Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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If you've seen the trailer then you know the movie to expect, and that is exactly the movie you should expect. For a movie about "two men who don't follow the rules!" Warrior follows the rules to a tee. It doesn't much try to add side-dishes of flavor to the stew like David O. Russell's The Fighter did - it's the same straight-forward recipe we've been tasting for decades. I won't spoil the ending for you - I'll leave that to every other sports movie ever made to do.

But! There is a but! (Unfortunately there aren't any butts though. They got in this kind of shape and couldn't find a single shower scene? Really?) Back to the but - Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are two extraordinarily talented young actors and they take this material and they work little wonders with it. The moments where the director allows the stock story to rest for a breath, his actors express effortless power. Hardy for me especially - with him it's as if the quieter and stiller he gets the more you can feel this explosion being muffled up inside, and he underplays every turn of a movie screaming out for screaming out with real grace. Edgerton too - they make a rock-solid (god they're solid) pair, KO'ing cliches left + right! (Spoiler: The cliches win on a technicality.)

But if you're not as cynical as cynical ol' me this is an easy movie to get swept up in - it hits all the beats that drive an audience looking for their "Ooh-rah!" experience to their feet with a cheer. They bring in a Drago-esque Soviet villain for us to hiss at! Hiss! Hiss! The end.

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1. Battle Los Angeles - I kept thinking maybe this movie was a come-on, and the punchline was right around the corner. That it couldn't really be pushing these cliches honest to goodness. There is an earnestness here that would make the shots of little children waving American flags while running through fields of sun-dappled wheat in slow-motion in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor positively cringe. But earnestness really is too kind a word - it implies good intentions. Battle Los Angeles is dumb and cynical right down to its obnoxious shaky-cam aesthetic. It was apparently crafted while snorting Oxycontin off a burning copy of Guns and Ammo.

2. Rango - There's some nice animation here and some very nice character design but oh my god this movie is so boring. I actually gave up ten minutes before it was over because I just couldn't find it in me to care enough to take ten more minutes of my life to see it through, even after already wasting an hour and a half. The next morning I asked my boyfriend what happened at the end, he saw it through, and he shrugged and said, "The water came back, I guess?" He couldn't even remember.

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Before seeing it I'd heard Bedevilled referred to as "a female Deliverance," and I came out of it surprised just how spot-on a description that turned out to be. Not in the facile Hollywood way you expect such a statement to pan out - it's not "a female Deliverance" in the sense that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is Jane Austen with brain-eaters smashed on top. In broad terms the plot is similar - city-girl heads to the country for some R&R only to be confronted with barbarism and violence - but the way the story unfolds it made me think less of Deliverance than it did I Spit On Your Grave. (Yes, it's a revenge tale from South Korea! Shocking.) It veers left when you think it's going right, and is the cleverer (and blessedly more character-focused) for it. 

But thematically is where Bedevilled has more in common with Deliverance than it ultimately does in the way of its telling, because it's really a story of urban apathy and the way it cuts us off from those who need us - of friendship (this round indeed female) challenged and ultimately undone by the compartmentalization of our humanity. About how we can be too far removed as outside observers in our own lives, even where we most should act.


Like most revenge tales the film grows murkier point-wise as the increasingly horrific revenge is doled out and we the audience grow more and more bloodthirsty. And it runs a little long. But Yeong-hie Seo gives a justly praised performance that runs the gamut, and Chul-soo Jang, with his first film, proves he's got himself an interesting voice taking what'd become well-worn South Korean revenge off into some curious and under-explored territory.

Mainly it's just really damned good at making your eyes turn red with venomous rage. There was an old lady sitting in front of me exuberantly applauding the graphic on-screen slashing of another old lady, and if that isn't a giant point in the plus column then I don't have a clue what we're here for.

Somewhat interesting structure- wise, and blessed with a very fine performance from Anthony Wong, Punished - which tells the story of a wealthy businessman who hires a man to hunt down the people who kidnapped and killed his daughter - still can't really escape the shadow of the seventeen thousand other Asian revenge thrillers from the past few years. The way the threads unravel is by no means unique - we flash back to see what happened to the girl as each person in the conspiracy's uncovered - but it's done well enough, and the way the film doesn't allow any detectives into the story feels like a freshly defiant rejection in the face of an overused storytelling trope for these things. But we get it - revenge doesn't work! Everything goes wrong, nobody's satisfied, and somewhere a Liam Neeson gets his wings.

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It feels cruel to single out The Rite's pretty-boy priest Colin O'Donoghue as being the biggest problem with the film - he's very pleasant to look upon, especially when fully collared up, and since this was his first starring role to lay the blame upon him feels like it could limit our future opportunities to look upon him. And yet... yet... god does he give a lifeless performance. One flat note from start to finish, while Anthony Hopkins grows broader and bigger filling up every frame screaming out words like "Kissylips!" with abandon, and O'Donoghue just bats his gorgeous blue eyes blankly. It's not entirely his fault - one gets the feeling Hopkins sucks the air right out of every room he enters these days - but whether his drab performance is a symptom or the cause of the film's deathly dullness it don't matter, it's DOA.

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Terrible movies don't live up to their hype as often as you'd hope. And even when they are quite terrible enough thank you, for every delightfully horrible Troll 2 there's a bash-your-skull-against-the-wall boring Birdemic. Dario Argento's Giallo is every ounce as awful as I'd heard, but it willfully denies you the camp factor too. Actually that's narrow-minded of me - it denies you everything. Like attractive people (it makes Adrien Brody and Emmanuelle Seigner look monstrous) in shots you like looking at, or a story that's even trying to make sense, or the feeling as if someone was paying attention to what was going on at some point, whether while putting the movie together or while filming it or afterward when all that footage is sitting there asking to be put together into a thing called a movie. None of these things are anywhere to be found. Indeed it seems so purposefully void of anything worth looking at it seems diabolical, as if it were a dare. Let's all hope that nobody ever double dares Dario Argento then.

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