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August 7-13, 2008
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Mummy can’t buy happiness
by Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
Costner takes another swing
by Michael Phillips
 Mummy can’t buy happiness
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
Some movies should’ve signed a no-compete clause with themselves. The action beats are more like action beat-downs. One Wow cancels out the last Wow, until the Wows start looking more like lowercase wows and soon the wows become merely eh, or worse, a string of low-grade, minimally inventive aggravations that fail even to hit the level of eh. They’re more like bleh.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is bleh, though it’s likely to click with the public, given the enormous profitability of the first two in the recent Mummy cycle. Certainly Brendan Fraser’s granite-jawed, goofily satiric take on a generic serial archetype, the tomb-raiding wiseacre, didn’t hurt. Nor did Rachel Weisz simply showing up and being there, pulling laughs out of thin air and reminding everybody else that there’s a trick to acting even in a soulless evocation of another era. It’s called style.
For this third installment in the series, Weisz took a powder, leaving a role open for the similarly overqualified Maria Bello. There’s a new director this time, Rob Cohen, who did The Fast and the Furious and XXX and the underrated Bruce Lee biopic, Dragon. Tomb of the Dragon Warrior, alas, drags him down to its level, though it begins promisingly, with a pleasantly outsize prologue setting up the stuff about the ancient horrible warlord (Jet Li, encased in cement, or computer-generated fire, or digital decomposing-corpse makeup) turned to stone by a 2,000-year-old curse. Michelle Yeoh plays the good witch who re-enters the story in 1946, aiding Fraser and Bello and their grown adventurer son, played by Luke Ford (meager franchise potential with that one, I’m afraid). Also we get a trio of abominable snowfolk, and the skeletal ghosts of the emperor’s long-buried slaves, revived to fight the emperor’s stone-no-more army.
Cohen has some fine and varied vistas at his disposal, thanks to the Chinese location work. But be they back-lot and urban or green-screen and rural, the action scenes grind on forever. Neither of the film’s two credited editors can make much visual sense out of what’s happening. There’s a moment when Fraser is playing catch with himself with the special magic “eye of Shangri-La” diamond, which holds the key to something or other, and he’s not doing anything a reasonably agile performer couldn’t pull off in a single take. Yet the bit’s hacked up into four or five teeny little shots that wreck the rhythm. Are you telling me a 21st-century audience can’t sit still for 7 seconds without a cut? And by the way: You kids get offa my lawn!
The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over. Characters both digitized and human are constantly getting kicked in the head, or beheaded. The bone-crunching sound effects are cranked up to the glory-day levels of Sensurround. Except it’s Sensurround — and KickintheFace — without a breather.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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 Costner takes another swing
by Michael Phillips
A Frank Capra throwback for an era of diminished expectations, the amiable Swing Vote casts Kevin Costner as an unemployed egg processing plant worker who must decide the fate of the state of the union. The hopes and ideals of the apathetic American citizenry are pinned on this hard-drinking resident of Texico, N.M., whose wife ran out on him to pursue a singing career, and whose 12-year-old daughter, played — and very well — by Madeline Carroll, has too long been the caretaker in their coexistence.
The premise is comfortably far-fetched, i.e., just far enough. The presidential election between a Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and a Democrat from Vermont (Dennis Hopper, failing to fully suppress his innate nutso DNA) comes down to a statistical dead heat. Owing to electronic voter error — One? In the entire country? This is a fairy tale! — and a few laborious machinations by screenwriters Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern, a single vote to be cast by one Bud Johnson (Costner) will set the course for America’s future.
Both candidates, guided by their respective ruthless campaign managers (Nathan Lane for the Dems, Stanley Tucci for the Republicans), launch into scramble mode as the media circus comes to town and camps outside Bud’s trailer park domicile, desperate for a comment. Everything Bud says is over-, mis- or hyper-interpreted by the politicos, and before long the Republican is renouncing his stance on gay marriage, and the Howard Dean-type is clamping down, hard, on illegal immigration.
Directed by Stern, Swing Vote downplays the comic potential in this setup for ever greater shipments of what has come to be known as “Capra-corn,” a facile description of what you find within the populist boundaries of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the darker, messier Meet John Doe. Here the taste is closer to high-fructose Capra-corn syrup. Bud must prove to himself that he’s a worthy, informed man of the people, deserving of his fabulously well-informed and idealistic daughter. (She’s presumably Democratic; Bud may be undecided, but even with the film’s strenuous even-handedness he appears to be leaning toward the incumbent.) The Capra echoes include a semi-corrupt TV reporter (Paula Patton, who’s no Jean Arthur, but who is?). She likes Bud and adores his daughter but likes his story more.
Swing Vote lopes along and is best taken as a tale of a father and a daughter coming through a rough patch to a better place, rather than anything to do with actual real-world politics. The movie’s insistence that the outcome of the election doesn’t matter is sort of galling. The script is content to say simply that we should be smarter. Well, it’s a start, I guess. I wish Costner’s character weren’t such a puddin’-headed write-off (by design, that is; once he begins his political home-schooling, watch out!). Costner yuks it up and sings a little and plays his guitar and reasserts, amiably, his chosen corner of the global movie-star turf.
I like my political serio-comedies with some actual, verifiable politics tucked in there somewhere. But Swing Vote is far easier to take than, for example, Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, which never figured out what sort of movie it wanted to be. This one may be soft and derivative, but the actors establish a groove and stay on-message. And as certain real-life presidents have shown us, staying on-message is especially valuable when you don’t have much to say.
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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