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 Verfasst am: 17.04.2008, 18:17 Titel: |
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<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> .... You'd think that with mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, and large, screeching birds you wouldn't need much more to deliver an entertaining romp through yester-epoch, but 10,000 B.C. proves that merely having an exotic setting as your premise won't get you over a mundane plot and more mundane characters. The film begins with a blue-eyed girl coming to live with a clan of "manuk" (that's "mammoth" to you and me) hunters after her tribe is wiped out by what appear to be the bad guys from Conan the Barbarian. The tribe elder (Mona Hammond) declares that this girl is part of some prophecy while the son of the tribe's #1 hunter looks on....asdkjhuewr2
<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> .... That little boy grows up to be D'Leh (Steven Strait), but not before his dad runs off for no apparent reason, leaving his son an outcast. The little girl grows up to be Evolet (Camilla Belle), on whom D'Leh has a pretty serious crush, but, tribes being what they are, he must take down a woolly manuk in order to win her. Seriously. D'Leh actually accomplishes this goal, albeit accidentally, but no sooner is he confessing the truth about his ill-gotten laurels than the marauders from Evolet's past come along and ruin it all by kidnapping just about everyone in the tribe, including Evolet. The rest of the movie is D'Leh, with some help from the current #1 hunter Tic'Tic (Cliff Curtis) and others, trying to track down and retrieve his beloved.....asdkjhuewr2
<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... All of the ingredients are here for a solid, if routine, action epic, and, to be fair, the film does an adequate job of delivering said epic before getting increasingly silly towards the end. But that's the problem. When you have multimillion dollar special effects and the potential to watch man vs. prehistoric beast, "adequate" doesn't cut it. But that's all you get: adequate action sequences and adequate special effects. The Skull Island sequence from Peter Jackson's King Kong alone blows this movie out of the water, and it doesn't take almost two hours to slog through. (Too bad about the rest of the movie, eh? - Ed.) And for an "exotic" setting, 10,000 B.C. isn't all that exotic. A desert is still a desert, a jungle is still a jungle, and snow is still snow (even if you call it "white rain"). Nothing in this film really makes you feel like you're transported back in time. If anything, the attempt to fuse ancient Egyptian lore, tribal warfare, and mammoths towards the end of the film is more confusing than engaging. ... asdkjhuewr2
<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... Which brings us to the silliness. At some point in the film, D'Leh and his wandering band discover a black African tribe. They, in turn, lead him to other tribes, which seem to cover everything from pygmies to Native Americans. They believe because of some prophecy (everybody in this movie has a prophecy) that he's the one they've been waiting for to lead them to victory. Frankly, it's a little depressing to think that even in a film set 12,000 years ago, the highly-trained dark-skinned warrior characters need to wait for a rookie light-skinned character to come along before they can do anything to help themselves. Secondly, the United Tribes of Benetton shtick feels forced and, for a film that's already left plausibility in the fridge way past the expiration date, totally impossible even if they were living on Pangaea. ... asdkjhuewr2
<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... With the ongoing popularity of high stakes poker, greenlighting a film like 21 would appear to be a Tinseltown no-brainer. After all, you've got the true story of how a group of MIT students broke the bank in Vegas by applying their highly trained analytical minds toward counting cards, beating Sin City's blackjack tables in the process. It's a mega-dose of Mensa wish fulfillment. But leave it to Hollywood to fiddle with the facts. Ben Mezrich's non-fiction book entitled Bringing Down the House centered on a group of mostly Asian geniuses grifting casinos for all the cash they could. Somehow, that translated into a cast consisting of Kevin Spacey, Jim Sturgess, and Kate Bosworth. ... asdkjhuewr2
<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... When Ben Campbell (Sturgess) learns that Harvard Medical School will cost $300,000 for tuition, room, and board, he sees no possible way of paying the bill. While studying one night, he is approached by Jason Fisher (Jacob Pitts) who invites him into the secret world of Professor Micky Rosa's (Spacey) card-counting club. With an elaborate system of formulas, buzzwords, and signals, Rosa and his students have been hitting Las Vegas on weekends and winning big. They now want Ben to join their clandestine cabal. At first, he says no. But thanks to the seductive sway of juicy Jill Taylor (Bosworth), Ben acquiesces. Soon, he is leading the group toward untold riches -- and the investigative glare of casino security agent Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne).
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<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... With its insider track, specialized skill, and beat-the-system sentiment, 21 is desperate to be a cracking cautionary tale for the Hard Rock Cafe crowd. Instead, it's a middling entertainment that gets a lot of mileage out of very little cinematic star power. Somewhere buried in all the glitterati shots of neon-streaked avenues and polished gambling pits, the comp suite spaces, and hallowed halls of advanced learning is a truly amoral romp about cheating to achieve material gains. While Spacey's Micky makes it very clear that there is nothing inherently illegal about card counting, Fishburne's got a series of scary rings on his fist that says different. One of them is right, and it's this ethical quandary that consistently subverts the film's narrative strides.
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<a>asdkjhuewr2</a> ... In fact, the vast majority of 21 plays like an overlong lecture in ethics class. Sturgess is viewed as both a wide-eyed innocent and an easily-directed huckster. One moment he's concerned about doing the right thing. The next he's foaming at the mouth to make another trip to the Blackjack tables. He does incredibly dumb things -- hiding tons of cash in his ceiling, ignoring his overly curious friends -- for such a smart guy, and his motivational shifts are so severe that we never get a clear handle on his goals. It's the same with everyone else in the film. Spacey seems poised between villain and Svengali, in it for the money and/or the interpersonal manipulation. Bosworth blossoms when she works the dealers undercover, but seems strangely one-dimensional when purely acting the student. ... asdkjhuewr2 |
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