Of the two major video game adaptations to be released so far this year - Roar Uthaug's Tomb Raider and Brad Peyton's Rampage - it's clear which project faced the most difficult task in successfully translating from pixel to screen. The Tomb Raider franchise first emerged in 1996, successfully combining action and adventure with an iconic hero at its centre in Lara Croft. The games had already inspired a move adaptation back in 2001 with Angelina Jolie in the lead role, and a sequel in 2003, and the filmmakers tasked with the reboot had over two decades of stories and established characters to work with. Rampage, however, was based on the 1986 arcade game, in which the player would control a human-turned-monster and lay waste to cities as the army tried to bring you down. That's pretty much it, but it was enough to convince the studio heads that a blockbuster could be made out of the rubble.
In terms of box-office, both movies failed to live up to expectations, and the mediocre takings of Rampage proved, if anything, that Dwayne Johnson isn't invincible. But in terms of reputation, Peyton's unashamedly brainless actioner is starting to pick up steam as a guilty pleasure. It does, after all, feature the muscly charms of the man-mountain formerly known as The Rock, a giant who is about to throw down with an even more impressive specimen, and possibly gain an extra neck-ripple in the process. He plays Davis Okoye, your average Special Forces soldier turned primatologist who enjoys a special bond with albino gorilla George at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary. When debris from an exploded space station crash down around George's enclosure, he starts to grow rapidly in size and his behaviour becomes increasingly unpredictable. The mysterious canisters belong to the gene manipulation company Energyne, who hope to create super-sized creatures and sell them off to the highest bidder. Why they are conducting their experiments in space is beyond me, but Rampage isn't the kind of film to benefit from closer scrutiny.
George isn't the only unstoppable beast on the loose: there's also a wolf and a crocodile. Joining Davis on his mission to prevent the monsters from laying waste to an entire city is exposition tool Kate Caldwell (Naomie Harris) and a shady government agent with a cowboy's accent and swagger. Played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Agent Russell is the film's most ridiculous character. It's unbelievably stupid, even by the standards expected of a film like this, brushing it's scientific explanations under a carpet and removing any stakes by making its hero utterly indestructible. But I found it impossible to resist its cheesy charms, and the relationship between Davis and George - who communicate with sign-language - is nicely done. Where Rampage fails is in its clashing of tones. Pantomime villains Claire Wyden (Malin Akerman) and her brother Brett (Jake Lacy) appear to have wandered in from another, even camper movie, and the sight of millions of innocents being casually crushed and burned in a wave of CGI destruction as our heroes fire off one-liners always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Still, I enjoyed Rampage way more than I expected, even if I felt a little stupider as the credits rolled.
From the opening moments of sitcom-inspired office hi-jinks in this plinky-plonky rom-com, the outcome is never in doubt. When we first glimpse our leads - beautiful people Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds - the inevitability of how this film will leave us is cemented even further. There's a set formula to these kinds of movies, and knows well enough just how the target audience it so aggressively pursues wants to be left feeling. The key to a decent rom-com is having a funny script; one that will have you laughing and hoping the mismatched couple will finally realise their love for one another to care about how predictable the whole things is. Anne Fletcher's The Proposal does none of these things, and instead betrays the likeability of its leads by having little zip, and keeping them apart for what seems like a large chunk of the movie.
Margaret Tate (Bullock) is executive editor-in-chief in a successful New York-based publishing company. She has an icy reputation in the office, and her panicked underlings frequently alert the others of her arrival via group e-mail. Her dedicated but overworked assistant Andrew Paxton (Reyolds) is the only one who tolerates her, and that is because he hopes to win himself a promotion through his loyalty and hard work. Margaret also happens to be Canadian, and after a minor violation of the terms of her work visa, she finds herself facing deportation and without the job she has worked so hard to get. In a panic, she announces that she has been seeing Andrew for the past year and the happy couple are soon to be married, much to Andrew's dismay. Sensing foul play, U.S. immigration agent Mr. Gilbertson (Denis O'Hare) keeps a close watch on them, forcing Margaret to accompany Andrew to a family get-together in Sitka, Alaska.
Despite never really convincing as a couple, and neither really having moments of clarity that will help us understand when the script starts to push the two closer together, the two leads are a joy to watch. Bullock is now a legend of the genre, and Reynolds demonstrates the cheeky charisma he wouldn't be allowed to fully embrace until 2016's Deadpool. It's solid proof that the fault lies with the material they're given. Once in Alaska, The Proposal becomes a sickly loop of increasingly bizarre comedy set-pieces, including a moment where Margaret must fend off an eagle attacking the yappy family dog. It's a sea of white, middle-class faces, and the only person of colour seems to be the Hispanic Ramone (Oscar Nunez) who, in a slight racist twist, works just about every job in town from store-owner to stripper. There's also the dull sub-plot involving Andrew's father (Craig T. Nelson), who wants his son to ditch his New York adventure to join the family business, which exists solely to give Andrew something to do away from Margaret. The stars deserve much better.
Bringing Alan Moore's cerebral and sprawling novel to the screen was always going to a near-impossible task. It's very much an anti-superhero story, where the 'heroes' are merciless psychopaths, government weapons of mass destruction, or sexually impotent. Spanning decades and featuring snippets from books, comics and newspaper reports within the world Moore creates, any film adaptation simply could not match the level of details and authenticity of the much-lauded novel. Zack Snyder, a fan of the original, and a director who was just off the back of the surprisingly excellent Dawn of the Dead (2004) and the shouty, crass 300 (2006), puts all of his heart and soul into Watchmen.
Using a no-name cast, a convoluted and dangerously slow story, and an adult rating thanks to all those snapped bones and a massive blue willy, it's a wonder this ever got made at all. It was in development hell for years, with names such as Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass becoming attached and then quickly detached from the project, and even the nerve-jangling possibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the movie's only true superhero was banded around in the mid 1990's. It's almost impossible to think of a more faithful adaptation than Snyder's, often re-creating frames from the comic in the minutest of detail, and even including Tales from the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic from the novel with the voice of Gerard Butler (this is a review of the 215-minute cut, which I feel is the best version out there). Yet, you could still argue that Moore's book is un-filmable.
The 1980's, and President Nixon is running his fourth term in office, and superheroes have been outlawed. Ageing government assassin The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former member of two superhero groups named the Minutemen, is murdered in his home. Vigilante and wanted man Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) investigates the murder, and brings his theory that someone is hunting down retired superheroes to his friend and former partner Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), formerly known as Nite Owl. With the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets becoming frequently more inevitable, heads turn to Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a neo-God with the ability to bend matter to his will. But when he learns that he may have given his friends and loved ones cancer, he flees to Mars, leaving the world vulnerable to complete annihilation.
The Watchmen world is thick and meaty, re-writing history as if masked heroes and super-villains actually existed. In the film's opening titles, we are treated to an impressive collage of famous historical events, such as the Moon landing, but here it's Dr. Manhattan photographing Neil Armstrong. It's a hell of a lot of back-story to fill in, and the movie spends most of it's time filling in the gaps between the 1940's and the 1980's. Luckily, the characters Alan Moore wrote so beautifully, are fascinating, and the extended segments dedicated to portray their personal evolution are arguably more interesting than the movie's main plot. These are not flawed superheroes like Batman or Wolverine, they are complete fuck-ups, getting sexual stimulation from violence, battering minor offenders to a bloody pulp, or, in Dr. Manhattan's case, literally losing every trace of his humanity.
Moore's novel made them a parody of the idea of masked superheroes protecting the weak. The Comedian especially is a piece of work, gleefully frying a Viet Cong with a flame thrower, while a giant Dr. Manhattan stalks the jungle vaporising any enemies in his way, helicopters whizzing by his head while 'Ride of the Valkyries' plays. Like with 300, Snyder way overplays it. The comic itself wasn't exactly subtle, but Watchmen the movie amps everything up to 11, and while this admittedly makes the film more exciting, it makes the themes heavy-handed and sometimes plain laughable. Dreiberg can only get it up for the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) after he's murdered some criminals, but when he finally does, Snyder captures it like a soft-core porn movie starring Shannon Tweed, with the cringe-worthy use of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' in the background. In fact, the entire soundtrack feels as if it's been picked by some stoner student with Jimi Hendrix posters on his wall.
It's no surprise that, after a very successful opening week, Watchmen plummeted once word-of-mouth got around. Audiences drawn in by the possibility of another superhero spectacle were no doubt left baffled by the existential musings of it's characters and the extreme darkness of the film's themes. Perhaps it was what the film deserved, as when it's good, it's the work of a true artist, and when it's bad, it's quite embarrassing. But it's the best that us fans are likely to ever get, and we must be thankful that a director who really knows and loves the source was on board, and insistent that it wasn't destroyed by the studio butchers. Snyder has also rounded up an excellent cast, with Haley and Crudup standing out especially (Akerman suffers from some dodgy delivery occasionally but she sure pulls off that costume). It will continue to divide it's viewers, but it'll be somewhat cherished by it's fans.
In terms of box-office, both movies failed to live up to expectations, and the mediocre takings of Rampage proved, if anything, that Dwayne Johnson isn't invincible. But in terms of reputation, Peyton's unashamedly brainless actioner is starting to pick up steam as a guilty pleasure. It does, after all, feature the muscly charms of the man-mountain formerly known as The Rock, a giant who is about to throw down with an even more impressive specimen, and possibly gain an extra neck-ripple in the process. He plays Davis Okoye, your average Special Forces soldier turned primatologist who enjoys a special bond with albino gorilla George at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary. When debris from an exploded space station crash down around George's enclosure, he starts to grow rapidly in size and his behaviour becomes increasingly unpredictable. The mysterious canisters belong to the gene manipulation company Energyne, who hope to create super-sized creatures and sell them off to the highest bidder. Why they are conducting their experiments in space is beyond me, but Rampage isn't the kind of film to benefit from closer scrutiny.
