Total Recall (2012)

Rating: **

So outraged were some of the nerdery that when it was announced they were remaking Total Recall, many people acted like someone said Citizen Kane, or Casablanca. The original Total Recall, although definitely with its own charm, is hardly the type of seminal science fiction film, like 2001 or Star Wars, that should probably defy the odds of re-imagining. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, remakes, as a trend, is not necessarily something we need fear. There's a fine tradition of remakes sometimes exceeding the original, like John Carpenter's The Thing of the Humphrey Bogart-starring Maltese Falcon. Even in music there's the long proud tradition of the cover song.

But let's not to get your hopes up. Total Recall, the 2012 edition, is not in anyway an improvement on the Paul Verhoeven version from 1990. This one's directed by Len Wiseman with the general feeling that before undertaking the film he sat down one weekend and watched Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Die Hard a couple of dozen times. There are storm troopers, gravity cars, rain-soaked futuristic cityscapes and an everyman hero in over his head being pursued by a pair of dangerous women. One of them is being played by an actress married to the director.

Colin Farrell plays Douglas Quaid in this new Recall replacing Arnold Schwarzenegger. He too has a menial job, a hot wife and longs for something more of the secret agent variety, and he too has seen the ads for Rekall and wonders if he can get away for a couple of hours into an action-packed fantasy. The difference this time is that Quaid doesn't have to get his ass to Mars, the action's happening right here on Planet Earth, were an ecological disaster has rendered only two parts of Earth unscorched: England and Australia. Workers from Australia serve the decadent Britons via an elevator that spans the planet called "The Fall." And there are some nefarious seeds a-doin' as Britain seems to be making a move to reclaim Australia.

This is where Quaid comes in. He knows... Something, and the evil British Empire of the Future are prepared to do anything to keep him from remembering. Or maybe they want him to remember. Or maybe they want him to think he's still plain old Doug Quaid to keep him out of the equation. Perhaps they want him to turn back into Hauser so that he can lead them to the rebel Matthias. Either way, Quaid's pretty, American-accented EMT wife is a butt-kicking, British-accented assassin out to kill him. But on the other hand, there's the idealistic, equally action-capable and lovely sidekick that picks up Quaid and promises to help lead him to the truth. But which truth is the truth?

The original Total Recall was a thinly-veiled meat-head blockbuster filled with Arnold-ready catchphrases and over-the-top violence. Who cares if nothing about it vaguely makes any kind of sense? It was awesome for the sake of being awesome! I wish this Total Recall had that kind of self-awareness. While I appreciate any attempt to make an empty-calorie summer blockbuster more deeper than a shallow pond, Recall's mish-mash of greatest hits and the surprisingly long shadow of the original film create a difficult double hurdle for the filmmakers to vault.

In its favour, Recall has exception production design acumen, and I can tell that Kate Beckinsale relished stepping into Sharon Stone's well-worn bitch boots, but the screenplay's attempt to craft a puzzle out of the conundrum of what's real and unreal is more akin to a jumble than the New York Times crossword puzzle. The normally reliable Bryan Cranston seems to be working overtime to channel Ronny Cox, and Jessica Biel is remembered more for being a vague presence than actual creating a memorable character.

As for the man behind it all, director Len Wiseman, I think the best thing of him is to get away from the remakes and sequels. I may not have liked Sucker Punch, but I've got to give Zack Snyder a hand for at least recognizing that he can't build a whole career as a filmmaker reveling the ideas of others. Considering that much of what counts as "originality" in Total Recall is totally derived from other, better movies, Wiseman should approach the idea that he should be generated, at the very least, original stories that he could then integrate the recycled details. And as for the fans out there who were against this from the beginning, congratulations! Your sacred cow remains intact.

Underworld: Awakening

Rating: **1/2

I congratulate the makers of Underworld: Awakening for being able to make a mountain out of a molehill; from the humble elevator pitch of “Romeo and Juliet with vampires and werewolves” comes one of the most densely packed mythologies of modern movie franchises covering fantasy, action, sci-fi, horror, and borderline homages to the bondage subculture. The films are a proverbial genre frappé, carried mostly on the notion that fan boys would watch Kate Beckinsale reading the phone book if she were dressed head to toe in skin tight leather and firing a big, damn gun.

In the series fourth outing, Underworld, like action franchise cousin Mission: Impossible, proves that age ain’t nothing but a number. The action scenes are brisk, well-executed and enthralling, and Beckinsale proves that after a break of a couple years from kicking any kind of butt that she can still stab, shoot, throw ninja stars and set off explosives with the best of them. In other words if you don’t like loud noises, monsters, death metal, and assorted on-screen carnage, this is not the movie for you. Reversely, if you’re looking for a movie with coherent storytelling, thoughtful characters and logical pacing, this is not the film for you either.

A couple of years ago, there was a film released called Ultraviolet about a future world where a virus turned ordinary people into superhumans who were then hunted and killed by an evil medical research company. In this uncertain time, one rebellious female warrior refused to go down without a fight and struggled to protect a child that both sides wanted dead, but who had the power to end the war. I only bring this up because Underworld: Awakening follows almost exactly the same plotline.

Taking place in the not too distant future, the secret war between vampires and Lycans (werewolves, remember) has become a not-so secret war where the human race is trying to rid the world of both immortal species. Captured by the obviously evil Antigen, vampire warrior goddess Selene (Beckinsale) has been cryogenically frozen and studied for over 12 years, when the breakout of “Subject 2” causes the release of Selene as well. Caught up in the new normal of the world, Selene seeks to get to the bottom of Antigen’s true purpose, copes with the revelation of “Subject 2” being her daughter Eve (India Eisley), and looks really, really good while fighting some new bad guy every five minutes.

The sheer brazenness of these films, which act as though coherent storytelling and practical character motivation is a luxury of script-writing, is something I rather enjoy. For instance, when Eve reveals that she’s really Selene’s previously unknown daughter it’s in the midst of a car chase, the human detective investigating the resurgence in supernatural activity seems to disappear from the plot for an hour, and Michael, the werewolf hybrid played by Scott Speedman who was so central to the plot of the first two films, appears only briefly and is played by a stand in. Granted, Underworld isn’t a Tolkien-esque tome filled with back story and detail, but I believe there is a minimum amount of work necessarily to at least build your world in three dimensions.

The technical edge this film has over the previous instalments is that it’s screening in 3-D and in IMAX. Now I didn’t see it in IMAX, so maybe that makes a difference, but watching an Underworld film in 3-D is an experience in squinting. It’s not good when you give up on the 3-D glasses and watch the film without them about 50 per cent of the time. If you have similar issues with 3-D, maybe only where the glasses for the action scenes, but I will say that one sequence where heroes let off a grenade of silver powder to take out a group of bad wolves looked amazing in 3-D. Seeing the little specs of silver dance out from the screen was almost worth the 3-D surcharge. Almost.

I also think that Swedish directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein have a better idea of what an Underworld is supposed to be, but that idea is putting emphasis on action and cool looking effects over a substantive script. Still, it’s an improvement considering that past films have had aspirations of Shakespeare and Puzo, but it also means you hiring decent actors who get wasted. Stephen Rea as the head of Antigen looks downright unsure what he’s doing on this film, and Canadian actor Kris Holden-Ried, who plays a werewolf weekly on the hit Showcase series on Lost Girl, deserved a, ahem, meatier part.

But despite everything I just wrote, most of which being arm chair quarterbacking post game, I still walked out of Underworld Awakening feeling moderately satisfied. It is what it is, Kate Beckinsale in skin tight leather fighting monsters for an hour and a half. If only all movies were this self-aware.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Rating: **1/2

After being under-whelmed by Underworld, and downright bored by Underworld Evolution, I was prepared to treat Rise of the Lycans with only a passing interest. Low and behold though, this rather dullard looking franchise took a left turn into actual engagement. Amazingly, it only took three films for the Underworld folks to find even half the potential for their horror/action/S&M fetish combo platter, but it says something more that even at its best, the Underworld films deliver marginal thrills. While the execution has substantially greater levels of gusto, the core problem with the series remains the same: it borrows too heavily from its genre forbearers to be taken seriously.

This Underworld takes a detour to the distant past and reintroduces us to minor faces of the franchise’s past. (So no tight-leather clad Kate Beckinsale in this one boys. Sorry.) In a medieval castle, the vampire lord Viktor (Bill Nighy) has bred half-breed Lycans that can transform back to a human form, the first being his favourite “pet” blacksmith Lucian (Michael Sheen). What Viktor doesn’t know though is that Lucian’s loyalties is not out of a slave’s gratitude for some modicum of freedom, but because Lucian is in love with Viktor’s daughter Sonja (Rhona Mitra), and she with him. But Viktor’s anger and pettiness over the affair spurs Lucian to revolution; leading his werewolf brothers in a rebellion against their vampire masters.

So yes, it’s 90 minutes of film taken from about five lines of dialogue in the script of the original. Firstly, Rise of the Lycans suffers from “prequelitis,” where any chance of a compelling story coming out of the antics on screen is foiled by the fact that we already know where it’s all going. If the appeal of doing a prequel has any merit, it’s that you get a chance to flesh out the details more and really develop characters and relationships that might have suffered in the originating chapter for whatever reasons. One marked area of improvement is the romance angle. Sheen and Mitra make a much more believable couple than Beckinsale and her werewolf beau Scott Speedman ever did. Granted, that accomplishment didn’t require much of a push to make the win.

But if there’s a real benefit to this movie, it’s that the central characters are played by two distinguished and talented British thespians. The right actor can take B-movie drivel and remind you that a film can be more than a two-bit, RPG rip-off with delusions of X-Men. Unfortunately though, this is not the case with Rise of the Lycans. There’s something about Nighy, right down to the way he’s lighted, that screams Disney villain; from his skeletal face bones to his scenery chewing delivery. Sheen comes off better and certainly seems commanding enough to be believed as the George Washington of the werewolves. However, this doesn’t stop the movie from being too terribly shallow, and there was definitely room for improvement in terms of how some of the relationships played out.

And still, everything is shot in that horrid, blue gel that makes everything look so fake and staged. There are times the entire production seems more like an elaborate LARP scenario than a movie, just because of the pedigree of the actors sometimes makes you do a double take as to how they were compelled to be involved in this in the first place. Working in favour of this Underworld though is that it seems to truly embrace its core idea, and it seems that the movie’s got its act together more here than in the previous films. But core improvements don’t erase the fact that this entire series feels like it was ripped off, and it’s as uninspired now as it was when the first film was released way back when. Perhaps the makers of Underworld can take a cue from other horror franchises: just remake already.