Tag: Liam Neeson

  • Unknown

    I have a feeling that Unknown may actually not be that good of a movie, but for some reason, Neeson is enthralling in these sort of high-stakes Eurotrips. It’s a great setup. Neeson is knocked unconcious in the opening minutes, is in a coma for a few days, and when he finally wakes up, he finds someone else has taken over his life. No one believes Neeson’s story — probably because his wife doesn’t back him up. This leaves the rest of the movie for Liam to run around Berlin, trying to prove his case and uncovering a vast Eco-terror plot in the process.

    Liam simply owns these movies, and it’s to his credit that he’s reinvented himself as a thinking man’s action star. There’s also great supporting work from Diane Kruger as the cab driver who helps him. She doesn’t get nearly enough work in Hollywood. If only the script had been a little better. Too many times they get help out of nowhere, from a kind-hearted nurse who just happens to know a former East German spy with nothing better to do but take on seemingly insane American hospital patients. It also helps that Diane’s cab driver character is on good terms with a nightclub bouncer, giving them a great hideout when they’re on the run from mysterious agents.

    As the twists and turns mount, you think you’re headed to a great pay-off, but the final twist seems too fabricated and unlikely, based on a serious of miraculous incidents (not least of which is why Liam cracked his head in the first place). It should also be noted that January Jones as the wife has a certain woodenness to her performance that has left many forests envious.

  • Batman Begins

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    88

    One might suspect that there would be a lot of superhero movies on a list of extraordinary adventures. But superheroes are a strange lot, preferring to stay in one place most of the time and fight petty criminals.

    Occasionally you’ll get a supervillain who has some dastardly world-domination plot, but even these are usually run out of the basement of some abandoned building in the superhero’s home town, and involve the theft of nuclear warheads which are conveniently being transported via the nearest forest road.

    Even if the superhero has great abilities for travel and high resistance to danger, they don’t use it much. Superman can fly into space and back, but only to retrieve lost nuclear warheads or stop time. The Flash can run at near lightspeed, but only finds it useful to beat the rush hour in the local business district.

    Gotham City
    Gotham City: Surprisingly still crime-ridden in spite of billionaire vigilante justice

    There are no historic artifacts in superhero stories (nuclear warheads don’t count), no epic battle scenes (it’s usually just a brawl between a couple of invincible people, and Hulk vs. the entire U.S. Army does not count), and the costumes, while exotic in one sense of the word, lack the worn-in look of classical adventure fare.

    Don’t get me wrong. I love good Superhero movies, and there are several that are pretty awesome. But few embody the spirit of adventure like Batman Begins.

    Batman Poster
    I am tortured, oh so tortured, by my uncanny physical skills and immense wealth.

    Let’s face it: Batman is a character that is famous for doing all of those things I just mentioned. He stays in Gotham, butts heads with the local criminals, and dresses in black latex. But when Christopher Nolan took over the franchise, he brought Batman to the world.

    Here is a hero on a search for meaning. This goes beyond the typical armchair psychology of superhero stories. Bruce Wayne travels to the ends of the earth in order to know and understand suffering. In the remote mountains of Asia, he is trained in the art of survival, in the martial arts, and finally in the mystic practices of the ninja.

    Batman's Flower
    This is not a still from Viggo Mortensen's "The Road," but rather a scene from Batman's quest for a rare flower (seriously)

    Ra’s Al Ghul is the secret man/organization that takes Bruce under his/its wing and teaches him that periodically civilization must be broken down to its primitive roots or suffer the consequences of indulgent humanity. This is a far cry from a crazy nutjob like Lex Luther or the Joker, because their evil is incomprehensible. But Batman, while troubled by their methods, kind of sees their point. It does not hurt that Ra’s Al Ghul is fronted by Liam Neeson, who has already appeared in at least one of the stories on our list, and may yet appear in more.

    Bruce Wayne
    "And it was there, right in the middle of my cage match with The Cobra, that I thought up the idea for a kevlar suit that would showcase my pectorals while at the same time protect me from getting punched to death."

    In the second half of the movie, Bruce returns home, secretly infiltrates his own corporation, constructs a massive underground lair with the help of his spry, remarkably fit 70-year-old butler, and sets about dismantling a web of corruption in the city.

    It is amazing to me that Nolan was allowed to make a Batman movie in which Batman does not appear for nearly an hour. This isn’t like Jaws, where maybe the rubber suit didn’t look real enough. This was a full-on resurrection of a franchise (after the disaster of Batman and Robin) and Nolan’s solution was to keep the rubber suit off the screen.

    Batman Begins
    When we finally see Batman for the first time, he is exiting a laundry, having just dry-cleaned his cape.

    The first half of Batman Begins – the hero’s journey into the Abyss, his taking up the mantle of goodness, his befriending of strategic allies – is for my money as good as it gets in superhero movies. Even the Dark Knight, which may be a superior film overall (though not as adventurous) does not have a sequence as good as this.

    The end of the movie does veer back into conventional superhero territory with an exciting train chase into the heart of Gotham, but we can forgive them, since it’s a law that every superhero movie must have at least one extended CGI sequence. But it doesn’t dilute the power of the story. When Ra’s Al Ghul shows up at the end, having targeted Gotham as the civilization to bring down next, it proves that sometimes shadowy villains are more menacing than a killer clown or a guy that dresses like a penguin.

    The Penguin
    Portrayed here by Jon Lovitz

    The performances are solid across the board. There is the aforementioned Liam Neeson. Christian Bale is by far the best Batman. Michael Caine simply is Alfred (hey, Michael Caine on our list again!), and it’s hard to go wrong with both Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman in your movie. But where Batman Begins really excels is the script, which manages to externalize a man’s inner demons and tell a compelling adventure story that spans continents. All that and Batman-shaped throwing stars.

    Batman Throwing Stars
    Yay!

    Next up, #87