On Screen

...Humans have become a society of ignorant slaves, and the imprisoned Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) resolves to defeat Terl (Travolta), the chief Psychlo...

...I grant that Maximus, perhaps the biggest pill in action film history, has reason to brood...

...Besides Gone, each of the films mentioned offers a simplistic variation on the Jesus story...

...Mission: Impossible 2 is incoherent...

...Animation fans fare much better with auteurs like John Lasseter, whose Toy Story series has relied exclusively on vibrantly colorful computer generated effects, andNick Park, creator of the Wallace and Gromit series and of Chicken Run, who eschews computer graphics altogether and works only with stop-motion photography...

...But those scenes are almost completely devoid of tension...

...but it might more appropriately have been, "Sulk and the World Sulks with You...

...Regardless of how dynamically a director may stage his shots, a sequence will remain flaccid unless they are edited as a unit...

...Adventure movies have long focused on bloody carnage while paying lip service to the pursuit of peace...

...Confidential and The Insider, is the perfect actor for this role...

...The film does not explore why Cage perversely relishes pilfering vehicles, but it allows him to enjoy thrills the audience is meant to feel vicariously...

...I think it is possible to detect the individual stamp of directors as commercial as Ridley Scott and John Woo...

...I have heard some people praise Woo as an ironist, but just what is he mocking...

...When Cruise's cycle takes a direct hit, it merely leaks fuel...

...Maximus is a professional killer, but despite the dignity Crowe gives him, he never thinks of self-sacrifice or noble death...

...GIVEN PRESENT digital limitations, a brighter, more complete reality might be expected from the animated movies, whose color and movement are entirely controlled by illustrators...

...Much of the film takes place outside during the day, but the light always seems refracted, hazy, as if the heavens themselves were casting a pall over the proceedings...

...its more troubling sequences were punctuated by traumatized screams from some of the smaller audience members...

...I don't agree...

...In the interim, it poses obstructions to the heroes' success which, if not as exciting as those in U-571, give us something to worry about as the characters scramble to change their plans and still meet the deadline...

...Maximus (Crowe) of Gladiator helps his fellow slaves stay alive in the ring...

...A friend of mine, a baker, believes that Americans patronize chain restaurants because they can depend upon the consistency of the cuisine...

...Gladiator features live actors, but they function in such a stylized physical world that it feels like a cartoon...

...The story line of U-571 is fairly straightforward...

...On Screen Fast Food Films By Raphael Shargel In one of the year's most reviled movies, Battlefield Earth, adapted from a novel by Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and starring Scientologist John Travolta, a race of appallingly groomed nine-foot aliens called Psychlos rules our planet...

...The meek never inherit the earth...

...In the movie, a homicidal car thief desperate to please one of his buyers forces legendary burglar Memphis Rains (Cage) out of retirement...

...are no better...

...In Titan A.E., for example, painted foregrounds that appear hand drawn are superimposed upon live or computer-generated backgrounds, again contributing to a disjunctive, muddy look...

...Dinosaur and Titan A.E...

...Some of the gloom can be attributed to technological necessity...

...Here Director Ridley Scott allows him to crack a smile only once in the movie's interminable two-and-a-half hours...

...Some of the protagonists stick up for the little guy...

...The films of John Woo, director of Mission: Impossible 2, exemplify this trend...

...their defense is reduced to a single torpedo that stubbornly refuses to fire...

...Certainly it would be silly to expect summer fluff to mirror the genre's most sophisticated films and explore that contradiction...

...We know we're in trouble from the credit sequence, when the background changes to fiery red just before the director's name appears on screen...

...He has probably won more acclaim by looking pensive than any other performer in Hollywood...

...The film, though, gives him plenty of opportunities to show his enemies the business side of his sword...

...Mission: Impossible 2 and Gladiator, by contrast, galumph along, their cameras worshiping handsome but robotic principals...

...Rains is told that if he doesn't deliver 50 cars by the end of the week, his mother and brother will be killed...

...The accomplished Crowe, brutalized by the system in L.A...

...In fact, one gets the impression that the directors of these movies have fallen so in love with the esthetics of the shootout and the car chase that they refuse to hinge them upon something so gauche as a story...

...Barry Pepper may be as clean-cut as his character's name, but Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, the respective stars of the othertwo films, are so like their bloodthirsty foes that they make one yearn for simple moral polarities...

...Although his film is slightly more absurd and excessive than Gladiator, Titan A.E...

...Creatures slash viciously at one another, push opponents off cliffs, and, in one sequence, pick the bones of the dead...

...from 20th Century Fox) embody a clash of styles...

...The summer action and adventure films that have followed register such contempt for plot that their characters occasionally blow things up for no apparent reason...

...In the film's silliest chase scene, we can infer that the villains are failing to apprehend him because they have purchased defective vehicles: Their gas tanks explode as soon as Cruise fires a bullet anywhere in their vicinity...

...Dinosaur, marketed for small children, is unconscionably brutal...

...She feels the same is true for movies: People flock to see Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson because they can count on the kind of experience they will have...

...when the bullets, and the cuts, begin to fly, it is impossible to decipher where anyone is in relation to anyone else...

...But the sexual tension and the jealousy that fueled the plot of the earlier movie are absent here: Cruise and Newton articulate and consummate their passion before they both go undercover...

...Aladar, of Dinosaur, befriends suffering stragglers left behind during a forced march to greener lands after their stomping grounds have been hit in a meteor shower...

...It moves from sequence to sequence with agonizing slowness, introducing a relatively small cast of sullen supporting players who include Richard Harris and the late Oliver Reed in his last role...

...The new digital capabilities have to a considerable extent changed that...

...His World War II submarine drama, U571, issued in the spring, is more gripping than any alleged "thrill ride" that has come out since...

...And soon Tim Robbins' prophecy in Robert Airman's The Player may be fulfilled: It could become possible to do away with writers and directors, and as computergenerated effects continue to improve, with actors as well...

...Only Gone in 60 Seconds, a trashy effort that is nevertheless refreshing in its unpretentiousness, provides some relief...

...The principle was understood by writer-director Jonathan Mostow, too...

...Park and Lasseter also understand the power of a good story...

...For the most part, this heist movie is not very different from its partners in frivolity...

...But if they are going to ignore their own hypocrisy, the people doing the fluff should at the minimum behave as if they were enjoyingthemselves...

...All of Gladiator is as morose as its hero...

...they know that even during an action sequence, an audience in the grip of suspense will be more involved than one bombarded by flashy visuals...

...The run of summer films thus far is so drab, however, so predictable, that I can't help feeling it is part of a giant conspiracy on the part of big-budget movie producers...

...U-571 draws on Alfred Hitchcock's truism that our awareness of dire obstacles in the heroes' paths is what arouses interest...

...I saw Dinosaur in a crowded kiddie matinee in the rural Midwest...

...Their objectives are simple—destroying the enemy, reaching the promised land—and relatively few complications stand in the way of pursuing them...

...Four or five sequences involving Newton—including a car chase, a scene at the racetrack, her pilfering of a computer disk from the pocket of the villain, and her beginning to succumb to a deadly virus—are lifted from Hitchcock's legendary Notorious...

...As the years go on and producers give us summer screen fare that is increasingly predictable, such customers may find themselves more andmore satisfied...

...Sets and costumed players can now be generated by computer...

...The film is such a gross mess that the Psychlos' attempts to wipe out humankind seem gratuitous: The special effects unit has beaten them to the punch...

...Must the process of creating excitement and pleasure seem so grim...

...Yet none of these narratives of revolution convincingly installs a more egalitarian society after toppling its tyrant...

...Mission: Impossible 2 is too literal to count as an homage, too listless to qualify as a spoof...

...The catch is, the new processes are cheaper and easier to use when a director opts for a drab palette...

...After his escape he discovers that his wife and son have been murdered and finds himself sold into slavery, forced to fight in tournaments...

...Fortunately for them, Angelina Jolie, a recent Oscar winner, appears as Nicholas Cage's girlfriend, and her bleached-blond, tattooed, modelthin mechanic/barmaid is so clearly the biker boy's feverish dream that the figures who surround her appear deep by comparison...

...In the early stages of Gladiator, this Roman general is disgraced and hauled off to be executed...

...sailors are forced to navigate a German submarine they have crippled through enemy territory...

...It boasts comparatively few special effects and a minimum of explosions, but it cleverly throws so many obstacles in its characters' paths that the viewer forgets they are not very well developed...

...I walked out of the theater pursued by images of Tom Cruise hanging from a cliff, Tom Cruise racing after girlfriend Thandie Newton in his car, Tom Cruise falling fromaplane, Tom Cruise turning his motorcycle around to fire at a foe...

...Mostow also teaches us something about the dangers of submersion, so that when the American captain gives the order to dive below 200 meters, we are fully aware of the risks involved...

...Unfortunately, like several recent efforts from Walt Disney Studios, both Dinosaur (a Disney product) and Titan A.E...

...But producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Dominic Sena stuff the film with supporting roles and, unlike Ridley Scott, are savvy enough to permit very talented actors like Robert Duvall and Delroy Lindo to bring a little depth to their flatly written characters...

...To his credit, he can fashion genuinely stunning tableaux...

...But they concern saviors who come with weapons to redeem the world from dictatorial oppressors...

...It features the same incomprehensible action sequences, one-dimensional characters and silly situations...

...No wonder Gone in 60 Seconds feels a lot like a breath of fresh air...

...The animated blockbusters Dinosaur and Titan A.E...

...In a market where the success of a film can be determined by advance spin and advertising, the producers seem deliberately to be muting any elements of narrative that defy convention...

...or any of the James Bond films, nothing in it suggests a parody of the genre's clichés...

...Gladiator ahistorically restores the Roman Republic following the death of mad Emperor Commodus, but leaves the fate of the new government in the hands of another megalomaniac...

...We don't have a sense that Cruise has won a battle until the dust clears and he is the only one standing...

...Even though Battlefield Earth surely deserved its critical drubbing, it is actually better than most of this summer's action and adventure movies...

...The tag line for Gladiatorreads, "A Hero Will Rise...

...For another, it clearly distinguishes between good and evil characters...

...After Earth) obliterate any opposition to their rebellious heroes, ultimately giving them total power over their followers...

...There are critics who refuse to treat popular movies as individual works, viewing them instead as interchangeable products of the culture that produces them...

...Because normal human movements are so difficult to imitate, special effects sequences are often executed in slow motion, which adds both to the air of unreality and the running time...

...As if the situation were not difficult enough, their plans are continually frustrated: German planes and destroyers spot and hail their vessel...

...Ignoring the fans of the television series it is based on, who delighted in the thick maneuvering of the espionage yarn, as well as those who loved the deliciously complicated first film, Woo spends most of his time scrawling his violent signature on our retinas...

...He assembles a crack team, but is constantly hounded by savvy cop Lindo...

...Until then, the camera is so deeply in love with Cruise that it is obvious nothing will be allowed to muss his hair, much less scratch or bruise him...

...In universes where the sole challenge to a sneering despot comes from slightly more enlightened fascists, blood is bound to spill...

...Cale, the petulant teen hero of Titan A.E., finally agrees to recreate and repopulate a new earth after the old one has been destroyed...

...For one thing, it at least has a discernible plot that develops toward a climax...

...Gone in 60 Seconds holds up until very late in its running time, when the murders mount and Cage faces off with his adversary...

...the U-boat's commander, now a captive, sabotages its equipment...

...For action fans who like a little intrigue, wit or humor mixed in with the titillation, such movies will be a poor substitute for entertainment...

...Not too many years ago, I remember hearing that the era of the Roman epic was over, that it was no longer possible to finance amovie requiring the ornate costumes and sets essential to a Spartacus or a Fall of the Roman Empire...