Illusionist

A good storyteller, like a good magician, knows that the audience wants to be fooled, at least while the show is in progress. In the end, we may or may not want to know the truth—for the truth, once revealed, may come either as a revelation or an anticlimax. But while the performance unfolds, we want the illusion, want to be taken out of the real world. Once we see through the story or the trick, the spell is broken, and we're back in the real world.

A moody, atmospheric fairy tale, The Illusionist is the story of one illusionist—Eisenheim, a fictional turn-of-the-last-century magician—being told by another, writer-director Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin). By the film's end, the viewer knows the truth about some of Eisenheim's illusions, and some of Burger's as well. Some viewers may see through the plot's central illusion early on; others may be as fooled as most of the characters. On a fundamental level, though, The Illusionist succeeds: While the storytellers are at work, the spell holds.

Based on the Steven Millhauser short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist," Burger's film tells the story of an unflappable, charismatic magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton) in pre-WWI Vienna. Like a method actor who stays in character off the set, Eisenheim maintains a quiet, commanding presence on or off the stage, an inscrutable sense of knowing more than he lets on, as he plays a dangerous game of wits with the heir to the Austria–Hungary monarchy, the Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), and with Leopold's favorite among the police, chief inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti).

Edward Norton as a turn-of-the-last-century magician

The sparks begin to fly when Leopold, attending one of Eisenheim's performances, volunteers his paramour, the Duchess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel), for one of the illusionist's effects. The Duchess takes the stage, and for a moment it seems Eisenheim is the one under a spell. "You're certain we've never met?" he asks rhetorically, for the audience's benefit.

But they have met, a lifetime ago. In those days, Eisenheim was merely Edward, teenaged son of a cabinet-maker and a new student of conjuring tricks, while Sophie was the young daughter of an aristocratic family for whom Edward's father was working. Their puppy-love romance was doomed from the start, of course, though they fantasized about "disappearing" and "running away together."

Hiding in the forest with authorities closing in, young Sophie pleaded with Edward, "Make us disappear." Alas, in those days Edward was not yet a powerful enough magician for such an illusion. Humiliated and abandoned, Edward vanished and began a long journey in which he would completely reinvent himself.

Looking back on this journey, Eisenheim later tells Sophie, "I kept thinking I'd find it just around the next corner … a real mystery. The only mystery I ever found was why my heart wouldn't let go of you."

Paul Giamatti as Chief Inspector Uhl

The star-crossed lovers face an even greater obstacle now in the figure of Leopold, whose planned marriage to the Duchess is an important part of his political ambitions. But Eisenheim is no longer the hapless teenager who was once sent packing in the woods. His calm dignity is like a cloak pulled tightly around him; never again will he be humiliated, though under the right circumstances he is willing to humiliate others, even Leopold himself.

As much with his insinuating, impudent manner as his seemingly impossible stage miracles, the illusionist stumps the crown prince, an egoist who prides himself on his rationalism and sophistication and is eager to prove himself beyond any deception. At the same time, Eisenheim finds an appreciative audience in Uhl, an amateur conjuring enthusiast who is fascinated by Eisenheim's mastery.

Like Leopold, Uhl wants to know how Eisenheim's effects are achieved. But where the prince arrogantly wants to explain away every trick, Uhl respects the illusion and wants to understand how it's done in order to fully appreciate its ingenuity.

Rufus Sewell as Crown Prince Leopold

In part, The Illusionist is about the willing suspension of disbelief, the readiness to accept and appreciate the illusion on its own terms. Interestingly, a somewhat similar theme crops up in Giamatti's other current cinematic fairy tale, M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, which contrasts the jaded cynicism of a film critic with the childlike spirit of acceptance Giamatti's character must adopt in order to receive the story.

Yet in contrast to Shyamalan's tediously self-conscious "bedtime story," The Illusionist doesn't insist on suspending critical faculties altogether. Uhl is fascinated by the illusion—but he still wants to analyze, to grasp how it's done. Unlike Shyamalan, Burger doesn't ask Giamatti, or the audience, to curl up on the couch with a milk mustache and accept whatever he chooses to spoon-feed us, no questions asked. Instead, Burger allows Uhl, and the audience, to ponder and cross-examine his illusions even as we are entertained by them. In any case, Leopold permits himself no illusions when it comes to Sophie. He has her movements followed, and is crudely blunt about the possibility that the duchess and the illusionist may be having an affair. Before long, a shocking turn of events renders the question of Sophie's affections moot, and the dangerous romantic triangle is reduced to a mere contest between the two men.

Deja Vu !

If you thought it was just a trick of the mind, prepare yourself for the truth, promises the tagline for Déjà Vu. Yet if the movie's fantasy premise purports to offer an explanation for one of those nagging, inexplicable impressions we sometimes get, it isn't so much the sense of something having happened before, but rather the creepy feeling that somehow, even in our most private moments, we are being watched.

True, Déjà Vu deals with timelines revisited, events seen and reseen from different points of view, and ultimately the growing sense that all of this has been before. Indeed, the film involves some of the most intricately interconnected time-bending plotting seen in years, with a tightly looped storyline that carefully sets up a long chain of dominoes that have already been toppled. "You don't have to do this," a character tells ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) at a critical juncture, to which he replies, "What if I already have?"

Denzel Washington as ATF agent Doug Carlin

Even some viewers may have a feeling of déjà vu, what with odd bits of God talk and spiritual references juxtaposed with fingers being lopped off, duct-taped faces and prisoners with hands affixed to steering wheels, a kidnapped damsel in deadly distress, and deadly explosions, all in a hypercaffeinated Tony Scott thriller starring a sunglasses-wearing Denzel Washington, set in a down-and-out Mexican/Gulf area city, and featuring a quasi-christological climax.

No, it's not the odious Man on Fire all over again—fortunately, it's quite a bit better than that. To begin with, this time it's the bad guy blowing people up, which is always a good thing. Beyond that, Déjà Vu pursues its science-fiction conceit to some nifty places, including an extraordinary cross-temporal chase scene in which the hero must negotiate traffic in one timeframe while "following" a vehicle more than half a week in the past. Are you thinking fourth-dimensionally yet?

Responsible for all this is a top-secret FBI surveillance technology that—according to the official explanation offered to Carlin—reconstructs an on-the-fly virtual view of the recent past by synthesizing input from all available sources, from satellite photography to local security cameras, into a single, continuous roving image of life as it was four and a half days earlier.

Doug speaks with FBI agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer)

Thus, when post-Katrina New Orleans is rocked by a terrorist bomb, the FBI sets up shop and starts combing through images of the days before the blast for clues. Although Carlin is a lowly ATF officer, an FBI agent named Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) admires his efficient detective work and recruits him to go over the surveillance images with them. "I need someone who can look at a crime scene exactly once," Pryzwarra says, "and tell us what shouldn't be there, what's missing, what matters."

He isn't kidding about the "exactly once" part. Within their surveillance radius, the FBI team can see literally anything happening four days ago—even looking through walls, a bit like in Scott's earlier Enemyof the State, thus allowing agents to peer in on the last hours of a murder victim named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) as she changes clothes, showers and so forth. All the time, though, the past marches on as relentlessly as the present, and there's a complicated, possibly disingenuous technobabble explanation for why there are no do-overs, no rewinding, no fast-forwarding.

Carlin doesn't mind the view of Claire's boudoir, but he doesn't necessarily buy the feds' technobabble about how the chronoscope works—especially when Claire herself seems aware of something out of the ordinary. "Hello? Hello?" she calls uncertainly, looking around her apartment and then wandering out into the hallway. Later, she makes a note in her diary about "that weird 'I'm being watched' feeling."

Uh oh. So, if I feel like someone's watching me, maybe it's crime investigators in the future trying to piece together what happens to me a few days from now? At least it looks like I don't have to worry about déjà vu—not being a law enforcement official involved in a high-tech crime investigation.

Paula Patton as Claire Kuchever

Déjà Vu rides the razor's edge between competing theories of time travel: Can the past really be changed? Or will anything you do in the past turn out to be just part of what already happened anyway? The filmmakers spin a slick, engrossing yarn and ratchet up the suspense effectively, but eventually they write themselves into a corner. At some point, they must choose between one ending that follows from everything we've seen, and another ending that gives viewers what they want. Neither is fully satisfying.

There just might be a way out of this dilemma, if the filmmakers were clever enough to find it. Somewhere along the line there needs to be a key turning point between one possible outcome and another, a domino set to fall one way that winds up tipping another, whether due to unpredictable human choices, or even the "divine intervention" ("something spiritual," something "more than physics") that comes up more than once.

Unfortunately, the film never finds that turning point, and a potentially mind-bending sci-fi tour de force breaks down into a fairly conventional suspense thriller, with the hero racing against time to stop a killer before he strikes. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and the film works well enough on that level. On the other hand, the opening terrorist attack on New Orleans perhaps still hits a bit too close to home, in more ways than one, to effectively set the tone for 90 minutes of escapist excitement.

Jim Caviezel as one bad dude

There are other potential drawbacks. The voyeuristic scenes of Carlin and the FBI agents watching Claire in her apartment are milked to an over-the-top degree, with Claire constantly striking glamour-model poses and perpetually in various states of undress, even though she's just hanging around her apartment. Carlin watches, entranced, with easy listening playing on the soundtrack. Even when we first meet her as a corpse on a slab, Claire is somehow presented as a sex object, a fixed expression on her face that hardly seems indicative of her ghastly death.

Then there's the terrorist (Jim Caviezel), who turns out to be (spoiler alert) a Timothy McVeigh psycho-"patriot" who talks about "human collateral" and "the cost of freedom." As with the neo-Nazi villains in the movie version of The Sum of All Fears, Hollywood's taste in bad guys seems increasingly stale and artificial.

If it isn't the brilliant film it could have been, Déjà Vu still contains enough flashes of that film to make it entertaining while you're watching it. On reflection, though, it feels a bit like a shell game in which the conjuror himself has lost track of where the pea is supposed to be.

One thing you have to say about that FBI chronoscope surveillance technology: With its hyperkinetic, weaving, zooming point of view, it's a plot device tailor-made for Scott's jittery visual style. Never mind Doug Carlin: If the FBI ever really does invent a machine like that, they should call in Tony Scott to operate it.

Ghost Rider

If someone makes a mistake—a big mistake—do you think they should have to pay for it every day for the rest of their life? ponders Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage). Or does he deserve "a second chance"?

Carter Slade (Sam Elliott) is sure Blaze deserves a second chance—even if his "mistake" was selling his soul to a devil named Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda) in order to save a loved one dying from cancer. "You did it for the right reason," Slade assures Blaze, "and that means you've got God on your side."

Well, that's a nice thought. In supernatural comic-book movies, though, "God's side" can be a pretty abstract concept, especially compared to, well, the other side. Religious references and iconography are allowed, yet as the powers of hell run amok on the earth, the powers of heaven seem distant and uninvolved.

In Hellboy, the villain went so far as to taunt one of the heroes about how "your God remains silent" while the villain's "god" was active in the world. Constantine at least had angels around, although they seemed impotent and passive compared to the demons. (In one scene demons kill a priest right in front of an angel, who can only comfort him as he dies, and another major angelic figure turned out to be a dangerous wacko.) Then there's Spawn, in which a damned soul subverts hell's plans to attack heaven, without much evident support from heaven itself.

Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze, aka Ghost Rider

An early Ghost Rider storyline in the comic books featured a startling contrast to this general principle: In Ghost Rider #9, Johnny Blaze is granted his "second chance" by no less than Jesus Christ himself, who delivers Blaze from the Devil's clutches, saying, "Johnny Blaze's soul is beyond you, Satan. He has earned his second chance."

Writer Tony Isabella, who developed the story in that 1973 issue, has observed that there were "plenty of Satan avatars active in the Marvel Universe, but precious little evidence of the loyal opposition." (Isabella planned to have Blaze become a Christian and be delivered from the Devil's power, but this was squelched, and even Jesus' appearance later reinterpreted, apparently at the insistence of controversial editor-in-chief Jim Shooter.)

Filmmaker Mark Steven Johnson knows the Ghost Rider mythos backward and forward, and has synthesized elements from four decades of different comic-book series about characters called Ghost Rider, not all of which were originally connected, into a single story.

Yet in a story that finds room for (I think) six to eight different demonic figures (depending whether you count the two Ghost Riders), once again the powers of heaven are present in name and image only. God may be on Johnny Blaze's side, but he doesn't seem to be doing blazes to help him against the forces of darkness arrayed against him. Once they've been cast out of heaven, it seems the only thing fallen angels have to fear on the face of the earth is someone badder than they are.

Eva Mendes as Roxanne, in one of the few times she's not showing cleavage

Depictions of St. Michael casting down Satan are seen more than once, and we're told that four of the demonic characters were cast out of heaven by Michael himself. There's also a Spanish priest who defensively raises the crucifix of his rosary against a demon named Blackheart (Wes Bentley), apparently to no effect. (We never learn happens to the priest, but Blackheart, who has just finished lighting a rack of candles in a church, doesn't seem intimidated by sacred things. Perplexingly, the movie elsewhere assures us that the demons "can't go on sacred ground.")

As he did in Daredevil, Johnson distills elements from multiple versions of his source material into an eclectic story peppered with homages and asides that diehard fans may appreciate. Johnson's interest in his subject is palpable, and it's not hard to believe that Nicolas Cage, a lifelong comic book fan and motorcycle enthusiast, relished the role of Johnny Blaze, and lobbied hard for the part. This isn't Fantastic Four, a film so woefully adrift from its origins that it seems to have been made by people who never actually read a comic book.

Yet for all their evident interest and affinity for the material, the filmmakers haven't made a very good movie. They've figured out how to get Blaze (Cage), the motorcycle-riding hellion who makes a deal with the devil, into the same picture as Carter Slade (Sam Elliott), the originally unconnected (and not even supernatural) Ghost Rider of the Old West. But they haven't figured out either who Johnny Blaze is as a character, or what the Ghost Rider is all about.

On the Johnny Blaze side, the comic-book character has long been seen as a tortured soul living in the shadow of a Jekyll-and-Hyde curse in which he must share his life with an uncontrollable figure of evil. The movie, though, defers the Ghost Rider's first appearance for decades after Blaze's initial deal with the devil.

Wes Bentley (2nd from right) as Blackheart, with some of his hellish friends

An Evel Knievel-type motorcycle stunt rider, Blaze spends his life pursuing ever more suicidal stunts in an effort to prove to himself that his life is still his own. Ever fearful of the fate that hangs over his head, he flees from his lifelong love, Roxanne Simpson (Eva Mendes, displaying more cleavage per minute of screentime than any actress in recent memory). Yet it seems that Blaze can't die, for Mephisto wants him alive. "You got something more than luck," says a crew member, shaking his head. "You got an angel looking out for you."

"Maybe it's something else," Blaze mutters to himself. A wittier movie might have remembered that demons are fallen angels, and so Blaze does have an angel looking out him, after a fashion. (The film misses the same opportunity later when Blackheart shows up at a biker bar, for no apparent reason, and is told that admission is "Angels only." "You got a problem with that?" the biker asks menacingly. "Actually, I do," Blackheart answers, passing on the chance to say, "Actually, I am an angel.")

In the comic books, the Ghost Rider has long been understood as a figure of vengeance, a hellion whose wrath is directed at punishing the guilty. The classic incarnation had a mystic "hellfire" power that could scald the soul without harming the flesh, while a later version added a "penance stare" power that works like the contraposto perditions of Dante's Inferno, inflicting back on the wicked the weight and suffering of their own sins.

The movie includes this, but essentially as a sidebar. Ghost Rider gives hell to a random street thug, and later to a jail cell full of brutal prisoners (though he spares one terrified prisoner, declaring him innocent). Later, the Ghost Rider finds a way to use his power against his archenemy Blackheart, even though the latter is a demon and has no soul to burn.

Ghost Rider can get a little hot-headed sometimes

But the idea of punishing the guilty just doesn't figure much into a story that doesn't have any human villains for the Ghost Rider to punish. Instead, the plot is driven by a war in hell between Mephistopheles and his brat kid Blackheart, who are battling over a supernatural MacGuffin, a contract for the souls of an entire town of damned souls.

It seems this contract was snatched out of Mephistopheles' hand 150 years ago by the Carter Slade Ghost Rider, and now Blackheart is after it. For reasons that seem murky at best, this contract, and the damned souls it commands, may give Blackheart the power to claim the entire earth as his own. Go figure.

In this war of powers and principalities, the Ghost Rider's role as a punisher of human wickedness is subordinated to a new job description invented for the film: the devil's "bounty hunter," or rather goon squad. Mephistopheles sends the Ghost Rider after Blackheart and his squad of fallen angels, and the film becomes a series of devil-on-devil smackdowns.

There are also a series of vehicular chases in which the police chase Ghost Rider by car, helicopter and so forth. This is the best Johnson could do with a fiery, chopper-riding skeleton that punishes the wicked—put him in chase scenes and have him duke it out with other supernatural beings? What a wasted opportunity.

300 Spartians

There are essentially two things you need to know about 300: It's extremely violent, and it's unlike anything you've seen before.

The first point should come as little surprise for a movie about the Greco-Persian Wars, specifically The Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. According to history, King Xerxes (yep, the same guy who takes Esther to be queen in the Bible) launched a massive campaign against Greece with an army that most claim to have numbered in the hundreds of thousands—some even say the millions. Many states were easily conquered by Persia's might, and Sparta seemed poised to fall next.

Not if King Leonidas could help it. Sparta was a militaristic state, reputed for its disciplined warriors—the special-ops forces of their time. As the film tells it, nationalistic pride drove Leonidas to refuse Xerxes' demand for submission. However, despite his requests to dispatch the combined Greek army for retaliation, the local priests and their oracle refused, apparently because of a religious festival—Sparta's equivalent to the Sabbath. As Leonidas asks in the film, what must a king do to save the very city whose laws demand he do nothing?

Leonidas (Gerard Butler) seeks the counsel of his wife and queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey)

With defiant loyalty to his country and firm convictions bordering on madness, Leonidas rallied together all he could muster: a small detachment of his 300 finest warriors, plus a small army of less experienced Greeks willing to participate. Those odds seem suicidal, yet the fiercely courageous Spartans managed to wipe out wave after wave of stunned Persian soldiers at a strategic mountain pass, with hope that reinforcements might eventually arrive.

The battle was previously depicted in Rudolph Maté's 1962 film The 300 Spartans, but not with this level of graphic detail. Gladiator? Braveheart? Kid stuff. 300 offers hundreds of stabbings, impalements, dismemberments, and beheadings—not to mention blood galore. I can't say it any more plainly: If you don't like movie violence, do not see this film.

And yet I must also confess, the violence didn't shock me as I expected. You might call it desensitization, though I still wince at the graphic brutality in films like Braveheart, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan. Chalk it up instead to the stunning visuals, which brings me back to point number two: This movie is unlike anything you've seen before.

Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), the Persian king who claims to be a god

300 is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller (Sin City, Batman: Year One), and as with Sin City, director Zack Snyder (2004's Dawn of the Dead) uses the same technique of computer generated art direction to faithfully reproduce every panel of Miller's acclaimed work, only adding scenes out of necessity to elaborate on the story and provide character development—particularly Queen Gorgo and her efforts to persuade the Greek council to send the army to support her husband.

The result is an eye-popping vision with massive armies, imaginative landscapes, and lots of slow-motion action. It's all so stylized, 300 comes off less as a horrific reenactment than as an art museum or history book come to life. Aside from the actors, most everything you see is computer-generated—including the blood—presumably allowing Snyder to control every component of the shot to make it as artful as possible. Virtually any given still from this movie could pass for a hyper-realistic painting.

A wounded Leonidas roars his defiance at the Persian invaders

As such, the violence almost appears fake at times, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I prefer not to be distracted by shock value and "quality kills." This is history played up as folklore—the sort of thing where a storyteller recounts how a hero slew a hundred men with but one swing of his sword. Indeed, 300 shows a Spartan stopping a rhino with a single spear throw. Another soldier recounts the history of Leonidas, who as a ten-year old killed a demonic-looking wolf with gleaming eyes. Xerxes himself is portrayed as a bronzed and bejeweled Goliath, at least eight feet tall with a deep voice, yet effeminate face. The overall mood is thus more mythical than reality, which is probably why the film seems more palatable.

But make no mistake. Some will object to the film's apparently revelry in violence. To some extent it's necessary—just as violence of some magnitude would be necessary in bringing the book of Judges to the big screen. The real question is whether 300 glorifies violence unnecessarily, and it probably does since The 300 Spartans wasn't as graphic. But much of the violence in 300 isn't that far removed from what was seen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which at times came close to an R rating with its decapitations and dismemberments.

Some will feel that 300's other adult content is more problematic. The aforementioned oracle does some sensual writhing in the nude. There's a grotesque Persian orgy that goes a little too far in making its point. Leonidas shares a short, somewhat graphic love scene with his queen. There's also an implied rape. And let's not forget that we're watching 300 ultra-ripped, half-naked male specimens with 12-pack abs on screen for most of the film. Like everything else in this movie, it's all artfully handled, but is it also too much to take? Consider yourself warned, and use careful discernment.

The battle scenes are few, but quite intense

All things considered, you'd think 300 is nothing more than a testosterone fueled, sword-clanging epic with stylish visuals. But I have to believe that the two guys who sat near me—giggling and rubbing their hands in anticipation as the battles geared up—were a little disappointed that such a movie is so talky. 300 is not the popcorn action flick some might be expecting. It's more like a war movie for fans of comic books, art history, and opera—propelled more by ideas and images, not action.

There's much talk (and posturing) between the action sequences, raising interesting themes about what the Spartans were fighting for: idealism vs. realism, perhaps even their very souls. Consider a scene where one Spartan offers to betray his countrymen for personal reasons. Xerxes comes across as the Devil himself, promising him wealth, women, and power, repeatedly extolling his kindness: "Leonidas would have you stand. All I ask is that you kneel." It's one of the most striking scenes of temptation I've ever seen in film, while providing some insight into what the Spartan "stand" truly represents—to take a self-proclaimed "god-king" down a peg by sheer force of will (and sheer force).

I cannot stress enough that this movie is not for everyone because of its violence and excesses. Nevertheless, the execution is artful (literally and figuratively) and it presents some lofty ideas in the process. With filmmaking both epic and imaginative, 300 is the stuff that legends are made of.

Hannibal Rising

Mischa and Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel), baby brother and sister, are inseparable; it is their love for each other that ties their bond. Their companionship is forever binding, until, with their family, while hiding from the Nazi war machine a twisted set of circumstance sets the pace for a most vicious attack on the future of one Hannibal Lecter for the sworn vengeance for the brutal killing of his baby sister. Years later, we find Hannibal, the teenager, setting up in Paris, and living with his aunt Lady Murasaki Shikibu (Li Gong) and studying at medical school here he finds his forte. Still searching for his sister's murderers, still bitter and still ever hopeful of satisfying his desire for retribution. This chance arrives, and soon we are to learn that for a pound of flesh lost a pound of flesh must be repaid. This is the horrific tale of justice and honour, a young mans growing pains that will have the guilty paying with more than just flesh and bone. This is the up and rising tale of the young Hannibal, prey you do not meet him, for meat you shall be to him. Taste his wroth. This is the story of the monster Hannibal Lecter's formative years. These experiences as a child and young adult led to his remarkable contribution to the fields of medicine, music, painting and forensics. We begin in World War II at the medieval castle in Lithuania built by Dr. Lecter's forebear, Hannibal the Grim. The child Hannibal survives the horrors of the Eastern Front and escapes the grim Soviet aftermath to find refuge in France with the widow of his uncle, mysterious and beautiful Japanese descended from Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji. Her kind and wise attentions help him understand his unbearable recollections of the war. Remembering, he finds the means to visit the outlaw predators that changed him forever as they battened on helpless during the collapse of the Eastern Front. Hannibal helps these war criminals toward self-knowledge even as we see his own nature become clear to him. Based on Thomas Harris' upcoming new book of the same name, this prequel shows a young Hannibal Lecter in three different phases of his life from childhood in Lithuania to his ten years in England up to his time in Russia before his capture by FBI agent Will Graham in Red Dragon.

The Guardian 2006

If Flyboys was Top Gun with biplanes and trench warfare, then The Guardian is Top Gun with diving gear and big waves. Once again, a cocky young hotshot joins a military academy—in this case, a training school for the U.S. Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers—and once again, the eager young braggart learns more than he expected, as he butts heads with his teachers and experiences a tragedy or two, all of which turn him into a better, more mature, more professional kind of person.

However, unlike some films in this genre, The Guardian is just as interested in the teachers as it is in the students—at least where Ben Randall (Kevin Costner) is concerned. Ordinarily, Randall would be out at sea saving lives, not coaching a bunch of trainees; he is a hero among rescue swimmers, a legend who has saved countless people. But his very dedication to his job drives a wedge between Randall and his wife (Sela Ward), and so one day he comes home to find that she is leaving him. And then he loses his best friend, and several others, in a tragic accident at sea. So his commanding officer (Clancy Brown) reassigns him to the school, hoping that time away from the emergency calls will give him a chance to deal with his losses.

Ashton Kutcher as hotshot Jake Fischer

And that's where Randall meets the aptly-named Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher), the former high-school swimming champ who, not realizing that Randall is one of his teachers, makes a point of introducing himself to the school by announcing that he's going to break Randall's records. And so begins a battle of wills between the two men, as Randall pushes Fischer and his classmates to their limits, while Fischer does all he can to show that he can meet and surpass Randall's expectations—at least when it comes to swimming fast, holding his breath underwater, and so on.

More important than the physical training, of course, are the Valuable Life Lessons that Fischer picks up along the way. After making a bet with his fellow trainees, Fischer walks up to a woman (Melissa Sagemiller) at a bar and introduces himself to her, and while their relationship begins on an officially "casual" note—sex and nothing else—it begins to show signs of something more serious; they even consider going out on a date. Meanwhile, Randall digs into Fischer's background to try to see what motivates him, and he tries to advise Fischer on how to work within a team, and on how to cope with the inevitable failures that will be part of his job.

Kevin Costner as legendary rescuer Ben Randall

The film hews closely to the conventions of this genre, though at times you can feel that director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) and writer Ron L. Brinkerhoff (D-Tox), wanted it to go just a bit beyond the formula. On some levels, they are successful. The supporting cast is especially good, and it is fun to watch the camaraderie between Randall and the other "mature" people—including Neal McDonough as one of the more intense instructors, John Heard as the head of the school, and Bonnie Bramlett as a blues singer—while Fischer gradually comes to a better, deeper understanding of his classmates in general and of Randall in particular. (And just as Fischer becomes more serious as a rescue swimmer, so Kutcher, normally associated with dumb comedies like Dude, Where's My Car?, proves he can handle drama.)

Emily (Melissa Sagemiller) has her eyes on Jake

On other levels, however, the film doesn't quite realize its ambitions. The film is book-ended by references to a legendary guardian in the water who acts as "a fisher of men, a last hope for all those who have been left behind"—but this fleeting hint of fantasy doesn't really fit with the movie's more down-to-earth sensibility. And the film as a whole is just plain too long. About an hour and a half into it, I began to wonder how it would end; obviously it wouldn't be enough just to show the trainees picking up their certificates on graduation day. But about two hours into it, I began to wonder when it would end; it just keeps on going, and keeps on finding subplots in need of resolution. Multiple endings were forgivable in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, because it was part of a trilogy and there were over ten hours of story to wrap up; but a simple one-off like this needs to be a little tighter, especially when so much of what we see feels like it was copied from some other movie.

Apocalypto

Say what you will about Mel Gibson, but there's no denying the man knows how to use a camera—which is more than can be said for many other actors who have turned to directing. His skills as an auteur have become especially apparent over the course of his last two films, The Passion of The Christ and now Apocalypto, both of which feature mostly unknown actors speaking ancient languages; the absence of big stars and readily intelligible dialogue keeps us focused on the visuals, which are bold and unsettling throughout. Gibson also made both films with his own money, so for better or for worse, they truly represent his personal artistic vision, unlike many so-called "independent" films that are tweaked by their distributors. But that means Gibson's weaknesses are just as evident in these films as his strengths.

Apocalypto begins with a shot that brilliantly distills the essence of the movie, as the camera slowly moves in on some bright green forest plants, and a pair of feet suddenly rush past in the foreground. This is a chase movie with an environmental theme, and the footsteps that momentarily block our view of the foliage bring to mind the opening shot of the similarly-titled Apocalypse Now, in which helicopters whirred by in front of us just before laying waste to the jungles of Vietnam.

Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw

But it turns out the main chase has not yet begun; the feet that rush by are actually those of a Mayan forest-dweller who, together with other men from his tribe, is hunting a tapir (an animal related to the horse and the rhinoceros). The method by which they catch the animal is ingenious but also rather crudely violent; and as soon as they sit down to cut out its organs, the script turns crude in other ways, too. It seems one of the men, whose name is Blunted (Jonathan Brewer), has a wife who has not yet borne him any children, so his friends goad him into eating the tapir's testicles, telling him it will help him to prove his virility. When he gags on the gonads, the men laugh—and that's only the beginning of their taunts.

All four of the films Gibson has directed—including The Man Without a Face and Braveheart—have been, at least to some degree, about father-son relationships and the role they play in shaping what it means to be a man. (Even The Passion begins with Satan taunting Jesus, "Who is your father? Who are you?") In Apocalypto, that theme is expressed primarily through the character of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), who receives stoic advice from his father Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead) and struggles mightily to save his pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernandez) and their son Turtles Run (Carlos Emilio Baez) when their village is raided by a war party from a nearby city.

Jaguar Paw and Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead)

Jaguar Paw successfully hides his family in an underground cave—a well, perhaps?—but he himself is captured by the raiders, who proceed to enslave most of the adults that they have not already killed or raped. The adults are then taken through the forest, across a river, past fields of failing crops, and into a city where the women are sold into slavery while the men are painted blue and led to the temple.

Their fate is foreshadowed in gruesome ways, first as they approach the temple and witness the grim relics of human sacrifice, and then, as they enter and walk past a series of paintings which spell out in horrifying detail what will happen to them once they reach the top of the pyramid. What transpires after this is best saved for the film, but we already have an inkling that at least some of these men will survive. We know that Jaguar Paw, after all, has to go back and retrieve his family from their hole in the ground. And a diseased girl has already taunted Jaguar Paw's captors by uttering a series of prophecies—prophecies that require at least one or two of these men to escape the war party—and in movies like this, prophecies always come true.

Seven (Dalia Hernandez) is Jaguar Paw's pregnant wife

Despite the film's two-hour-plus running time, the characters are never particularly developed; Gibson is working with archetypes, not real people, and he could just as easily have named his characters Family Man and Pregnant Wife. While the "archetype approach" may make the movie more accessible, it also distances us emotionally from Jaguar Paw's plight; we object to the sacking of his village on principle, but not necessarily because we feel any connection to him as a person. Gibson is more interested in the chase itself, as Jaguar Paw outruns and outsmarts the Mayans who pursue him.

But even more than that, Gibson is obsessed with the nature of violence—and, for that matter, with the violence of nature. Snakes and jaguars attack people without warning, and the opening scene of the hunt, and the distribution of the tapir's organs afterwards, anticipates the later scene of human sacrifice. But there are crucial differences between the two scenes, too. Jaguar Paw and his kin do not derive any sadistic pleasure from killing their prey, and for them, the hunt is an opportunity to come together as men—as human beings—as much as it may be anything else. But the priests and soldiers from the city seem to delight in cruelty, and for them, other people are animals, to be hunted for sport, exploited for labor, or offered up to gods whose thirst for human blood is as insatiable as it is inexplicable.

Director Mel Gibson to cast members, 'You can find more baby powder right over there, guys'

Gibson, as usual, finds himself in the middle; he is a sadist who rubs our faces in cinematic violence, and he is also a masochist who figures the best way to deal with the violence he sees in the world is to accept it and absorb it somehow. But where The Passion gave his admirers an easy out—between Jesus taking the pain and his enemies inflicting it, we side with the pain-taking, no question—Apocalypto is harder to pin down. One man, who is clearly meant to be a role model of sorts, faces his own death with incredible resolve, betraying no emotion and barely any suffering. But Jaguar Paw must fight back, at least to save his family, so the film takes a few steps back to the revenge-seeking ways of Braveheart and other Gibson flicks.

It will be interesting to see what Christian movie buffs in particular make of this film. When The Passion came out, there was much speculation that Gibson had become "one of us," and there were many requests for Gibson to follow it up with a movie about the Maccabean revolt, Saint Francis, or any of a number of other biblical and religious subjects. Instead, with a budget rumoured to be over $70 million—much of it amassed from The Passion's profits—Gibson has made a bloody flick about death and social decay in a pagan culture, and he hints ever so obliquely that the world has not fared any better under we Christians. After watching Apocalypto, some people may find they cannot watch The Passion the way they used to.