There is an all-too-flippant trend in criticism to either attribute genius to something, or bin it off as a failure. Sometimes, though, a film will feature themes and ideas which are worthy of praise – even though they botched the technical production. It’s often been a theme of my reviews in the independent space – but there are occasions when its also true of films that cost millions of dollars to make!
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Being stuck in development hell will do strange things to a production. Terry Gilliam spent almost three decades trying to make this film, and at various points it seems to have had several equally fantastical stories – including one in which a marketing executive was thrown back in time to meet Don Quixote (who was fictional, but they didn’t make that version, so let it go). The seemingly cursed production went through financial backers almost as quickly as it went through lead actors – and over its various production cycles it seems as though everyone in Gilliam’s periphery was slated to play Don Quixote at one time or another.
The version that finally did get made follows a marketing executive as he tries to reconcile with two people whose lives he seemingly ruined for the sake of a student film. Before Toby (Adam Driver) arrived in a small Spanish town, and tormented an old man (Jonathan Pryce) into embodying Don Quixote, he was working as a relatively sane cobbler. While Toby feels he may have destroyed the old man’s mind, as he now refuses to be addressed as anything but Don Quixote – even by his daughter. But things are not so black and white as all that – and perhaps the Don is simply happier now, having been invited to indulge in dreams and fantasy in a way his former life had inhibited.
Exploring these themes seems to take almost as long as it took to make the film, though. It very much feels like a film that is longer than two hours – and maybe after 29 years of trying to make this film, Gilliam either lost sight of the most important aspects of the story, or just became too sentimentally attached to any of them to leave them on the cutting room floor. Either way, the wry wit and playful sense of adventure at the project’s heart are diluted to their detriment – and rather than wanting to go on living in this world like the Don, most viewers will feel happy to escape from it by the end.
The Anderson Tapes
Casting Sean Connery as a seasoned con-man who is leading an assortment of character actors in a heist sounds kitsch, but also like it could be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, much of the ending seems to have been torn up or rejigged thanks to the fears of the distributor, Columbia Pictures, who were reportedly afraid a happy ending would mean it could not be sold to television companies which required ‘bad deeds to be punished’. As a result, a collection of quirky characters you end up liking are met with brutal and sudden ends that seem out of step with the jaunty feel of much of the film.
Similarly, the idea of a crime thriller, in which a heist inadvertently threatens to expose pervasive wire-tapping and the infringement of individual rights during the Nixon era, sounds like a great idea on paper. The problem might be that it never actually made it onto paper. Everything relating to the paranoia of that time seems to have been tacked on in post-production, because it never actually interplays with the main story. Connery and his team never actually stumble onto anything – they are just observed by men in dark suits and shades, as a weird and inconsequential framing device. There are vague jibes at how the government is treating everyone perceived as a threat – including the Black Panther Party – but because it never becomes overt, and something the characters are aware of, it never goes anywhere, or seems like it is even approaching a political critique that has earned its place in an otherwise disconnected film.
Gamer
Snow Crash was a dystopian novel which coined the term metaverse, and was latched onto by many proponents of the 2020s tech-fad as a description of a desirable world. Fortunately, the dead mall of the metaverse seems to have fallen apart now, in part because it never managed to find a compelling way to encourage users to engage with it beyond mining for cryptocurrency that might be worthless by the following dawn. Looking back on this film, however, I am slightly relieved that Gamer never got the kind of prevalence that could have seen it similarly adopted by the airheaded tech-bros of Silicon Valley.
If you were going to try and make a metaverse that caught on, using it to allow a space to commercialise violence and exploitation would have probably worked a lot better than a Nintendo Wii menu screen where nobody had legs. In Gamer, it is not just the case that the rich and powerful can get away with sexual assault or murder when they go into the ‘virtual world’ (because they can already do that). It is the case that the aspirational middle classes can find ways to buy themselves a slice of that life – with brain-implant technology allowing them to pay to manipulate poor, desperate people in a ‘sex work game’, or to control people in the prison system to fight death matches.
Gamer was unfairly branded a rip-off of films like The Matrix because of its tech-driven critique of society – but I think it goes into specifics in a way that The Matrix didn’t to explicitly take aim at a definable concept. It is not taking aim at commercialised violence in video games, per se, as much as the tendency of the middle classes to unquestioningly direct violence at marginalised or exploited people, as a rite of passage to the economy’s top table. While vagueness of The Matrix means a world imagined by two trans women has since been easily appropriated by the grotesque world of men’s rights activism, nobody has been able to do that with Gamer, because it is very clear who it is taking aim at.
Sadly, despite its promising concept, Gamer is let down by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s script – which is at odds with itself, struggling to live up to its social commentary angle, while also yearning to forget it all and just deliver some good, dumb, action schlock – as the duo did with Crank, Crank: High Voltage, and to a lesser extent, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. And then there’s the cast: an absolute who’s who of Hollywood’s mid-tier – with a constellation of stars who never quite rose as high as they promised to. The Teflon-coated Gerard Butler is absurd in the lead role – but he is absurd in every lead role he is handed, and it hasn’t stopped him yet. But more frustratingly, the cooing villain played by Michael C. Hall is distractingly bad. Admittedly Hall could only play an antagonist as it was (poorly) written, but his believability was key to audiences buying any of this; and as it is, he is stilted, weird and one-dimensional.
Daybreakers
Trailers come perilously close to false advertising sometimes. I can’t help but admire the craft though – and the imagination it must have taken to find ways to make Daybreakers look as cool as it did in its theatrical teaser. Soundtracked by Placebo’s cover of Running Up That Hill, we are presented with a series of timely philosophical musings about dwindling resources in late capitalism. The premise delivered is that in a world where vampires have become the dominant species, human beings have become a finite resource. Having drained the remaining survivors in grotesque battery farms, human blood is running out, and when vampires don’t drink blood, they turn into disgusting, feral bat-monsters.
So, how long will ‘civilisation’ survive when its key lubricant runs dry? And in what form does ‘civilisation’ really exist, when the less monstrous option relies on keeping human beings in veal crates. There are moments when the film itself lives up to this billing. Sam Neil is excellent as a leading business magnate, who is financing the development of synthetic blood. When a breakthrough seems to have been found, suggesting vampires no longer need to live as cruel parasites to survive, he quashes the idea, smiling darkly that someone will always be “willing to pay more for the real thing.”
Where the film runs into trouble, however, is that it isn’t a trailer, it’s a feature – and features (especially when they have little hope of a sequel) feel an unfortunate obligation to go somewhere. To conform to a hero’s journey arc. To tie everything up in an infuriatingly neat bow. Things take a convoluted turn when Willem Dafoe turns up as a recovered vampire named Elvis (after the King himself, because without current references like that, how would the film appeal to the youth market?). As enjoyable as Dafoe always is, he and “the folks with the crossbows” he lives with are a screenwriting Get Out of Jail Free card, with Michael and Peter Spierig aware they need a mechanism to deliver a happy ending –having written themselves into a corner with a world in which that is completely implausible. Daybreakers would have worked infinitely better as a fatalistic short-film, coming into the story late, and getting out early, having heavily implied the bleakest of endings is on the horizon. But instead, it fixates on finding a way to deliver a solution that pleases no-one.
The Hateful Eight
The Hateful Eight is evidence that even with a big budget, big stars, a soundtrack by one of the greatest film composers of all time, and a script from Quentin Tarantino, you can still fail to stick the landing. On a practical basis, the film is billed as a kind of slow-moving talky, but with the trappings of a standard Tarantino film. A whodunnit, with a soundtrack and cinematography that merge Once Upon a Time in the West with The Thing. It should be great. But the ‘mystery’ element is a letdown, which violates the first of S. S. Van Dine’s famous Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories: The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.
But more of a missed opportunity for me, is that The Hateful Eight touches on a theme that could have made it an extremely prescient critique of modern America. That would be that the historical mainstream definition of equality, and reconciliation, tend to hinge upon the demonisation of another smaller group. In a society and economy which is built upon the need to exploit someone, hate cannot be eradicated – only transferred to a new other.
The set-up is billed as a classic whodunnit, with eight thoroughly dislikable characters stranded in a wood cabin during a blizzard. The characters each have various reasons to dislike each other – but as is often the case in Tarantino films, race is front-and-centre. The film’s conspicuously ugly climax sees a confederate and a major in the union army find common ground, finally bonding on just how much they hate the only woman in the room. As the two characters gargle on their own blood, they are seemingly triumphant in having just committed a lynching – and that rightfully carries an air of wretched capitulation: these losers feel like they have won the day by putting aside their differences to kill this woman, even though their petty squabble has also left them mortally wounded. The problem is Tarantino can’t help but shoot the lynching in as grotesquely fetishistic fashion as possible, he can’t help but glamourise this display of pathetic machismo – completely undermining the point (if he actually intended to make it at all). This was not helped by one of the actors who participated, Walton Goggins, unironically claiming the two survivors cooperating in the hanging was a symbolic step to erase racism, one which he called “as very uplifting… very hopeful” and as a “big step in the right direction”.