At times it's quite entertaining--the cast overall is unassuming and attractive, including three male pin-ups (that's not Republican Alan talking), and Seth Green is particularly funny, especially when watching Statham pick up a woman. (This scene will remind you that Gray directed Friday (1995), one of the best comedies of the 1990s.) I'm not too priggish to enjoy the good parts just because I hated the rest. (Though even the most entertaining characters are based on weary stereotypes: the Jew is the brainy nerd who can't get girls; it's supposed to be amusing that the black guy wants to collect first editions.) But, boy, did I hate the rest. At the end we get a "cute" coda in which we're told what the thieves bought with their money. "Bought"? With money? Why should such personable daredevils have to pay for anything?
If you want to know about genre in movies, a grasp of the narrative structures of romance and melodrama will tell you most of what you need to know for 90% of the dramatic movies Hollywood turns out. (The best place to start laying down a foundational understanding of literary genres is Northrop Frye's 1957 classic Anatomy of Criticism.) Universities teach courses called Novel into Film, but despite superficially realistic treatment, American movies do not generally model their narrative structure on novels. I think the common ignorance about romance and melodrama, to say nothing of irony, may account for the AFI's recently released list of the greatest 100 Heroes and Villains in American movies. Jim Carruthers's insightful comment at the bottom of this post by Eric Olsen at Blogcritics.org gets at the problem. But I think the larger problem is a failure to understand genre.
"Villain" is a term from melodrama, a theatrical genre that features a streamlined struggle between good and evil, personified (and absolutely polarized) in hero and villain. There's a lot of overlap between romance and melodrama in terms of the struggle of good and evil, as Carruthers suggests, but in romance the evil figure can be larger than a (merely human) villain--more directly connected to the principle of evil, and, often enough, the prime mover of evil himself. (Think of the difference between John Grisham legal melodramas and that feverish, paranoid-liberal romance The Devil's Advocate (1997).)
Thus, Carruthers is right that the town officials who keep the beaches open are the composite villain in Jaws (1975), but only with respect to the melodramatic structure of the plot. Bruce the Shark, however, is also a force of evil, but within the romance structure rather than the melodrama. In The Exorcist (1973) Regan isn't a villain because the movie isn't a melodrama at all. It doesn't have the storyline of chivalric romance but it does have many of the elements: Regan is a damsel in distress (what kind of psychotics could watch that movie, in which welts spelling "Help Me" arise on the little girl's body, and think of her as a villain?); the demon Pazuzu who possesses her is a combination of an evil wizard, a dragon, and the source of all evil; the young priest is the white knight; the old priest the good wizard, etc.
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Article comments
1 - peter
Great review, thanks a bunch. It's not everyday that I find a review of a movie that I agree with so much. I'm glad you pointed out the moral issues which heist movies have in abundance and also the predictability of the movie. I waited until the end of the movie only because I thought there would be a clever plot twist in the end...I thought maybe they would pull off the final heist just like the "italian job" and possibly have all the mini's as a distraction from where the gold really is. Or I thought that the 'damsel' would run away with the black knight and take the money with her. I was really looking for an interesting twist or plot change to make the rest of the film worth it, but I was horribly disappointed. Also, the line dialogue, especially between Norton, Wahlburg and Therone was especially terrible. The entire "date" scene was absolutely pathetic. In my mind, the *only* redeeming parts of the movie were the scene you mentioned with Statham and Green or the running "Napster" joke with the cameo from Shawn Fanning. Also, the second time I watched it (not by choice exactly..) I noticed that Spiderman makes an appearance in the movie. I took some screenshots and posted them on my webpage if you're interested: peterswift.org.
Anyhow, great review, I enjoyed it.
2 - jadester
this is exactly why i don't wish to see it. The original was cool - and no, it didn't really portray the criminals as being characters the viewer should be sympathetic to.