Monster March II: The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)

Leave it to The Cinema King to find a way to work Batman into a month of monster movies. But for so very many reasons, how could we not review The Batman vs. Dracula? It’s got everything I love, with a perfect tie-in for October and an even more perfect excuse for me to check out one of the last corners of Gotham City I haven’t yet visited.

 

When The Penguin (Tom Kenny) and The Joker (Kevin Michael Richardson) break out of Arkham Asylum, their quest for loot leads The Penguin into a desolate Gotham crypt, where he accidentally reawakens the long-dead Count Dracula (Peter Stormare). But there’s only room for one bat-man in Gotham, as Bruce Wayne (Rino Romano) learns when he meets his latest supernatural foe.

 

It may surprise you to learn that I’ve never seen an episode of The Batman (2004-2008), the animated series to which The Batman vs. Dracula belongs. It was made just when I was phasing out of comics and ended just before I jumped back in, and I’ve never quite gotten used to the character designs, which look like inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons compared to Batman: The Animated Series (which, you’ll recall, is much more my jam). It ran for five years and sixty-five episodes, which is a significant investment of time for a project I’m not sure cuts the mustard for me.

 

After watching The Batman vs. Dracula, I’m still not sure if it’s “my” Gotham, per se, but I’m a little more intrigued after having dipped my toe. Still, The Batman vs. Dracula isn’t a new classic in the Gotham canon, a la Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman: Under the Red Hood. It’s perfectly serviceable but a little more shallow than some of my favorite Batman stories. It does exactly what it says on the tin – Batman does indeed fight Dracula – but it does so without the sophistication that might come of pitting two children of the night against each other. Indeed, the script feels very much like what might happen if you gave action figures of Batman and Dracula to a child: simple and straightforward, with a certain charm in its innocuous lack of depth.

 

Even before we meet Dracula, for example, when Bruce Wayne announces that he’s working on a device that will process solar energy, he may as well call it the deus ex machina, since we know it’s going to come up in the third act. Penguin, meanwhile, is relegated to the Renfield role without really doing much of anything else in the film; it’s perhaps just as well, since this Penguin seems to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, with a scatological sense of humor to match. The Batman’s Joker is an interesting ragdoll of a man, with a husky voice and a colossal mop of green hair; while this isn’t the Joker I’d have written, it’s an intriguing and perfectly valid take on the villain, and Richardson captures that manic energy that makes the Clown Prince so compelling.

 

Then there’s our titular antagonist, and it’s hard to imagine better casting than Peter Stormare as Count Dracula. Stormare’s voice isn’t always recognizable – which is a shame, given how distinctive his line-readings can be (cf., The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld’s “The Frogger”) – but he’s clearly relishing the role, turning every line into a deep-throated snarl. The character is undercooked, only a surface-level interpretation of Stoker’s original, though perhaps anything would pale in comparison to Lugosi or Oldman. Stormare might have fared better in a longer theatrical release; as it is, direct-to-video animation doesn’t give this Dracula ample room to spread his wings. 

 

I’ve said almost nothing about Rino Romano’s Batman, but then again I grew up with Kevin Conroy, and there are very few who can hold a candle to his Dark Knight. Romano (no relation, apparently, to Andrea Romano, who assembled the voice cast that included Conroy) is evidently playing a younger Batman, and the script seems to lean into his inexperience. He assumes, for one, that Joker’s death in the opening sequence is permanent, but then again, the city later assumes Batman has gone rogue based on the word of only one less-than-credible witness. Perhaps this is overall a younger Gotham than I realized? Then again, Romano’s Batman simply isn’t as vocally distinctive as some of his Bat-counterparts, though I may feel differently after watching more of the cartoon.

 

All told, The Batman vs. Dracula is not a great Batman movie, nor is it a great Dracula movie. I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone beyond the most ardent aficionados of either franchise. It’s serviceable and inoffensive, and it is transparently a product of its time, a particular era of Saturday morning cartoon that is hard to describe if you didn’t live through it. Its soundtrack, full of wailing electric guitars, makes it feel as much like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as anything else, and at least for this reviewer that’s not a tremendous compliment. 

 

The Batman vs. Dracula is not rated. Directed by Michael Goguen. Written by Duane Capizzi. Starring Rino Romano, Peter Stormare, Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Alastair Duncan.

22 Jump Street (2014)

We were all caught off guard by 21 Jump Street, which led every cynical filmgoer to scoff at the idea of rebooting the silly premise of a late-80s TV show best known for giving us Johnny Depp.  But retrospectively, these being the same directors behind The Lego Movie, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised.  I don’t think 22 Jump Street is as good as its predecessor, in part because Phil Lord and Christopher Miller don’t quite – and can’t, in fact – surprise us the way they did last time, though it is enough fun and better than your average sequel.

In a bit of meta-commentary, Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) are reassigned across the street to 22 Jump to “do the same exact thing” – track down a new designer drug – albeit in a college setting this time.  That is essentially the whole plot; Ice Cube returns with a slightly larger role as Captain Dickson, and Peter Stormare plays drug supplier Ghost with his reliable brand of comic menace.

First of all, I will say that 22 Jump Street is very funny.  It’s not as funny as the first one, but it is funny enough.  In fact, interestingly enough, had the first film not been so good, I think 22 Jump Street might have come off better; that is, it suffers only by comparison, which is paradoxically both unfair and (in this case) inevitable.

It’s a comparison that’s made all the more apparent by the film’s central conceit of “do the exact same thing” – and indeed, it is very similar to the first film despite the apparent self-consciousness at play.  This is a very funny gag at first, particularly in a scene in which Nick Offerman’s police chief stands in for studio executives, expressing puzzlement that the first film/case worked as well as it did before sending Hill & Tatum back to the grind.  I say “at first,” however, because this is a clever gimmick that runs out of steam about halfway through the film, after which the writers continue to introduce it with diminishing wit.  I see a lot of film critics falling over themselves to praise this move, but it certainly grows tiresome by the one-hour mark.

Fortunately, 22 Jump Street isn’t predicated solely on satirizing the sequel.  Instead, it wisely remembers that the big success coming out of 21 Jump was the surprise chemistry between Hill and Tatum, and the two continue to play off each other well.  Tatum in particular gives the break-out performance of the film, continuing the simpleton (self-)caricature from the first film but giving Jenko moments of clarity and self-awareness.  His are some of the funniest scenes in the film, particularly his well-timed delayed reaction to a key revelation, though Ice Cube is still the key scene stealer with his boisterous delivery and clear disdain for the protagonists.

There is, ultimately, not much else to say about 22 Jump Street.  It’s not better than the first one, which is, to be fair, a rather tough act to follow.  It is, however, better than most comedy sequels, which often merely replicate the success of the original.  But I don’t think the difference between 22 Jump and sequels like The Hangover: Part II is simply down to self-awareness.  22 Jump Street is actually quite funny in its own right, even divorced from its predecessor.  It only becomes something less by comparison, and while I’m still not sure if it’s fair to judge a movie “by comparison” I do know for a fact that I had enough fun with 22 Jump that I can recommend it, especially for fans of the original.

22 Jump Street is rated R for “language throughout, sexual content, drug material, brief nudity and some violence.”  F-bombs abound, as does talk about “hooking up” and the like.  The premise of the film revolves around a new mystery drug, which causes characters to “trip” in a very cartoony sequence.  There is gunplay, explosions, and some blood, but I don’t recall any nudity (nor does IMDb’s Parents Guide).

Come back on Thursday for a look at Disney’s latest, Maleficent!

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

The Brothers Grimm is almost Kaufman-esque, in a way, as a story about stories. By extension, then, I suppose it's the Pirates of the Caribbean of Charlie Kaufman stories - it doesn't take itself too seriously. But at the same time, it's a Terry Gilliam flick, which means The Brothers Grimm is superlatively visually stimulating, but coherence is not to be expected.

Fortunately, The Brothers Grimm is to date the most accessible Gilliam movie (excepting the brilliant Monty Python and the Holy Grail) I've seen.

These ain't your momma's Grimm Brothers, that's for sure. As portrayed by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Will and Jake - not Wilhelm and Jakob - are the 19th century equivalent of Ghostbusters, liberating French-occupied Germany from all manner of witches and demons. We quickly learn that the Grimm enterprise is a sham, as Will & Jake are staging superstitious happenings in order to reap the profits for "defeating" the apparitions. Their fraud is unearthed by the villainous French General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) and his Italian torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare, best known as the killer from Fargo, Karl Hungus/Uli Kunkel from The Big Lebowski, and rogue electrician Slippery Pete from "Seinfeld"), who force the brothers Grimm to solve the mystery of the missing girls of Marbaden, a forest town filled with every fairy tale denizen you can imagine.

Coherent? Certainly. Spectacular? Not quite. Fun? If you're into this sort of thing.

The fun in the film comes from two places: the cast and the script. The cast isn't quite impeccable, since they never manage to steal the show from the vivacious visuals Gilliam provides, but they all do a nice job of creating memorable if cartoonish characters. Damon and Ledger (both of whom can do no wrong in my book, though I would have liked to see the original choice for Will - Johnny Depp) are the stars, and they've got a real chemistry as brothers that suggests a long history between the two. Ladies man Will often clashes with bookish Jake, and both Damon and Ledger do a solid job of instantly creating a plausible characterization and sticking to it throughout. Ledger's accent, though, is a touch distracting, an interesting combination of Sean Connery and The Joker circa The Dark Knight. Pryce and Stormare are far grosser caricatures, underspeaking a typically British xenophobia of all things continental; Pryce is a knockout as always, and Stormare brings his conventional slimy foreigner aura to his role. Lena Headey (the queen from 300) is negligible as guide/love interest, but Monica Bellucci - as the eerie Mirror Queen - carries well the seductive cruelty of her witchy character.

The script, tangled though it is in places (and admittedly muddy in others) is fun because it's filled to the brim with references, homages, and nods of the head toward the more commonly known career of the Grimm brothers and the fairy tale canon on the whole. Keep your eyes peeled for Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel, and even The Gingerbread Man (look out, cookie from Shrek). Of course, knowing the identity of the little girl wearing a red hood in the forest isn't essential, but it helps make the later joke - in which Jake jots down in his journal "Little Red Riding Cape" - more entertaining.

I admitted the film is muddy, and it's classic Gilliam mud. After knocking out essential exposition within twenty minutes, the film dispenses with most claims to a plot and instead focuses on the Grimm dynamic and the eye-popping spectacle sequences (like moving trees, cobwebbed horses, and mud with a face). Consequently, the movie gets a little difficult to follow, especially when the narrative jumps quickly from scene to scene with little but imagination to fill in the gaps. What saves The Brothers Grimm from being another Gilliam headscratcher is its existence in a fantasy world where normal rules don't apply. I often ask of a Gilliam film, "How could this happen? What exactly is happening?" Here, the film makes up its own rules as it goes along, answering the question by saying, "X happens because that's the way fairy tales work."

The Brothers Grimm might not leave viewers happily ever after, but you'll at least turn the page with a smile on your face.

The Brothers Grimm is inscribed with a rating of "PG-13 for violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material." Violence and terror come on the whole from spooky creatures and foreboding forest environs, which some younger viewers might find more eerie than entertaining. As for suggestive material, Will is implied numerous times to be quite the ladies' man, but this is subtle and not prevalent.