SIDEKICKS: THE MOVIE

Bad movies are one thing. We know how to deal with them. But Minions isn't bad, exactly. It's perfectly neutral - the most impressively flavorless movie in many a long age. I've found preparing to review it has been something of an exciting race against the clock: would I be able to finish writing before every last memory I had of the experience of watching it had evaporated away? Given how hard it was to remember the beginning of the movie by the end of it, dear reader, I was not optimistic.

The film is a point-missing prequel to 2010's Despicable Me and 2013's Despicable Me 2 that contradicts the back-story heavily implied by the first of those movies, on top of the greater sin of fundamentally messing up the tonal balance that drove both of them. Basically, this is what happens when you put the comic sidekicks in the driver's seat. Instead of the little yellow capsule-shaped, gibberish-spouting minions serving as a enjoyably wacky, old-school cartoon way of leavening the slightly more sincere A-plot (as in DM1), or threatening to overwhelm the A-plot entirely and sort of making the whole thing a bit of a screechy annoyance (as in DM2), here they're the whole show. It's exactly like the difference between having a few cookies in between bites of a not-very-healthy mill, versus just straight-up unlocking your jaw an pouring a whole fucking bag of sugar down your throat, right down to the jitteriness and the headache at the end of it.

Minions opens at the dawn of life on Earth, with one of its very best sequences: the minions evolving from yellow unicellular organisisms clinging with enthusiasm to a bigger, meaner unicellular organism, and so on through the early history of evolution. It's in a style that looks like chalk drawings, skipping through time in a series of fluid "in-camera" edits, a great piece of mixed-media playfulness that of course descends into standard-issue CGI the second that the opening credits stop, and Geoffrey Rush pipes up on the soundtrack to narrate how minions evolved to pursue and serve the cruelest villain alive at any moment in history, eventually finding their true calling when mankind came into existence. And I will say this: to hell with narration (and the sequence would definitely play better if it were told entirely through images and editing), but there's absolutely no better choice than Rush for the slightly acidic warmth that gives the narration a sense of stately authority while also indulging the rampant silliness of the humor.

Anyway, the film posits that after accidentally killing Napoleon, the minions fled to the arctic to build their own society, and eventually found themselves on the verge of death by boredom, without any bad guys to serve. So in 1968, one of the wisest of them all, Kevin (voiced, like all the minions, by co-director Pierre Coffin), decides to go on a mission to find a boss, accompanied by the childlike moron Bob and the snotty Stuart - and before I completely get out of the habit of complimenting the film, kudos to writer Brian Lynch, to directors Coffin and Kyle Balda, and all the animators for creating three totally distinct personalities, instantly readable and flawlessly distinctive despite the fact that all three are identically-dressed yellow tubes with googly eyes.

The three minions arrive in New York, and travel thence to Orlando, amusingly sketched out as a pre-Disney hell of swampland and barely visible roads, and here they attend Villain Con. A spot of good luck puts them in touch with Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), the world's first female supervillain, who takes them on as her henchmen for a plot to steal the crown jewels of England. And somewhere in all of that, Minions burns off all the charm of its characters, and its brightly colored, highly angular design, and the way that design fits neatly into the stylistic ethos of the 1960s, and pretty much every other damn thing that gives it an ounce of personality. In essence, the film has no momentum of any sort: scenes happen, we hear one of the many incongruous celebrity voices studded into the movie (Steve Coogan, Allison Janney, a totally wasted Michael Keaton), some gags modeled on the slapstick MGM animation of the '40s or the absurdist Warner animation of the '50s. Then the cycle restarts. At no point does a sense of inevitability take over; there's barely even a sense of continuity about things, especially in the astonishingly arbitrary middle section when the minions wander around trying to find the crown and then- but even a barely-plotted collection of wacky shorts tied together more by proximity than anything else deserves better than to be spoiled, I guess.

The most annoying thing about Minions is that it has just enough individual pieces that are terrific in isolation that it's really not possible to discard the whole. The opening credits are on obvious place where the animation takes such a swerve that I can't help but love it, and the same is true of a mid-film bedtime story in faux-claymation with appealingly goofy character design and an acerbic, abrupt sense of humor. There are moments in which the even the bog-standard CG animation is suddenly and powerfully beautiful and detailed in texture and lighting.

And there are comic highlights throughout, one or two minutes of a stretch where the ludicrous illogic of the storytelling turns into something close enough to the classic cartoon shorts that are plainly never far from the filmmakers' minds that you can see them if you squint. The same lack of cohesion or building momentum that makes the overall movie a slog is, in fact, something of a strength at the micro level: the villain convention, for example, is such an odd and off-putting narrative element, but it's responsible for some of the most effective dashes of zany jokes in the whole movie.

But I'm hunting for nice things to say towards a movie about which it's hard to feel anything at all. Uncharitably, I'd say that Minions is a film that expects its viewer to have a stunted attention span. It jumps around so much in search of loud, simple gags that you never have to worry about paying attention. Were I being kind, I'd say that it simply knows its target audience: little kids who want to be dazzled for 90 minutes while laughing at straightforward jokes. Still and all, "it does a good job pandering to children" is hardly the stuff of praise and even if I aged out of the right mindset to really meet the film where it lives a solid quarter-century ago, I like to think that I still know profoundly mediocre filmmaking when I see it.

5/10

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THIS IS A BITTER ADVENTURE, IF IT MUST END SO; AND NOT A MOUNTAIN OF GOLD CAN AMEND IT.

And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 children's novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at all. Though it's still perhaps the best individual film of the trilogy, if only by default. It starts out terribly, finds itself by the end of its first hour, starts to lose the thread during the wandering titular battle sequence that can only boast about its mass, and not its narrative momentum nor its visual excitement, and finds itself again in the last 15 minutes or so, when it refocuses itself on the hobbit whose status of protagonist has been more nominal than actual in two of three films now. So that's a lot of losing and finding and losing, but in the aggregate, the film ends up with more satisfying material, percentage-wise, than the achingly slow-paced The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which kicked things off (barely) in 2012, or the meth-addled flitting between ill-constructed subplots in 2013's The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

The film's biggest problem is the obvious one: not, precisely, the decision to break the meager little book into three long tentpole films, but the way that decision came up so late in the game. Initially, the idea was to make The Hobbit into a two-part adaptation, and the revised concept came after the script was written and principal photography was completed, and the material had been shaped into two individually contained features. Jackson and fellow writer-producers Fran Walsh and Philppa Boyens did a solid enough job of fashioning An Unexpected Journey into a fairly cohesive thing even after chopping its end off and bloating it up with extraneous material in the middle, but The Desolation of Smaug felt at once too rushed and too aimless in all its padding, and the cliffhanger ending tacked on after its somewhat functional third-act climax made it feel needlessly unfulfilled in a way that none of the team's earlier Tolkien films had. But the worst of it is only now coming to fruition: for if The Desolation of Smaug is kind of a self-contained object with the illusion of a final act, The Battle of the Five Armies is that film's actual final act, bafflingly inflated to 144 minutes and given no first and second acts of its own. It's literally about virtually nothing but the run-up to its battle and the battle itself, trying desperately to buttress that with enough character scenes to feel like it has some kind of self-contained arc.

The movie is never worse than in its hectic opening, which abruptly picks up with the massive dragon Smaug (voiced and motion captured by Benedict Cumberbatch) flying to destroy the lake town of Esgaroth, outside of the lonely mountain Erebor where he lived for many years in evil isolation, until some dwarves riled him up by dousing him in gold from giant molten statue. Fuck alive, the end of The Desolation of Smaug was asinine. So Smaug burns the hell out of Erebor, until he is eventually taken down with an enormous black arrow fired by the brave pessimist Bard (Luke Evans), who has been prepared for just such an occasion. I admire any film with the instinct to hit the ground running like this, but Smaug's attack is not at all suited to the function the film requires it to serve, and we're never really invited back into Jackson's Middle Earth so much as we are plopped there. As the film clumsily juggles characters and plot developments that follow as the Esgaroth populace re-orients itself and marches off to Erebor to demand their share of Smaug's treasure from newly-reinstated dwarf king Thorin (Richard Armitage), the blunt-force style of storytelling only really serves to call attention to how little reason we've been given to care about any of this even slightly. Near the end of the overall sequence, a dog wandering through the bottom of the frame looks straight into the camera in a manner that suggests it's trying to get out of the movie, please, and boy, did I ever feel for that dog.

The opening sequence is the most aimless, trivial, aggravating part of a film that swoops from grandeur and the best filmmaking of Jackson's career since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King all the way back to tin-eared dialogue and embarrassingly amateur shot set-ups and editing at a fairly regular clip. The Battle of the Five Armies is at one and the same time far too indulgent in stretching barely any narrative content out to some two and a quarter hours of movie, pre-credits, while hectically rushed in its depiction of what little bit is there. The subplot from the last movie that found the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan, never less interesting in the role) trapped in a ruined haunted fortress is bluntly disposed of in about five minutes featuring weird cameos from Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Hugo Weaving; Stephen Fry's nefarious master of Esgaroth evaporates from this movie so quickly that I kept assuming he'd show up again.

Meanwhile, plenty of lengthy, soporific time is dedicated to politicking between elves and men, between dwarves and elves, and to maneuvering armies into place before they actually start to fighting. And a great deal too much time is turned over to the allegedly comic scallywag Alfrid (Ryan Gage), who gets himself into the most hellishly unentertaining scrapes and represents the single most ill-advised choice in this series, even worse than the dismal introduction of a romantic plot between dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) and elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the latter of whom makes it almost two-thirds into The Battle of the Five Armies before devolving into a generic action grrl damsel in distress. Some of this works better than other parts, and generally speaking, the tension the filmmakers creak out of the build-up is better than the actual fighting itself, which gets to be a bit numbing. And in the case of the protracted (so protracted) battle between Thorin and his CGI orc nemesis Azog (Manu Bennett), it's both numbing and boring, since the film's obvious hope that we'll regard this as a great clash between lifelong enemies is undercut by the crappy development of Thorin over the trilogy, and Armitage's limp performance thereof, and the complete absence of any development of Azog.

Regardless of the rest, nothing is better than when Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is the focus. After being rudely sidelined in The Desolation of Smaug, the ostensible lead character is back to getting enough screentime to feel like he matters again, and he's used as well here as in any other point of the trilogy. The point of hobbits, really, is to domesticate high fantasy; this was their function in both of Tolkien's novels featuring them, and it's something that Jackson & company have never grasped better than they do here, using Freeman's comic fluster as a way of lightening and humanising (hobbitising?) the clashes of battles, the ponderously portentous dialogue, and Howard Shore's emphatically epic score. Freeman, I am more convinced than ever, is the most interesting performer in the entirety of the Jackson Middle Earth franchise, playing a character whose arc and emotions he has thought about far more than the writers ever did, and making his interpretation all about Bilbo, not about the enormity of the films themselves. It is a little performance, a silly and friendly performance, and a very true performance, and because of all this, it is the absolute, clear highlight of a sloppy movie.

Sloppy, but not without its compensations. Limited to basically just three locations - the ruined city outside the dwarf keep, the dwarf keep itself, and an enormous iron hellgate - the director's tendency towards gawking at his sets is tamped down a bit, and instead of feeling like a travelogue for a CGI-aided New Zealand, The Battle of the Five Armies actually starts to use the camera to shape the action and provide a sense of scale; it is the only one of the Hobbit movies to come even close to attaining the visual sweep of all three Lord of the Rings pictures. Even some of the least interesting moments, like the Thorin/Azog fight, are pepped up by the introduction of winter, adding a harsh edge of white to Andrew Lesnie's characteristically postcard-like cinematography. And for the first time in three films, there's no obviously weak CGI: some of the close-ups of Azog and other computer-made creatures probably could have done with a bit less bright, direct lighting, but there's not a single shot that matches the tacky video game aesthetic of An Unexpected Journey, especially.

In essence, it mostly works as a popcorn movie: a fatiguing popcorn movie whose action scenes are repetitive and occasionally too ridiculous to care about (once again, Orlando Bloom's forgettable Legolas shows up to turn things into Mario game), but which are presented with a passion and gravity that feels so, so much better than the meandering idiocy of the last two movies, and punctured by Freeman's wonderful low-key comedy when it all threatens to become top-heavy with pretension. It proves that the whole idea of a three-part Hobbit was a ruinous idea for more than it ever comes close to redeeming the first two, and it still feels like a paltry return to Middle Earth that would have been better left undone. But it has its moments. And next year, when the single-movie fan edits of the trilogy are complete, I don't mind supposing that some of the loveliest stuff will be in the 20 or so minutes that come out of this last movie.

6/10

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DISNEY SEQUELS I MISSED IN 2014: I TINK, THEREFORE I AM

The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the company's output: Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue have been middling-to-awful, where as the Tinker Bells, when they are not busy telling pre-teen girls that science is stupid and a waste of time, have included some of the most thoughtful, nuanced stories in the entirety of the Disney direct-to-video program. And yes, that means we're talking about only a little bit of thought or nuance, but it's not nothing.

All of which is as much to say: I had expectations for The Pirate Fairy, the fifth feature in the Disney Fairies line, that were totally out of bounds for anything that it conceivably could have delivered. And it doesn't meet those expectations, though it's shockingly decent all in all: a considerable improvement over the somewhat idiotic Secret of the Wings from 2012, the last full-length film in the franchise. If it is a disappointment, it is a disappointment mostly at the level of theme: the whole deal of the series has been to expose young girls to what should be commonsense truisms about life and being a member of society, but are regrettably not. And The Pirate Fairy has no real theme of that sort: it does look for a while that it's trending back in the "oh, science, that's terrible stuff" direction of Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, but the final scene so thoroughly muddies any kind of overriding message in any direction that the whole thing ends up being very little more than a straightforward adventure with pirates. And given the state of American animation right now, "girls can be the protagonist in adventures" actually does count as progressive messaging, which is the most depressing thing I can think of right this moment.

The story this time hinges on a new character, Zarina (Christina Hendricks), a fairy with radical and untested ideas about using experimentation and research to expand the possible uses of pixie dust. When one of these experiments goes wrong, she banishes herself from the fairy world for a full year, returning as the captain of a human pirate ship, to steal the fairie's precious blue pixie dust and continue her experiments, while also using the powers of the dust to aid in her career of piracy. The series standby heroes happen to be the only ones to avoid being walloped by Zarina's attack with sleeping dust, and so they head off to stop her: Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman), and the Southern one (Megan Hilty), and the bitchy one (Pamela Adlon), and the quiet one (Lucy Liu), and the nervous one (Raven-Symoné), and the nice one (Angela Bartys). Against them are Zarina and her human first mate, James (Tom Hiddleston), an excitable human pirate who can understand the fairy language.

The pirates form a more explicit link to Disney's Peter Pan than has yet been seen in any of these films, and it's not always a perfect join: there are details that do not line up at all concerning the relationship of that film's Captain Hook (whose identity is meant to be a shock here, and I suppose it might be to someone, somewhere, but the literal first shot in which the future Hook showed up got me to thinking, "oh, well I bet I know who he turns out to be...") and the crocodile who ate his hand. But then again, if the film didn't commit that continuity error, we'd have been deprived the sight of that same crocodile as a baby, and I would not give that up for anything whatsoever, because good God damn, is it cute.

The story itself is pretty basic and entirely functional, ushering the characters through the ginned-up conflict by which Zarina swaps out all the heroes' natural talents, and they have to spend almost a whole scene figuring out how to adapt. It's pleasantly entertaining by kids' movie standards, mind you, and it breezes by at a crisp 78 minutes, almost ten of which are credits; there's little depth, and the shift by which the pirates go from being Zarina's jolly crew to scurrilous traitors (because of course they do) is disappointingly abrupt and ill-motivated; the film had a chance to do something complex and make the process by which villains are formed feel more organic and aware of human desire and psychology, but it just plugs in a stock reveal by which we find out that they were terrible, wicked beasts all along. Subtlety and complicated morality isn't this film's strong suit, which is too bad: it is one of the things the Tinker Bell movies have done best.

As a shallow adventure movie for children, though, I can say nothing bad against it: the characters are likable and given more flexibility in their personalities than has elsewhere been true in the series, though five protagonists was definitely two more than director Peggy Holmes and her coterie of writers had the ideas to deal with. But there's a generosity with which even the most easily-forgotten of the characters is handled, and with which their in-group relationships are teased out, that makes it all very nice and easygoing. The result is a lived-in and familiar feeling that compensates for how rushed it all is.

Better still: the film looks pretty terrific. For the first time in the franchise, the characters don't feel like plastic toys: they have a flexibility and ranginess to their expression unknown in earlier films. Their faces evoke emotions other than revulsion; that's a huge step for this series.

The lighting and backgrounds are also quite lovely; this is not new for the films (they've always had better backgrounds than character animation), but the ambition of the dusty and foggy lighting here is at a whole new level.

It is, dare I say it, a Tinker Bell film that is pleasurable to look at: not up to the standards of the best feature animation, but an enormous improvement over the rest of DisneyToon's output to date. And that, coupled with the pleasant storytelling and character building, makes for a movie that ranks right up near the very best of the its franchise and thus the very best direct-to-video Disney movies ever. Even if it doesn't the thematic resonance of its forebears, it's enough fun as a simple, colorful yarn with genial broad comedy and energetic characters that it's surprisingly beguiling in its little way.

7/10

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BAT MAN BEGINS

There was not ever going to be a good reason to tell the secret tragic backstory of how Count Dracula, one of English culture's all-time best unrelentingly wicked bad guys, was actually motivated by love of his family and country. Let's be totally clear about that part. Secret tragic backstories for the Wicked Witch of the West and Darth Vader had already tried to ruin two of cinema's finest villains; the same treatment for Bram Stoker's merciless, charismatic vampire would be too much to bear, even if Dracula Untold was a phenomenally great piece of filmmaking in every respect. And it's not: it's piercingly mediocre and clichéd in every possible respect. Let's be totally clear about that part, too.

The film, which has been retrofitted into the first volley of the hoped-for (though I am not clear by whom) Universal Monster Universe thanks to the addition of a clumsy final scene, mostly takes place in 15th Century Wallachia, which is always and unyielding referred to as "Transylvania". Here, Prince Vlad (Luke Evans), ruler of a people that are variously depicted as agrarian or townsfolk, based on the needs of the scene, maintains as much independence as he can against the always-present threat of the Turkish Empire, where he served in the army as a boy and adolescent, earning the war name "Vlad the Impaler" for his particularly gory way of displaying his dead victims, in a form of terrifically effective psychological warfare. His childhood friend, current Turkish Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper in the year's most unfortunate brownface to date, while we eagerly await Exodus: Joel Edgerton's Tanning Disaster) has decided to flex his muscles a bit demanding an unacceptable tribute of Wallachian Transylvanian boys to serve in his military, especially including Vlad's own son Ingeras (Art Parkinson). This Vlad will not accept, and so he makes a deal with, if not the Devil, than the best Devil analogue around those parts, a vile man-like creature (Charles Dance) living in a cave since ages unknown, after he made his own deal for eternal life and power. Vlad gains super-strength, the ability to transform into a colony of bats, a sensitivity to light, and a desperate thirst for human blood. If he can make it three days without ingesting blood, he'll be freed of his hunger and his powers, and so the film turns into a 71-hour countdown till he caves in and eats somebody, a development which is not remotely surprising, nor is the identity of the person he consumes surprising when it happens.

Between them, director Gary Shore and writers Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless have made a total of no features before this, which probably explains why Dracula Untold feels so calculating in its assembly from the spare parts of other movies (which, if we were talking a Frankenstein reboot, we might have something). Something like a Mitteleuropean 300 in its overall impact, only with blues instead of browns and hardly any slow-motion, it's a vampire film where vampires seem to be reluctantly added in after the fact, and horror doesn't exist other than in a couple individual flashes. Certainly, as a story that wants to play on the audience's affection for Dracula in all his guises throughout the century and change of his existence, it has absolutely none of the things that are usually associated with him: not the animalistic hunger and danger of the F.W. Murnau version in Nosferatu, not the suave European superiority of Bela Lugosi in Universal's first Dracula, not Christopher Lee's hateful cruelty in the Hammer series of Dracula pictures, not the erotic pull of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. He's just a generic super-powered badass, whose specific paranormal traits aren't even explored until the film is most of the way over. Evans gamely tries to inject some passion and fervor into all this ahistorical claptrap, but his dominant mode is brooding and quiet, and the film demands more rage, more Gerard Butler-style barking. That's just if it's going to survive on the dubious level of being a plastic, paint-by-numbers swordfighting action film. For it to work as a Dracula film... no, that was never going to happen. I cannot imagine the performance Evans would have had to give if he was going to actually sell this lukewarm Angry Dad as one of history's greatest monsters - certainly, the script doesn't sacrifice one detail that actually suggests that Bram Stoker's iteration of the character could possibly emerge from the noble, moral man who we see sadly allowing himself to be turned into a demon for the greater good.

Surrounding this vague, uninteresting hero is an entire vague, uninteresting movie, full of powerfully dark, metallic, ugly images (somehow, this was shot by John Schwartzman, a cinematographer whose tendency towards sun-kissed Rockwellian imagery is arguably problematic in its own right, but far more attractive than anything this film has going on), and action sequences which are so ridiculously infatuated with weightless CGI that they're never exciting in even a small way. Having put all that energy into making Vlad such a well-etched generic hero, the writers have nothing left over the rest of the cast, leaving only Dance with the film's hugest gimme role to make anything like an impact. Meanwhile, people who are at least capable of being interesting, like Dominic Cooper and Sarah Gadon, drift around filling parts that require only a warm body, not any kind of acting complexity, and contributing to the overall sense that everyone involved in making the film was as bored by it as we are in the audience.

It's just so pointless: the action's not exciting, the lead character's journey is cobbled together from third-generation copies of Joseph Campbell that we've all seen dozens of times, and the frisson when he inevitably transitions into the iconic literary figure we were promised never comes, sine the script so painfully avoids making this Dracula a bad guy, or even a conflicted antihero. He's just a tragic woobie. Not as tragic as the paying customer who sits through all of this hoping for even one frame that doesn't feel recycled, or one story beat that goes for even the second-most-obvious narrative trope, but tragic.

4/10

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DOLL FACE

The best movies are the ones that introduce you to a totally new experience. One of those happened to me at Annabelle. I have literally never had anything even a little bit like this happen to me before, and I don't know if it will ever happen again, though I can live in hope: after the movie ended, and just as the first card in the end credits was starting to fade up, someone in the middle of the theater loudly asked, in a voice that had more despair in it than anger, "Everybody agrees that was absolutely terrible, right? Did anybody think that was good?" And not one of the twenty or so souls in the room challenged him, though a few of us laughed.*

It could be worse. I mean, I'm sure it could. Though at this particular moment in time, I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining how that could be the case. Director John R. Leonetti (a cinematographer by trade, but his directorial credits extend all the way back to 1997's all-time classic Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) and his filmmaking team manage to make a creepy-as-shit doll not scary. That's like Horror Cinema 101: creepy dolls and ventriloquist's dummies. The only bigger gimme is clowns. And yet, in Annabelle, the titular doll only manages to look profoundly stupid. "Perhaps the Annabelle doll is just too ridiculously overdone and veers straight into camp", I thought to myself, around the time that Leonetti and DP James Kniest favored it with a close-up that lovingly showcased its cracked grey skin and its enormous blood-shot eyes, like it had gotten its little doll self plowed on doll-sized whiskey sours. But that can't be the case - we already saw Annabelle in 2013, in The Conjuring, to which Annabelle is a sort of half-assed prequel, and the doll was terrifying as all hell back then.

So the only real solution is that Annabelle is just a piece of incompetent shit, and the agitated fellow in the movie theater with me was absolutely right. It's not just that the film is bad: there are far more horror films that are bad than otherwise. It's that it's bad to a degree that absolutely makes no sense: even just regurgitating every single scare tactic from every single haunting movie in recent memory should have produced a somewhat more functional genre film than this terribly exercise in cinematic lard and self-sabotaging mistakes at every corner. There's a scene in which the female lead, Mia Gordon (Annabelle Wallis) is trapped in a basement with what certainly looks like Satan, or anyway a charcoal grey job that resembles the lazy "ooh, the Devil" design that horror filmmakers rest on when they're not interested in being bold. She gets on the elevator, and pushes 6. The doors close, the elevator grinds, the doors open, it's still the basement. She shines the flashlight around. Nothing is there. She pushes the "door close" button. This happens no fewer than four times, and Satan never does show up - never even puts his shiny black claws in the elevator door at the last minute to freak Mia out real good. I would call it laughably inept, except that, dear reader, I was not laughing. Just silently stewing and becoming good and pissed off that the film had decided that a busted elevator with nothing attacking it was the stuff of top-notch skin-crawling excitement

Or, ooh, how's this for ineptitude: in one scene, an artificial long take is created by stitching two shorter takes together, one as Mia walks to the front door of her house, one as she walks through her house. Garden-variety stuff. Emmanuel Lubezki has made a career out of it. And yet clear as day, you can see where then filmmakers here just threw in a really short dissolve to marry the takes, and it's as believable as those jump cuts in an old movie where the only way to make an object appear or disappear was to stop the camera, have everybody stand still, and hope like hell nobody shifted so much that their position in the frame shifted. When that happens in a film from the '40s, it's part of the buy-in you make to watch a film of that vintage. When it happens to an all-digital production from 2014, it is acutely disgusting.

The movie itself is a grab-bag of lazy notions from every other horror movie of the last five or ten years. A very pregnant Mia and her husband John (Ward Horton) are young marrieds in Santa Monica, CA, in 1972. He's applying for his medical residency, she's… it doesn't matter what she does, since she's about to be taken out of commission for a while. They have a kindly pair of neighbors, and the neighbors have a long-lost daughter named Annabelle, who left to join a cult. And one fateful night, she and her cult boyfriend creep back home to ritually murder her parents. When John goes to investigate the screaming Mia heard, they follow him back home, where they stab her in the belly. The baby survives, but the doctor insists that she stay in bed as much as remotely possible for the rest of the pregnancy.

So "Mia", "John", pregnant, Satan: it's an overt Rosemary's Baby nod, though by mostly limiting itself to stealing the names of that film's lead actors, it's actually something of a classy and restrained one. But as long as Roman Polanski is on the table - or even if he otherwise wasn't - hauling up the "Southern California cultists stab a pregnant woman" plot point (the Manson Family is even name-dropped in a news report) is neither classy nor restrained by any possible definition of those terms. I would go so far as to call it shockingly crass and exploitative to call upon the memory of Sharon Tate's horrible murder in such a direct and unthinking way. Annabelle, folks: there's no wrong way to hate it. But back to the plot.

It's during her convalescence that Mia starts to notice odd things, all of them clustering around the hideous-as-sin collector's doll that John bought for her the morning of the killings, and which Annabelle was holding as she committed suicide that night. We who saw The Conjuring - or even Annabelle's prologue, where two young women freaked out as they described their experience with the doll to an unheard offscreen investigator who the film rather obviously sets up to be a cameoing Patrick Wilson, except it never returns to the frame narrative at the end and so, fuck it (I will concede the possibility of a post-credits scene, but waiting to find out wasn't a priority at the moment the film ended) - we know that Annabelle-the-possessed doll is behind it, which frees up the filmmakers to stage lots of menacing shots of the doll as the music booms and nothing happens for many long seconds at a time. It takes the help of a pair of Wise Ethnics - Father Perez (Tony Amendola), the family priest, and Evelyn (Alfre Woodard), a bookstore owner with an interest in the occult, but it's not an occult bookstore, because that would be lazy writing - to clear up what's going on, and what is going on is the usual "the demon wants your newborn baby" folderol, with the usual lightbulbs bursting and devil faces appear in shadows and popcorn exploding and setting the kitchen on fire.

If the film does anything worthwhile, it's that it gets its '70s signifiers all lined up properly: the cloths and props are a little showy at times ("hey, I got you a VINTAGE BAG OF DORITOS! WHO WANTS DORITOS?" screeches one scene), but for the most part the settings specific enough that we can't forget it, but unforced enough that it doesn't get in the way of the story, which is almost a shame. And when Woodard shows up, she's like a cool breeze on a hot day, providing the movie with an authoritative, stable presence that comes amazingly close to making some scenes not-unpleasant to watch (I might add that, even by horror movie standards, what happens to Annabelle's solitary African-American character is a malarial swamp of problematic racial representation). Having said that, I'm tapped out of compliments: there's nothing else that's tolerable in Annabell, let alone actively good. The acting is horrible, especially Horton's, with his wide-eyed "golly willickers!" attitude that suggests he accidentally researched the 1910s when building his character, not the 1970s. But the actors can only be blamed so much, what with the crudely functional dialogue they are obliged to deliver, and the broken motivations they are given to play (for a woman whose single driving motivation is her baby's safety, Mia sure does seem to leave her alone in the haunted apartment a lot). And it's just even a wee tiny bit scary: every jump scare announces itself and is diluted by the half-dozen jump scares preceding it that never bothered to show up, and the creepiness of the "Satan wants your baby" routine is undercut by how much the baby feels like a concept the actors are playing, not a living being that parents desperately want to protect. Also by how much this is plainly a film that won't kill its baby.

It's useless, completely useless: clumsily made and criminally underwritten. If you had asked me if a 2014 movie about a baby and devil-worshippers had even a prayer of being worse than Devil's Due, I'd have laughed right in your face, but oh, how strong a bid Annabelle puts in for itself in the race to be the worst horror film of 2014!

1/10

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THEY KNEW THAT THEY WERE DRAWING NEAR TO THE END OF THEIR JOURNEY, AND THAT IT MIGHT BE A VERY HORRIBLE END

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug had every reason on Earth to be clearly and significantly better than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but it's much closer to being a dead heat. This ends up being far, far more depressing than An Unexpected Journey was in isolation, for there was still hope after that movie. Now there is not, for the dragon bits have been mostly used up with this film, and we've all known all along that the dragon bits would be the best part of the trilogy or tetralogy or septet or however many films Peter Jackson and company figured they could extract from a slender, brightly-paced children's book.

What isn't the case, to a shocking degree is that The Desolation of Smaug is variably weak and strong in the same general ways that A Long-Protracted Journey was. For two films made by the same crew and as part of the same production schedule, they are wildly different. They have, in fact, almost precisely opposite flaws: where the last film inched by with a slavish devotion to J.R.R. Tolkien's 1937 novel that crushed any sense of imagination or pacing, The Desolation of Smaug runs screaming from one plot point to the next, barely stopping to let anything sit and simmer and become rich and good. It invents huge swaths of totally new material, leaving even the plot points that Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens kept intact from the book feeling totally different because the context is so different; and where An Unendurable Journey needed, desperately, to break free a bit from the shackles of the book, The Desolation of Smaug is absolutely at its best when it's hewing closest to Tolkien and vividly, even objectively, at its worst when it is furthest away.

For also unlike its predecessor, it's spectacularly uneven. The opening 30 minutes and much of the last 30 are all pretty fantastic, far better than anything in the first movie save for its wonderful Gollum scene; but the middle of the film is a godawful wreck, as is the wildly inconsequential, jammed-in action setpiece that closes the thing. Moreover, the whole thing suffers, badly from a strange decision to refocus attention from the hobbit of the title to literally any other possible source: Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins is still very much the best performance in the film, and at his best moments still reaches the highest heights that any actor in any of Jackson's five (so far) Middle Earth epics have reached, but there are literally 20 minute chunks of the film where he barely even appears in the background of shots, and if someone were to tell me that he has less than 30 lines in the entire 160-minute feature, I wouldn't doubt them for a moment. That leaves us with no protagonist, but just a collection of ensemble-driven vignettes, and since The Hobbit across two films has only really bothered to establish four characters, most of those vignettes hang around people we have no reason to care about.

The plot, anyway, opens with a prologue that establishes Gandalf the wizard's (Ian McKellen) secret reason for wishing the exiled dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) should retrieve his kingdom at Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, from the dragon Smaug (voiced and mo-capped by Benedict Cumberbatch), and this leads into Gandalf's very own B-plot, in which he leaves Thorin's band of 13 dwarves and one hobbit to go hunting in the ruins of Dol Guldur, where a malevolent being naming itself the Necromancer (Cumberbatch also) is working to build an army to conquer Middle Earth. Meanwhile, that same band, after a dodgy, ill-expressed layover with a were-bear named Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), enters the foreboding forest of Mirkwood, hoping to arrive at Erebor more quickly than a circuitous route could provide, eventually falling afoul of the insular wood elves led by King Thranduil (Lee Pace) who live in the last relatively clean part of the woods. One thrilling escape later, the dwarf band arrives at the town Esgaroth, built on a lake at the foot of Erebor, where a local named Bard (Luke Evans) helps them to hide from the vain, tyrannical Burgomaster (Stephen Fry). Eventually, once Thorin's goal comes out, the people of Esgaroth are thrilled to put their lot in with the dwarves, convinced that this is the arrival of a prophesied king who will defeat the evil Smaug and bring peace and prosperity back to their village. Thus does the party, slightly reduced from sickness, journey all the way to the Lonely Mountain, where Bilbo is obliged to go deep into the depths of the former dwarf empire and parlay directly with the great dragon, whose amusement at the mewling size of this burglar is the only thing that keeps him from eating the hobbit outright.

That, hectically-expressed, is the whole plot of Peter Jackson's The Desolation of Smaug, which is not exactly the same as the plot of the middle third of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, but the point is the largely the same in either case: was there a need for a love triangle between an elf woman, an elf man, and a dwarf? Absolutely fucking not, and yet that is something present in the film regardless, and while it takes up only a little bit of screentime - 15 or 20 minutes all told, about the same length as any other individual plot in this overstuffed, jaggedly-paced, slurry - it is a deadly dull stretch that exemplifies the weirdest thing about this movie. Allegedly, the reason there are three Hobbits, instead of a nice sane two (we'll agree that one was just too damn much to hope for), was because of the amount of material to fit into it. Fine and dandy, but then why does The Desolation of Smaug consist to such a degree of material either changed to the point of being unrecognisable (the Beorn scene), augmented far beyond what Tolkien ever needed to get the same plot across (the political thriller that unfolds in Esgaroth), or straight-up invented? I get the need for even a single female character, and thus Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly); I get that it makes narrative sense for Legolas (Orlando Bloom), the character from The Lord of the Rings beloved by virtually nobody including the book's author, to show up; I don't get at all that the way to make this happen was by resorting to such a lazy, sexist notion as the girl who really loves this one guy - the designated "sexy dwarf", Kili (Aidan Turner) - while the other guy who loves her just rubs her the wrong way. Particularly in the overwhelmingly sexless universe Tolkien created.

Anyway, the film is insanely full of such pointless inventions that I would say distract from the plot, except that the secret is that The Desolation of Smaug lacks a plot: the book was already largely episodic, but An Unexpected Journey sidestepped this by giving itself an overriding villain and a character arc for both Bilbo and Thorin that was, unfortunately, largely resolved by the end. The Desolation of Smaug practically brags about how little flow there is between events, and the only reason it has any shape at all is because we know that this is a trilogy, and getting to the dragon's lair is a major point in that trilogy. But there is absolutely nothing that resembles a self-contained narrative (I suspect, with horror, that the Tauriel-Kili story was meant to provide that spine), and the film ends on an outright cliffhanger with nothing resolved. It should be pointed out that in the book, this same point is actually more of a narrative pause that makes sense, since Tolkien didn't throw in a spurious action scene that actually makes the film less coherent, and leaves Smaug's final actions in the film not just unmotivated, but completely irrational (indeed, the whole action sequence suggests that this ancient, ingenious monster is a big dumb animal who can be buffaloed as easily as the antagonist in a Bugs Bunny cartoon).

The film lives and dies, then, on the strength of its individual sequences, and these live and die almost entirely based on how closely they drift towards outright horror. For horror was the genre in which Jackson first made his name, and it is still the genre that he does best (in all three Lord of the Rings films, but especially The Return of the King, as well as in King Kong, the most vitally-directed sequences are the most horrific), and two of the three most successful sequences in The Desolation of Smaug are among the most explicitly horror-like scenes he's directed since the 1990s. One of these is the trek through Mirkwood, where outstandingly spooky production design and perfectly-chosen camera angles to create maximum disorientation and fear combine to make one of the best haunted woods I've ever seen in a movie (and the culminating fight against giant spiders is the film's best setpiece, anchored in mood and character rather than CGI choreography); the other is Gandalf's hunt through a haunted place called the High Fells, the one time in either Hobbit film that feels like it reaches the same terrible grandeur of the more epic moments in The Fellowship of the Ring, and I am here primarily thinking of the mines of Moria.

The third great sequence is the chat between Bilbo and Smaug (making this twice in two films that the highlight is a conversation between Freeman and a CGI effect), which also happens to be the scene most identical to Tolkien's book. This is in part because of two great performances, in part because of the cat-and-mouse thriller choreography, and in huge part because Smaug is such a fantastic visual effect: easily the best-looking movie dragon that I can think of, both in design and execution. It comes at exactly the right moment to redeem a flagging movie and almost leave it on a high note (that climactic chase scene is a movie-killer), and that would be the most irritating thing of all: no matter how much The Desolation of Smaug gets wrong, its successes are terrific. The effects are good if not great (better across the board than An Unexpected Journey, though the presence of CG, rather than practical orcs is still a problem), Howard Shore's increasingly derivative score gets the pulse quickening, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie once again makes New Zealand look so beautiful that it's sickening. We cannot write The Desolation of Smaug off as quickly as its predecessor, this is all to say. But for the exact same reasons, we can be even more frustrated by how much of it simply doesn't work at the levels of plot, character, or imaginative filmmaking.

6/10

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