Oz the Great and Powerful

How dare you wear white...you took Dawson's virginity!

Grade: C +
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Zach Braff
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 2 hr. 7 min.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in the Golden Age of Hollywood anymore.

Like the smoke and mirrors that two-bit magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) uses to transform himself into Oz the Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi employs cinematic sleight of hand to piggyback this prequel onto its venerated progenitor. But it takes more than a poppy field here and a CGI cowardly lion cameo there to take up the Wizard of Oz mantle. Indeed, almost as conspicuous are the other movie references being bandied about, from Snow White’s poison apple to Franco again playing opposite a talking monkey to the lightning that bad witch Evanora (Rachel Weisz) blasts from her fingertips at helpless good witch Glinda (Michelle Williams), a scene that recalls the Emperor’s treatment of Luke Skywalker at the end of the Stars Wars saga, another cinematic sacred cow again being fattened for avarice.

Indeed, Oz the Great and Powerful recalls the digitized, sanitized treatment of the Star Wars prequels or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland update. In truth, Oz’s most intriguing moments are its early establishing scenes set in a sepia-soaked Kansas circa 1905, where Oscar is a carnival cad charming lasses and fooling audiences with his low-tech magic act in one dusty town after another. After his hot air balloon is swept up by a twister, Oz crash-lands into a technicolor world eagerly awaiting an almighty savior who will defeat the wicked witch and assume dominion over the realm. The overt Messianic allegory lifts with the introduction of a trio of witches, including Evanora and her naive sister Theodora (Mila Kunis), all apparently waiting to go gaga for the first normal-looking male to fall from the sky.

The convoluted storyline follows Oz’s mission to defeat the wicked witch—but without killing her—using a band of tinkers, tailors and diminutive soldiers. Their steampunk solution to victory—and Oz’s ultimate larger-than-life persona—is nifty. And, Raimi draws an especially poignant parallel between a crippled Kansas girl (Joey King) who futilely asks Oscar to help her walk again, and an animated china doll (voiced by King) in Oz whose broken porcelain legs are glued back together by the accidental wizard.

But anytime the film threatens to gain traction, it’s undercut by the rambling narrative, Danny Elfman’s ill-fitting baroque score and, most significantly, Franco’s rank miscasting. While the rest of the cast—particularly Williams—try to stay true to their austere characters, Franco smirks his way through as if he’s on the set of Freaks and Geeks. And seriously, when (and why) did Franco start sounding like Jon Heder?

But, the fundamental flaw of Oz the Great and Powerful, like almost every other Wizard of Oz offshoot, is that it makes the mistake of positioning Oz as a place that actually exists in a separate dimension rather than its true tableau: the fever dream of an angst-ridden adolescent. Just like Dorothy Gale, doppelgangers from Oscar’s life in Kansas show up along the yellow brick road, but that device only made sense for Dorothy because she eventually “went home”/woke up.

There might not be any place like it, but Oz the Great and Powerful shows that you can’t always go home again.

The Bourne Legacy

"Why didn't I get to play The Hulk in The Avengers...Answer me!"

Grade: B –
Director: Tony Gilroy
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, and Stacy Keach
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

A rogue secret agent shoving a tracking device down a wolf’s gullet to mislead a missile-armed predator drone is a scene that sounds awesome even on paper. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of those adrenaline rushes in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth installment in the movie spy series.

Relentless early cross-cutting reveals that events in this sequel take place concurrent with those in the last Bourne film. With Jason Bourne on the loose and running amok (Matt Damon doesn’t appear, but his photograph does several times, curiously), the CIA decides to terminate other black ops programs, including their chemically-enhanced field agents. When Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) escapes a drone attack, he circles the globe looking for Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a geneticist with access to the chems and viral cultures needed to keep Cross super fit and focused.

Whereas the original Bourne trilogy was a modern-day Frankenstein story—a mind-altered monster searching for a creator now trying to destroy his creation—this reprise is about a junkie jonesing for his pills and a vial of liquid detox. Little else really happens aside from Cross and Shearing dodging repeated efforts to, you guessed it, eliminate them.

Still, consider me a sucker for jut-jawed bureaucrats—played here by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Dennis Boutsikaris, Scott Glenn and others—barking urgently to “cut off all loose ends” and “minimize the damage.” Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), who adapted the screenplays for the preceding three Bourne films, assumes the series’ directorial reigns from Paul Greengrass. The consequence is an increased predilection for dialogue and labyrinthine plot lines and less for kinetic action. The film has its breathless moments: a workplace shooting massacre is cruelly captivating, while a climactic car-and-motorcycle chase through the streets of Manila is exciting if haphazardly shot. And while Renner doesn’t possess Damon’s magnetism, he grittily fills his predecessor’s shoes.

As a standalone, The Bourne Legacy is an engaging spy thriller. As the inheritor of the Bourne mantle, however, it’s merely an adequate continuum…until and if Damon and Greengrass decide to jump back in.

Neil Morris

The Lovely Bones

Wait, you're not a vampire, are you?

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Jackson

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, and Rose McIver

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

It’s not the story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl that makes reviewing The Lovely Bones such a thorny undertaking.

If anything seemed like a sure thing, it was the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s mega-bestseller – it remained on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for over a year – directed by Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, helmsman of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, and apropos of Sebold’s dark subject, Heavenly Creatures.

Instead, apart from Stanley Tucci’s acclaimed turn as serial killer George Harvey, The Lovely Bones has been shut out of the awards season accolades. Frankly, some of the catcalls are nitpicky and unjustified. One of the most repeated criticisms is Jackson’s decision not to shoot the book’s gruesome, emotional touchstone, in which Harvey rapes and dismembers 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, Oscar-nominated for Atonement). Jackson proclaimed such a scene would “make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch” and that he had “no interest” in filming “anything that depicted violence towards…a young person in a way that was serious…”

Jackson’s larger, more cogent point is that the lurid rendering of such a heinous act is so combustible that it would suck the narrative and emotional oxygen out of the rest of the film. Indeed, The Lovely Bones is principally the story of Susie’s journey to an afterlife called “the in-between,” where she looks down on not only her killer, but also her family and friends as they struggle to cope with her death.

Jackson’s CGI-laden rendering of Susie’s hereafter is both risky and problematic. His ceaseless psychedelic representations are seemingly lifted from Terry Gilliam’s cutting room floor. But, the tableau is occasionally bucolic and evocatively spiritual. When Jack (Mark Wahlberg), Susie’s grieving father, smashes the collection of ships-in-a-bottle he and his deceased daughter once constructed together, the juxtaposition of life-sized shipwrecks that simultaneously occur along a rocky coastline in Susie’s afterlife is an affecting blend of bombast and melancholy.

The real problem with The Lovely Bones is that Jackson seems caught in his own in-between world. For starters, he adopts the book’s early-1970s suburbia setting, a milieu that speaks more to Sebold’s age (born in 1963) than any meaningful approximation of “more innocent times.” More significantly, Jackson takes the book’s already cumbersome plot points and lacquers them with jolting narrative and tonal shifts. The story’s meditative core metastasizes into a psychological thriller, police procedural, revenge saga, love story, coming-of-age tale, dark comedy, family drama, and, yes, spiritual odyssey. Taken individually, some of these subplots work well. As a whole, the result is schizophrenic and strangely emotionless.

Wahlberg proves both too young and lacking in emotional depth to portray the tormented Jack. Carolyn Dando and Reece Ritchie seemingly trained at the Twilight acting academy to play, respectively, the clairvoyant Ruth Conners and Susie’s would-be heartthrob, Ray. The rest of the otherwise game cast is repeatedly squandered: Susan Sarandon’s role as boozy Grandma Lynn is played for incongruous comic relief; the part of Abigail (Rachel Weisz), Susie’s mom, is edited down to the point of inertia; Lindsey (Rose McIver), Susie’s sister, primarily plays Nancy Drew and jogs around her neighborhood…a lot.

Even the precocious Ronan is reduced to monotonous narration and gaping at green screens. Her talents, like the other moments of brilliance sprinkled throughout The Lovely Bones, suffocate under the weight of great expectations and muddled implementations.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

I'm tired...just pull over and ask for directions
to the nearest mummy's tomb.

Grade: D

Director: Rob Cohen

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Michelle Yeoh, Luke Ford, and Isabella Leong

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Mummies get outsourced to the Far East in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the latest misbegotten sequel to an already marginal adventure-fantasy series. Consistent hack Rob Cohen (Stealth; xXx) inherits the directorial reigns to a senseless storyline about an ancient, shape-shifting Chinese emperor (Jet Li) resurrected in order to awaken a dormant, Terracotta army of CG cannon fodder and retake his Oriental throne.

Coming to save the day are father-son adventurers Rick and Alex O’Connell, played by Brendan Fraser and Luke Ford, whose every conversation sounds like marble-mouthed silent film stars struggling to adapt to talkies. Along for the ride are a pair of immortal crouching tigresses played by Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong, plus a pair of Yetis played by the sort of F/X normally seen in the direct-to-DVD releases, who, after dropkicking one of the emperor’s henchmen over a Himalayan gateway, raise their arms like a football referee signaling a successful field goal attempt.

The perfunctory air permeating this green-screened spectacle is as stale as a sarcophagus, and detailing all the script’s illogic would far exceed this limited space – e.g., why would a villain capable of morphing into a giant, three-headed dragon ride into battle on horseback in human form? Only Rachel Weisz emerges unscathed since she had the prescience to abandon the role of Evelyn O’Connell née Carnahan to poor Maria Bello and her wobbly English accent. Those responsible for this albino imitation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom should leave any future Mummies where they belong: dead and buried.

Neil Morris

Definitely, Maybe

I hear you're dating Scarlett Johannson,

so don't you think I'm a little old for you?

Grade: B +
Director: Adam Brooks
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Isla Fisher, Derek Luke, Abigail Breslin, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, and Kevin Kline
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Before its overextended, over-schmaltzy final act transforms it into this decade’s Jerry Maguire (“You complete me” could theoretically follow most sentences spoken during the last 15 minutes), Definitely, Maybe reminds you of the sort of film Woody Allen should be making nowadays. It marries sublime casting with smart characterizations and a modern-day zeitgeist that compliments, not devours, the storyline. It might not be on the level of When Harry Met Sally, but it definitely, certainly reminds you that producing a romantic-comedy of that ilk is still possible.

An explanation of “how I met your mother” literally turns into a bedtime story when young sprite Maya (Abigail Breslin), fresh off a grade-school primer on sex education, coerces her dad, Will (Ryan Reynolds), into telling the tale behind her mom and dad’s coupling, now on the eve of their divorce. Will’s journey dates back to 1992 when he leaves his Madison, Wisconsin hometown to work as a political consultant (and part-time gopher) in the 1992 New York City campaign office for then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

A whodunit shell game ensues, with the maternal candidates centering on three likely choices – high school sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), effete magazine journalist Summer Hartley (a radiant Rachel Weisz), and spunky gal-pal April (Isla Fisher). Over the ensuing decade, we watch as Will’s life vacillates between episodes of seduction and heartbreak, both personally (with the women in this life) and professionally (through the travails of the Clinton presidency).

Reynolds proves the able glue holding together the entire production, funneling his wiseacre shtick into a leading man who exudes masculine charm, vulnerability, and foibles. What is most stunning is he manages to cultivate credible onscreen chemistry with three different actresses (four if you count Breslin) representing three very different women, all without straining the bounds of believability or abandoning Will’s core personality.

There is seemingly a new delight emerging around every corner during the film’s first half, including Will’s political buddy played by Derek Luke and Kevin Kline as a author-cum-college professor beset with a half-tanked cynicism and penchant for bedding his freshman literary students, including Summer at one time. They all navigate a 1990s tableau – perhaps the first devout cinematic examination of the decade – in which everyone seems to enjoy boundless professional and economic success but still lacks a cohesive identity.

Writer-director Adam Brooks brings to bear an intelligence and wit not found in his previous two screenplays, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Wimbledon. If there is a critique, it is that the storyline unwisely extends past the big reveal – you had me at “Mommy” – and into a contorted epilogue desperately seeking some formulaic, fairy tale finale. Brooks should have trusted the maturity of his script, not narrative gimmicks and mawkish sentiment, to carry the film across the finish-line. While uniformly good, whether Definitely, Maybe is a great movie ultimately depends on which part you are watching, or, to quote a former president, “on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

Neil Morris