The Island (2005)

Twenty-three summers ago, when the science-fiction and fantasy genres seemed to be taking over cinema, critics worried about the dumbing-down of those genres by such movies as Tron, Star Trek II, Blade Runner, E.T., and The Thing (of course, they were wrong on some of them). I feel like going back in time, advising those critics to enjoy those relatively visionary and brainy films, and telling them they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot got the action-flick dumbing-down last summer, and this time around we have Michael Bay, who could probably make Dostoyevsky into something stupid. Ironically, his new one, The Island, is actually a fairly decent sci-fi thriller for its first half — immaculately designed, intriguingly written, and, for once, not edited with a Cuisinart. I began to wonder if Bay had even been on the set. Then the second half kicked in, and I didn’t wonder anymore.

The movie would have been far more effective if the ads didn’t give away the premise — that young heroes Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are actually clones of rich people in the outside world, and that they, along with thousands of other jump-suited drones in their sterile community, are being kept around until their “sponsors” on the outside need a fresh heart or kidney. The clones are kept docile by the promise that they will someday win a “lottery” and go to “the Island.” Diets are strictly monitored and enforced; sexes are not allowed to mingle beyond casual friendship.

The Island actually does an ominous and detailed job of setting all this up. The movie feels as if it were once much smarter — something on the order of Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca — and, sure enough, it probably was. Caspian Tredwell-Owen (Beyond Borders) wrote a script that caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks; Michael Bay was offered the project, and, predictably, the first thing he did was to hire two writers from the TV show Alias to pump it up. The script was being revised right up to the wire, literally weeks away from its premiere. The lesson here may be that the worst thing that can happen to a good script is to have Hollywood express interest in it, rather like having a rapist take an interest in your daughter.

Lincoln finds out his true destiny, courtesy of Steve Buscemi, who always plays sarcastic guys who exist to wise the hero up. Lincoln and Jordan go on the run, and here, dear friends, is where the movie finds its own destiny as a Michael Bay opus. There are idiotic chases with cars flipping end over end; there are many explosions and that bit you’ve seen in the ads with Lincoln and Jordan falling to earth inside a giant red R. None of this has anything to do with the core of this material, which raises thorny questions the movie blithely ignores. Lincoln meets his own “sponsor,” an arrogant Scottish racer with a bad liver, and Jordan sees hers on TV but never meets her. The climax of a thoughtful film might have had Jordan’s sponsor make a case for Jordan’s sacrifice: “Look, you’re my clone, I wasn’t told that you were a sentient being and this must really suck for you. But without you I’m going to die and my child will be an orphan.” How would Jordan respond to such an appeal? Good question. No answer.

Rather too easily, the “sponsors” are all rich people trying to buy immortality, and the man who runs the whole show is played by Sean Bean, that specialist in Machiavellian duplicity (he might as well have been wearing a dark pin-striped suit even in The Fellowship of the Ring). The hilarious thing is, none of the dumbing-down and pumping-up helped The Island worth a damn at the box office: it came in at #4 its opening weekend, beaten by three films that had been playing a week or more. What kept audiences away? The Michael Bay brand name? The feeling that they’d seen the relevant parts of the film in the trailer? The been-there-done-that factor (The Island is more or less an unofficial remake of 1979’s Parts: The Clonus Horror)? Maybe, with all the sequels and remakes this summer, audiences have seen quite enough clones already; they didn’t want to see a clone about clones.

The Devil’s Rejects

Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects is rated R, according to the MPAA, “for sadistic violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use.” If not for that pesky drug use, do you think we might’ve had a G-rated film here? Not a Rob Zombie film (though his next movie should be an all-ages musical, just to mess with our heads). The Devil’s Rejects is one of the most unremittingly unpleasant films ever made, a grubby fantasia of psychosis that barges into our faces with rotten teeth, fetid breath, armpit stench, and sharp instruments caked with clotted blood and scalp hair. You are excused from the movie, and from the rest of this review, if that sounds a bit much for you.

For the rest of us — we few, we happy few, we band of cult-movie fanatics — The Devil’s Rejects is a labor of love sheathed in the shabby clothes of hate. Rob Zombie adores the anti-PC, take-no-prisoners horror and exploitation films of his misspent youth, and in this film and his previous effort (House of 1000 Corpses) he does what he can to bring the puke-and-piss stink of grindhouse theaters into your friendly local multiplex. (The movie should really be seen at a late Saturday-night showing, surrounded by loud and potentially violent strangers.) Zombie goes so far as to provide acting work for his drive-in heroes, from the instantly recognizable Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead) and Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) to the almost unrecognizable P.J. Soles (Halloween) and Mary Woronov (Eating Raoul). As Dave Chappelle in the persona of Rick James said: “It’s a celebration, bitches!”

Those who missed House of 1000 Corpses won’t have a hard time following The Devil’s Rejects, even though it’s a semi-sequel, bringing back the earlier film’s maniacal Firefly family. As the film opens, the vengeful Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), still nursing the loss of his cop brother at the bloody hands of the Fireflys, leads an army of officers to the remote Firefly farmhouse. The matriarch, Mother Firefly (Leslie Easterbrook, subbing for Karen Black and overacting her heart out), is arrested; the others — sadistic Otis (Bill Moseley) and snarling wildcat Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s wife) — escape and meet up with creepy TV clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig), the family’s default father figure. Sheriff Wydell, gradually getting more and more freaky, is hot on their trail, though not hot enough to stop the Fireflys from kidnapping a country-music family headed by Geoffrey Lewis and Priscilla Barnes.

Things begin nasty and get nastier. There are no heroes in The Devil’s Rejects, just degrees of villainy. Zombie goes as far as he can within the confines of an R rating, which turns out to be pretty far. The tone of free-floating menace and unchecked sadism will be familiar to fans of such grindhouse classics as Fight for Your Life, I Spit on Your Grave, and particularly The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (there’s a horrific sick joke involving the swapping of a victim’s face). There are enough looming gravel-voiced madmen and nutbrain monologues (Robert Trebor has an antic appearance as a movie critic called in for his Marx Brothers expertise) to keep Quentin Tarantino happily chortling for days. There’s an extended finale, set to the mournful twang of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” — one of many stained-beard rock standards on the soundtrack; the movie is set in 1978, after all — that touches brilliance and deeply divides our responses (We want these sick fucks to die!…Except we don’t….But we should!…And yet, we don’t).

I enjoyed The Devil’s Rejects on the same level that I enjoyed House of 1000 Corpses — as a tribute. Rob Zombie desperately wants to reproduce the snarling teeth of the cult films he reveres, which isn’t the same as making his own cult films. They’re cultish by default — they’re so arrogantly, gleefully ugly they don’t look like anything else out there (the same was true of Alexandre Aja’s High Tension). Zombie is genuflecting at the altar of Tobe Hooper and Sam Peckinpah and a hundred forgotten Z-movie directors. The result is fun but won’t truly disturb anyone who’s seen the same movies Zombie has (heck, you only have to go as far as Natural Born Killers and the first hour of From Dusk Till Dawn, the latter of which is echoed very strongly here). I’m not saying that Quentin Tarantino has or should have a monopoly on grindhouse homage; the more directors working in that disreputable form, the more fun for us cult-film geeks, I suppose. But I’d like to see what else Zombie has up his sleeve. If, indeed, he has anything else.

Bad News Bears (2005)

If Bad News Bears isn’t the second film in Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad trilogy (following 2003’s Bad Santa), it should be. Shambling into the frame and muttering dark, unprintable things to himself, Thornton is an inspired choice to play the new Coach Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau’s role in the 1976 original), a broken-down has-been who takes a Little League team full of misfits and steers them towards the championship game. The movie is affable and nothing great, but it works, mostly due to Thornton’s charismatic anti-charisma. He is the unlikeliest actor to play a lead role in a studio film, much less a studio film with a cast of kids, and he knows it, and so do we. He plays losers with a kind of shabby dignity, and his triumphs are ours; we feel more comfortable rooting for him than for, say, Tom Cruise or other streamlined models from the Hollywood factory.

I’m not sure Bad News Bears needed to be remade; for one thing, in the nearly thirty years since its first incarnation, we’ve been inundated with kiddie sports films featuring wise-ass kids (hell, Keanu Reeves went down this road four years ago in Hardball). The original film was notable in its day for the amount of profanity (albeit PG-rated) the kids were allowed to spew; the remake is similarly colorful in its rhetoric, though some of the antics have been toned down — no smoking, no racial epithets (with one exception delivered by a snotty opponent). Nothing here really risks scandalizing parents, apart from the detail that the team’s sponsor is a strip club, and Buttermaker takes the kids out for a victory chow-down at Hooters and leads them in a rousing rendition of Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.”

Some will be attracted to the movie by Billy Bob, others by the director, Richard Linklater, who has had one of the more varied careers among indie-filmmakers of his generation. Linklater seems to approach Bad News Bears as a bookend piece to his 2003 School of Rock, in which a disgruntled has-been showed kids the way to Led Zeppelin Valhalla. Those looking for the Linklater of Dazed and Confused or Before Sunset in the film will be baffled; he has made the movie because he always wanted to make a baseball film, and this project came across his desk, and he has done an honorable and unobtrusive job. Linklater stages the games well, sometimes keeping the camera at a good remove so that we can see an entire play unfold on the diamond, rather than cheating with editing. He handles the young cast deftly, except for ringers Sammi Kane Kraft (as the girl pitcher who doesn’t throw like a girl) and Jeff Davies (as a punk with a mean swing), who are real-life athletes but quite obviously not trained actors; in a couple of scenes, genuine acting is needed from them, and they’re just not up to it, but they play beautifully.

The movie may end on a shot of the red, white and blue fluttering over the field, but Bad News Bears is no callow belch of patriotism or the ethic of winning. In the home stretch, Buttermaker pushes the kids hard to win, but then seems to understand (Thornton conveys it mostly with his eyes) that this game should be more about letting each kid play and have a good time. We want them to win, if for no other reason than to wipe the smug grin off the opposing team’s coach (Greg Kinnear at his smarmiest), but ultimately it’s not important to the narrative. The movie is your standard underdog sports comedy, with the ramshackle wit of Billy Bob Thornton and the gentle touch of Richard Linklater. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.