And everyone else gets to indulge in some nostalgic old-school studio programmer thrills. Those who want to see themselves onscreen get to do just that. But A) Hollywood doesn’t make much of that anymore and B) there’s value in giving demographics their chance to star in their own would-be Panic Room, Single White Female or Unlawful Entry. Something like The Intruder or No Good Deed, Breaking In and comedies like What Men Want and Little may look like a rehash of a prior generation’s cinema. In a skewed way, movies like War and Saaho (and surely others that I’ll have to catch up with) play like the thrillers and comedies from Screen Gems and Will Packer Productions that refashion 1990s urban/suburban thrillers and high-concept comedies with minority casts. Yes, some of the direct-to-VOD/DVD stuff (the Scott Adkins and/or Michael Jai White flicks come to mind) impresses on a relative scale, but War is a mega-budget example of a bygone era in action cinema. Yes, War rips off countless Hollywood action flicks, but those films are 10-to-20-years-old and represent a kind of filmmaking that we just don’t see in Hollywood at that kind of budgetary level.
It may not be art, but the Gerard Butler sequel works as a well-oiled, fully-functioning, character-driven, distinctly American action-adventure spectacular. Putting aside the whole “it’s a better and less problematic movie than its predecessors” factor, Ric Roman Waugh ’s Angel Has Fallen has legged out here and abroad ($67.66 million domestic/$126.5 million worldwide) partially because it’s a rock-solid example of a still all-too-rare decently-budgeted, R-rated action adventure movie.Įven with a $40 million budget, Angel Has Fallen feels big enough and works in the way we used to take for granted in the mid-1990s. I saw it because despite not liking Saaho very much, I had a good time examining it (and talking to folks online about it) and there just aren’t many Hollywood action films of this nature anymore.
War may be fun, but I’m not sure if it’s “good.” It’s ridiculously long (yes, there are musical numbers), rivals Peter Jackson and Zack Snyder in unnecessary slow motion and takes almost an entire act to get into gear.
0 kommentar(er)
