The Fast, Furious, And Frustrating

 

Latest Script For Overblown Franchise Leaks; Fans Horrified

Los Angeles (AP) Be careful what you wish for. It's an old expression, and a hard lesson learned. Director Louis Leterrier has been busy prepping the eleventh film in the Fast & The Furious franchise (twelfth, if you include the spin off Hobbs and Shaw). Series star Vin Diesel has been vocal about one condition for the next film being that "Brian has to return." This, despite the fact that Paul Walker, who played the character, died during the production of Furious 7, with his role completed with the cooperation of his brothers Cody and Caleb for that film.

The studios have been tight lipped about how to approach that even while assembling the cast. Would the Walker brothers rise to the occasion and play their dead brother's character again, helped with some CGI? Would a dummy be used, a la Weekend At Bernies? Would Walker himself be resurrected from the grave in a voodoo ritual?

Now it appears to be too late to keep the secrets. A copy of the script has leaked online.

The film, slated to have a budget of 150 million dollars, will follow the ragtag team of racers (family, according to Diesel's Dom Toretto) who started out racing cars and ended up in globe trotting adventures with high stakes and no regard for gravity. The leaked script reveals that the film will be a short one, with all of the characters involved in a friendly stakes all out car race in Death Valley- a race that will end with all of them dying in a horrible crash.

And if that isn't bad enough, it gets worse. The entire group will find themselves coming to in hell, and standing there before them will be their old friend Brian O'Conner, former cop turned racer turned criminal turned retired criminal turned... whatever. The point is, all of them will be dead, stuck in hell. And despite the history of the franchise in getting characters out of bad places implausibly, this will be the end of the line. Once they all see Brian, the screen will fade to black, and the franchise will end.

"Look, truth is, we're all tired of this," Michelle Rodriguez said. "We're tired of the franchise, of the nonsense, of the lack of attention to physics... we're just tired. So it's time to move on and do something else. And yes, maybe that script might have gotten leaked by one of us. Or all of us. Or maybe none of us. The point is, this whole thing should have been called to an end seven movies ago."

Jason Statham, playing Deckard Shaw, agrees by concession. "And I didn't get into this until the second half. How long do you keep this up? You can't. So giving it the finality of all of us in hell... well, that's something I can live with."

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was in agreement. "There's only so many times you can go flying two hundred feet from one car to another onscreen before your audience starts with the 'yeah, I'm not buying that' logic. And I say that as a guy who used to be a wrestler. Or maybe still am. What day is this?"

The studio is running damage control. "That's not the script!" spokesperson Callie Drake promised. "And the cast are just playing a prank, pretending that they're tired of the franchise! Everyone loves working on Fast & Furious! Look, we'll get to the bottom of whoever released that completely fake script, because it's fake. Fast & Furious is going to go on forever!"

The last word belongs to the franchise lead. Vin Diesel had this to say. "It's about family. And fast cars, and big stunts, and oh my god how did they do that moments. And family. Did I mention family? And everyone loves family. And that's what we are. And that's what we do. So of course we're gonna keep comin' back. And back some more. And back again after that. Because there's no way this franchise will ever run out of gas. Now if you'll excuse me, I've gotta see someone about a voodoo resurrection spell."

Try Hard Not To Speak Ill Of The Dead

The following is why I should never be trusted to give a speech at a wedding or a funeral. Because I'd make it an occasion to remember.... for all the wrong reasons.

"Thank you, Reverend Murchison, for that kind introduction. And thank all of you for coming out on this sad day to pay tribute to a man who left us far too soon. It falls to me to give a eulogy for my old friend Peter. For one thing, we knew each other since childhood. For another, I'm not on the suspect list.

When we think of the manner in which Peter died, we must shake our heads at the unfairness of it. A man's life snuffed out at the prime of life. A man who had succeeded in life, built a reputation for himself of good standing in the community. A man with a loving wife and three children. And his faithful Spaniel Muffy.

It's tempting to ask God... why? Why him? Why not someone who really deserves it? Like Chester Holloway, for example. That bastard deserves to meet a bad end if you ask me, and you are asking me. Oh, don't look at me like that, Chester, everyone in town hates you. You're not going to make friends in this life if you listen to ABBA, let alone headbang to ABBA. Honestly, man, were you born with bad taste or did it develop gradually?

But I digress. We're not here to talk about Chester and his horrible taste in music and how much he deserves to get thrown into a pit of hungry fire ants. We're here to talk about Peter. Pillar of society. Upstanding citizen. Family man. President of the Lions Club. Gave to charities of his time and his money. Member of the town council. Successful businessman with his own hardware store. Beloved by all. Or so we thought, until three days ago when his life came to an end. Because someone went out of their way to kill him.

It's shocking, really. One minute you're driving along, the next you're facing the Almighty and being told that your brakes were cut, your car was wired to explode, and for good measure, someone double tapped your corpse with a 22.

I probably shouldn't have said that. I have this bad habit of speaking without considering what I'm saying. Sister Mary Margaret of the Sisters Of Little Or No Mercy said that would get me in trouble someday. The point is, we don't really need the visual, do we? Not when we're trying to remember the good, not the bad.

And yet the bad is there. We can't dispute it. We can't dismiss the reality of the awful way that Peter died. We can wonder who did it. We can try to come to terms with what's come out since his death. What the police have learned. About how he'd been skimming funds out of the town council budget and depositing it in a Panama bank. About how that money he raised for Schauffhausen Syndrome went into another account in the Caymans, and how Schauffhausen Syndrome doesn't actually exist. About how he was cheating behind his wife's back with his secretary. What's that, Bridget? You didn't want the kids to know? Oh, my bad.

But it's shocking, I tell you. Shocking. How a man presents himself in one way and hides secrets. And he was the last person you'd expect in this town to be hiding secrets. Oh, we all expect secrets being hidden by old Elsa von  Berger over there, who to this day refuses to divulge what she was doing in Berlin in 1944. And we expect it out of Helen and Tommy over there, trying to hide their affair from their spouses. But Peter? Good, upstanding Peter?

Who wasn't so good and upstanding?

Yes, shocking. But someone knew. Someone had enough reason to want to kill him. And to do so in a way that would make sure he really was dead. Who was it? Could it have been the ABBA loving nitwit we all hate? Don't even start, Chester, or you and I can go outside right now and I'll beat your ass into a coma. Could it have been the reclusive possible former Nazi dominatrix Elsa von Berger? Could it have been a random stranger passing through town who just decided they'd kill someone in a spectacular way? Could it have been Miss Scarlett in the drawing room with a candlestick?

Could it have been the mayor? After all, the police have arrested him on corruption charges. It does appear they were both in on the siphoning budget dollars to Panama gambit. A falling out between two cohorts in an illegal scheme could lead to something even more illegal. Like murder. I'm just saying, I don't know. You don't know. Nobody knows but the killer. 

I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm sure Chief Seddings has her list of suspects well in hand. For all we know she's got her sights set on the grieving widow as Suspect #1. Because Bridget had a whole lot of reason to want to off her philandering, money laundering husband. Not the least of which was that ten million dollar life insurance policy.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Peter. Peter the upstanding member of society. Peter the secret crook. Peter the cheater. It is patently unfair when someone we love leaves us too soon. It is even more unfair when we find out they were a dirty rotten lying skunk. And it is dismaying to me. I consider myself a reasonably smart person. Even if I say things without thinking ahead from time to time. But I'd known Peter for years, and even so, I never saw what he was hiding. And that just baffles me.

Well, Peter, at least you went out quickly. Horribly, but quickly. Hopefully justice is done for you. It'll even be better if justice being done means Chester is the killer and winds up getting thrown in prison for the rest of his days. Which won't be long once the gang in lock up finds out he loves ABBA."

Beware The Wrath Of A Polar Vortex

Today I have an image blog. Enjoy!

Between A Rock And A High Place

Every summer it seems there are endless popcorn films that don’t make you think- aside from how preposterous that whole thing you just saw was.  It’s heavy emphasis on action, no emphasis on logic. Usually one of them can be described best as the Big Dumb Summer Movie, and usually it's one of Michael Bay's Transformers abominations. This year the title falls to Skyscraper, which could have easily been titled Die Hard In The Towering Inferno, or The Physically Impossible Crane Jump Shot. A derivative action thriller that pretty much messes around with both terrorist and disaster film franchises and doesn’t do so nearly as well, it gives Dwayne Johnson a chance to growl at everything (again) and throws concepts like sense, physics, and gravity right out the window. Of a very high building.

A prelude establishes Will Sawyer (Johnson), an FBI hostage rescue team leader, and a botched crisis results in his retirement, what with losing the better part of a leg and all, when it doesn’t go according to plan. Years later he’s married to Sarah (Neve Campbell), they’ve got a couple of too-cute kids, and his line of work is assessing security concerns for skyscrapers. He and his family are residing at the Pearl, a two hundred plus story beast of an ultramodern tower in Hong Kong, as he consults on the building design for his employers, and of course this being an action film, and since it’s ripping off Die Hard, it doesn’t take long for terrorists to show up and turn things into, well, a towering inferno.

Rawson Marshall Thurber wrote and directed this. He’s done comedy work before, most recently the film Central Intelligence, also with Johnson. This is the first time he’s done an action thriller. The script borrows liberally from more than one genre. The Die Hard theme of terrorists taking control of a confined space certainly applies. But so too are things like employers not taking legitimate concerns seriously, authorities jumping to conclusions, and ultimately life and death peril. And where Die Hard succeeds is in that we feel John McClane is believable and mortal; Sawyer, on the other hand, gets written in such a way that doesn’t feel believable, that’s over the top. This is Thurber desperately trying to hide the fact that his story is derivative behind a whole lot of overblown and over the top plot devices.

Disaster films are mined for their effect- a fire high in a very high building was already done to good effect with The Towering Inferno back in the day. The script plays to some of the same stereotypes typical of that genre, all while ignoring basic rules of physics. I mean seriously… there’s what we can best describe as the money shot of the whole film, and in short it is not possible. It’s a matter of defying things like gravity and physics and trajectory and fundamental reality. Not that it stops your average action thriller from ignoring such realities- insanely impossible stunts have kept Tom Cruise pretending he’s still twenty five years younger than he is in the latter half of the Mission Impossible series, after all.

Thurber as a director is more competent in that role. He can reasonably handle action, even if it feels over the top and violating the rules of gravity. A lot of the production values are CGI and FX- you’re not literally going to suspend an actor that high above anything, but things look realistic enough. It does have a vertigo inducing effect at times, which is appropriate given how tall this building is supposed to be. Thurber’s style handles the conventions of the genre decently enough- moments of sheer terror in between creeping down dark corridors and enclosed spaces, the desperate fights for survival, and so on, but it doesn’t change the fact that the film still feels derivative.

This is one of those cases where the cast is, for the most part, better than the writing gives them. Chin Han, who I’ve only seen in a supporting role in The Dark Knight, has a supporting role as Zhao Long Ji, the developer who’s hired Sawyer. He’s blasé about the concerns brought up, and hiding a secret or two himself. It’s reluctantly that he’s drawn into the action, but the actor gives the role a certain stoicism that at least works. Pablo Schreiber turns up as Ben, Will’s slighty shifty buddy. And British-Aussie actor Noah Taylor ramps up the sleazeball angle as an underwriter, Pierce, whose presence in the film just feels creepy.

Of course in a film like this, you need an antagonist, otherwise it’s just Building On Fire, News At  Eleven, Now Back To Men’s Curling In Progress. Which would make for a boring movie. The problem here is in the writing, because the villain, Kores Botha, is no Hans Gruber. Played by Danish actor Roland Moller, the character chews the scenery, menaces the innocent, and wrecks havoc. He’s the required Euro-trash thug with an agenda. The actor’s probably better than the material gives him to work with, but the material at hand just makes him the villain-du-jour and doesn’t give us a reason to find him compelling.

Neve Campbell, best known for Party Of Five and the Scream franchise, gets to play the requisite damsel sort of kind of in distress as Will’s life Sarah. Filling in the part of Bonnie Bedelia’s Holly (minus the marital estrangement) from the first Die Hard, Sarah finds herself and her children in peril throughout the film, either from gun toting Eurotrash or a burning building, and while part of that means she’s in peril, she’s capable of fending for herself too. Campbell makes the most of the role as a mother protecting her kids in the midst of peril (the Die Hard franchise waited to put the kids into peril until they were grown up), and at least the dynamic between she and Johnson feels believable.

Johnson as an actor has the gift of a good sense of comedic timing, a gruff, grouchy demeanour, and stage presence. He’s interesting to watch, though here the role is over the top. In the last few years his films have included playing a Greek demigod in Hercules, putting up with Zac Efron (for which he should have been paid double just for the irritation) in Baywatch, wasting time in some of those Fast And Furious films, tangling with mutated beasts in Rampage, and surviving the ultimate earthquake in San Andreas. Now we find him pitted against the world’s tallest imaginary building. While the character is rendered mortal- losing a leg will do that- it still doesn’t feel as human as, well, John McClane always felt. That’s more to the fault of the writer than the actor. Johnson makes do with what he’s given, wavering between seriousness and the occasional quip.

So Skyscraper pretty much takes the cake as the Big Dumb Summer Movie of 2018. It’s entertaining enough in its own way, but it’s derivative and over the top, and does things over the course of storytelling that defy logic. There are plotholes big enough to fit a skyscraper in, and it just leaves you with two general impressions- first, that the director needs to work from the scripts of others and the studio needs to keep a close rein on him, and second… just how ridiculous was that whole thing?