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.

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.