Andrew Sarris once ended a review of the Russell Crowe-Meg Ryan kidnap drama "Proof of Life" by telling his readers, "See it. It's better than you've heard." I felt the same way about two mostly maligned Hollywood movies that opened this month, "Firewall" and "The Pink Panther." A review of both movies follows, somewhat expanded from the version that appeared in the last issue of NYPress.
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"Firewall" and "The Pink Panther" pose the same problem for critics: how to resist writing knee-jerk pans of movies that look an awful lot like Hollywood Product, and that star aging icons who haven't connected with audiences in years?
On paper, both films seem like tempting targets. The kidnap thriller "Firewall" expects us to believe that 63-year old Harrison Ford, arguably the most underachieving A-list star in the history of American movies, and very much an emblem of mid-twentieth-century macho, is believable as an early 21st century computer security expert and a settled-yet-virile husband to Virginia Madsen, who's 20 years his junior. Added to that, "Firewall" is yet another example of what I call a Business Class Thriller, tailor made to engross upper-middle-class dads who spend lots of time on airplanes. The hero is usually, and not at all coincidentally, a married forty or fiftysomething suburban dad who spends most of his time filing paperwork but can still kick ass when the occasion warrants, a role tailored for Harrison Ford. "The Pink Panther," meanwhile, asks us not just to accept an actor besides Peter Sellers in the role of bumbling French inspector Jacques Clouseau, but to believe that star Steve Martin, whose career took a sharp left turn into New Yorker country about 15 years ago, can still work magic in the type of deranged slapstick romp that hasn't been central to his career since the early 90s. Both films seem like the sorts of films for which critics can start composing their pans en route to the screening room.
But there's a problem with this stock response: both "Firewall and "The Pink Panther" are entertaining, well crafted, somewhat eccentric Hollywood movies.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying these are revelatory films that will deepen with repeat viewings. I'm saying they're the sorts of films New York Times critic A.O. Scott recently complained weren't being made anymore: foursquare genre pictures with production values, stars and a wee bit of personality; not artful, exactly, but lively and purposeful enough to make you think maybe the studio machine isn't ready for the scrap heap just yet.
The Ford film's marketing campaign sells it as another domestic thriller with technology-run-amok elements, along the lines of "Panic Room" or "Cellular." It is that, but it's also something more: a two-fisted parable of the digital wall that's arisen between our private lives and the world. Director Richard Loncraine ("Richard III") and screenwriter Joe Forte push the hero and his family from a complacent, nearly virtual existence (they live on the Internet, instant message each other in their own house and babble incessantly on cell phones) to a brutally visceral struggle for survival, gradually moving them from the cocoon of their suburban fortress into remote mountain terrain where cell phones and broadband connections don't reach. This isn't a preachy or heady film, just a lean formula thriller that exists not in GenreLand, but in a semblance of this world, like "Fatal Attraction" or "Unlawful Entry." Its cultural relevance is tattooed on its biceps.
Ford's character, Jack Stanfield, who designed the computer security system for Landrock Pacific, a small Seattle-based banking chain, is targeted by sociopathic mastermind Bill Cox (a silky, menacing Paul Bettany, purring like a baby James Mason). The bad guy ensnares Jack in a "Fugitive"-like trap, saddling him with $95,000 in nonexistent offshore gambling debts and exacerbating tension between him, his coworkers (Alan Arkin and Robert Forster) and representatives from the international bank that's in negotiations to absorb Jack's chain. Then Cox holds Jack's wife and two kids hostage and threatens to kill them if Jack doesn't help him steal hundreds of millions from Jack's employers. You can guess where this is going: poor Jack isn't just being strongarmed into acting as the inside man in a bank heist, he's being set up to take the fall later. 
But the movie isn't content to dwell in a single genre for its entire running time. The first third feels like an old time B-movie kidnap drama a la "The Petrified Forest" or "The Desperate Hours"; the middle third is a high tech cat and mouse game, with the hero trying to outsmart his tormentors. The surprising and often exhilirating final third relocates the characters from the city to the mountainous hinterlands, recalling such stoic action westerns as Anthony Mann's "The Naked Spur" and Budd Boetticher's "The Tall T," in which fugitive villains move through hostile natural terrain with hostages in tow. All these disparate movies share a sincere interest in moral choice, in the psychological dynamics that enable criminals to do their thing while evading the admission that they're scum. Cox has no qualms about tormenting Jack and his family because he's a remorseless brute, but his men are vulnerable to manipulation by the Stanfields, who instinctively realize their best bet for survival is to sow distrust among the hot-tempered kidnappers and charm the semi-decent ones.
"Firewall" is generic as hell -- literally generic, in the sense that it's practically a smorgasbord of popular movie formats -- but it's made with care and a sense of humanity that raises it above mere routine. I liked Ford's age-and-class-appropriate performance; he's not playing an Indiana Jones or even Jack Ryan type, but an ordinary middle-class husband and father who falls down when he runs through the woods and clutches the injured hand he used to commit his first killing. 
I liked Ford's lived-in byplay with his gal Friday at the bank (Mary Lynn Raskjub, who's a couple of performances away from national treasure status) and the silent reaction shots of kidnappers trying to hide their opinions of Cox's cruelty. Most of all, I liked how Loncraine and Forte prove their seriousness with stray touches that tease out the movie's themes. A closeup of what appears to be a tropical fish tank pulls back to reveal that it's actually a computer screen with a fish tank screen saver; a briefly-glimpsed TV shows the astronauts of "Forbidden Planet" blindly lobbing laser bolts at the film's monster, an invisible id beast whose wrath is felt from beyond, much like Cox's baddie, who wreaks havoc through cyberspace.
Shawn Levy's remake of "The Pink Panther" isn't art, either, but to invoke Sarris, it's a hell of a lot better and funnier than you've heard, and it manages the nearly impossible feat of making you forget about Peter Sellers for 90 minutes. The plot has something to do with soccer coach and lothario Jason Statham, possessor of the Pink Panther diamond, getting shot dead while his lover Xania (Beyonce Knowles) and thousands of soccer fans look on. National police chief Dreyfus (Kevin Kline in Herbert Lom's old part) hires pondunk cop Clouseau to bungle the case so he can step in later, solve it and win the presidential medal he's always coveted.
But plot is irrelevant in a movie like this, which is all about setting up demented situations and letting the actors run with them. I laughed harder at "The Pink Panther" than at any Martin film since "Bowfinger." Martin's Clouseau is as moronic and smugly righteous and borderline incomprehensible as Sellers', but more charming and lyrical, like a Harold Lloyd character. His scenes with stolid partner Ponton (Jean Reno) are gems of deadpan goofiness (their dance duet is a stupid hoot), and his scenes opposite police secretary Nicole (sexy, daffy Emily Mortimer) have some of the nutball magic that animated Martin's relationship with Bernadette Peters in "The Jerk." They're idiot sprites who've found each other. Their super-tentative courtship (aware of professional codes, they interact as if separated by an electric fence) is just marvelous, and produces some of the sweetest faux-poetic yammering this side of "Punch-Drunk Love." ("A woman is like an artichoke," Clouseau intones. "You have to do a lot of work before you get to her heart.") They're so great together that I wish the whole movie had been about them; hopefully the inevitable sequel will rectify that.
Interweaving Clouseau scenes and non-Clouseau scenes at a brisk clip throughout, this remake moves better than any of the "Panther" movies directed by creator Blake Edwards in the 1970s, films that were hobbled by lurching rhythms and died when Sellers was offscreen. There are five or six bits in "The Pink Panther" that are as hilarious as anything Martin has done, including an imbecilic twist on Good Cop/Bad Cop and a five-minute scene involving Clouseau and an accent removal coach that will be quoted at any restaurant that serves hamburgers. Martin and Levy's "Panther" plows through one dumbass comic setpiece after another with the sureness of a class clown who just figured out how to make people spit milk through their noses.
Reporting a suspect's murder, Ponton tells Clouseau, "He was shot in the head."
Clouseau: "Was it fatal?"
Ponton: "Yes."
Clouseau: "How fatal?"
Ponton: "Completely."
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Better than you've heard
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15 comments:
Jesus, Matt - I thought for sure I could skate by, easily passing judgment on Martin's Clouseau without ever even seeing it.
Now I may just check it out - but not until DVD.
Zat you may take to zee bank.
SC
I wanted to like Firewall as an actioner, or at the very least, giggle like a teenage girl on nitrous oxide at how computer illiterate it was. I could do neither. Firewall is just plain dumb, and not dumb in a fun way. Ford looks so old and haggard that I shudder to think there will be an Indiana Jones IV. Him running around made me think of Charles Bronson in the last Death Wish movie he did, Death Wish 75. Buying Ford as a computer geek is less believable than buying Denise Richards as whatever the hell kind of scientist she was supposed to be in that James Bond movie. (A hot scientist!)
Bettany evokes James Mason, but the James Mason of Mandingo, not of old. Madsen is wasted, which irritates me because she'll always hold a place in my heart for those HBO movies and Hopper's The Hot Spot.
The Desperate Hours is no classic, but it is infinitely better than this. I was offended as a Ford fan, a silly action movie fan, and most of all, as a programmer! I'm looking forward to Spike Lee's Inside Man.
And as much as I love the passion you exhibit on this blog, were you hitting the Cinnamon Toast Crunch when you compared this movie to Budd Boetticher?!
As for The Pink Panther, there is only one movie in that series that I enjoyed, and sorry, but it comes in that 70's period that you panned. It's The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
I used to watch the movies on TV just to hear the theme song and see the opening credits cartoon, but Martin's PP remake manages to ruin that as well. I love Martin when he's stupid (which is why I thought Bringing Down the House was a C+ and not an F) but he should never have attempted to fill these shoes. I would rather have seen Kevin Kline do it. Here, I could see Martin's gears working, something I never saw during The Jerk. It was painful.
With comedies, either you laugh or you don't. I laughed once during The Pink Panther, during the Jean Reno/Steve Martin dance number. Other than that, I sat stone-faced while the 10 year old kids in the audience cracked up joke after joke.
Beyonce was as stiff as I am when I watch her videos. Was she reading off a teleprompter?
The only saving grace in the movie is Emily Mortimer, who does more acting here than she did in Match Point. She has chemistry with Martin. I agree with you about wanting to see them in another movie about them. She can play this character, and Martin can play somebody else. Maybe they can team up in Match Point 2: Electric Boogaloo.
If I'm the only person on this blog who thought both of these movies stunk, I'm having you investigated by Inspector Clouseau!
I welcome the Inspector's questions. I am sure he will conduct the sort of thorough investigation this subject deserves.
On a more serious note, I'd try to rebut you but I already spent all my ammo in the piece. This is a more subjective call than most. I'll just say again that Ford gets a lot of shit for not challenging himself and for acting within a very narrow range of possible types (I've probably ridden him as hard as anyone) but he's as perfectly suited to this role as John Wayne was to TRUE GRIT. It's the sort of role you cast with Harrison Ford if you know what's good for you. And his age and soft-bellied middle class pamperedness isn't danced around, it's addressed directly in the movie. The movie knows he's too old for this shit. I think Ford is extraordinary in this. If I were in charge of putting out a boxed set of Ford's best non-Spielberg and Lucas movies, this is one of hte five I'd pick, along with THE FUGITIVE, WITNESS, BLADE RUNNER and RANDOM HEARTS.
As for PINK PANTHER, well, either it tickles your fancy or it doesn't. I agree that THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN is frickin' hilarious -- is that the one where Sellers and Herbert Lom get wasted on nitrous oxide and Sellers' false nose melts? -- but this movie equals it, setpiece for setpiece. I'd put the "I'd like to buy a hamburger" scene, the Reno-Martin dance scene, good cop/bad cop, anything with Martin and Mortimer, and the vase scene up against anything Sellers and Edwards did, and there are lots of incidental pleasures along the way.
Re: Boetticher, Ford's horrendously violent final confrontation with the bad guy, and the family's slow-mo emergence onto a desolate road with the wind blowing in their hair and mountains looming in the background, is the spirit of Budd incarnate. (Damn you Odie, no weed jokes now.)
A cloud of negative expecation surrounds both these movies. Again, I repeat, they are better than you've heard.
Odie. "I'm looking forward to Spike Lee's INSIDE MAN." Wow. Things really are bleak!
I wrote off both these guys years ago. Sorry, but neither of these movies made me want to revise my opinion. I agree, though, that the last third of "Firewall" had a somber grandiosity that really worked. Ford looks good with the shit beat out of him. Insert your own punchline here.
MZS: is that the one where Sellers and Herbert Lom get wasted on nitrous oxide and Sellers' false nose melts?
Yes. It is also the one with the love scene on the Murphy bed set to the Tom Jones song (which was up for an Oscar!)
As for Inside Man: It looks like it might be fun! I don't know if you've seen it, so I'll take your "things are bleak" comment with a grain of salt. There really isn't much to look forward to on the horizon, and methinks things would be bleaker if I had said I was looking forward to The Hills Have Eyes remake. (I am not. The original was enough for me.)
As a side note: I saw Tristram Shandy, which was, in keeping with the theme of today's post, better than I had heard.
To describe my feelings about most of Michael Winterbottom's movies, I'd have to title the post, "About What I Expected." With certain exceptions -- JUDE, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO and 9 SONGS, which I thought was grubbily amazing -- I find myself admiring the idea of Michael Winterbottom and marveling at his loose, improvisational confidence and his ability to get all sorts of demented projects made with great actors in them. He's an indie film hero in some ways.
But like Spike Lee throughout much of his career, and Steven Soderbergh in recent years, Winterbottom has often seemed to be more in love with filmmaking than with making good movies. I get a tremendous contact high from watching Winterbottom's movies but no sense of centeredness or heft. Even his best recent stuff feels a bit half-assed to me, poorly thought out and a tad glib and rushed. There was no reason why THE CLAIM couldn't have been one of the great revisionist frontier epics ever made, a dirty epic in the same weight class as McCABE AND MRS. MILLER and now DEADWOOD, but it just kind of galumphs through the snow with a self-important air, not really going anywhere in particular. And WONDERLAND, which features some really amazing actors and has a great documentary epic feel (it's shot handheld, on 16mm that has been cropped to CinemaScope dimensions, 2:35 to 1) could have been like a Paul Thomas Anderson film with discipline, or good early Mike Leigh, but it settled for histrionics and brooding. And in the end it just kind of falls apart in a blaze of indie film angst. Often with Winterbottom I am astonished by his energy but depressed by how easily it disperses and adds up to nought.
Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen to Winterbottom as an artist would be to fall down the stairs and break one leg and both hands. Being forced to sit in solitude and think about the meaning and purpose of his work for a couple of months without interruption, and without being able to write or make movies no matter how badly he wished to, might clarify some things, and result in more powerful, cohesive work.
That said, I haven't seen the new one that just played Berlinale, and it sounds amazing, so you never know.
I wish I saw the same FIREWALL that you did, Matt... because the one I saw did not have a wee bit of personality. (Why hire Alan Arkin and Robert Forster if you're not going to allow them to do anything interesting?)
I'm usually a big fan of meat-and-potatoes thrillers (especially CELLULAR, which you mentioned in your post) but this one struck me as just plain half-assed.
There are a few good ideas that the filmmakers seem to just give up on - like that potentially awesome scene where Ford ditches the camera pen, but must keep pretending to talk on the phone as he runs around trying to escape. Great idea, but it just sort of peters out after a minute or so without a payoff. Same goes with Ford being forced to fire his secretary, what the heck happened there?
I'm also not sure if I agree with your reading about the digital wall, as it is also technology that comes to the rescue of our hero time and again (laptops, iPods and of course, that damn dog-collar ex machina.)
And I would maybe give Ford's performance a little more credit if he wasn't already all frowny and grumpy even before his family got kidnapped.
I thought last year's HOSTAGE (very much a "better than you've heard" movie) worked some surprising angles on the same basic scenario, and was held together by a terrific Bruce Willis performance.
Funny, even though he gets no respect, Willis really has carved out the kind of career we all seem to wish Harrison Ford had - balancing the movie star tuns in popcorn flicks with interesting character roles in risker films.
And yes, I am just a little embarassed about how much I'm looking forward to 16 BLOCKS.
"Hostage" was indeed a better than you've heard movie. It became repetitious and dumb as it careened toward its blowout climax, but I liked the hallucinatory mood, which told me that I wasn't seeing anything "real," that it was a nightmare or fantasy of a movie. Like De Palma directing a Hong Kong action picture. Willis handpicked everyone on both sides of the camera for that movie, which makes me think very highly of him.
Regarding technology being a double-edged sword in "Firewall," you're right, but I think the movie acknowledges that as well. It's not contradiction, it's complexity. Technology only works for the family when it's attached to something real, something with emotional value, like that dog.
I had a feeling THE PINK PANTHER might be funnier than the critics said. The trailer was promising. I'll catch it on DVD. And I applaud your praise for HOSTAGE, which I thought was an excellent, underrated genre movie from last year. Ben Foster gave a positively hypnotic and creepy performance as the Marilyn Manson-like kidnapper. It was my first real exposure to him. And NINE SONGS was good, too! I expected to be treated to a little enjoyable kink, free of guilt (it's an art movie, honey!) and was surprised by how much I cared about those characters by the end, or at least cared about the dissolution of their relationship. How did Winterbottom do that? Did the frankness of the sexual scenes make the relationship truer?
TLR-HB: Yes, Ben Foster was terrific, often verging on brilliance. He was James Dean in the first third, Sal Mineo in the middle, and a Columbine demon at the end, basically an angel of death. What a fearless actor! He's not afraid to be big, and he has the intensity and control to pull it off, and to be entertaining and sly rather than pompous.
I actually wrote a long paragraph praising his performance in my NYPress review of "Hostage," but it got cut for lack of space. I wish he could have read it, because I have a feeling he's out there thinking he went above and beyond the call of duty in a role that normally would never ask such a thing of a young actor, and no one noticed.
Re: Winterbottom. What about Code 46? Maybe it didn't go anywhere, but it got there in a really thoughtful and beautiful way, one that made me think that maybe the best way to make a good sci-fi movie is to get a director who knows absolutely nothing about sci-fi.
Matt: Amen to The Pink Panther. I was beginning to think something was wrong with me because I very much enjoyed this flick. (Granted: it ain't a masterpiece, but it is much better than most of the crap the studios excrete.)
I've not seen 'Firewall,' but 'The Pink Panther' is being unfairly slammed by critics.
Rob: "Panther" is really, truly funny, if you consider the most primitive jokes satisfying. It's the first Steve Martin movie in a while that you can't stop quoting. "I woood LAHK...to BAH...duh AMMbur-GURRRR...."
Yeah, but in Hostage, that dude gets stabbed in the face. Which was pretty awesome.
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