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DokBrowne [ 5.0 ]
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Can Terry Gilliam ever branch out? He's been directing movies for only about 30 fucking years now so I suppose it's too soon to tell, but this latest of his is just "Baron Munchausen" meets "The Fisher King" and he knows it. As expected there are captivating aspects, particularly all of Heath Ledger's presence and the uniquely impressive narrative and casting fluidity Gilliam conjures to substitute for the late actor's incomplete work. Moments of effective imagery (Jude Law's vertiginous stilt-walk, the mountaintop climax) abound as well, but relative to the tantalizing wonders of the film's trailer in addition to the director's famed knack for strange yet dazzling eye candy, the junky low-budget look is far too dominant here, and the flights of fancy within the imaginarium too often resembnle a cut-and-paste potpourri of half-assed, disjointed effects both hand-crafted and CG. It's the opposite of seamless, and not in an endearing way, nor much of a technical improvement over the crude animation he started out doing back in the "Monty Python" days.
Speaking of Python and messy hodgepodges, the story and feel of the movie can mostly be characterized thusly. Touchstones of fantasy and black comedy, as filtered through Gilliam's grimy, tattered, playful yet ominous take on the magical dimensions just beyond our reality, parade through the movie like a dispiriting checklist of cliches he's explored ad nauseum from one film to the next to the next to the next to the next, and into which he has no fresh insight or perspective. It's kinda the same problem George Romero's been facing this past decade since reviving his "...of the Dead" series, or maybe even Woody Allen's predicament. His (Gilliam's) is an interesting, even inviting style and ambience and mode of storytelling, but its inherent novelty has expired so in order to provide any artistic or entertainment value it/he really can't get away with being as borderline incoherent, tacky, and mediocre as this. At times it comes across as a regional theater-quality production with so many formless scenes and cheap dialogue exchanges.
But then there's Ledger, whose death is inextricably coiled up in the experience, accentuated repeatedly by Gilliam's own pervasive themes and motifs of looming mortality. Aside from being the only dynamic character (one who seems fully awake in all his scenes and who faces actual goals and conflicts that visibly concern him, unlike the rest of the cast's superficial, zombified, seemingly improvised nonsense), the concept of sharing him between four different actors (and A-list stars, at that) is intriguing unto itself, even without the unfortunate circumstances that inspired it. It's also worth noting that I frequently mistook Johnny Depp for Ledger himself at first glance, and even Jude Law for Johnny Depp on one occasion. The two of them and Colin Farrell may have been cast for their off-screen connections to Heath Ledger, but they're all rendered uncannily similar to him.
Ledger's character's arc is more striking than Christopher Plummer's (whose own nevertheless at least concludes on a touching note), so if there's anything really to take away from the movie afterwards, it's Heath Ledger, the mysterious charmer he plays, the other stars who lend him a hand, and Gilliam's ingenuity in transforming a major off-screen set-back into an inspired plot device. Hold out for Tony's scenes and try to ignore the mumbled, fruitless chaos of the rest.
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jeff_v [ 6.5 ]
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Not to be confused with Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium --it's confusing enough as it is. Terry Gilliam does his Terry Gilliam thing, and though his heart is in the right place, and I tend to favor personal filmmaking over market-tested blandness, I could never get into it.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.4 |
| No. Ratings | : 2 | |
| No. Reviews | : 2 | |
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