Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Hancock” tries to be a different sort of superhero movie. Starring Will Smith as a misanthropic, alcoholic humanoid being with godlike powers, it promises a galvanizing mix of subversive humor and crowd-pleasing spectacle. Smith plays an unrepentant jerk with energy and conviction while keeping the audience on Hancock’s side. But he can’t lighten the touch of director Peter Berg. “Hancock” is supernatural and super-serious. Occasionally Berg throws in a genuinely funny scene or a wildly off-the-mark stab at broad humor. More often, though, he directs the movie like an episode of his acclaimed TV melodrama “Friday Night Lights” – shooting angsty close-ups with a handheld camera, cutting them together raggedly and setting it all to mournful, atonal music. As in his previous movie, “The Kingdom,” Berg comes off as overwrought and desperate, trying to impose on the material an intimacy that the writing can’t support. The screenplay is a mess, too. There are only three major roles: Besides Smith, we get Jason Bateman as a PR executive who tries to rehabilitate Hancock’s image and Charlize Theron as Bateman’s steadfast wife. Yet the movie can’t persuasively sow conflict between these three good guys or reconcile them against a common foe. It hints at an elaborate mythology that it never explains, and eventually Berg just gives up and turns on the tears and the rain machines. “Hancock” drowns in self-importance.

LISTEN: Hancock

No two people experience the same story the same way. A reader or listener can contribute just as much imagination as a storyteller. “The Fall,” a beguiling and ravishing movie from director Tarsem, celebrates the power of a listener to transform a tale. The storyteller is Roy, a recently paralyzed movie stuntman in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital; his audience is Alexandria, a six-year-old girl recovering from a broken arm. Lee Pace finds the charm, pathos and self-loathing in Roy, while as Alexandria, Romanian actress Catinca Untaru has the unself-conscious naturalism of the best child stars. Roy rivets the girl’s attention by making up an adventure involving five exiled bandits who seek revenge against a cruel despot. Alexandria fleshes it out and colors it in with her mind’s eye. And Tarsem finds ways to communicate visually her bountiful imagination. He shot “The Fall” over a four-year period in 18 countries, and he makes spectacular use of the Mughal forts and palaces that hover over the cities of his native India. I’ve visited many of these locations, and I can attest that Tarsem didn’t alter or dress them up in any way. They are so magnificently strange that they can support the wildest fantasy. “The Fall” evokes both “Pan’s Labyrinth,” with its imagined world that may or may not provide solace from an ugly reality, and “Days of Heaven,” with its early-20th Century setting and child hero with an incomplete understanding of adult motives. It doesn’t quite measure up to those two masterpieces, but it’s the most exciting movie I’ve seen this year.

LISTEN: The Fall

Mike Myers likes to take a mediocre gag and hammer it to death. Sometimes, like David Letterman, he can wring laughter out of repetition through sheer kooky enthusiasm. Think of the shushing scene in the first “Austin Powers.” Myers finds no such inspiration in “The Love Guru,” in which he plays an American-born, Indian-raised self-help crackpot. It’s funny the first few times Myers says hello by pressing his hands together and solemnly intoning “Mariska Hargitay,” the musically named “Law and Order: SVU” star. But when he greets Hargitay herself early in the movie, the joke jumps the shark – and Myers keeps at it anyway. “The Love Guru” feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant by Myers, whose brand of literal-minded gross-out humor ran its course in the 90s. He’s still playing wacky caricatures when the likes of Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn have married bawdy comedy with honest emotion. Myers also appears reluctant to yield the punch lines to his co-stars. Otherwise he’d surround himself with more nimble performers than Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake and Verne Troyer, the erstwhile Mini-Me who shows up only so Myers can mock his diminutive stature. The plot – involving the guru’s attempt to reunite a neurotic hockey player and his wife – wouldn’t keep a six-year-old in suspense. The movie runs out of gas in the first half-hour. For the rest of its mercifully short 90 minutes, “The Love Guru” serves up more of the same.

LISTEN: The Love Guru

“The Incredible Hulk” is lean and mean and has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. Such qualities have been in short supply in the recent crop of superhero movies. And they should ease the angst of anyone who saw “Hulk,” Ang Lee’s plodding and pretentious 2003 attempt to bring the angry green man to the big screen. Presumably those viewers included the star and uncredited writer of the new movie, Edward Norton, and his hired-gun director, Louis Leterrier. Their wise strategy is to pretend the earlier movie didn’t exist. “The Incredible Hulk” has as much exposition as any comic-book adaptation needs – brisk flashbacks during the opening credits show scientist Bruce Banner injecting himself with radiation that turns him into a 10-foot-tall, pea soup-colored beast. He’s an impressive-looking creature, too: You feel the heft of his muscles, the power of his stride and the rage and confusion in his eyes. We’ve become jaded by digital effects, but the CGI in this movie truly dazzles. More important, Leterrier assembles crisp and coherent action sequences, and he smartly raises the stakes every time the Hulk clashes with a sneering mercenary played by Tim Roth. Leterrier is less comfortable with humor, but I appreciate the attempt. The movie even acknowledges the absurdity of Banner’s pants staying on when he quadruples in size. During a critical moment, the Hulk gets to let loose with a signature outburst: “Hulk smash!” I don’t know if that describes the movie, but “The Incredible Hulk” delivers a solid impact.

LISTEN: The Incredible Hulk

The new Adam Sandler movie contains a running gag about sex with elderly women, Rob Schneider doing another one of his noxious ethnic stereotypes and a mild strain of Sandler’s recurring homophobia. Nonetheless, “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” gives off a sunny, even innocuous vibe. It’s goofy and zany and slap-happy. Sandler plays a sex-crazed Israeli commando who dreams of retiring from the military to become a hairstylist. He stows away to New York, where he lands a job at a ragtag salon run by a fetching Palestinian woman. Sandler keeps the Israeli accent more or less consistent and shows genuine affection for the quirks of Middle Eastern pop culture, from hacky-sack to bizarre soft drinks to cutoff jeans shorts on men. While Sandler has shown an adventurous streak in recent years, he tends to keep the comedy crude and broad when he works under the banner of his production company, Happy Madison. “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” which he co-wrote, maintains that tradition, but it’s not afraid to take the target audience out of its comfort zone with jokes not everyone’s going to get. Sandler also shows a burgeoning political consciousness. He promotes peace and tolerance by depicting Jews and Arabs as happily coexisting on a studio mockup of a Manhattan block that’s about as gritty and realistic as Sesame Street. “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” is a timely valentine to America the melting pot, a country whose strength and character come from its vibrant mixture of cultures. All that, and sometimes it’s even funny, too.

LISTEN: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

It’s not accurate to characterize “Sex and the City” as an extended episode of the HBO series. With a running time of nearly two-and-a-half hours, it’s more like an entire season – a mediocre one. The show ended – a few years removed from its frothy, raunchy peak – with the heroine and her three sidekicks basking in a contented glow. The movie proposes to find out what happens after the happily-ever-after. For writer-director Michael Patrick King, the answer is more of the same – a lack of emotional fulfillment fueled largely by poor communication between romantic partners. But instead of playing the friction for comedy, King steers it toward maudlin melodrama. He tears everybody down, then builds them back up – tediously. And he sparks the conflict by having his smart, capable characters behave without the self-awareness that ought to accompany their supposed maturity. If you want to see Carrie, Miranda and Samantha act like buffoons, “Sex and the City” is for you. Charlotte, played by Kristin Davis, doesn’t get to do as much – and Davis overcompensates with an acting style better suited for Telemundo. Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and especially Cynthia Nixon remain skilled performers, capable of sass and vulnerability. But King again does his stars no favors by shooting them as if they’re still on television – with brightly lighted, indifferently framed close-ups. There’s more to movie glamour than draping Parker in garish couture. This “Sex and the City” will work best as the sleepy coda to all-night DVD viewing parties.

LISTEN: Sex and the City

I’m not sure if it’s a failure of imagination on the part of author C.S. Lewis or director Andrew Adamson, but I get the impression watching these movies that Narnia is about the size of Rhode Island. I’m tempted to blame Adamson, though: The “Narnia” series is shot in New Zealand, which provided Peter Jackson with enough locations to suggest the vast sweep of Middle Earth in the far superior “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. There’s no place in Narnia that our heroes can’t walk to in half a day.

Narnia appears sparsely populated as well. My internal crowd estimator, honed at years of news and sporting events, counted roughly eightscore native Narnians. Presumably the dwarves, centaurs and fauns have been so decimated after centuries of ethnic cleansing by the Telmarines that they’ve resorted to inbreeding. And by the end of the movie, 100 of them are dead! “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” has a remarkably high body count, and Peter Pevensie, despite bravely claiming that he’s learned all he can from Narnia and won’t be returning, really ought to see a counselor for his post-traumatic stress disorder. It can’t be pleasant to have led so many of his former subjects to bloody deaths. He may have been known as “Peter the Magnificent” during his time as king, but as a combat general, he’s so inept he’d make Ambrose Burnside cringe.

The Pevensie siblings, of course, ruled Narnia for decades after freeing the land from the wintry clutches of the evil White Witch in the previous installment, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” But when they are whisked back to England, they’re children once again: Time in Narnia and on Earth do not progress concurrently. In the new movie, the rapidly maturing Pevensies find a new portal to Narnia on a subway platform. Once there, they discover that 1,300 years have passed since their reign, and the brutal, paranoid Talmarines — an olive-skinned race of men who speak with Mediterranean accents — have taken over. Lewis’ weirdly paternalistic vision – the humanoid or talking-animal denizens of Narnia prosper only when governed by a “Son of Adam” – takes on an imperialistic slant this time around. A proper Son of Adam must be pale and preferably a product of exclusive grammar schools. The swarthy, funny-talking types cannot be trusted to rule as benevolent tyrants. These outmoded attitudes — along with the Christian undertones — make it hard for me to believe I’m being whisked away to a magical place. Of course, it’s not the sort of stuff I noticed when I read the books as a kid, and I doubt the target demographic of 7-to-13s will have any complaints about ”Prince Caspian.”

Like “Wardrobe,” “Prince Caspian” is sturdily plotted: Lewis understood how to construct a story in which actions have consequences and incidents build upon one another. It’s a skill that’s sorely lacking in modern screenwriters, and the “Narnia” writing team of Adamson, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely deserves credit for not reducing the movie to a series of set pieces. At the same time, though, I don’t think “Prince Caspian” is one of the more inspired efforts in Lewis’s seven-book series. It feels like a sequel bereft of ideas: Lewis simply sends the same kids back to Narnia and gets them into a bunch of battles. (The third book, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” rediscovers the sense of wonder that made “Wardrobe” so memorable.)

In the movie, the battles just go on and on and on. Adamson is at best a competent hack at staging action, ripping off techniques from Peter Jackson, Ridley Scott, Mel Gibson et. al. I got the feeling the 2-hour, 20-minute movie would be at least a reel shorter if Adamson had simply resisted the urge to shoot in slow motion while one of the Pevensies yells “Nooooo!!” or “For Narniaaa!” or whatever. Such uninspired moviemaking contributes to the feeling that we’ve seen this all before and that “Narnia” is “Lord of the Rings” lite, particularly since the climactic battle sequence takes its cues from the seige of Helm’s Deep, all the way down to the last minute bailout from a deus ex machina (in this case, Aslan the Jesus-lion).

The actors playing the Pevensies (William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley) have grown into confident performers, with Popplewell in particular suggesting a rich emotional life for the elder girl, Susan. Peter Dinklage is admirably dour as the stalwart dwarf Trumpkin. As the title character, Ben Barnes talks like Manuel from “Fawlty Towers” while sporting the prettiest hair in all the kingdom. The movie lacks the commanding presences of first-rate thespians like Tilda Swinton (reduced to a cameo this time around) or James McAvoy. Actors like that can make seen-it-all adult moviegoers as slack-jawed and giddy as younger fans. I wasn’t bored or despondent at “Prince Caspian” — it’s sturdy and competent – but I fear that I’ll come to regard the ”Narnia” series as a duty rather than a pleasure.

Moving the “Indiana Jones” series from the 1930s to the 1950s is more than just a concession to the passage of time. It opens up a slew of new pop-cultural reference points for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the consummate entertainers who created the character. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” offers exactly the sort of adventure Indy should be having in 1957, one that leaves behind biblical artifacts in favor of science fiction. Anyone who thinks that’s an inappropriate turn for the franchise probably has an inflated sense of the earlier movies’ importance. Spielberg made “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as an homage to the cheeseball matinee serials of his youth, and the new movie honors that tradition. It weaves just enough intrigue around the McGuffin – a crystal skull that seems not to have been carved by human hands – before launching into a rousing series of chases, fights and quests. Creaky and cranky old Harrison Ford appears rejuvenated as he dons the fedora and bullwhip again. His callow co-star, Shia LaBeouf, brings Ford-like energy and professionalism. The supporting cast is shakier, including, sadly, Cate Blanchett as a power-hungry Soviet operative. She looks great but never instills much fear. The first three “Indiana Jones” movies were made before the dawn of CGI, and with a few unfortunate exceptions, Spielberg resists indulging himself on digital imagery this time. Most of what you see on screen are actual objects in front of the camera, and that’s just one of many ways in which “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” provides solid entertainment.

LISTEN: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

“Speed Racer” is a beautifully redundant title, one that might lead even the least demanding moviegoer to expect something swift and light on its feet. Such descriptions have rarely applied to the work of the Wachowski brothers. Even their masterpiece, “The Matrix,” bogged down when the cast sat around spouting portentous dialogue. “Speed Racer” begins with a glorious 15 minutes that establish the major characters, the relevant backstory and the high-octane atmosphere. The Wachowskis use canny and innovative visual techniques as they weave together flashbacks to Speed’s boyhood with his attempt to shatter a track record held by his late older brother. After that rip-roaring start, the movie stalls and sputters. For a PG-rated adventure based on a cartoon, the Wachowskis have constructed a needlessly complicated plot about corporate skullduggery. And they can’t write or direct conversation with any pep or urgency. Still, despite their devotion to computer-generated imagery, they get occasionally subtle work out of their strong cast, which includes Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, John Goodman and Christina Ricci. The actors’ faces have a porcelain smoothness that can only be the result of digital airbrushing – they sometimes appear as cartoonish as everything around them. I think the weirdness of “Speed Racer’s” candy-colored look is partly responsible for the tepid response from audiences, but I found it engagingly fanciful. The movie would really be a gas if it weren’t so slow, “Speed Racer,” slow.

LISTEN: Speed Racer

Anyone who saw the fifth season of “The Wire” knows that Tom McCarthy is a skilled actor. But I’d be happy if McCarthy never acted again if that meant he devoted all his energy to writing and directing. “The Visitor,” McCarthy’s second feature, establishes him as a remarkable moviemaker. It’s crisp and confident, with hardly a wasted shot or line of dialogue. It addresses sticky and prickly themes – illegal immigration, the legacy of nine-eleven and the grieving process – without ever stating them explicitly. “The Visitor” just watches as ordinary people try to get on with their lives. The consummate character actor Richard Jenkins stars as Walter Vale, a burned-out economics professor at a small Connecticut college. Dispatched to Manhattan for a conference, Walter finds a young couple living in his long-neglected apartment, and, motivated more by loneliness and boredom than by compassion, he allows them to stay. Walter’s visitors are undocumented immigrants, one from Syria, one from Senegal, and while they quickly warm to their host, his presence leads to complications that eventually involve the young man’s mother, played by the luminous Hiam Abbass. As a director, McCarthy finds lucid emotions in New York locations – the vibrancy of Washington Square Park, the menace of a Queens warehouse, the romance of the Staten Island Ferry. And he never reduces his noble, believably flawed characters to symbols of global injustice as in “Crash” or “Babel.” “The Visitor” earns a long stay in the hearts and minds of moviegoers.

LISTEN: The Visitor