HERCULES: Of Pleasing Daddy, Selling Merhcandise, and a Motown Chorus

Hercules (1997) – The 35th Walt Disney Animated Classic – Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker – Starring Tate Donovan, Danny DeVito, James Woods, Susan Egan, Rip Torn, Bobcat Goldthwait, Matt Frewer, Hal Holbrook, Paul Shaffer, Wayne Knight, Keith David, Frank Welker, Roger Bart, and Charlton Heston.

HERCULES is what happens when you push your formula one step too far.

Disney’s 35th Animated Classic comes near the end of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, and I think the film works as Litmus Test of sorts. If you love all things Disney, there’s enough here to make HERCULES a rather enjoyable film, while if you are not a fan of the Renaissance, my guess is that HERCULES is going to grate on your ears and eyeballs rather harshly. For me, I like the movie without embracing it fully. There’s an overwhelming sense of the ghost of other films’ ideas here than adds a sense of sameness to the film.

To be clear, there are parts of HERCULES that I love. The Motown-singing Greek chorus is fantastic and adds both an interesting and unique vibe to the movie. When these talented, toga-wearing ladies are singing, HERCULES sparkles with energy and cleverness. Unfortunately, they’re not the focus of the movie. While there semi-frequent appearances help the film, they’re in a secondary position to Hercules’ story, and that’s where the film comes up short.

Hercules (Tate Donovan does the talking, Roger Bart does the singing) is the son of Zeus who gets poisoned by two minions of Hades (James Woods) and loses his immortality. Hades wants to conquer the world or Olympus or Canada or something and the Fates tell him the only person who can stop him is Hercules and only on one specific night 18 years from that moment when the planets are in alignment and Hades can free the Titans.

Of course.

Your patience with that level of plot contrivance is just the kind of Litmus Test I was referring to up above. When Disney movies are working, it’s easy enough to accept this kind of set-up as the necessary foundation that allows for the enjoyable story to take place on top of it. When a film isn’t working, however, the foundation sticks up like an eye sore, and that’s what’s going on here. By telling us that Hercules is destined to save the world (or Olympus or Canada or whatever), the film renders it’s big training sequences kinda irrelevant. Hercules wants to be a hero in order to regain his godhood, which will allow him to live on Olympus with the other gods. (Plus, because it’s a Disney movie, he has the requisite Daddy Issues that plague many of our heroes and heroines.) Herc trains with Philoctetes (Danny DeVito), a satyr who earns his place in the world by training heroes.

Phil is in career crisis mode, however, as his past champions – Achilles and Odysseus (or maybe he calls him Ulysses – it’s not important) – have let him down. Hercules proves himself to Phil, however, and his training begins. These training sequences are incredibly common in the sword and sandal films, of course, and HERCULES does score some points by echoing those films.

It’s one of the few times in the movie where there’s something for older fans, because whatever else HERCULES is, it’s a Disney film that’s clearly aimed at a young crowd. There are some adult issues in the film, but for the most part, this movie is going for as young a crowd as any modern Disney movie. Characters have very little sense of grey; other than love interest Megara (Susan Egan), the HERCULES is populated with folks who are overblown in their attributes. Even the characters shapes and sizes are exaggerated, and Zeus’ big, smiling face is creepy in its intense, bug-eyed jocularity.

Hercules himself isn’t very likable, either. He’s a nice kid with big powers and a clumsy persona, but as soon as he finds out his human parents aren’t his real parents, he ditches them to go off and make his biological daddy proud and win his way back into Heaven. His instant decision to ditch his adopted parents makes him come off as a bit of a dick and his relationship with Phil just sort of happens.

Which isn’t to say there’s no enjoyment to be had watching Phil and Herc run through obvious routines, just that it’s the kind of enjoyment I get from a program when I fall asleep watching something else and then wake up and don’t have the energy to get off the couch to get the remote to get my TV to another channel.

James Woods is entertaining as Hades, but it’s a typical Disney Big Ugly villain, just as Bobcat Goldthwait and Matt Frewer are good as Panic and Pain, but they’re typical wacky henchmen.

The one shining star of HERCULES is Megara, the love interest with shady intentions. She made a deal with Hades to save her boyfriend and then that boyfriend ran off with someone else, leaving her without her lover and with a debt to pay to the God of the Underworld. Meg gets run through the standard plays-him/falls-in-love-with-him plot, but there’s some actual conflict and character development here.

At the end of it all, HERCULES is neither good nor bad. Or rather, it’s both good and bad, with some enjoyable moments tucked in among a lot of familiar territory. What brings me back to HERCULES is the enjoyable mix of the Motown sound with the Greek setting. Unfortunately, the songs are mostly forgettable and the Greek setting rarely stands out. Watching HERCULES isn’t a waste of my time – it’s just not the best way I can spend it.

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And hey, if you like all ages stories, check out my kid’s novel ADVENTURES OF THE FIVE: THE COMING OF FROST. Available now in both paperback and for the Kindle.

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE: I’m Gonna Get My Applesauce Back

Punisher: War Zone (2008) – Directed by Lexi Alexander – Starring Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Julie Benz, Colin Salmon, Doug Hutchison, Dash Mihok, and Wayne Knight.

It’s fitting that Jigsaw is the villain for PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, as we have a third film starring the Punisher that just falls short of being something special, and more pieces for fans to pick from to assemble their ultimate Punisher film. Each of the three films – 1989′s Dolph Lundgren PUNISHER, 2004′s Thomas Jane PUNISHER, and now 2008′s Ray Stevenson WAR ZONE – are good movies, but all of them fall just short of being something truly special.

Yet there is a sense among Punisher fans, if you talk to them long enough, that all of the right pieces are here to make that really special film, they’re just not in the wrong place. For me, I think swapping Lundgren and Stevenson’s villains would improve both films, as Lundgren’s burnt out approach to the Punisher would benefit from the balance Dominic West’s cartoonish Jigsaw would offer, and Stevenson’s more focused, but shaken Punisher would benefit from being paired off with Jeroen Krabbe’s cool mobster. Perhaps the same could be said for John Travolta’s Howard Saint and Krabbe, too.

The more interesting question for me is whether we can argue that the Punisher has proven himself the most successfully adapted Marvel character to the big screen? Financially, of course, this is far from the truth, but if we look just at the quality of lead performances, the Punisher has starred in three rather good films made by three different directors and starring three different actors. Even if we factor in the TV movies, Captain America has been played by three actors, but only Chris Evans’ film has reached this level of creative success. Spider-Man has been played by three actors, too (even more when we factor in The Electric Company and Japanese series), but the Nicholas Hammond TV version iteration falls far short. Nick Fury has been played very well by two different actors, but Sam Jackson hasn’t been asked to carry a film, yet. Blade was played very successfully by Wesley Snipes and then … well, I haven’t seen the TV show, so I can’t really comment on Sticky Fingaz’s performance

Only the Bruce Banner/Hulk combo really stands in the Punisher class, as Bill Bixby, Eric Bana, Edward Norton, and Mark Ruffalo have all played the Green Giant’s alter ego to varying degrees of success, though Ruffalo has not yet been asked to carry a solo movie.

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is much like the Lundgren PUNISHER film in that it is an era-specific genre piece. The differences between the late ’80s and the late ’00s creates a different aesthetic in the film, as WAR ZONE is a slick, highly-stylized action flick that moves fast and hits more violently. WAR ZONE is a darker film in terms of its style as the graphic violence has been significantly turned up (we see face half-blown off, chairs jammed through people’s skulls, knifes jammed straight through the top of heads), but not in terms of its content. Lundgren’s Punisher was a man near the end of his rope, while Ray Stevenson’s Punisher is a man not quite there.

None of the three Punisher movies are purposely tied to one another, but if you can get past the variation in origin (here, we’ve got Frank Castle’s family killed at a picnic and not in a Puerto Rico massacre), the proper viewing order would go Jane, Stevenson, and then Lundgren, and I think that makes a pretty solid trilogy.

Actually, the proper viewing order would be: the Jane/Saint subplot, then Stevenson, then the Jane/Joan/Bumpo/Spacker Dave sequence, and then Lundgren.

Get on that, movie people.

WAR ZONE sees a Frank Castle in the prime of his killing life, but when he accidentally kills an undercover FBI agent, he decides he wants to quit. He tries to give the agent’s wife some money but she won’t take it, though he does start to develop a bond with the agent’s daughter. All of the acting they require Stevenson to do is in his wheelhouse, because Frank’s overall demeanor means he’s going to stand there looking angry and a bit forlorn 95% of the time, no matter if he’s cracking a joke, making a threat, or talking to the woman whose husband he accidentally killed.

The film builds its emotional core around the relationship between Castle and the little girl, and it’s effective. She reminds Castle of his own family, which makes him sympathetic without being heroic – a tact that the Jane film kept forcing on us.

Dominic West plays Billy “the Beaut” Russoti, who gets dumped into a glass shredder by Castle, and ends up with a mangled face, and he recasts himself as Jigsaw. Jigsaw is the worst part of the film, as he and his brother, Loony Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison) are sadistic, cartoonish killers. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re not all that much fun to watch, and they never really feel like proper threats to the Punisher.

There’s some good secondary characters here in the form of Detective Soap (Dash Mihok), Agent Budiansky (Colin Salmon), and Microchip (Wayne Knight), and really, when the Punisher and his cast of characters are on the screen, WAR ZONE is a highly enjoyable action film. It’s when Jigsaw and his minions are on screen that the film takes a nosedive in quality.

That doesn’t detract too severely from the overall quality of the film, however. I really like WAR ZONE’s dark story and its slick presentation. Some of the killing sequences are wonderfully rendered and provide the perfect mix of violence and over-the-top style. Ray Stevenson does an excellent job walking in Lundgren and Jane’s footsteps, and for the first time in all of the films, I get really excited at the idea of the violence to come. The brutality of what happens here hits home, and WAR ZONE gives just enough emotion to make this about more than simply killing a bunch of bad guys.

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE is like the perfect “back issue” movie. If I went to a comic shop and bought a bunch of PUNISHER back issues, WAR ZONE is exactly what I would want to find.

JURASSIC PARK: We’re Gonna Make a Fortune with This Place

Jurassic Park (1993) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Samuel L. Jackson, Bob Peck, Martin Ferrero, B.D. Wong, and Wayne Knight.

JURASSIC PARK is the quintessential summer blockbuster. Full of great characters, ideas, and story, it’s a highly quotable visual spectacle that leaves you on an emotional high. PARK is both easily consumable and incredibly satisfying.

My favorite scene in the film – and one of my favorite scenes in any film – comes when Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) first arrive on the island. Dr. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has picked them up at the copter landing spot and is wheeling them towards his big park’s HQ when they see their first dinosaurs. Spielberg masterfully builds to the moment, showing Grant’s eye-popping reaction shot, followed by Sattler’s eye-popping reaction shot, and then finally turning his camera around to show us a massive, magnificent Brachiosaurus eating from the top of a tree. John Williams’ score swells as the camera widens to show more and more dinosaurs moving around a pond. Grant and Sattler’s pure disbelief at what they’re experiencing when they see the dinos for the first time is like a grown up kid seeing everything they’ve always dreamed about in the flesh.

The beauty of this scene and the impact it has on Grant and Sattler always gets to me, and I always well up a bit at this moment. I was one of those kids who loved dinosaurs, who read everything I could about them, who endlessly imagined what it would be like to see one of them. The idea of dinosaurs walking the Earth again is, as an idea, an incredibly powerful one, and is, as an idea, something I wholly embrace.

Whether it’s an idea that should come to pass is, of course, the philosophical question at the heart of JURASSIC PARK.

Spielberg deftly weaves this question into the movie. Much like the Michael Crichton book the film is based on (Crichton gets a co-screenwriting credit alongside David Koepp), it’s Ian Malcolm who gets to pose the toughest questions about the existence of the enterprise, and Malcolm speaks in such a clipped, insightful manner that while his questions are profound, he doesn’t come across as pretentious. Well, okay, he does come off as pretentious, but disarmingly so; Malcolm is the kind of know-it-all jerk that you end up liking because he’s also just self-deprecating enough to make himself not only tolerable, but oddly likable.

Malcolm is completely in love with himself; his entire “rock star” persona is designed to front an image that he’s the coolest guy in the room, and he’s got the smarts to intellectually battle anyone who wants to challenge him.

Hammond has brought Grant, Sattler, and Malcom to his island because a worker was killed during a Velociraptor transporting accident. The island’s insurance company and its investors are worried enough that they know want experts to come in and sign off on the park. Company lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) joins them, and to Hammond’s surprise it’s Gennaro who sides with Hammond and the three scientists who line up against him after they take a mini-tour and see the birth of a raptor in captivity. Malcolm’s disagreement is philosophical, as he doesn’t think Hammond has earned the power he now wields: “You stood on the shoulders of giants and took the next step.”

It’s a bit of a weak argument, as this is what scientists have been doing for ages. A far more compelling question is raised when he asks Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

While they don’t spend an inordinate amount of screen time together, Hammond and Grant are set up as dino-loving opposites. Both of the men love the idea of dinosaurs being back, but where Hammond plunges ahead to make that reality a possibility without full recognition or concern for the consequences, Grant sees the inherent danger (both philosophically and physically) in bringing extinct animals back to life.

Hammond urges them to hold off their final judgment until they take the tour, but as further proof that Hammond is just a big kid with a billionaire’s bank account, he thinks it’s a grand idea to invite his grandkids along for the tour. Lex and Tim (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) aren’t bad kids, but they’re kids, and Alan Grant doesn’t like kids. So, of course, the film is going to pair Grant with the kids.

Hammond piles the 3 scientists, 2 kids, and 1 laywer into decked-out Ford Explorers and sends them into the park proper. The first stop is the Dilophosaurus area, but they don’t show up. The next stop is the Tyrannosaur paddock, but she doesn’t show up, either. At this point everyone is starting to get frustrated. In the control room, Hammond and engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) are busy monitoring everything in the park. Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), the computer programmer, is around, too, being a general nuisance. Nedry is planning to steal the dinosaur DNA for a rival company.

Complicating everything (and excellently raising the level of tension in the film), is an approaching storm that has narly everyone working on the island exiting on a departing boat. The storm creates several positives for the film. First, it gets all of the non-essential (to the plot) characters off the island. Second, it raises the tension by creating a sense of foreboding before things go awry with the dinosaurs, and third, it creates one heck of a massive rain storm to make the first night’s action sequences even more dramatic.

Before that storm hits, however, we’ve got a really powerful scene with a sick Triceratops. Bored with the tour, everyone ends up piling out of the Explorers when they see the sick dino. Grant leads the way to the animal, and it’s a fantastic scene for several reasons. It gives us a one-to-one, physical interaction between man and dinosaur, which allows us to fully grasp how big these animals are as well as feel that they’re real creatures and not just beautiful CGI renderings. Like Grant, the Triceratops was always my favorite as a kid, too. The sequence also shows us the scientists in action, and narratively serves to split Sattler from Grant.

With Sattler sticking behind to help with the Triceratops, Grant, Malcolm, the kids, and the lawyer head back to the Explorers. On their way back to HQ, Nedry shuts the power off, which stalls the vehicles. While they’re waiting for the power to come back on, the Tyrannosaur shows up and gives us the film’s signature action sequence as the T-Rex takes on the two Explorers.

It is a magical sequence as the T-Rex sniffs and nudges and roars outside the kids’ Explorer. The kids are too scared to keep still, which gets the T-Rex to attack their Explorer to get at them, and forces Grant and Malcolm to get out of their Explorer to help. It’s as iconic a sequence as you’ll find in a popcorn flick, and every bit as good as Spielberg’s best and most iconic moments in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws.

By the end of this first encounter with the T-Rex, Gennaro is dead, Malcolm is severely injured, and Grant, Lex, and Tim have fled deeper into the park.

Kids can often be so annoying that they ruin a film like this with all their shrieking and wailing and stupidity, but Lex and Tim make fine additions to JURASSIC PARK, and provide a strong narrative arc for Grant. It’s a bit simplistic to think he can go from hating kids to loving kids over the course of a day running away from dinosaurs, but Spielberg doesn’t shove it in our faces. The growth comes naturally over the course of the film, and Lex and Tim prove capable of taking care of themselves.

The film is full of great action sequences beyond the initial T-Rex sequence: Nedry vs. the Dilophosaurus, Muldoon (Bob Peck) vs. the Velociraptors, the kids vs. the Velociraptors, and the T-Rex vs. the Velociraptors. There’s also some less violent moments, too, such as when Grant and the kids wind up in the middle of a Gallimimus stampede. All of the dinosaurs are gorgeous to look at and it’s somewhat surprising that 19 years after the film hit the theaters (God I’m getting old), the dinosaurs still look every bit as incredible as they first did. I bet I’ve listened to John Williams score to this film more than I’ve listened to his Star Wars score, as the main JURASSIC PARK theme is every bit as good as the Star Wars theme, but even more uplifting.

JURASSIC PARK is a magnificent movie, as close to cinematic perfection as you can get. Breathtaking, action-packed, funny, full of great characters, great music, and a simple, but satisfying horror story, JURASSIC PARK is one of the most-watched films in my collection. Every time I watch it I get sucked into it all over again. I’ve always loved dinosaurs but they’re special to my childhood more than my adulthood. Just the idea that there were these massive creatures roaming the Earth millions upon millions of years before humans was fascinating, as was the idea (as cheeky as it might sound now) that dinosaurs were nowhere in the Bible. Dinosaurs offered an alternative narrative of the history of the planet that we were learning at Sunday morning mass and in CCD classes. Loving them led to learning about them, and learning about them led to questions about God and church and the history of life itself. As a kid, of course, this manifests as the tried-and-true, “Why are there no dinosaurs in the Bible?” question, but not getting a satisfactory answer led to more questions and more questions and the idea that what I was being taught was perhaps not the truth.

But really, I liked dinosaurs because they were big and awesome and cool-looking, and more than anything else I’ve ever seen, JURASSIC PARK recaptures that sense of wonder.

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JURASSIC PARK Review Index

JURASSIC PARK: We’re Gonna Make a Fortune with This Place
THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK: From Capitalist to Naturalist in Four Years
JURASSIC PARK III: This How You Play God