Flight of the Phoenix (2004) [PG-13] ***

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net

The 1965 version of Flight of the Phoenix is not a great movie, but it has a lot more going for it than the second-rate 2004 re-imagination. Despite using the same premise and numerous identical plot points, this remake replaces suspense with boredom and witty dialogue with lame lines any self-respecting actor should be embarrassed to utter. The only thing better about the 2004 Flight of the Phoenix are the special effects, and there are times when the computer-generated imagery isn't convincing.

Comparisons between the two editions may be unfair, but they are inevitable. The first place to start is the acting. 1965's Flight of the Phoenix featured four Oscar-winning actors (James Stewart, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, and Peter Finch). The new version is headlined by Dennis Quaid, who is joined by Hugh Laurie, Giovanni Ribisi, and Miranda Otto. Among them, they have one Golden Globe nomination. I think all of them (except possibly Laurie) have attended the Oscars, but as members of the audience. While awards do not always define the performers, there's a gap between the 1965 cast and the 2004 troupe. It's possible to lay some of the blame at the feet of screenwriters Scott Frank (Dead Again) and Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen). Few actors can impress when delivering a line like We're not garbage - we're people!

Quaid plays Frank Towns, a gritty pilot who has been tabbed by a big oil company to bring their employees home after an operation in Mongolia is a bust. Among Frank's human cargo are the drill site's chief operator (Otto), a suit who's visiting (Laurie), the mysterious and insecure Elliot (Ribisi), and a group of grunts, each of whom has one discernible personality trait. On the way back to civilization, Frank's plane runs into a monstrous sandstorm. Pieces of the aircraft begin coming off, including the radio antenna (not good) and a propeller (even worse). The crash landing in the Gobi Desert takes two lives, but leaves the survivors with a dilemma. Unless they are spotted from above (highly unlikely), they have only enough food and water for one month. At that point, Elliot makes a startling pronouncement. He is an engineer who designs planes, and he believes that it is possible to build a new plane out of the wreckage of the old one.

I'm not going to complain about the improbability of the film's premise. If you're going to see the movie, you have to buy into it, or what's the point? Flight of the Phoenix's failure is the result of poor execution. I was never frightened for these people, and I never believed their venture might fail. I expected one or two of them to die along the way, but it was obvious that Flight of the Phoenix was headed for an upbeat ending. Without suspense, all we're left with is a bunch of half-developed characters reciting laughable dialogue.

When faced with an ensemble cast, it's difficult to develop all of the characters effectively. One or more is likely to be shortchanged, unless the director and writers are extremely talented (for an example of what John Moore should have used as a template, watch Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot). In this case, however, no one - not even Frank Towns - gains a shadow of multidimensionality. These are plastic people - walking stereotypes who interact using clichés. There are numerous times when Flight of the Phoenix doesn't make sense, and it's because the characters are flimsy. For example, Frank is set against building a new plane until he hears a speech about hopes and dreams; then he decides it's worth the risk. This moment was taken straight out of Plot Contrivances 101.

For the most part, people in this movie act the way they do because the script demands such behavior. There are instances in which the characters exhibit the kind of extreme stupidity normally reserved for horror movie victims. And there's one scene in which Elliot is cast in a negative light because he makes a decision that is as unpopular as it is necessary. The guy is almost always right, yet the film insists on portraying him as a bottom-feeder. And Giovanni Ribisi's campy performance doesn't help. Elliot should be generating sympathy, not causing suppressed giggles.

Mention has been made of Flight of the Phoenix's amazing photography, and I suppose it's all very pretty. But it is in the service of a movie that isn't worth the time or effort attending. Flight of the Phoenix boasts only two worthwhile moments: the crash-landing (which is handled nicely) and the take-off. Beyond that, if you're looking for awe-inspiring shots of dunes, Lawrence of Arabia is your best bet. And if you're in search of a version of the story that won't have you squirming with impatience in your seat, rent the original. This is one bird that should have stayed grounded. [Berardinelli's rating: * 1/2 out of 4]

Labels: action, adventure, drama, flying, thriller
Internet Movie Database
Metacritic 47/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=48, viewers=60)
Blu-ray

If Only (2004) [PG-13] **

Singer and songwriter Samantha Andrews (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is studying music in London when she first meets Ian Wyndham (Paul Nicholls), and they both realize at once that they are meant for each other. However, shortly after they have their first big argument, tragedy strikes and Samantha dies in a horrific accident. Grief-stricken Ian is inconsolable until fate intervenes and the pair is given a second chance.

If Only I had read some of the reviews by professional film critics, I could have spared myself this silly, superficial and mostly meaningless romantic comedy and not wasted ninety minutes of my life. Produced by Jennifer Love Hewitt, this is mainly a star vehicle for Hewitt to make silly faces, bat her eyelashes, display her curvaceous form and sing, all of which she does badly. The screenplay is sloppily written, the dialog between Hewitt and Nicholls is embarrassingly inane, the romantic chemistry between the two is non-existent, and the ending is totally unsatisfying. If you want to see a second-chance romance with some substance, I suggest 13 Going on 30, The Family Man, Just Like Heaven or Sliding Doors, but not If Only.

Labels: comedy, drama, fantasy, romance, tragedy
Internet Movie Database
Tomatometer (critics=NA, viewers=85)

The Great Gatsby (1974) [PG] ***

A film review by Roger Ebert for rogerebert.com on January 1, 1974.

The Great Gatsby is a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel. I wonder what Fitzgerald, whose prose was so graceful, so elegantly controlled, would have made of it: of the willingness to spend so much time and energy on exterior effect while never penetrating to the souls of the characters. It would take about the same time to read Fitzgerald's novel as to view this movie -- and that's what I'd recommend.

The movie is faithful to the novel with a vengeance -- to what happens in the novel, that is, and not to the feel, mood, and spirit of it. Yet I've never thought the events in The Great Gatsby were that important to the novel's success; Fitzgerald, who came out of St. Paul to personify the romance of an age, was writing in a way about himself when he created Gatsby. The mundane Midwestern origins had been replaced by a new persona, by a flash and charisma that sometimes only concealed the despair underneath. For Fitzgerald, there was always something unattainable; and for Gatsby, it was Daisy Buchanan, the lost love of his youth, forever symbolized by that winking green beacon at the end of her dock.

The beacon and the other Fitzgerald symbols are in this movie version, but they communicate about as much as the great stone heads on Easter Island. They're memorials to a novel in which they had meaning. The art director and set decorator seem to have ripped whole pages out of Fitzgerald and gone to work to improve on his descriptions. Daisy and her husband, the ruthless millionaire Tom Buchanan, live almost drowning in whites, yellows, and ennui. Tom's mistress Myrtle and her husband, the shabby filling station owner George, live in a wasteland of ashes in Fitzgerald's novel; in the movie, they seem to have landed on the moon.

All of this unfeeling physical excess might have been overcome by performances. But the director, Jack Clayton, having assembled a promising cast, fails to exploit them very well. When the casting of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby was announced, I objected because he didn't fit my notion of Gatsby: He was too substantial, too assured, even too handsome. I saw him as Tom Buchanan, and somebody else as Gatsby (Jack Nicholson, maybe, or Bruce Dern -- who plays Tom).

Having seen the movie, I think maybe I was wrong: Redford could have played Gatsby. I'm not even sure it's his fault he doesn't. The first time Clayton shows us Gatsby, it's a low-angle shot of a massive figure seen against the night sky and framed by marble: This isn't the romantic Gatsby on his doomed quest, it's Charles Foster Kane. A scene where Gatsby reaches out as if to snatch the green beacon in his hand is true to the book, but the movie's literal showing of it looks silly.

These hints of things to come lead up to two essential scenes in which Clayton fails to give us a Gatsby we care about. The first is the initial meeting between Gatsby and Nick (Gatsby wants Nick, his neighbor and Daisy's cousin, to invite her to tea so they can meet again). Redford is so inarticulate and formal in this scene with Nick that we laugh; it's the first time we hear him talk, and he's so mannered that the acting upstages the content of the scene. Doesn't that have to be Clayton's fault?

We know Redford has range enough to have played the scene in several better ways. And then the actual reunion between Gatsby and Daisy -- the moment on which the rest of the movie is going to depend -- gives us Gatsby's toothpaste grin and Daisy's stunned reaction and holds both for so long that any tension reduces itself to the ridiculous. It doesn't even feel as if Gatsby's happy to see Daisy -- more that he assumes she's overjoyed to see him.

The message of the novel, if I read it correctly, is that Gatsby, despite his dealings with gamblers and bootleggers, is a romantic, naive, and heroic product of the Midwest -- and that his idealism is doomed in any confrontation with the reckless wealth of the Buchanans. This doesn't come through in the movie. When Nick, at his last meeting with Gatsby, tells him how much he admires him (You're worth the whole crowd of them), we frankly don't know why unless we've read the book.

Oh, we're told, to be sure: The sound track contains narration by Nick that is based pretty closely on his narration in the novel. But we don't feel. We've been distanced by the movie's overproduction. Even the actors seem somewhat cowed by the occasion; an exception is Bruce Dern, who just goes ahead and gives us a convincing Tom Buchanan. We don't have to be told the ways in which Tom is indifferent to human feeling, because we can sense them.

But we can't penetrate the mystery of Gatsby. Nor, to be honest, can we quite understand what's so special about Daisy Buchanan. Not as she's played by Mia Farrow, all squeaks and narcissism and empty sophistication. In the novel, Gatsby never understands that he is too good for Daisy. In the movie, we never understand why he thought she was good enough for him. And that's what's missing.

That, and one other small item: How could a screenplay that plundered Fitzgerald's novel so literally, that quoted so much of the narration and dialogue, have ended with a rinky-dink version of Ain't We Got Fun instead of the most famous last sentence of any novel of the century? Maybe because the movie doesn't ever come close to understanding it: And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. [Ebert’s rating: 2.5 stars out of 4]

Labels: drama, romance, tragedy
IMDb 64/100 
MetaScore (critics=43, viewers=59) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=50, viewers=64) 
Blu-ray 
Roger Ebert’s review (2.5 stars out of 4)