MovieComment

I, Robot

Posted by Player under Action

I, Robot is perhaps the first film I’ve ever seen, where it was made fun of even before it debuted in another film. In the movie Jersey Girl, Will Smith stars as himself and jokingly he refers to his latest movie. But ironically, Will Smith’s film really ends up being just that, a film that could have been about the big questions of life, like what is life? or why are we here?, but which ends up being just another action film.

I’m sure some fans of the author of I, Robot will not see this film based on principle alone, but since I have never read the original book, (although I have read some of the short stories,) I took a chance and sat through the film.

The story begins with Will Smith’s character. A homicide cop who is divorced and who has a prejudice against robots in general. It is he who is called to an apparant suicide at US Robotics, who is the world’s most powerful company. The company’s co-founder and chief scientist has just killed himself. USR is about to unleash it’s biggest rollout of their new NS-5 robots, but Smith thinks the suicide was really a homicide and all clues point to one NS-5 unit who just happens to be very unique for a robot. Eventually all events lead back to USR headquarters where the real enemy is revealed, and when of course all NS-5 units go crazy.

Will Smith proves that even if the script sucks, that he can still act and that he is still one of the most charming actors in Hollywood. It is his charm that makes I, Robot watchable. His supporting cast is mostly terrible or one dimensional characters without depth. The robots have more depth in this movie!

The special effects are actually not very believable. The Robots are all CGI animations, and although they are very cool looking, their physics sometimes boggles the mind, more than it amazes it.

In some moments, the film stops and asks some deep questions, but the answer never comes, and instead some more action takes place, which makes me think, the action movie was more important than understanding the human dilemma.

I, Robot is not the drama that A.I. was, and does not exceed The Chronicles of Riddick on the action movie scale, about the only thing it has is Will Smith.

Paycheck

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Face/Off is one of my favorite action films, cause it throws out realism and replaces it with incredible action scenes and one liners from what may be one of the last films I actually liked that featured Nicholas Cage. John Woo was the director who made Face/Off, and also Paycheck. However this time, Woo does not deliver on action as much as he delivers what I would call a suspense or thriller film which falls short of being good.

I guess it seemed like a good idea to put Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, two of today’s biggest Hollywood actors and make a loosely sci-fi themed thriller, but somehow the acting did not quite pan out. Affleck plays a brilliant engineer named Michael, who routinely reverse engineers products for any company that will pay his price. Since his customers can’t trust him with their technology once he leaves, Michael undergoes a memory erase after he completes the project so that he has no memory of the time he spent at the company’s lab. For his current job, he is asked to go a longer memory erase, which amounts to three years, in order to get the biggest paycheck of his life, hence the name of the film. During his time at the company he meets Uma Thurman’s character. Thurman is a nerdy biologist at the same company. We are led to believe that they fall in love during the 3 years Michael works for the company. Thus begins the action and conflict of the story. When Michael leaves the company he finds out that things are very wrong and that he has sent himself an envelope containing insignificant items to help himself out of danger as he is now a wanted man by both his former employer and by the FBI. In other words there is no paycheck! This all leads to Michael realizing just what he did during the last three years and trying to save the world.

If all that seems impressive, it is, but emotionally Michael is not very much of a hero. Affleck’s character never seems believable and is not very emotional. Unlike Cage and Travolta where they seemed overly dramatic in Face/Off, Affleck comes off as being unsympathetic to the audience and about the only sentiment of actual depth is from Thurman’s character. In the film, Thurman plays her part well, emotional and not stunningly hot, basically your typical boring scientist who just happens to be somewhat attractive.

As for the action scenes? Well it is a Woo film, so expect a motorcycle scene which is at least interesting, but in no saves the film from its mundane acting and unsympathetic characters.

What I found most interesting about Paycheck was the sets, and the way the future looked. The theme also speaks a little to our attachment to technology and how shallow and petty people can be in valuing such things.

So if you are looking for a good Affleck film, this one is not it. Pretty much Affleck’s acting might have helped kill this film, but that all depends on what you think, for me, he definitely did not help.

Hard Boiled

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This is another classic John Woo film which probably not many people in the US know about. The film stars Chow Yun-Fat as the typical badass cop, Tequila. The plot is pretty thin and by the last thirty minutes of the film you wonder why there is even a plot because the best part of this film is in fact the last thirty minutes and the final scenes are all about guns, guns, guns, and more guns!

The story starts out with Tequila involved in an undercover sting operation to arrest some gangsters who are dealing in illegal arms. We see that the cops end up up killing their own sometimes, because sometimes they can’t tell who is an undercover cop and who is just a gangster. The story then develops into Tequila’s relationship with an undercover cop who has infiltrated the gangs and their shared interest in bringing down the main bad guy. This eventually leads to the last thirty minutes of the film in which the gangster is cornered and he has an entire hospital rigged with explosives and he is going to kill everyone.

The ballet of gunfire violence then really begins and you see Tequila with a baby infant in one hand and a gun in the other as he dodges machine gun fire, explosions, and fire. The gunfire is just endless, and unbelievable! One of the main bad guys only has one eye, and yet he manages to kill everyone he comes across except the main characters of the film. If you wonder why John Woo is known for his violent footage, these action sequences will permanently answer that question for you. You will never see anything that even resembles this violent montage in an American film!

For movie fans that love action films, Woo delivers a stunning and explosive landscape that will truly delight. Think of Die-Hard, but with less plot and more guns.

Alas the DVD release of this film has some shortcomings. I could not even get the DTS track to play and some of the overdubs are just plain bad for some of the languages. The video also seemed less than stellar, but sharper than VHS quality. Available now, is a better Hard Boiled Criterion Edition as well as an even newer Hard Boiled (Two-Disc Ultimate Edition).

Kill Bill: Volume One

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The 4th Film by Tarentino, was received by many critics as nothing more than a violent montage of blood and other upsetting images, but the film actually is a little deeper than that, and while older audiences might find the film less than entertaining, younger audiences will certainly be drawn to it’s coolness. However as with most things, the truth lies somewhere in between.

There’s something unique about Uma Thurman. From her long toes and fingers, to the way that blood shimmers just right from her angled cheek bones, assail your doubts, Tarentino has made Thurman a screen goddess. From every frame, from every bit of color, and from every angle, Kill Bill is the inner vision of a haunted mind that is in love with the look and feel of film. This is a well planned, well laid out, well thought out, and perhaps the life work of Tarentino’s career. The movie itself is greater than the sum of its parts, it’s not spectacular in idea, dialogue, or anything particular, it is in how all the pieces fit in the end that makes it a very good film. Kill Bill is about revenge, nothing more, and nothing less… or is it?

The story follows the tale of a woman who has been betrayed by her former gang. The terrible tragedy that befalls her only makes her determine to avenge her enemies, that is at least after she wakes up from her coma. We follow on her treacherous path of vengeance, as she kills two of her main assailants.

“Do You Find Me Sadistic?”

Within the film, Tarentino manages to include the chopping of many body parts, stabbing, a scalping, rape, and even an animated petaphile situation. All this is enough to make some people walk out of the theatre, probably those who expected colorful dialogue along the lines of Pulp Fiction, but instead got a very visual oriented film, where the dialogue plays second to action and cinematography, but Tarentino’s text does imply some things. Like in the first question uttered by an invisible Bill, “Do you find me sadistic?” Taking pleasure in cruel acts is not what Bill is all about, or at least that is his argument, so perhaps Tarentino is not also sadistic. Maybe there is more.

“I assure you this is me, at my most masochistic.”

Perhaps it is not about taking pleasure at violence, but instead to be willing to subject oneself to the most unpleasant of things, to see the world through the eyes of the victim. But why would we do this, why would Bill do this, perhaps that is the question.

There is a sense that things always balance themselves out in the end. In action films, the good guy never wants to kill, he ends up having to do it, to restore balance and order. In Kill Bill, revenge is about resolving the wrong that was committed. In the end the bad guys have to die, they know it, Black Mamba (our heroine) knows it, and so does the audience. There must be balance.

Which of course leads me to think about the Suzie homemaker character that Vivica Fox plays as Veretta Green. A homemaker married to a doctor, who coaches little league, and who use to be a professional killer. When her past catches up to her, she knows there has to be a retribution.

In the end no one escapes.

If we are to take Kill Bill as a masochistic text, we can identify then with the victim, and all the violence and unpleasant images speak more about why we should care, why we should be more compassionate, and why we should Kill Bill, than about how we are insensitive to violence or each other.