There's a recent tradition in contemporary movies to have stories in hyper-real, ultra-stylised worlds. From Dick Tracy to Immortals and every Frank Miller film in between (300, Sin City, The Spirit) director can now put their live action characters in surreal artisic worlds. The latest film to do this is Bunraku which puts Josh Hartnett, Demi Moore and Ron Perlman in a landscape inspired by the look of children's pop up books. Colours are uniform and bright, the sky a patchwork collage of shapes and the building are simplistic and theatre-like in their construction.
Into this world, director Guy Moshe presents a futuristic worlds where western gangster/gunslinger culture meets easter samurai philosophy in a mythic action revenge flick that you'd expect from the likes of Snyder, Tarantino or Rodriguez. Unfortunately, Moshe isn't as disciplined or focused a director as any of those visionaries which means the film occasionally looks tacky, is half an hour too long and lacks a certain wit with which to pull this kind of thing off.
The cast are solid, especially Hartnett who does the Eastwood-esque man with no name thing pretty intensely, and the scale of the story and the inventivness with which it's told is impressive to be sure. But a bigger budget, a less po-faced script and another set of eyes in the edting suite might have produced a cult classic. Bunraku is still worth a look for the effort to produce something new though.
No comments:
Post a Comment