No.2 : The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow at the IMDb

In 1930’s New York the bad guys better watch themselves or they may just get laughed at by our titular hero - and he’s the one running about in a cape and a floppy hat.

The film opens with Alec Baldwin in a bad wig being all diabolical in China. Somehow he’s an opium lord with a gaggle of henchmen and a pretty strict employee welfare policy. After ignoring a threat he’s bundled off by some monks who train him up to be a good guy. Their theory is that as a bad guy he knows how bad guys think and therefore will be more effective - would of served them right if he’d ran off with their cash box.

After a time and money saving story scroll we land in New York seven years later in the midst of a gang land rub out. The bad guys are slow about their business and this give The Shadow plenty of time to fanny about and laugh a lot. The victim is saved and very grateful, but not one to do a favour for nothing The Shadow demands that he now does his bidding as one of his network of agents - it didn’t say what would happen if he told The Shadow to bugger off - it’s not like he asked to be saved or anything. He also gives all of his helpers a red ring - the dirty bastard.

Back in his playboy millionaire guise of Lamont Cranston The Shadow shows off his two great talents - telling people to forget things and pulling the ladies - surprised he bothers to do any Shadow stuff at all.

Meanwhile back at the museum a mysterious package has arrived from the east and as everyone who works in a museum knows, that’s got to be bad news. Of course it turns out to be a recently revitalised Genghis Khan who also has the power to tell people to do stuff. The strings are being pulled from behind the scenes, or more correctly from behind a big bill board, and soon the city is being held to ransom with only the Shadow and his pals able to save the day. Will funny haired Ian McKellen’s bomb blow up everything? Probably not as you might have guessed.

This is a right old mess of a film with few things to recommend it. For a start it doesn’t seem to know if it’s a comedy or a thriller with seemingly straight scenes being unintentionally funny and the lighter moments being dull and overly earnest.

The cast is pretty good but Tim Curry and Ian McKellen are criminally underused. Baldwin is mostly dreadful but to be fair he does get some awful dialogue and has to play twin roles both of which are rotten. As the playboy he’s a below par Bruce Wayne who every so often speaks in a stern voice with dramatic music cues when he wants things done or forgotten. As The Shadow he does deep bellowing voice that‘s meant to sound threatening and mysterious but comes across as a bit camp.

The Shadow himself is a poor hero with his powers of moving quickly and laughing a lot never going to set the screen alight. His motivations are never really explained and it seems it’s all down to ‘a monk told me to’. It looked a lot more fun being a drug lord.

The proto-cgi is bad with the teleporting monk and flying dagger especially ropey. The city looks quite good in places but in many scene the use of sets and matte paintings is painfully obvious. The plot is all over the place and I kept losing track of who was good, who was bad, who was being controlled and who was miscast.

The dramatic finale with Ian McKellen’s dotty scientist trying to diffuse a bomb on a countdown as The Shadow fights his nemesis was strangely played for laughs with an never worse McKellen failing to raise a smile as the colour blind boffin looking for a green wire to snip.

The film was directed by ‘Highlander’ helmer Russell Mulcahy who seems to have done little since on the big screen and we all must be thankful for that. Ultimately I think the film failed as the hero was poorly defined and set against a baddie with the same powers as him - where’s the fun in that? If you must have a THE superhero The Rocketer, The Spirit and The Phantom must be better bets …stay tuned!

THE Tag Line : The Shadow Blows! 45%

No.1 : The Road (2009)

The Road at the IMDb

I sometimes get annoyed when people saw they preferred the book to the film, as they invariably do. Some people say it to show how well read they are (‘Oh yes the novelisation of ‘The Transporter by Gore Vidal had far more depth’) but for the most part it’s said because it’s true. Of course it is, when you read a book you cast it in your brain and imagine the characters and visualise the events. In a film some director does it for you, and how can that ever match your imagination? The exceptions to the rule are films like ‘The Music of Chance’ which was a great book but also a great film, partly due to a fantastic cast and a respect bordering on reverence to the source material, which came through virtually intact.

‘The Road’ is a great book. It won a Pulitzer prize and was even showcased by Oprah’s book club. I read it in one sitting on a bumpy flight back from New York and have read it at least three times since. I like the attention to detail and the desperate situations of unimaginable hardship the father and son characters endure. There are many sequences where nothing much happens, such as the Dad changes a wheel on a supermarket trolley. This basic task is described over a full page and shows how the simplest of things have taken on the greatest significance and are so difficult to imagine to our privileged society.

The film of the book was always going to be a tough ask. A 400 page book takes a lot of condensing and inevitable scenes are lost - that supermarket trolley one for a start!

If you are new to all of this, the book and film follow a journey of an unnamed father and son character who are trekking across a ruined and desolate America to an uncertain future. The world is dying with the animals all gone and petrified trees crashing down all around. Their fellow survivors of the unspecified apocalypse are mostly robbers and cannibals and every step of their journey is fraught with danger. Not a lot happens as such, but as the journey progresses we realise their trek is pointless and oblivion looms large.

The film stars Viggo Mortenson as the father and Kodi Smit McPhee as the boy, two good actors who didn’t quite live up to my own thoughts on the characters. Viggo for a start is too familiar. You never get the sense of a desperate everyman, more ‘look there Aragon wearing a dirty puffa jacket’!. The boy looks a bit too well fed and too ‘stage school’ for my liking. He does OK but I had the Boy down as a stick thin waif not this chubby brute who practically sweated pies! The cast is filled out by the likes of Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Omar off ‘The Wire’ each of whom seemed to stick out like a sore thumb then they showed up. These ‘star cameos’ do nothing but lift you out of the calamitous world and set you thinking ‘what was that thing he was in again?’

The film also features Chalize Theron as the mother of the boy, whom we see in flashback. In the book she merits a couple of pages, but in the film she appears in Viggo’s dreams every five minutes and kind of invades the two person dynamic.

My main problems as a devotee of the book was the amount of stuff missed out, condensed or abridged - where was the baby on the fire or the head in the cake dome? Where was ’trolley fixing hour’? or the apples and morel feasts? or even the march of the catamites? Clearly you can’t have everything but what we got was so disjointed that it was almost like ’scenes from the hit book!’. For example in the book they scavenge and forage for weeks for scraps and then one day they find an abandoned fall out shelter and they see real food for the first time in years and the joy pours off the page. In the film they go ten minutes without a meal and then it’s banquet time. It just felt totally unearned.

Overall the film is a good effort and if I’d seen it in isolation I’d probably have quite enjoyed it but as it was it seemed a bit rushed and insubstantial. The world didn’t look too bad and nor did the people. If this is to be the end of the world I don’t think it’ll be as bad as we may have been lead to believe.

THE Tag Line : A Road Best Not Travelled - 63%

The Definite Article Movie Blog

Don't you just hate it when film makers give their movies long and tiresome titles that you just can't fit it on the front of that DVDR you've just burned? Me too. This blog will celebrate those movies that show a brevity of naming that deserves our respect. None of your 'The Adventures of Pricilla Queen of the Desert' here, you'll get 'The Box' and like it.

All films reviewed will have two word titles the first of which must be 'The'. No sequels like 'The Fly 2' are allowed and no foreign stuff unless the the generally accepted translation is 'The Caterpillar' or something like that.

Our previous quest, which is still running incidentally, catalogued and critiqued over 160 movies that started with a 'W' and we'll hope to top that by Christmas 2025. Any suggested viewing or comments on the comments are of course welcome. We'll start soon, so clear those diaries and prepare for an onslaught of the ''THE' movie blog', that the world could possibly do without.