2020 Catch Up: Vol 2

Madness in the Method

Dir: Jason Mewes

It’s probably fair to say that Jason Mewes largely lucked into his 25-year career as an actor. When Kevin Smith made Clerks, he cast his friend as Jay simply because Mewes made him laugh. While Mewes has done plenty of other acting work, he’s never really escaped the character of Jay (playing him again in the upcoming Twilight of the Mallrats) and that is the jumping-off point for this, his feature directorial debut.

The screenplay, by Dominic Burns and Chris Anastasi has Mewes playing himself as an actor who wants to break out of playing Jay and other assorted stoner roles by landing the lead role in The Odyssey, an Oscar-tipped production that will be the directorial debut of Clerks actor Brian O’Halloran (just go with it). To that end, he’s introduced to a book on method acting, but as he goes ever more method he descends into madness.

The idea of an actor getting too into a part has been mined for chills before, but Mewes tries to lean into the comedy of the idea. To be fair, he finds a handful of laughs. A scene with former TV Superman Dean Cain is pretty funny; Cain is portrayed as always fearful of fans coming up to him and being disappointed that he’s not actually Superman, there are a few amusing lines here and Cain seems to be on board with poking fun at himself. Unfortunately, the funny moments are few and far between, otherwise largely confined to scenes of loose, possibly improvised, banter between Mewes and Kevin Smith (also playing a version of himself).

The problem is largely that Mewes doesn’t exactly have the A list to choose from in his casting. Vinnie Jones is as charisma-free as ever, even when playing himself; Gina Carano is wasted, not even getting to fight as Mewes’ girlfriend, despite the fact that there’s a scene late on where her doing so could be pretty funny and Blake Harrison is woefully unfunny as a stereotypically gay entertainment reporter. Most of the rest of the cast are restricted to cameos, clearly working just a day or two and seemingly putting in all the effort that would suggest, Teri Hatcher’s scene, for instance, looks like it could have been tossed off in a few minutes in her home office.

Mewes’ direction and performance are both perfunctory. It’s ironic that by playing an actor desperate to break character he ends up showing that he’s a bland presence outside that character. He doesn’t convince in the scenes where he’s going mad. This might have played if he was able to start out that way and then evolve to become more convincing as his character kept reading about the method, but Mewes simply doesn’t appear versatile enough for this. Directorially the film is largely flat looking, with daytime scenes like the Hollywood party he finds Smith at being especially televisual. When Mewes gets more ambitious things hardly improve, with a couple of nonsensical musical fantasy interludes (happily Mewes doesn’t sing) being the nadir, at least until Danny Trejo shows up in a feather boa, perpetrating another awful gay stereotype because he too has gone method. 

Madness in the Method isn’t a terrible idea, but sadly it doesn’t reveal any untapped potential in Jason Mewes and without doing that it should lean much harder into the essential ludicrousness of its central premise for most of its gags to land. As it is, this hits neither humour nor chills and fails to point to an interesting directorial career for its star.

★

Mulan [2020]

Dir: Niki Caro

The Disney renaissance started at the right time for me, I was 8 when The Little Mermaid came out, 10 for Beauty and the Beast, but by the time Mulan rolled around in 1998 I was 17 and probably thought I was too much of a sophisticated cinephile for another Disney princess movie, and I still haven't got around to filling that gap in my viewing. Coincidentally, right around the time the animated Mulan was coming out, I was just starting to discover martial arts movies, which remain one of my great loves. It was this that drew me to this live action take on the material, not only because of the trailer, which suggested a definite leaning in to the action side of the story, but also the casting, including legends of martial arts cinema like Donnie Yen, Jet Li and Cheng Pei-pei.

I've not been a great lover of Disney's recent run of live-action versions of their animated classics. Up until now only Pete's Dragon has struck me as much more than a very expensive form of karaoke. For the most part, Mulan squares the circle of being both a traditional Disney fairytale and a martial arts action film well. The first act is focused on building the themes of family, self-belief and exceeding the expectations set out for you. We see Mulan as a little girl being mischevious, energetic and showing promise in martial arts, but her father (Tzi Ma) and Mother (Rosalind Chao) make it clear to her that, as a girl, she is not meant to fight and her role is to find a suitable match (facilitated by a matchmaker played by Cheng Pei-pei). When, years later, the Emperor's army comes looking for recruits, Mulan (now played by Yifei Liu) sneaks away to take the place of her father, disgusing herself as a boy so that she can join the regiment led by Commander Tung (Yen) and fight against the rebellion led by Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and his sorceress Xianniang (Gong Li)

The sections with Mulan training and bonding with her fellow recruits are fun, combining a playful sense of growing camaraderie, especially with Chen Honghui (Yoson An) with a real sense of them being prepared for battle in martial arts training montages led by Yen. However, it's when the war starts that the film takes off. Caro and her stunt team marshall some great battle scenes. The large scale sequences are an excellent synthesis of real stunts and high quality CGI, with a strong enough sense of space and flow that we never lose the detail of what's going on. When we zoom in on individual moments, fight coordinators Nuo Sun and Heidi Moneymaker deliver action that can stand comparison with pure martial arts films. The fights may not be as hard-hitting as some, and clearly there is never any blood, but neither do they come off as cartoony. This Mulan, with animal sidekicks and songs stricken from the adaptation, definitely has a somewhat harder edge than I might have expected.

This also comes through in the villains, with Jason Scott Lee forceful as Bori Khan. His story is fairly one-dimensional; he's the bad guy out for revenge on Jet Li's Emperor. A version of this film from another studio might have dug more effectively into the moral ambiguity of the history between the two, but Disney does like its morals painted in black and white. A more effective villain storyline comes from Gong Li and how her attack on Mulan brings out the courage in her to reveal her identity to Tung and the other recruits and step up as a leader in the film's third act. The scenes between Gong Li and Yifei Liu bring out the most nuance we see in Liu's leading performance, which can be a bit flat, as she seems to be the only member of main cast who struggles with her English. These sequences are also some of the most visually impressive, thanks both to the settings and to the striking design of Li's makeup. The message delivered in their last scene together is a little rushed and rather predictable, but it does knit the film's themes together well.

On the whole, Mulan delivers. It serves up some simple but effective morals for the family audience, but it's also visually interesting, with beautiful scenery and design throughout. The action is what marks the film out as different from many other Disney efforts, it wears its influences on its sleeve, nodding especially at the martial arts films of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. It may never hit those heights, but Niki Caro and the stunt and fight teams deliver consistently thrilling, good looking, action that flows well both narratively and visually. Along with Pete's Dragon this is, flaws and all, one of the high watermarks of Disney's live action remake era.

★★★½