DOOMSDAY: The Hounds are Hungry

Doomsday (Unrated version; 2008) – Directed by Neil Marshall – Starring Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins, Malcolm McDowell, Alexander Siddig, David O’Hara, Craig Conway, Adrian Lester, Chris Robson, Darren Morfitt, MyAnna Burning, and Sean Pertwee.

We live in the Age of Hyperbole. It seems one cannot turn on the TV or radio or look on the internet without some new movie or television show or sports team being heralded as the Greatest or Worst Thing Ever. There are some things, however, which are immune from hyperbole, which still live up to whatever lofty praise or abyssal condemnation even the most adjective- and hype-addicted hack lays at their feet:

The transcendent exaltation of Beethoven’s 9th.

The magnificent roar of the spectacle that is the start of a Formula 1 race.

The call to arms of the St. Crispin’s Day Speech from Henry V.

The heavenly grace of the Pillars of Creation.

The hotness of Rhona Mitra.

If there were a way to digitally insert the 2008-2009 version of Ms. Mitra into every movie ever made, I might be offended, but I wouldn’t complain.

I offer this as evidence of my own potential insanity. DOOMSDAY is Neil Marshall’s third film and it is not well-loved by critics or the public. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, DOOMSDAY has a 50% rating with critics and a 46% rating from the public. In contrast, I kinda love it. While not the greatest movie ever made, DOOMSDAY has plenty to appease me: Rhona Mitra in a post-apocalyptic setting fighting refugees from both Mad Max and King Arthur, plenty of stylistic violence, and a pretty decent car chase featuring a Bentley Continental GT jumping through a bus.

DOOMSDAY is not a funny movie to watch as there’s precious little humor spread throughout the tale, so I wouldn’t call it a great popcorn flick, but if you’re looking for a good, serious, sci-fi actioner, DOOMSDAY will foot the bill. There is a definite “throw everything against the wall” feel to the film as plenty of scenes in this movie make you think of other films: Mad Max, Escape from New York, Omega Man, A Boy and His Dog, etc. (Heck, even two characters are named “Carpenter” and “Miller” as nods to the directors John Carpenter and George Miller.) It works for me, though, because Marshall makes them all his own. Even though there are nods to other movies, it’s all filtered through Marshall’s lens and DOOMSDAY’s worldview.

The premise here is that Scotland was infected with the Reaper Virus, which spread like crazy, turned people nuts, and then killed them. The British government put up a wall and locked all the Scottish inside to quarantine the virus. The last person out is a little girl, who only got out because a soldier jumped down to offer her his seat. Twenty-seven years later, the little girl is all grown up. She’s a bad-ass cop and looks just like Rhona Mitra, so when it’s discovered that the Reaper Virus has reappeared inside London, Prime Minister Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) and his right hand man, Canaris (David O’Hara) ask Top Cop Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins) to send his best man into Scotland to look for a cure, his only real option is Major Eden Sinclair.

The goal for Sinclair and her team is to track down a scientist named Kane (Malcolm McDowell), who was the top scientist working on a cure from inside the Scottish quarantine zone when the nation was sealed off. The reason Hatcher and Canaris think Kane has developed a cure is that three years ago they discovered there are still people walking around so, obviously, there must be a cure.

Sinclair and her team go through the wall and into Scotland in a vehicle that looks like was leftover from Aliens. DOOMSDAY doesn’t do too much messing around as the first building they enter they’re quickly attacked by the Marauders (the Mad Max refugees). The Marauders attack style is to show up in massive numbers, scream, yell, charge, and die.

Sinclair’s team starts dying out quickly so you don’t have to bother learning their names, and to the film’s credit, Sinclair is captured by the marauders in this first encounter. She’s taken to their stronghold, where Sol (Craig Conway) beats her up a bit and then tells her she’s their ticket out. Kane has told everyone that there’s nothing left alive in the outside world, but Sol doesn’t believe him. After he does his crazy man routine on Eden, he goes outside where they roast (literally) Dr. Talbot (Sean Pertwee) alive, and then carve him up like Sunday dinner and eat him.

Because they’re cannibals.

Eden escapes, because she’s a bad ass, and kills Sol’s main squeeze Viper (Lee-Anne Liebenberg), because she’s a bad ass, and then takes a fellow prisoner with her, because that prisoner is Cally (MyAnna Bunning), because Cally happens to be Kane’s daughter. After they get out of the city, they head into the woods, which leads them to Kane and his King Arthur leftovers for a medieval repeat of what we just saw. Kane tells them he never developed a cure, but they were naturally resistant to the virus.

Whoops.

They escape here, bust a Bentley out of storage, and then head out on a car chase, which ends with the bus exploding and Sol losing his head. Eden calls in Canaris (Hatcher killed himself when he feared he was infected), gives them Cally (they can derive a cure from her blood) and the one remaining member of her team, but Sinclair stays behind because she wants to track down her mother’s old house. At the end of the film, she delivers a disk to Nelson that she recorded with her fake eye (did I forget to mention she has a fake eye?) that helps bring Canaris down, because Canaris was all in favor of not using any cure until after enough people in London have died to cull the herd that is the population of London.

The film ends with Sinclair claiming leadership of the Marauders, which doesn’t really sound like an awesome time to me, but does set up a sequel we’ll never see because not enough people liked it or saw it.

Assh*les.

In truth, there’s nothing special about DOOMSDAY that makes me hate you for not liking it, but for me, it hits enough notes that it makes for a good, solid, post-apocalyptic action film. I just bought the Blu ray out of the $8 bin (actually, the $7.88 bin) at Walmart and it’s a slick watch. DOOMSDAY moves fast, hits hard, looks great, and it has Rhona Mitra kicking ass. It doesn’t have the style or narrative strength of something like 28 Days Later, but if you like these post-apocalypse stories like I do, DOOMSDAY delivers.

BLUE THUNDER: If You’re Walking on Eggs, Don’t Hop

Blue Thunder (1983) – Directed by John Badham – Starring Roy Scheider, Malcolm McDowell, Daniel Stern, Candy Clark, and Warren Oates.

Watching BLUE THUNDER now it’s hard to say what would be more anachronistic if this film popped up in your local 2011 movie house: an action movie starring a middle-aged non-action star like Roy Scheider, or a movie about a helicopter.

BLUE THUNDER is a weird movie; on the one hand it’s a cop movie about a grizzled vet who gets suspended and uncovers a major criminal plot, but then there’s that kick-ass helicopter, which doesn’t really do much ass-kicking. It’s much more a cop movie than an action movie, but nothing about this film feels like it needs to have been made for the big screen. The helicopter is far less interesting than the death of a mayor’s aide, but the helicopter gets the bulk of the screen time.

I could never fully embrace BLUE THUNDER, but what makes the film worth watching is the performances of Roy Scheider and Daniel Stern (with a shout-out for Warren Oates, who plays one of the most stereotypically grizzled captains you’ll ever see). Scheider doesn’t fit the mold of today’s action star, but he’s an engrossing performer at this point in his career, able to walk that fine line between being the best and being unhinged, and he does his best to make Frank Murphy an engaging character. More comfortable in the air then on the ground, Murphy (Scheider) is a compelling figure, but Bruce Willis will do this role a hundred times better when DIE HARD comes along five years later. Murphy is a Vietnam vet who maybe is going a little bonkers; he can’t get past what happened in Nam on a helicopter he flew, so when he sleeps he dreams about it and sweats. Nothing from that earlier moment really plays an important role in the film, other than the fact that one of the soldiers who tossed the Vietnamese dude out of the copter to his death was Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell).

Cochrane ends up being the current pilot for Blue Thunder, and Scheider is brought in because the army is throwing the locals a bone and letting them get involved. These two hate each other, which manifests with McDowell trying to kill Scheider by monkeywrenching a helicopter Frank is going to pilot during a tryout.

The tryout, it should be noted, takes place over the city of Los Angeles, which means Cochrane isn’t that smart – if Scheider crashes the copter and gets killed, or kills civilians, there’s going to be an inquiry, which will bring more heat than his governmental band of thugs should want.

BLUE THUNDER’s biggest problem is that the plot is too fragmented and coincidental; it probably should have either concentrated on the murder of the mayor’s aide or the personal vendetta between Murphy and Cochrane but by combining them, by making Cochrane involved with the people who are behind the murder, the film tugs in two directions – Murphy solving the crime and Murphy getting vengeance on Cochrane. Murphy finds out about halfway through the film that Cochrane is involved in the crime, which robs us of that mystery, and then doesn’t adequately bring the Murphy/Cochrane rivalry to a head because it’s so black and white.

The film also does really silly things, such as having Murphy and Lymangood (Daniel Stern) gather this big piece of incriminating evidence against Cochrane and his buddies while inside Blue Thunder as they hang silently outside and office building’s window (and McDowell’s look of “oh sh*t!” surprise, but then landing the bird and going through a convoluted cloak and dagger bit to get the video tape of the incident to the media. It’s stupid – they’ve already kept the copter out longer than they were supposed to and this info they’ve gathered is incredibly powerful, so why they don’t just take Blue Thunder right to the news station and hand deliver the tape is beyond me. Well, it’s not beyond me since the movie still has a good half hour and the bulk of the film’s action to go, but it’s a dumb decision.

The movie also spends a lot of time building Blue Thunder up, but then fails to capitalize on the helicopter’s awesomeness. We see it do little things, but given that Cochrane comes after Blue Thunder is a small, dorky helicopter that looks like the one TC uses on Magnum, P.I., how awesome are we really suppose to think it is?

Why the filmmakers thought Cochrane in a dorky helicopter would provide adequate villainy for the film really is beyond me. They should have had Red Thunder or Black Thunder or Mauve Thunder waiting in the wings so we’d get an appropriate battle and a real nemesis battle. Instead, at the film’s most climactic moments, we’ve got Murphy in the most advanced helicopter in the world, and Cochrane in a bubble copter with machine guns. It’s not a good fight.

We get a scene early on when Murphy and Lymangood fly out of their area so they can spy on a naked woman stretching because …?

Because the movie wanted to show some ass and boobs, I suppose. How tough would it have been to have them spying on the mayor’s aide and then watch her get attacked from their weaponless copter, unable to do anything? Doing so could have condensed the plot in a meaningful manner and offered a tighter narrative push.

Murphy also cares so little for public safety that it’s hard to think he hasn’t come undone, but we still root for him because Cochrane keeps saying, “Catch you later” in the most annoying manner possible. When the military sends some F-16s after him with heat seeking missles, Murphy tricks the missiles into detonating in an OFFICE BUILDING! Nice one, Officer Bin Laden.

Scheider does what he can to make Murphy compelling and when he’s on-screen the film is a long way from terrible, but he can’t do anything about the rest of the movie, which fails to ever … wait for it … get off the ground. Oh, snap!

BLUE THUNDER is worth a watch for Scheider and Stern, and the helicopter is undoubtedly cool, but the film feels more like a missed opportunity than an enjoyable watch.