Tag: Michael Ironside

Blackberry (2023)

Comic-drama about business collapse wants to The Social Network but lacks its deft touch and humanity

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Jay Baruchel (Mike Lazaridis), Glenn Howerton (Jim Balsillie), Matt Johnson (Doug Fregin), Rich Sommer (Paul Stannos), Michael Ironside (Charles Purdy), Martin Donovan (Rick Brock), Michelle Giroux (Dara Frankel), Saul Rubinek (John Woodman), Cary Elwes (Carl Yankowski)

“We’ll be the phone people had before they had an iPhone!” I’ve always found successful products that collapsed overnight fascinating. The Blackberry tapped into something people didn’t even realise they wanted: a phone that combines a computer and pager, a status symbol that told everyone you were a Master of the Universe. It was the product everyone wanted – until Steve Jobs announced the iPhone that did everything the Blackberry did better. It should be material for an entertaining film – but Blackberry isn’t quite it.

The film is set up as a classic Faust story. Our Faust is Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), co-founder and CEO of Research in Motion, a tiny Canadian business with an idea for lovingly crafted cellular devices. Our Mephistopheles is Jim Balsille (Glenn Howerton), an aggressive blowhard businessman who sees the potential – and knows he can sell it the way the timid Lazaridis never could. The angel on Faust’s shoulder is co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), who worries the quality-and-fun parts of the business will be sacrificed. Nevertheless, Mephistopheles tempts Faust into partnership and they turn Blackberry into a huge business destined to all fall apart.

Blackberry desperately wants to be The Social Network. What it lacks is both that film’s wit and sense of humanity. It’s a film trying too hard all the time, always straining to be edgy. You can see it in its hand-held, deliberately soft-focus filming style, the camera constantly shifting in and out of blur. (Watching after a while I genuinely started to feel uncomfortable, with a wave of motion sickness nausea.) It goes at everything at one hundred miles an hour, but never manages to make its depiction of a company bought low by arrogance and unwillingness to adapt either funny or moving. It’s aiming to capture the chaos, but instead feels slightly like a student film.

It’s Faustian theme of selling out your principles for glory is just too familiar a story – and the dialogue isn’t funny enough to make the film move with the zingy outrageousness it’s aiming for. It also lacks momentum, the woozy hand-held camerawork actually slowing things down, a very shot lurches into focus. It’s a film crying out for speedy montage and jump-cuts to turn it into a sort of cinematic farce, as the business makes ever more sudden, chancy calls which switch at the mid-point from paying off to unravelling. Instead, it stumbles around like a drunken sailor.

At the centre, Jay Baruchel delivers the most complex work as the awkward and timid Lazaridis who slowly absorbs more and more smart business styling and ruthlessness over the film. But the film fumbles his corruption. His opening mantras – that “good enough is the enemy of humanity”, that Chinese mass production equals low quality because the workers aren’t paid enough to care about the product, that companies should focus on human needs – are all-too obviously dominos set up to get knocked over as Lazaridis gets corrupted and cashes out his principles to turn out exactly the sort of bug-filled mass-produced crap he railed against at the start – but this makes the character himself feel more like a human domino himself rather than living, breathing person.

The other performances all verge on cartoonish. Glenn Howerton channels Gordon Gekko and The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker as abusive, sweary, would-be Master-of-the-Universe, only-interested-in-the-bottom-line Jim Balsille. Balsille will do everything Lazaridis won’t do: he’ll cut corners and browbeat his way into meetings. A smarter film would make clear Balsille is in many ways more effective than Lazaridis – that without him Research in Motion would have gone bust years ago. It could also have looked with more sympathy at a guy who so believed in his one shot at glory he re-mortgaged his house to pay for it. But the film leans into Howerton’s skill at explosive outburst and never really humanises him, constantly shoving him into the role of villain.

The film also fails with its more human element. Director Matt Johnnson plays Doug Fregin, Lazaridis’ best friend and business partner. Fregin is set-up as the angel in Lazaridis shoulder, the decent guy against selling out. But Johnson’s performance lacks charm or likeability. Fregin – like many of the other workers of the company – is a geek-bro, his veins pumping with fratboy passions, who thinks the best way to get people working is to throw a string of parties. He’s, in a way, as wrong as Balsille is on what makes long-term business success. Crucially as well, the friendship between him and Lazaridis never really rings true, not least because Fregin browbeats and bullies the timid Lazaridis as much as Balsille does.

With no-one to really care for, the tragedy of this business never hits home. It does capture the sense of desperation as the once-mighty company collapses in the face of Apple – Lazaridis ramming his head into the sand and refusing to believe anyone would want a phone sans keyboard – but it fails to successfully illustrate why an innovator lost his ‘magic’ touch. The script fails to land much of its humour, and tiptoes around positioning Lazaridis as increasingly corrupted, even as starts hiring brash businessmen (epitomised by Michael Ironside’s sergeant-major fixer) to say the thing to his underlings that he’s too scared to. The financial shenanigans that land Blackberry in trouble with the SEC aren’t properly explained, and the actual reasons the iPhone finally put Blackberry in the dust bin of history are hand-waved away (“minutes… data… look just accept it ok”)

Blackberry would, in the end, have been better as an hour-long documentary, with dramatic reconstructions supported by informative talking heads. The film we have fails to deliver on a concept that bursts with comic and dramatic potential.

Top Gun (1986)

Cruise flies into movie super-stardom in this fun-but-much-worse-than-you-remember flying film

Director: Tony Scott

Cast: Tom Cruise (Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell), Kelly McGillis (Charlie Blackwood), Val Kilmer (Lt Tom “Iceman” Kazansky), Anthony Edwards (Lt Nick “Goose” Bradshaw), Tom Skerritt (CDR Mike “Viper” Mitchell), Michael Ironside (LCDR Rick “Jester” Heatherly), John Stockwell (Lt Bill “Cougar” Cortell), Barry Tubb (Lt Leonard ”Wolfman” Wolfe), Rick Rossovich (Lt Ron “Slider” Kerner), Tim Robbins (Lt Sam “Merlin” Wells), James Tolkan (Cdr Tom “Stinger” Jardian), Meg Ryan (Carole Bradshaw)

“I feel the need: the need for speed!” Those words lit up mid-80s cinema screens with one of the biggest hits of the decade. Top Gun is still one of Cruise’s most iconic films, its blasting rock-and-roll soundtrack, beautifully backlit romance and cocksure go-getting self-confidence making it one of the definitive Reaganite 80s films ever made. Its legacy is so all-consuming, it’s always a surprise when you sit down to watch it what a fundamentally average it is.

Its plot, such as it is, can be summarised thus: Tom Cruise cockily flies planes and romances Kelly McGillis until Goose dies. Then he flies planes with the same level of skill but slightly more humility and commits to Kelly McGillis. It all takes place in TOPGUN, the navy’s dog-fight training school for elite pilots. Cruise is Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, super-confident best-of-the-best. Kelly McGillis is the astrophysicist and civilian instructor on the course whose heart melts for Tom’s boyish charms. Anthony Edwards is the doomed Goose (he might as well have a skull and crossbones hanging over him – he’s even got a loving wife and son back home). Val Kilmer is Cruise’s rival pilot, super-professional “Iceman”. The training is fast-paced, macho and culminates in a clash with a (conveniently unnamed) country that definitely isn’t the USSR.

There are three things undeniably great about Top Gun. The songs from Kenny Loggins and Berlin are top notch, full of soft-rock sing-along bombast. Scott shoots the hell out of scenes and the sun-kissed beauty framing the various airplanes and aircraft carriers is superb. With its fetishistic worship of the manly glory of the navy and its equipment, the film had full military backing, a huge boon it exploited for wonderfully executed scenes of dogfights and faster-than-sound planes (Scott even paid $25k to get an aircraft carrier to change course – writing a cheque there and then – so a sunset shot would look better). And of course there is Tom Cruise.

Top Gun is the foundation stone in the Church of Tom Cruise, defining a persona Cruise would effectively riff on for huge chunks of his career. Pete Mitchell is so cocksure he’s even called Maverick. But, as well as being arrogant and over-confident, he’s preternaturally skilled, boyishly enthusiastic, strangely vulnerable, yearns for affection, wins people over with a grin and goes through a crisis of confidence that sands down his negative qualities while never touching his courage, skill and likeability. Cruise cemented his eye-catching charisma and relatability: audiences wanted to be him or be with him. A huge chunk of its massive success is down almost exclusively to what a star Cruise is and how easily he makes this hackneyed stuff work.

The rest is a bizarre mix of half-formed plot ideas, weakly sketched characters and a plot so shallow it almost doesn’t deserve the name. Top Gun is all about a cool guy flying planes accompanied by some excellent songs. There is no depth to its character exploration. There is a dim suggestion Maverick needs to mature (with Goose as the sacrificial lamb to prompt that development) but it’s barely explored. It has no shrewdness in its look at the risk-taking intensity of flying or the type of personalities it might attract. The training is awash with familiar tropes: hotshots, grizzled trainers (two of them in Skerritt and Ironside!) mixing growls with behind-his-back grins at Maverick’s pluck. His rival is the anthesis of Maverick, but (gosh darn it!) he eventually learns to respect him.

The central romance seems thrown in because a film like this needs it – it’s very much An Officer and a Gentlemen in the skies. Maverick’s true emotional love story is with Goose – this surrogate brother/uncle providing Maverick’s only friendship and the vicarious family this Cruise archetype character secretly longs for. But gosh darnit, it’s Hollywood so gotta have a beautiful woman for our hero to manfully seduce. Poor Kelly McGillis looks rather uncomfortable in her ill-shaped and poorly developed character, while her love scenes with Cruise are acted with a slobbering over-intensity that suggests both of them are trying too hard (he constantly kisses her tongue first, which is gross). Perhaps they wanted to really go for it in the hope viewers would overlook the obvious homoerotic tensions of most of the film.

Oh those tensions! Top Gun drips with gleaming, tanned half-naked men squaring up to each other in dressing rooms – and that’s not even mentioning the infamous volleyball sequence (where only Edwards, bless him, wears a t-shirt). Characters forever utter variations on “I’ll nail his ass” lines. Iceman and Maverick take part in a homoerotic-tension fuelled rivalry that culminates in an explosive dog-fight climax and a loving embrace on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

It’s hard to tell how much all this was a joke, and how much Scott, Bruckheimer and Simpson just didn’t notice in the middle of all their glistening, back-lit, fast-paced shooting of military muscle (in every sense) how gay it might look. Maybe they thought people wouldn’t notice either amongst all the military machinery (this must be Michael Bay’s favourite ever film). Top Gun’s aerial footage is super impressive (though it is funny noticing now that famous daredevil Cruise clearly does all his cockpit shots in front of a green screen) even if the whole film feels like an MTV video to promote its knock-out songs.

Top Gun is still fun, even if that’s mostly mocking the nonsense and emptiness it’s built upon. Nothing much really happens, its plot so flimsy it barely stands up against the Mach-9 force of its planes. But it’s got Cruise at his blockbuster best – and when you’ve got that you don’t really need anything else. It’s poorly written, junkfood trash all framed in a fetishistic beauty – but it’s sort of goofy, stupid, empty fun.

Starship Troopers (1997)

Earth’s military might goes up against space bugs in Paul Verhoeven’s militaristic satire

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Casper Van Dien (Johnny Rico), Dina Mayer (Dizzy Flores), Denise Richards (Carmen Ibanez), Jake Busey (Ace Levy), Neil Patrick Harris (Carl Jenkins), Patrick Muldoon (Lt Zander Barcalow), Clancy Brown (Sgt Zim), Michael Ironside (Lt Jean Rasczak), Seth Gilliam (Cpl Sugar Watkins)

Every so often, a film uses the tropes of bad films so well, and makes such effective satirical digs, that people initially miss the point of what the film is trying to do. This is pretty much what happened with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. On the surface a terribly acted, deeply stupid sci-fi actioner about soldiers killing space bugs, Verhoeven actually created a sharply intelligent, wry satire on the very bombastic militaristic fascism it seems to celebrate. This satirical bent was missed not only by the critics, but also the producers of the straight-to-video sequels the film spawned.

In the 23^rd century, mankind has reached the stars. But it’s done so by creating a militaristic, aggressive society, where the young are encouraged to join up to the military in order to become “citizens”. Leaving high-school, hotshot would-be-pilot Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) joins up – followed by her boyfriend Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien), in turn followed by Dizzy Flores (Dina Mayer), the girl in love with him. Joining the ground soldiers, Ricco and Flores find themselves as the point of the spear in mankind’s war with the Arachnids (the Bugs), a race of (it becomes clear) intelligent and savage insects on a distant planet.

Starship Troopers isn’t really like anything else: it might well be Verhoeven’s American masterpiece, the perfect mix of his love for extreme gore, violence and sex (filmed with lashings of comic colour and playful glee) with keen social satire, the very ideas he had explored in everything from Robocop to Total Recall. At first glance, Starship Troopers serves up the all-action, gun-toting space battle excitement you would expect from its genre. But Verhoeven not only ramps everything up to 11, he also laces the dialogue and action with a keen satirical bent that hammers home the underlying theme of how war essentially (as Verhoeven puts it) “makes fascists of us all”.

The action is regularly interrupted by propaganda newsreel footage, which stresses the importance of sacrifice for the military effort. The military training camps are almost obsessively focused on brainwashing and reducing the young people in them to cogs in the machine, with safety and welfare as very much a secondary concern (the death of a recruit in an exercise is a concern only because it shows careless leadership rather than because of the death itself). Everyone in the film seems to be a perfect physical specimen. Military lives are thrown away through a combination of arrogance (they’re just bugs, this will be easy!) and incompetence, but never with any feeling of responsibility or expression of regret (though the media works hard to adjust all casualty figures wildly downwards).

The film fires shots at everything in the industro-military complex. The foreign policy of this world is ludicrously aggressive and jingoistic. Despite the spin of the propaganda, it’s pretty clear that humanity has started the war itself. The army is like Hitler’s wet dream – sleek perfect bodies, suicidal self-sacrifice, a complete lack of questioning of any orders or directives, a willing acceptance of corporal punishment. This attitude of violence and unthinking aggression is at every point of society – newsreel footage shows children holding guns with grinning soliders, who then proceed to hand out live ammunition. Later children are shown stomping cockroaches, to cries of the “the only good bug is a dead bug!”. Trials are routinely praised for the brevity (one day between arrest, conviction and execution!). It’s a terrifying world.

What Verhoeven does so well is that, while aware of the multi-leveled nastiness of the world of Starship Troopers, he also makes it a pretty effective straight-war movie. It’s exciting and the action quotient is high. Just like the soldiers in the picture, it’s very easy to see the bugs as faceless opponents which it is easy to feel little regret over killing. The battle scenes are high scale – and of course blackly comic in their extreme gore and bloodlust. But you can still enjoy the action – which is why the film works so well as satire. And also perhaps why so many at the time missed the point. Verhoeven makes this as an enjoyable B-movie, by really effectively using the tropes of B-movies. He turns the trashy B-movie into a sort of art exhibit.

That surely also explains some of the casting. I’m not sure how many of the actors are in on the joke. Certainly Casper van Dien and Denise Richards seem blissfully unaware of the satirical bent under the film. These two wooden actors trot through the sort of banal, by-the-numbers plot arcs and dialogue that fill films like these, with van Dien’s jaw as chiselled as granite and Richards grinning no matter the content of the scene. But their honest woodenness is perfect for the film: a smarter actor would have wanted to tip the wink to the audience, but these guys play it totally straight without even a hint that they are aware of the message underneath.

The more satirical element is left to other members of the cast: Michael Ironside has great fun as an almost absurdly fanatical solider, first introduced as a teacher lecturing his students on how the state must come before everything else and violence is the solution to all the world’s problems. Neil Patrick Harris tips a slight nod to the audience as a young man who rises so swiftly through the ranks that by the time we reach the end of the film, he’s a Gestapo-coated secretive colonel. He fits right into the grey militaristic, Nazi design of the military. You can watch all this stuff and simply enjoy the silliness – teenage boys will love this. And when they mature they’ll realise how awful the world it’s presenting is.

Starship Troopers is the ultimate military satire, a film that pushes every single fascist, militaristic society cliché to the limit. The news comes only from state propaganda. Military training involves brainwashing, maiming and slaughter. Education praises anger and violence as a solution to all problems. Verhoeven shoots this all with a grandeur, that pushes the celebration of militaristic violence to the max.

It’s a film which is brave enough to make its militaristic sequences exciting, to shoot and cut this fascist wet dream with a stirring sense of excitement underpinning all the action. At the end you can celebrate the small victory our heroes celebrate in what is clearly going to be an ongoing war – until of course you realise it’s the victory of a Nazi organisation. The fascist world of the future may bring us sexual and racial equality – but that’s because it’s worked out everyone is needed to feed the grinder. It’s a super-smart satire film that disguises itself as a completely trashy action flick. It’s actually rather brilliant.

Total Recall (1990)

Arnold Schwarzenegger goes for a trip into his memories in Total Recall

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Douglas Quaid/Carl Hauser), Rachel Ticotin (Melina), Sharon Stone (Lori Quaid), Ronny Cox (Vilos Conhaagen), Michael Ironside (Richter), Mel Johnson Jnr (Benny), Marshall Bell (George/Kuato), Roy Brocksmith (Dr Edgemar), Dean Norris (Tony)

Perhaps in 2084, they will look back on Schwarzenegger’s career and wonder what on earth we were all thinking. He was the figurehead of the 1980s fashion for muscle-bound leading men, defined more by physicality than acting ability. Since then, fashions have changed: movies are led by actors who go through hours of physical training, rather than weight lifters taking acting classes. Would Schwarzenegger be a star today? Quite possibly not: compare him to his nearest modern equivalent, Dwayne Johnson. Schwarzenegger doesn’t have an ounce of Johnson’s ability, wit or even charm. Would the world of Twitter embrace an often one-note performer with a paper thin range?

Schwarzenegger got where he was because, for all his lack of acting skill, he is a very clever man: he could spot a script and worked with people who got the best out of him. He turned himself into a brand: “Arnie” the pillar of strength, the master of the one-liner. It worked for films, it worked for politics. Which is all a long intro to say: in his best work, he put himself into decent roles in films from distinctive filmmakers, like Total Recall.

Total Recall is a semi-smart sci-fi action thriller, directed by Paul Verhoeven with his usual Dutch excess: part social satire, part wallow in extreme cartoonish violence and grotesque, Flemish-painting style imagery. Douglas Quaid (Arnie) is a construction worker in 2084, who dreams of escaping his humdrum life and visiting the Mars colony. He decides to visit Recall, a memory implantation centre which promises to give him memories of visiting Mars, with a twist: he’ll visit as a secret agent. However, the implantation reveals Quaid has hidden memories – he may in fact be rogue agent on the run, Carl Hauser. Before he knows it, everyone from his own wife (Sharon Stone) to a brutal intelligence operative (Michael Ironside) is hunting him with lethal force – and Quaid must head to Mars for answers about who he is.

Verhoeven’s sci-fi work adds a level of social satire to high concept stories. In Total Recall he mixes in his critical denunciations of big business and corporate ethics (also a major theme of Robocop) with an everyday acceptance of brutal violence that is so neck-breakingly, blood-spurtingly extreme in places it could only be social satire. Total Recall mocks our own ease with violence as entertainment, by setting itself in a world where the news broadcasts government troops machine gunning protestors (while a newsreader cheerily comments on the minimum use of violence), and the representatives of the Mars Corporation have literally no compunction or hesitation in inflicting huge numbers of civilian casualties in the crossfire.

A lot of this cartoonish violence spins out of the movie’s own playing around with the nature of reality. It leaves open the question of whether Quaid is really a spy in disguise, or if the film’s events occur only in his fractured brain suffering a terminal meltdown from an upload gone wrong. At Recall Quaid is promised his new fantasy memories will be full of action, he’ll get the girl and save the world. Needless to say he achieves all these things by the film’s end. Rachel Ticotin even appears on a screen in Recall as his “fantasy” woman. Is Quaid dreaming or not? It’s a question that is of more interest to viewers I suspect than the filmmakers (other than a few cheeky bits from Verhoeven), but it does tie in neatly with the almost dreamlike hyper violence Quaid dishes out: necks snapped, bodies spurting fountains of pinky red blood, dead bodies used as shields ripped to pieces by bullets. It’s all so extreme that it deliberately feels both not quite real and a mocking commentary on the bloodless action in other sci-fi films.

Schwarzenegger fits surprisingly well into all this. On paper, he’s completely miscast as an innocent discovering a hidden past, the future Governator anchoring a film with satirist leanings. But Verhoeven gets something out of Schwarzenegger in this film that works surprisingly well. Like James Cameron recognised, Verhoeven saw Arnie had a sort of upstanding sweetness amidst all the macho posturing. Arnie is surprisingly effective as Quaid, suddenly shocked at his capabilities for violence (as well of course or physically selling the action). Verhoeven taps into Arnie’s likeability (what other action star could sell “Consider this a divorce” as a punchline as he shoots his fake wife in the head?) and runs with it throughout the film.

As such, Schwazenegger makes a decent lead. It helps that he is willing to be a figure of fun at points. He wears a wet towel round his head to block transmissions. His face contorts ludicrously as he pulls an enormous probe from out of his nose. He infiltrates Mars dressed as an old woman. Most of this material fades away in the second half of the movie when Schwarzenegger reverts to the more typical heroic action (I suspect negotiations over the script shifted the film into a halfway house between a standard action movie and Verhoeven’s more satiric bent). But it’s all still there and helps humanise Quaid, so that we are on board with the slaughter he perpetrates later. Quaid is probably one of the best roles Arnie had – and Verhoeven does very well to fit a man so serious about himself into a world of self-parody. Saying that, the role is in some ways beyond Arnie’s reach – I’m not sure he is really plugged into or understands the dark comic tone of the movie, and he doesn’t really have the wit as a performer to do much more than deliver killer lines, certainly not to contribute to the dark satire Verhoeven is putting together.

As a whole the film doesn’t always deliver. Schwarzenegger seems at sea during scenes with his feisty, independent love interest played by Rachel Ticotin (this does her no favours, as her role hardly connects). Sharon Stone similarly has little chemistry with the Austrian Oak – although at least she has the second best role in the script as a vicious woman not afraid to use sex as a tool. The actual plot fits in nicely with the possibly dreamlike nature of what we are seeing, but the villain’s aims seem rather unclear, and the film lacks a strong enough antagonist (neither Michael Ironside or Ronny Cox have quite enough to make their thin characters come to life).

This plays into the film as being semi-smart: it’s a curious mix of smart and stupid. It’s got enough brains to poke a bit of fun at corporate America, and to make moral comments on our treatment of minorities (here represented by the mutants who inhabit Mars). On the other hand, it’s a schlocky action cartoon, that revels in ultra-violence while creating a world where, in universe, it is not considered extreme enough to comment on.

Total Recall is a fun movie that allows you to read more into it than is probably really there. Verhoeven peddles themes around the nature of reality, and introduces satiric comments on corporations and violence in the media that don’t hit home so heavily that they become wearing. I also have to say I like its empathy with the vulnerable and weak – the mutant resistance on Mars is engagingly grounded and humane, particularly in contrast to the ruthless heartlessness of Mars Corp. It’s not a masterpiece, but as a smarter piece of popcorn fun it works really well.

For Schwarzenegger himself, this was his final non-Terminator hit. Terminator 2 (a year later), an undoubted work of genius, was his high watermark. Three attempts since to relaunch the Terminator franchise (all with mediocre or worse directors), demonstrate Schwarzenegger’s awareness his time was fleeting and dependent on his roles rather than his skills. Total Recall was Schwarzenegger doing something completely different, to great success – but also one of his last hits-. His run of good scripts, and pulp premises, came to an end here – but it was a good end. California awaited!