Scraping the bottom...
...(so you don't have to)!!!

by Ed Owens

"Reviewers make mistakes, too, Ed. I'm sure you've made some yourself." So said the voices inside my head, just after noting that I needed to add LeSour Canned Peas and Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia Ice Cream to my grocery list.

"Yes, they do, and yes, I have," I replied, realizing only after noticing the odd stare of the lady surveying egg noodles in aisle five that I had said it out loud. After a moment's thought, though, I came to the conclusion that there is an acceptable level of error, an error tolerance, if you will, that a reviewer must steer clear of in order to maintain what little credibility he or she retains (given that they have chosen perhaps the second least respected profession available - fluffer beats it out by a hair).

For example, venturing out into the lobby to get a refill of your large Coke forty minutes into Basic Instinct isn't going to have a profound effect on your ability to follow the rest of the film. Try that with The Crying Game, and the results could prove disastrous.

Take Resident Evil, for example, the latest video-game-turned-film from director Paul Anderson (not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson - although admittedly the mind boggles at the latent possibilities of the films of Paul Thomas being turned into video games..."Boogie Nights: The Game, exclusively for the Xbox"). The film opens with a virus being set loose inside a corporate-owned underground lab called The Hive. The lab's security system, in order to prevent the virus from escaping to the surface, seals its doors and then gasses or drowns all of the workers (including a savagely funny bit involving a group of people trapped in an elevator).

Soon afterwards, Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked on the floor of her shower, the victim of some nasty bruises and a wicked case of amnesia. Before she can put on some decent clothes, a group of commandoes crashes in and takes her with them as they make their way down to The Hive. The remaining 85 minutes (the events described above total less than ten) follow the commandos as they shoot, kick, chop, punch, and stab their way through a healthy dose of the undead (lots of people and a gaggle of dobermans). Some commandos live, some die, credits roll, people leave.

Speaking of the lab's defense systems, one reviewer said, "The Hive is set to lock itself forever after 60 minutes have passed, so the characters are racing against time. In other words, after it shuts all of its doors, and gasses and drowns everybody, it waits 60 minutes and really shuts its doors--big time." The problem is that the above point (couched as it is in terms of a criticism of the film's plausibility) is moot, ignoring as it does, two rather obvious plot points that could only have been missed by the comatose or those who chose to refuel during one of the film's three brief expository pauses.

Sorry, but that sort of thing bugs me.

To say the film is formulaic is being overly generous, but that doesn't mean it isn't any fun. Resident Evil is precisely the sort of film that demands to be seen in a theater with the right audience, and the one area where the film succeeds is in its awareness of and interaction with that audience. The film makes no pretense of being anything other than a straight-up horror flick. (Did I mention Milla Jovovich wakes up naked? Don't everybody rush to Fandango at once, as the collective mouse clicks of everyone reading this could be too much for their servers to handle.) It plays to its target audience in numerous ways. A brutally funny sequence involving a series of lasers that streak down a sealed corridor, effectively dismembering our heros, holds true not to any sort of internal logic, but to the expectations of the people watching. This sort of play between the film and its viewers is successful precisely because it eschews the smug self-awareness which has all but destroyed the genre as we know it. The audience I saw it with went with it, and the overall experience was enjoyable.

But leaving the film to its own devices proves very nearly fatal. While the lack of pretension is refreshing in this era of post-modern horror, it also means the film brings little if anything new to the table. At a relatively brisk 90 minutes and change, the film still begins to lose steam towards the end, especially when film's uber-monster appears, a CGI-abomination that is about as scary as a child's Spongebob action figure. The film still has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve (there is yet another shot of Jovovich nearly naked), but it can't completely escape its own self-imposed limits.

On another note, one of our county's finest who routinely patrols the multiplex actually stood in a side aisle through the entire film, even going so far as to participate in the various audience-related activities. I've never felt safer in a movie theater.

Movie: C+
Audience: A-
Security: A+
Reviewers who can't keep basic plot elements straight: F

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A new release that doesn't succeed in any way is Tom Dey's Showtime, the Robert DeNiro/Eddie Murphy buddy comedy that follows a formula it clearly doesn't grasp. Two dissimilar cops are paired for a new primetime reality TV show a la Cops (a fact the film makes frequent mention of, just in case we didn't get the joke). One is a hardline detective, Mitch Preston (DeNiro), and the other a loud-mouthed screwup beat cop named Trey Sellers (Murphy). Sellars desperately wants to be an actor, and Preston desperately wants to be left alone. Aside from the high-concept premise, the film's plot is a throwaway, a rigidly routine story involving a Latin American drug lord and some high-powered weapons. Hilarity ensues, the odd couple bonds, credits roll, I leave. I say "I leave" because I was pretty much alone in the theater. A couple did come in ten minutes in, but they made so little noise throughout the film that I frequently forgot they were there.

So much for the audience factor.

Murphy's character flip-flops between obnoxious clown and likable nebbish, failing to ever find an appropriate balance. Murphy's casting is a bit of a question mark, as the film constantly puts him on a leash when he most needs to be let go - put any of twenty actors in his place and the result would have been exactly the same. DeNiro's casting, on the other hand, is crystal clear, given that the character is invariably the same as every other role he's had in reccent years. DeNiro shows more energy in the brief outtakes which accompany the closing credits than in the entire film itself, and his performance here should put an end to the debates over whether or not he has resorted to phoning it in. As if the waste of the two leads weren't bad enough, the film further trashes the career of Rene Russo in the thankless and one-note role of the show's producer.

Saddled with a weak script and restrained performances from two of the more dynamic actors currently working, the film seals its own fate two-thirds of the way in by taking a decidedly nasty turn, showing a complete lack of restraint in the one place it so desperately needed some. The problem is a couple of particularly violent sequences which seem painfully out of place given the relatively light tone established early on.

Movie: D-
Audience: MIA
Seating availability: A++

©2002 Ed Owens
CineScene