Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
3/23/08
Since
the clamps were let off of movie content at the end of the censorship era
in the late 60's, we've always had violent, gory horror and action movies.
But during times of particular national distress (Vietnam/Watergate, the
Reagan-era climax of the cold war, and, uh, now) certain sub-genres have
consistently risen from their graves. Flesh-eating zombies, world-destroying
plagues, and the post-apocalyptic future popularized by the Mad Max
series have all taken on lives of their own. But by offering us a
world-destroying plague that gives rise to a flesh-eating Mad Max society,
writer/director Neil Marshall (in his first outing since being declared
a horror genius for his work on The Descent) struggles to make anything
about his aptly titled new film Doomsday pop. We have literally
seen it all before, and if you're pulling this much of your movie out of
the recycle bin, the execution had better be top-notch. Unfortunately,
with a few notable exceptions, Doomsday is as creaky as it is familiar.
Sometime
around the present, Scotland is ravaged by the Reaper Virus, which turns
people into puffy-faced makeup effects before killing them and spreads
like the common cold. Mortified, England chooses containment over
finding a cure and walls off the entire country, also surrounding it with
mines and a no-fly zone, then happily forgets about their dying neighbors
to the North. Disgusted by their heartless behavior, the rest of
the world turns their backs on England and the country descends into poverty
and chaos. Then, in 2035, the Virus turns up in London. One
of the very few to make it over the wall was young Eden Sinclair, and as
an adult (Rhona Mitra) she's become one of those leather-clad killing machines
without which you can't have one of these movies. Summoned by friend
and mentor Bill Nelson (Bob Hoskins), she's recruited to lead a mission
authorized by the Prime Minister (Alexander Siddig) and his sinister right-hand
Canaris (David O'Hara) to head back over the wall and track down the still-living
people they've found in satellite photos (to be alive at all, these survivors
must have either a cure or an immunity). If she and her team doesn't
deliver results within 48 hours, London will be walled-off and flooded.
On the other side of the wall, Sinclair discovers two different civilizations:
one a more depraved version of the Mad Max movies led by the ultra-violent
weirdo Sol (Craig Conway) and a bunch of medieval throwbacks who answer
to Kane (Malcolm McDowell), the scientist who stayed behind to try to cure
the disease. As petulance spreads through the streets of London,
can England be saved not only from the virus, but the evil maniacs calling
the shots?
Doomsday
starts with a bang: the spectacularly staged walling-off of Scotland
is shocking in its' heartlessness and desperation, but it writes a check
the movie to come can't cash. Later flashes of the disease-ravaged
London retrieve some of that apocalyptic energy, and Siddig makes a great
in-over-his-head PM. But as his very important right-hand, O'Hara
is so wooden I'm forced to rely on my recollection of his fine performance
in The Departed to assure myself he's a
professional actor. And nothing that happens on the Scottish side
of the wall has any ticking clock urgency. McDowell's Kane has an
interesting backstory, insisting to his followers that it's the world OUTSIDE
Scotland that's come to an end, but the time we spend in his personal Medieval
Times just doesn't go anywhere and the actor is coasting on his trademark
malevolence.
The
Road Warrior society is quite the opposite end of the spectrum,
so over-the-top violent and sadistic that it swings between intentional
and unintentional hilarity while some of what we see is unwatchably unpleasant
and some is such overkill it's just dull. Give Conway his due, he's
ALL IN as a maniacal villainous punching bag, and Sol is such a loser and
buffoon that watching him scream his guts out every time he fails becomes
more and more entertaining as the movie goes on. But he generates
ZERO menace, and a sequence where he stages a burlesque show for his assembled
troops is worse than just establishing Sol as someone who should be embarrassed
at his own idiocy: it pulls the whole movie into the same situation.
Because the villains are interchangeable goons and our heroes not much
more distinctive, the early battles between them are hard to invest in.
Marshall sure does love to watch all the different ways people can explode
into puddles of blood and grue, but the only action sequence he stages
effectively is the Big Finish: as impressive an imitation Road
Warrior chase/fight as you'll see.
Mitra,
who I've liked back to the days when I first saw her on TV's The Practice,
has presence to spare: in fact, Eden is so tough and so capable,
she never even seems challenged by her opponents. I haven't seen
The Descent, but I've read so much about its' reputation as feminist
allegory that it's hard not to look at Doomsday as presenting us
with a struggle between overcompensating, impotent male figures like Sol
and the idealized Strong Woman Eden. The problem with that dichotomy,
of course, is that it's really just two ends of the same adolescent dominance
fantasy, and doesn't really say much of anything (“I am woman, hear me
decapitate?”). Whether it's intended to represent anything or not,
the society Sol has built (one which I couldn't help thinking would have
been a thousand times better if he'd just once whipped out a DVD copy of
The Road Warrior and fessed up to where he'd gotten his ideas) is
oddly asexual given how all its' members are dressed in fetishwear and
keep wagging their tongues at the heroes. Sure, they can talk the
talk, but this world with no signs of anyone under the age of 20 doesn't
seem to be walking the walk.
Doomsday
is all over the map, going wherever the source material it's stealing from
at that moment leads. It's also slipshod enough that I couldn't tell
the characters played by actors I didn't know apart without a scorecard
(“Who is that guy who's suddenly kicking butt and quipping during the climactic
car chase?”, I wondered), and at least half the movie's plot threads sputter
out before they're actually resolved. It's sufficiently fast-paced
to hold one's attention and sports a couple good performances and that
great car chase, but I think I'd rather do what Sol is probably somewhere
in the world doing right this minute: watch The Road Warrior
again. |
