The Fury

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

People accuse Brian DePalma of ripping off other directors, especially Hitchcock. I think it's more influence than theft, and that DePalma brings enough of himself to make his style feel original. No, the real person De Palma rips off is himself.

I love Brian DePalma, but the man is not shy about repeating himself. It's not uncommon for one of his movies to steal a plot point, or a set piece, or a major theme, or other story idea or structural element from an earlier movie. His movies cover a broader range of genres than, say, Dario Argento (who, don't get me wrong, I also love), but there is a strong sense of repetition or rehashing in a number of his films. Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Raising Cain all use the split-personality gimmick. Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Raising Cain and Femme Fatale all have a big "it was only a dream" fakeout. Scarface and Carlito's Way both are about latino crime lords, both times played by Al Pacino. Blow Out and Body Double both have "movie within a movie" motifs. And his newest one, Redacted sounds like it reuses the same soldiers raping and murdering a civilian plot as his other war film, Casualties of War.

This list could go on and on.

I bring it up because The Fury turns out to be an early, particularly brazen example of De Palma ripping himself off, and my least favorite example of him doing so. Why? It's the only time where I feel like he's repeated himself solely to try to cash in on previous success.

You see, The Fury was his first film after Carrie. And the main character is a teenage girl with telekinetic powers. Yup. It's a little more of an action/intrigue movie than a horror film, but still. Jesus. It must have looked at the time like DePalma was going to become the auteur of psychic teenager movies.

Can you imagine if that's really how his career turned out? Like, if he kept making psychic teenager movies in different genres? If Casualties of War was about American soldiers raping and murdering a telekinetic Vietnamese girl? Or if Scarface was about a telekinetic Cuban taking over the drug trade? That actually sounds incredible, he should remake all his movies with psychics and telekinetics.

Enough of that. I'm sorry to report that The Fury turns out to be one of my least favorite DePalma movies. The story and writing is pretty lame and sometimes funny for the wrong reasons. He's usually great at messing around with a normal movie structure; making you think someone is the main character then killing them off, going off on tangents that take up a larger chunk of the film than you expect, major characters or plot elements disappearing for a while or being introduced later than expected. There's a little of that here, but it doesn't work. It just feels like the movie ignores one boring character for a while to go focus on another boring character for periods of time that feel distractingly long.

None of this would matter if this had some classic DePalmian set-pieces, but unfortunately there really isn't anything special here. The big car crash/shootout pales in comparison to even his average work. There were maybe a handful of little moments I like. Especially at the end where the girl uses her mind to make a guy explode, thereby one-upping David Cronenberg's Scanners like 3 years before it even came out. Take that, you canuck fuck. Two masters of the horror genre made psychic-themed movies around the same time, and they both sucked, but yours sucked more!

Well, I'm still slowly but surely working my way through the DePalma filmography, but I have a bad feeling that most of the ones left to see are more at the ass-end of the spectrum. Oh well.