andrewryland Reviews

3 Ninjas (1992)

turtletaub on acid

[2 October 2000]

It is perfectly obvious that John turtletaub is the greatest living American director. People who have yet to acknowledge this are what we call "lacking" "up top".

A bit simple.

Their lives are empty and their houses smell. Three Ninjas is liquid Turtletaub, a seminal movie, perhaps lacking the intense emotional core of "The kid", but then even Turletaub on a slightly off-colour day kicks seven shades of excrement out of most directors whacking off on all cylinders. Watch it or I'll cut your arms off.

Parting Shots (1998)

The portly talent's greatest ensemble

[13 August 2000]

There is a delicious insouciance to be had watching Michael Winner at work. His mastery of the cinematic rhetoric and peerless ability to blend biting black comedy and social satire with intricate, subversive drama, coupled with a parody of the presumptive disorder of contemporary movie-going make him nothing less than Britain's answer to Verhoeven.

It is of course the tragedy of Winner's career that he has arrived at a time when hardly anyone is clever enough to appreciate the brilliance. Where other writer/producer/editor/directors (and who can name many!) insist on superficial shifts of idiom each time they make a film - one cringes at the thought of Winterbottom and Egoyan - Winner has approached the cinema with a ferocious dexterity that threatens to shake the foundations of the medium. His rhetoric - the wronged avenging the scum in a series of caustic execution set pieces - has delivered numerous cine-riches. Simply, Winner is a storyteller whose genius is to keep telling the same story.

In the powerfully conceived `Death Wish' for example, Winner staked his claim as the vigilante-dude and the world half-choked on his brilliance. This was particularly pertinent since the transatlantic hack Martin Scorsese had recently unveiled his plethora of filth, `Taxi Driver', a seething piece of self-narcissism on the part of its sickening `creator'. In what would emerge as merely the first of many tedious misunderstandings, the stupid critics who dissed Winner actually preferred the yellow-car film. The threat had Scorsese scuttling off to waste his time on bloated musical vehicles such as `New York New York' and `The Last Waltz', which represented vomit rather than filmmaking, projected at 24 bursts per second at that. No such tossing around for Winner. He is a bastion of proper cinema and made a real film like `Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood'.

Returning to his preferred themes with such subtly evocative pieces as `Firepower' and `Death Wish II', Winner's milieu began to deepen and enrich the palette of his lucky viewer. I marvel at his ability to tease the preconceptions while giving the enjoyment bone a most satisfying tickle. Each time Winner spins another stand-here-while-I-kill-you-filth-monger yarn, he deepens his audience's understanding for both the material and the power inherent in cinema itself to undercut the value system of not just society but a collective consciousness, informed or otherwise.

For me the 1990s have been his most rewarding decade yet. So deftly has he proved that his punch can be packed in the days of the precocious upstart (go back to Film School David and Paul) that other so-called filmmakers have blushed in humble gratitude at the Mighty Mike. Granted `Bullseye!' (1991) is hardly vintage Winner, but who else could have come back from such a mauling with a piece of work like `Dirty Weekend'? One might of course subtitle the film Death Wish VIII, but it would be a chronic error. Beneath the muck lies a liberating, staunchly pro-feminist slant on the tale, lending the film a raw, lifelike quality that no amount of excrement-munching and choked fellatio attempts and could sweeten. Once again, even after 32 years, the powers-that-be did not understand. They are dumb.

The response for Winner was a 6 year absence from the business. In an act of almost offensively brilliant self-deprecation; Winner filled the time writing about waiters, being smug and generally letting people laugh at him. What else could have possibly led to the creation of `Parting Shots', a film so good that my face has blisters on it?

Where can I begin to describe just how good this film is?

Firstly I should begin with how bad it is. Of course I don't really think it's bad, but it is necessary to see why Winner was so devilish as to make a film that has all the surface appeal of a turd party. The reason is this; post-modernism begins with Michael Winner. He is the inventor, purveyor and instigator of this purely cinematic phenomenon. The question then: how does an archly brilliant post-modernist respond to accusations he is an appalling waste of time, 30 years out of date? Answer: he makes a film which is both and laughs his fat gourmet-crunching arse off at the same time. Returning with a baby-belter of a movie (cutter Crust is back too), Winner combined his twin career-pillars of mass murder and knockabout comedy to awesome effect, essentially summarising his work to date and affording long-time devotees a chance to glimpse the future of cinema.

Winner paints a haunting, ethereal landscape of memory and loss; dreams failed and lives squandered to the mire of a country lost in regression and hypocrisy. Rea's Harry is the archetypal Winner anti-hero writ anamorphic. A wedding photographer. He simply records the still moments of other people's happiness whilst his own has slipped by him like a soft liquid. It is great fun to see Harry killing people who have annoyed him because everyone has enemies in their life who they want dead. Like his director, he turns murder in to a new kind of art form, breathlessly contemporary, yet somehow timeless in its piquant beauty.

There were a great many occasions during the film when I felt a lump in my throat, often several. The opening scene when Harry is told he has 6 weeks to live is one of the most devastating openings in modern cinema, rivalled only by `Apocalypse Now' and `Manika, une vie plus tard'. Other non-sequetant jellyfish moments include Harry telling Bob Hoskins that his swimming pool is half his before drowning him, saying,

`You can 'ave the bottom 'alf'.

It's just so good. Also funny is Oliver Reed as well as John Cleese who I like. The ending is such a subversive, head-stoking success that I wondered if I could have done it better myself, even if I had an extra brain. Michael Winner is a man for our time and the time of our children. I love him. I love him.

I love him.

Wild Things (1998)

Look at the poster - it tells you all you need to know.

[25 May 2000]

If the concept of Denise Richards, naked but for a bra and schoolgirl mini-skirt ravaging a Gothicly made-up and chemically altered Neve Campbell is appealing to you, then you may find yourself in video heaven. This film is aimed so squarely at the young heterosexual male market that it's pitiful plea for respectability (tick off the Hitchcock references) must have been the only thing to prevent the producers from casting a less principled actress than Campbell and going straight for the top-shelf.

Wild Things is not misogynist per se, since the men are as guilty as the women. Indeed, every character is a fraud of some description and since Bill Murray's is the only one to admit as much, he is easily the most charming of a thoroughly abhorrent lot, most of whom get what they deserve. However, it is hard to imagine what possible appeal this could have to female audiences who don't find Matt Dillon's smug grin or Kevin Bacon's damp member enough to reduce them to dribbling lust.

There isn't so much a plot here as a series of excuses; for another illogical character-reversal, some pretty scenery or another shot of Richards scantily clad figure, who's cleavage the Director of Photography must have had burnt on to his retinas by the end of the shoot. In amongst it all there is a well-executed parody struggling to get out. The small-town California instincts are played up nicely with the community sub-dividing itself in to various factions who don't so much live together as co-habit. Theresa Russell has fun as Richards (naturally) sluttish mother who has slept her way around "Blue Bay" and still has a crush on Dillon's teacher-of-the-year. At the other end of the social strata, there is the inevitable "swamp trash" represented by Campbell and her family of in-bred crocodile trainers. The script is at pains to highlight the differences between these two lifestyles at first but soon gives up when the convoluted murder/black-mail/double-cross system gets in place.

In the end this emerges as a competent thriller, high on titillation, low on logic, and acted with general apathy. Executive producer Bacon is particularly tedious, especially when his presence starts to dominate the second half. What you are left wondering is why these people should have bothered in the first place. Granted Campbell is given the chance to show another side to her usual "vulnerable-innocence" persona, demonstrating "vulnerable-guilt" instead and Richards is presumably aware that an array of bikinis, pouts and lesbian clinches (champagne-splattered breasts inclusive) will hinder her career none and makes you wonder why she refused Verhoeven. Otherwise Bacon and Dillon seem merely to be waving to each other on downward trajectories, while director McNaughton has finally given in and admitted he is simply a peddler of forgettable trash.

Of course, none of this really matters a damn to those who will watch Wild Things, since it is not a bad evenings entertainment if you would rather not have to deal with anything too cerebral and are willing to forgive the dubious quasi-racism and ideological hypocrisy on offer. And unless you hoped to see Neve in the buff, chances are you'll get exactly what you paid for.

Wild at Heart (1990)

An appalling indulgence

[25 May 2000]

There are a number of people who will trawl through David Lynch's films, lauding and praising each one for their apparently daring originality, their unusual and often incoherent narratives and the general level of weirdness on display, frequently concluding that the man is a genius who remains at the forefront of greatest American film-makers. I count myself in that group.

No other modern writer/director has proved as consistently surprising and challenging as Lynch and managed to disturb and provoke in such intelligent fashion. But there are certain parameters necessary for the Lynch cocktail to work its magic. In his most successful films, there are in place certain constraints which are being pushed against, sometimes the quiet etiquette of suburban blandness, behind which all manner of desires and perversions seethe (Blue Velvet, Twin peaks, Lost Highway). Lynch has used this contrast to strong effect in other settings as well, such as the mannered hypocrisy of Victorian England (The Elephant Man) where men try to find solace and dignity or the dislocated and simple lives of Mid-West Americans 9The Straight Story) where one man's strength and determination slowly teaches them a little more about themselves. In Wild at Heart however, his most Lynchian and least effective film to date, there are no such constraints on either characters or director, so they all indulge their every whim. From the violent opening Lynch signals a ride of freewheeling excess is on the cards, but that excess is not grounded in any kind of stable centre and the overall effect is one of numb indifference.

The basic plot is anther spin on the lovers-on-the-run theme, with just-out-of-prison Ripley (Cage) and naughty-rich-girl Lula (Dern) fleeing her horrific mother, Marietta (Dern's real-life mother, the insanely Oscar nominated Diane Ladd) and the loser (Stanton) she has assigned to wipe out Ripley because of some raging sexual jealousy left over from Ripley's rejection of her years before. From here on the story becomes largely irrelevant, since this is Lynch's arena and he uses it to dredge up all manner of over-wrought set-pieces, dream sequences and "symbolism", which are largely pretentious and uninviting, such as the sex scene where we repeatedly fade to each colour of the rainbow. Of course this is in keeping with the film's endless Wizard of Oz motifs, which are purely superficial and add nothing, since Lynch provides neither a worthy homage to that film or an interesting critique of its place in American culture (although he seems to think he has done both). There are less obvious "Oz" reference points which this film deconstructs, such as the death of the all- American family and the surreal nature of the open road, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that Lynch is simply keeping up his everything-goes ethic which permeates the film (or maybe just throwing a bone to those who enjoy spotting that kind of thing).

This is not to say W.a.H. is a complete failure. Lynch is still an inventive and controlled visual director and at least some of his black humour comes off well, but these qualities lose their impact when there is a void of genuine suspense or intrigue. This is the one film which sees Lynch the film-maker pandering to "Lynch" the brand name, offering his fans all their favourite ingredients from his previous films, exploiting them to the full and removing the limitations which made those facets of his personality interesting in the first place. Ultimately, how you view Wild at Heart depends on whether you find this tedious or enthralling. Few, I imagine, will fall in-between.

Vertigo (1958)

Perhaps the greatest film of the 20th century

[19 May 2000]

This is the film that should be held up in recognition of the medium as a pure art form. Vertigo was unlike every film that came before it and still retains its unique power even as it influences countless modern directors, from Scorsese and Lynch to Gilliam and Burton.

Viewed today it looks cutting-edge and revolutionary, with its tantalising genre-bending and one of the few linear structures more bewildering and unsettling than Psycho. It is essentially an 80 minute and a 40 minute film sewn together and the experience is rather like living out someone's disturbing dream, then waking to find the reality is even worse.

The plot is Vertigo's weakest element. It ultimately emerges as preposterous, contrived and largely unconcerned with the demands of logic. However, it is difficult to summarise without revealing the key development that occurs some way in (although most reviewers give it away anyway), so this synopsis will be expository only. A San Francisco beat cop, Scottie Ferguson discovers during a fraught roof-top chase that he suffers from vertigo and is inadvertently responsible for the death of a colleague, who was trying to help him. Gutted, he retires from the force and leads a fairly routine life until an old friend contacts him with a private job; to follow his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak) who appears to be transfixed by the spirit of a dead relative and whose trances are becoming increasingly intense. Scottie agrees to follow Madeleine as she makes her way around the city each day, visiting the same few places and sitting quietly as if possessed. When she attempts suicide in the San Francisco bay, Scottie jumps in to rescue her and a relationship develops. Scottie tries to discover the reasons for her trances as the pair begin to fall in love.

What follows should not rightly be revealed because, like Psycho, the film is supposed to be watched with as little knowledge as possible of the plot twists. (Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to see the film for the first time without already knowing all but the ending.)

It is the most perplexing and intriguing of the Hitchcock legacy and broke the rules in so many ways that it's influence is felt even in films which appear unconnected. It was conceived under the jurisdiction of a Hollywood studio, but produced in conditions we would now associate with independent cinema, since Hitchcock's reputation allowed him almost total control over his stories and selection of cast and crew. It allows its "villain" to escape unpunished, with reward, which censorship had never permitted before. Symbols and meanings are created out of music, colours and other visual motifs in the most original way since Citizen Kane. The manipulation of its stars' personas and what audiences expect from them (Stewart especially, but Hitchcock as well) to enhance its power was extremely unusual in an age when actors were required to be instantly recognisable "types" to maintain their appeal. Finally, its world-view of corruption, sadism, loneliness and disaffection is presented with such unforgiving cynicism as to be absolutely suffocating to watch.

Vertigo is also a technical marvel, with the camerawork fluid and perfectly controlled (pioneering the now legendary zoom/track in reverse directions - see Jaws, Goodfellas, Three Kings etc). The photography has a dream-like beauty which only scenery-based films (Lawrence of Arabia, Badlands, The Thin Red Line) have matched; the music haunting and unforgettable; the performances astonishingly honest and brave.

But for all the achievements of Hitchcock's servants, it is his own personality which makes Vertigo the film it is. He orchestrates a story that is both emotionally involving and clinically cold. It is impossible to separate the film from our understanding of him as a director and the role that the director plays in creating the film experience for us. If Rear Window is an allegory of our impulses to watch and observe the images we see played out in front of us every day, then Vertigo is about taking it a step further and making our own; crafting and moulding people to resemble our fantasies, seizing back control from a world which has long since gone mad and left us to make what we can of the pieces.

Viewed a certain way, nearly all Hitchcock films can be interpreted as black comedies, wherein he found a quiet, slightly perverse amusement at the horrors he was putting up on screen. But what little humour there is Vertigo is not ironic, it is wry and often sad. It may be the only film where he truly dropped his popular "showman" facade and offered to the world something which borders on confession, perhaps even a plea for understanding and forgiveness. You can see adverts, pop videos and feature films which spoof famous scenes from Hitchcock's films; the crop duster in North by Northwest, the endless moments of "watching" in Rear Window or the shrieking shower-slaughter in Psycho. But when film-makers draw on scenes from Vertigo it is never to get laughs or brag about what they know, but usually to show respect and acknowledge their debt to Hitchcock. Nobody has set a comedy sketch in a bell-tower or a green neon-lit hotel room and they never will, because people the world over see Vertigo and often react exactly the same way, despite differences in culture and language. It is not about the terrorists, the freaks or the rejects of society that surface occasionally to pick off one of the ordinary folk, it is about the monster that lurks in everyone. It doesn't just rear its head on occasion, it subtly dominates everything we do to ourselves and each other and no-one, least of all Hitchcock, has found much to laugh about in that.

From Russia with Love (1963)

The finest of the series

[18 May 2000]

From Russia with Love was the 2nd and is still the best Bond film to date, building on the themes and style set up by the first film, Dr. No, but distancing itself considerably from that film's tone of cartoonish escapism which would became the trademark of the series.

FRWL is a serious espionage thriller with all the elements of a crowd-pleasing adventure expertly woven together. The elements of gadgetry, humour and vulgarisation of female sexuality are played down at all times, appearing only when relevant to the plot and enhancing the film rather than dominating it.

This was the first Bond film to include the now-obligatory pre-credits sequence scene-setter, which would soon become exercises in special-effects driven budget-expenditure. Here it is a simple but very effective cat-and-mouse pursuit through the gardens of a mansion at night, ending on a clever twist which neatly introduces the film's study of professionalism undermined by personal involvment.

The plot that emerges concerns the SPECTRE organisation's attempt to manipulate British and Russian powers to bid for a Decoder system which would give the victor a considerable advantage in the Cold War. There is no attempts at world-domination, simply a calculated political scheme which adds considerably to the suspense.

Connery fits the role of Bond even better this time around and enjoys the demands on his physicality and wit, before the fatigue was to set in and he resorted to a glib caricature. Surprisingly, the film's female roles are given equal attention by the script, from Daniela Bianchi's manipulated heroin to Lotte Lenya as the truly horrific assassin, Rosa Kleb. The villains are charismatic but believably deadly and never overplayed, with Robert Shaw particularly impressive as the agent sent to execute Bond by impersonating a British agent and gaining his trust.

Anyone more familiar with the modern Bond films may mourn the comparative lack of action-sequences, but for those prepared to follow the engaging and unpredictable plot, there are some excellent set-pieces towards the film's end, such as the helicopter attack on bond, the fight in the train carriage (17 films later it still the best-executed of any Bond film) and the climactic boat pursuit as Bond escapes to Venice.

What remains most satisfying about this film is the attention that has been paid to the human interest. The love story is complex and convincing, the differences between cultures and ideologies subtly drawn and the psyche of the protagonist explored much further than usual. Every so often the producers decide it's time to give a Bond film a bit more "depth" than usual (see Licence to Kill or The World is not Enough) but they have rarely achieved it without unbalancing the picture or striking a false note. From Russia with Love remains the least typical but most rewarding Bond film.

Arlington Road (1999)

Stunning

[15 May 2000]

Arlington Road is a film that truly believes in something and stands by it. It goes out of it's way to shake the audience out of their complacency, by having Farraday (Bridges) address certain issues in seminars and then watching him live through the horror that he has only read about.

Rarely has a commercial American thriller been so intent on blaming its own villains for some of the injustices of terrorism. The convention (so imbedded that no-one but the occasional critic even questions it) that the biggest threat on American democracy and peace is from Middle Eastern terrorists is dispelled at once in Kruger's surprisingly powerful screenplay. The threat here is front the family next door. Mark Pellington's directorial debut cunningly balances this fear with the concept of fear itself; in a world of conspiracy theories and paranoia, might Farraday simply become a victim of his own obsession or does he truly have reason to suspect his new neighbour?

After a horrific and intensely claustrophobic opening, the credits sequence launches an assault on the senses like nothing since Fincher's "Se7en" (1996, dir. David Fincher, scr. Andrew Kevin Walker). Whilst the early stages of the film are relaxed and somewhat subdued, the themes are established early and the tension quietly built up in to true panic.

The closing chase does stretch credibility, but is justified by an extraordinarily sly twist which may be devastatingly cruel, but it is essential to the film's power. If it had opted for the ending which sees innocent man defeat deadly foe, it would have betrayed every principle it made in the first half. Instead it actually acts its theory and ensures that no-one forgets it in a hurry. I defy anyone, even on video, to walk away from Arlington Road without wondering whether they might also have been susceptible to the kind of lies and manipulation which it so brutally exposes.

Scream 3 (2000)

The weary sound of a machine notching up another hit

[15 May 2000]

Scream 3 is a film hampered by the weight of expectation, it's own lack of truly original ideas and the general apathy of the makers toward their material.

For about sixty seconds the opening is impressively different from its predecessors, before the conventions creep back in and the script starts to buckle under it's own tedium. The killer demands to know the whereabouts of Sidney Prescott from his hapless phone victim, Cotton Weary. So now we have to wait not only for the endless round of stalk-and-chase scenes on the perky heroin, but for the killer to actually find her in the first place.

The post-title trawl around the various locations of the original characters gradually brings them all together. In order to continue the "tension" the script once again has split Dewey and Weathers and attempts to surprise greatly by re-uniting them again at the end. Meanwhile no-one whatsoever is interested in the Campbell's character, who once again plays a supporting role to the many cameos, in-jokes and new characters.

Scream 3 has absolutely no focus and is a remarkably cold experience. The characters in Scream were always stronger than those of its successor but this time even the few remaining ones have been underwritten and acted with little enthusiasm from the cast (a similar flaw can be found in Marquand's Return of the Jedi). Arquette is stiff and uninteresting, Cox-Arquette nervy and thoroughly stereotyped (some may remember how impressively her characterisation just avoided obvious cliché two films ago) and Campbell simply awaiting the pay cheque. New characters provide little interest since they are predominantly "actors" playing Scream characters in film-within-film horror-movie, Stab 3.

So the dearth of human interest thoroughly unengaged (bar an amusing and rather touching cameo from Jamie Kennedy as film buff Randy) whose personality only serves to reminds us of how inferior the series has become, one inevitably looks to the suspense elements for a modicum of real interest.

Unfortunately, the identity of the killer is an area that the cynical minds behind this concoction might have paid greater attention to, but alas it has scarcely been more obvious. It would take an extremely deficient mind not to guess at once who he/she is from the early set-pieces. This is made even more obvious by the sheer obviousness of its red herrings. The chase sequences are executed with requisite gusto and style by Craven, even playing games with our memory of the sets in the original film (which have of course been reproduced in proportion-perfect detail in the Hollywood back-lots), but can not disguise the fact that they are tense but never once frightening.

The hopeless (and frankly, incoherent) finale takes far too long to reveal what we have already guessed at anyway, and revels in sadism and brutality towards women even more than usual, whilst singularly failing to deliver anything new in its closing seconds. For all its smug mocking of genre clichés, it is remarkable how many there are that these films would rather you didn't notice they are adhering to. Logic, of course, has become irrelevant by now and once again the killer keeps on trying to kill the protagonist before using his final chance to stop and explain all the motives.

Most galling of all is the defence of the film's existence in terms of its trilogy status. Scream 2 hinted at it with a throw-away remark, but part 3 never misses an opportunity to remind as us that we are watching "part 3 of 3", even though the killer never actually states an intention to finish a trilogy. All concerned (characters and film-makers) seem intent on following the rules and guides set out by Randy in his video monologue. The three-act structure adds nothing to the drama or our understanding of the previous films, except to relentlessly point out that some detail from the past which we have overlooked may come back to get us in the last reel (it never does by the way, it just contrives new back-stories which were evidently not there first time around).

If Craven, Williamson et al had never made another Scream film, who exactly would be crying out for precisely two more? Scream would be recognised for what it really is (and the more of these films that get made, the more the original film is undermined), a witty and energetic horror spoof that conquered the hardest (and generally, most pointless) genre of all, the horror-comedy, and succeeded in both. There was nothing exceptional in the idea, but it was executed with startling technical proficiency and a real affection for the spirit of the films it lampooned. The characters may have been thinly drawn and two-dimensional but they were at least engaging to watch for the running time. And crucially, Sidney's slightly dour self-pity was nicely offset by her spunk-filled friend Tatum (the lovely Rose MacGowan). In 2 and 3 there had been no foil for Sidney and she is simply the dull centre of a lifeless universe.

The swipes and references to horror films were never over-emphasised, but a believable part of the film's world; the closet small-town community that might well have been drip-fed scary movies set in towns like theirs. The move towards more commercially viable (and populated) locales in the subsequent films has lessened their impact considerably and left a fundamental flaw in their ideology: the main point that 2 and 3 have kept making is that under the cloak of celebrity and fame, the plight of the individuals who suffered is forgotten. People make money out of other peoples' misery and take the benefits that come with it. Problem is, the sequel makers care just as little about human beings and are content to simply sit back and wallow in the sound of cash-tills pinging the world over.

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

It's certainly magnificent

[15 May 2000]

Early on in Sirk's MO, a character says to Rock Hudson,

"Becoming a doctor is like an obsession. It will consumes you and make you consume it even more. But when you do...it will be a MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION."

Granted here I have maybe not quoted right in all ways, but the spirit of the sentence comes through starkly and brilliantly.

Obsession. With being a doctor? Obsession. With getting it right? Obsession. Can you save a blind women (and it was his fault)? Obsession. Of course he can?

When he does it will be magnificent.

Boom - sha - car - luck!!!

Hudson is of course here in this film and it is his film to be in. He is of course magnificent as the titular obsession. Film deals with obsession in many ways, not least in its title.

Sirk is a director par good and this film is certainly one he will be remembered for, even when he has gone. He directs MO like his drip-line is feeding him the very spirit of the ghost of a dead doctor. The doctor Hudson sees prompting him from above, like heaven, only better. It is a thick and strongly resonant image, reminiscent of late-Fandolini, perhaps even early-Baddger. Reflections and the surface of things play a large part in Hudson's style and he cleverly counterposes what we see with what else we see, asking us what might be the truth. Can we see past the surface? Also, well script.

Batman & Robin (1997)

An underrated future classic

[26 March 2000]

If like me, you felt that the first two Batman films were cramped by the relentless Gothicisms of Tim Burton's tedious style, you may find this fourth in the series a refreshing change. Burton has been ousted in favour of Joel Schumacher, a chronically underrated director who added a good deal of sophistication to such otherwise mundane vehicles such as The Client, 8mm and the mediocre Batman Forever.

Here he demonstrates his mastery of audience wish-fulfilment, piling on well-executed action sequences with wonderfully wacky visual compositions and some very touching moments which really add new dimensions to the franchise.

The introduction of a new character in Bat-girl is perfectly timed. Silverstone's understated performance of feminine grace and physical strength provide a much needed counterpoint to the machismo of Clooney and O'Donnell. Clooney may not be as strong a Batman as Val Kilmer was in Forever, but he does hold the screen for the most part, proving just why he is so popular among viewers of all ages; he can handle a quip better than most leading men you could name and generates a sizzling chemistry with supermodel Elle Macpherson, stunning in her first screen role.

Certainly this film is not without it's flaws. Schwarzenegger so relishes his occupation of the bad guy role that he threatens to detract from Clooney's heroism, whilst Uma Thurman looks far too attractive to convincingly suggest she could hurt anyone.

But babes and villains have never been the lynchpin of the Batman films; it is always the plot that is the star and it is here that B & R delivers with aplomb. From the opening which deftly pits the protagonist against killer ice hockey players (and neatly establishes the fractious relationship between the titular duo) to the sky-high finale, the overall feeling is of being taken on a roller coaster ride where you have no idea when it will stop and if you will escape with your life.

The generally negative critical reception was undoubtedly due to a certain prejudice on the part of those who felt that the film would not be able to escape from under the shadow of the poorly scripted Forever. This is a vehicle ripe for rediscovery on a VHS system as it may well be in years to come. Perhaps only then will audiences realise just what viewers of the mid nineties were taking for granted.