Ticket Stubs #25: Two and A Half Gimmicks

FROM August 22, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #15: Two and A Half Gimmicks): If you're looking for a review of the sitcom formerly helmed by Charlie Sheen, go somewhere else. This is SW@ Ticket's look at recycled plots, overused symbolism, and scrapyard special effects. It usually helps to get all the bad out of the way first, so here goes.........................

Taking Lives is your basic serial killer film with your more than basic serial killer. Kiefer Sutherland (or is it Ethan Hawke? It's "hard" to tell) plays the elusive killer who takes people's identities. Not your usual credit card fraud type of ID theft; this guy goes all out (almost) by putting in contacts to take on the same eye color, shaving off and wearing the victim's fingerprints, dyeing his hair, putting in false teeth, and even paying their taxes for them. It all sounds cool until pseudo-psychic criminologist Angelina Jolie enters the picture. The brains behind the film put the psychic element in by bits and pieces, all the while seeming to deny that that's what they're doing--after hearing voices, Jolie covers her ears and makes the excuse "I think better when it's quiet." Things seemingly move in the background when she wiggles her fingers in their direction, and a little Spider-sense music goes off when the killer enters a crowded room. And as if things weren't bad enough already, Jolie falls for a murder suspect. If the killer wasn't so easy to find, the whole psychic thing would have been more tolerable. But he was, so it wasn't.
C-

On to a film with so much symbolism in it that even the most stoned of mythology professors would say "Holy Shit!" in disgust: Godsend.
Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos star as parents who lose their eight year old son in a car accident. Rather than face their loss, the couple seek the help of a scientist (Robert "I Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty" De Niro) who promises he can clone their son. But when the clone passes the age of his death, seemingly supernatural things start happening to him.
The title is sheer genius when you stop to think about it: on one hand, regaining a lost loved one is a Godsend, but on the other hand, cloning is playing God--making Him unnecessary in a sense--and so brings about God's end. And of course, they had to name the cloned boy--the first cloned boy--Adam, and introduce a destructive alter ego named Zachary in some weak, Alphabet-based attempt at life/death symbolism. Great story with good-but-predictable twists and plenty of good scares without turning up the sound on your TV.
B-

Viggo Mortensen (LOTR) stars as a cowboy who participates in a 3,000 mile race across the Arabian desert with his title horse, Hidalgo.
Great personality on Mortensen's part, fulfilling the tall tales of fighting raiders, surviving the savage elements, bringing two countries together with his sheer will, and leaving truth in the background of the story. Yes, the half-Native half-American hero beating all odds sounds like a folk tale, the journey taken by film and star sounds like the brag story Tobey Maguire's character tells in Seabiscuit (or Robert Duvall and Michael Caine's stories from Secondhand Lions), and the sandstorm looks like it was reused from The Mummy (minus Arnold Vosloo's face, of course), but that's Disney for you. And I've never had to eat locusts in an Arabian sandstorm before, so take that into account. Action movie, racing movie, Western, love story, comedy; Hidalgo does it all commendably. And props for saying it's based on a true story rather than calling it a true story period.
B+

Now to a Critical Quickie that uses reality to defy gimmickry:
A Beginner's Guide to Endings--Harvey Keitel (Reservoir Dogs), Scott Caan (Hawaii Five-O), JK Simmons (The Closer), Tricia Helfer (The Firm). The plot is something we've seen before: the lives of three brothers get turned upside down following their deadbeat father's death, where they learn that they are about to die. Ne'er do well dad Keitel's mistakes are so catastrophically selfish and stupid that you could believe they'd happen to a real person. The family dynamic between the brothers, the actors' onscreen chemistry, and the screenwriting and setting (filmed on location in Niagra Falls) that backs it all feel genuine. Another well-concocted, white-trash tale of strange serendipity in the bag.
A

Next issue, the horror gets so un-horrific that we find ourselves up a certain proverbial creek, sans paddle, and headed for a Critical Quickie that is more rantical and less of a quickie than ever before. So stay tuned.