WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Bloodrayne

Has anything good ever come out of the movies-based-on-videogames subgenre? Is Uwe Boll’s reputation as the man who does for cinema what Jack the Ripper did for escort agencies actually deserved? To try to answer these two questions, I watched ‘Bloodrayne’.

Fuck my life.

The answer I’ve arrived at regarding the first question is: only if you’re a thirteen year old boy and the idea of Lara Croft being incarnated by Angelina Jolie, Alice from the ‘Resident Evil’ games by Milla Jovovich or Bloodrayne by Kristanna Lokken is enough to give you a stiffy without even watching a single frame of the resulting productions. Let’s face it, only a thirteen year old boy besieged by hormones and obsessed with video games could possibly feel any stirring of excitement over these largely sexless opuses.

So kudos to Uwe Boll for at least putting one sex scene in ‘Bloodrayne’, even if it is utterly joyless and perfunctory.

Are any more kudos due to our much-hated German director? Well, let’s spend a little time with the movie and attempt an answer.

‘Bloodrayne’ is about a vampire called Rayne (Lokken) who is first introduced in captivity, being paraded as a sideshow freak. Um. No. Let’s back up a tad. Rayne is sort-of vampire. A damphyr (I’m guessing at the spelling) – in other words, a product of a vampire/human union. The union in question being the rape of her mother by sadistic patriarchal vampire Kagan (Ben Kingsley).

Yes. Ben Kingsley. Sir Ben Kingsley. The guy who played Gandhi. In a Uwe Boll film.

Fuck my life part two.

Anyway, Rayne’s out for some payback against Kagan, while Kagan is more concerned with protecting his fiefdom against the ministrations of the Brimstone Society. This organisation is headed up by Vladimir (Michael Madsen), a man who comes across as a somewhat podgy Van Helsing with a haircut redolent of Bon Jovi circa 1986. Vlad’s retinue include Sebastian (Matthew Davis) and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez). Katarin’s loyalties to the Brimstone Society are compromised by her relationship with her manipulative father Elrich (Billy Zane).

Vladimir and his team are seeking to destroy Kagan, Elrich has his own agenda, and all of the various parties have a vested interest in Rayne. Despite an attraction to Sebastian, Rayne’s own agenda – the simple, powerful and unambiguous desire for vengeance – dictates her choices, and she embarks on a quest for three talismanic items guaranteed to vouchsafe her an audience with Kagan. The risk is considerable, however, since to reunite the purposefully scattered talismans could provide Kagan with his passport to true immortality and absolutely power.

All of which sounds promising, ja? Vampires, vampire hunters, court intrigue, Machiavellian power plays … throw in swordplay, explosions, nudity and intense people galloping full tilt across rugged landscapes on horses, compress it all into a 90 minute running time and surely this has got to emerge as some kind of ballsy, fast-paced guilty pleasures and never mind the 2.8 IMDb rating. I mean, surely?

Wrong.

‘Bloodrayne’ is quite frankly dull. Boll clearly has no idea about pacing, characterization or simply engaging with his audience on even the most basic level. Some of the blame has to be laid at the door of screenwriter Guinevere Turner – virtually every line of dialogue is stilted and unconvincing. Not that Boll (yup, we’re back to the main offender) even tries to get more than the most lackadaisical line reading out of his cast. And anything approaching an actual performance – fuhgeddaboutit! Lokken, not the greatest thespian talent to begin with, handles the swordplay decently and looks hot in a leather waistcoat, but remains a bland heroine. Madsen is embarrassingly miscast. Rodriguez, always one of my favourite tough gals in the movies, looks cool but is given sod all to work with. Only Meat Loaf – deliberately hamming it up as a dissipated nobleman …

… and Billy Zane, who tosses off his few scenes with all the glib sarcasm the production deserves, emerge as memorable. It is better that we do not speak of Ben Kingsley. I will assume he had severe gambling debts, desperately needed the work, and not speak of his involvement in an Uwe Boll film again.

Every aspect of the film is perfunctory, as if Boll had a checklist that read: hot chicks, swashbuckling, neck-biting, crossbows, tits, blood; and randomly threw one or more of these elements into whatever scene he was currently filming. As a result, what should be trashy is tedious. What should be exploitative ends up an exercise in ennui. What should be a blood-drenched, decadent hour and a half seems to last twice as long. No joke, I can’t remember looking at my watch this often during any film I’ve seen in the past few years. Nor did I hit pause so many times to slope off for a pee, pour another drink, make some toast, watch cars passing on the street below or check Facebook. Somebody had posted a picture of their Christmas tree. It made for more entertaining viewing.

Boarding Gate

The first film of Olivier Assayas’s I saw was ‘Irma Vep’, a dreamy fantasia on two highly different forms of cinema – the work of French director Louis Feuillade, and the iconography of Hong Kong movies – starring the strikingly beautiful Maggie Cheung. It was a film in which very little happened, but happened so hauntingly and elegantly that to be anything other than completely mesmerized wasn’t an option.

‘Boarding Gate’ – while poles apart from ‘Irma Vep’ in style and content – is immediately recognizable as the work of the same director. Olivier Assayas gets the language of cinema. Framing, mise-en-scene, use of light, depth of focus, spatial cognizance, editing, performance – every frame of ‘Boarding Gate’ bears the stamp of an artist who knows exactly what he’s doing.

Watching this as the second part of today’s double bill was revelatory. With ‘The Red Siren’, Oliver Megaton attempts juxtapositions, narrative rug-pulls and the conjuration of enigmatic characters and emerges with a wildly variable piece work that only just sidesteps being a big old mess. Assayas achieves all of the same things in ‘Boarding Gate’ and creates an effortlessly cool slice of cinematic existentialism.

Which isn’t bad considering that Assayas himself acknowledged ‘Boarding Gate’ as an exercise in “constructing a project around B-movie economics”, shot on a constrictive budget in just six weeks. If only all cheapies looked this good! The cover blurb on the Revolver Entertainment DVD seems to acknowledge the aesthetic, screaming “More daring than ‘Basic Instinct’, and with more tension than ‘Eastern Promises’, Asia Argento and Michael Madsen deliver the goods in this fast-paced, action-packed thriller.” Which is kind of true one respect and total bollocks in another.

Let’s deal with the comparisons. More daring than ‘Basic Instinct’? Well, it dares to be an intelligently-made thriller rather than a flashy, trashy POS, so score one. It’s got Asia Argento in the kind of tough/vulnerable/sexy/individualistic role she was put on this earth to play. Massive trade up from Sharon Stone’s by-the-numbers femme fatale, so score two. Then we’ve got Michael Madsen looking a tad overweight and rumpled, instead in Michael Douglas looking a tad overweight and rumpled, so we’ll call that one evens.

More tension than ‘Eastern Promises’? Since ‘Eastern Promises’ – like ‘Boarding Gate’ – is an examination of a certain milieu, a certain criminal underclass and its established traditions, rather than a suspense-driven thriller, the point is moot. ‘Eastern Promises’ gives us Viggo Mortensen in a naked smack-down in a bathhouse while ‘Boarding Gate’ gives us Asia Argento in skimpy black underwear getting all BDSM on Michael Madsen’s ass, so I guess it’s a question of you pays your money and you takes your choice.

“Fast-paced, action-packed”? Well, Assayas sure knows how to stage a chase or a shoot-out, and he pulls off a character-sinking-out-of-frame-to-reveal-antagonist shot worthy of Asia’s dad. And he turns up the heat in the second half, his heroine adrift in Hong Kong and encountering treachery at every turn. The early stages of ‘Boarding Gate’ are slow-burn to the point of almost extinguished, with a pivotal twenty-minute scene just shy of the midway point playing out as a two-hander.

I haven’t mentioned the plot. Not going to, either. Assayas sets up one character, effects a nifty rug-pull by swapping the focus to another very quickly, then concludes the aforementioned twenty-minute scene with a narrative development that sends the film spinning off like a pinball, slamming its way through the crowded streets and neon-bathed clubs of Hong Kong. Some of it is pure pulp, yet Assayas’s subversive intelligence is always present. Argento and Madsen put in great work, and there are stellar supporting turns from Kelly Lin and Carl Ng. The whole thing looks amazing, and there’s an inspired final shot that showcases the most artful use of blurring I’ve ever seen. It captures an uncontrived moment of redemption, and allows Assayas’s heroine to drift upwards, out of the frame and out of the film, as if she were an angel.