For the week of December 21st, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the big-budget fantasy Pan to Blu-ray. I like director Joe Wright, and I want him to do well. His work on Hanna and Anna Karenina does a great job of subverting what we expect from four-quadrant prestige pictures, and it gave him enough artistic-creative cachet that I was willing to accept his revisionist Peter Pan take that gives us a Lost-Boy-less Pan (Levi Miller) and teams him up with a hook-less Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund) as they battle the villainous Captain Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). However, Pan flopped hard this summer, and the end result deserves all the scorn that critics and viewers gave it. In trying to reinvent the Peter Pan story, Wright and screenwriter Jason Fuchs committed a cardinal sin: they gave us a prequel. Yep - instead of telling an old story in a new way, they tell a story that no one wants. We don't need to know why or how Peter made it to Never-Never-Land, or see how he met Tiger Lily (a miscast Rooney Mara), or watch him learn how to fly, and we really don't need his story retconned as a boilerplate Luke Skywalker-esque journey, with Peter an unassuming lad who - get this! - is really The Chosen One. It's just two hours of boilerplate screenplay conventions and winking nods (to the Lost Boys, to Tinker-Bell, to Smee, even), and what's even worse is that it's not even a complete movie - Wright ends the movie on a cutesy-obnoxious beat foreshadowing the Peter-Hook conflict in a sequel that, if the box-office grosses for this one are to be trusted, will never happen. I expect more daring and verve from Wright (only one scene, a bizarre musical number that has Jackman leading a rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," has any spark). I certainly don't expect this.
Michael Reuben had a more favorable opinion of the film, writing that "Pan has also been criticized for its many incongruities and anachronisms, including the rainbow of indigenous peoples who make up Neverland's inhabitants (Native Americans, Australian aboriginals, African tribes and many more) and several pop songs that play prominent roles, notably 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' which Blackbeard uses to rouse his minions to a cheering frenzy. These, too, are consistent with the notion of Neverland as a world invented by an imagination that is restlessly sweeping up whatever raw material happens to be available (as Wright relates in the commentary, the odd effect of the Nirvana song was discovered by accident during rehearsal; if nothing else, it instantly confirms that this is not the Neverland you thought you knew). Today's movie audience has become so instinctively sophisticated when it comes to CGI-enhanced action sequences that no one can predict what they'll like, but I found several of Pan's set pieces inventive and original. Peter's removal to Neverland during a German air raid is an elaborately crafted marvel, with Bishop's ship evading German bombers and RAF fighters over a historical London skyline. Meanwhile, RAF commands tries to make sense of the conflicting reports being radioed in. The scenes at Blackbeard's mines, which recall the crowded desolation of Mad Max: Fury Road, offer exceptional scale that is matched by Jackman's florid performance as Blackbeard (big performances are fine, if they suit the character, as they certainly do here). Later sequences, including the elaborate battle in which Blackbeard is finally defeated, are well-crafted though somewhat more familiar. Still, Pan is never dull, and its busy action is always in service of a story. It's just not the story that audiences were led to expect."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes the chess docudrama Pawn Sacrifice. Unlike Pan, Pawn Sacrifice makes no attempts at pretending it's anything other than what it is: a thoroughly conventional biopic. Here, director Ed Zwick and screenwriter Steven Knight are dramatizing the events in and around the legendary 1972 chess match between Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber), and minus some attempts to put a little English on their spin - particularly in their handling of Fischer's mental illnesses, which come over like The Aviator-lite - they respect the standard biopic template, simplifying a complex series of interpersonal events into three acts and giving it all sorts of portentous undercurrents. In this case, the Fischer-Spassky match wasn't just a game: it represented nothing less than a battle for the hearts and minds of the world between the United States and the then-Soviet Union. But there's corn, and then there's good corn, and Pawn Sacrifice falls squarely on the latter side of that equation. In films like Glory and The Last Samurai, Zwick has proven himself a sturdy hand at making compelling these sorts of rote historical dramas, and Pawn Sacrifice is no exception. As hokey as the whole us-vs.-the Russkies setup is, we're with the drama the entire way, primarily because Zwick has two compelling leads in Maguire and Schreiber. Maguire gives one of his best-ever performances - outside of his work in Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, I've never seen him this forceful or this willing to appear unlikable - and Schreiber quietly matches him as the more stoic but just-as intimidating Spassky (it helps, too, that Knight's script gives Spassky some small-but-key grace notes that hint at similar demons plaguing him). We realize we're being manipulated, but ultimately, we don't mind.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie shines under Zwick's careful direction, but it's Tobey Maguire's standout performance as the chess maestro, whose enigmatic lifestyle feels often more complex than his carefully calculated chessboard maneuvers, that makes the movie great. Maguire brings a carefully constructed dichotomy of genius and insanity to the part, keying on the small eccentricities but commanding the part with his detailed embodiment of everything from deeply held paranoia to minute hypersensitivities to his environment. His ability to demonstrate the raw strategic genius and inability to accept anything other than a perfect win under ideal circumstances is commendable, but it's when the actor plays his life as he plays chess - as the whirlwind of calculations and permutations that define his game shape his every moment - that the film truly shines. The picture further benefits from a fantastic and highly calculated work from Liev Schreiber as Fischer's Soviet nemesis, a character whose personality is not dormant but who works more from the inside out rather than the outside in, as seems the case with Fischer."
Finally, Scream Factory is offering two schlocky-but-enjoyable horror titles: 1962's The Brain That Wouldn't Die and 1983's Nightmares. Despite its low-budget origins - you get the sense that the film's whole horror premise began as an attempt to eke the most from a nothing budget - The Brain That Wouldn't Die has a junky charm. You've got to love, if only a little, a thriller about a mad scientist (Jason Evers) who preserves his beloved's severed head (Virginia Leith, who's kind of wonderful) and keeps it alive while looking for a replacement body. Plus, squint a little, and you can see the inspiration for Carl Reiner and Steve Martin's hilarious comedy The Man with Two Brains: whole sections play out as loving homage. The Brain That Wouldn't Die delivers exactly what you're expecting from it, and that kind of truth in advertising is all too rare. Nightmares, by comparison, is less than the sum of its parts, and I mean that quite literally - it's a horror anthology compiling four stories of uneven quality. Two are out-and-out bad: "Terror in Topanga" squanders its can't-miss premise (a serial killer on the loose) on flabby padding and a lame ending, while "The Benediction" plays like one of those filler Twilight Zone episodes you'd have to settle for in between classics like "Eye of the Beholder" or "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." Things improve, albeit slightly, with "Night of the Rat," which does engage in some decent human-on-rat combat (it's no Of Unknown Origin, though), but it's "The Bishop of Battle" that emerges as the anthology's clear standout. The story follows a teenage boy (Emilio Estevez) whose obsession with the titular video game turns deadly, and it's the best paced and directed of the four, generating solid suspense and a chilling ending. Sure, many of the effects are pretty dated, but for a certain generation of preteens and teenagers, this segment was pure nightmare material.