Tradecraft: Fox Tries Spies Again

After ordering two spy pilots this past season (The Asset and one from Karyn Usher that never got a title) and then failing to book either one to series, Deadline reports that Fox is trying again to get a spy show on their schedule. They seem pretty determined, as they've ordered three spy pilots in the past week! Hopefully one sticks. The first order is for Anonymous, which is described as a "character-driven action dramady" and comes from Emmy-winning character-driven dramady specialist Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) and action veteran Simon Kinberg. Anonymous "follows a rebellious, hot-shot wunderkind who is plucked as the CIA’s latest recruit and teamed with a seasoned handler with whom he forms an unlikely father-son relationship." The last network spy dramady about a hotshot wunderkind plucked as the CIA's latest recruit was CHAOS, and that one didn't work out so well. But with Katims and Kinberg, this one at least has the DNA to succeed. (Then again, so did that one.) Kinberg's most recent spy movie, This Means War (review here), may have been a misstep, but his genre debut, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (written while he was still in college), was a very impressive script in a surprisingly difficult hybrid genre, the action romcom. (Try writing one if you don't believe me!) For that alone, I'll always be interested n his projects. Kinberg's extensive spy resume also includes xXx: State of the Union, Knight and Day (as a script doctor), X-Men: First Class (as a producer), the Robert Ludlum remake The Osterman Weekend and a TV version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith that never aired. He will serve as executive producer on Anonymous along with Katims, who will write the pilot. According to the trade blog, Katims "expressed interest in the CIA arena, which he had never tackled before." He was introduced to Kinberg, and teamed up with him because of his expertise in the genre.

Movie Review: This Means War (2012)

The action/romantic comedy is a really hard genre combo to pull off. Attempts at such desperate marriages—always appealing to studios, as done well, they could potentially bring in men and women in equal numbers—usually fail. But This Means War had a pretty promising pedigree. The director, McG, recently wrapped producing duties on the long-running spy series Chuck, which deftly pulled off that unique combination for most of its run. Even more promisingly, co-writer Simon Kinberg had penned one of the most successful attempts ever at combining those two disparate genres, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). His audio commentary on that DVD, in fact, is a master class in concocting such a blend. (And he admits that a lot of trial and error went into perfecting it in that movie.) And, finally, the stars seemed like a promising fit for such an amalgamation. Reese Witherspoon has long ago mastered the romantic comedy, and Chris Pine (Star Trek, and the upcoming Jack Ryan reboot) and Tom Hardy (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Inception) are two of the most promising young action stars out there. All in all, these people seemed like the right creative team to succeed in mixing the spy and rom-com genres. Therefore, I went into This Means War with high hopes and low expectations. Unthrillingly, it exceeded those expectations (slightly), but failed to live up to my hopes. It’s neither great nor awful, but it’s more awful than great. Mostly, though, it just is.

Neither spy movies (of this shoot ‘em up ilk, anyway) nor glossy romantic comedies tend to take place in a recognizable real world. And This Means War certainly doesn’t. It takes place in a world of conspicuous consumption, in which everyone has loads of money to spare. Witherspoon’s character, Lauren, works at a consumer goods testing company decorated in huge swatches of bright colors, where workers toil away the hours spraying products with water hoses and flame throwers. It’s sort of the Consumer Report equivalent of SPECTRE Island. Lauren lives in an incredibly spacious Los Angeles house, and those aren’t cheap. If she actually runs the company (which isn’t entirely clear), then perhaps that’s plausible. Chris Pine’s character, however, shoulders not only the unlikely name of “F.D.R.,” but a most unlikely lifestyle for an orphan who’s gone into government work. He lives in a luxurious bachelor pad that might make Diabolik jealous, complete with a swimming pool seemingly stocked with bikini beauties running the length of his glass ceiling. It’s the sort of place usually seen being broken into by Jason Statham with the objective of killing a drug lord. In addition to being a world of conspicuous consumption, this is a world of indeterminate time. But rather than recreating a specific, distinctive era (how cool would it be to set a spy rom-com in the pre-Swinging Sixties of Doris Day and Dr. No, along the lines of Down With Love meets OSS 117?), it appears to take place about a decade ago—which may just indicate a script that’s been in development for that long. This is a world where there are still giant video stores in downtown Los Angeles. Cool ones, too, with entire rows of the Criterion Lady Vanishes DVD faced out, which no Blockbuster I ever shopped at would have had. It’s okay for spy movies and romantic comedies to take place in unrecognizable realities on their own (and both genres certainly tend to play up the conspicuous consumption), but I feel like a more grounded world would have better suited the mixture of the two. As it stands, there’s really no relatable point of entry: not the guys, not the girl, not the world.

F.D.R. and Tuck (Hardy) are best friends who work together at the CIA—in its luxurious Los Angeles field office, which suits makers of films and television much better than Langley. (Their boss is an utterly wasted Angela Bassett, who also briefly headed up the CIA’s massive Los Angeles branch on a late season of Alias.) The script seems to hint that they’re even more than friends—either foster brothers (they seem to share a foster grandmother, but that plotline appears to have been excised) or gay lovers (in one particularly awkward scene, F.D.R. insists that Tuck recall an instance in Bangkok when he glimpsed his penis), either one of which might have made this premise more interesting. But of course it doesn’t actually go in either of those potentially promising (however unlikely) directions. Instead, the two bosom buddy colleagues both fall in love with the same woman—Lauren. To the credit of Kinberg and co-writer Timothy Dowling, this amazing coincidence is actually sold fairly plausibly, all things considered.

Tuck, who meets Lauren through an online dating service, is the nice guy. (“Safe,” as she puts it to her confidante, played by a typically annoying Chelsea Handler.) He’s got a young son from a previous marriage and he takes her on thoughtful dates like an impromptu trapeze session at what appears to be a closed circus. You know, like you do. F.D.R. is the sleazy ladies’ man, who tries to pick her up in the aforementioned video store, fails, and persists by following her to her place of work and shanghaiing one of her product testing focus groups. (Actually, this is one of the film’s best scenes, full of the kind of banter you expect from good romantic comedies, and Pine sells the seduction by delivering his double entendres with charm to spare.) He takes her on thoughtless dates that seem to have worked on a lot of women before her, trying to impress by ushering her past long lines into noisy, trendy dance clubs where he knows the doormen and the DJs.

When the two spies discover they’re competing, they pull out all the stops and spend millions of taxpayer dollars by railroading CIA resources to spy on Lauren (learning all about her to give them the dating advantage) and sabotage each other’s efforts. The upshot is a lot less fresh than when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Harry Tasker pulled the same trick to spy on his wife in True Lies, but no less creepy—and no less expensive! At one point, Tuck cavalierly shoots down a drone that F.D.R. has re-routed to spy on his friend. After the recent drone crash in Iran, audiences are fully aware of how much that costs. These guys’ abuse of Company technology makes 007 look like a model of responsibility! But of course that sort of analysis is beside the point. This is a comedy, and we’re not supposed to be thinking about such things. The fact that I was thinking about them speaks to the effectiveness of the comedy.

You would think that a movie in which two potential suitors make a bet out of a woman’s affections and then invade her privacy and her personal space to win that bet would end with the woman getting the better of them. Maybe she goes off with a more deserving man, and leaves them with what they deserve—each other. Or maybe the script is more clever than that, and she turns out to be an enemy agent herself, who’s been purposely diverting their attention this whole time, getting the better of them? No. Sadly, this movie has no such rewarding twists up its sleeve. Instead, she actually chooses between them (even after learning the truth), and her choice seems completely arbitrary. In fact, it seems like she chooses the less appropriate mate based on all of the information the movie has provided us with. And we’re not privy to the reasons why. The other one then ends up with a random character who hasn’t been developed as a presence in the film at all up until that moment—just to keep the ending “happy.”

If This Means War is unimpressive as a romantic comedy, how does it fare as an action movie? For the most part, equally unimpressively, I’m sorry to say. McG demonstrated on the Charlie’s Angels movie that he’s capable of masterful over-the-top action scenes in a comedic vein, and I was hoping for a few of those. Instead, we’re treated to a messy and unoriginal shootout in a rooftop club and a close-quarters fight lit by strobe lights that impede any comprehension of what’s happening. The inevitable fight between the two colleagues, in which they destroy two levels of an upscale restaurant, is considerably more impressive, but unfortunately it’s so hard to root for either of them by that point that its impact is deadened on arrival. The only truly rewarding action setpiece comes in the form of a freeway chase at the finale, but that seems to be happening because the genre (or one of them, anyway) requires it to and not because the plot does.

So that all sounds pretty miserable, right? Why, then, did I begin this review by stating that it wasn't awful? This Means War has one saving grace that makes it at worst watchable and at best entertaining at times: the game performances by the three leads. Pine, Hardy and Witherspoon each put their all into this film, and do their best to sell lines and situations that are frequently beneath their talent. And, for the most part, they do sell them. That scene in which F.D.R. interrupts Lauren’s focus group to ask her on a date is a case in point. In other hands, the character might have come off as obnoxious in the extreme, and be seen as bullying her into going out with him. But Pine uses his considerable charm to sell the dialogue (including lines like, “maybe this grill can’t handle a guy like me”), and the scene comes off as him winning her over rather than him forcing her to bow to his demands. Witherspoon gives as good as she takes, and she, too, sells her lines, even saddled with a hopeless character whose actions make very little sense. Hardy’s equally capable, and achieves the difficult feat of making us care about a character constructed entirely from leftover clichés. It’s actually a treat to watch these three on screen, even when they’re acting their way out of the cringe-inducing situations in which the writers have trapped them. And for that reason, I can’t entirely hate This Means War. I can’t give it a very enthusiastic recommendation, either, though, for all of the reasons discussed above. I guess that makes it, overall, a wasted opportunity.

Tradecraft: Brian Kirk Ponders Ludlum's The Osterman Weekend

It's been a while since we've heard about any movement on Summit's new adaptation of the 1972 Robert Ludlum novel The Osterman Weekend (his second), which was previously made into a film in 1983 by Sam Peckinpah. This week, that changed. Deadline reports that Irish director Brian Kirk (Luther, My Boy Jack) is now in talks to direct the conspiracy thriller, using a script by Simon Kinberg and Jesse Wigutow. Ludlum's novel follows his most successful formula of an ordinary man thrust into international espionage. It follows a TV executive named John Tanner who's told by the CIA that one of his guests at an upcoming weekend get together is a KGB agent, and asked to help the Agency ferret out the traitor. The new movie will be updated, and according to the trade blog it will now be a reporter rather than a CIA agent who gives Tanner the news that one of his friends is not who he thinks he is. Back in 2008, Kinberg himself was aiming to make Osterman his directorial debut. By 2010, Wigutow was penning a rewrite and RED's Robert Schwentke was circling the project. Apparently Bourne Identity helmer Doug Liman (who collaborated with Kinberg on Mr. & Mrs. Smith) also flirted with it for long enough to add himself to the film's long list of producers, which also includes Kinberg, Peter Davis and Captivate Entertainment's Jeffrey Weiner and Ben Smith, cinematic keepers of the Ludlum flame.

Movie Review: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS (2011)

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)
The Superhero Tentpole As Sixties Spy Movie

While I love the richly textured period detail in the recent OSS 117 movies, those parodies also made me wish that someone would make a straight spy movie set in the Sixties, with Sixties fashions and attitudes, but contemporary fight choreography and special effects. Well, now Matthew Vaughn has done it, and it’s excellent! Some might not see it as a straight spy movie since it’s also got superheroes, but regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware of the long association between the spy and superhero genres, which actually thrived in the Sixties. Despite the title, X-Men: First Class is a spy movie with superheroes, not the other way around. And as it’s a prequel to the previous entries in the X-Men series, it is not required that a viewer have any prior knowledge of the characters to see this one… so even if you generally avoid superhero fare, but you like Sixties Bond movies, by all means do yourself a favor and see X-Men: First Class, post-haste!

Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) takes his stylistic guidance primarily from Sean Connery Bond movies, Sixties heist flicks (including the original Ocean’s 11) and British television adventure series of the era, like The Avengers, The Champions and Department S. There are so many nods to Sixties spy sources that espionage fans will be in constant ecstasy savoring it all. First and foremost, X-Men: First Class has all the Jet Age globetrotting of the original Bond films. In the first half-hour alone (more or less), the plot jumps smoothly (more or less) from Germany to New York to London to Switzerland to Las Vegas to Langley to Argentina to Miami, and later makes additional stops in Moscow and Cuba. Vaughn savors all the locations in the same way that Terence Young did, providing lingering establishing shots of each new locale to stimulate the audience’s escapist travel fantasies too often ignored by modern Bond movies. (Or cut too quickly to take in, as was the case with the deplorable Quantum of Solace.)

The CIA has a millionaire villain named Sebastian Shaw under surveillance. They suspect him of collaborating with the Soviets, but they don’t know the half of it. Kevin Bacon plays Shaw, and in keeping with the character’s comic book origins which were torn wholesale (by writer Chris Claremont) from the classic Avengers episode “A Touch of Brimstone,” he ably channels all the louche decadence of Peter Wyngarde (who guest-starred on that episode). In the comics, Shaw had a confederate who wore that influence on his sleeve with a name that conjured both the actor and his most immortal character, Jason King (hero of the ITC show Department S and its spinoff Jason King): Jason Wyngarde. Sadly Jason Wyngarde isn’t in this movie, but Bacon’s svelte Shaw seems to owe as much to Wyngarde (both the character and the actor) as he does to the Shaw of the comics, who was based on the more solidly built Bond villain Robert Shaw. While he doesn’t sport Jason King’s (and Wyngarde’s) distinctive facial hair (which would have been rather anachronistic to this film’s 1962 setting), he does share his affinity for cravats and flamboyant velour suits (which is in itself a tad anachronistic, but more forgivably so). The character also shares Jason King’s taste for luxury. His private submarine/mobile lair (whose first appearance is one of the film’s biggest spy fan delights) is decked out in all the luxury trappings of a Sixties bachelor pad. Its velvet cushions, paisley wallpaper, shag carpets and stocked minibar (natch) all recall not only that crate (average on the outside) that Jason King used to smuggle himself into East Berlin, but also James Bond’s iceberg mini-sub in A View To A Kill.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we meet Shaw, he’s entertaining a selection of America’s richest and most powerful men at his Hellfire Club, which has been relocated from The Avengers’ London to Las Vegas. (The establishing shot of Vegas deliberately evokes Diamonds Are Forever, even if it’s a decade early.) The CIA is keeping tabs on the event from a car across the street, but agent Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) realizes the need to get closer and sees her opportunity, which comes right out of “A Touch of Brimstone.” Shaw’s right-hand woman, Emma Frost (again, Claremont deliberately appropriated Emma Peel’s first name for his Hellfire Club’s White Queen; Diana Rigg’s Peel was the Black Queen in “A Touch of Brimstone”), played by Mad Men’s January Jones (remaining safely in her comfortable Sixties milieu; more on her in a moment), is shepherding a bevy of lingerie-clad beauties into the Playboy Club-like event. Moira quickly strips down to her underwear, which, of course, is black lingerie sexy enough in itself that it might have been selected deliberately for the occasion, but as it happens, it’s a moment of inspiration. “What are you doing?” asks her male partner, aghast. “Using some equipment not issued by the CIA,” she replies (or something to that effect). That gives Vaughn the opportunity to keep his female spy in lingerie while she does her spying (yes, actual spying—something you don’t see too much in any spy movies anymore!), which seems very appropriately Sixties. Also appropriately Sixties is the spot-on art direction by Chris Seagers (Johnny English), which recalls not only Ken Adam’s Bond sets, but also his famous war room from Dr. Strangelove, which is lovingly recreated. In the club, there’s also a nod to Live and Let Die with a revolving booth. The only aspect that could stand to be more Sixties is Henry Jackman's score.  There's nothing wrong with it, and sometimes (as during the Maurice Binder-inspired end titles), it evokes the era plenty.  But I would have preferred a brassier, more John Barry-ish accompaniment throughout, akin to Michael Giacchino's Incredibles music.  Oh well.

When Moira’s intelligence gathering reveals the presence of mutants in our midst to the CIA for the first time (well, at least to her; her superiors require convincing), she sets out to recruit an expert on the phenomenon. That leads her to Oxford, where she meets newly-minted Professor Charles Xavier, played here by James McAvoy (and in the previous movies, at a more advanced age, by Patrick Stewart). Charles has penned a thesis on mutant genes, but keeps secret his own mutant power of telepathy, preferring to use it for parlor tricks to pick up girls in pubs. (He also manages to use the word “groovy” in his pick-ups—and, surprisingly, sells it!) With Charles she also gets his adoptive sister, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), whose mutant power allows her to assume the form of any person she wants. (She’ll later become Mystique, played by Rebecca Romijn in the other X-Men movies.) Raven’s demonstration convinces the CIA that they need a mutant division, and it’s quickly established under the direction of an underused Oliver Platt.

Xavier’s first mission for the CIA (to locate Sebastian Shaw and the nefarious mutants already observed by Moira) takes him into contact with the movie’s real star, the future Magneto (played in the other films by Ian McKellen), Erik Lehnsherr. Erik is played by Inglourious Basterds’ Michael Fassbender in a truly star-making turn that also unspools as an extended audition for James Bond. People have been touting Fassbender as a successor to Daniel Craig since Hunger, but this is the first performance in which he’s truly sold me on the notion. (And then some!)

Fassbender’s part is by far the most complex and well-developed in the movie—and also the coolest. As a child, Erik’s mutant gift for manipulating metal (I know, it sounds like a really lame power but actually turns out to be the coolest one in the film!) first manifested itself when he was separated from his parents while interned in a concentration camp. The Nazis, led by Bacon’s character in a previous identity, conducted horrifying experiments on him and he watched his mother murdered before his eyes. When we catch up with him again in 1962, he’s using his powers as a revenge-driven Nazi hunter. He’s also dressing like James Bond (a suit he wears in Geneva could have come right off Connery’s back in From Russia With Love—complete with hat) and behaving like him as well. (And when he’s not in suits, he wears more black turtlenecks than Sterling Archer—and pulls off the look with great elan.) These moments of Erik exuding cool and exacting vengeance in Europe and South America are among the film’s most Bondian, and they’re utterly thrilling as filmed by Vaughn. The future Magneto’s quest to find his mother’s killer takes him from Argentina to Miami, where he engages in some Goldfinger-style scuba skulduggery and finally crosses paths with Charles Xavier in the film’s best spy setpiece.

Despite having vastly different outlooks on their mutant status, Charles and Erik share a common objective in tracking down Sebastian Shaw. Therefore, they team up and forge a moving friendship. Fassbender and McAvoy have excellent chemistry together, and I wish that events of this movie would have allowed for further adventures together, because they make a great team. Of course their ultimate destinies (explored in Bryan Singer’s compelling X-Men and X2 and Brett Ratner’s risible X3) lie light years apart, but this period of friendship is fertile enough that it easily could have (and probably should have) fuelled a trilogy rather than a single film. Vaughn accomplishes in this single movie what the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy failed to; he succeeds in making the character we all know turns out to be a villain into a thoroughly likable hero, and we’re rooting for him not to take the path we know he does. However, that ultimate choice feels a bit rushed crammed into the movie’s final fifteen minutes or so, and I wish it had played out over more films. Oh well. The friendship and ultimate schism between these two men provides the heart and backbone of X-Men: First Class, but the entire ensemble is for the most part successful.

Together, Charles and Erik recruit a small cadre of young mutants to the CIA team in a recruiting sequence reminiscent of great Sixties capers like Grand Slam, Topkapi and Ocean’s 11. They also find another mutant already working for the CIA in a Q capacity in the form of Hank McCoy (the future Beast, played by Nicholas Hoult). While the (slightly) older characters are the more interesting ones, the scenes of the young mutants exploring and developing their powers are expertly handled, leading to an action climax that incorporates each of their specific skills like a super-powered Mission: Impossible against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Shaw also has his own team of mutant hench-people, foremost among them the aforementioned Emma Frost. January Jones aims for ice queen but comes off more as wooden, though she makes a most attractive clothes horse for costume designer Sammy Sheldon’s fabulous Emma Peel-inspired attire. (Still, her performance here is a definite improvement over the one in the Liam Neeson neo-Eurospy caper Unknown earlier this year.) For a fairly major character from the comics, Emma Frost has remarkably little to do in the movie—and disappears for most of the second half. But when she is on screen, it’s always in an amazing take on Diana Rigg’s wardrobe, which is a welcome sight—if a tad anachronistic for 1962. Her catsuit probably should have been closer to Cathy Gale’s looser motorcycle leathers than Emma Peel’s body-hugging get-up… but that’s just not as much fun! And this movie is fun.

In X-Men: First Class, Matthew Vaughn has crafted not just a fantastic homage to Sixties spydom, but a fantastic movie in its own right—and the best in the X-Men series to date. Watching it makes me even sadder that his take on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. never came to fruition. Vaughn clearly loves the era and the genre. Thanks to him, I finally have that Sixties-set modern action movie I always wanted—and enhanced with well-executed superheroics. This is the spy movie to beat so far this year, and all fans of the genre should check it out.

For more on the connections between these X-Men characters and The Avengers (including wardrobe similarities), click here.

Blu-ray Review: Knight and Day (2010)

Blu-ray Review: Knight and Day (2010)

Note: This review incorporates and greatly expands on my initial theatrical review of Knight and Day.

The Movie

Knight and Day features two bona fide movie stars with great chemistry between them on a romantic adventure that takes them all over the world, from one exotic location to another–and from one thrilling action setpiece to another. It’s the sort of epic spectacle spy movie that we just don’t get anymore–a throwback to the over-the-top late Connery/Moore era of Bond movies. (In fact, its points of parodic reference may have been too old to resonate with lots of average moviegoers.) If you like spy movies that feature both tropical paradises and snowy Alpine streets (I do!), then you will enjoy Knight and Day.

I’ve called the Transporter movies and their neo-Eurospy ilk the heirs to the daffy action of the Roger Moore Bonds. Knight and Day also fits that bill, but on a much larger Hollywood budget. It follows the Eurospy “kitchen sink” pattern of how to imitate 007 (pack in as many exotic locations as possible into a short amount of time, pile on one over-the-top action scene after another, and set multiple factions after the same ridiculous Macguffin), but it’s clearly a Hollywood product. In other words, it offers the best of both worlds when it comes to delivering Bond-like adventure in an openly sub-Bond, tongue-in-cheek fashion.

Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller (not the same Roy Miller Matt Damon played in another 2010 spy movie, Green Zone), who is either a maverick CIA agent who’s been forced to go renegade by villainous elements in his own organization, or a crazy person. Carmeron Diaz plays June Havens, an innocent bystander swept up into his maelstrom who’s not sure which story to believe. He certainly has secret agent skills, but he also acts pretty crazy.

The romantic comedy hook at play here is the idea of telling the story from the point of view of a Bond Girl–an ordinary (if beautiful) woman who finds herself mixed up with spies and way out of her depth. Despite that appealing hook, though, Knight and Day plays like an action movie with comedy and romance rather than an awkward action/romcom hybrid. It’s not the equal of Charade or North By Northwest, but that’s the tone it’s going for and generally succeeds at. It’s an action/adventure with a light but compelling romantic relationship at its center–and plenty of comedy. It reminded me a lot of James Cameron’s True Lies, which also built a succession of exciting, over-the-top, Bond-inspired setpieces around a central relationship. The action (heavily reliant on rather blatant CG) may not be up to Cameron’s standards, but overall I prefer the tone of Knight and Day and the chemistry between its stars.

I’m a sucker for a good Macguffin, the less explanation the better. Knight and Day is propelled by a classic (and very Eurospyish) Macguffin: the perpetual energy source. The movie makes no attempt to explain the science behind this device, relying instead on the shorthand of “not your average Duracel” or something like that. (It’s also conveniently battery-sized, yet prone to overheating–which can also prove convenient.) I was grateful for the lack of pseudo-scientific explanation and thoroughly involved with the chase on only the information provided. As Hitch himself said, the Macguffin itself shouldn’t matter at all. It just has to succeed at driving the plot. Knight and Day thrives on the slightness of its premise, and winks at the audience by not attempting to explain it any more than necessary. The audience (ideally) is complicit in this entertainment. We willingly surrender ourselves to the movie, and it knowingly acknowledges this with a recurring device in which Roy drugs June, and we then cut away and “wake up” with her in an entirely new exotic location with no explanation as to how we got there. While I would kind of like to have seen how Roy piloted them away from a tropical island under attack by a drone in a helicopter, I’m perfectly willing to accept this device–especially if it means more exotic locations, which it does.

Roy whisks June all around the globe, from Wichita to Boston to a tropical island to Austria back to Boston to Spain and finally South America. (More or less.) Maybe I’m even leaving out a few places. The point is, the film packs in the exotic scenery, which is one of my primary requirements from good spy entertainment. Director James Mangold also stages appropriate action sequences in each locale. In Kansas we get a spectacular plane crash in a cornfield, reminding us just how exciting the heartland can be for such sequences, as Hitchcock showed us half a century before. In Boston we get a breakneck highway chase and in New York we get a warehouse shootout. In the tropics there’s that drone attack, spewing bullets and missiles, and in Austria we get a fight on a train and a rooftop chase. (Yes! I love trains in spy movies–especially with fights on them! And I love European-set rooftop chases!)

Sevilla offers a car and motorcycle pursuit involving sporty electric cars and–of course!–bulls. Yes, the bulls and the cars interact–in a most satisfying manner. All of the action could be better (and as I already mentioned, the CGI is painfully obvious in places–but that’s a flaw I’m willing to forgive when I’m invested in the ride), but at least Mangold has the sound mind to allow it to play out largely in wide master shots so that you can actually follow what’s going on and take in the breathtaking scenery at the same time. Such action direction (recalling–if not quite up to the standards of–the great and too often unsung John Glen) is a welcome breath of fresh air at a time when the trend is to shoot and cut action sequences so fast and furiously that the viewer can neither comprehend the action nor savor the location. (I’m looking at you, Quantum of Solace!)

Is the movie without flaws? Of course not. Frankly, I would have been happy if it had ended in Sevilla; everything after that (about ten minutes) seemed extraneous. And, as I mentioned, while I’m grateful that the action is allowed to play out in a comprehensible manner, it could have been more dynamically directed. There are some great stunts and practical effects, but they’re frequently drowned out by an over-reliance on CGI. John Powell scores a rare miss with his tropicalia-flavored score when what was really called for was Bondian bombast–or at least Powell’s own contemporary brand of bombast which I was just praising last week in my Fair Game review. Tom Cruise himself was seen as a liability (and his supposed–and erroneous–inability to open a film these days apparently led to an overhaul of the next Mission: Impossible movie), but he really isn’t at all. I’m not a very big fan of Cruise anymore (like most of America, apparently), but he puts his all into this role and delivers a genuinely charming performance. If bigger audiences tune in on DVD and Blu-ray than did in the theaters, they’ll quickly forget whatever issues they have with the actor outside of his movies. So Cruise may have been billed as a drawback in the media, but he isn’t at all. The title Knight and Day may have been–and it’s never adequately explained in the film. (It still beats the awful working title of Wichita, but surely they could have come up with something better!) Oh well. Whatever Fox wants to call it, this is a thoroughly entertaining spy movie that rewards fans of the genre with the genre’s most famous hallmarks: fantastic locations, over-the-top action and grand escapism.

The Disc

The special features on Fox’s DVD and Blu-ray combo, unfortunately, aren’t much to write home about. “Wilder Knights and Crazier Days” is the meatiest of several featurettes at a whopping 12 minutes, but you won’t get any serious insights into the filmmaking process. It’s mostly tepid and generic EPK (Electronic Press Kit, generated to promote the film, not to examine its making) material. If you can get past the EPK shmooze-fest, though, and ignore the canned soundbites, there are some neat BTS (behind-the-scenes) shots of Tom Cruise performing his own stunts in various exotic locations.

I could do without Cruise himself boasting about how he always does his own stunts and the other stars providing contractually-obligated soundbites about how in awe of him they are for it, but the footage itself is impressive. In the movie, these stunts are often slathered in so much obvious CGI that it’s tough to appreciate that they’re done for real. (Director James Mangold even laments this fact, though it’s he who packed the stunts in amidst all the CGI!) On the BTS cameras, though, it might not look as slick, but it’s much easier to appreciate what Cruise puts himself through for our entertainment. There’s a lot of focus on the highway chase in Boston (though all these California Movie People keep referring to it as a “freeway chase”) and the rooftop foot chase in Salzberg, Austria. The latter is pretty awesome, I have to say. That chase more than any other goes by in a flash in the film, and takes place at night, so I really appreciate the more lingering glimpse provided here. It’s such a great spyish location and appropriate setpiece! Seeing the BTS footage, I really wish the scene had lasted longer in the movie.

One telling thing that it’s possible to discern amidst all the PR whitewash is that Tom Cruise seems to very much be the dominant force on the set, not James Mangold. Cruise takes credit for the motorcycle stunt wherein Cameron Diaz flips around from riding behind him to riding in front of him, facing backwards and firing guns. He says he always wanted to do that stunt. Oh yeah, Tom? “Always” as in ever since Pierce Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh did it thirteen years ago in Tomorrow Never Dies, maybe? Well, original or not, it is a cool stunt, and it works just fine the second time around in Knight and Day. (Right after that bit, there’s a quote from Mangold admitting that, “We did model them after the great chases of the Bond movies.” Remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is the key for Bond fans to enjoying Eurospy movies, and the same applies here.)

“Boston Days and Spanish Knights” is basically just a shorter (7 minutes) cutdown of the same EPK package, using lots of the same soundbites and clips. It’s kind of frustrating to see the same material in two separate special features, but having worked in that business I know exactly how that happens. (Two cuts of the same BTS documentary I worked on ended up being included on the Return of the King DVD, with much of the same material–basically because the studio couldn’t decide what it wanted–but overall I suppose they were different enough to warrant the inclusion of both.) We do get some good quotes from Mangold that weren’t in the other piece really summing up the tone of the film much better than Fox’s ad campaign did. “This is a movie that’s not about reality,” the director tells us, “but that’s about a fantasy made real.... It’s candy for the eyes.” Exactly! And I loved it for that, while some of my friends who seemed to expect something deeper went home disappointed when we saw it in the theater together. Mangold also explains that it was important for him to actually take audiences around the globe, and I, for one, was appreciative of that mandate. The diverse worldwide locations are one of the best things the movie has going for it!

Two even shorter featurettes (running about 3 minutes apiece) are basically even more drastic cutdowns of the same BTS material. “Story” is misleadingly not about the story (which Mangold summarizes succinctly–along with pretty much every other spy movie ever–as “he’s in possession of an object that everyone else wants”), and if you’re expecting a complex examination of the screenwriting process, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Instead it’s a total love-fest, with everyone saying how great Tom Cruise is and how Cameron Diaz is “incredibly gifted,” etcetera, etcetera. Once again the best quote belongs to Mangold, who says, “There’s movies you make because you want to deliver a message; there’s movies you make to take someone on an emotional journey; this is supposed to be a ride.” Exactly! That’s just what I wanted from it; that’s all anyone should expect of it, and they’ll be richly rewarded.

“Scope” is another 3-minute EPK featurette virtually indistinguishable from “Story.” It mainly focuses on the locations, though, and as I admitted above, I like seeing locations and I like seeing BTS that proves they really shot on those locations, so I’m not going to complain about that... except to say that if you’ve already watched “Wilder Knights and Crazier Days,” then you’ve already seen most of it.

“Knight and ‘Someday’” is an even more useless featurette somehow stretched out into eight agonizing minutes. This one’s for die-hard Cruise and Black Eyed Peas fans only, and I’m not sure how big a cross section of those fan bases really intersects. It’s essentially about Cruise asking the Peas to perform a song on the film’s soundtrack (“Someday”) and then appearing briefly with them on stage at London’s O2 arena, but it really milks this setup! We follow Cruise walking through the halls of the arena with his wife Katie Holmes, hugging person after person after person and patting them on the back. It’s horrible! Then the Peas themselves take forever to tell the story of how Cruise came to their show in Miami and asked them to do a song. Really, this story does not even need to be told at all, let alone drawn out! (And I’d say that even if it were Shirley Bassey talking instead of will.i.am. It’s just boring.) We learn that Tom “loves that creative process” hanging out with the band, and that singer will.i.am thinks the movie is “dope.” All this leads up to footage of Cruise’s big moment joining the band on stage (with a caption helpfully telling us that “the English crowd went crazy”), yet when we get there, we just see it; we don’t actually hear Cruise singing! Instead, they play the album version of the song over the footage. Eight minutes of agonizing setup with zero payoff! Skip it.

The only thing that keeps “Knight and ‘Someday’” from being the MOST pointless featurette on this or any DVD is another one entitled “How To Make a Digital Copy” (or something to that effect). In this one, a ridiculously chipper and smarmy Luke Wilson wannabe smiles his way creepily through a tutorial designed to show even bigger Luddites than myself how to transfer their digital copy to their computer or portable media device. It even shows us how to plug in a USB cable! And how to insert a disc into your computer! Really. “So look for the digital copy logo whenever you buy a DVD or Blu-ray!” the host concludes after seven or eight minutes. (I know; I know. Obviously I didn’t have to watch that and just wanted to be a wise-ass. I’m sure it’s very helpful to the all-important Wal-Mart demographic.)

Rounding out the special features are the trailer that played like clockwork before every movie last spring, and two promotional minute-long viral videos. “Soccer” shows Cruise and Diaz kicking a soccer ball on set and showing off tricks they know. Is it real? I’m not sure–and therefore I’m not really sure of the point. “Kick” definitely isn’t real, though, presenting a setup wherein Diaz ends up kicking Cruise in the chest during rehearsal and knocks him into a craft service table. I guess it’s funny. These aren’t really my cup of tea, but I guess they have their audience so it’s cool that they’re included.

That’s a lot of griping about the special features, then. But the main attraction on all three discs on the combo package (Blu-ray, DVD and digital copy) is of course the film, and it’s a good one. Knight and Day and Cruise both got a bad rap this past summer, and undeservedly. The press seemed very anxious for Cruise to fail, and so they painted this film to be a flop. But it really wasn’t–certainly not internationally. It was recently reported that Knight and Day went on to make $264 million worldwide, more than Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups, which was considered a hit. Knight and Day wasn’t a flop and it isn’t bad. It’s not groundbreaking cinema or anything, but it’s not for one instant trying to be. As Mangold makes clear in the featurettes, this is a popcorn flick, through and through, and it delivers pretty much everything I desire from spy popcorn flick with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek: great locations, cool action setpieces, engaging performances and stampeding bulls crushing a sports car. The high-def transfer on the Blu-ray showcases all those things–particular the stars and the locations–to their best advantage, and the standard-def transfer on the DVD certainly isn’t shabby either. The bonus material is, but don’t let that stop you from picking up this highly entertaining, utterly unpretentious popcorn spy flick.

Tradecraft: McG Directing Spy Rom-Com

I could have sworn I'd already posted about this movie, but I can't find such a post at the moment, so maybe not.  Anyway, Deadline reports that McG is directing a romantic comedy about two CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) "who wage an escalating war" for the affections of the same woman, played by Reese Witherspoon.  The movie is called This Means War.  Today's news is that late night talkshow host Chelsea Handler has just joined the cast as Witherspoon's best friend.  I assume they meant sassy best friend, because that's how female best friends always are in romcoms.  Personally, I find Handler unpleasant and annoying, but I like McG (Chuck) and I like Simon Kinberg (writer of Mr. & Mrs. Smith), who is producing.  I also like Pine and Hardy; I'm fairly indifferent about Witherspoon. I'm very curious to see if this team manages to pull off the spy romantic comedy, a tough nut to crack that has produced more misses at the box office lately (Killers, Knight & Day) than hits.

Tradecraft: Lots Of Ludlum Developments, Including TV Series

Deadline files two reports today on Robert Ludlum adaptations.  First, the trade blog reports that writer Jesse Wigutow has signed on to do a quick rewrite on Summit's remake of The Osterman Weekend.  Presumably the draft he'll be polishing is Simon Kinberg's, since Deadline asserts that Kinberg (who at one time was set to make this his directorial debut) is still involved as a producer, along with Peter Davis, Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (who probably deserves his own blog label by now, since his name comes up here so often) and Jeffrey Weiner, who controls the rights to Ludlum's books.  As previously reported, RED director Robert Schwentke is circling the project, and apparently the purpose of this rewrite is to entice him to commit to it as his next film. Yes, please! Bring on more Ludlum movies, especially while the most promising one of the many in development, The Matarese Circle, is tied up in the hell that is MGM at the moment.

Second, and perhaps more interestingly, as though there have been several mini-series, there has never been a TV series based on the works of Robert Ludlum before, Deadline also reports that just such a series is now in development at CBS. According to the trade blog, Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI, is developing a spy series called Treadstone. Treadstone "centers on the workings of Treadstone 71, the black-ops arm of the CIA featured in the Ludlum novels. Yes, that's the shadowy group for which David Webb worked in Ludlum's novels, with whom he created and assumed his more famous identity as assassin Jason Bourne. Deadline doesn't indicate whether or not this Treadstone will be more closely affiliated with the organization in Ludlum's novels, or the one in Universal's recent Bourne movies. Whereas the motivation behind Treadstone in the novels is basically heroic, the Treadstone of the movies is a much more sinister organization.  It was also, I believe, officially shut down by Brian Cox's character, Abbott. If the series takes place in the movie universe (which seems likely), then it would make more sense to feature a reactivated Treadstone under new leadership than for it to be a prequel to the films set in the late 90s or early 2000s.  I think this is actually a really good way to keep the brand alive while the studio figures out how to progress with the Bourne film series without Paul Greengrass and very possibly without Matt Damon.  Depending on how closely the TV show is tied into the film universe (would Joan Allen do TV?), it could also serve as a breeding ground for new agents to carry the film franchise.  The project has a script commitment from the network, and considering Zuiker's involvement, I'd say it has a good chance to progress further quickly. John Glenn (Eagle Eye) is writing the pilot.

Tradecraft: RED Director To Take On Ludlum?

It's been a long while since we heard anything about that Summit remake of Robert Ludlum's The Osterman Weekend (which was originally filmed by Sam Peckinpah in 1983). But apparently the project's got momentum again, according to a nugget buried within a Deadline Hollywood story about who's vying to direct Wolverine 2. According to the trade blog, "Robert Schwentke, who created Comic-Con buzz for his film RED, had been in the mix [to direct the Wolverine sequel] but he opted out of the competition. Instead, Schwentke is eyeing projects that include Robert Ludlum's The Osterman Weekend and Universal's Ryan Reynolds-starrer RIPD as possible next pictures." Ludlum's novel follows a reporter, John Tanner, who's co-opted by the CIA into spying on his fellow guests at a weekend getaway with friends, some of whom he's told are KGB agents. There's no word yet on whether the plot would be updated or set in its original Cold War period, like the new movie version of John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but my guess would be updated.  It's worked well (at the box office, anyway) for the Bourne films, and the themes in Ludlum's original story actually hold up well today.  Last we'd heard about this new Osterman Weekend, Simon Kinberg had written the script and was set to direct.  Obviously he's not directing anymore, but the short trade piece doesn't give any indication of whether or not his script is still in play.  Schwentke previously directed Flightplan and The Time Traveler's Wife. Based on the encouraging trailers for RED, I'd be keen to see him stay in the spy genre... and I'm always game for more Ludlum movies!

Smith & Smith Redux?

New York Magazine's surprisingly well-informed entertainment blog The Vulture reports (via /film) that Fox is plotting a new Mr. & Mrs. Smith film–without star couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The Vulture calls it a reboot, which certainly fits the current mania, but the actual concept, as described, doesn't really sound like a reboot to me.  The non-sequel would be called Jones and, according to the blog, would focus on a Mr. and Mrs. Smith-like "pair of twentysomething spies are set up as a fake married couple when they graduate agency training."  Of course, the original Mr. and Mrs. Smith weren't technically spies; they were assassins, but it's ultimately the same difference, right?  Akiva Goldsman, who produced the original and mentored its screenwriter Simon Kinberg, will once again produce.  There is no mention of Kinberg's or director Doug Liman's involvement. 

Everywhere I look I see a tabloid screaming that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are breaking up. While I normally pay little heed to celebrity gossip, I do get a pang every time I see those rumors and think they mean we'll never see the Mr. & Mrs. Smith sequel (the idea, for better or for worse, was that they'd have a kid) that was mooted as soon as the first movie proved a hit.  According to The Vulture's Claude Brodesser-Akner (formerly of Variety and still the host of NPR's "The Treatment"), a rocky relationship between the stars (true or false) isn't the only reason we'll never see that sequel.  "The real reason," he says, "is economic. One of the root rationales behind Hollywood's reboot fever is that by ditching pricey talent but extending popular name-brand franchises, they get the best of both worlds: a title people know and like, with stars they can afford." 

It should be noted that this is not the first time Fox has attempted to extend this particular franchise with younger, more affordable stars.  In early 2007, a TV pilot was shot with Martin Henderson and Jordanna Brewster playing John and Jane Smith.  (Full details here.)  That pilot was written by Kinberg and directed by Liman, and was sadly never picked up (despite brief, renewed hope).  Perhaps it may yet show up as a bonus feature on a future Blu-ray reissue of the original film; I hope so, as I'd love to see it!

Tradecraft: Osterman Redux

Hollywood's posthumous love affair with Robert Ludlum continues! Today's Hollywood Reporter has an article about Mr. & Mrs. Smith scribe Simon Kinberg's new archaeological adventure project with Nicole Kidman attached, The Eighth Wonder. According to the trade, that project aims "to create a movie that will be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies," which sounds tantalizing in itself. But buried in the back of the story is the passing mention that Kinberg "also is working on a new adaptation of [Ludlum's] The Osterman Weekend for Summit [Entertainment]." Some Googling turns up a Variety story I missed in May of last year, which reveals that Kinberg will also direct the new adaptation. There's no way of knowing if that's still the plan sixteen months later, but the mention in today's Reporter at least indicates that the project is still alive. Ludlum's novel follows a reporter, John Tanner, who's co-opted by the CIA into spying on his fellow guests at a weekend getaway with friends, some of whom are are apparently enemy agents. Sam Peckinpah adapted the novel to screen in 1983, but his final cut was famously compromised. In 2004, Anchor Bay released a DVD that included a rough "workprint," ostensibly truer to the director's original vision.

I remain elated by all the new Ludlum movies in development. I just hope that some of them actually get made! (Especially The Matarese Circle with Denzel Washington.)