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JUL 21 - JUL 27, 2010 | WWW.CONNECTSAVANNAH.COM
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Inspired in part by the delightful Mickey Mouse sequence from Disney’s 1940 Fantasia (there’s even a scene in which Dave battles dancing mops), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is strictly standard action–fantasy fare, not too bad as these Bruckheimer boom boxes go. There’s some clever CGI trickery mixed in with the more lackluster effects, Baruchel is appealing in his limited way, and the jackhammer pace insures that there’s no time to get bored. But is any of it memorable? Hardly. I remember the contours of my theater seat better than I recall the particulars of this cinematic sleight of hand.
PREDATORS It may not have seemed like much at the time, but in retrospect, 1987’s Predator now stands as one of the better pictures on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly underwhelming resume, behind only the first two Terminator films and Total Recall. Predators, on the other hand, won’t seem like the cream of anybody’s crop; instead, time will dismiss it as yet one more belated sequel
hoping to turn name recognition into cash value. An ’80s breeding ground for future governors (Arnold and Jesse Ventura) and a wannabe governor (Sonny Landham), Predator benefitted not only from powerful visual effects and brawny performances but also from the muscular direction by Die Hard’s John McTiernan, who worked over the streamlined storyline and brought it to rippling life. Director Nimrod Antal can’t manage to do the same for Predators, a flabby new variation on that most reliable of short stories, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” Instead of Zaroff and his hounds, we get the title fiends and their hounds from hell, four–legged grotesqueries employed to drive the human prey out into the open. Here, the hapless earthlings, all imported to a distant jungle planet for the amusement of the alien hunters, include a humorless mercenary (Adrien Brody), an Israeli soldier (Alice Braga), a murderous convict (Walton Goggins) and the apparent wimp of the group, a meek doctor (Topher Grace). You know priorities are out of
whack when the film’s most interesting performer, Machete’s Danny Trejo, checks out waaay too early while the worst actor in the bunch, the perpetually hammy Goggins, is allowed to hang around. Laurence Fishburne, who I always assumed couldn’t give a bad performance, proves me wrong with a head–scratching turn as the only survivor of the predators’ previous hunting expeditions. And Adrien may have the Oscar, but he’s no Arnie, and he turns out to be a rather colorless action hero. Speaking of the action, which of course is the film’s raison d’ tre, it’s dutifully handled, but there isn’t much here that quickens the pulse or jolts the imagination. In fact, if there’s a central failing in Predators, it’s that true innovation is in desperately short supply. The film comes armed with memorable monsters and a workable premise (the hunters become the hunted), but by offering little more than one–dimensional variations of the original’s entertaining characters as well as basically duplicating its lush forest setting, this one qualifies as little more than a bungle in the jungle.
Despicable Me When James Stewart offers to lasso the moon for Donna Reed in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s purely a romantic gesture. When Gru (Steve Carell), the star of the 3–D opus Despicable Me, plots to shrink the moon to a size small enough so that he can make off with it, it’s clearly to show that he’s the baddest dude around. After all, if a supervillain isn’t feared and respected, then what good is he? Despicable Me, one of those non–Pixar animated efforts that actually turns out to be good (happily, we’ve seen an upswing in the number of such worthy achievements, as evidenced by the likes of How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs), is a witty, congenial lark that obviously won’t have the staying power of Toy Story 3 but serves quite nicely as a pleasing placeholder in the cinematic summer of 2010. Sweet–natured yet also avoiding the cloying sentiment that tarnishes any great number of toon tales, this finds Gru enlisting the aid of three oblivious orphan girls to help him one–up his
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