The Wolverine (2013)

While the original "X-Men" trilogy was not that great and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was pretty bad, Marvel did get it right with "X-Men: First Class," which I consider the best film they've produced. So in that regard any "X-Men" movie, while capable of greatness, isn't something that's guaranteed to be amazing. Granted I'm not a big fan of Marvel films in general, so my opinion is somewhat suspect, but that's just me. In any case, I wasn't holding my breath when it came to "The Wolverine." It's not that I thought it looked bad, in fact I thought the trailer was pretty promising, but I didn't really feel like paying movie theater prices to see it.

To my pleasant surprise, however, "The Wolverine" ended up being a film that I greatly enjoyed. In fact I had such a good time with it that I'd put it up there with "X-Men: First Class," although the later is the ultimately more satisfying film. It's a very different "X-Men" movie than we're used to, stripped down to the bare essences and free of the clutter of outlandish super-powers and revolving door of half-baked, poorly-defined characters dragging the plot through the mud as we slog through the cameos. That was always one of my biggest issues with those movies: It always seemed like there were about two dozen main characters, barely any of whom had enough screen time to be more than a walking name tag saying "Hi, My Name is Rogue."

Instead of having a massive cast who all seemed haphazardly crammed in strictly for fan-service reasons, "The Wolverine" keeps the story simple and about one (1) guy's journey. After the events of "X-Men: The Last Stand," Logan (Hugh Jackman) is living out in the wilderness, having nightmares every night about having killed his love interest Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), and essentially being a miserable bastard who has had quite enough of living. When Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), a powerful businessman whom Logan had saved from the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki, offers him a way out of his misery by taking away his immortality, Logan finds himself tempted by the idea and goes to Japan.

Of course things go kind of sour pretty quickly, Yashida dies, a power grab ensues, his funeral turns into a slaughterhouse, and Logan finds himself on the run, protecting Yashida's daughter, Mariko (Tao Okamoto) from the Yakuza and a dangerous mutant named Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) as they make their way across Japan, trying to solve the mystery of what exactly is going on here. All this is going on while Logan's healing ability is strangely not working very well, causing him to actually be hurt by such trivial things as being shot and stabbed. Eventually he makes his way to one of Yashida's fortresses out in the middle of nowhere to save Mariko and put an end to the shenanigans afoot. Oh, and there may or may not be a fight with a giant samurai made from ademantium.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

It's a very simple story that, not surprising given the plot, is not dissimilar to a samurai flick that you may have seen Toshiro Mifune in. Yashida even calls Logan a "Ronin" at one point, and there's plenty of imagery that makes it clear that's exactly what they were going for here. It almost reminded me of a live-action anime given the style and setting, which is very cool and off kilter enough to make "The Wolverine" really stand out among the rest of the Marvel franchise.

In fact this film rarely even feels like a Marvel movie, simply on the basis of it being too good. Yeah, you heard me fanboys, I said it. In terms of it being an uncluttered story with solid character arcs, well laid out motivations, believable and non-irritating characters and consistent and satisfying themes, this is better than any of the rest of the Marvel films with the exception of "X-Men: First Class." But in some ways I like "The Wolverine" better.

One of the main reasons it feels different is because for most of the movie, Logan is hurting pretty bad. His healing powers aren't working, so he's vulnerable. His brash actions that typically involve him eschewing any kind of caution now have dire consequences, to the point where he could actually die. The problem with a lot of the X-Men is that they are utterly defined by their powers, and while that is still somewhat true with Logan, in this film he has to become more than just a man who can't die, because that's not who he is anymore. I think it's the first time any X-Men movie has dealt with characterization to that extent, and it's a refreshing change.

As refreshing as the gentle breeze on top of a train going 300 mph. Aaaah. Soothing.

On a number of occasions it also had me doing one of my favorite things, which is sitting back in awe as I say to myself, "Well, I've never seen that before." Two scenes in particular stand out, one being an absolutely stunning action sequence on top of a bullet train which puts the end of the first "Mission: Impossible" to shame, and the other one being a sequence where Logan performs open-heart surgery on himself. I was invested for the entire film, but those parts were especially fantastic and blew me away.

And of course Hugh Jackman IS Wolverine at this point, having completely become the character and the eternal badass that he is. The fact that he's great in it is a given, but it was nice to see them make his hair look a little less ridiculous while still giving the hint of his classic but absurd haircut. It was also cool seeing Will Yun Lee again, and I also always enjoy seeing Hiroyuki Sanada show up in anything, and he gets to play both a jerk and swing a sword here, both being things he is exceedingly good at, so that was cool. And newcomers Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima were a delight, and I hope to see more of them in the future because they're both quite good. The only issue I had was Svetlana Khodchenkova, and that's not because she was bad, but because she's got this mole of preposterous size on her face that is intensely distracting.

"Hey, you've got something on your face. Right there, to the right. You need to take care of that. Seriously, it's like someone glued a Coco-Puff to the side of your mouth. It's freaking me out."

It's not surprising given that the director, James Mangold, is very very good, but "The Wolverine" exceeded pretty much every expectation that I had. I'm not sure if it'll make my Top 10 of 2013, but if it doesn't it'll probably make an honorable mention at the very least. If they keep cranking them out like this, the X-Men films might start showing the other Marvel films up. Not in terms of box-office, I'm sure, but since when do box-office numbers count for quality? Just have Joss Whedon write a bunch of jerks snarking at each other for two hours before actually doing something productive and acting like superheroes. That sounds way better than something with actual characterization and mature themes.

Check out this awesome trailer for "The Wolverine."

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Wolverine" is way better than a sequel to "X-Men: The Last Stand" has any right to be. It's stylish, it's action-packed, Hugh Jackman is fantastic, and the storyline has the most introspective and deep characterization we've ever gotten in a Marvel film, mostly due to the fact that it's about just Logan as opposed to a cast of dozens, so it gets a chance to actually flesh him out as a character. One of the best Marvel films ever, second only to maybe "X-Men: First Class."

Die Another Day (2002)

As another era of James Bond films came to an end, most were quick to dismiss the final contribution of Pierce Brosnan to the series. "Die Another Day" received lukewarm reviews when it came out, and years later it's still dismissed by many as the last straw to a tired franchise that had gotten stale and moldy enough to start making penicillin out of it - clearly only being salvageable by scraping everything and rebooting it, which four years later they would do. Even at the time I remember walking out of the theater thinking it was trash.

But here's the crazy thing, and it's something I honestly didn't expect: Upon seeing it again after a decade, I actually don't think "Die Another Day" is that bad. I won't lie to you and say it's a great movie, because trust me it has issues to spare, and when it's dumb it's really dumb. And maybe I was in a bad mood that day in 2002, or maybe I was expecting too much from it. Or perhaps it was because I hadn't yet seen the true lows of the series that I couldn't appreciate it when a Bond movie managed to be merely "alright." While absolving the film of its faults due to other films before it being worse isn't what I'm setting out to do here, I do have to take the big picture into account and offer a moderate defense of "Die Another Day." It's really not anywhere close to as horrible as its reputation suggests.

They're molding him into Ernest P. Worrell. The devious bastards.

The opening finds Bond in North Korea going under cover to disrupt a diamond-trading-for-weapons deal run by Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) and his partner Zao (Rick Yune). When, after being betrayed by an unknown source, Bond's cover is blown (along with Zao's face after an explosion imbeds diamonds in it) he attempts to escape but fails, and Moon is presumed dead after Bond drives him off a waterfall. Being disavowed by MI-6, Bond spends the next 14 months in prison being tortured before he is exchanged for Zao, who had been captured elsewhere in the meantime. M (Judi Dench) revokes his 00 status because she thinks he may have squealed under torture, but Bond is too pissed to let Zao run loose on account of him, and there's still a traitor to find. So, like in "License To Kill," he goes off the grid to settle some accounts. In my opinion it's one of the better setups the series has had.

That leads us to one of the weirder plots of the franchise, involving a satellite that can serve as a second sun, a hotel made from ice, weird neon headsets out of "Tron," a billionaire entrepreneur/professional thrill seeker named Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), and gene reassignment therapy, a truly absurd concept that takes the relatively simple process of plastic surgery and makes it a thousand times more complicated and physically impossible. It's kind of a wild ride while it lasts, and while it could be called many things ("silly" being a notable option) it's seldom dull.

Oh, and there's an invisible car, too. Most people will remember that.

As you can see, the gadgets in "Die Another Day" have made a prevalent and clamorous comeback. It's possible that Bond has more toys in this movie than he's had in quite some time, although I have yet to make an official count. Whether or not you like that is up to you. Some people don't care for that aspect of the franchise, but personally I enjoy the gadgets. I always have a good time watching him get good use out of them, which he most certainly does here.

Unlike "GoldenEye" or "The World Is Not Enough" which brought out this sweet car to basically do nothing but drive around, the car in "Die Another Day" gets put through the freaking gauntlet. This car must have gotten more use than any other car since maybe "The Spy Who Loved Me." And the car in that one doubled as a submarine. And yeah, here it's invisible. And yeah, that's dumb. The way they explain the tech is just slightly plausible enough to make you almost buy it, but I'd almost prefer it if Q had admitted that they had found a wizard in the London subway system and had hired him.

I mention this because I think that's one of the things that made "Die Another Day" work for me, at least a little bit. It's so packed to the brim with wild stuff going on and crazy gadgets and locations and action segments that it's a fun ride despite the stupidity. Even when there are scenes like Bond and Graves sword-fighting through a posh mansion like Inigo Montoya and the Six-Fingered Man, it's still a possessing of just enough of a flippant attitude about the whole thing while refraining from being overly goofy about it that I actually found myself having a good amount of fun. They could have made this really silly and did the Roger Moore thing of winking to the camera, but they didn't. And that, to me, made all the difference. It's stupid. It knows it's stupid, but it's not treating YOU like you're stupid. Does that make sense?

Aww! The hovercraft is smiling! He's so happy to be helping James out!

Before you get the wrong idea and think that I'm heaping wild praise upon "Die Another Day," allow me to clear the air a bit: This is still not a very good movie. There are things about it which are bad enough to nearly ruin the experience. It's just that the good things in it are good enough to still make it watchable. It's akin to an argument given by Christopher Hitchens but written down by a dyslexic 4th grader. The grammar, spelling and penmanship is horrid, but man is it full of rock-solid ideas.

I've mentioned the good, mainly being the abundance of action and gadgets, but it's also worth mentioning Brosnan again, since he's just too awesome as James Bond. I can't help it, I love the guy. Toby Stephens is also fun to watch as a Bond villain. He's kind of like what you would get if Hugh Grant and Eric Stoltz screwed. I dug it. I wasn't as big of a fan of Rick Yune, though. He was scary I suppose, but I don't know. I couldn't understand why he never took the diamonds out of his face.

 He'll tell you it's from an explosion a British spy set off in his face, but the real story was that his older brother got really mad at him while they were playing that board game Forbidden Bridge and slammed his head in the box that held all the jewels.

But here's the bad, and it's bad. We'll start with the slightly less awful, being that that the editing in this film is pretty janky. Being the first millennial Bond film, I guess we had to go really stylized with it. And by stylized I mean ""The Matrix" happened." Much like nearly every other action film after Neo said "Whoa," there are some truly bizarre random slow downs and frame-rate sputterings that pop up very often that would look more at home in a music video. In fact the entire movie kind of looks like a car commercial. That's the only way I can describe it. Although in its defense I'm sure it would have aired during the Superbowl. It doesn't go full blown Paul W.S. Anderson, but it's close.

And as much as I actually like Madonna as an artist and am a fan of her music, the opening theme is terrible. It bleeps and bloops at us like a laptop starting up, completely devoid of the style and swagger the best of what came before possessed. You gotta have sleaze and swing in a Bond opening. It's not something you're supposed to rave to, it's something you smoke a carton of cigarettes while playing cards to. But I don't even think this would cut it as a song to play in a club, let alone at the front of a Bond movie. It doesn't put me to sleep or anything, but it does set a tone of things being slightly off.

"Ah yes, Mr. Bond. After this drink, we shall fight to the death in a good-natured fashion. By the way, why is Madonna here? And why is she the only one who gets to wear black?"

However, the most egregious fault the film has can be summed up in four syllables: Halle Berry. Good. Grief. I ragged on Christmas Jones for being insufferable, which she was, but at the same time Denise Richards really can't be blamed for being a terrible actress in it because she's Denise Richards. What did you expect? But Halle Berry has been accused of being good at her craft. Apparently they even saw fit to give her an Oscar for it at one point. I have no idea what her excuse was here.

Here's the thing: Jinx isn't a bad character. In fact she's kind of awesome. She's a CIA Agent who is pretty lethal in her own right, and doesn't always need Bond to save her. She does occasionally, but there are moments where she handles herself just fine, and is pretty useful overall. She's not the kind of whimpering bimbo we're used to. And I liked that. But here's where it starts to go south. Fast.

SHOOP DA WHOOP!!!

You see, I see what they were attempting to do with Jinx. They were trying to make a female James Bond. And I suppose that's an...alright idea. They've done the "Bond meets his equal" schtick before, but that was simply involving skill levels. And Jinx is tough and savvy and is a decent spy, so there they've essentially succeeded. But when I say they were trying to make a female James Bond in this movie, I mean they were trying to clone him. And even if that was a good idea, which it isn't, she's less Pierce Brosnan and more Roger Moore. Oh dear.

The issue comes from the dialogue. That's where you can tell they weren't interested in Jinx as a character at all. They just wanted another mouth to put rejected Bond quips into after they'd been determined too dumb for him to say, so they switched the pronouns and gave them to her. Every line of hers...EVERY SINGLE LINE out of her mouth is some cringe inducing pun or innuendo, oftentimes flying in the face of whatever the situation is and coming across as irritatingly childish at best and horrifyingly distracting at worst. For the love of Sean Connery's toupee, even Bond picked the moments to bust out the one-liners. He wasn't always on. There is a time and a place for snark. If I wanted unfunny crap spewed out constantly no matter the situation, I'd watch something Joss Whedon wrote.

"Switch them off or I'll be half the girl I used to be!" Somebody got paid to write that. Halle Berry got paid to say it.

But for all that is good in this world, I don't think anyone could have given a worse performance than Halle Berry did. It's shocking how bad she is here. Don't get me wrong, the dialogue would have made the character always suck no matter what, but I can envision a scenario in my head that features an actress not making Tanya Roberts look like Meryl Streep in comparison. At least Denise Richards looked like she was trying. It's really stunning how much Halle Berry looks like she does not give one single crap, simply flying by on an eternal smirk saying "Hey look at me! I'm Halle Berry! I'm a Bond girl! Yay! I don't have to act today! This is fun! Penis joke!" All the meanwhile Brosnan is playing it relatively straight and Rosamund Pike is over there completely showing Berry up every step of the way. Where's the justice?

Literally every line of hers can be followed up with the phrase "SHUT UP, HALLE BERRY."

If there was one thing that utterly guts this film, it's her. Everything else is actually not that bad. Like I mentioned before, it's a lot of fun, it's pretty looking despite some weird CGI going on, Brosnan is still the mack daddy, and it calls back to A LOT of older Bond films. A decent drinking game could be made if the players all had good enough knowledge of the series. In fact it seems a bit like an over-caffeinated version of one of the older Connery flicks like "You Only Live Twice" or "Diamonds Are Forever." I kind of liked it.

So with that we bid farewell to Pierce Brosnan. With the exception of one film, I had quite the fun journey with him. With a 75%, he had one of the better records as far as veteran Bond actors go. But once again the series would sit silently in the wings for a brief hibernation once again, as Hollywood broke out their new favorite toy: The Reboot. After this we got a new start along with another new Bond. Nobody was exactly sure what we would get, but it's pretty clear that no matter what it was, it would have a substantial coating of grit.

This is actually a really good trailer, but man it's like reliving my hatred for Halle Berry all over again. Watch at your own risk.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Die Another Day" is not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests. No, it's not that great, but that's mostly due to weird stylized editing and a legendarily bad performance by Halle Berry. But if you can grit your teeth and suffer through her wretchedness, this isn't a bad little action flick. This is middle of the road Bond. Not one of Brosnan's best, but still far from the worst.

JAMES BOND

WILL RETURN IN

CASINO ROYALE

Red Dawn (2012)

I love action movie cheese, whether it's "Top Gun" or "Point Break" or anything starring Dolph Lundgren. But there do exist a few films deemed classics in the "badly awesome" category that I am not a fan of. One of those is the original "Red Dawn." I know it occupies a special place in many hearts, but for some reason I could never get behind it.

There's a lot of reasons to like it to be sure, be it the amazing cast or the stunningly absurd plot that screams out for high-octane action movie shenanigans, but I honestly slept through most of "Red Dawn." I have a hard time pointing to exactly the reason why, but there's something about that movie that just makes me drift off into a stupor worthy of post-Thanksgiving dinner. Considering that there's a calculated 2.23 acts of violence every minute of the film (seriously, at the time it made the Guinness Book of World Records), it's quite an accomplishment to make something that action-packed boring, but hey there it is.

I always found "Red Dawn" inexplicably dull, and because of that I didn't like it. Well, that and it was really creepy watching it knowing that there are people in America who look at it like it's a precognitive documentary. Honestly it made me feel a little queasy because it was like looking at the world through the lenses of their paranoid, gun-nut, conspiracy theory laden crazy goggles. It's an unsettling feeling.

That's a thing I want to watch: Alex Jones' spank material.

So sure. Remake it. Whatever. At this point I'm not even going to rant about them remaking everything. At least it's a remake of a movie I don't care about. It could be much worse. And when a movie has been sitting on the shelf for 3 years after being completed (true story, it was shot in 2009), you know you're dealing with some quality material, am I right?

This is going to suck, isn't it?

Well, the answer is unfortunately "Yes, it did suck." This is not a good movie. Not even by the standards of unnecessary remakes is it a decent film. It's barely coherent in its narrative, the plot does the impossible and is even dumber than the original, all but one of the characters are essentially walking cardboard cutouts spouting dialogue equivalent to a dog gnawing on a squeaky toy, and the admittedly plentiful action is squandered by the watered-down PG-13 rating. I would ask how something this easy is messed up so much, but honestly there wasn't much to work with to begin with, so I can't even be that mad about it. It's not like I'm surprised it sucked. I'm just tired.

All that being said, I still liked it better than the original. At least I stayed awake this time.

You know what the deal is at this point with the story, and little has changed from the original in that respect. Very early on, a foreign army invades America, and with a pillaging that would make the beginning of any fantasy movie proud, the townsfolk of Spokane, Washington are promptly slaughtered and interned. Escaping from the invader's clutches is a group of high schoolers who decide to flee into the woods and fight the good fight, calling themselves The Wolverines and eventually throwing a big enough wrench into the enemy's plan as to suggest eventual victory in the near future. Since "Red Dawn" doesn't feel the need to have an actual ending.

Cower in fear, North Korea. She's going to make duck-lips at you.

In the original film the invaders were the Russians. And in 1984, I'm sure that made some sense. In the remake, it's North Korea. It was supposed to be China, but when MGM decided they didn't want to make them mad, since it might eat into the box office sales in...well, China I guess, they changed it to North Korea, a place where barely anyone has electricity let alone a movie theater to go to. It's not even worth it to mention how stupid the idea that they could successfully invade us is. But I'll still say it. That's stupid.

The whole invasion is explained to be possible because of "a new weapon" that destroys all communication or something, kind of like an EMP, except North Korea's stuff is immune due to a MacGuffin they needed for a third act plot device. Of course, the film never explains how all the radios and TVs and communication that was not protected is still working after the invasion, but there I go nitpicking "stuff that doesn't matter" like the buzz-kill I am.

Our main heroes de jour are played by Chris Hemsworth (pre-"Thor"), Josh Hutcherson (pre-"Hunger Games"), and Josh Peck (post-proving he's a terrible actor). There's also Jeffery Dean Morgan and Brett Cullen who show up to throw some acting chutzpah at us, but they are extremely underused. So overall the cast is alright, but then again, among The Wolverines we've also got Adrianne Palicki, who played Wonder Woman on the failed TV reboot, and Isabel Lucas, who was the Decepticon in "Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen" who could turn into a human (since Decepticons can do that now), so I guess we've got to pick our battles here.

"I'm the only reason you're watching this, aren't I?"

When the cast is good, it's pretty darn good. Morgan and Cullen are of course great, but Hemsworth is carrying the movie nearly the entire time, being the best actor of the main cast by as far as Thor could chuck Mjolnir. It also helps that he is given the most interesting character, being a soldier recently back from the war who has some issues, but obviously becomes indispensable when North Korea attacks. Hutcherson is okay, but he has the same problem most of the cast has, being that his character is so anonymous that he kind of fades into the background, and it's a struggle to even remember his name. Even Will Yun Lee, playing the essentially nameless Big Bad doesn't really do much besides get killed via impossible convenience, although he is fairly intimidating.

But when the cast is bad, it becomes borderline unwatchable. The worst offender of this is Josh Peck as Hemsworth's younger brother. I knew I was going to hate this character the instant he showed up as a hotdogging quarterback who ends up costing his team the game because he felt he could win it single-handedly. He was mistaken. And true to that character trait of selfish impulsiveness (which is about the only one he has), he ends up getting one of his friends killed at a later point in the film. I thought that perhaps that may have proven to be a learning experience for him, but nope. Not happening. He doesn't learn anything and ends the movie the same character he started as despite suffering horrendous loss. What a character arc.

And Josh Peck is such an unlikable actor that it really is nails on a chalkboard for me to even look at the damn guy. And it took me the longest time to place where I'd seen him before. At first I thought he was that mattress selling prick from "Devil," but then I finally realized where I'd seen him before.

IT'S THAT LITTLE TURD SMUGGLER FROM "ATM."

Of course it is. Why wouldn't that be the actor they got for "Red Dawn?" He's only the most soul-punchingly obnoxious and irritating actor I've seen since Ryan Reynolds or Dane Cook. Sounds like a great time. Make him one of the heroes. In fact, make him essentially the main character, as he's one of the few who survives till the end. Fantastic. I'm glad I'm watching him in this movie.

Aside from the shortfalls of the cast, the rest of the movie does tend to make itself not boring by having a good amount of bombs, bullets and guys screaming "AAAAAARRGH!" as they shoot the enemy troops, all of whom seem to have the survival instinct of a duck with a sexual attraction to spinning helicopter blades. The problem with all of that is that pretty soon scenes start feeling less like a cohesive narrative and more like a slideshow of explosions that happened in no particular order. "Red Dawn" will jump from scene to scene with no lead-in or establishment of when or even where we are in relation to the thing we just saw, making the story quite hard to follow. And it's not too long before it starts getting really hard to care one way or another.

 It's the amazing Wolverine Brothers, Douche, Square-face and Talent!

By the way, isn't it nice when we don't have to see blood during our sequences of horrific violence? Much like "Alex Cross," there's a shocking moment in "Red Dawn" featuring a sniper rifle. But in this movie, instead of the chest, the person gets shot in the head. But don't worry! Just because the dude would have gotten his head half removed with that large-caliber bullet doesn't mean we have to see blood. Because just like real life, that's a very tidy affair. They wouldn't have even had to wash the carpet he fell on. Man, why can't every violent action movie be PG-13? It makes it so much better!

"Red Dawn" feels to me like a 5 hour long TV mini-series that was trimmed down to an hour and a half and released in theaters. And that compression does make it go by at a very brisk clip, but at the cost of knowing what in the world is happening. I'd prefer it as a mini-series. And maybe if it had been a series we could have actually gotten to know the characters instead of just knowing them as "The annoying one," "The one with the weird face," "The black one," "The one Josh Peck got killed," and Chris Hemsworth. 

I don't know what else to say, honestly. "Red Dawn" isn't the worst remake I've ever seen, but some of that probably has to due with the fact that I never liked the original. So even if it did suck, hey it's no skin off my back. I just don't care.

Check out the trailer for "Red Dawn." BTW Chris Hemsworth is not nearly as prominent in the actual film. Of course.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Dawn" is relatively harmless, and the action is admittedly plentiful, but it's ultimately not worth the time or effort it takes to get the disc, put it in the player, go back to the couch, hit play, chapter skip through the previews and commercials, play the movie, and then sit there for an hour and a half. There are better things you could be doing.