short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Premium Rush (2012, USA)


Disclaimer – as a city cyclist, I really hate the type of urban riding on display in Premium Rush. Bikers, whether messengers or commuters, who ride into intersections against lights and cause drivers and pedestrians to freak out make a bad name for all of us. And the last thing urban riders really need is more drivers who seem like they’re out to get them.

Premium Rush is a dumb-fun B-movie with one big asset – Michael Shannon. Joseph Gordon-Levitt may get first billing, but Shannon’s the star here, and director David Koepp wisely spends equal time with his cop villain as with his messenger hero. As an actor, one of Shannon’s most enviable skills is his lack of pandering to questionable material. He may be playing a rote baddie in a late-August release about hotshot bike messengers, but he might as well be playing to the Academy (his comedic twist on the character reads more as an inspiration than a stunt). The stunt riding – particularly the low-angle stuff – is fun, and Gordon-Levitt acquits himself well as usual, but Premium Rush is Shannon’s show, and the movie’s smart enough to know it.

Friday, August 10, 2012

The Dark Knight Rises (2012, USA)

I’ve read that some critics have liked The Dark Knight Rises more after a second viewing. I had the same reaction with Batman Begins, but the opposite after a repeat of The Dark Knight – the former seemed stronger, though still problematic, while the latter was a slog. With the final film in the trilogy, I wonder if the disparate elements in the narrative hang together better upon a second watch.

It’s not that Rises isn’t entertaining – for the bulk of its extensive run time, it’s a gripping film – it’s that the Batman elements often feel extraneous to the rest of the film. I think I get what Nolan is trying to do here, apart from his typical meditation on the savagery of human nature and the fallibility of our structures and institutions, but I don’t know if it gels successfully. For a movie that’s over two and a half hours long, certain plot points – the romance between Bruce Wayne and Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), for example – feel shoehorned in, and the removal of our hero midway through the action seems as much an excuse for Nolan to focus on the (much more interesting) drama in Gotham as providing opportunity for one of his typically beautiful but leaden symbolic journeys.

As with the prior films, our emotional investment is never in Batman/Bruce Wayne, it’s in the people surrounding him, the most obvious analogue in Rises being Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s idealistic rookie cop. This makes the Gotham uprising elements of the film work particularly well without Batman’s participation – indeed, it was something of a letdown when the Dark Knight reappears to save the day. But perhaps this is what is so fascinating about Nolan’s trilogy in the first place – he’s using a comic book hero to tell a much larger story, one that might have seemed far-fetched without being placed in a fantastic realm. And while, as with many of his other projects, the Batman films are often weighed down with too much bombast and an overwrought symbolic narrative, one thing they cannot be accused of is being empty entertainment.