Steven Spielberg: Munich

An act of American obliviousness sets in motion the events of Munich. At the 1972 Olympics, a group of American athletes stumble across some Palestinian men attempting to get past a gate. Used to the sight of small bands of men from different countries roaming the area, the Americans jovially call out to them and ask what event they're in. Blind to the tense, apprehensive faces of the men, the athletes show them in and depart on friendly terms. But before the Americans are even out of range, the group is already pulling out new clothes and weapons to storm the hotel room holding the Israeli Olympic team. They do, and everything else plays out on the actual newscasts recorded over the next 18 hours. It ends, of course, with Jim McKay's infamous declaration, "They're all gone."

But despite the film's title, Munich does not end with the conclusion of its heinous massacre; it's only just begun. In fact, Munich may not even be about the aftermath of the killings in the titular city. Released in proximity with the 9/11-conjuring fever dream War of the Worlds, Munich serves as the more thoughtful, severe follow-up to the notion of a terrorist attack and society's response to it. Spielberg's reenactments of news crews frantically assembling outside the hotel, scrambling for any new updates as their presence only worsens the situation, is as indicative of Spielberg's true aims as the final shot showing the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still standing in the middle of the frame. Munich may be about a specific event and the fallout from it, but the director clearly wants us to apply the lessons the movie teaches to more current issues of terrorism and counterterrorism.

If War of the Worlds captured the pandemonium of a shock attack, Munich details the ways that both sides react to an act of aggression. Spielberg lays the groundwork early by showing Israelis and Arabs watching the archival news footage plays on TVs. Wails of agony greet each new report, with Arabs mourning the news of authorities killing the Palestinian radicals and Israelis weeping over that horrible, final update. The grief and rage of those watching is palpable, and before anyone has time to speak any lines of outrage and agony, the director establishes a bedrock of righteous fury on both sides of the Israel/Palestine divide that ensures no peace will come of this atrocity.

Indeed, Spielberg soon depicts the plotting of vengeance by the Israeli government. As newscasters read the names of the dead athletes with grave sympathy, Spielberg intercuts shots of Israeli agents making a list of their own, rattling off names of those suspected of orchestrating the attacks. Prime Minister Golda Meir looks at the assembled photographs and tells her advisers "Forget peace for now." Blood must pay for blood.

Meir and her top advisers devise a plan to eliminate 11 targets supposedly linked to the attacks, matching the number of slain Israeli athletes. To lead this mission, they bring in Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), Meir's former bodyguard and a member of Mossad. His handler, Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), calmly lays out the unbelievably dangerous task for the man and assigns his team, gently but firmly shoving the man—who appears to care about his expecting wife more than the massacre—into participation.

But the plan betrays warped logic from the start. On face value, the Israelis have the moral high ground in their outrage, but they soon discover that their plot to fight terrorism with terrorism is, surprise surprise, as illegal as regular ol' terrorism. Already strong-armed into the mission, Avner is then made to resign from Mossad and sever all official ties with Israel; they even strip him of his pension so that he no longer exists in any payroll. If Israel sees Operation Wrath of God as justice, why must they conduct it clandestinely?

Further delving into the sinister politics surrounding the mission, Avner quickly learns that his heritage played as big a role as anything in his selection. Though he cannot officially take credit for the mission, Avner's status as a "sabra," a natural-born Israeli citizen, is instrumental in his placement at the head of the team. The government may not be able to claim him, but it will want the Arabs to know that a true son of Israel is after them. But before Avner recognizes this, he first interacts with a Ukranian-born Israeli in charge of supplying the team with cash. (I would call him a quartermaster, but the man behaves more like an usurer.) Despite the man's status as a naturalized citizen, he talks down to the sabra, calling him a "Yekke" because of his family's German lineage. The government knows of his family's roots in Europe, of course; that is as much a reason they chose him as his being a sabra. Yet in this moment, Spielberg shows a dark reversal in ethnic distrust. Germans with even the faintest traces of "Jew blood" in their family trees were arrested under Hitler, and now Jews with traces of German in them are mistrusted by other Israelis. In the old man's gruff rudeness is a taste of the overriding nature of this mission: the justifiable anger and pain stemming from horrors committed upon Jews threatens only to turn Jews into what they hate.

Interestingly, however, the actual squad assembled for the planned assassinations lacks much of the bloodthirst of its organizing bodies. Avner looks forward to completing the mission solely so he can return to his wife. His detached professionalism is shared by Hans (Hanns Zischler), the document forger; Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), a Belgian toy-maker turned demolitions expert; and Carl (Ciarán Hinds), an ex-soldier who cleans up the assassinations. Only Steve (Daniel Craig), a South African Jew who serves as the getaway driver, displays any burning desire for revenge, spouting such platitudes as "The only blood I care about is Jewish blood." (I wonder what it says that a man from another land where the native population is forcibly kept in ghettos by a West-backed minority is the one who most ardently supports the mission). Christopher Hitchens mocked the character in passing, but I think he missed that Spielberg does too. Late in the film, Steve complains, "I'm the only one who actually wants to shoot these guys!" In measured tones, Carl responds, "Maybe that's why we don't let you do it. Your enthusiasm."

Nevertheless, the team's professionalism slowly deteriorates over the course of the film as the stress of the mission and their investment in it fluctuates. Not that it was ever particularly great: Avner takes no pleasure even in the first killing, ambushing an old Palestinian in Rome and visibly trembling as he asks the same questions repeatedly to prolong the situation before he and Robert pump him with 11 bullets. Avner celebrates shortly thereafter, but there's a perfunctory nature to his toast that suggests he's breaking out wine just because he could use a strong drink.

Things only get worse from there. Robert's explosives never seem to work properly, being either too weak or too powerful. In one case, the damn things don't work at all. The desire to minimize collateral damage and the deaths of innocents leads to a harrowing scene where the team must coordinate the bombing of a target in Paris without killing the man's wife and child. A truck obscures the car holding Robert, preventing him from seeing the man's daughter return to the hotel and pick up the rigged phone meant to kill her father. They manage to stop Robert just in time, though once the girl leaves again, they set off the explosive without compunction. It's a brief show of moral superiority to terrorists who put civilians in harm's way, but this doesn't last. A raid on Beirut leaves many bystanders dead, and the ease with which the powers that be justify the deaths erodes their supposed righteousness as the team is repulsed by the outcome.

Spielberg never lets the audience forget that what these men are doing is secretive, even seedy. The roaming camera at times feels more like that of De Palma than Spielberg, moving outward from targets to spot all of the voyeurs watching over them as each assassinated is orchestrated. Furthermore, the director's love of bright backlighting has never been more thematically telling, casting the team in deep shadows that offers visual obscuration to match the deliberately vague sketching of the characters. A point of criticism among the film's detractors, the forgettability of the team allows Spielberg to more easily present these pro-Israeli fighters alongside the Palestinians with whom they come into contact. When Robert poses as a journalist to set up the aforementioned phone bomb in Paris, he jots down the idealistic screed of the man's rant, which doesn't sound that much different from some of the more bullish speeches of the other side. Robert is only incensed by the talk, but the distance left between him and the viewer permits the audience to rise above the relativistic outrage on both sides to see how similar they really are.

Later in the film, Avner even gets to have a conversation with a PLO member when the team poses as leftist radicals to avoid a firefight with the Palestinians hiding in the same apartment complex in Athens. Their chat is somewhat contentious, with Avner boldly arguing for the validity of a Jewish state and nearly blowing his cover, yet the two ultimately have a revealing exchange of beliefs. Avner, who amusingly calls himself "the voice in the back of [the man's] head," asks if all the bloodshed is worth the scarce patch of desert these fighters have only heard about from their forebears. The question is deeply ironic, given the risks Avner and his team take for the same bit of land, and Ali firmly points this out. He says the Palestinians will remain in their camps and continue to fight until the world stops ignoring them, even if it takes generations. "How long did it take the Jews to get their own country?" he asks Avner, whose response is snappy but deflated, mournfully aware of what this will mean for the prospect of peace in his lifetime. For a brief moment, the two sides frankly admit their implacable stances in terms that are human and sympathetic, not warlike and self-justifying.

It's a tiny, all-too-quickly forgotten breakthrough in an exchange that has been going on since the start of the team's actions. When pro-Palestinian forces begin to respond to the squad's killings with more terrorism of their own, Hans rightly deduces, "We're in dialogue now." Contrary to the views of those who consider Munich a lazy equation of Israeli and Palestinian actions, Spielberg routinely stresses the disproportion of each response to emphasis the overall meaninglessness of this terrorism/counterterrorism conflict. The initial selection of exactly 11 targets to correlate to the number of Israelis killed soon becomes a farcical stab at 1:1 "justice" that falls apart when the assassinated targets are replaced by others who will eventually need taking out as well. And even if they stick to the original 11, the bloodshed won't end there. Hans laments after a few months of work that the team has only managed to kill seven targets (one of whom wasn't on the original list) while their own actions have prompted bombs and hijackings that left hundreds dead. Spielberg isn't trying to cast both sides as equally bad, merely asking whether a sense of moral superiority is worth the endless killing.

That he cannot see any end to this conflict makes Munich one of Spielberg's darkest films, second perhaps only to the epic antihumanism of A.I. So twisted is the film that one of its most chilling, hopeless moments is also one of its most aesthetically tranquil. Following his seedy French informant, Louis (Mathieu Amalric), to his family estate in the French countryside, Avner falls into conversation with Louis' father (Michael Lonsdale).

Papa is a fascinating character, a man who's made millions off of selling information in various conflicts and has picked up a hatred for governments because of it. Crystallizing the film's point about the waste of nationalistic fury and righteous wars, Papa mentions fighting in the resistance to overthrow Vichy and the Nazis, only to be greeted by Gaullists and the double-whammy of the Soviet Union and America. He then criticizes his pompous, fashionably Marxist children for dressing like factory workers without doing labor of their own or supporting Algeria but not truly caring for anyone in that nation. These lines wouldn't be out of place in a Godard film, with is ironic given that the French auteur has more or less cast Spielberg as the bogeyman for everything wrong with American cultural output (and, by extension, America as a whole). With this scene, Spielberg expands outward beyond merely the Israel-Palestine turbulence, deepening the feeling of disgust with armed conflict

Though when it comes to pitch-black despair, nothing compares to the murder of a Dutch assassin to avenge her killing of Carl. Throughout the film, Avner and the others have occasionally broached the subject of being sent to kill people not directly tied to the Munich massacre. At first, Avner places his trust in the government that passed him these names, but his mounting doubts nag at him as the film wears on. The assassin, however, must die solely because she has wronged these individuals. When they track her down to a houseboat, the men kill her horribly, using zip guns to put two holes in her chest and throat as she strips to tempt them. This scene is straightforward in the script, with the action over in a flash and the grim coda not much longer than that. But Spielberg draws it out, not having the woman die quickly but instead stumbling around, wheezing through the hole in her jugular vein as black blood spurts out with each thin hiss. And when Hans puts one final round into her skull, he refuses to let Avner close her open housedress, leaving her naked and blood-soaked as they depart. This moment plunges the film into almost nihilistic horror, severing whatever thin ties still held these men to feelings of moral justification and precipitating the downfall of the team. It's bleak, harrowing stuff, miring the film in a complexity that ranks the film among the director's most important works.

The only hiccup I can think of lies in the vague presentation of Avner's connection to the mission. He is constantly having visions of the Munich attack (which he did not witness and which was not captured on television), though he never seems to be particularly enraged by the Palestinian attack. Thus, he must be occasionally reminded of it via those odd interspersions of the massacre reenactment footage. It almost serves as a metatextual dose of Jewish guilt, prodding Avner into caring about his nation's wounded pride and murdered sons even as he displays a clear disdain for the thought of vengefully killing the sons of other countries from the start. But Spielberg's is a cinema of scrutinizing the faces of his characters, not what they see. He has a gift for infusing an objective frame with the subjective emotions conjured by those images, less so for diving into a character's headspace the way that a Scorsese or De Palma can. Todd McCarthy made a valid point when he said the film needed to implicate the audience in the assassin squad's actions, though I think his criticism applies best to these scenes, not the masterful detachment of the more objective action.

Consider the climax of these taunting visions of Munich, in which images of the tarmac shootout are intercut with Avner making angry, distant love to his wife. The implication is obvious: thoughts of his mission and its fallout have corrupted the last bastion of love and solace Avner had. He's wanted to return to his wife and child for so long, but the horror came home with him. But the already clichéd use of mashed up sex and violence would have been more potent for actually including images of the team's actions, not Black September's. As it is, Avner is "haunted" by an event he did not witness, and the blame is inadvertently cast on the Palestinians for starting all this when, as the rest of the movie bears out, it's Israel's response that tears the man apart. The sex scene is surrounded by scenes of Avner in abject terror of Mossad coming for him, and the use of the Munich footage lacks the power of what bookends it.

But perhaps the final-act paranoia explains this artistic choice. Everything finally collapses near the end, with Avner left so ragged by his experiences that maybe he does at last dwell on Munich, wishing it undone if for no other reason that it might have spared him the torment, not the athletes. The righteous speechifying of both sides previously demonstrated how revenge and plotted murder gnarls one's national mindset, but Avner's complete breakdown examines the more intimate effects of such policies. Furthermore, Avner's initial detachment from the mission, his view of the assignment as just that, makes his spiral all the more tragic. This is not a man undone by his own bloodlust but that of others, forced onto him until he snaps under the strain of someone else's rage. In that context, the repeated use of the Munich footage actually works, again as a visualization of a nationalistic form of Jewish guilt that strips him of his own humanity in service of a meaningless revenge scheme.

This is made more personable by a scene with Avner and his mother, who naturally plays the role of the guilt-inducing Jewish matriarch. Aware that her son is traumatized by what he's done, she makes vague references to her experiences in the Holocaust and of losing her family. She does not even have to refer to the Shoah by name for Avner to suddenly avert his eyes in shame and inherited grief. This scene precedes the cut-up sex scene with Avner and his wife, yet it perhaps holds the key to what follows. If Avner uncomfortably shifts at the slightest reminder of the Holocaust, suddenly the use of the Munich massacre in his headspace is not so bad. Spielberg could have inserted frames from Schindler's List in-between the couple making love, and the effect would be the same. A distraught Avner almost tearfully asks his mother if she wants to know what he's done, and she instantly responds, "Whatever it took." Then, she continues, almost oblivious of her own son: "Whatever it takes. A place on Earth. We have a place on Earth at last." In her stubborn oblivion is the face of Israeli insanity, the centuries of Jewish persecution having warped an entire people into single-minded focus. There is sympathy in Spielberg's treatment of this madness, but he recognizes it as madness, nonetheless.

Where Saving Private Ryan found childish nobility in suicide missions, Munich argues for more peaceful solutions. There is an understanding in Munich of the futility of conflict, and not just in the modern context of wars without clear borders. Recall Louis' father speaking of trading one dangerous power for others. For every terrorist Avner and his team kill—if they are even terrorists—another enemy shall replace him, and on it goes in perpetuity so long as each new terrorist is given a fresh reason to hate Israel and in turn gives the other side new reasons to plot the next round of strikes. Nothing hammers this home like the aforementioned final shot, settling on the World Trade Center in a grim reminder that the efforts of Avner et al. to rid the world of terrorists did little to stop the tide of violent, attention-grabbing atrocities. In that shot is also a warning to Americans of the folly to which they are committing themselves by demanding vengeance for the fall of those towers. Six years after the film's release, it would seem as if we still haven't listened to its message.

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Watching Green Lantern in 3D is like watching a glowstick through sunglasses, the already unimpressive neon goop dimmed to a murky hum of sickly light. Its dulled visual scheme matches the narrative, a story about a man chosen for the highest honor in the universe that has all the excitement of finding out one has been selected to be a Nielsen family. In fairness, this movie is not as bad as the increasingly increasingly garish X-Men: First Class, which is aging in my short-term memory like milk left out in a hot sun. Green Lantern at least lacks the pomposity and waste of recent blockbusters, but it makes up for this "shortcoming" with a stupefying lack of creativity, in a film about a hero whose power is his imagination.

The first sign of the dearth of ideas is the hero himself. The Hal Jordan of the comics, a conservative, stoic pilot without fear, is replaced with a smarmy jackass played with much-practiced knowing by Ryan Reynolds. Jordan here is nothing more than Tom Cruise's character from Top Gun, to the point that, after he becomes the titular hero and inevitably saves the day, I expected Hal to buzz the giant lantern core on the planet Oa, making the gruff drill sergeant Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan, because of course he is) spill his galactic coffee all over himself in surprise and rage. But, if wishes were horses...

Green, as we are told, is the color of willpower. But it is also the color of envy, and one doesn't need 3D glasses to see DC's intent to rip off Marvel's approach to their film franchises leap off the screen. I admit to being no expert on Hal Jordan, but even a cursory look into the character reveals an overhaul to slip into Marvel's winning formula. Hal's turn to asshattery aligns him with the wisecracking Tony Stark, while his constant hand-wringing over responsibility ties him to the self-doubting Peter Parker. The decision to make the fear parasite Parallax into a giant space cloud recalls the similarly baffling treatment of Galactus. And like Thor, it introduces an expansive, intergalactic sandbox, only to spend all its time in a banal conceptualization of Earth.

The only thing Green Lantern has to distinguish itself is its loud color palette, all bright greens and yellows with splashes of magenta and fuchsia for Sinestro and Abin Sur. But of course the 3D shaves off the candy coating for the sake of a handful of scenes with any artificial depth. Martin Campbell, a more than competent action director responsible for two of the finest and most exciting Bond movies, Goldeneye and Casino Royale, cannot find the same thrill in the lava-lamp CGI of Green Lantern's hokey powers (really? A Hot Wheels track to stop an out-of control helicopter?) and the all-too-brief forays into space where the film might have worked.

Relegated mostly to Earth, Campbell has to tread through a perfunctory romance with no-nonsense/well-maybe-some-nonsense pilot/businesswoman Carol (Blake Lively) and hysterically tacked-on daddy issues for the hero and undercooked villain Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard). I had to struggle not to laugh aloud at a particularly inappropriate time at the end of Hal's early flashbacks, a predictable and clumsily handled bit of tragedy to weigh upon Hal's shoulders as an attempt to explain away his incessant waffling.

The only true pleasures Green Lantern has to offer are the things it isn't: it isn't overlong like so many bloated franchise starters of late, coming in a good 20 minutes under two hours if you leave when the credits start (and who the hell will want to stay?). It is not self-serious, unlike, say, the "Born This Way" moralism of X-Men. But nothing that actually makes its way into the frame is of much use. The film tries to Marvelize Hal Jordan, but in the end he simply leaps from fool to fearless warrior without progression. But then, origin stories these days always fail to adequately build their franchises, and if Green Lantern is going to skip anything involving character growth and plot development, at least it truncates the running length to send us on our way sooner.

I'm almost impressed that a film this dull can avoid feeling longer than it is. But for the love of God, when is someone going to make one of these epic films with even a hint of wonder? They're superheroes, for the love of Pete; awe is what they do best. But there isn't a single moment of Green Lantern that attempts to capture the overwhelming feeling of being thrust into something unfathomably vast, and I remain ever-unsettled by Hollywood's ability to rob the universe of its grandeur. DC heroes typically lack the psychological depth of their Marvel counterparts, but an insightful film could have been made about Hal's stubbornness and two-dimensional commitment to duty. In trying to ape Marvel, Campbell and the DC team overseeing him have ironically only simplified this character further.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall, 2011)

There's no point in even trying to write a pan for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, not after Ali Arikan used his walk-out as an excuse to vent his splenetic fury on the society that would allow it to happen. I sympathize with objections to the piece that cite its lack of hard facts, but then the article openly states it is not a review (and couldn't be, since he walked out) and reads more like an account of the proverbial last straw. Those raising hell over his piece, however, must not have seen the movie, because even if Arikan wanted to discuss the film, I don't see how he could. The fourth installment of this bloated, long-since tired franchise barely qualifies as a movie. In a literal sense, of course, its production value is enormous, worth some $150-250 million depending on the estimate (and that's not even counting the marketing, which has been so overwhelming and seemingly endless I begin to wonder if ads for the movie came with the first pressing of the Gutenberg Bible). Artistically, however, Rob Marshall's insipid, scattershot behemoth is nothing more than a ludicrously expensive cash-in and a woefully safe bet on the presumption that Americans will never ask for anything better.

Through its own ineptitude and transparent avarice, On Stranger Tides ultimately condescends so thoroughly to its audience it's all the more troubling and saddening that so many will cheer it. Marshall, one of the least talented directors to be a star director in Hollywood, pieces together such a disjunctive movie it betrays its apathy on the assumption that the people who see it will be too attention-deficit to care about scenes simply starting and stopping without care for flow or continuity. What am I saying? You need a story to be able to adhere to it.

Picking up where the finale of At World's End left off, On Stranger Tides shows Capt. Jack Sparrow searching for the Fountain of Youth, though why anyone blessed with the perennially young face of Johnny Depp would risk his life for a few more years of looks is something of a mystery. Without his compatriots from the previous films—save the boozy proselytizer Gibbs—Jack simply exists for his own gain, lacking the foils that bring out his humanity. This may only be more true when an old flame, Angelica (Penélope Cruz), enters the film recruiting sailors for her father, Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Yeah, that one.

Jack Sparrow's greatest asset and greatest weakness as a character has always been a moral ambiguity that actually simplifies rather than complicates him. He will act according to his own selfish desire, even in cases that he aids others. The morality of the Pirates films always fell to Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, whose dealings with Jack managed to complicate and enhance them even as the dear captain remained his two-dimensional self, if he did not in fact become even more of a caricature. The palpable friction he had with Keira Knightley gives way to empty scenes of innuendo between Depp and Cruz, neither of whom has ever seemed less sexy. Cruz is there to be eye candy and knows it, and the look of boredom on her face throughout suggests that even the person who speaks English as a second language found the writing to be stilted and obvious. For the majority of the film, On Stranger Tides has no one to represent an actual human being with motivation and purpose, and when the person with an actual stake in the fight against Blackbeard is revealed, it's the one character more solidified in his simplistic franchise role than Sparrow.

Thus, the film immediately breaks apart, splintering into vignettes by a director known for his musical work. Marshall even has the audacity to frame some sequences as if bits in a musical, including an obvious interlude between Jack and Angelica on the deck of Blackbeard's ship with Stephen Graham in the background playing Spanish guitar. But Marshall could never even find a line of consistency for his musicals, leaving this swashbuckling epic high and dry from the start.

The musical-esque excesses extend to the acting and dialogue of the film, which is so broad that the rousing wit of the first Pirates cannot be seen for the loud punchlines and hammy acting. With Depp on autopilot, Geoffrey Rush hobbles up with a fresh wooden leg to teeter and preen his way through Barbossa's new gig as a privateer hired by the Crown to essentially perform his old job for the state. To offset Rush's dip into absurdity, he gets placed with ludicrous cutouts, most notably Richard Griffiths' borderline obscene take on King George II, in which every line is so over-pronounced that he bypasses parody for travesty. Sam Claffin plays a missionary held captive on Blackbeard's ship, where he constantly tries to entreat the good within the supernaturally evil pirate and even falls in love with a dangerous mermaid—an almost hilarious attempt to put romance back into the film by finding some garish midpoint between Will and Elizabeth's relationship and that of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (A sexy missionary! A beast from the lowest pit! Can it work?!). Taken with the highly Catholic Spanish fleet also in pursuit of the Fountain of Youth only so more bodies can be added to the climactic showdown, the missionary's constant, perfunctory invocation of his faith marked one of the few times I have ever felt sorry for God.

On Stranger Tides is the fifth Disney film to use 7.1 surround sound, and the mixers appear to have used this setup to make the dialogue as stacked and incomprehensible as possible. Everyone's so busy being manic and loud that lines disappear in deafening roars of mass hackdom, which is actually a blessing when the film quiets down just enough for you to hear a line or two. These moments are infrequent, as Hans Zimmer's crashing, reckless score cascades over the entire film, making even the less action-packed moments so bombastic I left the theater with ringing ears.

And woe betide those who see this movie in 3D. Marshall filmed a great many sequences at night or in dimly lit areas, making even the 2D print so murky that large action sequences can be glimpsed in only a few of the fractals of Marshall's hectic, sloppy editing. I would have thought Marshall might have been able to pull off at least something approximating a good sword fight: it's all choreography, after all, and that's how Marshall got his start in show business. I wonder how he'd feel if someone came in and spasmodically jerked around the intricate moves he'd worked out with performers. The final fight between British privateers, the royal Spanish fleet and Blackbeard's crew is so messy, stiff and pointless that even Jack Sparrow calls attention to the ridiculousness of it, only to be drowned out like the peppered voices of sanity in the audience of this film who will find themselves overwhelmed by the bewildering support shown to it by masses who ignore the nagging sense of logic tugging at them in order to see a fight, any fight, no matter how meaningless.

As ever, On Stranger Tides will benefit from an audience without passion or care who will nevertheless defend it as if they made it so they can justify to themselves a total lack of standards. When I read Arikan's piece for Slant, I keyed in on his anguish and zeal over the state of Hollywood fluff and how people, even those supposedly arch critics, will forgive a bad, stupid, insulting film because it came out between the months of May and August and cost a lot of money. Nothing in this film feels complete; nothing in this film even has a spark of inspiration. There aren't even inventive setpieces; as bad as Dead Man's Chest and At World's End were, at least Gore Verbinski used his budgets to try out some wild sequences to offset his writer's scripts. Now he's off making a unique, imaginative film like Rango while everyone here lines up for another go in the slop trough. When Jack proudly shows the map to the Fountain of Youth at the start, Depp may as well have unfurled the paycheck he received for this movie. That's all anyone here seems to care about, anyway. So why will people once again absolve it with that most useless of benedictions, "It does what it says on the tin?" It doesn't: rewatching the first Pirates film for the dozenth time will offer more fresh, unexpected moments than this predictable farce.

If there is any bright side to On Stranger Tides, it's that Rob Marshall is only desecrating a franchise already worn down by its desperate attempts to outdo itself in convolution and tedium rather than ruining something potentially worth seeing. His take on Memoirs of a Geisha was nearly as inflated and obvious as this, but it tore down a gentle, nuanced story in the process. Giving a hack hundreds of millions of dollars piddle away this wanton incompetence with a murky, haphazard piece of tripe, though, does not exactly seem a step in the right direction. Besides, I hear he's returning to dramatic fare soon. So scratch that; everyone loses.

The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.