'Unexpected Wit'
PODHORETZ, JOHN
'Unexpected Wit' It's not the action that makes action movies blockbusters. by John Podhoretz Why is Transformers, a movie based on a 23-year-old line of toys for 9-year-old boys that, in turn,...
...Of course, the future of the planet ends up in the hands of that teenage boy and the hot chick from his high school, who wears a push-up bra to Armageddon...
...I think it's because of the Bangalore call center...
...The secret to mammoth success lies in how such a movie handles the moments that aren't action-packed, how it surprises its audience with unexpected wit...
...About half an hour into the movie, an American soldier under attack by alien robots in a town in Qatar (don't .. ask) commandeers a Qatari cell phone...
...The GI has to run over to his colleague, who is firing a rocket launcher at the alien robots, and pick his rear pocket to find a credit card to place the call that will help save the earth...
...The movie features some of Bay's patented bad-director techniques, like crosscutting so hyperactively during action sequences that you have absolutely no idea what is going on...
...It's Alan Rickman, the boss of the crew that takes an entire skyscraper hostage in Die Hard, making up fake terrorist names on the spot with a surprised smile on his face because he wants the cops to think his purpose is political rather than financial...
...There are several other such moments in Transformers...
...Movies of this sort—which is to say, movies based on a marketing concept from another realm of pop culture—are certainly not fated for success...
...Whereupon we cut to a bored Indian guy sitting in a bland-looking office: "Sir, I don't think your attitude is going to help the situation," the Indian guy says as he picks his teeth...
...Does anybody remember what happens in Raiders of the Lost Ark and why Indiana Jones meets up with his bitter ex-girlfriend in a bar in Nepal...
...The bad guys need that pair of glasses to reawaken their leader, who unfortunately landed in the wrong spot on earth near the North Pole and froze solid...
...It's not the action in an action movie that can transform it from a conventional night at the multiplex into a cultural phenomenon—the kind of film that teenagers want to see four times...
...And it's not because the special effects, which show cars and planes and cell phones turning into war-fighting robots, are awe-inspiring—although they are...
...Cinematic adaptations of video games, which would probably be the closest analogy here, have almost all been financial disappointments or disasters...
...As the battle screams around him, he screams into the phone: "I need to talk to the Pentagon right away...
...And it's not the plot, really...
...The Indian guy then asks the GI if he wants to hear about an exciting new offer from the cell phone company...
...It's Indiana Jones facing down the raging Egyptian who spins and thrashes about with a terrifying saber—by impatiently pulling out a gun and shooting the knife-handler...
...Nor is it because the sequences in which 20-foot-tall robots reduce a city's business district to rubble are exciting—although they are...
...Transformers took in $152 million at the box office in a week's time and will probably be the biggest hit of this year...
...The cop gets so loopy that the boy asks him, with genuine concern, "Are you on drugs...
...But because the Transformers are so big, they are clumsy and end up wrecking the flagstone path the boy's father has carefully laid from the house through the lawn...
...Transformers is solidly within this tradition, and it's a minor miracle that it was directed by Michael Bay, whose previous work (Bad Boys, Pearl Harbor) has provided the English-speaking peoples of our age with a dictionary definition of the term "ham-handed...
...My bad," says the inadvertently destructive Transformer...
...by John Podhoretz Why is Transformers, a movie based on a 23-year-old line of toys for 9-year-old boys that, in turn, became a cartoon series watchable only by undiscrimi-nating 7-year-old boys, such a colossal box-office smash...
...The teenage hero (Shia LeBeouf) is arrested at one point and interrogated by a ridiculously tough cop with a '70s handlebar moustache who mistakes canine pain medication for the latest street amphetamine...
...The nice Transformers follow the boy home because they need a pair of glasses once owned by his grandfather (again, don't ask...
...He pauses...
...If plot were the reason people come to feel such affection for these action movies, then Transformers would have tanked...
...Audiences expect exciting action from their action pictures and therefore discount it a bit, the way one expects excellent service at an expensive restaurant...
...John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...But Bay evidently took a graduate-level course in the works of Steven Spielberg, the movie's executive producer, and learned enough from the Master to transform 1980s dross into new-millennium cinematic gold...
...It's a whole lot of nonsense about an all-powerful Cube that's hiding inside Hoover Dam and an outer-space war between two races of robots— the Autobots and the Decepticons— that comes to earth...
...He's also a resident of Hoover Dam...
...Movies based on Barbie dolls go straight to DVD...
...What do you mean I need a credit card...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 42
