Capsule Reviews: End of Watch, Flight, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012)

Whether the cops in End of Watch talk like cops matters less than the joy of them talking like actual human beings. Jake Gyllenhaal and partner Michael Peña enjoy a natural chemistry that works with Ayer’s hyperactive, disjunctive direction to give the impression of normal police work on L.A. streets even as the calls to which they respond are not only blatantly cinematic on an individual basis but also link up in a building narrative arc. That frenetic direction is the result of handheld cameras, most of which appear diegetically, toted by cop and criminal alike as their colleagues attempt to dissuade the would be filmmakers from carrying around evidence against them. It figures: the one time these characters are spared the weight of allegorical importance, they strive to be symbolic stars of their own movies. Admittedly, the sheer frantic collision of shots holds the film back, but it also pays off in some nearly surreal setpieces, especially during a rescue effort in a burning house that actually manages to communicate the terror of heat forming physical barriers and exits being lost behind smokescreens at a second’s notice. Besides, the technique cannot be too distancing, as End of Watch creates an immediacy of emotional connection rare to cop films. Grade: B+

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)

Doing press for this film, Robert Zemeckis objecting to an interviewer’s question about what it was like to return to live action, asserting that he had never left. Judging from this film, though, he’s still making cartoons. The opening plane crash sequence is one of the most thrilling sequences of the year, in which the tension of mechanical failure is compounded by the question of just how functioning an alcoholic Denzel Washington’s pilot is. Washington suits the role well, his mix of natural charm and the increasing droop of his hang-dog neutral expression preparing him for the task of facing the world with a dubiously believable smile while always standing on the brink of his self-control. But Zemeckis cannot let Washington’s subtleties sell the picture, instead relying on ridiculous side players (one woman’s brief “Praise Jesus” rivals the totality of John Goodman’s “Sympathy for the Devil”-scored entrances as a Brundlefly version of The Dude and Walter Sobchak) and thudding moral twists to put forward a message far blunter and more one-sided than the real ambiguity Washington suggests. And yet, for all the plodding obviousness of Zemeckis’ choices (not to mention the hilariously on-the-nose soundtrack), Washington’s performance stayed with me after watching it. Initial, mixed-to-negative thought slowly crawl toward a positive appreciation of the honesty that Washington, if not the film around him, brings to a subject that usually fares even worse than some of the eye-rolling clichés found within this uneven picture. Who knows, maybe after a revisit I will like it even more. That I want to revisit it at all places it on a level above Zemeckis’ motion-capture work. Grade: C+

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

Freed from the debate over its much-lambasted 48fps 3D presentation, the first of Peter Jackson’s strung-out Hobbit trilogy is a stupefyingly bad film in its own right. Jackson’s inconsistent direction of the Lord of the Rings films is compounded here by the general lack of tactility stemming from the transition from a mix of CGI and physical effects to all-digital wizardry. The results make for tacky, clearly fake production design, makeup and effects, all in service to a lugubrious story that takes pains to introduce a cast of characters for whom it does not care in any way. Even Martin Freeman’s natural comic timing does not get a chance to shine, and the host of dwarves he accompanies manage to be even more indiscriminate from one another than in Tolkien’s pages. It is disastrous filmmaking, its chaotic, incoherent action setpieces nothing more than the video that will play in the waiting line for whatever amusement park ride is made out of this travesty. Grade: D

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of  scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Even the traditionally animated opening credits evoke a sense of goofy yet epic exploration, condensing the entire film to a shadowplay of whimsy and intrigue. The camera finally pulls back from this dynamic opening to reveal the 3D world, which instantly looks different from previous forays into mocap. Faces still have an awkward stiffness to them, but clear advances in the technology make for a far greater range of expressions and naturalness than the clumsy, even repellent animation that has obsessed Robert Zemeckis for whatever reason. Tintin himself (Jaime Bell) is the most porcelain-looking of all the characters, but his immediately apparent and unquenchable thirst for adventure makes his unblemished face endearing rather than creepy, and the grizzlier, more textured friends and foes he encounters on his journey make for artfully simple black/white designations of comic book heroes and less pure beings.

The animation in broader terms is simply stunning. The jam-packed mise-en-scène is never incoherent, and the detail of background characters is so good that some looked just like real people. Coordinating what Spielberg wanted took plenty of man-hours (he completed the physical filming for the motion capture by March 2009 and animation has taken up the intervening two years), but the results are breathtaking, complex yet ultimately lucid. The animation also benefits from the lighting consultation of Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, whose advice here benefits the film's gorgeous aesthetic as much as Roger Deakins' work on Wall•E made the animation not merely technically beautiful but artfully arranged. Kamiński helps lay out a noirish world in the first half that makes brilliant (in both senses of the word) use of blinding lights piercing fog and night to illuminate and disorient in equal measure. Street lamps, headlights, even muzzle flashes have a lyrical quality to them only enhanced by the danger they signify.

Combining several of the comic book stories into one narrative, Tintin moves at breakneck speed, instantly introducing a model of a ship that contains part of a guide to treasure and spiraling into a global trek by the end of the first act. The action moves at a similar pace, with even a minor apartment chase between a cat and Tintin's trusty dog Snowy working as a display of uninhibited camera movement. But soon such silly bits morph into gigantic, freewheeling pieces of constantly evolving mise-en-scène that layers utter pandemonium without the shot ever losing focus. To pick but one of several lengthy examples, a chase through the streets of Middle Eastern land "Bagghar" features Tintin, Snowy and their perpetually drunken but necessary ally Capt. Haddock (Andy Serkis, yet again putting in an expressive and multifaceted mocap performance) chasing after the stolen clues to sunken treasure. Spielberg piles on the absurdities, from a misfired rocket exploding a dam to a tank jutting into view, dragging along the building it unsuccessfully attempted to drive through. The action even splinters off in different directions, but Spielberg manages to track one character until he comes back in contact with another headed in an opposite direction, not cutting but merely arranging the progression of stunts until everything folds back to the other focal point.

It's tempting just to list all of the things that happen in any given sequence, though that would necessitate several thousand words to simply account for the objects in the frame. But the sheer giddiness of the construction is hard to shake off; after a decade and a half of more serious, dark films, Spielberg evokes open-mouthed, ecstatic wonderment for the first time since he panned up to show that brachiosaur in Jurassic Park. I went into Tintin looking forward to whatever the astonishing writing team of Edgar Wright, Steven Moffat and Joe Cornish came up with, but as much as I enjoyed their jokes—a scene with bumbling Interpol detectives Thompson and Thompson and a pickpocket achieves screwball-era verbal acrobatics—I kept coming back to Spielberg's unleashed id, where his visual creativity moves unbounded and his childlike exuberance and darker thoughts can coexist in ways they never quite managed to in, say, Hook. Through Haddock, the film touches upon the notions of failure, depression and redemption, and I noted that, after that absurd retooling of E.T., Spielberg no longer seems to have a problem with guns appearing in a film ostensibly for children (hell, Tintin himself gets off some rounds). But even those more grim facets cannot for one moment lessen the overwhelming delight of the picture, one of the purest expressions by one of the most resolutely uplifting of filmmakers.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a fear du jour-updating reboot of the apes-take-over-Earth franchise, has just enough creativity in it that its problematic whole is all the more frustrating. The only actor who genuinely fits into his role comfortably is animated out of the picture, while a good third of the film feels like padding to establish questionable, simplistic motivation for a primate proletariat revolt. Yet when the film clicks, Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds a surprisingly effective tone between the sentimental and vicious.

Swapping out fears of nuclear holocaust for the less definite disease paranoia, Rise of the Planet of the Apes repositions the root of man's fall as the noble but misguided attempt to alter nature. Will Rodman (James Franco) is a scientist for a pharmaceutical firm who engineers a virus to repair the brain, effectively curing Alzheimer's and other brain-degenerative diseases. It's a lofty goal, and one that doesn't particularly need the addition of Will's Alzheimer's-stricken father (John Lithgow, making the most of an almost unwritten part) to sell the importance of such a breakthrough. But when an aggressive test chimp forces the closure of the research, Will secrets away the ape, Caesar, who inherited his mother's altered genes and exhibits intelligence even beyond that of a young human.

This is a mercifully non-mythologizing setup, and while Rise dallies in getting toward any kind of point, the scenes with young Caesar are entertaining for one simple reason: Andy Serkis. Franco portrays the pain of watching his father slip away with all the deep human agony of watching a meter reader assign a parking ticket, but Andy Serkis, rendered by computer animation, creates a broad emotional spectrum for Caesar's development. Though the CG of the ape bodies is noticeably fake —and is it me or has CGI actually gotten worse of late? — Serkis' wonderful captured facial and body progression through childlike wonder to an increasing sense of discomfort and confinement in the cramped San Francisco house is the most thrilling mo-cap performance since, well, Serkis' last one. When Caesar later becomes a revolutionary, Serkis manages to put righteous fury on a chimp's face, even as he never loses that sense of empathy.

In order to transition from this secluded growth to a full-on revolution, however, writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver rely on logic gaps and laughable shortcuts. When the situation of raising a hyper-intelligent but confused and powerful chimp inevitably leads to a sour conclusion, Caesar finds himself in a primate shelter under the mistreatment of a one-note slop-slosher (Tom Felton), who pisses Caesar off into leading an insurrection among the captive apes. This personalization of the rebellion lacks the matching social oppression that made Conquest of the Planet of the Apes more plausible, and I wish the filmmakers had taken a more high-minded approach. Perhaps posit the eventual rebellion as a means of asserting a species' dominance, suggesting that a being capable of great intelligence will not merely carve out a place at the top of the food chain but willfully subjugate other species as conquest. This would be in-keeping with the franchise's slyly satiric exploration into mankind's thirst for supremacy, and at the very least it would offer more thematically rich motivation for a full-on war than "Draco Malfoy sprayed me with a hose."

But then, maybe war isn't really what Caesar wants at all, given how the filmmakers soften him for PG-13 purposes. And therein lies the key issue with the film: it does not appear to know what it wants to say, and because of that the plot starts changing on a whim in the film's second half. The greedy CEO of the pharmaceutical firm (David Oyelowo) does a facile reversal on Will's research solely to allow for a stronger version of the "cure" to be manufactured to both heighten the apes' intelligence further and introduce a human side effect that allows the writers to shift blame for the coming apocalypse away from the poor, misunderstood apes. This adds a number of awkward, disconnected lines that no one even tries to coherently bring together at the end, from the unnecessary second batch of test apes to Caesar's forced mercy. The movie performs such an awkward pivot that it recalls the test-audience-generated ending of the aforementioned Conquest, a film that likewise pulled its punches, at least in the theatrical cut.

Nevertheless, director Rupert Wyatt stages some impressive shots that find a richer balance of the gentle and violent than the script, from a shower of leaves falling in ironic beauty as apes swing menacingly through trees to the clever use of San Franciscan fog in the climax on the Golden Gate Bridge. Furthermore, Caesar's interactions with other apes, from his initial suffering for genetic differences to eventual leadership of enhanced primate warriors, are so transfixing that the fluff that fills the second act no longer feels like tedium when the camera stays in the cage with Caesar after dark. The impressive degree of communication exchanged between these mo-capped actors through body language and grunts makes the long stretches of technically wordless sections as gripping as the action setpieces. A late exchange of looks between Caesar and a fallen comrade attains an ephemeral poignancy that will make you mourn the loss of an ape.

These moments, great and small, offer a tantalizing glimpse into a potentially great film, one that unfortunately gets consumed in bet-hedging and plot-convenient rewrites. And if the film ultimately feels pat and trite, it has enough ideas to make the idea of a sequel more appealing than any other franchise-starter this year, save Captain America. Perhaps, like the retrovirus-exposed apes, the intelligence of the writing will have grown exponentially by then to match the potential.