Dull blade
By Leo Mouzenko
Special to The St. Petersburg Times
So, let's see: there's a guy with tormented past and a blade coming out of his hand. Whenever he's enraged by some unjust or just annoying cause he's virtually unstoppable, crashing everything and everyone around with his unbreakable blade. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?As far as sources on the web say, a Wolverine spin-off from the "X-Men" series of Hollywood blockbusters, based on the comic books featuring Wolverine and his genetically-mutated pals, is scheduled to hit the screens in 2008. But what we have here is a different film: the latest Russian action flick, "Mechenosez" ("The Swordsman.")
The film enriches our lives with the story of Sasha (Artyom Tkachenko), a guy who has a blade inside his hand. Apart from the sword, he also seems to have developed an emotional attachment to lead pipes but as well as most of characters bio it's a field to fantasize.
Out of nowhere Sasha arrives to another somewhere (which just happens to look like St. Petersburg) for an unspecified reason. First thing he does is beats his old friend's new boyfriend, thus making a few enemies.
Then he meets a really cute Katya (Chulpan Khamatova) and pulls her into bed with a couple of one liners. Sly dog. This swordsman/playboy isn't too much of talker anyway, he usually stares. When he bravely looks in the eye of his future victims he's intense and scary; when he stares at his curly-haired object of affection this hound of the Baskervilles suddenly becomes a droopy eyed pup. In case you didn't catch it, this is called character versatility.
During the rest of the movie, our versatile character reaps to shreds whoever is around him: policemen, inmates in Kresty jail or offensive looking businessmen. One of the latter, the supposed counterpart of the title character, inspired by the heaps of limbs that Sasha leaves left and right decides to practice on-sight surgery and amputates a policeman's finger with a help of a pair of pliers in a dirty bathroom. In case you didn't know, offensive looking businessmen always carry pliers to the bathroom. In the end of this cinematic celebration, a vengeful mechenosets or swordsman discovers the ability of his weapon to cut in half an airborne helicopter while chopping wood on the Gulf of Finland coast. Brilliance anywhere you look.
The script has more holes than a shower head and less substance than candy cotton. The fantasy world in which the characters live doesn't require such boring things as logic or motivation; they do just fine with meaningful looks and gladly dissipate in the gloomy ambiance.
On the other hand, lack of substance can be easily compensated with imaginatively choreographed fighting scenes, thrilling car chases and stunning visual effects. After all, isn't it why people go see action films?
The director, the charming Filipp Yankovksy, seems to think otherwise. He claims to never have seen any of the "X-men" movies, thus having no way of knowing about Wolverine but he guessed it was an action film. Score!
It's a pity that the charming Yankovsky didn't do his homework. If he chose to watch at least one mindless cut-throat Hollywood action feature, he'd find out that such movies involve a totally unexpected element… action!
In "Mechenosets" all those gory scenes with splitting bodies in half happen off screen: it's either an imagination examination or a test "How well do you remember Tarantino movies?" Visual effects are produced in the similar fashion and can be easily put to shame by inter-level cartoons in the mediocre video games. We're only left to guess what the production team did with the reported $12 million budget; probably had a lot of pizza on the set.
Obviously, there's some kind of misunderstanding going on. Yankovsky, scion of a filmmaking family, isn't new to the industry. His previous effort, "The State Consellor" (2005), based on Boris Akunin's novel featuring 19th century detective Erast Fandorin, was quite decent. The truth does come out when you listen to the director. In his own words, he was making "a love story" and "a parable". Right, that explains it all. The director was trying to go for something higher while the greedy producers marketed "Mechenosets "as an action film to sell more seats.
The film is too shallow and too dim to even render an idea clearly. As a love story it fails as well: Sasha's and Katya's love seems to occur mainly horizontally. They don't share a bit of dialogue and their on-screen chemistry is similar to that of Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke in "Taking Lives" (2004): put two beautiful undressed people in one bed and hope it will save the movie. Doesn't work. Sasha's effort to get back to his woman in the end looks like an attempt to fill the vacuum in his life because he doesn't seem to have a thing of his own. Because he doesn't.
Characters in "Mechenosets" aren't even clichÎs: they're phantoms, shadows of an idea, the statement that can be applied to the whole movie. Yankovsky and co might have wanted to create a good action film but found out they don't have the means; then decided to go with an art-house idea but discovered they don't have the potential. So they went with the flow. The result is highly dissatisfying.
In the end of the cast presentation, Sergei Selyanov, the producer said that a UFO showed up during the shooting and it can even be found in the film. Perhaps aliens were interested at first but then took a better look and went somewhere else. For instance, ABC premiered the third season of "Lost" last week. There's a thought.
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