Tag: Benedict Wong

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) s01e04 – Is This Not Real Magic?

This episode down-shifts the action a little, leveraging returning guest star Benedict Wong—who star Tatiana Maslany frequently breaks the fourth wall to comment on appearing—without moving any of the subplots forward. Other than Mark Linn-Baker’s too understated sitcom dad in the real world bit. He shows up for a scene to Wrecking Crew-proof Maslany’s apartment after the attempted assault last episode. No straight-to-the-heart and twist zingers for the incel bros this episode, but Maslany does get in a fun “what’s Twitter complaining about?” comment in.

Is that Earth-616 Twitter, Earth-199999 Twitter, or our Earth Twitter? I really want to know the rules behind references in the MCU; I hope we find out all the twists, turns, and hurdles someday.

A bad (as in, bad at his job) stage magician named Donny Blaze (unclear if he’s Johnny’s brother) has been using actual magic to add some oomph to his shows. He starts teleporting random audience members, usually women in short skirts, into other dimensions. One, played by Patty Guggenheim, fights her way through a demon dimension while making bargains and having adventures, escaping to Wong’s living room just in time to spoil “Sopranos” for him.

Rhys Coiro (director Kat Coiro’s husband) plays Blaze. He’s a complete dipshit, which is one of those strange casting choices. Leon Lamar plays his enabling sidekick. They’re both fine but somewhat lackluster compared to Wong and Guggenheim. Guggenheim’s hilarious as a party girl with a heart of gold; she ought to get a spin-off. They should at least do a special about her fighting her way through Hell, Vormir, or wherever.

Wong does a lot with a little; he’s mostly reacting to Guggenheim being fabulous and Rhys Coiro being scummy.

The subplot has Maslany reluctantly starting to date in her big green persona, which proves to attract a different caliber of Tinder match. Michel Curiel plays her dreamiest match. They have a wild night out.

“She-Hulk” is on entirely solid ground now, but—even more than “Ms. Marvel”—it feels like they’re making a TV show here, meaning a second season should be in order, especially if the MCU movie guest stars are going to do two-episode arcs. At the same time, the guest stars—even the tangential ones—are distracting from the regular law firm cast. Ginger Gonzaga’s the only one to show up here, again entirely support for Maslany, with no one else making the cut.

It’d just be such a perfect way to comment on the overall MCU (Wong makes a good Spider-Man: No Way Home reference at one point).

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) s01e03 – The People vs. Emil Blonsky

I’m pretty sure this episode of “She-Hulk” is the first time the MCU has acknowledged white males aged eighteen to thirty-four are entirely pieces of shit. There’s a bit with the news showing Twitter posts complaining about She-Hulk, then the MCU version of the Wrecking Crew is a bunch of Trump voters who’ve decided to finally commit to just assaulting women. It’s a fantastic flex from the show, and watching CGI She-Hulk beat the shit out of the Wrecking Crew, who seem like they’ll be back, is going to be great.

This episode’s where the show finally delivers on all fronts—there’s legal comedy-drama, there’s MCU business, there’s fourth wall breaking, there’s a celebrity cameo. The show takes several shortcuts to get there, including B plot protagonist Josh Segarra. Segarra plays Pug, who’s from the comics, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in the last episode. He certainly didn’t talk or get introduced. In fact, when he shows up in this episode, the focus is on returning guest star Drew Matthews.

Matthews is an assistant district attorney shit-bag Maslany and Ginger Gonzaga used to work with; he needs their new firm’s help with a matter involving a New Asgardian shapeshifter. It’s a lot of… not MCU workplace jabs and jokes. The MCU got over the Blip faster than real life got over lockdown. It’s a bit disconcerting seeing “She-Hulk” comment on workplace harassment fifteen minutes after Tatiana Maslany broke the fourth wall to assure viewers the show’s not just about returning MCU guest stars (no Mark Ruffalo this episode, but Tim Roth and Benedict Wong).

Roth and Wong are in the A plot—we can call them A and B plots with “She-Hulk,” Maslany broke the wall to talk to us about how they work—spinning out of their adventures in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It’d be fascinating to see the Disney+ numbers to see if “She-Hulk”’s an entry to Shang-Chi or vice versa.

Anyway. Maslany’s still trying to get Roth out on parole, and Wong seems to be the key, only Wong’s the Sorcerer Supreme, and he’s got things to do. It’s an excellent sequence and a wonderful comic adaptation; they’ve cracked “She-Hulk.” Unfortunately, it does seem like there’s been a lot left on the cutting room floor—Segarra’s introduction, Gonzaga and Maslany being besties, Gonzaga having a part—but the show delivers. Roth, a stunt cast back in Incredible Hulk, finally gets to loose himself in the part.

And Wong’s a delight.

And Maslany’s a delight. “She-Hulk”’s loads of—surprisingly grounded—fun.

Code 46 (2003, Michael Winterbottom)

Code 46 is a budget future-noir, down to the male lead being a fraud investigator (though it’s unclear why there’d be a third-party contractor investigating identity theft). But it’s not just a budget future-noir; it’s also a future eugenics thriller; the title refers to the legal code forbidding procreating with your near relatives. Cousins would probably be all right. The movie opens with the explanation as two title cards; it doesn’t matter for half the movie.

And once it does matter, it’s another ten or fifteen minutes before someone explains there are clones everywhere. Most people never know their birth parents—just their “nurture” parents—so you’d never know if someone was actually your genetic sibling. Though without ever really breaking it down, the exposition has to be opaque to some degree because not everyone’s going to know about the Code 46. Or at least not at the same time. Though it’s unclear how some people find out about it because Code 46 has some very broken noir-ish narration. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce writes just to the edge of the plot hole and then leaves it up to director Winterbottom to cover.

“Cover” is another of the film’s MacGuffins. To get around in the future, you need to have “cover,” which is basically either a travel pass or a living permit. Some people get to live in the nice cities, and some people live outside the nice cities. Those living outside don’t have “cover.” Though when you want to go someplace and can’t, it’s because you don’t have “cover.”

Samantha Morton works at a cover manufacturer. Since Code 46 is pre-smartphone (though people do have video phones), the “cover” is a physical object. Tim Robbins is investigating someone making counterfeit cover and giving it to undesirables. Though it turns out, they might not be so much undesirable as in danger. Code 46 doesn’t pay its oppressive future society enough attention—or define it enough—because it seems generally altruistic.

Like, preventing unnecessary deaths and in-breeding isn’t villain activity.

Such observations do not matter, however. Any observations about Code 46’s plot or any details with potential are useless; it all goes nowhere; Code 46 has a sparse script, which just draws attention to the worse aspects. Like Morton’s MacGuffin dream sequence. The film opens on her birthday and promises to be about her recurring dream and then is never, ever, ever about her recurring dream. Partially because it’s not a real detail, it’s just something to kill time.

The film’s only ninety-three minutes. It’s concerning how much time they waste.

The whole thing hinges on Robbins and Morton having chemistry, which they do not. He becomes infatuated with her and frames someone else for her crime. She apparently has a thing for much older men. Part of Robbins’s character involves him being on an “empathy virus,” which lets him read minds. Including passwords. No one in the future uses good passwords, it turns out.

The film could get away with all the future silliness and plot conveniences if it didn’t go spectacularly off the rails in the second half and then just keep going, making less and less internal sense as it goes along.

Morton and Robbins do better than expected. In the first half, anyway, when it seems like Morton’s got a character. She will not, with the film increasingly restricting and erasing her development in the second half. At the same time, it’ll turn out Robbins doesn’t have anything going on either.

There’s good photography from Alwin H. Küchler and Marcel Zyskind, though Peter Christelis’s editing is probably more impressive, even though the film uses his cutting abilities for questionable purposes. Okay music from Stephen Hilton and David Holmes. Mark Tildesley’s production design is excellent.

Winterbottom’s direction is just okay. He makes some big swings—having Morton stare directly into the camera a lot, a Coldplay song—and they don’t often connect.

Code 46 is an unfortunate fail; it seems like there might be a decent picture in the cast, crew, and concept, but Cottrell-Boyce’s script isn’t it. It doesn’t help Winterbottom’s checked out too. There are some solid moments and efforts, but they’re nowhere near enough to compensate for the problems.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022, Sam Raimi)

Doctor Strange and the Maddening Mouthfuls of Multiverses is barely a sequel to the original Doctor Strange outing, which is fine; the original was six years ago, and star Benedict Cumberbatch has gotten more mileage out of his non-solo appearances. However, given it’s a sequel to the Disney Plus show, “WandaVision,” which was a deliberate, thoughtful examination of the trauma Elizabeth Olsen (second-billed in Multiverse) experienced as an MCU character… it’s not great they (they being screenwriter Michael Waldron, who did not write “WandaVision” because it was well-written) turn Olsen into a one-to-two note supervillain here. She’s a Disney villain, right down to how calling herself a “witch” means she’s bad now.

Olsen’s performance is, you know, excellent. No notes. She’s terrific. It’s a bad part, but it’s good acting.

Cumberbatch starts the movie dreaming about a ponytailed version of himself fighting a monster alongside teenager Xochitl Gomez. Then he goes to ex-girlfriend Rachel McAdams’s wedding to someone else, who the movie never actually introduces because it’d require too much writing. Instead, a giant one-eyed octopus monster invades New York City, and Cumberbatch has to save the day. In doing so, he discovers the monster’s after Gomez, who isn’t a figment of his unconscious, but rather a real teenage girl who’s spent her life accidentally jumping from universe to universe. And someone’s after her.

Benedict Wong, who’s taken over Cumberbatch’s job as Earth’s sorcerer supreme since the Avengers movies, also shows up to fight the monster. So pretty soon, they’re all sitting around to talk multiverses. Wong and Cumberbatch are funny together, and they decide they’re going to help Gomez with the demons pursuing her.

Cumberbatch has the great idea to ask Olsen for help, only to discover she’s actually the evil stepmother. Sorry, supervillain.

There are some big action set pieces, but then it’s off to the multiverse for Gomez and Cumberbatch while Wong’s trying to stop Olsen on Earth. Regular MCU Earth. Doesn’t go great for Wong.

Olsen’s trying to steal Gomez’s multiverse jumping power so she can find a universe where her sons are real (she made them out of magic on “WandaVision”). Also, dreams are views into other universes, which seems like it should be important but isn’t.

There are some big and not-so-big cameos along the way, but most of the movie is pragmatically setting up the finale to be as contained as possible. See, it turns out Gomez jumps to the universe most likely to quickly hurry plots along, so if you need to get to a universe populated by Marvel heroes from alternate realities (or franchises), Gomez’s on it. She and Cumberbatch also pick up a variation of McAdams along the way, so while McAdams has a lot to do in the movie, it’s all busy work and emotional labor for Cumberbatch (who she doesn’t even know, not really).

Of the action set pieces, only a few are inventive. Well, one, actually. There are some other okay ones, but only one is anything special. The rest are a combination of good CGI and decent humor. Primarily because of Gomez, Wong, and McAdams. Cumberbatch plays well off the actors who can do the humor better. Olsen doesn’t get any humor; she just gets to turn the internal turmoil and suffering to eleven with no payoff.

Despite all the cameos, Multiverse avoids bringing back anyone to give Olsen an arc. And since all the cameos are otherworldly—other-universey—they don’t carry any emotional heft, though there’s an excellent joke for one of the cameos. And the acting on them’s not bad, especially the most fantastic of them.

Raimi’s direction is fine. He’ll occasionally show more enthusiasm than the baseline, which is pretty rote. Of course, it doesn’t help he’s apparently disinterested in all the world-building in the second act, but considering it’s all fluff… he’s not wrong.

The movie doesn’t overstay its welcome, which is good, even if it means the finale just reveals they didn’t actually do an arc for Gomez (instead treating her as an accessory for Cumberbatch). Multiverse takes an incomplete on character development overall, promising next time maybe Cumberbatch will grow a little.

Okay music from Danny Elfman, decent photography from John Mathieson (except in the cameo-heavy part of act two, where some setting appears to be off with the cameras), and excellent production design from Charles Wood. Even when the setting’s incredibly obvious, Wood makes it unique.

Multiverse only runs a couple hours, but because it’s truncated. With an actual first act, it’d add on at least another twenty minutes. It’s almost like they should’ve just done it as a TV series, though more Waldron writing wouldn’t do anyone any favors.

It’s mostly middling, with some good performances and solid filmmaking. Given how much the film disses Olsen’s efforts for the overall franchise, hopefully, she can escape any sequels, prequels, sidequels, or spin-offs.

What If…? (2021) s01e04 – What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?

Apparently, at some point, if you’ve been a superhero long enough—in this case, Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s five years in—you eventually end up in a junkyard having a Superman III fight; wait, so was Christopher Reeve. Anyway, in this universe, Rachel McAdams is not a disposable girlfriend character in Doctor Strange; she’s the all-powerful girlfriend in a refrigerator. And after she dies instead of Cumberbatch losing the use of his hands, he becomes obsessed with going back in time and bringing her back, even though wise Asian sidekick Benedict Wong tells him it’s a bad idea.

Cumberbatch doesn’t listen, obviously, because he’s the white male savior, and A.C. Bradley’s script for “What If: Doctor Strange” impressively brings in all the colonizing white male saviorism of the movie. He discovers McAdams dying is a fixed point in the timeline—can’t wait to see if anything else time travel going forward in the MCU respects this nonsense—and there’s nothing he can do. Or so Tilda Swinton tells him. She has to bring herself back from the dead to warn him.

But she’s just a girl—I really hope Swinton’s magic bald white lady cultural appropriationist has some amazing history, like she was a missionary to China in the 1800s—so he runs off to find someone who’ll help him. So he goes searching for the mythical library of Cogliostro (or something, I’m just assuming it’s Cogliostro because Cogliostro is Nicol Williamson from Spawn and it’s hilarious to think Marvel-Disney’s ripping off Todd MacFarlane now) but only finds a Black guy dressed in tribal attire who doesn’t seem to speak English.

It doesn’t turn out to be a cringe-y Wakanda reference, and instead, the Black guy, played by Ike Amadi, does speak English; Cumberbatch is just a shitty white guy who assumes making demands while speaking loudly and slowly is the way to get through to people with different color skin.

There’s then a bunch of magic stuff when Cumberbatch is absorbing interdimensional monsters—if there are any Easter eggs, I missed them, save a reference to the Cthulhu from the first episode of “What If”—before eventually discovering there’s going to be the Superman III junkyard fight. It’s going to resolve the episode.

During said junkyard fight, there are moments when you can see the potential in a “Doctor Strange” cartoon. Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t realize them. But you could do it. Even as cheap as they do this episode.

Jeffrey Wright gets to interact with the main story. His voice acting is worse when doing it, but Cumberbatch is somewhat risible, so it’s nice to have a reminder “What If” doesn’t promise any good acting whatsoever. Of course, Wong, Swinton, and Amadi are fine. McAdams seems to have contributed a paragraph of dialogue they keep rearranging, but she’s at least better than Cumberbatch or Wright.

The most compelling experience during the episode is waiting for Wanda to show up since she’s supposedly more powerful than Doctor Strange in the MCU now. Clearly, Elizabeth Olsen has a better agent than Cumberbatch.

Otherwise, it’s just marveling at how cheap the animation’s getting and Cumberbatch’s inability to emote.

What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s02e01 – Resurrection

So, there’s a lot to say about “What We Do in the Shadows”’s return, like how they figured out an amazing way to keep growing Harvey Guillén’s vampire hunter arc (as he is a vampire’s familiar) and how the show uses a time jump (summer is over, so we get some exposition—unclear if the show was supposed to air in a fall or it’s just a plot device), but the big deal of the episode is Haley Joel Osment.

Osment plays Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou’s new familiar—their last ones kept getting killed off—and he’s a terrible coworker for Guillén. Osment plays on his phone while Guillén does all the work. Guillén is up all night every night killing off the Max Schreck Nosferatu assassins who are after Berry, Demetriou, and Guillén’s master, Kayvan Novak, for some shenanigans last season. And hiding it from them because then they’ll know he’s a vampire hunter.

There’s this great bit about him eating chocolate covered espresso beans to stay up, which Novak thinks are his dried turds. It’s really funny. Excellent script from Marika Sawyer.

Anyway, the setup isn’t Osment being a crappy coworker to Guillén but Osment dying—just like all of Berry and Demetriou’s familiars, only instead of just burying him in the yard, they take him to neighborhood necromancer Benedict Wong.

Wong’s hilarious, selling tchotchkes in his shop and scatting through his incantations to bring Osment back. Now, Demetriou believes in necromancy, but Berry doesn’t, so there’s a bunch of griping Berry, which is wonderful as always.

Only Wong’s legit and Osment’s risen…

Only he’s a zombie.

And none of the vampires believe Guillén. So there are all these chase sequences throughout the house, with Osment just as funny undead as alive. He’s not a regular familiar who wants to be turned into a vampire, it’s just a cool side gig while waits for his 0.5% ownership of a microbrewer to pay-off. Like, it’s awesome stuff. Sawyer gives Osment all this great material and he nails it all.

So good.

It’s downright lovely to have the show back. Just what it needs to be. Novak, Demetriou, and Berry are all great too but it’s really Guillén and Osment’s episode.

Doctor Strange (2016, Scott Derrickson)

The only particularly bad thing in Doctor Strange is the music. Michael Giacchino strikes again with a bland “action fantasy” score. The score feels omnipresent; I’m not sure if it really is booming all throughout the film or if I was just constantly dreading its return.

Dread is something in short supply in Doctor Strange. The film opens with Mads Mikkelsen’s ponytailed bad guy doing some visually dynamic magic. The world becomes a moving M.C. Escher piece, with lots of tessellation. While visually dynamic, these magical reconfigurations of the world don’t affect regular people and don’t really change the fight scenes much. The reconfigurations happen aside from the principals’ actions. Most of that action is white people doing questionable kung fu fighting with magic assists.

Director Derrickson embraces the long shot and the extreme long shot to do his action. The camera’s never close enough to reveal whether Tilda Swinton really did all her kung fu fighting. She definitely did her melodrama scene though. It’s a special thing, a melodramatic scene in Strange, the film utterly avoids using them. Lead Benedict Cumberbatch’s character development is done without them. Sure, when he’s despondent over his injured hands after a car crash, there’s a little melodrama. But not once he starts his journey.

Cumberbatch gives up on conventional medicine–he was the only surgeon good enough to fix his hands–and heads to the Far East. He’s looking for a magical fix. He finds it with Swinton and company. Swinton’s the leader, a near immortal sorcerer with a shaved head. Chiwetel Ejiofor is her main lackey. He gets the job of training Cumberbatch when the movie takes time for a training scene. Until Cumberbatch gets the magic; after he gets the magic, he’s got all the magic. No one seems to notice he goes from novice to sorcerer supreme in three minutes.

They’re too busy trying to save the world. Jon Spaihts, Derrickson, and C. Robert Cargill’s script is long on exposition, short on thoughtful plotting, even shorter on character development. Ejiofor gets it the worst. He’s in the movie more than anyone else in the supporting cast, but he never gets a character. Not until the third act and then it’s just a contrivance.

Rachel McAdams is in the movie less than Ejiofor, with a lousy part. The screenwriters seem to think Cumberbatch needs a romantic interest of some sort. She doesn’t have anything going on besides doting on Cumberbatch, whether she likes it or not.

Many of the performances improve over time. Swinton’s far better later on than at the beginning. Mikkelsen is bland at the open only to end up saving the middle portion of the film. He and Cumberbatch have some banter. The banter keeps things going given the CG spectacular isn’t ever spectacular when it needs to be. Cumberbatch, for instance, is only ever a passive party when not doing CG spectacular by himself.

Eventually Cumberbatch starts getting into ghost fights. Fighting when a ghost on the spirit plane. The ghost fights are simultaneously well-executed–something of a surprise as Derrickson and photographer Ben Davis don’t seem to care at all about the CG compositing being weak–and boring. The visual concept for the astral plane kung fu fights is good. The special effects realize it perfectly well. Derrickson just can’t direct fight scenes. So the scenes get old fast. Especially when they’re distracting from Mikkelsen.

Mikkselen’s essential for keeping it going in the second act. He and Cumberbatch’s banter has more character development for Cumberbatch than his entire mystical training.

Cumberbatch is entirely bland in the lead. He’s more believable opening portals to mystical dimensions and having showdowns with ancient intergalactic evil beings (who look a like the MCP from Tron, only without any enthusiasm in CG) than he is being the world’s best surgeon, who also knows more seventies music trivia than anyone else. His voice is flat and without affect; he’s trying not to lose his American accent. Unfortunately, it affects his performance.

It’s unlikely McAdams and Cumberbatch are going to have any emotionally effective scenes, but at least if Cumberbatch were concentrating on responding to her lines and not making sure he never sounds British… well, it might have helped. Both actors are completely professional opposite one another, but there’s zero chemistry. Wouldn’t really matter if there were any chemistry, as McAdams is only around for medical emergencies.

The film moves well once it gets to the second act. Cumberbatch moping is a little much; his performance doesn’t have any nuance. Maybe it did on set, but if so, Derrickson goes out of his way not to shoot it. Long shots, extreme long shots, bad expository summary sequences. Derrickson plays it completely safe. Even when Doctor Strange gets visually fantastic, Derrickson rushes it along so there’s not time to regard that fantastic.

Anyway, once Cumberbatch starts doing magic, it picks up. Then he runs into Mikkelsen and the film improves big time. Of course, then the third act is a mess and Mikkelsen’s villain level gets downgraded. The action finish is also contrived in just a way to keep Derrickson from having to direct anything too complicated. His action is like watching a video game cut scene. One where you aren’t worried about any of the characters being in danger.

And the cape stuff is good (Cumberbatch gets a magic cape once he’s a wizard). And Cumberbatch and Benedict Wong are almost good together.

Doctor Strange’s lack of ambitions, narrative or visual, hurt it. But the script and Derrickson’s disinterest in his actors hurt it more. Still, it’s usually entertaining. It could definitely have been worse. Cumberbatch’s lack of personality probably helps Doctor Strange. The film wouldn’t know what to do with any.

Moon (2009, Duncan Jones)

Moon is quite good.

Moon’s not the most impossible film to talk about without spoiling… but some of its goodness is wrapped up in its plot developments. The viewer should get to enjoy Moon without knowing about them in advance.

I have to be very careful in terms of those developments. I’ll try to avoid talking about all of them.

While the film’s good, Sam Rockwell movies sometimes get to be about marveling at his acting skills. The film isn’t necessarily superior; his performance is startling. He’s always fresh, never resembling anything anyone has ever done before.

Jones does an excellent job directing the film, which isn’t easy since he’s awakening the quality sci-fi genre from its dormant state. His influences are visible—a clear one is Alien, but I won’t spoil it—but he ranges from 2001 to Outland. Moon feels like a return to that late sixties through early eighties sci-fi genre picture. Even the film’s unfortunately traditional conclusion makes it fit.

At a certain point, Jones loses track of the film’s successes. It’s too bad; at times, Moon is singular (again, I can’t say too much without spoiling).

The hipster music—from Clint Mansell—fails. Though I suppose a lot of Moon is, depending on how much you want to read into it, hipster. But there’s a solid core to the picture.

While it is a promising debut from Jones, Moon’s mostly just another great Rockwell performance.

It’s too bad it’s not a great film.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Duncan Jones; screenplay by Nathan Parker, based on a story by Jones; director of photography, Gary Shaw; edited by Nicolas Gaster; music by Clint Mansell; production designer, Tony Noble; produced by Stuart Fenegan and Trudie Styler; released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Starring Sam Rockwell (Sam Bell), Kevin Spacey (GERTY), Dominique McElligott (Tess Bell), Kaya Scodelario (Eve Bell), Benedict Wong (Thompson) and Matt Berry (Overmeyers).

RELATED

Frankenstein (2007, Jed Mercurio)

“a monstrous creation ; especially : a work or agency that ruins its originator”

Frankenstein. (2008). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Retrieved October 2, 2008, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Frankenstein

I wish I could use the OED, but it doesn’t seem worth thirty bucks.

Especially ruins. Two important words for a Frankenstein adaptation. Jed Mercurio does a future Frankenstein, set in the near future–after a super-volcano covers the world with ash, presumably to allow for nighttime shooting and a small number of outdoor shots. What his Frankenstein, here a Victoria (played by Helen McCrory), does different than her filmic predecessors is create her monster for a reason–she needs to farm its organs for her dying son, William. William’s father is Henry Clerval (James Purefoy).

Purefoy is the only character, besides Neil Pearson’s Professor Waldman, whose surname the script verbalizes. The words Frankenstein are never spoken in the television movie’s ninety minutes and they’re only seen on screen briefly and half distorted. Discovering how Mercurio is going to bring familiar elements into the effort is one of the more interesting things. Because lots of the stuff is neat–a female Frankenstein married to Clerval, neat. Mercurio makes frequent homage to the 1931 film and maybe even some of the Hammer ones (I really wouldn’t know, I try to forget the Hammer Frankenstein movies).

But Mercurio’s neatness–his cuteness–is eventually problematic. Bad guy scientist Lindsay Duncan is revealed, in the end credits, to be Professor Pretorius. During the film, everyone just calls her Jane. So her status as a bad guy is disguised through a trick, but it’s also indicative of where Mercurio goes wrong. He comes really close to making something new, but fails because he’s not adapting the novel or even using it as a starting point… he’s making a neatly put together, kind of Frankenstein adaptation, one where cute homages overpower the story.

Mercurio introduces a lot of entirely new ideas to the standard–a female Frankenstein, a motive for creating the monster, a lack of responsibility (Duncan and Pearson are the ones who take over the project)… not to mention the good doctor putting her dying son’s DNA into the monster. With the rather adult romance between McCrory and Purefoy, Mercurio’s Frankenstein could go places and, until the twist ending, appears ready to plunge into the deep end. I trusted Mercurio to pull off the ending right, which might explain some of my displeasure. He copped out. He didn’t just cop out of a proper adaptation ending, he copped out of ending the story he told well. His ending is as sensational as a television movie with an obviously limited budget (the monster only gets one close-up) can get.

I think Mercurio was going for a stab at reality, but it’s unclear.

McCrory is good, though her determination in the first act is poorly paced. At ninety minutes, Mercurio’s script feels like a solid stage adaptation rather than a filmic adaptation. He’s restricted to certain sets but he doesn’t spend enough time on them. Purefoy starts out stumbling, but eventually turns in a respectable performance. Both Pearson and Duncan are goofy villains, never once believable as scientists working in academia. Benedict Wong is great as McCrory’s assistant–Ed Gore, get it? It’s cute, but it’s also only in the credits.

I wasn’t expecting much from Frankenstein–I thought it was the BBC holiday special from last year; it isn’t–but it had a lot of good material in it. But Mercurio got lost in all his busyness and didn’t concentrate on what was working right. I mean, there’s a whole subplot with the cops on the monster’s trail. It’s silly.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Jed Mercurio; screenplay by Mercurio, based on the novel by Mary Shelley; director of photography, Wojciech Szepel; edited by Andrew McClelland; music by John Lunn; production designer, Will Hughes-Jones; produced by Hugh Warren; released by Independent Television.

Starring Helen McCrory (Dr. Victoria Frankenstein), James Purefoy (Dr. Henry Clerval), Neil Pearson (Professor Waldman), Benedict Wong (Dr. Ed Gore), Matthew Rault-Smith (William Clerval), Fraser James (Joe), Lindsay Duncan (Professor Jane Pretorius), Ace Bhatti (Dr. Dhillon), Julian Bleach (The Monster) and Cally Hamilton (Little Girl).

RELATED

Dirty Pretty Things (2002, Stephen Frears)

At some point during Dirty Pretty Things, maybe the half-way point, I didn’t check, I realized the film’s non-traditional approach was holding it back. It’s ironic (or maybe not, I’m sure I’m using the word wrong) since the third act is the most predictable thing I’ve seen in recent memory. I sat and waited for my predictions to come true and all of them did… even the last few moments, which were straight from a Hollywood playbook. Being straight from that playbook isn’t even a bad thing, necessarily–yes, I realize I just said not playing from it was holding Pretty Things back–but changing… modes of transport (I was going to go metaphor, but got too self-conscious) handicaps the thing. What starts as a good, solid different film becomes everything it wasn’t at the beginning. It preaches, which is one of the great things the first two acts do not do.

I thought, when the film got going, it was going to be an interesting, hotel-set mystery. It isn’t. It’s half traditional thriller, half character study. The character study eventually loses. Very little happens in the first twenty or thirty minutes and, once it does, a lot of the film’s charm disappears. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance is astounding. The poster I remember is the one with Audrey Tautou’s name above the title and the definite suggestion of a thriller. Obviously, American (especially Miramax) marketing of foreign product tends to be bullshit, but in this case, it’s an incredible slight against the film. But I’m glad, since I went into it knowing Ejiofor was good in other stuff and getting to see him–unexpectedly–in the lead. Tautou’s supporting, nothing more. She’s in it more than most of the other characters, since she’s the McGuffin in many ways. Any time something happens, it’s somehow because of Tautou (and occasionally because of Ejiofor’s concern for her). Sophie Okonedo is in it a lot less, but she has a lot more of an impact, just because of how her character shows up in the film. She tends to be in scenes where Ejiofor is defined through his actions, rather than his reactions to Tautou. Not to say Tautou’s performance isn’t good. It’s fine. It just doesn’t resonate very well… she doesn’t embody her character enough to make the character’s sometimes unlikely story fly.

As the villain, Sergi Lopez is excellent.

Frears does a good job throughout, maintaining an off-putting atmosphere to the film. He only really slips a couple times. Once with the Jaws dolly zoom and again in the film’s last few shots, when he inexplicably loses the distinctive color palette. At that point, however, the film had turned into the inspirational tale of an illegal immigrant instead of a story about a human being.

A few more words about Ejiofor. In many ways, since he is in most scenes, Dirty Pretty Things is a fantastic showcase for his ability. He gets to display a wide range–even though the script does him the disservice of trying to make him ominous, which is an absolutely ludicrous device (maybe the worst in the film), and even then he works through it. The only downside is how infuriating it is when the script makes him have to do (or say, especially say) something stupid.

2.5/4★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Stephen Frears; written by Steven Knight; director of photography, Chris Menges; edited by Mick Audsley; music by Nathan Larson; production designer, Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski; produced by Tracey Seaward and Robert Jones; released by Miramax Films and BBC Films.

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (Okwe), Audrey Tautou (Senay), Sergi Lopez (Sneaky), Sophie Okonedo (Juliette) and Benedict Wong (Guo Yi).

RELATED