By James Bowman on 4.7.09 @ 6:02AM
Progressive reviewers and others older than 13 were aghast, but
torture has its uses in this CIA superhero flick.
As I was perusing the website of the New Republic the
other day, I came across this sub-headline to Christopher Orr's
review of Monsters vs. Aliens: "Enjoyable enough if
you're under 13, or have the taste of someone under 13." Ha ha.
But wait a minute. Isn't there supposed to be some news value in
a headline? Aren't you supposed to say "Man bites dog," not "Dog
bites man," if you want people to read on? Is there anyone on the
planet who doesn't know at least as well as Mr. Orr and long
before stepping into the cinema to see it that Monsters vs.
Aliens is going to be a movie made for the sensibility of a
13-year-old? We could go further and ask if there is anyone who
doesn't know that 90 percent of Hollywood's mainstream product is
made for 13-year-olds? The surprise, I guess, the unexpected
element in his story, is that he should treat anything so
predictable as a surprise.
Well, here's a real surprise. If you have come to think, as I
have, that the CIA is just a dysfunctional agency in the business
of producing useless intelligence, getting things wrong, offering
sinecures to the likes of Valerie Plame and engaging in
bureaucratic backbiting and the undermining of elected authority,
it turns out not to be true. Not according to Hollywood, anyway.
All true patriots will rejoice to learn from Taken that
the Agency, or the Company, as those of us in the know refer to
it, is really in the business of turning out superheroes who have
the ability to right the wrongs of the world single-handedly and
against overwhelming odds while biffing the dozy, incompetent and
corrupt French in their own country into the bargain. The fact
that the movie is directed by one Frenchman and written and
produced by another suggests a deep psychological conflictedness
that, alas, doesn't do anything to enliven this dull thriller.
What does is -- you'll never guess -- car chases! Of course I
ironize. Christopher Orr might not be able to guess it, but the
rest of us will without difficulty, particularly if we are
familiar with the cinematic oeuvre of Pierre Morel and
Luc Besson, director and writer-producer respectively, who
earlier collaborated on the Transporter films. In
addition to the car chases, of course, there are the usual
superhero antics. You know what I mean. The craggily handsome
hero -- here played by Liam Neeson -- walks into a room full of
men with foreign accents and guns who are all eager to kill him,
and, in a matter of seconds, he kills them instead. All
of them. In Taken he does this, several times, in order
to rescue a pure and virginal maiden -- his own daughter (Maggie
Grace) captured by Albanian white slavers in Paris -- in order to
make up for years of parental neglect while he was being a
superhero for the CIA instead of freelancing, as he is now.
Of course, like all superheroes, he is incredibly lucky. Talk
about all the breaks going a guy's way! With only 96 hours to
rescue his daughter before she disappears forever, he finds that
the first pimp he approaches, or who approaches him, is one of
the Albanian gang of kidnappers. This person then inadvertently
leads him straight to where a bunch of the kidnapped girls are
kept, where he immediately finds one of them with his daughter's
jacket. He extracts this drugged girl from her place of
confinement, killing any number of those who have been charged
with guarding her and the others, and takes her away in a car
that, in the ensuing chase, is soon riddled with bullets, all of
which fortunately miss both him and the girl. With his skills in
pharmacology and medicine he then revives the girl and finds out
from her where the bad guys hang out before proceeding to kill
another house-full of them -- all except one, whom he tortures
for the information he needs to find his daughter.
After that it gets a bit complicated, but you'll not be surprised
to learn that his incredible luck holds -- as does the incredibly
bad luck of yet another boat-load of bad guys. The
surprising thing -- at least to me -- is that the scenes of
torture are meant to make our hero more, not less sympathetic to
us. The script even allows him to joke about it as he turns on
the juice to shock the bad guy strapped to a chair. "You know, we
used to outsource this stuff," he tells him meditatively. The
trouble was that the power grids in the Third World countries
that got the contracts were unreliable. Here in France, he tells
him, "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on
until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill."
Of course, the guy gives him a name, Vincent St. Clair, but can
give him no address, even under torture. He doesn't know, he says
desperately. The good guy replies: "I believe you" -- and then,
as he goes out of the room, he turns the electricity back on.
"But that won't save you."
Ouch! This, says the New York Times reviewer Manohla
Dargis in a review headed "Vigilante Daddy Avenges
Kidnapping," is "a repellent scene," which leads her to the
further observation that "swarthy Europeans and Arabs may still
be the villains du jour at the movies, but the
Americans, including those with inexplicable Irish accents, are,
alas, catching up." Like President Obama, in other words, Ms.
Dargis thinks that we don't have to choose between our ideals and
our security. And nobody's going to tell either of them any
different. Thus, she simply refuses to accept the central
dramatic premise of the movie -- surely not that unbelievable
when compared to most of what it is asking us to swallow --
namely that, without the torture, the L.A. princess would have
been on her way to some wicked sheikh's seraglio post haste. Only
by torture (not to mention all the indiscriminate killing) is
daddy able to save her. And this makes him a "vigilante" and a
"villain"? Well, in that bastion of enlightened progressivism,
the New York Times, I guess it does.
Presumably, in his position, Manohla Dargis would have stuck to
her high-minded principles and fed the virginal princess to the
big bad wolf. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be an all-bad
idea. At least daddy might have left her in the company of the
wicked sheikh for a while before rescuing her -- and killing him
-- in the hope that she would come out of the experience a little
less spoiled and princessy and a little more humble instead of
being launched, more or less immediately upon rescue, into her
career as a celebrity singer -- again with daddy's never-failing
help. But then I suppose that superheroes must be expected to
spawn other superheroes or they're not really superheroes. The
13-year-olds would protest.
