Piranha 3-D: Beach blanket bloodbath, barf-bags may be required

Alexandre Aja’s third horror remake kicks off with Richard Dreyfuss getting sucked into an astonishingly lame-looking computer-generated whirlpool before being gobbled by two-million year-old killer guppies. Dreyfuss’ cameo is meant to remind the amnesiacs in the audience of Jaws, though wouldn’t it have been more in keeping with the monumental crassness of Aja’s Piranha to somehow digitally resurrect Roy Scheider and shove him into this innovative new product for inducing vomit? That’s not hyperbole, incidentally—there are at least two acts of vomiting in the movie itself, and only one is performed by a piranha.

Wasn’t the first third of Saving Private Ryan supposed to be a comedy? Apparently that’s the sort of “high-concept” that gets green-lit these days, resulting in this brazenly cynical, simultaneously tedious and upsetting beach blanket bloodbath, quite possibly the only summer fare that includes both Academy Award-winning actors and porn stars in its cast, not to mention the chubby kid from Stand By Me. Funny thing is, I’m not sure which camp gives the worst performances. At least valiant Elizabeth Shue looks like she’s trying, and Christopher Lloyd is nearly amusing in the Sam Jaffe expository scientist bit, though he doesn’t have to work as hard as Sperm Overload 3’s Gianna Michaels, playing a topless parasailing appetizer.

Scripted by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, the story’s at once risibly sentimental and utterly heartless, winkily aware of its own irritatingly idiocy yet idiotic nonetheless. It concerns Sheriff Shue trying to evacuate an Arizona resort upon discovering swarms of hungry cannibal piranhas released from captivity while some mannequin who’s supposed to be her teenage son absconds from babysitting duties to hang on a boat with Jerry O’Connell’s insufferable moron with a movie camera, who’s supposedly making pornography. Of course Shue can’t get those pesky spring breakers to exit the water, and soon enough all those dozens of young women Aja worked so hard to get out of their bikinis are ripped to shreds, not only by piranha teeth but also the outboard motor of some scumbag foolishly trying to escape the massacre. After seeing Piranha you may want to undertake hypnosis to get its images out of your head.

It strikes me that O’Connell’s would-be director is actually a pretty obvious stand-in for Aja. While he’s clearly no match for Aja in the sadistic misogyny department, all O’Connell wants for the first half of Piranha is to shoot naked tits, yet his most vivid expression of amazement occurs when he sees one of his honeys consumed by piranhas, who possess the showmanship to penetrate her from below and exit through her mouth. Soon after O’Connell’s back on his boat, half-mutilated, paraphrasing Eric Roberts in The Pope of Greenwich Village. “They took my penis,” he gasps, as though he wasn’t impotent to begin with. But he’s impotent in 3-D! Feeling entertained yet?

The Expendables: Island hosts a cage match

Sylvester Stallone’s throwback actioner gathers as many genre stars as can fit on the poster and casts them as soldiers of fortune who take out baddies on a made-up Latin American isle where ugly American Eric Roberts has erected a puppet dictator in the interests of squeezing as much dope from cheap labour as possible. Somewhere in all this the mercenaries talk about feelings and ostensibly gain some social conscience. Obviously, the whole thing’s absurd and wildly bloodthirsty. Amongst the more astonishing sequences has Stallone and Jason Statham just barely escape from the island only to double back for no other reason than to slaughter dozens of underpaid local military. Yes, these are the good guys. And if their journey gradually bears vague traces of a Wild Bunch type of suicidal, go-for-broke, final act shoot-up, you can rest assured that the list of casualties will manage to stay extremely one-sided.

The Expendables is not without bizarre points of interest. Plenty of shit blows up for those requiring that sort of thing, but merely beholding this motley assemblage of hulks, he-men and has-beens can be kind of fascinating in its own right. Mickey Rourke especially seems present for no other reason than to present Mickey Rourke. He enters on a Harley, sports his favoured Predator hairdo, does tattoos, smokes a pipe, and gets a teary monologue soaked in regret and despair—is it me or did Rourke invent this character on his own? Jet Li is the butt of many short jokes and that’s about it. Dolph Lundgren gets the nuttiest bit as the loose cannon who turns on his own crew, with lines like “Life’s a joke, shitbird!” and “Bring it, Happy Feet!” (That one’s for Li.) Stallone for his part underplays every scene, his face clay-like and largely immobile, his bulging veins resembling a topographical map of the Himalayas, which might be the place on earth where The Expendables isn’t opening this weekend. It’ll be bigger than Westlemania.

See Wednesday's post for a wide-ranging rooftop interview with Dolph Lundgren

Eat Pray Love: JR tours the globe in search of Enlightenment Lite

In her Washington Post review of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search For Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, Grace Lichtenstein quipped that the only thing wrong with Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir “is that it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.” Lichtenstein misread the book. It’s actually a Julia Roberts movie. It is very much a Julia Roberts movie.

Roberts is ten years older than Gilbert was in her memoir, and this might contribute to the some of what feels off in the comma-excised adaptation of Eat Pray Love, directed by Ryan Murphy, who seems drawn to best-selling memoirs in which privileged people quench their spiritual thirst by trying on alternative lifestyles. Roberts is very youthful and still adorable, but it’s to Roberts’ credit as a human that her Liz seems like she should be a lot smarter by this point in life. Marital disharmony to Billy Crudup sends Liz to prayer, self-help books, and James Franco’s cutie-pie actor, which is how we discover that Gilbert’s also the author of one of the worst plays in the English language.

When none of those remedies serve, the next step is travel—lots of it. Liz’s tours of Italy, Calcutta and Bali hit on each of the titular verbs, though Gilbert forgot to add Shop. A feast of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology bullshit follows. It’s frustrating because it’s not as though most of us can’t relate to Liz’s search for inner balance, and it would be pointless to condemn her for having the means to solve her problems through extended peregrination.

Roberts embodies Liz’s yearning while never succumbing to morbid self-absorption—remember, Roberts was born perky. In fact, Roberts is capable of many things, including smartness, sexiness, even misdirection. As a star, the only thing missing is taste. Things might have worked better without Liz’s voice-over, which starts by telling us that survivors of genocide just want relationship advice and goes downhill from there. Liz becomes didactic by example, though I don’t buy any of her tidy revelations. She’s far more convincing when she’s just having a good time.

Richard Jenkins is nice as an abrasive Texan, until he’s prompted to suddenly spill his guts. Javier Bardem is strangely tough to accept as Brazilian, though I’m not sure if this tremendously gifted actor is actually trying. Is it just me, or is Bardem’s sloppily emotive performance commenting on the material? Is he perhaps wondering when exactly he was pegged as the new Antonio Banderas?

Roberts and her crazy brother Eric both have new movies out this weekend, one for women, the other, boys. Neither goes any distance toward renovating the careers of these talented siblings. Maybe they need to be in a movie together? My Best Friend's the Pope of Greenwich Village? Runaway Bride-Train? Help me out here.