Jackman-a-thon 3
March 11th, 2009 at 9.30am (Movie reviews)
I am so, so done with this — I think I need to only watch Best Picture-winning movies for the next little while to clean out my brain. If you missed out on the first two posts, the story goes as follows: I watched every one of Hugh Jackman’s Hollywood feature films in a period of two weeks. It was alternately fun and excruciating. I have to qualify with “Hollywood” because I didn’t manage to find the two Australian projects he did in 1999 (one of which garnered him an award from the Australian Film Institute), and “feature” because I’m still missing one of the short films. This adds up to twelve in total. Yup, one a day, with a break for Watchmen and a break before the last one because my head was about to explode.
If you’re interested enough to read about what went down in previous posts, here they are: 1-7 and 8-10. Here’s the last two … I’ll try to be nice.
Someone Like You (Tony Goldwyn, 2001)
Don’t watch this movie.
Van H — Oh all right, here’s the long version. Ashley Judd can’t act, Greg Kinnear can’t really act, and even Hugh Jackman isn’t exactly at his best. His character starts out promisingly, with a gleeful amount of sarcasm and innuendo, but by halfway he’s suddenly lost his entire persona and is just another washed-up and predictable character. Judd, for her part, is as full of expression as a block of granite; her narration at the beginning sounds like a bad lecture, and her most emotive gesture is opening her eyes wide as saucers. Kinnear delivers his lines like he’s in uncomfortable pain.
The title card gimmick gets tossed by the wayside part of the way through — not that it was funny in the first place — and most of the film is an excuse to man-bash, something I hate. That pastime gets partially redeemed in the end, but the happy ending is so badly set up that it’s not even worth it. They just had to get a kiss in before it ended, and Hugh Jackman was just there … ugh ugh ugh this is terrible. Just don’t bother.
Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, 2004)
Oh yeah, this one sucks too. Ridiculously and unequivocally. A fabulous redeeming factor, however, is David Wenham — you might remember him as Faramir in Lord of the Rings, or the fabulously slimy Neil Fletcher in Australia — he’s super funny in this one, and provides at least a bit of relief from the ludicrous happenings on screen. Jackman is not that exciting (and that hair should be outlawed) and the CGI looks extra artificial, surprising considering it came out in 2004, and the dramatic lines are so overdone it hurts.
Also: does everything have to have an obvious love story? Is there one film like this that can have male and female leads without them having an angsty kissing scene in the middle somewhere? I’d really like that.
The bit at the end where the claws come out (sorry, I’m trying not to spoil this in case there are people left on this planet who somehow want to see this movie) is so Wolverine, though, that I had to laugh out loud. Seriously, I can’t imagine how that would have been overlooked … but this entire movie is a walking disaster, so maybe it was.
Final words
Man, I am tired of writing reviews of bad movies.
In all seriousness, though, this has made me realise a few things. One of them, and perhaps the most glaring, is that Hugh Jackman never gets to be Australian. He uses his native accent in exactly one of these films — Australia! — and otherwise is either English (Kate & Leopold, The Prestige, Scoop, Van Helsing) or American (X-Men, Someone Like You, Swordfish, The Fountain, Deception).
Not that this is a totally new problem. Other Australian actors seem to face the same thing: Nicole Kidman, Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett. Kidman, for her part, is one of Hollywood’s best-known Australians — though she was born in Hawaii, she grew up in Sydney — but in Luhrmann’s Australia, she played an Englishwoman. This is extra confusing.
Heath Ledger’s best known roles, arguably, are the Joker (American), Ennis del Mar (American — southern drawl), and his characters in A Knight’s Tale (English). Geoffrey Rush has a list of films in which he is English. When was the last time you saw an Australian character in a film? Australia doesn’t count. It’s probably been a while.
I guess the first thing that this says is that Australian actors are versatile — perhaps by necessity. They all have at least two accents on command, because Hollywood (being in the United States) seems to be of the mind that American accents are normal and the English have accents, and everybody else just sounds weird.
Looking back at Jackman’s list of films, some of the characters obviously required a different nationality (Leopold, for example, being an English duke); others, like Stanley in Swordfish, or Eddie of Someone Like You, could easily have been Australian without changing the story a whit. It sure would have made things more interesting. I find this phenomenon extra strange, and I hope that it changes — I am unable to explain it, but I don’t like it very much. I mean, it’s absolutely commendable that these actors can convincingly switch between three different nationalities, but sometimes they shouldn’t have to, you know?
Side note to Hugh Jackman: please, please stop making bad films. I love you, I really do, but that was a long two weeks. I suppose it’s a credit to your acting, though, that you were frequently the best part of a failing film — but not even you could save Swordfish. And you didn’t even try to save Van Helsing. (It’s okay, I wouldn’t have either.)
The good ones were really good, though. I mean, The Prestige. X-Men. Scoop. Please keep making decisions like those. I know, I know, you’re the Sexiest Man Alive (another side note: damn, I can’t believe how dumb the interview questions are for these things) and people will come see your movies anyway, but couldn’t you just keep making good ones? It’s really a win-win situation.
It’s been fun, though. Occasionally fun in the manner of throwing things at the television screen, but mostly real fun. I’m going to avoid your face for the next two months — it’s nothing personal, really — but you know as well as anyone that I’ll see you in May.
Ruhee out!
Tags: ashley judd, australia, david wenham, geoffrey rush, greg kinnear, heath ledger, hugh jackman, jackman-a-thon, kate beckinsale, movies, stephen sommers, tony goldwyn
