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.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: You Spoke Once of Wanting to Meet Your Demon

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) – Directed by Stephen Norrington – Starring Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Peta Wilson, Tony Curran, Stuart Townsend, Shane West, Jason Flemyng, and Richard Roxburgh.

What’s most disappointing about THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN isn’t that it’s awful, but that Stephen Norrington comes really close to making an honest-to-goodness good film. But LOEG isn’t a good film; at best it’s a diverting afternoon watch for me, and the hope I have is that it’s the afternoon watch for plenty of kids, who then explore these characters in other venues. Because LEAGUE is a little boy’s dream come to life; watching the movie is like watching what a little kid sees in his head when he plays with all of his various toys at once.

As you know if you’ve been kicking around the Anxiety for a bit, I don’t judge films by how well they stay true to the source material; I judge them on their own merits, and if they fall short I’ll sometimes look to the source material to try and figure out what went wrong. LEOG isn’t the comic book, and if you come to this movie wanting the Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill series to pop to life on the screen, you’re not going to get it. Norrington’s film treats these characters as pulp heroes instead of Moore’s more literary take on them; Moore gives us people who are largely on the downside of their careers, while Norrington seems obsessed with the eternal vitality of characters. Moore is interested in what happens to the characters after they leave the pages of the novels we’ve read, while Norrington’s interest is largely to create an actual all-star team. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Norrington’s approach – it just ends up less successful than I’d like.

It’s 1899 and the world is on the brink of a World War. Some evil dude called the Fantom is attacking both the Brits and the Germans, who blame each other. The Brits have a secret plan, though. They’re going to assemble a new version of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the key to this plan is recruiting legendary adventurer Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery) to head up the mission. A British government agent heads to Africa, where Quatermain is busy hanging out with some other old fogeys. Quatermain doesn’t want anything to do with the Brits. But then some mysterious cowboys show up and start shooting and blowing things up, so Quatermain decides he’ll help.

Quatermain heads back to England, where he meets M (Richard Roxburgh), Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), and Rodney Skinner the Invisible Man who they don’t call the Invisible Man because they couldn’t secure the rights (Tony Curran, who played Vincent Van Gogh in one of my favorite all-time DOCTOR WHO episodes: VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR). M gives them the rundown of what’s what and they’re off to recruit Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend). Dorian doesn’t want to sign up, but then some more of the Fantom’s men attack, and so he does. We meet Tom Sawyer (Shane West), a member of the U.S. Secret Service who slipped into the ranks of the Fantom’s men so he could get into Dorian’s house and find out what’s what. After capturing Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), the League jumps into Nemo’s ship, Nautilus … and the film grinds to a halt.

So far we’ve had a few mediocre action scenes, but at least the film is moving somewhere. Part of the problem with LEOG is that the CGI is so false looking; I never feel like I’m in a real world here. Now, that’s not a deal breaker because LEOG is so clearly a fantasy. Because it’s a little kid’s fantasy, realism is never really on the table.

Once we get to the Nautilus, the film starts moving the pieces around the board; every character gets a bit of screen time and the film’s mystery starts coming into focus. Unfortunately, this is the most boring and uninspiring part of the movie. Mina and Dorian have a sexual history and if this were a more adult movie there might be something here. Unfortunately for me, it’s not and so the two characters allude to their shared past without generating any heat. They’re both immortal with qualifications: Mina is a vampire and Dorian can’t ever look at a particular picture of himself or he’ll die.

That picture leads to a pretty hilarious (maybe unintentionally so) exchange between Gray and Quatermain. When they were back at Dorian’s house, they climb some stairs that are lined with pictures. There’s a big empty spot right in plain view, to which Quatermain remarks, “There’s a picture missing,” and Dorian replies, “You don’t miss anything, do you Quatermain?”

Back on the ship, Quatermain and Sawyer are bonding and the scenes almost work. The problem is Shane West’s Tom Sawyer, who’s Southern accent feels like someone doing a Southern accent rather than someone who’s from the south. Again, though, this plays into the idea that this whole movie is really just a kid pushing his toys around in his backyard somewhere, and doing a southern accent himself. Quatermain has lost a son in the near-recent past (which is why he has no love for the British Empire) and starts to treat Sawyer with some fatherly affections. They bond over guns because they’re men, and the film’s best and worst scene comes at the same time. On the deck of the massive submarine, Sawyer comes across Quatermain when he’s shooting his rifle. Quatermain gives him a hard time about being American, which means his shooting strategy is to keep firing until you hit something. Quatermain shows him how to shoot his way, to take your time, to take account of the weather and then wait … wait … wait …

Sawyer decides to take this moment to not only ask about Quatermain’s dead son, but to ask, “Did you teach your son to shoot like this?”

While the camera remains focused on Sawyer, we can see Quatermain exit behind him. It’s a great moment for Quatermain and a decidedly stupid moment for Sawyer; what’s even more of a juxtaposition is that Norrington makes such a correct choice in how he barely shows Quatermain walking away, but such a dumb decision in how Sawyer asks the question. It makes me cringe at how ham-fisted West’s performance is and yet appreciate how professional Connery’s is, with Norrington’s direction caught somewhere in the middle.

The League starts to notice all sorts of things are missing, and so everyone naturally blame the Invisible Man because he’s a thief.

The Nautilus gets to Venice where the Fantom is going to blow the city into the water to start World War I, and the film starts to pick up a real pace again. There’s a bunch of solid if unspectacular action sequences that generally take too long to get through. Take the scene in Venice – the League piles into Nemo’s white sports car as the Fantom’s seemingly endless supply of henchmen fire at them from atop the roofs. How the henchmen knew what rooftops to be in is besides the point, of course – they’re there because the film needs them to be there. The scene is okay but overlong, and at some point you wonder if anyone went, “Jeez, it’s just a car driving down the road getting attacked from above. Maybe we should, I don’t know, give the bad guys a car?”

It’s in Venice where the team is successful in stopping the Fantom and also learns that the Fantom is really M. It’s a nice twist, and it’s probably the film’s best blend of characters from multiple stories from multiple generations. We’ve got M giving Connery, a former Bond, orders, but then M turns out to be Moriarty, the legendary nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. It’s clever and sets the film spiraling through the second half. M’s plan is to take a piece of what makes everyone special and then manufacture a new army of augmented soldiers; his spy turns out to be Dorian instead of Skinner. M is blackmailing Gray because he’s got the magic picture that Gray can never look at, but Gray doesn’t exactly seem conflicted by this turn of events.

The acting in LEAGUE is completely over the top – again like a kid might do playing with his action figures. The only actor who doesn’t fall in line is Connery, who spends the bulk of the film stalking through the film like a very angry, very old man. He snaps at M, at Nemo, at Mina, at Tom- hell, at everyone, and delivers a mean punch whenever he can.

Post-Venice, we get a bunch more decent if not memorable action sequences until we get to the film’s climax. It’s a good old fashioned storming the castle finale, and it ends when Sawyer uses Quatermain’s shooting technique to kill Moriarty as he tries to make his escape. Hooray.

I’d put THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in the same class as a film like Van Helsing; they’re good and you can get some thrills out of them, but in the end they just don’t quite become what they could be. Everything in LEOG a bit too clean and phony looking, the acting and writing both play it broad, and the action sequences merely fill a role rather than wow me.

DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT: I Was Having a Daymare

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) – Directed by Mel Brooks – Starring Leslie Nielsen, Peter MacNicol, Steven Weber, Amy Yasbeck, Lysette Anthony, Avery Schreiber, Harvey Korman, and Mel Brooks.

Compared to Mel Brooks’ riff on the Frankenstein myth in Young Frankenstein, DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT completely sucks.

Compared to Mel Brooks’ hilarious send-up of Westerns, Blazing Saddles, DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT completely sucks.

Compared to the last junior high school play you watched, DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT completely sucks.

Look, Mel Brooks has had a long and incredibly successful career, and I take little joy in ripping what appears to be the last movie he’ll ever direct, but DRACULA really is an awful film, full of tired jokes, lousy acting, and uninspired directing. So let’s just do this quickly and then move on to something else.

Too much of the humor in DRACULA is derived from funny voices. That’s right, in 1995, someone still thought funny voices could be the backbone of a major motion picture. Everyone has an accent, and because Brooks didn’t cast any actual British people to play British people, or hire American people to play British people convincingly, nearly everyone sounds like that guy in your office who does funny voices so often you knew he thinks he’s really good at it, but isn’t. Old veterans Mel Brooks and Harvey Korman can at least keep their accent consistent, and Leslie Nielsen doesn’t do a bad job despite overplaying the Transylvanian accent (but, really, how can you not overplay that accent?), but the younger cast members all sound absurd; it would be fine if this was a skit on Saturday Night Live, but over 90 minutes I just want to tell Steven Weber, Peter MacNicol, and Amy Yasbeck to shut it. Just play American – what’s the harm? There’s nothing in this film that has to be tied to the 19th century – none of the jokes or plot points actually need this film to be in London in 1893.

The acting is rather wretched, too. Brooks gives himself a far too prominent role and Steven Weber doesn’t have enough charisma to carry the film. Leslie Nielsen does what’s asked of him, but Dracula isn’t a very funny character and Nielsen doesn’t have enough screen presence to make this role work. Peter MacNicol is horrid, but that has as much to do withe the conception of the character as it does with his performance. He certainly doesn’t add anything positive to the film, however, as his sniveling act wears thin one scene after it debuts.

Brook’s directing shows no life, no energy, and no passion. DRACULA is a film that largely just sets a camera up one one end of a sound stage and lets the action take place right in front of it. There’s a couple bits with Dracula’s shadow and one with a mirror in which he has no reflection that are nice attempts, but they’re not enough to save the film. Everything unfolds here in a perfectly predictable pace and none of the actors every feel like they’re anything more than actors playing dress up. Maybe Brooks could have gotten better actors, but he definitely should have gotten more out of the actors he did hire.

There’s really not much more that I want to say. Maybe I’m just being generous, but when a talent like Brooks makes something this lame, and when that reel of lameness is likely the last thing he’ll direct, I’m content to just let it pass quietly by. DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT is an awful movie, and an unfitting end to the directing career of Mel Brooks.