Get Carter

GET CARTER (2000)

I screwed up making egg salad once and added way too much mayonnaise. Since I had used all the eggs, my only chance to save things was to keep adding mustard. But that didn't work too well; by the time the egg salad had a certain amount of tang to it, it was mainly a sea of goop in which floated scattered bits of drowned egg. I haven't thought of that sloppy batch of egg salad in years, but its image returned unbidden to my mind right around the time the end credits of Get Carter started rolling.

I have two confessions before I get to the business of watching the movie; first, I never saw the original Get Carter with Michael Caine. Sad but true. (Thanks to Netflix, I should rectify that in the next week or two.) Second, when I saw the preview for this movie, I knew I was going to rush out and see it within the first week of release. During the course of the preview, there's lots of handheld, ultra-grainy, mega-quick-cutty footage, as well as Mickey Rourke and Rachel Leigh Cook, but mainly there's Stallone. Stallone plays Jack Carter, a legbreaker in Vegas who finds out his brother in Seattle is dead. Estranged though they've been for years, Carter heads back to his hometown of Seattle to find out what happened. Suspecting that his brother died of foul play, Carter uses his job skills to get the truth out of some tight-lipped people and finds himself in the middle of more than he bargained for.

This is literally my idea for a great movie. I've had a varation of the above story floating in my head for a few years now, and when I saw the preview, there was the relieved feeling of, "Great, now I don't have to write it. I can just go watch it." And I was jazzed at the idea of Stallone playing a Vegas legbreaker; as he gets a bit older and gravity gives him a bit of inevitable sag, Stallone in a suit looks exactly like a certain type of mook in a suit you see hanging with organized crime (and probably modeled their look on Stallone in the first place). Also, Stallone has always been a ham actor, unafraid to take a big-ass bite out of whatever he's playing. And ham actors can sometimes, in the right part and with the right situation, give a terrific performance. (Look at Orson Welles, for example). In short, I had hopes.

Sadly, Get Carter resembles my egg salad from long ago. The director works his ass off with fades, blurs, overlaps, and camera spins to suggest a world of inner turmoil; and the scenes where Stallone is by himself, pondering his brother's death, initially have a certain weight to them. But the movie, like obvious financial inspiration Payback and artistic inspiration The Limey, seems so uncomfortable with its own antihero premise it seems static, tentative and, finally, dull. All the mustard doesn't hide the lack of egg.

I appreciate the director Stephen Kay's efforts to make all the talking interesting with quick cuts and the like, but, dude, you don't have to do that for the action scenes. Get Carter has some of the sloppiest car chases put on film, and more than a few fight scenes that can barely be followed. It takes some of the pep out of the few that are done well, and leads to a certain amount of watch-checking by the last half-hour of the movie.

Stallone and director Stephen Kay And let's face it; Stallone is in tight with the mob. You think he's not just going to start beating and capping anyone who gives him grief? But by the time of the sixth tense showdown with Mickey Rourke (one scene of the two men beating on each other, which ends before it begins, suggests that the movie was edited based on test audience reaction, if not reshot in some sequences), you get the idea that Stallone just isn't going to do anything until the standard THEY PUSHED HIM TOO FAR point near the end of the movie. I mean, the film starts with a flickering epigraph (while Stallone chases some poor mook down the Vegas strip) from Robert Browning about the only good that men can do in this life is by realizing that they are bad. Couldn't the filmmakers have paid attention to the damn thing? Do we have to have half the scenes justifying why Stallone is bad and the other half justifying why Stallone is there? Carter's supposed to be classic antihero; they live by their own code, like scruffy Nietzscheans, outside good and evil. Stallone's character is bad because he is--and he's there because he has to be.

You'll notice that I keep referring to "Stallone" instead of "Carter." And this is one of the biggest problems with the movie--Stallone can inhabit the body of a violent mook who's privately haunted by regret until he opens his mouth. Once he does, he's got Sylvester Stallone's voice, arrogantly breezy and unconvincing. The guy's got all the gravitas of hot air popcorn. As desperate as he is to salvage his career and be taken seriously, Stallone can't get himself to let go of the idea of himself as an 80's action hero, all banter and bravado, with Jack Carter, leg breaker in an expensive suit, being just some oddball iteration.

(Other bad things in Get Carter for me: the unconvincing faux trip-hop soundtrack; the sad fact that "Jack" is a name that now Rachel Leigh Cook: I'll take what I can get. only people in movies have and so every time somebody calls Stallone "Jack" it sticks out in precisely the same way that an American name does when somebody says it on Univision; John McGinley's character, who is just as annoying and unconvincing as every other John McGinley character; Gretchen Mol who I've decided is this decade's Penelope Ann Miller; Alan Cumming's character, who is clearly supposed to be Bill Gates and is played by McGinley like a spoiled raver kid; that Cumming's character gets in trouble when he funds Rourke's cyberporno operation; the fact that Rourke's character is named Cyrus Paice, a bad pun on cyberspace, which made me wonder if the whole movie wasn't a half-assed metaphor for Microsoft's legal troubles once it tried to horn in on the web browser market; that Stallone never beats anyone until they're a bloody squealing mess; the lack of seeing what Stallone's brother even looks like (combined with everyone challenging Stallone about why he even bothered to come back, it feels like the filmmakers are actively trying to talk you out of believing in the movie); the complete and utter waste of Miranda Richardson; Carter's two catchphrases, both of which are annoying and unconvincing; and Michael Caine who apparently just exists to pay lip service to the original movie and give the mega-flat character he plays a certain illusion of depth.)

Get Carter is a good-looking film that I didn't mind watching; at times, I could feel it trying so hard to work that I tried to convince myself that it was working. But in the end, the only really good thing about Get Carter is that Rachel Leigh Cook's head finally seems the same size as the rest of her body. Hey, I had high hopes for Get Carter--I'll take what little solace I can get from it.

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