Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Movie Review
Jolie good! This is Angelina Jolie's second release this week in India. After watching her slither seductively up to 'son' Colin Farrel in "Alexander", she is seen playing mind games with a non-American actor in this comic-book-on-celluloid featuring a charismatic cast and a whole lot of redundant special effects that seem to have been deliberately designed to give the picture a studio feel.
Though set in the sky, the aerial view is so vaporous that we end up looking not at the spectacle but the flimsiness of the whole exercise.
Much of the film depends on comic-book concepts of entertainment with the two protagonists flying across a studio skyline on a designer-plane. The fantasy figures at the helm are a super-hero (Jude Law) and a shifty journalist (Gwyneth Paltrow) out to nab a villain who wants to destroy the world.
Before that happens, all definitions of decorum are decimated. The narration is much too heavy handed to qualify as comic strip entertainment, while the characters are far too cartoonish to be credible.
Undoubtedly, a good job has been done in creating a world run by fantasy. The frames are lit up to highlight the cavernous contours. The characters exude a sly, smouldering satirical aura. But you never get a glimpse of any world outside the immediate. Hence, the urgency of the characters in crisis regresses to a juvenile jigsaw rather than any serious attempt to qualify the epic dimensions of the James Bond capers in a contemporary context.
This is the stuff animation films are made of. And, sure enough, Paltrow gives an animated performance. In a blonde wig and sporting a caricatured attitude to a news-hound's notorious inquisitiveness she's immensely un-likable, and perhaps purposely so.
Jude Law is an extremely watchable actor. If you've seen him in "The Talented Mr Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" you'd know what I mean.
There's little he can do with a role that requires him to put on a mask and pretend to be piloting a plane through a virtual map of the world. Jolie, with an eye-patch, is an aperitif in a meal that has no main course.
One gets the feeling that Hollywood is leaning too heavily on fantasy elements to further its interests. It's time to get real.
