MIB2 and The Transporter
You'd be forgiven for thinking that I hadn't seen a movie in a while, but you'd be wrong. It's just that what I've seen lately has been so poor that I haven't had the heart to review it. I feel I should at least try, so here goes.
Men In Black II
You know you're in trouble when weak plot points are solved through the abundant use of Deus ex Machina. I can just imagine the script-writing session that came up with some of the answers to the problems facing the sequel authors.
A: We can't bring him back, he lost his memory because he was neuralized.
B: So we give him his memory back, just think of a name for a machine that gives it back to him and put it in the movie.
A: Errr.. DE... Neuralizer?
B: That's really good, how do you come up with these things? Thank God we're paying you lots of money to help us with this script.
When running out of clever dialogue, the dastardly duo have a new cunning weapon against the neer-do-wells that refuse to co-operate: They stand really still, freeze their facial expressions and say nothing. Somehow the targets of this cunning piece of mental trickery crumble under the pressure and quickly become very co-operative. How do the writers get so creative?
Weak weak weak weak weak. I should have listened to the video-store guy, he knew what he meant when he saw me rent it and his eyebrows rose so violently they fell off his head.
Which leads me to ...
The Transporter
If you like action and nothing else, this is passable - unfortunately, the dialogue suffers from Luc Besson-isms and ends up very stilted, and the whole thing doesn't hang together very well. I watched this at home and found myself wandering around, making coffee and flicking through magazines as it played because there wasn't much in the way of plot.
With lengthy action sequences, there's less and less room for development, and with most conversations boiling down to collections of witty one-liners, writers no longer need to define their characters to any level of depth. The result is a feeling that the main protagonists are only skin deep, and they are. The backstories that motivate the actions of the characters on screen are two-dimensional, and this leads to predictability, cliché and a lack of empathy with them. More often than not now, we don't really care about the characters anymore because there are no value-changes during the stories. Moral dilemmas are simple, two-state and solvable, and our characters don't grow as people during the story.
When at the end of a story, the world and it's people seem pretty much the same as they were at the beginning, you have to wonder what the point of it all was.
I can't think of much to say about the above two films because there's really not much to them. Avoid.
Posted by nlvp at June 1, 2003 07:26 PM