Because they look so odd in makeup, the effect is quease inducing. They fall victims, indeed, to the Uncanny Valley Effect. This phenomenon, named in 1978 by the Japanese robot expert Masahiro Mori, refers to the ways in which humans relate emotionally with robots. Up to a certain point, he found, our feelings grow more positive the more the robots resemble humans. But beyond a certain stage of reality, it works the other way: The closer they get to humans, the more we notice the differences and are repelled by them. In the same way, the not quite convincing faces of the two white chicks provide a distraction every moment they’re on the screen. We’re staring at them, not liking them, and paying no attention to the plot. Not that attention would help.
The Whole Ten Yards
(DIRECTED BY HOWARD DEUTCH; STARRING BRUCE WILLIS, MATTHEW PERRY; 2004)
A fog of gloom lowers over The Whole Ten Yards, as actors who know they’re in a turkey try their best to prevail. We sense a certain desperation as dialogue mechanically grinds through unplayable scenes, and the characters arrive at moments that the movie thinks are funny but they suspect are not. This is one of those movies you look at quizzically: What did they think they were doing?
The movie is an unnecessary sequel to The Whole Nine Yards (2000), a movie in which many of the same actors sent completely different messages from the screen. “A subtle but unmistakable aura of jolliness sneaks from the screen,” I wrote in my review of the earlier movie. “We suspect that the actors are barely suppressing giggles. This is the kind of standard material everyone could do in lockstep, but you sense inner smiles, and you suspect the actors are enjoying themselves.”
The problem, I suspect, is that The Whole Nine Yards did everything that needed to be done with the characters and did it well. Now the characters are back again, blinking in the footlights, embarrassed by their curtain call. The movie has the hollow, aimless aura of a beach resort in winter: The geography is the same, but the weather has turned ugly.
You will recall that the earlier film starred Bruce Willis as Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski, a professional hit man who has moved in next door to a Montreal dentist named Oz (Matthew Perry). The dentist’s receptionist was Jill (Amanda Peet), a woman whose greatest ambition in life was to become a hit woman. Jimmy was in hiding from a Chicago gangster named Janni Gogolak (Kevin Pollak), who wanted him whacked.
In The Whole Ten Yards, Jimmy the Tulip and Jill are married and hiding out in Mexico, where Jill finds employment as a hit woman while Jimmy masquerades as a house-husband. That puts Willis in an apron and a head cloth during the early scenes, as if such a disguise would do anything other than call attention to him. Oz, meanwhile, has moved to Los Angeles and is married to Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge), who used to be married to the Tulip. (His first wife, played in the earlier movie by Rosanna Arquette with a hilarious French-Canadian accent, might have been useful here.)
Janni Gogolak was made dead by Oz and the Tulip in the first picture, but now his father, the crime boss Laszlo Gogolak, has been released from prison and uses all of his power to find revenge against the two men; that fuels most of the plot, such as it is. Lazlo Gogolak is played by Kevin Pollak in one of the most singularly bad performances I have ever seen in a movie. It doesn’t fail by omission, it fails by calling attention to its awfulness. His accent, his voice, his clothes, his clownish makeup—all conspire to create a character who brings the movie to a halt every time he appears on the screen. We stare in amazement, and I repeat: What did they think they were doing?
The movie’s plot is without sense or purpose. It generates some action scenes that are supposed to be comic but are not, for the inescapable reason that we have not the slightest interest in the characters and therefore even less interest in their actions. The movie is instructive in the way it demonstrates how a film can succeed or fail not only because of the mechanics of its screenplay, but because of the spirit of its making.
The Whole Nine Yards was not a particularly inspired project, but it was made with spirit and good cheer, and you felt the actors almost visibly expanding on the screen; Amanda Peet in particular seemed possessed. Here we see the actors all but contracting, as if to make themselves smaller targets for the camera. That there will never be a movie named The Whole Eleven Yards looks like a safe bet.
Wolf Creek
(DIRECTED BY GREG MCLEAN; STARRING JOHN JARRATT, NATHAN PHILLIPS; 2005)
I had a hard time watching Wolf Creek. It is a film with one clear purpose: to establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture, and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her “a head on a stick,” I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking.
It has an 82 percent “fresh” reading over at the Tomatometer. “Bound to give even the most seasoned thrill seeker nightmares” (Hollywood Reporter). “Will have Wes Craven bowing his head in shame” (Clint Morris). “Must be giving Australia’s outback tourism industry a bad case of heartburn” (Laura Clifford). “A vicious torrent of bloodletting. What more can we want?” (Harvey Karten). One critic who didn’t like it was Matthew Leyland of the BBC: “The film’s preference for female suffering gives it a misogynist undertow that’s even more unsettling than the gore.”
A “misogynist” is someone who hates women. I’m explaining that because most people who hate women don’t know the word. I went to the Rotten Tomatoes roundup of critics not for tips for my own review, but hoping that someone somewhere simply said, “Made me want to vomit and cry at the same time.”
I like horror films. Horror movies, even extreme ones, function primarily by scaring us or intriguing us. Consider Three … Extremes recently. Wolf Creek is more like the guy at the carnival sideshow who bites off chicken heads. No fun for us, no fun for the guy, no fun for the chicken. In the case of this film, it’s fun for the guy.
I know, I know, my job as a critic is to praise the director for showing low-budget filmmaking skills and creating a tense atmosphere and evoking emptiness and menace in the outback, blah, blah. But in telling a story like this, the better he is, the worse the experience. Perhaps his job as a director is to make a movie I can sit through without dismay. To laugh through the movie, as midnight audiences are sometimes invited to do, is to suggest you are dehumanized, unevolved, or a slackwit. To read blasé speculation about the movie’s effect on tourism makes me want to scream like Jerry Lewis: “Wake up, lady!”
There is a line, and this movie crosses it. I don’t know where the line is, but it’s way north of Wolf Creek. There is a role for violence in film, but what the hell is the purpose of this sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty? The theaters are crowded right now with wonderful, thrilling, funny, warmhearted, dramatic, artistic, inspiring, entertaining movies. If anyone you know says this is the one they want to see, my advice is: Don’t know that person no more.
Oh, I forgot to mention: The movie doesn’t open on December 23, like a lot of the “holiday pictures,” but on Christmas Day. Maybe it would be an effective promo to have sneak previews at midnight on Christmas Eve.