Cage plays Roy and Sam Rockwell plays Frank, two grifters we first meet in the midst of scamming an old lady by calling up and telling her she won a contest. I must be getting soft in my old age because seeing it open that way made me wonder if this movie was gonna be too unpleasant to watch. We all love a good con job in a movie, but telemarketing scams on the elderly? Usually not as fun. Fortunately it gets more complicated when they show up at her house pretending to be FBI agents after the people who scammed her and take advantage of her hotheaded husband. The more complicated it gets the less moralistic we become as an audience. We would cheer on Ocean’s 11 even if they were stealing from orphans, as long as they had to use a tunnel and dress up in uniforms. Or that’s one theory, anyway.

But Roy’s fucking up and he’s not happy. He’s got alot of problems and he’s low on the pills that keep them under control. He’s got some serious obsessive compulsive behaviors, including but not limited to extreme cleaning, opening and closing doors a set number of times, involuntary bodily movements and phrases he repeats to himself.

Frank convinces him to see a psychiatrist, and this is what turns it into a movie. The quest to take control of his life leads him back into his past traumas, and ground zero for that is the girl who left him years ago, who, it seems, then gave birth to his daughter Angela (Alison Lohman from DRAG ME TO HELL). Frank meets Angela, next thing you know she’s fighting with her mom and invites herself over to his place, where he tries to figure out how the fuck you’re supposed to do this whole “dad” thing. And also be a con man. It’s about their relationship, but not too sappy.

Not right away, but eventually, he lets her take part in his scams. Reluctantly, and then to teach her a lesson, and then out of desperation. It scares the shit out of him, but makes him proud when he sees how good she is at it.

Lohman’s really good, too. Since I really only know her from DRAG ME TO HELL, where she plays a young professional, it’s funny to see her not that long ago riding around on a skateboard and skipping around the house eating Ben and Jerry’s out of the carton. But she pulls it off.

This is definitely one of Cage’s best performances. He’s doing all these tics – a blink of his left eye, a head jerk, closing doors three times and counting it off, a weird gulping sound, a satisfied mm-hmm to himself – but he doesn’t go over the top with it. It’s like a brewing storm that he’s trying to keep under control. Sometimes he holds it all the way down, on a bad day it explodes out of him. You can tell he studied people with problems like this. I recognized some of them from people I’ve met and seen around.

This is an ultimate Cage role because it’s a perfect excuse for him to use both ends of the spectrum, from laid back and subtle to full blown knock you on your ass mega-acting worthy of KISS OF THE VAMPIRE. Usually somewhere in between, but he could go off at any moment. There is an absolutely classic bit of Cage humor when he’s flipping out trying to get medication at a pharmacy and another customer sarcastically asks him if he’s ever heard of waiting in line. At his most crazed he asks the guy “Hey have you ever been dragged on the sidewalk and beaten ’til you PISSED! BLOOD!?”

Then, once the pharmacist decides to help him he turns to the pissed-blood guy and says, “And I am sorry, sir,” clearly convinced that saying that makes it all okay.

It’s just great to see someone as talented as Cage getting to use everything. It’s a meticulously detailed performance with his quirks, his dark humor, but also his emotional vulnerability. And then Cage has to portray Roy, this mess of a guy, portraying other characters in order to pull off his scams. So, that’s one of the reasons why this is better than NATIONAL TREASURE.

(I was thinking Lohman and maybe Cage had been nominated for Golden Globes or something for this, but nope. Rockwell was nominated for a Golden Satellite. That’s it. )

I thought the movie had one major weakness, which I will go into in the spoilbox below. But it’s interesting because most con movies live or die on the strength of their con – how clever it is, etc. This is the rare movie where the con aspect somewhat drops the ball but everything else is so great that you don’t care that much. It’s trying to be more a story of the relationship between this fuckup and this young girl than about crime, and it really succeeds. I liked this one.

The one thing holding the movie back for me was that, whether through smarts or just luck, I completely saw through the tricks of the plot from the very beginning. I noticed that Frank recommended the psychiatrist, that the psychiatrist made the alleged phone call to the ex-girlfriend, that Angela gave a separate phone number and didn't let him pull up in front of the house, so there was no question what was going on there. The only suspense was the off chance that it was made obvious only so they could actually do something else at the end. It would've been more enjoyable if it surprised me, but the fact that it didn't kill it means this is a strong movie regardless of tricks. And I have to say, the way it all turns out makes it worth it. I love the epilogue, where you learn that Roy isn't all that bitter about what happened because he understands the justice of getting suckered the way so many had been suckered by him. And he decides that the bonding he did with "Angela" still stands even though it turns out she wasn't his daughter. It doesn't get struck from the record, he's still connected to her. I like that kind of shit. Sometimes there's somebody that you had a problem with a long time ago, or you hated them, but if you see them again later you feel more like they're an old friend. Holy shit, haven't seen you in ages. They really captured that good in this movie.

[ratings]

More to the point, let’s say you are also a wiseass camera operator who enjoys running through explosions in a firesuit or rollerblading around holding a camcorder, but have not yet developed an interest in some of the other elements of photography such as framing or holding still. Fine! Great! That is your calling, you should rollerblade all you want. It is probly good aerobic exercise. But I have one caveat: if your plan is to incorporate that footage into an actual movie and not just an episode of JACKASS then you have a responsibility to look at the footage first and ask yourself if somebody could watch it and understand what in God’s holy name is being shown. And if the directational fraternity duo Nevildine/Taylor were being honest with themselves the answer to that question would usually be “No. No, not at all. Oh jesus, no, are you kidding me? Uh uh.” I’m thinking maybe these guys should forget about the cameras and just be stunt men. They seem more interested in carrying the camera through risky situations than actually pointing the lens of it at specific things.

The CRANK movies gave me that impression too, but they took place in a 14 year old boy’s cartoon dream world and the hero had to keep his adrenaline up or he’d die, so it seemed like a conscious artistic choice, at least. But now here they are trying a more serious RUNNING MAN/DEATH RACE type sci-fi action story and they’re using the same god damn Robin-Williams-riffing-on-a-talk-show visual approach. In other words, no, CRANK was not a conscious choice, they just don’t have a clue how to film an actual movie. They got one bag of tricks, and it doesn’t close.

Like with CRANK it has a cool enough premise that I want to like it: death row inmates are controlled by videogame nerds in deadly battles, and if Gerard Butler survives one more they’ll let him go. Unfortunately they don’t do much with the premise. They barely seem to sense the fucked-upness of a kid controlling a murderer for fun. They don’t really explore at all what the kid’s life is like or even get any mileage out of the idea of some dumb kid having this power over an adult. There’s definitely no Verhoeven meat on these bones. These jokers are much more interested in a subplot about a disgustingly obese shut-in controlling Butler’s hot wife in another game. They keep coming back to it like they’re real proud of this observation that a hot chick on the internet is probly a gross fat dude, but they do nothing with it at all, no insight into why he’s doing it or anything. They come up with a concept and that’s it, that’s the end of their work. No time to take ideas anywhere, gotta rollerblade.

One example is the title. Why is it called GAMER? That’s a word that only sounds cool to a gamer, if anyone. In the movie I guess it refers to the kid who controls Gerard Butler as a video game. But why is he significant? Admittedly none of the characters are developed much at all, but clearly the avatar is the focus of this one, not the gamer. There’s no significance to the title. They just wanted to call a movie gamer because they’re gamers. Lots of movies have dumb titles, but this one is fitting because it represents the low level of thought they give to every aspect of the movie.

Okay, so it’s not a smart movie. It’s really, really, really not a smart movie. It makes DEATH RACE look like DR. STRANGELOVE. But it would get away with that if it had great action scenes. Or maybe if it had good ones. If not, I would accept acceptable ones. Instead they have inexcusably shitty ones, just a bunch of shaky camcorder looking footage (with added blips) of dudes running around shooting guns behind a warehouse somewhere. There are some sparks. I think a car flips in one part. Possibly explosions. I initially turned the movie off after about 15 or 20 minutes because I couldn’t wait for the action scene to be over and then it got into the parts between action scenes and I couldn’t decide which one I hated more. It picked up a little when I continued watching the next day, but not enough to recover.

There’s a scene in the movie where Butler gets a missile shot at him or something and then the camera feed for the pay-per-view coverage shuts down. And it shows some fan watching the fight and she yells, “What the FUCK just happened?!” And you find yourself saying, “Exactly! Exactly!” Even the characters in the movie agree that the battles are poorly filmed and edited.

Okay, I got a good example here. The end credits listed Zoe Bell. I said what? Zoe Bell was in this? Where? So I found a picture of her from the movie online, and clearly she was one of the other fighters in the game. So I went back and fast forwarded through the movie and I figured out what scene she’s in. She’s sitting right next to Butler and she introduces herself to him, but it’s in a dark room with a strobing light, so she’s hard to make out. I swear on Christ’s pacifistic nuts that when I watched it the first time I thought it was a voice speaking to him from behind the wall or through a hidden speaker or something. I really didn’t know somebody was sitting there talking to him, let alone that it was Zoe Bell. After that she’s running next to him in a battle but it’s all the handheld shit and you don’t see her face clearly. Yes, she’s a stuntwoman, but in this one she’s supposed to be an actor, you don’t try to obscure her face. You’re thinking backwards, guys.

N + T Movie Factory also make the rookie mistake – or ROBOCOP 3 mistake – of having a righteous resistance for the hero to team up with. Screen Actor’s Guild Award winner* Chris “Ludacris” Bridges has the Ice-T-in-JOHNNY-MNEMONIC role of the prophet who pirates the airwaves to make useless speeches about rebelling. I compare it to ROBOCOP 3 because that was a movie where they took a perfectly good nightmarish dystopia that speaks for itself and then ruined everything by having rebels point out just how bad it is. These ones have the usual futuristic hippie look – in the role of white girl with dreadlocks is Alison Lohman, who was so good in DRAG ME TO HELL. Here here line readings are so stiff I honestly thought she was some non-actor friend of theirs they wanted to give a bit part to.

To be fair, these rebels don’t preach as much as the ones in some other crappy sci-fi movies. More than militants or subversives they seem to be a radical exposition cell. They’re there to read long sentences of techno-gibberish to explain the sci-fi concepts of the movie. I guess if they weren’t in the movie there wouldn’t be a villainous master plan, because they’re the ones that explain what it is and then it never happens.

The best reviewed role is Michael C. Hall as the annoying billionaire creator of the game, frequent talk show guest and aspiring conqueror of humanity. I guess Hall is supposed to be good because he does a different accent than on his TV show DEXTER. Okay, fine, but his drawl and random dance scene can’t really make him into a good villain. He’s evil for no reason, doesn’t have anything else going on in his life and doesn’t even have any funny lines.

Kyra Sedgwick is also in the movie as a talk show host who gets sort of involved and doesn’t turn out to be important. I assume the casting agent pointed out to her that Joan Allen was in DEATH RACE.

Like the action scenes, the story has no build and an underwhelming climax. They don’t do anything with the concept of him being controlled by a kid. Instead the kid somehow lets him loose, so he becomes an even better fighter. The villain still can control him though so he holds a knife up to him and can’t stab. Oh wait, he tried real hard and then it worked! The end. This is an action movie where the climax is the hero and villain standing there and the hero stabs the villain.

If none of that can un-sell you on this movie, I feel it’s important to tell you that the opening scene is a montage set to Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams.” Then, a little later in the movie, there is an action scene set to the same song! I guess they got the bulk rate on music rights.

So, sorry guys, but I gotta give up on Nevildine slash Taylor. As moviemakers I realize I really hate these motherfuckers. They got a couple ideas but no talent for communicating them and no brains to put anything behind or in front of the ideas. If anything, they should write loose outlines that other writers and directors then flesh out into actual movies. Or they should be an executive producer that comes in and suggests possible gags, like the guy putting out the cigarette inside Jason Statham while he’s getting heart surgery in CRANK PART 2. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure these guys are cool to hang out with if you like playing video games and giggling about balls for hours on end, but in my opinion they are not ready to tell stories through a series of photographic images.

*2004 Best Ensemble for CRASH

[ratings]

Have you ever had a friend, a relative or a pet that disappeared for so long you thought they were dead, and after you gave up hope they showed up again? Or maybe your car got stolen, you figured it was gone for good but then one day the cops called you and they found it on the side of a road somewhere without that much damage? Well, that’s Sam Raimi. He was lost so deep in Spider-land we went through a period of denial, then acceptance, then moved on with our lives in a Raimi-free world and forgot all about him. But all the sudden the intercom buzzes in the middle of the night, we rub the sleep from our eyes and look out the window and holy shit if that isn’t Sam Raimi standing at the gate holding DRAG ME TO HELL in a little cage.

Let’s be fair though. I’m not gonna disavow the Sam Raimi of the 21st century. I don’t blame him for getting bored with what he was doing and making THE GIFT, even if I was kind of bored with what he did in THE GIFT. And I liked his SPIDER-MAN movies, it’s just that seven years of them is a heavy trade for the old Sam Raimi we loved. EVIL DEAD seems like so long ago now that when you hear his name associated with a horror movie (he produces a bunch of them through his company Ghost House) you assume it won’t be very good.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT had some good parts, but there’s not a particularly good track record there. There is no noticeable connection to the O.G. Sam Raimi, the guy with the energetic visuals and goofy dark humor, the purveyor of ultimate experiences in grueling horror and Three Stooges homages. The guy who strapped that camera to that car and drove it through the woods, who made a character swallow a flying eyeball, who had Liam Neeson demand the fucking elephant and blew a hole bigger than a grapefruit through Keith David’s head in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. What happened to the guy who worshipful fans rallied around and cheered on when he got to do SPIDER–MAN and then kind of… forgot about? You see glimpses of that guy in the SPIDER-MANs, but they’re hidden behind the big budgets, the top-of-the-line effects, the demands of the corporation and the iconography and the movie stars and the franchise. Not as much room to fuck around and invent shit when you’ve got all those boxes to check off. So we don’t really get to see all his talents there.

But god damn if O.G. Sam Raimi isn’t back with DRAG ME TO HELL. Written with his brother Ivan just after ARMY OF DARKNESS, this is an old fashioned fun-time horror movie with a tone very close to EVIL DEAD II. It treats its story of a fatal 3-day gypsy curse seriously just like EVIL DEAD did the Necronomicon Ex-mortis. It’s not another fuckin horror comedy. But you will find yourself laughing at all the inventively horrible things that befall the young loan officer Christine Brown, played by Alison Lohman.

There’s a great score and arsenal of creepy sounds courtesy of Christopher Young (HELLRAISER), and the old school Universal logo and the way the title slams onto the screen get you ready for business. But the point where I made a positive I.D. on our man Sam Raimi was in the first real setpiece where Christine fights a decrepit, angry gypsy woman in an enclosed space and the two use every dirty-fighting technique known to woman. (My SPOILER favorite: the old lady loses her false teeth but bites Christine in the face anyway.) Just this scene milks more laughter and squirming out of you than most recent horror movies do in their entire running times. And this one never lets up.

Somebody told me DRAG ME TO HELL had “jump-scares” that work, somebody else said it wasn’t very good because it was just a bunch of jump-scares. Both might be valid but I didn’t think about it that way. I don’t think it made me jump, it just seemed to be a movie where everyday reality can at any moment be ferociously invaded by feverish otherworldly visions, demonic apparitions and disgusting substances. It doesn’t build to a crescendo of insanity like EVIL DEAD. It’s more like this young professional is trying to keep a lid on the horror but it keeps pushing its way out and whacking her in the jaw with the lid. The poor girl is trying to get a promotion at the bank, but she bleeds all over her boss. She’s trying to make a good impression on her boyfriend’s parents but she starts yelling at a demon during dessert. She’s not stuck in a cabin in the woods, she’s trying to live her normal life and go to work and everything while this devil keeps circling around her licking its lips.

As horror fans we know that when somebody comes back from the dead there’s gonna be something missing, such as a soul. Maybe it looks like little Gage, but he’s gonna slash your achilles heel with a scalpel, so I was worried there would be some catch here with Raimi. Horror fans tend to be purists, and most of the ones I know are totally racist against any use of CGI. I do think there is one quick grossout gag in the movie that was a mistake to do with computers. We know it’s fake when it’s made out of rubber, but at least you know she really had to have slime on her face. When it’s digital it might as well just be a drawing. The rest of the computery shit I thought was really good though. There’s a scene involving a fly that could not have been done any other way, but looked good enough it had me questioning whether they somehow really did it.

Okay, so the computers aren’t the monkey paw’s curse, so what about the rating? If you’ve avoided this movie it might be because you read it was PG-13, the cursed watered-down rating that has been forced on so many once proud R-rated series. THE EVIL DEAD was pretty damn R (nobody gets raped by a tree in PG-13, that’s the rule), Raimi was once known for his extravagant gore, and there have been almost no good horror movies ever released with that rating. (I like the remake of THE RING, that’s about it.)

But my friends, I don’t know how to explain this, but somehow this one works. It doesn’t feel like “good for a PG-13″, it just feels like “good.” If I did not know about that rating I would’ve never believed it. This doesn’t necessarily need to have a bunch of blood (actually it does have a bunch) and it turns out that inventing new ways to be disgusting doesn’t affect the rating. I would still think it would be a problem though because with a PG-13 rating you can feel safe knowing that certain things won’t happen, certain lines will not be crossed, and that takes the horror out of it.

But take my word for it, lines are crossed in this movie. There are things that happen here that you don’t expect to happen in any movie, let alone a PG-13. There are tricks in the movie I completely fell for. I think it’s one of those decoy PG-13s they put on there to give you a false sense of security just so they can fuck with you. One act in particular – okay, it’s off screen. But it is something reprehensible that you do not ever expect the hero of a movie to do. Especially when the hero is a pretty young blonde.

That brings me to my next point, which is the unexpected cleverness of the characterization in this script. The basic feel of the movie is like a spookhouse ride. It’s about fun. This ain’t MARTYRS. So the characters can just be types if they want to. There are a couple really hatable types in here, and Raimi could leave it at that, but then these characters show another side you don’t expect, and just at the right time to make everything more uncomfortable.

More importantly Christine is subtly different from your standard horror heroine. Most women in horror movies are either idiots or saints. If you look at Laurie in HALLOWEEN, Nancy in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, Helen in CANDYMAN, Sydney in SCREAM, Kirsty in HELLRAISER… most of these ladies are goodie two shoes by design, they are supposed to have a purity that gets challenged or corrupted when they encounter true evil or whatever. They find the toughness to survive and maybe kill their attacker, but they’re still good through and through.

Christine might seem the same at first – she was raised on a farm, she’s nicer than everybody else at the bank, she even says she’s a vegetarian and volunteers at a puppy shelter. But the nice twist is that throughout the movie she has moral lapses and temptations that are a little over the edge of what can be reasonably expected. She’s still sympathetic but every once in a while she has a plan that makes you think, “Wait– really?” For example she comes very close to allowing a random old man at a diner to get his soul ripped out in place of hers. And worse.

There’s alot of humor in this going too far, and I think it’s really cool they would give that to a female character. I can see Bruce Campbell doing this stuff but I can’t think of another woman that would.

The other thing about the script that makes it a little better than it might appear on the surface is the classic horror movie morality that (by accident, I think, since it’s an old script) is very timely. The whole story kicks off with her denying an old lady a loan extension, causing her to lose her house. For Christine’s own personal code it’s the wrong thing to do, but she’s under pressure from her asshole peers and wanting to get this promotion, so she tries to be unfeeling about it. Raimi sets it up in an interesting way because the old lady is not very nice (to say the least) and is physically repulsive, coughing snot onto Christine’s desk and taking out her false teeth (which are completely rotted, by the way, even though they’re false). Christine has many excuses not to feel sorry for her, but deep down she does anyway, showing her humanity. And then throughout the movie she can have a combination of fear and guilt.

This goes back to Christine’s moral lapses, too, because she keeps lying and saying it was her boss that denied the extension, even though we saw that it was her own decision. Even while communicating with angry spirits in a seance she tries to pin it on her boss. Some funny shit. But of course she learns her lesson.

DRAG ME TO HELL doesn’t waste its time trying to reinvent horror, and it’s not nostalgic either. Okay, I counted four references to the EVIL DEADs, but it’s not trying to be retro or meta or anything. It’s just reviving an enjoyable type of horror that we don’t get enough of in our diets, and executing that style with flair and supreme skill.

Welcome back and long live new-old Sam Raimi.

[ratings]