Port de Cliché

Does the world really need a remake of Death Wish, and does an actor of Liam Neeson’s caliber have to play the Charles Bronson vigilante? Clint Eastwood, who played the other extrajudicial killer Dirty Harry, already repudiated the sub-genre with his recent Gran Torino. Must we sit through this again?

In the Luc Besson production Taken, Liam Neeson plays a CIA operative who opts for early retirement and moves to California to try and build a relationship with his teenage daughter. French director Besson also produces the Transporter movies — his name in the credits means we can expect loud, violent but enjoyable silliness modeled on Hong Kong action movies. Loud: check. Violent: check. Silly: check.

Enjoyable... maybe if you had a very bad day.

In the early scenes Liam Neeson makes awkward attempts at being a father, and the problem is that Neeson can’t pull off awkwardness. He turns up at his daughter’s birthday party hosted by his ex-wife (Famke Janssen), who’s remarried a zillionaire. I thought Famke Janssen had the most unique eyebrows until my friend told me that that’s how women shaped theirs in the ‘70s. A teenager with the genes of Liam Neeson (who played Rob Roy and a Jedi master — in the bad Star Wars, but still Star Wars) and Famke Janssen (who played the Russian villainess who strangled men with her thighs in a James Bond movie, then Jean Grey in X-Men) should be nine feet tall and amazing. Instead we see a gangling bowl of cold oatmeal who expresses youth by shrieking. Early in the movie she shrieks with delight; later she shrieks with terror. Oddly, the shrieks sound exactly the same.

Lonely Liam gets a visit from his ex-spook friends and they observe the American guy tradition of drinking beer and burning meat on a grill. We are not convinced. For starters, why does he have an Irish accent? Neeson can play Oskar Schindler, Dr. Kinsey, the cute homeless witness in that movie where Cher was a lawyer, but we can’t buy him as an average guy.

Then the daughter gets kidnapped in Paris, and Liam snaps into action. Conveniently the girl is on the phone with him at the exact moment she’s kidnapped, so Liam gets to deliver a long speech to her kidnapper promising to find him and kill him. The message of this movie is: If you don’t do exactly as your dad tells you, bad things will happen.

Liam uses his particular skills set to rescue his daughter from the bad men, in the process killing half of Paris — mostly Albanians, Middle Eastern types, and innocent civilians. Even if we might’ve ignored the fact that Liam plays an American with an Irish accent, we don’t think the Albanian villains would admit him into their lair when he pretends to be a French bureaucrat. Who speaks only English. While the Albanian gangsters reply in English.

In one scene the ex-CIA dad tortures a gangster by electrocution, noting that in Third World countries the voltage fluctuates, but not in Paris. That tipped me off to the real point of Taken: it’s not just a vigilante fantasy, it’s a critique of American foreign policy! If Liam’s methods are typical of CIA procedure, no wonder the world is a mess.

I  gave Vicky Cristina Barcelona more chances than I do other movies because during my unhappy adolescence I decided that Woody Allen is my father and Diane Keaton my mother. When I watched the DVD and felt nothing I figured it was the format so I went to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona at the cinema. Still nothing, just a nicely-photographed travelogue with a voice-over narration along the lines of “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” Unlike many picky moviegoers I have no problem with voiceover narration, but why bother telling me that Vicky and Cristina went to a bakery and ate delicious cookies when I can see that Vicky and Cristina are at a bakery eating delicious cookies? Is this voiceover for the visually impaired?

Then I saw Sweet and Lowdown, a Woody Allen movie from 1999 starring Sean Penn as a brilliant 1930s jazz guitarist who is an awful man, and Samantha Morton as the mute laundress who becomes his girlfriend. The artist-jerk is a cliché, and the maltreated artist’s girlfriend is another, but they are revealed to be distinct personalities with unexpected bursts of self-knowledge. Penn’s character can’t help undermining himself: he boasts about being the greatest guitarist on earth, but feels compelled to add that Django Reinhardt is better.

Morton’s character is constantly stuffing her face with sweets because she’s starved for affection. When she’s with the guitarist, the look on her face is more eloquent than any speech. When Penn reminds her not to get too attached to him because he’s an artist and needs his freedom, we know he’s really asking her to love him.

Sweet and Lowdown asks age-old questions about Art and Life: Why are many great artists jerks? Does a chaotic personal life make you a better artist? Isn’t freedom supposed to make you happy? Why do you have to choose between stability and creative fulfillment — can’t you have both?

There’s my problem with Vicky Cristina Barcelona: it asks the same questions, but it frames them in clichés. Take away these clichés and you have nothing but pretty pictures of a Spanish vacation. Two cliché American tourists visit the cliché Old World. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is a cliché impetuous blonde trying to find herself, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a cliché levelheaded brunette. They encounter the cliché hot Latin lover (Javier Bardem) who has a cliché turbulent relationship with his cliché Latin spitfire ex-wife (Penelope Cruz).

They are egged on by the cliché American housewife (Patricia Clarkson) bored with her marriage. The two girls pick up assorted clichés about tortured artists, romantic love, and finding yourself. In the end the tourists are unsure exactly what happened to them in Barcelona. So tourism, whether geographic, emotional, or aesthetic, is shallow and — what’s that word again? Cliché.

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