A Four Film Review for the New Year

     Basic Instinct 2 (2006) cost 70 million dollars to make, lost 31.4 million at the box office.  A failure, financially and critically.  The late movie reviewer guru Roger Ebert assigned 1.5 stars out of four, an F Plus if it were a grade.  

     Sharon Stone is the plus in this film.  Every one of her scenes electrified me.  Her gaze is one of the greats of cinema, along with Monica Vitti.  The way she holds her eyes in this film reminds one of a predatory cat (some would joke, a cougar).  She returns as Catherine Trammell, a torrid novelist writing under the giveaway name, Catherine Woolf, a nod to the individualistic crankiness of Virginia Woolf, but also the name for another predator, a night hunter.  She drives off a pier with a footballer in the passenger seat.  She's engaged in receiving a finger-job from him, doing most of the work since he's paralyzed with a dose of ketamine.  She orgasms as the car flies to the water, it's like something in an opera directed by Ken Russell.  

     She escapes, leaving the athlete stuck in the grip of his uncooperative seatbelt and his inability to move due to the drug.  The image of the sports car going farther and farther into the murky brown Thames depths contrasts with Catherine's push towards freedom, air, and a new victim to ensorcell.

     She's a more interesting protagonist than Sonja (Rhona Mitra) in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009), the third in the Underworld series, although it takes place during a literally dark Dark Ages.  Sonja, it's a pity, could be a better character if she wasn't stuck with playing out a Romeo and Juliet scenario with the Lycan (think werewolf) Lucian (Michael Sheen), a servant of the vampires who leads a revolt against them.  By 2009, the trope of a military leader barking to his fighters about "freedom!" had become so solidified in big money moviemaking circles that the 35 million dollar film earned 91.4 million at the box office, riding perhaps off of the success of its predecessors.  

     All is dark blue, gray, black, dark red in Rise of the Lycans, the series' usual "color" scheme.  It's interesting, from an historical standpoint, to see the premise of vampires versus lycans in a pseudo-medieval setting, a hypergothic world where sunlight is a killer and blood is shed as easily as if it were the War on Terror.  

     Rhona Mitra's beauty, her full lips, her Southern European look and curves (she's a Londoner), contrasts with the overall dullness and grimness of the setting, a look and feel repeated in the modern times sequel, Underworld Awakening (2012), where everything is dark blue, black, gray, white (the vampires) and rain seems permanent.  There's a battle against humanity, which attempts to wipe out both lycans and vampires.  How we humans tried this futile endeavor I don't know.  It seems like a pretty stupid move on our part, just stirring up a pot of badness.  The film bludgeons the viewer with confusing situations, fights, intense spillage of gore, an amusement park ride that isn't amusing.  70 million dollars to make, like Basic Instinct 2, but grossing 160 million.  Damn!  That's successful!  We need more movies like this, less movies like the more interesting and well-made Basic Instinct 2!

     X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) in some ways is the best of the four films written about here.  Amber Heard takes the role of Jean Grey.  Hit "by a mysterious cosmic force" (like with the Fantastic 4 characters) her X powers grow exponentially; this, the dumbest part of the film but also what propels it forward.  She flirts with the dark side as represented by Magneto (Michael Fassbender), popular character Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) gets impaled early on, a pointless (pun intended) death that can only mean Lawrence must've been ready to move on from a blue-painted character she never quite brought to life in four X-Men movies.  What strikes me on this issue is Lawrence's superb acting abilities in less fantastic films (American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook) not given a chance to manifest in the Marvel Comics Universe.     

     Hans Zimmer's musical score is the reason to watch and listen to this X-Men film.  Atmospheric, a cut above most scores these days, a sonic drama throughout, creating tension and textures to scenes that might seem ordinary otherwise.  Jean Grey's transformation into a super-being is well-accompanied by music to make the audience uneasy.  It's wonderful to receive such a musical bonus in a comic book movie after seeing so many comic book movies lacking standout music.

     The main flaw here is the usual flaw with these films: action scenes that need to be trimmed by a few to several minutes each.  More emphasis on character development would be welcome, but the film depicts an alteration, an evolution in a character who isn't human by the end of the film, but is something akin to an archangel.  

     Dark Phoenix cost 200 million dollars, brought in 252.4 million at the box office.  A marginal success, I guess, although a net gain of 52.4 million in a sane world would be regarded as a big hit.

     The four films cost 375 million dollars, grossed 542.4 million for a net of 167.4 million dollars, or 32.6 million shy of a Dark Phoenix budget, but more than the budgets of Basic Instinct 2 and Underworld Awakening combined.  None of the four films is a standalone.  It seems as if the more a film is a sequel or a prequel, the more likely it is to have a huge budget.  On the other hand, sequels tend to degrade in quality from the original, at least in some ways, as in how they tend to become self-referential over time--"I've got a bad feeling about this," from the Star Wars films--taking away time from devotion to originality for each successive film in a series.

     Basic Instinct 3, were it ever made, would find Catherine Trammell in a different city, mind-fucking a different man who's confident about himself at the beginning but is made into her marionette by film's end.  Familiar ground.  The Marvel and Star Wars and I guess also the Underworld films pave over their familiar ground situations with ever newer and more distracting visual effects.  Human-forms becoming lycans makes for a pretty cool effect.  Jean Grey transforming into a light creature of air stirs the parts of us that believe in angels.  

     But of these four films, the one that touches on real life, Basic Instinct 2, takes the setting, London, the central situation--a woman turning the tables on her psychiatrist--and twists it into a suspense film with a twisted central character manipulating an even more twisted man, her doctor, drawn into Trammell's web so she can write about his downward spiral in her next bestselling novel.  A silly, pseudo-Hitchcockian plot, but nicely executed by the director Michael Caton-Jones and well acted by David Morrissey (the Governor in The Walking Dead) and especially by the great Sharon Stone.  

     Even so, four movies costing 375 million dollars.  Cinema needs to be scaled back cost-wise so it can breathe again, looking more like a world that isn't just computer generated, like the abysmal backdrops in the Underworld films.

        Vic Neptune