Xiibaro Reviews: Scary Movie 2, Cats and Dogs, and Kiss of the Dragon

Scary Movie 2

(Dir: Keenan Ivory Wayans, Starring Anna Faris, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Christopher Masterson, Regina Hall, David Cross, Chris Elliott, Kathleen Robertson, Tori Spelling, Tim Curry, Richard Moll, James Woods, Andy Richter, Natasha Lyonne, and Veronica Cartwright)

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BY: DAVID PERRY

Last year I happily gave my support to a little Dimension comedy that had the makings of an Airplane for the South Park generation -- a spoof that would appease the teen crowd while still remaining funny in its targeting of the genres it spoofs. That film, of course, was Scary Movie, and I soon found that I was in the minority in supporting the film. In fact, it was not long before receiving mail noting that I had what could be considered the kindest review written on the film (this could be true, I never took the time to find out). My feeling on that film still stands, that its skewering of the Scream films and their spawn was without a doubt funny. I laughed when they riffed The Matrix, The Usual Suspects, The Blair Witch Project, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and the regular clichés found in the horror genre.

But that genuine happiness that came from watching Scary Movie is not found in its successor, the dismally unfunny Scary Movie 2. Director Keenan Ivory Wayans returns, as do most of the cast, but the original four co-writers (that is, except Keenan Ivory Wayans' brothers Shawn and Marlon Wayans) exit to make way for four first-time writers. The absent four are definitely missed.

Where Scary Movie seemed fresh -- at least, as fresh as a film devoted to other people's material can be -- the new film seems stale. Of course, some of this can be seen in the fact that the original had a product prime for spoofing -- Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's franchise was fresh for the ridicule of some smart film producer. However, I truly doubt that anyone was sitting around hoping that a spoof of The Haunting would come along some day. But hey, what do you expect considering that Wayans thought that he'd only have the first one and used as many references as was possible.

Does this sound familiar: a devilish older man invites a group of young people to stay in a haunted house in the guise of a sleep depravation study? Of course it does, but the problem is not whether or not the citation to The Haunting is noticeable, instead whether or not it is funny. And funny is definitely not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking of Scary Movie 2.

The youths in this case are the survivors of Scary Movie -- well, actually some of them died in Scary Movie, but does that really matter in such a film? Cindy Campbell (Faris) is now a freshman at college, where she has come to get away from the problems that she found in high school (you know, that usual murderous boyfriend, moribund friends, and a deceptive retarded police officer). Most of her friends are there too, including the loud-mouthed Brenda (Hall), the sexually ambiguous jock Ray (Shawn Wayans), and the marijuana obsessed Shorty (Marlon Wayans). Now, through their first year in college, they have picked up a few new people to bring with them to their travails: the seductress Theo (Robertson), the frat boy minded Clark (Masterson), and the overtly perky Alex (Spelling).

Evil and all-around lothario Professor Oldman (Curry) and his wheel-chair bound henchman Dwight (Cross) plan to send all these kids to a house haunted Huey Cain (Moll), who is obsessed with his late mistress, a woman that strikes an incredible resemblance to Cindy. Soon the six youths are running for their lives, whether it's from skeletons, poltergeists, cats, or lecherous Oldman.

Amidst all this are countless of jokes ripping off various films like Dude, Where's My Car?, The Haunting of Hill House, Mission: Impossible 2, and an incomprehensible Nike ad. And yet, with all the finagling, only three really good ones pop out: a surprisingly funny Save the Last Dance spoof, a goofy What Lies Beneath spoof, and a fun at first but really overlong Charlie's Angels spoof. That is always a bad omen to a comedy: if you can count the amount of laughs, there's something definitely wrong. I can even pinpoint the one moment that I felt was genuinely funny without any film antecedent, a hilarious James Woods (recreating Max von Sydow's title character in The Exorcist) reply to Veronica Cartwright's line that her daughter, a possessed Lyonne, will not allow her mother to touch her. He matter-of-factly states, "It helps if you give them candy."

Scary Movie 2 stands as one of the worst spoofs yet released -- the Naked Gun trilogy and the two Airplanes seem like Renoirs by comparison. For heaven's sake, this film is on the same level as bombs like The Kentucky Fried Movie, Mafia, BASEketball, and High School High. I knew that there was something fishy when Scary Movie turned out to be funny when it actually had a couple Wayans brothers in the screenplay credits, now I know why that was questionable. In the first, four people had the ability to cover up the bad Wayans penned jokes with their funny spoofs. Now, the second time around, none of the new writers seem to want to coat over the crap.

Cats and Dogs

(Dir: Lawrence Guterman, Starring Elizabeth Perkins, Jeff Goldblum, and Alexander Pollock, and voices include Tobey Maguire, Alec Baldwin, Sean P. Hayes, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Clarke Duncan, Susan Sarandon, and Jon Lovitz)

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BY: DAVID PERRY

In the year's greatest injustices folder, Warner Bros. has added an entry with Cats and Dogs. Leni Riefenstahl made propaganda for Hitler, Mikhail Kalatozov made propaganda for Castro, and now Lawrence Guterman has made propaganda for the canines. While the other two made artistically engaging works for otherwise for unworthy groups, Guterman's fails to be engaging but does get the unworthy part right.

Well, perhaps I am biased -- I am a cat lover through and through. Seeing them subjugated by filmmakers to tiny fur balls of evil is disheartening, even if they are done is such an over-the-top way that can only be seen as farce. Cats and Dogs, of course is not the first film to take sides in the cats v. dogs fight, but it is definitely one of the most one-sided. For the best assessment, I turn to Robert De Niro's species comparison in Meet the Parents.

Yes, all this hoopla is my own form of farce -- Cats and Dogs is definitely not meant to be any true-to-form review of the interspecies battle. In fact, the little film, moving as nothing more than some light family fun this summer, couldn't be more free of pretext, even if their main argument really has only one side. With an ethnic crossing between the U.S. and China, a highly polarized Senate, and the most partisan politicians running the country, seeing a movie documenting a dispute this close to charade, this airy is possibly one of the finest counter programming ideas this year.

However, Cats and Dogs never really gets beyond its early virtues -- this is one film in which the idea is far better than the end product. A shorter version of the film, perhaps a 15- to 30-minute short would have been perfect for the story, but as a 90-minute feature, everything feels old by the third act. First time screenwriters John Requa and Glenn Ficarra have a really nice idea for a movie at first, if only Warner Bros. had brought in two other people to write the rest of the film.

The story proper to Cats and Dogs revolves around the notion that cats really do hold a grudge against dogs -- so much that the two groups have created a type of cold war. Cats are fiendish and deceptive -- they can use their cuteness to get into a heart before turning the heartstrings into marionette strings; dogs are noble and virtuous -- they are more than just man's best friends, but, in some ways, man's keeper. The cats can use their size and intelligence to get what they want, but the dogs must turn to hi-tech gadgetry, at times their arsenal looks like something out of a James Bond film.

The center of the war is at the Brody residence, where patriarch Professor Brody (Goldblum) is working on a cure for allergies to dog dander. He gets his son Scott (Pollock) a dog in part as a present, in part as a tool for testing his various early versions. The boy feels that his father is uninterested in him, but his doting mother (Perkins) tries hard to console him.

The cats yearn to get into the basement libratory of Prof. Brody and finally get an opening when a chase ends with the Brody dog being abducted and sent away to early retirement in Florida (no, I'm not kidding). But the international alliance of dogs quickly get to work on finding a replacement dog to guard the lab and make sure that the cats cannot come in and take the cure away. The local head honcho is Butch (voiced by Baldwin), a shepherd that is one dog-year away from pension and a gold watch, and he takes the task of saving the Brody place from intrusion as a highly important detail. The academy, where puppies are trained to work for the alliance, accidentally fails to get one of their recruits into Carolyn's hands as a replacement dog for Scott. Instead a beagle puppy (Maguire), wet-nosed and wet under the ears, is adopted and given the name Lou. With this completely untrained tyke, Butch must create a dog that can be trusted to take care of the professor's work.

Meanwhile, in the lap of luxury, a white Persian cat affectionately named Mr. Tinkles (Hayes) sits in a mansion where his long sick owner sleeps and the maid constantly dotes. The unending costuming, primping, and cuddling that occurs to Tinkles has further pushed his disposition to the point that he is ready to lead a revolution that will end the dominance of dogs in the households of America and make cats the pets of choice by default. Tinkles has even come up with an idea that might counter the serum that might make people allergic to dogs instead of curing them.

There are definitely a handful of nice moments in the film that stand out -- a Stalin-esque rally of cats is the most memorable, they even throw in the red flags and marching phalanx -- but most of it is cloyingly cutesy attempts to pander to, as W.C. Fields would put it, animals and small children. There are some parents that would get their kicks with their kids, but most will not really share the pleasure that potty jokes give to the children. There are some really fine moments -- the Stalin sequence, an unusual alliance between two enemy species, and a fight with a Russian blue kitten -- but the majority of the film fails to really create the fun that these occasional amusements invoke.

Earlier this year, Dimension released their own revision of the spy genre with Spy Kids, a far superior work compared to Cats and Dogs. That film was fun regardless of age, but the new film does not even take the time to satisfy the elders in the audience. All they really needed to do was have a little more fun toying with the genre instead of pandering to the kids. This has been a good year for family films -- there have been successes with Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Shrek, and Spy Kids -- but Cats and Dogs is one of the first failures, regardless of your allegiance to a particular species.

Kiss of the Dragon

(Dir: Chris Nahon, Starring Jet Li, Bridget Fonda, Tchéky Karyo, May Ryan, Burt Kwouk, and Laurence Ashley)

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BY: DAVID PERRY

In his review for the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell muses that the mistreatment of Bridget Fonda in Kiss of the Dragon may be the product of writer/producer Luc Besson's anger that she appeared in a remake of his own La Femme Nikita, the horrendous Point of No Return. After seeing Kiss of the Dragon, I am instead brought to believe that the actions are not against Fonda, but against the American viewing public, who actually made the mistake of even creating the anglophile remake.

Kiss of the Dragon has more plot holes, timeworn clichés, and unengaging characters than most summer action blockbusters, but in this case, when the eyes are mainly drawn on them, even the action sequences fail. First time feature director Chris Nahon, cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, and editor Marco Cavé have evidently noticed that there is really nothing to their film, so they create such a slap-dash job at the framing, pacing, and editing that the film is nearly incomprehensible. I suppose that their line of thinking is that if people cannot really catch what's happening, they cannot say they hated it.

Jet Li has been in America for three years now, and one would think that producers might have started to take note of his great fighting abilities, giving him films that could properly showcase his work without making it the only noticeable part of the entire movie. Kiss of the Dragon, Li's third American feature, is like a straight-to-video thriller or a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle -- the lack of any real interest in anything outside of Li's kicks can make the audience slightly, though only momentarily, forget how inconceivable the rest of the movie is.

Li is Chinese police officer Liu Jian, brought to Paris to take care of some much-needed business. He is one of the many envoys sent to the Parisian streets by the Chinese government, and all his predecessors have died in the line of duty. He is set up with a residence at a shrimp chip shop where the old owner (Kwouk) only waxes on the mortality of everything. His location is not one of luxury; in fact everyday he must look out the window and see all the prostitutes looking for a john (believe it or not, later in this film, the search for a john takes a double meaning -- that's the type of intellectualizing that Kiss of the Dragon offers).

When he sets out on a mission involving the Chinese drug czar and a meeting with some very influential men, Liu Jian is given an Anglo name, John (make that three meanings), so that the audience will not have to try and keep up with a name like Liu. At this meeting, the czar is killed by a prostitute who is then killed by the corrupt Paris detective behind the entire murder. He is Jean-Pierre Richard (Karyo), a detective evidently with enough clout to take the entire French police force off of the streets and into a manhunt for his John, whom he framed for the slayings. But, luckily for Liu, he has one thing that can keep him out of jail, a surveillance tape that shows Richard shoot the final bullet into the czar and the prostitute -- now all he has to do is get the tape into the right hands without dying in the process.

Thrown into the mix is Jessica (Fonda), the unseemly prostitute that stands outside of the shrimp chip shop. She is not really a selling her body because she wants to, but because she has to. Richard also deals a little as a pimp and, through his abduction of Jessica's daughter, can force the young North Dakota farm girl into prostitution. Not only that, but he is so dastardly that he forces Jessica to become addicted to drugs. And guess who can help her...

Kiss of the Dragon has been waved of its crimes to cinema because some critics have noted that it succeeds in its main importance: the fights. However, even the fights could not get a rise out of me. They were so over the top, so uninteresting, that by the final kick, I really did not care who succeeded. And then, in the film's final face-off, it goes for an anticlimactic show of blood and gore, as if that was the only thing they had left out. Even the 1997 Tsui Hark (who directed Li in the Once Upon a Time in China trilogy) film Double Take had a better final fight sequence, and the best fighters it had was Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman.

Jet Li is impressive, don't get me wrong, but not so much that the lackluster fight sequences dazzle. He can fight up a storm, but that does not make the horrid encounter any less dumbfounding, like the fight in what seems to be a karate class in the police station. But at least he can fight better than he can act. In his performance, he shows only two faces: one of surprise and one of anger, and both lead to him beating someone to a pulp.

And then there's poor Ms. Fonda. From an acting family as respected as Drew Barrymore's, it is sad to see her lost in such roles. In her career, she has shown an ability to find characters that show her best (Jackie Brown, City Hall) and her worst (Point of No Return, Kiss of the Dragon). Fonda, who is actually a better actress, delivers a performance here that even Romeo Must Die's Aaliyah would look down on. Fonda plays the role with constant whines and idiotic turns, creating one of the hardest female kicking boys to sympathize with.

Five years ago, I would've had a hard time believing that this was the production of a man like Luc Besson. I do not find it shocking that Jet Li receives a story credit, but the screenplay credit for Besson is upsetting. Up until 1998's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Besson still had a flawless filmography in my book -- I even liked The Professional, which was critically reviled by many. At least The Messenger prepared me some for Kiss of the Dragon -- had I seen his credit without the Messenger blemish in my mind, I might have been surprised with how flawed the film is. Instead, the surprise is gone, though the flaws still stand loud and clear.