Bruckheimer

If you want any great movie subject to look cheap and utterly unbelievable, as in brainwashing unbelievable, you give it to Jerry to produce that movie. If Inception would have been produced by the “action” master, it would have been now a merely 7.0 imdb rated, and that owed maybe to Leo, if he would accept to act in that conditions.

Jerry Bruckheimer

Returning to Bruckheimer, it seems he’s trying to throw back the old Hollywood pattern, which guided the movie makers for decades: “A film is a story, people come to see it in order to escape from the day by day life routine”. It took great directors like Elia Kazan to re-arrange a little the realistic side of a movie, and change the vision. Any story must fulfill a hope, a dream or something somehow achievable, to represent a masterpiece.

So this Bruckheimer fellow, is laughing big to the American people. I figured out something, watching the 2002 released, Bad Company. Long time I thought Anthony Hopkins is a bad actor. He’s not bad, that’s the role’s prescriptions, what director or producer says, he execute. With all the awards and nominating, I really thought him bad. But he directed, wrote and got credit for the music as well, for Slipstream (2007), a movie with only 5.1 imdb rate and the movie was well. Actually was a very subtle parable, that being the reason of such an underestimation. It’s not the only one under-rated movie I saw, and it’s not his best acting so far, it is representative for his attitude. Not necessarily a matter of preference, Anthony Hopkins has his own class, being quite unproductive to take him out of that. In Bad Company, he plays a human CIA agent in charge with some smoggy and totally unsupported (logically) nuclear bomb deal. What is the “unsupported logically” meaning is that you have to show a reason for almost any action in a movie. When one can’t offer logic to action, I called it “logically unsupported”, and this is Jerry Bruckheimer specialty. Expensive action, sometimes (actually quite very often) expensive location, all in all expensive production cost with no reason. Just meaningless action, unsupported by the screenplay and sometimes by the actors themselves, but they do all they can, that’s obvious, because he, Jerry is lucky with the budget and has good actors to play his thrash. See Denzel Washington in Deja Vu, Johnny Depp in The Pirates of the Caribbean series. Not the case with Coppola‘s nephew Nicolas Cage in National Treasure sequels, this one came from a long row of motion screening barely able to be considered movies, maybe just re-enacted cartoons or comics.

Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock

I’m not spoiling the plot here, because it’s a matter of taste after all, to see Chris Rock with some of his successful routines, he is brilliantly funny along the smoggy misplaced Hopkins, who runs, climb stairs, jump from cars and of course shoots with a trade mark, chewing gum. The Mercedes Benz they blow up in the movie was too expensive maybe to comprise a double for the poor guy, he was painfully loosing his breath most of the time. Why I said Jerry Bruckheimer is mocking the American people, is that he presents the CIA as a patriotic “no mercy” organization following a “stolen” nuclear bomb from “somewhere in the Urals” by a psychopathic former Soviet general turned “Russian Mafia” (Peter Stormare), and the “deal” with two bidders, the elegant Hopkins and a Yugoslavian origin Dragan whatsoever “terrorist” who wanted to “punish America for growing fat while other are starving”. CIA had no consideration for civilians or for people in general, they apparently wanted to prevent any potential nuclear event on the American soil, all the rest being expendable. You see, the bomb was for sale for $ 20 Millions. I hope you see what I mean. What I said, except for the “reason”, one finds in the first three – four minutes, so I haven’t spoiled anything. The rest is action and more action, in a few very nice marketed locales from Prague, the Czech Republic’s capital (for the Americans), in Europe, Eastern Europe to be more precise.

Peter Stormare

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