Lawless (2012)

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce

Director: John Hillcoat

Genre: Crime, Drama, Western

Rating: C

I was really disappointed by this movie.  There was a lot about it that should have been good - that could have been good - but ended up sadly failing.  I don't think I've ever actually watched a Gary Oldman movie that I didn't like before, and perhaps that's where this could have gone right.  Movie makers of the world, take note: more Gary Oldman is always a good thing.

Based on the book The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant (grandson and great-nephew of the Bondurant brothers featured in both book and film) Lawless takes us to Franklin County, Virginia during the Prohibition.  The film follows three brothers, Forrest (Hardy), Howard (Clarke), and Jack (LaBeouf) as they come up against the law, primarily in the form of Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Pearce).  The Bondurants are moonshine bootleggers who refuse to give a cut of their profits to the law, causing the law to begin to try to find ways to get rid of them - typical violent ways - pushing them towards a relationship with mobster Floyd Banner (Oldman).  Along the way both Forrest and Jack find love; Forrest in former Chicago dancer Maggie Beauford (Chastain) and Jack in the form of Bertha Minnix (Wasikowska), the daughter of a preacher (who I think might've been Amish or some similar religion).

To start, Lawless has an amazing cast.  With the exception of LaBeouf, who's movies tend to get mixed reviews, and Clarke, who I really don't know from anything else, there is an amazing cast here.  I mean, Jessica Chastain alone has won or been nominated in awards for almost every movie she's been in so far - and not awards like MTV Movie Awards, I mean BAFTAs and Oscars.  And that's without taking into consideration the fact that Gary Oldman is in this movie - Gary Oldman, who was described as "one of the best actors on the planet" by film critic Peter Travers.  When you see a cast like this, you should be able to expect greatness from a movie.  Something more than just the typical shoot 'em up type film.

In many ways, this is where Lawless fails.  It's trying to be more than your typical shoot 'em up type film but fails because it doesn't properly utilize its cast.  The best parts of the movie were the scenes with Chastain and Hardy or anything with Oldman, but Lawless wanted to focus more on LaBeouf and his adventures.  I haven't read the book, so I can't say what the source material does, but the story of the quiet and rough Forrest and his relationship with the far more sophisticated Maggie is a lot more interesting than anything Jack does.

What Lawless does with Jack is nothing short of predictable.  It's not really a shoot 'em up type film, but it's stereotyped of a lot of western and crime type movies.  Watching it you know what's going to happen long before it happens - at least when it comes to Jack.  There's a bit of unpredictability with Forrester, and a lot with Howard (who really, should be described as a drunk lunatic and thus by nature of his character is unpredictable), but the other stories... I know what's going to happen. It's obvious.  I usually try to avoid going into spoilers and talking about the endings (or at least not being graphic when I do so), but I feel like with Lawless I could detail the entire movie, right down to the end, and no one would be surprised about it - well, no one who watches movies at least.  Oh, and Oldman?  Completely under utilized.  He only had a handful of scenes, maybe two of which were actual speaking parts.  I loved his performance, but there definitely wasn't enough of it.  Once again: movie makers of the world please remember you can always use more Gary Oldman.

One good thing did potentially come out of my seeing this movie.  I now have a desire to read the book that it's based on.  If it's anything like your typical book-to-movie conversion - in which a great book becomes a rather shittastic movie - I think The Wettest County in the World could be a really interesting read.  It at least appears to have gotten better reviews on Goodreads than Lawless has anywhere.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Director: Christopher Nolan
Genre: Action, Comic, Drama, Thriller
Rating: A+

"Gotham, take control... take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation! Identify yourself to the world!"

I’m going to stick this out there right at the start – my biggest problem with The Dark Knight Rises is Bane’s voice.  While I actually liked the accent overall, as well as the sheer amount of thought that Hardy appeared to put into it, there were points when it was rather screechy and as a result what Bane was saying became a bit incomprehensible.  I always got the general gist of what he was saying, but I often lost the actual words, which was a bit disappointing because in this movie Bane is more than just a brute, he’s almost Shakespearian in his way of speaking and thinking.  On the plus side of the accent, however, there were also points when he sounded like Sean Connery.  I’m just going to throw this one out there: sounding like Sean Connery is never a bad thing.  Never.

The Dark Knight Rises picks up eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne (Bale) is living as a hermit, basically, in Wayne Manor, allowing Alfred (Cain) and Fox (Freeman) to basically run his operations. Bruce is still haunted by the death of Rachel and suffering from the injuries that he sustained as Batman, notably a pronounced limp. The streets of Gotham, however, have been cleaned up because of his sacrifice, and the city has gone on to worship the fallen hero, Harvey Dent – although Commissioner James Gordon (Oldman) clearly regrets his part in the cover up of Dent’s crimes and desires to come clean about them, when the time is right. The time is taken from him rather suddenly; following a series of events initiated by cat burglar Selina Kyle (Hathaway), Bruce loses his fortune and control of his company after Bane attacks Gotham’s stock exchange. Bruce decides to bring Batman out of the closet, while also moving to relinquish control of the company to Miranda Tate (Cotillard), instead of his business rival John Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn), who’s been working with Bane. Batman is unsuccessful in defeating Bane, however, who seizes control of Wayne Enterprises, turns a fusion core that they’d created into a nuclear bomb, and uses it to take over the city – unleashing chaos and entrapping the majority of the city’s police force underground. Not underground is Gordon and newly promoted special duty police officer John Blake (Gordon-Levitt), who conspire to disable the bomb and take back their city.

To be honest, going into this movie I wasn't entirely sure what to expect.  I tried to keep my expectations down; I didn't want my love for The Dark Knight to spoil this movie.  That happens so often with sequels in general.  They might be good movies on their own, but because of the build up as the result of their predecessor(s) they fall short.  I was expecting Dark Knight Rises to fall short - especially once I heard that the villains were going to be Bane and Catwoman.  Between Batman & Robin and Catwoman Bane and Catwoman were both big parts of two of the worst movies ever.  It's hard to follow up Heath Ledger's Joker with villains associated with the worst Batman movies ever.

Dark Knight Rises takes all of your fears and throws them away.  It makes you forget that the horrors of previous Batman movies never happened.  Despite Bane's occasional vocal problems he still has a flowey, poetic way about him that makes him more than just a brute.   While it takes a bit for the movie to develop, with Nolan falling back into the use of flashbacks and reused footage from Dark Knight, once it does develop you're almost completely sucked into it - asides from the occasional jarring moments when Bane becomes incomprehensible.  The thing that I really liked about this movie was that it isn't all about the action.  It's making a social commentary about anarchy, the one percent, and standing up against evil.  It was about the people of Gotham growing up and taking back their city.  Some of my favourite parts of this movie weren't the fight sequences but rather the slower and quieter montages of the characters as they come to terms with what they face.

There are problems with The Dark Knight Rises beyond just Bane's voice.  I really didn't like what they did with Alfred in this movie, it almost felt like Michael Caine was phoning in his performance here.  It seemed very un-Alfred like.  A lot of people seemed to intuitively know things in this movie, or else I just missed the explanation on how some of them knew things that they knew.  The movie was a lot slower than Dark Knight and took a bit more to get into, although as I've already mentioned this wasn't all bad.  I really enjoyed the twists that the movie brings.  I saw some of them coming from the onset, saw others just before it happened, and was caught completely unaware by others.  All in all, it was a good journey.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman

Director: Christopher Nolan
Genre: Action, Comic, Drama, Thriller
Rating: A+

"Why so serious?"

I’m not really sure if there are words to describe just how much I was blown away by The Dark Knight, the second in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  This movie has you sitting on the edge of your seat from start to finish and appears to complete Gotham’s descend into a really dark world.  My favourite part, though, is Ledger’s take on the Joker and the very sick and dark form of humour that he brings to the film.  While Batman movies have been funny before, they’ve never done so in a way even remotely similar to Heath Ledger’s Joker.

The Dark Knight escalates things from the way that they were left off in Batman Begins. While the mob still rules in Gotham it is clear that the duo of Batman (Bale) and Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Oldman) are making a very clear dent in the business. Mob bosses are now definitely scared of the Batman, and the new district attorney Harvey Dent (Eckhart) has a tough on crime approach that makes him a good ally to this dynamic duo. That is, until a new villain arrives on the scene. Calling himself the Joker he is a perpetrator of anarchy and desires to cause Batman to break his one unbreakable rule – he wants to drive Batman to kill. Alongside the struggles of Batman is the slow downfall of Dent, who at the start of the film is a stoic man unwilling to compromise his morals – an unmasked counterpart to Batman, and a good match for Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal), who acts as the damsel in distress to both Bruce Wayne/Batman and Dent. Just as it appears that they’ve caught the Joker, Dent and Rachel go missing – it’s up to Batman and the good men of Gotham’s police force to find them in time.

This movie takes the set up that Bale established in Batman Begins and runs with it. We know who the players are and the world in which they live; it’s been established that Bruce Wayne is a brooding, stoic man who carries a torch for Rachel – a torch that while being mutual is in competition with her feelings for Dent. Since we already know this – as well as Batman’s decision to not kill – Nolan doesn’t need to waste the viewers time re-establishing all of this. Instead he just plunges us straight into the action – even going so far as to introduce the movie’s villains before he reintroduces its heroes. And from that moment when he takes out the bus driver Ledger’s the Joker has us completely captivated, assuming that it even took that long.  The best part is that never once does he do anything to rip you out of the compelling narrative that he's weaving; as soon as you're sucked in, you're in it until the end.

The acting in The Dark Knight is stellar, but with this kind of cast it shouldn't come as a surprise.  I much preferred Maggie Gyllenhaal's Rachel Dawes to Katie Holmes', however I am still disappointed that they had to recast her.  I hate it when they recast characters, be it in the movies or on TV, as I find that it takes away from the narrative.  It's one thing when it's James Bond, which is special, and another thing when it's pretty much anything else.  I love, love, love Heath Ledger in this movie.  He was one of my favourite actors, and I think this movie just really shows his genius.  The Joker has always been one of the best Batman villains, and in this film Ledger proves to be one of the best Jokers.  That the film doesn't stop with the one villain makes things even better.  The problem with Batman Begins is that it was unremarkable and rather slow: it spent so much time setting up the premise that by the time everything was established half the movie was over and then they finally got around to dealing with the villains and plot twists.  Dark Knight doesn't waste any of this time and as a result it's plot twist after plot twist, action sequence after action sequence, and the whole thing just blows your mind.  Even when it isn't the big action sequences - even when it's just the Joker strolling down the street you're completely captivated.  If you haven't seen this movie yet, I highly recommend you do.

Batman Begins (2005)

Starring: Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Genre: Action, Comic, Drama, Thriller
Rating: B-

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this for a bit, but all that I can actually think of is “na na na na na na na... BATMAN!” which I suspect you are all now doing. I’ve always had a thing for Batman; he’s probably my favourite superhero and definitely the only DC Comics hero that I like. In celebration of the release of the third and final instalment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy I’ve decided to re-watch the earlier instalments before catching The Dark Knight Rises. Having now dived into Batman Begins I’m almost questioning just why we love this series so much (almost – I know that the answer lies in The Dark Knight). While I’ve watched this movie a few times already it didn’t take me long to realize just how unmemorable Batman Begins was. Sure it’s dark and action packed, but there’s very little about it that’s awe inspiring and nothing really sticks out in your mind once you’ve watched it.

The movie tells the origins of Batman, from Bruce Wayne’s (Bale) initial encounter with bats and the death of his parents, to him making the decision to free Gotham from its criminal underworld, the training that he undertakes in order to be able to do so, and his return to Gotham and the creation of Batman.  While training, Bruce spends time in a Bhutanese prison, where he meets Ducard (Neeson) who offers to train him as a ninja with the League of Shadows, headed by Ra’s al Ghul.  That’s right, Batman is a ninja.  While he trains under Ra and Ducard, he disagrees with their methods and eventually burns their temple down and kills Ra, before returning to Gotham.  Once back at Gotham he enlists the help of long time family butler Alfred Pennyworth (Caine) and high ranking Wayne Enterprises employee Lucius Fox (Freeman), who has been delegated into a dead end job for opposing C.E.O. William Earle (Hauer) in the boardroom.  Bruce and Alfred build Batman’s lair underneath the Wayne mansion, while Fox provides Bruce with the technology needed to make Batman awesome, thus proving that any billionaire ninja can become a crime fighting unit if he has a secret lair.  Later, Batman’s allies are joined by Sergeant James Gordon (Oldman), Gotham’s only uncorrupt police officer.  Batman’s first target is the ruler of the underworld, gangster Carmine Falcone (Wilkinson), but what he doesn’t realize is that psychopharmatologist Dr. Jonathan Crane (Murphy) has an alter-identity as the Scarecrow, and has been dumping fear inducing toxins into Gotham’s water supply.  Oh, also there’s a girl: Rachel Dawes (Holmes), assistant district attorney and Bruce’s childhood friend adds some sexual tension, but really doesn’t become relevant in any way until the end.

There is nothing remarkable about Batman Begins.  It’s not that it’s not a good movie, but in terms of a Batman movie it doesn’t really stand out.  It’s not so horrible that it just sticks in your mind like a really bad dream – that would be Batman and Robin.  It’s not so ridiculous and over the top that you can’t help but love it – that would be the Adam West Batman.  Where Batman Begins is successful is not in the movie itself but in what it succeeds in doing for the Batman franchise and the superhero genre in general.  Previous superhero movies were prone to being campy and very light; look at the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, where you really do expect Spider-Man to say “Gee, golly” as he’s fighting crime.  Batman Begins takes this genre to a whole new level of grittiness.  Gotham is a dark and ugly world, completely free of camp that has haunted other films.  This film is the push that the genre needed in order to give us the far superior superhero movies of the last few years, from The Dark Knight to The Avengers.

Beyond that, the acting is stellar; Christian Bale is awesome, although the voice that he does for, well really both Bruce Wayne and Batman, is a bit ridiculous.  I almost wished that Bale would use his natural voice, although I somehow suspect that Batman with an English accent would have been a lot easier to identify.  He wasn’t the shining star in this movie though, although Bale did succeed in making Batman stand out far more than his adversaries (evidently, the trick to doing that is to make the villains not all that cool).  I think the real stars of this movie were Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman.  Seriously, how can a movie go wrong with these three in it?  It’s kind of messed up when you care more about Alfred the butler than you do about Batman himself, but then that’s been a problem that’s long existed within this franchise.  I love how Caine developed his own backstory before portraying Alfred; it’s never determined in the film itself, but it gives him a deeper sense of who the man is and by extension creates a deeper character.  I got a similar feeling about Oldman and Freeman; they really knew the characters that they were portraying.  It’s also important to note that the accent that Oldman used in this movie, while not his natural one, was far better than the fake accent that Bale used. Come on everyone, say it with me “I’m Batman.”