The Expendables

The Expendables is kind of weird, because in some ways it delivers on its promise of over-the-top 80s style action with a giant cast of movie veterans, and in some ways it doesn't. I definitely liked it, but I feel that it also could have been much better. The problem is the question of how seriously the movie takes itself. If the movie was straight-up homage to what movies used to be and maybe more tongue-in-cheek, it might have been better. But you get the feeling that Sly Stallone was being completely genuine in his attempt to bring back the glory days, and in that light it's not as successful. I mean, as far as replicating what's come before, he pulled it off. The problem is that those movies were rarely actually very good, and the script at work here is pretty damn weak. It gets made up for a bit by the advancements we've made in filming entertaining violence, but it's certainly a flawed movie.

Sylvester is the leader of a crack team of guns for hire, featuring knife expert Jason Statham, martial arts expert Jet Li, betrayal expert Dolph Lundgren, giant ridiculous automatic shotgun expert Terry Crews, and Randy Couture. Stallone is the only one whose character is really drawn beyond a very brief sketch, and while the rest of them all have what could be described as character traits, they're really just there to help blow things up. Even the second in command Statham is basically playing Action Star Jason Statham, with the only thing trying to avoid this being one of the most pointless subplots ever. Here's what it consists of: Scene 1. He goes home to his girl (played by Cordelia from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and surprises her with a ring, but he finds out she's seeing another guy. Scene 2: He finds out the guy hits her, so he kicks his and his friends' asses on a basketball court and then drives off with her on his bike. Then she disappears from the movie.

And that's by far the most anybody besides Sly gets to do outside action scenes. Lots of guys get small parts, there's a fun scene where Sly gets a mission from Bruce Willis and has some half-witty repartee with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mickey Rourke forgets what movie he's in and acts his ass off delivering a monologue that helps Sly figure out what he has to do. Eric Roberts is an enjoyable smarmy villain, Batista from Dexter is the foreign general whose army is getting taken advantage of, and Stone Cold is menacing enough as the king henchman. So there's a lot of recognizable faces, and they all seem to be having fun kicking each other's asses. The action is surprisingly well choreographed, featuring an entertaining mix of guns, hand to hand beatings, and giant explosions. Unfortunately this is mired a bit by how dark the movie is, especially in the climactic scenes, and a tendency to match the current trend of very quick cuts despite the old pedigree, which occasionally makes the super violence a bit hard to see. So it's an action movie without a good story to prop it up, and the action isn't perfect either. But like I said, I mostly enjoyed it, laughing out loud on numerous occasions while acknowledging that it wasn't actually a very good film. Which is fine, it certainly could have been much worse. Personally, I'm hoping for a sequel with more Dolph, Arnie, and Bruce. And some decent lighting.

Die Hard with a Vengeance

With John McTiernan back in the director's chair, the series returns to its roots a bit, with a slightly more down to earth believability to John McClane's actions, as he's less about shooting everyone in sight and more concerned with figuring things out and gutting out a win. The scope of the movie itself is even bigger, as terror sweeps through all of New York City, but it has something from the first movie that the second didn't, that thing which made the first original and interesting in the first place. Anybody can make an action movie where things blow up and a foreign guy threatens people, it takes a little extra to make it as fun as this. In fact, it's pretty damn surprising that the guy who wrote the script (which wasn't originally going to be for a Die Hard movie) went on to make something as amazingly nonsensical as The Punisher. It's not the smartest thing in the world, but it's clever and funny and exciting enough to easily last through the two hours.

A lot of entertainment comes from the buddy picture quality of the story, an otherwise typical black/white dynamic when McClane gets shoved together through circumstance with an electrician from Harlem, but it's saved by the entertaining, antagonistic chemistry between Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. They're forced to team up and race around New York while solving riddles to try and prevent bombs from going off, being teased and tricked by an enjoyably evil Jeremy Irons. Eventually though they realize the bombs are just part of a much larger and more diabolical plot, and not just a simple vendetta. The two have to use all of their wits and get the crap kicked out of them just trying to keep the bad guys from winning. By the end you're as exhausted as they are, but it was worth it because it was just about as much fun as you can have seeing a movie without it really being a great one. McTiernan may be going to jail for some of the things he's done, but you can't take away that the guy knows how to make an action movie.

Die Hard 2

Die harder, yo. That's the tagline and occasional subtitle, but I don't think this movie is really die hardier than the first. It's pretty die hardy, but if die hardness is measured by what made the original unique, then the sequel drifted away from that somewhat. Any action movie can have gun fights and explosions, so what made Die Hard cool was that John McClane didn't win by blowing the bad guys away, but by acting intelligently and being a tough son of a bitch. It was a deadly game of cat and mouse, and him matching wits with Gruber was a lot of fun. Die Hard 2 mostly sacrifices that for a bunch of traditional action movie stuff, and while it hits those notes pretty well, and is a pretty decent movie overall, it's definitely a significant step down.

In some ways, the set up is very similar (close enough that the characters repeatedly remark on how unlikely it is for McClane to be in the middle of this kind of thing twice), with bad guys taking several planes full of passengers hostage at an airport rather than the guests of a party in a building, again on Christmas Eve. There's still some subterfuge as the good guys try a few ways to regain control of the wayward planes, but McClane's role is mostly limited to shooting guys and making generally terrible wisecracks. He has a few chances to be clever, but really the treatment of the character is one of the most disappointing aspects of the sequel. I still generally like Bruce Willis, but this just isn't one of the best scripts he's gotten. My favorite actor in the movie was actually Dennis Franz playing a typical angry police captain to the hilt, and clearly enjoying the work. There's a couple other likable performances, but really the movie's all about the action. The plot doesn't make sense and the brutality of the violence seems a little over the top, but that's pretty much what you have to expect from big action movies. At the very least it's mostly enjoyable trash the whole way through, which would generally be fine, except it just hurts a bit more after the original.

Four Rooms

So Four Rooms is a bit odd. It's an anthology film, featuring segments by two filmmakers I like, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and two that I've never heard of, whose names I've forgotten. It takes place in a hotel during New Year's Eve, and tells small stories in four different rooms all featuring Tim Roth as a strange bellhop who's new to the job. The two unknowns go first, and the segments tend to improve as the film goes on. You'd like a bit more consistency in this format, but at least getting better with time is superior to getting worse. Apparently Richard Linklater was supposed to do a fifth segment early on, but he pulled out before production started. That would have been interesting, but the movie really didn't need to be longer than it was.

The first segment features a coven of witches performing a ritual in their room, and the supernatural elements don't exactly jive with the rest of the film. All of the pieces are sort of different stylistically though, so it isn't a huge deal. It's sort of funny, although in the first two segments Roth's performance is just a bit too weird and inhuman, while Rodriguez makes him more angrily maniacal and Tarantino chills him out quite a bit. The second part has Roth caught up in an unusual roleplay with a husband and wife, which like the first is a bit hit or miss.

The third segment has Antonio Banderas, fresh off my favorite film of his (Desperado), as cool as ever taking his wife to a party and leaving Roth in charge of looking after their two kids in the hotel room. I liked this one a lot, as early on it captures the feeling of being a bored kid in an unfamiliar place as well as anything I've ever seen, and it starts getting really insane as it goes on, culminating in a highly unlikely and entertaining situation that wouldn't seem out of place in an R rated Warner Bros. cartoon, complete with appropriately half-witty, half-corny punchline.

I'm not sure if I preferred Rodriguez' segment or Tarantino's, which is very much in his traditional style, with a lot of long takes, extreme profanity, and unexpected violence played for laughs. Tarantino casts himself as an eccentric and successful film director, Marisa Tomei has a highly entertaining single scene on the phone with Roth, and Bruce Willis shows up in an uncredited role for fun. It has a strong mix of humor, rising tension, and humor again, topping the film off in a way I've come to expect from one of my favorite filmmakers. Four Rooms really isn't a great movie, but it's an interesting experiment with plenty of fun moments.

12 Monkeys

Another time travel movie. I've never seen any of Terry Gilliam's non-Monty Python work before, but it's really not too different in feel. The plot is an interesting, violent science fiction story, but there's a fair amount of silliness in certain scenes. There's something odd about the way he films things. I don't know if it's a lens or what, but just like his short before Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, it feels flat and contained or something, not exactly low budget, just a little antiquated in the apparent scope of the image. It doesn't make the film worse, it just seems unusual. The performances are odd, too. Bruce Willis is totally not his in his standard mode for serious movies, and Brad Pitt's character is completely nuts. A couple of his quirks seemed forced to me, but otherwise it was an extremely entertaining job.

Basically Willis lives in a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by a deadly virus, and he's sent back in time to gather information about what happened. I like how the plan isn't to change the past, just to help make the future better. Of course, things in time can become distorted and everything's not quite what they assumed, as the plot gets more and more convoluted. What I found interesting was how the main characters became more mentally disturbed and confused as they went on. In movies like this the characters always take things more in stride than we might realistically expect, but here they begin to seriously question whether they're imagining everything or not. It all leads to the inevitable circular ending. Really enjoyable film.

Die Hard

What? You've never seen Die Hard!? BLEUUUUUUUGHHHHH.

Die Hard was a pretty exciting and funny movie, although it was really more of a suspense/thriller sort of thing than a true action movie, considering Bruce Willis' John McClane spends most of his time creeping around an office building, hiding from thugs and trading barbs with Alan Rickman, as opposed to shooting dudes and blowing crap up. Although he does that too. I think it was lauded by action fans at the time for McClane not being some ridiculously amazing superhero guy, instead just being a good cop who has to fight his way tooth-and-nail through everything. Though really, with all the punishment his body takes in just a few hours, it ended up seeming just as unrealistic to me as the alternative. Still, I enjoyed it for the novel feel.

The movie holds up pretty well considering it's 21 years old. There's very few instances of anything being too 80s besides John's wife's hair and it's focused on an intricate robbery/hostage situation instead of something that would seem quaint now. I don't know if it's just me, but it felt like the actions taken by the police and FBI are completely fucking ridiculous and would never happen in a world that's supposed to be gritty and real, but it doesn't hamper the main tension too much. John McTiernan was a pretty consistent director in the beginning of his career, and it's too bad he's tapered off so much since then. I'm not hyped to immediately jump into the sequels or anything, but Die Hard didn't disappoint after the long wait.