How unoriginal and derivative can a film get? Watch Racing Stripes and find out!

Despite having been very impressed by him in Romeo and Juliet and Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio has never really had much appeal for me as a star. His heartthrob status has got in the way of my appreciation of him. (I still haven’t seen Titanic, and have no particular plans to.) But The Aviator has changed all that. His performance as the obsessively driven Howard Hughes is, quite simply, spectacular. It’s a demanding role, calling for a convincing portrayal of both fierce determination and drive and introverted neuroticism, and DiCaprio pulls it off like a master. Scratch that, with this role he shows that he is a master.

But even with this performance, DiCaprio doesn’t own the film: Cate Blanchett races off with an amazing piece of character acting as she totally becomes Katherine Hepburn. The supporting cast, from small parts such as Jude Law’s Errol Flynn, to major antagonists like Alec Baldwin’s Juan Trippe, is stellar. (Definitely a candidate for the award for best use of the word “fuck” in a serious screenplay^*.) Even at a challenging three hours long, the film is never less than totally engrossing. A masterpiece.

Kevin, Rob, and Sam are a group of friends with a game they call “Foolproof”: they meticulously plan out robberies just to prove that they could pull the jobs if they wanted to. But they never go through with them–until someone steals the plans for their latest stakeout, and gets away with hundreds of thousands of dollars in diamonds. At first they hope they can just keep quiet and let the whole thing blow over, but then the mastermind behind the stolen heist approaches them with an offer they can’t refuse: help him pull an even bigger robbery, or he’ll send their original plans, along with incriminating fingerprints, to the police.

As heist capers go, this isn’t bad. The screenplay is good: it explores the dynamics within the group very nicely, and uses shifting allegiances to provide tension right to the end. The excellent Ryan Reynolds plays Kevin fairly straight, which is appropriate for the role, but kept me expecting more deadpan humour than the film is geared to deliver. David Suchet as the criminal mastermind Leo Gillette prickles with diamond-hard menace, and often threatens to overwhelm the rest of the cast. This lack of balance–the question of whether it’s going to be funny or deadly serious–keeps the film from achieving a better result. (It’s still definitely not bad, though!)

Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is an innocent teen who has been home-schooled by her parents most of her life, but now she has to face the real thing. She initially makes friends with a couple of the class outsiders, but when the “Plastics” (a clique of the richest, most beautiful, and most obnoxious girls in the school) invite her to join them, her friends encourage her to accept the opening. Their plan is for Cady to infiltrate the clique and bring back juicy insider information. But as Cady spends more time with the Plastics, she becomes more and more like them, until her friends start wondering if she has turned to the Dark Side. Subtle in places, spikily barbed in others, it’s a lot funnier and more interesting than your standard teen comedy.

Despite what you may have read, this is not going to be the worst film of the year. It’s not brilliant, but it’s far from awful.

Unlike most recent superhero/action movies, it doesn’t revel in its fight scenes, and it doesn’t linger over the heroine’s anguished antagonism towards the bad guys. It does spend a lot of time in broody contemplation of Elektra’s sense of isolation and loss, and this is perhaps where the perceived rot creeps in: the film simply doesn’t have a strong enough story to support this meditative aspect.

It’s an Eternal Battle of Good Versus Evil kind of thing, with a Mark IV Chosen-One Prophecy Module strapped on, and powered forward by a 1.6 litre Wayward-Heroine-Makes-Good engine. But it suffices. The villains tread a fine line between vaguely unpleasant and slightly crap, and most of the time end up dead, instead. The climactic fight scene is surprisingly poorly staged, given modern cinematic standards for the martial arts, and the whole final act that surrounds it feels like it was chopped up and mixed together by a committee who didn’t like Jennifer Garner all that much.

It lacks depth and richness of plot, the characters are ropy, the dialogue frequently stinks, it drops the ball (repeatedly) on back story, and it fails to properly activate any sequel hooks. It’s like the producers lost heart half-way through the film, and couldn’t be bothered giving it a thrilling end. And yet, despite all that, I just can’t bring myself to call it bad. The first hour is very watchable, but it should have been followed by another hour. Instead, it peters out with a mere half hour, and little promise of more to come. Pity.

Van Wilder (Ryan Reynolds) is the big man around campus. The girls want to date him, and the guys want to be him. He’s been there for seven years, and he has no intention of ever leaving–until his father stops his tuition payments. Faced with the prospect of being kicked out of the comfortable home he has made for himself, Van turns himself into a party organiser, charging money for arranging good times.

As seems to be the requirement for comedies of this type, there is a love story driving the plot forward. Gwen Pearson (Tara Reid) is the campus reporter trying to write a story on the enigmatic Wilder. In doing so, the two get close, hit it off, yada yada, and Gwen has to decide between Van and her rich frat boy boyfriend. I can’t say that this apect of the film worked for me. Tara Reid is a pretty face, but she has all the charisma of a blob of silly putty. Ryan Reynolds has enough charm and grin potential to make up for a lot, but he still can’t pull the film up much beyond average. Funny, but forgettable.

I find it hard to understand how a film with so much going for it turned out so average. The cast is extraordinary: Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, John Cusack, Rachel Weisz. And as expected, they all turn in strong performances. The production values are high, the lighting is gorgeous, and the direction is particularly smooth. But for a story that is kicked off with a brutal gun crime, and which revolves around the emotive issue of responsibility for gun-related deaths, it comes across as remarkably heartless. For all its cynicism regarding the firearms manufacturers and the process of law, it fails to make any kind of point about this cynicism.

In fact, the film is all about the plot as distinct from the story: how cleverly the pawns in the game can be manipulated, and how the players strike and dodge and thwart each other at every turn. Every character and every scene is set up as part of this elaborate dance to keep the viewer on their toes. There is anger, but no tension; astonishment, but no surprise; tears, but no pain. It lacks honesty and real emotion.

Andrew “Large” Largeman (Zach Braff) is a going-nowhere actor whose psychiatrist father has kept him doped up on anti-depressants since he was a kid. When he returns home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral, he starts to come out of his haze and wake up to the world around him. While hanging out with a group of his old school friends, he falls in love with Sam (Natalie Portman), and gradually learns to deal with the raw emotions that he has been shielded from for so long.

One words critics use to describe Zach Braff’s directorial debut is “assured”, and you really can’t argue with that. For a film where very little actually happens, the scenes are set and played out with a minimum of fluff and shilly-shallying, while simultaneously maintaining a light touch of dreamlike whimsy. It’s very clever. The dialogue is natural, even when the characters are off-beat, but I thought it fell down at the last hurdle. Large’s confrontation with his father, and the tearful airport scene seemed lacking in passion, and they deflated the magical, romantic bubble of the rest of the film. It’s still enormous fun to watch, though, and Braff is going to be an actor and director to keep tabs on for the future.