Director Kenneth Branagh, who showed in his Shakespeare adaptations that he understands how to maintain a smooth, controlled pace, uses that quality to good advantage in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. There are at least three action sequences (a hotel ambush, a heist, and a car chase) that, in less expert hands, could have been dull and generic. As choreographed by Branagh, they crackle with tension and suspense. At its best, the movie feels relentless, almost exhausting. The necessary connective tissue between the adrenaline-fueled scenes is also deftly handled; the movie rarely threatens to bog down due to excessive exposition. At the same time, there's a little time for character development.
And Vishnevetksy this:
A movie doesn’t have to be original to be entertaining;
surefooted direction can energize the most clichéd material. Suspense, however,
isn’t Kenneth Branagh’s strong suit. The actor-director, who also plays Jack
Ryan’s villain, is fond of visual quirks (his last film, Thor, was
chock full of canted angles) that create a patina of eccentricity, but don’t
function in any meaningful way. Jack Ryan has a few of these
oddball flourishes—a double lens flare which obscures everything else in the
frame, a hard dolly-in during a stabbing—but when it comes to the movie’s
centerpiece scenes, Branagh keeps things bland. The major action
sequences—several car chases, a shoot-out, and a break-in at a high-tech
skyscraper that probably seemed less out-of-place when the project was set in
Dubai—are messy and uninvolving, composed largely in disorienting
telephoto-lens handheld shots
These two critics must be quite different to make such contrasting claims. Now, because I haven’t actually seen the film, I can’t assess the action scenes myself, but based on knowledge of these two critics, this might be more than a mere disagreement.
First off, I generally like Berardinelli. A simple critic with low ambitions, he offers assessments of films that are in no way academic, but also not
entirely subjective, either. He gives unbiased, reasonable opinions and tends
to do a pretty good job of backing up his claims about narrative and character. As a writer he’s pretty
formulaic, and he rarely crosses the bridge from reviewing to film criticism.
There’s nothing especially distinct about him, but his honesty and lack of
pretension is usually refreshing. Also, he tends to be one of the more reliable
critics when it comes to big studio movies. That said, if he was in a younger
generation, I cannot imagine he would have the success he’s had over the last
18 years. He simply happened to be one of the first thoughtful and
knowledgeable people to use the Internet to post reviews of movies.
One major distinction between him and Vishnevetsky (other
than the fact that their style and tastes couldn’t be more varied) is that the
former approaches movies as stories, while the latter puts an enormous emphasis
on the purely cinematic attributes of a film.
Consequently, it’s never exactly clear how much Berardinelli
knows (or, for that matter, cares) about filmmaking as a craft. So when he says
that under Branagh’s direction, Jack Ryan’s action scenes “Crackle with tension
and suspense,” it’s hard to tell if he’s saying this because he actually
examined the way the scenes were put together, or if it’s because that’s how he
felt watching them.
Vishnevetsky, though, sees the director as an architect, and
is always concerned with not just what he’s designing, but how he’s doing it.
With an expansive knowledge of film style and history, he’s able to pinpoint
different ways a director is putting scenes together, why, and whether it’s
effective. Even a review of a bland product like A Madea Christmas shows Vishnevetsky’s acute awareness of
structure:
Style-wise, Perry seems to be stuck in 1931, and there’s
an undeniable early-talkie charm to the film’s long takes, out-of-nowhere
wipes, slightly mismatched reverse angles, just-a-tad-too-long cutaways, and
stage-voice performances. (Abundant echoes—audible whenever the characters are
standing in front of a metal surface—suggest that Perry has a thing against
lavalier mics.) The oddness of Perry’s Madea movies owes less to incompetence
than to eccentric working methods. The fact that scenes involving Madea tend to
run long and are interspersed with generic reactions from other characters
reveals that Perry improvises most of her dialogue in one-and-done takes, while
everyone else in the cast sticks to a script. (Some of the film’s Madea improvs
are even funny.) Perry’s sense of visual blocking is stubbornly old-fashioned,
with above-the-waist wide shots intercut with close-ups in which only the
speaking character is visible.
By not actually analyzing the action scenes, but merely calling
them good, Berardinelli is falling into a trap shared by many critics:
discussing form without solid backing. As a result, this pretty pointless case
of opposites in a pretty pointless movie might actually have larger importance
in the context of criticism in general.
No comments:
Post a Comment