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Reviews
The Wicker Man (2006)
They shouldn't have sacrificed the script.
The Wicker Man is a horror movie by virtue of the fact that it occasionally jumps out at you, is dark, and wants to disturb you with its strange imagery. Horror movies are not always scary, but mostly because audiences have become desensitized to the tricks and traps of filmmakers over the years trying to give us the willies. That said, The Wicker Man is one of the most unintentionally hilarious movies of the year and well worth your time, if only to be mocked.
Officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) finds himself in the middle of a drug-addled bender after failing to save an atypically creepy horror movie child from an exploding car. He grieves and pops pills, probably because he wasn't harmed in the blast, despite having his head in the car window. Then, he receives a letter from his ex-girlfriend, Willow (Kate Beahan). It seems Willow is living on a private island now and her child is missing, possibly secreted away by the very people she is living with! As an audience, we already know that the daughter belongs to Cage, since such a thing would be far more dramatic and give him ample reason to turn Summerisle upside down. But Edward Malus does not realize this. Perhaps he is too busy being distracted by the Neo-Pagan Amish community that lives on the island, where men are kept submissive by the powerful female Sisters that run the place. Or it could be he is preoccupied by all of the bee hives around the island, since the Sisters of Summerisle deem it to be their most important crop. Are we surprised that Malus has an allergy to bees? It never really is explained how the people of Summerisle sustain themselves on just honey.
Whatever the reason, Malus bumbles around the island, growing increasingly more and more horrified by the events transpiring around him. A feminist bitch teaching an English class about the atrocities of men? Clearly this island is the bastion of Satan himself. Ah, but we find a clue here. Despite the fact that all of the residents of the island insist that there is no girl, there is a single unoccupied desk in the middle of class. Cage then opens the desk, only to be startled by a crow and screams "What?!" At that point, we are thinking along the same lines.
But hold on: these are the best parts of the film. Up until now, the plot hasn't started to collapse in on itself, though we can see the stress fractures running along the edges. Malus spots a girl in the distance after popping some more pills in the middle of the night and gives chase into a nearby barn, where he barely escapes death and completely fails to thrill us. Undaunted, he continues to be lied to by everyone on the island, including his ex-girlfriend, who seems to watch everything transpire like a deer in the headlights. We know she is up to no good, though she could at least pretend to care.
Finally, we have some revelations. It seems young, misplaced Rowan was born during a harvest year when the crops failed. Dear god, they are going to sacrifice her to save their honey! Based on this hunch, Malus then punches out an Innkeeper, karate chops Leelee Sobieski into submission, ducks into a bear costume, and sneaks into the ceremony to save the little girl that may or may not be the subject of a sacrifice. But then, we stopped taking The Wicker Man seriously a long time ago. Perhaps it would be easier to take the movie as seriously as it does if Nicolas Cage wasn't flailing around like a drunk in half of his scenes. Or maybe the movie is just bad by default.
I wouldn't dream of giving the ending away, but it is far less effective than that of the original movie, which I decided to watch after seeing this. It almost feels as though this version of The Wicker Man was pulled together through vague recollections of the original after a long night of alcohol abuse. It's not necessarily a bad thing to try out new stuff with old material, but the minute your hero comes to the rescue dressed as a bear, you should know something has gone horribly awry.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Mission Ridiculous
When you go to see a Mission: Impossible movie, you have a certain set of expectations set by the others that have come before it. Primarily, that there will be espionage and intrigue, like on the television series, and that there will be plenty of cool action pieces, such as the previous two films. And in it's own unique way, Mission: Impossible 3, or the extremely marketable and radical M:i:III, as it likes to be called, fails all of the expectations it builds and neglects to blow up.
Ethan Hunt, after two movies full of explosions, double crosses, and plenty of high tech gadgets, has decided to settle down and start a family with the cute and uninteresting Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who is apparently appealing because she both Trusts Him and Is Concerned. Having found happiness, Hunt is immediately contacted by an IMF liaison to meet with him at a nearby 7-Eleven, where they talk shop while browsing over some Ritz crackers and Oreos. Hunt's student, Lindsey Ferris, has been captured and is being held behind enemy lines! However, Hunt is out of the game, so he grabs a candy bar and heads out the door, but not before grabbing the secret message hidden in the Kodak disposable camera on the way.
What follows is a quickly edited but slowly paced romp across the world to find The Rabbit's Foot, a macguffin of supposedly destructive potential that everyone under the sun wants for various reasons. Bad guy Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) wants it to sell to the Middle East, because that would be appropriately evil, and John Brassel (Laurence Fishburne) of the Impossible Mission Force wants it because without it, we wouldn't have a plot.
The race to get the Rabbit's Foot first leads us on a variety of high tech capers, from storming office buildings in Japan, to raiding the Vatican on a kidnapping mission, and everything in between. Many of these capers all involve seemingly cool elements from the previous films, such as Tom Cruise repelling down on a wire and landing inches above the floor (which happens twice in this movie), to Cruise leaping out of a shattered office building window and pulling his parachute to glide to safety (which we unfortunately only get to see once). Everything else is your standard ultra techie and unrealistic heist crap, with characters bypassing dozens of elaborate security systems with relative ease and little excitement. Gee, ever wonder for a moment if something will go wrong with their plan? Of course not! This is Tom Cruise we are talking about here! Tom is also joined by Mission: Impossible regular Ving Rhames, who spends the entire movie lecturing Hunt about why he shouldn't be in a relationship with someone. I kept hoping he'd spit out another classic line, like "That punk put a hole in my Versace!" but no dice. Cruise and Rhames are also joined by two extra team mates, who serve no real purpose. Each of them get an obligatory Character Development Scene in order to distinguish them from flat, two dimension characters, which they clearly are not.
But the really stand out performance in this movie belongs solely to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is trying his hardest throughout the film to flush his Oscar straight down the toilet. Hoffman wanders the film with a drunken expression that somehow fails to emote Evil Murderous Bad Guy. The only time he really seems to show his character is during the scene in the previews, where he threatens to kill Hunt, murder his wife, shoot his dog, pee on his rug, and trample his fish. That being done, he immediately hits up the hash again, and just stares blankly as the rest of the movie passes him by.
I honestly don't recommend this movie at all. The set pieces are uninteresting, the plot is uninspired to say the least, and the action is fundamentally boring. There is not a single scene in the film to get your blood pumping and the adrenaline flowing. I literally walked out of the film at one point to get a glass of ice from the concession stand, simply so I could witness something engaging going on, such as solid dialog ("Can I have some ice?" "Sure.") and a reasonable conclusion ("Here you go."). While I'm sure an audience for this film exists, I highly recommend renting a better spy thriller, like say, Agent Cody Banks, rather than giving Mission: Ridiculous a try.