Welcome To the Dead Parade #6: Dead In the Water (Intermission)

As promised, this week offers a second intermission from the Dead Parade. I was going to make this the 25th issue of Just the Ticket, but with a title like "Dead In the Water," I just had to keep the parade marching on.  The first two movies up for review this week, as my oh-so-clever title suggests, sink like ships passing in the Bermuda Triangle.

We begin with the hole-riddled hulk known as the USS Contraband, a smuggler's vessel steered wrong by reluctant captain Mark Wahlberg (feel the vibration? That's the sound of your bilge pump exploding).  OK, I've taken this maritime metaphor as far out to sea as I dare. On to the good shit, lollipops.

Wahlberg tries adamantly to take the helm (sorry, I couldn't resist) as a smuggler-turned-private security consultant who must (like 90% of the action stars and aging dramatists in Hollywood) do "one last job" to protect his family from a ruthless former colleague (Giovanni Ribisi, looking like John Cusak in The Raven and sounding like Marlon Brando in The Godfather).

What starts out as your basic heist-by-numbers quickly (I should say too quickly) degenerates into the kind of "one goddamned thing after another" stupidity that plagues the average disaster movie (a conveniently apt comparison, don't you think?) and ends with one twist you can see coming from the word "action," and another in such desperate need of explanation and demonstration that any tutorial on the matter would amount to bludgeoning an invisible dead horse when no one is looking.  Let's see Houdini pull that off.

D+

After watching Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close yesterday (which I will review in the next issue), I finished up my week in movies this morning by surfing the Dark Tide. I suck at surfing, so I quickly went over-bored.

As a sample of the kind of movie I was subject to, you should know that one of the previews included at the beginning of Dark Tide was the "suspenseful," "thrilling" (these are sarcastic quotes, not direct quotes) Open Water, in which a couple are left out at sea to drown and be eaten by sharks when their idiot tour guide forgets that they are scuba diving and takes off with their boat.

Dark Tide is not much different or better. This latest shark-jumper (sorry) features a minimal cast led by Halle Berry as a traumatized and nearly bankrupt marine biologist convinced by her husband (Unfaithful's Olivier Martinez) and his millionaire friend to take them out on a shark-diving tour off the coast of South Africa. In the middle of mating season. In the middle of a seal buffet. Without any hint of a decent plot. Oh, yeah. I forgot about the money. Let's go do it!

After what seems like an hour and a half or more of boring, dark, bubble-fuzzy underwater scenes, three people have been eaten and Halle Berry has spouted some crap about respecting the dangerous beauty of sharks. What about the soothing menthol aroma of cigarettes? The delicious almond flavor of cyanide? The agonizing pace of Dark Tide? Do I need to bring up the lion again?

F