The Cave

The Cave (Director: Bruce Hunt)

This is Hunt's feature debut; he worked as a second unit director on the Matrix trilogy and Dark City. Co-written by Michael Steinberg, who co-wrote Sleep With Me (most famous for Tarantino's riff on Top Gun, a piece written by his pal Roger Avary), and small-time character actor Tegan West.

You don't have to do much to make a movie like The Cave enjoyable. It's a B-movie with no aspirations, so as long as you stick some good action scenes in it and don't screw it up, it'll all be fine. However, The Cave is quite screwed up, and when a B-movie turns awful, it's hard to find anything good at all in it. Much like this year's Alone in the Dark, when the action becomes sloppy and it begins to insult the audience with its careless attitude, it certainly becomes a matter of just sitting and taking it if you've paid money to see it.

OK--simply, there's this cave that a group of explorers have found and then go missing. Then some biologists (including Lena Headey and Romanian actor Marcel Iures) find the cave in the Carpathian Mountains, and they need an expert team to help them go down an extract samples from what might be a thriving ecosystem. The expert team is led by Jack (Cole Hauser), and his team includes his brother Tyler (Eddie Cibrian), Buchanan (Morris Chestnut), Phillip (Rick Ravanello), techie Vincent (Kieran Darcy-Smith) and cutie Charlie (Coyote Ugly's Piper Perabo). Joined by photographer Alex Kim (Daniel Dae Kim from "Lost'), the crew goes down into the foreboding cave, and just like Aliens, start getting picked off one-by-one by...something. After awhile, the cave expedition becomes a matter of getting out rather than sticking around, gathering samples. Of course, they can't go back the way they came.

First off, The Cave has probably the most confusing, most inept action scenes I have ever watched. Hunt really, really enjoys extreme close-ups and super-fast editing, meaning that when the shit goes down, you are likely to see a ton of stuff all at once going, "What's that? What's that? What happened?" All you can do is rely on the movie to tell you what happened after it's all done, or just assume. We've talked a lot about action scenes in the past, and besides setting up spatial distances and clear action, the viewer should definitely feel like they are eyewitnesses to the action--not having to venture a guess or have it explained later. Movies should be an active process. Once you get into the action scenes Hunt takes you completely out of them. I wanted to strangle him.

Besides that, you have a lot of unappealing characters. The only one worth a damn is Lena Headey's and it's not like the movie rests on her shoulders. We have two hotshot dick-swingers in Tyler and Phillip. We have the stoic leader Jack, where the story demands that he start becoming heartless and borderline crazy that it's impossible for the viewer to latch onto him as the guy who's gonna' get us out of the cave. Of course, Charlie is one of those one-of-the-guys chicks who always has to prove in some way that even though she's a woman she can do all the man stuff, and better. I hate it when movies bring it to our attention that the woman can do everything a man can. If I went up to a group of feminists and said, "You know, even though she's a woman, she can still do the job," I would be gasped out of the room. This is a visual representation of that remark.

Anyway, unless you're stuck in town and have to waste two hours waiting for something more appealing like a dental appointment, I would stay away.