Having gone through fourteen years of development hell, the first of Sony’s planned videogame adaptations arrives – Uncharted, starring Tom Holland, turns the famously cinematic action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving games into surprisingly enjoyable action-adventure treasure-hunting puzzle-solving cinema.
Well, “famously” is relative – Uncharted is an enormously successful blockbuster series with which Mike is familiar, but José didn’t even know there was a series on which the film was based. With the benefit of his experience, Mike discusses how the film adapts five games’ worth of material and the expectations he had, and we consider the characters’ relationships and personal stakes, conceptualisation of the action, the similarities and differences to Indiana Jones, and Antonio Banderas’ villain.
I have now seen Transformers: Age of Extinction which I find crude, ugly in spirit, a kind of barbarism in culture. In keeping with the rest, the ‘girl’ screamed a lot. The only thing barely human is Mark Wahlberg. The rests seem like an illustration of The Dialectic of Enlightenment: all that science, all that knowledge, all that artistry, marvellous shots; all now directed at destruction, and of ideals too not just of things
I went to see it hoping to understand why the franchise remains so popular. I do see that not all expensive movies that make a great big noise and that have shooting flames as a background to people leaping over things are alike; and some of them can be quite beautiful (though of this type of film, I’ve only liked Edge of Darkness so far this year). This is neither beautiful nor did I get any insight into what audiences are getting from it. Plus I mistrust criticism in the press to such an extent (and with excellent reasons) that I think I should check these things for myself and have my own views, which I now do. That’s what I expected and got from seeing the latest Transformers I suppose.
Another reason I go is because when I was young I remember critics saying those Schwarzenegger and other action/spectacle films of the 80s were the way I now see the Transformer films and I think some of the Schwarzenegger films are some of the great masterpieces of the cinema so I keep thinking maybe I’m missing something:
Terminator, Total Recall etc. are now recognised as classics of the genre (and this applies to the Robocop, Aliens, Batman etc. as well); so I’m just curious to see if younger people have reasons for loving these films that I’m not getting (I think most people would now agree with me about the aforementioned Schwarzenegger and so on; and I think the older people who dismissed them in the 80s just didn’t bother to look, or look carefully, it was partly not seeing, partly not knowing how to see). So I go to these to find out if I need to learn a new or different way of seeing or whether there’s simply not much to see beyond what I already do.
What I do see is a chasing of the Chinese market, product placement trying to sell us things, sexism, all the crash and bang and explosions and metal twisting, a militarist, gun-loving play on destruction: thousand of buildings get destroyed, loads of people die, nobody cares. I thought this of a show the Black Eyed peas did in the middle of the Super Bowl a few years ago: all military outfits, regimented movement, thousands of dancers, like soulless robots out for the kill; and one begins to see that these are signs of empire in decline; all the filmmakers cannibalise Arthurian legends without understanding what was at stake in them. The Transfomers talk of freedom without taking into account everything they’re destroying to achieve it. It’s like the collective, the common good, a sense of common humanity and individual rights have no place in this vision of the world.
The movie is making money and that is receiving substantial coverage. But there are more important things than money. If what movies say and how they make us feel don’t matter, then movies don’t matter; and if movies do matter, we should care more; and if movies matter as much as I think they do, the filmmakers should be ashamed to put such shit out into the universe. Hardened whores have more of a conscience than is evident in this type of cynical filmmaking.
If film-going were still a simple leisure activity –easy, cheap, the kind of thing one did to while away a Saturday afternoon in between shopping; or as I did as a kid, the place you went to for a bit of fantasy and glamour whenever you felt like it — you’d walk in in the middle of the film and stay until the film re-started again and took you to where you came in; and then, if you liked it, you sat some more and saw it again — if film-going were still like that, rather than the expensive, troublesome, special event its become, then I’d recommend 2 Guns.
The film clearly set out to be an A-minus genre piece. You can imagine someone pitching the concept: a heist movie crossed with a buddy film but with a twist: the crooks who pull the job, Bobby(Denzel Washington) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) are really DEA and Navy, and the money they steal is not the Mexican mob’s but the CIA’s.
In 2 Guns no one is who they claim or who they seem to be –Deb (Paula Patton), that beautiful girl Bobby meant to like is double-crossing him with Stig’s prettier boss, Quince (James Marsden). In fact everyone will double-cross everyone. Each betrayal allows the plot a shoot-out, a car chase or both. At the end, the two stars will walk arm-in-arm into the sunset but not before one shoots the other in the leg, partly to even out something that happened earlier but also to eliminate any funny ideas people might have.
I experienced the film as an enjoyable trifle: as befits a comic-book adaptation, it has a handsome, mindfully sparse look; the compositions of a noir but the colour palette of a comic book influenced by noir (browns, blacks, grainy bright yellows); it has Denzel Washington, the most charismatic of contemporary stars (of the other contenders, Will Smith tries too hard — you’re frightened he’ll hip-hop onto your living room ceiling if he got even the slightest whiff it might please you; and there’s something oleaginous and slightly dishonest about George Clooney’s charm – like he’s trying to trick you into liking the he that he is not).
It also has Mark Wahlberg, looking like an inflated galumph; as if he were an ordinary Joe trying to get fit but instead getting fat on the wrong protein shakes; but with those sad, knowing, little eyes of his telegraphing that he’s not as dumb as he sounds. His voice, gentle, low but thin, an expressive counterpoint to the power implied by his body, always hits the right note when he’s got a joke to put across.
Washington and Wahlberg, play off each other with rhythmic ease; they give and take on the lines, battle it out for the camera’s focus on the two-shots. You never get the sense they’re playing real people, they’re big stars trying to outdo each other and trying to entertain us; they’re both slightly past their prime physically which perhaps makes one even more aware of just how good they are and how rare their skill.
The film delivers on what the advertising promises. In fact it does better than that. Edward James Olmos is terrific as the Mexican gang-Lord: greying, measured, gravitas backed up by weaponry, and with principles, the only ones the film has on offer. Bill Patton is just as good, all southern charm laced with sadism. Lovely to see Fred Ward also, as the Admiral who plays by a set of rules different to Stig’s. And James Marsden seems to have found his calling as the bad guy. He’s the type of star who’s so good looking and so pleased with himself you always wish someone would smack him; when he plays the bad guy, somebody does! He should play bad guys more often.
As I was walking home after the movie, I thought, ‘it’s ok’; and then I began mulling on how interesting the film was ideologically; it criticizes all the institutions, CIA, DEA etc. It’s a corrupt world through and through; where the only relationships are instrumental, where people mean to love but end up betraying or marrying up and for money. The film’s message is clear: the only thing that matters is taking care of the guy next to you. Moreover, 2 Guns felt like the first of these interracial buddy films were race didn’t really seem to figure as an issue (compare to the 48hr films) and I don’t think it’s only because Bobby is white in the original comic book. Race is currently being re-signified in American cinema and this is a good example of how it’s happening. I haven’t quite worked through these ideological implications; I’m not even sure they’re worth working through; but by the time I’d got home the film seemed richer, more suggestive, at least worth a think.
And then, by the time I started writing this, I thought, people might not go to the pictures as they used to but maybe the way we consume films might not be that different: Pop the DVD in, see a bit of it, if you like it see it several times. And really, the real test is that unlike most films, some whom I initially thought more highly of, I would see 2 Guns again when it comes out on DVD: It looks good, moves well, the actions scenes are competent, and it delights with expertly exchanged banter, a few good jokes, and two stars showing each other and the audience why they’re stars. Moreover, the supporting cast is made-up of people who normally headline and are here at their best. Plus it seems to have interesting things to say. When did I get so picky?
