Tag: Famke Janssen

Taken 2 (2012, Olivier Megaton), the unrated version

Besides a truly excellent real time (or very close to it) sequence where Maggie Grace avoids being kidnapped in order to help already kidnapped parents Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen, there's not much to Taken 2. Even the action-packed finale is a disappointment. I had been hoping it'd match that long sequence–which goes from a foot chase to car chase, with action moments throughout–but it's like everyone gave up and truncated the ending.

Maybe Neeson had it in his contract the movie could only run so long. A major part of his performance is his visible distain for the film; he incorporates the world weariness into the part well, but one can't help notice he doesn't run very often and many of the complicated action choreography happens when he's offscreen.

Still, director Megaton does a perfectly adequate job. Taken 2 is fast and dumb, no one seems to disagree. Writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen don't even try to fill the runtime with action and intrigue–there's a long first act setting up Janssen and Grace visiting Istanbul with Neeson. The writers pretend spending time with the characters will make the audience care, but really… no one cares. Not the writers, not the actors. They all do okay enough–even Grace, who looks about twenty-two as a teenager (which isn't bad, considering she was twenty-eight or so during filming).

Maybe it'd be better if Rade Serbedzija's villain weren't so lame, but why bother caring. Like I said, no one else does.

GoldenEye (1995, Martin Campbell)

I love Goldeneye’s plotting. It’s clear they plotted the film to be most enjoyed the first time through, but in terms of reveals and action sequences. The opening sequence doesn’t work particularly well in the end, though, a problem I had the last time I watched the film as well. It’s simply not interesting on video—we know James Bond is going to make it and without the spectacle, it doesn’t work.

Goldeneye excels on two levels. Campbell’s direction is magnificent; he’s able to alternate between the grand, third person Panavision action and setup direction, but also some incredibly personal moments. Combined with his ability, Eric Serra’s score just makes Goldeneye an audio-visual delight. Campbell’s an excellent Panavision action director and generally traditional in those scenes. But Serra’s music is very revisionist. It changes the film’s feel, without affecting the tone.

The other level is Pierce Brosnan and Izabella Scorupco. While Brosnan’s great as Bond, it’s not like he’s achieving much. There’s only so much he can do. But Scorupco is able to humanize him. She’s not a damsel in distress, instead she’s an active participant (one wonders if a better film might not have featured her as the lead and a Bond-like character as her sidekick). She’s fantastic.

The supporting cast has highs and lows. Famke Janssen, Robbie Coltrane and Gottfried John are all good, John especially. Sean Bean and Alan Cumming are weak. Judi Dench and Joe Don Baker are in between.

It’s a solid film.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Directed by Martin Campbell; screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, based on a story by Michael France and characters created by Ian Fleming; director of photography, Phil Meheux; edited by Terry Rawlings; music by Eric Serra; production designer, Peter Lamont; produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson; released by United Artists.

Starring Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Sean Bean (Alec Trevelyan), Izabella Scorupco (Natalya Simonova), Famke Janssen (Xenia Onatopp), Joe Don Baker (Jack Wade), Judi Dench (M), Robbie Coltrane (Valentin Dmitrovich Zukovsky), Gottfried John (General Arkady Grigorovich Ourumov), Alan Cumming (Boris Grishenko), Tchéky Karyo (Defense Minister Dmitri Mishkin), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny), Michael Kitchen (Bill Tanner) and Serena Gordon (Caroline).

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X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, Brett Ratner)

Apparently all the X-Men movies needed was the vapidness of Brett Ratner. What’s strangest about his replacing of Singer is the mutation being a metaphor for homosexuality. Singer used it as a metaphor (poorly) for race in the first one. I don’t think there were any metaphors in the second one, but it works perfectly in this one–especially since the mutation can be hidden and so on. But Ratner doesn’t harp on it, it’s just a little detail.

Maybe it’s Ratner’s lack of harping–Dante Spinotti’s cinematography and some great special effects sequences (the whole Golden Gate bridge scene is handled maybe better than any superhero movie moment since Superman)–but X-Men: The Last Stand is a lot of fun. It features some great character actors in bit roles–Michael Murphy, Bill Duke, Josef Sommer, Anthony Heald–finally casts some good actors in the supporting roles–Ben Foster and Kelsey Grammer. Grammer, under pounds of makeup, is great.

The regular cast is better this time too. Berry’s not as annoying as usual, Hugh Jackman’s fine, Patrick Stewart and James Marsden aren’t in it enough to hurt much… Ian McKellan finally gets a director who understands encouraging his overacting is funny. And even though Aaron Stanford’s a terrible actor, it’s hard not to get a homoerotic vibe off he and McKellan’s scenes together.

Anna Paquin’s terrible, but no worse than usual. Elliot Page is pretty obnoxious. Famke Janssen’s blank, but it’s finally her role.

It’s a good time.

X2 (2003, Bryan Singer)

X-Men 2–sorry, X2–is one of the worst movies I’ve ever sat through, if not the worst.

Singer does a lousy job on X2. It looks like it was filmed in Canada on a restricted budget; it looks goofy and cheap. The story is idiotic and the script is terrible. There’s no good split between the characters in terms of screen time. Patrick Stewart disappears for a while, so does James Marsden.

There’s one scene with promise–when Hugh Jackman is talking with Shawn Ashmore and it’s an awkward moment. It doesn’t really fulfill any of that promise, but it’s not as bad as most of the film.

There aren’t any good performances, which is disappointing if not surprising. Ashmore gives one of the better performances. Bruce Davison’s all right. As opposed to the first one, Jackman’s not good in this one. Patrick Stewart’s bad. Halle Berry’s bad. Famke Janssen’s less bad than those two, but still bad. Ian McKellan’s not as bad as he was in the first one, but he’s still lousy. Anna Paquin’s no good. Brian Cox is awful. Alan Cumming is awful. Cotter Smith plays the President–he exudes a Canadian production.

There is the one amazing scene where Wolverine kills all the army guys–the U.S. Army is the bad guy in X2. They’re child killers. This movie’s from 2003, demonizing the U.S. Army, which is kind of ballsy. It’s a gratuitous scene and its presence in a huge Hollywood blockbuster is startling. It’s great.

Taken (2008, Pierre Morel)

Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen have been writing ninety minute and change action movies for about seven years. It’s the only thing Kamen–who at one time was a Hollywood action screenwriter–is known for these days. Besson’s written a lot more of these mindless action feasts on his own and I don’t think it ever occurred to me one of them might some day turn out good. I didn’t even know the duo was behind Taken (Besson also produces). I just thought Liam Neeson’s career as a leading man had gotten too tenuous. But maybe only a leading man on the outs could make Taken, because even though it’s good, it’s still a subplot-free, ninety minute action movie. There’s no character development, nor the pretense it would have any part in such a narrative.

Taken‘s story is simple–Neeson’s an action guy (in this case a former CIA operative) who’s daughter gets kidnapped in Paris. He goes to get her back. He beats up a lot of people. Every frame of film is utilized towards that story–even tangential sequences reveal themselves to be part of the main plot. The first act of the film, which runs a half hour (lengthy for a ninety minute movie), is actually rather boring.

There’s a lot of (as it turns out) necessary setting and character stuff; these quieter moments are where Taken is chubby and off-point. Without them, however, the movie would only run an hour, which means it’d never get a theatrical release in the United States. Also, the viewer wouldn’t get to find out Maggie Grace is fine (nothing more) playing a teenager at twenty-five. He or she also wouldn’t get to suffer through Famke Janssen’s latest attempt at essaying a harpy. She fails once again, no surprise.

But immediately–with the kidnapping scene–Taken becomes captivating. It’s cheap and manipulative and it works. It’s short enough not to outstay its welcome and its occasional incredulousness can’t surmount Neeson’s fine performance.

Neeson makes Taken seem like it isn’t a disposable action movie. As goofy as the film gets in its scenes (not the action ones, the buddy scenes at the beginning), Neeson always makes them work. The whole movie depends on him and he doesn’t fail it.

Taken is very obviously not a mainstream American action movie, simply because of the plot’s clearness. The bad guys are not techo-terrorists, they’re just human traffickers. As the film revealed that plot point, I wondered if Taken was going to inform on that situation (on average, American men laugh when told of human trafficking; American soldiers in Iraq frequent victims of human trafficking), but it does not. Taken doesn’t really have room to educate, doesn’t have room to linger. It slices quickly and directly, just like Neeson’s character.

Morel’s direction is similarly efficient. The fight scenes are well-cut (especially given how tall Neeson is compared to his co-stars) and Taken–thanks to the combination of acting, directing and editing–never feels as though it’s trying to hide Neeson not actually being a trained martial artist. There’s also no sped up film, which is a pleasant surprise.

Taken succeeds on a higher level than it should because Besson and Kamen have constructed it to be self-evident. Just as there aren’t any subplots, there aren’t any themes or metaphors. It’s an action movie and a good one.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Directed by Pierre Morel; written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen; director of photography, Michel Abramowicz; edited by Frédéric Thoraval; music by Nathaniel Mechaly; production designer, Hugues Tissandier; produced by Besson, Pierre-Ange Le Pogam and India Osborne; released by EuropaCorp.

Starring Liam Neeson (Bryan), Maggie Grace (Kim), Famke Janssen (Lenore), Xander Berkeley (Stuart), Katie Cassidy (Amanda), Olivier Rabourdin (Jean Claude), Leland Orser (Sam), Jon Gries (Casey), David Warshofsky (Bernie), Holly Valance (Diva), Nathan Rippy (Victor), Camille Japy (Isabelle), Nicolas Giraud (Peter) and Gérard Watkins (Saint Clair).

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X-Men (2000, Bryan Singer)

My wife wanted me to mention the only reason we watched X-Men was because she wanted to see Hugh Jackman with his shirt off… I watched it to insure she didn’t have a cardiac arrest.

Back in the old days, before IMDb edited their trivia section, the X-Men trivia featured defenses of some of the terrible performances. There was some excuse for Halle Berry’s terrible accent and another for Anna Paquin’s mysteriously appearing and disappearing one. It’s too bad IMDb got classy and took them down, because there were even more defenses and they were a lot of fun.

But if one is trapped and watching X-Men, in between parts where Hugh Jackman’s giving a fine performance, there are amusements. It’s fun to see Bryan Singer composing his shots for a pan-and-scan VHS version (faces occupy one half of the screen while empty space occupies the other or the action is in the center, with empty space on the sides). There’s also the obviously Canadian sets–which make the Statue of Liberty finale all the more amusing. I mean, X-Men is an action movie where one of the big sequences takes place in the Liberty Island gift shop. Not many movies can make that claim. Or the train station… wow, that one’s exciting.

There are more amusements, some not recognizable at the time. It’s not really an amusement, more an unfortunate reality–Michael Kamen’s embarrassing score, which would be terrible on a razor commercial, is one of his last. But on the more amusing things–like trying to take Tyler Mane seriously. The guy’s 6’8″ but the make-up and costume are so silly, he looks like he’s performing at a kid’s birthday party.

The most fun, however, is trying to figure who gives a worse performance, Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan. The script, which has some of the worst dialogue in any major motion picture I think I’ve ever seen, does neither any favors, but I do think Stewart edges McKellan out. Though McKellan is worse, he’s in it a little bit less and doesn’t have the long expository monologues Stewart gets to deliver.

The plot is smartly bound to Jackman, which kind of makes the thing deceptively okay in parts. Thankfully, the moronic ending (it’s Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, get it?) erases any memory of his fine performance.

Speaking of performances, there really aren’t any good ones other than Jackman. James Marsden is hilariously bad, as is Berry, as is Rebecca Romijn. Famke Janssen’s bad, but nowhere near as terrible as the others. Bruce Davison, who really sets off those made in Canada flags, is awful.

I’ve seen X-Men three times now and I still don’t understand how it was a hit or how it is considered “good.” It kicked off the modern superhero movie genre, which has produced some worse entries, and maybe it just doesn’t seem as bad in comparison to those. But with the exception of Jackman, the whole thing feels like a syndicated, shot-in-Canada TV show. It’s like “RoboCop: The Series.” Only worse.

The Gingerbread Man (1998, Robert Altman)

Somehow Altman lets The Gingerbread Man get away from him. Never the direction, which holds up until the end–and seeing Robert Altman direct a fight scene is something to behold–but the plotting. The film starts high, thanks to the compelling plot and the performances, but then the plot gets more and more… not convoluted, but desensitizing. Once Kenneth Branagh’s kids are in danger, it’s clear there’s nothing special about the plot, since it’s such a genre standard. The film also loses, around that section, as the storytelling becomes more set piece oriented, the strange texture Gingerbread Man had before. It was clearly, both through style and script, a Robert Altman movie. Branagh, always the protagonist, was not the whole show. Then he becomes the whole show and the movie loses something.

It never regains it either. Even with one nice moment or two, there’s the epical storytelling key turn and then it’s liftoff and it’s Branagh racing to discover the truth, just like every other thriller involving a lawyer who gets involved with a client. At that point, it’s sort of clear the story came from John Grisham. Or maybe I’d just like to think Altman wouldn’t have made a pedestrian conclusion. It’s possible, since it is Altman, he was pandering to see what it was like to pander (Altman’s disinterest in his finished product, good or bad, is always a little stunning).

The acting is, with one and a half exceptions, fantastic. Branagh’s performance (as a Southerner) is excellent. Embeth Davidtz makes a great white trash femme fatale, Daryl Hannah is good as Branagh’s (long suffering) associate. Robert Downey Jr. has a great time in a flashy private investigator role–not spinning Downey off into his own movie is probably Gingerbread‘s greatest tragedy (as is not sticking with him as much as possible). Even Tom Berenger is good in a small part. The two exceptions? Well, the half is Robert Duvall, who does his crazy thing again here. Duvall looks the part and I suppose he’s fine, but it’s a lame casting choice and a poorly written character. Then there’s Famke Janssen, who’s less convincing as a parent than as a Southern belle (her accent is less convincing than Marge Simpson as Blanche). Luckily, Branagh is frequently around to save Janssen’s scenes.

The Gingerbread Man is a fine filmmaking exercise from Altman, has some great acting, and has some great cinematography. But its production quality is not matched by the rote plot. Altman, had he taken the film at all seriously, could have done a lot more with it.

2.5/4★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Robert Altman; written by Clyde Hayes, based on an original story by John Grisham; director of photography, Gu Changwei; edited by Geraldine Peroni; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Stephen Altman; produced by Jeremy Tannenbaum; released by Polygram Filmed Entertainment.

Starring Kenneth Branagh (Rick Magruder), Embeth Davidtz (Mallory Doss), Robert Downey Jr. (Clyde Pell), Daryl Hannah (Lois Harlan), Tom Berenger (Pete Randle), Famke Janssen (Leeanne Magruder), Mae Whitman (Libby Magruder), Jesse James (Jeff Magruder) and Robert Duvall (Dixon Doss).

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Monument Ave. (1998, Ted Demme)

An utterly depressing Mean Streets knock-off–but beautifully directed by Ted Demme, who manages to make it both derivative and affecting–which might not have much potential, but certainly has the cast for it. Even though Denis Leary is over forty as the guy who wants to get out but they keep pulling him back in–and, honesty, if the film had taken Leary’s age into account, it would have been a lot better–he’s real good. It helps Demme shoots it so well, but the movie’s got a great cast.

Besides Leary–and Billy Crudup, fantastic in a small role–there’s, in particular, Ian Hart and Colm Meaney. Hart’s got the sidekick role. He doesn’t do anything to break out of it, but he inhabits it perfectly. Meaney’s the heavy and he’s great at it, looking like he should be having more fun than he is–but he never lets the character go wild like most heavies in the genre do and the result is a much finer performance. Meaney and Leary are both these exhausted men… one of the other nuances ignored.

There are some mediocre performances, of course, given this one’s a neo-indie film from the late 1990s and everyone has to be a name. Famke Janssen, for example, isn’t entirely bad, but she is completely unbelievable as the neighborhood girl who never could get away. Noah Emmerich, however, is just bad. And Martin Sheen turns in one of his least impressive performances ever.

But John Diehl’s great.

Demme also shoots these wonderful drug use scenes–I suppose, given his death by overdose, it would have been better if he’d shot them poorly–and he really makes Monument Ave. work better than the script deserves. Besides some stylistic flourishes on Demme’s part, as well as the good acting, nothing makes the movie stand out. To some degree, those qualities ought to be enough, but Demme was obviously trying for more… but the script just doesn’t have anything more to give.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Ted Demme; written by Mike Armstrong; director of photography, Adam Kimmel; edited by Jeffrey Wolf; music by Todd Kasow; production designer, Ruth Ammon; produced by Joel Stillerman, Demme, Jim Serpico, Adam Doench, Nicolas Clermont and Elie Samaha; released by Lions Gate Films.

Starring Denis Leary (Bobby), Ian Hart (Mouse), John Diehl (Digger), Jason Barry (Seamus), Noah Emmerich (Red), Billy Crudup (Teddy), Greg Dulli (Shang), Famke Janssen (Katy), Colm Meaney (Jackie O’Hara), Martin Sheen (Hanlon) and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Annie).

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