Overrated/Underpraised: Pirates vs Musketeers

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Nathan Adams of Filmschoolrejects has started a cool new column which pits a film with undeserved love against an unfortunately ignored or ridiculed one. I'm making a similar blog, and by similar I mean the exact same. :)

It has been less than a year since Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers hit theaters, but no one remembers it. However, everyone remembers the original Pirates of the Caribbean. You know what that means: It’s time for some Overrated/Underpraised.

Both of these movies take a period known for swashbucklers and sword fighters and add in extra elements to make a light blockbuster. For the original Pirates movie--Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl--these elements were skeleton pirates and Johnny Depp. Judging from the box office receipts and the critical reviews (and the fact that the series has continued going when every subsequent movie was absolutely terrible), one would think this was a good idea. It sort of is. However,The Three Musketeers had some better ones.

Skeleton pirates are cool, so I won’t bash them. I will instead focus my energy on Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow (sorry: Captain Jack Sparrow). At first, he is entertaining, a gonzo character in a sea of mind-numbingly boring heroes and villains. His introduction of riding a sinking boat into a major English port and tipping his hat to the hanging corpses above a “Pirates be Warned” sign is funny. But if his antics don’t seem to get old on you, they probably should. Jack Sparrow is a pretty terrible human being. He makes his living by stealing. He spent years in a crew with some sadistic terrorists. He “borrows” Zoe Saldana’s boat without permission and then sinks it. He constantly drinks as if being drunk is something cool and attractive. He takes cursed gold pieces that turn him into a skeleton despite knowing it comes at the cost of his soul. He wears way too much eye shadow.

Why should we care--and root for--such a jerk? Should we really admire his drunken, selfish antics? Now I know that we are supposed to believe Jack Sparrow has a good heart, because in the beginning of the movie he reveals his identity as a pirate to save Keira Knightley. But does one selfless act really justify his entire past as a pirate and his entire future as a pirate?

Another problem with the movie is Knightley's character Elizabeth Swan. Keira Knightley has given some great performances--if you haven’t already, please see Last Night--but in the Pirates movies she does a really bad job. The character is a selfish, strident shrew who in addition to being really annoying is completely incapable of doing anything herself. She nearly drowned because her corset was too tight! Kinda sexist.

The Three Musketeers goes with a different strategy. They spice up the old story by making it a heist film with giant airship battles. It is anachronistic and silly, but so much fun. The Three Musketeers has been told dozens of times, but adding the extra element of zeppelins and Ocean’s Eleven-style cons breathes new life into it.

Every scene is just as funny and playful as in Pirates. A highlight is where the young monarchs infuriate the cardinal by making a joke out of an unfair trial over a brawl the musketeers were involved in.

Add onto this is the fact that there is a much clearer theme in Three Musketeers. Even though it takes place in a France torn by a power struggle between a child king and a ruthless cardinal, it ends up being a testament to patriotism and honor. The three musketeers (four if you count the protagonist, played by Logan Lerman) have their flaws, but in the end they are admirable, traditional heroes. Keep in mind, though: This message never interrupts the story’s fast, fun pace.

The Three Musketeers doesn’t just have a better moral, it could likely be a more enjoyable experience than watching Captain Jack & Friends.

Lockout (D-)

DVD Review

Lockout is meant to be mindless action fun. It can be, I suppose, if one truly ignores all aspects of plot and morality and creativity. Lockout wants to be an exercise in self-referential silliness, but it is more a bad movie that openly admits it is a bad movie. Admitting it doesn’t stop it from being true.

Lockout is written by Luc Besson, the guy who created Taken andThe Transporter who is also the guy who created dozens of other action movies that are long since forgotten (Colombiana being the most recent). In other words, it is written by a talented guy who occasionally slips a half-way decent b-movie into the schlock he is hired to churn out. The Internet Movie Data Base identifies him as coming up with the “original idea” and writing the screenplay. I doubt there is an original idea in Lockout, but I assume the events that occur in the picture were scripted since they lack all forms of spontaneity. Still, the database also says he was assisted by James Mather and Stephen J. Ledger (both known for shorts, not feature films), who also direct. I find it possible that one person could have done such a bad job on the story, but it is pretty impressive that three of them could come up with something this awful. Maybe they each wrote a third of the scenes without telling each other what happened in the other parts and then patched it all together as best they could without taking time out of their weekends.

The story is about a guy named Snow who is framed for the murder of a colonel he is friends with. He didn’t do it, but he did take a briefcase which was supposed to be important (before someone cut the scenes explaining that part). Now he is convicted of conspiracy without a trial because it is a dystopian future and something something. Luckily for him, the (US) president’s daughter was on a mission to a space prison to investigate the rumor that it does medical tests on deep space travel on its prisoners. The space station is in orbit around Earth, so I am skeptical as to what “deep space” means, but apparently the president’s daughter isn’t. She was thinking about closing it down because it seems inhumane. She doesn’t bring up the fact that even in the future it is doubtful the idea of a space prison is cost effective. It isn’t like they still don’t still have to pay for guards—there are tons of them walking around the prison, even though all the inmates are cryogenically frozen.

Anyway, she ends up in danger because one of her personal bodyguards starts beating the snot out of an inmate she unfroze because the inmate said he wore perfume, and then the inmate stole the bodyguard’s gun and shot a gas tank, and then unlocked the cryogenic cells so prisoners can walk around if they want. I swear it makes less sense when you see it! Snow is sent in to save her, because they say more than one man would cause her to be killed in the crossfire, and sending in a convicted terrorist as the rescuer seemed safer. So Snow needs to rescue the president’s daughter before they blow up the space prison (since a few of the prisoners took hostages that means it is probably best for all 500 of them to die). Wait, if it is inhumane to test the effects of deep space travel on prisoners why is it okay to blow them up? Being blown up always seemed pretty inhumane to me.

There are two somewhat acceptable parts of the film. The first are the well-executed action sequences that are fun odes to 80s B-movies despite having been obviously edited down to secure a PG-13 rating. It is worth noting, though, that this movie was made with 20% less cash than it took to make Lethal Weapon 2, and that is not adjusting for inflation. Maybe a space epic setting wasn’t the best choice: The cheapness of it all is evident in every frame.

The second not-bad part of the movie is the acting. Maggie Grace, as the first daughter, is not very good; that is probably the script’s fault. Everyone else is great. Guy Pearce as Snow, Vincent Regan as a criminal mastermind, and Joseph Gilgun as a sadistic lunatic are all hamming it up, but that is exactly what is needed for an over-the-top, silly action flick. They are so entertaining to watch you occasionally forgot that everything else is really, really, really terrible.

Some people might be able to ignore plot and morality and artistic merit to see some good action pieces, but in this day and age there are hundreds of movies with better action sequences than this that are of better quality. There is no need to encourage this hideous studio cash-grab by renting it; just get one of the free 80s flicks that can be downloaded 100% legally for free with three clicks of your mouse. One of the best perks of this day and age is you don’t need to settle for garbage like Lockout.

The Amazing Spider-man (B-)

The Amazing Spider-man is an okay film, and probably would have been a great one if it weren’t for the clowns at Sony.

While all film distributors must be primarily driven to make money, Sony/Columbia’s extreme greed and lack of any artistic integrity is a step beyond anything the other companies do. They forced a Ghost Rider movie to go into production with only half the budget of its predecessor, they let Steven Soderberg leave Moneyball less than a week before it would start shooting because he wanted it to be historically accurate, and they forced MIB3 to film without a finished script because they were offered a tax incentive to film before the end of the year.

The Spider-man franchise is arguable Columbia’s most valuable film property, so naturally they have been complete tyrants with its film productions. They forced Spider-man 3 to go into production very fast, but at the last minute demanded the script to be completely changed in order to incorporate the Venomcharacter so they could have a spin-off film. When the movie was released, it received significantly lower reviews than its predecessors. Sam Raimi--who had reinvented the super-hero genre with the blockbuster trilogy--returned for the fourth installment, but Columbia continued to demand rewrites and hurry production until he dropped out. Therefore, a reboot came out five years after the last movie (with only three years devoted to its production).

Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy

Still, it had an impressive crew. Avi Arad--who successfully brought the Spider-man, X-Men, and Avengers franchises to the big screen--hand-picked Marc Webb for the role of the director. He had only directed one previous movie, but that movie is (500) Days of Summer, which everyone agrees is fantastic. Webb is great with the Spider-man characters--setting the story in high school, he mixes angst, humor, and teen awkwardness together for something thrilling, charming, and entertaining (also, he has the perfect name for the subject matter). He also is better at getting great performances from all the actors he deals with. Andrew Garfield is made to look more cool and less geeky than Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker/Spider-man (probably because fans like myself can't relate to someone nerdy and geeky), but he brings both a charm and a relate-ability to the role.Emma Stone plays Peter’s love interest Gwen Stacy; the dynamic between her and Garfield is delightful. Rhys Ifans asthe villain, Sally Field as Aunt May, and Denis Leary as Gwen’s police chief father are all good choices; the real gem, though, is Martin Sheen as a loveable yet believable Uncle Ben (Peter’s caretaker).

Another interesting element is how the manner in which Spider-man webs through the city. It is less graceful than in the original, but more realistic. It is a great way to distance this movie from the original, and it looks fantastic (especially in 3D).

In an effort to distance itself from the Raimi trilogy, this story follows Peter’s quest to find out why when he was about eight years old his parents fled (leaving him with his aunt and uncle) and then promptly died in a bizarre plain crash. No one really cares about his parents, but it is a great excuse to show him get bitten by a spider, develop awesome super-powers, and battle crime. The first problem arrises from the fact that Se7en scribe James Vanderbilt's original screenplay has obviously been rewritten too many times. The second problem is that the story obviously featured drastic edits and changes--after it was shot. For proof, one can see the promotional material, which features loads of scenes that didn’t make it into the final movie but should have. Dave Faracci at Badass Digest writes a great article explaining it all: the effects of tampering way too late into the production process are pretty apparent. Despite the dark tone and interesting set-ups, there is no clear theme; several plot threads are left unresolved; and characters vanish from the story with no clear explanation.

The reasons for the changes have to do with time (a shorter movie can be shown on TV or in theaters more frequently) but also with a set-up for a sequel. I think the sequel will probably be pretty great, though any comic fan knows it will get FAR darker. However, this movie now seems like homework you do to understand what is going on in The Amazing Spider-man. Well thought-out, carefully detailed, and mildly entertaining homework; but wouldn’t you rather not do homework at all? Sam Raimi’s Spider-man was a set up for the excellent Spider-man 2, but it was entertaining and thoughtful on its own. The Amazing Spider-man is an incoherent mess.

That above line is very critical, which makes me stress that this movie isn’t bad, per say (just incoherent and a mess). It has cool visuals, good acting, great artistic style, and the semblances of great stories. And if you ignore the plot it’s action scenes are pretty cool. It just has been tinkered around with too much.