“Underworld: Blood Wars”
“I have lived beyond my time” are the first words (not counting the helpful catch-up prologue) husked by Kate Beckinsale‘s sexy/weary vampire Selene in Anna Foerster’s ‘Blood Wars,’ either the fifth or the forty-fifth “Underworld” movie, no one knows. And ’tis true: this is a franchise that should have died years ago, but keeps trundling cheaply on. Adding little to the ever-underfed mythology, here we get a bit where Selene fights a dude in a cage and another bit where Theo James, as chiseled and expressive as a not-particularly expressive chisel, becomes a king and waggles a sword around. Tobias Menzies plays the Lycan leader, Lara Pulver seems to be having a tiny bit of fun as a baddie vamp, and Charles Dance mercifully comes to the end of his contractual obligation and is killed. And all this is basically just to complete Selene’s major arc: from raven-haired immortal, to raven-haired immortal with already off-trend silver ombre highlights.
“Baywatch” [our review]
The trouble with Lord & Miller’s ability to spin unpromising straw into quality gold, as seen with their brilliant “21 Jump Street” reboot, is that it makes other, less talented folks believe they can do the same. And hence we got “Baywatch,” an R-rated comedic revival of the David Hasselhoff-starring lifeguard series from “Horrible Bosses” director Seth Gordon and six credited screenwriters, in which Mitch Buchannon (Dwayne Johnson), newcomer Matt Brody (Zac Efron) and their team take on a Florida drug-running gang. But in the place of the ingenuity of “21 Jump Street,” or hell, even the fitfully funny moments of “Starsky & Hutch,” we get thinly plotted, mostly mean-spirited gruel strung together with a series of lowest-common denominator set pieces that rarely raise a smile. It’s not that Johnson, or even Efron, can’t carry thin comedy on their sheer biceppy charisma — look at last year’s “Central Intelligence” or “Neighbors 2” — but the material is such leaden ballast here that it even drags them down.
“Unforgettable” [our review]
Boasting a collection of poisonous reviews that only serve to reinforce the truism that screenwriters should be very careful before building a memorability reference into their title, (and also that 90% of us critics ain’t too proud to pick the low-hanging fruit) Denise DiNovi‘s “Unforgettable” is a lukewarm rehash of the 90s erotic thriller that suffers mostly from a rather split personality. Though not lacking in camp potential, the film isn’t over the top enough to really get the juices flowing, nor smart enough to work as a straight-up thriller. Instead, it’s a disappointingly competent take on the well-worn “bitches be cray” subgenre, glancingly updated to include references to Facebook and smartphones, but mostly, even down to the gauzy photography and lingering reflection shots, firmly stuck in the past. Katherine Heigl‘s well-publicized hireability problems make her choice of the psycho-with-the-relentlessly-ironed-hair fairly understandable. However the real mystery remains: who did the great Rosario Dawson piss off so that this is her only live-action film role in 2 years?
“Resident Evil: The Final Chapter”
The vulgar auteurist cinema of Paul W.S. Anderson has its defenders among cinephiles, but we’ve never really been among them: the clarity of his framing and occasional action choreography skill has always been overridden, for us, by the choppy editing, cheap look and nonsensical storytelling. (Also by the fact that the best anyone can ever say of him is “clarity of framing” etc). In “The Final Chapter” of his “Resident Evil” franchise, his bad qualities are amplified, while his good ones are muted. Seeing heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) return to the setting of the first movie to take on a resurrected Isaacs (Iain Glen, returned thanks to his “Game Of Thrones” success) with some old pals and a few new ones, it lazily retreads the greatest hits of previous movies without bringing much new to the party beyond some extra ludicrous plot twists. If this truly is the end of the franchise (and a reboot seems to be in the works already), it won’t be much missed.
“The Belko Experiment” [our review]
Unleavened with humor and not smart enough to be satire, Greg McLean‘s “The Belko Experiment” takes a vaguely interesting, “Saw“-meets the Stanford Prison experiment premise and turns it into a relentlessly unpleasant slaughterfest. Apparently designed solely as a showreel for the manufacturers of exploding head prosthetics and gunshot squibs, its high concept is as follows: in a corporate building on lockdown, 80 employees are forced to cull one another by a disembodied voice. It’s got too many enjoyable b-actors to be a total write-off, but as soon as you realize that the likes of Tony Goldwyn, John C McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Josh Brener and Michael Rooker are only here because otherwise we’d have no way of telling characters apart, so thinly are they drawn, the cast itself starts to become an annoyance. Long before the nth head explodes the only mystery that remains is that this was written by James Gunn, and yet displays not one iota of the wit, invention and affection we’ve come to expect from him.
