Summer 1997 Sucks

by Jeff Bond

Can anyone point out to me a more disappointing start to the summer blockbuster season than we're having this year? Here in beautiful suburban Cincinnati it has rained almost nonstop for the past two weeks, and that and the feeble excuses for summer movies that have come our way have made the promise of summer an entirely illusory affair so far. Most of the cool stuff I was looking forward to (Paul Verhoven's Starship Troopers, Alien: Resurrection, James Cameron's Titanic and Randy Newman's score to Air Force One) has been either postponed until the chilly days of autumn or winter, or discarded entirely. As for what we've been handed so far:

Shockingly, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, which I didn't really like all that much, has been the only 'summer' release to offer up anything even remotely new, and since I expected nothing out of Eric Serra's hammering techno-funk score, I was not disappointed.

The biggest letdown comes from two creative talents who have rarely disappointed in the past two decades: Steven Spielberg and John Williams. It's amazing how an entire film can be gutted for the exercise of one aesthetically bankrupt idea: the sight of a tyrannosaurus rex trundling down the streets of San Diego. For that cheap thrill a potentially thrilling adventure is hacked down to a few well-handled but hardly inspiring special effects set pieces and a giant crowd of characters with nothing to do but be eaten. Rumor has it this idea was pursued in mid-course, necessitating the jettisoning of numerous subplots and character arcs and rendering the entire film almost wholly unbelievable. I've never heard so much bad word-of-mouth about a Spielberg movie, and John Williams finally suffers the fate his contemporaries have had to deal with for years: having to crank out a second-rate, monotonous action score at the very last minute. The Lost World CD is over after its fourth track, but unless you're quick with your remote you'll have a good 45 minutes of listening to handle after that.

If movie quality was measued by the number of film edits per minute Simon West's Con Air would certainly be up for a fistful of Oscars come next February. West, like The Rock's Michael Bay, is a servant of evil—er, I mean mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer. ("One down, one to go...") Bruckheimer likes to apply the aesthetics of television commercials to the movies, which means the intensity dial on the color saturation meter and the digital editing machine gets turned up to maximum while story logic, intelligence and characterization are thrown out the window. Having good actors like Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich and John Cusack in the mix just kept reminding me how much these talents were being wasted: they can barely seem to get their mouths around the mind-numbing dialogue. The only difference between West and Bay seems to be that West doesn't actually strap his camera to a jackhammer for key sequences like Bay did in The Rock.

The standard answer to this kind of criticism is that a movie like Con Air is just supposed to provide a brainless good time, but even by those Neanderthalic standards this movie is amazingly flat and predictable. The bankruptcy of ideas leads to this entry in the 'poetic comeuppance for the evil villain' sweepstakes: the ne'er-do-well in question has his leg run through with a pike, is thrown through two plate glass windows onto some live electrical lines which he's fried on. Then he's dropped into some piece of industrial pile-driving equipment (what this was doing in the middle of the Las Vegas strip I have no idea) which smashes his head into a pulp. Justice is served, America.

Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin know that a movie like Con Air doesn't really require a score. I think it's time for the whole Zimmer/Mancina group to get some kind of corporate name like Scores 'R Us or Chock Full O' Scores. Con Air has even less to offer in this regard than the incredibly annoying score to last year's The Rock: you got yer drum machines, your pulsing low end synth lines and wailing electric guitars and voila: the audience is satisfied that they're watching the coolest people in the universe in action. For sensitive moments in which Cage's character thinks about or mentions his wife or tends to his insulin-deprived buddy, a pretty guitar and harp melody emerges and takes a bow, grinding everything to a halt so we can get all teary-eyed about how sensitive a human being that Nicolas Cage is. Con Air is a two hour Miller Lite commercial, and the score is beer commercial music.

So what does that leave us to look forward to? Batman and Robin looks like the Batman Icecapades, and this series hasn't produced a good score since Danny Elfman's original 1989 effort. Elfman might fare better with Men in Black, a funny idea that will have to have funny lines to succeed, something high-concept comedies like Mars Attacks! and Austin Powers have been increasingly lacking in lately. Then there's Speed 2... after the second Die Hard movie I have no desire to see another hapless regular Joe 'hero' while about how incredible it is that they wound up in an unlikely action movie plot for a second time.... let's see how many key changes Mark Mancina can take his theme through this time...