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JanViewAry: Ride Like a Girl (2020), The Patriot (1998), Red Planet (2000), The Invasion (2007)

 


Ride Like a Girl (2020) – Rachel Griffith’s film about the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup is an earnest crowd-pleaser. Like most Hollywood takes on inspirational, incredible true stories, Ride Like a Girl hammers said inspirational, incredible true story into a somewhat familiar shape, but I appreciated its earnest and unjaded portrait of a Christian family and the nicely shaded performances of Teresa Palmer and Sam Neill.

 

The Patriot (1998) – An addendum to DeSemler, and probably the only Steven Seagal film I’ll ever cover on Down Under Flix. DP Dean Semler’s sophomore and swansong directorial feature after Firestorm, again with Stephen F. Windon lensing (adequately), the film stars Seagal as a former superstar immunologist turned regional GP and cattleman who faces off against a virus-spreading militia. Falling in the transitional period of Seagal’s stardom – no longer the star of lean & mean genre films or expensive Hollywood blockbusters, not yet the bloated star of direct to video fodder – The Patriot is a curiosity as a Seagal actioner, modern Western, and Outbreak-style viral thriller hybrid, though not particularly successful dabbling in any of those genres; as a Seagal actioner, it’s especially unsatisfying, with no punches thrown til 45 minutes into its 90 minute runtime and only the briefest displays of aikido thereafter.

 


Red Planet (2000) and The Invasion (2007) are unremarkable American genre films boasting remarkable Antipodean assets: the landscape of Coober Peedy in the former, and Nicole Kidman in the latter. Both assets were showcased in better films released those same years – Coober Peedy in another sci-fi thriller, Pitch Black, and Kidman in Margot at the Wedding – though their contributions to Red Planet and The Invasion are fairly unimpeachable.

The similarities go on. Both films are dogged by comparison with companion pieces: Red Planet was the second Mars-set thriller of 2000, following Brian Dr Palma’s Mission to Mars, while The Invasion is the fourth iteration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Both were costly Warner Bros productions featuring studio-sanctioned stars of Batman Forever (Val Kilmer in the former, Kidman the latter) as well as ascendant stars in supporting roles (post-The Matrix Carrie-Anne Moss in the former, post-Casino Royale Daniel Craig in the latter). Both were helmed by directors who were, not to put too fine a point on it, in over their heads (debutant Antony Hoffman on Red Planet, American debutant Oliver Hirschbiegel of Downfall fame on The Invasion). Both were troubled productions: friction between Kilmer and co-star Tom Sizemore plagued Red Planet, while The Invasion underwent extensive reshoots by The Wachowskis and James McTeigue after the studio was unhappy with Hirschbiegel’s work. Finally, both were commercial disappointments. 


However, while both films are unremarkable, they’re unremarkable in ways I find soothing and engaging, as opposed to supposedly remarkable Oscar bait films like The Iron Claw which seed nihilism and disquiet. Both Red Planet and The Invasion trade in concerns even more topical now than in the 2000s – an ailing earth and AI going AWOL in Red Planet, a global pandemic and dangerous mob mentality in The Invasion – but in fun movie hokum ways, with resourceful stars navigating from Complication A to Complication B to Complication C before arriving at Resolution A and so on (actually, much like her ex-husband’s War of the Worlds, released two years earlier, Kidman’s Invasion focuses on a parent and child navigating the crisis, with the breakthrough that cracks the issue happening offscreen by other players). Both Red Planet and The Invasion are indisputably derivative, but entertainingly so and technically polished (par the course for projects involving The Wachowskis and, in Red Planet’s case, DP Peter Suchintzky).


Ben

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