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Nikita: 2010 TV pilot

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Paul

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From La Femme Nikita the movie to La Femme Nikita the series to Alias the series to Nikita the reboot, Hollywood is never happier than when it’s at its Ouroboros worst.

The original Luc Besson movie that spawned this increasingly derivative affair was a sharply directed – if ultimately unsatisfying – slice of spy-based espionage, the opening gambit in what came to be known as the Girls With Guns genre. The formula has since been repeated ad-infinium, with JJ Abrams’ Alias TV series being one of the more recent and blatant homages. This CW reboot is quick to recall that show in both style and fanboy titillation, with lead Maggie Q taking time out of her busy Need for Speed schedule to open proceedings with a flitter around a pool in a one-piece that leaves little to the sun-kissed imagination. Excuse me, sir, whilst I bend down slowly, glistening, to adjust my sculpted, precision ass in front of this high-definition camera.

Oh my.

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to see the original, the setup there and here is that a young woman is accused of killing a police officer during a botched raid on a pharmacy. Sent to a prison for a crime she didn’t commit, these men promptly escape she is offered a lifeline by a shadowy Government agent: come work for us, goes the pitch, and we’ll make all this go away; a kill in exchange for your freedom.

Trained assassins and the men who command them, then, are the order of the day. Young people with a reason to disappear are dispatched to kill a rival agent here, a Government official there, often wearing very little whilst doing so, because hey – those pool parties sure aren’t going to infiltrate themselves. So far so Alias, then, only Nikita wisely dispels with the Rambaldi artefact gimmick that came to push that show into a tragic death spiral. In its place comes… well, guns and more voyeur moments. Teenage boys everywhere sigh in relief.

Maggie Q as the titular agent provocateur is pleasing to the eye but her appeal largely ends there, lacking as she does even the limited emotional range of Jennifer Garner’s Alias character. Absent, too, is any kind of family dynamic to act as an emotional pivot. There are hints at a fractured past, but Nikita’s present is a lonely one, and the dramatic absence of friends and family is felt even in the pilot. How do you connect with a character so utterly bereft of feeling or loyalty? The lone gunman approach can be compelling narrative arc in a more short-form medium, but TV needs a great ensemble, and all the best shows set their stall out early.

Nikita is not a great show.

Proof comes primarily in the chiselled form of Shane West, playing Nikita’s handler at the agency as every bit the corporate, All-American blank slate. Out of his depth even in this, the shallowest of TV ponds, West’s portrayal is completely absent any range or intrigue, and even the briefest of comparisons to any of the central characters from Alias will have you come up wanting in just about any area you care to mention: where is the subtle, unpredictable danger of Arvin Sloan? The divided love of Michael Vaughn? Nowhere to be seen on this walking jawline, certainly.

There are seeds of promise amongst the wreckage, primarily in the mileage of watching young, angry recruits out on their early missions in the field, conflicted about their role in killing civilians at the biding of anonymous figures in Washington. Yet as you watch them act as little more than glorified redshirts, you’re left with the impression they’ll serve as little more than fodder for Nikita to do her toned thing to, possibly in slow motion. More promising is Lyndsy Fonseca as Alex, giving the show’s only real performance as a fellow agent, freshly brought into the fold and desperate for a way out. Early as it is, her edgy portrayal already gives her the jump on the pedestrian showings elsewhere, and raises the question of why the show doesn’t centre on her, rather than the used teabag that is Nikita.

But hey, when you can have the lead character walk around in her bra and panties *just because*, who needs to actually make a statement or have anything resonant emotionally? Somewhere out there in TV land, something else is resonating just fine for pimpled teenagers, cock and balls in hand.

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Please Give

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Paul

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Please Give is a movie about waiting to die: waiting for your neighbour to die so you can knock through and make a bigger bathroom. Waiting for your client to die so you can sell her furniture at markup. Waiting for your grandmother to die because she’s a bitch. Please Give is about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about waiting to die.

It’s also about the logistics of dying, because that’s really what it comes down to for all of us; someone to bury, something left to sell. Kate and Alex have made dying their business, and their shop is stocked with remnants of the deceased. They tour homes to pick over the remains, knocking at the door to be greeted as though they were simply next on a to-do list somewhere. They haggle with relatives for the furniture, though none seem to care very much; they just want it gone.

Rebecca and Mary are sisters. Rebecca is cute but deliberately dowdy. Her sister is more obviously attractive, but is irredeemably cold. They feign to look after their grandmother in an apartment along the hall from Kate and Alex, though Mary makes the imposition plain. In one scene she discusses with relish how the renovations will go when her grandmother has gone, the lady in question just a few feet away on the sofa cradling a plate. “This cake is dry”, she moans, to no one in particular.

Everywhere you might not care to look, there are lonely people looking out of lonely windows, and this film is an ode to them. It recalls the work of Todd Solondz, piecing together these disparate tragic lives into a meaningful whole. Nearly all the characters keep a certain distance, enjoying casual jokes about the morbid as though it will keep it at bay, but sometimes deeper truths reveal themselves. As her grandmother half-heartedly suggests her arthritis can somehow be beaten back, Mary coins simply that “You’re old. Things get worse, not better”. Later, clawing futilely at her reflection in the mirror, she admits to having ‘hit the wall’. She must be all of 35.

The last half an hour of the movie trades black humour for a strangely unsentimental reality. As if to prove Mary’s point, the grandmother slips away in the night, and her and Rebecca sit on a sofa that will doubtless end up in a store one day. “You’re going to work?” Rebecca asks. “No no, you’re right” comes the reply, pausing for a moment. “Hey, look, she’s still dead”. Left alone, Rebecca calls upon Kate, perhaps looking for comfort. They exchange meaningless patter about dented fruit cans, and go their separate ways; there are no big speeches, just these two people and their problems.

Kate is wrapped up in finding a purpose in a macabre and exploitative field, but doesn’t seem able to commit. She volunteers and gives generously to the homeless, but ends each day somehow more empty than when she started. Her husband is pragmatic and amusing, but he finds himself flirting with a woman half his age at a dinner party; soon they end up in bed together, but neither of them seem overly bothered when it ends. “I don’t want to fuck you anymore” she says, as he stares at the ceiling.

Please Give is understated, but it’s a delicate and oddly touching look at the matter of dying. Characters come and go, and their lives are sold piece by piece. Those that remain tend to the arrangements of their lives, busying themselves with mundane exchange of pleasantries that never confront the problem. Nothing much is resolved or challenged by the end, but then, what can be? We’re all going to die, and so we wait.

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Iron Man 2

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Paul

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Tony Stark is the kind of billionaire playboy I can get behind.

True, Bruce Wayne got there first, but when you picture him on his birthday, you can only really envisage him brooding in his batcave, thumbing his mother’s old jewellery from the night of her murder. Tony Stark, on the other hand, is more likely to be found collapsing drunk as the DJ at his own penthouse party, but not before having Scarlett Johansen drape herself over him, declaring that – were it *her* birthday – she’d “do whatever I wanted to do, with whoever I wanted to do it with” [beat] *seductive stare*.

No one likes a party pooper, Bruce.

Still, Iron Man 2 isn’t very good. Naturally, to suggest Robert Downey Jr acting out his vigilante fantasies could be anything less than basically enjoyable would be foolish; it’s simply inherent to the form. But after a first film that exuded youthful confidence and delighted us with a sharp script, this sequel seems content merely to swagger its way to a bloated middle age.

There are problems and delights in equal measure, often in quick succession. The introduction, for instance: on the one hand, the film opens with Stark cementing himself as The Free World personified, aptly dispatching with trouble wherever it might arise. We meet him revelling in his success at the opening of the Stark Expo, proud on a stage of buxom cheerleaders and pyrotechnics. He is at ease with the crowd’s rapturous applause, and the film is quick to recapture the pomp and humour of Iron Man 1: Stark as the man, a playboy prince at work and play.

Yet it also introduces its villain by way of recycled – generously, ‘referenced’ – scenes from that film: deep in Siberia, a father is on his death bed and tells his son of his secrets, the Stark Expo playing ominously on the small screen behind. They whisper together in Russian, the rough translation amounting to “Son, you will, through the power of vodka and montage, build your own Arc Reactor to challenge the imperialist might of Tony Stark.” “Okay Dad”.

And so begins the farcical introduction to Ivan Vanko, Mickey Rourke’s approximation of a comic book villain at a He-Man convention, all bursting pecs and cod-pieces. His scenes are depressingly outmoded, a montage lazily recalling Stark’s own suit-building sequence segueing into one of *those scenes* of him screaming in despair, fists shaking as the camera moves skyward and looks down. It turns out costumes of awesome power can be forged only in the fires of your cave whilst you bitterly look at press clippings of your rival. Must. Solder. Through. The. Night.

More rewardingly, the film explores new territory in the ramifications of Stark Industries having access to military-grade technology, with a series of hearings amusingly culminating in a grizzled senator compelling a whimsical Stark to hand his suit over to the Government. Whilst not obviously fertile ground for an action film, the thread develops the film’s key partnerships and rivalries: Colonel ‘Rhodey’ is the middleman between Tony and the Military, though it’s difficult to take actor Don Cheedle seriously when, donning the counterpart to Iron Man’s suit, he curiously transforms into Spike Lee droppin’ gangsta. Justin Hammer, meanwhile, is deliciously slimy as Stark’s business rival, up to his neck in government contracts and loving every minute. So compelling is the dynamic between the two of them that poor Vanko finds himself largely relegated to background boogie man.

Director Jon Favaeu apparently made a point of keeping the series as grounded as possible, yet much as the first film seemed fantastical, this not only offers Vanko up as the most unlikely physicist this side of Christmas Jones, but has Tony Stark manufacturing an entirely new element by waving his hands around like it was 1977. It isn’t immediately clear why that’s less credible than tossing off an arc reactor of limitless potential in a cave, but watch and you’ll surely understand.

Stranger still is Johansen as Natasha Romanoff, a S.H.I.E.L.D agent who manages the incredible feat of being fantastically, outrageously attractive, yet utterly redundant. That such words dare to be juxtaposed amounts to a blasphemy from a seasoned voyeur like myself, but it’s true nonetheless: important to the cannon or not, as she slinks around in a figure-hugging catsuit trying to be nonchalant, you feel embarrassed even for Samuel L Jackson, a man whose own contribution extends only as far as a comedy eye-patch.

Amongst all that, there are glimpses of magic, notably in the old-married-couple dynamic of Pepper Potts and Tony that fuels what little emotional resonance the film has, or in an early speech where Vanko equates humiliating Stark to ‘making God bleed’. But for an action movie it’s curiously lacking in action scenes, preferring to focus its limited energies on pointless exposition and technogabble solutions that stretch science-fiction creditability. The little action is intermittently enjoyable, but too often falls into the trap of simply throwing more bodies at the screen, particularly in a climax that wouldn’t seem out of place in Transformers the sequel.

Iron Man was never lacking in such indulgences, but as Tony Stark creates new elements in his basement, a feat sandwiched between lattes and secret superhero clubs, you find yourself rolling your eyes at a franchise that once winked at the audience.

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