Here comes Tom Hardy to kick the crap out of you. No, really. Or not really. So hard to know. I quite liked Warrior AND Burke and Hare, both of which opened this week. My reviews of them for MSN Movies are at the titular (or is it eponymous?) links.
I really enjoyed your review of “Warrior”. Everyone I know who has seen the film has been very surprised by how moving, detailed, and exciting the story is. “Warrior” is both a solid sports movie, and a very astute look at a broken family.
Just saw Huston’s FAT CITY for the first time, and I think it’s another fight film whose story line isn’t a “welter of clichés.” However, this may be because the film doesn’t exactly HAVE a story line.
I suspect BURKE AND HARE won’t come to my neck of the woods, but I’ll keep an eye out. Sounds like great fun.
I don’t have much interest in this film, even with GK’s intriguing review, though I DO think Hardy is a real talent and I’d be excited should he find his way to better, more complicated material. Dude’s got chops.
I have to say, O’Connor’s got a pretty good track record as far as making straightforward dramas that may seem cliched on the surface but still work, including, as you say, MIRACLE (once you got past, unfortunately, just how little Patricia Clarkson had to work with. On the other hand, Kurt Russell was terrific, and it was nice to see a Disney sports movie for once where the opponents weren’t some villainous Other), so I definitely will see WARRIOR.
The embedded trailer for Burke seemed to put the lie to your praise, Glenn…could it really be so misleading? I mean,a 19th century shart joke? Ugh…
Not my favorite joke in the picture, Andy. But the anachronistic stuff, from the way the hangman breaks the fourth wall in the first minutes of the picture, and beyond, is what made me think of the Hope/Crosby pictures, “Road To Utopia” in particular, so…
Well, I guess it would have been more to my point to say “shart joke,” period. But you couldn’t have Trading Places without blackface and “jacuzzi” jokes, and I suppose I wouldn’t throw that baby out with the jacuzzi water…I guess I was just hoping to hear that the easy, puerile jokes in the trailer represent a minority portion of the film. The trailer was pretty unappealing, somewhere between the trailers for Zookeeper and the upcoming Hysteria.
On another topic, speaking of Landis’s docwork, props for Slasher…
I liked but didn’t LOVE “Warrior.” Seemed to be woefully missing a second act– After all this nice buildup with Edgerton and his financial woes, his Steven Bauer-esque buddy, his teaching job, etc, and all the Nolte/Hardy stuff, it seems to skip right ahead to the MMA contest. Even the one surefire thing in this kind of movie– a rousing training montage– was sort of bungled with that four-pane throwaway; Is there even one frame of Nolte actually training Hardy? My kingdom for a Stallone Climbing the Mountain “Hearts on Fire” sequence.
Also Hardy is getting vaguely annoying. He’s like a ‘roided up Simon Rex trying to out-mug 2006 Ben Foster. I don’t know, I liked Edgerton a lot better.
I have to admit that part of what won me over about “Warrior” was that it took me by surprise—wasn’t expecting much from it at all. So what material is actually there—and there’s a good deal of stuff, the movie’s almost two hours twenty minutes—compensated for its ostensible sins of omission, which I don’t think Lex is entirely off-base about. The point concerning Edgerton is well-taken too; without giving too much away, his is the less showy, more demanding role (as great as Hardy is, half of his work is just showing up LOOKING like that), and he is really great in it. Also, “roided-up Simon Rex”=classic, and alas not entirely inaccurate!
I think “Burke & Hare” is really something: not just “Oh, isn’t it nice that John Landis made a feature again”-special, but “John Landis may have just made his best feature”-special. I took it as a comic version of Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s “From Hell” (not to be confused w/ the movie version): where the anachronisms and mixture of fact with (mostly) fiction serve to give us a “secret origin” of “right now”. This is especially true in terms of the movie’s take on capitalism: Adam Smith is never mentioned, but his ghost haunts the movie. (It also seems apt to recast the birth of photography/cinema as a way to get a better look at the inside of human bodies – although I’m a bit wary of following that line of thought too far.)
Andy’s comment very much seconded—“Slasher” is as good as anything Landis has ever made.
I ended up liking WARRIOR a lot, though I don’t think it’s without cliches (I would once, just once, like to see a guy-dominated “sports movie” where the woman character was more than just The Wife or The Girlfriend). And I also think Edgerton is the better of the two actors playing the brother.