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ACTIONLegion *
Rated R • AMC Orange Park, AMC Regency Square, Carmike Fleming Island, Cinemark Tinseltown, Epic Theatre St. Augustine, Hollywood River City, Regal Avenues, Regal Beach Blvd. Hell on Earth PAT McLEODThis doomsday flick could use some serious soul-saving The Apocalypse has always been a favorite subject on Hollywood screens. It’s been done in both black-and-white as well as Technicolor, usually accompanied by a veritable smorgasbord of special effects, but once in a while with a minimalist approach. The typical Doomsday scenario includes one or more of the following: stray meteors or asteroids, malevolent aliens, bad weather, a plague, and, of course, nuclear holocaust. Only occasionally has the end of Man and his world been attributed to Biblical causes. The last one, really the only one, I can remember is Michael Tolkin’s “The Rapture” (1991). Knowing a good source when he needs one, first-time writer/director Scott Stewart turns to the Bible for his chance to wreak havoc. The narrator, a young unmarried woman named Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) who just happens to be pregnant with a portentous child, recalls asking her mother why God would have tried to destroy mankind in the first place. The inelegant answer, which is repeated twice in “Legion” (at the beginning and end of the film) goes like this: “I guess He just got tired of all the bullshit!” Filmmaker Stewart obviously loved his punchline, compelled as he was to repeat it, and it suits “Legion” perfectly, since the movie absolutely wreaks of bovine ordure. Get this: Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) has revolted against God, clipped his wings (dutifully sewing up the prodigious wounds afterwards) and strapped on a whole arsenal of firepower to save the above-mentioned Charlie, whose unborn bastard baby is (for some reason or other) the only hope for mankind. Michael does this because he, unlike God, hasn’t lost hope. The Deity, however, has sent the Archangel Gabriel and a whole army of slavering, mindless zombies to kill Charlie before the baby is born. To cut budget costs, Charlie and the usual gang of stereotypes for this kind of film are holed up in a small diner called Paradise Falls in the desert outside a big city when the wipeout occurs. With unchaste Charlie are the grizzled, down-on-his-luck shop owner (Dennis Quaid), his dutiful son who has the hots for Baby Mama Charlie, the no-nonsense cook, an upper-class couple with a bitchy daughter and a surly stranger with a gun. After a sweet little old lady suddenly goes ballistic, biting one of them on the neck, then crawling across the ceiling like a spider, the occupants of Paradise Falls realize they are in trouble. Communications fail, accompanied by a storm of flies, before Michael shows up with an arsenal and the news that an army of angels is on its way to take them out. Actually, God gets his recruits, it turns out, by possessing local human beings (men, women and kids) and turning them loose as extras from “Night of the Living Dead.” The only visible angel on the attack is Gabriel, who sports a set of nifty bulletproof wings that double as armor when he pirouettes. He also wields a mean mace. For most of the movie, Michael and the gang engage in typical horror-movie carnage, interspersed with innocuous dialogue about feelings and sentiments in order to underscore motivation. Somehow or other, the baby manages to get born before the final showdown between Michael and Gabriel. But then there’s another showdown and yet another series of concluding shots before the movie finally concludes with the “bullshit” line. Having seen more than my share of bad movies over the years, I am pretty much inured to stupidity on the silver screen. However, “Legion” may take the cake. The plot is so utterly ridiculous, the dialogue not much better, that one has to wonder how the filmmakers were able to coax Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid to hop aboard. The latter responds with a workshop exercise in overacting. Bettany and the rest manage to keep straight faces which, in the present context, is a miracle on the order of the loaves and fishes. For my money, Christopher Walken remains the best killer Archangel on film in 1995’s “The Prophecy,” which plays like “Citizen Kane” compared to the “Legion.” POLICE DRAMAEdge of Darkness ***
Rated R • AMC Orange Park, AMC Regency Square, Carmike Fleming Island, Cinemark Tinseltown, Epic Theatres St. Augustine, Hollywood River City, Regal Avenues, Regal Beach Blvd.
What Remains MARY ANN JOHANSON A BBC miniseries is adapted for celluloid -- with all the good stuff left out
It’s apparently inevitable that when you take a six-hour miniseries made for British TV and boil it down to a two-hour American studio movie, a lot gets lost. And since we’re going from the BBC to Tinseltown, it’s easy to guess that what’s lost is the bulk of what made the original six hours long in the first place: character stuff. Because even if Hollywood movies gave a damn about character as a primary motive for storytelling, there’s simply not a lot of room for character if you want to keep all the mystery and the bit of action that made up all the not-character stuff in the source material. What’s weird about this new “Edge of Darkness,” though, is that while much of the character stuff has indeed been sucked out, what’s left is a plodding police procedural that thinks holding back on “action” makes it “serious” even in the absence of anything substantial to take its place. The basic story is shared with the 1985 miniseries: A cop — here, Mel Gibson’s Tom Craven is a Boston homicide detective — witnesses the murder of his twentysomething daughter, Emma (played by Bojana Novakovic), in an attack he first believes was targeting him. Once he scratches the surface of the crime, however, it becomes obvious that the killer may have been gunning for Emma after all. And so Craven is off on the hunt for whoever it was who wanted his daughter dead, and for an explanation as to why anyone would want to kill a nice, harmless young lady like Emma. So Craven is on the case and off the cop reservation, but not so much as you might expect from a Mel Gibson protagonist: There’s no “Gimme back my son!” moment here. (A line like that might have injected some temporary excitement.) Gibson gets his now-trademarked crazy on, but it’s kinda subdued, even at the end, when Craven dishes out some vigilante revenge that seems to be de rigueur for any movie today wanting to impart a sense of justice. The deeply cynical attitude of a movie such as this may well mirror the zeitgeist — perhaps no one does trust any of our institutions anymore, and has good reason not to — which only makes it all the more depressing, and not in the least satisfying. When more than one of Craven’s fellow officers, including a superior, can assure him that they will do absolutely everything they can to solve his daughter’s murder because “this is a cop thing,” it sounds less like a promise to Craven and more like a threat to the rest of us. It does seem as if screenwriters William Monahan and Andrew Bovell, hamfistedly adapting the 1985 script by Troy Kennedy-Martin, want us to get revved on Craven’s grief-driven retribution, but in apparently seeking to avoid the cheap thrill such a story can deliver if done right, they’ve left us with nothing beyond sullen pessimism. The film and miniseries share a certain angry scoffing at the corporate and governmental misdeeds that turn out to be behind Emma Craven’s murder, but the TV show — which is newly available on DVD, and highly recommended — was primarily driven by Craven’s (played by Bob Peck) posthumous relationship with his daughter (Joanne Whalley), as he discovers the woman she’d turned into. He talks to her, too, and she talks back, in a ghostly pas de deux in which we’re never quite sure whether she’s present in a supernatural way or whether Dad is merely hallucinating in his grief. It made for a delicate portrayal of a father-daughter relationship, the likes of which we rarely see on film. All of that is gone from this “Edge of Darkness.” I can’t help but wonder if director Martin Campbell thought he was simply restaging the 1985 miniseries, which he also directed, in all its solemn, odd quietude, without realizing that everything that made that version of the story work had been excised. We know Campbell knows how to make genuinely exciting movies. He’s given us the enthralling “Casino Royale” and the huge fun of the Antonio Banderas “Zorro” movies, so I can’t imagine what he was thinking in creating this new take on “Edge of Darkness.”
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