The Greatest Trick

I recieved this piece of monumental sarcasm from my good friend Charles Storrar and thought it was too good not to blog. Hopefully Mark won’t mind.

Doom and Doomer:

If you see one movie about a rag tag space SWAT team despatched to investigate something gone horribly wrong at a science facility, possibly involving genetic experiments this year, make sure it’s DOOM. As ever this classic conceit is fresh and original and this offering provides a crisp new take. And as ever sadly the question must be asked, given the slew in the 90s of such well-crafted and well-received releases as Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, why on earth has it taken Hollywood so long to make more movies based on computer games?

The Rock puts in his most convincing performance since 2004’s critically acclaimed, or at least acclaimed critically (What the hell did you rent that for?) Walking Tall. Make no mistake – this man’s eyeballs can act. Their dynamic screen presence alone more than makes up for any supposed trifling inadequacies in the Rock’s other thespian credentials. How Brendan Gleason somehow fluked the part of Moody in Goblet of Fire is anyone’s guess. The Rock for goodness’ sake has not one Mad Eye but two! – Either of which would have excelled in the role. Perhaps he was deemed to be over qualified.

Karl Urban’s portrayal of the brooding Reaper meanwhile demonstrates how his master class in moral fortitude and conflicting loyalties as Eomer in The Two Towers were clearly a mere stepping stone to this similar but much greater role, fuller and more mythic than anything within Tolkien’s limited creative powers.

The skilful handling by the director of some of the story’s trickier points is also worthy of note. For example the fact that of the eighty or so scientists and civilians (including children) the team has been sent to rescue, not one of them escapes being mutilated, eaten and/or turned into zombies – could potentially be problematic. But this difficult issue is brilliantly resolved by having the viewer deeply and genuinely not care about them. Furthermore the inevitable but often unconvincing sciencey explanation bit when it comes, delivered here by that-girl-what’s-her-name-from-the-last-Bond-movie-quite-pretty-but-eyes-a-bit-bulgy in this case is well researched and believable (something about chromosomes?) Other questions are really too straightforward to warrant serious response – we know that scientists are a bit funny and not like the rest of us, so of course they would build their research facility with mazes of dark corridors, sewers and seemingly large and complex areas with only one small airlock in or out. I am embarrassed to even have mentioned it.

But let us not forget the essential humanity of this film, which for this viewer was embodied in the moment near the end when one creature about to be blown up by a proximity mine in the final second realises his plight and performs a comedy double take. In that instant this vile corruption, facing his imminent transport to that Undiscovered Country which we all must undergo, becomes as frightened and vulnerable as a little child.

Great credit must go to the director (whose name I must confess escapes me, anyway I hadn’t heard of him) and his production team for their masterful use of cliché throughout. Everything - every line, reaction, pause, fake shock, real shock, discovery of the truth of what-the-hell’s-really-been-going-on-around-here-anyway to final denouement is so well observed and executed that it is difficult to know if we have even seen this film before or not. Even the noble tradition established in the Alien/Predator franchise of having a black crewmember ill advisedly take on the monster mano a mano in unarmed combat is reprised to good and welcome effect. To create something so artfully contrived that it can slip so easily, indeed barely unnoticed, into its viewer’s consciousness must surely be the work of a master filmmaker.