Monday, Mar. 17, 2008

Gory Doomsday disappoints, but it still entertains

By Edward Robertson, Special to the Herald

You know how Pitch Black was perfect and awesome, but David Twohy's next film, The Chronicles of Riddick, was a big crazy mess?

Well, The Descent, Neil Marshall's cave-diving horror movie from a couple years back, is also perfect and awesome. I've seen it with four or five different groups of people, and every time the monsters show up, someone screams. Men scream. Women scream. I'd scream, if I weren't too busy fainting. You could probably pinpoint every time I've seen it by the massive spike in my electricity bill. After The Descent, no light in the house gets turned off for a solid week.

I didn't see a preview for Doomsday, Marshall's latest, until a week before it came out. Whoops! Unless you're Mike Judge, it's never a good sign when a major film studio is too ashamed to even advertise your product. Miracles happen, though, right? Maybe Marshall's first project after his breakthrough movie wouldn't be a total overbearing forehead slapper. Maybe it'd be even better! Yeah, that's the ticket! But that ticket would be a lie.

As the Reaper virus tears across Scotland, the country's thrown into chaos. Walled up and quarantined, the land's abandoned, the infected left to die.

Twenty five years later, in overcrowded and internationally shunned London, the virus resurfaces. Back when she was a kid, Rhona Mitra was airlifted out of Scotland in the last days of the disease -- as an adult, she's a special agent, and the perfect woman to be sent into the hot zone in search of the cure and the mother who helped her escape.

There are survivors in Scotland. The government has seen them on its satellites. Cut off from civilization, they've reverted to a barbarous society more dangerous to Mitra and her team than any virus.

Incidentally, the survivors are pretty big Mad Max fans, what with their love of shredded leather clothes, dopey haircuts, and personalized deathmobiles. If Doomsday were a better movie, that wouldn't be a knock -- who doesn't love Mad Max? Or a movie so full of other influences it could be called 28 Years Later: Col. Kurtz Rules Bartertown (and That One City in Resident Evil Too)?

Marshall clearly loves the seamy side of movies: he's got blood spurting hither and yon, people roasted for dinner, severed screaming heads rocketing across the screen. This isn't entertainment, it's the very definition of good times.

But when the ridiculous gleeful violence isn't going on, that means we've got the other parts of Doomsday to deal with. The wacky and clumsy parts, full of blockbustery dialogue, cartoonish villains putting on a show of evil that can be seen from space, and a main character who's tough because she never talks or otherwise relates to anyone at all. And it's suggested, by which I mean it's clubbed over your head so hard you'll be lucky if you can ever see or walk again, that politicians are no less savage than the motorcycle gangs in the hot zone.

Though it might be simpler to tally up the parts of it that do make sense, I'd like to do Doomsday the honor of creating a madness index to use for those especially brain-punching movies that exist outside the normal bounds of logic and reason. Since we're already talking about very crazy things, let's keep it simple, and just call it the List of Things That Make No Sense. So, here we go:

1) Where the opening narration is coming from. Not who's saying it, but who he's saying it to. "Himself" is not a valid answer. 2) Why all the important people in Scotland seem to be related to each other. I've never been to the ancestral homeland myself, but I get the feeling my branch of Clan Robertson may have shipped off for America not to look for jobs or religious freedom, but because everyone in the Highlands was starting to look like their sisters. 3) I can't dig into this too far without risking spoilers, but let's just say the guys calling the shots down in London have a very poor grasp of diseasyology.

Not to say all this nonsense isn't fun -- every time I see a cow get crushed by a tank, I heave a gentle sigh, knowing my ticket money's well spent -- it's just hard for Marshall to find an identity of his own when he's making so many references to other movies, and with a plot this scattershot, all the madcap adventures don't add up to much more than a lot of shouting, beatings, charbroilings, and arrow-shootings.

So yes, it's very cool, and yes, if it were playing on TNT I would sock everyone until they shut up and let me watch it, but as soon as the credits rolled and I unpeeled myself from the couch, I'd be left with the vague feeling there should have been something more. Marshall's got talent, though. Even if he didn't have The Descent to his credit, Doomsday has too much weirdness in it to mistake it for the boring kind of failure. What's the word for when something is a disaster, but it's also funny and energetic and kind of a blast? Oh, right: it's still a disaster.

Grade: C+