Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Inception” contains some of the most spectacular nonsense ever committed to film – drivel with intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Writer-director Christopher Nolan crafts a fine impersonation of a good movie, with strong, brooding performances, gorgeous atmospherics and inventive, if showy, digital effects. But Nolan is more interested in toying with his audience than telling a story that holds together, a gambit that should be familiar from his previous original screenplays, “Memento” and “The Prestige.” Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a corporate spy who steals from people’s dreams. He’s hired to attempt the more ambitious “inception” — planting an idea in the mind of a target. The genre trappings are familiar from any heist movie — a damaged hero whose only hope for future happiness rests on one last job. To its credit, “Inception” stages this material intriguingly, within an elaborate, shared dreamworld. This choice allows DiCaprio’s dead wife, played with luminous bitterness by Marion Cotillard, to supply the emotional weight. But Nolan eventually loses control, shuffling between incoherent and unnecessary action sequences, underlined by a droning, bleating Hans Zimmer score. His aim is to tantalize people into seeing the movie again, but there’s a difference between a lucid film that rewards multiple viewings and a deliberately vague puzzle picture that taunts you to make sense of it all. “Inception” is the work of a filmmaker with something to hide. Nolan hasn’t made up his mind or committed fully to his ideas — so he asks the viewer to do the hard work for him.

“The Last Airbender” was an old-fashioned turkey, easy to mock for its spectacular ineptitude and its desperate 11th-hour conversion to 3D. A week later brings a new bid to goad families into theaters, the animated comedy “Despicable Me,” about a washed-up supervillain who adopts three orphan girls. It will get better reviews. But to these eyes it’s a more insidious and depressing film. “The Last Airbender” was clueless and dunderheaded; it couldn’t help itself. The makers of “Despicable Me” know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is reprehensible. It’s a calculatingly vapid commodity, always making the lazy, obvious choices. It doesn’t entertain; at best, it distracts. It has virtually no story or likable characters, so it’s packed with throwaway sight gags, most of which ask us to chuckle at physical pain or humiliation. The French filmmakers lack vision or charm, and they wallow matter-of-factly in the coarsest elements of American culture. They make no attempt to amuse adults and children at the same time. “Despicable Me” is festooned with references that young viewers have no capacity to understand, like a shameless and pointless homage to the horse’s-head scene in “The Godfather.” On top of the violence and mild scatology, there is of course cloying sentimentality, as the malevolent if hapless bad guy is reformed by fatherhood. Of course, he only turned dastardly because his mother neglected him. The moral, then, is that parental love is a good thing, so take it to heart and spare your kids from “Despicable Me.”

“The Last Airbender” plays like the most expensive instructional tai chi video ever made. The heroes can move air, water and earth with their minds, and before they do, they often gesticulate like the congregants in a Beijing park at sunrise. Since the acting is so poor, the story so incoherent and the dialogue so wooden, they might as well turn to the camera and explain earnestly how the ancient martial art enhances their physical and mental well-being. Instead, they just do their tai chi and are surrounded by elaborate and costly digital effects. It’s not clear what the practice has to do with telekinesis. Mostly I think it’s thrown in to add some Asian flavor to this inexplicable production. “The Last Airbender” was adapted from an anime-style Nickelodeon series, but it’s about as Asian as P.F. Chang’s. The art direction, the costumes and the mythology carry Eastern influences, but the heroes are white, the villains are mostly Indian and other ethnicities get thrown in only when convenient. Paramount Pictures must be desperate for a new tentpole to throw 150 million dollars at this ragged material and entrust it to the faded filmmaking prodigy M. Night Shyamalan. His name doesn’t sell tickets anymore, and the actors are mostly unknown, so the 2D production was retrofitted for 3D, which means you wear the uncomfortable glasses but rarely notice any stereoscopic effect. It doesn’t help that the term “avatar” is crucial to the plot. “The Last Airbender” was intended as the first chapter of a trilogy, but like “The Golden Compass,” it may endure as an embarrassing standalone.

You know who you are. You love movies, or at least you used to, but you’ve been avoiding them this summer because everything on the marquee looks like the shoddy remake of a sequel to a video game. I can’t say “Knight and Day” will enthrall the discerning moviegoers who’ve sent the box office into a well-deserved slump, but it should placate them. At least it did for me. The versatile director James Mangold relies on an endangered formula: A-list stars, glamorous locations, action, humor and romance. “Knight and Day” knowingly takes place in a fantasy version of the real world, where feats of derring-do are tossed off blithely, recognizable in their aftermath only because the hair of Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz is slightly tousled. Cruise again puts his feral energy in service of comedy, satirizing the super-competent Ethan Hunt of his “Mission: Impossible” series. Diaz is less ideally cast. Her persona in material like this is bubbly-flighty-ditzy-clumsy, and she does it well. But it doesn’t jell with her character’s occupation, restoring vintage cars, or with her surprising acumen in the world of high-stakes espionage. Mangold packs every scene with delirious action and banter, and it’s charming, especially for the first hour or so. But just when the movie should be serving up its most memorable delights, it falls into a rut, repeating setups, transitions and barely-literate catchphrases, like Cruise reacting to desperate situations with three words: “I got this.” “Knight and Day” is similarly enamored of its own sleek competence. It seduces itself when it should still be seducing the audience.

The protagonist of “Please Give” buys people’s unwanted antique furniture for her Manhattan boutique, where she sells it at ridiculous markups. She feels guilty about her occupation. I wonder if writer-director Nicole Holofcener feels the same way about hers. She and distributor Sony Pictures Classics are making the same cynical calculation as her hero: that customers will overpay for crap because the venue has a reputation for quality. It’s sadly apropos that the title sounds like a desperate plea for charity. “Please Give” is boutique cinema that belongs in a DVD bin at Wal-Mart. It’s not incompetent, but it’s so slight it’s barely there. Holofcener casts some of the most appealing actors in movies today, including Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall and Oliver Platt, and together they craft some plausible character sketches. But the movie concludes by asking us, without apparent irony, to be moved by a privileged 15-year-old girl getting a bad facial, then buying some expensive jeans. Holofcener can hardly be bothered with aesthetics. She begins with a montage of breasts on a mammogram machine, a cheap attention-getter with little relevance to the story. Then she settles in for 90 minutes of people talking, photographed in purely functional closeups and medium shots and accompanied by a Muzak score. There’s no reason to see “Please Give” in a theater, and that means it’s not a movie. When a show as painstakingly crafted and dramatically potent as “Mad Men” is on basic cable and a film like this is charging admission, the choice isn’t just obvious. It’s a moral necessity.

“Splice” isn’t the sort of horror movie where things jump out at you, accompanied by deafening sound effects. It doesn’t pit good against evil or, in the case of many slasher pics, evil against banal. The monster isn’t the bad guy, or girl in her case, and the movie plumbs her complex relationship with her antiheroic creators, as in “Frankenstein.” “Splice” is provocative and unsettling, with sexual taboo-breaking that provokes discomfort more than visceral terror. No wonder it seems to have gained more traction with critics than with the moviegoers who favor the “Saw” series. Its seriousness is evident from the casting of Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as geneticists who create a new species in a bid for pharmaceutical riches. They deliver nuanced performances, even when their characters show laughably bad judgment, recklessly adding human DNA to their stew and hatching a fast-growing girl they call Dren. She’s smart, physically imposing and increasingly easy on the eye, and her development is fraught with moral dilemmas and Freudian psychodrama. “Splice” is never dull, but it’s not always surehanded. Director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali has a few independent genre films under his belt, and he clearly knows how to stay under budget: He uses a mere handful of sets and locations, and only five actors get speaking parts. The movie needs a more expansive third act, but that’s not possible under those limitations, and Natali’s filmmaking disappoints in the crucial final reel. Even so, “Splice” is one of the year’s most interesting and rewarding major-studio releases.

“The Secret in Their Eyes” is a Latin lover of a thriller: It seduces you slowly, with suave confidence and courtly flair. This Argentine Oscar winner chronicles a murder mystery that spans a quarter century, but it’s no procedural. There are no red herrings, no gratuitous twists. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is adult, literate, restrained. Its themes of loss, stasis and long-dormant passions can be parsed from fleeting glances and tossed-off gestures. The movie begins in 1999, with Ricardo Darin as a retired federal justice agent who’s trying to write a novel about his investigation of a 1974 rape and murder. He reconnects with his former boss, the subject of his unrequited ardor. The sad-eyed Darin and the elegant Soledad Villamil make a handsome would-be couple with a deep, unspoken bond. Film acting doesn’t get any better. In the flashbacks, director Juan Jose Campanella keeps the exposition light and engaging, thanks to the irrepressible performance of Guillermo Francella as Darin’s drunken right-hand man. Then Campanella boldly disrupts the movie’s rhythm, using an exhilarating single shot to stage an elaborate pursuit inside a packed soccer stadium. He follows that up with an incendiary good-cop/bad-cop interrogation. It appears that justice will prevail, but Argentina in 1974 was corrupt and unstable, with Juan Peron serving his short-lived final stint as president. Picking up the case in calmer times, our hero confronts the psychic scars of the period. “The Secret in Their Eyes” wrings compelling human drama from crime, politics and the shortcomings of well-meaning people.

Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” tries to tap into the appetite of contemporary moviegoers for comic-book-style origin stories and franchise reboots. That’s an appropriately modest goal for Scott, who’s shown little vision or creativity in the nearly 30 years since “Blade Runner.” There’s nothing new in his tepid and humorless take on the mythical bandit of Sherwood Forest, unless you consider it innovative to transform Robin into a dour grump who, like so many comic-book heroes, has unresolved Daddy issues. And please don’t buy into the marketing that touts this movie as realistic or historically accurate. The Robin Hood of this tale is a lowly archer called Robin Longstride, an absurd and transparently made-up name for a 13th-Century English yeoman. Scott also seems to believe his native country is around the size of San Diego. You might as well watch Errol Flynn wage exuberant swordfights in a doublet and hose, but if it’s a gritty “Robin Hood” you’re after, that’s been done, too. Check out Richard Lester’s bleak, anti-heroic “Robin and Marian,” in which Sean Connery plays Robin Hood as a grizzled warrior and a charming rake. That’s beyond the capabilities of Russell Crowe, whose charisma has deserted him. Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland waffle ineffectually between medieval politics and Robin’s mild personal struggle. There are some amusing performances at the margins, and Scott lavishes welcome attention on King John’s French mistress-turned-queen. But his “Robin Hood” is several arrows short of a quiver.

With “Iron Man,” Marvel Studios and director Jon Favreau asked star Robert Downey Jr. to carry them to glory. They hoped his charisma was so overwhelming that audiences would flock to a movie in which he spends much of his time welding — that is, when he’s not off-screen entirely, replaced by a computer-generated guy in a silly metal suit. I thought they failed spectacularly, but I was squarely in the minority. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but snicker at the beginning of “Iron Man 2,” as the audience is treated to a long sequence of Mickey Rourke … welding. Is this a superhero saga or a dreary two-part episode of “Dirty Jobs”? Thankfully, “Iron Man 2″ gets better from there, but the welding torch is the only thing that catches fire. It’s a reasonable exercise in big-budget escapism — competent but uninspired. I got my kicks mostly from the intermittently clever one-liners and from the hammy antics of the first-rate cast. Downey, Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson and Garry Shandling perform with gusto. Beyond his able handling of the actors, I remain mystified that Favreau is allowed to direct these movies. He can’t stage action with any tension or verve, and his images just sit there, indifferently lighted and framed. Maybe he hopes we’re watching through an “Iron Man” mask. The first movie had novelty on its side — it introduced an intriguingly flawed superhero, played by an actor with a notably checkered past. But I’m not sure “Iron Man 2″ will generate much excitement beyond the marketing-driven opening-weekend bonanza.

Among the many astonishing sequences in “Oceans,” several got me thinking about military history. A school of sardines endures its own Pearl Harbor, getting dive-bombed by kamikaze birds and swallowed whole by dolphins, sharks and whales. Newly hatched sea turtles are massacred from above, Omaha Beach-style, during their sun-baked journey from sand to surf. And in the strangest scene, thousands of spider crabs re-enact the battle of Agincourt, clashing like armored knights in close-quarter combat. I wish we got to find out why the crabs fight each other, but “Oceans” is merely an introduction to weird and wonderful marine life, not an advanced course. This French-made documentary begins with a contrived image of a boy staring out to sea, and it regards the creatures therein with childlike wonder. Even a kid-friendly movie could stand to be more honest about the damage humans are doing to the seas. Overfishing, pollution and climate change are mentioned briefly, then followed immediately with bromides about the resilience of marine life or the growing awareness of the need to protect our waters. The movie aims to soothe and reassure, not to inform or provoke. The filmmakers don’t clutter up their images with titles on the screen, leaving narrator Pierce Brosnan to provide all the factual information. It’s a reasonable aesthetic choice, but a few signposts would be helpful. Eventually “Oceans” gets a bit repetitious as it hopscotches around the globe, showing off the fantastic creatures of the deep. But you’ll still spend plenty of time with your mouth agape.