Cellular, Resident Evil 2

1. Cellular (Director: David R. Ellis)

Hollywood is finding directors from all walks of life nowadays, witness hairstylist Paul Abascal's debut last week with Paparazzi. Here, we have stunt coordinator and second unit director David R. Ellis, in this actually his third film (legendary films Final Destination 2 and Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco are the others). This is a B-picture, and B-pictures can be fun, and I'm happy to report that this film is surprisingly good.

Story: Jessica Martin (Kim Basinger) gets kidnapped by a man named Greer (Jason Statham) for unknown reasons, locked in an attic where a phone sits waiting for Greer to smash it up with a sledgehammer (this is actually the most unbelievable part, since simply unplugging the phone would have been much better). Jessica is a smart school teacher and figures out how to get the smashed phone working, and somehow gets in contact with a random cell phone held by slacker Ryan (Chris Evans). Ryan comes in contact with a detective (William H. Macy!) who, although doubtful of the story, checks all the leads and begins to investigate himself. Plot devices separate the two, and Ryan must perform several acts that would normally be considered illegal like stealing cars and shooting up a cell phone store to get a charger. His talks with Jessica lead him to find the source of the kidnappers' actions, and suddenly the bad guys are after him, too!

In this way, the movie is very much like, say, Speed. I don't know what you guys feel about Speed, but I thought the movie was incredible. Jan De Bont's only good film, Speed always was about much more than keeping the bus at 50 MPH the whole time. There were other obstacles and choices surrounding the greater situation that made the movie ultimately exciting to watch. In Cellular, it's much more than keeping the signal alive, and it puts a guy who normally isn't doing much with his life into a situation where he has to do things you wouldn't even consider doing in a normal day. The key to "everyman" action scenes is making it look like you yourself could perform the stunts and that it is perfectly logical for you to do so without thinking. Once it starts getting into a territory where the action seems impossible, that's where you lose the audience. Chris Evans is extremely likeable in this role, and Kim Basinger...has she gotten better with age? It appears so. Add to that the great William H. Macy, who makes any movie better, and emerging B-hero Jason Statham, you've got yourself a mini-classic that will likely not be seen by many people. It's kind of a shame, but that's where you tread in the B-action genre.

2. Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Director: Alexander Witt)

I made a statement a few weeks ago about Paul W.S. Anderson in regards to Alien Vs. Predator, grouping films he had made together in one unholy trinity of celluloid ungodliness (to refresh, those are: Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, and the first Resident Evil). Now, I will say that, besides Event Horizon, there were things to like about those films, but you could see an ugliness in the director's vision, a sort of gee-whiz amateurish vision to the proceedings. I walked away from Resident Evil thinking, "Wow, that wasn't half-bad." However, half-bad is P.W.S. Anderson's MO. We should expect more after the first few tries, right? Here, he is credited with the script and as producer of the sequel, that long-time camera operator and second unit guy Alexander Witt directs.

Where has terror gone in today's cinema, notably American cinema, since Jaws and Halloween, staples of the 70s that led to gory franchises in the 80s and then, the first-person horror shoot-em-up and puzzle games that have appeared in the last 10 years? America is lagging behind the Japanese, and have started a can't-beat-em-so-join-em philosophy in horror (which I discussed in my review of Ju-On). I feel like a movie called Resident Evil: Apocalypse should be about terror and all-consuming fear, and when your mind races as to how this could have been so much better than what is displayed on screen, you know you're not having a good time at the movies.

This is a big action film with monsters in it. The zombies are background fodder to the ultimate story involving the evil Umbrella organization and their evil plans to make evil super-mutants involving their evil science, and it just so happens that Alice (Milla Jovovich) is a curiosity to the company, a woman who survived their zombifying techniques and is now a woman with powers. Umbrella is also looking fondly at Nemesis, a huge otherworldly creature (with a secret!) who they can use for utter destruction in a pinch. Under the guise of quarantine, Umbrella blocks off all of Raccoon City to find Alice, who after the first Evil woke up from a coma or something and escaped the Umbrella facility (this after a couple of hours of zombie-wasting that led to the aforementioned coma). All of this, of course, is to justify a couple more hours of zombie-wasting and fodder characters. There are SURPRISE! out-of-nowhere attacks that are the only mode of terror in American movies today, but no, what critics refer to as a sense of dread.

And once again, we come back to action scenes, the filming aspect. When can you tell a director has been lazy in filming action? When there's no sense of place, when the film is edited so quickly that you know something has happened, and it must have been cool, but you never really get to see it. We go to action films to witness what no normal human being can do, and when all the superfast action occurs at the speed of however fast an editor's hands can cut 6 frames of film or less (1/4 of a second, if you're counting at home), then the action is all up the editor. Maybe we should be watching the editor, because he's the real star. Add to that, just never knowing where everything is in relation to the other, no sense of suspense because everything is crashing into the screen as a brief scare tactic. The mind whirls at how many things are inept about this film. At least Milla Jovovich is cute.