Summer School: 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' (2014)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's returning franchises.

One of the great things about the world of the X-Men in comic books is how vast and varied it is. Even within the larger Marvel universe, the X-Men exist in their own expansive world, one that encompasses a wide range of superpowers, heroes, villains, conspiracies, institutions, alien races, alternate dimensions, dystopian futures, etc. Even the best movies in the X-Men franchise prior to Days of Future Past haven't managed (or even attempted) to capture that scope. So it's exciting when Days opens not on Xavier's mansion or a government building or a quiet suburban street, but in a war-torn, post-apocalyptic wasteland like something out of the Terminator movies. Returning director Bryan Singer immediately announces that this is going to be a different sort of X-Men movie, and he largely delivers on that promise.

As has been the running theme of these entries, it seems, watching Days immediately following the previous movies in the series highlights some of its shortcomings, most notably its haphazard approach to continuity, which it both uses and disregards whenever convenient. The entire story is built around the idea of messing with the timeline, so keeping things straight would apparently be important, but Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg use only the elements that serve their story, and throw out the rest. It's easy to forgive those missteps when the story is as entertaining and exciting as Days is, though, and Singer and Kinberg do a great job of creating an engaging, fun and thrilling story out of scraps of several other movies.

Days takes place mainly in the past, during the 1970s about a decade after the events of First Class, with a framing sequence and occasional glimpses of that post-apocalyptic future. Although the movie was touted as a combination of the casts from the first three movies and from First Class, the actual screen time is divided unevenly, with only Hugh Jackman from the original cast taking on a real starring role. The rest of the returning characters appear only in the future scenes, and some barely even appear at all. After fighting so hard to get more substantial storylines for Storm in previous movies (and ending up with high billing in this one), Halle Berry only has a handful of lines. Anna Paquin, also highly billed, doesn't appear at all until a wordless cameo in the coda. The longer cut of the movie (which I still haven't seen) features an entire future-set subplot about Paquin's Rogue that was cut for time, and while it would have been cool to see her do more, I don't think the movie suffers for where it places its focus.

Adding Jackman to the cast of prequel characters is a brilliant move, and his Wolverine fits in perfectly with James McAvoy's Professor X, Michael Fassbender's Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique and Nicholas Hoult's Beast. Getting Wolverine's consciousness back into his younger self to stop a terrible future from happening requires some pretty painful contrivances (especially the random, nonsensical new powers for Kitty Pryde), but it's worth the effort, and Jackman makes the most out of his character's man-out-of-time predicament. This is easily the most humorous X-Men movie, but it also features real emotional depth, especially in the struggles of Professor X and Magneto to believe in their dreams again. The mid-film scene in which McAvoy and Patrick Stewart interact (via a trippy sort of cross-time telepathy) as the two versions of Professor X is a lovely distillation of the core philosophy of the series.

On top of all that, Days is a great action movie, easily the best installment in the series since X2. It features some impressive set pieces with real suspense, and the time-travel storyline lends a sense of urgency to every mission that none of the other movies had. The X-Men are saving the world, but they're doing so by having intense arguments with each other, combining two of the elements that make this franchise unique. The fate of humanity and mutantkind hinges on whether two old friends can put aside their differences and work together.

And it really does feel like something important hinges on these characters coming together and fighting for what they believe in. The climax features some excellent, extremely effective cross-cutting between the two timelines, as the mutant-hunting Sentinels close in on the future X-Men, while Magneto and Mystique close in on the president and his advisers in the past. And yet the final victory comes about thanks to diplomacy, not violence, although there is plenty of that leading up to it. The coda, featuring cameos from several stars who had major roles in the earlier movies, is pure fan service, but it's crafted with just the right balance of pandering and genuine emotion. In a way it's a shame that the success of Days and Hollywood's endless hunger for franchises won't allow the series to end, because Days is a satisfying capper to an inconsistent but groundbreaking superhero series.

Summer School: 'X-Men: First Class' (2011)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's returning franchises.

Falling somewhere in between a prequel and a reboot, X-Men: First Class was a refreshing change of pace for the franchise when it was released in 2011, following 2006's disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand and 2009's even more disappointing spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It doesn't look quite as good in retrospect, especially compared to Bryan Singer's first two movies, and, like The Last Stand, it sets some dangerous precedents for messing with series continuity that would become the foundations of later installments. To be fair, at the time the filmmakers didn't necessarily anticipate that the timelines of this film and the previous films would merge, but First Class makes enough references to the earlier movies that it can't entirely be viewed as a standalone piece.

For starters (literally), the opening is an exact replica of the opening scene of Singer's X-Men, with young Erik Lensherr discovering his powers as the Nazis cart his mother off to a concentration camp. Director Matthew Vaughn (who stepped in when contractual obligations kept Singer from returning, and who was originally set to direct The Last Stand) then expands on that, introducing young Erik to the sadistic Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), an underrated villain in the series. Although the movie takes place in 1962 and contradicts a number of established back-story elements from the earlier films (especially The Last Stand), it still works to connect itself to its predecessors, with cameos from Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Romijn and references to events that would theoretically be yet to come for these characters.

Still, First Class is plenty entertaining on its own, and James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender do a good job of putting their own stamps on Professor X and Magneto. Vaughn has a lot of fun with the time period, in his visual style (including split screens, reflections and Dutch angles), in the fashions and in the use of real historical events, most significantly the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is reimagined as a mutant battle. Shaw makes for a fabulously evil villain, more sadistic and sinister than Magneto or Stryker, albeit just as focused on the idea of human-mutant mutually assured destruction. McAvoy, Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence as the young Mystique establish a strong central dynamic that will carry through the next two movies, and Nicholas Hoult offers decent support as Beast (although he looks pretty silly in his furry blue form).

Other supporting characters are kind of wasted, though, especially the team of X-Men that Professor X eventually recruits to go after Shaw. They're mostly third-string characters, rather than the actual "first class" from the comics, since the movie doesn't reuse any characters who were already introduced in the present-day timeline in the previous installments. Shaw's team of evil mutants is also pretty forgettable, and January Jones' wooden performance kind of ruins the introduction of Emma Frost, one of the most interesting characters in the X-Men canon. The flaws of First Class are more apparent when it's viewed in the context of the series as a whole, but from moment to moment it's still fun to watch, and it delves into philosophy and character dynamics much more effectively than The Last Stand did. In a way it's a victim of its own success, since instead of launching a rebooted franchise, it got folded into the main series, retroactively becoming a solid prequel rather than a true fresh start.

Summer School: 'X-Men: The Last Stand' (2006)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's returning franchises.

When X-Men: The Last Stand was released in 2006, I was in the minority of critics who gave it a positive review, albeit with a number of reservations. Revisiting it now right after rewatching the first two movies, I'm more attuned to its faults, but I still don't think it's nearly as bad as some critics and fans have made it out to be. Sure, it's a letdown, especially after the excellent X2, but it's far from incompetent, and it delivers one of the most memorable moments of the entire series (Magneto taking hold of the Golden Gate Bridge and moving it across the bay to his destination). Brett Ratner is justifiably considered a hack, and he obviously doesn't have the same connection to the material as Bryan Singer (who's now directed four of the six movies in the main series). But he knows how to put together a Hollywood movie, and The Last Stand often works well enough as a large-scale spectacle.

It's much less successful on a character level, especially in its truncated attempts to adapt the Dark Phoenix Saga storyline from the comics. The resurrection and corruption of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) is handled clumsily and without the emotional resonance that should come from such a beloved piece of storytelling, and overall the character interactions are not nearly as affecting as they were in the first two movies. Ratner and screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn either downplay the important relationships (Professor X and Magneto share only a few moments onscreen) or overplay them (the shift of Jean and Logan's dynamic from unrequited love to melodramatic romance is completely miscalculated). The movie adds far too many new characters only to completely squander them, while doing a disservice to some of the central figures from the previous movies.

Poor James Marsden, after disappearing for large stretches of X2, gets unceremoniously killed off about 20 minutes into this movie, and even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) ends up dead in an anticlimactic confrontation halfway through. Both Cyclops and Professor X have been dead multiple times in the comic books, so it's not like there isn't precedent for their demises (however temporary), but the movie fails to give them the weight that Jean's death carried at the end of X2 (which is sort of undone here). After exploring his past in X2, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is mostly used as a fighter here, except when called on to wail over Jean's corruption. The returning character with the most significant development is Halle Berry's Storm, finally given some depth (in her need to step up as leader following Professor X's death) after her fairly flat appearances in the previous movies. Berry fought hard to get Storm more screen time, and those efforts finally pay off here.

As for the new characters, they're largely forgettable, and there's no villain here comparable to Brian Cox's delightful William Stryker in X2. The company that creates a mutant cure (a storyline with potential for allegory that's mostly wasted) isn't particularly sinister, so Magneto ends up as the de facto main villain, and while Ian McKellen is great as always, the series has relied too much on returning to Magneto's familiar mutant superiority angle for its major climaxes. Magneto recruits some underused new allies that are little more than cannon fodder, and the new heroes make only slightly more of an impact. Kelsey Grammer is quite out of place as the Beast (the guy is erudite, but that doesn't mean he should sound like Frasier), and Ben Foster essentially has nothing to do as Angel, while Ellen Page has a few nice moments as Kitty Pryde, even if the Kitty/Bobby/Rogue love triangle doesn't really go anywhere.

Almost of all of the plot developments in this movie were later ignored and/or retconned, so in retrospect it's hard to get too worked up over the characters that are killed off or depowered. Still, The Last Stand set the precedent for rewriting or discarding the series continuity, with its retroactive powering-up of Jean and its supporting cast of mutants with ill-defined powers. It's a movie that seems to care little about what makes the X-Men unique, instead focusing on delivering big, expensive action thinly supported by elements from the comics. Putting the X-Men in a glossy action movie isn't necessarily a bad thing, but burning through so many of the characters' most interesting stories in service of that action is a definite disappointment.

Summer School: 'X2: X-Men United' (2003)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's returning franchises.

From the first moments of X2: X-Men United (or just X2, depending on what source you trust), it's obvious that the success of the first X-Men movie three years earlier has afforded director Bryan Singer a massive increase in budget. Teleporting mutant Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) would have been too elaborate to create on the budget of the original movie, but here he catapults himself around the White House with impressive fluidity, mixing acrobatic combat with CGI flashes as he disappears and reappears throughout the building. Singer and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shoot the sequence with equally acrobatic camera movements, creating suspense and intrigue right from the start. That level of confidence never flags over the course of more than two hours (the sequel is also about half an hour longer than the previous movie), and X2 still stands as the pinnacle of the long-running series.

It also, however, introduces some of the trends that would end up sabotaging later entries, including the excess of thinly developed characters and the endless cluttering and/or rewriting of continuity. The new characters here mostly serve useful functions, and the expansion of the backstory mostly makes sense, but it's not hard to see how further efforts in those areas could go off the rails. Nightcrawler is the most prominent new hero introduced here, and while Cumming's performance is a little underwhelming, Singer and screenwriters David Hayter, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris smartly use Nightcrawler's background as both a circus performer and a devout Catholic to flesh out the character in a few small scenes. New villain William Stryker, played by Brian Cox with sinister flair, is also a welcome addition, and his fervently anti-mutant perspective makes him in a way a better antagonist for the X-Men than the somewhat sympathetic Magneto.

Speaking of Magneto, he's one of many returning characters who gets some interesting character development, as he teams up with the X-Men to take down their mutual enemy Stryker, who plans to use Cerebro to wipe out all mutants. Ian McKellen is great at maintaining Magneto's air of danger and malevolence even when he's on the side of the good guys, something that both the movies and the comics can't always manage. After giving a breakout performance in the first movie, Hugh Jackman also gets more to do here, as X2 explores Wolverine's mysterious past, which ties in with Stryker's long-term mutant experimentation. There's real soul and anguish to Wolverine here, and his unrequited love for Jean Grey sets up her tragic fate. As in the first movie, Famke Janssen is the most underrated cast member, and she gives Jean a quiet strength through to the end.

The expanded cast does mean that some of the returning characters get short-changed, especially James Marsden's Cyclops, who's offscreen for almost the entire middle of the movie. Anna Paquin's Rogue, a sort of audience surrogate in the first movie, has little to do here despite her burgeoning romance with Shawn Ashmore's Iceman, and although Halle Berry reportedly got a bigger part written for Storm, she still often comes off as superfluous. Even so, every character has a part to play in the overall story, and the larger scope mostly justifies the larger cast.

Beyond the eye-catching opening, Singer stages a number of thrilling set pieces, including a fight between adamantium-enhanced foes Wolverine and Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu), a midnight raid on Xavier's school, and a mid-air jet freefall that ends in the iconic image of Magneto using his powers to hold up the X-Men's plane just feet above the ground. Overall, X2 is an exciting, well-paced blockbuster that shows Singer at the height of his talents and balances the increasingly grandiose ambitions of the series with solid, character-driven storylines.

Summer School: 'X-Men' (2000)

Once again, I'm looking back at previous installments of some of this summer's returning franchises.

Given how prevalent superhero movies are today, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary Bryan Singer's X-Men was when it was released 16 years ago. Before Singer took on the mutant superhero team, the only Marvel feature films that had made it to American theaters were Howard the Duck and Blade (both 1989's The Punisher and 1990's Captain America went straight to video in the U.S.). Even beyond Marvel, the most recent high-profile superhero movie was Joel Schumacher's notorious 1997 failure Batman & Robin. The climate was not exactly hospitable to superhero movies, let alone ones that took themselves seriously and attempted to address complex issues.

Against those odds, X-Men became the main movie responsible for the current superhero boom, the one that showed studios that audiences would flock to a well-crafted movie about people with superpowers wearing silly costumes and fighting each other, and that acclaimed filmmakers like Singer should be the ones entrusted with these characters. Not only did the movie succeed at the box office, but it also garnered positive reviews and pleased the hardcore comics fans who were ready to tear it apart. That level of commercial, critical and fan success has become crucial to the movies that Marvel now makes on its own.

And yet X-Men is also in many ways a modest film, since it was a gamble for 20th Century Fox at the time, and didn't have nearly the budget of a current superhero movie (even its own many sequels). Singer keeps the cast manageable, using only a handful of the dozens of mutant heroes as his main characters, and adding a few others as supporting or background players. This movie isn't trying to lay the groundwork for years of sequels and spin-offs; it's just trying to tell a solid, self-contained story about the X-Men, to introduce them and pit them against one of their most famous enemies. The climax doesn't involve the wholesale destruction of a city or the end of the world, but it still has high stakes in its more limited way. Subsequent movies would totally botch the series' continuity several times over, but here Singer keeps things coherent and streamlined.

He also lines up a fantastic cast, several of whom made these characters into definitive roles of their careers. Obviously Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is the breakout star of the film, and it's impressive to see how fully formed and commanding his performance as the character was from the very beginning. But Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are also fantastic, imbuing Professor X and Magneto with the depth necessary for the audience to take them seriously. It's a testament to their work in these films that the guys who played Capt. Picard and Gandalf are known nearly as widely for their X-Men work. I think Famke Janssen is underrated here (and in general), and she has great flirty chemistry with Jackman, without ever undermining Jean Grey's intelligence and autonomy.

There is a lot of silly stuff in this movie, including Magneto's primary plan to use some sort of gyroscope to turn all humans into mutants. But even if the action isn't as elaborate as in the later movies and some of the character introductions now seem a bit clumsy, the dynamics among the characters are strong and distinctive, the dialogue is often clever, and the story has clear dramatic stakes. The sequence featuring Magneto turning the guns around on the police officers who are surrounding him is still one of the most iconic moments in superhero cinema. There would be better superhero movies (and better X-Men movies) made after this one, but Singer laid the groundwork in a confident fashion that holds up remarkably well all these years later.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Murder on the 13th Floor' (2012)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

These days, Tessa Thompson is a rising star with notable roles in acclaimed movies like Creed, Selma and Dear White People, and upcoming appearances in the next Thor movie and Alex Garland's Annihilation. But just a few short years ago, she was a relatively unknown working actress, stringing together TV guest appearances and low-budget indie movies like Murder on the 13th Floor, a terrible thriller that eventually premiered as a Lifetime original movie. You would never guess from this movie that Thompson had a bright future ahead of her as an actress, but then again no one comes off particularly well in this sloppily conceived time-filler. It's the kind of movie that takes place in empty, cavernous spaces presumably because the budget didn't allow for enough supporting actors or extras, and the story is similarly bare-bones.

Thompson plays Nia Palmer, the nanny to wealthy couple Jordan (Sean Patrick Thomas) and Ariana (Jordan Ladd) and their son Cody (Terrell Ransom Jr.). Jordan and Ariana have developed a high-tech, ultra-modern high-rise apartment building, but inexplicably they and Nia are the only people who live in it. The building is completely finished and functional, but Jordan and Ariana are just now trying to sell the condos to residents, which seems like a poor business plan. Anyway, for some reason Jordan and Ariana live in a nice apartment on the 14th floor, complete with a bunch of goofy futuristic technology (like a toilet that analyzes your urine every time you use it, which becomes an important plot point), while Nia lives on the 13th floor in an apartment with no fancy upgrades. The only other person in the building is a tech guy whose job involves tweaking the various systems when they malfunction.

Since this is a Lifetime movie (or at least a movie that Lifetime picked up), Nia is having an affair with Jordan, and Ariana is about to put her in peril. Contrary to the title, there's no murder on the 13th floor (although there is eventually murder on other floors), and it takes quite a while for Ariana to enact her plan of hiring a pair of hitmen to kill Nia while Ariana and Jordan are out at a promotional gala. This movie has a weird moral universe, in which the interloper in the marriage of two seemingly stable people, who also pretty deliberately usurps the role of a young child's mother, is the sympathetic heroine, the cheating husband is the gallant hero, and the woman whose husband is having an affair and whose child is being turned against her is somehow the villain. Of course, Ladd plays Ariana as a snide, money-hungry bitch, while Nia and Jordan are both warm and caring. There's also a weird racial dynamic going on, since Nia and Jordan are both black, while Ariana is white. You could read the movie as having a stance against interracial relationships; only by restoring racial purity are harmony and balance also restored.

But this movie isn't sophisticated enough to be saying something that complicated. Mostly it's about watching Nia and Cody run around the empty building while being chased by a couple of clueless assassins, who accidentally kill Nia's best friend instead before realizing she's still alive. All of the high-tech gadgetry is depicted without consistency or believability; the bad guys electronically lock down the entire building, but then characters can open doors and use elevators when the plot requires it. The movie is only four years old, but its depiction of computer programs looks like something out of the '90s, when "the internet" was a scary unknown factor to use in thrillers like The Net.

There's virtually no suspense to the story, and the character dynamics are all awkward and forced (it doesn't help that much of the dialogue was poorly post-dubbed). The ending abruptly punishes the villain and sets up Nia and Jordan and Cody as a new family (apparently Cody isn't too concerned that his mom is being carted away in handcuffs), without addressing any of the consequences. It's a rushed ending to a movie that never thinks through any of its plot or character developments. Thanks to Thompson's stardom, however, its ineptitude will probably be showcased on Lifetime for years to come.

Bette Davis Month Bonus: 'Special Agent' (1935)

At this point, I've seen nearly all of these quickie programmers that Bette Davis churned out in the 1930s, and what's left is mostly the dregs. Special Agent, one of 13 films Davis co-starred in with George Brent (just when I think I've seen the last of him, he shows up in another Davis movie), is definitely among those dregs, with very little to recommend it other than some historical curiosity and a solid (but not outstanding) performance from Davis. Brent is the real star here, playing a U.S. Treasury Department agent who works undercover as a newspaper reporter as he attempts to ensnare a wily crime boss played by an amusingly sleazy Ricardo Cortez.

Davis plays the boss' secretary and bookkeeper, who is also sweet on Brent's Bill Bradford, without knowing his true identity. Davis' Julie Gardner is a good-hearted woman, neither the amoral femme fatale nor the morally righteous crusader Davis played in other crime movies. She's in over her head and wants to get away from her boss, but she doesn't really have any mission other than living a safe and happy life (and eventually marrying Bill, of course). So Davis plays her with a mix of sweetness and determination, and she's easily the most likable character in the movie. But like all the other characters, she's basically one-dimensional, and the movie is more interested in plodding procedural details than in telling an interesting story or developing rounded characters.

It opens with a literal lecture to Bill and his colleagues from a superior officer whom we never see again, describing the vital importance of the Treasury Department in rooting out organized crime and other vices in the United States. And the rest of the movie pays lots of attention to minutiae like making photostats and squad cars radioing in as they follow some criminals to their hideout. There are a few nice touches to Bill and Julie's relationship, like her constant hunger (for food), and Cortez plays up his character's ruthlessness with enthusiasm. But those are small grace notes in an otherwise dreary, forgettable morality play.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'Hellblock 13' (1999)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

Presented by Troma, Hellblock 13 is the kind of micro-budget exploitation movie that filled video-store shelves in the '90s, with an audience primarily composed of teenage boys eager for any movie featuring boobs and/or gore. Hellblock has a bit of both, although perhaps not as much as one might expect from a movie with this pedigree. It's a sort of low-rent take on Creepshow, an anthology of three EC-style horror stories, with a framing sequence that offers its own horrific twists. B-movie favorites Gunnar Hansen and Debbie Rochon star in the framing sequence, with Rochon as a serial killer about to be executed and Hansen as her executioner. Rochon's Tara has been keeping a notebook full of scary stories that are relayed to her by the ghosts in the prison (or something), and she convinces the nameless executioner to let her read him some of them.

So the three other segments are meant to be Tara's stories, although they don't really connect to her vaguely witchcrafty practices or to each other. Nor do they make much sense, really. The first one involves a woman whose two kids have gone missing, and it's never clear whether the woman actually killed her kids and is being pursued by their vengeful ghosts (since she's tormented and killed by a ridiculous-looking drowned-kid ghoul), or someone else killed the kids and set their ghosts on her, or it's something else entirely. The waterlogged kids are kind of hilariously clumsy-looking, and the woman's completely bored response to everything that happens to her (being accused of murder, being attacked by ghosts, being proposed to by her boyfriend) seems like more a product of bad acting than a deliberate storytelling choice.

The second segment is similarly baffling and similarly grotesque, with an abused trailer-trash housewife attempting revenge on her husband, only for the spell she procures from a local witch to backfire (it's not quite clear how) and turn him into a hulking monster (featuring more terrible prosthetics). This story just kind of peters out, with the only possible lesson being that it's a bad idea to attempt to escape an abusive relationship. The third story is the most coherent, with a biker gang initiating its newest member via a secret ritual honoring the spirit of a dead biker mama. The new member is an undercover cop, and he gets his comeuppance at the hands of the vengeful biker-mama spirit. It's simple and straightforward, and it gives the movie the opportunity for some gratuitous biker-chick toplessness and lesbianism.

The framing story wraps up with Tara getting her revenge on her captors by killing herself before they can kill her, then returning as a ghost (or something) and executing her executioner. Before killing herself, she writes "Publish Me" in blood on her cell walls, so the whole thing is apparently an elaborate ploy to get a book deal. That kind of haphazard silliness pervades the movie, which isn't really campy enough to be funny but certainly isn't actually scary or creepy, either. Rochon's exuberantly evil performance is the movie's highlight, but even that is only good for a handful of entertaining moments.

Director and co-writer Paul Talbot made three of these straight-to-video horror anthologies in the '90s and then apparently got out of the movie business, and it's hard to see anything particularly promising in his flat, functional style (it doesn't help that the version I watched on Amazon looked like it was transferred directly from VHS). B-movie aficionados (especially fans of Rochon or Hansen, who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre) could find a bit of enjoyment in this movie, but even they might struggle to make it to the end.

'Hunters'

Syfy has made a significant effort recently to rebuild its reputation as a place for intelligent science fiction, with series like The Expanse and The Magicians, and at first glance, Hunters seems like it could be part of that same trend. Based on the novel Alien Hunter by renowned genre writer (and alleged alien abductee) Whitley Strieber, Hunters is sort of like 24 meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with an elite government agency battling against alien terrorists hidden among the human populace. It's a silly, pulpy premise that could have been campy fun, but creator Natalie Chaidez (a writer and producer on Syfy's 12 Monkeys) plays it with deadly seriousness. The tone is so grim and gritty that it's laughable, especially with the weak acting, chintzy special effects and overall blatant cost-cutting.

Shot in Australia (presumably to save money) but set in the U.S., Hunters features a cast of mostly Australian actors doing questionable American accents, and sticks to generic-looking locations that lack geographic specificity (although theoretically the show takes place in the Washington, D.C. area). Everything about the show is just slightly off, in a low-budget knockoff kind of way. The characters work in an underpopulated warehouse-style office, for an agency with the absurd name of the Exo-Terrorism Unit (or ETU, strikingly similar to 24's CTU). The frequent shots of alien guts are excessively gross but also extremely fake-looking. The aliens' main form of communication is a kind of chattering that is meant to sound creepy but quickly becomes annoying, especially because it crops up in every attempt at a suspenseful moment, and also before and after every commercial break. It's like the producers were determined to build the entire series around one particularly cool piece of sound design that they commissioned.

Star Nathan Phillips plays the standard macho, tortured agent who crosses the line but gets results, who has a personal grudge against the alien terrorists who kidnapped his wife. Britne Oldford is slightly better as the ETU agent who is actually an alien herself, although she grew up believing herself human and doesn't know where the aliens come from or what they're meant to do. The main distinguishing mark on the aliens is a rash that looks like extremely dry skin, which leads to a hilarious scene in the second episode in which the anguished hero is devastated to discover his missing wife's cabinet full of moisturizer. Playing this scene as an emotional bombshell is indicative of how seriously the producers take this nonsense, and no one in the cast (even TV veteran Julian McMahon, playing the main super-evil alien terrorist) is equipped to pull it off. Hunters desperately wants to be a serious allegory for modern terrorism and an intense action thriller, but it fails at both, and in doing so loses the opportunity to at least come up with some enjoyable B-movie cheese.

Premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on Syfy.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The 13th Warrior' (1999)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

In junior high, I was a huge Michael Crichton fan; Jurassic Park was one of the first "adult" novels I ever read, when I was in fifth grade, and I eagerly devoured Crichton's books alongside my other middle-school favorites, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice. Crichton's short 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead was sort of an outlier, a historical thriller dressed up to seem like nonfiction, with an academic narrative style that often undermined the story's potential excitement. By 1999, when the notoriously troubled film adaptation of Eaters of the Dead (retitled The 13th Warrior) was released, my Crichton fandom had largely subsided, and I never had any interest in seeing what turned out to be a poorly reviewed box-office failure.

It'd be nice to say that the movie turned out to be underrated, but the best I can say for it is that it doesn't come across as quite the disaster that one might expect from a movie that underwent extensive reshoots, helmed by a different director, after bombing at test screenings. I don't remember the plot details of the novel (which I probably read close to 25 years ago), but the movie hangs together well enough as a story, even if the narrative doesn't really go anywhere. Absent Crichton's meticulous (fake) historical references, Warrior is just a mediocre action movie with dubious period accuracy, cribbing a bit from Beowulf (although honestly I didn't realize that until reading up on it later) and a bit from the real life of 10th-century Arab explorer Ahmad ibn Fahdlan (played, of course, by the Spanish Antonio Banderas).

While on a diplomatic mission, Ahmad encounters a group of Vikings who enlist him to join their band of warriors (as prophesied, the 13th member must be a foreigner) and travel north to a village ravaged by mysterious cannibalistic assailants. Apparently these savages are meant to represent the monster Grendel from Beowulf, but the entire story builds to the revelation that they are not supernatural creatures, merely primitive humans (in the novel, they are specifically identified as remnants of Neanderthals), making it hard to know how to interpret their depiction (which seems vaguely racist at times, although against what real-life ethnic group is never clear).

The movie spends a lot of time building up Ahmad's rapport with his Viking compatriots, including an absurd montage in which he learns their entire language in what appears to be a few days, so that the characters can all talk to each other in English onscreen. That kind of clumsy storytelling might be indicative of where things went wrong, although it's generally hard to tell which parts of the movie were created by original director John McTiernan, and which were later added by Crichton himself, who was the uncredited director of the reshoots. Either way, the early part of the movie is a bit of a slog, but once the savages start attacking the village, things perk up a bit, and McTiernan (I'm assuming) stages a great nighttime battle sequence lit only by torches as the Vikings struggle to fight off what they believe may be actual demons.

Things go downhill from there, and the attack by the Vikings on the savages' lair (meant to most directly evoke Beowulf) is confusing and anticlimactic, as is the rushed finale (which Crichton shot to replace McTiernan's poorly received original ending). The Vikings themselves never really develop into distinctive characters, and while Banderas gives Ahmad some moments of quiet strength, he remains mostly inscrutable as well (his fling with a Viking woman barely makes an impression). Diane Venora gets second billing but virtually no screen time as the queen of the besieged village, another sign of what may have been left on the cutting-room floor. A handful of online posts clamor for a release of the original director's cut, but the movie doesn't give the impression that there's brilliance to be salvaged somewhere within.

'The Real O'Neals'

For all its pretense at getting to what's "real," The Real O'Neals is as tacky and glib as any sitcom on the air, treating the supposedly serious issues of its characters with a dismissive shrug. There's no sense of the real difficulties facing the formerly upstanding Catholic O'Neal family as they deal with various hidden problems, all of which bubble to the surface in the overwrought pilot episode. Parents Eileen (Martha Plimpton) and Pat (Jay R. Ferguson, a long way from Mad Men) are getting divorced, football-playing older son Jimmy (Matthew Shively) is anorexic, daughter Shannon (Bebe Wood) is a kleptomaniac, and younger son Kenny (Noah Galvin), who also narrates the show, is gay.

Kenny's coming-out motivates the explosion of family secrets, but his newly expressed sexuality and his mother's negative response to it are depicted with the same breeziness, just wacky quirks among this deeply repressed family. Advice columnist and outspoken LGBT activist Dan Savage is one of the producers (and a loose inspiration for the main character), but none of his passionate advocacy comes across in the way the show portrays Kenny. Kenny's siblings' problems are given even less weight, to the point at which it's hard to understand what place they even have in the show's concept. It would be one thing if this was a challenging show mining dark humor from uncomfortable situations, but it's just as corny and contrived as the average family comedy. The actual jokes, with wacky mishaps and tiresome fantasy sequences (check out the ABC cross-promotion with the extensive Jimmy Kimmel guest spot in the second episode!), don't live up to the potential complexity of the concept.

As she proved on Raising Hope, Plimpton is great at playing an exasperated matriarch, and Ferguson, whose work on Mad Men was underrated, has a few solid moments as the clueless dad. The kids are less impressive, especially Galvin, whose voiceover narration should tie the show together. His observations are neither funny nor insightful, over-explaining the central concept (that the seemingly perfect family is not actually perfect) in a way that only highlights the disconnect between what the show is aiming for and what it actually accomplishes.

Premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. on ABC.

Triskaidekaphilia: 'The Thirteen Assassins' (1963)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

It's been quite a while since I wrote about Takashi Miike's 2010 remake of the 1963 samurai movie The Thirteen Assassins, and I don't remember a lot of details about it, other than that it ended with a massive, incredibly violent action scene that took up essentially the entire third act. The original follows the same structure, although director Eiichi Kudo doesn't have Miike's penchant for extreme violence (not that it would have been acceptable in a movie from this era anyway). The first half of the movie is more of a slow historical drama than an action movie, and there really isn't any fighting until the last half-hour, when the titular team of samurais stages an elaborate ambush in a remote village.

Their target is a powerful, arrogant feudal lord who raped and killed one of his subjects while he was a guest in her husband's home, and then killed the husband, too. The complicated process of authorizing his assassination, and the various political alliances that come into play, takes up most of the first hour, and it's a bit pokey and hard to follow. Even with helpful onscreen explanations of some of the terms used in feudal Japan (a pleasantly surprising addition to the subtitles), I still had trouble figuring out how the various characters and domains related to each other. As with the remake, I also ended up having a tough time telling most of the assassins apart, with their nearly identical outfits and hairdos.

Still, the stuff about honor and obligation is interesting as an examination of the historical period, and the attention to detail and methodical plotting give the movie a sense of realism by the time it finally gets to all the sword-fighting. Kudo doesn't have the same nihilistic worldview as Miike, and this movie's fight, while bloody and deadly, isn't the kind of over-the-top gory massacre that Miike presented in his remake. The deaths are more about honor and respect than about random cruelty, and the characters live by their strict moral code to the very end, even when that code requires them to kill people they respect. The callous, self-centered lord who set the plot in motion is the only person in the movie who behaves dishonorably, and the ripple effect of his actions leads many more respectable (but less powerful) men to their dooms. For Miike, that's evidence of the harshness of the world, but for Kudo, the fact that that these men would come together and give their lives to right a wrong that none of them directly experienced or witnessed is a kind of validation of human decency.

'Freeheld'

The good news about Freeheld is that the true-life situation it depicts—lesbian police detective Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), dying from cancer, unable to pass her pension along to Stacie (Ellen Page), her longtime domestic partner—should no longer be a concern thanks to the legalization of gay marriage. The bad news is that Laurel and Stacie’s legacy is being honored with such flat, uninspired drama, a movie-of-the-week-level narrative that does little service to the difficult fight they fought. Moore and Page (also one of the film’s producers) stumble awkwardly through Laurel and Stacie’s early courtship, and the movie also clumsily introduces Laurel’s law-enforcement skills with a barely developed subplot about a murder investigation.

Director Peter Sollett and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner move things along briskly, so that Laurel goes from having a pain in her side to a doctor’s visit to late-stage cancer within a handful of scenes. Moore and Page bring out the heartfelt emotions in the story, but the movie frustratingly loses focus on them in the second half, as both Laurel’s police-force partner (Michael Shannon) and a flamboyant gay-rights activist (Steve Carell) spend time arguing with the local government (known as freeholders) on her behalf. A story about a lesbian couple fighting for their rights shifts to a story about various men deciding their fate. Both the movie and the men in Laurel’s life are well-intentioned, but both seem to be ultimately missing what’s important about her struggle.

Available on DVD/Blu-ray today.