The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

I’m a big fan of the original version of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. It was a snapshot in time of New York City in the seventies; a cynical, bloated, bureaucratic mess that was entirely unprepared for a terrorist attack. In fact, there were actually concerns that the movie would inspire real terrorists to take a subway train hostage. The original featured everything from undercover cops to hippies, a crisp military professional turned terrorist to the random accidents of people in stressful situations. It even invented the “color codenames” later used in Reservoir Dogs.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is catnip to movie directors in the same way that single stage sets are to theatrical directors – be it a subway or a stage with just two chairs, this is a film about two men facing off in a battle of wits. The majority of the movie takes place over an intercom between a terrorist and a dispatcher, with occasional cuts to the havoc their conversation causes throughout New York City. And if the terrorist represents the international Other that is a threat to our national security, the dispatcher represents the everyman of New York, our hardworking servicemen and women who lost their lives on September 11. With material like that, it’s no wonder the film has been remade twice.

Director Tony Scott updates the film to modern day sensibilities. The villain, Ryder (John Travolta in full crazy mode), isn’t a mercenary applying crisp military precision to the art of extortion; he’s a (SPOILER ALERT) former Wall Street tycoon – slightly lower on the villain totem pole than industrialists who pollute the environment. The undercover cop moves into action immediately rather than later in the film, because of course New York’s finest would respond quickly to a terrorist attack. And the dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington, looking appropriately puffy and slouched) has a more complicated past and a bigger role.

Unfortunately, the film suffers as a result. In the original, military precision was entirely the point. The trains never ran on time, so challenging New York to meet a deadline was both a delicious irony and a sticking point with a former military officer who expects nothing less than perfection from his men and from the negotiators. Here, that point is muddled by a sort of “we’re all into this together” blue collar ethic that Ryder projects into Garber. Their dialogue still crackles, but this simple change dilutes the force of the film.

The four-man team of bad guys is reduced to two speaking parts, with the other two generic thugs. The emphasis is clearly on Travolta and Washington, and it’s refreshing to have a movie that’s not afraid to spend some time letting actors just act. There’s a lot of talking in this film and that’s not a bad thing.

The movie struggles with the modern updates. A live wireless webcam feed gets broadcast to the Internet without government interference (yeah, right). Even though the laptop’s battery dies, it’s mysteriously back on a moment later. And the two teens on either side of the webcam come off as self-absorbed morons.

Because this is a big budget action film, the quiet subtlety of the original version is glossed over in favor of an MTA agent handling a hostage negotiation, wielding a gun, and ultimately engaging in a showdown with the bad guy. Since Ryder has no principles to speak of, the conclusion is particularly unsatisfying.

Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a serviceable action film but not a particularly good update of the original. The seventies version was more of a drama with an ensemble cast that was comfortable playing second fiddle to the biggest character of all: New York City.

Quantum of Solace

Congratulations! You've managed to reinvent your Bond franchise after the tired old boy had sipped his last martini, drove his last fast car, and bedded his last exotic hottie. This new Bond is vulnerable and violent at the same time, a wounded animal that was willing to give up the whole spy life for Vesper Lynd, a woman who betrayed him. This is supposed to explain why Bond's such a cold-hearted bastard, and it blazed an exciting if somewhat jarring new path for the Bond films.

The challenge with reinvention is that there is a blurry line between following the new Bond to his logical conclusion and retaining the quintessential elements that constitute Bond. Or to put it another way, if you constantly make Bond different with each film, he's not really James Bond anymore.

Quantum of Solace chose to continue Bond's (Daniel Craig) destructive path from the first film, picking up where Casino Royale left off. Bond tracks the shadowy global conspiracy (Quantum) that has infiltrated Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's right, there's a double agent in double-oh-seven's midst, and only M (Dame Judy Dench) seems to be the least bit concerned about the entire organization being utterly compromised. This is just one of Quantum's many incongruent plot points that are resolved with "LOOK! EXPLOSIONS!" to divert the audience's attention.

Our resident villain is a pop-eyed Buscemi look-alike named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who runs...wait for it...Greene Planet, an environmental organization that is secretly arranging deals for oil. But actually, it's about water. Greene's Blofeld-ian murder signature is to drown his victims in oil. It's not nearly as cool as it sounds.

Bond's supposed lust-interest is an agent named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who saunters onto the screen in boots and an overcoat. With her bright red hair, Fields seems like a great romantic foil for Bond. When Bond asks her first name, it's "Fields. Just Fields." No Strawberry. And here we come to the problem: Quantum of Solace seems embarrassed to be a Bond film.

Every opportunity for Bond to be suave gets glossed over. He just commands women, like Fields, into his bed. He kills every bad guy he's supposed to capture. When his license gets revoked, he blithely ignores M's commands. When he attends an opera, Bond lurks in the rafters like some kind of murderous roadie. Instead of cleverly tricking the Quantum cabal into revealing themselves, he crashes their secret meeting and then guns down their goons.

In the first film, Bond's blundering and brutal tactics were excusable because he was new. It was a great way to reboot the franchise with the promise that, over time, Bond would transform into the elegant, suave killer we've come to know and love. It's a particularly American approach, the idea that even killers can better themselves through hard work. But with Quantum of Solace, Bond is so bereft of actual development that he gets a proxy instead: Camille (Olga Kurylenko), an exotic hottie whom he doesn't get to bed.

The movie goes south from there: inexplicable bad guy meeting that brings everyone together in one place, flaming deathtraps that Bond brute forces his way out of, and a bad guy who physically can't compete with Bond but tries to make up for it by being really, really nuts. The clear advantage Bond has over Greene is obvious; it's like a jock beating up a nerd at supervillain convention.

In the end, Bond finally meets up with the agent responsible for Lynd's betrayal, Yusef Kabira. SPOILER ALERT: After all the beatings, blasting, smashing, crunching, and punching, the movie concludes with a quippy aside and some hurt feelings.

Are you kidding me? By the end of the movie I was so frustrated that I wanted to see Bond seriously #$% up the one guy who could arguably be held accountable for destroying the love of his life. Instead of using Camille as parable to tell the tale of Bond's self-destructive path, Quantum of Solace should have STARTED with Bond leaving Kabira in a body bag. Or multiple bags.

Now that we've gotten the murderous quest for vengeance out of the way, can we get back to Bond being at least slightly civilized, seducing hot women, and killing dangerous villains with awesome technology? Please?

Drag Me to Hell

After being disturbed by Evil Dead and delighted Evil Dead II, I decided to host a showing of the two movies to share the madness with my friends. We then all went to the opening of Army of Darkness. We were confused (the three films vary widely in tone) but ultimately loved them all, adopting the Raimi clan and The Man, Bruce Campbell, as one of our own in geekdom.

Ever since then, Raimi's fans have been waiting for him to return to his horror roots. Oh, we've gotten hints that he hasn't forgotten us through the years. We caught the Evil Dead II homage in the chainsaw sequence from Spider-Man. Campbell is in just about every movie Raimi produces. And the Oldsmobile Delta 88 makes an appearance in Drag Me to Hell – a big appearance, actually – as it has in every Raimi movie since Evil Dead. The Oldsmobile's arrival signals that Drag Me to Hell is a quintessential Raimi horror film.

Drag Me to Hell harkens back to the golden age of 80s horror, an era Raimi helped spawn, when humor and horror were inextricably mixed thanks to Freddy Krueger's perpetual joke-machine. Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a cute blonde loan officer in five-inch heels working at a bank – any social commentary is surely accidental (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) – and when she turns down an old gypsy woman (Lorna Raver), things go horribly and hilariously wrong.

Raimi has always been a master of scaring you with things you can't see. He knows how to use sound to freak out the audience, employing the same shrieks and creaks he used in Evil Dead II to represent something from another dimension crossing into our world. Raimi also knows when to use silence as a tool, which just ratchets up the tension – this is the first film where I could hear the movie projector clicking away in the background. He manipulates billowing curtains and floating handkerchiefs with the methodical calculation of a Universal horror theme park, shrieking "BOO!" when the tension is at its height.

Raimi expertly manipulates the audience's affection for Christine. On the surface she's an adorable girl from the country just trying to be accepted by her big city boyfriend's parents. But as we get to know her, Christine comes off as a mewling brat more concerned about her appearance while poor people like Mrs. Ganush are being thrown out on the street. There's a turning point mid-way through the film where Christine crosses the line from being merely pathetic to reprehensible, and from there on out cat-lovers may well begin cheering her demise (I know I was!).

The similarities between Drag Me to Hell and Evil Dead II are striking (SPOILER ALERT!): an unwitting protagonist is cursed; an evil hag attacks; his friends become demonically possessed, flying around the room cackling and dancing like marionettes; the evil "gets inside him" causing him to vomit a huge amount of nasty stuff; there's a fight in a tool shed; eyes show up in weird places; eyeballs fly into somebody's mouth; even the twist ending is similar.

I didn't love this film, though I desperately wanted to. It's probably because I'm not the target audience – Drag Me to Hell is a PG-13 film and although its scares are suitably disgusting, they aren't nearly as gory as other horror movies. In other words, it's perfect for teenagers out on a date. For jaded horror fans like myself, we've seen it all before. The only thing missing is The Man himself.

Layer Cake

Like Pulp Fiction, Layer Cake’s title hints at the irregular path the film takes to tell its tale. It follows an honorable crook, which we know only as XXXX (Daniel Craig), who specializes in trafficking cocaine. XXXX’s strategy is to never get involved directly with the criminal element, surrounding himself with other honorable criminals who in turn conduct themselves professionally. It’s all a very neat arrangement on the surface, and XXXX thinks he’s got the system beat. He plans to retire and disappear from the business. WARNING: As we eat this cake, there’s bound to be some juicy spoilers inside.

Peel back a layer… and it turns out that XXXX actually has a boss, Jimmy Price (Kenneth Craham). He demands XXXX personally track down Charlie, the daughter of Price’s fellow crime boss Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon, an evil version of Dumbeldore!). This violates XXXX’s rule of never getting personally involved, but he has no choice.

Peel back a layer…and Price also wants XXXX to organize the distribution of “super ecstasy” tablets from The Duke (Jamie Foreman). Except that the drugs were actually stolen from a Serbian gang, who is intent on tracking them down and murdering everyone involved.

Peel back a layer…and we discover that Price is quite vindictive. He wants XXXX to actually kidnap Charlie in a twisted revenge plot against Temple. It seems Price doesn’t like the idea that XXXX thinks he can retire and wants him dead – if Temple’s men don’t kill him, drug dealers certainly will.

Peel back a layer…and we finally get to the best part of the cake. Nobody is innocent. The professional associates have all committed their own heinous crimes for petty reasons: clubbing snitches to bloody pulps, killing people they dislike, and hiding corpses in freezers. This awful truth requires XXXX to get his hands dirty and he does so in the most thuggish fashion.

The visual direction in Layer Cake is superb, using Matthew Vaughn’s trademark whiplash style that he perfected in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It makes what could be a standard drug dealing tale much more interesting. Although the accents are hard to follow at times, the acting is top notch. XXXX is a complex character that gives Craig an opportunity to experience extreme violence, utter defeat, passionate lust, and a host of other emotions beyond the reach of the Bond films.

Although Layer Cake narrative can be circuitous, stick with it. There’s one more layer at the end of the movie, a surprise twist that shows we were looking at the wrong cake all along.

Star Trek

The original Star Trek series took time to establish itself as the premiere franchise it is today. The movies steadily improved the characters and special effects, building on a large canon of established Trek lore. The best movies gleefully embraced this rich history; the failures ignored or contradicted it. Star Trek is simply too big to reinvent, and J.J. Abrams knows it. So he did the next best thing by tweaking the established universe of Star Trek just enough to carve out his own little patch for the movie.

This is the beginning of Star Trek re-imagined as a futuristic Earth that incorporates the go-go 60s with iPod style. We see Kirk as a kid on the farm, Spock struggling with his half-Vulcan nature and Bones becoming a crotchety windbag—which, it becomes quickly apparent, he always was. We witness Kirk’s solution to the Kobiyashi Maru, Spock’s acceptance to Starfleet, and the construction of the Enterprise. In short, this is a true and proper launch of a Star Trek movie, from the beginning, so that all those non-Trekkies won’t feel like they missed out…

But if you are a non-Trekkie, you missed out. There are so many nods to Trek lore that my head nearly exploded. SPOILER RED ALERT.

Sulu fences! There’s a splash of light over the captain’s eyes when he sits on the bridge, just like the original series. Red shirts die! The same sounds beep and bleep in the background, from the sensors to the transporters. There are several Wrath of Khan references, from Spock’s famous last words to creepy worms that take control of your brain. There’s even old-style Romulans and Klingons. Fans worried that Abrams was going to remake the series in such a way as to make it unrecognizable can rest easy; this is the Star Trek we know and love, dusted off and buffed to a 21st century shine.

The plot involves time travel, a guest cameo, and references to the central conceit of the series: Spock follows the rules, Bones doesn’t, and Kirk floats above it all, waffling between the two ideologies and blazing his own path as his ego suits him. The movie has no qualms about portraying Kirk as a womanizing jerk or using him as the butt of some hilarious slapstick. It also isn’t afraid to push the envelope with the aliens, going beyond makeup to ensure they’re just unnerving enough for you to notice them even if the rest of the crew doesn’t. This is more than just a new Star Trek, it’s Star Trek done right with a bigger budget.

There are some flaws. The villain is one dimensional. Uhura’s headstrong personality has to carry the burden of embodying all females in Trek, which begins to grate. Winona Ryder (age 38) seems to have wandered onto the set to play Spock’s (Zachary Quinto, age 32) mother. And an uncharacteristically vengeful tactics from the good guys at the end of the movie borders on “ludicrous speed.”

But you know what? I forgive all that. This movie made Trek worth watching all over again and reminded us why it’s okay to travel through time and space, encounter green alien hotties, and bed them. Because it’s FUN.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I didn’t expect much from the Wolverine movie. Billed as X-Men 4 by the movie theater (says so right on my ticket), it is anything but. This is Wolverine getting the full Weapon X treatment, a mystery that took forever in comic-land to finally reveal. And with a few exceptions, Wolverine gets it right.

Whereas the previous X-Men movies became increasingly complex, with jumbled storylines and too many characters, a single character sharpens Wolverine’s plot to a knife’s edge. Nigh immortal and capable of regenerating from the most grievous wounds, Wolverine and his brother Sabretooth slash their way through the century, engaging in every major war and some minor ones too. For a little while, that’s enough, until Sabretooth’s propensity for raping and pillaging gets out of hand. A firing squad doesn’t do the job (that whole immortal thing), which is when General Stryker offers a devil’s deal.

There’s nothing new here with the exception of the movie’s primary x-factor: Wolverine. Jackman transforms Wolverine from a passive loner to an outraged spirit of vengeance as everyone he loves dies. And behind it all, pulling the puppet strings, is Stryker, channeling Hannibal from the A-Team.

Throughout his adventures, Wolverine is surrounded by a cadre of other mutants with their own abilities. Unlike the other X-Men movies, each mutant serves a very specific purpose. Nothing feels forced. Except for maybe the Blob, but he’s amusing enough in early and later incarnations to provide some much needed levity that borders on the game Super Punchout.

The real revelation here is Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. Reynolds did a great job as a sword wielding antihero in the last Blade movie and he’s largely the same wisecracking nut job here. Only he’s much cooler and plays a larger role (think Darth Maul without the makeup).

There are some odd points where the Wolverine movie isn’t sure where to go. Stryker, for all his duplicity, often seems content to pull the movie villain mistake of letting people just walk out of his grasp. Some twists are emphasized with a theatrical exclamation point as the character tells us in no uncertain terms exactly what their plans are. And a few feats of derring-do border on the ludicrous…

But then I remember this is a movie about a comic about a guy who has metal claws between his knuckles. If you can keep that perspective, Wolverine is a lot like the titular character’s signature move: it tears through crowded plotlines with deadly efficiency. And if you’re a fan of other members of the Weapon X program, stay to the end of the credits. You can thank me later.

Six-Legged Soldiers

Six-Legged Soldiers is an interesting look at how bugs have been drafted by humanity as vectors to spread disease. Be it to destroy crops, sicken an enemy, or torture a captive, insects have been our unwilling minions for as long as mankind has been around.

The first third of the book is dedicated to insects and their use in history. The critters that steal the limelight are the creepy-crawlies we loathe, like spiders, wasps, and scorpions. But according to Lockwood, the real threat isn't just from the direct harm an insect can inflict by bite or sting, but from the diseases they carry. Mosquitoes carrying yellow fever can inflict far more damage on an army than a hive full of angry bees.

From there, Lockwood moves on to conspiracy theory. Rife with allegations alternately unfounded and confirmed, it traces the Japanese government's top-secret experimental program conducted during World War II and America's subsequent dark dealings with the scientists from that same program. Do we have knowledge of bio-weapons capable of spreading plague vectors? Lockwood seems to think so. The real controversy is: have we used them?

The second third of the book discusses this at length, as well as other governments' possible use of insects in modern warfare. The problem is that the evidence is nigh impossible to prove. The very nature of insect warfare, a vector that spreads at its own pace and on its own terms, is its greatest strength and weakness. Modern militaries supposedly reject using insects because they're unpredictable; countries attacked by irruptions of plagues claim the insects were unleashed precisely because they're so innocuous.

Lockwood comes to the conclusion that the most obvious use of insects in warfare isn't on the modern battlefield at all, but as part of a terrorist attack against civilians. He drags out such horrors as the parasitic screwworm, vegetation-devouring beetles, and crop-destroying aphids. Eminently transportable, easily unleashed, and capable of inflicting immense damage with comparatively little effort, Lockwood emphasizes that the next Weapon of Mass Destruction is actually very tiny indeed.

There's a lot of meaty content here, but it's at times overshadowed by Lockwood's narrative, which is reminiscent of a carnival barker. He's enamored with alliteration, to the point of distraction. Six-Legged Soldiers also lacks focus. It's alternately a historical review of insect warfare, a conspiracy theory on government cover-ups, and a modern drama about terrorism. If you're a fan of all three topics like I am, this book is a compelling review of insects as weapons.