Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

Director: Jean-Francois Richet

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello

Have I Seen it Before: No. Oh, no.

Did I Like It: I mean, I want to like every movie I watch as it begins. I really do. But I’ll admit that between my love for the original and my antipathy for really every John Carpenter re-make, I started this one absolutely stone-face, with my arms crossed.

The film had an uphill climb. But there was hope, there. Maybe the fact that Precinct isn’t nearly as universally loved as Halloween (1978) or even The Fog (1980)*, the filmmakers would feel free to create something watchable, and dare I even hope, fresh and interesting.

One can’t imagine that this would be able to harness the ruthless simplicity of the original. That’s probably automatically too much to hope for, as even John Carpenter wasn’t wielding the energy of his earlier work by the time this came around. Years started beginning with “2” and subtlety went right out the window. The plot is over-constructed, which inevitably leads to more dialogue, which inevitably takes away from the action…

And, far more importantly, opens the doors to cliché. While they may attempt to give a bit of a spin to the character eventually**, the moment O’Shea (Brian Dennehy, in case you were wondering what happened to his character after First Blood (1982)) proclaims that he is right on the cusp of retirement, an infant is more than capable of mapping out where his character is going to end up.

And then there’s Jeffrey “Ja Rule” Jenkins. See, kids, this is back in a time when selling copies of the soundtrack album for a film still meant something, and therefore bringing a rapper into the mix. He’s not a bad actor. The role isn’t much, but he’s got a decent screen presence that he isn’t distracting from the rest of the film.

But his end credits theme? I really, really hated it. Not just because the film never bothers to pull from Carpenter’s original score***. It goes beyond the “re-count the plot over the end credits” rap anthem that we’re normally used to, and name checks Hawke, Fishburne, and proceeds to be the most painfully obvious song I’ve ever heard. It may have ended the trend of ending films with these kinds of songs. It may very well have been the last one to include such a song. On that front alone, I guess it is kind of historic.

*I didn’t, but you might have.

**I wouldn’t get too terribly excited: it’s not that much of a spin.

***Try getting away with that kind of nonsense in the Halloween series. I dare you.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Director: Rocky Morton, Annabel Jankel

Cast: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis

Have I Seen It Before: I’m not 100% sure, but I think I may have seen it twice in the theater. I may be the only person living, or to have lived (including the cast and filmmakers, one would imagine) to have seen it in the theater twice. It was somehow on my—I was all of eight—radar to insist we go see the movie, despite the commercials screaming—even to an eight-year-old—that there was something not quite right about the film. Then, when a friend’s mom decided to try and stem the tide of summer exhaustion with a trip to the theater, I went again, because even then I’d rather be at the movies than almost anywhere else. That’s still true.

Then I remember becoming absolutely fixated on renting the movie and seeing it again when it was released on video later that year. I can’t remember why I might have done this, because I wasn’t all that thrilled with the movie even back then. It may have been a direct result of someone  in the school cafeteria insisting that Disney/Hollywood Pictures (or, the monolithic “they” as we would have called it then) was absolutely, without a doubt going to make a sequel, because the people that make movies don’t include the <Back to the Future (1985)> ending.

As it turns out, I’ve probably seen this film too many times.

Did I Like It: Making a good movie is a mysterious alchemy. It’s a massive undertaking, where the majority of the intricate pieces involved have to be either simultaneously or in precise coordination at the top of their game, and if the marketing isn’t right, no one may see the damned thing. The one thing that I think probably has to happen is that the people involved have to want to be there*. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo don’t want to be there, but to dip one’s toe in the trivia associated with the train wreck production knows that they were sufficiently lubricated to work through their displeasure. They emerge from the film as genial presences, and we can commiserate with their plight in being in the movie while we are forcing ourselves to watch it. And yet, one can’t help but marvel at the alternate universe—where’s a massive meteor when you need one?—where Tom Hanks nearly played Mario, but was passed on as he wasn’t at that time the kind of box office draw that they could get out of Hoskins.

Dennis Hopper, on the other hand, just spends the film looking angrily confused, screaming “plumbers,” “fungus,” and “meteor” in alternating combinations.

Maybe Hoskins and Leguizamo should have offered him a drink. If everyone had been sloshed, we all might have gotten into the cheap (emphasis on cheap) riff on <Blade Runner (1982)> or <Total Recall (1990)>. Instead, things seem as off as they did when I was eight.

Then again, my usual standard for a good adaptation of a pre-existing property is that it makes me want to take in the original source material. I’m fairly sure that each and every time I’ve seen the movie, I’ve wanted to play one of the Mario games, if only to wash the taste out of my mouth**.

*Sure, a movie like Casino Royale (1967) is filled with overpaid, overly relaxed people, and is perhaps the dictionary definition of a train wreck and by all accounts Bill Murray would have preferred to be eaten alive by wildebeests than continue shooting <Groundhog Day (1993)>, but these exceptions would have to be unusual bordering on unique.

**In the movies defense, we were sufficiently inoculated from having to force ourselves to try and play a terrible SNES game adapted from the movie.

Violent Night (2022)

Director: Tommy Wirkola

Cast: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Had half an inkling to go see it in the theater, and now that it is available on Peacock, I ran out of reasons to stop.

By the way, Peacock has spoiled me on the ad supported movie services. They front-load all of their ads, while literally every other service that has ads, is jamming them in the middle of the movie. I love you Peacock, and I didn’t think I would. And this is only kind of about you guys footing the bill for the Community movie.

Did I Like It: For some reason, I thought this was a horror movie as I went into it, which seems silly now that I think about it. Instead, it’s not just the best argument against Die Hard (1988) being considered a Christmas movie, it’s just about the only cogent argument that can claim an even baseline level of cogency.

Aside from the fact that the movie takes the Die Hard model and injects it into a story more directly at home with the themes of the Christmas holiday (giving of gifts, frustration with family members, presence of any children whatsoever, and expressing even a small degree of disappointment with the holiday), it isn’t offering much new. The notion of Santa (Harbour, shaking off any stink he might have gotten on him from trying to be Hellboy) in an unassailably adult action picture, coupled with a suddenly tragic backstory for the legend is all new. But literally everything else screams a quick pitch of “Die Hard, but with Santa.” Even the supporting cast feels like ideas Rian Johnson might have scratched out while writing Knives Out (2019) or Glass Onion (2022).

It’s probably unreasonable to expect much more from a film. In all reality, it was selling a particular bill of goods, and delivered those precisely. Come for Harbour’s performance, stay for the Harbour performance. Everything will work out fine.

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Harold Perrineau, John Leguizamo

Have I Seen it Before: I can say with certainty that couple with being alive and conscious in the 1990s, and having HBO for most of that time, I had plenty of opportunities to see the movie. Ultimately, owing probably due to a measure of unavoidable—but able to be shed—adolescent chauvinism, I don’t think I got much of anywhere past the scene where Romeo (DiCaprio) first lays eyes on Juliet (Danes).

Did I Like It: A Shakespeare adaptation is about the easiest thing not to screw up, sort of like the dramatic equivalent of boxed Mac & Cheese in the food world. As such, it can be the purview of the profoundly lazy. Dress everyone up in period-specific attire, don’t futz with the script too much (it’s got to help that Shakespeare can’t bring a case to arbitration with the WGA), and you even get bonus credit if you just copy and paste the full text and make us sit there for four hours.

But really, you should get even more credit for fitting the expansive scope of any one of his plays into a manageable running time.

This would count then, wouldn’t it?

Real credit, though, should be given when a Shakespearean adaptation reaches for the Orson Welles standard and tries to make that text work in a context that feels closer to the audience for which it is intended. One could have just put DiCaprio (who, let’s face it, has more interesting work ahead of him after he could sell an army’s worth of tickets with just his face alone) in the role and called it a day. Actually giving a MTV-obsessed generation some identification with the material, all the way to the point where the various Montagues and Capulets might have been equally at home in a season of The Real World as in Verona (or Verona Beach), would have made Welles—and quite possibly the bard himself—proud.

This doesn’t even begin to cover the delightful, anarchic absurdism at the core of any Luhrmann work, does it?