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**1/2 (out of ****) "300" crossed with "Shrek." The showdown between man and dragon has the Rube Goldberg improbability of "Wallace and Gromit" and the gore of, well, "300." Warrior Beowulf ("Sexy Beast" Ray Winstone) vanquishes the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover) but then makes a Faustian bargain with his hot mother (Angelina Jolie) for fame and fortune. Regret ensues. "Beowulf" is a game effort, interesting to look at and often engaging, but it feels hedgy and uncertain, like its script by Neil Gaiman ("Sandman" graphic novels) and Roger Avary ("Pulp Fiction") is full of compromises and attempts at second-guessing an unwashed public that they fear don't know nothing about the past. I don't doubt that medieval Norsemen pissed, belched, and farted naked as much as they do in "Beowulf," but their continual amusement at these bodily functions comes across more like Renaissance Fair re-enactors than as people who actually lived that way. "Beowulf" uses the same motion-capture animation as "The Polar Express." MoCap's enthusiasts and advertising machine have been cramming it down our throats as "the future of filmmaking." It's sterile and inorganic compared to the rotoscoping of "A Scanner Darkly," but motion capture is not without its charm. "Beowulf" is better than "The Polar Express," not so much because the technology has improved since then, but because "Beowulf's" subject matter is more appropriate to the creepy, often lifeless look of motion capture. Grendel's mother shapeshifts from a hot naked hottie into a barely glimpsed monstrosity lurking in a cave. Similarly, her second son changes from a hairless T1000 into a dragon. The show is stolen by Crispin Glover as Grendel, disgusting and sad and looking a whole lot like the genetic mix between human and monster. The most sympathetic character in the movie, he slaughters Norsemen because they're too noisy and his hypersensitive ears drive him mad. As Beowulf and his second-in-command, Ray Winstone and Brendan Gleeson are appropriately surly. It's hard to believe that this is only their second movie together (after "Cold Mountain"), but they often fulfill the same role and most movies don't need two of them. Incidentally, "Beowulf" is the most ridiculous PG13 ever. Naked animated Angelina Jolie is considerably more impressive than naked real Jolie. Perhaps the animator read my mind and filled her out the way she needs to be. Her ponytail / dragontail is just HOT. The violence, while clearly being actively hidden behind furniture or averted cameras, is still pretty gruesome. "Beowulf" is also the laziest anti-Christian film since "The Brothers Grimm," which I'm pretty sure claims that no one cut down trees before there was a Church. To say it's "critical of Christianity" is giving it more credit than it deserves; the movie takes adolescent pleasure in burning down a church but that doesn't count as satire. John Malkovich's Christian Norseman is, of course, a cowardly hypocrite ("The Simpsons Movie" is more daring by making Ned Flanders a nice guy), and "Beowulf's" attacks on Christianity are contradictory. At one point, Malkovich asks to include prayers to Christ alongside prayers to their Norse gods, which implies that Christianity is no different than pre-Christian belief systems that are no longer practiced. Okay, fair enough. Then later Beowulf bemoans that the "Christ-god" has taken all the heroes out of the world which, of course, implies that Christianity IS different than outdated belief systems. The implication is that it's also inferior, of course and all other religions are given a free pass in movies like this. Which is it? Different or the same? Hardcore atheists must be pissed that there aren't many movies out there that slam all religion equally. The "blessed are the cheesemakers" sequence alone from "The Life of Brian" is exponentially more sophisticated in its questioning of the infallibility of both religious text and traditions. Finished February 29, 2008 Copyright © 2008, 2010 by Peter Kovic (aka Friday + Saturday Night Movie Critic) BEOWULF **1/2 (out of ****) Starring Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright-Penn, John Malkovich, Crispin Glover, Anthony Hopkins, and Brendan Gleeson Directed by Robert Zemeckis, + written by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman 2007 113 min PG13 |
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