SCREAM 2 (1997)

SAW IV (2007)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

A NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM 2 (2009)

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS – THE SQUEAKUEL (2009)

It’s the nature of entertainment business executives to give the public more of what they’ve liked before. On the surface of things, it makes a good deal of sense, from a business point of view.

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of art, which movies are to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual case, (and there’s plenty of variation just in the list above, to veer sharply into the lane of understatement), to tell its story, and then that story is told, and that’s the end of the story.

There was probably a reason, when you think about it, that Dickens never did a Great Expectations 2, or an Oliver Twist sequel entitled Fagin’s Frolics. William Shakespeare somehow avoided the temptation to fudge a sequel involving various bench-warmer relatives of Romeo and Juliet having a similarly star-crossed romance, perhaps with a happy ending this time around. Beethoven’s fifth symphony was pretty hot stuff, but it apparently never occurred to him to re-work a few of the themes, trot out the “da-da-da-DUMMM” bit for another airing, and issue a Symphony 5B. He seemed content to get on with #s 6, 7, 8 and 9 instead.

No matter how compelling the characters, settings, themes or combinations thereof, the rule of thumb in art seems to be, when you’ve nailed it the first time, well, that was your creative adventure in that little world, and now you get on with the next development, wherever the contents of your head happen to take you. You don’t stick around and play with your food. You finish your plateful and move on to the next meal.

The odd thing is, we all get this, at least on a subconscious level. When the tale is told, and it’s a good one, and it’s well-told, as much as we liked it, or revelled in it, we really know it’s over when it’s over. If they produce a sequel, we might buy a ticket, go along and kind of enjoy it, maybe, but it’s generally a kind of pale photocopy of enjoyment. We KNOW the magic was in the first time around. We KNOW they’re playing with their food for our entertainment. That birthday cake tasted great on the first bite, but three pieces in and your stomach starts to perform stunt-flying manoeuvres. The movie business often seems dedicated to proving comprehensively that lightning isn’t the only thing that doesn’t strike twice.

The exceptions to the grinding truism that movie sequels are inferior to the originals are few. Generally those few involve a substantial revision of the original conception, (perhaps, for one obvious example, a tendency to greater comedic orientation than in the original version), and/or better casting, a superior screenplay, and a better (or more suited) craftsman as director.

But generally, they’re a washout.

There’s also an irony, or a fallacy, in the Bizness theory of “giving ’em more of what they already ate”. If you ask the general public what they want, regardless of which pop or mass culture area you’re talking about, they’ll ALWAYS indicate that they want more of something they’ve had before.

And then the Bizness keeps feeding that to them, and the public will go right on saying they want more of it, right up until most members of the public all suddenly realise they’ve mined that particular seam of entertainment dry, at which point someone ends up with a massive turkey on their hands flickering away in empty cinemas, and the public all rushes off to see something novel/new/different which they never told the Bizness people they wanted, because they didn’t KNOW they wanted it, right up until they saw or heard it. (And whatever that is, it will soon enough be strip-mined, sequelled, and imitated to death as well, prior to the next big thing coming along.)

And this is the fallacy of asking the public what they want. Most of the general public don’t have the inclination to indicate they’d like something different, and don’t have the imagination to hazard a guess or express a preference as to what that “something different” might be. Which is absolutely fair enough – it’s not their jobs.

What you might expect, though, is that the showbiz execs who are paid to analyse this kind of information, would know better than to fall for the same three-card trick over and over again. But, quite frankly, if you put enough accountants and brothers-in-law in roles that really demand a creative mind, this is the kind of result you’re probably bound to get.

The pursuit of endless sequels (and needless, ill-conceived remakes – just as poisonous and creatively-challenged a phenomenon) is, necessarily, a determined pursuit of the law of diminishing returns, certainly creatively, generally in terms of quality, and arguably, also financially. The funny thing is, on some level or other, we all know it. The other funny thing is, nobody really does much about it, and this is not like the weather, where you CAN’T.

Anyway, let’s nail some specifics, and talk about some movies in this here movie column.

The brouhaha with the Scream pictures when they first surfaced was about how clever they were, playing with the conventions of the slasher horror movies, turning them on their heads, and underscoring them with knowing humour. I have no doubt that the thoroughly revolting word “savvy” was bandied about at some point.

I don’t know about all that. The first Scream had some in-movie winking at the format and formula of horror movies, with the characters describing the “rules” as the bodies fell. This didn’t diminish the scares, (it was used well on occasion to build chills), but if it delivered so much as a laugh, I wasn’t in the room at the time. Actually, the banging on in the dialogue about the “rules” got kind of tiresome to me.

The laughs came from some unexpected slapstick involving the killer, and a few bits of sly commentary in the movie-making itself, rather than the dialogue per se. However what made the movie work as well as it did, along with Wes Craven’s technical facility in manipulating you through a horror movie, was the excellent capturing of atmosphere and place in the small college town, and some endearingly eccentric performances that allowed you to care about the characters.

It’s Drew Barrymore’s small but telling role near the start that sets up the whole picture. The various Cox-Arquettes and Arquette-Coxes did their jobs too. No matter how clever the horror movie is, it’s harder to get really sucked in if you don’t care about the characters. You “bought” the college atmosphere too. These kids have lives, hopes, dreams etc. And some lunatic is killing them.

The undertow of wry self-commentary was important in giving Scream its own peculiar life, but it was a long way from being the whole deal.

As Scream 2 demonstrated pretty well. The Courteney Cox performance is a little more of a caricature, the David Arquette one simultaneously more stock-comedy and manic, there’s no Drew Barrymore, and Neve Campbell’s lead character is given less to demonstrate why we should care about her.

So we run through more rope-a-dope with the audience expectations, more jack-in-the-box set-ups, more horror “rules”, more fitful “commentary” that doesn’t really comment on anything.

The skill demonstrated in running the ropes of the horror movie genre delivers some good solid scares, and it is mostly an entertaining movie, but there’s no real core to it at all. It probably would have skated by, but where Scream 1 delivered an ending that was something of a wet-end, and lacking for brains in the logic department, the many climaxes of Scream 2 are (a) completely ludicrous on any level, (b) a series of car-crashes in execution. And those climaxes just keep-a-comin’.

Ten years later, the abattoir artistes behind Saw IV dispensed with the “knowing self-analysis of horror movies” stuff and just built that right into the movie, rather than telling us all about it so we knew how clever they were. That wasn’t such a bad idea, probably. They also dispensed completely with humour. That was more of a mixed blessing.

For those who don’t know, the Saw saga (and odds are there must some web-galoot out there who calls it a saga) concerns a serial killer type guy called Jigsaw who was active in the first couple of pictures, got crook and kind of roped in an assistant or two after that.

At the beginning of Saw IV, he’s very crook – to the extent that he’s dead. However his trademark killings are still going on, which means there’s still some assistant out there doing his work. There’s cops coming at him from one end, the FBI from another, and all concerned are trying to nail down who the active Jigsaw is, who just might be one of the people involved in the investigation.

So it’s a whodunnit, along with a horror picture once over heavy on the surgical levels of guts and gore, plus the killer’s trademark gimmick, of conceiving bizarre torturous traps in which the victim or victims’ fate/s are often in their own hands, kind of.

The peculiar backwards morality behind the Jigsaw killings is kind of an interesting point of distinction with this movie, right until they morality us to death with it. There’s just far too much background/origin information on why the original Jigsaw became what he became, until it becomes like a particularly psycherligical Law and Order: SVU episode gone horribly wrong. It also successfully diminishes the Freddy Krueger of this particular franchise from being a kind of supernatural figure into being an old tired man who went bananas. Quite a bargain heading in that direction, then.

And for all that the movie has technical facility – not so much editing as footage chopped up like highly energetic coleslaw, and some “Say, how did them movie folks DO that?” shot transitions – it sometimes handles routine exposition like lumpy gravy, is riddled with incredibly poorly incorporated flashback material, and the build to the ending struck me as incoherent to world and Olympic levels – I literally couldn’t tell if one of the parallel expositions being shown was a flashback or a “contemporary” sequence, and once I had worked it out, I still didn’t know why it was there.

Saw IV can’t even sustain its own logic. It pimps on this regularly, whenever it suits. It has some effectively grisly moments, and some clever gimmicks, right alongside idiotic gore flinging that comes across like a gross-out routine that two 12 year olds might have come up with. It’s not exactly an actors’ showcase type of film, but alongside the performances that get the job done, there’s a few that clunk like a loose nut in a power mower. Any thought of characters an audience member might actually get involved with was apparently dispensed with prior to the soup course at the first luncheon meeting concerning the picture. The result is that it’s not really that scary. Hard to be scared on behalf of characters you can’t care about. I think I may have mentioned that before. Can’t say after this one I’m desperately HANGING to see Saw V.

It’s hard to see how they could have screwed up on the 21st Century Batman sequel, right up until you see the picture. And by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re determined to, make sure you pack a lunch. Or two.

The first Christian Bale one was an ok action/adventure movie, with a certain smell of obsession, danger and the odd question of principle, to help flesh things out. Adding in THE franchise villain of Batman’s world to the mix in the sequel shouldn’t have hurt, exactly.

So where did they go wrong, to cut to the chase. Well, it’s two and a half hours long, to start with. Roughly one hour of that comes down to Batman and the Joker demonstrating their duelling psychological obsessions (directly opposed and yet somewhat strangely similar, and interdependent in a way) – and that’s the whole guts of the picture, and apparently nobody in charge realised it.

The other 90 minutes is a loud exploding series of hiccoughs and explosions, with some vaguely desperate attempts to claim contemporary significance by comparing what the Joker does with terrorism. To say this is in poor, or no, taste might be fair comment. But what cripples the picture is that it has nothing to do with the core of what the movie is so obviously about – the Batman/Joker dynamic.

And you can also throw in that Christian Bale mostly decided to deep-asthma-breathe his dialogue in standard cartoon superhero fashion, rather than acting like he did in the first picture, that there are only about 97 climaxes too many, that the Joker as portrayed in this movie is a complete unreliable, unpredictable maniac, who can also pinpoint plan a highly complex scheme that would be beyond the resources or planning abilities of the greatest military minds in history, that the long-term Batman comic book villain Two Face is introduced and blown off in one picture for no reason, and that even at the movies with full multi-track sound, in between the explosions, the musical score farting away, and the mysterious clanking noises that all big movies have up the back of the mix somewhere for no apparent reason, I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue at all. I think they won an Oscar for making me not hear the dialogue.

Heath Ledger is pretty good. It’s a valid interpretation of the Joker character, and different from anyone else’s. As far as the make-up goes, I could have come up with the same given about ten minutes, a bag of flour, and the continuity girl’s lipstick.

The answer to the conundrum of making a great Batman/Joker picture is pretty simple. Instead of just happily tearing off bits and pieces of ideas from the comics concerned and turning them into a theme park, they just have to read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and convert them as faithfully as possible into movies. But of course the ever-delightful mantra of “This is Hollywood and we change everything here” will doubtless prevail. Maybe they can make the next Batman picture three and a half hours long and have 243 climaxes. Think I might sit that one out.

A Night at the Museum 2 – err, has anyone previously ever made a “lo-concept” picture? This one’s pretty simple to explain. In fact, arguably the previous sentence was two words too long. Ben Stiller – currently heading for a Dan Aykroyd-like longevity record of not actually being funny while repeatedly appearing in comedy movies – plays the guy who is night guard at a museum where all the exhibits come to life at night, including dinosaur skeletons, and famous people from history and stuff like that there. The basic result – and level of ambition – is a cross between Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Toy Story, only a great deal dumber and more incoherent than either.

This may be the first movie with attention deficit disorder. It can’t remember what it’s trying to be from second to second, much less sequence to sequence, and keeps throwing in irrelevant spot gags like one of the more irritatingly patchy Family Guy episodes. Incidentally, that’s an approach that works a lot better in a half-hour series than a 104 minute movie. Everyone except the people who made this movie probably knows that already, of course.

What makes this a great deal worse is that the movie wants you to take it seriously (when it remembers) and actually care whether Ben Stiller’s team of good guys beats the bad guy team involving Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible and Napoleon. It’s not only centred on a premise that’s fairly stupid but it can’t even retain any consistency on what the premise is. The “to thine own self be true” subtext it can barely be bothered paying lip service to. The intermittent thud of rah-rah USA-boosting is nauseating in this context, not to mention coming off as shallow enough that toddlers could swim in it unsupervised.

Performances, like everything else in here, vary wildly. Owen Wilson is annoying as usual. Stiller is virtually a straight male lead. Christopher Guest is wasted, given very little to do as Ivan the Terrible. However the guy who plays Napoleon is given plenty, and just isn’t funny at all. Amy Adams is cute and fun as Amelia Earhart, but the role’s not funny and the dialogue tends to be wearing. Robin Williams gets the job done as Teddy Roosevelt, but that’s not a funny role either.

Steve Coogan IS good as a tiny little Roman Emperor, it’s difficult to work out what Ricky Gervais’s character was meant to be, other than Ricky Gervais. (This may well have been a design flaw at script level, like most of the rest of the movie.)

But there’s one guy in A Night at the Museum 2 who may well enter the annals, if not top the all-time listings, for a wig-flipping performance in a doggedly unnecessary movie – Hank Azaria, as the evil Egyptian pharaoh with a rather foppishly theatrical manner, and a Boris Karloff-imitation voice that just won’t quit. He’s just fantastic. He would have committed grand larceny of the entire movie, had there been one there to steal.

Otherwise, suffice it to say that about three-quarters of the way through I suddenly realised that I couldn’t even work out what kind of audience they THOUGHT they were aiming at when they made this picture – general, adult, or exclusively kids. Still couldn’t tell you on that one. Oh, and by the way, the special effects are tremendous. And, as usual, what an undetectable difference that truly does make in entertainment when the rest of the picture is one big vacuum cleaner spill.

And finally we come to Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel, in which the entire concentration of inspiration and telling wit involved in the enterprise was plainly expended on the title. I’m going to waste very little time on this one. It’s a kids’ entertainment. It’s proficient enough at what it is, I guess. I would have thought Betty Thomas has demonstrated sufficient talent as a director that Hollywood might be able to find her something to do a little more, err, essential than this, but she gets the job done, and neatly, and (and this could be a lesson to virtually every other film covered here), in good time as well. The “Our heroes go through trials and tribulations, but when things are darkest, they prevail” plot-line has hairs on it that are older than most of our grandparents, but no-one went to the cinemas expecting King Lear, or even King Leonardo and His Short Subjects. By contemporary standards, it was a little short of leavening gags to keep adults awake.

(There was just one that I liked. A harried MC type, hosting the big climactic talent show remarks that there’s a lot of acts on, and we have to get through them in a hurry “because the heating goes off at ten”. I laughed solo in the cinema at that one.)

I mean, it was pap, and the music was fairly grisly. But then most of the actual chart music of right now, other than the voices being at normal speed and the concept of “booty” being mentioned rather more frequently, is pretty much identical to the oeuvre of the Chipmunks and the Chipettes. And just about every movie I mentioned elsewhere here is pap, only this one more or less did what it set out to do, and completed the task in under 90 minutes. My nine-year-old niece thought it was just peachy. I didn’t have to keep asking her, in a whiny voice, “Is it over? Can we go yet?” I guess that’s a win-win. I just couldn’t recommend it that strongly to anyone over nine years of age.

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Official ratings on the LeapsterMovie “Ours is one better”, out-of-eleven MPHOAH scale:

Scream 2 - 6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH (docked 0.5 for multiple idiotic endings)

Saw IV - 5 out of 11

The Dark Knight - 6 out of 11 (If they ever cut an hour out of it, I’d give it a solid 6.5)

A Night at the Museum 2 – 5.5 out of 11 (would have been about 3.5 without Hank Azaria and the effects)

Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel – 5.5 out of 11

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