Colombiana

Colombiana’s tagline is “Vengeance is Beautiful.”  I’d have made it, “You’ll believe a 115-lb wisp can kick a grown man’s ass.”

The film begins in Bogota, a hot, dusty, and overcrowded series of favelas in which sweaty, grimy men kill for a dollar.  Coincidentally, I’m in Bogota as I write this.  As I look out my hotel window in this city at 8600’ above sea level, I see pines and walnut trees, green grass and a park.  It’s 68°.  The people are better-dressed than the average American.  So really, the film doesn’t begin in Bogota at all.  It begins in the Scary South American Drug Haven of Euro-American imagination.  That’s fine, because the film exists in the world of imagination.  It imagines that Zoe Saldana, an attractive and athletic woman who looks like she never ate a cheeseburger in her life, can deliver a punch that’d actually, y’know, hurt.  It imagines that a villain sophisticated enough to pull off a $50M Ponzi scheme would be a Z-grade vulgarian willing to blow his entire take in the first five years, going by his choices in housing, entertainment, and personal protection.  It imagines, well, it imagines a lot of things.  Your enjoyment of this film will hinge upon your willingness to imagine along with it.

Are you willing, for example, to imagine that a parkour-inspired chase sequence actually happens, since the film cuts so quickly from shot to shot that we never actually see any of the stuntmen do anything?  Are you willing to imagine that Zaldana is capable of learning and performing a fight routine, since the film never actually shows us one?  Are you willing to imagine that a top-notch revenge thriller is unspooling before you?

Me, I’m willing.  And not just because Saldana looks great in a catsuit.  I’m willing because Saldana sells it.  She sells smart and menacing and deadly so well that I didn’t even consider the film’s implausibilities until I sat down to write this.  When Saldana declares her need for vengeance (yes, this is just another revenge thriller), when she chaos-cinemas her way through an army of bad guys, I believe it because she believes it.  This woman’s gonna be a big, big star because if anyone can make an audience believe that a 115-lb wisp can do whatever she damn well pleases, it’s Zoe Saldana.

So enjoy your trip to Fantasyland and groove on the ‘splosions and dig the gunfights and all that.  Let your imagination run wild.  Zoe Saldana will help you believe; and it’s beautiful, man.

Sunshine

There's a lot to like about SUNSHINE. It sports dazzling visuals, arresting sound design, and a fun twist on the reliable science fiction premise of things going wrong on a spaceship far from home. The twist, of course, is that this spaceship is on a mission that takes it dangerously close to the sun, and the star's radiation is so dangerous that it borders on tangible.

Often, a film like this will pit the feeling humanists against the cold-hearted military types. I thought SUNSHINE was going down this road, so imagine how surprised and delighted I was when the military types turned out to be right time and again. Another common pitfall of this kind of picture is a disregard for physics, and I thought that SUNSHINE handled this particularly well in the third act, when time and space get ginchy.

Unfortunately, however, physics is about the only thing right about the third act. When the movie twists, its as if the filmmakers lost faith in the inherent fascination of their premise and decided to go, instead, with a bogeyman. And then they present the bogeyman horribly, with inexplicable fuzzy-cam and at least one victim shot so amateurish that I couldn't believe it made the final cut.

Even with the disappointing close, however, I still recommend SUNSHINE. It looks great, sounds great, and is a good time at the movies for most of its run. You could do worse.

Live Free or Die Hard

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD is the best "Die Hard" movie since the original.

Yeah, I read all the bellyaching about this being "Die Hard in Name Only." Y'know what? I don't care. I don't care about the sanctity of the John McLane character. I don't care about the formulae used in previous outings. Just tell me a story. And while you're at it, blow some stuff up.

LIVE FREE tells me a story. And it blows lots of stuff up. The scenario is actually one that folks in government worry about a lot: an orchestrated cyber attack on the US that locks up our transportation, shuts down our financial networks, and eliminates communication. Granted, LIVE FREE embellishes the magnititude and drama of such a scenario, but it also features a guy shooting down a helicopter with a car. Not in a car - with a car. So that more than makes up for it. While this is happening, McClane must "get the guy to the place," a reliable quest formula well in keeping with storytelling tradition. Speaking of storytelling traditions, this film departs from previous "Die Hard" movies in that John McLean has gone from the modernist, vulnerable American hero model to the near-invincible Northern European version. He's Beowulf with male pattern baldness, and that's ok. Did I mention that he shoots down another helicopter with hydrant water? There's also some stuff in there about reconciling with his daughter (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, an actress with a long career ahead of her) and helping the Guy He's Got to Get to the Place find his inner hero. Oh, and he leaps from a collapsing structure onto a moving Joint Strike Fighter and essentially surfs the thing all the way to the deck. Awesome.

LIVE FREE seamlessly combines CGI with practical stunts. It has well-choreographed fights and action set-pieces. Justin Long does his schtick, but it hasn't worn out yet. Timothy Olyphant, while no Alan Rickman, makes for a fine villain. The whole zips right along, and, even at 130 minutes, I never once looked at my watch. If you like stuff blowing up real good, and you like the Northern European heroic tradition, and you like the idea of a guy finishing off a deadly villain by crashing an SUV into her in a an elevator shaft, this movie is for you.

It was for me.