The story bears more likeness to “Man on Fire”, with Denzel. Both plots to rescue a captured girl by unscrupulous rescuers. Both backed by a high degree of police corruption, making it one man against everyone else.

I am quite impressed with Liam Neeson. I haven’t seen him in this kind of role before, but I think he fits it well. Then again, he takes on quite a wide spectrum and fares well wherever he goes. Oskar Schindler will always been in our memories, but he was a submarine officer in “K-19″, and then played the Batman villain in “Batman Begins”. There are those actors who just seem to fit in whatever the environment, without making a big splash, part of the scenery almost. And you think they’ve always just been there. Neeson is one of them.

The premise for Chuck is the same. He’s a geek, he has a pity-friend geekier than him. He works at a big electronics chain. And he has a “normal” sister who wants him to be “normal”.

Then it happens. His old college buddy, a CIA agent gone rogue, sends him a message containing every government secret he’s stolen in his “rogueness”. Chuck somehow absorbs the whole thing, the computer breaks, and now he’s the only one with the secrets. Except he’s still the geeky suburbia guy, so two agents from competing agencies show up to make sure nothing “happens” to him. Needless to say, he cannot divulge anything to his sister or his friend, so he has to pretend like nothing has changed. The agents, in turn, get jobs near him and have to fit into the suburban landscape.

You’re probably thinking “with a premise like that it could so easily suck”. And I’m with you. But it doesn’t. Chuck is pretty good in his role, and the whole spying thing is sufficiently farsical to be funny, but not so overdone that it’s stupid.

Not a great story, but not a bad one either, there is enough to work with no doubt. But that’s kind of where the positives end. Mark Wahlberg in the lead.. not bad frankly, but for a role like this you need an actor who can be sensitive, someone who can express the turmoil that he’s going through, and Mark just isn’t it, the best he can do is look serious. If you think that is revealing, you’re onto something. The big problem with this movie, nay disaster, is casting. The casting is horrendous, to the point that not a single actor is right for his/her role.

There is Danny Glover, so admired from the Lethal Weapon epic. For some reason he doesn’t even have a voice to speak with, barely producing the words. But he’s one of the better ones. The eager detective Nick Memphis who just started at the FBI. Eager yes, but playing a detective like you would a bartender, no feel for it. Swagger’s female friend looks like a contestant for Miss America, dolled up like she’s going shopping, lives on a farm. Again, no personal drama that anyone would buy. And so it goes, the standard FBI/police war room personnel in a movie like this, all of them misfits, badly cast. Same goes for the bad guys.

I felt the first half of the movie was going somewhere, but the ending is crying out for a rewrite. When you’re doing a plot like this you can win the viewer over by building up to something. It’s a matter of trust, you tell a story that captures the viewer’s interest, and based on that you make a promise to deliver something later on. I’ll agree to hold my judgment and go along with you. That’s why you have to deliver at the end, you can’t just walk out, or the trust is broken. A feeling of betrayal ensues.

A good director could have taken this plot somewhere, maybe even with the ending as it is. But the casting is unbelievably bad.

So basically we have a timid, illiterate hitman who lives mostly on milk and cookies. Contrary to that whole ninja school of combat, he’s not one of those “my body is my temple” types. He has a sort of rugged fitness which is kept in check by doing sit-ups every morning (and the constant milk, calcium mhm-hm). He’s probably not very fast on his feet, cause at no point is there any running. His main gimmick is hanging from the ceiling, so that when the bad guys come into the room they don’t see him (a poor man’s ninja if you will). Oh, and he’s the best hitman in town, sublime when on the job (less so off of it).

Not much is known about his past, but apparently he came to America as a poor, helpless immigrant, taken pity on by a generous Italian restaurant owner. All these facts are stretching poor Jean Reno’s acting skills to the limit. Reno has a thick French accent with no vocal skills to get around it, how the hell do you claim he’s Italian?

Besson makes no effort to justify Leon’s career choice. It’s not because he grew up in a war torn country, because his parents were killed or because he read too many comic books, he was just poor. And killing seemed as good as anything else, eh? Then again, he does put on those dark sunglasses when he clocks in, no doubt there is a deep and heart wrenching ethical conflict there, but it goes unarticulated. (Personally I would suggest his superego needs a small tune-up.)

And there is a girl. Dad does coke, family gets nailed by bad guys, same old, same old, yadda yadda yadda. Mathilda takes refuge at Leon’s, teaches the big bear (or shall I say pig, that’s his favorite fluffy pet) to read, he teaches her about guns, the usual story. If you’ve read this far just to find out if the “I love you”s are forthcoming, they are.

If you like the idea of Reno as a hitman and you want to see him in a far stronger part, check out “Ronin”, it’s quite good in more ways than one.

On the face of it, RoboCop is a lame story about the decay of society as a pretext for violence. The world portrayed in the story is dystopian, there are raving bands of hoodlums, there is organized crime, social order is all about defeated. And it’s a cold world, filled with cruelty, void of compassion, a world of desperation. And above all, a world where corporations have taken over.

In this world, the dead police officer Alex Murphy becomes the cyborg RoboCop. A robot with a half-human mind, preserving some of his memories and emotions. But programmed by the powerful Omni Consumer Products (OCP) corporation to obey the directives he has been given. Essentially a killing machine, but a somewhat restrained one. Imagine a slow thinking, emotionally numb human, in terms of decision making.

Irony and comedy

But appearances can be deceiving. Sure enough, there is enough gunfire to go around, but the writers saw no reason not to have a little fun with the story. Picture your average worker stuck in a dead end job who has to pretend he’s taking it very seriously, but when the boss isn’t standing over him, he finds ways to amuse himself.

In order to drive home the point of a violent world in need of an enforcer like RoboCop, we have Media Break, the news program that reports nothing but violence. Since the writers already had this means of narration, they decided to put in some commercials as well, just like on real tv. These ads are wonderfully ironic and humorous. One is for a board game called Nukem, showing your average family sitting around a table playing wargames, where the culmination, of course, is the nuclear strike that wipes out everything.

Another ad goes like this:

*attractive woman by the pool in a robe* They say 20 seconds in the California sunshine is too much these days. Ever since we lost the Ozone layer. *takes off robe, now wearing a bikini* But that was before Sunblock 5000. Just apply a pint to your body *stars smearing herself with an opaque blue substance* and you’re good for hours. See you by the pool. *by now completely covered in the blue stuff*

But there are other humorous angles to it. Take how RoboCop, who is by no means the brightest intelligence, suddenly develops deep sensitivity, so that when the little girl says she misses her parents, and he scans his data to learn that they were killed in the riots, he decides not to tell her. For a robotically enhanced killing machine he’s also quite polite (compared to the humans around him), never curses people, the worst he ever called anyone is scum. In a rather unfortunate reprogramming mishap he even becomes politically correct, condemning wrong doing by lecturing delinquents rather than arresting them. Then, in a risky act of self-sacrifice he electrocutes himself to restore him own judgment.

Or take how in order to wrap up the story (whose premise it is that the OCP corporation controls the world) in some fairly definitive way, the writers decided that an unannounced, amateur broadcast of 2 minutes over the corporation’s network would result in OCP’s stock to drop to zero within 5 minutes. Problem solved. Then, just as we remember from The Karate Kid, Part II, the powerful owner of the Japanese company which absorbed the OCP in a hostile takeover came out to meet the people who had valiantly defended themselves against their corporate aggressors, decided he had made a mistake and paid tribute to them.

Truth

For all the parents out there on the fence about whether they should let their kid go see RoboCop, there is plenty of educational value in these movies.

Lesson #1: Crappy tv commercials never go away

That commercial with the bald guy and the hookers who says “I’ll buy that for a dollar” appears several times in the first movie, and reappears in the last one.

Lesson #2: The success of the corporation is the suffering of humans

The big, evil corporation OCP is plotting to tear down all of Detroit to replace it with some sort of high tech metropolis called Delta City. But before that can happen, goes the story, crime must be brought under control. They even deploy their own special “security force” to speed up the process. And they own the police, so they can tell them what to do. The only incentive for any corporation is more profit, which means ever decreasing freedom for the average person, and ever increased in-fighting inside the corporation itself. Another movie that explains this is in great detail is The Corporation, so have that one ready when the kids start asking about it.

Lesson #3: Media is run by corporations

Media Break is driven by an agenda to be a scare mongering institution, a propaganda device. All they ever report is violence domestically and violence abroad. This is exactly like modern day media institutions which have lost all credibility and only pander to corporate interests. CNN, anyone? But at least Media Break has more of a conscience, as one of their reporters walks out in the middle of a newscast because she can’t stand to dish out the misinformation.

Lesson #4: A system can only be secure when it’s physically secure

Over the course of the three movies various people get their hands on RoboCop and reprogram him. In the third movie the little girl even plugs into the ED-209 robot using her laptop and makes it friendly to the rebels. This is the truth about computer security that everyone knows. If your system is physically compromised, you can’t trust it. Sending a robot out into the world gives everyone access to it and they can plug into it just like you do at the lab.

What I really like about this story is how raw the characters are. This is not a story about a veteran in the field à la Jason Bourne, who knows everything, feels nothing, never fails. It’s about a guy you can relate to, someone who is learning to understand, but still living through the pain of being put through all these things that are happening to him. The plot isn’t brilliant, it’s neat and tidy, almost simple. But the appeal of the movie isn’t in that, it’s in the characters, how real they are and how unrefined their reasoning and emotional response is.

The idea is nothing is what it seems, but they don’t take this very far, they hold back so that the characters can tag along at their own pace. And that’s.. nice. Most other stories try to push the envelope and many of them fail to resolve well. This one doesn’t, and you can appreciate that they care more about the character development than the goal to have a complicated plot.

Enjoyable as it is, I just have to point out a few technical things. Forgive me, it’s too much to look the other way, downright embarrassing at times. Okay, what the bad guys are after is “a virus”, a computer virus. It turns out, though, that this is a magical virus that you can deploy right into the power socket in your house and it will infest the nation’s whole power grid. Okay, that’s just beyond bad. And James is the MIT kid who is a computer wiz. And we are supposed to buy this. Had they said it had something to do with electricity or whatever, maybe if they’d tried hard enough I’d bought it. But a computer virus on the power grid? Seriously, do 15min of research before you put that in a movie.

Secondly, as the guy duly explains, the CIA headquarters are well guarded, you can’t take anything out of there. That’s why the computers don’t have disk drives. Yes, that’s a quote. What kind of disk drives? Floppies? CDs? Zip drives? And you also can’t print anything because they don’t have printers. Uh-huh. Well that still leaves about a dozen different media you could use, including usb drives. And what do you know, that’s precisely how the super clever villain exports this “virus” out of the building, hiding the usb stick in a coffee mug. Now, your typical computer virus is probably less than 1mb of source code, I mean these things have to be small to go unnoticed. But this mastermind is smuggling it out… in pieces. What do you got there, Photoshop? Like the whole thing wouldn’t fit on the usb stick, so you have to do it in turns. Okay cmon, I’m on candid camera, who the hell would believe this?

It’s basically just a long action sequence. And the action is pretty artsy as they come, it’s not meant to be realistic or anything like that, so the physical realities are comfortably ignored. They’re fighting off all kinds of attacks, swinging their shields so fiercely that every impact with an enemy is like the collision between a semi trailer and a bicycle. They also use this Matrix-like technique where the action slows down and the Persian soldier is moving in slow motion, while the Spartan navigates the space/time continuum so he can swing his sword in real time during a slow motion sequence. No wonder they were so hard to defeat.

Of course, that being the case, the obvious question is why didn’t the Persians just drop some rocks on them? Where were their catapults? Would have trampled the Spartans easily without much effort.

Xerxes called himself a god (there’s actually some substance to that claim, there is an xml library in his name, meanwhile Leonidis has no such legacy), but the Spartans were actually more like gods. For starters, they never wore anything over their underwear. I suppose the Greek climate is nice and comfy, but even so you would expect some manner of unkind weather. Then they never ate or slept, and could fight 24/7. And they had no logistics, no supplies of weapons, soldiers, or provisions. Obviously they were no gods, though, no god would be stupid enough to reject the offer to become warlord of all Greece and avoid certain death.

But there are many other curiosities. For instance, why did the Persians make their landing in a place where the Spartans found their ideal strategic position? X marks the spot, right? So the most convenient landing would probably the red arrow. And suppose from that point the only road to Sparta leads through that narrow canyon the Spartans enjoy so much. Well we already saw how the Persians have a gazillion ships, so how about trying some other approaches? I suggest the green arrows, those put you at a proximity to Sparta.

The ending is also very puzzling. Once Leonidis’s troops are wiped out, with the promise of Persian massacre onto Sparta, we somehow move one year ahead, Sparta now has found and trained 30,000 troops while escaping extinction. Pink Panther fans are surely shaking their heads.

So yeah, there were some nice artistic images in this movie. A lot of interesting Photoshop-like art, especially in terms of landscapes, skyscapes and lighting effects. Very odd movie, I’d much prefer one about my childhood comic book action hero, the Phantom.

If you’ve familiarized yourself with 1984 or any derivative thereof (like Equilibrium), you will find yourself right at home. It’s hard to know to what extent Ray Bradbury’s vision was recreated faithfully, but the odd thing here is the lack of a totalitarian regime. The one authority we relate to is the Fire Department, whose function it is to burn books. The rationale is that books make people unhappy, and therefore they must be destroyed. Mkay.

From 1984 they reused the tv concept, as a propaganda delivery device (not terribly far fetched in our world anyhow). This is also the only reference to a regime in the plot, where they call the nation a family and citizens cousins. But the tvs do not spy on people. 1984 is truly totalitarian in how every aspect of life is controlled. Here it’s just the books they don’t like. They bring in the owners to be questioned, but there is no sense of torture or death row punishment for the offense.

The culmination of rebellion, is the notion that every person who loves books picks one and commits it entirely to memory. So that instead of *having* the book they *know* the book. This is where the literalism runs wild. They even take it as far as if a book is published in two volumes then two people will learn it and each recite one volume. This idea is put into practice in a pretty odd way, as we just see people wandering around the woods reciting books without much concern for where they are spending the night or how they plan to feed themselves. I can’t say that I see the immediate benefit of this lifestyle. After all it’s not the literal content of books that is useful, it is the wisdom.

I get the feeling that Bradbury was much in awe of Orwell and decided not to push the envelope here. Orwell’s society is masterfully crafted, whereas Bradbury seems to have limited himself to some reasonable subset without trying to connect as many dots. Of course, one can ask oneself whether topping Orwell is even possible. But not trying obviously won’t get you there.

An interesting story, but a bit half baked.

It’s one thing to put Vin Diesel in an extremely explosive action movie with a lousy plot. He may not look much like a field agent, but he is rough and he’s definitely crazy enough to do anything. But Ice Cube as a marine takes the cake.

If you’re looking for some mindless action, this is a fun movie. The whole time I’m expecting Ice Cube to start rapping, but somehow he resists the urge. Instead he’s shooting guns, jumping, running, fighting, all rather clumsily. And he’s not very bright for an agent, none of his sentences are longer than 7 words, none of the words more than 3 syllables, it’s such a spectacle.

His foe is played by Willem Dafoe, who really isn’t a good actor at all. He’s the typical minor part actor you’ve seen in a ton of mediocre parts, so his lead role is somewhat surprising. Then again, Ice Cube..

The opening sequence tells you all about what kind of movie this is. A squad of professional killers breaks into a super secret NSA facility…. underneath a farm. Samuel L. Jackson, who regrettably doesn’t play a big role, is the only one to make it out alive in a modded hot rod, along with his geek-of-the-movie companion. Whom I have to say is a breath of fresh from the typical geek, he’s not a teenager, he doesn’t talk in puns, and he wears a flannel shirt.

Then they go to pick up Ice Cube, who of course, is in jail. After a break neck escape he jumps off a roof… grabbing onto the chopper piloted by Sammy. A poetic move. Then they go get some wheels, where Ice Cube unveils the most ridiculous ride ever, a truck the height of two cars. Well you can imagine how this movie unfolds…

Don’t miss the hilarious scene where Ice Cube and his band of thugs break into a tank and cruise to the White House in it.

“Did the president of the United States just quote 2 Pac?”

As I’m watching the opening sequence I can’t even believe that it *is* Die Hard, thought maybe it was trailer. But then the title comes up. Basically, this is not a Die Hard movie. These people have no idea what they’re doing. Die Hard is about a band of armed robbers with an ingenious plot to steal a ton of money. It’s not a disaster movie, and it’s not a computer cracker movie. Half an hour into it I was thinking enough with the computer crap, already!

And I wasn’t the only one, every 15 minutes John McClane was asking wtf is going on, he had no idea. I mean the whole point of Die Hard is for John McClane, a clever cop cut way above the dumb-cops stereotype to overturn the plot. But he had no clue what was going on here. If McClane can’t figure it out, there’s something very wrong with the story.

This movie is a story about computer crime retrofitted with John McClane.

The story isn’t terrible, it has its merits. I think it’s a quite acceptable computer-terrorist-takeover plot as they come. But since they call it Die Hard I’m going to continue discussing it on that premise. So let’s focus on the bright points, cause we need to savor them.

Bruce Willis is indeed a bit gray haired for this role. But considering how estranged he is from the plot, he does a decent job. Basically he’s the best feature this movie has. His cracker/stoner companion starts off very lame, but he comes along.

But now let me ask this. Did they not have any money for this movie? The casting is like a who’s who of bad actors. Bowman is the worst FBI director of any movie ever. He’s completely clueless, gutless, and worthless. He has no idea what’s going on, and absolutely no concept of what to do. Then there’s the villain Thomas Gabriel. Now if you know anything about Die Hard, you know that the whole success of the story is predicated upon a great bad guy. Simon Guber (Jeremy Irons) was a *genius* in Die Hard with a vengeance, he made the story a success. Thomas Gabriel, meanwhile, is a puny security expert gone loco with a plot to steal billions of dollars. If Bowman is the least convincing character, Gabriel Thomas is a close second. Guber was a psycho, Gabriel cries on the phone when he finds out his girlfriend is dead. This is supposed to be a Die Hard villain? He looks more like an insurance salesman.

Then there’s Mai, Gabriel’s right hand. How relieved was I when she was killed. It’s like a contest of who can make the worst fit for their role. Then there’s Gabriel’s squad of French/Italian terrorists/crackers/soldiers. This is a very odd mix of outsourced personnel, they don’t even speak English. Consequently they don’t have any terrible lines either, so perhaps that’s a plus. Cyril Raffaelli does a decent job with the parkour, but frankly if you want to see coolass parkour, you’ll go see Banlieue 13, which is much better at that.

The action sequences are for the most part terribly misguided. Here’s the thing: if you want to do an action sequence, you have to build up the plot first, so that it culminates into the action. In Die Hard 4 you just have a lot of very random action bits. Like the car falling into the elevator shaft – Jurassic Park already did that several times with a bus, enough already. Then there’s the helicopter-assassinated-by-car idea, which is beyond ludicrous. Apparently a speeding car hitting a toll booth is supposed to elevate some 30m right into a chopper of killers. Can’t you at least try to make it believable? The most complicated action sequence must be the fighter-jet-hunting-a-semitrailer. And it’s not really that bad, it’s just that you have to somehow buy the story to enjoy it, which is unlikely. Also, it’s high time for Hollywood to stop telling us that you can drive a car at high speed and come to an instant stop without a scratch. No one is buying it.

I also don’t buy the soldier/cracker idea. We’ve all seen so many action movies with terrorists where you have these really big chunks of muscles, expert with weapons and combat. But in this movie, they try to make them computer experts too, which isn’t convincing.

Also, why are crackers always so shy and timid? Trey is Gabriel’s geek-who-makes-it-all-possible friend, and he’s like every cracker in every terrorist movie, full of scruples and hesitation. Theo, from the first Die Hard, was much better – he was actually evil. Sure he didn’t kill anyone, but it didn’t deter him either. He even tried to make away with the money when everyone else was taken out of action.

Saving grace that he is, John McClane struggles to fit into this plot. In Die Hard with a vengeance, he fought the bad guys, but he was just trying to catch them. In Die Hard 4 he actually announces his intention to “kill them all”. This is not the John McClane we know.

A surprisingly well kept secret is that it’s the story that drives a good action movie. That is why Die Hard with a vengeance was a masterpiece. If not, it’s just boring combat and shooting. A fact lost on this guy and the 44,517 people on imdb.com. This review gets it right:

Boring characters, crappy script, interesting fight scenes. But fight scenes never make a movie. The worst die hard in my opinion, even worse than die hard 2. At least die hard 1 and 3 had interesting tutonic villianry.

At the end of the day, it’s not such a terrible movie, it’s just not Die Hard. Which is a shame, considering what they advertise on the movie poster. If they didn’t do that, it would be a much quieter movie, with a fraction of the people come to see it, and they’d probably be more satisfied than those of us who wanted a Die Hard movie.