TOTAL RECALL (2012): I Give Good Wife

Total Recall (2012) – Directed by Len Wiseman – Starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Bokeem Woodbine, John Cho, and Bill Nighy.

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Len Wiseman’s TOTAL RECALL is one of those films that just sort of exists.

It is not a bad movie, but it is not a great movie, either, and the result is a film that’s technically proficient without ever being spectacularly memorable. Wiseman directs a decent action sequence, but RECALL is a joyless chase film that’s mildly entertaining without being the least bit engaging.

I feel a bit bad bagging on a film like TOTAL RECALL because I paid my money, ate my popcorn, and for the most part enjoyed what I was watching. There’s a few times when the film lags, but I was largely impressed with how the film looked and moved. I just wanted more. I wanted to be drawn into this world and drawn into this story and these characters and I just wasn’t. The narrative is very robotic and predictable, and not predictable because this is a remake of the original TOTAL RECALL, but predictable because I’ve seen action movies before.

I wish Wiseman would get handed a great script because I think he could deliver a really great action film, but all of his previous action films are really just okay and nothing more. Technically, they’re fine, but emotionally, they’re flat.

One big problem with this movie is that, much like the original RECALL, the narrative wants the audience to be thinking, “Is what I’m watching real, or is it all a Rekall fantasy?” and just like the original RECALL the answer is obvious moments after Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell here, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original) sits in the chair and gets his injection. In the original, Quaid gets a scratch on his neck that disappears once the injection goes wrong, and here Quaid gets a stamp put on his arm that disappears just as fast.

How fast? We see the stamp, the injection goes wrong, a bunch of officers show up with guns, Quaid puts his arms up behind his head and … no stamp.

Making it completely obvious right up front does take a bit away from the rest of the movie. It’s not enough to ruin it – I can still watch The Wizard of Oz and The Usual Suspects after learning at the end of those films that most of what we’ve just seen is a made up story inside the story – but it does make all of the “stop the action so we can debate the authenticity of this experience” moments a bit tedious. Paul Verhoeven had the decency to make his movie fun, but Wiseman has no desire to include humor. There’s literally only one moment in the whole film where I chuckled. It’s in the middle of one of the 857 big action sequences and Quaid and Melina (Jessica Biel) have just dropped into an elevator.

“Is this going down?” Quaid asks of the stunned riders.

One chuckle.

One.

I’m not going to spend much time discussing the differences between the Wiseman and Verhoeven films because the amount of fun generated in both films is the biggest difference. Let’s focus on the Wiseman film:

Doug Quaid lives in Australia (The Colony) and works in a factory in England (The United Federation of Britain). The rest of the world is a poisoned wasteland. How does Quaid get to work every day? Via the Fall, a big, honking gravity elevator that cuts through the planet. Doug has dreams about running away from cops with Jessica Biel. (Fittingly, these dreams are nightmares.) Doug is married to Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who tries to convince him that he should be happy. Even though their life together hasn’t turned out exactly as they dreamed, she’s still the most gorgeous woman on the planet and that has to count for something, right? (Note – that may not be exactly what she said, but that’s what I heard.) I’m not sure why it makes sense for Doug to visit Rekall and have fake memories implanted in his head when he’s having nightmares, except that these dreams leave him with the feeling that he should be doing something more with his life.

His work pal Harry (Bokeem Woodbine) plays the class card and wants to know if Doug thinks being a factory worker is something to be ashamed of, and Doug says No (though he means Yes), and then goes and visits Rekall, where John Cho implants the spy program in his body. Then everything goes “wrong,” meaning that Doug gets the exact experience he’s paying for, but he doesn’t have any fun because he decided to be a double spy instead of being a guy married to Kate Beckinsale.

Once things start to go bad, TOTALL RECALL simply becomes a lesser version of The Bourne Identity. Doug is on the run, trying to figure out what’s going on and who he really is, and he teams up with one woman as the government chases him. It’s not as skillfully made as Bourne is, and there’s a real herky-jerky quality to the film: everybody hurries up to do a bunch of shooting and running, then the narrative stops so Doug can find something that advances the plot, then everyone hurries back to the running and shooting.

After things go wrong at Rekall and Doug returns home, Lori decides it’s time to attack him and bring him in. So they fight. And fight. And run. And fight. And jump. And shoot. And fight. It’s a very good action sequence, first in their apartment and then through the rooftop streets of the Colony. (The Colony and UFB are elevated regions, so there’s multiple layers to the city’s layout.) I do feel it goes on a bit too long – in an action sequence you should never be wondering, “When is this going to end?” – but it’s good stuff.

None of the actors here have an abundance of personality and that hurts the film, too. Farrell, Beckinsale, and Biel are all good, but they don’t move me. I’m never on Doug’s side here. I’m not rooting for him. And not just because I’m rooting for Beckinsale, either, but because I just don’t care about Doug’s plight. One, I know that within the confines to the story his experience is a fake, and two, he’s a nice guy but not a compelling guy. Farrell has a sense of humor and I would have liked to see more of that put into the film.

And by “more,” I mean, “any.”

The best chemistry in the film comes between Beckinsale and Biel, and I wish we would have gotten more with the two of them going at it instead of Doug serving as the meddling third wheel. Farrell is a much better actor than Schwarzenegger, but he’s not a more fun actor to watch, and the script here doesn’t take advantage of Farrell’s talents. I think RECALL perhaps reveals why it will be so hard to reboot Scwarzenneger’s films – the man might not be a good actor, but he’s a huge personality. It’s tough to find actors who can shine that brightly

RECALL isn’t a very deep film. There’s a decent backdrop of politics, with the rich UFB government manipulating a war against the poor Colony workforce, but it’s all handled with the skill of a butcher using a chainsaw. There’s a good visual look to the cities, and plenty of well-executed action sequences (especially the magnetic car chase). All the actors do what they can with the roles they’ve been given, but the roles are all rather simple.

TOTAL RECALL can never escape that sense that it’s just a poor copy of other films and stories.

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And if you like good sci-fi action stories with strong female leads, please check out my 2011 novel,HARPSICHORD AND THE WORMHOLE WITCHES.

Harpsichord & the Wormhole Witches. The First Novel of the Deep. Now Available at Amazon.com in Paperback. From Atomic Anxiety Press.

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING (3D): I’m Not Going to Complain About 90 Minutes of Kate Beckinsale in a Catsuit …

Underworld: Evolution (2012; in 3D) – Directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – Starring Kate Beckinsale, Sandrine Holt, Theo James, Michael Ealy, India Eisley, Stephen Rea, and Charles Dance.

… but I will complain about nearly everything else in this dreary, tired shoot ‘em up.

UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING does not do for 3D what it does for catsuits.

Look, I’m never going to get tired of Kate Beckinsale. Ever. Even if she wasn’t jumping around looking all bad ass in her leather and latex catsuit, she’s one of the most stunningly beautiful women walking. That’s awesome, but that’s not enough to make a movie awesome, and unfortunately UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING is just not a very good movie.

I don’t really want to talk to much about the movie, and not just because there’s not a lot to talk about. The film jumps the story 12 years into the future because … well, because that’s the number someone pulled out of a hat. There’s no real discernible difference in this world. There was a “Purge,” where humans went all crazy killing all the vamps and wolves they could and driving the rest underground. They put Selene (Kate Beckinsale), Michael (Scott Speedman, who’s not in the film, but whose face was used to make it look like he was), and their daughter Eve (India Eisley) in cryogenic suspension and do all kinds of tests on them to come up with evil science-related stuff. Selene and Eve escape and then …

Then the shooting starts. It stops an hour or so later.

When the film does the franchise’s trademark shots of Kate looking sexy and bad-ass (usually in shots involving smoke, slow-mo, and her icy-blue enhanced eyes), AWAKENING is a reasonable enough facsimile of the first two movies to not be a waste of your time, but even the action sequences here seem tired and dated. Selene can walk around in the sunlight now, and the film takes advantage of this by … *grumble* … by having two scenes take place in the sunlight. One takes place in a car when the film establishes that Selene being in sunlight is a big deal. The second is when she gets out of the car and walks into a building.

That’s it.

What’s the point of her having these new powers if you don’t take advantage of it?

What’s worse is that most of the action scenes take place in dingy, cramped, dark settings: a vampire coven’s underground lair, an abandoned building, a pier, a rooftop, a science lab, and the big finale takes place in … a parking garage.

Honestly.

All of it creates a claustrophobic feel to this film, a feeling made worse by the 3D.

Which gets me to what I really want to talk about: 3D. I haven’t seen a 3D movie since Captain EO. Yeah, Captain EO. And after watching AWAKENING, I really don’t have a lot of desire to see another one.

Now, I am completely aware that UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING does not represent the finest and highest quality 3D technology the world is capable of producing. And were a film (like Hugo, for instance) made to take advantage of what 3D has to offer, I would gladly pay my money to see it, but AWAKENING does nothing with the technology that makes the use of it seem the least bit worthwhile. I mean, big deal, some shards of glass fly at my face. A werewolf sticks his snout in mine.

It doesn’t add anything to my experience.

In fact, it hurts the experience. Perhaps my “Real D 3D” glasses are to blame, but I’ll take a crisp, bright image in 2D over a muted, dull image in 3D any old day of the lunar calendar. At several times during the film I actually took the glasses off and just watched the film without them. I kept waiting for the sequence where it would all pay off, but it never arrives. I’m sure the extra $2 I paid (well, that the person I went with paid) to watch the 3D version helps the bottom line, but a bad experience hurts the bottom line of every film that comes along after this that has the 3D option.

I’ll offer two caveats to this: One, when we left the theater there was a massive line waiting to get in. My guess is that those people were there to see the 3D version of Phantom Menace because what else is in the theaters right now that could get that many people to wait in a huge line in the middle of a day (even a Saturday) in Reno? Perhaps my dissent puts me in the minority. There’s no shortage of 3D movies being released, so obviously there’s an audience for them, but a movie like AWAKENING just feels like a 2D movie with 3D tacked on.

The second caveat is that the 3D trailer for Wrath of the Titans looked much better than anything offered in AWAKENING, so it is completely possible that I just happened to sit through one of the worst examples of what the current tech can do.

All of the above being true, I didn’t have a completely horrible time. No, AWAKENING isn’t a good movie, but it is a mildly diverting one. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to give Selene a kid to worry about (for the fifth film, how about we give her nothing to worry about and just let her kick ass?) and I’ve completely had it with the vampire/lycan hybrid angle, but if you’re either a fan of the franchise or a fan of catsuits, there’s nothing else in the theaters right now that offers both. AWAKENING isn’t anything it doesn’t advertise itself to be, but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically good.

But, hey, 90 minutes of Kate Beckinsale. I’ll see anything she’s in, catsuit or not.

Well, anything except Pearl Harbor.

VAN HELSING: I Am Hollow

Van Helsing (2004) – Directed by Stephen Sommers – Starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Will Kemp, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Shuler Hensley.

Seven years on and VAN HELSING still reeks of bad stew.

There’s no reason why this film shouldn’t have been a blast given the inclusion of Sommers (hot, at the time, off the first two Mummy movies), Hugh Jackman (hot, at the time, off the first X-Men movie), Kate Beckinsale (hot, at the time, because she’s always hot), Richard Roxburgh, a triumvirate of horror movie monsters (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein), and an ample CGI budget, and yet the film is little more than a moderately attractive clunker with a pretty decent score by Alan Silvestri.

Why did it fail?

The most obvious problem with VAN HELSING is that it reeks of derivativeness. Right off the top there’s Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing, who’s been crafted as a Victorian Wolverine. Van Helsing is an anti-hero, a killer working on the side of good with a mysterious past, troubled memories, and (once he gets bitten by a werewolf) an inner beast that he struggles to contain.

How’s Van Helsing different? Well, he’s got long hair. And he wears a coat. And a really stupid hat. Honestly, I’m so tired of the black duster/leather jacket look anywhere outside of a western. Hugh Jackman can’t pull it off. Nic Cage can’t pull it off. That dude on the cover of the Jim Butcher books can’t pull it off.

Just stop.

So we’ve got Victorian Wolverine running around, working for some secret religious organization housed at the Vatican and called the Knights of the Holy Been Here Seen This Already. Van Helsing walks into a confessional and a James Bond Q sequence breaks out as we watch Carl (David Wenham) show off a bunch of new weapons that makes jokes about using. It’s such a tired and played out sequence that your finger starts itching for the remote control.

Then there’s Kate Beckinsale’s Anna, who comes off as the lesbian love child of her own Selene from Underworld and Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle. She talks with such a ridiculous accent that Kevin Costner is jealous. “I vill talk like dis for de entire picture show, Van HELLLLsing.” Honestly, why bother with accents in a movie like this? Is anyone going to go home from watching this in the theater going, “Man, VAN HELSING was the f*cking bomb, but, geez, Kate Beckinsale couldn’t even do a Transylvanian accent? What a joke.” Dumb. Just dumb. Like so many decisions in this movie it’s just a dumb decision. No one is going to care. And if you’re worried they will? Easy. She’s part of a family that Dracula wants to eradicate. Send her to boarding school in England, for heavens-to-backstory’s sake.

I’m sure someone with money at Universal saw a team-up of Wolverine and Selene running around in a movie done by the Mummy guy as a Can’t Miss. But it misses badly.

And I think the biggest problem is Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing.

Now, I’m not hating on the dude. I like him as an actor just fine and he’s perfect for a movie like this, but the mix of Sommers and Jackman creates a very character with a conflicted tone. At times, Van Helsing is quick with a quip, but at others he’s so overwrought and serious that you wonder if he’s embarrassed to be in a popcorn flick.

Maybe the problem lies with Sommer’s creation of the character. Maybe he didn’t want to do Brendan Fraser Redux with his main star but removing an overblown character with a somber one hurts the unbelievability of the movie. Fraser is having such a good time in The Mummy that his energy and charm propels you through the ridiculousness of certain situations. Because he’s got his tongue-planted-firmly and all that, you like him and because you like him you want to like the movie.

Jackman’s Van Helsing could offer the same charm because Jackman shows in the random scene here or there in VAN HELSING that he can bring that same lightheartedness, but the film fronts the dark and mysterious aspect of Jackman’s character in a nod towards realism and that, in turn, makes the unbelievable seem hokey as opposed to fun. Because Van Helsing isn’t having fun or taking note of the absurdity of what’s happening, when the absurd happens (such as during the horse carriage chase sequence) I just roll my eyes. (Figuratively, not literally – who actually rolls their eyes anymore? It’s a lost gesture.).

Van Helsing doesn’t look like he’s having fun. He doesn’t look like he wants to be here and if he doesn’t, then why should we care?

Thirty-four minutes into the film it’s obvious this film is not going to please. Through the first 34 minutes we’ve had four action sequences and a totally unnecessary infodump sequence (the aforementioned James Bond Q sequence). The movie opens with a nice idea – a black and white storming the castle sequence with angry villagers raiding Castle Frankenstein as the good Doctor is trying to bring his creation to life – but it never really comes together because there’s too much going on. We’ve got Dr. Frankenstein doing his thing but then Dracula shows up and Igor betrays Frankenstein and I started to instantly get the feeling that the film was just tossing anything familiar it could get its hands on up on the screen. It’s like no one involved in the production had a “2 AM Cool Idea Filter” to stop those ideas that seem good as a concept but fail in execution.

Just talk out that last paragraph. You’ve got Frankenstein doing his most famous bit but then Dracula shows up and Igor switches sides as the villagers are rioting outside … sounds perfectly cool but it doesn’t come together. It’s all played too seriously. When the scene is over we shift to color and get the title card, “One Year Later.”

What?

It took one year to go from black and white to color?

We get our intro to Van Helsing as he chases down Mister Hyde through a big fight sequence. Then it’s on to the Vatican for the Q sequence, then we jump to Transylvania where we’re introduced to Anna and her brother Velkan, and then we get a big action sequence where Anna and Van Helsing team up to fight lady vampires. It just doesn’t work.

Action, action, infodump, action, action.

Serious, quipster, quipster, serious, serious with a dash of quipster.

It’s not fun and that’s VAN HELSING’s biggest crime. Even when Jackman is quipping, he does it in a droll manner that might make you smile thin but not smile broad. There’s so much thought put into elaborate CGI action sequences and so little into what the end result of their work is going to look like on the screen that it just frustrates you. I don’t ever feel like they really know who Van Helsing is and so we get this disconnected, disjointed character that has no appeal. He’s not cool, he’s not dangerous, he’s not really tortured, and he’s simply not engaging. I don’t care what happens to him.

Richard Roxburgh is fantastic as Dracula and he actually seems to be having a good time, so we’ve got the inverse of the Mummy formula here, where the bad guy has the mega personality and the hero has the flat personality. When asked by one of his brides if he has a heart about them, he responds gleefully that, “Of course not. I have no heart. I am hollow,” in a wonderfully campy manner. Maybe if Kate Beckinsale’s Anna wasn’t also so damn dour and glum and tortured it wouldn’t seem like such a disconnect between the fun Dracula and the boring Van Helsing, but they’ve overloaded her character with such a heavy backstory that she can’t offer anything but dourness.

Is this done purposely to mirror Selene? Was there enough time between the two movies for this to be done on purpose?

The same disjointed conception of character affects Anna, too. On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe she’s this sword-wielding bad ass who can take care of herself, and yet every time she gets in danger, she starts quivering and shaking and being all afraid. Why? The most egregious affront to her character comes during the big final battle when she’s squaring off against the last remaining lady vampire (she has a name but you’ll remember her as “the redheaded one”) and she gets saved by … wait for it … Frankenstein’s creature crashing through the window.

Circumstance. F*cking circumstance.

It’s such garbage.

Even the key to victory is achieved through circumstance. People have been trying to kill Dracula for 400 years and no one can do it. Silver doesn’t work, crosses don’t work, fire doesn’t work, terminal boredom doesn’t work. So what’s the key to killing him?

You’ve got to be a werewolf to do it. And, oh, lookee there, Van Helsing got himself bit by Anna’s werewolf brother. How lame is that? How about having them figure it out and Van Helsing allowing himself to get bit?

Further showing that the film doesn’t want you to have a good time, they deliver a limp ending that sees Anna getting killed by the Van Werewolf and then a sad hero gets to literally see Anna being reunited with her family in Heaven. And by “in Heaven,” I mean the clouds in the sky.

VAN HELSING is an attractive enough looking film that it’s not a horrible watch, but it’s certainly not a very good movie. Poorly conceived characters in a poorly executed story with a decent visual look makes for an forgettable film.