For the week of November 25th, Arrow Films is offering a new special edition of Paul Verhoeven's masterful 1987 satire RoboCop. RoboCop remains a minor miracle, a grisly, gutsy blend of ultraviolence and caustic wit that looks to Frankenstein, Dirty Harry, and King of Kings for inspiration. Peter Weller stars as the title character, a bionic supercop charged with cleaning up a dystopian, ruined Detroit, and he's able to give RoboCop more soul than you might expect. Using subtle facial gestures and body language, Weller creates a portrait of a machine slowly rediscovering his humanity. Verhoeven locked into the character when he realized the potential to create the "American Jesus," and both he and Weller push the character's suffering to a place of almost transcendental brutality. It's our luck that the movie around Weller is just as good. Verhoeven tosses everything at us, from slam-bang action scenes, cutting-edge (for 1987) special effects, beyond-gory carnage, and trenchant social criticism. For Verhoeven, it's a toss-up who's worse: the amoral psychopath (Kurtwood Smith) responsible for pushing drugs and crime into Detroit or a corporate police state (personified by Ronny Cox's sneering, ladder-climbing business executive) that sees no value in a human life. Along with Starship Troopers, which shares much of the same DNA, RoboCop might be Verhoeven's finest hour.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that this film "may be a so-called 'high concept' film, but it's surprisingly visceral, with an unexpected amount of heart for what is in essence a kind of science fiction tinged thriller focusing on a Detroit cop (in a more or less unspecified 'future') named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) who is ruthlessly murdered by a gang but who is 'resurrected' as a cyborg, albeit with vestiges of his human identity still troublingly intact…[The film] still has its own distinctive flavor, one that mixes a surprising amount of heart and even some relatively cheeky humor into its tale of out of control hooligans and rampant crime in a supposedly futuristic Detroit. This new Arrow release offers solid technical merits and a really engaging array of supplements, along with some very handsome packaging."
Almost as interesting - if not as bracing and wonderful - is John Badham's fascinating 1979 Dracula adaptation. The most distinctive takes on this character realize how malleable the Dracula story can be. Something like Werner Herzog's sepulchral Nosferatu the Vampyre latches onto the rot and decay that a vampire could accumulate over thousands of years; Francis Ford Coppola's gonzo Dracula from 1992 imagines a surrealist farrago adjacent to the H'Năng river of Coppola's equally psychedelic Apocalypse Now. But what Badham and writers W.D. Richter, Hamilton Deane, and John L. Balderston present is Dracula: Romantic Hero. Yes, the film trots out rotting crypts and undead ghouls, but Dracula himself (the great Frank Langella) remains a figure of grand, tragic nobility. When he drinks blood, he doesn't drool blood everywhere - Langella's version doesn't even have fangs! - and he sees in Kate Nelligan's Lucy Seward not a meal but rather a soul mate, someone who will complete him after centuries of loneliness. I don't think I've seen a Dracula where the filmmakers side with the title character as much as this one; just look at how they re-imagine Van Helsing (Lawrence Oliver) as a dotty old fanatic who seems to resent vampires without ever truly understanding them. The potential downside to casting Dracula as the film's romantic lead is that the Badham Dracula ranks as one of the least scary versions, especially in his preferred cut, which desaturates the color palette until the film almost takes on the gothic pallor of something like Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. But the film has such a clear, unique point of view that I'm willing to excuse a lack of frights for the fresh perspective. In its own way, a singular piece of work.
Of an earlier Blu-ray edition, Brian Orndorf noted thatDracula is "a respectful translation to the screen, investing entirely in mood, finding Badham soaking the feature in smoke and dark lighting, working overtime to achieve a gothic atmosphere that supports Dracula's enigmatic ways, powers, and shape-shifting abilities. It's an admirable effort, with specific attention to the details of set design and costuming, watching Dracula stalk around with a traditional high-collared cape and chest-baring shirt, while his home is a cavernous castle decorated with displays of his might and history, allowing the viewer to explore hints of macabre events to come. It's obvious that blood, sweat, and tears were poured into the making of the movie, which showcases an enormous push of creativity and construction to build a suitable widescreen home for Dracula, away from cheap and silly endeavors."
Less singular is the lunkheaded actioner Angel Has Fallen. Olympus Has Fallen, the first entry in this inexplicable ...Has Fallen franchise, remains one of the laziest series openers I've ever seen. It's somehow turgid and slapdash - director Antoine Fuqua's gory, sluggish action choreography only serves to expose the film's D.C.-for-Louisiana location swap. Somehow Olympus ended up grossing almost a hundred million dollars and spawning a Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) series of adventures. And I suppose it counts as faint praise to brand Angel Has Fallen the best of the series, but even still: let's emphasize the faint side of the equation. This movie should be a dirt-cheap Fugitive lift wherein Butler's Secret Service operative gets framed for the attempted murder of the President (Morgan Freeman, who literally sleeps through 85% of his performance) and has to go on the run looking for the real killer. But it's so blunderheaded and inept that it can't even do that right. We spend about forty minutes slogging through Banning's physical degradation (his spine and brain suck, or something, from years of ripping out people's throats with his fists, I guess), and then it's ten or fifteen more minutes before Banning starts doing his VOD Richard Kimble impersonation. So why does Angel Has Fallen rank comparatively higher above its peers? Well, the action scenes are better. There's a bit too much shakycam, and the CGI work is atrocious - a rooftop battle between Banning and the Big Bad looks like Banning, his enemy, the sky, and even the roof itself have been individually composited in from different PS1 graphics engines - but director Ric Roman Waugh is an underrated action helmer (he also made Snitch and the great Felon), and he has a good eye for chaos. Furthermore, for about a reel, it seems like Angel Has Fallen might become something truly ludicrous in the best way: a bargain-basement Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. See, Banning has an estranged father, played by Nick Nolte in full-on shambling hobo mode: he lives out in the woods, he's convinced the government is after him, and he's definitely not aware they're making a movie around him. Nolte's wack-job energy galvanizes all his scenes, including a cracking action sequence that has him blowing up a forest full of bad guys before his son can even get close enough to attack them. I'd be into a whole movie of just these gruff lunatics screaming at each other. Alas, Nolte disappears sooner than I'd like, and then it's business as usual. Some dumb movies don't even know the best way to be dumb.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film " tries desperately to inject some actual human emotion into proceedings which otherwise seem to be largely focused on things that go boom (and a lot of things go boom in this movie). That approach includes Mike's wife Leah (Piper Perabo) and perhaps more saliently his estranged father Clay (Nick Nolte, looking not much different from his now infamous mug shot). The relationship that actually ends up resonating the most, though, is the one with the most 'history' within the franchise itself, namely the one between Mike and Trumbull [Freeman]. There's an appealing camaraderie between Butler and Freeman that makes that part of the film rather engaging, even if many of the plot trappings surrounding the relationship are patently ridiculous."