PREDATOR 2: No Stopping What Can’t Be Stopped, No Killing What Can’t Be Killed

Predator 2 (1990) – Directed by Stephen Hopkins – Starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, María Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, Robert Davi, Kevin Peter Hall, and Adam Baldwin.

PREDATOR 2 may just well be the most poorly conceived and executed sequel of the last three decades.

The largest problem with the film is that it can’t commit to the idea that the Predator isn’t a villain, and it doesn’t have enough brains to artfully work at the theme of moral complexity. The result is that we get the Predator slaughtering drug pushers, yet being tracked by our hero cop, Danny Glover. Are we supposed to root against the Predator when he’s killing hardcore killers and drug lords, and hanging the upside down? Because I’m totally rooting for him through the first part of the movie. Even when his actions are re-contextualized as “evil,” when he kills Glover’s partner, Danny Archuleta (Ruben Blades), that’s not enough for me to root against him – Archuleta was trespassing on the Predator’s turf, after all.

When Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Glover) goes all predator on the Predator (Kevin Peter Hall), and I’m conflicted. I like Harrigan, and I can understand his wanting revenge, but I like the Predator, too. (Even if in this movie he’s really more Punisher than Predator.) My emotional commitment is further conflicted by the presence of federal agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), who’s a typical federal agent douchebag. In the same scene, then, I’m rooting for the Predator to take out Busey as I’m conflicted over the Predator/Glover fight.

There’s a real solid pot of conflicted morality here, but the film is too stupid to do anything with it.

Taking the film series out of the jungle, PREDATOR 2 takes the alien hunter persona and drops him into future, borderline post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. I’m not really sure if PREDATOR 2 is more properly called the worst Predator movie or the worst Lethal Weapon movie, but it’s a film that just isn’t very good. It’s main problem is that it oversells it’s attitude – Harrigan is too much the hothead cop, the violence is too cartoonishly executed, and Detective Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton) is, well, too much a Bill Paxton character from the ’80s.

Taking the Predator to the city isn’t, in and of itself, a bad idea, but it’s not executed very well, at all, as the filmmakers decide to push this film into the near future by setting it in 1997. They seem to want a war zone in Los Angeles so they can use a gang war as an excuse to have lots of minorities kill each other with lots of blood and bullets.

The opening sequence is simply preposterous. In the director commentary track on PREDATOR, John McTiernan talks about a scene in the jungle where Dutch’s group fires all of their ammo at where they think the Predator has gone. They decimate the forest, but don’t kill the Predator, and McTiernan relates that this scene was his way of silently protesting the fact that he’d been hired to make a film that revels in violence as pornography. The payoff for McTiernan is that all that gunfire kills nothing more than vegetation. It’s a wonderful nod to the shortcomings of guns, which is that you can’t kill what you can’t hit.

There’s none of that cleverness in PREDATOR 2, and the opening sequence of gang violence is a horrid welcome into this movie. It’s just a seemingly endless series of people firing semi-automatics just to show gunfire. After this, we’ve got to endure a whole bunch of formulaic “good cop who doesn’t play by the rules and thus gets called on the carpet” nonsense. In short order, we watch Ruben Blades and Bill Paxton get killed, and Maria Conchita Alonso get injured. Glover then runs into the feds, where Gary Busey gets killed.

Danny Glover gives the role everything he can and it’s everything the role asks for and more. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing as he (and the film) go overboard a few too many times.

PREDATOR 2 never creates a real threat for the Predator. Yeah, Harrigan kills him, but it’s an opportunistic kill instead of a battle of smarts and so it falls flat to me.

I do like what happens after the kill, when a group of Predators reveal themselves to Harrigan so they can take the body of their fallen comrade away. One of them tosses Harrigan an old 18th century firearm, which confirms for Harrigan (even though Gary Busey just told him this) that the Predators have been here before and will be here again.

It’ll just take a while for them to be back in their own movie.

TITANIC: A Woman’s Heart is a Deep Ocean of Secrets

Titanic (1997) – Directed by James Cameron – Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Frances Fisher, David Warner, Kathy Bates, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Michael Ensign, Eric Braeden, Ewan Stewart, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Suzy Amis, Danny Nucci, and Ioan Gruffudd.

TITANIC is why Hollywood exists.

Epic, breathtaking, overblown, and yet achingly small when it needs to be, TITANIC is both an emotional and technical masterpiece. James Cameron’s film is the grandest of cinematic spectacles, artfully blending romance and tragedy in such a way that makes the smallest and largest moments resonate with a deep emotional power. TITANIC is not a complex story, yet the simplicity of the trapped rich girl and hopeful poor boy falling in love aboard the world’s most famous ship makes their love story even grander as it is set in the context of the legendary disaster that awaits the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.

I fully and readily admit that I am utterly in the bag for this movie. Even when it was released back in 1997 and I was in full-blown elitist snark, “everything sucks” mode I was moved by this very simple, yet sweeping love story set aboard a massive spectacle. For me, James Cameron has only made two masterpieces, and this is one of them. (Aliens is the other.) Perhaps because these characters are so simple and set against such an important historical moment, they gain a timeless quality that sustains this movie.

Cameron’s style of directing TITANIC is to continually contrast the smallness of people with the grandness of the ship, or the importance of a small moment in the context of the ship’s sinking, and in doing so he elevates the cinematic impact of both. For the people aboard the vessel, every emotion they have takes on greater importance, while the ship itself is constantly represented as a massive leviathan, complete with towering stacks and endless labyrinthine corridors.

What works most for me about TITANIC is that Cameron is constantly offering us these intimate moments between characters, and that continually drives home the idea to embrace every moment of your life because (clumsy Cameron metaphor coming in 3 … 2 …) you never know when you’re going to run into an iceberg and run out of the possibility of moments.

There’s all sorts of intimate moments here, however, that touch me emotionally. It’s not always the romantic moments between Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), either. There’s a whole passenger list full of moments:

It’s Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), the Titanic‘s shipbuilder, standing alone in front of a clock in the first class smoking room as his ship – his ship – is falling apart and sinking. His lament to Rose that, “I’m sorry I couldn’t build you a better ship,” reveals that he’s putting the weight of this entire disaster on his own shoulders.

It’s Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), so full of vinegar throughout the film, being deflated by the unwillingness of anyone else in her lifeboat to go back and look for survivors.

It’s the old couple holding each other in bed as water is swamping the ship.

And the moment that, for some reason, hits me hardest: at the end of the film, when Rose is standing alone on the deck of the Carpathia and Cameron gives us a perspective shot looking up at the towering Statue of Liberty. Why this moment resonates stronger than the other moments in the film is nothing I’ve ever really been able to explain. I think it has something to do with the promise embodied in that Statue of America being the land of new beginnings. From Rose’s perspective, this is a return to the United States for Rose, but it’s not with the sense of entrapment she felt at the start of the voyage. Where she was saddened and crushed by being able to see her whole life as Cal’s wife laid out before her, she now has complete freedom to live whatever life she chooses to live. Lady Liberty is once again a beacon of possibility instead of oppression. There’s a stoic strength to the Statue, too, and Cameron uses the brief appearance to symbolize hope, strength, new beginnings, and safety.

Is TITANIC a manipulative story?

Damn straight it is, but isn’t that why we go to the movies … to be manipulated? Don’t hate because Cameron writes that manipulation large. The same goes for the film’s adherence to history – I don’t need my movies to be 100% historically accurate (though it’s nice if they are), so Cameron’s altered depiction of Molly Brown is unfortunate, but not a deal breaker. What I want is for movies to be 100% engaging, and TITANIC is definitely that.

Cameron contrasts the tragedy of the ship’s narrative with the uplift of the love story. We know the ship is going to eventually sink and we know Jack and Rose are going to fall in love, and the two arcs intersect each other at the moment the Titanic hits the iceberg and ruptures its hull. Both DiCaprio and Winslet are fantastic throughout the film. Cameron writes simple characters, of course, but again, I think this ends up being to the film’s advantage, as Cameron encourages you to experience this movie instead of thinking about it. Simple characters work in TITANIC for me because I want to believe in Jack and Rose’s story. I do not want to dwell on the possibility that Jack is some kind of confidence man, and Cameron doesn’t, though he allows the other characters in the film to take advantage of Jack’s lower class to exploit this possibility in the mind of others.

Cameron frames his movie through the lens of Gloria Stuart as Old Rose. Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) is a deep sea treasure hunter on the trail of the Heart of the Ocean. He doesn’t find it, but he does uncover a nude drawing of a woman wearing the Heart of the Ocean. Back in the States, Old Rose is living with her granddaughter (Suzy Amis), sees the report, and contacts Brock’s expedition, who fly her out to question her about the diamond’s whereabouts.

While Brock and his crew are unemotional treasure hunters, but they become sucked in to Rose’s story. (Again, Cameron’s penchant for simple characters works to his benefit here, in part because of the story and in part because he’s hired actors like Bill Paxton who can convincingly portray simple characters and still make them seem like real people.) Occasionally, throughout the film, Cameron cuts back to Old Rose telling the story to the crew and I know this is a small, obvious thing to do, but it really works for me to see these cynical guys drawn completely into this old woman’s story.

TITANIC does play a bit loose with Rose’s story. Either what we’re watching is literally her version of events, in which case she’s filling in details that she couldn’t possibly know about (like what was going on in scenes where she wasn’t present), or we’re watching what actually happened, and getting more information than Brock’s expedition.

When the film ends, Brock tells Rose’s granddaughter that he’s spent three years thinking of nothing but Titanic, but he never understood until he heard Old Rose’s story. It’s a powerful moment, delivered in a wonderfully understated manner by Paxton, and speaks to why it’s critically important that personal stories of historical tragedies are told. Life is more than an accumulation of facts and dates and figures and TITANIC brings that home. Yeah, it’s a made-up love story set in the middle of a true tragedy, and yeah, Cameron is more interested in emotional truth than historical truth, but I’m okay with that.

TITANIC is a big, powerful, Hollywood love story, and I love every frame of it. In the final scene, when Old Rose dies or dreams her way back down to the sunken Titanic beneath them to find all of the dead waiting for her, and then applaud her return and reunion with Jack, it stands as a powerful moment of a life well lived, and celebrates that most sacred human connection:

Love.

HAYWIRE: You Shouldn’t Think of Her As Being a Woman

Haywire (2011) – Directed by Steven Soderbergh – Starring Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas.

“You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. No, that would be a mistake.”

This is the line Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) says to hitman Paul (Michael Fassbender) when he’s trying to convince Paul to take the job to assassinate Mallory Kane (Gina Carano). “I’ve never done a woman before,” Paul had said to him, and this is Kenneth’s final pitch to get him to sign on.

It’s a problematic statement, of course, but it gets to the heart of the problem with HAYWIRE: What do we make of both Mallory Kane and the woman who plays her, Gina Carano? For Kenneth, the statement is both completely true and absolutely false. He completely thinks of Mallory as a woman because he used to be romantically involved with her, but he also absolutely thinks of her as an employee instead of a woman, and her decision to leave his employment will kill his business as she takes many of his clients with her. It’s a perfect storm of personal and professional debasement for Kenneth, and he’s looking to make Mallory pay for this by setting her up to take the fall for the death of a journalist. (The plot is needlessly convoluted, but we’ll get to that.)

This personal/professional divide haunts the Mallory Kane character throughout HAYWIRE because Soderbergh is willing to embrace her professionalism but not her personal feelings and desires. She is clearly at the top of the covert op game. Coblenz (Michael Douglas), a U.S. government official, insists that she be part of an operation he hires Kenneth’s private firm to complete, which tells us how highly she’s thought of, and why Kenneth is so upset that she’s about to bail on him. She’s the meal ticket.

Coblenz is the only purely professional relationship in the film. He represents that far end of the spectrum and her father (Bill Paxton) represents the far end of the personal section. In the middle we have ex-boyfriend Kenneth, who’s completely ensconced in both worlds, Aaron (Channing Tatum), who’s a professional associate that she hooks up with after a job, and Paul, who should be a professional-only contact, but their mission sees them playing a married couple, so it’s like Soderbergh wants to keep up this illusion of her as a part of a couple.

And that brings us to Soderbergh and Carano, and what makes me uneasy about HAYWIRE. The whole film comes out a bit creepy. Instead of coming off as the strong, sexy woman she is in real life, Carano feels a bit fetishized in HAYWIRE by Soderbergh. It just feels … off-putting to me that in a movie where Carano plays this top flight covert op, Soderbergh can’t get away from the fact that she’s a woman, too. She’s constantly wearing outfits that accentuate her sexiness, and while that is, by no means, a bad thing, it also feels like we’re supposed to be surprised when this incredibly sexy woman is also incredibly capable of kicking ass.

Which is silly because we’ve all been watching beautiful women kick ass for years, so why does it come off like Soderbergh is the one who finds this surprising?

In the Blu-Ray’s special features, Soderbergh talks about how he first became aware of Carano when he was watching MMA on CBS (he seemed very focused on the CBS thing, for some reason) and decided someone should build a movie around her. HAYWIRE is the result, but the film offers no more depth than you’d get from watching Carano fight on MMA. (On CBS, or otherwise.) It’s that back and forth between Carano being gorgeous and Carano kicking ass that emphasizes her physicality that bothers me because there’s no emotional counterweight. She even worries about having to play the gorgeous woman with Paul because she’s “not comfortable playing the dress,” which she means as not being comfortable playing the sidekick but comes across literally as her not being comfortable in a dress.

The structure of the film opens with Mallory fighting Aaron in a diner in upstate New York, and then semi-kidnapping a guy (he doesn’t seem to be complaining too much, perhaps because she’s a woman he tried to help when she was fighting with Aaron), who she then decides to tell her story to, because she wants someone to know her story so the truth can, at some level, get out. We get this whole, over-complex plot that’s told largely in flashback, but even though the story is thus told from Mallory’s perspective, she’s largely an empty shell of a character. She comes off as a professional, someone who’s more interested in their job than in the personal, which is fine, but since so much of the film is about how other people emote onto her, it would be nice to get a little something on how she emotes back. Or, if she doesn’t emote back fully, if there was a bit more about how she struggles to emote back, because she just seems to mirror Kenneth and Aaron’s emotional states back to them.

The best scene of the film is when Mallory is killing people in her dad’s house and her father sees her in action down a darkened hallway. Paxton’s face is a mix of emotions; even though he knows what his daughter does, he’s never seen her in action and now he’s watching her in a hand-to-hand, fight to the death battle.

As an actress, Carano is limited, but that’s not surprising given that this is her first film. She’s not bad by any stretch, but HAYWIRE doesn’t ask her to talk a whole lot, which adds to that sense that she’s simply an object for us to watch. Not knowing a whole lot about her, I had a feeling the fight scenes would be good because of her MMA background (and they are brutally fantastic), but even though I’d seen he before, I was a bit take aback at how amazing she looks on film. In some scenes she looks a bit like Rachel Weisz and in others she’s definitely giving off an Asia Argento vibe, but in all scenes she’s Gina Carrano, and the camera simply adores her.

I’m left feeling like Soderbergh let Carano down here, which is a silly and stupid thing to say since she’s only here because of him, but I feel like HAWYWIRE is simply a movie with more style than substance. Because it’s a Soderbergh film he can get Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, and Paul Fassbender to show up for small roles, but this adds to the fact that none of these characters really feel all that real. They’re ideas, they’re types, but they’re not people.

The script also lets the film down by an overly complex infodump at the end of the film that tries to do the whole, “you thought this guy was the bad guy but this guy is the good guy, and vice versa” bits that’s just not necessary.

Stylistically, then, I’m a fan of HAWYWIRE (the movie has a slick look, and David Holmes’ score is phenomenal), but if you told me right now that I can only watch Carano’s next film or Soderbergh’s next film, I’d pick Carano’s. Soderbergh should deliver something more than a beautiful surface and he doesn’t. On the other hand, Carano has the on-screen presence to have a career in the film business. While her speaking parts are the weakest aspect of her performance in HAYWIRE, the special features segment on her dedication to training, and the glowing way everyone (trainers and fellow actors) talked about her willingness to learn, and take and apply criticism, speaks well of her chances of improving.