Stone Age Storytelling
10,000 B.C.
(PG-13)
originally published March 12, 2008
Steven Strait and Camilla Belle
10,000 B.C., Independence Day director Roland Emmerich’s latest quasi-epic (he also unleashed global environmental disaster in The Day After Tomorrow), impresses in so many unimpressive ways. The action flick isn’t epic enough to overcome its grievous historical inaccuracies, nor is it cheesy enough to defeat a complete lack of entertainment. These feats are pretty impressive, considering a mammoth budget used to create a grand lost world of wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and pyramids. IMDB’s message boards are ablaze with arguments about the necessity of historical accuracy in what amounts to a popcorn movie. 10,000 B.C. isn’t a documentary, but does it need to be held to even a modicum of a standard for accuracy in its depiction of our distant past? Or can we simply dismiss the wildly incongruous existence of mammoth hunters and pyramids in a movie whose title suggests their appearance some 4000 years early with the offhand universal excuse of “it’s just a movie?” As with so many queries, the answer is unsatisfyingly yes and no. Yes if 10,000 B.C. succeeded as sheer movie spectacle; no if the erroneousness interferes with the actual telling of the story.
In the world of 10,000 B.C., an Ice Age is ending and the herds of wooly mammoths that sustain the Yagahl tribe, populated by studly young hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait of the unwatched Undiscovered) and blue-eyed hottie Evolet (Camilla Belle, When a Stranger Calls), are migrating less and less often. After what may be the last annual hunt - a disappointing CGI affair during which everything appears to have been greenscreened - a mysterious band of “four-legged demons” attack, making off with young Evolet, and thus, sparking D’Leh’s inner heroic fire. Marching hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles through mountains, tropical jungles and deserts, D’Leh and his band of hunters pick up other conquered tribes, all apparently African, on the way to a river-based proto-civilization led by a god. The greatest flaw of 10,000 B.C. may be in its geography. The trailers imply D’Leh’s tribe resides in present-day North America, yet they somehow find their way to central Africa before winding up near a river one can only guess to represent the Nile, or the Tigris, or Euphrates. I could suspend my disbelief to allow for the general abuse of time (10,000 B.C. isn’t a guarantee but a catchy round number), but the lack of any geographical cohesion troubled me to no end. Without an engaging story or characters to cling to, 10,000 B.C. left me with far too much time to struggle, and fail, to make a whole out of the ill-fitting pieces of this shattered lost world.
No Prison Sentence
The Bank Job
(R)
originally published March 12, 2008
Jason Statham
The Bank Job, based on the infamous 1971 robbery of a London bank, doesn’t stray far from the heist movie formula, yet the film milks that staid old M.O. for all it’s excitingly worth and then some. Is it the knowledge that if all these events really took place as they are depicted, then they couldn’t have been scripted better? Could it be that the heist itself is almost secondary to the intricate web of corruption and lies upon which it is precariously suspended? Who cares with a film this good? In need of money to pay off an outstanding debt, shady car dealer Terry Leather (Jason Statham) is all ears when a pretty figure from his past, model Martine (Saffron Burrows), offers him “too good to be true” inside information about the Lloyds Bank located on London’s Baker Street. Too bad Terry doesn’t know the whole scheme is a put-on concocted by MI5 or 6 (the characters in the film are as unsure as I am about which is which) to recover scandalous photos of a royal princess from a Black Power abusing thug monikered Michael X (Peter De Jersey). Terry might be even better off if he knew that one of the safety deposit boxes he was about to rob also belonged to porn mogul, Lew Vogel (David Suchet), while another contained incriminating photos of some of England’s top civil servants. Amateur thieves at best, poor Terry and his boyhood chums, Kevin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Dave (Daniel Mays), soon find themselves swimming with professional sharks.
The Bank Job relies on its actor’s anonymity to achieve the degree of realism required to make this true-life tale believable. Star Statham is about the only familiar face, and he isn’t a household name outside of homes in which C-list action-cum-martial arts flicks don’t run 24/7, which is exactly why he needs a movie like The Bank Job. The classy nature of the film (despite its rather smutty dealings) is a boon for Statham, who burst onto the crime movie scene with Guy Ritchie’s arty gangster flick, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, before the minor hit, The Transporter, started a one-sided competition with an over-the-hill Jean Claude Van Damme for European martial arts supremacy. Statham’s got a certain charisma lurking beneath his Neanderthalish brow that is better suited for smart, modish fare like The Bank Job than trashy flicks like Crank and WAR. Convoluted, suspenseful, and fun, The Bank Job ranks right up there on the shortlist of 2008’s great films as well as the long list of all-time great heist movies.
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