Now Showing...

Candid Reviews of Movies
Just Hitting the Big Screen

President DiCaprio —Lame Script, Bad Music, and Leo Looks Like Clinton

Leonardo DiCaprio has somehow aged to resemble what one could easily imagine as a young movie-star version of Bill Clinton. On the cover of this month’s issue of the Brit magazine The Face is a photo-still of DiCaprio from director Danny Boyle’s (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting) The Beach that looks like a youthful Bill Clinton in a freeze-frame from some non-existent version of Cape Fear. The lighting is eerie and the atmosphere reflects more of a late evening swamp feel than a sunny ocean vista. I mention all of this because on the heels of the huge success of Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio (The Basketball Diaries) has ended up with a film that will go down in cinema history as simply more clear evidence of the actor’s screen charisma overshadowing every bad line of voice-over narration (“My name is Richard. What else do you need to know?”) and banal plot line thrown at him.

Once you get past Boyle’s uneven and heavy handed use of ill-chosen club music to underscore Richard’s adventure into the depths of post-modern solitude on a remote Thai island inhabited by marijuana farmers on one side and new age sycophants on the other all you’re left with is DiCaprio’s inarguably magnetic performance. Far removed from the actor whose slight presence was practically eaten alive when he rubbed shoulders with Jeremy Irons and Gerard Depardieu in The Man In the Iron Mask (1998), DiCaprio turns the tables to put the bite on every other actor in The Beach. It’s not a matter of scene stealing like you might see from James Woods in his most inspired moments of set chewing but rather more of an Edward Norton earmark of acute wisdom puncturing the actor’s own skin of innocence and inscrutable potential. Perhaps as a backlash from his being passed over by the Academy for his work on Titanic, DiCaprio works the camera with a vengeance, his heavily wrinkled forehead flashing out semaphore messages of lust, denial, and ambition.

Tilda Swinton (Orlando) plays Sal a matronly new age leader to the group of international misfits who have settled a commune of paradise bliss at the lip of a Club-Med-perfect enclosed lagoon. Swinton hits the screen as a welcome surprise of formidable jousting promise for DiCaprio’s Richard to go toe-to-toe but never gets enough screen-time to show much more than a fresh make-up change.

John Hodge’s (Trainspotting) screen adaptation of Alex Garland’s 1997 best-selling novel fails to lift the material beyond its Gen-X “Gilligan’s Island” limits. As Richard finds himself exiled from the tiny community of dimwits to recapture a map that has brought an unwanted group of surfers, he and the movie collapse into a silly Apocalypse Now kind of reverie inspired by Richard’s brief encounter with a crazed former island inhabitant named Daffy (Robert Carlysle) that led Richard and two French companions to the island in the first place. Richard indulges in a ridiculous video game inspired bit of cat and mouse with the armed drug lords that guard much of the island seemingly as an excuse for Boyle to show a trashy video game version of Richard’s inner subjective experience as he runs through the jungle. It’s an animation-fueled sequence that completely defeats all willing suspension of disbelief by the audience.

Mankind’s search for Shangri-La and his unencumbered pursuit of pleasure are goals best achieved alone. So seems to be the overriding theme of The Beach. It’s an outwardly ideal motif for Boyle to frame in his pulp-action style of Scottish anti-capitalist filmmaking. The problem is that The Beach’s dramatically hollow script already barely supports the weight of its thinly Lord of the Flies derived quality. Richard is an impure interloper to the island community because he arrives with capitalist traits of fear, lust, and selfish greed. But where Boyle had a handful of fully-drawn and fiercely motivated characters to work with in his screen adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, The Beach’s characters are more like San Francisco residents caught by another surprise earthquake: the surroundings look great but everyone knew the earthquake was coming, so where’s the surprise?

Analysis Miss — Gun Shy Sinks Like Concrete Shoes

If you get more than five or six mild chuckles from debut writer/director Eric Blakeney’s pathetic effort at toilet-humor imbued, mob-inflected comedy then you’re incredibly easily persuaded to laughter. The writing in Gun Shy is so blandly forced and dumbly uneven that you might stay and watch just to comprehend its insipidness. Besides being transparently derivative of last year’s Analyze This and crudely aligned to the current cable television show “The Sopranos,” Gun Shy insults the audience with dreadful recurring themes of bowel related problems and bathroom incidents (the lead character is seduced by his enema nurse) and a sixth of the movie seems to take place in a men’s room.

Charlie (Liam Neeson -The Haunting) is a legendary undercover detective working as a mediator a money laundering operation between trigger-happy mobster wanna-be Fluvio Nesstra (Oliver Platt - The Imposters) and a couple of gay Colombian drug cartel types played by Jose Zuniga and Andy Lauer. Charlie has been spooked by a recent operation during which his cover was blown and he was tortured with a rifle stuck in a lower orifice before being rescued at the last minute by fellow detectives. Charlie is so traumatized that he can’t control his bowels and has joined a support therapy group to hold his hand through this final mission before he can escape into retirement if he isn’t killed first. It’s with this set of ideas that Blakeney has casually stamped ‘comedy ensues’ and relied on a laundry list of actors to fill in the all too blank margins.

Gun Shy’s gray area of broad humor is further exhausted by its loose plot and ill-developed relationships among characters. The money-laundering operation is all run through the stock market and therefore seems no more threatening than the latest Bill Gates acquisition. The movie lurches in fits and starts through Charlie’s burgeoning romance with enema nurse Judy Tipp (Sandra Bullock). The two lovebirds take obligatory long montage walks around Manhattan — and I mean all the way around Manhattan, because even in the 21st century directors seem to have not yet learned the importance of continuity in regard to locations.

There’s an ugly trend in American comedy screenwriting lately that says it’s really cool to throw a bunch of dislocated comedic ideas into a screenplay with a nod to the dramatic genre here and there and it will play as ‘dark comedy.’ It’s a style reflected in the recent screen disaster Play It To The Bone and the boring result comes off as an ineffectual morass. There’s no attention paid to comedic timing (which should come at a fast twitch pace as with any of Mel Brooks’ movies) or to the subtle touches of innuendo (which comedy masters like Brooks and Billy Wilder understood to the core).

Liam Neeson is a second-rate actor. And I don’t just mean Baldwin-brother second-rate because even when he shoots for power and authority (as with Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins or last year’s crummy Star Wars installment) the actor comes up embarrassingly short. In one particular scene in Gun Shy the towering 6’4” actor is called upon to frolic romantically with Sandra Bullock in the midst of a dirt and water drenched rooftop garden bit of foreplay. “Wooden” and “stilted” are actor’s terms that best describe Neeson’s attempt at spontaneous romance. The poor guy tries too hard all of the time. Even when he’s trying not to try so hard there’s an unpleasant strain behind his speech and body language that screams out to the audience, “acting in progress.” The problem is that the acting never seems to occur. Neeson constantly appears to be preparing to get ready to perform some monumental task. Comparing Neeson’s performance in Gun Shy with De Niro’s in Analyze This will provide acting students with a wealth of information about the difference between bad and good renderings of similar characters on film but it won’t do much for audience enjoyment.

©1990-2003 Copyright ScotGiambalvo.com. “MODE Weekly™”, and “MODEweekly.com™”  are trademarks of Scot Giambalvo.
All rights reserved. Copying content from this site without permission is illegal. Linking to this site as if it was your own is just plain rude.
Click here for usage/link permission.