Review

Review Date: 8-March-09
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Watchmen (2009)

Your sweet and fruity critic does not number among the fans of the graphic novel Watchmen by virtue of never having read it. In fact, I took the dorky step of plugging my ears to avoid book-fans' anticipatory comments while standing in the ticket line. So what follows is an outsider's impression of an adaptation of what some people call a classic. Why? I am not exactly sure. Director Zack Snyder delivers a weighty-looking package, but the story within is light.

Watchmen appears to be a socio-psychological consideration of the effects of power, human depravity, and the Cold War on average Americans. That is, average Americans who wear superhero outfits and have watched Richard Nixon get elected for three consecutive terms. Framed around the question of who assassinated a retired vigilante and lifelong S.O.B. known as The Comedian, the movie describes the past and present trials of his younger colleagues who banded together to fight crime until they were outlawed by federal decree. One, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), has been tortured by vice since childhood and now views bloody vengeance as the only means of making the world bearable. Another (Matthew Goode) is enjoying a second career as a tycoon bent on curing the planet of its addiction to unsustainable energy. The only one with actual superpowers is a former scientist (Billy Crudup) who got blown to smithereens in a lab accident and was reborn as an almost omniscient and omnipotent being whom the U.S. promptly recruited as a weapon. Every day they ask themselves what they ought to do in the world and whether they feel a connection anymore to the people whose lives they take into their hands.

Haley provides some emotion (and a fair amount of gore), but the heart of the story concerns the most innocent of the erstwhile Watchmen and the familiar argument that love is the answer. Patrick Wilson endears as a nerd who feels invisible without his cape and mask, while newcomer Malin Akerman flops as the team's sole female for whom he has long carried a torch. I expect Akerman will be a cinematic one-hit wonder, for she really is awful. Then, too, she and the rest are betrayed by a long and incoherent ending which starts after the sex scene, wanders to Mars for silly soap opera, and wraps in an Egyptian-themed evil mastermind's lair in the Antarctic. Seeing the movie with minimal knowledge of its origins, one is apt to conclude that meditations on how to handle man's destructive nature might be better served by ink and paper than celluloid and special effects.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.