Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’ is no classic. Let’s be completely honest about that. It’s as flawed as ‘Man of Steel’ was. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. The things that don’t work – in particular matters pertaining to Lex Luthor – are hugely awful. The things that do work – in particular matters pertaining to Diana Prince – are as iconic as any fanboy could wish for. The film is a mishmash, and narratively wonky. But does it deserve the outpouring of hatred that the critics have almost unanimously delivered? In my humble opinion, no.

Which isn’t to say that, having emerged from the cinema with a general feeling of I enjoyed that more than I thought I would, I’m going to fashion this review into not just an apologia for ‘B vs S’, but reappraise it as a misunderstood classic of the genre. No, sir. It would be remiss of any reviewer to gloss over the film’s problems, just as it’s lazy of the majority of them to join in the hurling of brickbats.

In the interests of objectivity and balance, let’s acknowledge the faults. First and foremost, the characterisation of Lex Luthor is terrible, partly because Jesse Eisenberg is miscast but mostly because the script (a) gives him some of the most thankless dialogue any actor could find himself saddled with, and – more problematically – (b) fails in establishing any credible motivation for his increasing sociopathic behaviour. And, no, his oft-repeated variations on a theme of man’s victory over God doesn’t really cut it since there’s no moment in his character arc that leads him to this mindset. In fact, he doesn’t even have a character arc. It’s as if the first script conference settled on Lex Luthor as villain based on the rationale that everyone knows he’s the villain anyway so let’s just wheel him onstage and give him villainous things to do and we won’t need to bother with any of that tedious exposition business.

Likewise, the titular Batman/Superman conflict is predicated on very little. Sure, there’s the effective opening sequence where the finale of ‘Man of Steel’ is restaged from Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck)’s perspective as he navigates rubble-strewn and dust-choked streets in an attempt to facilitate his employees’ evacuation while Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod twat each other in an orgy of city-wide destruction and wait a fucking minute, since when exactly was Wayne Industries based in Metropolis? So, yeah, the ultimate superhero anti-hero, a man who was wreaked his fair share of havoc in order to take down bad guys, suddenly goes all antagonistic on Superman because he wreaked havoc in order to take down a bad guy. 

Meanwhile, Clark Kent pursues a media campaign against Batman for little other reason that it gets him off the sports desk. Though why he spends his time at the office getting all moody and embittered when he’s shacked up with the uber-foxy Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is anybody’s guess. Ditto why Lois continually puts her life in danger chasing down stories when she’s just as loved-up herself.

Finally: the flashbacks/dream sequences. They’re piss-poor, on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Really, really piss-poor.

And if you took ‘B vs S’ on the 500 words above, the critical kicking would be easy to understand; in fact, you’d probably feel like grabbing a burning touch and allaying yourself with the village lynch-mob. But said course of behaviour would leave one blind to the pleasures of the film. To whit:

Ben Affleck as Batman. I’ll cop a guilty plea, right here and right now, to face-palming and groaning when I heard the news of Affleck’s casting. And by the same chalk I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I was wrong. Trudging through the metaphorical treacle of a script that can’t even establish a fundamentally plausible motivation for his character, Affleck nonetheless knocks it out of the park in his portrayal of a Batman who is middle-aged, world-weary and descending into an embittered psychosis. This is a not just a Batman who, prior to the titular stand-off, has to force himself through a masochistic training regime and build an armoured suit that it’s effortful even to walk in (in fact, there’s something about seeing the un-suited-up Bruce Wayne pounding at a truck tyre with a sledgehammer that presents an anti-iconography: the training montage actually strips a superhero down to a new personal low), but Affleck is just as acute in his characterisation of Bruce Wayne, showing a jaded multi-millionaire going through the motions of what society expects of him; even the playboy lifestyle and womanising seems forced, to the point where Alfred sneers at him that there’s little hope for a next generation. 

Subject of whom: Jeremy motherfuckin’ Irons. Hot on the heels of his fantastic turn in ‘High-Rise’, he reinvents Alfred to his own specifications within seconds of appearing onscreen. Retaining the Jeeves-like pragmatism of the character’s previous incarnations, Irons adds a level of barbed irascibility and the result is magnificent. In fact, I’d give Irons the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award if it weren’t for …

… Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. Introduced in oblique fashion, with much of her narrative arc and motivation remaining enigmatic for most of the running time, Gadot isn’t given much to do but look slinky and seductive as Prince and wield a sword in menacing fashion as Wonder Woman. Given the script’s total inability to treat a female character as anything other than a plot device, Gadot could easily have come adrift in the melee, her character mere eye-candy in the CGI-driven morass of the final act. But, by God, a former model who I wouldn’t have previously credited as having any claim to cinematic iconography doesn’t just make something out of nothing, she creates bona fide moments of mainstream cool.

Other plus points: Snyder’s commitment to a dark vision of the material – slammed by the critics for humourlessness – yields some genuinely striking moments: the film begins and ends with funerals (Snyder shoots funerals with the same quasi-pornographic delight that Argento at his best reserved for death scenes); Wayne’s contact with a Russian mobster takes place at a grungily ugly bare-knuckle boxing competition; Superman’s coercion into appearing at a congressional hearing is the culmination of a subplot about political showboating/careerism and is full-stopped by a hugely cynical punchline almost calculated to plug into contemporary America’s terrorism fear-factor. Snyder plays it equally dark and cynical in terms of classical allusions, throwing in Icarus, Parsifal and a painting in Luthor’s apartment that’s basically a combination of Gustav Dore and William Blake; there’s even a dream/hallucination sequence where Kevin Costner reappears as Clark Kent’s mortal step-father, staged in such a manner that short of inserting a title card reading “and my father on that sad height” the nod to Dylan Thomas couldn’t be more explicit.

And this is perhaps what ‘B vs S’ offers as an apologia for itself even in the face of its harshest critics. In an era where superhero movies – specifically those of the Marvel ilk – have come to define mainstream cinemagoing, Iron Man and Captain America might flirt around the edges of prescient storylines about the corrupting influence of power and the fear of the unknown, but you’re highly unlikely to stumble across a classical allusion or a debate on the very redundancy of heroism; whereas Snyder, carrying on the dialogue he established in ‘Man of Steel’, batters furiously and incessantly away at the very concept of the genre even as he embraces its most fetishistic excesses.

The Double

There’s a poem by Adrian Henri called ‘Welcome to my World’. It goes like this:

“Don’t find me”
snarl the poems
from the headlines
   “Ne me trouvez
 pas” cry
the objects
from the beaches.

Watching Richard Ayoade’s ‘The Double’, I was assailed by a similar sentiment … except here it was meaning and subtext daring me to explicate them; theme and imagery and symbolism offering me to come and write a review if I think I’m smart enough.

I’m probably not smart enough, but here goes anyway.

In a subgenre that’s not exactly crowded with entries, ‘The Double’ is the oddest and most iconoclastic Dostoyevsky adaptation I’ve ever seen, easily eclipsing the meta-fictive noodlings of Karoly Makk’s 1997 take on ‘The Gambler’ (an account of the writing of Dostoyevsky’s confessional novel featuring a film-within-a-film version of the novel itself). But whereas ‘The Gambler’ was written under the gun to fulfil a contractual obligation – and, in the pantheon of the great author’s work, something of a drawn breath between the huge mature works ‘Crime and Punishment’ and ‘The Idiot’ – ‘The Double’ dates from much earlier in his career: his second published novel, in fact, following the well-intentioned ‘Poor Folk’. It’s also a bloody hard slog to get through, mainly because much of the text is an engagement with and, to a certain degree, a refutation of works by Gogol, whereas Dostoyevsky’s later works (i.e. anything from ‘Notes From Underground’ onwards) find him utilizing what is entirely his own voice.

Suffice it to say, that Ayoade’s film retains a structural touchstone with the novel – in both, it’s about a third of the way through before the protagonist’s doppelgänger shows up – as well as exploring the idea of a nascent kinship between them before jealousy and rivalry spins the narrative towards its psychological fallout; likewise, the polarities in their personalities and how these affect their progression, or otherwise, through the rigid hierarchy of the bureaucratic system is well represented; other than that, Ayoade and co-writer Avi Korine joyously go their own way with the material.

Here’s the basic set-up: low-ranking clerk Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) has the day from hell: he loses his briefcase after the doors of an underground train close on it; his ID is inside, which throws him into conflict with the jobsworth security guard at his office; his attempts to connect with Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the ethereal girl in the reprographics department, are constantly thwarted; the bills for his mother’s retirement home are increasing; and a neighbour from the opposite side of the courtyard cheerlessly waves at Simon before he leaps to his death.

Simon witnesses this as an aftermath to watching Hannah, who also lives on the opposite side of the courtyard, through a telescope. Hannah spends her evenings creating small paintings which she immediate tears into pieces and throws into the garbage chute. Simon religiously retrieves and reassembles them and pastes them into a scrapbook. Simon is arguably the most asexual and sensitive voyeur in the history of film. Carl Bohm in ‘Peeping Tom’ would probably slap him upside the head and have a few words.

It’s just after the suicide that Simon has his first glimpse of the doppelganger. The next day, at work, James Simon (Eisenberg, playing the alter ego with an incredibly subtle sureness of touch) is Simon’s new colleague and making waves in the department before he’s barely through the door. James is loquacious where Simon is tongue-tied, confident where Simon is shy, a lothario where Simon is virginal. Simon accepts what he’s told and doesn’t argue. James gets what he demands. Initially, Simon is fascinated and responds enthusiastically to an evening out where they run the gamut of being rude to waitresses, getting drunk and instigating a bar-room brawl. Then James offers to assist in Simon’s wooing of Hannah but when Simon inevitably screws things up, James steps in with predictable consequences.

So far, so Fyodor-meets-‘Fight Club’, and I sat in Nottingham’s Broadway cinema and with some degree of satisfaction mapped out a reading of the film that tied Dostoyevsky’s psychological character study to Tyler Durden’s patented brand of FTW wish-fulfilment. I’d pinpointed Simon’s waving back at his suicidal neighbour as the point at which he thinks “that’s me” (he is, after all, the quintessential nobody: a colleague describes him as “not particularly noticeable”) and creates a super-self – a facsimile from the id – in order to survive … only to engender a living, breathing and reprehensively popular avatar of the genus “be careful what you wish for”.

And while there are definite shades of ‘Fight Club’, albeit with its corollaries cloaked in caesuras where Fincher’s film veritably signposts them, Ayoade throws in more than one curveball that forces an entirely different reading. I can’t remember that last time a film wrong-footed me so often and I responded to its game-playing with such big-hearted adoration rather than simply being pissed off at the filmmakers’ irresolution and/or clever-cleverness. Much of the fun of ‘The Double’ – and may I send out a resounding accolade to Ayoade for pitching it as a comedy: played straight, the film would be unbearably depressing – owes to its melange of cultural references, and how indeterminate its setting. Is the mise-en-scene how the future would have looked in the 50s, or a vision of Orwell filtered through Terry Gilliam? Indeed, where exactly is ‘The Double’ set? The ambulances that show up for the most crucial scenes scream Britain in the 1970s; the diner Simon and James patronise is pure 60s American; their office is like Dostoyevky meets Zamyatin at a midnight screening of ‘Brazil’; the apartment block could have stepped in, equally, from Mike Leigh or Lukas Moodysson.

Muddying the waters still further is the cheesy ‘Blake’s Seven’-style TV show Simon watches. You’d be forgiven for thinking that its gung-ho hero, played in a frankly bonkers but hilarious cameo by Paddy Considine, is the model for his conjuration of James as his alter ego (if, in fact, Simon actually does author his alter ego: there is, not evidence exactly, but suggestion to the contrary) but the final correlation paints a different picture. The last we see of Simon’s TV idol, he’s unarmed and on his back, his nemesis declaring “You’ll die like a snake.” Later, facing up to Hannah after she’s discovered the Simon/James duplicity, he winces as she spits “You’re a snake.”

Other correlations speckle the film, either in its rhymed scenes à la ‘Deep Red’ (for all that Adoaye is being compared to Wes Anderson by the critics du jour there’s more of early Argento in his mind-fuckery and bravura camera movements, particularly a couple of fog-wreathed tracking shots through nocturnal exteriors), or its sound design (‘The Double’ boasts arguably the most specific attention to foley since Du Welz’s ‘Vinyan’), or its occasional, almost electrical, flashes of colour. There is a precision about the film’s use of blue – Hannah’s photocopier emits it instead of white; Simon orders a Coke at the diner and is given a glass of blue water instead; blenders of some stranger blue cocktail screech away when Simon tries to eavesdrop on James and Hannah at a restaurant – that I’m convinced is deliberate and coded and quite possible the key to the whole thing.

But like much of ‘The Double’, a second and perhaps a third or fourth viewing almost demand themselves in order to tease out the suspicions, ellipses and enigmas that tantalise on a first viewing. Perhaps there is no final and definitive take on the film. If that is the case, then Ayoade has succeeded brilliantly in creating a perfectly paranoid parable for our times. And what’s truly breathtaking is that this fearlessly accomplished piece of work is only his second outing as director, following the already accomplished and quirkily memorable debut ‘Submarine’. God know what he’s going to do next, but I’m first in the queue when it’s released.

Now You See Me

Cineworld held a mystery film screening this evening, whipping up publicity by posting a series of downright oblique clues via Twitter. Messageboards were abuzz with speculation: many thought ‘Pacific Rim’, others plumbed for ‘The Lone Ranger’; when we booked the tickets, my wife was holding out for ‘The Wolverine’ while I had my fingers crossed for ‘The World’s End’. Ultimately, we were both disappointed. But at least it wasn’t two hours of CGI robots twatting aliens and then twatting each other. As we queued – interminably – I put a comment on FB to the effect that if it was ‘Pacific Rim’, I was going home.

We ended up not going home … well, not till the movie was over. We’d already agreed on the Half Hour Rule (if neither of us are digging a film at the half hour, we cut our losses and blow the joint). By minute thirty of ‘Now You See Me’, we were both enjoying it. By the time it was over, though, we had mixed feelings.

‘Now You See Me’ does several things right in very quick succession. It starts with a voiceover warning the audience that the closer they look, they less likely they’ll be to spot the trick. At the same time, a simple card trick plays out. The camera forces a very specific card on the viewer. It’s kind of a flipside to the opening of ‘The Prestige’. Where Christopher Nolan’s film clues you in to the three stages of an illusion, ‘Now You See Me’ deliberately sets out to obfuscate. It’s both a ballsy stroke of legerdemain and a self-defeating act: the longer ‘Now You See Me’ goes on, the more evident it is that director Louis Letterier wants his film to be a ‘Prestige’ for the Jerry Bruckheimer generation. But whereas ‘The Prestige’ has a genuine weighty human drama to anchor its more fanciful elements, ‘Now You See Me’ trades solely in the fanciful.

But let’s skip back to its opening reel. Having pulled a beautifully executed fast one on the audience, Letterier assembles his quartet of prestidigitatorial protagonists with superb economy, dealing out their vignettes like cards: street magician with a tendency to the theatrical J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist/shakedown artist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), glamorous escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and new kid on the block Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). The narrative flings them together and has them pulled into the scheme of an unknown benefactor so quickly – the title card is a perfectly-timed punchline to the whole sequence – that their ineffably stupid names didn’t even begin to annoy me till a good halfway into the movie.

In equally quick succession, our foursome have been reimagined as a sell-out Vegas act who make headlines (and get themselves arrested) on account of an illusion based around a bank robbery. What pisses off the authorities, and gets Interpol newbie Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) assigned to assisting rumpled sourpuss detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) – this really is That Movie Where Really Talented People Play Really One-Dimension Characters With Really Stupid Names – is the disappearance of a fuckton of Euros from a Parisian bank that tallies exactly with the magic trick.

The rest of the movie – or at least, the 75% of it that conspires to make you take your eye off the ball prior to the big reveal – is essentially Dylan and Alma vs. The Four Horsemen (thus the collective name the illusionists bill themselves as, notwithstanding that one of them is a woman), while vengeful impresario Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) hover in the wings nursing their own agendas.

‘Now You See Me’ is magnificently entertaining for a big chunk of its running time. Less than an hour in, I decided not to bother trying to second guess and just enjoy the ride. I’m glad I took that approach, because the whole improbably contrived plot pays off in a manner that, while not disappointing or in any way a cheat, is a little underwhelming. The essential problem with making a film about magic is that magic is a con. It’s smoke and mirrors; razzle dazzle; misdirection. It’s all surface and when you think about it too much, you dismiss it – rightly – as bullshit. ‘The Prestige’ is only superficially about magic – the real point of the film is the cost of the illusion; what you have to sacrifice to accomplish the seemingly impossible. To a lesser degree, Neil Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ sets out its box of tricks as a backdrop to a tale of romance. ‘Now You See Me’ is entirely about the illusion, and as such starts to vaporise in a fog of its own insubstantiality the moment the end credits roll.

Zombieland

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedies / In category: 5 of 10 / Overall: 39 of 100

I sometimes think my wife should work for ‘Sight and Sound’. The result would be shorter and significantly less pretentious reviews. For example: as the end credits rolled on ‘Zombieland’, she remarked, “There was no point whatsoever to that film.”

Does that sound harsh? She wasn’t dissing ‘Zombieland’. In fact we’d both laughed uproariously through most of its brief 81-minute running time. But it’s an accurate point. As much as any zombie movie can be said to have a point beyond “group of (generally mismatched) survivors hole up against the undead and try to stay alive”, ‘Zombieland’ is singularly lacking in narrative, structure or character motivation.

And that’s kind of what makes it fun.

Most zombie movies lock themselves into a restricted locale scenario. A farmhouse, a shopping mall, an underground military installation or – in the quintessentially British spin ‘Shaun of the Dead’ puts on things – one’s local pub. ‘Zombieland’ thumbs its nose at convention and sets itself up as a zombie-ridden road movie. True, the genre has come close to (pardon the pun) going down this road before: ’28 Days Later’ and ‘Diary of the Dead’ permit their protagonists to be more mobile than is the norm. But for my money, ‘Zombieland’ is the first zombie movie that captures the authentic freewheeling aesthetic of a road movie.

Hell, the very first scene (following an hysterical slo-mo credits sequence that sets up urban America as a hotbed of zombie activity) has slacker-turned-survivalist Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) fending off a trio of flesh-munchers as he tries to fill his car up at a seemingly deserted gas station. Later, leaving the city sans automobile, he hitches a lift with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a man who blames the zombie infestation for creating a world which is becoming increasingly devoid of Twinkies. Later, the pair of them encounter teenage sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and some cat-and-mouse shenanigans ensue around who can claim ownership of Tallahassee’s pick-up truck.

Essentially, the foursome (a relationship based on mutual distrust gradually thawing to something that just about passes for comradeship) travel across America. They kill some zombies en route. They kill a fuckload more at the end of the journey. That’s about your lot. Motivations are basic: Columbus wants to get back to his home town to see if his parents are alive (pretty early into the film it’s suggested they won’t be); Wichita wants to protect her younger sister at all costs; Tallahassee just wants a Twinkie. It says something about characterisation when the protagonists are named after the towns of their birth.

Equally gimmicky is the frequently updated set of rules Columbus abides by, ranging from never trusting restrooms (you’re sat on the can, trousers round your ankles, at your most vulnerable; zombie crawls under the door, chomp, game over) to cardiac considerations (outrunning a zombie is only effective if you’re fit; fat people needn’t worry about being eaten – a massive coronary will bet them first). Every time Columbus invokes one of the rules, a flashback accompanies it while the rule itself floats across the screen in ‘Panic Room’-style lettering. It’s contrived, but utterly effective.

Midway through, however, we get the Mystery Guest (I’ll leave their identity under wraps just in case you’ve been on Mars or in solitary confinement for the last couple of years) and the film’s sometimes-cute-sometimes-acerbic humour suddenly gets weighted down. It’s a joke too far. ‘Zombieland’ becomes top-heavy as a result of it, particularly when scripters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick quickly have to rid themselves of said Mystery Guest in order to get things (quite literally) back on course again. The way they write him out is painfully obvious from the get-go.

Equally problematic is the funland finale. While an inspired location for a horror movie (see also Paco Plaza’s ‘A Christmas Tale’), the mechanics of the denouement require the hitherto more-than-capable Wichita and Little Rock to do two fairly stupid things in quick succession just so the boys can show up in eleventh-hour fashion and rescue them.

Minor complaints, I guess, when the film is so gut-busting funny the rest of the time, but still annoying when Reese and Werbick and director Ruben Fleischer gleefully disregard narrative conventions for much of the running time only to embrace the rustiest and creakiest of plot mechanics at the last hurdle.