Narimiya Hiroki stars as Phoenix Wright, a low on the totem-pole defence attorney called up to the big leagues when he signs on to defend a young woman he believes has been wrongfully accused of murdering her sister, a woman who was also his colleague. As it turns out, this is only the first of several trials that make up Ace Attorney’s two hour and fifteen minute runtime – after going head to head with Phoenix in round one, star prosecutor Miles Edgeworth (Takumi Saito) also finds himself on the stand for murder. As things progress, it slowly becomes clear that all the killings are somehow connected to a cold case from more than fifteen years ago, which Phoenix must solve in order to clear the names of his clients.

It’s likely that some of the appeal of Ace Attorney lies in its cultural roots. There is a distinctly Japanese flavour to the movie, and from the over-the-top character mannerisms to the increasingly ludicrous hairdos, Ace Attorney frequently resembles a live action anime, manga or video game. Some audiences might find the pictures unabashed silliness endearing or entertaining, but from my perspective – a Westerner with no familiarity with the source material – the total absurdity of the picture almost immediately begins to grate. Wright himself goes from incompetent to legal genius then back to incompetent without a seconds notice, while minor comic characters, with names like Larry Butz and Dick Gumshoe (he’s a detective, get it?) stay excruciating useless throughout.

Miike is an extremely talented filmmaker, and occasional moments throughout the film – a shot here, a sequence there – reflect this fact. But that only makes Ace Attorney all the more baffling. Was this a passion projects of his, or did he simply do it for the paycheck? And why, for the love of all that is good and holy, is this movie over two hours long? At least comparable American “comedies”  like Zookeeper or Jack & Jill  (yes, it’s that bad) have the decency to keep things close to ninety minutes.

A lot of Miike’s movies feature torture. Watching Ace Attorney is torture. Avoid at all costs.

—

Ace Attorney was reviewed as part of our coverage of the 41^st International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

You can read all of Tom Clift’s coverage of the festival here.

Kotoko (IFFR Review)

The Lincoln Lawyer (Review)

13 Assassins (MIFF Review)

Still Life [Stillleben] (IFFR Review)

38 Witnesses [38 Témoins] (IFFR Review)

Before continuing, it’s worth considering the possibility that this was all just an innocent mistake. Maybe Anderson thought he was making a subversive parody of The Three Musketeers, one designed to point out how inane it would be if videogame logic was used to sully Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel. Or maybe, just maybe, he thought he was making The Three Musket Ears; a direct-to-DVD mockbuster intended to piggyback off of the release of the real movie, which was being made elsewhere by an actual filmmaker. You know, one who, upon standing behind a camera, yells sensible things like “No! I don’t think we should make a Three Musketeers movie about the proliferation of CGI airships! Whatever we do, let’s not do that!”

At least the costumes are nice!

The story itself is far too convoluted encapsulate in a mere paragraph, but think of it as Resident Evil in a corset; a disconnected string of action set pieces where Anderson’s wife, Milla Jovovich, back-flips her way through tripwires and dangerous contraptions laid out by none other than Leonardo da Vinci himself (who clearly had nothing better to do with his time). Still, looking back over Anderson’s repertoire, it could have been much worse; Athos (Matthew Macfayden) could have been an Alien, Porthos (Ray Stevenson) a Predator and Aramis (Luke Evans) a zombie, although maybe they’re saving all that for the hinted-at sequel. Here, only the actors appear to be zombies, the exception being Macfayden, a versatile performer who deserves much, much better. As for Evans, I spent half the film thinking he was Orlando Bloom, which I must admit, left me feeling a bit silly when Bloom turned out to be playing the Duke of Buckingham. Still, with that accent, I’m sure he felt much sillier.

Let me talk a bit about the fourth musketeer D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), because after all, he’s the “hero” of this film. D’Artagnan is introduced innocently enough, leaving his Ma andPa behind and setting off for Paris in a hope of teaming up with the famed Three Musketeers. But, like a drunken polo-popped skinhead who’s just been kicked out of a nightclub, the first thing he does is pick a futile fight with scar-faced guardsman Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen). Being the right-hand man to the devious French Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz), Rochefort shows no mercy to the wannabe swordsman, and in fact comes mightily close to killing him. It’s a damn shame he didn’t, because I don’t think the silver screen has seen a more infuriatingly smug little twerp this side of a Star Wars prequel. 19-year-old Lerman, with his dollish face yet lifeless presence, appears to be the first prototype to be churned out of the Hollywood Hunk Machine 2000, a contraption that smashes together DNA from the likes of Justin Bieber, Alex Pettyfer, Rob Pattinson, Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron into one irresistible tween magnet.  Well, that’s the theory; they haven’t worked out all the kinks just yet.

The insanely irritable Logan Lurman, who I hope is having a bad day.

Look, I could harp on about how stupefyingly dumb it all gets, how tediously derivative the action is (one scene being a shot-for-shot Matrix rip off) and how the accents manage to be everything but French, but we’d be here all day. I could also attempt to calculate the precise number of black holes that must align for a movie this outrageously awful to come into existence, but given that the last time this happened was only a year ago (see: The Last Airbender), I think we’re all better off not knowing. Ignorance is bliss, they say.

Verdict:

Alexandre Dumas isn’t merely turning in his grave, he’s half way through re-enacting ‘Thriller’.

Resident Evil: Afterlife (Review)

Australian Box Office Report: 28-31 Oct 2010

Australian Box Office 6/11/11: We still love to be ‘In Time’

Australian Box Office Report: 14-17 Oct 2010

Australian Box Office 30/10/2011: JT not just NSync but In Time for top spot

Like pulling teeth, there is no easy way around saying that Dwayne Johnson’s latest film Tooth Fairy, is a complete disappointment. It should be granted that when considering a film about an ex ice-hockey star, relegated to the minor leagues via injury and bitterness who then gets a reality check via a summons to serve as a tooth fairy, we never really should have expected much in the first place. So what if character Derek Thompson doubts the kids in his life and blatantly tells them their dreams won’t work out…what about actor Dwayne Johnson’s debt to his audience for introducing possibly the worst movie of the year…and we’re not even through January yet.

The beauty of a kids’ flick is that they’re around about 90 minutes of film that have to rely on pure storytelling talent, minus the gold, guns and girls of the cinema those of us over the age of fifteen shamelessly love. The mark of a brilliant kids’ movie lies in it’s ability satisfy the entertainment needs of small children, whilst also holding the cynical attentions of persons past accepting the pure blisses of childhood fantasy. We’re all familiar with the brilliance of Pixar and that old conglomerate Disney (which coincidentally owns Pixar), so if it’s easy enough for the  FIVE screenwriters who were paid for this project to steal corny dialogue such as “you can’t handle the tooth” and “the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth” dipped from Oxford’s book of modern cliche, it really should have been easy enough for them to just rip off the entire winning formulae of those powerhouse kid’s filmmakers before them. Director Michael Lembeck is of the Santa Claus 2 and the Santa Claus 3 fame, so it’s surprising he is even directing something that is not officially a sequel, although *gasp* this film may one day have one…

Goofy Stephen Merchant stumbles and stutters his way through a stint as Thompson’s case worker at tooth fairy headquarters, and an aging Julie Andrews is so botoxed that even when she’s angry at the ice-hockey defenseman-turned-failing fairy, she is STILL smiling. In The Tooth Fairy, there is no comedic timing, every line is something we have all heard before and the dynamics of the focal family are so stereotypical that they really are bland people: Ashley Judd for example, is a fantastic actress here conformed to the role of a worrying mother only interested in finding the perfect daddy for her ex-husband’s spawn – a sensitive emo boy who hates hockey and a little brat princess. Typically a knockout in her own right, Judd takes on this role with little to no persona, only a few whiney bits of dialogue and baggy sweaters…she’s like a cinderella soccer-mum and her fairy godmother never comes.

Where the screenplay had potential to be laced with laughs and double entendre, only gaping cavities exist. The jokes that do find their way onto the screen – despite even a ten year long screenwriting process on this project – simply have no bite. Instead, every sound that booms forth through the pearly whites of Dwayne Johnson reduces itself, and this film,  to mere cliche, void of any originality. Waiting for the next one liner to pop up in this film at the most predictable moment is akin to waiting in the dentists’ chair when you know you’ve eaten too much candy between visits. The only point that deserves a laugh in this film occurs when all six-feet or so of the ex-wrestler is ridiculously crammed into a tiny pink tutu costume…

Verdict:

The filmmakers should be summonsed for tooth fairy duty to repay their debts to anyone who has even enjoyed a decent movie.

WTF: ‘The Fast and the Furious’ Set to Outlive Religion…

Faster (Review)

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Review)

WTF: Angelina gives Brad directions?

Are Teen Readers Granted More Blood, Guts and Sex than Moviegoers?

To be fair, Murphy isn’t the only one to blame. The film was doomed from the beginning with Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon’s screenplay, which literally sees Murphy, as workaholic financial advisor Evan Danielson, put a blanket over his head and run around his house like an absolute moron for most of the film. The blanket belongs to his daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi), which  she takes everywhere as a form of security after the divorce of her parents. When his ex-wife Tricia (Nicole Ari Parker) tells  him to take on a more active role in Olivia’s life, Evan finds the perfect reason to bond with his daughter when he discovers that her imaginary friends, connected with the blanket,  turn out to be incredibly good financial advisors. They help Evan get the upper hand over his obnoxious colleague Johnny Whitefeather (Thomas Hayden Church) — who speaks Native American gobbledygook to woo his clients – in their rivalry for a big promotion.

The story derived from a conversation co-writer Ed Solomon had with his son, and in a perfect world, it would have stayed as just that.  The sheer absurdity and meekness of the premise should be obvious enough, but my grievances with the film’s narrative don’t end there. Firstly, there’s the problem that Murphy’s character isn’t the least bit likeable. Why should we care for this self-absorbed father, who abuses his daughter’s insecurities for financial gain? While Evan inevitably has his moment of redemption – arriving at the last minute to his daughter’s recital – you’ll end up despising him all the more for making one of the most clichéd, gag-reflexive entrances in cinematic history.

Secondly, who in their right mind revolves a kids film around an investment banker? Half of the film takes place inside Evan’s workplace and deals with concepts that will go straight over the heads of children, likely boring them to pieces.  For adults, these scenes are marginally less painful to watch than the other half of the film, where Murphy resorts to his manic slapstick antics within his daughter’s imagination.

This brings us to Imagine That’s most detrimental flaw; despite a title that suggests otherwise, the film is severely lacking imagination. Neither Evan nor the audience get to see a single glimpse of Olivia’s imaginary world. The idea is that we let our own imagination fill in the blanks, which is probably an attempt to cut back on costs more than anything else. Unsurprisingly however, our mind stays firmly grounded in reality. The point of a film is to visualise a text so we don’t have to, immersing us within the creative mind of the filmmaker and not our own. Take Pixar’s Up as a prime example, or any of the Harry Potter films. Since Imagine That visualises nothing of Olivia’s wild imagination, we’re left to watch Murphy strike up manic conversations with walls for 110 agonising minutes.  Can anyone honestly imagine that being funny?

Tower Heist (Review)

Evan Rachel Wood and Guy Pearce join Kate Winslet in ‘Mildred Pierce’

Couples Retreat (Review)

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Review)

In Shreds #3

Just to clarify, I’ve got nothing against the film being a franchise reboot. Everyone’s doing it, and if any series needed to start afresh, it’s Friday the 13^th. After 10 instalments – two containing the word ‘final’ in the title, one set in space and one franchise crossover with Elm Street’s Freddy Kruger – it’s safe to say Hollywood had bled the hockey-masked hacker to death (if the bastard could actually die, that is). If it had to be anything, which it obviously did,  a remake was the right direction.

Yet to call Friday the 13^th a remake would be to lie. Only a brief, epilepsy-inducing preamble covers the events of the first film, where a young Jason watches on as his psychopathic mother is decapitated in an act of defence by a counsellor of Camp Crystal Lake. You see, Mrs. Voorhee’s went on a killing spree after the counsellor was too busy fornicating (happens a lot in this franchise) to notice her son drowning in the lake, to which he emerged deformed. Fast forward to present day and Jason (Derek Mears) still lives at Crystal Lake, killing anyone who dares to cross his path. In terms of back story and motive, that’s about all there is to it.

But before we even get the title card, or any sense of plot, we’re subject to what is easily the lengthiest ‘opening kill scene’ on record.  In it, five college friends venture to Crystal Lake to find a hidden marijuana plantation and have sex in tents, cause you know, that’s what teenagers do nowadays. Of course, Jason isn’t the least bit impressed by their trespassing ways, and in what is essentially a short slasher film in itself, kills them off one by one.  Yet given this sequence has little to do with the primary story arch, it’s twenty five utterly pointless minutes of film.  That being said, it’s also the best twenty five minutes of the film because we only have to put up with these obnoxious pincushions for a quarter of the time than that of the fresh batch of teens that follow.

I mentioned earlier that there was a plot, but don’t get your hopes up. What little there is concerns nice-guy Clay (Jared Padalecki), who is searching the Crystal Lake area for his missing sister (from the opening sequence).  He crosses paths with Trent (Travis Van Winkle), an unsympathetic jock spending the weekend with his girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) and five other blatantly stereotyped friends at his parent’s lakeside cabin. Aside from the narcissistic jock, there’s the token black guy (Arlen Escarpeta), the blonde bimbos (Julianna Guill and Walla Ford), and the Asian nerd (Aaron Yoo). It’s hardly a surprising line-up considering the film is produce by none other than Michael Bay, the man criticised for the illiterate, smack-talking robotic twins Skids and Mudflap in Transformers 2.

Anyway, back to the *ahem* plot; Jason thankfully kills most of these intolerable characters, conveniently after the females have had a chance to flash their boobs, and  the credits start to roll. No originality, no twists, no nothing. Friday the 13^th is just one mindless killing after another, none of which are particularly frightening or inventive.  It’s a case of “he’s behind you!” repeated ad nauseum, where sudden bursts of sound stand in for real scares.

Maybe if the film didn’t take itself so seriously (à la Drag Me To Hell), it might have actually benefited from its stereotypical characters, copious genre clichés and almost laughable death sequences. But since it doesn’t so much as wink at the audience, Friday the 13^th is yet another hack-job of a film in a franchise that Just. Won’t. Die.

Cinema Releases – March 12, 2009

My Bloody Valentine 3D (review)

New CONAN THE BARBARIAN trailer unleashed!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Review)

A Nightmare on Elm Street [2010] (Review)

When professional Transporter Frank Miller (Jason Statham) is pressured into working a delivery for a man known as Johnson (Robert Knepper), he is forced to break his first rule; he only works alone. Along for the ride is a Ukrainian girl by the name of Valentia (Natalya Rudakova), whom also knows little about the job at hand. What they do know is that they can’t leave the radius of the car; doing so will trigger an explosive device strapped to their wrist. With little choice but to follow Johnson’s directions, Frank gets acquainted with his passenger and discovers that she is more important to the job than he originally thought.

Instead of expressing my discontent in a standard review format, I’m compelled to use Transporter 3 as a short “what not to do” guide when making an action film:

1. Narrative cohesion is something necessary to any film, be it a profound period drama or a mindless action romp like this. Transporter 3 introduces you to this subplot about an offshore container ship full of toxic waste, only to then spend the next hour following Jason Statham around as he drives from location to location, taking a break every so often to bust out some kung-fu and speed off a bridge.

Why exactly? You’ve got me…

It’s as though the film is content with the fact that we don’t know what the hell is going on or that we don’t actually care enough to find out. Even when the relation between Statham’s delivery and the container ship is eventually drawn, I still can’t work out why Statham’s character was at all necessary to the scenario. They could have easily booked a flight to their destination instead; I wasn’t aware holding someone hostage now required an elite chauffeur to drive them around Europe.

2. If you’ve got a film that sells primarily because of its action, at least try and make said action good. Each chase and fight scene is completely old hat; nothing here hasn’t been done before and done so better. Director Olivier Megaton – whose subtlety obviously derives from his last name – must have realised this, explaining why he opted to speed up the action to a laughable level. It also appears that editors were specifically tasked with making sure the audience is unable to follow the action, almost as if to further mask just how ridiculous and sloppy these sequences are.

3. Apart from endless chase sequences, films about cars have one other integral component; attractive females. Like everything else, Transporter 3 is surprisingly lacking in this department as I’m certain  the film has only one female speaking role; Frank’s Ukrainian passenger Valentina. Not only does she turn out to be loathsome by nature, Valentia is unfortunately portrayed by a completely listless Natalya Rudakova. Her character’s contribution to the film had me borderline infuriated; all she does is sleep, eat, cause trouble and complain. Even if she was the only female in sight, to which I already established that she is, I still would have eagerly kicker her out of the car before I even left the garage. What kept Statham from doing the same is anyone’s guess.

4. The secret to a good film soundtrack is that it should never be noticeable enough to distract the audience from the visuals. Of course, Transporter 3 does the complete opposite and  makes sure every single change in the soundtrack is glaringly obvious. This might be because of a song selection couldn’t have been more obnoxious and unfitting if it tried. Someone should inform Megaton that a chase scene does not suddenly allow for a romantic interlude by simply by replacing the Techno mix with an overly sappy string composition.

If you hadn’t notice, I’ve given Transporter 3 a ½ star, which indicates that 10% of the film isn’t as bad as the other 90%. You can thank the film’s star Jason Statham and villain Robert Knepper for this slight glimmer of salvation. Statham still manages to look cool and in control, which is expected considering he’s been playing the same role for about 5 years now. Knepper, of TV’s Prison Break fame, manages to be somewhat menacing despite the cheesy script. However, it’s the Audi A8 that turns in the film’s best performance. Although prospective buyers should be warned; contrary to what the film will have you believe, a car will not start – let alone go at speeds in excess of 200 Km/h – after taking a deep plunge off a bridge and into a dam.  If you believe that it can, then you might just be the demographic responsible for Transporter 4 being green-lit, so here’s hoping you don’t.

Conclusion:

If my mobile phone wasn’t turned off during the film, I would have called Frank and asked him to transport me the hell out of the cinema.

Cinema Releases – February 5th 2009

The Mechanic [2011] (Review)

Competition: Win tix to TT3D CLOSER TO THE EDGE plus DVDs!

The Expendables (Review)

Death Race (Review)