Post by rra on Apr 29, 2008 12:37:45 GMT -5
DOOMSDAY (2008) - ***1/2
(NOTE: As my first movie review here at EWR, I'm posting an oldie review from another website, written back in March. Apologies for it being out of date.)
I never start reviews with such crude bluntness, but for DOOMSDAY, I must make an exception.
Go see DOOMSDAY.
Go watch it now, before it disapears from theatres.
Do whatever it takes to make this happen.
Hitchhike, steal a car, stowaway, everyone will understand.
Don't Wait for DVD. Hell, Bootleg it, but don't rat me out to the cops.
Now goddammit before I cook and eat ya!
With the movie not screened for critics ahead of its release, and the Internet "Nerd Clique" ignoring it this side of an African war crime, alot of good people are missing out on the great matinee trash experience of 2008 that is Neil Marshall's DOOMSDAY, which is surely destined for cult glory.
The raw gritty acceleration of DOOMSDAY harkoned me back to my high school years, where my teenage self fell in love with the "post-apocalyptical" action cinema of the late 1970s and early years of the Reagan Decade. From George Miller's MAD MAX epics to Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS to James Cameron's immortal THE TERMINATOR, they delivered such a brutal potency, their heroes fighting with desperate bravado, against a society that's dying or already has collapsed.
Writer/Director Marshall must be a fan too, for his DOOMSDAY is a dramatic synthesis of that entire genre, a fan love letter. Its creative lynchpin though is clearly John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, which lifts the plot, the smoking stone cold protagonist racing against the clock, and the armies of mutants and criminals to fight through. People will complain, but its fitting considering Carpenter ripped off Sergio Leone for ESCAPE and Howard Hawks for ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13.
Funny enough, DOOMSDAY is a better ESCAPE remake than the aborted Lens Wiseman/Gerald Butler "reimagining" could have ever been.
This is the movie that PLANET TERROR so desperately wanted to be but failed to pull off, so much that I fear Robert Rodriguez would cry if he ever watches DOOMSDAY. It wipes its ass with TERROR, then mocks it for being so crappy. While both are Carpenter-inspired highlight reels, what prevails for DOOMSDAY beyond the homages and geek references is that Marshall delivers an organic urgency towards the threat, a convincingly dangerous world for his heroes to march through, and enough ground-level balls-to-the-walls action to make for a good testosterone, chest-pounding time at the movies.
It helps too that unlike recent would-be action heroines like Milla Jonovich and Angelina Jolie, DOOMSDAY's lead in Rhona Mitra is a tough badass customer, regardless of her sex.
DOOMSDAY may be a son of a hundred movies, but like Freddy Krueger, it's still a sharp deadly mother. Blood and violence is literally everywhere, with decapitations and gruesome but awesome kills that put Eli Roth to shame. When a rabbit explodes from gunfire, you know fans of splatter cinema will be very pleased indeed. Forget RAMBO.
What is really compelling is that there is a scene where the heroes drive by abandoned wrecked homes, all spray-painted with numbers, to signify to the cavalry that would never come how many residents in each complex needed to be save. A rare break from this fantasy, and an eerie intentional echo of New Orleans in 2005 after Katrina flooded the city, when many within the Federal government seriously considered simply abandoning the city and its residents.
What put DOOMSDAY over the wall for me was Marshall's moments of pure crazyness within such a typical action plot, the SHOOT'EM UP or THE LAST BOY SCOUT for this year. Cannibalistic urban survivalists fire up a victim, and then gruesomely rip him to shreds this side of a turkey. Mitra using her glass-eye as a helpful camera, among other uses. Naked beautiful women wielding shotguns. Malcolm McDowell ruling as a feudal lord over the Scottish Highlands of 2035 from the remains of a castle.
Yet they all are nothing compared to when the psychotic leader of the punk/glam rock maniacs in Sol finds out that his woman literally was cut down to size by the heroine. He promptly tapes her body back together, tying her to his passenger seat as he and an armed convoy of cars head off for revenge against the heroes in a highway finale this side of THE ROAD WARRIOR.
Now that's love.
While I have some slight problems with DOOMSDAY, from the lack of characterization beyond Mitra to an uninspired climax also borrowed from ESCAPE, I other wise really enjoyed the hell out of DOOMSDAY. It's an unjust world where lousy mediocrity like RESIDENT EVIL can make a profit, but DOOMSDAY met its own armageddon this weekend.
It's a taunt masculine satisfying throwback to my adolescence, and I at least appreciate Marshall for the free time travel.
It's practically a movie made for us.