Trailer Tracking 2: The Best and Worst in Recent Movie Trailers by Tom Burns
Trailer That Honestly, Honestly Can't Be as Obvious As It Seems: Righteous Kill
Do you remember how surprised you were when you realized that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino had never shared a scene in a movie before Michael Mann's Heat? There's just something about Bob and Al - this simpatico on-screen powerhouse vibe - that made everyone think that they MUST have done some Scorsese movie together back in the day. But, nope, Heat was their first time on-screen together and, let's be honest, that coffee scene was electric.
The new cop thriller, Jon Avnet's Righteous Kill, is all about seeing if the two old pros (who are, admittedly and sadly, both past their primes) can sustain that electricity for 2 hours. The plot revolves around two New York cops who seem to have a hard time letting go. Due to a procedural error, a rapist (Anthony Michael Hall, no less) is set free, and we're treated to scenes of De Niro kicking a suspect until Pacino pulls him back. In voiceover, De Niro tells us "You don't become a cop because you want to serve and protect. Anyone who believes that's an idiot. You do it because you get respect. Because they let you carry a gun and a badge. Most people respect the badge, everybody respects the gun." Then the plot kicks in - someone kills the released rapist Hall and it looks like some vigilante is killing bad guys. Pacino and De Niro look conflicted - Al mentions pinning a medal on the guy and then flips to seriously worrying about the secret assassin killing again. Lots of typical normal cop drama clips then flash past - the girlfriend of one of the cops (Carla Gugino) is made a target, Brian Dennehy warns that they could "lose it all by taking this case," stakeouts, target practice - no cliche is untouched. (Did we see Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson turn up as potential villain? Hope we get an overly-expository end-credit rap song recounting the plot as the credits roll.)
Basically, it looks like a normal (and kind of pedestrian) cop drama, but we have one BIG problem with the preview. So, there's someone out there killing bad guys and the trailer opens with Al and Bobby lamenting that a bad guy went free... maybe we've just seen too many Shyamalan movies, but - did anyone else get the sense that either Pacino or De Niro is the secret killer? Let us restate: in our opinion, the trailer beats you over the head with a friggin' baseball bat that one of them is probably the killer. (Or at least working with the killer. Our guess is De Niro.) Maybe we're just paranoid, but come on, the only thing more attractive to a director than a Pacino/De Niro buddy movie is a movie where Pacino/De Niro are buddies for most of the film and then become enemies in the closing reel. And the trailer is scored with the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil"... encouraging us to be sympathetic to the bad guys, right? Maybe we've just been reading too many Lost conspiracy theories on EW.com, maybe it's a brilliant red herring, but if Righteous Kill made their big, enormous plot twist this obvious in the TRAILER - that's pathetic. Hopefully, we're wrong. Hopefully, we're horribly, egregiously wrong. But if we aren't... that's so not righteous.
Trailer That We Love So Much It Pains Our Cold Robot Hearts: Wall-E
We realize that the sheer amount of negativity and bile dripping from this column has probably made you think we're a wee bit cynical here at The Deadbolt. But think again. All we need is a cute little robot E.T. analog (he does kind of look like Mr. Phone Home, right?) created by possibly the greatest animation studio in the history of the medium to melt our frigid, sarcasm-frozen exteriors. Needless to say, we absolutely loved the new Wall-E trailer.
Critics and pundits keep waiting for Pixar to falter and far, far too much attention has been paid to how Ratatouille didn't meet the domestic gross projections of.... shut up. The fact is, not to jinx them or anything, but Pixar has NEVER made a bad movie yet. Sure, some we liked more than others (Cars is, we'll admit, a loving CGI tribute to Doc Hollywood), but they've all had a spark and an artistic verve that the pixel-jockeys at Blue Sky and Dreamworks have never been able to reproduce nearly as well.
What, specifically, do we love about the Wall-E trailer? We love the Douglas Adams-esque narration, we love the character design (where do we pre-order our Wall-E toys?), we love the animation's epic scope and the storyline's apparent small personal focus. We're big advocates of robot love - get back to work on that, nation of Japan - and the burgeoning romance between Wall-E and Eve, his iPod-inspired girlbot, looks tremendous and is going to bring a big female audience to this film. (Note the clip of Barbra Streisand's "Hello Dolly" that Wall-E is watching.) Not that there isn't anything for the guys in there. It looks like the movie features its fair share of space-flights, explosions, and ray-guns, and the suggestion that Wall-E ends up leading an interstellar robot revolution will completely geek out any sci-fi fans who ever wanted to see a Droids movie spun-off from the Star Wars universe. All that plus the fact that all of the physical gags were pretty damned funny. We're predicting this one will be huge, but come on, it's Pixar. Of course, it is.
Trailer That Makes Us Weep for Our Time-Ravaged Childhoods: Lost Boys: The Tribe
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Well, that might be a bit much. The original Lost Boys isn't a bona fide classic - thought it might be one of Joel Schumacher's few good films - but it's a surprisingly fun teen genre flick that people who were of a certain age in the 1980s watched incessantly on video and HBO. Hoping to cash in on that nostalgia, the director behind Sniper 3 and From Dusk Till Dawn 3 is bringing you this (assumedly) straight-to-DVD sequel starring the always-available-for-bar-mitzvahs Corey Feldman. MTV debuted the trailer online this week, and our response can be summed up in one word - "Meh."
To summarize the trailer - Take MTV's soul-killing, waste-of-airwaves series The Hills (was that Lauren Conrad making a cameo or did they just cast a Lauren clone?), some sub-syndicated, Buffy wannabe vampire effects, bad lighting, bad alt-rock, some decidedly softcore on-screen humping, and Mr. Feldman showing up in costume as Edgar Frog and tossing off a few of his sort-of remembered catchphrases, blend them together, toss it on a discount DVD rack, and forget it ever happened. Not that we were expecting much, but the whole "we're teenaged creatures of the night, we can do anything" thing has been done to death with recent teen flops like Blood & Chocolate and The Covenant. It almost would've been better if the trailer/movie had embraced MTV's new agenda of promoting the most-shallow teenaged culture in the history of the world and turned Lost Boys 2 into a satire - a vampire version of My Sweet Sixteen.
But no, expect lots of references to the earlier, better things that happened in the original Lost Boys, lots of Abercrombie & Fitch-style teen angst, and Edgar and Alan Frog praying that pop culture remembers they exist. Actually, the most entertaining part of the trailer is the Corey Feldman video interview that follows it, in which Feldman discusses the project way, WAY too seriously (c'mon, it's not a sequel to Stand By Me, it's frickin' Lost Boys 2: The Electric Vamperoo). He even alludes to the fact that they might reshoot scenes bringing back Corey Haim's character, which makes us assume that Haim must have just finished a season on VH1's Celebrity Rehab or something.
