Why did almost every summer movie in 2001 feel tired and lame? It makes you wonder: can Hollywood even piece together a decent, dumb summer flick anymore?
I won’t lie: I enjoy a good summer popcorn movie as much as anyone else. But this year, they just seemed to get dumber and dumber.
It started out with tripe like The Mummy Returns and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Now, you shouldn’t require a great deal of concentration to stay awake through these summer movies; you don’t have to be a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to figure out the plot points, either. Yet there I was, nodding off halfway through both. My wife had to jab me in the ribs by the time the credits rolled. I couldn’t tell you what transpired in The Mummy Returns; I’m pretty sure it was about mummies, at some point. And it was only the sight of Angelina Jolie in a projectile T-shirt that kept me buoyed up through the many slow parts of Tomb Raider.
Then came Planet of the Apes. Lots of buzz about this one: Tim Burton directing, Mark Wahlberg doing the Charlton Heston thing. So what went so horribly wrong? First of all, Mr. Burton should really start examining other hues in the color wheel – something besides his cherished blues and greys. His films have simply become too dark, literally. One nice thing about the 1968 original film was the visual contrast between the desert landscape, the humans’ lush forest, and the apes’ world. Contrast is good. In the remake (or "reimagining," as they’re calling it), it’s always night. That can get really boring. Add to this a lack of development in Wahlberg’s character, a lack of chemistry with simian love-interest Ari (played by Helena Bonham-Carter), and a serious lack of any new imagining in this "reimagining," and you’ve got a real summer snoozer on your hands.
How hard is it to make a simple-minded action thriller, I ask you? Something that keeps you glued to the screen, like Gladiator? Apparently it’s not so easy. I sat there, half-lidded, watching Wahlberg dash through the jungle, Brendan Fraser running around with torch in hand, and Angelina leaping through the air yet again, and I wondered when Charlie’s Angels II would come out; at least that brainless thriller was fun, and it kept me awake! (It almost makes the director of Charlie’s Angels, McG, look like a bloody one-name genius.)
Steven Spielberg should always be counted on for good summer action, and although he didn’t direct this summer’s Jurassic Park III, his fingerprints were all over it. After all, it is his franchise, and he did manage to dump another dysfunctional family on an island, only to bring them closer together through radical dinosaur therapy. That sequel was at least a cut above The Lost World, and most of the fizzled action films which came out this summer.
Pearl Harbor was another huge-budget film that failed to stir audiences the way Hollywood hoped. In fact, it seemed to get the summer off to a screeching halt. Michael Bay was clearly looking for a Titanic-sized success, but with half-watt actors such as Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, the film got mostly soggy reviews. Many complained that the focus wasn’t on Pearl Harbor’s history, but on an insipid love story straight from a bad ‘40s melodrama. Others thought it harked back to a squeaky-clean America that never really existed. One thing’s for sure: those expecting non-stop summer action were sorely disappointed.
There was also that huge-budget musical starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor: the garish, overblown Moulin Rouge. Baz Luhrmann’s psychedelic vision of Paris’s red light district in the 1800’s was definitely eye-catching, and dizzying enough. It was kind of like Ken Russell’s 1975 rock musical, Tommy, if Ken Russell had taken maybe three times as much acid as his usual dosage.
Young audiences seemed to enjoy the revved-up versions of songs from their generation, stuff like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Like A Virgin. Older audience members scratched their heads in confusion and wondered if they were watching MTV. In truth, even in its audacity, Moulin Rouge failed to keep me awake for too long; I nodded out around the time Jim Broadbent was being chased around in a white wedding gown.
Part of the problem here is Hollywood trying desperately to play it safe. According to industry reports, nearly every successful film from 2000 was either a remake, a sequel, or based on previous material (such as Charlie’s Angels, Mission Impossible:2 or Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch). Most others were what is known as "high concept." High concept movies are plot-driven films that can usually be described in a single phrase (examples: Meet The Parents = mild-mannered suitor takes on fiancée’s tough dad; Erin Brockovich = feisty single mom takes on corporate polluters; Perfect Storm = crusty sea captain takes on huge storm). These movies made huge profits because people knew what to expect: a safe landing when the movie was over.
But this summer, virtually none of the movies following these formulae has been as big as expected. And Hollywood is probably a little scared.
Other duds in the action category included Driven, the Sylvester Stallone auto racing film that couldn’t get out of first gear; Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which boasted great computer animation but characters as flat as a kindergartener’s crayon drawing; and Evolution, a David Duchovny "sci-fi comedy" that made Ghostbusters look like Lawrence of Arabia.
The few films that did rise above the general shoddiness were: Shrek, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). Oddly, these three should all be suspect. One’s an animated film, one’s a high-concept movie based on previous material, and the other’s a Spielberg movie. Yet in a field of embarrassing summer bombs, these three managed to avoid the shrapnel and will no doubt reap nominations come Oscar time. Shrek is a clever, modern-era fairytale that lampoons Disney Inc. as well as old nursery rhyme conventions; it also features fun, engaging performances by Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy. Bridget Jones’s Diary takes a lightweight, funny book and turns it into a lightweight, funny movie that benefited immensely from Rene Zellweger’s winning performance. And A.I. is simply the most imaginative Hollywood movie to come down the pike since, well, probably E.T. You just can’t buy that kind of creativity off the rack, and you can’t crank it out in a Hollywood factory. And when all is said and done, when the theater lights went up, the difference between these three films and the other summer duds I mentioned is this: nobody in the audience (including me) was snoring.