reVIEW (34)
BLADE II

With Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army coming rapidly down the pike, I thought to look back at his immensely enjoyable Blade II.
And as an added bonus, I’ve also resurrected a review of Blade: Trinity, which is somewhere in the Archive.
Sorry, but I’m not enough of a masochist to actually endure Steve Norrington’s Blade again just so I can write a review of it. That’s for far braver souls than I.

Now if you’re a regular ‘round here at the Iguana, you’ll know that I love me my vampires, so I’m rather picky when it comes to my suckheads.
Well, I was pretty underwhelmed with Steve Norrington’s stab at the genre with the original Blade. Though it did have Stephen Dorff and Udo Kier in it, the movie itself was fairly unimpressive.
Not so with Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II.

To begin with, this sequel’s actually got a director behind the wheel, someone with a clear and focused vision of the film he wants to make, and the skill and creativity to bring that vision to celluloid life.
That director then has a script by David S. Goyer, who, apparently realizing that a Blade movie is, in essence, a Wesley Snipes action vehicle, throws out all that bush league vampire politicking from the original, and serves up a high-flying, kick-a$$ ride, with crateloads of crazy, wonderful toys that make nasty undead meanies go boom.

Aside from Del Toro and Goyer, there’s a whole bunch of other key personnel involved that make Blade II have the big, sharp, and formidable teeth that it does.
There’s the triple threat of cinematographer Gabriel Beristain (The Ring Two and The Invisible), long-time David Cronenberg collaborator, production designer Carol Spier (who also worked on Christophe Gans‘ ultra-creepfest, Silent Hill), and costume designer Wendy Partridge (who also dressed up the bizarre residents of Silent Hill, as well as the weirdoes on Del Toro’s Hellboy).
Then there’re artists Tim Bradstreet, who serves as Vampire “Look” Consultant, and Mike Mignola, who serves as Visual Consultant. (Mignola would, of course, collaborate with Del Toro again for the Hellboy films.)
Tippett Studios (founded by special effects wizard Phil Tippett) then provides creature effects, bringing the film’s Reapers—vampires who feed on other vampires—to hideous, hellish life.
With all this top caliber talent behind the camera, Blade II looks effin' fan(g)tastic (sorry), and feels like you’ve walked straight into a Vampire role-playing game, with a whole lotta guns and testosterone, of course.

And in front of the camera, you’ve got the one-two Big Baddie punch of Thomas Kretschmann and Luke Goss, as vampire ancient, Overlord Eli Damaskinos, and Reaper Jared Nomak, respectively. This pair bring the necessary gravity to their antagonists’ roles that make the film’s bad guys substantial and worthy opponents, with a presence that cannot be ignored nor dismissed.
Kretschmann would, of course, go on to appear in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, while 80’s music junkies may—or may not—recall Goss as part of the duo, Bros. (Goss returns to Del Toro-landia as Prince Nuada in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.)

Anther key performer is Ron Perlman, as Bloodpack member, Reinhardt. Perlman had previously worked on Del Toro’s debut feature Cronos, and would, like Mike Mignola, re-team with the director for the Hellboy films. As part of the Bloodpack, Perlman’s Reinhardt has been training two long and hard years to take down Blade, only to have to work alongside him, to deal with the Reaper problem. The macho antagonism between Reinhardt and Blade make for some interesting and amusing moments in Blade II.
Among the Bloodpack, you’ll also find Donnie Yen, as Snowman. Yen, is of course known for his work on the Hong Kong martial arts scene. On Blade II, Yen also handles the martial arts choreography, resulting in some awesome fight sequences, the best in fact, in the Blade trilogy. (Yen would subsequently be seen as Sky in Yimou Zhang‘s visually ravishing Ying Xiong (Hero). This year he headlines Wilson Yip‘s Dao Huo Xian (Flash Point), and next year, Gordon Chan’s highly-anticipated remake of the supernatural thriller, Painted Skin, which revolves around “a vampire-like woman who eats the skins and hearts of her lovers.” Yum.)

But for all those impressive pluses, there is a rather glaring minus, in Leonor Varela, who plays Damaskinos’ daughter, Nyssa. At this juncture, I’d like to point out that in the old tongue, “Nyssa” means “She Who Does Not Know How To Act.”
It’s sad that Varela is given one of the bigger supporting roles in Blade II, as her performance is far from convincing. Kretschmann and Goss manage to emote far better from beneath Nosferatu-like make-up appliances than Varela does with her flawless, God-given skin.
Still, even with that drawback—and some sequences where the CGI isn’t quite pixel-perfect—Blade II is still light years better than either Norrington’s original, or Goyer’s Blade: Trinity.

That singular moment, early on in Blade II, when Snipes leaps off a rooftop, and the camera twists and turns along with him in his rapid descent to the street below, then tags along with the bullet as it speeds towards an escaping vampire, is the moment when it all fell into place for me. In that bravura, CGI-assisted move, Del Toro pulled me onto the kinetic ride that is Blade II, instantly imparting an instinctual knowledge that I could trust him, because he knew exactly what he was doing.
And he did.
This is one of the few Marvel movies that actually has the brazen and ballsy energy of the best comic books out there, and in this day and age, should serve as an important touchstone, when audiences seem content to allow limp entries like Ghost Rider and the Fantastic Four films to actually turn a profit.
Thus far, this also remains Del Toro’s best Hollywood movie to date. We will, of course, have to re-evaluate after Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but until then, you’d do well to take Blade II in, ‘cause Del Toro slathers enough butter, blood, and adrenaline on this popcorn movie to make it all worth your while.

Parting shot: Reviews of Blade: Trinity, Ghost Rider, the Fantastic Four movies, Guillermo Del Toro’s El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), the Hellboy animated film, Sword of Storms, as well as Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two and David S. Goyer’s The Invisible (both of which were shot by Blade II cinematographer Gabriel Beristain), can be found in the Archive.

(Blade II OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (32) 
SUSPECT ZERO

I only recently got to see the amusing faux documentary Incident at Loch Ness on cable, which got me some good looks at one Gabriel Beristain (cinematographer on Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II and David S. Goyer’s The Invisible) and one Zak Penn (who directed Incident). Since Penn co-wrote Suspect Zero, I thought, “Why not?”
A few years back, E. Elias Merhige gave us Shadow of the Vampire, the canny exploration of creativity set against the backdrop of the filming of the classic German silent film Nosferatu. Now, Merhige returns with Suspect Zero.

“A 50 foot shark. Ever see one?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

FBI Special Agent Tom Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has been relegated to the Albuquerque field office after a six-month psych evaluation following a much-publicized breach of Bureau protocol. As it turns out, Mackelway has become the obsession of Benjamin O’Ryan (Sir Ben Kingsley), a man who claims to be a former FBI agent, and is apparently a remote viewer, a psychic individual able to “see” things happening in distant locations. Shortly into the film, Mackelway becomes embroiled in the investigation of a man murdered by O’Ryan, a man whose eyelids have been sliced off.

If you’re beginning to get the impression that Suspect Zero is a grisly, disturbing piece of film, well, you’re partially right. Though certainly nowhere near as grisly and sordid as Seven was, Zero is a subtly disturbing exercise in the building of mood. With masterful editing and the use of eerie audio tracks and an eclectic and interesting musical score, Merhige manages to construct a movie that keeps itself afloat by virtue of atmosphere.

“Okay, but a serial killer, by definition, is condemned to repetition, isn’t he? I mean, isn’t that what he’s all about?”

Where Zero falters however, is its script (by Billy Ray and Zak Penn), which doesn’t allow itself to build any momentum to carry us forward. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of urgency to solving the case doesn’t help matters much either. Unlike The Silence of the Lambs or The Cell, where we are given a specific victim in current jeopardy to identify with, the victims in Suspect Zero are too much of ciphers for the audience to care about, except in the most abstract of ways.
Though not as handicapped as Seven is when stripped of its technique, Zero nonetheless lacks a certain something to make it a film of substance. Or perhaps, there is a little too much there to make it a tight, coherent piece. Much like the frantic and cluttered writing and art of O’Ryan, one detects a certain busy-ness of plot elements and details that only serve to obscure the merits of what could have been an excellent film.

Fortunately, we have Eckhart and Sir Kingsley to keep us occupied. Eckhart, with his past work with Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men, Possession), has proven to be an engaging performer, and Sir Kingsley brings both a borderline psychotic intensity and world-weary humanity to O’Ryan that is a privilege to watch. Given that, it’s sad that Carrie-Anne Moss, who proved in Memento that she can do more than just fancy martial arts on wireworks, isn’t given much to do by the script.

And once again, the script is the culprit, which I believe is the case with practically all the post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thrillers, including its sequel Hannibal, and its prequel, Red Dragon. Not even Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter could save Copycat, and as I alluded to earlier, bereft of David Fincher’s moody technique, Seven’s script isn’t much to write home about either.

“We saw things men shouldn’t see. Agony. Torture. Evil.”

In trying, among other things, to posit a new sort of serial killer for the new millennium, the metaphorical “50 foot shark,” which may exist despite not having been seen by mortal eyes, Suspect Zero only succeeds in giving us a muddied view of a grab bag of ideas that never quite comes together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps if Ray and Penn had trimmed down some of the story’s minutiae, focused less on ideas and more on the story’s rhythm, Suspect Zero could have been the film it clearly wanted to be. As it is, though it isn’t a total waste of time, it also isn’t an entirely satisfying cinema experience.

Parting shot: Eckhart, who was also great in Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking, will be seen in next year’s The Dark Knight, as D.A. Harvey Dent, a.k.a. The Man Who Will Be Two-Face.

(Suspect Zero OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above review began life under the title, “A View To A Kill.”)

THE INVISIBLE
(Review)

Nicholas Powell (Justin Chatwin; Tom Cruise’s son in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and undercover cop Eddie on Lost) is a smart and promising honour student just a few days away from graduation. But a confluence of unfortunate events involving his mother Diane (Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden, soon to be seen in Frank Darabont‘s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist), his best friend Pete (Joan of Arcadia’s Chris Marquette), and school miscreant Annie Newton (Margarita Levieva; TV’s Vanished), results in a tragedy that causes Nicholas to return, unseen and unheard by others, no longer able to physically interact with the world around him. And even as Nicholas gradually discovers how he ended up like this, Detective Brian Larson (Callum Keith Rennie; Leoben from Battlestar Galactica) tries to get to the truth of Nicholas’ disappearance.

Based on the novel and film Den Osynlige, The Invisible is directed by David S. Goyer, someone who I know is both capable of kicking my a$$ (with his scripts for Dark City, Blade II, and Batman Begins), and disappointing me tremendously (writing Blade, and writing and directing Blade: Trinity). He’s also capable of coming up with some interesting television (the sadly short-lived Threshold) and some not-so-interesting television (Blade: The Series).
With The Invisible, Goyer does get some things right, though the great film this could have been manages to elude his grasp.

It’s fortunate that Goyer lucks out on some key casting choices, among them, Chatwin and Harden. Chatwin’s performance as the young man who is finally finding the courage to defy parental authority only to have fate deal him a very strange hand, is balanced beautifully by the apparently cold and distant maternal figure played wonderfully by Harden.
Goyer’s cinematographer, Gabriel Beristain, also succeeds in capturing some interesting imagery. (Beristain also shot Guillermo Del Toro’s Blade II and Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two, and can be seen playing himself in Zak Penn’s entertaining faux documentary Incident at Loch Ness.)

Sadly though, the film feels a little longish, and we get to spend a little too much time witnessing characters seemingly ready to do everything but the right thing. Much of The Invisible is a testament to the weakness of the human spirit, as people manage to disappoint Nicholas at every turn.
With at least one relationship, Goyer and scriptwriters Mick Davis and Christine Roum, fail to get us to sympathize with the character, while only barely succeeding with another. Most of the time, I found myself getting aggravated and annoyed with the people on-screen, fully understanding Nicholas’ tumult of feelings. How bone-headed could these people be?!
The final scene then left me with the feeling that a number of issues remained unresolved even as the end credits began to roll. As moving as some scenes were, The Invisible in its entirety doesn’t quite gel together as well as I’d hoped.

Curiously, it almost seems as if Goyer and company were aiming to find a balance between a cerebral art house experience (where one would ponder things like the intimacy between attacker and victim, the nature of atonement, and the alienation and isolation of the youth) and an emotional Hollywood button-pusher (with its preponderance of Modern Rock Moments where tracks by Kill Hannah, Death Cab For Cutie, and Snow Patrol, play during key scenes, most of which occur in MTV slow-mo).
The mix just doesn’t work here though, and while some scenes seem blatantly manipulative (and are thus ultimately ineffective), others seem devoid of any honest emotion, causing one to think—just as Nicholas voices out more than once in the film—“We don’t have time for this.”

It’s sad that I found Goyer wanting on this. Admittedly, this is a sight better than Blade: Trinity, but somehow, The Invisible doesn’t completely deliver.
Having never read nor seen Den Osynlige, I have no way of knowing how close (or distant) Goyer’s version is to either. If it’s one thing though that’s come out of my partial dissatisfaction with The Invisible, it’s that I am now more curious than ever to check out Den Osynlige.
Maybe then, seeing those other, earlier versions of the tale—in a curious parallel of Nicholas’ cinematic journey—I’ll better understand some of the choices Goyer made with The Invisible. And with any luck, I’ll come to appreciate it more.

(The Invisible OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)