Rampage

Incurious George

Grade: C –

Director: Brad Peyton

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jake Lacy, and Joe Manganiello

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 55 min.

Look, we all love the Rock. Dwayne Johnson is this generation’s larger-than-life movie action star, so in exchange for flashing his smile and flexing his pecs, we’ve excused his cinematic transgressions, whether punching a missile in The Fate of the Furious, cracking bad puns in Baywatch, or doing whatever it is he did in The Tooth Fairy. But surely our tolerance level and related movie-going budget has its limits, and they’re put to the test in Rampage. The film begins with a mutated rat ripping apart a space station and ends with a pervy gorilla. In between, it’s brainless eye candy, a CGI creature feature that’s one part MonsterVerse, two parts Transformers.

Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a primatologist who used to be a special forces soldier because, well, of course he was. Davis’ best bud is an adopted albino gorilla named George, which communicates with Davis using sign language (although Davis conspicuously fills in the gaps using spoken English, somehow), which is an excuse for George to playfully and repeatedly shoot Davis the bird. When the aforementioned space station blows apart, three samples of its secret science experiment gone wrong fall to Earth. The pathogens are found and inhaled by George, a wolf in Wyoming, and an alligator in the Everglades. All three infected animals mutate in size, strength, and aggression as they begin to, well, rampage across the countryside.

For some reason, the woman (Malin Akerman) heading the corporation that developed the mutagenic serum thinks it’s a good idea to lure the creatures to their headquarters in downtown Chicago, ostensibly to administer an antidote, something that apparently couldn’t have been done in any remote, uninhabited part of the world. Thus charts the inevitable climax, which involves the most destruction visited upon the Windy City by animals since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Davis is aided by defrocked scientist Dr. Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) and Harvey Russell (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a pistol-packing, Texas-twanged spook who works for a mysterious government agency that Caldwell jokingly wonders might be “the Justice League.” OK, not to nitpick, but this seemingly minor quip is emblematic of Rampage’s uninspired ineptitude. First, Russell’s black suit and pencil tie make Men in Black the better joke. Watchmen also would have made more sense, since two members of that film’s cast, Akerman and Morgan (!) appear here. But I digress …

Nothing makes sense in Rampage, even if you suspend disbelief for the sake of its ludriciours plot, adapted from the video game series of the same name. Johnson reteams with his San Andreas director Brad Peyton, and if that’s not enough warning, the film regularly falls into that Transformers trap of returning to its campy, distractingly ubiquitous side characters, the sort of scene-chewers who always show up wherever the action is happening at that moment. And then there’s Dwayne Johnson—like George, the Rock is a behemoth trying his best to emulate regular human activity and culture. If only his films started making a similar effort.

Red Dawn

We're supposed to be looking for Loki, right?

Grade: D +
Director: Dan Bradley
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, Adrianne Palicki, Josh Hutcherson, Isabel Lucas, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Connor Cruise
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 33 min.

One thing I learned watching the remake of Red Dawn is that Bane had an easier time taming Gotham City than the Korean People’s Army does keeping control of Spokane, Wash. Or, maybe that Thor trumps Batman. Either way, this update of the Reagan-era Red Scare flick is silly without the fun, a preposterous script that’s high on xenophobia but low on nuance and common sense.

Fresh back from a tour of duty in Iraq, Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) gets back to his Washington state home just in time to watch little brother Matt (Josh Peck) quarterback the high school “Wolverines” to a loss in the big game. Oh, and to see the North Korean army parachute into town, capturing everyone except the handful of teens that Jed shepherds to safety in the surrounding hills.

Adopting the name of their high school mascot, the Wolverines embark on guerilla warfare, which Jed explicitly and somewhat offensively patterns after the very insurgents he fought back in Iraq. It’s hard to empathize with these freedom fighters when they can so easily saunter around town and even enemy headquarters, picking off Korean interlopers without much threat of reprisal. Of course, the fact that the actual North Korea recently failed to even launch a missile successfully makes their ability to swoop in and occupy the Pacific Northwest appear even more ludicrous, even with the aid of cyberterrorism alluded to during actual news clips of President Obama and others that open the film.

When the Koreans finally do strike back, it is with a knowledge and purpose that suggest the presence of a mole that never comes to fruition. That’s just one of the gaps in this hole-ridden plot. But the biggest problem is that while the 1984 original was at least subversive enough to put fresh-faced Brat Packers in peril, here we get a cast of mostly unknowns, led by an Aussie actor proclaiming, “This is our home.” Still, Hemsworth looks like Olivier next to the rest of the vapid cast, including a perpetually petulant Peck, Tom’s adopted son Connor Cruise, a grousing Jeffrey Dean Morgan and two actresses—Isabel Lucas and Adrianne Palicki—who manage to keep their hair and makeup in check for the Eckert boys even in the middle of a war zone.

Directed by longtime stunt coordinator Dan Bradley, the action scenes carry little resonance beyond shaky-cam urgency. And every time the script flirts with complexity, whether about the town’s coterie of collaborators or the wider reaches of the conflict, it retreats back into a shell of training montages and risible platitudes. There’s an enemy to be fought in Red Dawn: boring movies.

Watchmen

Why so delirious?

Grade: B –

Director: Zack Snyder

Starring: Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, and Carla Gugino

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 41 minutes

Renowned, mercurial comic book writer Alan Moore once declared that his epic graphic novel series Watchmen was unfilmable. While now a technically inaccurate statement, one gander at the long-awaited cinematic rendering of Moore’s magnum opus provides ample appreciation for the spirit behind his proclamation. Watchmen is as much a Rorschach test as the undulating inkblots that incessantly swirl across the stocking face of the story’s keynote sociopath vigilante. The film is visually arresting and thought-provoking; it is also bloated and unwieldy. Some will regard it as a cinematic work of art; others will see sheer fanboy pornography.

It must be said that the opening two scenes are brillant - and hover like an unmet promise throughout the remainder of the almost interminable 161-minute running time. First is the brutal, lyrical beating death of venerable Watchman Edward Blake, aka The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), set to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” That is followed by a contextualized opening credits sequence, accompanied by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which chronicles the Watchmen’s origin as a group of 1940s-era crime-fighters called The Minutemen (cops who decided to mask-up like their quarry) who later become social pariahs outlawed by federal legislation but still clandestinely serving the U.S. government as jackbooted goons-for-hire with a hand in everything from the Vietnam War to the JFK assassination.

In this present-day, hyper-realistic setting, the year is 1985 and Richard Nixon, credited with victory in Southeast Asia, is serving his fifth term as president. However, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. are on the brink of atomic conflagration, a cold to hot war shift largely the consequence of a power imbalance generated by the existence of Dr. Manhattan – formerly gregarious nuclear physicist Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) – a radiantly blueblooded, Nietzschean nude whose omnipotent powers have gradually forged a detached ambivalence towards mere mortals.

Against this backdrop, Comedian’s death convinces Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), who continues to mete out his skewed measure of justice in spite of federal law, that there is a plot afoot to kill all superheroes. He solicits the help of his former Watchmen mates, including Dr. Manhattan, his sultry yet frustrated girlfriend Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), a retired, burned-out Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), one of the only Watchmen to publicly reveal his secret identity in order to capitalize on his celebrity and super-intelligence for material gain and the realization of a worldwide utopia.

By portraying its heroes as antiheroes plagued with foibles, neuroses, and god complexes, “Watchmen” is widely viewed as a deconstruction the superhero mythos. Director Zack Snyder (300) pulls no punches for the silver screen, intersplicing his sumptuous palette with buckets of blood, ultra-violence, sex, and frontal nudity. Snyder’s mostly inspired, sometimes heavy-handed soundtrack choices run from KC & The Sunshine Band to Leonard Cohen to Janis Joplin to Mozart. However, the irony is that the story employs and relies upon the very superhero archetypes it attempts to (literally and figuratively) strip bare. Indeed, we may snicker at seeing Dr. Manhattan vaporizing the Vietcong, but the spectacle is no different than when Superman and Captain America fought Adolf Hitler in their comic books during the early 1940s.

Watchmen is a phantasmagorical mind-trip, but not about the psychology of America’s pop-culture as much as psychology of America itself. On one level are the extremes of our ideological spectrum: the weirdly arch-conservative Rorschach patrols New York City’s mean streets like a deranged guardian angel, while Veidt’s abstruse liberalism makes him feel superior to those he would supposedly save. Rorschach believes in killing the guilty to save the innocent; Veidt believes it is acceptable to kill innocents to save others from the guilty.

On another level is an allegory for America’s psychic apparatus. The cigar-chomping, maniacal Comedian is our id, gleefully feeding off his own lusts as he imposes a warped, but potent brand of law and order. Dr. Manhattan is the super-ego, divorced from emotion and perhaps humanity even as he acts as the world’s father figure imposing his perception of perfection (“The Superman exists, and he is American,” Osterman’s fellow scientist famously boasts). In between is the ego, epitomized by Nite Owl as an ordinary man not blessed with superpowers but struggling to do what is right to the best of his abilities.

The problem arises when Watchmen wallows too literally in its pop psychology at the expense developing a storyline with drive and purpose. Dialogue that is profound on the page proves ponderous when spoken, whether it is Dr. Manhattan’s metaphysical musings or the narration of Rorschach’s journal that reads like the deranged rants from the serial killer’s diaries in Se7en. Snyder’s slavish, if skilled devotion to crafting a faithful adaptation shackles him to the panes of Moore’s graphic novel in the same way film versions of plays are often confined by stagy strictures. When the film visits Mars where Dr. Manhattan constructs his own fortress of solitude, or Veidt’s Antarctic lair, or even an explicit sex scene between Nite Owl and Spectre, the results feel as hermetic as Dr. Manhattan’s psyche. Psychologically speaking, Watchmen needed more Jon Osterman and less Dr. Manhattan.

Who will watch Watchmen? Undoubtedly, a great many will. Enjoying it, however, involves a matter of perspective.

Neil Morris