Welcome, dear readers, to the first of a brand new series here at Oliver Cooper writes ..., 'Stuff wha' I 'ave watched 'n' wha' I faw abaiiii'. Originating from a collaborative video project I participated in some time ago, it is reborn here for your reading pleasure as a series of reviews for that ever-fine assortment of audiovisual media: film and television.
So: how'd it get burned?
That's right. I'm kicking off1 with one of the most infamous movies to come out of Hollywood, and to my mind one of the best, worst, average films in existence: The Wicker Man (2006), directed by Neil LaBute, and starring the incorrigible Nicolas Cage.
Let me begin be saying that it’s an interesting experience.
I’m not going to go into the fact that it is a remake of the significantly better regarded 1973 British film of the same name. Nor am I going to focus too entirely on Cage’s acting and put the entire blame for this dimdraster of a movie on him. No, if we want to get our greasy monkey paws on the hidden corn kernel of truth that lies at the centre of this steaming mass of faecal whatthefudgery, we're going to have to dive in a little deeper. Gloves on? Let's go!
The film opens in a diner, where our protagonist, Edward Malus, is looking at hypnotic self-help tapes that make for a pivotal plot point in the narrative. I say 'pivotal' because, given the spiralling mess that is to follow, it would be nice to have something to hold on to. So remember the tapes, my naive, little screen-monkeys, because the film certainly won't. Why Malus is looking for self-help tapes in the first place is never explored. I guess we are just to assume that he’s not all too happy with himself. Poor fellow.
In the first few lines of dialogue, there are already hints of poor acting run a-muck, but who am I to say it won’t get better? And maybe the tapes aren't important. Let's get to the action.
Nicolas – whom I will hereafter refer to as ‘acts-like-he’s-still-reading-his-lines-off-a-page’ – Cage ends up party to a terrible road accident whereby he fails to save the lives of a young girl and her mother. This is handled acceptably (it's almost exciting) and offers what might be an interesting development for the central role - a police officer made to deal with grief, loss, and maybe even guilt for the accident.
This, I'm afraid to say, isn’t what follows. Off-the-page Cage gets a letter from his ex-fiancé telling him he has to fly out to help find her missing daughter. Gallant Cage travels to a remote island where the mother and child live as part of a matriarchal nature cult, separated from outside American society. "Interesting," I hear you think2, "maybe this film comments on gender hierarchies and cult behaviour, or commercialism in modern American urban/suburban lifestyles." Oh ye of too many English classes! Put away your copies of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, for The Wicker Man does not attempt to do anything with this potential, though it has the gall to make promises throughout. No. What follows is an hour and a half of mind-chewing craptackery.
Now, I get the idea here. The film is intended to be scary – mysterious – there are no easy answers for Malus. Everyone seems to be conspiring against him, and he is driven increasingly more paranoid by the people and their actions. Great. We're meant to be confused. Yet, at every turn, the sensation we feel is not a shared sense of desperate uncertainty; just unengaged, unsatisfactory bewilderment. I mean, what the seven honey-coated hells is going on here?!
When you create a mystery narrative, there need to be pay-offs. Even in a film where I imagine the point is for our protagonist to descend into a state of pathological fear and a lost sense of reality, the film has to make sure you’re with the protagonist in that confusion. Perhaps you notice that he takes medicine to control his nightmarish hallucinations. Well-spotted, but the film does nothing with this. You remember those self-help tapes? Well they go missing fairly early on and are never remarked on again. I like to imagine a film in which the central figure’s psychological instability is relevant to their development, and such props are not just thrown out to make room for more cringe-worthy dialogue and drawn-out scenes in which either nothing happens or something happens but you feel like you've not progressed anywhere. In truth, the film-makers didn't seem to know what they wanted. Is The Wicker Man supposed to be disturbing or surreal or comic? It jumps haphazardly and uncontrollably from one poorly-explained scene to the next, joined only by lots of monotonous running about, plummeting quickly from a potentially interesting but badly made beginning into complete shote-shovelling chaos. And we still don't know how it got burned!
My main complaint is that the film chronically hints at interesting directions but fails to follow any of them, leaving us, the audience, asking why these things were included in the first place. Flashbacks, visions and dream sequences all suggest symbols and themes; but nothing is developed well enough to communicate anything. Too much is mysterious, when in reality it is just absurdly and lazily unanswered. Was there ever really a car crash? How did the doll get in the grave? How did Nicholowsy’s character spend an entire night almost completely submerged in water without developing hypothermia? What’s the deal with the bees and his allergies? How’d it get burned?! And did they really expect to make the jump between Cage running around the island, stumbling upon countless, unjustified, clichéd set-pieces to him running around the island in a bear suit right-hooking every woman he comes across without getting some kind of laugh? Accidental comedy is one of my guilty pleasures, but this is so painfully and inconsistently ridiculous that I can’t even enjoy it for that. The laughs I had were snorts of disdain that didn’t heighten the film to B-movie triumph, but exposed it for the pitiful farce it is.
The script was apparently adapted from the British original, so I justly declare that whoever did that adapting jobby needs to have their computer privileges taken away and their fingers periodically broken to the sound of Rage Cage repeating "How’d it get burned?!" to the backing of Beethoven’s Fifth3. I appreciate that St Nick of the Wooden Perfomance wouldn’t know how to deliver a good line anyway, but the lines really weren’t worth delivering at all. The supporting cast offered nothing to fill the aching void of my dribbling brainspace. I can only assume they were overwhelmed by the sheer gumphucstacy of the script and were suffering from the same insidious headrot the audience had to suffer trying to work out what in the great, bear-suited car crash they had just watched.
The Wicker Man is interesting, if only as a course in how not to do mystery, horror, suspense, fantasy or *insert genre or filmic aspect here*. It does nothing right. It doesn’t even do getting it wrong right. And for that reason, I can't recommend it4; though I am more than willing to give the original a try. I mean, it's got to be better than this, right? Hell, I might even find out how it got burned.
All in all, I give The Wicker Man a "meh" and a "huh?" out of 5.
Till next time, Screen-monkeys. Watch out for bees.
1 Sports analogy. *shudder* I apologise.
2 Don't worry, readers. I don't really have prophetic, inter-computational telepathy. ... Yet.
3 Now brought to you by The Internet.
4 For a 3-minute version of the film that makes just as much sense but is at least 170% funnier, click here.
