cartman442003 Reviews

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

Kurt Wimmer buckles under pressure; goes with the "safe" ending

[5/10 · 25 July 2010]

"Law Abiding Citizen" is a movie that got me angrier than "Transformers 2" and more disappointed than "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." Yet, I'll probably watch it again. And again.

See, "Citizen" inspires a rare sort of hatred in me. 90% of it is a provocative, fearlessly cathartic and hauntingly relevant piece of social satire mixed with a grade-A action thriller script and top-notch acting across the board. That's why I'm going to watch it again, despite how terrible the ending was.

Without giving anything away, the movie spends all of its time making us know that Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a meticulous planner who's serious about getting even with the system of justice that allowed his wife and daughter's true killer to go free with a mere 3-year sentence. Literally every move the justice system and his ex-attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) make, Shelton has already set in motion countermeasures for that step and the next three they will take. Rice is characterised as a smarmy, ladder-climbing political manoeuvrer who cares more about his reputation as a prosecutor than dispensing actual justice. Not once during the course of the movie does he ever, ever admit that he was wrong not to pursue full conviction for both the killer and his accomplice, or even conceded that Shelton was cheated out of justice by a corrupt and broken system of law. "Some justice is better than no justice" is the phrase he uses to rationalise his decision. This being a very anti-establishment film, it's clear that the intention was for us to see Shelton as, though a morally ambiguous psychopath, a man who sees the justice system for what it really is: a mere system. A cold, soulless, illogical, by-the-book factory made up of bored and overworked people that treat justice "like it's an assembly line." Rice, therefore, represents the system then, in both occupation and personality: he's incorrigible, he's utterly cocky, and he refuses to acknowledge fault in himself or make any concessions for Shelton. Though he clearly believes in justice, he's still part of the problem. Right?

You're right. That was the intention. However, "Law Abiding Citizen" ends up being just another crime thriller. The "psychopath", the societal outcast, is punished and ceased, while the clean, self- righteous lawyer finishes the job just in time to make it to his little girl's cello recital. No, really. That's where it ends. In fact, once Shelton is killed, it cuts soundlessly to the recital and then goes black. A quiet, abrupt end. Despite everything that had been built up, it just ends.

I find it hard to believe that this was the original ending that the writer of "Equilibrium" intended to have. This movie reeks with the pungent stink of producer tampering. The quality and style of the ending doesn't match that of the rest of the movie. I wouldn't be surprised if that was intentional, if that was Kurt Wimmer's way of spiting whoever forced him to change the ending, the one where the psychopath succeeds in uprooting the corrupt system, succeeds in bringing "the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on (Rice's) head". The ending was far from "biblical". It was a short, quiet, but mostly ugly, cop-out. Because of that, I'm cutting the score I would have given this movie, a 9, in half. It's rounded up because I feel like this movie could've really said something, could have stood out, had it not ended like every other movie that gets cranked out of the old Hollywood assembly line these days.

Silent Hill (2006)

Poorly translated from the game, good as a standalone movie

[7/10 · 4 February 2010]

Someone said in a review I read a second ago that "Silent Hill" is something that he called a "nightmare drama." To clarify, there is no such genre as "nightmare drama." That doesn't exist. What he clearly meant to say is that Silent Hill is "a drama with horrific elements that follows the journey of a central protagonist through a Lovecraftian nightmare world that ultimately leads her to confront deeper aspects of herself and humanity in general."

That, children, is what "horror" is.

"Silent Hill" isn't what has become accepted as "horror." Horror can be all blood, guts and cheap scares, but that's shallow horror. True horror uses subtlety, slow-burn, suspense, and its horrific elements are made up of things that, given another context, would be normal, or almost normal. Horror is, essentially, when everything in the room is horribly, disturbingly WRONG, but the room doesn't seem to agree. The tone (the feeling of the author or scene) is normal, smooth, almost blasé, while the mood (the reactionary feeling of the audience to the things on screen) is utterly disturbed.

Good horror = a man wakes up in his bed, sees his young daughter, who has been dead for years, walking across the ceiling.

Bad horror = A masked grotesquery wielding a chainsaw, in full, plain view, cuts a young woman's head off. The camera focuses on what was once her neck, spraying blood all over the room.

You're probably asking by this point, "which is the Silent Hill movie, good or bad horror?" To tell you the truth, a bit of both.

I saw this movie before I played any of the games. That way, I didn't find myself comparing it to every aspect of the games that it got wrong, and I was able to enjoy it to a far greater degree than I would have otherwise. The monsters (especially the Grey Children) were superbly recreated. They were extremely disturbing and the fact that why they look the way they are is never explained makes it even more unsettling; it helps you feel that the protagonist has stumbled into a world that really is completely different from what we have come to know as "ordinary." The creepy little girl is the best part, I think. Although creepy little girls with long, black hair are always scary, this movie uses the element cleverly, in a way that doesn't feel as though she's scaring us for the sake of scaring us- there's a reason for everything she does, however unsettling or seemingly random it may appear. This, in turn, adds to the creepiness.

That's all the good I have to say about this movie. It was scary at times, but the interjections with Chris Da Silva were pointless and broke the flow of the movie. The climax of the movie on is the best part by far. I'm not gonna spoil anything, but trust me, one of the final scenes in the movie almost makes the whole damn thing on its own. Pyramid Head is pretty cool, but he's just another monster here. He's not playing the role he played in SH2, he's just some guy with a giant, pointy hat and a sword that he probably should have considered scaling down a bit for the sake of practical use (there's a reason it's so huge in the game, but in this movie it's just a part of his costume). The acting is sub-B grade, the story is hammy, Sean Bean's character is more or less pointless, the subtlety was sliced in half by Pyramid Head's great knife, and many of the scarier monsters are put in simply because of their iconic status within the games. The result is that all of them are taken out of context seemingly without the writer of the movie having understood what they were meant to represent in the games. Pyramid Head's role is definitely the most painful case of a beloved Silent Hill ghoul's significance being nullified by his out of context placement in this movie, but the most pointless appearance came from the nurses. Really, why did they have to be in this movie? Was Rose battling with her own sexuality underneath everything else that was going on, trying in vain to repress a furious lust for women? If that's the case, it was never mentioned in the movie, and if it isn't, then the nurses are completely present as a fan service.

It's not a bad movie if you judge it by its own merits. I still think someone more capable, that is, someone who actually understood the game, should have another go at the series some ways down the road. As a game to movie translation, this film is a swing and a miss. As a HORROR movie, though, it's well worth at the very least renting for a weekend.