11/11/14: The Back of the Class

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Accion Mutante, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alex de la Iglesia, Anna Massey, auteur theory, based on a book, Burn Gorman, cinema, co-writers, disappointing films, dramas, El dia de la bestia, Elijah Wood, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, grad students, Guillermo del Toro, Jim Carter, John Hurt, Jorge Guerricaechevarria, Julie Cox, Leonor Watling, mathematical formulas, Movies, murder-mystery, Oxford University, Perdita Durango, professor, Santa Sangre, The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus, The Oxford Murders, twist ending, Witching and Bitching, writer-director

Without a doubt, Spanish auteur Alex de la Iglesia is one of my very favorite filmmakers, a mischievous maestro who combines the surreal, magical-realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky with Guillermo del Toro’s affinity for genre material (and impish sense of humor). When de la Iglesia is good, he’s absolutely amazing: I would happily rank his most recent films, The Last Circus (2010), As Luck Would Have It (2011) and Witching and Bitching (2013) as some of the best films I’ve ever seen, which doesn’t even take into account his legendary ’90s output that features such cult classic (if impossible to find) treasures as Accion Mutante (1993), El dia de la Bestia (1995) and Perdita Durango (1997).

At his best, de la Iglesia is like a more accessible Jodorowsky, filling his films with delightfully bizarre little asides and eye-popping visual spectacles: in fact, I’ve always felt that The Last Circus was the best film that Jodorowsky never made, an impossibly beautiful yet horrifyingly grotesque political parable that can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the classic Santa Sangre (1989). When he’s not scaling those impossible heights, de la Iglesia manages to turn out massively entertaining, endlessly pulpy genre films that usually involve tough women, lots of cars and guns and odd supernatural angles. Despite not having the pleasure of watching his entire back-catalog, I can honestly say that I never met a de la Iglesia film that I didn’t like…until I met The Oxford Murders (2008), that is. Despite an excellent cast and an appropriately twisty storyline, the film is largely an inert, confusing mess that displays barely a glimmer of de la Iglesia’s trademark bravura filmmaking. For the first time, to my chagrin, here was my hero treading water.

Our hero, Martin (Elijah Wood), is a grad student obsessed with the legendarily difficult, reclusive mathematician Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). Seeking to get a face-to-face meeting with the professor, Martin takes up lodging with his sister, Mrs. Eagleton (Anna Massey), and her moony-eyed daughter, Beth (Julie Cox). Disrupting one of Seldom’s lectures, Martin makes an ass out of himself, which makes things even more awkward when both he and Seldom end up back at Eagleton’s boarding house. They soon have something to talk about other than Martin’s bad manners, however, when they stumble upon the decidedly dead body of the land-lady.

A note found at the scene seems to indicate that Mrs. Eagleton was the victim of a serial killer, one who inscribes mathematical symbols like perfect circles onto his missives. Putting their heads together, Martin and Arthur realize that the killer is trying to play a game with the professor, a game that involves creating perfectly logical murders, all towards the goal of proving that they don’t exist. Confused yet? As Martin and Arthur rush from one new crime scene to the other, ably aided by Lorna (Leonor Watling), a young nurse who’s been intimate with both the grad student AND his elderly professor, they discover an intricate series of “almost-murders,” crimes committed in such ways as to seem almost natural…unless one knows what to look for, of course.

As the clock ticks down, the dynamic duo finds themselves in more and more danger, along with an increasing police presence that sees their continued appearance at the crime scenes as being a little too coincidental. Will they catch their culprit or will a mysterious maniac continue to wreak havoc in the hallowed halls of Oxford University?

There are lots of rather critical problems with The Oxford Murders but we’ll start with the biggest one: the film is both overly complicated and impossibly stupid, a critically lethal combo if ever there was one. In an attempt to seem Hitchcockian (an obvious source of inspiration), de la Iglesia piles one double-cross after another left-turn into further complications until the whole thing collapses into a soggy mess of plot contrivances. There are so many red herrings here (Martin’s batshit crazy roommate is an obvious one) that it kinds of feels like parody, after a while, as if de la Iglesia decided to take the piss out of old “drawing-room” mysteries for no perceptible reason.

Trying to follow the plot is no easy task but it’s made immeasurably more difficult by the film’s manic pace and propensity for over-the-top melodrama: Burn Gorman’s Yuri is one of the best examples of a character who not only makes no narrative sense but is pitched at such an insane level (he appears to be dubbed, which makes his bizarre speech patterns a little more understandable but just barely) that he seems to belong in another film. The bit where he makes an ass of himself at the party is a real “high” point but there isn’t much to his performance that could be deemed natural or, you know, non-hysterical.

Wood and Hurt, for their parts, are reliably sturdy, although they both end up just recycling previous performances as if re-wearing comfortable suits: Hurt is the cranky, sardonic old mentor, while Wood is the fish-out-of-water newbie just having his eyes opened to the real world. They’re performances that either actor could give in their sleep, to be honest, and bring nothing new to the table.

It’s not all a dreary disappointment, however: buried within the muck is one moment of pure, unadulterated de la Iglesia that’s an absolute joy to watch. After leaving Prof. Seldom’s lecture, Martin heads back to the boarding house and the camera heads along with him. In a simply glorious single take, the camera glides along after Martin but ends up “tagging” various other characters along the way, jumping from person to person like a giddy child before finally swooping into the boarding house to reveal Mrs. Eagleton’s dead body. Quite simply, it’s a wonderful scene: too bad it’s the only moment in the entire film that actually reminded me of de la Iglesia.

All in all, The Oxford Murders is a middle-of-the-road mystery hobbled by some truly over-the-top performances, a needlessly confusing plot and a truly stupid twist ending. Were any other filmmaker attached to this project, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the film, since I’ve seen way too many “competent” movies just like this. This is Alex de la Iglesia, however, a genuinely brilliant writer-director: there was no need for the film to be so completely tedious and anonymous. Luckily, de la Iglesia would follow-up The Oxford Murders with the aforementioned trilogy of The Last Circus, As Luck Would Have It and Witching and Bitching, handily proving that this was only a minor blip in an otherwise impeccable career. As it stands, The Oxford Murders should only be of interest to de la Iglesia completists: all others are advised to go straight to his classics and give this as wide a berth as possible.

10/15/14: All in the Family

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31 Days of Halloween, adoption, Andres Muschietti, based on a short, childhood fears, children in peril, cinema, co-writers, Daniel Kash, David Fox, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, fairy tales, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Guillermo del Toro, horror, horror movies, Isabelle Nelisse, Jane Moffat, Jessica Chastain, Mama, Megan Charpentier, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, sisters, The Woman in Black, writer-director

For the majority of its run-time, writer-director Andres Muschietti’s Mama (2013) is a moody, atmospheric and fairly slick little chiller that handily recalls such recent films as Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2010) and The Woman in Black (2012). Relying more on suspense and fantastic visuals than creative bloodshed or mass chaos, there’s something decidedly old-fashioned, yet intensely endearing, about the film’s rather modest aims. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, for the most part, but it’s an incredibly easy film to get along with.

At the climax, however, Muschietti tries something a little bold and stretches for a pretty emotional, almost melodramatic, finale. While this tactic could have resulted in something with all the consistency of sodden cardboard, it actually ends up working spectacularly well, imbuing the film with a warm, authentically emotional and subtly powerful finale. If the final moments can color our ultimate impression of a film (how many otherwise quality movies have been all but ruined by terrible endings?), then Mama’s finale helps boost the movie up into a slightly loftier collection of peers.

Muschietti’s feature-length debut is actually an expansion of his earlier short (also called Mama), which garnered quite a bit of attention, particularly from genre superhero Guillermo del Toro. Suitably impressed with Muschietti’s ability to combine atmospheric chills, creepy visuals and genuine emotional impact, del Toro jumped on as executive producer, leading to the full-length expansion that we’re currently discussing. There’s always an inherent danger to expanding a short into a feature: one merely has to look at the vast majority of SNL “features” to fully see how difficult it can be to stretch 5 minutes of material across 90 minutes of dead air. In this case, however, Muschietti has succeeded in expanding out his original idea without making the whole exercise seem unnecessary and academic.

Beginning with a haltingly handwritten “Once upon a time…” scrawled in white over a black screen, Mama has all of the nightmare unreality and sense of fantasy of the best fairy tales. We follow an obviously distraught man as he packs up his two young daughters (leaving their pet dog behind, which strikes a subtly ominous tone from the get-go) and races out for an isolated cabin in the woods. His behavior is erratic and frightening and there’s nothing about this that seems to spell a happy (or long) life for either young girl. Once at the cabin, however, the father is attacked and dragged off by some kind of unseen something, leaving his daughters on their own in the middle of nowhere.

Jumping ahead five years, we learn that the girls’ uncle, Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), has been looking for them ever since, despite the nagging notion that five years is an awful long time for a couple of young kids to be missing. As luck would have it, Lucas’ friend, Burnsie (David Fox), manages to stumble into the hidden cabin in the woods and finds the young girls alive and well, if filthy and seemingly feral. With the aid of his punk-rocker girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain) and the kindly Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), Lucas attempts to reintegrate the girls back into the civilized world.

The girls, however, are acting a bit odd, to say the very least. For one thing, they won’t stop talking about the mysterious “Mama” that (supposedly) cared for them in the cabin for the past five years. Burnsie and Lucas find no sign of anyone, however, leading them to believe that the girls have retreated into their imaginations in order to deal with the trauma of their father’s actions. Even more unnerving, however, are the quiet little conversations that Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse) appear to have with no one in particular. As these behaviors continue, Lucas and Annabel begin to feel the influence of a powerful, potentially malevolent force.

When Lucas is inexplicably shoved down the stairs by an unseen force, Annabel is forced to care for the kids on her own, while her boyfriend lies unconscious in the hospital. Despite her steadfast refusal to devote herself to kids or “settling down,” Annabel comes to care for Victoria and Lilly, vowing to protect them at all costs. Something else feels protective towards the children, however, something primal, evil and relentless. It would seem that someone else was looking after the girls, after all…and Mama has no intention of letting her “babies” go without one helluva fight.

Similar to Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Woman in Black, Mama puts atmosphere before action and setpieces, which tends to give the whole affair a more muted, subtle feel. This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t feature more “modern” scare moments (ie: the “screeching jump-scare sound of death”) but it is to say that these moments are easily the film’s weakest. When allowed to spool out slow and creepy, however, Mama proves to be a real winner. There one scene, in particular, which showcases the film’s aesthetic to great effect: as Annabel and Victoria play in one room, Lilly plays with an unseen Mama in the other. The shot is devised as a “natural” split screen, with the door frame dividing the screen in half. It’s a cleverly staged moment, to be sure, but it’s also a fantastically effective one: I’m willing to wager that more than one viewer will experience a bit of the ol’ goose-flesh during that particular moment.

As mentioned earlier, the film is aided considerably by a nicely realized, very emotional finale. Without giving anything way, suffice to say that Muschietti manages to temper the character of Mama with enough melancholy to put her evil into a different perspective, allowing for a climax that’s equal parts sad, lovely and very satisfying. There’s nothing especially upbeat about Mama but it also refuses to traffic in easy “sorrow-porn,” either.

Craftwise, the film has a consistently polished look that works quite nicely, especially during the aforementioned finale. The special effects scenes, while obviously CGI, are fairly well-integrated into the film, allowing everything to feel a bit more organic than in the similar Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (which often felt perilously close to slipping into CGI-silliness). The acting is good, although I must admit to being less than impressed with Chastain’s performance: her character vacillates between whiny and ridiculously self-assured and there were plenty of moments where I found myself unable to fully invest in her character. By contrast, Charpentier and Nelisse are rather amazing as the young girls: child actors can be notoriously hit-and-miss but there’s nothing about either one of their performances that took me out of the film, especially once things start to ramp up in the final third.

While there’s nothing especially gritty about Mama, it stands as an exceptionally well-made, effective and moving bit of fairy-tale influenced horror. From the outstanding opening credit sequence (creepy kids’ drawings that tell the film’s story in shorthand) to the knockout finale, Mama is a consistent pleasure. It may not be the most original film in the world (astute viewers should probably be able to get the general drift by at least the midpoint of the film, if not sooner) but it’s also the furthest thing from anonymous dreck as one can get. If you’re a fan of slicker, more commercial fare (the movie is rated PG-13 which, for the most part, means absolutely nothing nowadays), you could definitely do a whole lot worse than pulling yourself up to Mama’s table.

10/14/15 (Part One): The Sisterhood of the Flying Broom

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31 Days of Halloween, 800 Bullets, Accion Mutante, Alex de la Iglesia, alternate title, armed robbery, auteur theory, battle of the sexes, Carmen Maura, Carolina Bang, El dia de la bestia, favorite films, feminism, Film auteurs, foreign films, Gabriel Delgado, Guillermo del Toro, horror movies, horror-comedies, Hugo Silva, Jaime Ordonez, Kiko de la Rica, Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi, love story, Macarena Gomez, Mario Casas, men vs women, misogyny, paganism, Peter Jackson, romance, Santiago Segura, Secun de la Rosa, small town life, Spanish film, special-effects extravaganza, Terele Pavez, The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus, witches, Witching and Bitching, writer-director, Zugarramurdi

Occupying a common ground somewhere between cinema-fantastique auteur Guillermo del Toro and legendary surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, the films of Spanish writer-director Alex de la Iglesia are, without a doubt, one-of-a-kind treasures, little islands of individuality adrift in a cinematic sea of homogeneity. Since the early ’90s, de la Iglesia has used genre films like feature-length debut Accion mutante (1993) and El dia de la bestia (1995) to address everything from organized religion to societal responsibility, from the vagaries of the child adoption system to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Beginning with 2002’s 800 Bullets, de la Iglesia began to move further afield from the scrappy supernatural-themed films that began his career to focus on more “mature” films, albeit ones which still bore very little resemblance to anyone else’s. El crimen perfecto (2004), The Last Circus (2010) and As Luck Would Have It (2011) might have been more grounded in reality than de la Iglesia’s previous films (although The Last Circus is a pretty surreal cake, no matter how you slice it) but were no less quirky and ground-breaking. Since As Luck Would Have It was his most linear, “normal” film yet, I found myself wondering if the wild man of Spanish cinema had decided to walk the straight and narrow, so to speak.

For his most recent film, however, de la Iglesia opted to go a little further back in his career: all the way back to the outrageous El dia de la bestia, as it turns out. Witching and Bitching (or the Witches of Eastwick-referencing original title, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi) (2013) combines action, slapstick, sly black humor and the supernatural in truly invigorating ways, offering up a treatise on the eternal battle of the sexes that manages to lob grenades at both sides while still finding plenty of room for romance, some sneaky asides about Spanish pop culture and some pretty awesome SFX setpieces, including a climatic battle with a massive, ancient goddess that would make Peter Jackson smile. In other words: that magnificent bastard de la Iglesia has done it again.

De la Iglesia has always been masterful with his opening segments and Witching and Bitching continues this trend. After a nicely atmospheric intro featuring some good, old-fashioned witch action (think “bubble bubble toil and trouble/big black cauldron type stuff), we get jumped into a thoroughly dynamic credit sequence that manages to juxtapose images of famous female actors, politicians, historical figures and celebrities with those of witches, pagan symbols, fertility statues, arcane images and serial killers, as if to make the claim that pigeonholing women is just about as stupid and pointless an exercise as possible. De la Iglesia seems to be making the statement that women, like men, are a little bit of every archetype: that old cliché of “the Madonna or the whore” is just as worthless today as it was a hundred years ago.

The film, proper, begins with Jose (Hugo Silva), his young son, Sergio (Gabriel Delgado) and accomplice, Antonio (Mario Casas), fleeing a badly botched jewelry store heist. They make off with a dufflebag filled with gold wedding rings but Tony’s girlfriend has taken off with their getaway car (in her defense, Antonio never bothered to let her know that he would be using her car for an armed robbery, so her reaction is kind of understandable), leaving them stranded as the cops begin to bear down. Springing into action, Jose carjacks a taxi, taking the driver, Manuel (Jaime Ordonez), and his passenger hostage. All that Jose wants to do is get to the French border and he sees Manuel’s taxi as his golden parachute.

Meanwhile, Jose’s highly irate ex-wife, Silvia (Macarena Gomez), has heard about the botched robbery on the news and is rushing over to rescue her poor son and slap Jose upside the head so hard that it jogs his common-sense loose. Along for the ride are bickering cops Calvo (Pepon Nieto) and Pacheco (Secun de la Rosa), who are both convinced that Silvia somehow abetted her low-life ex-husband with the robbery. As luck would have it, all of these disparate characters converge on the titular town of Zugarramurdi, where they will find themselves in the midst of an ancient coven of witches, led by Graciana (Carmen Maura), her elderly mother, Maritxu (Terele Pavez), and daughter, Eva (Carolina Bang). The witches are seeking to resurrect a pagan goddess, in order to replace the reigning patriarchy with a matriarchy and right the countless wrongs that have been inflicted on women since the dawn of time. As love affairs pop up left and right, however, loyalties will be tested: when Eva experiences the first pangs of true love, she must make the impossible decision to either betray her family and her gender or her own heart.

As with all of de la Iglesia’s films, there’s a lot going on in Witching and Bitching: at times, the film seems to move from one complex setpiece to another, with very little room in-between to catch one’s breath. This only ends up being an issue if the film’s setpieces are lacking which, fortunately, is not a problem that de la Iglesia ever seems to be saddled with. From the dynamic, thrilling and hilarious opening robbery (seeing SpongeBob Squarepants get all murdery with a shotgun is, to be frank, a sublime joy that my mind never knew it was missing) to the jaw-dropping special effects showcase that ends the film (I wasn’t lying about Peter Jackson approving: it’s one hell of an awesome sequence), there’s very little about the movie that isn’t captivating, visually stunning or flat-out hilarious.

As a comedy, Witching and Bitching works on a variety of levels, from the silly and slapsticky (Eva serves “finger food” that consists of actual fingers; the various chase scenes remind of Scooby Doo cartoons, at times) to the more subtle and cutting (Eva’s family frequently reminds her that she should be out engaging in “fist-fucking, golden showers and zoophilia,” not falling in love with a wimpy man…they didn’t send her to “the worst schools” just to suffer this indignity!). In addition, there’s plenty of commentary on the “battle of the sexes” from both sides: neither men nor women escape the film’s withering glare unscathed.

As a horror film, de la Iglesia’s movie is, likewise, a home-run – despite the near-constant comedy, he manages to sneak plenty of pure horror beats into the mix, as well. The town of Zugarramurdi is ridiculously atmospheric, coming across as nothing so much as the return of the fog-shrouded hamlets of Hammer Studios’ glory days. There’s a nicely tense bit involving a mysterious person reaching up through a toilet-bowl that’s nearly Hitchcockian in its sustained sense of suspense and the previously mentioned climax, featuring the massive, ancient and blind goddess (brilliantly depicted as a towering combination of the Venus of Willendorf and one of Jackson’s trolls from LOTR) is a real showstopper: they even manage to throw in a nifty mid-air “witches’ battle” to keep things lively.

Despite the nearly constant spectacle, the cast of Witching and Bitching manages to hold their own against the onslaught. Hugo Silva is a charismatic hero and he’s ably paired up with Mario Casas to give the film a pair of sympathetic (to a point) protagonists. Jaime Ordonez is, likewise, pretty great as the kidnapped taxi driver: the scene where he decides to “join” the gang, only to be met with mass confusion by Jose and Antonio (“Does this mean you want a cut or something? How do we know we can trust you?”) is an easy highlight and Ordonez’s nervous, fidgety energy contrasts nicely with Silva’s more traditional heroism and Casas’ kind-of/sort-of nice-guy dumbass.

On the female side of things, Carmen Maura, Carolina Bang and Terele Pavez pretty much steal the film from the rest of the cast: the bit where Pavez puts in razor-sharp steel teeth and Maura scuttles across the ceiling, like a fly, are undeniably badass, as is Bang’s ridiculously hot-headed Eva whenever she’s on-screen. More importantly, none of the witches ever come across as overly shrill or needlessly bumbling: unlike many genre films that purport to detail a (literal) battle of the sexes (Jake West’s Doghouse (2009) comes immediately to mind), there’s never the notion that de la Iglesia has unfairly stacked the deck against his female antagonists.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way in which the notion of feminism is handled. Early on, we get a pretty much never-ending stream of misogyny from the likes of Jose and Manuel: even nice-guy Tony joins in after he realizes that his girlfriend actually “holds the reins” in their relationship. This is qualified, of course, once we get to Zugarramurdi and get the other half of argument from the female participants. As Graciana makes plainly clear, men are really afraid of women because they realize that God is actually female and are too terrified to admit the truth: by bringing about the return of their goddess, the women hope to usher in a new, enlightened era, one where women are not subjugated, abused and ridiculed. In a way, neither gender makes it out of Witching and Bitching completely intact, although most of de la Iglesia’s sharpest rocks are reserved for the lunk-headed men in the film.

Ultimately, de la Iglesia’s latest film is proof-positive of why I absolutely adore his movies: they’re big, brash, colorful, lively, funny and intelligent…pretty much any and everything that I possibly hope to find at the theater. While del Toro and Jackson might be better known, I’d argue that de la Iglesia is, without a doubt, the more accomplished, interesting filmmaker: he has a way of blending the fantastic and the mundane in some truly invigorating ways. While The Last Circus will probably always be my favorite de la Iglesia film (if there are flaws in that film, I haven’t found them), Witching and Bitching is an instant classic and should be required viewing for genre fans. Start with this one, start with The Last Circus or pick a random title out of a hat: whatever you do, make yourself familiar with the films of Alex de la Iglesia. If you love films as much as I do, I’m willing to guarantee that you might just find yourself with a new favorite director.

4/14/14: When Charlies Attack

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action-adventure, apocalyptic, auteur theory, Charlie Day, Charlie Hunam, Chuck Hansen, cinema, Cronos, drifting, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, giant monsters, giant robots, giant robots fighting giant monsters, Godzilla, Guillermo del Toro, Hannibal Chau, Hellboy, Idris Elba, Jaeger, Kaiju, King Kong, Max Martini, Movies, Newton Geiszler, ocean combat, Pacific Rim, Ray Harryhausen, Rinko Kikuchi, Rob Kazinsky, Ron Perlman, sci-fi, special-effects extravaganza, Stacker Pentecost

If one wants spectacle in their films, can there be any greater way to achieve it than by having giant things duke it out while the terrified masses of humanity watch helplessly? Since the golden age of cinema, audiences have thrilled to gargantuas like King Kong, Godzilla or any number of Ray Harryhausen’s iconic stop-motion creations. There’s something about watching a gorilla the size of a skyscraper throw elbows at a toothy dinosaur, something that seems to cut beyond notions of story and right into the primal: this is storytelling stripped back to its childhood, sandbox essence. While technology (and patience levels) may have changed since those glory days of guys in suits stomping about miniature cities, the public’s thirst for spectacle seems just as strong as ever. And if there’s one modern director who knows a thing or two about spectacle, it would definitely have to be Guillermo del Toro.

Although he began his career with his most subdued film (1993’s Cronos, which still stands as my favorite del Toro film), del Toro quickly moved into the realm of big-budget spectacle films with Blade II (2002), before clinching his spot in fan-boy history with his all-in adaptation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (2004). Hellboy, while filled with endlessly inventive, frequently stunning imagery, was also stuffed to bursting with some of the most interesting characters in parade through a film since the glory days of Star Wars, not least of which was Ron Perlman’s epic performance as the big red guy. Although his next film, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), would split the difference between the more subtle emotional beats of Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone (2001) with the eye-popping imagery of Hellboy, it was a character-heavy piece that showed del Toro hadn’t lost sight of the human actors on his phantasmagorical stages. A return to Hellboy, in 2008, would yield an even bigger, more epic version of the original film, although there seemed to be slightly more focus on the effects and imagery than on the characterizations.

When I heard that del Toro’s follow-up to Hellboy 2 was going to be an original film about giant robots fighting giant monsters, I’ll admit that I was conflicted. On the one hand, my primal self wants nothing more than to see giants things kick the ever-loving crap out of each other…that’s just a given. On the other hand, I don’t really find myself particularly drawn to mega-budget spectacle films anymore: even something like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation grew tiring, for me at least, and I’ve studiously avoided the various tent-pole pics like Battle: L.A, Battleship and Ender’s Game that have cropped up lately. Since del Toro seemed to be moving further from his characters and more into the spectacle of it all, would Pacific Rim end up being a delicious but empty fistful of cotton-candy? As it turned out, the answer was “yes”…but man…that cotton candy…

Pacific Rim jumps right into the thick of things by bringing us up to speed on the state of this particular version of reality: gigantic, Chthonic monsters called Kaiju have been popping out of the office, bent on destroying mankind. As defense, humans create Jaegers, which are basically giant robots that require two pilots, both of whom are psychically linked to each other and their custom-made Voltrons. These lead to giant melees where giant, tentacled monstrosities get pounded into submission by a multinational coalition of Jaegers, including Russian, Australian and American versions. Raleigh (Charlie Hunam) and Yancy Becket (Diego Klattenhoff) are brothers who also happen to be super-close and the best in the Jaeger biz: if you don’t suspect a looming tragedy, you’re probably in the wrong multiplex room. Yancy dies, Raleigh vows never to fight again and the world keeps on spinning.

As usually happens in these situations, however, Raleigh ain’t gonna stay retired for long. He gets called back to the majors by his old commander Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba, with the best character name in the movie) and ends up partnered with a complete newbie: Mako (Rinko Kikuchi). Mako is untested but you just know that kid’s got potential. Something’s brewing, however, and the Kaiju seem to be up to something. The old methods might not be good enough now, but never fear: it’s always sunny at the Pac Rim, it turns out, because we have Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) to help. That’s right: good ol’ batshit Charlie shows up as…well, a pretty batshit scientist, to be honest. He ends up “drifting” with a Kaiju brain and gets the inside scoop on their plan: this is wholesale apocalypse, baby! Time to get some advice from Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman), suit-up, shit talk the Aussies, admire the Russians’ fashion sense and open a super-sized can of whoop-ass on these bio-luminescent goons. Stacker says it best: “Today, we’re cancelling the apocalypse.”

There’s obviously something inherently silly about any film that features giant monsters and giant robots wrestling: unless the proceedings are being filmed like a dour mumblecore snooze (which would be kinda awesome), you’re still dealing with giant monsters and giant robots wrestling. In and of itself, this isn’t really an issue: as previously mentioned, cinematic history is jam-packed with similar films. The big challenge, then, is to do something inherently different with the subject matter, something to make it stand out from the field of similar fare. On one hand, Pacific Rim was always going to have a leg up on the competition since the film is completely state-of-the art, featuring the finest effects work that money can buy. In that aspect, no prior film of this ilk can even stand next to Pac Rim: the 1954 version of Godzilla may as well have been from 1854. Del Toro has proven, time and again, that he’s particularly adept at shooting this kind of spectacle. He’s always seemed like a fan, first and foremost, and he shoots what similar fans want to see.

On the technical side, Pacific Rim is never short of marvels. The Kaiju are paragons of creature design, nightmarish, bio-luminescent beasts that seem to have been poured straight from H.P. Lovecraft’s fevered skull into our terrified world. They look truly unique, no mean feat in a jaded era where we’ve everything at least twice. As a lifelong horror/sci-fi, I couldn’t get enough of them and was already ready for the next appearance. In particular, a scene where a newborn monster chases Newton is so thrilling, so perfectly staged and executed that it could have been its own self-contained short. The Jaegers are no slouches, either, with the individual machines tailored to the various nations and their designs providing a real sense of heft and reality. Make no mistake about it, however: the entire film belongs to the Kaiju. If all elements of Pacific Rim could be considered del Toro’s children, each one unique and worthy of its own admiration, than the Kaiju are the obvious, over-achieving, doted on favorites…no one else even comes close in Papa’s heart.

This, of course, ends up being a massive problem in the grand scheme of things: Pacific Rim, while being one of the most gorgeous, thrilling action films I’ve seen in some time, also ends up being one of the emptiest. Character development is pretty much non-existent from the get-go. We get so little time with the brothers Becket at the beginning of the film that we just have to take it for granted that they were close, mostly because Raleigh says they were. Nearly everyone else in the film exist as generic types, with particular derision going to the ridiculous father-son Australian Jaeger pilots, Herc (Max Martini) and Chuck Hansen (Rob Kazinsky). Chuck is a ridiculously unlikable character, a sort of spiritual brother to the awful Johnny from Karate Kid: he’s all bluster, bullying, sneering and bad attitude. This really comes to a head in the scene where Herc and Chuck are supposed to share a tender moment: the tone is all over the place and it just comes across as parody. The poor Russians don’t get off much better, mostly reduced to thick “Da”s and outfits that look like they came out of Eddie Izzard’s Mystery Men wardrobe closet. Hunam isn’t terrible as Raleigh but he doesn’t seem to have much personality, which seems strange coming from an actor like Hunam: I don’t think he’s Brando, by any stretch, but the guy definitely seems to have a pulse on Sons of Anarchy…a little more of that fire would have been welcome here.

As can be expected, however, two actors take the football and run it to the next county: Charlie Day and Ron Perlman. I’m an avowed Perlman fanboy who thinks he can’t do anything wrong, is always perfect, yadda yadda yadda but even I have to admit that his performance as Hannibal Chau is something special. Chau is such a complete and total badass, such a funny, vibrant character that I really wish the film was about him fighting Kaiju singlehandedly. Not only does he get the best scenes in the film, he also gets a postscript that manages to one-up the films actual ending. Whether its due to their close working relationship or Perlman’s inherent awesomeness, del Toro always manages to wring great performances from him and Pacific Rim is no different.

Much more surprising, however, was Charlie Day’s turn as Dr. Geiszler. Even though you can see lots of It’s Always Sunny Charlie in the character, Day still manages to make the character his own. At first, I wasn’t ready to buy Day as a scientist any more than I would be to accept Johnny Knoxville as a certified public accountant. He really jumps in fearlessly, however, and makes every single acting choice seem as natural as breathing. Whether he’s doing one of those patented “Charlie freakouts” or bringing some of the quiet storm, Day is always a joy to watch in the film and always seems like he’s having the best day of his life ever. Good for him.

At the end of the day, however, I find myself needing to remind myself of something very important: this is still a film about giant monsters wrestling giant robots. For all of the movie’s subtext about immigration issues (they’re building a wall to keep out the Kaiju, you see, because they’re undesirables), the destructive nature of mankind (Mako’s flashback to the Kaiju attack she survived recalls images of the Hiroshima bombing) and the notion that newer isn’t always better (Raleigh’s Jaeger is analog, making him the perfect hero when a rampaging Kaiju knocks out the electrical grid, disabling the fancier, newer-model Jaegers), the film still comes down to one important element: robots fighting monsters. When the film is amazing, it’s unforgettable (a brief glimpse into the Kaiju’s apocalyptic world is so eye-popping that I hope to hell del Toro gets his At the Mountains of Madness production off the ground) and the whole thing is never less than entertaining. Too often, however, everything gets bogged down in banal dialogue (by the end, I was finishing nearly every line of dialogue, no mean feat on my first viewing of the film) and place-holder dramatics that seem designed merely to get us to the next Kaiju/Jaeger dust-up.

If, however, you are so inclined to watch a mega-budget spectacle about giant robots and giant monsters wrestling, than your first stop needs to be Pacific Rim. This may not be the best action/adventure film ever and certainly is nowhere near del Toro’s best (Hellboy still takes it out with one punch) but I can honestly say that it’s the absolute best film ever made about this particular subject. That is, of course, until del Toro decides to unleash Pacific Rim 2 on the world. As long as there’s plenty of Hannibal and Newton, they’ve already pre-sold at least one ticket.