All of this plays out against the backdrop of Terri’s deception of her dad, who is convinced she’s in Palm Desert because Terri and Aunt Nina phone him on a conference call. Dad only wants the best for her, of course, but when he finds out about the deception, he declares, “I want her home, right now!”
Does that mean (a) she comes home, right now, or (b) her mom and Aunt Nina work on Dad, and, wouldn’t you know, the auditorium door opens and Dad walks in just in time for his daughter to see him from the stage halfway through her big solo. The answer of course is (b), right down to the obligatory moment when the disapproving parent in the audience nods at the gifted child onstage and does the heartfelt little nod that means, “You were right, honey.” But her dad was right about one thing. Something terrible did happen to her in Los Angeles. She made this movie.
Reign of Fire
(DIRECTED BY ROB BOWMAN; STARRING MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, CHRISTIAN BALE; 2002)
One regards Reign of Fire with awe. What a vast enterprise has been marshaled in the service of such a minute idea. Incredulity is our companion, and it is twofold: We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made.
Of course, in a story involving mankind’s battle with fire-breathing dragons in the year 2020, there are a few factual matters you let slide. But the movie makes no sense on its own terms, let alone ours. And it is such a grim and dreary enterprise. One prays for a flower or a ray of sunshine as those grotty warriors clamber into their cellars and over their slag heaps. Not since Battlefield Earth has there been worse grooming.
The story: A tunnel beneath London breaks open an underground cavern filled with long-dormant fire-breathing dragons. They fly to the surface and attack mankind. When one is destroyed, countless more take its place. Man’s weapons only increase the damage. Soon civilization has been all but wiped out; the heroes of the film cower in their underground hiding places and dream of defeating the dragons.
Along comes Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), the Dragon Slayer. He is bald and bearded, and his zealot’s eyes focus in the middle distance as he speaks. He’s the kind of tough guy who smokes cigar butts. Not cigars. Butts. He has a disagreement with Quinn Abercromby (Christian Bale), the leader of the group. I am not sure why they so ferociously oppose each other, but I believe their quarrel comes down to this: Van Zan thinks they have to fight the dragons, and Quinn thinks they have to fight the dragons but they have to look out real good, because those are dangerous dragons and might follow them home.
There’s not much in the way of a plot. Alex (Izabella Scorupco) gets grubby and distraught while standing between the two men and trying to get them to stop shouting so much and listen to her scientific theories. Meanwhile, dragons attack, their animated wings beating as they fry their enemies. Their animation is fairly good, although at one point a dragon in the background flies past the ruined dome of St. Paul’s, and you can see one through the other, or vice versa.
I’m wondering why, if civilization has been destroyed, do they have electricity and fuel? Not supposed to ask such questions. They’re like, how come everybody has cigarettes in Water World? Van Zan figures out that the dragon’s fire comes from the way they secrete the ingredients for “natural napalm” in their mouths. His plan: Get real close and fire an explosive arrow into their open mouth at the crucial moment, causing the napalm to blow up the dragon.
He has another bright idea. (Spoiler warning.) All of the dragons they see are females. Many of them carry eggs. Why no males? Because, Van Zan hypothesizes, the dragons are like fish and it only takes a single male to fertilize umpteen eggs. “We kill the male, we kill the species,” he says.
Yeah, but … there are dragons everywhere. Do they only have one male, total, singular? How about those eggs? Any of them male? And also, after the male is dead, presumably all of the females are still alive, and they must be mad as hell now that they’re not getting any action. How come they stop attacking?
I know I have probably been inattentive, and that some of these points are solved with elegant precision in the screenplay. But please do not write to explain, unless you can answer me this: Why are the last words in the movie “Thank God for evolution”? Could it be a ray of hope that the offspring of this movie may someday crawl up onto the land and develop a two-celled brain?
Reindeer Games
(DIRECTED BY JOHN FRANKENHEIMER; STARRING BEN AFFLECK, CHARLIZE THERON; 2000)
Reindeer Games is the first all-Talking Killer picture. After the setup, it consists mostly of characters explaining their actions to one another. I wish I’d had a stopwatch to clock how many minutes are spent while one character holds a gun to another character’s head and gabs. Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise between them explain so much they reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s line about Ezra Pound: “He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Just a nudge, and the movie would fall over into self-parody, and maybe work better. But I fear it is essentially serious, or as serious as such goofiness can be. It opens in prison with cellmates Rudy (Ben Affleck) and Nick (James Frain). Both are about to be set free. Nick has engaged in a steamy correspondence with Ashley (Theron), one of those women who have long-distance romances with convicts. His cell wall is plastered with photos that make her look like a model for cosmetics ads.
But then (I am not giving away as much as it seems, or perhaps even what it seems) Nick is knifed in a prison brawl, and when Rudy walks out of prison and lays eyes on Ashley—well, what would you do? That’s what he does. “I’m Nick,” Rudy tells her. Soon they make wild and passionate love, which inevitably involves knocking things over and falling out of bed and continuing on the floor. You’d think if people were that much into sex, they’d pay more attention to what they were doing.
Then there’s a major reality shift, and perhaps you’d better stop reading if you don’t want to know that … Ashley’s brother Gabriel (Gary Sinise) heads a gang of scummy gunrunners who think Rudy used to work in an Indian casino in upstate Michigan—because, of course, they think Rudy is Nick, and that’s what Nick told Ashley about himself. Gabriel and his gang try to squeeze info about the casino’s security setup out of Rudy, who says he isn’t Nick, and then says he is Nick after all, and then says he isn’t, and has so many reasons for each of his answers that Gabriel gets very confused, and keeps deciding to kill him, and deciding not to kill him, and deciding to kill him after all, until both characters seem stuck in a time loop.
There are other surprises, too, a lot of them, each with its explanation, usually accompanied by an explanation of the previous explanation, which now has to be re-explained in light of the new explanation. They all got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
The movie’s weakness is mostly in its ludicrous screenplay by Ehren Kruger. The director, John Frankenheimer, is expert at moving the action along and doing what can be done with scenes that hardly anything can be done with. Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron soldier through changes of pace so absurd it takes superb control to keep straight faces. Theron’s character looks soft and sweet sometimes, then hard and cruel other times, switching back and forth so often I commend her for not just passing a hand up and down in front of her face: smile, frown, smile, frown.