Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you from the midst of a week that offers no reasons to suffer its completion, with the One Piece manga, One Piece show, and even my goddamn D&D campaign all taking the week off. It is difficult to see purpose in existence when I am denied my weekly trickle of media dopamine, but fortunately, the entire collected history of cinema was here to comfort me through it. This week featured a varied assembly of car thieves, satanic monsters, hungry sharks, and even some nazis in hiding, making it easy to forget that our lives are spent mostly in anticipation of moments that will pass even before they are fully savored. Let’s rage against the dying of the light with some delightful feature films!
With our journey through the Fast & Furious franchise having instilled in us an unquenchable thirst for fast cars, we cast around ourselves for more films to slake the craving, and came up with Gone in 60 Seconds. The film stars Nicolas Cage as Randall Raines, a former car thief who’s drawn back to the streets of LA for one last job: steal fifty cars in three days, or his brother’s life is forfeit. Assembling a crew of old friends and new blood, Raines must pull off a heist like none before, all with the LA police watching his every move.
Like the first two Fast & Furious movies, Gone in 60 Seconds is first and foremost an expose on what counted as “early ‘00s cool,” with all the tinny nu-metal and awful hair stylings that implies. The script is too pedestrian to avoid a sense of having been here before (at least if you’ve ever watched a single heist movie), but the stock archetypes here are somewhat elevated through the superior talent bringing them to life. Alongside Cage, we’ve got Robert Duvall as Raines’ mentor, Delroy Lindo as the cop on his tail, Timothy Olyphant as Lindo’s bizarre partner, and Christopher Eccleston as the preening crime lord – even Angelina Jolie is here, though her role as “the chick” gives her precisely nothing to work with.
The raw talent on display helps sell dialogue that could still use a couple rewrites, but unfortunately, the film is also deficient in the cool cars going fast department. Most of the team’s hijacking proceeds without incident, and what few chases exist are brief and lacking in energy, possessing none of the out-of-control sense of escalation that has defined great chases from Bullitt through Fast 9. The cast do their best, but there’s just not much here for them to work with, making the film feel like a frustrating squandering of opportunity.
We then checked out City of the Living Dead, the first film in Lucio Fulci’s loose “Gates of Hell” trilogy. Like Zombi 2 before it and The Beyond to follow, City of the Living Dead is a gooey, grotesque experience, full of squelching practical effects and violent ends. The film was apparently Fulci’s attempt at a Lovecraft-style narrative, but outside of the city in question being named Dunwich, there’s really not much weird horror here. Instead, we get things like a zombie priest staring at a woman so hard she literally pukes her guts up, and a window blowing open to hail a rain of maggots upon our poor heroes. The film’s actors are as unskilled as its practical effects are advanced, making for a lopsided but altogether entertaining ride through a carnival of horrors. If you’re eager to explore the far reaches of practical effect horror, Fulci’s filmography is essential.
Next up was End of Days, a ‘99 Schwarzenegger vehicle in which the big man plays an alcoholic former detective named Jericho Cane, who now works as a bodyguard. After saving a banker from a mysterious assassin, Cane swiftly finds himself embroiled in a thousand-year supernatural conflict, wherein the devil returns to earth and attempts to impregnate a woman with the antichrist.
End of Days attempts to split the difference between action and horror, tragically slamming into the pavement between them. The film’s attempts at horror mostly amount to dressing up New York City in a Spirit Halloween coat of paint, but it’s simultaneously too grounded and self-serious to ever let Schwarzenegger embrace his larger-than-life action persona. End of Days’ only saving grace is Gabriel Byrne’s performance as Satan; he is a far better actor than this film deserves, and blankets the screen in confident, playful menace every time he appears. Still, as our viewing of Legend recently demonstrated, one great Satan does not a movie make.
We then checked out 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, the sequel to that film about being stuck in a cage on the ocean floor while sharks circle above you. You’d think that concept would be difficult to iterate on, but Uncaged actually acquits itself well, shifting both settings and subgenres to offer a very different kind of creature feature.
While the original 47 Meters Down leaned close to a thriller in its tension and psychological flair, Uncaged is more like a shark-based slasher movie, presenting an intriguing underground ruin and unexpectedly robust kill count. With the film mostly taking place in a series of underwater caves, the claustrophobia is palpable, and the cast’s series of increasingly desperate escape plans add a nice sense of escalation and adventure to the horror. It’s far from essential viewing, but I was impressed by how well this film innovated on its predecessor’s concept, and even more impressed that it managed a full horror meal within the confines of a PG-13 rating.
Last up for the week was Marathon Man, a ‘76 thriller starring Dustin Hoffman as “Babe” Levy, a graduate student and would-be marathon runner. Though he believes his brother Doc (Roy Scheider) is some kind of oil executive, Doc is in truth a government agent who serves as a courier for nazi collaborators, keeping the odious concentration camp doctor Christian Szell (Lawrence Olivier) happy in exchange for information on other nazis. However, when Szell’s brother dies in a freak accident, he embarks on a campaign of killing all his couriers and retrieving his New York City-bound diamonds, putting both Doc and Babe in his crosshairs.
Dustin Hoffman, Roy Scheider, and Lawrence Olivier? It’s a generous goddamn billing, and all three put in phenomenal work here. Scheider has never been cooler, with the aloof confidence of his professional affectation contrasting beautifully against his easy warmth with his brother. Hoffman is always great, and here presents a painfully convincing portrait of a young, idealistic man being bruised and tempered by experience, emerging as a rattled yet indomitable killing machine. And Olivier is simply terrifying as “The White Angel,” reminding me of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal in terms of how much power he exerts over the film relative to his screen time.
After a leisurely first act that ensures our full investment in these brothers’ fortunes, the film kicks into high gear and never slows down, a shocking knife in the chest leading into chases, shootouts, and one of the most nerve-wracking interrogation scenes I’ve ever witnessed. Though its ambitions never stray much higher than keeping us on the edge of our seat, Marathon Man accomplishes that with ease, while still offering a seasoning of reflection on how “protecting American interests” is not and has never been an inherently noble pursuit. Scattered with all-timer sequences of tension and elevated by its incredible cast, Marathon Man is an eminently recommendable thriller for anyone with a strong enough stomach.
