MOVIE REVIEWS: 'The Matador' and 'Hoodwinked'


Movie reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.




The Matador
(wr./dir. Richard Shepard)

It's a shame "The Matador" isn't a better movie, because this semi-dark comedy contains one great, cackling, self-loathing performance by Pierce Brosnan.

It's been fun to watch Brosnan grow into himself as an actor. When he first blew up on "Remington Steele" in the '80s, he was a fop -- a skinny, floppy-haired, fake-posh doofus with too big a knot in his tie. A "Remington" contract dispute kept him from taking the James Bond role back then, and it was a relief: The man lacked gravitas.

By the time he finally donned the tux in "Goldeneye," real life had weathered Brosnan a bit; he regularly outshone the increasingly lame 007 franchise. And now, with "Matador," the 52-year-old has gone one better: He's pulled off an absolutely unembarrassed, drunken goof on his former iconic persona.

In "Matador," Brosnan plays Julian Noble, a "facilitator of fatalities" who's been icing the enemies of his corporate clients for 22 years. And he's a wreck. His shaky confidence is causing him to botch assassinations -- and once you remove Julian's specialized skills, all that's left of the man are his vices and some exceedingly unpleasant personality quirks.

Brosnan has a field day bringing those quirks to life. The movie opens as Julian wakes up next to a strange woman and a bottle of Maker's Mark, then raids her makeup case and paints his toenails, cackling to himself. He sports tattoos and a dorky porn-'stache. He wanders around drunk in a Mexico City hotel, wearing nothing but boots and an unflattering Speedo. He leers at Catholic schoolgirls in front of his handler (Philip Baker Hall). He tells a small child, "I'd only be interested in your mother if she lost 20 pounds and three years." And when he meets equally blitzed family man Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) in the hotel bar, Julian interrupts Danny's story about his son's death to tell a dirty joke. It's a tour de force by Brosnan, and it's easy to see why his Golden Globe-nominated performance made a splash at Sundance last year.

Would that the rest of the movie were working at Brosnan's level.

Unfortunately, writer/director Richard Shepard's piñata-bright comedy tries a little too hard for quirk -- right down to its "funny" musical score. (A more deadpan vibe would have made "The Matador" roughly a hundred times funnier.)

Danny and his wife Bean (Hope Davis) -- whose Denver home Julian crashes after a contract is put out on Julian's life -- aren't particularly interesting characters. And when Julian drags Danny on one last hit, the buddy banter feels forced and dull.

Here's how lame it gets: Toward the end, during a hit at an Arizona racetrack, poor Kinnear is standing in plain sight, yelling, "I can't believe I'm in a stairwell trying to convince you to assassinate somebody!" Well, I can't believe it, either.

All that said: It's a hell of a lot better than "After the Sunset."
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Hoodwinked
(wr./dir. Cory Edwards and Todd Edwards)

Okay. So "The Matador" doesn't work. But I'm actually embarrassed for "Hoodwinked."

The opening scene of this unbelievably cheap-looking animated "Shrek" rip-off is familiar to anyone who grew up on that one Bugs Bunny cartoon: Red Riding Hood (voiced by Anne Hathaway) goes to Grandma's house. Grandma (Glenn Close) is tied up in the closet. Red's menaced by the Big Bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton). A woodsman bursts through the window and starts swinging an axe.

And then -- in a departure I don't seem to recall from the original European folktale -- somebody calls the cops.

Soon, Grandma's house is a taped-off crime scene. Chief Grizzly (Xzibit) is threatening charges of "Intent to Eat." And everyone's telling Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) a different story under interrogation -- sort of "The Usual Suspects" meets "Rashomon," only with bad puns and worse songs. And it all leads to a fateful confrontation with the mysterious "Goodie Bandit."

It's not a bad idea for a kid's movie, I guess, though I'm not sure we needed yet another smirky, pop-culture-referencing take on fairy tales. (The "Shrek" films, with their "hilarious" of-the-moment nods to "The Matrix" and the like, are aging worse than three-year-old "Daily Show" reruns.) And Warburton is pretty dryly funny as the Wolf, who turns out to be an investigative reporter modeled on "Fletch," right down to the Lakers jersey and Faltermyer-esque theme music.

But in every other respect, "Hoodwinked" stinks. It's horrible. It's wretched. It's limburger pickled in castor oil.

Where to begin? Well, the soundtrack is packed with lousy pop songs. And not that this is crucial to good storytelling, but the computer animation takes every shortcut in the book. The flashback structure means we keep seeing the same work from different angles, over and over, and whenever characters are asked to run or emote, they fall somewhere short of Rankin-Bass stop-motion puppets. And the character design is uninspired and kind of ugly; Red, for example, looks uncannily like a 45-year-old Campbell's Soup Kid:




Even worse, the jokes never, ever rise above the level of bad puns. Here are three actual dialogue exchanges from the film, and sadly they're representative:

• "How does the fellow with the axe fit in?" "Maybe you should axe him yourself."

• "This guy's a loon!" "Watch it, Chief -- my mom's half-loon."

• "Someone hibernated on the wrong side of the tree!"

After 80 minutes of this -- particularly after 80 minutes of seeing this same story repeated four or five times -- you want to climb under the seat, roll around in used candy wrappers and gnaw off your leg.

Missed opportunity
Hooey in the 'hood
(The Oregonian, Jan. 13, 2005)

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Posted: Fri - January 13, 2006 at 10:54 AM        

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