CORNED BEEF & SPAGHETTI

This week’s openings suggest that it’s Bloody Revenge Weekend:

Run All Night—One of the few pretty funny lines that Neil Patrick Harris had in this year’s Oscar show was his introduction of Liam Neeson, to the effect of: “Here’s a man with a particular set of skills—he will find you, and he will kill you.”

This new melodrama is the latest of Liam Neeson’s murmuring threat movies, the ones where he earnestly warns some gangster or kidnapper, usually over the phone, that they’re in big trouble if they don’t lay off some innocent victim. The bad guys never listen, and buckets of blood pour out of people’s heads.

Here Neeson plays Jimmy, a conscience-haunted former hitman in service of Queens crime boss Shawn (Ed Harris). Jimmy’s now a pathetic broke drunk, but when his estranged son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) witnesses Shawn’s cokehead son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) kill some Albanian gangsters, Jimmy kills Danny in Michael’s defense. Though he loves Jimmy, Shawn feels he has no choice but to have Michael killed in recompense, and Jimmy of course is determined to defend his son.

Bullets fly, and innumerable henchman fall. There are some gothic twists, including one of those unstoppable juggernaut hitmen that turn up in movies like this, creepily played by rapper Lonnie “Common” Lynn, called in by Shawn to wipe out father and son (not in that order).

This has the makings of a terrific melodrama, in that it has two great actors in an unresolvable conflict. Neeson and Harris are both as commanding as ever, and when they’re onscreen together they’re better yet—two aging slabs of Irish corned beef who’ve learned first-hand what a vile business murder is, and gaze at each other tenderly, in genuine sorrow over the horror they’re unleashing in each other’s lives.

But the movie, directed by frequent Neeson collaborator Jaume Collet-Serra (he also directed the notorious Orphan) from a script by Brad Ingelsby, ultimately wastes this great advantage. The action is too contrived and overscaled, the escapes too improbably hairbreadth, the music by Junkie XL too blaring. Eventually it gets funny, and then it gets tiresome.

There’s a moment toward the end, when Shawn knows—after one of those murmuring Neeson phone calls—that Jimmy is about to attack his stronghold. He looks at a henchman and tells him to tell everyone to get ready: “Jimmy’s comin’” This could have been a spinetingling melodramatic flourish, but we’ve seen so much ridiculously cartoonish carnage already that it barely registers.

Meanwhile, at the Valley Art:

The Salvation—For sheer ugly brutality, this Western revenge yarn makes Run All Night look like My Little Pony. The hero is Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) a Danish immigrant in the American West whose family is murdered. He quickly kills the men responsible, but in so doing gains the enmity of the twisted gang boss (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who has the craven town under his thumb. Jon and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are former soldiers, veterans of Denmark’s 1864 Schleswig War, and when they take up arms against the gang, blood spills copiously.

This Danish/British/South African co-production (it was shot in the deserts of the latter country) offers shootings and stabbings, rape and torture, scurvy henchmen and mealy-mouthed officials, most notably Jonathan Pryce as the corrupt mayor/undertaker. It’s like Titus Andronicus on the range, right down to a baleful woman (Eva Green) who’s had her tongue cut out.

This description should be enough to determine whether The Salvation is to your taste—or, indeed, whether you even approve of it—but in any case it’s executed with precision and confidence in a taut hour and a half. Director Kristian Levring works, from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen, more or less in the “Spaghetti western” style, with faux-Morricone strumming away on the soundtrack, and there wasn’t a minute that I was bored, or that I didn’t want to see Jon have his revenge. The comeuppance the bad guys ultimately receive was not painful, humiliating or protracted enough to satisfy my nasty heart, but in movies like this it almost never is.

SHADOW PLAYFUL

As Barnabas Collins in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp comports himself like a Gothic popinjay. He carries himself proudly erect, and speaks with orotund, self-dramatizing verbosity and sweeping gesture, whether anyone else is around to hear him or not. The performance is a near-tour de force of comic, cosmically wounded dignity.

Being a vampire, he must occasionally feast on the blood of the living, but he does so reluctantly, first offering his victims polite regrets. His great wish, other than to be reunited with his lost love Josette, is to restore his family’s Maine fish cannery. He’s a bit of a pussycat, as undead revenants go.

It’s hard to say to whom this Dark Shadows is being marketed. The film is a parody, a pretty broad one, of the Gothic-horror soap opera (ABC, 1966-1971) on which it’s based. Created by Dan Curtis and writer Art Wallace, the show began as tempestuous bosom-heaving romance, perhaps in the vein of Barbara Cartland, but faced with sinking ratings, the writers began to experiment with ghosts and other supernatural elements about six months in, and eventually they threw a Hail Mary in the form of Barnabas, a forlorn vampire played by an obscure Canadian stage actor named Jonathan Frid.

He was a hit, and so the show threw caution to the wind—witches, werewolves and any other gruesome menace became fair game. Two movie spin-offs, House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Night of Dark Shadows (1971) were produced, along with dozens of tie-in novels, comic books, toys, puzzles, etc. I was too much of a wussy, at six or seven, to watch the show for more than a few wide-eyed minutes during its original run, but I got hooked on it in junior high, when it ran in syndication. Even by soap standards, it seemed to have a high incidence of blown lines, crew members caught on camera, actors struggling not to crack up, but somehow this didn’t defeat the show’s spooky yet oddly bracing atmosphere.

The Burton film’s script, credited to Seth Grahame-Smith of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, takes scraps of plot from the old show and stitches them together, but there’s almost no serious attempt at spookiness. A friend of mine said that the ads make the movie look like a sketch from The Carol Burnett Show.

Many fans of the original series are likely to be disappointed—if not outraged—by such an approach, while non-fans and younger viewers are unlikely to be too interested in a comedic version of an old TV show that they may never have heard of in the first place. Overall, the film seems poised to be vaporized by The Avengers’ second weekend like a vampire by a ray of sunlight.

A small pity if so, because while Dark Shadows is hardly high art, it’s sort of an endearing trifle. As always with Burton, it’s a beautiful movie to look at, with a whimsical, Edward-Gorey-ish look (the production designer is Rick Hienrichs) and a ridiculously attractive cast.

My friend’s take on the movie’s attitude was about right—it plays like a string of Carol Burnett sketches, with a bit more polish to the jokes and a lot more polish to the production. The target of the parody isn’t Gothic melodrama but ‘70s kitsch culture, with the 18th-Century sensibilities of the resurrected Barnabas bounced off of hippies and television and lava lamps and fast food signage and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” (of which Barnabas approves—unsurprisingly, since as played by Depp he most certainly speaks of the Pompatus of Love).

Depp is a hoot, but he isn’t alone. The high-ticket cast is fine form: Michelle Pfeiffer in Joan Bennett’s old role of matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, Chloe Moretz as wild child Carolyn Stoddard, the waiflike Australian Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters, Jackie Earle Haley as drunken handyman Willie Loomis, and the always-excellent Helena Bonham Carter as the shady shrink Dr. Hoffman. Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee turn up in guest roles.

The movie is close to stolen, however, by the French actress Eva Green as Angelique Bouchard, the witch who cursed Barnabas with vampirism when he didn’t return her love, and who’s still around in the 20th Century, running a rival fish cannery and looking intolerably chic. Green (she played Vesper Lynd in the 2006 Bond film Casino Royale) makes Angelique’s spite a lively aphrodisiac; she has a crazy-eyed smile that’s both alluring and terrifying, and her skin’s tendency, in moments of stress, to crack like the shell of a hard-boiled egg is rather captivating, too.

Burton and Grahame-Smith probably try to touch too many bases from the series—the movie is cluttered, and it goes on at least twenty minutes too long. But overall, it’s a goofy pleasure. Like the old show, it’s an enjoyable waste of time. Unlike the old show, it can be experienced in one sitting, and its laughs are intentional.