Film: Armond White
Layer Cake
Unleashed
Directed by Louis Leterrier
The term "summer movies" insidiously replaces the term "genre movies." It lets ticket buyers forget that movies-genres-have a specific function. Genres are recognizable through familiar characters, locations and situations that are utilized to explain the world and reveal our natures. The term "summer movies" distracts us from seeking such enlightenment; its casual acceptance proves film culture has not only shifted gears, but plummeted. I'll only use it in disdain-as when posing the wretched "summer movie" Layer Cake against the superb genre movie Unleashed. And as more cravenly calculated summer releases approach, this distinction becomes especially important.
Both movies show United Kingdom gangsters aping the ruthlessness of American gangster-movie prototypes. In Layer Cake, Daniel Craig (whom Keith Gardner calls "the guy who looks like he was punched in the face") plays XXXX, a wannabe dapper cocaine dealer slipping in and out of the life. X4 is a cipher who mostly observes his colleagues' mischief. Not representing the class struggle that linked both Hawks and DePalma's Scarface, he's simply amoral. In Unleashed, Jet Li plays quiet, morose Danny, a disoriented, lonely child-man used by tough-guy extorionist Bart (Bob Hoskins) to attack his opponents who don't pay up. Danny the Dog epitomizes the degradation that has infected recent gangster films. Beautiful thing is, he's not a stylish misanthrope addicted to cool, but a quietly aching soul.
While Layer Cake's director Matthew Vaughn reduces gangster patterns to hipster routines, Unleashed simplifies gangster attitudes to their moral essence. Vaughn was producer on Guy Ritchie's moronic Tarantino rip-offs Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He lacks Richie's damnable verve that makes the various mutilations merely ugly. (One thug is killed by having a clothes iron pressed against his chest "until his heart boils"; even X4's face gets smashed into a tub of frozen fish.) Layer Cake's title mocks Vaughn's delectation for the grotesque. His insensitivity to violence suggests he is unfamiliar with it in real life.
Surprisingly, the violence in Unleashed demonstrates producer Luc Besson's pop ambivalence and moral revulsion. With Jet Li exhibiting unexpected ferocity-when Danny attacks he is unstoppable, remorseless-both star and producer reassess the action genre. Unleashed isn't shockingly violent, but shockingly sensitive. It opened the same week as Layer Cake, yet reviewers seemed bored by the feeling in Unleashed. They didn't understand why it lacked that "summer movie" callousness, or that Li and Besson (who wrote the script) not only restored emotion to the gangster film, but revived its egalitarian American spirit.
There's a better sense of moral dilemma here than in Layer Cake (or even Revenge of the Sith), because Danny's dilemma concerns his dehumanized state, his need to turn away from the dark side. Vaughn, however, is doing the 39th, deracinated version of Get Carter. Besson and Li illustrate the gangster film as a genre about thwarted and misguided human struggle. Danny, bound by a high-tech collar around his neck, appears less than human. Waiting for his master Bart to release him from his dungeon-cell and sic him on living targets, Danny suffers. Unlike X4, he remembers a previous, better life. Besson and Li risk seeming sentimental and unhip, but here's where they show up Layer Cake-and the "summer movie" tendency toward jaded brutality-as affected and desiccated. They allow the genre conventions to open a world of lyrical, familial possibility.
In the character of a blind piano tuner (Sam, played by Morgan Freeman) who helps Danny reverse his brainwashing, Besson finds a larger context for this genre exercise. Because Danny's indentured beastliness unmistakably evokes slavery (and the errant machismo urban audiences learn from movies), it takes a presence as solid as Freeman's to counterbalance it. Yes, there's a powerful black actor in Layer Cake (George Harris as Morty, who gets to administer a prolonged and ruthless ass-kicking to a weaker rival), but that's bullshit QT "equality." Freeman has attained a human surety and solidity that is ethnic-and more. He speaks to Danny in a voice that is convincing, reassuring, made for a lullaby-which is exactly how a good genre movie should feel. (Yet Sam's not sanctimonious; one of his best lines sizes up a bad guy: "That man can talk some serious shit.") Layer Cake's pell-mell viciousness overrides the miracle of genre movies: When ingeniously and efficiently told, they become mythic versions of the audience's experience.
Unleashed explores the quintessence of liberation through the humane example Sam represents. One reviewer extolled Sam, misguidedly enthusing about "the power of stereotypes," but Unleashed, unlike Layer Cake, is distinguished for transcending stereotypes. When Freeman's voice hits its baritone register, he elevates the film from its violent, action-movie premise into a compassionate story about the values human beings share. "Pianos are a lot like people. You pound on a person, they get out of tune," Sam says. "Music has to flow from within. Can't flow if you're all stiff." Perfect advice for Jet Li who, since Hero, has pursued more substantive kung-fu roles. Danny's temper is as heartbreakingly abused as Conrad Veidt's in The Man Who Smiles. This is Li's richest, most meaningful emotional display. Forced to perform in a gladiatorial/snuff spectacle, Danny, the trammeled-on artist, 2protests "NO MORE KILLING!"
Both Li and Freeman escape stereotype because Unleashed does more than spin a yarn. Layer Cake uses X4 and the gangster genre as an occasion to exhibit sadism, but Danny's story in Unleashed maximizes the efficacy of genre filmmaking. Examining Danny's fear of free will, it expunges compulsive violence and dehumanized conditioning-a tragedy that addresses summertime's perversion of genre movies. Besson, once a hack, knows better. He imparts his genre mastery to Unleashed's proficient director Louis Leterrier (whose entertaining debut The Transformer should provide his nickname). Besson ensures that Unleashed is as superior to Layer Cake as his Joan of Arc film The Messenger is superior to Ridley Scott's pre-summer genre catastrophe Kingdom of Heaven. Unleashed's plot worthily reworks Sam Fuller's classic B-movie White Dog. Danny's flashback to childhood, crawling at his concert-musician mother's feet, under her piano where a metronome tick-tocks the past and future, is Fullerian-uncannily touching. Besson, a Frenchman using the international language of genre movies, can't help giving his gangster film a Proustian frisson. Layer Cake is crummy but Besson's variation on the gangster film makes Unleashed the best pure genre movie in a long time.
John Boorman's Point Blank, the greatest of all color noirs, finally comes out on Warner DVD this summer. Boorman's classic mingling of Nouvelle Vague estheticism with genre movie existentialism still resonates. Lee Marvin's gnomic protagonist is bowdlerized in Layer Cake, but Jet Li's Unleashed underdog does Marvin's Walker proud. Besson extracted the melody from Boorman's cinematic symphony; he and Li keep faith with Boorman's understanding of the soulful yearning that exists within noir's violent confusion. Seeing Point Blank again, in a vivid new transfer, should rectify the past decade of neo-noir slovenliness. It's classic proof that style is substance.
Sam Peckinpah's 1972 film The Getaway is part of Warner's Steve McQueen box set, more proof of the splendor that genre movies can provide when plot conventions give rise to indelible psycho-sexual imagery. While in some ways a minor Peckinpah film, The Getaway has visual excitement from cinematographer Lucien Ballard. It is lean, lyrical-and visceral. Only Walter Hill (who wrote the screenplay) commands this mix of grandeur and efficiency. Peckinpah's cops-and-robbers imagery (sympathizing with the disenfranchised) is essentially a macho hallucination. But the depictions of threat and destruction echo strongly in the memory like the ricochet repeat of the astonishing, climactic hotel shoot-out.
Without doubt, the most anticipated Summer release will be La Guerra del Todos Mundos by Estaban Digamont. No one expects American filmmakers to be capable of making genre movies that also deal with urgent political topics. It's customary to accept political themes from foreign filmmakers whom we don't associate with big-budget studio extravaganzas. If you've seen the trailers for La Guerra del Todos Mundos in theaters (or on tv), you know that its power will only be denied by the blind or the willfully mean-spirited. Catch the terrifying image of contemporary destruction intercut with Common Man (and Everychild) awe. It's a B-movie trope, but it reimagines the world-unifying moment of this millennium as a haunting pop myth. This summer, expect Digamont to confirm the power of genre movies. -A. W.