Jupiter Ascending movie review (2015)
Tatum's emotional transparency makes you care about Jupiter's protector, Caine Wise, even though he's as much a stick figure as the other characters. Tatum cries the best righteous manly-man tears in cinema. He's a rare American hunk who can sell Boy Scout decency without seeming like a con artist. But like the other lead actors, he's defeated by the movie's pre-fab cinematic world. Too many of the action scenes, creatures, cityscapes and starships will make you wish you were watching "Guardians of the Galaxy" or "The Fifth Element" instead, even if you didn't like them.
At least Redmayne's mannered acting plants a freak flag in the movie's swollen purplish heart. At times his performance seems modeled on how Redmayne imagines Glenn Close might look and sound, should she live to be 100. He trembles and flares his nostrils. He whispers 90% of his lines and shrieks the other ten. Not once does he blink when you expect him to, or for as long. Did Redmayne decide it was necessary to destroy the film in order to save it? If so, give the man an "A" for anarchy.
"Jupiter Ascending" is an example of a particularly depressing sort of bad blockbuster: one made by artists that you might not know were artists unless you'd seen their other films. It's not "so bad it's good," which would at least promise a certain lunkheaded obsessiveness. Nor is it aim-for-the-moon-and-land-among-the-stars bad, or any other sub-category of bad that one could make a critical case for. It's blandly, often listlessly bad, check-the-blockbuster-boxes bad, just-out-of-film-school-and-shopping-a-tentpole-screenplay bad. That's the last thing I would have expected from the directors of "Speed Racer," a film whose neon-and-steel-and-peyote aesthetic went beyond incoherence and attained psychedelic poetry, and "Cloud Atlas," a fable about reincarnation, the indestructibility of true love, and the Brotherhood of Man that wanted to be a modern "Intolerance" and got startlingly close at times.
Maybe the version that was supposed to hit theaters last summer has more nuanced characters, a more comprehensible plot, and an altogether surer touch. No matter: the two-hour version released to theaters this weekend is striking mainly because long sections of it feel as though they could have been written and directed by anyone with a pile of money to throw around, and a decade's worth of cliched action-fantasies to ape rather than re-imagine.
To be clear, the problem isn't that the movie lacks passion or sincerity. This is a defiantly corny silent-movie-with-sound, in which Jupiter keeps falling and falling and falling and Caine keeps soaring in, Superman-style, to scoop her up in his arms. The problem is that the film fails to find a new or even halfway distinctive way to express itself. For all its noise and color, "Jupiter Ascending" looks, sounds and moves too much like every other sci-fi or fantasy adventure you've seen in the aftermath of the "Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" trilogies and "Star Wars" prequels.
