BATTLESHIP

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs
 
BATTLESHIP
GRADE: D  
Taylor Kitsch, Brooklyn Decker, Alexander Skarsgard, Rihanna, and Liam Neeson
Screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber
Directed by Peter Berg

Hollywood is officially out of ideas.

In 2005, NASA discovers an extrasolar planet inside the Goldilocks Zone, with conditions similar to Earth. Nearly wetting themselves with self important enthusiasm, NASA transmits a powerful signal from a communications array in Hawaii, which will be boosted by a satellite in orbit.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or in this case the bar, two brothers, Stone and Alex Hopper ,are celebrating the younger brother's birthday, when Alex (Taylor Kitsch), notices a strikingly beautiful women at the car attempting to order a chicken burrito. Unfortunately, the bar doesn't serve food this late at night. This bright but down to earth and normal, every day, real life girl next door type (played by top Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Brooklyn Decker) initially has no interest in our intrepid young hero, but when he breaks into a convenience store across the street in order to get her a burrito, causing a good deal of property damage, including a police car wreck, and is then tasered by the police as he falls at her feet handing her the much coveted microwaved grease-ball, she is so obviously touched by the fact that chivalry lives as proven by the fact that a total stranger would break the law while drunk and cause a major police incident in order to steal a $3.75 Frozen Food Item for a woman he has barely met even though she has long golden blonde hair and stunningly perfect breasts, that she is instantly smitten. It's these kind of reality based, “slice of life” moments that are synonymous with the words “in Association with Hasbro.”

There is, however, a complication. The woman is Samantha Shane, daughter of Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Shane (played by Academy Award Nominee Liam Neeson, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom) who in turn is the superior of Commander Stone Hopper (Alexander Skarsgard), Alex's older brother. Stone is not happy: his little brother is a slacker, and a malcontent who mooches off of him and refuses to live up to his potential, and he himself is stuck with a name that sounds like a term used to describe someone going from bathroom to bathroom trying to deal with a painful kidney problem. In order to fix both situations, Stone forces his brother to join the United States Navy, reasoning that things will somehow become better if both men are in a good position to get regularly shot at, and that the movie will be even more annoying if both of them are referred to only as “Hopper.”

By 2012, Hooper #1 (Kitsch) is a Lieutenant and the Tactical Action Officer aboard the destroyer USS John Paul Jones, while Hopper # 2 (Skarsgard) is commanding officer of the USS Sampson. Hopper is also in a committed relationship with Samantha and wants to marry her, but is afraid to ask her father for permission, but Hopper insists that Hopper do so, worried that further antics from Hopper will further endanger Hopper's career (Hopper, not Hopper, though what is bad for Hopper is not exactly good for Hopper, either.).

At RIMPAC, a series of Naval excercises taking place at Pearl Harbor, Hopper brawls with Japanese officer Captain Nagata (Tadanobu Asano), the latest in a string of incidents that could result in his discharge at the end of RIMPAC (the first being when he and Goose buzzed the tower of an aircraft carrier, unless that was a different movie.) . Meanwhile, in a key subplot carefully designed to pad the movie out to two hours, Samantha is now working as a physical therapist with spectacularly perfect breasts, and she accompanies a retired Army veteran and amputee on a hike on Oahu to help him adapt to his prosthetic legs, the reasoning being that Decker has made a career out of making men stand on their own (rim-shot.).

But everything changes when five alien ships arrive in response to the NASA signal. One ship collides with an orbital satellite and crashes in Hong Kong, while four others land in the water near Hawaii. Sampson, John Paul Jones, and the Japan destroyer Myōkō investigate, but are trapped when one of the ships erects an impenetrable force field around the Hawaiian islands. The destroyers attempt to establish contact, but the aliens open fire: Sampson and Myōkō are destroyed, and John Paul Jones is damaged, with the commanding officers, executive officers, and Jon Bon Jovi all getting killed in the process. Lt. Hopper takes command as the most senior officer left on the ship, and they recover survivors from Myōkō, with Captain Nagata among them.

But then, unfortunately, in the second act, the movie starts to get a little silly (as opposed to before). Since the barrier prevents the use of radar and sonar (they can't see the aliens, and the aliens can't see them), Nagata reveals that they can use tsunami warning buoys around Hawaii to track the alien vessels' movements. In other words, they are looking at electronic maps and firing at numbered coordinates based on their best guess. Sound familiar? Brilliant, isn't it? And you thought this wasn't actually going to tie directly into the game, did you? Come on. Would the folks who gave us the same Transformers movie three times and put Channing Tatum into Oscar territory with G.I. JOE disappoint us? The answer is, only if you are stupid enough to have expectations. In the final third, an actual BATTLESHIP is brought in so the title of the film will work, and all is put right.

All the elements are in place for a truly terrible summer blockbuster, and director Peter Berg, who previously gave us the Will Smith travesty Hancock, is faced with the daunting task of tackling a franchise concept so stupid that Michael Bay wouldn't touch it with a 200 foot tall explosion. While Berg lacks Bay's most frenetic traits, he also lacks his sense of style, and tries to make up for them by mimicking the Pearl Harbor “bomb's eye view shot” approximately ninety times, and by making this film an amalgam of every Bay blockbuster: aliens are dropping robotic meteors that transform into buzz saws on Pearl Harbor. The only thing missing is a pair of wise cracking, black buddy cops busting Sean Connery out of Alcatraz.

The film has the distinction of featuring by far the most slapdash and nonthreatening alien invaders in decades – they look like something that wandered of the set of the early seasons of Red Dwarf. As big and bombastic as the movie is, it is apparent that Universal and Hasbro knew they did not have a Transformers sized hit on their hands and cut corners where they could.

Bad performances abound. Decker honestly manages to give a reasonable approximation of acting – she's far from good, but she's at the very least no worse than Megan Fox and certainly better than Rose Huntington Whitely, the underwear model who replaced Fox in the Transformers series. In fact, truth be told, she embarrasses herself less than Liam Neeson, who could, after all, be in a real movie and acting, if he felt like it. Singer Rihanna, as the sassy black tomboy bad ass who can fight as well as any white man, manages to make a big impression in the sense that now we understand why Chris Brown hit her. As for Taylor Kitsch, the Keanu Reeves for a new generation, he gives an adequate, if uninspired, performance, but fared much better earlier this year in John Carter, another silly, over the top sci-fi epic that had the advantage of not sucking but unfortunately managed to lose so much money that it nearly destroyed the Walt Disney Corporation to such an extent that they now are only the third richest independent nation on Earth.

But the big question you want to know is: does anyone actually say “You sunk my Battleship?” the answer is no, but they do resort to recycling the single most over used line from the Star Wars saga, so still they get no credit from me. In the end, if you really like the Michael Bay formula, and tend to get into shameless, flag waving, pro military propaganda, you may have some fun with this. But even then, don't pay full price.

Battleship is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, and mild, badly directed sensuality.

DARK SHADOWS

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

GRADE: B

Johnny Depp, Eve Green, Michelle Pfeifer, Bella Heathcoate, Chloe Grace Moretz,

Johnny Lee Miller

Based on the television series created by Dan Curtis

Screen Story by Seth Grahame -Smith and John August

Screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith

Directed by Tim Burton

If you pay go to see a Tim Burton film, you pretty much know exactly what you are going to get. Sometimes you get a little bit more (Ed Wood, Big Fish) and sometimes you get a lot less (Planet of The Apes, Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks!). The bad news about Dark Shadows is that it is nothing more than a very average Tim Burton film. The good news is it's also nothing less.

In 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins sail from Liverpool, England to North America. Their son, Barnabas, grows up to be played by super mega star Johnny Depp, who has achieved enormous popularity and raves for the stunning versatility he shows in finding ways to play every character as a variation on Jack Sparrow. The adult Barnabas is a wealthy playboy in Collinsport, Maine, and the master of Collinwood Manor. Like most playboys, Barnabas gets around. Unlike most, he has the misfortune of doing so with a servant who also happens to be a witch. Angelique Bouchard (played by Eva Green), is more than a little upset when Barnabas spurns her for the lovely Josette. She responds by killing his parents, cursing his family and causing all of them, to leap to their deaths from a nearby cliff. Finally, she turns Barnabas into a vampire and buries him alive in a chained-coffin in the woods.

200 years later in 1972, Barnabas is accidentally freed from his coffin by a group of construction workers, sucks them dry of their blood and makes his way back to Collinwood Manor where he finds his once-magnificent mansion in ruin. The manor is currently occupied by Barnabas' descendants, who are in a bit of a financial rut and are dysfunctional in exactly the way you would expect a family to be in a Tim Burton film. The teenage girl, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz) is moody, rebellious and oversexed; the young boy, David (Gulliver McGrath) claims the ghost of his dead mother speaks to him, and the boy's father, Roger (Johnny Lee Miller) is a womanizing cad who gives little attention to his son. His sister Elizabeth (Michelle Pfieffer) the of the family, is saddled with the daunting task of saving the manor from being taking away from them, and when Barnabas suddenly appears, talking of a buried treasure, she decides to look past his eccentric ways and hide his status as a vampire in hopes that he can restore the once proud family to their former glory.

Also living with the family are Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), a family therapist, and Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcoate), and beautiful young nanny who draws the attention and affections of Barnabas. But problems arise when an old enemy appears to foil the vampire's plans to raise his family name from the dead.

All of this is pretty by the numbers and predictable – this harkens back to Burton's early days, in particular Beetlejuice. But it's well paced and nicely acted, with the ever reliable Depp (The Tourist notwithstanding) injecting a lot of life into his death, and Pfieffer displaying a subtle strength and charm that reminds us why she once a top star. Bonham Carter is a regular fixture of Burton's films, and for the most part a welcome one (if he has to cast his current love in every movie, thanks heavens he is now married to an accomplished and versatile actress instead instead of Lisa Marie, who was given ample opportunity to show of both of her major assets in a number of Burton films but never actually gave anything resembling a performance.). Unfortunately, Bonham Carter's character is very hit and miss, and provides some of the films highs, but also quite literally it's biggest low.

Eva Green, as the vengeful witch, Angelique, is clearly having a great time in her role, playing it to the hilt, and is quite entertaining. But ultimately the movie (big surprise) rests on Burton and Depp, and fortunately this is a more successful pairing of the happy couple than the wildly disjointed Alice In Wonderland, which if we are being honest was just a half baked remake of Hook that gave Depp an excuse to show us what it would be like if he stuck all of his previous film roles in a blender along with Jim Ccarrey and hit “puree.” (In fairness, I must point out that Alice was a huge hit and this movie is unlikely to approach its box office gross.). But Dark Shadows succeeds where that film failed, primarily for the reason that it follows the point of view of the strange outsider, Barnabas, which comes naturally to Burton and to Depp. It's when they are forced to portray normal people that both become out of their depth.

The film has a number of clever and amusing moments, too many of which, unfortunately, are seen in the trailers, but like the series on which it was based, it was it's darkly serious side as well. It's more violent than most audiences may expect, and the sexual content is surprisingly strong (in particular a sequence with Depp and Bonham Carter that will force many a squirming parent to answer the question “What was she doing to him?”) But the mixture works overall, never quite soaring as high as it would like but certainly staying in the air.

Ultimately, once again, this is a Tim Burton film, and your ability to enjoy depends on how you feel about that. As someone who alternately loves and hates that, in the end, I was decidedly entertained but not overjoyed.

Dark Shadows is rated PG-13 for violence, sex, profanity, vulgarity and smoking.

THE AVENGERS

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs

THE AVENGERS

GRADE: A +

Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L. Jackson
Based on the comic created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Story by Zak Penn and Joss Whedon
Screenplay by Joss Whedon
Directed by Joss Whedon

It's finally here. The comic book movie event that Marvel Studios has been leading up too since 2008, when Iron Man surpassed all expectations and Robert Downey, Jr. finally became the huge star some of us always knew he could be. The setup continued that same summer with The Incredible Hulk, a dumbed down and painfully dull attempt to reboot the character after Ang Lee's misunderstood gem left audiences cold. This version actually made slightly less money, and opinion is still divided on which incarnation was better (despite revisionist history, a lot of critics reacted favorably to Lee's film at the time.). Between this quick, shoddy version of The Hulk and the overly crowded, muddled Iron Man 2, which was far more preoccupied with bridging the gap leading up to Avengers than in actually telling a story, I wasn't that excited about where Marvel Studios was going. Three things changed my mind: Kenneth Branagh's delightfully entertaining Crocodile Dundee meets Lord of The Rings approach to Thor, the wildly underrated Joe Johnston's wonderfully nostalgic throwback Captain America, which I never get tired of revisiting, and finally, the announcement of Joss Whedon as writer-director for The Avengers. Suddenly, this became a mouth watering prospect, and I was catching the vision of what might be the biggest event move in super hero history.

The story begins as Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), director of the espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D, arrives at a remote research facility during an evacuation. As this point in the screening, as Jackson stepped off the helicopter, wearing his eye patch and leather trench coat, the man sitting next to held out his hand to me for a friendly first bump. Normally I do not indulge in this ritual, but there was a an excitement in the air and a friendly, nerdy camaraderie emanating from this fellow that seemed to say “This should make up for the wedding night neither of us will ever have. Is this the emotion the humans call joy?”and I got into the spirit of things and returned the fist bump with great enthusiasm. This was, after all, The Avengers, and we were seeing it first. We are talking serious geek cred here.

Anyway, back to the setup: The tesseract, an energy source of unknown potential (introduced in the stinger sequence of Thor and then explained in Captain America) has activated, and a portal through space has opened. Out of it comes the exiled Norse god of mischief, Loki (Tom Hiddelston). Loki takes the tesseract, and uses his abilities to control the minds of several S.H.I.E.L.D. Personnel.
In response to the attack, Fury reactivates the Avengers Initiative. First up are Dr. Bruce Banner( Mark Ruffalo) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), alias “The Hulk” and “Iron Man,” both of whom are reluctant to join the team but are persuaded not only by Fury but by his loyal agents, Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Coulson (Clark Gregg.) Next up is Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the recently unfrozen Captain America, who is still adjusting to life in 2012 as opposed to the '40's.

Rogers, Stark and Romanoff travel to Germany to apprehend Loki, who is recovering iridium to stabilize the Tesseract's power and demanding that the civilians kneel before him. After a battle with Captain America, Loki surrenders and is escorted back to a S.H.I.E.L.D. plane. However, Thor (played again by Chris Hemsworth), Loki's older brother and the Norse god of thunder, arrives and attempts to free Loki to reason with him. Stark and Rogers confront Thor, and Loki is eventually returned to the Helicarier, a high-tech, flying aircraft carrier, and placed in a cell designed to hold The Hulk.

The group Fury has assembled does not get along at all, in particular Rogers and Stark, whose “Luke Skywaker” and “Han Solo” personalities completely clash, and as Banner observes “This isn't a team. This is a time bomb.” But it's no spoiler to say that when push comes to shove and the fate of the Earth truly hangs in the balance, this team, joined by Agent Clint Barton, also known as Hawkeye (two time Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner), comes together and becomes the fighting machine to end all fighting machines.

There is no question that this movie is going to play best if you have seen all of the set up films (with The Incredible Hulk mattering least, as there is more than enough introduction of the character here and the the Norton film is barely referenced at all). In particular, some familiarity with Iron Man and Thor is a a big plus to following the story, but even if you haven't seen any of those films, The Avengers is a fast paced, large scale epic thrill ride with so much action, so many genuinely laugh out loud moments, and a surprising amount of quality character moments, that it should appeal to just about anyone unless they just flat out hate superheroes.

This is a near perfect piece of entertainment that delivers on every level, and somehow manages to give each of its primary characters (even Agent Coulson) a chance to shine, and no one is short changed, though the filmmakers are well aware that Downey's Stark is the biggest draw here and do not miss the opportunity to put him front and center whenever possible. But while every character delights, the unquestioned, breakout, crowd pleasing favorite is The Hulk. Credit should be divided equally between Ruffalo, Whedon, the voice of Lou Ferrigno and the special effects team for finally making a Hulk that should please everyone, and he really steals the show and creates a big smash (rim shot.) Evans also really shines as the Captain, one of the most genuinely likable movie heroes in many a year, Hemsworth gets a few great moments as Thor, and Johansson is sexy, deadly and at times hilarious, as the script gives her far more to work with than her introduction in Iron Man 2 ( her character as seen here could easily anchor of movie of it's own). And Renner may be the most interesting and versatile rising star of the moment. It takes a while before Hawkeye gets a chance to really get in on the action, but when he does, he does so with a vengeance, and Renner yet again proves he has a star quality that matches Hollywood's biggest and brightest.

This is Joss Whedon script, so it goes without saying that's full of snappy and amusing dialogue and many a creative moment, but Whedon the director, who previously impressed with Serenity, the big screen follow up to his short lived cult hit series Firefly, also really knows how to stage eye-popping action with the best of them. The scale of this film is massive, easily justifying the need for so many heroes, but Whedon keeps it focused and balanced, never losing control. This is almost exactly the movie Michael Bay has failed to make so many times before, and rarely has a big summer sequel blockbuster (this is part six in a series, after all) come through with such flying colors.

It's not likely to be an Oscar contender, but The Avengers will be a hit of epic proportions and likely the most unbridled fun you will have at the movies this summer.

The Avengers is rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, and mild innuendo.