Reviews

Films

Tank Girl

Directed by Rachel Talalay, starring Lori Petty, Naomi Watts

A post apocalyptic setting, mid-'90s grunge music, the girl from Point Break, Naomi Watts before she became THE Naomi Watts and a gangster rapper dressed up as a kangaroo. Based on a comic book series, Tank Girl is a dizzyingly energetic film that nonetheless neglects to engage its audience and instead pleads for us to keep up. It can cite Star Wars, Mad Max and even the movies of John Waters as inspirations, but it doesn't channel these influences into anything either fresh or particularly exciting.

The world has been decimated by a meteor strike, leaving it almost barren. An evil corporation controls nearly all of the water while a small group of desert folk survives on illegally hand-pumped water and hydroponic plants.

After a raid on the group's premises, Tank Girl (Lori Petty) is captured and confronted by the corporation's leader, Kesslee (Malcolm MacDowell). While in captivity she meets the shy Jet Girt (Watts), who she convinces to escape with her and soon the pair forge an alliance with a band of half-kangaroo, half-man rebels.

Ice-T stars as one of these kangamen - so silly is he made to look that he should have fired his agent soon after or simply stopped making rap records that deal with urban squalor. Petty's squeaky voice can get a little irritating after her 100th slacker retort, while Watts can rack this one up to experience.

In some sequences the director, Rachel Talalay, takes the literal approach to comic book adaptation and flashes actual panels of the comic on the screen. It would have been interesting to see what Spiderman's Sam Raimi did with this material. Ben Davey

The Guardian

Directed by Andrew Davis, starring Kevin Costner, Ashton Kutcher

Bursting at the seams with archetypes, clichs and sub plots, The Guardian sees Kevin Costner return to water over 10 years after the flop that was Waterworld. This time though, Costner is not playing a creature a few pegs up on the evolutionary ladder; instead, he tackles the kind of role he has considerable experience with. He's legendary US Coast Guard rescue swimmer Ben Randall, who has lost faith in himself and now faces the prospect of training a cocky up-and-comer.

And that young chap is a high school swimming champion named Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher), whose arrogance is a shield he wears to protect old emotional wounds. But if anyone's going to find out what makes Jake tick, it's rusty old sea dog Ben. During a grueling training regime, Jake excels despite Ben's unconventional tutelage and tough-love philosophy. Amid this frenzy of waterlogged shenanigans, the work-obsessed Ben is going through a separation from his frustrated wife (Sela Ward).

Bull Durham meets Top Gun? Yeah, you could say that, and if The Guardian had stuck strictly to this brief it could have been a much better film than it turns out to be. A movie about the lives of coast guard rescue swimmers is a good idea; and the cooperation of real life operators gives the exciting action sequences credibility. However, the icky eulogizing that surrounds the finale rams the needle on the schmaltz-o-meter into the red. BD

(China Daily 08/23/2007 page20)