***
It also harms the character dynamics, which weren't particularly strong to start. I suspect the production intended to coast on Harrison Ford's charisma before he turned 'em down, and so Treat Williams is largely affecting his best Ford impression to middling effect. He'd still serve if he had a good, long stretch to exercise a dynamic with his fellow crewmembers and butt heads with the mercs in interesting ways, though. Unfortunately, because we've simply gotta spend so much time on the cruise ship before it sinks, the time we have aboard the smuggler ship is halved, and Williams only has the briefest amount of time to establish a back-and-forth with Wes Studi's merc captain before they're on the liner, and people start dying. Aside from him, there's only Kevin J O'Conner around, who's too deep in snively comic relief mode to impress a relationship with his captain or the men antagonizing him, and Una Damon as first mate, who gets killed to make way for Janssen as our lead. Considering Janssen's character is entirely superfluous if you cut the mystery-ruining early scenes, has little chemistry with Williams (much less time to IMPLY a romance before they're face-smearing one another), and just not giving it her best, it feels we left a potentially more interesting character to die in favor of a conventional dangling love interest.
Our writing woes just spill out from there. Once we start killing characters it happens at an alarming clip that removes a lot of potential for interaction. Losing out on the potential mystery/thriller aspect undercuts what impact the second act revelations could've had. Even with the improvements I've suggested, the nature of the conflict basically leaves us with nothing to DO character-wise in the third act save escape the boat, which takes the form of very simple tasks being complicated by sudden bursts of busywork. All throughout, conflict and tension are generated more by characters suddenly acting needlessly aggressive rather than drawing on a dynamic built naturally through exchanges and events. The movie's even so committed to insisting Anthony Heald's boat owner is the more interesting presence, it kills Studi early in favor of having Heald act the selfish psychopath for the finale. There are bad screenwriting decisions spilled all over this movie, the cast aren't really charming enough to distract from said issues, and it's all incredibly frustrating, because I can see how some tweaks to this one early structural element might've capped these poor impulses and resulted in a stronger final product.
I go with a 2.5 rating rather than the 2 stars my discussion here implies on the merit of the film functioning fairly as an action-horror in the watching. The Ottoia-derived monster's just a massive blob of CG nothing when we see it in full, but the tentacles look fairly menacing on their own or in a pack, and have some damned good effects work for the time and budget. If you take the deaths as less scary moments and more a game of Who's Gonna Get It Next, there's a few solid whacks throughout. Treat Williams, though working an entirely thankless job with so many Star Wars references I'm not at all surprised Ford refused his participation, manages some charismatic presence through a part that doesn't really realize he's protagonist till halfway through. And like... it's a monumentally stupid part of this movie, but I do think the whole setpiece with Williams and Janssen zipping around the flooded corridors of the sinking ship on a jetski, trying to build up enough speed to ramp out while blasting tentacles and obstacles with a shotgun is a good bit've fun. I'd play that part of the Deep Rising video game, it's got a neat two-player mechanic - one of you drives and hits fire, the other has to pump and reload and aim the shotgun over the other player's shoulder.
You can see the rot settling in Stephen Sommers' brain watching Deep Rising. The same inability to write or direct meaningful character interplay, structure a screenplay without a lot've ancillary bullshit stapled on, or deploy special effects without obviously using them as spackle to hide cracks in his scenario. All things that would fester and dig their roots deeper until he went all-out with Van Helsing and just broke the movie. Here, they're a hindrance, but he gets a little something out've the enterprise all the same. Like I say, if he'd taken another week to edit the script and narrow in on the potential for a mysterious situation where the main character learns what's going on alongside the audience and has a stronger rivalry with the dangerous men he's smuggling, he might've had something wholly passable. The near-misses are always more disappointing than the total misfires, even when they're still enjoyable at their own level.
2.5/5
***
On reflection, the terrible attempt at a meta in media res opening might stand as the best thing about Happily N'Ever After. It's a painfully unfunny onslaught of Freddie Prinze Jr trying to make bluntly introducing every character for the three-year olds in the audience prior to doing so again minutes later at all engaging, it does nothing save add minutes to the runtime, and several of those precious seconds are spent establishing character who will not matter a tit in the upcoming film... but it represents a modicum of effort. The whole film afterwards is so dried and tired in its efforts to give former Shrek producer John H Williams a Shrek of his own for Vanguard Animation, an extremely poor attempt to do something out of the ordinary as prologue is almost welcome. I can identify ways in which their work goes wrong that doesn't involve endlessly harping on about the low-quality animation or bored voice actors or zero-effort humor! I can say they tried and failed, rather than pointing out how they just laid there on the floor not doing anything and still made an annoying nothing of a movie! Huzzah!
Normally, when I go this low on the rating scale, I like to put forward a few suggestions for improvement, some little tidbits on how positive elements might've been tweaked to create a better experience. In this case, while I've suggestions, they're of little use for this purpose. We COULD look into how fairy tale characters having to fight the very balance of fate itself in a world where their existence is simultaneously predetermined from start to finish AND can still change independent of the scales being tilted entirely against their favor has a bit of potential if written right. Gotta get creative with how you embody the universal threads conspiring against them at every turn, but there's fun ideas here. Or else we could talk about how if you ditch literally every single idea in this film, leave only the aggressively Southern doomsday prepper versions of the Seven Dwarfs, and give them the full attention of a competent production team, then you'd have something I want to watch. Compared against "evil step-mother gets all the power" or "early 2000s teen idol is the whiny kitchen boy who's secretly the hero," zippy little prepper dwarves is something I can work with, even if the film at present only uses them for a tired action sequence where the jokes come nightmarishly slow despite their animation speed. They're at least neat enough conceptually to baaaaaaarely raise the score here a paltry half-star.
But, like, between the poor celebrity voice work, the nowhere near good enough animation and digital effects work, the asleep-at-the-wheel storytelling, and the shameless attempt to do Shrek ideas Williams ported over from Dreamworks before his old collaborators could get out the next few Shrek films, these ideas for improvement are useless. Throw out everyone involved in production, hand the reins over to someone more competent/better budgeted, and THEN we can talk. Although, pretty much everyone who did any kind of fairy tale animation was by this point fully committed to doing meta riffs on the concept, and doing it far better (Disney had Enchanted the very same year), so maybe forget forcing Happily N'Ever After on someone else. Maybe forget making the movie entirely. Maybe just let it subside into the realms of lethe, where it will be wiped from the record with no foul on anyone.
(Why is George Carlin in this movie? He's not allowed to do any of the things that made people like George Carlin, and nobody who likes George Carlin is likely to take their kids to see a movie because George Carlin's name is one the poster.)
1.5/5
***
There's not any big secret why Jane Got a Gun doesn't work - you've an interesting set-up with the titular Jane forced to defend her outlaw husband and homestead against a gang of ruthless bounty hunters with the help of an outlaw gone straight whom she loved before he marched off to war, but Natalie Portman and Joel Edgerton do little to sell the emotional tension beneath the surface. They play things so terribly quiet and restrained without substituting in the necessary nuance or subtlety, and so render much of the opening and middle a tedious affair. The non-chronological flashbacks scattered throughout present them as far too different from what we see in the present, while acting like the unsatisfactory explanation for how their relationship became strained is an adequate replacement for seeing and feeling that strain in the present. When Edgerton's character crosses a line and prompts an honest dialogue between the two right before the climax, it shows potential to get the drama boiling, except this comes after an entire hour of boredom and drifting attention on my part, so it does little to salvage my interest regardless.
A third act action sequence revolving around their inability to see the bounty hunters through heavy darkness and their own fortifications makes some interesting moves to take advantage of the film's darker color palate, though the final confrontation with Ewan McGregor's villain is undercut by his heavily understated presence and Portman's lack of emotional connection with anyone. I think the film needed to focus more on the danger of the situation, the threat presented by Edgerton being asked to defend a wounded man he believes stole his love. We get a little of that towards second act's end, but it's not nearly enough to make up for the hour of Edgerton seeming less a dangerous outlaw who's only here as last resort, and more a cowboy sad on account of his getting double cucked (as Connie put it). Jane Got a Gun is a dry experience, so low-key as to not register on the ears, devoid of the strain and heartbreak I'm sure someone saw on the page when they picked it for production. I know those involved can sell this kind of quiet work to far greater satisfaction, so it's disappointing to find them murmuring nothing at all in the middle of the desert.
2.5/5
***
The Bye Bye Man didn't have to be such a broken, janked-up film. All throughout the film dribbles little tidbits of ideas one might employ to create a far more interesting product. The Bye Bye Man's name sounds all silly and innocuous, like something a child would say, so maybe you do as the characters in the beginning do and casually spread it around before the horror manifests. There's a guy who slaughtered everyone who knew the name to prevent its spread fifty years ago, how about we play our film so the main characters are being hunted down for reasons they don't understand until the Bye Bye Man manifests? Any one of his psychic powers has potential as the focus of a film, be it the wave of paranoia he casts, the hallucinations for the purpose of driving you to do harm to yourself or others, or the compulsion to say his name aloud and spread the curse. Pick whichever you like, they've all some worth after a good workshopping session. One of the characters realizes the Bye Bye Man is more memetic idea than physical entity and resolves to engage him in a battle of wills, powering through the hallucinations and refusing to feel afraid, that's a good excuse to get really crazy in your finale and show off some mind-bending scares. Hell, if we draw from the original Robert Damon Schneck short story, The Bridge to Body Island, and work the harbinger train whistle angle to include the Bye Bye Man physically travelling by train to your location, we could set the movie in a town with an active railyard and ramp up tension by making it difficult to tell when the Bye Bye Man will arrive.
The Bye Bye Man does not properly utilize these brief flashes of potential. Its story focuses on a trio of college students who move into a decrepit old house and spend more of their time worrying about their uninteresting love lives than the monster out for their heads. Our central villain is a mess of half-baked concepts, with rules of engagement the movie feels free to ignore whenever convenient, and so many psychic abilities as to keep one from understanding what he is at an abstract conceptual level. Not the good sort of "Oh no it's an ancient unknowable evil!" manner, understand, the "I know you're trying to be clear and concise about what this thing is, but you're talking through a mouth of cotton balls" way. Tension is mostly communicated by the actors delivering highly strained, desperate-to-sound-meaningful dialogue dancing around the situation, and scares are doubly undercut by excessive telegraphing that there will be a scare exactly ten seconds from now, and the Bye Bye Man himself being little more than Doug Jones in a ratty hoodie and a bald cap. Most of the interesting ideas I outlined above exist as either mere backstory with no relevance to the present-day plot, or notions the film goes hard on for a scene before dropping without a second thought. It even goes so far as to outright cheat at times, clearly intercutting what can only be objective reality with the perspectives of two hallucinating characters, only to imply there was somehow a third layer of hallucination when the basic layout of the scene disallowed such, just for the sake of a cheap "shocking" twist.
Everyone and their brother has jumped on the whole "Haha, his name is The Bye Bye Man, that's not scary," angle, and for sure having everyone in your movie solemnly intone "The Bye Bye Man" like its association with a trainyard hobo and his CG meat dog is supposed to make it frightening deepens every problem plaguing the film. For my taste, beyond this problem, and the plain writing and directorial incompetence on display across every scene (Your husband wrote this screenplay, Stacy Title, surely you want it to come across well? Why are THESE the takes on his rancid dialogue you're using in the final cut?), the real issue is the lack of effort to make your concept work. "The Bye Bye Man," is such an obviously silly, non-frightening name, you need to mold your entire story to acknowledge and take advantage of the goofiness - like I say, have it be a casual innocent thing you can spread, make the threat someone who knows the truth before the monster arrives, really dig into the mechanics behind a memetic threat. Haphazardly flinging substandard stock room scary things about a story about a college student afraid his girlfriend's cheating and then calling the source the Bye Bye Man indicates terribly little care to do more than Make A Movie after so many years out've the saddle. The Bye Bye Man hardly DESERVES more effort, considering he's just some bum who likes to vibe out on the railways of America, but I'd've appreciated someone here putting forth a modicum of effort to work with what anyone with eyes and ears can readily understand.
Well, there's some pretty killer music during one brief part of the climax. So good on the Newton Brothers for that.
(Your paltry five CG face maggots will not impress me, not when I also watched City of the Living Dead this last week. Get on Fulci's level, Title and Penner.)
1.5/5
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