Against All Odds

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Here we are at part 2 of the first ever Robert Mitchum Sorta Kinda Convoluted Remake Double Feature. But this post also has another theme to it. Following in the tradition of my posts for Cop and The Falcon and the Snowman, Against All Odds is another 80's movie that was more or less forgotten yet somehow ended up on my radar.

Damn, I should have just stuck with Cape Fear, because this movie kinda sucked. I'm gonna blame it on the forgotten 80's-ness thing.

The 80's were not a good time for noir. I'm sure there were a few good ones (The Big Easy comes to mind), but the overall aesthetics of the 80's did not fit the genre. Too bright, too laid back, and the synthesizer music is a total mood killer. And shit, I normally like this decade and all it's cheesy bullshit, but it's wrong for this kind of movie. Maybe if they tried to make more noir in the 80's that looked like The Terminator or Demons or something like that, with dark foggy streets and neon lights, that could have worked. But mostly the 80's noirs just looked like Weekend at Bernie's.

OK, so there was no way in hell that this was going to be as good as the movie it is a remake of: Out of the Past, which is, you know, a classic. But it could have been way better than this. We have Jeff Bridges and James Woods filling in for Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas; terrible choices if you're trying to make an approximation, but interesting if you're going for something different.

Outside of a few superficial details taken from Out of the Past, Against All Odds is a new beast, and if I didn't know it was a remake I never would have guessed. So it's not really fair to criticize it for failing to capture what was great about the original movie. It is, however, perfectly fair to criticize it for not coming up with anything good on its own.

In this one, the lead character is a football player who gets canned after an injury. Alright, I'm thinking, this is fine. This could make a decent backstory. Maybe they'll allude to it once or twice, flesh out the character a bit. But it turns out that the football thing dominates the first 30 minutes or so and pretty much stays a major part of the plot throughout. And I'll be honest here, the politics of running a football team aren't too interesting to me, and they definitely don't fit in to the noir template.

Really, this movie isn't too concerned with the noir templete, it more fancies itself as a character drama with strong mystery elements than it fancies itself a neo-noir. Which might have worked except the characters aren't very interesting, and although the mystery is complex, it's half-assed and not particularly compelling. Then there is the seductress/femme fatale, and I won't bother to look up her name, but she's not very sexy, not very seductive and has a bad looking, short 80's haircut. And she's not all that deadly. Maybe she's not really supposed to be a femme fatale.

There's occasionally some pretty good dialogue, and most of the cast is good (or at least watchable) but this is a bore. So I think the score tonight is Robert Mitchum: 2, 1980's: 0.

Cape Fear

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my first ever Robert Mitchum Sorta Kinda Convoluted Remake Double Feature. (It's not likely to be a repeat event... a little too specialized). It starts with Cape Fear, an early 60's horror/thriller movie in which Mitchum co-stars as the villain, which was later remade by Martin Scorsese starring Robert DeNiro in the Mitchum role. Next up is Against All Odds, a mid-80's remake of the classic Mitchum-starred film noir Out of the Past, with Jeff Bridges stepping into Mitchum's shoes.

So, you know, there's some sort of tangential, spritual connection going on between these films. Kinda. One's a Robert Mitchum movie that was later remade, and the other is a remake of a Robert Mitchum movie. So maybe they are like evil twins. Or one is the Bizarro version of the other, I don't know. The theme still works a little, I don't think it's too tenuous.

Let me start by noting that Cape Fear was directed by J. Lee Thompson, who 20 years later would make Happy Birthday to Me, a sometimes well made, near-miss slasher movie with a batshit crazy ending. (You can read my post about it here. When I saw it, I was all fucked up on cold medicine and the movie felt like some weird, 5 hour long dream about a slasher movie.) How Thompson went from directing a classic thriller with respectable cast members like Mitchum and Gregory Peck, to making a weirdo slasher picture where the killer impersonates the heroine by wearing some sort of futuristic, perfectly lifelike mask of her and by doing a fucking amazing impersonation of her voice... I don't understand. Later on, when he was 73, he did Death Wish 4: the Crackdown. Life is something, huh?

This is one of those movies that black and white was made for... it's so shadowy and sinister looking, dripping with atmosphere. It's a lot darker and more violent than I was expecting... I know 1962 wasn't some time of puritanical innocence, but I wouldn't have guessed that they would have the villain constantly threatening to rape the family of the hero. That's intense.

Any ways, really good thriller, great score, but I'm here to talk about Mitchum. And he's awesome. He's one of the creepiest, most intimidating villains ever here, even moreso than his performance in Night of the Hunter. I always thought Robert DeNiro did a great job of getting under your skin in the Scorsese version, but he doesn't hold a candle to Mitchum, and Mitchum doesn't even seem to be trying too hard. He just oozes some sort of insinuating evil. The way his character seems to be motivated by pure hate, yet never seems to become angry or worked up. Good shit.

Oh, one last thought. The movie has an anti-violence (perhaps anti-death penalty) message and does a good job of getting it across. It sets up Peck as an upstanding liberal citizen, but as Mitchum starts to threaten him more and more, Peck becomes more and more willing to resort to violence/vengenace to protect his family. So for a while it seems like there might be some sort of Death Wish-esque, let's be tougher on criminals sort of vibe. But in the end, Peck opts not to kill Mitchum when he has the chance, and instead makes sure he goes back to prison. No fancy speeches or nothing, it gets it's point across via the actions of the characters, just the way I like it.