The Man Who Would Be Kingpin

Wanted

The New York Sun, June 27, 2008

Whatever else you might want to say about it, Mark Millar's graphic novel "Wanted" was one of the most effective evocations of nerd-boy rage since the days of Bobby Fischer. Obscene, misogynistic, scatological, and saturated with a nasty geek nihilism, it's a clever, unsettling, and unpleasant bloodbath only occasionally softened by signs that it was intended as some sort of parody. Reports that "Wanted" was to be turned into a major Hollywood vehicle made for a bad day. The news that it was going to be filmed by Timur Bekmambetov made a bad day worse.

Mr. Bekmambetov is a Russian director best known in the West for "Night Watch" and "Day Watch," huge hits in his home country that were, if nothing else, reassuring evidence that the era of the Soviet collective-farm epic has, mercifully, drawn to a close. Indeed, the Russian appetite for flashy, empty-headed movies with pretensions of saga status is, these days, just as great as our own. The first installments in a confused and barely comprehensible fantasy trilogy, "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" have been compared by the deluded or the hired with the "Lord of the Rings" films, a comparison not unlike claiming that "Van Helsing" should be ranked with "Dracula." The prospect of Mr. Bekmambetov taking his restless, gimmicky, and derivative camera into the depths of Mr. Millar's perverse multiverse was almost too awful to contemplate.

Remarkably, however, the director and his scriptwriters (previously best known for their contributions to "The Fast and the Furious" canon) have surmounted both their limitations and the business problem presented by Mr. Millar's original material by coming up with a plot that is not only pretty much their own, but, once one has accepted its fundamental absurdity, fairly easy to follow. The starting point in "Wanted" owes much to Mr. Millar and his concept of a geeky loser trapped in Dilbertland who comes to discover that he is the heir to something powerful, dangerous, and strange (wish fulfillment, anybody?).

From there, however, the film mainly goes its own way (apart from the watered-down finale), with only the occasional allusion to the original "Wanted." Mr. Millar's key dystopian premise has been shelved, and with it, his supremely unattractive super-villains (including a Thing-like creature composed of serial-killer fecal matter), the use of random killings and rape as methods of empowerment, and rather too many sequences of peculiarly grotesque violence.

Instead, moviegoers will be treated to a mildly enjoyable piece of hyperkinetic hokum. Innovative it is not. "Wanted" is overreliant on car chases as dully prolonged as a mid-'70s guitar solo and about as original, age-old conspiracies with more than a hint of Dan Brown about them, and slow-motion bullet ballets of a type already clichéd by the end of the first "Matrix" film. If "Wanted" feels by-the-numbers, that's because it is: Even its mayhem comes across as just a touch too planned. Crash the car. Wreck the train. Kill someone.

The movie has its moments, one or two good jokes, and a satisfactory number of exploding heads, but, whatever its director's aspirations, it fails to convey that sense of another world — ours but not quite — that ought to be key to any comic book adaptation. A film of this type should be a magic carpet ride, exhilarating and impossible. "Wanted," by contrast, is as functional as a trip on the crosstown bus, complete with stops, starts, and periods of boredom.

When given the chance, the cast does the best it can. Mr. McAvoy is splendid as Wesley, the bright, put-upon office drone who discovers that he is a member of an ancient caste of assassins. Slight and not particularly tall, Mr. McAvoy is not an obvious action hero, but as Wesley is taught the ways of the Weavers (the ancient caste, not the ancient folk group) in a series of tutorials that appear mainly to involve repeated beatings, target shooting at corpses, and riding the roofs of Chicago's 'L' trains, the actor offers a surprisingly convincing picture of a nerd being transformed into possibly the planet's most lethal killer — no small achievement for a man who played a faun in the first Narnia movie.

Meanwhile, as Weaver chief Sloan, Morgan Freeman takes a break from playing the president and God to remind us that he can portray someone altogether less lofty. Clad in what looks like early Reagan-era Men's Wearhouse, he's bureaucrat, capo, and mentor — a blend of organization man, Don Corleone, and the X-Men's Professor Xavier. He's also an individual with secrets to hide, something that Mr. Freeman manages to convey with little more than a deft glance. Under the circumstances, it's an amazingly subtle performance.

And then there's Angelina Jolie as Fox, the Weaver who is the first to wrench Wesley away from his previously humdrum life before becoming his trainer and, on his first mission, accomplice. Fierce, chiseled, and commanding, Ms. Jolie dominates nearly every scene in which she appears. As is to be expected of the former Mrs. Smith, she makes a very believable assassin. Nevertheless, it's difficult to shake the feeling that her role is as much "Angelina Jolie" as it is Fox, as much a riff on her own public image as an interpretation of the character she is allegedly depicting. Either way, it's a hypnotic performance, if it is a performance: There's an alarmingly feral glint in her eye that must, I imagine, be very, very tricky to fake. There are times when I tremble for Brad Pitt.

The Man Who Would Be Khan

Mongol

The New York Sun, June 6, 2008

On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. "Oh, yes," came the reply, "but he was provoked."

That's pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made "Mongol," a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year) movie that opens in the city today and depicts the rise of Genghis as a well-deserved triumph over adversity. To be fair, this is also the way this tale is told in "The Secret History of the Mongols," a 13th-century Mongolian text that, despite its misty mix of myth, history, and propaganda, is probably the most accurate account of the khan's early years.

It's from there that Mr. Bodrov has taken the core of his story about the young man, known as Temudjin, who will be khan. The film begins in his childhood, and as childhoods go, it's rough, a blend of the bleaker elements of "Oliver Twist," "Harry Potter," and the princes in the tower, transported to Central Asia and reimagined by the creators of "A Man Called Horse." The 9-year-old Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) witnesses the murder of his father, is robbed of his right to succeed to the chieftaincy of his clan, and, finally, is forced to escape into the wilderness. As the years pass, ordeals pile on. Even Temudjin's much-delayed honeymoon is transformed into a nightmare when marauding members of an enemy tribe kidnap his gorgeous, free-spirited bride, Börte (Khulan Chuluun).

That ought to be quite enough misery for anyone, but Mr. Bodrov, a true Slav, adds more. In sequences that owe nothing to "The Secret History of the Mongols" and everything to the need to provide a vaguely respectable rationalization for one of Genghis's later massacres, Temudjin is handed over to the rulers of the neighboring Tangut kingdom. They treat him very nastily indeed. At this point, astute cinemagoers will know that the Tanguts are toast. And so they turned out to be, although in "Mongol" this barely merits a footnote. The Tanguts were, in fact, annihilated. Their once-advanced civilization was reduced to desolation, archeological fragments, and something less than a memory. Their only crime was to have been in the way.

Not that that appears to worry Mr. Bodrov much. Once best-known for the lyrical, haunting "Prisoner of the Mountains," an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella updated to reflect today's Chechen conflict, the director has abandoned his earlier, subtle take on the cost of war in favor of something cruder. His last film, "Nomad," was a cack-handed Kazakh "Braveheart," a laughably acted, lamentably written slab of nationalist kitsch redeemed only by its deft use of a landscape so lovely, so strange, and so huge that John Ford should have been there to film it.

That same terrain, or somewhere very much like it, adds an equally hallucinatory grandeur to "Mongol." What's more, like "Nomad," the new film shows clear traces of "Eurasianism," a distinctively Russian, distinctly shaky interpretation of history sometimes deployed to explain why Western-style democracy could never work in Russia. Whatever the similarities between the two movies, however, "Mongol" is a significantly better film. This time around, the screenplay is refreshingly adequate (despite sporadic slips into portentousness, narrative muddle, and shamanistic hocus-pocus).

The acting is much more than that. Casting a Japanese actor to play the 20-something Temudjin may irritate some purists, but at least Tadanobu Asano is considerably more "authentic" than his most notorious predecessor, John Wayne, who played the role in "The Conqueror," Howard Hughes's bizarre, irradiated (it's a long story), and very approximate take on the same tale. Mr. Asano is also far more convincing: His compelling, carefully calibrated performance should quiet most doubts. His Temudjin is watchful, stoic, and self-contained, his terrifying, patient stillness that of the predator waiting his turn, even under the most horrific duress.

Mr. Asano is beautifully counterbalanced by the Chinese actor Honglei Sun (most of the rest of the cast here is, tactfully, Mongolian) as the ebullient Jamukha, Temudjin's rescuer, blood brother, ally, and, ultimately, adversary. Mr. Sun delivers an unexpectedly touching performance as a man driven by custom, power politics, and fate into a savage conflict that he would have given almost anything to avoid.

This sense of destiny galloping onward and ominously at an ever-increasing pace lends the film much of its force, which is only amplified by our knowledge of where the saga will lead. Those first skirmishes on the vast grasslands, wild lightning horseback clashes conducted at a speed that would shame the Comanche, are precursors of a razzia that will, eventually, rage across two continents with a brutality that is breathtaking even by the demanding standards of the 13th century. But as those quick clashes evolve into brilliantly filmed, dizzyingly choreographed massed battles, it's impossible not to wonder if the spectacle is not a dazzling, distracting camouflage deliberately designed by Mr. Bodrov to mask the horrors he purports to show — horrors that foreshadow the hecatombs to come.

"Mongol" concludes with Temudjin imposing a bloody unity on his perpetually feuding nation — an objective, justification, and excuse typical of strongmen throughout the ages that have, in Mr. Bodrov, clearly found both a willing listener and a talented apologist. The director is now proposing to turn his attention to Temudjin/Genghis's subsequent wars of conquest. If "Mongol," the first of a planned trilogy, is anything to go by, the remaining two films will be wonderful to watch and troubling to ponder: Atrocities are still atrocities, however much time has passed.

Cops Gone Wild

Street Kings

The New York Sun, April, 11, 2008 

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night," George Orwell once wrote, "only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

That society sanctions the use of force to protect itself is neither surprising nor controversial. What we debate instead is how rough those men can be and how, exactly, they can be controlled. We live, so the story goes, in a nation of laws, but we also seem to accept, if quietly, that some laws will occasionally have to be broken if others — the laws we really care about — are to be enforced. When that rough Dirty Harry went a little too far, nobody, other than unlucky punks, persnickety lawyers, and senior policemen, seemed to mind too much. Nor, over the course of five movies, did his audience.

Sometimes, of course, a rogue cop is just a rogue cop. The difficulty of distinguishing between good policemen and bad is, I suppose, the theme trying to survive the splattering gore, rampaging clichés, and flying bullets that otherwise define the noisy, nasty, but sporadically watchable "Street Kings," by the sophomore director David Ayer (who made his debut in 2005 with the oppressive and pretentious "Harsh Times").

Mr. Ayer has explored the world of the police before, but he did so as a screenwriter on the excellent "Training Day," the appalling "Dark Blue," and the idiotic "S.W.A.T." On this occasion, the screenwriting credits are divided among, encouragingly, the author James Ellroy (who also wrote the original story), ominously, Kurt Wimmer (a writer-director best known for two pieces of dreary sci-fi sludge, "Ultraviolet" and "Equilibrium"), and, mysteriously, Jamie Moss (who is, apparently, now slated to work on an upcoming manga epic).

Whatever the hopes and fears stirred by the thought of Messrs. Ellroy, Wimmer, and Moss, "Street Kings" remains a distinctive Ayer production, starting with its location. As he seemingly rarely misses an opportunity to mention, Mr. Ayer spent part of his teens in South Central Los Angeles, and it is becoming to him what the Upper East Side has been to Woody Allen — trademark, canvas, and, if he's not careful, dead end. "Street Kings" features the usual menacing streetscapes of a gang-ruled Los Angeles, the usual elite unit-turned-rancid, the usual stash of concealed dollars, the usual banality masquerading as profundity, and the usual pantomime machismo. The film is too one-dimensional to be noir: Any ambiguities are illusory, all conundrums easy to decipher, and the view taken of the police is too predictably jaundiced to be of any real interest.

That said, "Street Kings" is partly redeemed by the performances of those few members of the cast allowed to develop their roles beyond stereotype, notably Forest Whitaker as the manipulative, clever captain in charge of Ad Vice, this particular film's rogue unit. His Captain Wander is an officer who appears to barely remember why he joined the force in the first place. He may still cling to some notions of frontier justice or, at least, frontier rationalizations ("At the end of the day it's order that counts. Why sweat the details? Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet"), but for the most part, Wander's preoccupations are power and control; even the money he has accumulated is just a means to those ends.

Cool, self-possessed, and restrained, his lazy eye only serving to emphasize his vigilant, calculating authority, Mr. Whitaker is all too believable as a leader able to forge a fierce loyalty among his men — a loyalty that has transformed them into something between a cult and a tribe, a brotherhood that sets its own rules.

As weary viewers of Mr. Ayer's early films will know, male bonding is part of the shtick, along with sporadic suggestions that the police themselves are, in a sense, just another gang (something in this case also implied by the title). In this movie, though, these ideas are handled more subtly than usual, and from time to time, they even persuade. Thus we note that there's nothing distinctively LAPD about Ad Vice's style. Neatly groomed and smartly dressed, they look like the ambitious middle management (check out Jay Mohr's performance) of a successful corporation, albeit one that's gone feral. The winning's the thing. The group's the thing.

But it's a group that's under suspicion. Internal Affairs, in the form of Hugh Laurie's insinuating, tricky, and nicely observed Captain Biggs, is circling. Biggs realizes that a shooting witnessed by Ad Vice's Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) may present an opportunity to break the unit open. The embattled Ludlow may be the roughest of the rough ("the tip of the f---ing spear"), but he is crumbling. His wife is dead, he's drinking too much, he may be the target of a frame-up, and, most discouraging of all, he's played by Mr. Reeves, the king of coma. Referred to at one point as a "guided missile," Mr. Reeves's Ludlow is better described as a piece of wood. The movie is meant to revolve around Ludlow's struggle to do the right thing (he's basically one of the good guys), but with a near-catatonic Keanu in the role, it's difficult either to care or, indeed, to notice.

Yes, "Street Kings" has its moments, but on the whole, it's better to move along: There's nothing (much) to see here.

Fighting for a Lonely Planet

I am Legend

The New York Sun, December 13, 2007

Hell may not, whatever Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, be "other people," but other people, or what's left of them, certainly conspire to mess up the second half of "I Am Legend," a movie that was, until then, developing into one of the finest science fiction movies of recent years.

In his retelling of Richard Matheson's harsh, hallucinatory novel from 1954, director Francis Lawrence is brilliantly successful in re-creating the book's post-apocalyptic vision of a survivor hanging on to life, and the remnants of civilization, in a city that is intact — but not — and where he is alone — but not. It's an extraordinarily compelling idea, and given the relish with which Homo sapiens, that most narcissistic of species, savors the spectacle of its own destruction, it's no great surprise that this is the third movie, after "The Last Man on Earth" (1964) and "The Omega Man" (1971), based on Mr. Matheson's story. However, in the bleak grandeur of its images at least, this latest version is easily the best.

The Brooklyn Bridge is a ruin. Times Square more unkempt even than in the days before Mayor Giuliani. Deer roam through Midtown. We see Manhattan, both Eden and Pompeii, slowly, remorselessly, and with only the occasional cliché (the errant lion last seen in "Twelve Monkeys" makes an appearance) revert to wilderness. But, however beautifully crafted (and in this movie they are), tracking shots of a verdant, abandoned city are not, in themselves, enough to convey the true sense of catastrophe. For that you need a witness: Charlton Heston, say, raging at the sight of the Statue of Liberty toppled, broken, and half-buried in the sands of a planet that now belongs to the apes.

In "The Omega Man," the tireless Mr. Heston, harbinger of global doom, was again that witness. But neither his performance, nor that of the no less grandiloquent Vincent Price as the Last Man on Earth before him, can compare with what Will Smith brings to "I Am Legend" as Robert Neville, Mr. Matheson's bereft and resourceful hero. By definition, this is for long stretches a solo role, and thus not easy to do, but with little more than his dog for support, Mr. Smith skillfully conveys the loneliness, determination, and increasing mental strain of life as a Robinson Crusoe marooned on the island that was once his home, but is now, well, something else.

In part, Neville has adapted by turning Manhattan into his private playground (taking golf swings from the deck of the USS Intrepid, gunning a muscle car down empty avenues), but it's a playground where the pleasures are as transient as they are solitary. What really keeps him going are the routines — obsessive, meticulous, and tough — of the work he carries out while hunkered down in a bunkered-up brownstone on Washington Square. Neville is a military virologist (the novel's Neville is, by contrast, an everyman, which makes his plight as the last man all the more affecting), and he is still, even now, trying to find a cure for the man-made plague that took his world away.

He has to, because the virus didn't finish off everyone else. In Mr. Matheson's book, a number of those infected are transformed into vampires. In Mr. Lawrence's take, these lethal unfortunates are reduced to "dark seekers," feral, albino, debased ex-men who look as if they have escaped from the set of 2005's "The Descent," but behave with the hyperkinetic ferocity of the zombies in "28 Days Later" (a fair enough exchange, one might think: The latter film owed a considerable, and insufficiently acknowledged, debt to Mr. Matheson's tale).

That makes for some undeniably exciting scenes of chase and combat, roaring and head butting, but the decision to dumb the infected down drains much of the intelligence and the horror from the original concept. Once we understand the nature of the threat that the dark seekers represent, the distinctiveness of this movie begins to evaporate. It's still highly entertaining ("I Am Legend will, I reckon, be a massive hit, and deservedly so), but its early promise is frittered away.

The tumble gathers pace after the arrival of two other (healthy) survivors — a young woman (Alice Braga) and a child (Charlie Tahan). Helpfully enough, they extricate Neville from a tricky encounter with some dark seekers, but their key function is to drag the film even further away from the pitiless premise underpinning the novel that inspired it. Indeed, they are used to inject a spiritual, even religious, dimension into a narrative that, as first conceived, had none, and needed none.

If it's not absurd to suggest this about a work involving vampires, Mr. Matheson's book is best seen as a classic of mid-20th-century realism, unflinching in its acceptance of impermanence, chance, and an uncaring universe. We live now in dreamier, less clear-eyed times, and Mr. Lawrence has tailored his movie accordingly. You'll have to see for yourself how it ends, but I will say that it recounts a legend that bears little resemblance to that of Mr. Matheson's original Neville, the man whose destiny was to become a legend of a far darker kind, "a new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever." To understand how, and why, read the book. Oh yes, see the movie too. It's good, but it should have been — could have been — great.

Don't Worry, You Can Take the Family

The Golden Compass

The New York Sun, December 7, 2007

It is a measure of the genius of the British novelist Philip Pullman that when, less than 30 pages into his book "The Golden Compass," 12-year-old Lyra Belacqua angrily objects to the refusal of her (supposed) uncle Asriel to take her to the frozen, fabled northlands, most readers will understand and agree with her. "I want," protests Lyra, "to see the Northern Lights and bears and icebergs and everything." And so, you just know, do you. Disappointingly, despite some excellent special effects (the bears, a race of gigantic, heavily armored ursine warriors, have to be seen to be believed) and a remarkably assured performance by the no less remarkably named Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra, the new film by Chris Weitz based on Mr. Pullman's novel never manages to generate, or satisfy, that same sense of anticipation.

In part, this was inevitable. When it comes to conjuring another world, the very literalness of computer-generated imagery can conspire against it, especially when it has to compete with author-generated imagery such as this:

…The main interest of the picture lay in the sky. Streams and veils of light hung like curtains, looped and festooned on invisible hooks hundreds of miles high or blowing out sideways in the stream of some unimaginable wind…

When Mr. Pullman is good, he is very good. The film, by contrast, is just okay.

Mr. Pullman also doesn't patronize. He doesn't think of himself as a "children's writer," with all the title can sometimes imply. His portrait of that other, parallel world, is a fascinating, glittering, mixed-up what-might-have-been of ancient and modern, of Charles Dickens, of H.G. Wells, of the brothers Grimm, of the "Edda," and of who knows what else. It is heavily layered, marvelously complex, and described throughout with a madcap erudition that adds to its magic. The movie, however, is far simpler, dumbed-down, even.

This, too, was probably inevitable, both for reasons of pacing (only so much detail can be packed into two hours) and, more critically, commerce. "The Golden Compass" is being marketed as a holiday movie appealing to all youngsters, not just the early-to-mid teenagers who were the original novel's natural readership. It also has to be, to use the dread euphemism, family friendly. Thus, for example, the book's references to castration have been, well, cut, and, in recognition of the fact that butchered tykes haven't been Christmas fare since Herod, so have (more or less) its dead children. Overall, the film is more upbeat than the novel, and its characters less morally ambiguous.

This may relieve some parents, but it doesn't excuse the performances turned in by some key cast members, notably Nicole Kidman, a peculiarly stiff and dismayingly unconvincing principal villain, and the unforgivably hokey Sam Elliott. As aeronaut Lee Scoresby, Mr. Elliott is meant to be this movie's Han Solo, but he comes across as Colonel Sanders with a six-shooter. Then there's Daniel Craig, an oddly bland Asriel, but the blame for that lies with the script, not 007.

Fortunately, these weaknesses are offset by Ms. Richards's Lyra, who is sly, determined, awkward, and brave, a character with just the right hint about her of the first, and finest, of such heroines: the little girl who tumbled down a rabbit hole one-and-a-half centuries and one dazzling imagination ago. And Ms. Richards is not alone. In particular, she is ably assisted, both in her mission (like many works of fantasy, "The Golden Compass," which is the first installment in a trilogy, revolves around a quest) and in helping the movie along by Jim Carter, who is impressive and imposing as John Faa, Lord of the Gyptians.

The Gyptians are a half-tolerated, half-outlawed people who have managed to retain a degree of independence in the constricted, caste-hobbled, and authoritarian England of Pullman's vision. That's no mean feat: The country, and much of the world, is dominated by the sinister Magisterium, an organization determined to enforce its own brand of ideological conformity. Revealingly, Christopher Lee, saturnine and urbane, is its First High Councilor. Sadly, we don't see that much of him. For a fuller idea of the Magisterium's nature, we have to look to Simon McBurney, who is painfully watchable as the insinuating and shifty Fra Pavel. Pavel is a sort-of-priest with more than a suggestion of the Inquisition about him. He's also a reminder of why Mr. Pullman has so enraged such dime-store Savonarolas as the Catholic League (boycott the movie!), Focus on the Family (boycott the movie!), and the Halton (Ontario) Catholic District School Board, which has pulled Mr. Pullman's books from its library shelves for "review."

This is absurd, but predictable. Mr. Pullman is a dogmatic, rather insistent, and very public nonbeliever, and, like most preachers, when it comes to the topic of the big man upstairs, he's a bit of a bore. Mercifully, there's little of this in the first novel (and almost nothing in the film), but the trilogy as a whole does end badly, not only for God, but for the reader, its literary merits overwhelmed by its author's lunatic-on-the-subway determination to get his atheistic message across again and again and again. For this reason, the filmmakers' decision to make the Magisterium much less of a representation (or caricature, take your pick) of the Catholic Church bodes well for the sequels to come.

To be sure, Mr. Weitz's Magisterium still has a whiff of cloister and incense about it, but that's beside the point. It is principally attacked not for what it believes, but for how it believes, for its insistence that it has sole access to the truth, and for its intolerance of dissent. Its scheme to, quite literally, reduce most of mankind to the level of children — pliable, credulous, and incapable of self-determination — makes good sense both as drama and, yes, as warning. We live, after all, in an era when religious fundamentalism is on the march in our world as well as in Lyra's.

Saturday Morning Classic Literature

Beowulf

The New  York Sun, November 16, 2007

Mighty Beowulf fought for glory, honor, and immortal renown. If, however, the hero of that ancient Anglo-Saxon epic had been unlucky enough to see three recent movies inspired by his exploits, he would, I reckon, have opted instead for obscurity.

The first, Graham Baker's "Beowulf" (1999), was an incoherent fiasco starring Christopher "Highlander" Lambert, and set in a dank, dismal techno-medieval future. Next came Sturla Gunnarsson's "Beowulf & Grendel" (2005), a movie of such numbing sanctimony (trolls as oppressed minority, or something like that) that not even the beauties of Iceland and Sarah Polley were able to redeem it. And now, well, let's just say that Robert Zemeckis has done to "Beowulf" what Grendel never could.

In discussing a film this bad, it is, as with a particularly unappetizing meal, difficult to know where to start. A good place might be its most distinctive feature: the way it looks. This owes a great deal to the technique, known as "performance capture," first used by Mr. Zemeckis in "The Polar Express." Sensors attached to the actors' faces and bodies enable their movements, gestures, and mannerisms to be stored digitally for later use. With this method at his disposal, Mr. Zemeckis could, quite literally, do what he wanted with his cast. Eat your heart out, Mr. DeMille. He altered their appearance, he dressed or, oh yes, undressed them at will, and then inserted them into the computer-generated backdrop against which the film lurches along its blowsy, hectic, and heedless way.

Sometimes the results are striking: Ray Winstone, an actor of average height, middling age, and respectable stoutness, is turned into six and a half feet of ripped Viking hunk. But usually they are just clumsy: John Malkovich's Unferth resembles one of those annoying Geico cavemen, Anthony Hopkins's King Hrothgar becomes a pudgy Pillsbury satyr, and the lovely Robin Wright Penn (Wealthow) is given the bland prettiness of a lesser Disney princess. It is telling that the most successful transformation is that of Angelina Jolie (Grendel's unsettlingly yummy mummy), an actress whose most distinctive features may already owe a little something to science.

Worse, even if we ignore the obstacle posed by a laughably inept script, these added layers of technological artifice appear to have prevented a talented cast from breathing needed life into their characters. The makers of "Beowulf" might like to claim otherwise, but their actors have largely been reduced to cartoons. This need not have been fatal. Done well, the otherness of animation can be used to spirit audiences away to a parallel world of myth, magic, and the strange. But doing it well is more than a matter of megabytes. The imagery must awe, disturb, and beguile. Here and there, "Beowulf" does. The scenes in Grendel's lair are beautifully done — eerie, majestic, and resonant, the stuff, as they should be, of legend. As for Grendel's gorgeous mom, a nerd-core idol if ever one existed, the dangerous temptation she represents to Hrothgar and Beowulf is easy to understand. She is, insists Hrothgar, "no hag." Indeed she's not.

But these are exceptions, not the rule. Even viewed in their occasionally spectacular (and, in such a doggedly one-dimensional film, decidedly ironic) 3-D format, the visuals in "Beowulf" are, for the most part, shockingly banal. Nowhere is this more the case than in the depiction of Grendel (Crispin Glover), the "grimma gæst" (grim demon), whose repeated murderous onslaughts on Hrothgar's great hall summon Beowulf across the seas, to the rescue, and into the high school English curriculum. In the original text, Grendel is, to borrow descriptions from Seamus Heaney's grand and clever translation, "a shadow-stalker, stealthy and swift … [a] huge marauder … warped in the shape of a man." In this movie, he's little more than a jittery, whiny comic-book grotesque.

Similarly, the source of the fury that drives Grendel's lethal rampage has been dumbed down and jazzed up. It's no longer enough for him to be enraged by his sense of exclusion from God's good graces. Now he has family issues: Dad's the real problem, not God. In some respects, the writers of this film have turned a saga into soap opera, complete with warring spouses, infidelity, jealousy, and an examination of the wreckage left behind by unsuitable couplings. They attempt to justify this by claiming that it's a way to fill in gaps in the original narrative. We'll leave scholars to debate the extent of any such gaps, but it's difficult to avoid the suspicion that the screenwriters' real motive was to sidestep the core themes running through that bleak Anglo-Saxon verse: The implacability of fate and the impermanence of existence don't exactly make for the most promising box-office material.

To the tough-minded pagans of Beowulf's time, the most intelligent response to the inevitability and permanence of death was to try to live on in memory. Back then, the best chance for that was through heroic feats of arms, a concept that the screenwriters clearly understand, but which, I suspect, leaves them uneasy. It's true that some of their dialogue mourns the death of the age of heroes, but those passages seem primarily designed to take a swipe at the impact of newly arrived Christianity (something that does a disservice to the original poem's subtle blend of Norse and biblical mythology). This film's Beowulf is a brute, a liar, and a boor. He's also brave, and he is prepared to sacrifice himself for others. But if he is a hero, he's a hero diminished, if not debunked.

This, then, is not a very heroic film. It's not even a heroic failure.

In Search of the Inner Shaman

Khadak

The New York Sun, October 12, 2007

There once was a glorious, splendid, self-confident epoch, back in the reign of the blessed Eisenhower, when a director from the West could shoot a film about remote, mysterious Mongolia with minimal authenticity, fearless inaccuracy, and cultural crassness so epic that it could feature John Wayne as the young Genghis, Susan Hayward as Bortai, a haughty Tatar princess, and the irradiated Utah desert as the land of the khans. "The Conqueror" (produced, appropriately enough, by remote, mysterious Howard Hughes) may have been a critical and box office disaster in 1955, but there is something about its trashy exuberance, ludicrous script, and unashamed sexism that make it a wild, if naughty, treat. Who could forget those seductive, sinuous dancing girls and the touch of Vegas they brought to that distant, turbulent steppe? Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, the directors of "Khadak," that's who.

If "The Conqueror" is like one of those alluring, amazing, artificial, Technicolor desserts that used to bring a chemical grace to the dinner tables of Ike's America, so "Khadak," which arrives at Cinema Village today, is fat-free and eat-your-greens — appropriate fare for our grimly sensitive and relentlessly sanctimonious era. Be warned that it is, ominously and accurately, also billed as a "magical-realist fable," a description so reliably predictive of imminent tedium that both the Khan and the Duke would have trembled at the thought of the horrors to come.

The movie's confused and fragmentary narrative revolves around Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), a young nomad herdsman. Glum, taciturn, and subject to fits, poor Bagi gradually discovers that his seizures are triggered neither by epilepsy nor irritation at this film's stumbling screenplay. Rather, they signify that he is a shaman. In "The Conqueror," that would have earned him a weird clown hat and a prominent role at court. As, however, this particular shaman has found himself trapped in "Khadak," he has to make do with time travel, the companionship of the beautiful Zolzaya (Tsetsegee Byamba), and the opportunity to uncover a possible government conspiracy to trick his fellow nomads into abandoning their traditional lifestyle in favor of jobs with a mining company.

If the storyline in "Khadak" is unconvincing, much of its cinematography is anything but. For all its faults, this is undoubtedly a visually striking movie, at times astonishingly so. Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth (both of whom have backgrounds in documentary film) have been working in Mongolia for a number of years and it shows. The stark, vivid, and contradictory imagery of the Mongolia portrayed in "Khadak" bears little resemblance to the kitschy, made-for-export spectacle presented by the country's best-known director, Byambasuren Davaa. Ms. Davaa's movies ("The Story of the Weeping Camel," "The Cave of the Yellow Dog") may be wonderful to look at, but their underlying aesthetic, picture book prettiness, and superficial samplings of third-world exotica owe more to "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" than the realities of life in Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator) or, for that matter, the Gobi.

The beauties of "Khadak" are something more subtle, complex, and disturbing. To be sure, there are the inevitably lovely shots of windswept wilderness and lonely ger, but these are complemented by evocative footage of industrial machinery and the haunting remnants of an old Soviet settlement. Taken together, they make a compelling backdrop both to this movie and, frustratingly, the far better film it might have become.

Something similar could be said of the cast in "Khadak." For the most part, they do their best with the little they've been given (we'll draw a veil over the histrionics of Tserendarizav Dashnyam, an actress who puts the ham in shaman), but, in the end, there's just not enough material for them to work with. It's hard to avoid the impression that Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth viewed their ac tors as little more than additional backdrop, puppets to be manipulated and posed rather than fully realized characters with inner lives all their own.

One reason for this may be these filmmakers' inexperience with fiction, but a more likely explanation is that they were more concerned with the content of their message than its delivery. And that message is routine environmentalist agitprop overlaid with the multiculturalist piety that is, in reality, a form of profoundly insulting condescension. Mongolia is a hideously poor country trying to escape both ancient backwardness and the cruel pastiche of modernization that was communist rule. To deny that this process is difficult, occasionally brutal, and often exploitative would be absurd. Even so, to suggest, as this film appears to, that the solution can be found with the help of eco-babble, ancestral superstition, and premodern agriculture is even worse. It's a point of view that reveals more about the self-loathing of certain sections of the Western intelligentsia than any real understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Mongolian people.

"Khadak" is therefore best seen as an example of an updated form of cultural imperialism, one made all the more egregious by its pretense to be just the opposite. Under the circumstances, why not stick with the honest dishonesty of the original? In Mongolia's case, I'll opt for "The Conqueror" and the pleasures of Susan Hayward's high camp Bortai, an alabaster-skinned, red-haired daughter of Tatary born in Brooklyn, filmed in Utah, and financed by Howard Hughes, that fantasist, fabulist, and jet-age shaman.

Fathers, Sons, And Bogeymen

This  Is England

The New York Sun, July 25, 2007

Don't be put off by agitprop, achingly self-conscious blue-collar grit, and accents that may mystify some on this side of the Atlantic: "This Is England," the latest offering from the up-and-coming British director Shane Meadows, is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes wrenching and, at its best, profoundly moving coming-of-age tale that also manages to find room to ponder questions of friendship, fatherhood, group loyalty, masculinity, and national identity. That's not bad for 98 minutes.

What's more, this is a film with a brilliantly evocative sense of time and place. "This Is England" offers the England of 1983, an era of great transition. As the origins of the movie's title (borrowed both from a classic World War II documentary and an even more melodramatic than usual offering from the Clash) suggest, it was a country on edge, and at the edge. The most difficult part of Margaret Thatcher's harsh, necessary cure was, we know now, over. Back then, however, it was by no means clear that the treatment would work, particularly in beaten-down provincial towns of the type where "This Is England" is set-- places that rapidly found themselves becoming post-industrial at a time when post-industrial was a euphemism for "nothing to do."

It is one of the ironies of history that, if there's one thing that came to symbolize Britain's brighter future, it was the Falklands War, a conflict rooted in Britain's imperial past, a conflict that Mr. Meadows has called "suspicious." Oh, whatever, Shane, whatever. The fact remains that victory in the South Atlantic was a reassuring reminder that there was life in the old lion. Still more important, it ensured Ms. Thatcher's re-election, something that Mr. Meadows probably still regrets. Get over it already, Shane: It's done.

It is one of the ironies of "This Is England" that triumph in those distant islands has brought only misery to the film's hero, 12-year-old Shaun (the remarkable Thomas Turgoose). Already something of a loner, Shaun has been left adrift by the death of his father in combat in the Falklands. Try as she might, his mother cannot fill the gap left by a much-missed dad, who survives only in vacation snaps and in one ramrod, khakiclad portrait, as Tommy Atkins, iconic and doomed.

After a bad day at the local Comprehensive (in his painfully-dated flares, he's ineligible for membership in any of the schoolyard's tribes), poor, battered Shaun is making his way home. Wearily, your poor, battered reviewer braced himself for the inevitable rain, concrete, and misery of almost any British film set in the depths of the Thatcher terror. What happens, instead, is that Shaun encounters a small band of skinheads-- lost boys (and girls) lurking, as lost boys (and girls) should, under the ground (well, in an underpass anyway). Before too long, the loner finds himself adopted into a tribe all his own.

Despite its daunting exterior, the tribe, genially presided over by the kindly and charismatic Woody (wonderfully played by Joe Gilgun), is benign. The time it spends together is purposefully aimless, purposefully companionable and just a bit daft. This reaches its peak in one oddball, joyful excursion that is transformed into something almost ecstatic by the bewitching ska rhythms of the film's skillfully compiled soundtrack. It concludes with the trashing of some empty municipal housing, but it's difficult to mind too much. As J.M. Barrie would have explained, lost boys can make for a rough crowd.

A rose-tinted spectacle? Yes. But one that is forgivable in such a nostalgic, openly autobiographical movie, particularly as, in contrast to what comes next, it serves an obvious dramatic (and too obviously didactic) purpose. Every Eden must have its serpent, every lagoon its Captain Hook. Sure enough, Shaun's skinhead idyll is soured by the arrival of Combo (a subtle, horrifying and ultimately heart-breaking Stephen Graham). A "first generation" skinhead now in his 30s, Combo is fresh from prison and ready to reassert his authority. He's a malign, thuggish Falstaff to Woody's gentle Prince Hal. Too weak to stand up to him, too strong to go along, Woody quits the group, taking his girlfriend and a few others with him. It's a measure of Mr. Meadows's sensitivity as a filmmaker that we see that this is the last thing that Combo wants.

Woody may have departed, but Shaun remains. In effect he abandons the mentor who befriended him for the brute power of a man who is, significantly, about the same age as that father now lying in a military graveyard. Combo appears content to fall into some approximation of the paternal role, but he comes with an unlovely agenda. He's with the National Front, a racist, proto-fascist political party that defaced the British political landscape at the time. For a while it looks as if Shaun might prove an all-too-apt pupil.

In reality, the National Front was always more of a bogeyman to be brandished by the left than a serious electoral menace, and it's as a bogeyman that Mr. Meadows uses it in this movie. Taking his film solely as a period piece is, I suppose, fair enough; but if it's contemporary political resonance he's looking for, it falls flat, too dated to be persuasive: Those best described as "fascists" in modern Britain are more likely to be interested in fatwas than führers.

If Mr. Meadows's politics tend to the one-dimensional, his skills as a director (and writer -- the screenplay is his as well) are anything but. Combo is a vicious bully, but, it turns out, there's more to him than that. Deeply conflicted and flailing desperately in a world that has left him behind, he is no cartoon Brownshirt. How Shaun reacts to him is the central drama of this fascinating, complex film, and this is a drama that will not date, so long as there are fathers, sons, and the need for a tribe.

A Room With a Bloody View

1408

The New York Sun, June 22, 2007

I like hotels: the soothing anonymity, the agreeable sensation of watching people pick up after you, the questionable pleasures of pay-per-view. Needless to say, Stephen King, a writer at his best when conjuring up evil from the everyday, disagrees. In the prelude to his short story, "1408," he explains why hotel rooms are "naturally creepy": "How many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV?"

If you feel the same way, and you're reading this while slumped, quivering, and sweaty, in a Hilton, Hyatt or, God help you, Bates Motel, I'd prescribe clonazepam, not "1408." The latter is an effective, gripping tale, classic King, clammy and troubling, set in a hotel room so nasty that not even Basil Fawlty would dare explain it away. And if Mikael Håfström's new movie adaptation of the story has made it to that beckoning pay-per-view, keep clear. It'll only make matters worse.

Not that Mike Enslin (John Cusack, in a terrific performance) would. Mike is a once-promising novelist who now earns a good living churning out potboilers designed to discredit tall tales of hauntings, specters, and otherwise misbehaving dead. He's looking to conclude his latest book, so the arrival of a mysterious postcard hinting that room 1408 in Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel merits investigation proves to be an irresistible temptation. As a skeptic in a Stephen King story, Mike should know better, especially after being warned off by Gerald Olin (a splendidly forbidding Samuel L. Jackson), the Dolphin's manager. Gerald really, really doesn't want Mike to stay in 1408. Mike pays no attention, even after the solicitous Gerald plies him with good wine and a bad dossier. And what a dossier it is, choc-a-bloc with dangling corpses, bloody mutilations, and finales too disgusting to mention. It's not a question of ghosts, explains Gerald. It's just an "evil f------ room."

But Mike won't be deterred. Evil or not, the room is vacant. Under the law, he's entitled to book it (something to do with civil rights, apparently), and book it he does. This turns out to be the worst decision involving a hotel and a tale by Stephen King since Jack Torrance accepted that job at the Overlook.

As to what happens, you'll have to find out for yourself. Suffice to say, a bit of trouble with the heating (we've all been there) is the least of our hero's problems. If some of those problems (a sinisterly malfunctioning clock radio, attack by faucet, oozing walls à la " Barton Fink") are a touch clichéd, they don't detract much from what is, if not a masterpiece, a thoroughly competent, perfectly enjoyable horror flick — something that comes as a relief after the mess the Swedish Mr. Håfström made of his first English-language film, a train wreck of a movie called "Derailed."

A more serious objection to the approach he has taken is his recourse to sporadically spectacular special effects. These come close to turning "1408" into a generically chilling thrill-ride of a type that we have taken far, far too many times before. Worse, insofar as they open up and broaden the imagery of the movie, they risk throwing away the sense of claustrophobia that ought to be key to any narrative revolving around the plight of a man unable to escape from one murderous room. That this doesn't happen owes a lot to Mr. Cusack, who is horribly convincing as somebody caught in a trap that not only threatens his life, but also destroys the belief that has come to comfort, define, and enrich it — his conviction that the paranormal is delusion or fraud and that there's nothing that goes bump in the night.

It's no surprise to learn from an interview with Mr. Håfström on www.bloody-disgusting.com (you missed it?), that Mr. King has singled out Mr. Cusack for praise. The author was also, apparently, "very pleased" with the film as a whole. Given the mess that so many others, including, uh, Mr. King himself, have made of transferring his work to screen from print, it's a reasonable response. Even if the master of horror's judgment in this respect is not always sound (famously, he had major objections to the finest King movie of all, Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of "The Shining"), "1408" is a pretty good take on the original story. It's no "Carrie," but it's a long, long way from "The Lawnmower Man."

And if, in the end, it fails to deliver quite so much as the page-turner from which it has sprung, this was probably inevitable. The genius of Mr. King is more verbal than visual. It lurks in that curious mish-mash of the vernacular, the macabre, and the supernatural that he has made his own. In its blowsy excess, cornpone optimism, and bleary disillusion, it's as American as a slightly sour apple pie, yet it's so distinctive that, as Mr. Håfström is the latest to remind us, it is almost impossible to reproduce.

Nevertheless "1408" is well worth checking out. Just don't check in.

Britain, Year Zero

28 Weeks Later

National Review  Online, May 15, 2007

Here’s the problem. This review was meant to be about 28 Weeks Later, the newly released sequel to the hugely successful 28 Days Later, but, quite frankly, there’s not a lot to say about it. Judged in its own right, 28 Weeks Later is nicely paced, reasonably exciting, competently made, and well acted (with Robert Carlyle, as so often, a stand-out). What’s more, it boasts a few thought-provoking moments, and has enough deaths-by-helicopter-blade to justify the price of admission alone. The difficulty is that it’s a sequel. It cannot just be judged in its own right. The awkward, inconvenient fact is that those 28 weeks (or should it be 24?) simply weren’t worth the wait.

To understand why 28 Weeks Later is, relatively speaking, such a disappointment, it’s necessary to take another look at its predecessor. That’s just as well, because 28 Days Later is a much more interesting movie — and much more fun to write about. Easily the most gripping horror film of the last decade, the most shocking thing about its 113 minutes is quite how good they are. Sure, 28 Days Later is relentless, fast-paced, and savage, but it also displays a depth, intelligence, and lyricism that would be surprising in almost any horror movie: To find these qualities in a zombie flick is little less than miraculous.

Yes, a zombie flick. Ghastly, primitive, and profoundly embarrassing, zombies are the Billy Carters of horror cinema’s already dysfunctional family. Conjured up by American pilferers of some of Haiti’s tallest tales, and given shape by racist fantasy, rock-bottom budgets, and bankrupt imaginations, these hollow-eyed, empty-headed hooligans have been shambling their way through movies for more than 70 years. They may have nothing to say, but their box-office persistence is eloquent testimony to the fact that the supposedly sub-human are not the only creatures to be thrilled by the sight of torn and bleeding flesh.

There have been exceptions, notably the spookily effective I Walked With a Zombie, but for the most part these films have been a disgrace, a bloody smear across the silver screen, dominated by brutal massacre, inarticulate and vicious stumblebums, and, in the case of some of the more recent efforts, the worst displays of table manners since George H. W. Bush threw up in Tokyo.

The titles of just a small portion of the zombie oeuvre (helpfully chronicled in Jamie Russell’s indispensable Book of The Dead) give the game away: At Twilight Come The Flesh-Eaters (apparently the only known example of homosexual zombie porn), Blood of Ghastly Horror, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Corpse Eaters, Curse of The Cannibal Confederates (Strom Thurmond’s “longevity” explained?), The Curse of The Doll People, Doctor Blood’s Coffin, Erotic Nights of The Living Dead (heterosexual zombie porn), I Eat Your Skin, Neon Maniacs, Orgy of The Dead (scripted by Ed Wood!), The Return of The Blind Dead, Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Bloodbath, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Zombie Lake (Nazis — a twofer!), you get the picture.

Compared with that drooling, lurching cinematic rabble, 28 Days Later wouldn’t have had to amount to much to be considered one of the better zombie movies, but its makers were more ambitious than that, something evidenced by the trouble that the film’s director, Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle, has taken to distance his film from the z-word. Well, he can say what he wants. 28 Days Later is steeped in modern zombie lore. Boyle’s zombies (oh Danny, that is what they are, even if they didn’t have to go through the whole dying thing first) are the result of infection (science awry, another familiar theme), rather than supernatural intervention, they chew on me and they tear at you, and they exist in a post-apocalyptic landscape that they themselves have created.

Superficially, the most obvious difference between Boyle’s vision and that of the principal zombie auteur, the legendary George A. Romero, is that Boyle’s zombies, unlike Romero’s lumbering slowpokes, can move very, very fast. Thus the violence in this movie is often depicted with flickering, jittery strobe-light glimpses of high-speed slaughter, panic and mayhem, giving it an almost hallucinatory feel, far closer to Spielberg’s Omaha Beach than anything witnessed on Romero’s slow-mo killing fields.

A much more important difference is the care with which both the ruined world (in this case, Britain) and its few surviving people are portrayed. When Boyle’s hero, Jim (a terrific performance by Cillian Murphy) awakes from the coma that allowed him to sleep safely through the days in which a virus, “the Rage,” changed almost all his countrymen into unreasoning, homicidal maniacs, he discovers an eerie London that is both still there yet has been lost beyond recall. For Boyle, the litter-strewn shopping mall that usually symbolizes the aftermath of zombie apocalypse is not enough. In a series of magical, beautifully shot images of the deserted British capital, he gives us vistas incorporating the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, all intact, all empty, their survival only underpinning what has been lost, their lonely, lovely splendor only emphasizing the desolation.

The use of beauty to contrast with, and therefore deepen, the impression of overwhelming catastrophe is an effective device. Boyle returns to it throughout the movie, above all in its astonishing, blistering climax. Its setting, the complacent grandeur of a centuries-old country house, and the role in which it plays in the narrative, shows us both the achievements of civilization and, by not-so subtle implication, its fragility.

Seemingly a last outpost of order in a land gone mad, the once aristocratic mansion has been occupied by a small detachment of troops who have succeeded in keeping the infected at bay. When that order, never more than an illusion, finally collapses it does so into a ferocious hide-and-seek between zombies, Jim, increasingly feral troops, and Selena and Hannah, two refugees promised to the soldiers by Major West, their commanding officer, as playthings and broodmares. The fact that this lethal drama unfolds in the midst of the remnants of a Palladian idyll only adds to the sense of moral and intellectual collapse.

All this is reinforced by the soldiers’ decision to kit out their prospective concubines (one little more than a child) in gorgeous red dresses, costume that both parodies and mourns an elegance that now only exists in memory. Add the irony that Jim has to resort to such extreme violence to save them that both Hannah and Selena think that their rescuer himself has become infected, and then throw in some extraordinarily effective soundtrack music, and the result is some of the most powerful footage in recent cinema.

That description might give the impression that 28 Days Later has succumbed to the dime store misanthropy that characterizes all too many zombie movies. You know how it goes. The surviving humans (who are usually bickering amongst themselves) contribute to their own destruction and, even if they don’t, they normally behave so appallingly that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy when they are eventually pulled to pieces by greedy zombie jaws. That’s also typically Romero’s approach, except that he tends to camouflage the misanthropy with community college leftism: Vietnam, inequality, consumerism, redneck brutality, blah, blah, yada, and blah.

Thankfully, Boyle takes a more innovative tack. The survivors of 28 Days Later are often sympathetically portrayed (in the case of Frank, the loveable cabbie, somewhat stereotypically so), and when they bicker and feud, we see that this is a fairly understandable response to the predicament in which they find themselves. The film’s most identifiable villains (if we put the homicidal maniacs to one side), those renegade soldiers, are shown to be the lonely, scared, and despairing victims of a nightmare that would erode the restraints of civilization within any man. Even their major’s own approach to the situation, a rapidly degenerating mish-mash of Sandhurst, Darwin, Broadmoor, and Nietzsche can be seen as initially well-intentioned, a desperate solution for desperate times even if, as becomes increasingly obvious, it seems more likely to lead to Salò than to salvation.

Perhaps the most striking thing about 28 Weeks Later (this time Boyle was an executive producer, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed) is the way that good intentions gone wrong are also crucial to its narrative development. After a suitably horrifying preamble, the story basically begins with American troops re-establishing some form of normality in what is left of the U.K. As was hinted in the later stages of the earlier movie, the infection was confined to the British Isles. It’s now thought (ah ha) to have burned itself out (basically the infected were too maddened by their disease to look after themselves and starved to death). The few Brits to have survived the ordeal, together with those of their compatriots fortunate enough to have been abroad while the Rage, uh, raged, are now rebuilding their lives under benign, but somewhat oppressive, US supervision in the former financial district around London’s Canary Wharf, now known as the Green Zone. Ah ha indeed.

In a West now living once again in dread of devastating attack that scenario is bound to raise disquieting questions of just what would be left of life and liberty after. Then again, once the Rage returns, such concerns come to seem petty, the trivial obsessions of pampered folk who have forgotten their Hobbes. Needless to say, Uncle Sam’s response to the reappearance of the virus is panicky, brutal, pointlessly bloody, and as ineffective as it is counter-productive. The Green Zone falls, as, perhaps, green zones are always doomed to do. But before you rush to dismiss (or praise) these sequences (thoroughly gripping cinema incidentally) as a predictably unfair/much-needed critique of the current disaster in Iraq, it’s important to note that the sight of the Stars-and-Stripes forlorn and trampled amid the wreckage of the Green Zone heralds neither peace, nor liberation, but is a symbol of the triumph of elemental, irrational barbarism.

So, as I wrote at the beginning, 28 Weeks Later does indeed have its thought-provoking moments, but it’s unable to run with them for very long. The rest of the movie is, as mentioned above, watchable enough, and, as sequels to high-concept movies go, it’s far above Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the creators of this saga need to learn from the decline and fall of the monkey franchise. There’s already talk of 28 Months Later, but that would be a bad mistake. It’s time to put a stake through the heart of these particular zombies, Mr. Boyle.

Oops, wrong genre, but you know what I mean. Bullet in the head. Helicopter blade. Do what it takes.