Premium Rush

Premium Rush moves like New York City — fast and hard, with nary a backward glance. The movie is about Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a NYC bike messenger tasked to deliver an envelope. This envelope contains something very much desired by Detective Monday (Michael Shannon), a corrupt cop who wants to intercept it before it reaches its destination. Wilee is probably named after the luckless cartoon character, but he’s more like the Road Runner, with the cop as the coyote. Most of the city cops in the film, including a bike cop Wilee consistently stymies, are annoyances or obstacles. It’s an eerie coincidence that Premium Rush opened on the same day that New York City police, trying to take down a gunman, ended up wounding nine bystanders. New York’s finest, indeed.

Apart from its unintended ironies, Premium Rush is a fat-free thriller with breathtaking high-speed bike chases — we’re told the footage is unfaked — through busy Manhattan streets. Professional stunt drivers can almost do flashy, bone-crunching car chases in their sleep, but what must really require nerve-racking attention are the many scenes here in which cars are always braking within inches of hitting a bicyclist. There’s a lot of subtle yet thrilling car choreography here, reminding us that sometimes it’s more exciting when you see two or three near-simultaneous accidents narrowly averted.

Wilee is a great bicyclist, eschewing gears and even brakes; he relies on his legs and his instincts, and we see the latter at work at several points when Wilee has to make a split-second decision which way to go, and his imagination plays out various scenarios (if you go this way, you hit someone’s stroller; if you go that way, you’re gonna fly over someone’s hood). It’s as if Wilee’s got a rapid-fire GPS in his head that steers him to safety — in most cases. The director of Premium Rush is David Koepp, who’s primarily a screenwriter but has made a few interesting films, chiefly his directorial debut The Trigger Effect. Here, Koepp just takes us for a ride, no subtext required or desired. It’s a trim piece of work, maybe his best, because it isn’t bogged down and it knows how to sketch characters on the fly. In the minimalist-thriller race, I’ll take this over the pretentious Drive in a New York minute.

It helps that the Road Runner and the coyote are impeccably cast; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is accessible, smart, athletic, everything a young action hero needs to be, while Michael Shannon, born in Kentucky and raised there and in Chicago, almost single-handedly brings a ’70s New York flavor to the movie. (Detective Monday isn’t always eating a sloppy, garlicky sandwich, but spiritually he is.) There’s more New York irritability, desperation and unchecked pride in Shannon’s performance than in the entirety of the Taking of Pelham 123 remake from a few years ago. Shannon usually plays suffering saps in indie films (and is great at it), but here he’s clearly having a great time and shares it with us. The movie doesn’t stop there, surrounding Wilee with a crew of colorful support, including Dania Ramirez as Wilee’s ex-girlfriend and fellow bike messenger and Aasif Mandvi as his dispatcher. Everyone in the film has New York fever, and every damn time you see a cop he always interrupts himself to hassle someone over something small.

Premium Rush might be purer if we never knew what was in the envelope, but we find out it can lead to a little boy’s freedom. On one level that’s kind of a bummer — do it for the kid! — but on another level it adds some warmth and urgency to the chase. And the movie keeps going at a clip; the editors, Jill Savitt (who’s cut most of Koepp’s films) and Derek Ambrosi (making his feature debut), can take a well-earned bow. This is the kind of low-expectation late-summer film that can all too often fall under the radar but delivers more honestly and forcefully than most of its warm-weather predecessors. Watching Wilee and his cohorts bob and weave in and out of bleating traffic while Michael Shannon hilariously chews the scenery (minus one tooth) offers, if not pure cinema, at least pure entertainment.

Savages

Savages, the new drug thriller directed by Oliver Stone, has been getting a bit of a bum rap. This hard-charging controversialist doesn’t always need to poke America’s soft spots; sometimes he just wants to have a good lowdown time, as he did in his freaky U-Turn fifteen years ago. Savages would make a fine double bill with U-Turn, up to the point where many viewers will bail — when Stone delivers a tragic ending, apparently along the lines of Don Winslow’s source novel, and then rescinds it. For me, though, the “happy ending” actually politicizes the movie more than a crime-does-not-pay finale would have. It also says a lot about the Hollywood system in which Stone is expected to work these days. If Universal nudged Stone’s hand here, are they aware they’ve given a happily-ever-after to drug dealers?

Those dealers are almost cartoonishly whitebread: Chon (Taylor Kitsch), a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who picked up some excellent seeds during his tours, and Ben (Aaron Johnson), a do-gooder with a minor in botany. They’re both in love with Ophelia (Blake Lively), or “O,” and the three of them run a highly prosperous weed business out of Laguna Beach and are happy as clams until a Mexican cartel wants in. Ben and Chon try to fake out the cartel and split for Indonesia, but the Mexicans kidnap O, and the plot thickens. The cartel’s scary enforcer is Lado (Benicio del Toro), who likes to strike terror with chainsaws and whips, but the true mastermind is Elena Sanchez (Salma Hayek), who wears her hair in cruel black bangs. Even Lado is afraid of her. You might be, too. Stone has seldom known what to do with the women in his largely masculine films, but he gets a vivid, iconic portrait of corrupt humanity out of Hayek. After this and Frida, isn’t it time to admit that Hayek is one of our great actresses?

The story has many branches, including a dirty DEA agent (John Travolta), a perhaps too sensitive Mexican tasked to watch over O, and mostly faceless war buddies of Chon’s who always seem ready to drop everything and sit around in the desert for him with sniper rifles. Travolta is probably never better here than when Chon has just stabbed him in the hand and he seems less physically wounded than affronted in his soft spot, his dignity. Everyone here, indeed, has a soft spot, as Ben points out in one of his more lucid moments. Travolta’s other soft spot is his wife, expiring of cancer at home; he avails himself of some of Ben and Chon’s weed to make his wife’s chemo more bearable. This leads to Travolta’s other fine moment, when Ben asks how his wife is doing and Travolta says simply, “She’s dying,” and we’re reminded of the vulnerable actor who moved us in Blow Out and Saturday Night Fever.

Savages goes like a speedboat — its two hours and eleven minutes streak by. Stone shows a strong taste for brutality here; this is possibly his most splattery film since Natural Born Killers, and the presence of freshly chainsawed heads, skulls perforated in close-up, and the hard-to-watch fate of a man accused of being a DEA rat speaks volumes about how tolerant the MPAA is of violence these days. There’s also a good deal of sex (though no nudity from Blake Lively, much to her fans’ chagrin, no doubt) and, of course, near-constant drug use. Savages muscles its way into the heart of the hermetic superhero summer, sweating and cursing and bleeding and smoking and fucking. In its way, it’s a throwback to ’70s cinema, where nobody was all good or all bad, before George Lucas’ black-and-white chessboard design mapped itself over American entertainment.

This is by no means Oliver Stone’s best work — neither was U-Turn. But it’s his best work in well over a decade. He has a story here and he sticks to it, jazzing it up visually every so often, though never calling attention to his technique. He seems to be done with the Cuisinart style, as well as the Indian mystics who used to pop up in every Stone movie of the ’90s. If he has a muse this time, it’s Buddhist: Ben is a follower of the Dalai Lama’s teachings (up to a point), and O is referred to as a lotus. The comic tragedy of the movie is that nobody practices non-attachment, when they really should. Stone, a self-described Buddhist himself, makes movies that would horrify a monk but, in their rough fashion, stand as fairly memorable illustrations of the Four Noble Truths. Stone’s movies are full of what Buddhists call hungry ghosts, craving sensation and wealth, trying haplessly to fill a void in themselves. That double ending starts to make sense: it’s Stone saying “This is what could happen. And this is also what could happen. You have a choice.” The ghosts stop feeding and become people.

Red State

Someday, Kevin Smith’s Red State will form a natural double feature with his 1999 religious farce Dogma. The earlier film, shaggy and undisciplined, was Smith’s profanity-laced conversation with himself about his Catholicism; Red State is equally scattershot but has far darker things to say about religion, or at least the ways in which it can be perverted. Smith had long talked up Red State as his “horror movie,” but it really isn’t one, not at first glance; it’s more of an ideological drama in which two parties face off, taking orders from a higher power, or what they believe to be a higher power. Smith doesn’t trust people who claim to know the will of God; he also doesn’t trust people who carry guns for the government. Bill Hicks, if he were still with us, might raise a beer bottle in tribute to the film.

Red State does begin something like Hostel — a trio of teenagers head out to a trailer in the boonies in search of sex and wind up kidnapped by religious extremists. This clan, known as the Five Points Church, is headed by the hate-spewing pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), who brings his flock to protest at funerals with appallingly homophobic placards. Sound familiar? This aspect of the clan is obviously inspired by Fred Phelps and his wacko brigade, though Phelps’ group is mentioned in the script as being “suers, not doers.” Cooper’s clan are doers, all right: they live on a walled-off compound, fortified with military ordnance. They use the internet to lure and execute sinners. Laboring under a gargantuan monologue delivered to Cooper’s tiny congregation, the always-compelling Michael Parks manages to sell it, and many other small, subtle moments as well. He’s certainly more fun to watch than many actual fundamentalist loudmouths.

When the local police learn there’s a hostage situation at Five Points, and the matter is kicked upstairs to the ATF, Red State takes a hard left into ethical drama. John Goodman takes over the movie as Keenan, an ATF agent painfully aware of the legacy of the Waco siege at the Branch Davidian compound. Smith is aware of it, too. Cooper and the adult members of his cult are murderers, but there are also children there. Keenan’s orders are to kill everyone, leaving no one alive to testify against the government. He wrestles intensely with this, while his men, young and panicky, unload indiscriminately in the direction of whatever’s shooting at them. The firefights are sharply edited (by Smith himself); the sound design is realistic and punishing. People die randomly all over the place. Cooper believes God is telling him to kill sinners. Keenan is told straight-up to kill the killers and innocents alike. Who are the bad guys here?

Red State feels cynical and unresolved, and that’s about right, given the thorny areas Smith is wading into. In the end, it could be defined as a political horror film, of the sort that’s cruelly plausible in real life. Smith conflates Fred Phelps and David Koresh, suggesting a toxic stew of southern-fried religious hatred stirred up by happy triggers on both sides. It’s a flawed, unfocused movie, just as Dogma was, but they both come from the honest place of a filmmaker with something on his mind. That narrative hard left so many people have complained about lifts Red State above the Wicker Man rip-off it might’ve been. As always, Smith counsels us, “Question authority. Question yourselves, too, while you’re at it.”

Sucker Punch

Pity the poor workaday film critics who have to make sense of something like Sucker Punch. They have to stand and deliver a logical assessment of this crazed, three-headed Ghidorah of a film; they have to persuade their editors that they aren’t immature enough, attention-deficit-disordered enough, to fall for such heavy-breathing juvenilia. Perhaps the majority of critics are simply being honest when they say that they feel battered and annoyed by Sucker Punch, that it portends the death of movies, that its hotshot director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) should be sent to his room without supper. I, too, must be honest, and I can opine with very little reservation that Snyder has constructed a right-brain classic, a coruscating work of pure cinema that, at times, plays as though some brave loon at Warner Brothers handed Snyder the keys to an $82 million art-house oddity.

The story is a wheel within a wheel within a wheel, and I can imagine fans and non-fans alike working earnestly to parse the levels of reality and fantasy — what “really” happened, what “real-life” event has a “fantasy” analogue. The easy answer is that nothing in Sucker Punch “really happened.” It’s a movie. Duh. From there we can simply read the film as Snyder’s riff on themes of freedom, escapism, and institutional (the pun is and isn’t intended) sexism. In the run-up to the film’s release, Snyder went around saying things like (regarding the heroines’ peekaboo techno-fetish garb) “I didn’t dress them that way. You did.” The girls are dressed that way because ass-kicking girls in action movies have to be hot, as per the demand of the audience. Thus Snyder has made, in part, a movie that critiques other movies, just like Godard advised us to do. You don’t like Sucker Punch? Direct your own answer to it.

Godard’s confrere Truffaut said, “The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure,” and Sucker Punch is that, if nothing else. The quintet of girls flip in and out of massive set pieces resembling nothing so much as a boy’s epic combat play with a wide assortment of action figures from a dozen different toy lines. The girls are plunked into that universe like Barbie dolls, except they’re lethal Barbie dolls. The lead character (Emily Browning) is even named Baby Doll, and the others have names like Sweet Pea and Blondie. Nobody except Snyder named the girls; nobody except Snyder put them in the situations they’re in, so the movie is also a gigantic critique of Snyder’s own ain’t-it-cool aesthetic.

The girls, on a videogame-like mission to find various objects that will earn their freedom, don’t seem to feel much terror or joy in battle. They are emotional only in the setting of the burlesque house and brothel they’re “really” in, which may be a fantasy extension of the asylum they’re “really” in. What they’re “really” in is a movie called Sucker Punch that conceptually robs them of their dignity and humanity much as the male-fronted brothel/asylum does. But Snyder has cast the girls shrewdly, and the near-wordless Emily Browning, eyebrows perpetually knitted in anguish, compels us to lean forward and know what she’s feeling. Her cohorts — tough-minded Abbie Cornish, sympathetic Jena Malone, conflicted Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung — breathe life into their archetypes.

There’s a final betrayal of complacent audience expectations — the twist that gives the movie its name and probably served as the straw that broke the critics’ backs. Zack Snyder is wading deeply into meta-fiction here, toying roughly with storytelling itself. But always, always he seeks to entertain, to mount dazzling sequences set to the heavy insistent march of Björk’s “Army of Me” or various rock-classic covers. I’ve run hot and cold on Snyder; Watchmen impressed me, his other stuff didn’t. But this wild beast, whether he even fully understands it himself, is indeed the death of a certain kind of movie — the death and ne plus ultra at the same time, the apocalyptic orgasm that kills everything.

How can we take action cinema, or babes-with-guns flicks, remotely seriously (if we ever could) after Sucker Punch? Snyder has created a monument to entertainment that he loves but, presumably, hates himself for loving. It is both a guilty pleasure and the original wellspring of guilt, plumbing the melodramatic Prozac-porn of Sylvia Plath and Girl, Interrupted and 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up” to remind us of what Swoosie Kurtz had to tell us in The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom: “Crazy women are made by crazy men.” Crazy movies are, too. And sometimes great movies.

Take Me Home Tonight

Take Me Home Tonight is set in 1988, the year I graduated from high school. So I would’ve been a few years behind this movie’s characters, most of whom are Class of ’84 and are now looking back on four years of life post-high school. Some, like Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) and his twin sister Wendy (Anna Faris), have now also graduated from college but don’t know what to do with their degrees. Should Matt, who went to MIT, go into engineering and leave his safe, fallback Suncoast Video gig? (“I didn’t spend a quarter of my life savings,” says Matt’s cop-with-a-heart-of-gold dad, played by Michael Biehn, “so that you could work in a mall.”) Will Wendy ditch her stupid boyfriend and prospective fiancé (Chris Pratt, in real life Mr. Faris) and pursue her creative muse in Cambridge (that’s England, not Massachusetts)?

The movie, which like The Wedding Singer seems to want to fold the entire ’80s into two hours, is about something interesting: the post-college blues, wherein you’re still regularly seeing people you know from high school, who don’t seem all that different than they were — it has only been four years — so you don’t feel all that different. But life beckons, waiting for you to make some choices. What ties the movie to its actual ’80s ancestors is a variety of familiar tropes: the unrequited love who got away (Teresa Palmer), the cringing-geek buddy (Dan Fogler) who gets high (cocaine is a hell of a drug) and falls into squalor and embarrassment, the family bonds stronger than passing fancies. Take Me Home Tonight is particularly good at the last: Matt and Wendy talk and act like real siblings. I can see why Matt is annoyed that Wendy might drop her literary dream to marry a frat douche.

The film isn’t much, but for those of us who appreciate anything ’80s, it’s a perfectly painless nostalgia trip. It even has the cheapjack, slightly grainy look and muddy sound of an actual mid-’80s flick. All I needed to make the illusion complete was the odor of stale spilled beer of the crappy theaters of my youth. Faris gratifyingly plays smarter than she’s usually asked to play; Grace makes a suitable Andrew McCarthy/Anthony Michael Hall stand-in. The weirdest and perhaps funniest scene involves a passive three-way between Dan Fogler, a voracious Angie Everhart, and a strange man who wants only to watch, played by Clement von Franckenstein, the coolest name I’ve heard this year so far. (His full name is Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein, which is even cooler. Anyway, he lends the movie a jocular Euro-decadent flavor that reminded me of good old Dieter Meier, of the Zurich electro-pop band Yello, whose leering “Oh Yeah” was inescapable during the late ’80s.)

Take Me Home Tonight was completed so long ago (2007) that some of its bit players, like Whitney Cummings and Ginnifer Goodwin, have gone on to successes of their own. It was on the shelf that long not because it’s bad — it isn’t — but because the studio fretted over the cocaine use by two characters. Since the Bolivian marching powder, in this movie, leads only to a god-awful bathroom tryst while Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein watches, I don’t think Universal (which once upon a time unleashed Animal House upon the youth of America) should’ve worried much about it. This is your libido. This is your libido on cocaine. Any questions?

Anyway, a lot of the plot hinges tiresomely on a ruse worthy of Three’s Company (or That ’70s Show, of which Topher Grace and scripters Jackie and Jeff Filgo are graduates): Matt pretends to be working at Goldman Sachs to impress his high-school crush. Goldman Sachs, of course, was not in 1988 the spit-flecked profanity on our lips it is today. The ’80s were definitively the Money Decade, full of conspicuous consumption and questionable fashion and — to me, anyway — awesome music. The soundtrack of Take Me Home Tonight is predictable, even making use of standards from ’80s tribute movies like Grosse Pointe Blank (hello, Pete Townshend’s slow-dance remix of “Let My Love Open the Door”). But it ends with a tune I hadn’t heard since the ’80s, and I bow to no one in my hunger for ’80s obscurities: “Live Is Life,” a 1985 charter by the Austrian band Opus. Now, of course, I can’t get it out of my head, but any movie that can exhume a long-forgotten ’80s ditty for me gets a passing grade.

Drive Angry 3D

What we have here, folks, is body parts flying through the air in 3D, gratuitous sex and nudity in 3D, Satanic rituals in 3D, supernatural bullets blowing car doors off in 3D … Doesn’t sound like your thing? Click away to something else. Drive Angry 3D is a rock-solid, fist-pumping grindhouse throwback about ten times more entertaining than almost anything in Grindhouse. Gleefully shameless, the movie wallows in wrongness, and that’s exactly where an exploitation flick needs to be. It is also, of course, as dumb as a box of hair, but when delivered with wit and commitment, as it is here, dumbness can be more satisfying and liberating than anything that wins Oscars this weekend.

Nicolas Cage helps a lot. Cage is in iconic bad-ass mode here as John Milton, a former criminal out to rescue his granddaughter from a Satanic cult. I’ve seen reviews that give away what Milton really is, and I’ve seen reviews that don’t. I won’t. What I will say is that Milton has a way of attracting women who usually fall for bad boys. They fall very hard, very quickly for him. His relationship with foul-mouthed, hard-punching ex-waitress Piper (Amber Heard), however, remains chaste. He needs her help, and, more specifically, her ex-boyfriend’s ’69 Charger. I suspect that if Piper’s ex drove a modern hybrid, Milton might’ve kept looking; he and the movie both worship classic muscle cars.

Any movie that casts William Fichtner as a mysterious emissary who calls himself The Accountant and can kill two men with a flip of a quarter has done half its work already. Strolling through the chaos with amusing sangfroid, Fichtner is also responsible for perpetuating what I guess is a new micro-trend in recent movies: this is the second time in as many weeks in which a character sits completely deadpan inside a vehicle falling backward from a great height, last week’s example being Unknown. The Accountant is on Milton’s trail, while Milton is pursuing Jonah King (Billy Burke), the leader of the Satanic cult. You know Jonah is evil because he’s a white man with a soul patch. He also has ’70s hair and sideburns — whoever groomed Burke for the role knew what kind of film this is.

After an unpromising start with the execrable Dracula 2000, director Patrick Lussier has recently given himself a second life as a designer of cheerfully meretricious 3D drive-in fare; his previous effort was 2009′s My Bloody Valentine 3D, much loved by a section of horror fandom. Drive Angry 3D, too, dabbles in horror and gore; it is, unlike Milton’s preferred vehicles, a hybrid — a mix of lowball 42nd-Street revengeploitation and supernatural schlock, complete with a Satanic cadre that travels in a bland-looking Winnebago (an affront to the hard-driving Milton). This hybrid guzzles gas, though, and spews a fog of violence and profanity and T&A — toxic for some viewers, I admit, but a shot of oxygen to grindhouse acolytes. The movie stabs it and steers, to quote another Cage anti-hero, burns rubber, and doesn’t give a fuck about global warming.

PS: Tom Atkins is in this, being a bad-ass as only Tom Atkins can. I forgot to mention him in the review proper. But Tom Atkins should never be overlooked.

Defendor

Back in college, I doodled a weird little scenario in one of my notebooks. Two street thugs were beating up a hapless, confused, very non-superpowered man wearing a superhero costume. Writer-director Peter Stebbings has now made an entire film out of my idle sketch. I hope he has excellent lawyers.

Actually, Defendor is far from the first film to strand a superhero in the squalid real world (Blankman and Special were there first, to name but two), and it won’t be the last (Kick-Ass looms on the horizon). But I imagine it’s the most stinging and heartfelt. Whatever methods Stebbings used to peer into my college notebook eighteen years ago, he has found considerable pathos, and not a little heroism, in the image of a forlorn mouth-breather in a costume discovering that fighting is easier in the comics.

Woody Harrelson’s Arthur Poppington, who likes to call himself Defendor when on the prowl, is a cross between Woody Boyd and Mickey Knox: a simple, good-hearted man who nevertheless has reserves of razory madness. Flotsam from an awful childhood, Arthur tries to make sense of the world by dressing up and dedicating himself to defeating “Captain Industry,” an imaginary kingpin he thinks killed his slatternly mom with drugs. When Arthur meets Angel (Kat Dennings), a young crack whore, his manner around her is stiff and uncomfortable — he won’t let her arouse him — until he develops protective feelings towards her. It’s pretty obvious he sees Angel as his mother, and doesn’t want her to die all over again. Without going over the top, Harrelson commits himself to the reality of Arthur and the fantasy of Defendor, letting us see each in the other. It’s full and generous work from an often-underrated actor.

Defendor, which went straight to DVD in America (it’s a shoestring Canadian production), will alienate some because it seems to start out funny and then takes a turn into tragedy. But a closer look reveals that it’s never really all that funny. An addled, emotionally damaged man who needs to climb into a get-up and fight crime is not, in the real world, fodder for comedy or even escapism. I believe it was Alan Moore, or perhaps Frank Miller, who once said that someone like Batman in the real world would simply be sad and scary, a lunatic in a cape.

Moore and Miller, of course, were responsible for deconstructing the superhero in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. They were influenced by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s Mad parody “Superduperman,” and that goes back to 1953. Four-color heroes have been mocked for almost as long as they’ve existed. But Defendor doesn’t really mock Arthur (though almost everyone in the film does). Other than the outright scumbags, like Elias Koteas as a dirty cop, people look askance at Defendor at first but then get to know Arthur; they respond to the cracked folly of his mission, his essential kindness. Stebbings shows genuine compassion and affection for the man, and the film, for me, works for that reason — it’s not just “Hey, get a load of the tard in the costume.” The movie is unexpectedly gentle; by subjecting the superhero trope to harsh, cruel reality, it ends up restoring its sense of wonder. Arthur works like hell just to stay alive in those fights; he might not understand that he can get killed, but we do.

The film has its flaws; it’s a little poky, and the prohibitive budget puts a cap on how persuasive the urban milieu can be (as others have noted, there seem to be about ten people in the city). But this is a small, decent triumph with real shades of feeling. It’d be a shame if it got lost in the backwash of hype for movies like Kick-Ass and the similar movies sure to follow.

The Spirit

I guess I’m going to have to be that guy — the one who genuinely enjoyed Frank Miller’s uber-stylized adaptation of Will Eisner’s comic The Spirit. My brothers and sisters in the critical community, I salute you, but I must part ways with you here.

First and foremost, The Spirit is Frank Miller having a grand old time. I appreciate that. And I’ve gone back and forth on Miller in recent years — I was a fan of his comic-book art and writing way back in the Daredevil days. But in the last few years — starting with The Dark Knight Strikes Back, his controversial, freewheeling sequel to his seminal Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — Miller’s name has become mud among comics fans. They feel betrayed. They mock his increasingly loose artwork, his alleged obsession with prostitutes, his instant-parody dialogue (“I’m the goddamn Batman” from Miller’s recent All-Star Batman and Robin quickly became an internet meme among Batfans).

What they don’t understand, I think, is that Miller has come to a place where he does what he wants. What you see on the page — and, in The Spirit, on the screen — is exactly what he wanted to put there. And what he wants to do these days is to have fun. He became, with The Dark Knight Returns, the American king of grim ‘n’ gritty superhero comics (Alan Moore crowned himself the British king of same with Watchmen). He didn’t necessarily want all superhero comics to follow his lead. But they did. So what was Miller going to do to stay fresh, to march to his own beat? Well, the exact opposite of grim ‘n’ gritty. Thus his two much-derided Batman projects, which I now read as Miller’s attempt to inject some good old-fashioned escapist jollies into the clenched, self-serious superhero subgenre. “These are people who dress up and fight crime,” Miller seemed to say. “We’re taking it deadly seriously why?”

Will Eisner’s Spirit was never particularly serious, either. Eisner’s best work can probably be found in his later graphic novels (like the revered A Contract with God), but The Spirit was where he goofed around and, almost by accident, revolutionized comics storytelling by throwing bolts of cinematic electricity. The Spirit, a pulpy adventure series pitting noble masked hero Denny Colt against nefarious villains and gorgeous dames, was Eisner’s toy box, his space to try things out. Put Eisner and Miller together (the two were friends before Eisner died in 2005) and you get a massive, fetishistic buffet full of whatever Miller loved about Eisner’s work, with side dishes full of Miller’s own preoccupations. For instance, Miller clearly thinks Nazi uniforms look cool. Nazi regalia have popped up in his comics from time to time. So, here, in one scene, with no explanation, the villainous Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) and his disdainful assistant Silken Floss (Scarlett Johansson) rock SS garb. In another scene, the Octopus has a samurai thing going on.

The plot is essentially the Spirit (Gabriel Macht, this generation’s Sam J. Jones — who, besides being Flash Gordon, also played the Spirit in a forgotten TV movie) and the Octopus going at each other. For variety, there’s the Spirit’s childhood sweetie Sand Serif, who has become, in the curvaceous person of Eva Mendes, a swank jewel thief. The Spirit’s major weakness is women. Miller, I think, can relate. He photographs them adoringly — Johansson, Mendes, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega, Jaime King, the adorably enthusiastic Stana Katic, and so on. The Spirit is awash in stoic heterosexual chivalry — this hero would almost be content just to look at women, to catch their scent, to know they occupy the same sidewalk he does.

The look of the film (aided by master cinematographer Bill Pope) caught some flack because critics who saw the similarly hued Sin City enjoyed hypothesizing that Miller (who was given a co-director credit on that Robert Rodriguez adaptation of his comics) could only make movies in monochrome, with ostentatious pops of color. If so, who cares? Who else makes movies that look like this, and look so beautiful? The Spirit also seems to unfold in some strange time warp, where the costumes and attitudes are strict 1940s but there are also cell phones and camcorders. “What year is it?” a doctor asks the Spirit. “This year,” answers the hero, who, like Miller, won’t be tied down to any one era.

I guess a movie this brassy, sumptuous, and unafraid of what-the-hell effects, gags and visuals isn’t enough for a lot of people. I don’t really know why. Miller packs every silvery, snow-flecked frame with toys for the eyes; he loves good girls and goes absolutely sappy over bad girls; he even throws in his own storyboard art over the end credits. He puts more of himself into this movie than 90% of the competition ever do into their movies. For this he’s run out of town on a rail and tossed into movie jail? Why do so many people hate fun?

National Treasure

Nicolas Cage makes being a geek look cool. When he plays a brainiac, as he does in the retro, whistle-clean adventure National Treasure, he gets us caught up in the almost sensual pleasures of knowledge. Midway through the movie, Cage’s character, Benjamin Franklin Gates, stands holding the Declaration of Independence — the movie’s MacGuffin, which has an invisible map on its back — in Independence Hall; close to tears of awe, he says, “This is the first time this has been in this room since it was signed.” Moments like that, I think, are why Cage took the role; passion is his main currency, and Ben Gates is an impassioned, albeit discredited, student of history, as driven towards preservation as his other Ben (in Leaving Las Vegas) was bent on self-destruction.

Restlessly directed by Jon Turteltaub, who showed no particular flair for adventure filmmaking in his wet Phenomenon and Instinct, the movie goes like a rocket, from one ornate clue to the next; National Treasure is more a detective story than a two-fisted adventure like the Indiana Jones movies. The vast treasure promised by a family document has haunted Ben’s life, much to the dismay of his hard-headed dad (Jon Voight), who thinks the treasure’s a myth. Regardless, Ben has managed to convince some people, including his computer-nerd helper Riley (a scene-stealing Justin Bartha) and a shady character, Ian Howe, who funds Ben’s missions; Ian is played by Sean Bean, who specializes in duplicity, so we know he’s bad news the second we lay eyes on him. Ben isn’t so fortunate, not having seen GoldenEye or Ronin.

The movie becomes a merrily absurd hunt in which Ben tries to keep the Declaration of Independence safe from Ian’s band of thieves; to do this, Ben has to steal it himself. Before that, though, he slouches from office to office — FBI, Homeland Security — trying to tell everyone that the historical document is going to be stolen; no one believes him, not even Diane Kruger as a curator at the National Archives, who gets drawn into the adventure against her will during the Declaration’s theft-for-its-own-good. Those who hoot at the implausibilities in National Treasure are barking up the wrong tree, and may be forgetting how flatly unbelievable some of the situations in the Indy films were. Nobody wanted to spoil the fun then, so why should we now?

I called the movie “whistle-clean,” and it’s decidedly family-friendly; the backstory on National Treasure is that it was going to be distributed by Disney’s Touchstone wing, which handles PG-13 and R-rated films, until it was submitted to the ratings board and came back with a rare PG. That explains why the film is going out under the time-honored Walt Disney banner, and in truth, it’s about as wholesome as any of the studio’s live-action flicks decades ago; I’m pretty sure there isn’t even any swearing in the movie, except maybe in German. Nor is there much gunplay, at least none that pierces anything but walls, and there’s a refreshing lack of CGI gimmickry, too. I mention all this because I write about a lot of films that aren’t suitable for all ages, and when one comes along that’s not only safe for Junior and Grandma but also pretty entertaining, I like to point it out, if only to refute the complaint that they don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Of course, with such inoffensiveness comes a certain lack of edge. The plot of National Treasure could fit snugly inside a Hardy Boys book, and the scenes of clue-hunting (including a fairly nifty pair of specs that enable the wearer to have a Well of Souls-type revelation) should delight boys; I don’t know how well girls will take to the adventure, since Diane Kruger is mostly reduced to running around or dangling from things (Lara Croft she ain’t, nor even Marion Ravenwood). National Treasure, for me, is a fun and smooth throwback, but for boys of a certain age it may gather the nostalgic heft of the Indiana Jones films when those boys grow up. It might even inspire them to crack a book or two, and look up the Founding Fathers, and then the Freemasons, and from there, who knows.

Seed of Chucky

Connoisseurs of self-reflexive trash could probably do worse than Seed of Chucky, a gutbucket farce that works better as a lampoon of Hollywood than as a horror movie. This is number five in the Child’s Play series, which began in 1988 with the premise that your kid’s curiously lifelike doll (seemingly patterned on a Cabbage Patch Kid) could be possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. Brad Dourif has been cashing easy checks for the past fourteen years as the voice of Charles Lee Ray, a.k.a. Chucky, the homicidal doll whose third film purportedly inspired two British boys to murder a three-year-old, and whose fourth outing, 1998′s Bride of Chucky, found him fixed up with a gothy doll, Tiffany, inhabited by the spirit of his former girlfriend (Jennifer Tilly).

The result of the dolls’ passion in Bride turns up in Seed of Chucky as a rather forlorn, sharp-toothed doll (voice by Billy Boyd of The Lord of the Rings — the hobbit who isn’t on Lost) with a gender-identity crisis. The spawn, self-named Glen or Glenda depending on his/her mood (in a probable nod to Ed Wood’s anti-masterpiece of the same name), reunites with Chucky and Tiffany, who are quite busy these days in Hollywood, where they’re employed as “actors” in the horror movie Chucky Goes Psycho. The star of this epic is none other than Jennifer Tilly, playing herself as a sarcastic zaftig has-been who’s not above sleeping with a rapper-turned-director (the rapper-turned-actor Redman) for a shot at the role of the Virgin Mary in his upcoming Biblical flick.

Writer-director Don Mancini (who has written all the Chucky films) paints his Hollywood satire in broad, crude strokes, but not everyone would have the wit to cast notorious director John Waters as a sleazy paparazzo — a role Waters probably relished, and it shows, right down to his over-the-top death scene. An early movie-within-the-movie murder is outrageously gory, and I assumed the MPAA went easy on it because it’s “fake” in context. But then make-up wiz Tony Gardner appears as a, well, make-up wiz whose head is graphically, lingeringly divorced from his body, and we also get to see the caliber of Redman’s intestinal fortitude (he’s just eaten a hot dinner, so his innards steam on the floor). As Terry Jones, the director of the gore-drenched, PG-rated Monty Python and the Holy Grail, can tell you, a spoonful of comedy helps the splatter go down.

Seed of Chucky is lowbrow junk with a pulse, stuffed plump with references to its ancestors, from Halloween to Psycho to The Shining. Chucky himself, despite the vocal exertions of the amused-sounding Brad Dourif, is as monotonously nihilistic as usual, a cackling doll-face with an appetite for destruction. The cleverly designed Tiffany is another story; she’s the best thing to happen to this franchise, and with Tilly speaking her lines she’s a demented mix of hell-raising and nurturing. In the flesh, Tilly has fun sending herself up, bemoaning her career choices, taking a couple of shots at Julia Roberts, and winking at fans of what’s likely to be her headstone movie, Bound (there’s a wonderfully crass Gina Gershon joke, too).

Curiously, this fifth installment is the first to be distributed by Rogue Pictures (who earlier gave us Shaun of the Dead), the action-horror wing of Focus Features, which in turn is the artsy division of Universal, who put out the previous Chucky films under its general banner. That accounts for the film’s slick yet scrappily independent tone; if Julia Roberts gets miffed at Universal over the movie’s jokes at her expense, the studio can always pin the blame on its twice-removed distributor. More importantly, an indie horror division with major-studio dollars behind it (Seed of Chucky got a 2,000-screen launch) can risk more while still staying under the radar (the cultural watchdogs are more concerned about insufficiently patriotic films these days than about Child’s Play 5). With new movies by Wes Craven and George Romero in the pipeline, the horror genre is starting to be fun again, and Rogue Pictures can take some of the credit.