Tag: germany

Bloodrayne II: Deliverance

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★
“Ah, this is why people hate Uwe Boll.”

Look, I speak as one of the few people on the planet who found the original Bloodrayne other than unwatchable dreck. So when I say that the sequel is a soporific, poorly-constructed, badly-executed waste of time and effort for all concerned, including the viewer – for God’s sake, listen to me. There is simply no rhyme or reason present here, right from the setting which goes from Middle Ages Europe to the Wild West without any credible explanation. Billy the Kids (Ward) is a vampire, kidnapping the local kids, in some kind of half-baked plot device that makes no sense, involving him waiting for the railroad to reach town, to spread his curse. I guess going to a town that already has trains would be too much work. Rayne has to round up a posse to take on Billy and his blood-sucking cronies. Y’know? For the kids….

Malthe is not an adequate replacement for Kristanna Loken. While there are some settings in which she would make an appropriate Rayne, this isn’t it. I can do no better than reproduce goatdog’s limerick on this issue:
She’s entirely too soft-spoken.
She pales next to Kristanna Loken.
She’s not half as pretty,
her accent is shitty,
and her ass-kicking skills appear broken.
Beyond that, even my usually forgiving nature kept stumbling into holes of logic. For instance, Rayne’s posse is mostly there because she blackmailed or threatened them, yet this apprarently creates immediate loyalty, to the point they are prepared to die on behalf of a cause they know basically nothing about. Similarly, there’s a newspaper reporter (Coppola): his third scene explains his presence, yet mostly makes you wonder exactly what he was doing in his first two scenes. The film doesn’t even have consistency of vampire lore: can they, or can they not, be killed with regular bullets? The film says no, but then…

It’s not just a bad vampire movie. Probably worse, it’s a bad Western. Overall, it’s just bad: I generally have more time for Boll than most people [National Treasure was much, much worse than House of the Dead], but even I cannot defend this on any level. The original had a lunatic sensibility, heaving everything at the screen it could find: it may not have made much sense, but you did remember it. The sooner I can forget this, the better-off I will be.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Star: Natassia Malthe, Zack Ward, Michael Pare, Chris Coppola

Bloodrayne

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★★½
“Don’t belief the hype: it’s not that bad.”

Director Boll has a rep as the worst filmmaker ever, making movies based on video games entirely for tax writeoff purposes. But have things got out of hand? I mean, Bloodrayne was in the IMDB All-time Bottom 50 before it opened. So cut him some slack – even though we may be the only folk on this planet who admit to liking bits of House of the Dead. Still, despite a fine cast [any film with Udo Kier is okay by us!], uniformly dire reviews meant we went in to this with low expectations – and made up most of the audience. Ouch. Yet, despite rumours of Madsen being drunk every day, Kingsley refusing to act with Madsen – something leftover from Species, I guess – and Rodriguez’ horrendous attempt at an English accent, this wasn’t entirely terrible.

Not great, sure; but as someone from Britain, I knew right off Rodriguez wasn’t even trying. I think all she did was limit her normal accent – wise for a Hispanic in a setting of Romania, circa 1700. Anyway, she and Madsen are hunting down Rayne (Loken), a human/vampire halfbreed seeking king of the vampires Kagan (Kingsley), who raped and killed her mother. Kagan, in turn, is after three artifacts to protect him from water, crosses and sunlight. Basically, imagine a period take on Blade with less actual imagination and more digital blood. There is certainly potential; Loken looks the part (dig her groovy swords!), as does the landscape.

However, the action borders on the incoherent, provoking little or no sense of awe or excitement. Gossip also states most of the stars signed on about two weeks’ notice, and that would certainly explain their apparent large unfamiliarity with pointy weapons. From the reviews, you’d think this was worse than Plan 9 From Outer Space, yet ignoring the anti-Boll hype, it’s largely only the poor staging of the fights which prevent this from being, at the very least, a credible rental. However, an action film with bad action is like a horror film with bad scares, rendering the other ingredients largely irrelevant.

Dir: Uwe Boll
Stars: Kristina Loken, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Rodriguez

Bandits

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★★★½
“Bad Girls – the musical.”

Not the Billy Bob Thornton/Bruce Willis vehicle of the same name, this German film is several years older. Four girls, in the titular prison band, seize the chance to escape when playing at a police function. With freedom comes unexpected fame, thanks to a tape sent to an unscrupulous record company executive. There is plenty of potential for a Natural Born Killers-style hack at the media, manafactured celebrity: the Bandits could go after the exec for exploiting them, he could encourage the cops to shoot the fugitives and increase sales, etc. Von Garnier largely avoids this, in favour of unsuccessful chick-flick emoting, and a slightly surreal approach, like a long-format pop video. Add an irrelevant subplot in which the Bandits take a hostage, play with him for a bit, then dump him, and it’s clear the script is embarrassingly weak.

Fortunately the rest of the film holds the script up, aided by Von Garnier’s good visual style – albeit one perhaps more appropriate for MTV (one scene is in danger of turning into Fame!). The characters, too, deserve better, a fascinating mix of archetypes: the tough girl, the slightly mad oldie, the ditzy sexpot, etc. They could easily slump into shallow cliche, and it’s a credit to the actresses that they don’t. The music is a key element, and isn’t terrible, though personally, I’m a long way from going out and buying the soundtrack. In the end, all the elements combine with the unstated potential to create an engaging failure. Could have been, should have been, yet there’s still enough to make it worth a look.

Dir: Katja von Garnier
Star: Katja Riemann, Jasmin Tabatabai, Nicolette Krebitz, Jutta Hoffman

Run Lola Run

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lola★★★★★
“She’s got legs… And she knows how to use them.”

The term “action heroine” moves into a whole new dimension with this movie: no gun-battles, no fight-scenes, no explosions, but it still maintains a breathless pace for almost the entire 81 minutes. Lola (Potente) needs to find DM100,000 in 20 minutes, after her boyfriend Manni (Bleibtreu) loses a bag of money he was supposes to deliver to a highly dubious character. All this is set up in about five minutes, and then Lola is off, sprinting to try and get the cash.

The key twist is the film depicting three parallel stories; all start with her leaving her apartment, but they gradually diverge, and end in three radically different conclusions. One of the film’s myriad delights is seeing how they interweave, with the differing fates of the various characters, and how tiny changes in the decisions we make can have massive consequences.

Right from the start, when Lola lobs a phone in the air and it lands spot-on the cradle, we know she has unusual powers. Her screams can shatter glass, and there’s one moment, in the casino, when she turns to the manager and looks at him. “Just one more game”, she says, and as portrayed by Potente (an amazing performance, with “future star” written through it), her gaze comes across as a force of nature more powerful than a typhoon. Lola is someone absolutely determined to have what she wants – “love conquers all”, if you like – and she even seems capable of rewinding time through sheer will, when the results go against her.

Yet, curiously, certain experiences appear to carry forward: in run #1, she is shown how to use a gun, in run #2, she needs no such tuition. A security guard we see clutching his heart in #2, is met in an ambulance in #3. Tykwer sees no need to explain any of this (is it merely being played out in Lola’s mind?), yet spotting these things are part of what makes the film so incredibly rewatchable. Even after half-a-dozen viewings, I’m still finding new facets e.g. the number she bets on in the casino, 20, is also the number of minutes she has to save Manni, since there’s simply so much crammed in.

lola2Special mention needs to be made of the soundtrack, a pumping mix of techno co-created by Tykwer, which helps drive the film along at a blistering pace, and is one of the few soundtracks I will listen to on their own. Yet there are also tender moments (probably essential to prevent the audience from hyperventilating and going into shock), which Tykwer handles with skill and aplomb. Lola is something of an aberration in his filmography, stylistically: his other work such as Winter Sleepers are much more languidly-paced, but do cover similar themes of randomness and its effects. The end result is a film which manages to be shallowly entertaining and deeply satisfying at the same time. You can enjoy it purely on a “what happens next?” level, or appreciate it as something with so much depth that it can even be viewed as a retelling of the myth of Orpheus (the evidence pointing to such an interpretation is too lengthy to go into here). Truly a film with something for everyone, and for some, like myself, it has everything.

Dir: Tom Tykwer
Stars: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Nena Petri