Lone Survivor
This was way better than expected. Admittedly, I didn’t expect much. Action movies these days have become a wasteland of reboots, sequels, and old, old men with puffy faces echoing catch phrases that lost their freshness three decades ago. Seriously, Sylvester Stallone’s face can’t even grow a proper goatee on it anymore, it just hangs there like a prop moustache with half the glue malfunctioning.
As for the director, Peter Berg, his previous effort was the movie-based-on-the-board game Battleship. So my hopes weren’t high.
But lord be praised, Lone Survivor is no Expendables and no Battleship. It succeeds as an action film, and also as a re-telling of a true story. The movie is based on the book by Marcus Luttrell, who wrote about his experiences as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, in particular the ill-fated Operation Red Wings.
The movie doesn’t explore the rights and wrongs of Afghanistan, and given this is a personalised account by a foot soldier, it shouldn’t be expected to do this. What we should expect – and this is perhaps the only area where the movie doesn’t succeed – is a greater effort in connecting the audience with his doomed squad. There’s a perfunctory effort at the beginning of the movie to provide the back-story of these men and therefore help the audience to sympathise, but it is insufficient. If Lone Survivor wanted to explore themes of loyalty and loss (aside from being an exciting action flick), it needed to spend more time on the men who lost their lives.
The movie also raised one particular bugbear of mine: the Saving Private Ryan Conundrum. That is, what to do with a prisoner of war?
In Saving Private Ryan, the squad captures a German solider during an attack against a machine gun nest. The US troops lose some men during the attack. They are angry, and so argue for the prisoner to be shot. Captain Tom Hanks, all-round good-guy with a Forest Gump-level of lateral thinking ability, does the good-guy thing and lets the prisoner go. Later on, the same prisoner kills one of the members of the squad (who is Jewish) in a brutal hand-to-hand combat scene in a destroyed building.
What message is Steven Spielberg sending here? The easy answer is: ‘there are no easy choices in war’, and I guess that would be what he’d say during interviews. I suspect, however, when he’s having a drink with his mates he’d say: you capture a Nazi during wartime; you shoot him in the fucking head.
Here’s the thing: why not just break the guy’s hand? It’s win-win. The allied troops don’t have to worry about meeting him on the battle field again, and the German gets sent home to recuperate and see his family. Everyone’s happy.
So to Lone Survivor (spoilers in the next paragraph – though it is early in the film so the spoilers are very mild). The SEAL squad capture some Taliban goat-herders on the top of the mountain range they’re hiding in. Marky Mark says they have three options – shoot them, let them go, or tie them up and let them be eaten by wolves. Huh? Where the hell did that last one come from? Are there giant man-eating wolves in Afghanistan?
Here’s an idea – take their shoes. That’ll double the time it takes them to get down the mountain and report back to the Taliban. Or tie their hands and take their shoes. That’ll triple the time. But no – they let them go and one of the US-hating goat herding youngsters runs down the hill and tells the baddies where the goodies are. That’s when all the trouble starts.
Anyway, I am digressing, the point is that other than this, Lone Survivor is a satisfying and exciting action film. Yes, it loads up with a standard quota of jingoism and marine hoo-rah, but that is to be expected. Mark Wahlberg is a good choice for the title role as he’s one of the few Hollywood actors from a working-class background. Given nearly all of the US troops overseas are poor or working class, he brings some credibility to the part.
The movie is fast-paced, the action sequences well shot, and the battering the soldiers bodies take during the engagement quite extraordinary. Very watchable.
Verdict: 3.5 stars (out of five)
Bechdel Test: Fail
I, Frankenstein
I’ve eaten some turd burgers in my day, but this film has shot, with a bullet, into my top twenty shit sandwiches of all time.
It is hard to know where to start with this mess of a film.
We have Frankenstein’s monster – supposed to be made of ‘eight different men’ – looking like one man and one man only: Aaron Eckhart. Sure, he needs a bath, a haircut, and to find a doctor with a more delicate stitching hand than the guy that crocheted him together, but he’s pretty much leading man Aaron Eckhart. As the film progresses he even gets a haircut and styles it with product. And he’s quite articulate.
So we have a main character that is utterly unbelievable, which makes it pretty hard for the audience to suspend disbelief.
Then there’s the writing, which is so bad it is kind of funny. The actors look quite pained as they strut around the stage, trying to keep straight faces while declaiming such gems as this one from Demon Prince Bill Nighy, “Just because something has yet to be found does not mean it does not exist.” Nighy gives a rather stilting, arch delivery throughout that delightfully emphasises every pothole of verbal gibberish the film is heir to. It’s not clear why he agreed to do the film – perhaps he wanted a performance that required no effort and a couple of months filming in Melbourne. Understandable.
To make matter worse, the movie sets out the rules of the Frankenstein Universe, then fails to follow them. This is true even of the basic premise of Frankenstein. The characters make a big deal about how Frankenstein’s monster having no soul and that only those with no soul can hurt gargoyle-angels (they are the goodies – demons are the baddies). To emphasise this, Aaron Eckhart fights the only man in the movie with a chin as big as his (Australian actor Jai Courtney as the main gargoyle angel) and kills him. At the climax of winning the chin-measuring contest, Aaron Eckhart even helpfully reminds Jai that he has no soul as he chops him in half with a big axe.
But then, inexplicably, at the end of the film a demon tries to possess Frankenstein’s monster but fails because… well, he has a soul after all. Huh? (If you’re thinking – wait, isn’t that a big spoiler? Well, yes it is. But I feel an obligation to the viewing public to divert them away from this techni-coloured monstrosity).
The ending makes no sense either. Tens of thousands of demon-possessed Frankensteins have been animated and you’re sort of at the point where you want them to march and out destroy utterly the universe created by director Stuart Beattie. (Which actually would be sort of cool: a meta-statement on bad film-making – the monsters break the fourth wall and go on a rampage through the studio tearing the heads off Hollywood executives)
But no, Frankenstein-the-ruggedly-handsome etches a cross on the Bill Nighy-the-reluctant-demon-prince’s chest and he implodes in a fireball, for some reason taking all the bad-Frankenstein’s with him.
The ending, as with the rest, is nonsensical and unsatisfying. The director and writer Stuart Beattie is an Australian scriptwriter, and quite a good one at that. I don’t know what happened to him during this film. Maybe his ideas got mashed out of all recognition by an intrusive studio. Maybe he developed a crystal-meth addiction while he was writing the script. Maybe he’s got a bet with M Night Shyamalan and Michael Bay on who can serve up the biggest shite sandwich to the studios and have it funded.
Whatever the reason, I’d prefer he’d stop trolling the viewing public and give us a movie with some redeeming qualities. Like Peter Berg’s Battleship, for example.
Verdict: one star (for being visually quite pleasing during some of the fight scenes, especially when Frankenstein’s monster pummels the crap out of demons with his heavy silver Jesus-rods.)
Bechdel Test: Fail