National Post (National Edition)
NO ONE SAW THIS COMING
PAUL W.S. ANDERSON’S FINAL CHAPTER DIDN’T SCREEN FOR REVIEWERS
Over the course of Paul W.S. Anderson’s 20 year career he has directed a dozen feature films. He’s made genre movies, such as the spooky science-fiction thriller Event Horizon and a pair of historical action epics, Pompeii and The Three Musketeers. He’s directed franchise pictures, such as the intense Roger Corman remake Death Race, the bizarre IP mash-up Alien vs. Predator and, most curiously, the inexplicable Blade Runner spinoff/”sidequel” Soldier. And he’s behind the camera for adaptations of popular video games, such as Mortal Kombat and the blockbuster Resident Evil series — the sixth and (apparently) last instalment of which, The Final Chapter, opens in theatres across North America this week.
Anderson has never enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. His movies have never been well-received. Each has peaked around the 30 per cent mark on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and while his work has been championed on occasion in academic circles and by certain highbrow film journals — he is a favourite of both the Cinema Scope and Film Comment mastheads — broadsheet critics have scarcely forgone an occasion to besiege him with nasty ridicule.
Few auteurs in fact are so consistently savaged in the press; only Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry seem more reviled. Resident Evil’s $40 million Final Chapter didn’t screen for review consideration in advance of its opening weekend, as if even Sony Pictures had abandoned hope of praise. You’re reading this in lieu of a review because for me The Final Chapter remains to be seen.
And it assuredly and hastily will be. I am very eager to see The Final Chapter because I am a very enthusiastic Paul W.S. Anderson fan. The man is a B-movie maestro and an auteur of genre films par excellence. He’s a consummate stylist — he thinks in images, rather than simply shooting for coverage and hacking the action together any which way in the editing room, which gives his pictures rare coherence and flair. He stages kung-fu brawls and shootouts with balletic verve. He is a virtuoso with the set piece, devising escapes, chases and battles of exhilarating panache and brio. And he has a peerless gift for rooting through the tawdry — through gaudy CGI spectacle and over-the-top video game glitz — and finding the beautiful.
His first feature, the mid90s comic thriller Shopping, stars Jude Law as a twentysomething self-described “adrenalin junkie” enamoured of a dangerous pastime called “ram-riding”, whereby one drives a stolen car through a strip-mall storefront window before robbing it.
Law and his pals carouse and crash through central London listening to techno and riotously hooking up, playing hookie and avoiding the snare of the police, ever on the lookout for appealing shops to raid. Anderson shoots London as if it were a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with Law the urban Road Warrior. He’s not so much seeking thrills as living an unconventional life of righteous political dissent. Which is very much in keeping with the spirit of Anderson films to come: stylish, silly and keyed-up with directorial gusto — and serious as long as you don’t take them too seriously.
Mortal Kombat, Anderson’s wildly successful second feature, has much to recommend, even if its overtly frivolous source material (an arcade game even its developers presumed would lend itself poorly to the silver screen) and affection for special effects made it an easy target for critics on guard against the latest threat to the sanctity of cinema. An outrageous fistfight in the woods between a vaguely demonic baddie named Scorpion (Chris Casamassa) and the wisecracking pretty boy Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) — absent in the original screenplay but whipped up and shot lastminute after Anderson felt the movie needed more excitement — is an exemplar of action-picture elan, handsomely assembled and utterly delightful. It’s also a fine illustration of Anderson’s talent: say what you will about storytelling or plausible dramatic dialogue, but the man knows how to shoot a hunk locking horns with a demon.
Then of course there’s Resident Evil. I doubt very much that anybody, Anderson included, expected that a $30 million big-screen Hollywood adaptation of a Japanese survival-horror video games would go on to spawn five super-sized sequels and gross more than $300 million over the course of the next 15 years. Video game adaptations, quite unlike their closely related comic book cousins, do meagre business as a rule, and even at their most noisily marketed — such as, say, last summer’s Warcraft, or this past December’s Assassin’s Creed — seem doomed to remain niche rather than properly mainstream. Resident Evil, then, is the exception that proves all video game movie rules: lucrative, long-running, well-known and (among fans) admired. It’s also — and this is equally uncommon among video game adaptations — actually good.
The Final Chapter is the sixth episode in the Resident Evil saga but only the fourth directed by Anderson himself. The other three — the first, fourth, and fifth instalments — are, unsurprisingly, the only three of real merit. But what great multitudinous merit they have.
The first is a classical, close-quarters horror; a chamber piece confined to a much booby-trapped underground dungeon. The sleek, grisly little picture is furnished with decapitating elevators, dismembering laser grids and very many members of the flesh-eating undead. Each of these hazards are met and bested in turn by series star Milla Jovovich (Anderson’s real-life wife, incidentally) with captivating grace.
Part four, Afterlife, is a riot of ludicrous action and superhero brawn. If you skipped straight to it from part one you’d never suspect they were related — in the interim the franchise transformed from low-key creepshow to anarchic extravaganza, and Anderson takes the change in stride. Jovovich punches and kicks her way through henchmen by the dozen, twirling through the air and dodging bullets in slow-motion; it’s a mesmerizing, marvellously silly thing.
Oh, but it’s a mere amuse bouche next to the five-star spread of part five: Retribution, a glorious, practically experimental sci-fi action wonder. Its first few minutes alone are to die for: Anderson restages Afterlife’s last scene — a raid by helicopter on an aircraft carrier at sea — backwards, in slo-mo. It’s breathtaking.
Naturally the New York Daily News called Retribution “thuddingly awful,” and Variety said it often looked “like a second-rate video game.” The New York Times, in a couldn’t-care-less 200-word pan, dismissed this radical, wonderful epic as simply “airless,” whatever that may mean. The movie’s mutating episodic structure and engaged interest in appearances and identity went largely unremarked upon. So too did its deft, eccentric action. So too did … well, nearly all of its idiosyncratic virtues, flattened by most critics into whatever “mindless entertainment” they knew in advance they’d signed up to see. (I hate to impute motives on anyone, but that’s what these writers are doing to what’s on screen.)
Maybe it’s for the best then that The Final Chapter did not screen for review consideration. The critical establishment has never really considered Anderson or given him his due. Their loss, in this case, is most certainly our gain.