a solid thriller. Sigourney Weaver does a pretty fantastic job as the profiler who got damaged.
There's this copaganda storyline that I think pads the movie too much on top of the fairly solid police drama. Kyra Sedwick, I mean Holly Hunter has this thing about being in control. More specifically her partner is a loose canon. In the opening scene they're doing a training exercise and this killer cop in the making kicks in a door, shouts "Police Freeze" and then IMMEDIATELY fires 15 shots one after another in to a training dummy, then pauses looks at Holly Hunter's MJ and then fires a 16th shot. His shots aren't precise they're all over the place as MJ criticizes rightly it's an insane amount of bullets and given that the subject would have had zero time to react it's... just insane. The guy has a screw loose. This guy is also our love interest. He's the only cop who treats MJ the lady cop like a person he doesn't use terms that even in 1995 were still sexist and old fashioned. He looks at Sigourney's Helen Hudson as someone who is sweet rather than as everyone else, including Helen, sees her, a broken dickish person. I thought the precision setup was going to be left alone. I thought it was just about establishing some reparte. It was effective in setting up MJ as a no-nonsense cop who deserved to be leading the case. It was enough imo. But there's a scene of random violence in Chinatown and the debate from the opening between MJ who thinks you should shoot enough to put the villain down and Ruben who thinks you should shoot enough to make sure they never get up is settled by the movie showing MJ use her technique in a picture perfect manner. She hits a hostage taker right in the shoulder as she said she would, He even drops the gun as she says he would and yet still for reasons that aren't explained don't make any sense and defy logic, this villain who has taken a cop hostage in a police precinct, has taken a bullet to the brachial nerve and is lying down in a police station filled with cops who were watching him can use his other hand reach across his own body pick up the gun just to shoot the hostage anyway. That hostage? Ruben Goetz and the lesson is learned. MJ's methods don't work. It was wrong to be concerned about killing people by accident, about worrying about the investigation, about showing lack of impulse control, about considering whether someone is surrendering, about whether you might get sued for wrongful death, about the karma of killing someone. None of this matters in the movie because she was "wrong" and a cop got killed. No matter that her superiors try to tell her she did the right thing and just got the wrong outcome. That's true but the movie isn't interested in that. No the movie wants our main character to have learned her lesson. This is her punishment for choosing not to kill. Which is why in the final confrontation she doesn't hesitate. She pops one in the shoulder and then keeps shooting, somehow this superman after taking 4 bullets is still capable of aiming his weapon and so we get to see the satisfying headshot with accompanying triumphant score to seal the deal.
Now there's no need to consider the practicality of shooting the subject in the shoulder to aim for hitting a specific nerve cluster. That's mostly movie nonsense the real considering is about restraint. In real life police are trained to shoot someone so they go down. The real restraint is about when to pull out your weapon and when to fire. But the copaganda of this movie is that cops that show restraint lead to dead cops.
Outside of this ridiculously over the top plotline I liked this movie. Sigourney as I said basically killed it. I didn't recognize Holly Hunter doing her best Kyra Sedwick's The Closer imitation (yes I'm aware this movie came out much earlier). I liked both our main female characters and i think even Ruben was interesting. I think more could have been done to enhance their relationships. The sorta gay but never confirmed, but he was attacked in the gay serial killing scene Andy was almost fleshed out enough for a secondary character but I would have liked to see HOW Helen relied on him and what their relationship was like a little more. There's a hint that Ruben is a playboy and MJ suggests he's into young bimbo types which didn't jive with his flirtatious relationship with Helen. You have to really work hard to infer whether Ruben and MJ were more than work partners or if it was just her jealous ex-boyfriend, also a cop in their department, Nico being paranoid. I think there was room to cut out the jealous ex-boyfriend who you work with storyline entirely and that would have left some runtime for flesh out the rest of it. I mean we already have her tough as nails boss Lt. Quinn who barely respects her as a woman. It felt a bit excessive at times to watch Nico try to mark territory too.
Freshmen year of college was great. I really enjoyed the film history class, but there was one disadvantage to the first semester. It took a long time to get through silent films, and frankly a lot of them can be really, really boring in long spurts.
Then we got to (96 year old) Caligari. This movie pulled me in so well right out of the gate. I'm not exactly Mr. Abstract Love, but something about German Expressionism really works for me. I think it is because it always has a direct purpose that I believe is truly planned in advance.
All of the sets in this work so well. You get a sense of a broader set idea, even though it is clearly on a small stage most of the time. The jagged lines, sharp edges, and "color" usage all add to your sense of the feeling in frame.
As far as acting, I love the guy who plays Caligari. Such a creepy old man done so well with his happy little evil laughs. Then when he is pretending to be a civil, high class man he has a great walk and look with the fake attempts. Second, the somnambulist plays a waking scene perfectly. He manages to make a guy opening his eyes to the camera for a long period of time interesting and engaging. That is just amazing.
So yea, going through some boring ones to get to this was awesome. It helps show that silence doesn't make a film worse. Sometimes it can be used for great purpose, and this is a fine example.
Fun movie with nice jokes about the most classic monsters. Analyzing its narrative's contribution to social change, though, I can not help being disappointed at the maintenance of gender patterns. Unfortunately, it misses many opportunities for presenting children to a different perspective on gender education.
The movie starts being very promising around this subject! We see a young Mavis who loves her father, but is curious and rebel enough to face him in case of abuse. When the masculine abuse of power finally happens, the narrative shows how wrong it is for a father to be a control freak over his children (mostly female ones), and I got very happy about that. After that, we see Dracula doing everything that he can to control his daughter continuously, and that is portrayed as comic relief, as it should be funny. Amidst, we get to know a young boy - so desperately drawned into his young masculinity - that he acts completely stupid about anything he sees, sexually harasses Mavis, acts inconvenient over and over, does not respect the "monsters" space, makes fun of their peculiarities (remembering that monsters are a portrait of society's misfits), and all this shit-show is presented as funny to kids. And so the film goes, giving more space for us to get to know a controlling father and a toxic lover-to-be, than the character we really wanted to know a little better: its monster young girl. It is as if I was watching two men trying to figure out a way to make women believe they had a context so convincing that we should feel sorry and forgive their abuses. It educates young children to see always TOO MUCH of the masculine narrative and be content with TOO LITTLE of the feminine part. In the end, the girl, who should be the protagonist of the movie and has a dream to know the infinity of possibilities of her immortality around the planet, finds herself in a romanticized relationship with the only boy of "her age" and gets himas a present to travel around with her, leading young female spectators to see a custody transfer from a man to another as a happy ending. Exactly the same freaking story of Ariel, Mulan, and so many other brilliant dreamers of children's movies. Not to forget that everything is solved by the father and his male old friends, while Mavis stays crying in a lone castle.
Absolutely disappointed.
Very poor.
I couldn't tell you one thing I enjoyed about this. To be ultra fair, there isn't anything truly diabolical about it either - hence the (generous?) rating. It's just so basic and limp that it struggles to entertain at all, I'd even question if the younger audience would even like it.
The elephant in the room is also that's practically a rip-off of DreamWorks' 'Madagascar', which was released roughly one year prior. If we're comparing the two, 'The Wild' is weaker in every area - and I'm not even a massive fan of that 2005 film.
Animation-wise it's disappointing, it's not just dull but also quite jarring in parts. The cast aren't much better, I wouldn't say any of them are bad but none of them are memorable one bit - if you force me to pick a noteworthy member, it would be Eddie Izzard's koala. Kiefer Sutherland (Samson) and William Shatner (Kazar) should standout, but simply do not.
The story is shallow, predictable and boringly by the numbers. I expect much more from Disney, it's safe to say. Up until this point in time, it's definitely their worst animated release that isn't a sequel/spin-off.
Not even the short run time could save this. Shame.
