That’s right, there’s no “Th”. It’s a silly title, more suited to a first-person shooter video game, but that’s good, because it’s also your first warning to suspend every last shred of disbelief. Pretend it’s an animated movie, maybe some sort of violent anime, and you’ll be in the proper mood to enjoy this.
I’m not quite sure where to start explaining, it, though. The basic plot is as simple as any video game: Clive Owen (Children of Men, now out on DVD and Blueray, so go buy it if you haven’t already) plays the first-person shooter, “Mr. Smith”, a mystery man who lives in an abandoned building with a pet rat. He isn’t so much a character as a collection of quirks (Smith, not the rat), constantly going on rants about what he really hates, like bad drivers and people who slurp their sodas; and with an apparently never-ending supply of carrots somewhere on his person. But he’s a good guy, so when he sees a pregnant woman being chased by gunmen down an otherwise deserted street, he comes to her rescue. He delivers her baby in the middle of a shootout, and things just get more improbable from there.
Yes, I said more improbable. It seems to be set in New York, certainly someplace very large and crammed full of people, and yet the main characters are practically tripping over each other constantly, no matter how far any of them run. But the point is, Clive Owen is now stuck with this baby, because mommy didn’t survive the firefight and he has no idea where daddy is. Fortunately, he knows a hooker with a Heart of Gold (Monica Bellucci) who’s recently lost her own baby and is therefore his only option for feeding this kid, because baby formula is unavailable in the greater New York area. (Just run with it.)

The film in a nutshell: Clive Owen with a gun and a carrot, about to shoot a bad guy, with baby bottles in the foreground.

And since New York is such a small town, the bad guys who want the baby also know about this hooker, and go after her, and the chase is on. Like any good video game, it gets more and more violent as you go, and I can’t even begin to guess the death total. One scene alone has fifty men killed. Mostly people just get shot, but they have some other really gruesome deaths, so I guess someone had fun thinking them up. Did you know you can kill a man with a carrot? Well, maybe you can’t, really, but you can in this movie. And they do it to me again with the helicopter blades. Again you can see it coming a mile off, though, so it’s easy to avoid looking.
Mixed in with all the improbable action are a lot of bad jokes and puns and just about every cutsey little thing they could squeeze in. I can’t share most of them here, though, since I prefer to keep these reviews rated PG at worst. Early on, though, the main bad guy, Hertz, played by Paul Giamatti (Lady in the Water), gives an example I can use: “Why is having a gun better than having a wife?” he asks his goons, and answers his own question this way: “You can put a silencer on a gun.” Not nice at all, but at least clean. There are also lots of bizarre, MacGyver-like tricks with guns and bullets and of course duct tape, black-suited government agents that look like they shuld be trying to kill Neo, and lots of stuffed dogs. Actual dead, stuffed dogs, not the kind you buy for your kids (at least I hope not).
You can see why I had trouble figuring out where to start. It’s sort of a weird mix of some Quentin Tarantino film like Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix, and a spoof of a Bond film. Especially the end credits, so stay to watch those if you like the weird opening montages for the Bond flicks. And I’m still having trouble rating it. I love Clive Owen. He can manage to make any role work, apparently, given that he has almost nothing in the way of character development in the script but still manages to do something with the character. So I can’t rate it too low, even if I did keep expecting it all to turn out to be someone’s long, drawn-out dream, because it was all just that weird.
We’ll go with three idols. Maybe two and seven-eights, because three is my usual minimum for wanting to own a movie, and I’m not entirely sure I’d buy this one. It’s got enough improbabilities to keep anyone who likes to calculate odds busy for a lifetime, enough bullets to support a third-world revolution, and Clive Owen, but overall, I’m not sure the combination really does it for me. So just remember two things: don’t take any part of the movie too seriously, and don’t ever try doing any of the things you see on screen to a real baby. Yikes.

Here’s the first batch of requests from people… They’re not all exactly as requested, and I certainly did not do them all!
Erik had an idea… “I think it would be cool of you to compose some Japanese or Chinese music (classical type music, not the modern stuff).”
Well, I don’t know anything about the genre, so I just listened to a few clips off of Amazon. I might have this completely wrong – but this is what it sounds like to me.
Ishikari Lore
Lynette had an idea… “How about some music that could go with footage of driving on a roadtrip? ”
Okey dokey. Here’s another genre I have little experience in. So, I cranked up the GarageBand to see what it can do.
Matt’s Blues
Kristin has an idea… “How about some ancient type music. Or something that’s reminiscent of the Roman Empire. Like harps and flutes in a minor key.”
This one is a quite reserved sort of formal dinner kind of ancient music feel. I still might do another one that is more militaristic.
Temple of the Manes
And, I have an extra one… “Ominous Intro“. This one was written for a stage production that opened yesterday in Chicago. So if you’re in Chicago, go see this. It is very VERY good. And really REALLY inexpensive pound-for-pound considering the enormous entertainment it dishes out.
Get Downsized. I personally guarantee you will enjoy it… and I don’t care what demographic you’re from. mmm… maybe not Goths. But maybe! If you’re a Goth, and you go – let me know what you think of it!

It seems to me that Labor Day weekend here in the states was always kind of a big deal, movie-wise, like any three-day weekend, really. But somehow, this year, we didn’t exactly get a good crop. There was the remake of Halloween (yeah, right, like I was going to go see that) and that terrible Balls of Fury debacle that makes me wonder what’s happened to poor Christopher Walken’s career. He’s turned into some kind of parody of himself.
Oh, yeah, and then there was Death Sentence. It was almost totally un-hyped for some reason, in spite of starring Kevin Bacon, so I hardly knew it existed until suddenly it was at the theatre. It also stars Kelly Preston (Jerry Maguire, various Scientology meetings) as Kevin Bacon’s wife, Garrett Hedlund (Friday Night Lights — the movie, not the TV series) as bad guy Billy Darley, and John Goodman as an even badder guy who goes by the name of Bones (not to be confused with the Fox TV series).
Basically, Kevin Bacon and his lovely wife have two teenage boys, the elder of whom is a hockey prodigy, just ready to head to college and start his life. The younger one paints or something. The older son is killed, messily, as part of a gang initiation. Apparently they’re like the Mafia in that you have to kill someone before you’re “made”. The film also seems to revive an urban legend I heard long ago, which says that gang members drive around at night with their headlights off on purpose, and once another driver blinks his or her high beams in the universal signal for “Your lights are off, stupid,” they must follow that car and kill the driver. They kill the passenger this time, but close enough.
The one who actually did the deed is caught pretty quickly, buy they have only Kevin Bacon’s testimony and not much else in the way of evidence. The prosecutor thinks they can get a plea bargain and a three to five year sentence. Kevin Bacon decides that the law sucks, and recants his testimony so the kid can be released and Kevin Bacon can hunt him down and kill him instead. I get that he’s not supposed to be thinking rationally at this point, but yikes. Personally, I would’ve gotten the kid the jail time. As the prosecutor very rightly points out, a lot of these kids don’t survive three to five years in the big prisons.
But this is a movie, so Kevin Bacon does hunt him down, and off we go, spiraling down into a Greek tragedy, where every death provokes a revenge killing, and another, and another, until Zeus himself has to show up and tell everyone to knock it off. Okay, that doesn’t happen here, but they could’ve really used some divine intervention.

Kevin Bacon tries to look as tough as Jodie Foster in The Brave One.

At first, when Kevin Bacon’s just an ordinary guy trying to deal with his grief and guilt over what he’s doing, the movie’s still pretty interesting. He’s a normal person caught up in a violent world that he doesn’t quite understand, and things get out of his control too quickly for him to back off even if he’d wanted to. Then he slowly tries to turn into the Punisher or something, and it just gets… well, boring.
Actually, maybe the problem is that the movie tries to turn into Pulp Fiction. I expected blood, obviously, but they do things with a pump shotgun that just made me ill. I think it was the pump shotgun — there were so many kinds of guns around I lost track. But there are body parts flying, blood spattering everywhere, and a lot of uses of the F-word in various forms. I don’t know if they got anywhere near Pulp Fiction’s very impressive record (265 times, according to imdb.com), but they gave it a good try.
But at least with Pulp Fiction, appalling as it often was, you still got the sense the actors were having fun with it — they were really into their roles, and that showed on the screen. That little extra spark just isn’t here, though I’m kind of thinking that’s what they were going for. John Goodman, who helps add a great deal to the swear-word total, is also the only one who seems to be enjoying his over the top acting. The character is a horrible, fat, unshaven, unclean criminal who doesn’t seem to have a shred of conscience, but his scenes were the only ones where the audience reacted (except for the scene where a guy gets his leg blown off, but that was a different sort of reaction). He’s basically nothing but dry and deadpan and sarcastic, and he’s really good at it.
I was going to go with two idols, but for John Goodman’s sake, I’ll add an extra quarter idol. The gang members seem like caricatures of gang members (I’m not much up on gang culture, obviously, but somehow I don’t think there are a lot of them running around with “Carpe Diem” tattooed on their throats) and they’re all pretty much interchangeable as far as character development. Billy, the leader, gets more of a personality, but even that’s not much, though he does get a good scene at the end. At least, what I could hear of it sounded good. The same middle-aged couple who drove me crazy talking all through The Good Shepherd were back, and unfortunately sitting even closer to me this time. Anyway, don’t risk having to put up with noisy audience members, or even the film stopping twice, which happened to me — if you want the violence and the blood, just go rent the original Pulp Fiction. Accept no imitations.

…of the Body Snatchers, 2007 style. This is a remake, though of course they don’t make a big deal of that. No one ever really expects remakes to be as good as the original, somehow, even though in this case, just the fact that they can actually have special effects should make it better right there. It doesn’t, but it should.
This version and the three before it are all based on a story by Jack Finney (as was The Faculty, and maybe also others I don’t know about), so most people know the gist of the plot: an alien organism ends up on Earth and starts taking over the inhabitants. This was one place where the 1956 movie version (still the best, in my opinion) didn’t quite make sense — at the beginning of the movie, it seemed like people were being physically replaced, as the aliens grew exact replicas of their victims; but at the end, it seemed more that the victims’ existing bodies were simply taken over by the organism. This version smooths that out; the organism basically rewrites the genetic code in its own image, just like a virus, only on a much grander scale.
The 1956 version didn’t pretend to be anything but a B movie — the effects were practically nonexistent, the acting was solid if a little over the top for modern audiences, and the dialogue was nothing remarkable — but it worked, and has become a cult classic, and I’ve seen it many times. So that’s the one I kept mentally comparing this film to while I was watching, and 1956 kept winning, strangely. Nothing against Nicole Kidman, she can act up a storm, and Daniel Craig is no slouch. I didn’t even mind the kid in a relatively major role, which usually makes me cringe. But something just didn’t click.
Kidman is Dr. Carol Bennell, psychiatrist in a large city, I think New York. Originally, the lead was Dr. Miles Bennell, family physician in the small California town of Santa Mira. Miles’ girlfriend, Becky Driscoll, also gets a sex change for the new flick, becoming Ben Driscoll, M.D. (Craig). And strangest of all, the local psychiatrist from the first film, Dr. Dan Kauffman, apparently gets turned into Carol’s ex-husband, Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam, Gosford Park, and that new cable show The Tudors), now a doctor for the CDC, and the lucky first victim of the invading virus, brought to earth by a shuttle crash.
Like the original, much of the story is told in flashback, which I’m guessing is supposed to explain why sometimes it falls out of chronological order for a little while, but that was just faintly annoying as far I was concerned. Carol, ever the observant shrink, is pretty quick to realize something strange is happening. Suspicious, she goes to retrieve her son, OIiver (Jackson Bond), from his father’s house, but that’s when everything starts to go wrong and the projectile vomiting begins. Yeah, it was unpleasant, especially watching them do it into coffee urns.

Don’t show fear. They can smell fear…

But that’s how the virus spreads. Once in the bloodstream, through drinking tainted coffee or being vomited on directly — or, cleverly, by getting the CDC-recommended “flu shot” — all it needs is for the victim to enter REM sleep so it can jump in there and rewrite the genetic structure. That seems to me like a lot to accomplish during the relatively short period of REM sleep, but apparently this virus is good. As in the original, though, it’s also pretty stupid in other ways… as long as you don’t show any emotion, even when watching two people jump off a building, the infected people can’t tell who isn’t infected. You’d think they’d have a password or secret handshake or something.
Anyway, after a rather tedious scene about man’s inhumanity to man, blah, blah, it starts to turn into an action movie, with wild car chases and guns, and I think maybe that’s where this version went wrong. Not in having action, exactly, but it was almost always really jarring to see. Maybe that’s because the closest the original gets to an action scene is when Miles stabs one of the alien pods with a pitchfork, but it really shouldn’t be an action movie in any way — it’s all about the psychology of it, about what makes people people… or should be, at least. Maybe the various lectures about how animal the human animal is made everyone take the whole thing too seriously, because something just doesn’t click, as hard as everyone tries.
Two and a half idols here. It’s annoying, because I can’t point to any one thing and say, ‘this was really bad’ — though I also can’t pick out any one thing that was really good, either. Everything’s there to make a good movie, at least if some of the heavier moralizing is taken out, but it never quite turns into a good movie. It lacks the sense you got from the first movie about families being torn apart, loved ones being lost — the human angle, I guess. It becomes too global too fast, and ends up being about trying to save the world instead of trying to save individuals who the audience really gets to care about. You somehow don’t get much chance to care about any one character, so at least you won’t have to worry about not showing any emotion.