Legendary directors like Ridley Scott have the enviable ability to cherry pick the best screenplays, the best actors and the best personnel to help them make their films. This access to Hollywood's most desirable property and the industry elite undoubtedly increases the chances their projects will be both a critical and box office success. But somewhere along Ridley Scott's way, something has gone wrong. There is no question Scott is a master craftsman with chops rivaled by few in the business, but over the last twenty years Scott has been consistent at one thing: making mediocre films. Not since Alien and Blade Runner has Scott put together back-to-back masterpieces and in many ways, his career is still living off of the fumes of these two films. Today, we can expect Scott to dump beautifully polished turds into theaters once a year. Sure, each of these turds possess overwhelming potential, but they somehow never manage to transcend mediocrity. What has become commonplace in Scott's movies is the feeling you get that everyone above-the-line is mailing in their well paid efforts.
Body of Lies is no exception. Despite being expertly constructed by all the technicians on Scott's pretty payroll, the film never manages to exceed its technical proficiency. Much like Scott's last film American Gangster, BOL plays out like a greatest hits medley, many of its scenes poached from the genre's iconic predecessors. While AG was a mashup of The Godfather, GoodFellas, Scarface and Serpico, BOL seems to be spliced from the reels of Our Man in Havana, The Third Man, and more recently, Syriana and The Bourne Franchise. Even Ridley's brother Tony's mediocre Spy Game, seems to be in on the espionage collage cobbled together in BOL.
In the end audiences are left watching meticulously crafted filmmaking devoid of any real or heightened suspense. It's impossible to attach stakes to something we can't help but feel we've seen before, from the politics, the betrayals, the explosions, right down to the protagonist's inevitable defection. As bitter a pill as it is to swallow, it isn't much of a surprise Beverly Hills Chihuahua is destroying BOL at the box office: everyone has seen BOL before (in one form or another) and very few people (myself included) have seen a movie about talking chihuahuas...not that we really need to.
Body of Lies is no exception. Despite being expertly constructed by all the technicians on Scott's pretty payroll, the film never manages to exceed its technical proficiency. Much like Scott's last film American Gangster, BOL plays out like a greatest hits medley, many of its scenes poached from the genre's iconic predecessors. While AG was a mashup of The Godfather, GoodFellas, Scarface and Serpico, BOL seems to be spliced from the reels of Our Man in Havana, The Third Man, and more recently, Syriana and The Bourne Franchise. Even Ridley's brother Tony's mediocre Spy Game, seems to be in on the espionage collage cobbled together in BOL.In the end audiences are left watching meticulously crafted filmmaking devoid of any real or heightened suspense. It's impossible to attach stakes to something we can't help but feel we've seen before, from the politics, the betrayals, the explosions, right down to the protagonist's inevitable defection. As bitter a pill as it is to swallow, it isn't much of a surprise Beverly Hills Chihuahua is destroying BOL at the box office: everyone has seen BOL before (in one form or another) and very few people (myself included) have seen a movie about talking chihuahuas...not that we really need to.
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