A desperate return

ANOTHER 48 HRS.

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

Desperation and greed mark Walter Hill's "Another 48 HRS." It is the kind of movie that assumes glass breakage, gunshots, loud music and truly thumpingly and obscenely amplified punches are the equivalent of entertainment. For some they may be. For others, beware.

"Another 48 HRS." is one of several sequels released in the summer of 1990. That summer also featured "Gremlins 2," "The Two Jakes," "The Exorcist III," among others. Not the greatest company, though Nicholson and writer Robert Townshend at least attempted to make a different kind of sequel to "Chinatown." So then came the sequel to "48 HRS.," and it was assumed that it would be as funny as the original. Actually, it is more violent and nasty, and hardly funny. The film was made quickly and dispatched to theatres without a hint of what made the original tick.

For starters, Eddie Murphy looks like a carbon copy of himself, delivering his lines as the Armani-suited Reggie Hammond with the attitude of a robot. He only has a few choice moments, particularly when talking to the phone to his old buddies. It is also nice to hear his trademark laugh, but there is no pizazz, no energy in his performance. Even a recap of the bar sequence from the original (which is what made Eddie a star) feels perfunctory and delivers on the payoff of a gunshot as a punchline, not a joke.

Nick Nolte returns as the cop Cates but he seems exhausted by the proceedings, which makes no sense since his character is no longer the alcoholic he was in the original. He hardly brings any integrity to the movie - shoot one villain, beat up Reggie, shoot another, get hit with a basketball, and so on. His scenes with Murphy have no consequence or action or sense of urgency. They seem to return for the sake of returning for a sequel, not for a new original story.

Cold-hearted and wholly unbelievable from start to finish, not to mention having one of the most surprisingly crude endings in eons, and featuring several anonymous villains (including a funny cameo by Bernie Casey), "Another 48 HRS." does have some merits. Kinetic action-director Walter Hill stages moments of brutal, gory action with verve - his images move with crispness and detail. And even if they are a few choice moments, Eddie Murphy at least makes me smile when I hear his rendition of Sting's "Roxanne." Of course, we heard this same rendition in the original, so this sequel basically smacks of replicated desperation.

A new sheriff in town

48 HRS. (1982)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Eddie Murphy was only 19 when he made "48 HRS.," the truly exciting buddy-buddy cop flick that ignited his career. It did not take long when he followed his debut with "Trading Places," "Beverly Hills Cop," and the rest is history. Eddie is only part of what makes "48 HRS." a success - it helps that he is cast along with Nick Nolte, the primal force to be reckoned with.

Nolte stars as booze-swilling San Francisco cop, Cates, who can't seem to hold on to his girlfriend (Annette O'Toole), a bartender. He frequently forgets to call her. Of course, starting his rough day as a cop with liquor in his coffee doesn't help matters. One of his partners is killed in a brilliantly intense shootout in an apartment building. Cates need to recruit someone from the inside to find the killers. So he finds Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy), a former thief who belonged to this group. The trick is that Cates only has 48 hours to locate this gang or else he is out of a job. So begins the buddy-buddy cop formula that was the inspiration for "Lethal Weapon" and many other clones.

Reggie and Cates don't get along. Cates hates Reggie for many reasons, and engages in a fistfight that is among the funniest I have seen in a long time. The idea is that Cates is racist but, nevertheless, he has to work with Reggie in gathering information. What happens between the two macho, smartass guys is that a certain respect develops, despite their differences. Cates even allows Reggie to have sex with a hot dancer by paying for his room. Eventually, the handcuffed Reggie is allowed by Cates to bring a gun into a bar and intimidate an entire redneck crowd with the attitude of a sheriff.

"48 HRS." has two formidable villains, one is a coarse thief named Ganz (James Remar) and the other is his partner, a Navajo named Billy Bear (Sonny Landham). They have a lot of terrific scenes where their macho-istic behavior results in numerous chases and shootouts, including one in a metro bus! And Ganz is barely interested in sex with a prostitute - sometimes a bad guy only thinks with his other guns. And I should not fail to mention David Patrick Kelly as a hapless thief who is mostly concerned with the Porsche he has kept parked in a garage for three years!

Tough, exciting as hell, nailbiting, chock full of macho bull and damn funny, "48 HRS." is a cop movie with balls and a hell of a lot of attitude - the movie gets off on it. Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are memorable and their camaraderie adds to the overall excitement. I would not put this movie above "The French Connection" or "Serpico" or perhaps "Dirty Harry," but it comes close.

De Palma's jokey, dreamy noir

FEMME FATALE (2002)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Just when you thought sex was not sleazy anymore comes Brian De Palma back in fine form with "Femme Fatale," a highly erotic, stylish film that is really a noir comedy at heart. It is "Double Indemnity" crossed with "Vertigo" and De Palma's own "Obsession." It is loud, crude, high-pitched, self-parodic and a huge mess. It is also entertaining and absorbing, a truly dazzling cinematic treat.

Rebecca Romjin-Stamos stars as Laure Ash, a seductress that would give most seductresses in this decade a run for their money. This woman means business. At the start of the film, she poses as a photographer at the Cannes Film Festival to divert attention from a diamond heist. Laure has a tryst with a French model in the bathroom that is among the most erotic sex scenes ever filmed. This includes the removal of gold braces embedded with jewels which Laure cleverly removes and drops to the floor underneath the bathroom door so they can be whisked away by an accomplice. The robbery, the tryst, the scheduled film at a theatre and a cat toying with some snakelike microphone are all scored to the beat of a remake of Ravel's "Bolero." This sequence alone is so damn good and suspenseful that you hope this is the opening of one of De Palma's best thrillers. Ah, but if that was the case, this film would not be the guilty pleasure it finally aspires to be.

Laure escapes from the festival intact. Her accomplices know of her betrayal and want her and the jewels. Laure is then photographed in France by a professional paparazzi (Antonio Banderas), though we are not given the information immediately as to why. Then Laure is mistaken for another woman at a local church. She narrowly escapes certain death from her accomplices who want the jewels. Laure is taken in by the kind family who assume she is someone she is not. A suicide takes place. Laure (or her double) is on a plane to the United States where she meets an American ambassador (Peter Coyote). Seven years pass. Laure, now Mrs. Watts, is married to that ambassador. Banderas turns up again, involved in a double-crossing that keeps getting more and more complicated until we have given up. The key to this mystery is not clear until we get to an ending that asks us to determine what our fates might have been if we could turn back the clock.

The ending is silly and anticlimactic, but so is most of "Femme Fatale." The difference lies in the execution, and De Palma knows his notes of suspense and cross-cutting between parallel actions better than anybody since Hitchcock. "Femme Fatale" is more in line with "Dressed to Kill" and "Body Double" in its sleazy, sexual factor. Romjin-Stamos has a few nude scenes and some scenes of highly charged eroticism. She also adorns various styles of dress and hairstyles - a sort of homage to "Vertigo" times 10. Stamos's Laure is so amoral that Linda Fiorentino could take lessons from this true femme fatale. Speaking of Fiorentino, I admired her performance in "The Last Seduction" but this Laure is such a seductively sexual, sleek creature that I will not soon forget her. Stamos is not exactly a terrific actress but she has high energy and oodles of charisma - consider her a true siren in the film noir canon.

"Femme Fatale" is not a serious work nor a serious noir at all. It is a playful digression on noir - a pop carnival of heightened emotions and double twists in the form of a dream. It is a strange dream indeed, combined with De Palma's flair for whirlwind camera moves and excellent tracking shots that nobody can wield better than the master himself. It is also De Palma enjoying his parodic bent on suspense and noir, not to mention his own classic thrillers (I can only think of a Hitchcockian comparison in the playful "Family Plot," which was Hitch's joke on thrillers). As "Raising Cain" was a joke on horror, "Femme Fatale" is a joke on suspense. Don't listen to the naysayers. De Palma is back and better than ever.

I like to watch

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

An Appreciation By Jerry Saravia

 My initial review of "Body Double" went something like this: "Brian De Palma's stylish yet empty-headed exercise in thriller mechanics from the Hitchcock school of 'Vertigo' has little to offer beyond stylish mechanics. Not that it is a bad film, far from it, it is putrid but so cheaply entertaining and rudely exploitative that it is hard to forget." Well, this was a review I had written two years prior to this one but never posted or published since. Seeing the film again a few times since, I can honestly say it is a truly stylish, erotic film that offers something unique from De Palma (which he usually manages to accomplish without reservation) - he knows how to keep you hooked into the story and it is definitely hard to forget.

Craig Wasson is Jake, the listless, wan and unintelligent hero of the film, playing an actor fired from a low-budget vampire flick thanks to his outbreaks of claustrophobia. His wife is sleeping around with other men and so now he needs a place to crash. Another aspiring actor offers a UFO-shaped house on stilts as accommodation. This house also has another distinguishing feature - a telescope allows one to spy on the sexy neighbor who stripteases every night with the blinds open. Wasson is so intrigued that he watches her every night, until tragedy strikes. Of course, I would not dream of revealing any more of the plot except to say that if you've seen Hitchcock's excellent "Vertigo," then you'll know how this turns out. Even then, De Palma has a few tricks up his sleeve.

"Body Double" was one of my favorite films of 1984. When I saw it again two years ago, I thought it was a slipshod, mediocre thriller that at least kept one interest in seeing how much De Palma blatantly borrowed from good old Hitch. And I can't say I agree with that assertion anymore. "Body Double" grows on you and makes you want to watch what happens next (a phrase used by the Wasson character during a porno shoot sums it up: "I like to watch."). De Palma has that hook that grabs you tight and won't let go. Many great directors have it, including Stanley Kubrick, and even if all their films are not masterpieces, they keep you watching.

There is no reason for this film to work but Wasson's uncharacteristically strange, voyeuristic Jake (who becomes a temporary porn actor at one point) is watchable enough, particularly his trip into the porn industry where he discovers a sexy starlet (Melanie Griffith). She describes in a pre-"Boogie Nights" monologue all the acts she will and will not perform for the camera. Griffith is a dynamo to watch on screen, sizzling here with more pizazz than in any of her 90's screen efforts.

What else there is to enjoy is De Palma's fabulous tracking shots inside a mall (echoes here of "Dressed to Kill"), an ugly murder involving a power drill, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" performed as a musical backdrop for a porno flick, Guy Boyd as Detective McLean who calls Jake a "peeper," Wasson's hilariously overdone claustrophobic acts, a ponytailed Native America who follows the sexy neighbor (played with true sex appeal by Deborah Shelton) everywhere, and Dennis Franz's sleazy independent director who is ready to fire Jake at any moment.

Though this is not as monumentally good as De Palma's "Dressed to Kill," it does have plenty of style to spare and has more interesting characters than "Blow Out." I just do not know how to describe the feeling I have every time I see "Body Double." Perhaps its story of Hollywood scandal and murder, and its peek into the world of pornography, is akin to the stories that interest me ever since reading "Hollywood Babylon." In light of the masterful "Mulholland Dr.," "Body Double" certainly holds some interest in contrast. All I know is I like to watch.

Get off my plane!

AIR FORCE ONE (1997)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia
(Original review from 1998)

Most action thrillers nowadays rely on countless explosions, dozens of special-effects, wall-to-wall cartoonish violence, and enough gunfire to give Schwarzenegger a headache. The idea is to essentially give the audience a relentless assault on the senses and nothing more; some succeed such as "Mission: Impossible" and others fail like the mediocre "Broken Arrow" and the absurd "Ransom." Then there are the rare, humanistic, character-oriented thrillers like "The Fugitive," the original "Die Hard," and the spectacular "La Femme Nikita" and "The Professional," the latter two directed by action whiz Luc Besson who also helmed the offbeat "The Fifth Element." At least those films offered more than the usual slam-bam-thank-you-mam action. "Air Force One" is exactly what you might expect - explosions and action unashamedly standing in for character and plot.

"Air Force One" is an incredulous thriller; an occasionally exciting yet overbearing, feeble-minded piece where Harrison Ford plays the President of the United States as a straight, righteous man with no flaws. As he boards the Air Force One plane, Russian terrorists hijack it and hold all the presidential aides and staff members hostage in exchange for the release of an imprisoned Russian leader (Jurgen Prochnow). Ford is the kind of President who does not believe in negotiating with terrorists, especially not one played by Gary Oldman, so he fights mano-a-mano with them instead (imagine Abraham Lincoln going mano-a-mano with John Wilkes Booth). The First Lady and her daughter are also on the plane, and their lives are in danger if Ford does not comply with the terrorists.

Except for the novelty of having the President as the hero, "Air Force One" is strictly a "Die Hard"/"Under Siege" rip-off taking place on a plane, e.g., "Passenger 57," "Turbulence," and the others before it. There's nothing here that we haven't seen before and, most definitely, better. Harrison Ford makes a decent hero, as always, Gary Oldman is terrifying to watch, and there's a wonderful supporting cast including Glenn Close, Philip Baker Hall, Dean Stockwell, etc. Let's be honest, though: what we have here is a lot of machine gunfire and a high body count as compensation for a threadbare story, and a scenario as ludicrous as the one in Clint Eastwood's "Absolute Power." Close, but no cigar.

Size is all that matters

GODZILLA (1998)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
(Original review from July 1998)

Writer-director Roland Emmerich has produced some of the biggest box-office champs in history, particularly the grossly silly though often fun "Independence Day." Back in 1998, he produced and directed the most overhyped movie event of all time, "Godzilla." "Godzilla" was so overhyped in its marketing campaign (which started a year earlier) that there was no point in seeing the movie at all - you already had. In the previews, there were glimpses of Godzilla's enormous foot destroying half of New York City's streets and close-ups of its reptilian eye, and that's about all you see in the movie, folks. After Godzilla invades New York, he inexplicably and implausibly hides in the sewer and plays hide-and-seek with army helicopters. The footage is shot at night, and it is so poorly photographed that you can barely see the huge lizard at all, only a big, blurry shadow. And then there are Godzilla's numerous babies on the loose in typical velociraptor/"Jurassic Park" fashion.

For such a lavishly expensive production with state-of-the-art special effects, you would think we would at least see this creature. Godzilla stampeding through the city of New York is a great, wondrous and scary idea but the movie never follows suit. His foot is seen crushing cars, potholes, etc. How about Godzilla knocking over the Statue of Liberty or climbing the Twin Towers or lashing his tail against Times Square billboards? Nope, the filmmakers never use their imagination in conveying the destructive nature of the beast. He mostly runs through the city and often yells, and that is about it. How does this creature hide though? How does it change size and shape throughout? And how dare they allow us to develop sympathy for the monster only to then ask us to hate it at the end when all you hear is its heart beating (a lift from 1976's "King Kong")?

Another fact lost by the filmmakers is the genesis of this creature. Godzilla was a Japanese creation, a symbol of America coming on their fort and starting a war, namely World War II and the counterattack on Pearl Harbor. This new Godzilla is simply a special-effects blur with no personality and no purpose. This is Godzilla for the 90's with anemic co-stars such as Matthew Broderick, Hank Azaria and the shrill-voiced Maria Pitillo to boot? I'll stick with the original 1955 black-and-white version with Raymond Burr, thank you. At least the fire-breathing monster of that film was destructive.

Sad end for Heather O'Rourke

POLTERGEIST III (1988)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Heather O'Rourke, the cute child of the "Poltergeist" movies who died before the release of "Poltergeist III" of intestinal stenoisis, is one of those wonderful child stars who certainly had a career ahead of her. Her Carol Anne character embodied the fears of a child plagued by evil forces. The first "Poltergeist" movie was a glorious success. The second film a complete failure (though it racked up some dollars at the box-office), and the third film a complete fiasco at the box-office and with the critics. No surprise there since "Poltergeist III" is a failed experiment in subtle horror, though it is a marked improvement over the second chapter.

This time, Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is a twelve-year-old girl sent by her parents to live with her aunt and uncle (that explains the disappearance of both Jobeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson). The setting is a high-rise building in presumably Seattle, but I can't say for sure. Uncle Bruce Gardner (Tom Skerritt) loves little Carol Anne and loves his real daughter, Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle, in her first film role). He also loves his new wife, Patricia (Nancy Allen), referred to as Aunt Trish by Carol Anne. Patricia is the sister of Carol Anne's mom. What we have is one happy family, right? Wrong. Patricia despises Carol Anne and calls her a brat, particularly when things start going bump in the night. Uncle Bruce always kisses Donna on the lips, even when trying to calm her down during one of many endless climaxes towards the end of the movie (there is a hint of incest here, even if there isn't). To make matters worse, Carol Anne goes to a school for kids with emotional problems. One of her doctors assumes that Carol Anne induces mass hypnosis on people to make them think they are seeing poltergeists (!) Shall I re-read that last sentence? How can a doctor assume that? Where did he get his degree?

Lo and behold, Carol Anne is revisited by ghosts after going through some hypnosis by the good doctor, and one determined character, Kane (Nathan Davis, replacing the late Julian Beck from Part 2), who wants her to join them in the light. The light is the Other Side (coincidentally the subtitle of Part 2). It also involves endless shots of mirrors reflecting ghosts and other happenings. There are shots of parking garages with puddles leading to another world. And a lot of smoke and light flashes materialize. And then there are the shenanigans of Donna wanting to party with her friends instead of babysitting Carol Anne. And so on.

No imagination in terms of cinematography or real scares exists in this dull movie. High-rises can be scary but there is more character and color in those antiquated apartments in "Rosemary's Baby," made two decades prior to this movie. Skerritt and Allen seem to go through the motions. Heather O'Rourke overacts and seems too mature to wear her hair the same way she did in the first film (call it child abuse). Boyle looks like she would rather be somewhere else. Zelda Rubinstein returns yet again as the psychic Tangina, and gives a piss-poor performance. The saddest part of this film is that O'Rourke died before she could complete all her scenes. This lends further credence that Part III should not have existed.