Suckers

I managed with little effort to miss Twilight (2008) until very recently. I knew it was intended for a young adult audience (adapted from a wildly popular series of teen novels by Stephenie Meyer) and figured it probably didn’t have any of the macabre fun of the old Universal horror classics, but I was unprepared for the lurid look and the stoned, senseless rhythm (everybody’s face, human and vampire, is the same sickly gray-green, the same color as the landscape). It’s been awhile since I’ve seen something this mediocre take itself so seriously. It looks and sounds like an Eighties rock opera in some parts and an indie chamber drama in others, and it’s unrelenting. It’s also weirdly static. In many scenes, the actors just stand there, glancing around nervously, hesitating to deliver these awful lines while their mouths twitch, and you wonder whether they’re parodying youth or paying tribute to it. 

Postpubes. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart

The pictorial effects are gloppy–beautiful, like an issue of Condé Nast Traveler, and despite periodic moments of suspense, the movement of characters through the frame is poorly staged, and scenes repeatedly turn into pudding before they end. The production feels like a revolving tableau of celebrity glossies without any actual celebrities. Some sort of bizarrely postpubescent world view motivates it all, so the emotions all feel wobbly and terribly phony to adults. These bloodsuckers, who can swim underwater, experience all sorts of internal anguish, and they talk in pained, halting tones. All the actors appear to have used the same acting coach, and whoever it was probably works a day job in the food truck hospitality industry. Aside from their acting, the leads in the movie don’t embarrass themselves because they so obviously belong there; they’re of a piece with the somnambulant banality of the conception. But that unity of form and function is still pretty feeble; these young actors give you the impression they were hired at random in the school cafeteria. It’s obvious they’ve had little experience and even less training, and this movie is perfect for them. But the adults — the parents — all seem lost; in scene after scene, their faces wilt, possibly with shame over being stuck in a movie that is so patently not their own. (Maybe the adults were hired at random in a post office?)

I can understand why this movie was such a huge hit. It feeds a primal longing not for shocks or gross-outs (the staples of most teen horror films) but for liberation from high school routines or smothering parents or middle-class values, and I think young audiences projected themselves onto the hip, confused characters. It’s vampire psychodrama. But it all seems the product of an unformed mind and personality; it could have used some comic subtext instead of all this lugubriousness — the two leads must have the heaviest eyelids since Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao (1952). The idea that some vampires don’t want to kill people and so resort to chasing after forest critters does have comic potential (remember how Dwight Frye’s eyes lit up when he ate juicy flies?), and the soundtrack works best when it ditches the gloppy score and incorporates some funky pop songs, but practically none of that potential is tapped. This movie bungles its chance to put the groove back in the undead — it could have been the best thing since Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Lunkheads

The thinking—if that’s the word—behind The Expendables 2 (2012) seems to be: “We’re over-the-hill action stars who can no longer slam our bulging carcasses around a movie set the way we used to, so let’s play this for laughs.”

The problem with the cast (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, and Randy Couture) is that their self-referential, tongue-in-cheek shenanigans, which are supposed to be amusing, fall totally flat, while their earnest attempts at macho action (shooting and hand-to-hand combat) are pedestrian and embarrassingly tired. These lunkheads are too old and corpulent to be doing what they’re doing: they stand with their feet cemented in place and swivel their hips left and right, like plastic action figures. They hit dozens upon dozens of bad guys in the chest and face with a barrage of expensive ammo. The action figures in interactive video games are more believable than these movie “legends.”

The two guys who actually are physically fit—the scruffy Statham and a cardboard henchman named Scott Adkins—don’t exactly elevate the level of action-movie discourse, either. Adkins remembers every so often to deliver his lines with that phony Slavic accent that movie publicists love. What is it with cornball Russian villains in action movies? Adkins is a carbon copy of previous carbon copies, from Ivan Drago (Rocky IV) to Sergeant Yushin (Rambo) to Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash (Iron Man 2), and he doesn’t make an impression at all, even when his skull is pulverized by a propeller.

Action savior. Jet Li

The only person who brings any class to this noisy imbecility is the prodigiously gifted Jet Li, who executes his one fight scene with panache, timing, and genuine wit. Li seems to be in a different movie (actually, he was in a different movie at the time, the beautiful Flying Swords of Dragon Gate). He’s a deft acrobat, like the great silent movie clowns, as he casually smacks each opponent in turn with a cooking utensil; just as you expect him to hammer the one remaining opponent, Li gives him a quick jab with the palm of his hand to send him toppling, and then shrugs and wriggles his nose. Li is a martial arts Chaplin besting Mack Swain in The Gold Rush (1925). Everything about Li is elevated above the surrounding slop, and he gives moviegoers something back for the time they’ve invested.

The stock actors of Westerns in the 1940s and ’50s—John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Ward Bond, Jim Davis, and so on—stayed too long in the saddle. They kept churning out witless star turns in Westerns into the 1960s and ’70s, trying to maintain their own outsized myths while their faces sagged and their girths widened, hauling themselves up on horseback with the finesse of walruses. The Expendables 2 exemplifies a superannuated genre. Like those Westerns filled with stars who were well past their sell dates, it has all the charisma of a cattlemen’s convention. I hate to see Jet Li associated with something like this, not because he unbalances the movie with his talent but because, by saving a movie with no other redeeming value, he’s used sacrificially.