It is a failing of mine that I persist in bringing logic to movies where it is not wanted. During Romeo Must Die, I began to speculate about the methods used to buy up the waterfront. All of the property owners (of clubs, little shops, crab houses, etc) are asked to sell, and when they refuse, they are variously murdered, torched, blown up, or have their faces stuck into vats of live crabs. Don’t you think the press and the local authorities would notice this? Don’t you imagine it would take the bloom off a stadium to know that dozens of victims were murdered to clear the land?
Never mind. The audience isn’t in the theater for a film about property values, but to watch Jet Li and other martial arts warriors in action. Romeo Must Die has a lot of fight scenes, but key moments in them are so obviously special effects that they miss the point. When Jackie Chan does a stunt, it may look inelegant, but we know he’s really doing it. Here Jet Li leaps six feet in the air and rotates clockwise while kicking three guys. It can’t be done, we know it can’t be done, we know he’s not doing it, and so what’s the point? In The Matrix, there’s a reason the guy can fly.
There’s a moment in Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx when he uses grace and athletic ability to project his entire body through the swinging gate of a grocery cart, and we say, “Yes!” (pumping a fist into the air is optional). Here Jet Li tries the Chan practice of using whatever props come to hand, but the football game looks over-rehearsed and a sequence with a fire hose is underwhelming (anybody can knock guys off their feet with a fire hose).
Closing notes: Many windows are broken in the movie. Many people fall from great heights. There are a lot of rap songs on the sound track, which distract from the action because their lyrics occupy the foreground and replace dialogue. Killers on motorcycles once again forget it is dangerous for them to chase cars at high speed, because if they get thrown off their bikes, it will hurt. The reliable Motorcycle Opaque Helmet Rule is observed (when you can’t see the face of a character because the visor is down, chances are—gasp!—it’s a woman). No great romantic chemistry is generated between the young lovers, and there is something odd about a martial arts warrior hiding behind a girl’s bedroom door so her daddy won’t catch him. Delroy Lindo projects competence, calm, and strength in every scene. This movie needs a screenplay.
Running Free
(DIRECTED BY SERGEI BODROV; STARRING CHASE MOORE, JAN DECLEIR; 2000)
Running Free tells the life story of a horse in its own words. We do not find out much about horses in this process, alas, because the horse thinks and talks exactly like a young boy. The movie is another example, like Disney’s Dinosaur, of a failure of nerve: Instead of challenging the audience to empathize with real animals, both movies supply them with the minds, vocabularies, and values of humans. What’s the point?
As the film opens, the horse, later to be named Lucky, is born in the hold of a ship bound for German Southwest Africa, today’s Namibia. It is 1911, and horses are needed to work in the mines. Lucky has to swim ashore while still a nursing colt. He glimpses daylight for the first time, and tells us, “I didn’t see anything green in this desert land.” Hello? Lucky has never seen anything green at all in his entire life.
But the movie keeps making that same mistake, breaking the logic of the point of view. Adopted by a young orphan stable boy named Richard (Chase Moore), Lucky finds himself in a stable of purebreds ruled by a stallion named Caesar. Lucky wants to make friends with the stallion’s daughter, Beauty, but, “I was only the stable boy’s horse. I wasn’t good enough to play with his daughter.” And when Lucky’s long-missing mother turns up, Caesar attacks her, apparently in a fit of class prejudice, although you’d think a stallion would be intrigued by a new girl in town, despite her family connections.
Will the mother die from the attack? “I stayed with her all night, praying that she would survive,” Lucky tells us. Praying? I wanted the movie to forget the story and explore this breakthrough in horse theology. I am weary of debates about whether our pets will be with us in heaven, and am eager to learn if trainers will be allowed into horse heaven.
The human characters in the movie are one-dimensional cartoons, including a town boss who speaks English with an Afrikaans accent, not likely in a German colony. His son is a little Fauntleroy with a telescope, which he uses to spy on Richard and Lucky. Soon all the Europeans evacuate the town after a bombing raid, which raises the curtain on World War I. The horses are left behind, and Lucky escapes to the mountains, where he finds a hidden lake. Returning to the town, he leads the other horses there, where at last they realize their birthright and Run Free.
Uh, huh. But there is not a twig of living vegetation in their desert hideout, and although I am assured by the movie’s press materials that there are wild horses in Namibia to this day, I doubt they could forage for long in the barren wasteland shown in this film. What do they eat?
I ask because it is my responsibility: Of all the film critics reviewing this movie, I will arguably be the only one who has actually visited Swakopmund and Walvis Bay, on the Diamond Coast of the Namib Desert, and even ridden on the very train tracks to the capital, Windhoek, that the movie shows us. I am therefore acutely aware that race relations in the area in 1911 (and more recently) would scarcely have supported the friendship between Richard and Nyka (Maria Geelbooi), who plays the bushman girl who treats Lucky’s snakebite. But then a movie that fudges about which side is which in World War I is unlikely to pause for such niceties.
I seem to be developing a rule about talking animals: They can talk if they’re cartoons or Muppets, but not if they’re real. This movie might have been more persuasive if the boy had told the story of the horse, instead of the horse telling the story of the boy. It’s perfectly possible to make a good movie about an animal that does not speak, as Jean-Jacques Annaud, the producer of this film, proved with his 1989 film The Bear.
I also recall The Black Stallion (1979) and White Fang (1991). Since both of those splendid movies were cowritten by Jeanne Rosenberg, the author of Running Free, I can only guess that the talking horse was pressed upon her by executives who have no faith in the intelligence of today’s audiences. Perhaps Running Free would appeal to younger children who really like horses.
Rush Hour 2
(DIRECTED BY BRETT RATNER; STARRING JACKIE CHAN, CHRIS TUCKER; 2001)
Hour (1998) earned untold millions of dollars, inspiring this sequel. The first film was built on a comic relationship between Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, as odd-couple cops from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. It was funny because hard work went into the screenplay and the stunts. It was not funny because Chris Tucker is funny whenever he opens his mouth—something he proves abundantly in Rush Hour 2, where his endless rants are like an anchor around the ankles of the humor.
Jackie Chan complained, I hear, that the Hollywood filmmakers didn’t give him time to compose his usual elaborately choreographed stunts in Rush Hour 2, preferring shorter bursts of action. Too bad Brett Ratner, the director, didn’t focus instead on shortening Tucker’s dialogue scenes. Tucker plays an L.A. cop who, on the evidence of this movie, is a race-fixated motormouth who makes it a point of being as loud, offensive, and ignorant as he possibly can be.