Black Gate

The Bourne Legacy, Paramount’s attempt to extend their successful Jason Bourne franchise — based very loosely on the novels of Robert Ludlum — does give the impression of the first film of a trilogy. It feels like The Bourne Identity (2002), the inaugural movie of the Matt Damon trilogy: it’s a starting point with some excellent sections, but also the nagging sense that all the finest moments are yet to come. Overall, there is something slight about the enterprise, making it a minor disappointment for a film I hoped would salvage August. Will Expendables 2 be this year’s “August Surprise”? I never thought that might be a possibility at the beginning of the season.

Doug Liman directed The Bourne Identity, but it was Paul Greengrass sitting in the folding green chair for the next two films, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and it was his work that shoved the series into the high octane world of dazzling foot pursuits, close-quarter pummelings, shaky-cam car chases, and earnest people trying to get control of the world by walking fast while talking on cell phones. And audiences loved it. Those two films are the defining spy movies of the decade, easily besting the re-boot of James Bond (in the Jason Bourne mold, natch).

The Bourne Legacy, under the direction of Tony Gilroy, who wrote all three previous entries and made an impression as a director with Michael Clayton in 2007, collects the elements that made its predecessors work: whipcrack action with jittery cameras, raw global espionage, and top-level actors playing the gray-shaded manipulators attached to their phones and computer displays. What it doesn’t have is a compelling enough character story at the center to hold it together, or a resolution that satisfies beyond the need to signal a sequel.

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In a charming case of movie irony, the new Total Recall has already been mostly forgotten, even though it only came out on Friday. The Dark Knight Rises, in its third week, handily crushed the Len Wiseman-directed remake. I’m writing this on Tuesday, and it already feels as if the movie was never even released: it was a dream implant that never took, and the original memory of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger Summer blockbuster has already taken back all the cerebral space. Nonetheless, I’ll still perform this brain autopsy on Total Recall ’12 to see why no one bothered to show up except for people writing reviews.

If you were to pick the right approach to remaking 1990’s Total Recall — aside from simply not remaking it all — you would want to try it “straight,” focusing in on the everyman aspect of a protagonist in a cyberpunk future who discovers that his whole life is a false memory implant, and in truth he’s a dangerous double (possibly triple) agent. It is, after all, a nifty SF-noir concept, delivered courtesy of the Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” and refashioned into a feature film concept by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who also created the original screenplay for Alien.

And this re-make of Total Recall does that: it plays the movie as a straightforward science-fiction adventure film done in the current style. But… it was handed to Len Wisemen to direct. And he turned out the same film he always turns out: broadly competent but utterly dull, slick, superficial, and ultimately disposable. Producer Neil Moritz, responsible for the “Fast and Furious” franchise, should probably shoulder a good part of the blame as well, because the by-the-numbers execution here is what he does best unless he gets a director who clicks with the material.

Despite publicity hand-waving about “going back to the literary source,” this certainly isn’t a remake like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. Len Wisemen’s Total Recall does a beat-for-beat copy of the plot of the 1990 film with a few background substitutions and a number of bizarre moments of meaningless karaoke imitations (the three-breasted prostitute, the “two weeks” lady at the security station, ripping out an implanted tracking device), but with all the fun drained from it and slathered over with the same polished SF glean seen on movies since the early 2000s. Fans of the original will find themselves bored to the point of wishing the whole thing was a memory implant gone wrong — a schizoid embolism! — and viewers who have never seen the original will yawn over watching the same old junk they’ve slogged through for years… only with even more lens flares!

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With directing great superheroes comes great responsibility. I wish director Marc Webb knew this. Or perhaps directing superheroics on screen isn’t something the man is capable of.

Webb’s re-boot of Sony’s Spider-Man franchise is not an utter elevated train-wreck. If all you want is a bit of comic book action during the summer between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, then The Amazing Spider-Man is adequate to the task. I certainly can’t give it a worse rating than something like Battleship or Dark Shadows. It’s not a Batman and Robin. There’s that.

But as a Spider-Man film, and me speaking as a Spider-Fan, the The Amazing Spider-Man is a huge disappointment. It’s even a bit depressing. I’m glad I have the Sam Raimi films to bolster me, knowing that somebody has already done Spider-Man right, because otherwise this very unnecessary (except for keeping a lock on film rights) re-do of Spidey’s origin would be… okay, an elevated train-wreck. And to hear Sony, and even some fans, try to do revisionist history on the Raimi films as if they were off the mark — that’s painful. Yes, Spider-Man 3 had many problems, most of which were forced on Raimi by the studio, but it is still a better “Spider-Man film” than this one. The first Raimi film is a well-crafted, dead-on origin story, and Spider-Man 2 is just a goddamn great film. Raimi balanced Spidey’s drama with the crisp fun of his comics.

The Amazing Spider-Man is an overall mess, but there are two major problems that injure it. Before getting into that, here’s a fast rundown on its many other problems:

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