John Carter

Behold, the Mushroom of Souls

Grade: B –

Director: Andrew Stanton

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds and Dominic West

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 12 min.

At one point in John Carter, the titular earthling-turned-interplanetary freedom fighter impales—using his entire body—a giant, snarling white ape-like beast. Emerging out the back of the monster, he stands before an audience of green humanoids gathered to watch the blood sport. As Carter, covered in the creature’s cobalt-colored entrails, begins to address the motion-capture, computer-generated crowd, the echoes of Avatar are drowned out only by the rousing call-to-arms Carter bellows in his role like a Martian William Wallace.

First appearing in a 1912 magazine serial, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series has influenced generations of science-fiction, including Star Wars, Superman, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. However, any earnest attempt to render a feature film adaptation of Burrough’s creation has floundered for nearly 80 years. The delay is particularly surprising considering the decades of big screen adapatations that Burroughs’ Tarzan character has enjoyed. Indeed, the path to bring this John Carter to fruition began in 2004 and traversed at least three directors before ending with Pixar’s Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo and WALL-E).

Carter (Taylor Kitsch, Friday Night Lights) is an ex-Confederate soldier from Virginia turned surely Arizona golf prospector circa 1868. Stumbling across a mystical medallion held by omnipotent extraterrestrial being, Carter finds himself teleported to Mars, called Barsoom by its natives. There, less gravity gives Carter superhuman strength and leaping ability, skills that are noticed by Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe via motion capture), leader of a race of quadruple-armed, horned humanoids called the Tharks.

Once elevated to warrior status by the Tharks, Carter embarks on a mission to quell the conquest aspirations of Sab Than (Dominic West), who aided by a species of all-seeing shape-shifters called the Therns (headed by Mark Strong). Moreover, Carter becomes smitten with Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins), princess of a realm named Helium, and spends most of the film both saving her and trying to spare her from going through with a prearranged marriage to Sab.

But, the final, $250 million, 3-D special effects laden spectacle is, well, a mixed bag. Although adapted largely from A Princess of Mars, Burroughs’ first John Carter novel, Stanton plus screenwriters Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon draw elements from throughout Burroughs’ 11-part Barsoom book series. As a consequence, the plot—already saddled with a cavalcade of obtuse proper names—quickly becomes mired in its narrative muddle.

Kitsch is a capable lead, but while Texas native Collins is a suitable beauty, her acting is as uneven as the British accent that she and—for some mysterious reason—every English-speaking space race in the history of cinema speaks.

The best parts of John Carter are observing the hero’s discovery of both his alien surroundings and his otherworldly powers, along with the repeated flashes whimsy that show the film knows not to take itself too serious. Stanton confirms his skill behind the camera, but as an animated director his acumen in conjuring a digitized universe—which serves him well here for the most part—does not behoove fleshing out the flesh-and-blood characters and other live-action elements. The film’s broad, complicated canvas requires an accessible grandeur that few directors can channel.

The audience yearns for fleeting moments of recognition and clarity, such as a monologue from Strong’s Matai Shang in which he not only deciphers Carter’s home state from hearing his Southern accent but describes the Therns’ eons-long mission of meddling in the affairs of others beings. Otherwise, John Carter is handsome yet hectic, a standard-issue sword and sorcery flick set against an expensive, eye-popping backdrop. Although Burroughs’ stories might be the Rosetta Stone of modern-day sci-fi, the film is like Prince of Persia if it was written by L. Ron Hubbard.

Neil Morris

Woman in Black

Wow, Hogwarts has gone downhill fast

Grade: C +
Director: James Watkins
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, David Burke, and Shaun Dooley
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min.

The epochs of classic creature features and splatter fests have gradually given way to a contemporary horror film genre shaped by Asian influences and, more notably, the trappings of today’s technology. Starting with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu—a convenient, affecting marriage of these two influences—popular modern scare fare is the stuff of The Blair Witch Project and such progeny as Paranormal Activity. They’re the same chills and thrills, just filtered through the grainy prism of camcorder and surveillance monitors.

From this standpoint, The Woman in Black feels more like a musty curio than a standalone frightener. This adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel—already the basis for a West End theatre production now approaching a run of 23 years—pays homage to the Gothic Hammer Horror films, not coincidental as it is the first feature shot in England under the until-recently dormant production banner in over thirty years.

Director James Watkins imbues every scene with the typical tropes: creepy kids, evil apparitions, a vine-covered manse, overgrown cemeteries and an array of spooky toys and music boxes. Shadows flutter about and objects jump out of nowhere, usually accompanied by a musical flourish. It’s all a handsome showcase that taps your sense of nostalgia more intensely than your adrenal gland.

Set in Victorian England, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a widower whose wife died four years ago while giving birth to their son (Misha Handley). Now a struggling solicitor and single dad, Kipps is dispatched to the town of Crythin Gifford along England’s east coast to attend to the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow, a recently deceased recluse. There, Kipps finds a village of the damned as townsfolk grapple with an inexplicable epidemic of their children doing fatal harm to themselves.

Ignoring the warning of locals (natch), Kipps snakes his way down a meandering causeway to Drablow’s decrepit estate, an archetypal haunted house cut off from the mainland by the nocturnal high tide. Filmed on the 380-acre Osea Island in Essex, the evocative locale is, unfortunately, far more dynamic than its on-screen inhabitants.

After arriving, Kipps’ professional duties quickly take a backseat to wading into the mysterious death of a young boy years earlier. “Don’t go chasing shadows, Arthur,” warns Sam Dailey (Ciarán Hinds), a cynical local landowner. Of course, movies of this sort subsist off such folly, so Kipps not only chooses to stay overnight at the haunted mansion (cueing audience groans and guffaws), but he follows every sounds and opens every locked door, most notably the ghostly presence of the titular femme. There’s surprisingly little blood; the lone sight of crimson, gushing from the mouth of a doomed girl, stands out against a palette that’s as hoary as the horror precepts at play.

Radcliffe does well playing Scary Potter but is given little else to do—fans will have to make do seeing him again do battle with a pale-faced villain, visiting an ethereal rail station in the process. Hinds headlines a game supporting cast that includes Janet McTeer (Oscar-nominated for Albert Nobbs and Tumbleweeds) as Dailey’s grief-crazed wife. Their presence marks the only instances the film achieves anything approaching character complexity.

That said, Watkins crafts some striking visuals, and audiences pining for the visceral stimuli of an old-fashioned ghost story will occasionally jump out of their seats, at least until fifth or sixth time an empty rocking chair totters on its own or the WIB’s ashen visage appears in a window pane or down a long corridor. Capped by a cloying climax, The Woman in Black quickly runs out of frights…and clichés.

Neil Morris

The Debt

Don't look now...your past is gaining on you

Grade: B –

Director: John Madden

Starring: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas and Jasper Christensen

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 44 min.

It takes more than subtitles to translate a movie. Films such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and practically Michael Haneke's entire oeuvre, for example, are entertaining in their own right. But their deeper meaning often flows from the cultural vein of their native audiences: Dragon Tattoo reflected its creator's dark vision of Swedish misogyny, while Haneke's Caché draws on the dark past between France and Algeria.

The conundrum becomes magnified when these movies are remade by nonnative filmmakers. The Debt is an American remake of the 2007 Israeli drama-thriller HaHov, which concerns the particularly fraught world of Nazi hunting. Following the war, Israeli intelligence services and private citizens such as Simon Wiesenthal pursued Hitler's former minions, an enterprise that was not without controversy both inside and outside Israel.

The Debt is set in 1997, when three retired Mossad agents—Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren), ex-hubby Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and David (Ciarán Hinds) must confront the truth behind their incursion inside East Berlin 30 years earlier. Their mission was to locate and apprehend a former Nazi named Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), whose moniker "the Surgeon of Birkenau" clearly models him on Josef Mengele.

The bulk of The Debt, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), comprises a series of long flashback scenes set at the time of the operation and its aftermath. The exercise to capture and sneak Vogel out of East Germany plays like a taut procedural, particularly a sequence at a rail station in which their plan goes awry. This disruption forces the agents to stow Vogel in their safe house for weeks while they search for an alternate escape route, events that mirror the actual 1960 abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad agents in Argentina. Madden excels in cultivating an espionage-thriller vibe during these sequences that nonetheless hamstrings the present-day scenes by draining them of any philosophical subtext.

The most screen time is dedicated to Rachel, whose later book about the trio's exploits would earn them notoriety. Still, the way the character is written is a muddle: Young Rachel (Jessica Chastain) possesses the mettles to submit to Vogel's gynecological exams, yet she's so needy that, even in the middle of this delicate mission, she drunkenly and arbitrarily throws herself at both of her male co-workers on the same night, forming a haphazard love triangle that informs the story without really improving it.

Even so, the 30-year-old Chastain, last seen in The Help and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, acquits herself quite well. On the other hand, most of the other actors, particularly Mirren, Wilkinson and Sam Worthington (who plays young David), fret and frown a lot. And Hinds doesn't have time to even do that, appearing only once after his character throws himself in front of a passing truck in the film's opening scene.

The Debt's most intriguing characters are two of its secondary ones. Stephan (the younger version portrayed by Marton Csokas) portrays an intriguing clash of sniveling self-interest and earnest patriotism. And the way Vogel deciphers and exploits his captors' psychological vulnerabilities is Lecter-esque: even though Vogel is bound and gagged, he's the one who is truly in control.

Unfortunately, the screenwriting team of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class) fails to pivot The Debt from its sheer suspense elements into a film possessing any discernable political, cultural or emotional nuance. It culminates with a journey to Ukraine by Mirren's Rachel and a finale more befitting one of Brian De Palma's campy climaxes. Apparently certain types of cinema are universal, after all.

Neil Morris