A potential siege and not many dungeons
It has often been fashionable to be rude about films that have been adapted from computer games, and in ththese days, with the seeming limit on the amount of original ideas that can be in circulation at any one time, games are fair game for the easy movie option. From out of this murky mass has risen one director whose vision for the computer game movie has overtaken all others. The Raging Boll, the german wunderkind – Uwe Boll.
He is awful.
In strange bouts of pseudo-masochism I occasionally like to watch bad films. Generally I go for the truly awful, as they often cross the “so bad it’s good” line, but every now and again I find films that are so bad that they sit on that line, carefully keeping all of their extremities on the “so bad it’s bad” side, but looking whistfully into the distance of bad-but-good-ness. Uwe Boll’s films all seem fall into that latter category.
From the bowel wrenching mediocrity of Alone in the Dark, a film that drove Christian Slater’s career even further down the Hollywood slope, to the inexplicable mess of Bloodrayne (and its sequel), Boll seems to have an incredible ability to make movies that leave everyone watching them feeling slightly diminished. He is however a remarkably clever man, funding his films through an interesting feature of german tax law and also very good at self promotion, stretching to challenging his critics to boxing matches, hence the Raging Boll tag, and inevitably beating them. That all said, his talent as a film maker does seem to still be minimal.
So, after discussing the marvels of film with my friend Todd a few weeks back I decided to delve yet again into the depths of Herr Boll’s back catalogue and the lovely people at LoveFilm came through for me yesterday, delivering ‘In the Name of the King: A Dungon Siege Tale‘. It was Boll’s first (and only?) big budget movie, and with $60million of tax dodging german cash filling his pockets he does seem to have been determined to make something of it.
To start with, the all-star cast, headed up by Jason Statham, a man who I will happily watch growl to himself and kick people in the face for hours. Somehow, the casting director also managed to get Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Ray Liotta and Burt Reynolds. They also managed to drag in Matthew Lillard and help him hammer the last few nails into the coffin of his career. Surely these people don’t need a pay day that much? Happily, bringing in half decent actors, and Matthew Lillard, seems to have worked, as the acting isn’t generally all that bad (with the occasional exception and Matthew Lillard), and Reynolds even turns in one of the most understated performances of his career. They don’t have much to work with, but what they do have they have polished to a dull shine.
One of the main complaints that I’ve read about the movie is that it rips off the Lord of the Rings films. Of course it does, it’s a fantasy adventure with John Rhys-Davies and a guy with long Legolas-like hair in. Pretty much all fantasy can be described as ripping of The Lord of the Rings, and ever since Peter Jackson’s films came out you can’t put a loping orc on screen without having similarities raised. The ripping off of that trilogy is one of the things it does well, getting the nice sweeping shots of countryside and our motley band of heroes walking through it. There’s a lot less walking than in LOTR and lot more kicks to the face, which in my mind at least does give this film some credit.
The next vaguely decent thing it does is the aforementioned kicks to the face. Not only the face, but also many other parts of the body and some sword fighting, ranging from duels up to full battlefield reenactments. The fact that it is quite competently done doesn’t seem so surprising when you look at the names behind it – Siu-Tung Ching, a name I’d not heard before but have seen his work as fight choreographer in Yang Zimou’s rather pretty films, a fact that makes many of the scenes no longer knock offs but uses of his own trademark moves. The main problem with the fight scenes is the same that is levelled at most of Boll’s movies – they’re too long. There’s loads of bits that could and probably should be cut, both for time and also for not being as good as the rest. It’s almost as if they got to the editing stage and then decided to stick in as much of the fight footage as they could, maybe trying to get value for money…
But what about the bad? There is badness. Oh yes. Firstly Matthew Lillard. Yes, I know it’s easy to rip on him, but here he is the only person putting on an accent. Everyone else is all mixed up, with Jason Statham’s sparkling brit tones, Ron Perlman’s rumbling american and Claire Forlani’s normal american accent, despite her being british. Lillard seems to have subscribed to the Dick Van Dyke school of chimney sweep accents, got bored halfway through and then watched Austin Powers on repeat. It wavers around, never stays consistent, and mixed with his mildly histrionic performance it just annoys. Most ineffective bad guy, ever. Ray Liotta also occasionally walks a fine line between a downmarket Saruman and a combination of his role in Revolver and Jeremy Irons’s from Dungeons and Dragons (officially the worst fantasy film ever, even more rubbish than Hawk the Slayer) but doesn’t often cross to the dark side.
Next up is the editing. It’s bad. I’m not an editor, I probably can’t edit movies, but if I can tell that it’s bad then it’s probably bad. Scenes get cut off early, seemingly in the middle of dialogue exchanges. There are random scenes that appear for a few moments that seem to be trying to establish what’s happening with the various groups of characters, but which don’t actually add anything. It cuts back and forth randomly within scenes, almost as if they didn’t have quite enough coverage so had to piece together the important bits with whatever rubbish they had in the can. And most of all the film is long – 2 hours, with a promise of a 3 hour cut on DVD sometime in the future. Cutting a second off the end of scenes isn’t a way of getting the film down to a less flabby length.
The sound is also not great, with the music very high in the mix, almost as if they were deliberately trying to drown out the more awful end of the dialogue and added to that the looping is awful – Claire Forlani’s lines are so obviously spoken off set so much of the time that I started to wonder whether they’d bothered recording her at the time at all. We’ve moved on from the days of the spaghetti western and most films show it. Jason Statham’s rumble also seems strangely incongruous on occasion, as if he’d also been badly looped, but I think this is just the effect of his voice, as he always seems to have his lips moving just out of sync with his words and sounding like he was recorded elsewhere.
So, overall what do I think? Shockingly, I didn’t think it was all that bad. I would describe it as good, despite the best efforts of Uwe Boll – a solid chunk of B grade LOTR-lite. The acting was competent, the CGI pretty good, the story predictable but watchable and the fight scenes enjoyable, if a little long. It brought in chunks of the computer game, with the writers behind the story being the guys who wrote the game’s story, with character names, placenames, and the set and location all bringing in the look and feel of Dungeon Siege. There aren’t all that many action fantasy films out there, despite The Lord of the Rings opening up the market, and this one does what it says on the tin, there is fantasy and there is also action. Technical issues aside the film is watchable and a sign that either Uwe Boll does secretly have some talent or that with enough money he can hire people who do.
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Posted: November 9th, 2008 under blog.