Speed limits

In accordance with the title, I’ll make this quick: Need For Speed, based on the beloved video game of the same name, is a lot of fun whenever it kicks into high gear. Unfortunately, Need For Speed is an astonishing 130 minutes long, and every time it gets out of the car the thing just slows to a crawl, offering us way to much time to contemplate how unbelievably dumb it is.

Tobey (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) runs a garage in the upstate New York backwater of Mt. Kisco, where he and his buddies soup up cars and go racing in the streets. Tobey’s old rival, affluent asshole Dino (Dominic Cooper), comes back to town after having stolen Tobey’s girl and vamoosed to Manhattan. Dino pays poor Tobey and the buddies big money to work on a fancy Mustang, but these fellows just can’t get along. One thing leads to another, and during an impromptu race on the freeway one of the buddies gets blown up to death. Tobey winds up in jail while Dino gets off Scott-free, though everyone knows buddy’s death was Dino’s fault. Except it wasn’t entirely Dino’s fault. One of the appalling things about Need For Speed is the way it keeps making Tobey out to be the bad-ass hero and righter of injustices, when the guy repeatedly puts the lives of countless innocent strangers into harm’s way with his at times needless reckless driving and daredevil stunts. Our engagement depends on our sensing the tragedy of Tobey’s buddy’s death, but we don’t even know how many people were injured, maimed or killed during the multiple chases and crack-ups, most of which are caused by Tobey.

Anyway, the music is wildly overwrought, the movie over-long and the characterizations over the top. Dino is so bad, he only wears black! Paul’s performance is largely a matter of raspy delivery and hard stares. Imogen Poots shows up as a token love interest in misguided headscarves and a posh accent. Michael Keaton has a bit as a pirate jock radio variation on the DJ from Vanishing Point. As promised, the sequences in which Tobey’s behind the wheel—flying over Michigan off-ramps, refuelling without stopping, getting airlifted out of Utah—are truly thrilling, but everything else is a snooze. “This isn’t just about racing,” someone declares. They’re wrong. 

                   

Avengeance can be tiring

Gathering together a diverse crew of Marvel Comics all-stars—some already well into their respective movie adaptation franchises—to collectively combat the threat of intergalactic totalitarianism, The Avengers, helmed by Joss Whedon, is something of a super-hero clearing house: Want some more of that witty Iron Man? How about we throw in a little Hawkeye with that? Remember him? But the result of more bang for your buck can feel an awful lot like a monster truck rally that just never seems to end, a parade of virtually indestructible big dudes in funny suits beating the shit out of each other for 143 minutes, a marathon of dazzling fights that will leave you punch-drunk and exhausted. At least there are indeed some funny lines. And yes, Scarlett Johansson does wear latex well.

Should I describe the plot? Do you have an hour to spare? Got your super-encyclopedia handy? No? Okay, here’s the haiku version:

                        Spooky energy

                        Makes portal for aliens.

                        Super folk unite!

It begins with the flamboyant arrival of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) at a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. base where they house the Tesseract, a glowing cube that may or may not be aiding the development of weapons of mass destruction. In case you don’t know who Loki is, there’s some expository dialogue to help you out: “Loki,” gasps Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), “brother of Thor!” (If you don’t know who Thor is, you should probably just give up now.) “Freedom is life’s great lie,” says Loki, who wants humanity to kneel before him, forcibly, if necessary. So S.H.I.E.L.D.’s one-eyed director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tracks down Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to trap Loki and recover the Tesseract. Complications ensue, various feisty alpha-males learn to play nice, half of Manhattan is destroyed, et cetera.

That clever dialogue I mentioned is accompanied by much dumbness: a token gay character (Clark Gregg) who never stops reminding you that he’s the gay one; a presumably staggering civilian death count without a single image of anyone getting hurt; Iron Man’s boasting of his skyscraper powered by self-sustainable energy, while Iron Man’s jetpacks suck up more juice than a fleet of Hummers, his girlfriend regularly takes her private jet along the eastern seaboard, and the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. team whips all over the world in an invisible flying fucking aircraft carrier. Of course there are nice details, like the S.H.I.E.L.D. engineer who plays Atari when no one’s looking, a cameo by a certain beloved character actor, and Ruffalo’s pleasingly incongruent nuance, but the bulk of the pleasures to be found here are brute ones, mostly featuring Hulk ripping apart alien aircraft with a mighty roar. I’m not being facetious; Hulk ripping shit apart can be hugely entertaining. All I want to say is that there’s a point when this sassy, busy, carefully designed, emotionally shallow, mega-budget Wrestlemania pummels the viewer’s senses in such a way that it makes he or she want to transform into their own raging green Id-monster, screaming, “Okay, okay, I got my $13 worth! I don’t care if the Chitauri leader comes back after the end-credits. Let me out of here already!”

Tron: Legacy: Grid-locked!

It’s been two decades since programming genius and former ENCOM CEO Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) fell off the grid and disappeared into the Grid, leaving behind a son so baffled and dim he never bothered to check the wall behind dad’s Tron arcade game for the secret passage leading to the electronic rabbit hole. Perhaps Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) preferred being a wealthy orphan, having inherited dad’s company without having to assume any of dad’s responsibilities. When asked what he thinks happened to his father, Sam, now 27, shrugs amiably and replies, “He’s either dead or chillin’ in Costa Rica. Probably both!”

When Sam does finally follow Kevin into the infinite geometrical plain of the Grid, he actually seems more at home there than in Vancouver, where Tron: Legacy was filmed. Having simply traded one world without sunlight for another, Sam’s immediately stripped of earthly clothing, covered in flatteringly body-hugging electro-goo, given an “identidisc”—a sleek LP-sized object which slips snugly into your backpack and records everything you do—and sent off to play killer Frisbee in the neon coliseum. Sam proves a natural gladiator, literally shattering his opponents in quick succession and breaking away to find Kevin, who’s been hiding in some pocket where Clu (also Jeff Bridges), his evil renegade avatar who now controls the Grid, can’t find him. Kevin, now bearded and gray, wears comfy looking karate gear and sits barefoot and cross-legged, still pondering the possibility of “a digital frontier that will reshape the human condition” and “a system where all information is free and open… Beautiful.”

If we don’t count his appearances in a brief flashback and as Clu, whose face is digitally air-brushed to make Bridges look 27 years younger and really, really creepy, Sam’s reunion with Kevin about marks Bridges’ proper star entrance, 30 minutes or so into Tron: Legacy and not a moment too soon. 20 years trapped in a video game and Bridges still seems like a human being, while Hedlund, whose performance involves a great deal of face squishing, feels like a figure out of a video game from the very start. Bridges’ approach is so loose, funky and tender as to be refreshingly antithetical to the one-dimensional performance style that dominates these sorts of effects-heavy 3-D fantasies. Despite being a fugitive in the now fascist state of the Grid, Bridges’ Kevin retains a youthful enthusiasm for his grandiose project, which might as well be an organic farm on Mars. “You’re messing with my Zen thing, man!” The Dude abides… in virtual reality!

(There is one other notable actor of considerable skill and subtlety in Tron: Legacy, but unfortunately Michael Sheen, whose work I generally enjoy very much, here in creamy platinum Ziggy Stardust mullet, is working very hard at something that just doesn’t seem to fit. He plays this Mad Hatter nightclub owner. His clientele is uniformly sedate, but he dances around shouting and playing air guitar with his dandyish cane. As I write this it occurs to me that Sheen’s incongruous mania probably sounds pretty funny. If it is, I missed the gag the first time around.)

To be honest, though Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis’ script is somehow simultaneously underwritten and confusing, if not completely nonsensical—How do flesh-and-bone people get sucked into the Grid? And how do they eat that sucking pig?— there’s a lot about Tron: Legacy that feels like a welcome alternative to your average contemporary science fiction blockbuster. Rather than assault the viewer with frames saturated with extraneous detail and Redbull-addled editing, Joseph Kosinksi’s directorial debut, with production design by Darren Gilford, ushers us into a disco-lit world of smooth plateaus and distant thunder that’s austere enough to allow the action to become more graphically dynamic. The outfits, motorbikes and ships employed by the bad guys emanate a warm orange glow that reminds me of the inside of my toaster oven, and Daft Punk’s pleasingly percolating synth washes enhance the film’s overall liquid vibe as Sam, Kevin, and Quorra, Kevin’s lovely, almond-eyed Girl Friday (Olivia Wilde), attempt to cross the Sea of Simulation. It’s both a chase movie and the cinematic equivalent of a warm bath.

Tron: Legacy ends however not in the Grid but back in our gungy material world. Kevin’s big epiphany during his years away was that perfection needs to be cultivated rather than designed or dictated: “Bio-digital jazz, man!” The final shot, which of course alludes to another Tron sequel, implies that it’s the world we actually live in that contains the real adventure.

Prince of dumbness

Making even the Middle East safe for budget-busting spectacle cinema, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the invasion we were all waiting for. Today’s empires don’t colonize but rather colon-ize. This video game adaptation with the long-winded title, the colon and the words that follow presumably promising abundant sequels, sweeps viewers off to CGI-enhanced ancient lands and holy cities and holy shit is it ever devoid of new ideas. The opening anonymous voice-over actually begins with the words, “Long ago, in a land far away…” (You mean, um, Iran?) Three different scenarists, not to mention Jordan Mechner, the video game’s author, actually got paid to write that.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never before been such a dry screen presence, plays this street rat who gets plucked from a life of scavenging by a benevolent polygamist king and grows up to be this disturbingly inflated, giant-necked super-acrobat and ultimate fighting champ with L.A. rocker hair and stubble and a distractingly hazy British accent. Ben Kingsley’s his uncle, always looking a little fishy, wearing too much eye liner, and talking too smart for his own good. An unsanctioned invasion transpires, the king is killed by a cloak soaked in something flammable, and Jake takes the rap. With the help of Bond-girl Gemma Arterton’s ornery princess and a time-reversing knife, Gyllenhaal of course sets the record straight and saves the day. The fevered dumbness and political obliviousness wouldn’t be so bad if things weren’t so punishingly generic.

About the only thing that makes Prince of Persia relatively diverting is Alfred Molina, who keeps turning up with his entourage of black guys who don’t get to talk much. Molina mostly complains a lot about taxes but goes wild for ostriches, whom he races and kisses while fretting over their habitual depressions. Molina’s clearly been given a lot of room to stretch out with this potentially negligible supporting role, and that’s about the smartest thing director Mike Newell does here, taking his orders from the Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney juggernaut. The camera whips around a lot yet Newell can’t seem to piece together a scene with any real coherence, particularly when there’s a lot of action to track, often resorting to excessive slow-motion to cover the lack of useful coverage. Newell’s made some actual movies before, most notably Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but in joining the ranks of Michael Bay he’s managed to completely erase any sense of directorial personality. Given that video games, to my knowledge, don’t employ directors, you have to wonder if soon enough movies like Prince of Persia won’t save a few bucks and simply be helmed by robots.