THE PHANTOM (2009): They Were Good People

The Phantom (2009) – Directed by Paolo Barzman – Starring Ryan Carnes, Cameron Goodman, Jean Marchand, Sandrine Holt, Cas Anvar, Ron Lea, and Isabella Rossellini.

I was prepared to hate the SyFy/Movie Network THE PHANTOM miniseries, but it’s actually a passable way to spend a few hours.

To be clear, this miniseries isn’t nearly as good as the Simon Wincer PHANTOM movie with Billy Zane, and it does verge dangerously close to being an angst-ridden piece of pretend-cool idiocy, at times, but the miniseries kept surprising me – every time I thought it was veering far enough off course that I was soon to hit the fast forward button, the story brought me back.

After the miniseries opens with a mom and her young kid being car chased through a city, the production enters full-flight, “let’s be hip” mode. Chris Moore (Ryan Carnes) is doing a parkour run through the city as people in a restaurant watch him on their laptop. It’s the kind of scene that makes me think of old people who are desperately trying to be hip to what the kids are doing but getting it very, very wrong. Chris’ friend, who follows along to videotape the proceedings, takes a bad fall and the EMTs arrive in the form of Renny Davidson (Cameron Goodman). Since Renny is young and beautiful and a redhead, you know she’s going to be the romantic interest.

There’s a whole trope of stunted adulthood here, as Chris and Renny look like teenagers but are actually young professionals (she’s an EMT and he’s in his final year of law school), but yet still live at home with their parents. It creates this weird, conflicted vibe in the program as we’re supposed to believe that Chris does parkour, is in the final year of law school, yet still has to call home to check in or his parents freak out like he’s a sixteen year old girl out for a night with a dude who drives a Firebird.

Yeah, you know what I mean.

An aside – Women should never date guys who drive Firebirds, post-1970 Mustangs, or Jeeps. Guys who drive Firebirds are in love with themselves, guys who drive Mustangs are in love with their cars, and guys who drive Jeeps are assholes.

This is a gross over-generalization.

This is true 99% of the time.

I really don’t know what the filmmakers were thinking with this conception of Chris because when a dude who’s about to graduate from law school is grounded by his parents … what the hell are we supposed to think of him? At least Renny’s relationship with her dad feels more adult-like, though I’m not sure why an EMT would feel the need to live at home with her detective father, and the film never bothers to explain it. At least we know Chris’ parents have put themselves into a precarious financial situation to fuel his legal training.

The narrative doesn’t spend any time worrying about this because after Chris and Renny have that typical first date where she makes him dinner and they never eat it because they’re too busy making out (I know I’ve had this first date countless times), he walks her home, and assassins sent by the Singh Brotherhood kill Chris’ parents. He finds them in the upstairs bathtub.

We’re a half hour into the miniseries at this point and I have no idea what the producers were thinking. It’s a mess where everything happens simply because the movie is trying to fast-track us through the set-up.

The good news is that once we get past this point and Chris realizes he’s really Kit Walker, and he’s ushered off to the Bpaa Thap team located on Bengalla Island, the narrative quickly improves. There’s way too much time spent getting everything in place – we have to sit through Kit learning about the history of the Phantom, his training exercises, the tension between the old way of doing things and the new high-tech means – but things aren’t horrible. THE PHANTOM is incredibly well-paced for storytelling of this kind and it’s always sending us forward at a quick pace, so even though we have to sit through predictable sequences, the program doesn’t dwell on them.

As Chris Moore, Ryan Carnes isn’t very good. He struggles with the personal relationship aspect of his character (you know, anything that involves actual emotions), but when he gets to Bengalla and he can just concentrate on being a TV action star, he’s not bad.

The Phantom’s costume is pretty darn ugly. THE PHANTOM is an attempt to modernize Lee Falk’s Phantom, and most of it works well enough, but this costume is doesn’t really work for me. It’s the mask that ruins it, really, but the rest of the costume is just sort of indistinct. It’s a good color combination with the purple and black, though. I wish Hawkeye’s Avengers costume had this kind of color interplay.

After all the training stuff is mostly done, Kit decides he’s got to get back home to stop the Singh Brotherhood from taking over the world through the hypnotic power of TV cable boxes. Yeah. Isabella Rossellini is the mad scientist and I don’t know why she’s here. You have to figure that Rossellini got paid more than scale, so why are the producers paying her for an average role instead of using that money for more effects? I don’t know.

Anyways, the Singh want her to use the cable box to hypnotize people so they can kill someone who has a plan to bring peace to the Middle East. Apparently, this is the one plan in eighty-five billion plans that will actually work because the Singh’s want this guy dead so they can make money.

Look, none of this is all that great, but I am surprised that this mini-series didn’t lead to a new ongoing show, because what’s here would work perfectly fine as a weekly show. You can see the formula at work here and there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have found a home on SyFy for a few seasons. While the whole production does come across as a bit amateurish, it’s heart is in the right place: there’s good action, fiendish villains, a beautiful, capable love interest, and as long as Carnes isn’t asked to carry too much of an emotional load, he’s effective enough.

I don’t know if I’ll ever watch this miniseries, again. When I’m jonesing for a Phantom fix, I’ll watch Wincer’s film 100 times out of a 100, but if you’re interested in seeing a decent modernization, you could do worse than spend a few hours with THE PHANTOM miniseries.

THE PHANTOM: Take the Girl, She’s Our Phantom Insurance

The Phantom (1996) – Directed by Simon Wincer – Starring Billy Zane, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Treat Williams, James Remar, Bill Smitrovich, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Patrick McGoohan.

Simon Wincer’s THE PHANTOM is a quietly great movie that’s perfect for a Saturday afternoon.

THE PHANTOM is exactly the kind of movie I want to relax with after a hard week at work. I want to plop on the couch and be transported into another world for some really good, enjoyable, fun action and adventure, and THE PHANTOM delivers this in spades. Well-paced, full of good (if simply rendered) characters, exciting action, beautiful locales, and infused with something akin to innocence.

It’s that last but that really makes THE PHANTOM stand out – there’s no ego here, no shame about what the material is they’re presenting to the audience, and Simon Wincer and Company have embraced the idea of a fun, all-ages romp and that’s what they deliver. The very idea of romance between Kit Walker/The Phantom (Billy Zane) and Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson) is handled in such a chaste manner that when she asks him to take off his mask so she can see his face, she has to assure him that she already knows who he is.

Wincer quickly moves through the origin story – a group of pirates kill a kid’s dad and he bails, washing up on shore where the Bengalla islanders take him in and train him to be the Phantom. For generations, the legacy is passed from father to sun, but no one outside of the tribe realizes this is the case. Instead, everyone thinks the Phantom is immortal, giving him the “ghost who walks” nickname. We meet the current Phantom when a few archaeology thieves led by Quill (James Remar) steal one of the three Skulls of Touganda for Xander Drax (Treat Williams).

Remar, Williams, and Zane are perfect examples of the excellent casting done for this movie. Remar has that shady, tough guy vibe down so we don’t need to spend a lot of time with his characterization. We get that he’s a bad dude, and that he’s evil enough to make a little kid drive a truck over a rickety bridge, but he’s not so evil that he’ll shoot the kid afterwards like his henchmen want.

Treat Williams is the best part of the film, completely embracing the over-the-top aspect of his villainy. He’s slick, smooth, and deadly, willing to be completely charming a second before he puts a knife in your back. He walks through the world like it’s here for his pleasure, but he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty when the time comes. Interestingly, it’s not more Phantom vs. Drax action that I would have preferred to see, but more between Drax and the film’s other villain, Kabai Sengh (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the head pirate. It’s this villainous showdown that has the most energy in the film, as Drax’s slickness comes up against Sengh’s harshness. Watching them spar back and forth in the film’s tensest moment (Drax has two of the three skulls and Sengh has the third) renders everyone else’s involvement momentarily moot.

“X-A-N-D-E-R-D-R-A-X,” he says easily, spelling out his name for Sengh. “It begins and ends with X.”

After Quill steals the first skull, we jump back to New York and meet Diana, the go-get-’em society girl who’d rather play in the world than sit safely at home. Her Uncle Dave (Bill Smitrovich) is a big shot newspaper publisher (for kids watching THE PHANTOM for the first time – newspapers used to allow people to make gobs of money) and encourages Diana’s adventure streak. When Dave is convinced that Drax is up to supernatural no good, he sends Diana to Bengalla to look for evidence. On the way there, her plane is highjacked by female air pirates, led by the hot and dangerous Sala (Catherine Zeta Jones).

Bits like this really make me dig PHANTOM. I mean, hot female air pirates, you know? What’s not to love. And then when they come aboard and demand Diana Palmer to show herself, Diana immediately steps forward.

It’s hard to watch PHANTOM and not wonder why Swanson didn’t have a bigger career. She’s got an easy toughness on display here; she gets forced into playing the damsel on occasion, but she’s never in distress. I love how the film doesn’t oversell the whole idea of, “I’m a woman and I can do it on my own,” because Diana so clearly is a woman doing it on her own in nearly every scene she’s in.

Zane plays the Phantom with that same kind of easy toughness, but there’s also a vulnerability here. He sees the ghost of his dead father (Patrick McGoohan) every so often, and the old man delights in giving his kid a hard time over losing the first skull and later when he seemingly lets Diana get away from him.

THE PHANTOM is a bright, fun romp. It’s produced and performed with just the right sense of flair. Everything looks good and there’s a point in the movie where I realized just how much fun it would have been to see a host of Phantom movies with our purple-clad hero taking his adventures all over the world. Unfortunately, the world box office did not respond to the filmmakers’ efforts. Despite costing a modest $45 million, THE PHANTOM only managed to bring in a pitiful $17 million at the domestic box office. (Box Office Mojo doesn’t have international figures listed.) SyFy tried their hand at taking Lee Falk’s hero to the small screen in 2010, but I haven’t seen it, and there’s always talk of a new big screen adaptation. I wish the new production well, but watching Wincer’s film it’s hard for me not to think that we had something special here that was not allowed to grow.