Third Film Review - The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (2008)

Writer/Director: Christopher Nolan Writers: Jonathan Nolan, David S. Goyer, Bob Kane, Bill Finger

Stars: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Aaron Ekhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures

With the Bruce Wayne/Batman backstory firmly established, “The Dark Knight” fans out to take a broader perspective on Gotham City -- portrayed as a seething cauldron of interlocking power structures and criminal factions in the densely layered but remarkably fleet screenplay by helmer Nolan and brother Jonathan.

Using five strongly developed characters to anchor a drama with life-or-death implications for the entire metropolis, the Nolans have taken Bob Kane’s comicbook template and crafted an anguished, eloquent meditation on ideas of justice and power, corruption and anarchy and, of course, the need for heroes like Batman -- a question never in doubt for the viewer, but one posed rather often by the citizens of Gotham.

Indeed, with trusty Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, superbly restrained) and golden-boy District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) successfully spearheading the city’s crackdown on the mob, even Wayne himself (Christian Bale) figures his nights moonlighting as a leather-clad vigilante are numbered. The young billionaire hopes to hang up the Batsuit for good and renew his relationship with assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal).

But Batman’s stature as a radical symbol of good has invited a more sinister criminal presence to Gotham City -- and, as seen in the crackerjack bank-robbery sequence that opens the pic, one who operates in terrifyingly unpredictable ways. Utterly indifferent to simple criminal motivations like greed, Ledger’s maniacally murderous Joker is as pure an embodiment of irrational evil as any in modern movies. He’s a pitiless psychopath who revels in chaos and fears neither pain nor death, a demonic prankster for whom all the world’s a punchline.

After Ledger’s death in January 2008, his penultimate performance (with Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”) will be viewed with both tremendous excitement and unavoidable sadness. It’s a tribute to Ledger’s indelible work that he makes the viewer entirely forget the actor behind the cracked white makeup and blood-red rictus grin, so complete and frightening is his immersion in the role. With all due respect to the enjoyable camp buffoonery of past Jokers like Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson, Ledger makes them look like...well, clowns.

The pic shrewdly positions the Joker as the superhero-movie who threatens to target Gotham civilians until Batman reveals his identity. Batman, Gordon and Dent uneasily join forces, but the Joker seems to have the upper hand at every step, even from a jail cell; the city, turning against the hero it once looked to for hope, seems more fractious, vulnerable and dangerous than ever.

The Dark Knight pivots with similar ingenuity on a breathless series of twists and turns, culminating in a dramatic shift for Dent. This subplot reps the film’s weakest link, packing too much psychological motivation into too little screen time to be entirely credible. Yet Eckhart vividly inhabits the character’s sad trajectory, underscoring the film’s point that symbols of good can be all too easily tarnished.

From Wayne’s playful debates with faithful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) about the public perception of Batman to the Joker’s borderline-poetic musings on his own bottomless sadism, the characters almost seem to be carrying on a debate about the complicated realities of good vs. evil, and the heavy burden shouldered by those fighting for good. One of the few action filmmakers who’s capable of satisfying audiences beyond the fanboy set, Nolan honors his serious themes to the end; he bravely closes the story with both Gotham City and the narrative in tatters, making this the rare sequel that genuinely deserves another.

Viewers who found “Batman Begins” too existentially weighty for its own good will be refreshed to know that “The Dark Knight” hits the ground running and rarely lets up over its swift 2½-hour running time. Nolan directs the action more confidently than he did the first time out, orchestrating all manner of vertiginous mid-air escapes and virtuosic highway setpieces (and unleashing Batman’s latest ooh-ah contraption, the monster-truck-tire-equipped Bat-Pod). In a fresh innovation, six sequences were shot using Imax cameras.

Second Film Review - Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass (2010)

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Writers: Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman, Mark Millar, John Romita, Jr.

Stars: Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Mark Strong, Nicolas Cage

Studio: Marv Films, Plan B Entertainment

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a geek who wonders why no one has ever tried to become a costumed superhero before. As his friend Marty (Clark Duke) explains, “Because they would get their asses kicked.” Marty’s not wrong. Dave doesn’t heed his pal’s advice, dons a wet suit, wields two batons, creates the alter-ego of “Kick-Ass” and goes out to fight bad guys. We soon see that despite Dave’s enthusiasm and bravery, he’s only playing at the amateur level. The pros are Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) and Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), an adorable father-daughter duo who go out for ice cream by day and render criminals into slaughtered remains at night. The two storylines converge as mafia boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) puts out a bounty on the superheroes that are hurting his business despite the popularity of Kick-Ass as an Internet and pop-culture sensation.

Cage may be the biggest name actor in the film, but he makes a delightful turn in an important supporting role that helps bolster the world while helping to ground Hit-Girl as a real character who isn’t a disturbed individual despite her disturbing actions as a murderous vigilante. But the two real stars of the film are Johnson and Moretz and their performances are key in helping to combine the film’s cartoonish mayhem with a charming naivety and bravado.

The performance people will be buzzing about is Moretz. Hit-Girl steals the show with her brutal-yet-stylish kills, foul-mouthed dialogue, and her disarmingly sweet face. Hit-Girl is like the child on the front of a cereal box except the cereal isn’t a nice mix of toasted oats and marshmallows but of razorblades and shotgun shells (part of a balanced breakfast). If you take a step back, the idea of Hit-Girl is disturbing. She’s a child with no regard for human life or a modicum of mercy. But in the world of Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl is a cartoon. Her father puts a bulletproof vest on her and then shoots his little girl so she won’t be afraid when she’s looking down the barrel of a Glock. First off: who is making bulletproof vests in child sizes? Secondly, a vest may stop a bullet, but it won’t stop a little girl’s ribs from breaking apart. Hit-Girl is grounded in an emotional reality by her relationship with her father, but she, like all the other film’s characters, exist in a comic book world full of bright colors and blazing destruction.

However, it’s Aaron Johnson’s performance that holds Kick-Ass together and gives the film an emotional center. He’s a powerless Peter Parker and he’s skilled at getting his ass kicked, but we never look down on Dave or scoff at his noble intentions. He’s naive and he’s out of his depth, but he’s brave and his desire to do good is good enough. When Kick-Ass fights off three bad guys who are attempting to beat up on another person, he says he would rather die protecting a helpless stranger from three thugs. Superheroes let us imagine ourselves as protectors who can do great things. Dave just makes himself the star of his own superhero comic He may get his ass kicked, but Johnson makes Dave come off like a hero and not a schmuck. As Dave looks into his bedroom mirror and tries out one-liners against imaginary bad guys, Johnson manages to take what could feel like an unnerving Travis Bickle moment and transforms it into feeling like a kid playing superhero in his back yard.

But how do you blend such disparate characters into one story and one world? Ask director Matthew Vaughn because he found a way. For a film that could be wildly schizophrenic, Vaughn rips forth method from the madness and keeps the characters sane despite their insane actions. Working from a charged script he co-wrote with Jane Goldman, Vaughn electrifies the world of Kick-Ass with crackling dialogue, likable characters, and array of miscellaneous tools of destruction that I won’t spoil here. Vaughn’s trick is to not rip comic book characters out of the books and into a real world, but to rip out comic book pages, anime, B-movie action, and push the real world inside the gleeful chaos that cranks what you love about pop-violence entertainment and pushes the envelope of destruction as far as it can go.

Johnson and Moretz give terrific performances and Vaughn’s direction is borderline-supernatural, but as I’m sure you can tell by this point, the real star of the film is violence. It appeals to the child in all of us who laughed when Daffy Duck had a shotgun explode in his face or when Wile E. Coyote fell off a cliff. It devilishly snickers at the little bastards we could be when we happily took our action figures, made them fight, and then put one of them in the microwave to see what would happen (the result: our parents got really pissed off). Kick-Ass appeals to that kid who loves violence and still grew up well-adjusted…for the most part. For the part that remained in a state of arrested development, the film uses piles of corpses and twisted expectations to connect our childhood love of cartoon violence to the mature content we demand as adults. The coyote must now splatter on the desert sands, the duck must now have his head blown apart, and an 11-year-old girl must swear like a sailor and connect bullets to bad guys’ vital organs. If the performances, script, and direction of this film didn’t mix perfectly, we would find ourselves shifting uncomfortably in our seats and/or leave the theater feeling dirty. Instead, we’re cheering and laughing all the way back home.

Kick-Ass transports the viewer into a world of superheroes without superpowers, the celebration of online celebrity, and a level of exaggerated violence that would border on disturbing were it not imbued with childlike joy. It’s Looney Tunes, anime, first-person-shooter videogames, and gritty violence mixed with the innocence of Golden Age comics. It’s a delicious concoction that won’t only kick your ass, but will punch you until you’re smiling through a bloody mouth and broken teeth. Then you’ll ask for seconds.

First Film Review - The Departed

The Departed (2006)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: William Monahan, Felix Chong, Alan Mak

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Whalberg, Alec Baldwin

Studio: Warner Bros.

The Departed is a tale of Boston Irish tough guys on both sides of the law. Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career as the creepy and conceited young wiseguy Colin Sullivan who becomes the protege of south Boston's biggest gangster: ageing sociopath Frank Costello, played by Nicholson. Costello secretly sponsors Colin through police academy to become his personal executive-class snitch on the inside. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio is William Costigan, a moody kid with a brace of uncles known to the authorities, who is now genuinely trying to make it over to the right side of the tracks with a career in the police. He is headhunted by senior intelligence officers, fatherly Martin Sheen and his attack-dog lieutenant Mark Wahlberg, who offer him a new opportunity: use his family connections and credibility to go into deep cover in Costello's gang.

It's a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, with Tony Leung and Andy Lau, and where that movie emphasised a cool and elegant symmetry between the doppelganger finks, with the storyline indirect, and the violence kept relatively low, Scorsese's movie dots the is, crosses the ts, stomps the skulls and puts Rolling Stones numbers on the soundtrack.

Damon and DiCaprio are nicely contrasted; where Sullivan is smooth of face and style, Costigan is resentful, hunched and clenched, as if wearing a wire coat hanger under his jacket. He just has to sit there and take it when he is harangued - very wittily - by Mark Wahlberg's magnificently abusive undercover cop Dignam, for no reason other than to subject him to a little forensic ball-busting. Costigan makes the mistake of coming back at him with a quotation from Hawthorne, and Dignam jeers: "Wassa matter - you don't know any Shakespeare?" Frank Costello, wearing his own learning lightly, at one stage taps his head with gravitas and growls: "Hey - heavy lies the crown!"
Everyone gets good lines in Monahan's screenplay, but the lion's share, understandably, goes to Nicholson himself, each witticism a diamond in the most dangerous rough imaginable. Having menacingly asked after the ailing mother of one of his courtiers, and been told that she is "on the way out", Nicholson grins as if receiving good news. "We all are!" he declaims. "Act accordingly!"

And he certainly does, growling and snarling like an aggregate of the previous dark destroyers in his career, and incidentally finishing the movie with a half-moon gout of blood on his lower lip, as if reprising his Joker from the Batman movies. What a barnstormer this is from Nicholson, the kind of performance that no one else could possibly do, but which he could probably do in his sleep: and in his more heavy-lidded moments gives the impression of actually doing - without it ever being less than fantastic value for money. At one stage, musing angrily on the presence of a suspected rat in his ranks, Nicholson actually does an impression of a rat: two big front teeth suddenly pop out over his lower lip and that great snub nose twitches malevolently. I can't see Pacino or De Niro getting away with it. Whistler once said his exorbitant fees were not for the hours' work at the easel, but for the experience of a lifetime, and that is what we are getting with Nicholson: a great screen actor whose charisma has, through the decades, rolled over like a recurring lottery jackpot. Will the 69-year-old Nicholson get a part like this, with a director like this, ever again?

As for Scorsese, it is a return to the fluent, muscle-flexing movie-making with a visible directorial signature. Gangs of New York, though very good, was atypical. This is an unapologetic, unironised crime-family drama, which the director puts over like a roundhouse punch. It certainly felt like a work from Scorsese's golden years, and even has a scene in an old-fashioned porn cinema, of the sort once patronised by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and which surely ceased to exist long ago.