Stunts
Saw xXx the other day. The preview had made it look like mindless but entertaining fun, and I liked Vin Diesel a great deal in Saving Private Ryan and especially in Pitch Black.
(He was also the voice of the robot in Iron Giant, btw.)The movie was indeed mindless but entertaining. Diesel isn't as good in this as in those other movies, and the action and stunts weren't as impressive as I'd expected—the problem with the constant one-upping of action movies is that it's easy to get jaded. Everyone talked about this movie as having totally extreme stunts, but the way over-the-top action in Charlie's Angels and Die Another Day impressed me more.
Mostly, I liked xXx's premise, or rather both of the two alternate premises I saw, and wished the filmmakers had followed through on them.
The premise as presented in the preview, the way the film was (it seemed to me) marketed, was that Xander Cage (Diesel) was a badass mofo, a tough hardened criminal who was recruited to be a spy. That could have been fun—someone more amoral than Bond, a mercenary who doesn't turn out to have a heart of gold.
The premise as presented in the first third or so of the movie was that Xander Cage was an extreme-sports athlete with a social conscience and a heart of gold. That wouldn't make a great action film, but it could be a really cool movie. My favorite line from the movie: "If you're gonna send someone to save the world, make sure they like it the way it is." Take a guy who loves to take risks, is in absolutely top physical shape, and is something of an anarchist/radical (and who, as demonstrated in a fairly cool early sequence, is extremely observant and really smart), but who has never actually engaged in combat and is kinda upset at the notion of killing people, and turn them into a spy: instant internal conflict. Cool beans. (At a certain point in the movie, we learn that Xander has never used a real gun; "I had my leg in a cast for about three months, and all I did was play first-person shooter video games." I'd have loved to see him have some qualms about killing real people; that might've reinforced the notion that violent video games and movies aren't intended to get the audience to be violent in real life.)
But what we actually get in this movie is a standard-issue nonconformist superspy with a little lip service paid to giving him a nonstandard backstory. (The filmmakers seem to be under the impression that anti-authoritarian attitude is somehow unusual in a superspy character. Have they ever watched Bond interacting with M?) Once the action really gets going, Xander has no qualms about killing people in the service of his country, or about using a gaudy red-white-and-blue parachute. The one half-hearted attempt at explaining Xander's change of heart (in response to an evil anarchist who wants to take down the world's governments, Xander says something like "But how can you break the rules if there are no rules?") was cut from the movie.
There was another deleted scene that the director says he cut because it made Xander seem like too nice a guy too early on, ruining the character arc in which he gradually softens over the course of the movie. Which is odd, because I got the impression almost from the very beginning that he was a nice guy. And not just a nice guy underneath a rough and brutish exterior; just a nice guy period. I never saw the alleged rough and brutish exterior.
I kinda feel like the writer and the director (and possibly the actor) may've been a little at odds about exactly who this character was and what his character arc was supposed to be.
Anyway. The movie overall was fun, but not brilliant. I'm now slightly more curious about the Fast and the Furious movies than I was before, but not much.
(Side note: I was struck by how overwhelmingly white the movie was. I think the only character who isn't white in the movie is Samuel L. Jackson's. I suppose the raver/anarchist scene in Prague probably isn't all that racially diverse in real life either (ethnically diverse, sure, but maybe not a lot of variation in skin pigmentation), but it still stood out for me, perhaps simply by contrast to the multiracial raver scenes in The Matrix.)
The larger issue that the movie raised for me was a meta-question. It seems that one of the stuntmen, Harry O'Connor, died during the making of the movie. He was an experienced professional, doing an easy stunt; he did one take of it, and everything went fine. Then he did another take, and something went wrong and he died. The first take is the one that's in the movie.
And I find myself wondering whether it was worth it. On the one hand, he was an experienced pro in a risky job; he presumably knew the risks, and took the job in spite of (or, who knows, possibly even because of) those risks. On the other hand, someone died so that we could get the illusion of Vin Diesel soaring through the air for a few seconds in a second-rate action movie. Is it silly of me to be more distressed at this than I'd be if I thought the movie were great art? Or if any of the stuntpeople were shown more explicitly on-camera during the "making of" segments on the DVD, which felt to me like they were trying to ignore the stuntpeople's existence as much as possible? (But maybe it's not allowed to show them on-camera and identify them as stuntpeople, for all I know.) Or if the director didn't make such a big fuss about wanting to use real stunts rather than CGI because he thinks CGI makes audiences feel less of a sense of danger? In his brief commentary about the death in the making-of piece, the director says something like "This is what we were hoping to avoid"—and I'm probably reading way too much into it, but his tone sounded to me like he saw the death as an unfortunate annoyance, at about the level of the weather delays they experienced.
I dunno. I'd much rather walk out of a movie knowing that everyone in it had survived the making of the film, even at the cost of a small amount of suspension of disbelief. (It's not like the stunts are all that plausible anyway; there's all sorts of safety stuff and make-believe that goes on behind the scenes, so what we're seeing on-camera isn't "real" anyway. Using computers to make things a little safer for the actors seems to me a reasonable price to pay. Especially when I-as-audience-member can't tell the difference. Though I admit that knowing that Jackie Chan (e.g.) does a lot of his own stunts adds a certain frisson to watching him; but I think for me that's more because of the consummate displays of skill than because of the danger that he might die.)
But I can't presume to speak for the stuntpeople; I don't actually know anything about this particular situation, or what happened, or why, or whether the guy in question would have preferred this to, say, dying in bed. All I can really say is that it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, a little complicit in the guy's death.
(There's a little more info on this particular incident, including a note from O'Connor's family, on the Vin Diesel Yahoo!groups mailing list, mostly quoted from Ain't It Cool News.)
I also don't know how common this is. A few Google searches didn't turn up much, just an article on hazards of TV and movie production that says 40 people died during such production in 1980-1989, only 8 of whom were stuntpeople.
In other news, today is Writing Day for me, so off I go.
