Review: "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" is a very creative movie, but it's a shallow sort of creativity.

Based on the comics by  Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, "Valerian" is kind of a goofy James Bond-in-space adventure with tons of aliens and CGI. Written and directed by Luc Besson, it makes his "The Fifth Element" look like a hard and gritty drama.

Government agents Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner and hoped-to-be lover, Sergeant Laureline (Cara Delevingne), traipse through the galaxy getting into and out of all sorts of scrapes. The plot is barely comprehensible -- not that it's really meant to be -- having to do with a refugee race of aliens, a critter MacGuffin and the prerequisite sneering villain.

The tone is overtly comic book, and the expensive digital imagery ($180 million, I hear tell) has a deliberately cartoony look. I never quite knew how I was supposed to take the movie, or its characters. Certainly, we never feel any kind of connection to them. They're like our avatars in a video game that can't control all that well.

I'm not sure about the casting of the two leads. DeHaan, with his tired eyes and spindly frame, certainly doesn't look the part of an action movie hero. I'm actually OK with that: not every male body we see onscreen needs to have a six-pack and cannonball biceps. DeHaan plays Valerian as a smirking playboy who thinks he's finally found true love in Laureline, and tries to live up to that.

Delevingne brings some kick-ass authority to her role, a duty-bound soldier who's also able to look past the rule book when it doesn't fit circumstances. She continually puts off Valerian's advances, but the way she glances at him when he walks away tell us she secretly wants it to go on.

Things center around Alpha Station, a former Earth orbit platform that grew and grew as humans encountered more alien species and incorporated them into their galactic government. Eventually it got so big its gravitational pull threatened Earth's, so Alpha has traveled millions of miles over the last 400 years, and is home to multitudes.

The creature effects are quite impressive. Some, like those from planet Mül, look like stretched-out humans with translucent skin and no hair. Other aliens resemble the ogres from the "Lord of the Rings" movies, or butterflies, or sea slugs. Some are even liquid or gaseous, contained within space suit for interaction with humanoids, and others are living machines.

Combined with the wonders of Alpha and beyond, there's no denying "Valerian" is a feast for the eyes.

In one neat sequence, we enter a marketplace that exists in another dimension, so visitors don special eyewear to interact with the peddlers. Valerian sticks a laser pistol and his hand into a special gizmo, so he can shoot at bad guys while the rest of him remains phased in safety.

The adventure, though, soon grows tiresome as it seems there are no consequences to be encountered. For every obstacle or enemy, there's some kooky solution involving cool technology or interaction with a bizarre creature.

For instance, when Laureline needs to track down the lost Valerian, she seeks out a jellyfish that she has to, uh... interface with in an interesting way to learn his location. When roles are reversed, Valerian recruits a "glamopod" named Bubble who can transform her appearance. She's played by Rihanna, who does a very sexy and athletic burlesque routine as her introduction.

When she has to do dialogue, though... ugh. Rihanna can certainly perform, but she can't act.

Others rounding out the cast are Herbie Hancock (!) as the intergalactic minister calling the shots, Clive Owen as the local commander with a history, Sam Spruell as his upright number two, and Ethan Hawke as a cowboy pimp.

I had fun for awhile watching "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," but it grows tiresome, like a circus show that runs too long. There's only so much bedazzlement the eye can take in before becoming strained.

We jump from dizzying scene to scene like we're progressing through a role-playing video game, and waiting at the end is a prize we don't really want that badly.

Review: "Lucy"

"Lucy" starts out as a brash crime thriller/drama with a sci-fi twist, and then it swerves into profundity, and folly.

Scarlett Johansson plays the title character, an inconsequential American girl partying in Korea, who gets forced into being a drug mule for an international kingpin. It turns out the mysterious blue powder surgically implanted in her belly -- it looks like the stuff from "Breaking Bad" -- leaks into her system, and causes one of those chain reactions where it rewrites her entire DNA, granting her super powers.

In this case, the change is not in her body so much as her mind. The human brain only uses 10 percent of its cerebral capacity -- as we are continually reminded in concurrent lectures by a brilliant scientist, Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman). If we could unlock just 20 to 40 percent of that potential, he suggests, humans would become capable of all sorts of amazing feats -- including telepathy, telekinesis and more.

Lucy is the living experiment, with her mind growing apace even as she embarks on an elaborate revenge-slash-salvation mission to find the other drug mules and confiscate the other bags of narcotics before they ... well, it's not exactly clear why she wants the stuff.

To prevent the creation of other super-brains like her? Given the way she disposes of the innocent -- shooting a taxi driver for the crime of not speaking English, for instance -- altruism does not seem to be high on her priority list.

Min-sik Choi, the Korean star best known for his role in "Oldboy," plays the drug lord, Mr. Jang, who is sophisticated and wears expensive suits and seemingly has an entire floor of a high rise set aside for his gory amusements.

The reconstituted Lucy easily mows through Mr. Jang's bodyguards to force him to give her the locations of the other mules. She hurts him enough to make him really angry, but doesn't kill him, which even with 10 percent of my brain I can deduce is not a very smart move.

(This is the perennial conceit of movies about the super-intelligent, as they always proceed to do very dumb things.)

Anyway, the plot quickly morphs into a race against the clock, as Lucy determines she will not live past achieving total consciousness, aka 100 percent brain use. She hooks up with a smoldering French detective (Amr Waked), who's basically just there to bear witness to her miracles and provide the barest of romantic subplots.

Soon she moves past parlor tricks like making a hallway full of gunmen levitate to tapping into people's cell phone calls just by read their energy patterns out of the air, taking over entire computer systems, and so on. In essence, she becomes Neo from "The Matrix," but without the alternate reality.

Writer/director Luc Besson, a Frenchman known for over-the-top tales of kinetic fantasy like "The Fifth Element," came up with a great idea for a movie and then didn't know where to cut the string. Individual scenes have a certain vibrant energy, like when she's flying on a plane, working two laptop computers at the same time, and her physical being starts to fritter away. But we feel the same thing happening to the narrative.

Having Johansson play the role with a sort of vacant robot mien was a mistake. She says that she can no longer full pain, fear or desire, and that she worries her humanity is slipping away. But why would this be so? One would think being able to fully access our memories and experiences would render them more emotionally intense, not less so.

"Lucy" is a smart idea for a film, obtusely executed.

Review: "3 Days to Kill"

"Is Dad a badass?"
"He's done some things, yes."

"3 Days to Kill" is an odd flick, but not an un-entertaining one. On its face it looks like another one of these action-thrillers where an older assassin/spy proves he's still got it by mowing through an entire crowd of younger hit men -- by association also showing that the aging movie star portraying him still has some juice, too.

Liam Neeson relaunched his career this way, and now there are so many knockoffs it's practically become its own genre: Geezer Badassery.

But one thing joining all these films is their relentless seriousness and bravado, usually culminating in some scene where the protagonist makes a stern declaration about how he's such a force to be reckoned with, and you better not mess with him. (Predictably, the baddies never heed this advice, otherwise these movies would all end at the 20-minute mark.)

Kevin Costner doesn't do any of that in "3 Days to Kill." Like many of the other characters he's played, Ethan Renner is loose, easygoing and doesn't take himself too seriously. He's grim when his work requires him to be, but his default mode is a joshing sort of self-deprecating charm.

For instance, other characters in the movie repeatedly pester him about his casual dress, since everyone knows CIA assassins and their ilk are supposed to wear skinny black suits, instead of the slouchy chinos-and-bomber-jacket ensemble Ethan prefers. Heck, he doesn't even shave much, and mostly appears to be just going through the motions until retirement.

Of course, Ethan is dying from brain cancer, which has gotten into his lungs and caused a nasty cough, not to mention debilitating woozy spells that are kind of a hindrance when your trade involves people shooting at you. After his latest job goes bad, he's cut loose from the CIA with a tiny pension and barely a fare-thee-well.

That's a pretty dour setup for a movie. But director McG and screenwriters Luc Besson and Adi Hasak defy expectations by making the rest of the movie funny, jazzy and even kind of goofy. "3 Days to Kill" is essentially the comedy version of "Taken."

Ethan's goal with his few remaining months is to reconnect with the wife and daughter he abandoned so many years ago. But his daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) is lippy and combative, and has mastered that teen skill of humiliating their parents through sheer exasperatedness at their uncoolness. Her mother, Christine (Connie Nielsen), wants nothing to do with Ethan, and soon departs their Paris home for a business trip.

Then Vivi shows up. A young boss at the CIA played by Amber Heard, Vivi is a femme fatale who always appears in a different stunning outfit and new hairdo. She claims to have an experimental cure that could save Ethan or at least extend his life, which she's willing to share if he'll hunt down a mysterious arms dealer named The Wolf (Richard Sammel) for her -- which was the same job that blew up in Ethan's face.

Costner and Heard have a fun, antagonistic byplay, with her the brainy manipulator and him the old-school operator whose usefulness is fleeting. It's clear he halfway suspects the miracle juice she pumps into his arm his bogus, but he figures he doesn't have much to lose. She keeps coming on to him, though more as a power move than real seduction.

The running joke of the story is that Ethan's assassination mission keeps getting interrupted by the necessities of his return to a semblance of normal life. Zooey calls him on the phone, interrupting his interrogation of various lowlifes. It's hard to make a guy think you'll torture him to death if you're also asking him for pasta sauce recipes.

One of these is Marc Andréoni as a Middle Eastern wheel man for The Wolf. Ethan keeps kidnapping him and sticking him in the trunk of his car, but in between punches solicits his advice as a fellow father of teenage girls. It almost becomes a Laurel and Hardy routine.

Ethan also returns to find his apartment occupied by a large family of African squatters, who welcome him with open arms because they know archaic French laws won't allow them to be evicted. The deadly master assassin finds himself powerless at the hands of their warm invitations and smiles, and ends up enlisting the youngest son as his errand boy.

Rounding out the cast is Tómas Lemarquis as The Albino, the chief henchman of The Wolf. You know the villains are nefarious when they go by declarative titles instead of names. Do their close friends call them "The"?

Speaking of idiot nicknames, McG -- who insists on going by his frat-boy moniker instead of his given name, Joseph McGinty Nichol -- delivers crisp action scenes with a lot of spatial integrity, so that we understand where everyone is and what they're doing. Even the hand-to-hand combat doesn't devolve into a flurry if hyper-fast edits the eye can't track, which seems to be the norm these days.

I especially liked the sound design for the film. Gunfire is accompanied by deep staccato bursts, like a pile driver thudding into concrete. You can feel the vibration in your bones. Though, in grand action movie tradition, Ethan's gun clip appears to contain dozens of bullets.

The juxtaposition of these heart-gripping shootouts with the light, funny parts of the movie works better than you'd think. Ethan is a guy whom death surrounds like a magnetic field, yet this movie isn't about him riding a roller coaster into the grave. He regards killing as neither repellent or intoxicating, but simply part and parcel of the profession he's chosen.

The irony is now that he wants to leave that life behind, he must wallow in its excesses to obtain a shot at something more. The filmmakers opt to emphasize the ridiculousness of his situation rather than milk it for cheap thrills and quips after the bad guys have bought it.

Just shy of 60, Kevin Costner is still much the same performer as he was when he broke out a quarter-century past. His face is seamed and jowly now, but he retains that ornery twinkle and understated comedic timing. Even though "3 Days to Kill" chooses a very different route from similar films, it still accomplishes its task of proving its star has what it takes.

Review: "The Family"

"The Family" is a goof, a recycle of a rehash, a sort-of sequel to "Goodfellas" in which we find out what happens to the gangster after he snitches on his pals and goes into witness protection. It features Robert De Niro, who has largely spent the last 20 years of his career spoofing on the first 20 years of his career as a cinematic tough guy.

He still plays tough, but now it's for laughs. Or at least it's supposed to be. This inert comedy just lies there, intermixing horrific violence with jokes about more violence. It tries to skate by on the charms of De Niro and co-stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. But it's essentially a one-joke movie, and that joke gets old pretty quick.

De Niro plays Giovanni Manzoni, a one-time mob boss who's now living in France with his family: wife Maggie (Pfeiffer, doing a screechy retread of her "Married to the Mob" role), daughter Belle (Diana Agron, pushing 30 and playing 17) and son Warren (John De'Leo). They're a collection of Italian-American stereotypes in search of a set-up to deliver the obvious punchline.

They move from place to place whenever they cause any trouble, which is frequently. When they roll up to their new place in a tiny village in Normandy, Gio -- who goes under the name Fred Blake -- already has a body hidden in the back of the car. Gio seems cool as a cucumber on the outside, but the minute he feels disrespected, someone's going in a hole.

Unfortunately, being an American in France, the clan gets disrespected a lot. Director and co-writer Luc Besson wades into a whole lot of "ugly American" territory, with the added irony that "Fred" and company really are homicidal thugs. Maggie blows up a grocery store on her first day in town when the locals snicker at her request for peanut butter, and both kids lay severe beat-downs on classmates.

The strangest thing about the movie is there really isn't any reason for the story to be set in France. None of the family speak the lingo very well, even after living there for years. Would the FBI handler (Jones) really take the trouble and expense of setting them up in a foreign country when the good ol' U.S. of A is begger than 10 Frances?

The answer is "The Family" is based on a novel by a French author, Tonino Benacquista, and Besson is another Frenchie. It's basically their homage to "Goodfellas" -- there's even a scene where "Fred" gets invited to a film club meeting and that's the movie playing. So it's De Niro poking fun at one of his own iconic roles.

This sort of self-indulgence might be more tolerable if the movie were funnier. But between the geysers of blood, repetitive jokes about boorish Americans and snooty French, "The Family" was better left dead and buried.

Review: "From Paris with Love"

"From Paris with Love" is a dumb, violent movie, but it knows it. It doesn't take itself seriously, and features John Travolta in a performance of such impish glee, he's obviously enjoying chewing on the scenery so much he should have paid the filmmakers for the privilege, rather than the other way around.

It's such an adrenaline-filled, kooky kick that we don't mind that the plot makes hardly a lick of sense. Sometimes, boys just want to have fun.

Travolta plays Charlie Wax, an American spy sent to Paris do some clean-up work. And to someone like Charlie, getting things clean is a very messy process.

With a shaved head, goatee, gawdy earring and omnipresent keffiyeh and leather jacket, Travolta strikes quite an outlandish figure. The only thing more over-the-top is his behavior. Charlie's M.O. is shoot first, shoot second, and keep on shooting until your problems go away.

In one scene, Charlie goes into a Chinese restaurant looking for cocaine. He takes out his gun and starts blowing away waiters, and finally shoots holes in the ceiling, where streams of powdered narcotics start cascading down.

Who keeps cocaine stored in their ceiling? How did Charlie know it was there? If you're the sort of person who can't help but wonder these things, then this movie is not for you.

Charlie's reluctant partner is James Reece (John Rhys-Meyers), a young up-and-comer sick of his cushy duties acting as the American ambassador's secretary. He can't believe the way Charlie operates, and would rather be spending time with his cute French girlfriend Caroline. (She's French, so it's pronounced "karo-LEAN.")

Charlie clearly enjoys getting a rise out of James, so he does all sorts of crazy things to put them in danger, just so he can save their bacon. In one scene, he takes out an entire gang of drug dealers, then turns to James and thunders, "Tell me that wasn't some impressive shit!"

Based on a story by Luc Besson (who also produced) by screenwriter Adi Hasak, "Paris" was directed by Pierre Morel, who impressed with last year's "Taken." The characters played by Liam Neeson and Travolta couldn't be more different, nor the movies in which they are showcased. Whereas Neeson's ex-spy was a lesson in controlled lethality, Charlie is a giggly killer who really, really likes what he does.

At some point, the story turns from one about drugs to terrorism -- and it occurs just that abruptly. Charlie yells something like, "This isn't about cocaine, it's about terrorists!" And then they start chasing Middle Eastern-looking guys who are plotting to blow up something important.

One moment I have to comment on: At one point a character reveals themselves to be wearing a suicide bomb. In close-ups of the plastic explosives and wiring, you can clearly see a triangular sign in yellow-orange that says, "CAUTION." Now, what kind of terrorists put warning labels on their suicide vests? "Hey, we better let them know, since we don't want anything bad to happen."

I admit I went into "From Paris from Love" thinking it was going to be a supremely stupid movie. I was right, but didn't imagine how much fun idiocy could be.

3 stars