Journey To The Center of The Earth (1 star)
Directed by Eric Brevig. Written by Michael Weiss, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin, based on the book by Jules Verne. With Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem and Seth Meyers. (PG)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Written by Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola, based on the comic book by Mike Mignola. With Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, Doug Jones, Seth MacFarlane, Luke Goss, Anna Walton, Jeffrey Tambor and John Hurt. (PG-13)
For fans of light movies, this week's new releases offer up an interesting study in contrast. Both are essentially adventure/fantasy films laced with comic touches; both are drawn from previous source material (an early sci-fi novel, a comic book), both feature elements of the supernatural (sea monsters, a fish-man), and both rely heavily on special effects for much of their visual punch (see above). So why is it that one is barely worth watching, and the other is a joyride?
First up is the execrable Journey To The Center of The Earth, based on the vastly superior 1864 Jules Verne novel. A hammy Brendan Fraser stars here as Trevor Anderson, a university scientist plagued by nightmares about the death of his brother Max, who went missing a decade earlier. Both are vulcanologists, interested in the idea that "volcanic tubes" could provide a direct path through the Earth's mantle into its core, but Trevor has carried on his brother's work with little success. As the film begins, his lab is in the process of being shut down to make room for storage—Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live), as the oily bottom-line bureaucrat behind the shutdown, gives what is probably the film's best performance in his few on-screen minutes.
When Max's son Sean comes to stay with his uncle, the two first do the disaffected youth routine of Hollywood—Trevor uses the word "dude" a lot while Sean grunts—until they discover that Max's personal copy of Verne's novel is filled with marginalia that seems to point to a gigantic discovery (more volcanic tubes). After a few quick calculations, the pair is off to Iceland, where they follow the trail to Hannah ?sgeirsson, a mountain guide whose father, like Max, was a Vernean—someone who believed Verne's book was nonfiction. She's also drop-dead gorgeous, and apparently has a habit of wearing skintight leggings on her mountain excursions. In the screenwriters' defense, she's also the best spelunker in the group.
Once they get down into the underground guts of their volcano the special effects extravaganza begins. The problem is that most of the effects are flat and phony, and worse, show a serious lack of imagination. There's nothing here you haven't seen done better elsewhere, including a mine car roller-coaster scene lifted whole-cloth from an Indiana Jones picture. A story like this one, of course, can be expected to be preposterous—it's almost a requirement—and the main requirement is that it dazzle its audience in its telling, something this movie only does in dribs and drabs. For fans of the genre, look to Fraser's equally over-the-top but far more entertaining The Mummy and its sequels.
If you're interested in something with more filling under the crust, however, Hellboy II: The Golden Army may be just the thing. Based on Mike Mignola's cult-status comic book, this second installment about a group of crime-fighting superbeings is a riotous visual tapestry. Filled to brimming with evidence of the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, its images and colors are both bright and dark, at once grounding us in an entirely believable world and jumping off the screen with the intense hues of comics.
Of course, intense hues are a given when your hero is a brick red bruiser with a satanic tail. For this turn in the series, Hellboy (Ron Perlman again, in the role he was built to play) and his crew—firestorm girlfriend Liz and merman Abe Sapien—are joined by Johann Krauss, an ectoplasmic (read: cloud of gas) life form who gets around by inhabiting what appears to be an old-timey diving suit.
Their adversary this time around is Prince Nuada, who has returned from exile to break a longstanding truce between humans and his supernatural realm. When a piece of a magical crown goes up for auction, he and his henchman Wink show up to claim it, bringing along a couple of boxes of tooth fairies. Del Toro's tooth fairies aren't the ones familiar to kids, though: these get their name from their addiction to calcium, and they'll do anything to get to it, including eating through flesh to get to the bone.
When Hellboy and Co. show up in the aftermath of the heist, "Red," who longs for a bit of celebrity, sees his chance to grab the public eye, and gets himself tossed out in front of the news cameras. Dismayed when the public calls him a freak, and despondent over his troubles with Liz, he and Abe—who has fallen for the Prince's sister—drown their sorrows in a surprisingly touching, sweetly funny scene that revolves around a Barry Manilow hit. Far from being the usual League of Superheroes, this troupe is a bunch of misfits still trying to make their way in the world, a difference that, paradoxically, humanizes all of them.
But if the characterizations help raise the film above much of its comic-based brethren, in the end it's del Toro's vision that makes it the amazing spectacle it is. The success of Pan's Labyrinth helped introduce his dark and beautiful imaginings to a wider public, and here again he reaches deep into his dreams to produce the stuff of gentle nightmares: a gigantic forest god made of undulating greenery, a troll's market filled with a menagerie of underworld creatures, and an angel of death whose funereal wings are studded with eyes (del Toro has a creepy and effective thing for misplaced eyes).
Seeing such a fully formed individual worldview onscreen is becoming more rare in today's climate, where the impulse at studios is to flatten a film down until it will appeal to the broadest base. Here's hoping del Toro can keep his run going.
The Edge of Heaven (4 stars)
Written and directed by Fatih Akin. With Tuncel Kurtiz, Nursel Kose, Nurgul Yesilcay, Baki Davrak, Hanna Schygulla and Patrycia Ziolkowska. (NR)
The Edge of Heaven is a sad and meditative film, full of the existential solitude that is the birthright of humanity. "We all die alone," goes the saying, but the ghosts in this film—in the form of memory or shame, or an empty sense of loss—haunt those they've left behind, helping them forge new bonds with the living.
Divided into three acts and bookended by similar scenes, the film takes a tack similar to recent fare such as Crash—discrete stories that tie together within a larger narrative. But unlike those films, where the knitting together of narratives can sometimes seem a bit too convenient, Akin's work never connects the last few links in its chain. Though the characters bleed (sometimes literally) into the separate narratives, and come tantalizingly close to connecting, in the end it's only we, the audience, who are allowed to understand the full weight and meaning of their lives.
After a short introduction where we meet a young man on the road, a title card appears that leaves little to the imagination about what will come next: "Yeter's Death," it reads. Yeter (Nursel K?se), it turns out, is an aging hooker being visited by the elderly Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a gentleman rogue who takes joy in physical pleasures: wine, women, cigarettes. He's a bit of a mix between Charles Bukowski and the crooning Ben Gazarra of Buffalo 66—the sort of grandfather or oddball uncle families love to tell stories about. When he hits it big at the track, he offers Yeter a business deal: if she stops seeing other men and comes to live with him, he'll pay her whatever she was making at the brothel.
For Yeter, it's a way out of danger—she's been the target of threats from two Muslim men in her neighborhood who don't approve of her occupation—and she accepts. It's a short respite. Soon after, Ali's college professor son Nejat arrives to visit, and at dinner a drunk and suspicious Ali belittles his son before a sudden attack lands the old man in the hospital. When he's released, his jealousy and machismo erupt in a moment that ends one life and changes all the others it has touched.
The remarkable thing is that it's just that: a moment. In the next section, titled "Lotte's Death," death is again almost an afterthought, a moment in life when one took a wrong turn. Lotte is a German student who befriends the young radical Ayten, a girl on the run from police after a protest rally gets ugly. She's also Yeter's daughter, and she's looking for her mother. Before she can get very far—what she knows about her mother's life is mostly a web of lies—her past catches up with her and she's deported to a Turkish prison.
Meanwhile, a stricken Nejat travels to Istanbul in an attempt to find the daughter of the woman his father killed, and when he finds a German-language bookstore for sale, he and the owner—one homesick, the other sick of home—trade lives, and Nejat stays on in Turkey. When Lotte comes looking for her friend, she falls in with Nejat, and it's only a desire for secrecy that keeps them from knowing how closely they're connected.
There's more to the story in a third act that shares the film's title, and the long final shot of the film is left wonderfully open-ended, leaving the door open to at least a glimmer of hope. Akin is careful not to give us too much, and, to be honest, it's sometimes frustrating, because we want so badly for someone—anyone—to understand what's going on just beyond their periphery. But that frustration—the leftover puzzle piece that won't fit in a gap—is exactly what makes the film what it is: haunting."
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
