EYE SEE YOU (US/Germany - 2002) Directed by Jim Gillespie. Written by Ron L. Brinkerhoff. Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Tom Berenger, Charles S. Dutton, Kris Kristofferson, Polly Walker, Robert Patrick, Jeffrey Wright, Robert Prosky, Courtney B. Vance, Christopher Fulford, Stephen Lang, Sean Patrick Flanery, Dina Meyer, Angela Alvarado Rosa, Mif, Alan C. Peterson, Hrothgar Mathews, Rance Howard, Tim Henry, Frank Pellegrino. (R, 96 mins) Sylvester Stallone has had his share of ups and downs over the course of his long and storied career, but he perhaps hit his roughest patch in that post-COP LAND period from 1998 to 2006, after which he went into nostalgia mode with the surprisingly good ROCKY BALBOA. That film's success sent Stallone on an ongoing greatest hits tour that's seen him resurrecting Rambo, creating a new all-star action franchise with THE EXPENDABLES, and continuing Rocky's story in two CREED films so far, the first earning him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. The 1997 "indie" COP LAND came at the height of Miramax's Oscar-baiting power, and was supposed to be then-51-year-old Stallone's bid to reinvent himself as a Serious Actor. He even pulled a De Niro by putting on 40 lbs and sporting a gut to play a powerless and partially-deaf sheriff in a small New Jersey suburb that a bunch of corrupt NYC cops call home. The film was critically-acclaimed, Stallone got some of the best reviews of his career, and it was a modest hit in theaters, but it was more or less viewed as a stunt for Stallone and offers for more serious roles never materialized. So he went back to action movies with 2000's remake of the Michael Caine classic GET CARTER and the 2001 racing drama DRIVEN, and both bombed critically and commercially. Aside from his comedic turn as the villain in 2003's SPY KIDS 3-D: GAME OVER, Stallone's next three films--2002's EYE SEE YOU, 2003's AVENGING ANGELO, and 2004's SHADE, where things had gotten so dire that he took a supporting role as the mark in a ROUNDERS underground poker knockoff starring Stuart Townsend--either made it to just a handful of theaters, or (as in the case of AVENGING ANGELO, notable only as Anthony Quinn's last film and released two years after his death), went straight-to-DVD after extended stays on the shelf.
EYE SEE YOU began life as DETOX, and was supposed to be a major-studio Stallone thriller, produced for Universal under the auspices of Imagine Entertainment and executive producer Ron Howard. Budgeted at nearly $60 million, with 1/3 of that going to the star, DETOX was shot in 1999, when its director, Jim Gillespie, was still enjoying a huge box office success with the 1997 smash I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, one of the most popular entries in the post-SCREAM slasher craze. A strong cast was assembled in support of Stallone, including the likes of Tom Berenger, Charles S. Dutton, Kris Kristofferson, Courtney B. Vance, Robert Prosky, Jeffrey Wright, and Stallone's COP LAND co-star Robert Patrick, among others. DETOX was clearly a riff on the kind of dark and grim serial killer thrillers that came in the wake of David Fincher's SE7EN, and it cast Stallone as a troubled FBI agent who ends up at a secluded psychiatric facility that's dedicated to helping law enforcement PTSD cases. But once he's there, all the cops in the treatment program start getting killed off one by one and they can't call for help because communication's been knocked out thanks to a blizzard, which keeps them trapped inside. Mistrust, paranoia, and anger set in and for a bunch of cops who already don't need another push to go off the deep end, the situation soon turns into something akin to John Carpenter's THE THING if re-imagined as an Agatha Christie mystery.
Not a bad idea for a thriller, but things went horribly awry. Both Universal execs and test audiences hated Gillespie's initial cut. Reshoots were ordered and Gillespie was told to overhaul the entire thing. It's not clear how much he was involved, but Stallone said years later that Ron Howard himself supervised the post-production for a brief period of time. The ending was reshot and the title kept changing--from DETOX to D-TOX to THE OUTPOST and back and forth again as Universal tried testing the revamped version in 2001 and still got a chilly response. Now with the title settled on D-TOX, the film was released in Europe in early 2002 with little success, while back in the States, Universal decided they'd seen enough and washed their hands of it. They sold it to the lowly DEJ Productions, who retitled it EYE SEE YOU, and released it--minus the Imagine Entertainment logo and Ron Howard's executive producer credit--on 78 screens with no publicity in September 2002 on its way to Blockbuster shelves two months later as one of the chain's "Blockbuster Exclusives." After three years, multiple reshoots, numerous test screenings, and at least $60 million spent on it, EYE SEE YOU opened in 57th place with a weekend gross of $32,000.
So is it that bad? No, it's not. Looking at it now, it's nowhere near the vicinity of being Stallone's worst movie, especially in a filmography that contains STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT, REACH ME, and ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES. It doesn't even belong in his bottom five and might not even qualify for his bottom ten unless you're looking at OVER THE TOP through rose-colored glasses. EYE SEE YOU's biggest offense is that it's kinda dumb (but not as dumb as Paulie's robot in ROCKY IV) and it's quite shameless in its SE7EN worship, starting with the same kind of shaky and jittery opening credits, which was already a little past its sell-by date in 2002 but still hasn't stopped movies from ripping off even today. Stallone is Jake Malloy, an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer who kills cops--nine so far in the last six months--by taking their eyes out with a power drill and calling Malloy with garbled, electronically distorted phone taunts of "I see you...but you don't see me." As is wont to happen in cop thrillers of this sort, things get personal when EYE SEE YOU's "head in the box" moment comes pretty early on as Malloy's girlfriend Mary (Dina Meyer, in a test run for the SAW franchise she'd be a big part of a few years later) becomes the killer's latest victim on the night he was going to propose to her, her eyes drilled out and her corpse strung up and left hanging in the dining room. After a pursuit into an abandoned building, complete with a requisite dungeon-like room filled with just chains dangling from the ceiling, Malloy is about to confront the killer only to find that he's committed suicide and left a full confession. Case closed, but a depressed Malloy spends three months drinking himself into numbness, and after attempting suicide, his boss Hendricks (Dutton) intervenes, taking him to the remote clinic for cops, located in middle-of-nowhere Wyoming at a decommissioned former military asylum.
It's an effectively ominous setting, and it enhances the situation when other cops in the program--among them bullying hothead Noah (Patrick), emotionally shattered Conner (Sean Patrick Flanery), aging Canadian Mountie McKenzie (Prosky), drug-addled undercover narc Jaworski (Wright), and bad cop-turned-man of God Reverend Jones (Vance)--start getting offed one by one, with other targets and potential killers that include affable janitor Hank (Berenger), ex-cop and head doc Doc (Kristofferson), shrink Jenny (Polly Walker), and weirdo orderly Jack (Stephen Lang), whose obvious red herring behavior is so bizarre from the start that there's no possible way he could be the killer. Stallone turns in a strong performance, and while there are some head-scratchers throughout (why would off-duty, on-disability cops come from all over the continent and still bring their guns for Doc to keep in the safe and their shields for him keep in a file cabinet? Obviously, so Malloy can bust into the safe and give everyone their weapon once a killer is on the loose and so the killer can break into the file cabinet and collect the shields of his victims as "trophies." Duh!), it's really not any more or less idiotic than a lot of studio thrillers from that time. And after driving Malloy all the way out to the retreat, Hendricks decides to rent a cabin so he can do some ice fishing and of course, finds a dead body frozen in the ice, which turns out to be a cop who was on his way to the facility, which means someone isn't who they claim to be, as evidenced when Malloy just happens to look under the eyelids of one of the dead cops to find "I" written under one and "C.U." under the other.
Just out on Blu-ray from MVD Visual (because physical media is dead), EYE SEE YOU isn't going to be re-evaluated as anything more than a derivative but watchable time-killer aside from the novelty of being the closest Stallone's come to starring in a horror movie. But the Blu-ray does have one intriguing extra that's a point of interest for the morbidly curious or if you're the type that slows down on the interstate to rubberneck a car crash: the first official release of Gillespie's original 1999 cut, presented here as a widescreen workprint of acceptable VHS quality and under the DETOX title, with incomplete opening credits and no closing credits. There's ultimately just a one-minute difference between the two versions (EYE SEE YOU runs 96 minutes, DETOX runs 95), but the changes are apparent from the very first scene, even though there doesn't appear to be much in the way of reshot material. Most of the footage in EYE SEE YOU is right there in DETOX, but DETOX has a radically different structure that, to put it mildly, is a total clusterfuck.
Gillespie's DETOX cut utilizes a fractured timeline, but all this does is slow the film down and inadvertently compromise Stallone's performance. Arranging the film this way forces the audience to not only follow the unfolding mystery, but at the same time try to figure out what the hell happened to get Malloy there in the first place. There's absolutely no sense of pacing and no smoothness to the storytelling. It opens with a pre-credits sequence showing the murder of a cop, goes to the opening credits, and the first shot after that is Hendricks driving Malloy to the facility. Who are these guys? Why is Stallone being taken here? Why are his wrists bandaged? Less than ten minutes in, and DETOX dives right into Malloy's therapy with Doc and the other cops, while using periodic random flashbacks and cutaways to fill in the backstory--exposition that was ultimately presented in a linear and much more coherent fashion as the opening 20 or so minutes in EYE SEE YOU. In Gillespie's DETOX cut, it takes so long to dole out these important details that it's a full 45 minutes--almost half the film's running time--before we're even aware that Mary was killed and we can finally conclude why Malloy has been brought here. EYE SEE YOU fixes all of this start/stop, momentum-killing nonsense by arranging these sequences in a conventional narrative that quickly and concisely establishes who the characters are and what they have to do with the story.
Poster art for the European release before Universal sold it to DEJ Productions.
Imagine SE7EN opening with Kevin Spacey walking into the police station and then Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman thinking back to all the murders they've been investigating as they drive out to the desert. There would be no reason for the story to unfold that way, just as there's no reason for the clunky, jumbled narrative in DETOX, other than Gillespie getting a little too big for his britches after one hit and thinking he's pulling some USUAL SUSPECTS head games. Sometimes, the basic way is the way that works. The impenetrable structure of DETOX isn't in the service of a surprise, game-changing reveal. It's Stallone vs. a serial killer. There's no need to complicate it and overthink it with laboriously-executed trickery in a hapless attempt to be clever. Sometimes--not often, but sometimes--when a director is ordered to make changes or even has the movie taken away from them, and you finally get to see the director's intended version, you realize on occasion that the studio was right. And while that final version may be a flawed compromise, the term "director's cut" doesn't automatically mean it's the better version (PAYBACK, NIGHTBREED, and THE EXORCIST III come to mind). There are a couple of other major differences between EYE SEE YOU and DETOX. In EYE SEE YOU, when Malloy finds what he thinks is the killer's body post-suicide, he drops to his knees in exhausted anguish--a natural response. In the DETOX cut, he does an enraged Rambo yell and shoots the corpse six times. Lang gets a couple of additional lines of dialogue and sinister glances that make his twitchy character more aggressively asshole-ish in EYE SEE YOU. And in EYE SEE YOU, the climactic confrontation has been significantly reworked, with some new shots that give the killer a more violent, over-the-top death. EYE SEE YOU is not going to be mistaken for a neglected classic, but it looks like top-shelf Hitchcock when viewed in conjunction with the unreleasable DETOX. It's no mystery why test audiences hated it. And if the DETOX cut is what Stallone saw before washing his hands of the project, it's no wonder he and Patrick openly dissed it on the commentary track for the 2004-issued director's cut DVD of COP LAND (as Michael Rapaport's character vomits in a trash can, Stallone quips to Patrick "He looks like he just saw DETOX"). Or why Howard took his and Imagine's names off of it before its belated release, as all involved parties distanced themselves from it like a loud fart in a crowded room.
One of the chintziest-looking major-studio sci-fi movies of the 1980s, MILLENNIUM spent over a decade in development before it was finally made as sloppily and ambivalently as possible. Written by John Varley and based on his short story "Air Raid," MILLENNIUM is thus far the only screenplay by the author, whose short story "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" became a 1981 AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE episode that later ended up on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. MILLENNIUM was first put in pre-production as far back as 1979, with visual effects innovator Douglas Trumbull, best known for his work on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, set to direct and Paul Newman and Jane Fonda attached to star. That fell apart, putting it in turnaround and by the time it was ultimately made in 1989, the director was Michael Anderson (AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, LOGAN'S RUN, ORCA), with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd starring. It's a time-jumping sci-fi would-be epic, opening with a mysterious plane crash in 1989 that's been engineered from 1000 years into the future, with the "victims" appearing to be burned to death even before the plane goes down in 1989 but actually transported to 2989 in a "timequake" for reasons that will become clear--relatively speaking--much later. Crash investigator Bill Smith (Kristofferson) finds a strange weapon--a "stunner"--amidst the wreckage, a piece of evidence left behind by Louise Baltimore (Ladd), a warrior from the future. Her mission is to stop Smith, who senses he's met Baltimore somewhere before (because, duh, he has), and Dr. Arnold Mayer (Daniel J. Travanti, his post-HILL STREET BLUES big screen career going nowhere), a nosy physicist investigating strange phenomena surrounding a series of plane crashes, from figuring out the purpose of the "stunner" and causing a paradox that will forever alter the future in a Butterfly Effect sort-of way.
MILLENNIUM has some interesting ideas along the lines of influential '80s sci-fi masterworks like THE TERMINATOR and TRANCERS, and prefigures later genre examples like 12 MONKEYS and SOURCE CODE, but the execution is somewhat lacking. The motivation for the whole "stealing people from 1000 years in the past" is never expressed very well and for a film released by 20th Century Fox, the visual effects look like something out of a corner-cutting 1970s TV show. The entire film would probably play better if it topped out at 80 minutes and came from Roger Corman's Concorde or better yet, Empire Pictures, and starred Tim Thomerson, Barbara Crampton, and Art LaFleur instead of Kristofferson, Ladd, and Travanti. Kristofferson isn't bad but he's miscast, especially if you consider that his character is, at most, a teenager in a 1963 plane crash flashback subplot, which would make Bill Smith 40 tops in 1989, with perpetually craggy 53-year-old Kristofferson not looking a day under 65. The ending is a wreck, but it's at least better than the laughable one used for the film's overseas release and included on Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray (where it's paired in a double feature set with the incredible R.O.T.O.R.), which has a nude Kristofferson and Ladd holding one another in a LIFEFORCE-style embrace as a timequake envelops them. MILLENNIUM is watchable but it could've been something more with a little care and some more money--it's hard to picture Newman and Fonda doing the movie MILLENNIUM ended up being. Shot in Toronto, it's populated by a who's who of Canadian Character Actor Hall of Famers in supporting roles, like Lloyd Bochner, Maury Chaykin, Robert Joy, Lawrence Dane, Peter Dvorsky, Gary Reineke, Michael J. Reynolds, Brent Carver, and Al Waxman. MILLENNIUM bombed in theaters, opening in the ass-end of summer on August 25, 1989 and landing in 12th place. (PG-13, 106 mins)
This Montreal-shot fugitives-on-the-run thriller from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (ANATOMY, THE COUNTERFEITERS) offers an intriguing set-up but quickly gives way to cliches and contrivances before completely collapsing in the third act. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are siblings who pull off a day-before-Thanksgiving Michigan casino heist before wrecking their car on a snowy rural road. With Detroit cops and highway patrol in hot pursuit, they split up, Bana finding refuge with a family at a cabin where he kills the abusive stepfather, and Wilde with ex-con Charlie Hunnam, a disgraced boxer who may have accidentally killed his crooked manager about ten minutes after being paroled that morning. Hunnam and Wilde have some drinks at a bar and have sex in a motel room, so of course, they're in love the next morning and he takes her home to the family farm to meet mom Sissy Spacek and dad Kris Kristofferson. Naturally, an injured Bana is already there holding Mom and Dad hostage, and he's not very happy that his sister, for whom he harbors controlling and probably incestuous feelings, is in love with Hunnam. So with local deputy Kate Mara and her sexist, asshole sheriff father Treat Williams (why do the filmmakers make this character even more hateful than Bana?) closing in, an increasingly wild-eyed Bana decides to gather everyone for Thanksgiving dinner and poke them with sticks by getting into their heads and re-opening family wounds. Because hey, why not? It's not like the clock's ticking or anything.
It's too bad Ruzowitzky and debuting screenwriter Zach Dean gather all of these fine actors around a table only to have them go through some really tired soap opera melodrama. DEADFALL has some OK moments and there's snippets of genuine suspense, but the whole thing is so rote and hackneyed that it rarely rises above the level of strictly average. Most of the cast can't win playing such implausible characters (Wilde and Williams, in particular), but Kristofferson and Spacek do some really nice work here, convincingly conveying the strong sense of familiarity of a hard-working couple who've been together forever and can communicate in their own verbal shorthand or with just a look. DEADFALL feels most real in these few quiet moments with these two. (R, 95 mins)
ALEX CROSS (US - 2012)
Tyler Perry steps out of his comfort zone and into Morgan Freeman's shoes in this reboot of the wildly popular "James Patterson"® bestsellers that previously spawned the films KISS THE GIRLS (1997) and ALONG CAME A SPIDER (2001). Judging from the film's paltry box office, audiences weren't really interested in Tyler Perry: Action Hero. It's easy to mock Perry and make Madea jokes, but while he gets some points for trying, he's really not good here, though a lot of it is just bad writing. Maybe Freeman can sell the whole Sherlockian awareness of everything going on around him and being able to "tell that you had scrambled eggs for breakfast at 100 yards," but where Freeman plays authoritative and dignified, Perry glowers, growls, and overacts, turning Cross into more of a gun-toting, vengeance-obsessed, action-movie badass. It doesn't help that Cross is squaring off against a cartoonish supervillain in Matthew Fox's hired assassin "Picasso," on a spree at the behest of a corporate benefactor and so-called because he leaves clues to his next killing in intricate charcoal drawings at the murder scenes. Fox lost an alarming amount of weight for the role and turned what he had left into pure muscle. It's an unusual level of dedication for a film so silly and inconsequential, and he might've been more effective if his performance didn't rely on so many cliches (bulging eyes, wicked grins, calling Cross and taunting him, etc). There isn't one surprise here, unless you count how the filmmakers give police psychologist Cross a pass for breaking almost every law in the book, justifying it with Picasso killing Cross' pregnant wife (Carmen Ejogo). The film moves the novels' setting from D.C. to Detroit, presumably for production tax incentive purposes, though most of the film has downtown Cleveland filling in for Detroit, at least until Cross and Picasso's climactic showdown at the old Michigan Building, in the theater refurbished as a parking garage.
Also with Edward Burns and Rachel Nichols as Cross' partners, Cicely Tyson as Nana Mama, Jean Reno as a French billionaire targeted by Picasso, John C. McGinley as Cross' boss who's always reading Cross the riot act even though he's right 100% of the time, numerous scenes with Cross revealing key plot information to his clueless associates while the camera urgently circles around them, and one of the least-convincing CGI explosions ever seen in a major theatrical release. The one-sheet's tag line reads "Don't ever cross Alex Cross." Well, it's probably a good idea to not ever watch ALEX CROSS, either. (PG-13, 101 mins)
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (US - 2012)
Sometimes a really ambitious and inventive film can get made when nobody's paying much attention, and UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (the fourth film in the franchise, sixth if you count two made-for-TV movies) is anything but another by-the-numbers action outing. Its VOD and limited theatrical release in late 2012 got some unexpected praise from some serious critics, and the film displays a level of depth and intelligence that demand it to be taken seriously. Director/co-writer John Hyams made 2010's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION and returns with original UniSols Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, essentially supporting characters with the focus on John (Scott Adkins), who sees his wife and daughter brutally murdered in a home invasion led by UniSol Luc Devereaux (Van Damme). Awakening from a coma nine months later, John struggles to figure out who he is and why he's haunted by these painful memories. It turns out Devereaux is rounding up a rogue army of former UniSols and implanting a chemical that makes them consciously aware of their status as mind-controlled government killing machines. John discovers Devereaux is living deep in the Louisiana bayou, a messianic cult leader to a band of rogue warriors acting on their own volition, away from a government that can no longer control them. Is John one of these UniSols? Is Devereaux the real Devereaux?
US: DOR has Christopher Nolan-sized ideas on a DTV budget and you'd have to possess the ability of psychic premonition to have expected a film like this from Hyams (son of veteran director Peter Hyams), whose efforts to date have been unimpressive, to put it mildly. While some plot elements may borrow liberally from INCEPTION, THE TERMINATOR, and APOCALYPSE NOW (it's an intentional homage as John's journey down a river to Devereaux's camp even has a nearly-identical repetitive music cue heard when Martin Sheen arrived at Marlon Brando's compound), Hyams creates a surreal, disorientingly harsh, horrifyingly violent (30 seconds of splatter were cut to avoid an NC-17 rating), and potentially audience-alienating atmosphere throughout US: DOR. At times, the film feels like a waking nightmare that's being secretly directed by Gaspar Noe. It's almost experimental in the way it uses sound and visuals (particularly a dizzying strobe effect), and even with the impressive action sequences, there's no doubt that some people will absolutely hate this. Hyams even says as much on the commentary track, stating the script is admittedly "a little far off the reservation." It occasionally bites off more than it can chew and it goes on a bit longer than it needs to, but Hyams deserves a lot of credit for not going the easy route, and attempting--and very often succeeding--to create a significantly more unique, daring, and thought-provoking film than anything you'd expect something titled UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING to be. An instant cult classic. (R, 113 mins)
HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (UK/Japan - 2011; 2012 US release)
Originally shot in 3D, Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 classic HARAKIRI examines the same themes of honor and hypocrisy and retains most of the major plot details while deviating quite a bit in the third act. Miike, who's not quite as prolific and eager to shock as he was in his AUDITION, VISITOR Q, and ICHI THE KILLER glory days, fashions his HARA-KIRI as a dramatic companion piece of sorts to his excellent 2010 remake of Eiichi Kudo's 13 ASSASSINS (1963). Where 13 ASSASSINS finds unemployed samurai overjoyed at finally having a way to go out in a blaze of glory, this film has warriors on the other end of the spectrum: broke, jobless, without purpose, and struggling to survive in a world that no longer requires their unique skills. Miike's HARA-KIRI is one of his most restrained films, a samurai story with powerful drama, emotion, and tragedy at its core. In feudal Japan of 1630, peace has led to many unemployed samurai attempting suicide bluffs, where, in the name of honor, they request to commit seppuku in the courtyard of a feudal lord, usually resulting in a small job, a meal, or in the best cases, a financial handout from the sympathetic lord. The lord of the House of Ii is away when penniless ronin Hanshiro Tsugomo (Ebizo Ichikawa) requests to use the courtyard for ritual suicide. The lord's chief counsel Kageyu (Koji Yokusho) tries to talk Tsugomo out of his decision by telling him the story of Monome (Eita), who similarly requested to commit seppuku in the courtyard, resulting in Kageyu and the Ii samurai calling Monome's bluff and making him go through with it despite not even having a real sword, instead just one made of wood for show. Monome had a sick wife and child at home and heard about the suicide bluffs and decided to use it as a last resort. Tsugomo then informs Kageyu that he indeed knows Monome, and tells his own story about how the two are connected, and why he's really at the House of Ii. Ichikawa turns in a devastating performance as Tsugomo, often rivaling the finest work of Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in the samurai classics of old. Miike's film is leisurely paced but never dull, and there's a bizarre finale with long takes and intricate choreography that feels like a Kurosawa samurai battle restaged by Blake Edwards. (Unrated, 128 mins)
