Reel Entropy

One of the turnoffs for Run All Night was the apparent plot twist of sending Conlon back to the mid-1800s with this bolt-action Winchester. It’s pretty clear someone really wanted this scene and built a movie around it, but instead built a completely different movie and shoehorned this scene in at the end. Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Run All Night’s primary purpose is to fill a market niche opposite Cinderella, but it’s a  more than serviceable action movie in its own right.

It’s a story of parallels between Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), a drug lord with his life together and a screw-up son (Boyd Holbrook), and Jimmy Conlon (Liam Neeson), his old friend and hitman who descended into alcoholism over the memories of his murders with an on-the-right-tracks son (Joel Kinnaman). Mike Conlon (Kinnaman) works as a limo driver, and the plot jumpstarts when he witnesses Danny Maguire (Holbrook) killing a client. Jimmy Conlon is forced to kill Danny Maguire, sending his father on a vendetta against the Conlons.

It’s a great story with a lot of potential, not all of it realized. The basic elements are there — a large-scale chase scene driving the plot, a character one could care about in Jimmy Conlon. He’s got a lot of regret and a son that hates him, and those are universally sympathetic traits.

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“Wouldn’t you like to know a little about him before you marry him?” Ella asks her step-sisters about the prince while a cannonball of pure irony soars over her head. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

The first version of Cinderella seems to be Rhodopis, a Greek courtesan who is married by the king of Egypt after he becomes enthralled with her tiny feet in first century B.C. We next see a much more familiar rendition from ninth century China that adds an abusive step family and a fairy godmother — or in this case, a magical fish. The story was expanded on several times in Renaissance Europe, with the popular 1950 cartoon based on Charles Perreault’s Cendrillon. This story has been around for a while now.

Everyone under the age of 65 grew up with the Disney classic, but with the rise of fan fiction it appears this type of vapid wish-fulfillment may be even more elemental than that. As a character, Cinderella reads like a lazy Mary Sue. While most forms of this character are given continuity-breaking power with which to dispatch villains like so many flies, Cinderella doesn’t do even this much, but gets the good-by-fundamental-nature, fairy-tale-romance treatment anyway just for being the special and unique snowflake that she is, even though she doesn’t really demonstrate that uniqueness or snowflakiness. Everything bad anyone ever said about Bella Swan or Ana Steele applies just as much to this character.

This story is something almost everyone aspired to at some point, and that’s kind of a problem. What is that aspiration, really? “One day when I grow up, someone rich and powerful will fall helplessly in love with me for no real reason, and we’ll live happily ever after?” This isn’t something healthy people aspire to for either their professional or romantic lives, but the story is dug deep into the public consciousness. Self-determination is the measure of a man, but Cinderella has none. When her step-family turns her into a slave through essentially peer pressure, she bends over and lets them. When faced with adversity, she cries a bit and makes up her mind to just put up with the problems she allows to fester.

This is a bad story. It is a story that rewards complacency and passiveness. It is a story in desperate need of subversion and deconstruction, to be remade for a world that wants to inspire children to do things for themselves instead of waiting patiently for their prince, a world that wants resilient, aggressive role models for its daughters.

So how in fuck does this movie exist?

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Chappie is a truly inexcusable movie, the kind that would be laughed out of most entry-level film classes. The fact that this script and this director and these plot elements can get $50 million budget and wide release is staggering.

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s third nearly identical effort returns viewers to Johannesburg. Crime-ridden as ever, the police force have turned to automatons with limited artificial intelligence, real rabbit-looking things, to keep the peace. Ninja and Yo-landi Visser of the rap band Die Antwoord (these people) find themselves $20 million in the hole to local gang boss Hippo (Brandon Auret), and, being incredibly stupid, decide their best option is to get the remote to one of these robots from their designer, Deon Wilson (Dev Patel). They kidnap Wilson with a decommissioned police bot that he intended to try to run experimental full artificial intelligence software on. The rappers force him to activate the robot, creating Chappie (Sharlto Copley).

In a lot of ways, it’s more important to science fiction than any other genre to have a grounding in reality, and this movie has none in either the science or the fiction. Chappie’s life is necessarily brief — his chasis was decommissioned because the battery fused inside it, leaving him with five days of power and no way to recharge. His motivation is to get his consciousness into a new chasis, but Wilson, for some reason, says it can’t be done. Chappie searches for a way to convert his mind into a readable program while I and anyone else with a middle school understanding of computers scream at the screen, “It’s his hard drive! It’s in his fucking hard drive!”

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