Elysium (2013)

I was a fan of Neill Blomkamp's debut, "District 9." While it was as subtle in its social commentary as a flare gun fired off in an elevator, it did its job quite well and was a fun action film despite the overly shaky camera. After seeing his sophomore feature, "Elysium," I get the feeling that "a fun action film that is too jittery with the camera and too telegraphed with the social justice angle" is going to be a common phrase heaped upon Blomkamp's filmography. To be fair, there are a lot worse things that you could say about a movie, so don't feel like that's writing the guy off. He's looking to have quite the career ahead of him as a director.

The film takes place in the future, where the Earth is a barely habitable, overcrowded wasteland, and the rich live in a space station called Elysium, which looks a lot like The Citadel from "Mass Effect." It's a paradise that has everything you could possibly want, including perfect health and essentially immortality as they possess this crazy technology that instantly cures anything wrong with you. Anything. Seriously, at one point a dude gets his face blown off with a grenade, but since his brain is stilling functioning they just strap him in there, it reconstructs his head, and he's fine. It even keeps his beard. Basically it's that thing from "The Fifth Element" that reconstructs Milla Jovovich. Anyway, the rich are quite happy up in Elysium, and like to kill anyone who tries to smuggle themselves onto there.

Dah dah dah dah dah...dut dut...dut dut...

Meanwhile everyone else on Earth lives in squalor, including Max (Matt Damon), a reformed criminal who's just trying to save up enough money to one day make it up to Elysium, a dream that is a pathetic long-shot at best. When an accident on the job leaves him with five days to live, he kick-starts his dream by rejoining the criminal world to make it up to Elysium and their life-saving medbays. During his quest he finds himself in the middle of a struggle that could mean the end of Elysium's isolationist policy, and the salvation of countless millions on Earth.

Man, Nerf used to be awesome back in the day.

The film is a thinly veiled but well deserved middle finger to the overly wealthy, and it's not subtle with it at all (like, AT ALL), but the characters are well written enough and believable enough to pull the story off. While Jodie Foster's performance as Delacourt, the main villain for most of the movie, may come across as slightly over-the-top in her wickedness, it can't be said that her actions as the head of security on a place like Elysium didn't make sense, as did the actions of pretty much everyone else in the film. Even the setup probably wouldn't be that far off from reality, if the technology was there. Compare that with crap like "The Purge," which took place in a land where nothing made sense. With a story like this which is actually fairly plausible, the whole lack of subtlety aspect seems less and less important when you consider that at least for once it's well done social commentary.

While Matt Damon and the rest of the cast are all fine, the guy who steals the show was Sharlto Copley as Kruger, a mercenary working for Delacourt. I really like Copley as an actor, and here he's this off-the-wall psychopath who goes through everything that's around him like a sweaty wrecking ball, sneering in his barely decipherable Afrikaans accent. He's a delight to watch. He almost seems like he belongs in another movie, actually. He's way too much of a Bond Number Two henchman for this. But he is difficult to understand.

"Oy inno gwanna kill 'im dee boyke."

"...I'm sorry boss, you're gonna boink what?"

Like "District 9," the story builds up the majority of the first half of the film before being a straight up action flick by the mid-point. Some may call that a slow straight, but decent characterization is nothing to roll your eyes at. And when it does fire up all of its cylinders, "Elysium" is a hard-hitting, violent romp that has enough "OH DAMN" moments to satisfy the action fan. Like I said earlier, the camera does tend to drift to the shaky side of things, but it's dialed back a bit from how distracting it was in "District 9."

Overall this one was pretty satisfying. It's not going to reinvent the wheel or even be remembered with any great reverence, if remembered by many at all given a couple years, but it's a decent entry into the annals of the Sci-Fi/Action genre. And while it may be doomed to be lumped in with the many, many films that are just like it in terms of plot and quality, that doesn't make it bad. It just makes it "A Sci-Fi/Action Movie." And you've seen those before. If you want to see another one, hey, try "Elysium." It's decent.

Check out the trailer for "Elysium!"

THE BOTTOM LINE - A competent and satisfying film for those who are in the mood for some distopian sci-fi. Sharlto Copley is the main attraction, and makes it worth watching even if the rest wasn't anything too mind-blowing. It's a little awkward in how overt it is with the social commentary, but that doesn't mean it's not completely correct in what it's saying. That goes a long way.

Escape Plan (2013)

Some things in life are certain. Death. Taxes. Stupid things coming out of Kanye West's mouth. Like heat causing particles to move faster, some forces at work in this vast universe are akin to an unstoppable juggernaut - heedless of anything other than their own indomitable wills. Recently we bore witness to another one of these irrefutable aspects of nature: The awesomeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Like gravity from a black hole, it's impossible to deny the inherent glorious majesty of these two titans of action. Their presence, physicality, action movie acting chops and humor bring an inescapable aura of fun and badassery to the films they star in, often adding watchablity to what would otherwise be worthless. Oh, they have their detractors, it's true, but I choose to believe those who doubt them are simply blinded by the sheer manliness of their presence - A cowed, shriveling girly-man who is lashing out in fear at what they do not understand.

EMBRACE ME.

Schwarzenegger and Stallone have both had films this year already, and while Arnie's return to lead roles in "The Last Stand" was solid, sitting through Stallone's "Bullet To The Head" was a painful, joyless experience. "Escape Plan," the first feature these two legends have ever headlined together, seemed like a fun, action packed romp that smacked slightly of 80's and camp, which to me made for a promising setup. That is, with the exception of the name inexplicably being changed earlier this year to the terribly bland title "Escape Plan" from the more mysterious and stylish moniker "The Tomb," which is a decision I really don't understand.

"Escape Plan" didn't unfortunately reach the heights of "The Last Stand," but it was head and shoulders above "Bullet To The Head." It's what was promised in the trailer, and is pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to be. It's silly and kind of campy while taking itself dead serious, not a whole lot makes sense but it's just plausible enough to not be technically impossible, the actors all look like they're having a good time, some so-bad-they're-good one liners happen, and by the end we are given what we paid money to see: Arnold Schwarzenegger mowing down hordes of bad guys while shooting a gun the size of an El Camino. I don't feel ripped off in the slightest.

The man's like Rembrandt with a .50 caliber. His victims become Jackson Pollock paintings.

"Escape Plan" is about Ray (Stallone), a man who makes his living and fortune by getting himself sent into the world's most secure prisons and then escaping in order to show the flaws in their security, kind of like a quality control job where each contract takes a few months and involves shanking. When he is presented with a super top-secret job to try and escape from a new prison that is reportedly 100% escape proof, he takes the assignment only to find himself in a prison that is incredibly dangerous and really does seem inescapable.

Wanting to pull the plug on the whole thing, he gives his extraction code only to find that the warden, Hobbes (Jim Caviezel), has no clue or interest in what he's talking about, proving that Ray has been backstabbed and has been left to rot in the one place he can't get out of. After making quick friends with Emil (Schwarzenegger), another prisoner who seems oddly anxious to go to the wall for Ray considering that they're strangers, together they craft the eponymous scheme to bust out and find the double crosser.

Occasionally confusing shakey-cam sequence aside, the action in "Escape Plan" was hard hitting and entertaining enough, and the last shoot out when Arnold gets to do his thing is a pretty awesome sight to behold, and proves the man still has it in spades. Although considering it is an R rated film it probably could have been a bit more graphic and not lost anything. Not saying that we needed something like "Machete" levels of gore, but when the villain who is second only to the Big Bad is taken out by falling down the stairs (off camera, by the way) it tends to smack of unsatisfying. But like adding it wouldn't have hurt anything, not having it really didn't take anything away, either.

Stallone is...decent here. It's not that he's not good, in fact his acting is fine, but I think all the lumpiness has officially reached the point of distraction for me. In "Rambo" he had that on-and-off-again-steroid kind of body, but he was still cut. Here he's just kind of a big mass of muscle and sinew like a sack of skin that had a bunch of bones stuffed inside in no particular order. And am I the only one who has noticed that he has the most absurdly small sausage fingers ever? Have they always been like that or have his hands gotten huge and started eating his fingers from the knuckles up?

At this point Stallone looks like a PS2 era video game version of himself.

Schwarzenegger runs away with this film, honestly. It's not Stallone's fault, since being the snarky one who knows more than he's telling, Arnold has the more fun character to play. But Arnold also seems to be putting slightly more effort into the role. And I've always liked Schwarzenegger as an actor, but I can't express how much fun it is to watch him having fun acting. It's infectious, and it becomes the reason we care. Stallone's character exists to move the story along, but Arnold's character is why we get invested in what we're seeing.

That's not to say "Escape Plan" is a brilliant film by any means. It's got its share of problems. The biggest fault with it is probably the fact that, with the exception of some of the bigger "trailer moments," it's not a very memorable film. That's not to say it's boring, but it's nothing very unique. Now that's not an automatic bad thing in of itself because what's important isn't originality but how well a film does what it set out to do. And "Escape Plan" does what it does well. But the fact that it's generally pretty predictable doesn't help it in the "stick in your mind" department. Again, that's not because it's bad but because it kind of runs together with a lot of other movies similar to it.

But on the other hand, what were his options? NOT getting to da choppa? That's what you do.

And like any action flick, a lot rides on the performances of the villains. "Escape Plan" is sadly lacking in that department. Jim Caviezel is really bad at being a bad guy, and comes across as more obnoxious than threatening. He simply acts really uppity, fixes his tie a lot while brushing off his lapels and snaps his fingers anytime he wants something done, a character trait which gets annoying really quickly. Essentially he's just a monocle short of being the snooty rich guy in a cartoon who inevitably gets a pie in the face. Intimidating he is not. That role belongs more to Vinnie Jones as the #2 Baddie, but there's really not anything to him other than being a slightly larger and more psycho prison guard. He doesn't do anything to make me particularly notice him besides being an actor I recognize. And every other guard is literally faceless. It's difficult to care much.

You know, all these thing are pretty easily overlooked for me. I'm easy to please when it comes to Stallone, but even more so when it's Arnold. When he's spouting lines like "You hit like a vegetarian," there's bound to be some smiles to be found on my face. Even the post-kill one liner he has at the end that was so bad that it was honestly kind of awesome managed to put me in a good mood. By Crom, I missed that man.

Check out the trailer for "Escape Plan."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Escape Plan" is a solid action flick. It's a good time, and just entertaining enough to forgive some of the sillier nonsense. If you maintain a forgiving mindset and thoroughly suspended disbelief, it's as much fun as any random 80's action flick starring one of these guys. Its biggest fault is weak casting in the villain department, but Stallone and Schwarzenegger more than make up for it.