Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

2005 Geek Movie Guide

When you're known as a big ol' geek. you get used to people asking you about geeky stuff that intrudes into the mainstream. Usually, this means movies. Any time a comic book gets adapted to film, just about everybody I know asks me if it follows the comic, or what I think of it, or some other question to let me know that the person asking has some geek tendencies of their own. Oddly, none of the latter seemed to know that Road to Perdition and Ghost World were originally comics, not to mention Men in Black and The Rocketeer.

So here we are, with a pile of comic-related movies on the horizon, along with a bunch of original movies that have a vaguely-comic book vibe to them. The last time I checked, there were a few hundred movies in the works based on comics. Yes, hundreds. And, as is my habit, I'm going to go ahead and write reviews of a bunch of them, even though I haven't seen them yet. If you want, you can come back after they come out and tell me how wrong I am. I'm basing all these reviews on the trailers, advance publicity, interviews and knowledge of the original source material. I could be completely wrong; maybe the ones I think are gonna suck like a Hoover will turn out to be good. We'll see. Anyway, the trailers for most of these flicks can be seen at Apple's Quicktime site.

First up: Constantine. I've never been a Vertigo reader, so all my knowledge of the character is second-hand, but I won't let that stop me. Constantine first appeared in Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing comics, later appearing in the Sandman and getting his own book, Hellblazer; he is a rumpled, hard-boiled guy who can see angels and demons, and (in the movie, anyway) spends his days hunting and destroying devils in order to earn his way into heaven. Okay, so we're on some shaky theological ground here; it's just a movie, so we'll go with the concept. Anyway, here's what I think about it.... The mood looks right. Advance word from people who've seen it is that it's very good. The down-side is it's supposed to be set in London and Constantine is supposed to be Sting. For reasons known only to Hollywood, the story has been moved to L.A. and Sting has turned into Keanu. Go figure. My guess, people who never heard of the comic will probably like it a lot more than the diehard "Sandman" readers. Ultimately, the whole thing comes down to how you feel about Keanu. The thing is, Keanu is only good at two things: being dumber than a sack of hammers in comedies and serving as a prop in action pictures. If we accept the fact that he will pretty much be a cipher in this one the way he was in the Matrix flicks, and block out any knowledge of the Constantine character, it might be okay. If he tries to wrap his Malibu speech habits around the character's acerbic british wit, the picture is doomed. So if you've never heard of The Sandman, Hellblazer, Vertigo Comics or John Constantine, enjoy. Unless Keanu in action figure mode makes you irritated.

Fantastic Four. Hrm. I'm not too hopeful here. If you saw The Incredibles, then you saw what the Fantastic Four is supposed to be; a super-powered family, with all the bickering and complicated relationship dynamics that entails. A few of the super-powers coincide as well; in the Fantastic Four, the husband stretches and the wife turns invisible. The wife's brother burst into flame and flies, and the husband's best friend is big, strong, orange and rocky. The producers of this movie are going to have to work hard at not reminding people of the Incredibles, even though their characters are 40 years older than the newcomers. That doesn't bode well for the storytelling.

Aside from that, there are problems on a few fronts:
Casting. The least-endangered species on the planet is blonde-haired young actresses. The character of Susan Storm-Richards is supposed to be an elegant and sophisticated nordic-looking patrician Long Islander. Jessica Alba, for all her cuteness, is none of these things. Why the producers chose to cast an urban latina in the role is beyond me. Surely the viewers of Dark Angel aren't going to make that much of a difference in the ticket sales. By the way, I'm not bagging on li'l Jessica for her dye job; she looks perfect for her role in "Sin City" (another comic book movie), but she just simply isn't right for Sue Storm, no matter what color her hair is.
Plot. The bad guy is all screwed up. Victor von Doom is (in the comics) a megalomaniac who believes he's incapable of error. When he gets injured in a failed experiment, he accuses the man who warned him of an error in his calculations of sabotaging him. He dons a mask to hide the scars from his injuries, adding a suit of armor and taking his rightful place as ruler of a small eastern european country and turns all his resources toward the goal of destroying his perceived arch-rival, Dr. Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four. For reason known only to themselves, the producers have decided to have Von Doom get on the space ship with the heroes, get exposed to the same cosmic storm and get super powers of his own. His "Armor" is mutated skin. I'm pretty sure comic fans are going to hate this movie, and non-comic fans are going to think it's stupid. The plot changes are definitely a lose-lose for the intended audience. I think Fantastic Four will be the Hulk of 2005.

Batman Begins. This looks like the best Batman movie since, well, ever. Christian Bale at least has a chin, unlike Michael Keaton. The director has a track record of making compelling movies with actual plots, as opposed to the feature-length toy commercials Shumacher gave us, and doesn't seem willing to throw logic out the window for the sake of a cool visual, as Tim Burton is wont to do. Michael Caine is perfectly cast as Alfred the butler, as is Ken Watanabe as Ra's Al Ghul, the main villain of the piece. This is the one comic-based movie I'm actually looking forward to, at least until Shazam! actually goes into production.

I'll save a few movies for next week: Superman Returns, War of the Worlds, Star Wars Episode III, and of course Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

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