Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. Here’s another one I’m seeing next week. I have no expectations one way or another. Antoine Fuqua so far hasn’t made any impact on me as a filmgoer. I honestly don’t have any impression of him. He’s Teflon. No-stick. Will this change that for me? Let’s see what Benjamin’s got to say:
Moriarty, What goes wrong when you take a perfectly good concept for a movie (even if it's stolen from a perfectly terrible movie) and then try to pile more perfectly good concepts on top of it? You get a movie like Shooter which starts as one movie, shifts gears partway through, shifts gears again and then at the end finds itself back where it started, leaving you feeling horribly muddled about the whole experience. I went into Shooter largely on the credit that I think Mark Wahlberg is an incredible actor and that I've been waiting for Antoine Fuqua to knock something out of the park ever since I saw his potential in Training Day and in parts of Tears of the Sun. Now, I loved Training Day and thought it was a fantastic movie but there was a point at the end where Fuqua decided, "Ah hell, I know this is a gritty, realistic character drama but why don't we have Ethan Hawke dive off a 3 story building. It'll look cool." It was the single wrong turn of that film for me but the kind of decision that I feel has haunted his movies ever since in one genre-uncertain picture after another. Shooter was no exception. This was a movie that could have been an amazingly brutal genre film. With Fuqua's attention to detail and deft touch when it comes to raw, violent action, Shooter could have been amazing, so long as it stayed true to what it was doing. But somewhere along the line Shooter went from being an action/thriller to being an issues film and not only did it lose its focus, it lost its edge. I could almost feel the point in the film where the filmmakers knew that all of us were wrapped up in the suspense and decided that now was the time to let the cat out of the bag: they were here to make an issues film and goddammit, if they had to package it up like "Most Wanted" meets "The Fugitive", they'd do just that. All-talk, no-bullshit characters became blackest-of-evil monologuers. One character becomes a rapist and a screaming psychotic out of nowhere with no express reason other than to make the audience hate him more. Danny Glover, who up until that point had been an interesting and devious son of a bitch, became just another big bad guy full of "I can do anything and get away with it." This is to say nothing of Ned Beatty who played a US senator who spends so much time talking about wiping his ass with the American people that you're forced to wonder where he ever gets the time to take a shit. Wahlberg's character, who's narrowly focused vengeance was so easy to side with in the beginning changes gears like a cheerleader gone to college when he realizes that there were more serious, world-issues to be discussed than his little tragedy of being set up, blamed for an assassination and left for dead. And discuss them he does. Even the badass sniper has to take time out to moralize. Am I mad that things turned out this way? You're goddamned right and it is exclusively because this movie could have been so very good if it had just stuck to its primary direction. One of these days Fuqua needs to figure out that if he wants to make an American action/thriller film, he should make an American action/thriller film because he's goddamned good at action. And if he wants to make a movie about the atrocities in Africa, he should make a movie about the atrocities in Africa, he should do just that because he'd be fucking great at that too. Just someone please explain to him that he can't have his cake and eat it too. Morality movies can't be summed up in the last half hour and action films can only take so many monologues, trying to fit them both in sacrifices both. Fuqua could be one of the most gifted filmmakers of our generation if he'd just pick a genre and make the movie instead of getting hooked onto a project and trying to insert his genre. To close this out, you'll have noted no mention of King Arthur. That is because I understand the cluster-fuck that show went through in production and I don't blame Fuqua for it. I just do my best to pretend it didn't happen and hope everyone else will do the same. Hoping For More Next Time -Benjamin Elial
