New on DVD/Blu-ray: JOHN CARTER (2012) and GONE (2012)

JOHN CARTER
(US, 2012)

There's really no need to conduct another postmortem of what's become the HEAVEN'S GATE of its generation.  In a lot of ways, JOHN CARTER is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with Hollywood today.  In an era when films routinely cost $150 million or more to make, the budget was grossly bloated at $250 million, the marketing plan was terrible, the title change (from JOHN CARTER OF MARS) nonsensical, and Pixar director Andrew Stanton was out of his element on his first live action feature, shooting much of the film twice and even saying "I'm not going to get it right the first time." But it also exemplifies what's wrong with "fans" and the internet:  once the pre-release hate started brewing, it just became a toxic, pile-on mentality that certainly had a hand in killing JOHN CARTER before anybody even saw it.  Disney was banking on making a franchise out of the Barsoom series of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, but that seems highly unlikely now.  And the movie?  It's not bad.  It's not particularly good, but it doesn't deserve its pariah status as the new symbol of cinematic failure.  AVATAR was inspired in part by the Barsoom series and for all its problems, I'll take JOHN CARTER over AVATAR any day.  It's uneven, stars Taylor Kitsch (as John Carter) and Lynn Collins (as Dejah Thoris) aren't ready to carry a movie of this size and it's a real slog when it's focused on them, and too many of the action sequences (primarily Carter's sudden extreme jumping ability) look like a video game.  But there's a lot stretches where JOHN CARTER works in fits and starts, mostly early on or when the Tharks are onscreen.  The alien race is portrayed in terrific motion capture performances by Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Haden Church, and they, along with John Carter's faithful Barsoom companion Woola, provide many of the film's most enjoyable moments.  JOHN CARTER is an ambitious, gargantuan production that ultimately, despite Stanton's dedication, unfortunately feels like just another soulless, assembly-line product.  It's big and it's impressive-looking, but it's curiously empty.  Oddly, its colossal tanking has made it more memorable than if it had gone on to gross $250 million.  Then, it would've just been another blockbuster that everybody saw and forgot about ten minutes after leaving the theater.  (PG-13, 132 mins)


GONE
(US, 2012)

Almost nothing works in the ridiculous thriller GONE, but it gets a surprising amount of oomph from Amanda Seyfried's committed performance as a possibly crazy young woman who may or may not have been kidnapped and thinks the perp has abducted her sister.  Jill (Seyfried) was kidnapped a year earlier and managed to escape from her captor.  Now waiting tables at a diner, still traumatized by the incident and always paranoid, she practically goes off the deep end when her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) disappears without explanation.  The cops, of course, think she's overreacting and doubt she was even kidnapped in the first place, so Jill takes her unregistered, illegal firearm and goes on a rampage across Portland, OR trying to find Molly's kidnapper.

Pointless and hilarious red herrings abound in Allison Burnett's (UNTRACEABLE, UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING) script, which doesn't appear to have been worked on beyond a hastily-constructed first draft.  There's the creepy detective (Wes Bentley) who mentions having a thing for crazy chicks and disappears at a pivotal moment so he can take soup to his sick mother.  There's the weird locksmith (Joel David Moore) who just lets a total stranger borrow his van.  There's Jill's co-worker Sharon (Jennifer Carpenter), a twitchy-acting single mom who drives an SUV and lives in a huge house in a strangely nice neighborhood for someone who works the graveyard shift at a greasy spoon.  There's Molly's boyfriend Billy (Sebastian Stan), who's a natural suspect because he's the boyfriend.  Or there's the plausible possibility that Jill, a compulsive liar in the first place, really is making it all up.  That explains why, other than eager new guy Bentley, the rest of the detectives involved (RESCUE ME's Daniel Sunjata, Michael Pare, and THE L WORD's Katherine Moennig, sporting the most jarring, inexplicable, clock-stoppingly bad hairstyle imaginable), more or less blow her off.  Director Hector Dhalia generates a little suspense with a late sequence involving a long drive into an increasingly ominous forest, but overall, this is just silly, ludicrous stuff that doesn't feel all that different from a typical episode of a CBS police procedural, especially with most of the cast coming straight from TV.  GONE does her no favors, but Seyfried's energetic performance shows that she's at least capable of carrying a serious, well-written thriller should the opportunity present itself.  (PG-13, 95 mins)