Grade: C+I wish Peter Berg would stop choosing bad scripts. He always enthralls actors with his innovative directing style -- and I've always thought he had incredible potentil since the mid 1990s. Very Bad Things and Friday Night Lights (both film and TV) are some of my favorite works to watch on both an entertaining and artistic facet. In very few movies do I feel as if I am there, that I ride with the high and the lows of the actors. Maybe it's the way he motivates his cast and crew, and maybe it's the handheld camera shots he uses, but it's clear Berg has a unique and correct vision of how to make non-reality TV seem more realistic than life itself.
But in both Hancock and The Kingdom, he supremely disappoints. And I don't get it. He has much better actors in both films. Bateman is classic. Cooper and Theron are well-respected. Foxx and Smith will make any film better. And I guess I'll just have to blame the screenplays for both pitfalls. And it's a shame. You see glimpses of his genius in both films, but they both fall flat. You never get involved with any character, no matter how much you want to. You sort of see the tension and the drama, but it never fully unfolds in a way that makes you care. Just snippets of great 3 minute action sequences. But even after three or four of those snippets, you still have another hour and 15 minutes of movie time left.
The Kingdom is clumped up, sometimes moving too fast and sometimes moving too slow. Unlike FNL, it never makes sense why the characters or changing or how they're changing. You just see that the movie has to move along, so they change. Berg's next two films won't be released till 2010, will hopefully be long enough for him to get his mojo back. In the meantime, I can just enjoy the imprint of his creativity when FNL comes back in a few months.
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