For the week of October 30th, we can't ignore Scream Factory's Blu-ray upgrades of George A. Romero's Land of the Dead and Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. I'm still shocked at how thoroughly these two zombie thrillers demolished my expectations. I assumed that Land of the Dead would provide the reliable chills of Romero's three previous zombie classics. Furthermore, I assumed (and you might, too) that a remake of what might be the greatest zombie movie ever made would only end in tears, especially a remake from the bro mastermind behind 300 and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. How strange, then, that we live in a world where Land of the Dead marks the beginning of Romero's slow descent into zombie-movie irrelevance, while the Snyder Dawn might be the most giddily kinetic zombie actioner ever made. It just boggles the mind. I like parts of Land - Romero's attempts to transcribe his threadbare aesthetics onto the blockbuster stage are admirable (if still a mite underfunded at $16 million), and Simon Baker is appealingly understated as the protagonist - but on the whole, Romero pitches the whole endeavor as almost cringingly didactic. Romero is clearly firing a shot at the one-percenters. His villains live in a super-modern apartment complex while the poor suffer the zombie menace outside, and no one's worse than the George W. Bush analogue (Dennis Hopper, who seems a little embarrassed barking lines like "We don't negotiate with terrorists" as the film attempts to be politically resonant) in charge of the facility. And the less said about Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), the increasingly mentally active zombie leading an undead revolution, the better. I get that Romero wants to suggest the dawn of a new, intelligent species, but he lacks both the subtlety and the wit to get us rooting for his flesh-eaters. How pleasant, then, that the Dawn of the Dead remake largely dispenses with any serious asides to political commentary. Yes, Snyder still sets the action in a mall, except he mines the location for glib comedy (nothing like killing zombies as muzak plays in the background!) as opposed to the anti-consumerist screed that Romero pulled off in the first Dawn. Like James Cameron, Snyder is more interested in the ride itself, and on that front, his Dawn is a rousing success. In fact, I'd call the opening ten minutes, which follows Sarah Polley's empathetic nurse to the mall as the world goes straight to hell, maybe the most thrilling bit of zombie-movie mayhem I've ever seen. Snyder stages the destruction on a grand scale (this $28-million movie looks like it cost triple that), building to an opening credits sequence that makes chilling use of Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around." Sure, the rest of the film never quite reaches those heights, but there's still a lot to like, including Snyder's spatially respectful and coherent action choreography, a handful of terrific performances (besides the great Polley, Ving Rhames and Jake Weber play a couple of believably laconic heroes, even as Michael Kelly and Ty Burrell steal the movie as the mall's two most amoral characters), and a James Gunn script that's quick to throw a nasty surprise at us the second we get too complacent. Dawn of the Dead might be popcorn, but when it's made this well, you don't even care about the lack of nutrition.
This year, one of author's Stephen King most iconic masterworks hit cinema paydirt. While it's not without issues, the film absolutely nails King's unique/infamous melding of cosmic horror and depraved Americana, and it gets a lot of mileage from its talented cast. I'm talking, of course, about It. The Dark Tower, on the other hand, is so bad I'm doubly relieved It was such a runaway success. On its own, The Dark Tower would scare every studio executive with a brain far away from adapting any other Stephen King text ever again. You could argue that director Nikolaj Arcel and his co-screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Jeff Pinkner never had a chance; King's seven-volume saga (eight, if you count The Wind Through the Keyhole) about gunslinger Roland Deschain (played, and quite well, by Idris Elba) on a desperate quest to save all realities sprawls across a western-sci-fi-horror-fantasy landscape, pausing frequently for pop culture digressions and worldbuilding, many of which link to King's other novels - he was into the idea of an extended universe before Marvel was even a studio. Hell, if people like Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard couldn't crack The Dark Tower, how could we expect anyone else to even try? Somehow, though, Arcel still manages to lower the bar. The Dark Tower loosely adapts the first two novels in the series (The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three), yet it clocks in at barely over ninety minutes. The seams absolutely show, and I worry that a longer cut might have been worse. You get the sense that Sony's editing staff hacked away the worse stuff to the point of incoherence, hoping against hope that a shorter version would screen more times at movie theaters and, somehow, recoup the millions of dollars lost along the way. The end result feels both overstuffed and inexplicable - Arcel bounces us back and forth between New York City and an alternate, post-apocalyptic America, throwing in monster attacks and gunfights galore (albeit largely bloodless PG-13 affairs), except we have no idea why any of this is happening, and we don't really join Elba's protagonist until a third of the way into the movie. For some reason, this Dark Tower centers around young Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), and while Jake is definitely one of the series' most important characters, a) he supports Roland, and not the other way around, and b) Taylor is so wooden that you wonder what about him tested so strongly that Sony deemed it prudent to give him the whole show. Still, at least Jake acts as a constant exposition generator, which helps with some of the disorientation. I wish I could say the same about Matthew McConaughey's evil Man in Black, who preens and struts and gnaws on the scenery so voraciously it takes a little while before realize he's trying to compensate for an almost total lack of menace. Outside of Elba, nothing here works, and while Elba has been hinting that Sony is still planning to continue the franchise, his assertions seem deluded at best and deeply stupid at worst. Best case scenario? The success of It emboldens some studio to keep trying with The Dark Tower, only they start over and pretend this one never existed.
From Well Go USA comes Broken Sword Hero, a Muay Thai-infused biopic. You gotta give the film points for ambition: in telling the story of Thai folk hero Thong Dee, director Buakaw Banchamek wants to create a full-on biopic that also functions as a bruising action epic, full of Muay Thai fighting and combat and chases galore. Banchamek also plays the title character, so kudos to him for trying to make his very own Braveheart. Yet Broken Sword Hero is so eager as it strives for greatness that I'm a little ashamed to admit it doesn't quite work. Part of that is my fault - I have no cultural experience with the real Thong Dee, and I get the sense that people who do will appreciate more of what Banchamek is doing. Even still, I wish his efforts to grab viewers weren't so hackneyed. The drama, as it were, plays like a litany of clichés. Had I not known Broken Sword Hero focused on a real person, I would have assumed Banchamek was assembling his movie whole cloth from other movies. A little Conan the Barbarian here; a little Bloodsport there; a skosh of Geronimo and Gangs of New York for variety: shake, and you've pretty much got Broken Sword Hero. As a Muay Thai fighting movie, the film is far more successful, but I'd still be less inclined to recommend it over far less pretentious examples of the genre. The fighting in Ong Bak and The Protector, for example, evinces more invention and visual wit than anything in Broken Sword Hero, only minus this film's delusions of grandeur.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is almost willfully generic at times, often seeming totally divorced from its very subject and seemingly intent on just getting to the next fight scene. Even the fight scenes are often framed within the context of various martial arts academies, rather than what should be the main focus, namely Thong Dee's 'warrior' status that helped to push back Burmese insurgents and helped to create the modern nation of Thailand. A supposed love interest and some comedy relief are also injected into the story at almost random intervals, and the film's 'narrative' seems genuinely disjointed at times, something that may only add to a general befuddlement on the part of Western audience members who may not be up to speed with the actual history (not that the actual history really plays much of a part in the film's storyline). Buakaw Banchamek is a remarkable physical presence (he's evidently a multiple national champion in Muay Thai in his native country), and he even manages to emote a time or two throughout the film, but unfortunately there's not much 'there' there supporting his athleticism. Broken Sword Hero sparks fitfully to life in at least a few of the set pieces, but it tends to slog in the interstitial material, something that makes the energy generated by the action elements perhaps seem overly insistent at times."
Finally, we end with a worthwhile catalog title: the Universal release of 21 Grams. Before he became Hollywood's favorite big-budget surrealist, director Alejandro González Iñárritu fancied himself the next Vittorio De Sica, making neorealist epics like Amores Perros and this, a drama about three people (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro) all struggling to process a terrible accident. The tone is funereal grim, the characters brutally deglamorized, and the aesthetics vérité-raw - Iñárritu and the great DP Rodrigo Prieto shoot mostly handheld, blowing out all light and color until the palette becomes a kind of ash blue - yet 21 Grams shares more in common with Iñárritu's more stylized recent features than you might think. Sure, it might lack the digital surrealism and showoffy long takes of his Birdman and The Revenant, but in its place, Iñárritu, his former screenwriting partner Guillermo Arriaga, and editor Steven Mirrione indulge in narrative games that are no less tricksy. They turn the film into a jigsaw puzzle, fracturing and mangling the chronology, and it's up to us to figure out how everything fits together. On a first viewing, that spatial dislocation invites our active engagement. Once you've figured out how Penn, Watts, and Del Toro interlock amongst one another, however, the end result doesn't warrant all the editorial misdirection: Iñárritu and Arriaga have nothing more meaningful to say other than "Life Sucks; Get A Helmet." Anyone who thinks the flash and polish of Birdman and The Revenant mask less substance than meets the eye? You will find a lot to dislike here. Still, what saves 21 Grams, as is often the case with Iñárritu's features, are the performances. The three leads are phenomenal, with Watts and Del Toro scoring top marks as, respectively, a woman who can't process losing her identity as a wife and mother and a violent ex-con who uses Jesus to redeem his many personal failings. If Iñárritu is a little too quick to brand 21 Grams as Great Art, Penn, Watts, and Del Toro keep the proceedings human-scaled. They're more comfortable finding the truth in these scattered moments, and for that reason alone, the film endures.