On DVD/Blu-ray: FIRE WITH FIRE (2012) and MAXIMUM CONVICTION (2012)

FIRE WITH FIRE
(US - 2012)

This idiotic 50 Cent-produced thriller skipped theaters altogether despite a $20 million budget, most of which appears to have gone toward paying a large cast of slumming actors.  Fiddy has a small role and was one of 36 (!) credited producers, but the focus is on Josh Duhamel as a Long Beach firefighter who's in a carry-out when the owner and his son are killed by white supremacist crime lord Vincent D'Onofrio, who wants to run out the Crips who control the area.  At the urging of cynical narcotics detective Bruce Willis, who's obsessed with putting D'Onofrio behind bars, Duhamel agrees to testify but has to enter the federal witness protection program and goes into hiding in New Orleans.  Of course, D'Onofrio finds out where Duhamel is--largely because this film's version of witness protection bears no resemblance to reality--and sends hapless assassins Julian McMahon and Arie Verveen after him.  Duhamel, meanwhile, has been secretly dating the federal agent (Rosario Dawson) in charge of his case (and it seems as if her boss Kevin Dunn doesn't have a problem with it), and of course, she's now in danger as well, narrowly missing a bullet to the head that was meant for Duhamel.  Duhamel makes his way back to Long Beach and tries to start a war between D'Onofrio and the Crips, but ends up abandoning that idea and opting for the One Man Wrecking Crew approach, which means all involved parties--actors' availabilities permitting--will eventually meet for a showdown at an abandoned warehouse. 

Directed by TV veteran David Barrett (THE MENTALIST, CASTLE), FIRE WITH FIRE is bland, dull, and completely witless, filled with unconvincingly cheap CGI fire (they even CGI'd a speeding SUV in one hilarious shot that's visible in the above trailer) and bored performances by the cast:  Fiddy shows up for one scene as a gun dealer, Richard Schiff plays D'Onofrio's attorney, Bonnie Somerville is the district attorney, UFC champ Quinton "Rampage" Jackson and Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha are a couple of Crips, Eric Winter and James Lesure are Duhamel's firefighter buddies, and Vinnie Jones is in full-on blustery fookin' 'ell, mate! mode as one of D'Onofrio's flunkies and just your typical Long Beach white power soccer hooligan.  Willis, in his third 50 Cent production since fall 2011, probably put in two or three days' work, mostly sitting at a desk looking concerned and/or constipated.  He has a scene where he's on the phone yelling at Dunn that constitutes some of the worst acting of his career, or at least his worst acting since CATCH .44.  (R, 97 mins)



MAXIMUM CONVICTION
(US/Canada/Luxembourg - 2012)

Perhaps miffed at not being invited to the party, Steven Seagal attempts to headline his own straight-to-DVD version of THE EXPENDABLES, just minus action, humor, pacing, recognizable names, acceptable acting, chemistry, and inspiration.  MAXIMUM CONVICTION pairs the aging action star with pro wrestling legend Steve Austin (who was actually one of the bad guys in the first EXPENDABLES) as, respectively, Cross and Manning, the leaders of "Storm," a mercenary security contracting crew of former black ops badasses.  They're hired to decommission a decrepit prison that's being shut down, but trouble comes in the form of a team of rogue US marshals led by Blake (Michael Pare).  They're after a pair of females who are temporarily being held at the prison, one of whom (Steph Song) has a chip implanted under her skin with damaging top-secret government intel.  In addition to that, some of the prison's more dangerous inmates manage to get free, causing further headaches for Seagal and Austin.  Pare actually appears to be trying here (even though he's forced to utter that old standby "We've got a lot in common, you and I," when he and Seagal finally meet face-to-face), but it's hard to get excited about these Storm guys.  The only other one anyone might recognize is British Tae Kwon Do champ Bren Foster, who comes off like a second-string Scott Adkins.  There's a reason Austin hasn't moved beyond the world of DTV:  he just has no screen presence or charisma whatsoever.  The one thing working in his favor is that he's awake, which is more than you can say for Seagal.  I had somewhat elevated hopes for MAXIMUM CONVICTION being a solid DTV actioner since it was directed by Keoni Waxman, who's handled two of Seagal's better DTV efforts (the 2009 releases THE KEEPER and A DANGEROUS MAN, the latter of which easily measures up to much of the stuff from Seagal's big-screen heyday) and clearly has the potential to move on to bigger things. Seagal must've recognized this on their previous collaborations, because he actually seems to give a shit when Waxman is directing.  That's not the case here.  He's in total coast mode, maybe not relying on his stunt double as much as in other films, but he's still using his ridiculously affected Memphis Cajun accent, and much of his dialogue is completely unintelligible. Seagal is frequently looking down or off to the side in scenes where he's talking to other people, obviously reading his lines from cue cards or a crib sheet just out of camera range.  And the whole idea of Seagal and Stone Cold teaming up is a moot point since they're separated for most of the film and obviously not even on the set at the same time in their final scene "together."  Pretty far from Seagal's worst, but there's still no reason at all to watch this.  (R, 98 mins)

In Theaters: THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS (2012)

THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS
(US/China - 2012)

Directed by RZA.  Written by RZA and Eli Roth.  Cast: Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, RZA, Rick Yune, Byron Mann, David Bautista, Cung Le, Jamie Chung, Pam Grier, Gordon Liu, Daniel Wu, Kuan Tai Chen, Xue Jing Yao, Zhu Zhu, Dennis Chan, Telly Liu, Gang Zhou.  (R, 96 mins)

Wu-Tang Clan leader and kung-fu movie superfan RZA makes his long-planned directing debut with this martial arts homage, co-written by Eli Roth (HOSTEL) and "presented by" Quentin Tarantino.   It's a strange film that careens wildly between homage, spoof, and serious martial arts, never quite gelling but providing some occasionally entertaining moments.  RZA's initial rough cut is rumored to have run nearly four hours, and a lot of material is clearly missing, which probably explains why Pam Grier is in this for about eight seconds with one word of dialogue. 

In the Chinese town of Jungle Village in the 19th century, the treacherous Silver Lion (Byron Mann) murders a beloved clan leader, which sets off a chain reaction of clashes that will eventually bring together three lone warriors:  the dead man's vengeful son Zen Yi, aka "The X-Blade" (Rick Yune), the Jungle Village blacksmith (RZA) who unknowingly forged the weapon that was used to kill Zen Yi's father, and mysterious British mercenary Jack Knife (Russell Crowe).  The blacksmith, an ex-slave who fled America after killing a racist white man in self-defense, has ambitions beyond Jungle Village and is planning to run off with Lady Silk (Jamie Chung), who works in Madam Blossom's (Lucy Liu) brothel, where much of the action and carnage takes place. 

Owing as much to spaghetti westerns as it does to badly-dubbed 1970s kung-fu flicks (and arguably Jim Jarmusch's 2000 cult classic GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which was scored by RZA), THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is the kind of film that's made for fans, by fans, but it rarely seems as "fun" as it should be.  RZA's blacksmith and Yune's X-Blade are pretty dour throughout, leaving most of the jovial antics to an uncharacteristically amusing Crowe, who's rarely cut loose like this on screen before.  Playing Jack Knife as more or less a tribute to Richard Burton and, to some extent, his GLADIATOR co-star Oliver Reed, Crowe appears to be one of the very few cast members who seems to understand what kind of movie he's in, playing a wisecracking, cognac-swilling horndog with a big gut, working three of Madam Blossom's ladies at once in some rather perverse ways (there's one quick shot involving beads and another where he's holding a phallic-shaped device and says "Let's pretend to be Catholic"). Or a scene where he's revealed to be in a dubious-looking Chinese disguise accompanied by--wait for it--the sound of a gong.  Crowe was apparently only on the set for ten days and there's long stretches where his presence would liven things up a bit.  It's one of his oddest roles, and he likely did the film as a favor to RZA, who had a supporting role in 2007's AMERICAN GANGSTER, during which the two became friends.

Elsewhere, Mann approaches this the same way as Crowe as the ludicrously over-the-top Silver Lion, who looks like he belongs in a bad Asian '80s hair metal band.  MMA fighters David Bautista and Cung Le have supporting roles as bad guys, and genre legend Gordon Liu gets to once again don his KILL BILL Pai Mei beard to play a wise old mentor.  RZA's film is obviously made out of love and respect, but it ends up being mostly forgettable.  He includes a lot of in-jokes for fans, like deliberately having some shots out of focus or the camera moving erratically for no reason, which come close to taking the film into spoof territory, but sometimes it's played totally straight, and the general feeling is one of unevenness.  There's a jarring sense of video-game modernity to the hyper-stylized fight scenes and the overabundance of CGI splatter.  This is a case where the old-fashioned ways would've made major improvements.  As it is, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is enjoyable enough for a discount matinee price, but even with the surprise participation of an A-lister like Crowe, the whole thing has a distinct and undeniable straight-to-DVD feel to it.

In Theaters: FLIGHT (2012)

FLIGHT
(US - 2012)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis.  Written by John Gatins.  Cast: Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Bruce Greenwood, Tamara Tunie, Nadine Velazquez, Brian Geraghty, Keven Gerety, James Badge Dale, Garcelle Beauvais. (R, 139 mins)

Veteran airline pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) wakes up in an airport hotel room in Orlando with a naked woman and a floor littered with empty bottles. Groggy and hungover, he does a quick line of coke to balance himself out.  It's 7:00 am and he's piloting a 9:00 am flight to Atlanta.  The woman, Katerina (Nadine Velazquez) is one of his flight's attendants.  Whip is good to go and feelin' alright, as evidenced by a shot of Washington striding through the airport terminal to the tune of Joe Cocker's version of Traffic's "Feelin' Alright."

The planned 52-minute flight experiences some major turbulence but Whip gets them through it.  Only later, after Whip hands the controls over to co-pilot Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty), pours three mini bottles of Smirnoff into his orange juice and takes a quick nap in the pilot's seat, does all hell break loose.  The plane starts to nosedive and and West's steering mechanisms fail.  Whip decides to "roll" the plane by veering it to the point where it flies upside down, evening out the plane and stopping the dive.  All power eventually fails and Whip guides the plane to a crash landing just past a small church (MESSAGE!), losing six of the 102 passengers onboard.  Two crew members are killed, including Katerina.  Whip's daring method of handling the crash turns him into a hero, but there's a problem.  Standard NTSB protocol after a crash is to draw blood for analysis.  Whip was battered in the crash and unconscous for several hours and doesn't recall the blood being drawn.  They find the alcohol and cocaine in his system, and despite the clear reason for the crash being a faulty rear elevator assembly that caused the plane to nosedive, Whip's extracurricular actitivies present the possiblity that he's on the hook for manslaughter in the passenger deaths.

FLIGHT would seem to offer Washington the kind of tour de force that results in instant Oscar buzz.  He's a great actor, one of the best, but even he has a hard time elevating this beyond the point of hackneyed and predictable.  After the harrowing opening 20 or so minutes, the film turns into the kind of by-the-numbers addiction drama that frankly, we've seen a hundred times before.  While in the hospital, Whip meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a heroin addict recovering from an overdose, and they become friends after he's discharged.  She cleans up her act and tries to help him, but Whip, the kind of guy who doesn't need any help and shuts out anyone who tries, continues to drink and use.  Director Robert Zemeckis, helming his first live-action film since 2000's CAST AWAY, can't resist repeatedly hammering home the plot points over and over again, usually with the ham-fisted use of a popular song accompanying the scene just in case the audience is too dense to get it.  Was it necessary for a scene of Reilly shooting up to use both the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under the Bridge" and Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane"?  Or to have Whip's dealer (John Goodman) introduced to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil"?  FLIGHT starts out believably grim and realistic--as a character, the arrogant, irresponsible Whip is only slightly less of an asshole than Washington's Alonzo Harris in TRAINING DAY--but it grows increasingly "Hollywood" the more it proceeds towards it inevitably uplifting ending.  Allowing Whip some level of redemption is fine, but the path to it just feels hollow.  Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins (COACH CARTER, REAL STEEL) completely lose it in the home stretch when the perpetually self-destructive Whip falls off the wagon hard the night before a federal hearing and his lawyer (Don Cheadle) and union rep (Bruce Greenwood) resort to methods of sobering him up that very nearly turn the film into a comedy.  Let's just say it prompts Zemeckis to use an instrumental Muzak version of The Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends."

There's a lot of good things about FLIGHT.  Washington commands the screen, which should surprise no one.  British actress Reilly believably handles a southern American accent.  The terrifying crash sequence is easily the film's highlight.  But the film just really loses its way in the second half before utterly collapsing in the last half hour.  A lot of us have seen functioning alcoholics in action, but FLIGHT takes functioning alcoholism to ridiculous extremes, with Whip consuming amounts of alcohol that no one could handle, let alone fly a plane or calmly testify at a hearing.  At some point, despite a solid start, FLIGHT becomes less concerned with the plausible depiction of Whip's personal hell and more focused on getting Denzel Washington another Oscar.

In Theaters/On VOD: THE BAY (2012)

THE BAY
(US/UK - 2012)

Directed by Barry Levinson.  Written by Michael Wallach.  Cast: Will Rogers, Kristen Connolly, Kether Donohue, Christopher Denham, Stephen Kunken, Frank Deal, Nansi Aluka, Kenny Alfonso. (R, 83 mins)

Upon a cursory glance, the very notion of Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (DINER, GOOD MORNING VIETNAM, RAIN MAN, BUGSY, DISCLOSURE, SLEEPERS, WAG THE DOG) helming a found footage faux-documentary horror film produced by Oren Peli (PARANORMAL ACTIVITY) and the Strause Brothers (SKYLINE) seems absurd and insulting beyond comprehension.  Sure, Levinson's not at the pinnacle of his career now but in the '80s and '90s, the guy was practically unstoppable, even with something like 1992's misbegotten TOYS sullying his resume.  There were all those hit movies (he also wrote 1979's AND JUSTICE FOR ALL), plus his contributions to television: writing for THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW, and producing HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET and OZ.  Now here he is, 70 years old and trying to hitch a ride on the found footage bandwagon?  With all due respect, Mr. Levinson, there are other coping mechanisms for what you're going through.  You could've just bought a sports car and gotten your ear pierced.

But hold on a second.  THE BAY is actually good.  It's an unsettling and surprisingly solid addition to played-out subgenre that's admittedly on life support.  People turn out in droves for these movies whenever they open, but nobody seems to like them anymore.  It's too bad THE BAY arrived just in time for the backlash, because it's one of the better found footage flicks to come down the pike.  Levinson and screenwriter Michael Wallach approach it as a collage of confiscated footage acquired from a web site called govleaks.org, as part of a film being made by journalist Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), who was a student reporter and blogger covering the July 4th festivities in the fictional Claridge, MD in 2009.  A strange bacterial outbreak spreads throughout the small town of 6200, with residents breaking out on boils and blisters, almost like some sort of flesh-eating virus. What Thompson has pieced together from the assorted footage (from her cameraman, from others' home movies, security cameras, police dashboard cams, cell phones, etc) is that two oceanographers (Christopher Denham, Nansi Aluka) were aware of something odd happening in the Chesapeake Bay in Claridge at least six weeks before the 4th.  The mayor (Frank Deal), blew off the information that passed his desk about marine life in the bay being toxic and infested with rapidly-growing parasitic isopods, due in part to a local factory farm disposing steroid-loaded chicken excrement into the bay but also because of toxic materials dumped into the bay by the mayor's baby:  a cost-effective, privately-owned, corner-cutting desalination plant that provides Claridge's drinking water...from the bay.  Now the residents are infested with these parasites, which are growing at an alarming rate and eating their way out of their human hosts.

As the outbreak worsens and panic spreads over the course of the day, Levinson and Wallach show the paranoia and the frighteningly plausible levels of buck-passing bureaucracy that result.  Early townie speculation blames the situation on everything from Satanists to Al-Qaeda.  The FBI immediately shuts down Thompson's blog.  A frazzled ER doc (Stephen Kunken) Skypes with a CDC official who bluntly tells him "Just leave the hospital."  That same CDC official is later shown getting the run-around from a Homeland Security representative, telling him "This whole town has been wiped out in one day!" to which the Homeland Security guy coldly and matter-of-factly replies "It's a small town...let's keep it in perspective."

The cast is largely unknown--Denham can currently be seen in ARGO, and Kristen Connolly was in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS--which helps the sense of realism.  Most found footage films are more interested in quick, cheap scares, but Levinson makes THE BAY an eco-horror film with an environmental point to hammer home about everything from privatization to the food we eat to the endless red tape that puts people last if they're in the equation at all.  There's politics at play here (it takes place on the most American of holidays) and the filmmakers are unabashedly on the left, so how much you get out of the film or how plausible or serious you find it may depend somewhat on your leanings.  THE BAY is an effectively grim B-movie that never offers any outright jolts, but Levinson does a terrific job of establishing a dread-filled sense of conspiratorial doom that escalates throughout.  As sick and tired as a lot of us are the found footage fright flicks, THE BAY is one that actually has something to say, which is perhaps what attracted a filmmaker of Levinson's caliber to such an unusual project.

On DVD/Blu-ray: SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED (2012) and SOUND OF MY VOICE (2012)

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED
(US - 2012)

An occasionally amusing, very low-key comedy that exists somewhere in that space between mumblecore and quirky (one character has a fake ear and plays the zither!), SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED is the first starring vehicle for deadpan hipster heroine Aubrey Plaza (PARKS AND RECREATION).  She's a sarcastic, loner intern at a Seattle magazine, and tags along with another intern (Karan Soni) and a writer in an early midlife crisis (Jake Johnson) to track down the Ocean City resident behind an ad for a time travel partner, with the caveat "Bring your own weapons...safety not guaranteed."  They find the guy (mumblecore auteur Mark Duplass), a paranoid, part-time supermarket clerk, and Plaza ends up falling for him, despite not really being sold on the idea that he's constructed a time machine (and there are indeed government agents following him).  While Plaza does all of his work for him, Johnson decides to look up an old flame (Jenica Bergere), the real reason he wanted to go to Ocean City.  Likable if rarely laugh-out-loud funny, SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED gets a little too "cute" the more it goes on, but the cast is engaging (it's Plaza's film, but Johnson gets the biggest laughs), plus Jeff Garlin, Kristen Bell, and Mary Lynn Rajskub put in brief appearances.  Perhaps the film's most memorable scene occurs when director Colin Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly give Duplass a very heartfelt, moving bit where asks Plaza her favorite song and articulates his need to travel back to an earlier point in his life.  He says it's to find a lost love who died, but adds "It's not about the girl.  It's about a time and a place. You remember that time and that place and that song and you remember what it was like when you were in that place, and you listen to that song, and you know you're not in that place anymore and it makes you feel hollow.  You can't just go find that stuff again." (R, 86 mins)

SOUND OF MY VOICE
(US -2012)

This perplexing thriller with possible sci-fi undertones is another impressive project by promising indie darling Brit Marling, who wrote and starred in last year's ANOTHER EARTH.  Scripted by Marling and director Zal Batmanglij, SOUND OF MY VOICE has a pair of amateur documentary filmmakers--substitute teacher Peter (Christopher Denham) and his aspiring writer girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius)--infiltrating a cult quietly operating in a house in a non-descript L.A. neighborhood in order to expose its charismatic leader Maggie (Marling) as a fraud.  Maggie claims she's from the year 2054, and is gathering a small group of people to accompany her back to her future world.  There's plenty of evidence to support the fraud theory:  the fragments of her backstory indicate that Maggie might be mentally ill or might be a recovering addict, and when she's asked to sing a song that's popular in the future, she offers an a cappella rendition of The Cranberries' "Dreams" and banishes the lone cult member who dares to question her about it.  Lorna is disturbed by Maggie's psychological hold on the members and that Peter seems to abandon the documentary project and might actually be buying into it.  Things get complicated when Maggie asks Peter to bring her an emotionally-troubled eight-year-old girl from his class named Abigail (Avery Pohl), who lives with her mysterious single dad (James Urbaniak).  For every clear indication that Maggie is lying, there's something to back up her claims.  Such is the puzzle of SOUND OF MY VOICE, right down to its unanswered questions (Peter is very evasive of his own past; is the Department of Justice agent really who she says she is? And who exactly is Maggie's mysterious guardian Klaus?) and its conclusion straight out of the 12 MONKEYS and PRIMER school of ambiguity, the likes of which you can discuss from now until the end of time and never find a definite answer.  Marling was recently seen as Richard Gere's daughter in ARBITRAGE, but between SOUND OF MY VOICE and ANOTHER EARTH (both were shown at Sundance in 2011, but it took SOUND OF MY VOICE another year to get released), she's established herself as both a solid actress and one of today's smartest and most imaginative screenwriters.  This is a major new talent to watch.  (R, 85 mins)

In Theaters: CLOUD ATLAS (2012)

CLOUD ATLAS
(Germany/US/China/Hong Kong - 2012)

Written and directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski.  Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D'Arcy, Keith David, David Gyasi, Xun Zhou, Robert Fyfe, Martin Wuttke, Brody Nicholas Lee. (R, 172 mins)

Based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel universally considered unfilmable, CLOUD ATLAS is the kind of insanely ambitious undertaking that I suspect many people will respectfully admire from a distance rather than like.  It's a film that's bound to be divisive and not everything about it works, but it's a safe bet that you've never seen anything like it.  A collaborative effort between Lana & Andy Wachowski (THE MATRIX) and Tom Tykwer (RUN LOLA RUN), CLOUD ATLAS is one of those "everything is connected" films (in fact, that's the tag line on the poster art), but instead of the usual wallowing in self-absorbed ennui, it's a story that stretches across time, balancing multiple stories and timeframes.  It demands patience and attention and yes, it all eventually more or less comes together, though it can be a bit chaotic and messy at times.  There's a lot of comparisons one could make (I kept thinking of THE TREE OF LIFE if it was directed by Christopher Nolan), but CLOUD ATLAS is a film that stands uniquely alone. 

CLOUD ATLAS simultaneously tells six stories across six time periods and places, and almost all of the main cast appear as different characters in each:  in 1849, a lawyer (Jim Sturgess) travels by ship to facilitate a slave deal for his father-in-law.  In 1936 Scotland, Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) is hired to assemble pieces of a symphony dictated to him by an aging composer (Jim Broadbent).  In 1973 San Francisco, journalist Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) gets in over her head investigating a conspiracy involving a powerful oil company and a nuclear power plant after a chance meeting with an elderly man (James D'Arcy) in a stuck elevator.  In 2012 London, a scheming literary agent (Broadbent again) is duped into committing himself to a nursing home while on the run from gangsters to whom he owes a significant amount of money.  In 2144 New Seoul, a replicant waitress named Sonmi (Doona Bae) is being interviewed prior to her execution for leading a clone rebellion against the totalitarian status quo.  And "100 winters after The Fall" in a post-apocalyptic world, the nomadic Zachry (Tom Hanks) agrees to guide a strange visitor (Berry again) into the mountains.

Team Wachowski handled the 1849/2144/The Fall scenes, while Team Tykwer tackled 1936/1973/2012, working at the same time with two different crews and sharing almost all of the actors, who are often unrecognizable under heavy makeup, or at least playing far against type.  Most of the actors handle their multiple assignments well (even when playing different genders and races), but Hanks, largely because he's likable and instantly-recognizable Tom Hanks, does seem a bit out of place and miscast in some of his roles.  Having said that, it is amusing in the 2012 segment to see him playing cauliflower-eared, scar-faced thug of the "fookin' ell!" variety, dropping plentiful F-and-C-bombs and throwing a guy off a balcony.  Actors often fare better in some segments than others:  Hugo Weaving is distracting as a female nurse in 2012, but absolutely terrifying as a demonic figure tormenting Zachry in the Fall.  Berry is fine as the crusading 1973 journalist, but as an elderly male Korean doctor under a ton of old-age prosthetics?  Not so much.  But the stunt casting, for the most part, has a point, and ties into the "connected" them, regardless of any controversial "sensitivity" issues, as odd as it seems in 2012 to see British actors like Sturgess and D'Arcy playing Asians.  When's the last time you saw eye makeup like this?  Peter Sellers in THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU?  Joel Grey in REMO WILLIAMS?

CLOUD ATLAS is the kind of film that offers something for pretty much everyone:  drama, comedy, romance, art, high seas adventure, conspiracy/paranoia thriller, dystopian sci-fi, horror.  It's an incredible achievement in the sheer scope of what it tries to accomplish, and it mostly succeeds.  The filmmakers cut no corners with CLOUD ATLAS, and it's fascinating to watch a visual element in one time frame tie into another, or a line of dialogue in one section that has significance to something that happens in another.  As expansively huge as the film is, it's mostly very tight in its construction and rarely loses momentum despite two teams of filmmakers juggling six narratives for nearly three hours.

With CLOUD ATLAS, Tykwer and the Wachowskis reassert themselves as among the most visionary of modern filmmakers, even though they've only achieved fleeting mainstream success since their big breakthroughs.  The Wachowskis produced and scriped V FOR VENDETTA, but got otherwise chilly receptions for the disappointing MATRIX sequels, the underappreciated SPEED RACER and the unremarkable NINJA ASSASSIN (which they produced), and also had a hand in attempting to salvage THE INVASION (an uncredited rewrite, and their associate and V FOR VENDETTA/NINJA ASSASSIN director James McTeigue handled uncredited reshoots).  Tykwer thus far has yet to enjoy a repeat of the critical and commercial success of his 1999 cult classic RUN LOLA RUN, though 2006's PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER and 2009's THE INTERNATIONAL both deserved better receptions than they got.  I don't think CLOUD ATLAS is going to be a big US box office hit (it will likely do better overseas), but it's a complex and often extraordinary, one-of-a-kind film that will likely be discussed and dissected for years to come.  While not a perfect film by any means, and one where the technique is perhaps more important than the story, it strikes me as a film that will reveal more layers of detail with repeat viewings.

In Theaters: SILENT HILL: REVELATION (2012)

SILENT HILL: REVELATION
(Canada/France - 2012)

Written and directed by Michael J. Bassett.  Cast: Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Sean Bean, Carrie-Anne Moss, Malcolm McDowell, Deborah Kara Unger, Martin Donovan, Radha Mitchell, Peter Outerbridge, Roberto Campanella. (R, 94 mins)

Directed by Christophe Gans (BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF) and written by Roger Avary (PULP FICTION, THE RULES OF ATTRACTION), the 2006 film version of the video game favorite SILENT HILL wasn't exactly a model of narrative cohesion, but it was a triumph of atmosphere and mood and has found a devoted cult following in the years since its release.  It's doubtful that anyone will ever be looking back fondly on the belated sequel SILENT HILL: REVELATION.  Written and directed by Michael J. Bassett (WILDERNESS, SOLOMON KANE), SILENT HILL: REVELATION is based on the SILENT HILL 3 video game, but also has to function as a sequel to the Gans film, so some characters from the game end up having their roles filled by characters from the first film, which is a reasonable liberty.  I was a little rusty on the first film and revisited it the day before seeing the sequel, and even that doesn't make REVELATION's plot any more coherent.  Bassett's script has the characters spouting pages and pages of exposition to get the viewer up to speed on who's who and why they're important, but you almost have to be equally familiar with the plots of the video games to figure out what's going on.  The end result is a chaotic, unfocused, and boring film that relies heavily on tired genre cliches and jettisons the atmosphere and mood for dreary, ugly visuals, graphic gore, noise, and mostly uninspired 3-D.

Several years after the events of the first film, the nearly 18-year-old Sharon Da Silva (Michelle Williams-lookalike Adelaide Clemens, replacing Jodelle Ferland) is going by the name Heather and is on the run from the Silent Hill cultists with her widowed father Christopher (Sean Bean), who's calling himself Harry.  Sharon was adopted by Christopher and his late wife Rose (Radha Mitchell) and, as Bassett's script mentions multiple times in case you forgot, she's the manifestation of the good inside Alessa, a girl who survived being burned by the witch-fearing residents decades earlier for being born out of wedlock, bringing forth an otherworldly, supernatural darkness over the West Virginia coal mining town.  Rose, as explained by Mitchell who returns for a ghostly cameo, is trapped somewhere in the Silent Hill netherworld and had to sacrifice herself in order to save Sharon and return her to Christopher in the real world.  Sharon/Heather is plagued by nightmares and horrific visions, and when Christopher is abducted and taken to Silent Hill, she and new friend Vincent (Kit Harington, best known as Jon Snow on GAME OF THRONES) must travel to the cursed town to rescue him.  Of course, it's all part of a plot to lure her back to Silent Hill--being that she's the pure, non-evil part of Alessa--for the fanatical cult to rid the town of its sin.  Or something like that.

The foggy town and the constantly raining ash--both visuals carried over from the first film--still look effectively ominous, but that's about all that Bassett gets right.  What may work in the confines of a video game doesn't always translate to the screen, and SILENT HILL: REVELATION has no drive, no momentum.  It's practically incomprehensible, and where Gans was concerned with the atmospheric elements, Bassett goes in the other direction, focusing on splatter, dismembered body parts, steam-filled corridors in an abandoned factory, bodies hung upside down, flesh sliced off, cooked, and eaten by a bunch of grotesque, suture-faced demons that look like rejected Cenobite makeup designs from HELLRAISER.  The iconic "Pyramid Head" character reappears here, but in a heroic capacity, which makes no sense in reference to how he was portrayed in the first film (the video game apparently explains that Pyramid Head feels compelled to protect Sharon/Heather because she's a double for Alessa and he can't tell the difference).  It's hard not to leave SILENT HILL: REVELATION with the feeling that they simply made this up as they went along.

With less than half the budget of the first film, SILENT HILL: REVELATION looks a lot cheaper, and much of that money must've gone towards squandering an overqualified supporting cast, most of whom, with the exception of Bean, appear for a few minutes to proclaim some impossibly confusing exposition in about the same amount of time it would take for their agents to verify that the check cleared.  Mitchell probably left her car running while she ran in to shoot her scene.  Deborah Kara Unger returns briefly as Alessa's mother.  Carrie-Anne Moss sports some Johnny Depp pancake makeup to play the cult leader before she's transformed into a creature and faces Pyramid Head in a battle to the death.  Martin Donovan, looking homeless and sporting a comically oversized fedora, is granted an early exit as doomed private eye Douglas Cartland (a major character in the video game, but killed off quickly here).  Most embarrassing of all is the great Malcolm McDowell as a blind asylum inmate who holds the other half of an amulet that Sharon needs to defeat Alessa.  McDowell, onscreen for about three minutes tops, likely arrived prepared and with his lines memorized to enable a quick exit (no way he was on the set for more than a day) and, gracious raconteur that he is in his elder statesman years, probably entertained the cast and crew with tales of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and CALIGULA, but when he starts ranting about Alessa and "the Seal of Metatron," you just feel bad for him.  He's kept in chains for the duration of his role, and it probably had less to do with his character and more to do with keeping McDowell from fleeing in despair.

Of the two stars, Clemens seems like an appealing young actress.  She's not given much to work with here, but perhaps better offers will come her way (she should be on standby if there's ever a film where Michelle Williams' character has a little sister).   It's interesting for GAME OF THRONES fans to see Harington briefly reunited with Bean (Harington's Jon Snow is the illegitimate son of Bean's Eddard Stark on the show's first season), but the young British actor is pretty bad here, with a West Virginia accent that sounds like he's attempting the world's least successful Aasif Mandvi impression.

Being a fan of the 2006 film as well as a fan of Bassett's earlier work (WILDERNESS is a gem waiting to be discovered), I had high hopes for SILENT HILL: REVELATION, but between its terrible pacing, incoherent script, abandoned plot threads, and the obvious disinterest of its slumming cast, among other major issues, it's really hard to find anything worthwhile about this depressingly dismal sequel.