Contagion works as a movie because it feels more than plausible; it feels inevitable. Modern society simply presents too great a window of opportunity for an enterprising virus to catapult around the world faster than we can map it, track it, and immunize against it. That one hasn’t yet is just probabilities.

There have been many plagues throughout history, and science has done its best to minimize the damage. As our science improves, so do the viruses. They, after all, are also fighting to survive and evolve. This thriller, directed by the prodigious Steven Soderbergh, chronicles the emergence of a frighteningly-successful new flu and humanity’s response as days turn to months and a handful of casualties becomes millions. Early on, a scientist identifies it as essentially the offspring of a chance meeting between a sick bat and a sick pig – no terrorist weapon, no evil plot, just virus kismet.

We open on Gwyneth Paltrow, playing a woman in an airport bar named Beth Emhoff, who is coughing. Beth claims to be jet-lagged. Below her, a caption appears, reading “Day 2”. That’s a nice nudge from Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum). Emhoff is returning from an overseas business trip to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) in Minnesota, and I don’t ruin anything you won’t see in the very early minutes of the movie to say that she will not prove immune to what will become known as the MEV-1 virus.

There’s nothing bizarre about what MEV-1 does – the symptoms are as ordinary as the holiday sniffles. It is the speed, the ease of spreading, and its lethality that are a step beyond earlier cousins; the rest is mercilessly banal, as Beth Emhoff goes into a seizure and flops her life away on the dull kitchen floor. Soderbergh lingers on it, like watching a fish at the bottom of a boat.

For much of the time, Contagion is like this, observing its cataclysm in too-clinical a manner to produce any response in the audience other than dread or cringing. It is just so remorselessly accurate – a thriller built not on superhuman stunts and ticking-clock deadlines but on implacable logistics and the chaotic noise of human error. Death enters inside the most ordinary and unthinking behavior; one very bright, very useful character played by an Oscar-winning movie star is struck down by hotel room service. After the final action we see in their life – good-hearted but pitiful and futile – they are not borne from the stage like sweet prince Hamlet, but taped up in plastic and tossed in a ditch.

Providing much of what emotion the movie can is Damon, typically earnest and excellent as a father who has lost so much and is trying to protect the daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) he still has and not drive her away in doing so. And there is one marvelous scene that bursts with feeling, in which, at a pivotal moment in the quest for a vaccine, a woman shows her courage to the man who taught it to her.

But the rest is a brisk world tour with the key players. Centers for Disease Control director Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) tries to navigate bureaucracy, manage risk, and balance how much to tell a frightened public when he knows the cost of giving credibility to things half-understood. His associate, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), packs a bag for Minnesota to urgently track Beth’s recent movements and contacts – as one of the earliest victims, they are trying to discover ground zero by rewinding her final days. This drags out information which complicates Mitch’s grief. A World Health Organization doctor played by Marion Cotillard reviews security footage at an Asian casino – watching the now-dead interact and attempting to logic together, at each brush of contact, who was passer and passee.

And tromping around San Francisco with self-satisfied zeal is an anti-PHARMA blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who has a few things right and a few things wrong, but pastes it all together with strident assumptions about greed and collusion. This leads to a brief but fascinating little scene wherein a hedge fund representative (Randy Lowell), without even a nod or a wink, installs in Krumwiede the idea that his zeal can be profitable – much like how those talk radio hosts always preaching economic apocalypse segue seamlessly into commercials entreating you to buy gold.

It’s a parallel that enhances Contgation, demonstrating how a false belief can mutate, propagate through a population and, really, resist cure just like a virus; as a dense web of additional beliefs build atop the foundation of that first false one. People who let it past their defenses, in essence, quarantine themselves with their conspiracies away from the rest of humanity. At one point, shown lab results which contradict one of his earliest claims, Krumwiede is compelled to retort: “Well, of course YOUR lab would say that!” To allow for any other possibility would cost him too much.

The production, aided in every frame by Oscar-winning editor Stephen Mirrione, covers a broad ensemble and locations on three or four continents, on a budget that’s about a third of what gets tossed at your run-of-the-mill superhero movie these days. It’s a change-of-pace in terms of subject matter for Soderbergh, but a good match for his steady gaze and gift for broad-but-naturalistic color palettes. It is solid in all respects without being great; he has traded away the chance for epiphany or insight, and abandoned many opportunities for pathos, in exchange for relentless momentum. Cineaste that he is, he knows he is ultimately making a scary disease movie, and wants to make it as scary and disease-y as his equal desire not to insult our intelligence allows.

We see death, and panic, and looting, the true fragility of our social compact and the insidious way ordinary human contact can be made frightening. It is not gratuitously gruesome, although the filmmakers are not even done with pretty Gwyneth Paltrow after they’ve snuffed her. It’s not really about blood, it’s about sparing us the Hollywood world where nothing bad can happen to you if you are famous enough. One main character breaks a rule because his heart compels him to, like it would in any movie; only here the world doesn’t celebrate his act but sets him up for ruin – and you can understand their anger. That’s how I’d feel if I saw the empowered playing favorites while my neighbors were dying in their kitchens. But, as Contagion effectively reminds me, I would only be truly surprised if someone in his position acted any other way.

But I am noticing something as I watch trailers for upcoming films. Here is the featured cast for Steven Soderbergh’s September thriller Contagion: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne – not to mention supporting turns from star-emeritus Elliot Gould, and Winter’s Bone’s John Hawkes. Those eight actors have all either won or been nominated for Academy Awards. The ever-busy Soderbergh also has an action thriller set for release in January – Haywire. And while the star is Gina Carano, a mixed-martial arts fighter making her feature film debut, the cast around her features Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, X-Men: First Class star Michael Fassbender, and G.I. Joe star Channing Tatum. Film casts are getting conspicuously more star-studded these days, as posters swell with five, six, or more of the bold-faced names of a caliber which studios would formerly need only one or two to launch a blockbuster.

Back in the mid-90’s, it was the check cut for Jim Carrey to star in The Cable Guy that launched the so-called $20 Million Club for movie stars, and soon every agent worth their cocaine was striving to make sure their guy was either in that club or perceived as being worthy of that club. Salary quotes got set high, fixed fast and reported loud, so that if a star ever worked below-quote, it was a major artistic event. For several years, the name was the star, and so movies were getting made that had only one or two “star”-quality roles, because you just couldn’t afford any more than that. Ensembles that were rich in talent, dazzle, or both were so rare that Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s Eleven was greeted as an astonishing anomaly.

The pendulum was swinging. Studios and audiences worked together in unconscious conspiracy to undermine the caste system and make the brand the superior star to the actor. In the wake of Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings, getting John Travolta was suddenly penny-ante compared with having an action-fantasy property that had name recognition and “four-quadrant” demographic potential. People don’t talk as much about star salaries these days – and you would think that if they were going up, the agencies would be boasting. They’re not.

But I think, as I have pointed out before, that we have passed the break-point where larger and larger budgets are being applied to less and less valuable “brands”, and so the pendulum is swinging back. Not all the way to the other side again, but a little ways back towards taking advantage of the buyer’s market for acting talent and realizing creative and financial benefits from it.

Here are a few examples just from the mainstream fare of 2011: Behind new star Chris Hemsworth, Thor pulled together Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Rene Russo, and Stellan Skarsgard, not to mention trustworthy players like Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, and Colm Feore. The solidly-successful comedy Horrible Bosses combined Jason Bateman, Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Aniston, and comedy stars with built-in niche fan bases like Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day. Even Ron Howard’s underperforming comedy The Dilemma had Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Channing Tatum, and Queen Latifah. That’s a mid-budget movie with six separate stars who have all, at one point or another, been THE name launching a movie.

Even Transformers: Dark of the Moon found some cracks behind the pretty people and giant robots to wedge in the likes of John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, and treats for the character-actor connoisseur like Alan Tudyk and Ken Jeong. Have you looked at the cast list for next year’s The Dark Knight Rises yet? Because you should. And I don’t know if you noticed, but Tim freaking Robbins had a supporting role in The Green Lantern. When a movie like Super 8 comes along that doesn’t have many famous faces in it (just Friday Night Lights lead Kyle Chandler), it has to qualify as a conscious creative choice by the filmmaker, since the names are clearly available for the asking.

Part of it is a function of how massive and expensive an “A” picture can be these days – it takes a lot of artists to carry it. Part, too, is that fewer movies are being made for major theatrical release. Fewer and smaller paydays means that actors and their representatives are going to get more competitive when it comes to booking roles, and that competition appears to be manifesting itself in these bounteous ensembles.

I think that’s a good thing for Hollywood product. Special effects are impressive but you need the artistry of performers to bring humanity to any film, and so even when a movie fails as a piece of storytelling (and it can fail so easily no matter who you cast) there’s at least a lot of personality along the way. It has effectively closed the $20 Million Club for business with only rare exceptions – Daniel Radcliffe was pulling around that figure for the final Harry Potter movies because, well, do you want to be the one to try replacing him to save a buck? But that’s not payment for a name – that’s for a name and its value when wedded to a brand. Radcliffe is starting to book his post-Potter career, and you can bet his salary is not going to be the same – what’s more, it seems understood now. Just a normal part of business.

Maybe my perception is amplified by the fact that, as an obsessive movie-viewer who also works in the business, I just recognize more names. But whether audiences realize it or not, there is at least one aspect of Hollywood product in which they are genuinely getting more for their money these days. And it isn’t the 3D markup.

Contagion trailer:

Haywire trailer:

There’s a scene in X-Men: First Class that I would gladly show in the screenwriting class I teach. It happens in the first ten minutes, so it’s not as big a SPOILER as some things I could mention from the movie, but if you don’t want this pivotal scene laid out in detail for you in advance (some of you are that pure in your desires, bless you), then read no further.

The movie opens with a reprise of the scene that opened Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men –a young Erik Lensherr (Bill Milner) being separated from his family at a World War II concentration camp, and revealing his mutant magnetic abilities in a desperate rage as he twists a metal gate. This was always the key to making this franchise something more than just superheroics – you could never tell Magneto that he was completely wrong in his belief in the capacity of man for evil.

But this time around we see the immediate aftermath of that scene, where Erik is brought to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) for study. In this scene, Shaw wants Erik to show off his powers, and offers him patronizing encouragement and chocolate. He asks the boy to move a coin – the boy can’t. Now Shaw sighs, and says that for all their small-sighted bumbling, the Nazis have ways of getting results.

And now the camera switches position, and reveals a room on the other side of a glass wall filled almost floor-to-ceiling with surgical tools; a nightmare lab. In the characters’ world, this was there the whole time, but we’re seeing it for the first time. The filmmakers have chosen to expand the context, and make us dread in that exact moment what Shaw could have in mind next. We would not put it past someone to cut into a mutant to see what makes them tick.

The room didn’t change, but storytelling changed it for us, gave it additional meaning.

Now guards come in with Erik’s mother. Again, Shaw says, move the coin. Only this time, if Erik cannot, Shaw will shoot his mother. Fear is quite a motivator – Erik wants to do it more than ever. Still he cannot. Shaw counts to three. His mother tells him everything will be alright. Erik can’t do it. And Shaw pulls the trigger.

(Slightly more SPOILER-y tangent: grown-up Erik seems to have an obsession with stopping bullets, deflecting bullets, even turning missiles back on those who fire them. The movie never needs a character to say that it’s because of the one he didn’t stop here. Good writing has faith in the work it does.)

Now Erik is grieving. Now Erik is enraged. A bell on Shaw’s desk crumples. Then a filing cabinet. Then the helmets of the guards – crushing their heads and killing them.

And now all those surgical tools on the wall start to rattle and fly. And for the second time in this really cracking scene, the room is transformed by storytelling. Suddenly, the dread is not what the Nazis could do to little Erik with that stuff. It’s what Erik could do to someone, anyone, who has hurt him, with all that lethal metal. As Rorschach best said it in Alan Moore’s Watchmen: “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with *ME*!”

But Shaw doesn’t react with fear – he’s delighted. Laughing. We just learned something about him – he’s either more of a maniac than we knew, or there is something about him we don’t know yet that makes him less afraid. Later we will find out both things are true.

Erik, the future Magneto, holds onto that coin. One of a hypnotist’s most basic tricks is to put a coin in their subject’s hands and tell them that, after they count down from 10, they will drop it. Erik carries this coin for a long time, and has planned meticulously the moment when he will let it go. His fatal flaw is to think it will have enough meaning to the person he became getting there.

The message Shaw has for that little boy is “I am going to take away your childhood and make you a weapon.” And the way the writers and director use that manipulation of environment, the introduction of an object that will become a talisman representing a volcanic emotion, and the mysterious, horrific behavior of a character who will obsess us the way he obsesses his creation, is an elegantly-constructed mount for a gem of a scene that dramatizes exactly that. That someone could do that to a child, and that it cannot be undone by kind words or Charles Xavier’s unwavering friendship, gives Erik Lensherr more dignity and pathos than most comic book villains could ever dream of.

That little scene gets that much right and more, and yet never feels dense or complicated. It never looks like it’s working that hard. That’s what good screenwriting does.

Robots
Director: Chris Wedge, with co-director Carlos Saldanha
Writers: Screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, based on a story by Ron Mita & Jim McClain and David Lindsay-Abaire
Producer: Jerry Davis, John C. Donkin, William Joyce
Featuring the voices of: Ewan MacGregor, Robin Williams, Mel Brooks, Greg Kinnear, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Amanda Bynes, Jennifer Coolidge, Drew Carey, Stanley Tucci, Dianne Weist, Paul Giamatti

Robots is an absolute delight for the eyes. Through the work of production designer William Joyce, art director Steve Martino and a gifted crew of animators from the Fox-based Blue Sky, it’s a fast and colorful riot of gears, springs, bearings and dials. The world of Robot City is endlessly imaginative and machined to a fare-thee-well, the characters so tactile you want to pick them up and play with them, pining for the days when all really cool toys were made out of die-cast metal. I can practically recommend the movie simply so you can appreciate its manic geometry.

Those adults looking for sneaky pleasures while their kids soak it all up, though, will have to be satisfied with sporadically clever gags and the eye candy, because Robots has a rather lazy and overly-familiar story to tell. At times the plot seems to lurch forward simply out of habit, relying on your familiarity with its clichés to stretch across the gulf in effort between the painting of this gorgeous world and making any emotional connection to it.

Our hero is Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan MacGregor), an enthusiastic child from the day he’s “delivered” to his parents – packed in a shipping crate with assembly instructions. Raised by a dishwasher (Stanley Tucci) and a homemaker (Dianne Weist), he grows up without much luxury (his “big boy parts” are always hand-me-downs from older cousins), but he dreams of making it big someday as an inventor. His hero is Big Weld (Mel Brooks), who is giant, round, and operates like a mix between Walt Disney and Willy Wonka. He is the most famous of robot inventors, and swears that anyone who dreams hard enough can walk into his factory and present their wares.

Rodney creates a little gizmo he calls Wonderbot (Chris Wedge), which fits in a coffee pot and can handle all sorts of tasks, as long as it’s relatively calm. He hopes it can help out at work, since Dad is beginning to wear down and spare parts are hard to come by. But that doesn’t turn out too well, so Rodney decides to take the leap and move from Rivet Town to the metropolis of Robot City to seek his fortune and finally meet Big Weld.

He gets there to find it is not all like he dreamed, though – the city is vast and complicated, and the Big Weld factory not the welcoming paradise he used to see on TV. Big Weld has been “retired” to a non-participating emeritus position – that is to say, no one’s seen him in a couple of years, and the board is now dominated by the vain and ruthlessly profit-minded Phinneas T. Ratchet (Greg Kinnear).

He wants to take Big Weld Industries out of the spare parts business and exclusively sell shiny upgrades, perpetually making people feel bad about themselves if they don’t have the latest expensive equipment. And if you can’t afford it, that makes you an “outmode”, vulnerable to being harvested for scrap metal.

Rodney stands against this, and falls in with a group of “scavengers” led by Fender (Robin Williams) a manic con artist who can’t keep all his parts attached. Williams is a brilliant improviser whose work as the Genie in Aladdin years ago helped open the floodgates of celebrities “starring” in animated work, but he’s rarely more insufferable than when he’s completely unrestrained. Here, he scores plenty of laughs, and plenty of clunkers in between them. I wonder how many crucial minutes of potential plot-enrichment were sacrificed to make way for more of the “ad libs” he’s been using for years – really, do people still chuckle at Señor Wences jokes?

At one point, one of the scavengers, voiced by Drew Carey, has a transformative moment where he declares that he is sick of complaining about everything. I had a double-take – wait, was that your defining characteristic? There is such a glut of celebrity voices and characters whose motives are haphazardly sketched, it feels as if it’s just expected we will recognize them in their traditional roles and move on.

Nowhere is this more true than with the character of Cappy (Halle Berry), a board member at Big Weld Industries. She rejects Ratchet’s methods and affections, and admires and comes to love Rodney. I defy you to name one trait she has beyond that. This is not the way to make us care about characters.

It’s not that there aren’t abundant joys on screen – as with their previous movie Ice Age, the Blue Sky animators show a snappy and irreverent sense of timing heavily influenced by the Looney Tunes work of Chuck Jones. And any fan of the great Futurama knows there is a bottomless supply of gags present in a world where almost every machine is potentially a living robot. The music is eclectic and lively, from percussion work by the Blue Man Group, to cuts from Tom Waits and Stereogram, to a laugh-out-loud perfectly placed Kenny G tune.

It’s a shame that a mechanical world showing such untethered variety should deliver to us so thoroughly square a plot; it doesn’t even seem to excite the filmmakers except when it brings them to the next opportunity for visual flourish. I’ve labored the entire review to avoid this joke, but damn it, if Robots only had a heart…

Hostage
Director: Florent Siri
Writer: Doug Richardson, based on the novel by Robert Crais
Producers: Bruce Willis, Arnold Rifkin, Mark Gordon, Bob Yari
Stars: Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Jimmy Bennett, Michelle Horn, Ben Foster, Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman, Serena Scott Thomas, Rumer Willis, Kim Coates

Hostage opens with a scene which is expensive, loud and, if you bother to think about it, totally unnecessary. In it, a bushy-haired and gray-bearded Jeff Tally (Bruce Willis) is lead negotiator in an armed standoff in Los Angeles. It goes badly, people are killed, and Tally feels responsible since he gambled and was wrong.

But lest we misunderstand this to mean he is not a very good hostage negotiator, characters take care to shout lots of dialogue at us about how he is the best in the business, and has been working this case for 16 hours now after having worked two other terribly stressful cases this week alone. Okay, so we get the message – Jeff Tally is great, he’s the Eddie Van Halen of hostage negotiators. The question is, what can it possibly have to do with the story we are about to watch?

Once the plot is actually rolling, Tally is the cleanly-shaved, confidence-shattered Sheriff of a small California mountain town. During one long day he is going to have to deal with a new, dangerously unstable hostage situation as well as the kidnapping of his own family. Isn’t that motivation enough without him also having to recover his wounded mojo?

But playing dead-end middle-aged cops in photogenic small towns is not something movie stars do. The only reason a fish this big deigns to be in this small a pond is because they’re haunted. It’s just one of many signs that Hostage is unimpressive as a screw-turning potboiler, competent but favoring cliché over guts, and never able to settle on a prevailing tempo.

The crime starts small, with three joyriding petty criminal teenagers – the Kelly brothers (Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman), and their new friend, a greasy-haired budding sociopath who calls himself Mars (Ben Foster). They get some attitude from Jennifer Smith (Michelle Horn), the daughter of rich financial manager Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak), so they decide to follow her home and steal the Smiths’ pretty SUV.

But then resourceful son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) trips the silent alarm, the cop who answers finds another carjacking warrant attached to their license plate, and Mars has to go and whip two pistols out of his belt in slow-motion, like a guy who has worn out a VHS copy of Desperado, and gun down the poor officer. These kids today…

Well out of their depth now, the punks activate the security system, shuttering the place like a fortress, and start ineffectually bickering and tying people up. Walter hardly seems to need restraint, as he’s been pistol-whipped into a near comatose state. When Tally arrives and asks to negotiate, the kids shoot at his car and demand a helicopter.

He’s ready and eager to hand these loose screws off to a higher authority and go home, but here is the part where the music used to go dun dun DUNNNNNNN! – our Mr. Smith is holding a DVD that is very important to some unidentified rich ne’er-do-wells, and they don’t want any federales stumbling across it. Since no one in movies like this believes in simple plans, these crooks kidnap Tally’s family and demand he retrieve the disc for them right under everyone’s noses.

The kidnapper they hire for the task, played by Kim Coates, is the best part of the movie because he works at such a right angle to the slimy-evil personality you would expect. Hidden from start-to-finish behind a ski mask or cell phone, the performance is almost entirely vocal, and his voice is soothing, reassuring, oddly respectful. Even when handcuffing Tally to a steering wheel he remembers to say “please” and “thank you”. He’s like a man who wants with every line to make sure you understand he is very sorry about what he has to do, but if we all just chin up we can get through it together.

So Tally bluffs and improvises wildly trying to resolve the standoff and find out where the DVD is. Inside, the Kellys come up with no workable solutions, little Tommy crawls around in some amazingly large air ducts, and Mars just keeps getting freakier – he tries to woo Jennifer by glaring at her all moon-eyed and crazy-sad, like a guy who has worn out a VHS copy of The Crow. By the end of the movie he has been morphed into a near-operatic hybrid of a John Woo action hero and one of the monsters from Aliens.

I kept thinking in these patchwork referential terms; each sequence of the movie feels significantly different from the one that came before. It’s like director Florent Siri wanted each to feel like a great movie he liked even if the pieces didn’t suture together.

But helicopters buzz around and uniformed people bark orders at each other and everyone generally does their hysterical best. Save for the baffling Mars I liked the acting – Jimmy Bennett as Tommy doesn’t look like the usual Culkin-spawn child actor but a genuinely gawky and frightened little kid. He doesn’t, however, look like he ever came from the loins of Kevin Pollak – the children look like they had two different mothers, and two different fathers while they were at it.

Willis covers up his natural cocksure-ness and navigates the movie successfully but without making any special impression. It’s hardly a leap for him on the order of 12 Monkeys to play a cop with a troubled marriage and a child in jeopardy, but movie stars don’t make projects like Hostage to stretch.

The double-hostage crisis creates some imaginative worst-case scenarios, and I wish more time could have been devoted to Tally’s plate-spinning efforts to keep the bloodshed to an absolute minimum. But its focus is too scattered for that, too excited about all the possibilities contained in being a hostage movie to serve its own story to the best of its ability.

Be Cool
Director: F. Gary Gray
Writer: Peter Steinfeld, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard
Producers: Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, Stacy Sher
Stars: John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer, The Rock, Christina Milian, Harvey Keitel, André Benjamin, Robert Pastorelli, Steven Tyler, James Woods

The Hollywood cliché is known as “fish out of water”, and it describes movie stories about characters who leave their natural element, often with comedic results. You don’t see many “fish in water” stories, because what’s funny about that?

In Be Cool, we see that the answer is – not very much. In the original Get Shorty, one of a very short list of successful adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s unimpeachable prose, Chili Palmer (John Travolta) came from the streets to the sunny sidewalks of Hollywood and realized he could thrive on pure swagger. His mob past allowed him to see the hot air and doubletalk for what it was, and that the secret to being a film producer is simply to convince people that you are important.

Back for a sequel, he’s now more of a benevolent tour guide who visits the neighboring music industry. But nothing he encounters there proves to be much of a surprise. There are still gangsters and hipsters both real and posed; the clothes change but not much else. The fish stays securely in the water, and the movie never finds its footing as a result.

It tries, though, it tries awfully hard. Chock full of wearisome entertainment industry in-jokes and references to superior movies (including its predecessor), Be Cool stitches together another whimsical pastiche of hustlers, gives them each a joke or two to bludgeon us with, then sits back and hopes for the best.

Palmer, a decade of success now under his belt, is tiring of the movie business. His old friend Tommy Athens (James Woods) tries to tickle his fancy about the recording business – tells him he’s discovered a singer, Linda Moon (Christina Milian) who has got big star potential. Then, as Palmer steps into the men’s room, Athens has an unfortunate encounter with the Russian Mob.

Vengeance alone might not have been enough to drive him to action, but vengeance plus a change of scenery suits Chili Palmer’s style. He drops in to check out Linda Moon, a photogenic caterwauler (more than a little reminiscent of Beyoncé Knowles) who is wasting away singing disco covers in an ass-wiggling trio called “Chicks International”. How “Chicks International” scores a gig at the Viper Room is a puzzler, one of those cognitively dissonant happenings that follows when you’re trying to impress your L.A. location on the audience without thinking too strenuously about logic.

Palmer likes what he hears and decides to put her career on the fast track, even though he knows nothing about the music industry. As before, though, this proves no trouble at all, though he does rub a few people the wrong way as he goes about it. This is our intro to an iron-fisted manager with a similar street background (Harvey Keitel), his sidekick, who wants badly to be thought of as black (Vince Vaughn), and the bodyguard (The Rock) who doesn’t understand why people think he’s gay just because he likes red boots and performs scenes from Bring it On as audition pieces.

And Palmer rubs a few people the right way, especially Athens’ widow Edie (Uma Thurman), who misses her philandering money-sloppy husband like you might miss a really fun car. She’s determined to save their struggling independent record label…

…which is in debt to rap mogul Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer), and the list of characters just keeps growing. I haven’t even mentioned swing music-loving hitman Joe Loop (Robert Pastorelli), or Sin’s eager-to-participate brother-in-law Dabu (André Benjamin, aka André 3000 of Outkast) who handles firearms almost as dexterously as he handles his food. And then there are those Russian mobsters.

Within the ranks of the supporting players you can find some enjoyment, since they don’t need to waste time detailing the next story development to us. The Rock, continuing to surprise with his charms, takes his single joke and invests such effortless enthusiasm in it that it’s winning even when it’s not funny. He’s easily the highlight of the movie, and if he continues to select roles where he is allowed to grin at himself, he’ll enjoy a longer, healthier stay in the studio world than previous grappler-turned-thespian Hulk Hogan.

Vince Vaughn amuses too, using the batting average theory that if you do 1,000 things in the time allotted you, surely a few will be funny. Cedric the Entertainer gets some fresh chuckles from a well-worn angle – gangsters gone corporate – while Harvey Keitel looks like he’s not sure why they hired him but he’s determined to see this movie through anyway.

Although Travolta is back in slick black, and Thurman seems to get more sinewy-sexy use out of her body with each passing year, they look weary, like they are exhausted by the burden of keeping us up to speed with all the reverses and doublebacks of the been-there plot. Exposition is still exposition, no matter how stylishly dressed. She manages to boost her thin character with a few daffy details, but Travolta seems unmoored and disconnected from the graceful cool that made his first run as Chili Palmer such a comfortable fit. Inevitably, they dance together, a scene with no higher purpose than making us think of Pulp Fiction.

For all they try to put into the dance, it shines a disadvantageous light back on this product. It’s like the movie is admitting it will never really be any good on its own. No movie should consider it a success to make its audience wish it was watching a different movie. In the very first scene Palmer talks about how sequels are almost never good, particularly when they feel obligatory. But saying it is no way of outsmarting that trap, and that’s the only effort Be Cool even feels like making.

Cursed
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Producers: Kevin Williamson, Marianne Maddalena
Stars: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, Shannon Elizabeth, Mya, Kristina Anapau, Portia DiRossi, Milo Ventimiglia

For over a generation, two minutes of film have hung in judgment over the entire horror sub-genre of werewolf movies. I’m talking about the famous “transformation” scene in An American Werewolf in London where David Naughton, with clever cuts and masterful makeup, turned quite agonizingly into a werewolf before our very eyes.

A jaded modern audience might sniff and say the scene is “less realistic” than what you could achieve today. Setting aside the silly ironies in arguing what makes one werewolf transformation more “realistic” than another, I submit that it’s more convincing and entertaining to me than anything done via computer in Cursed. Muscles bulge and ripple and eyes darken and fingernails thicken in Wes Craven’s thriller, and it’s all very busy and expensive-looking, but nothing of it really provides me any gut-level feeling that a physical body is being wrenched quite against its will into a different, more savage form. That is what makes werewolves scary, and without it, you don’t have much of a scary movie.

Instead we have a bland stalking-monster story with another worn-out guess-who-the-bad-guy-is! multiple red-herring climax. Disappointing for an almost name-by-name reunion of the filmmaking talents that brought us Scream, but Cursed feels like a faded relic, the last gasp of an approach to horror that already had its day.

Ellie and Jimmy (Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg) are a young brother and sister struggling to fend for themselves after losing their parents. Ellie’s a producer on the Late Late Show, still hosted by Craig Kilborn back when this movie’s long and troubled production began. Jimmy’s in high school, unpopular, taunted by jocks and unrequited in his puppy love for the head cheerleader (Kristina Anapau). Ellie, meanwhile, is unsure whether her studly club promoter boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson) is ready for a real commitment.

Things start to change awfully quickly one full-mooned night when brother and sister get into a car accident out on a dark stretch of Mulholland Drive in the hills. They nearly rescue the car’s other occupant (Shannon Elizabeth), but then something very unfortunate happens involving a loud and hairy beast.

From then on, both find themselves craving raw meat, and enjoying heightened senses and sex appeal. Jimmy’s wound also seems to cause him to buy designer clothes and start gelling his hair. For awhile, having “the Mark of the Beast” is a positive experience for him, helping him stick up for himself at school. But this is a Wes Craven movie, after all, it’s not about to go Teen Wolf on us.

The original wolf is out busily stalking and eviscerating, while Ellie and Jimmy are progressing further down the road towards metamorphosis, and from here the plot clunks along like any non-supernatural serial killer thriller, eliminating and creating suspects for as long as it thinks it can hold your attention.

There are only a couple of moments where Cursed transcends its low expectations of itself and shows the kind of bloody cheek of Craven and writer/producer Kevin Williamson’s previous collaborations. At one point a school bully/victim relationship evolves to an amusing conclusion by, for lack of a better description, calling its own bluff. And then there is the moment of a most unexpected rude gesture.

The rest of the time it just seems exhausted with itself – like the hyper-articulate pop-sensible teens of Scream and Dawson’s Creek have grow up, gotten jobs and aren’t too much fun anymore. Their navel-gazing has lost its pubescent import and their libido trucks along more out of habit than anything else. Where once Jimmy’s drive to study up on werewolves might have led to some funny experimentation or video store chic, now he just punches a few buttons on the Internet and we have the rules for this particular movie – what silver does, what’s the importance of the full moon, and blah, blah, blah…

Craven hasn’t lost his instinct for milking tension in ordinary life settings – he’s still got enough game to make the act of pushing open a bathroom stall door nail-biting. He’s neutered, though, by a studio-imposed PG-13 re-cut. There are two parts to a really good splatter scare – the build-up where you work yourself into a lather wondering what horrible thing is going to happen, and the payoff, where something even worse happens. With those visceral punchlines yanked from his arsenal at the last minute, it’s too late to go back and make a more suggestive thrill machine a la Jaws or Alien, and what’s left is so much mush.

Rick Baker, the makeup legend behind that transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, is credited here as well and it’s shocking – what we see of the beast has none of the edge or imagination I expect from his work. Not since Harry and the Hendersons has so much of a big studio movie centered around a guy in a ratty fur suit.

As for the digital work – I pray for the day the bloom comes off and people accept that when it is really obvious digital work, it’s just as distancing as being able to see the fishing wire. It is just one technique in the effects designer’s arsenal, and has no more inherent pizzazz. As it has always been, it is up to the storytellers to provide a hell of a moment and a performer to make it emotionally-relatable. At best, effects can help an already good scene move up that one extra notch. Collectively, Cursed forgot that lesson.

Constantine
Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Story by Kevin Brodbin, Screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer
Producers: Benjamin Melniker, Lauren Shuler Donner, Erwin Stoff, Michael E. Uslan, Lorenzo DiBonaventura, Akiva Goldsman
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Djimon Hounsou, Shia LaBeouf, Max Baker, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Gavin Rossdale, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare

Hollywood needs to re-think demons, in my opinion. In almost every cinematic Last Days smackdown, demons are depicted as gruesome creepy-crawlies, Bosch/George Romero hybrids that like to jump and hiss and thrust their hideousness at you. In Constantine, based on the comic book Hellblazer, we see one get its kicks by terrorizing a poor kid on a city bus. Is it not enough that they’re going to devour your immortal soul and torment you for eternity if you sin? Do they have to look like rabid skin care ad cautionary tales while they’re doing it?

For all its attitude, and for all its colorful and imaginative visuals, in the end Constantine settles for being another movie about ugly things leaping into the camera frame accompanied by stings of music. And the war between Heaven and Hell is just another framework for shooting and one-liners. This stuff can be done well, and director Francis Lawrence keeps the energy up and doesn’t get distracted from the story by the camera whirligigs he brought with him from the music video world, but for all the money on-screen the movie doesn’t click fundamentally enough to rise above its genre trappings.

That boy on the city bus is John Constantine (played as an adult by Keanu Reeves), who from birth has had a psychic gift that allows him to see angels and demons roaming the Earth. He grew up troubled by these visions, was institutionalized, then tried to kill himself and spent two minutes in Hell. He’ll tell you it felt like a lot longer than that.

While in Hell he learned the truth about what goes on back on Earth – God and the Devil made a pact not to directly intervene with humans in their war to accumulate souls, only to subtly influence through supernaturally-powered intermediaries that walk hidden among us – “half-breeds”, Constantine calls them. Although he knows attempting suicide condemns him to Hell, Constantine hopes that by finding and destroying enough evil half-breeds, he can earn some chits with the people upstairs.

It’s said that his is the only soul Satan himself (Peter Stormare) will come to Earth to retrieve, and it won’t take long now. He has severe lung cancer, and of all people it’s the archangel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) who explains: it’s “because you’ve smoked 30 cigarettes a day since you were 15”. Reeves does his part by coughing in every third scene.

He’s not eager to go back below – “imagine being sentenced to a prison where half the occupants were sent there by you” he points out. Yes, eternal torment is bad enough, but in place where people are angry at you…

He lives in a cavernous apartment lined with runes and Sparkletts bottles filled with holy water. If I have my geography correct, it’s directly above the Shatto 39 bowling alley near the Wiltern Theatre. The bowling there is cheap and they have decent bar food, and to date I have never seen a demon.

To this odd home comes Angela Dobson (Rachel Weisz), a hardened police detective with impeccable eyeliner who every so often doesn’t sound like a British actress trying an American accent. Her twin sister has recently committed suicide, but Angela is convinced there was something more sinister to it, despite that the mental hospital where Isabel stayed has video of the suicide. In one of the grimmest bits of product placement I’ve ever seen, they actually give Angela the video and she watches it over and over again on Apple Quicktime.

Side note: Could we agree to a moratorium on naming heroines “Angela” in religious-themed thrillers?

This eventually mutates into a fate-of-all-mankind struggle involving Satan’s equivalent of God’s son Jesus, and the Spear of Destiny, the weapon that killed Jesus on the cross and has been missing since World War II. Constantine must fight off some demons, take a trip to Hell, and generally save the day.

One of the demons looks a lot like the R-Rated version of the Oogie-Boogie Man from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and there are other flashes of imagination and gallows wit. I particularly like a couple of morbidly funny billboards that pop up here and there, and Constantine’s habit of making bewilderingly specific requests – “I need a mirror! At least three feet high! Quickly!”

Reeves, to his credit, doesn’t sound like the remedial surfer for once, but many of his mannerisms seem aped from Clint Eastwood. Implacability and cold aggression are not the strongest weapons in Keanu Reeves’s acting arsenal, but he wrenches some laughs from the material. There’s a strong supporting turn from Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite, an ex-Witch Doctor who now runs a bar where angels and demons can let their hair down on neutral ground, and Peter Stormare’s finicky and childish Satan is one of the more unforgettable Princes of Darkness we have seen on screen – The Beast with just a touch of Paul Lynde.

The tone lurches from dark humor to spook house seat-buzzer fright and doesn’t do it smoothly, and the story is often needlessly slow to unfold. Constantine and Angela are contrived to meet twice before they have any reason to talk to each other, and the rules of what can and cannot happen and who is capable of doing what are never solidly explained enough to feel less than arbitrary. Eventually you just give up and watch the fireworks.

If you’re even following the plot enough to realize there must be someone on Earth commanding this conspiracy, you can unmask the villain easily enough by playing the usual game of identifying the most prominent and talented actor who has only had one useless expositional scene in the first two-thirds of the movie. If I could I’d ask for a moratorium on that old trick, too, but the movie business doesn’t shake its habits easily. I’d sooner believe that John Constantine will actually quit smoking.

Elektra
Director: Rob Bowman
Writers: Zak Penn and Stu Zicherman & Raven Metzner, based on the comic book character created by Frank Miller and the movie character created by Mark Steven Johnson
Producers: Arnon Milchan, Gary Foster, Avi Arad
Stars: Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Kirsten Prout, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Terence Stamp

Jennifer Garner has movie star charisma and has put in the time and effort to have a movie star’s career. I hope, after the confusing and inconsequential comic-book adaptation Elektra, that the piper can be considered paid, and she can move on to material more worthy of her charms and skills.

We last saw Elektra (Garner) being killed off in the movie adaptation of Daredevil, where she was sparring partner, lover, and enemy to Ben Affleck’s blind acrobatic avenger. A tycoon’s daughter and an expert in the martial arts, she was consumed by revenge when her father was murdered, Daredevil apparently the culprit.

But killing has an inconvenient way of stopping spinoff opportunities (see Catwoman’s back-from-the-dead emergence at the end of Batman Returns), so as this movie opens she’s in the pink, brought back from the dead by the blind martial arts guru Stick (Terence Stamp).

He did this with Kimagure, which is a kind of all-purpose magic power that lets masters see the future, move with superhuman speed, and revive the dead under the right circumstances. Elektra learned just enough Kimagure before Stick kicked her out of his training group to become the world’s most sought-after assassin. She even has her own assassin’s agent (Colin Cunningham), who is fast-talking and slick and sends her fruit baskets before each job; but lives, we discover to our bewilderment, on a farm.

Her new assignment is to kill a man named Miller (Goran Visnjic) and his rebellious teenage daughter Abby (Kirsten Prout). But, sensing a kinship with the girl, Elektra has a change of heart and decides to protect them from the murderous designs of The Hand.

The Hand is no less than the army of Evil itself, a mix between an old chopsocky pirate gang and a Fortune 500 company. Scheming from their tasteful boardroom, they are pursuing the Millers for reasons having to do with The Treasure, a warrior who is prophesied to tip the balance between Good and Evil. We never actually see them undertake any Evil not directly related to trying to kill our heroes, which makes them not very diversified as Embodiments of Evil go. They do scowl and snarl a lot. And as a bonus, in order to help secure a PG-13 rating, whenever a soldier of The Hand dies, his corpse disappears in a puff of antiseptic green smoke.

So Elektra takes flight and the soldiers of The Hand attack at random intervals using an array of run-of-the-mill computer-generated effects. Along the way we learn a few things about our characters, watch some confusingly-edited action, and root for Elektra to become more than a soulless but sexy killer-for-hire.

Under the guidance of the normally-efficient director Rob Bowan (the X-Files movie, Reign of Fire), Elektra suffers from many of the same flaws as its progenitor. At once too ambitious and too truncated, it sets up more than it can pay off, and treats opportunities to know our characters more as expositional place-holders, dragging the story to a halt but not adding anything to what we’re seeing once it starts up again.

Elektra has dreams about her mother’s murder – was it a warrior from The Hand or a Big Scary Demon that looks like Darkness from Legend? She has OCD, so she scrubs “every trace of DNA” off the floors of her home (this is modern Hollywood’s equivalent to Felix Unger moaning “Footprints, footprints!”) and lines up all her toiletries just so while traveling. Garner plays this with as much sincerity as is possible, so as daffy as it is to cut from her doing one-armed pull-ups to her agonizing over the positioning of her Colgate, it can’t be blamed on her.

OCD is a distracting and potentially paralyzing neurosis – this is coming from a guy who still feels compelled, when he exhales on one hand, to quickly blow with the same intensity on the same spot on his opposite hand. So since we never see it coming into play for our hero in any scene that affects the story, it comes across as existing for the sake of its own interestingness.

This is the vice of the worst of comic books and it infects this movie. There is no pretense that Elektra’s worksuit – a red-leather bustier and hiphuggers – has any use but providing the best possible viewing angles on her sashaying hindquarters. We have no explanation why Stick shows up in scenes alternatively as robed sensei, pool hustling saloon bum, or commando leader, but he does get to nod knowingly on each occasion and explain how everything that has transpired is exactly the way he intended it to. That routine gets more bamboozling as the plot unfurls. We have no idea why The Hand spies on Elektra using a giant animated bird, when hiding around the corner unobtrusively might have been the subtler choice.

Like Garner, the cast does their best to bring some credibility to the whole enterprise, but they seem largely at a loss as to why they are doing what they’re doing at any given moment. It’s unusual to find a big-budget movie err so conclusively on the side of under-explaining the story, but this movie does.

There are some appreciable if less-than-extraordinary fisticuffs, and the cinematography by Bill Roe is noticeably rich and colorful. And Garner has undeniable assets both physical and beyond. Thrown together there is enough to declare this movie not loathsome by far, but it is hardly a laudatory effort. Both its star and the superhero genre which has gained such mainstream appeal in recent years deserve better.

Alone in the Dark
Director: Uwe Boll
Writers: Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer
Producers: Shawn Williamson
Stars: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Frank C. Turner, Mathew Walker

I’m going to blow the lid off a major secret of movie critic-dom. Most critics, all rhetoric to the contrary, love movies like Alone in the Dark. We’re generally a petty and back-biting lot of junior Mr. Blackwells, and believe that no one ever really remembers how well you described a great movie, so it’s your slamming zingers which will make your legacy.

Maybe once or twice a year, a movie comes along which practically dares critics to pile on the abuse. It creates a desperate race to the bottom, and we reach into our mental thesauruses for ever-more vicious metaphors to cattily put it in its grave. Surely this is the worst movie ever made by Hollywood. Surely, never have more amateurish writing, directing and acting made such an unholy marriage. Surely, I now have a chance to compare this director’s work to worst-director-of-all-time Ed Wood! The reviews generally read like Mad Libs – “The effects are so bad, they’re like ______. Christian Slater’s acting is so bad, it’s like ________.”

The knives are out for Alone in the Dark, and the movie deserves it. It’s bad; awesomely, howlingly bad in that way that leaves a scar. But I would never claim that it’s the worst movie ever made. Someone will find a way to top it even before the calendar year’s out, I’m certain. In fact, let me turn convention on its ear, and find some nice things to say.

Gorehounds will appreciate two or three particularly bloody makeup effects. Fans of Atari’s landmark horror videogame franchise, upon which the movie is based, will note that not only is the title spelled the same, but several of the characters’ names are used, and the genre is in fact, vaguely similar. And hundreds of people worked on the movie, after all, and they have families who must be very proud of them.

But I suppose I must tell you something about the story. I’ll give it my best, although the movie does make a mighty effort to conceal the actual workings of its plot.

A terribly long opening narrative crawl tells us about an ancient but very very advanced civilization of Native Americans called the Abskani, who opened a doorway to the world of darkness and were wiped from the face of the earth by the beasts they unleashed. To make sure this didn’t happen again, they split the key to the door to the world of darkness into several pieces and scattered them around the world, which must have taken awhile on foot.

If you’re wondering how they managed this after being wiped off the face of the earth by the beasts of darkness, you are not ready for this movie.

Anyway, twenty years ago, a mad scientist named Dr. Hudgens (Mathew Walker) dragged twenty orphans down into an abandoned gold mine to perform hideous experiments on them. The supervising nun’s half-hearted objection is priceless: “I don’t know about all this…”

One of the orphans escaped, and grows up to be Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a freelance “paranormal investigator” who used to work for the super-secret government paranormal investigative unit known as Bureau 713. This unit, led by Commander Richards (Stephen Dorff, who looks like he missed nap time) is so super-secret that they can launch a military raid on a museum in the middle of a major city, using helicopters and automatic weapons, and no one finds out about it.

Carnby’s on-again-off-again flame is Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), an assistant curator at said museum, and an expert in Abskani artifacts. We know, because every time someone shows her an etched doodad provided by the prop department, she points at it and says “That’s Abskani”.

We also know she’s brainy, because she wears glasses for at least two scenes, and needs no instructions on how to use a gun. And when she sees people running into Edward’s apartment, she just opens fire, knowing somehow that they are not enthusiastic visitors, but zombies.

Yes there are zombies. And people who have been given super strength by strange larvae fused to their spine – or is that what made them zombies? Carnby shoots a superstrong guy in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses with a pistol he stole from a cop, after which he nonchalantly walks home and is never questioned by authorities about it.

Badly computer-animated creatures dubbed “The Xeno” are running around as well, eviscerating people and occasionally becoming invisible. Roger Rabbit had the power to escape from handcuffs, but only when it was funny. The Xeno can apparently become invisible, but only when it would be scary. Were they in the solid gold trunk Dr. Hudgens found at the bottom of the ocean? But the soldiers of Bureau 713, whose combat gear looks like it came from the BMX store, claim they have been hunting Xeno for years now; very secretly it would seem.

Dr. Hudgens wants to open the door to the world of darkness for some reason. There are lots and lots of Xeno on the other side of that door. Although apparently there are lots and lots of Xeno already here, which begs the question: have they just been lounging around for the 10,000 years since the last time the door was opened?

I give up. I surrender. I’m out of space and I haven’t even scratched the surface of this movie’s head-spinning paradoxes. At one point Carnby shouts “Will someone tell me what the hell is going on?” A soldier responds “We’re picking up massive readings!” Carnby replies, “That’s not what I’m asking, I want to know what’s going on!” If you can handle 90 minutes of that, 90 minutes of murky photography, voice-over designed to clear things up but which ends up creating even more questions, actors staring off camera for their cue; if you can handle Tara Reid trying to show her smarts by pronouncing it “New-FOUND-Land” and being brought along to the climactic battle for no better reason than that she’s pretty, maybe you can handle this movie. But why would you want to? We movie critics have our excuse. What’s yours?