because passion isn’t something you tend to associate with any Murray movie project, involving as it usually does laidback deadpan. Murray, at nigh-on peak fame – only cemented by the movie he agreed to make to make this movie – embarks on a serious-acting-chops dramatic project, an adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s story of one man’s journey of spiritual self-discovery. It should at least be interesting, shouldn’t it? A real curio? Alas, not. The Razor’s Edge is desperately turgid.

It’s not as if she were a… maniac, a raving thing.

Psycho (1960) (SPOILERS) One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom . One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those negative elements remain irrelevant to its overall power.

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (SPOILERS) Hitherto, I was most familiar with Jeremiah Johnson in the form of a popular animated gif of beardy Robert Redford smiling and nodding in slow zoom close up (a moment that is every bit as cheesy in the film as it is in the gif). For whatever reason, I hadn’t mustered the enthusiasm to check out the 1970s’ The Revenant until now (well, beard-wise, at any rate). It’s easy to distinguish the different personalities at work in the movie. The John Milius one – the (mythic) man against the mythic landscape; the likeably accentuated, semi-poetic dialogue – versus the more naturalistic approach favoured by director Sydney Pollack and star Redford. The fusion of the two makes for a very watchable, if undeniably languorous picture. It was evidently an influence on Dances with Wolves in some respects, although that Best Picture Oscar winner is at greater pains to summon a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans (and thus, perversely, at times a more patr

My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.

North by Northwest (1959) (SPOILERS) North by Northwest gets a lot of attention as a progenitor of the Bond formula, but that’s giving it far too little credit. Really, it’s the first modern blockbuster, paving the way for hundreds of slipshod, loosely plotted action movies built around set pieces rather than expertly devised narratives. That it delivers, and delivers so effortlessly, is a testament to Hitchcock, to writer Ernest Lehmann, and to a cast who make the entire implausible exercise such a delight.

Look out the window. Eden’s not burning, it’s burnt.

Reign of Fire (2002) (SPOILERS) There was good reason to believe Rob Bowman would make a successful transition from top-notch TV director to top-notch film one. He had, after all, attracted attention and plaudits for Star Trek: The Next Generation and become such an integral part of The X-File s that he was trusted with the 1998 leap to the big screen. That movie wasn’t the hit it might have been – I suspect because, such was Chris Carter’s inability to hone a coherent arc, it continued to hedge its bets – but Bowman showed he had the goods. And then came Reign of Fire . And then Elektra . And that was it. Reign of Fire is entirely competently directed, but that doesn’t prevent it from being entirely lousy.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog