Battle of the Bulges.

What better way to spend a night of leisure, after a long day of work than sitting in front of your TV and watching shitty action movies right?

That's what I had in mind yesterday when I decided I wasn't in the mood to think and decided to treat myself to a double bill of Priest and The Mechanic.

Let it be established that I am, by no means, the target audience for either of these movies, I just wanted to see them for well, the beef factor.

Priest gave me this:

The amazing Paul Bettany's abs appeared for little less than a second and the rest of the movie, which is an uninspired postapocalyptic mix of The Searchers and Underworld, other characters talked about Bettany's character's chastity.

The Mechanic ineversely gave me these (all within the first ten minutes! Plus gratuitous scenes with Ben Foster and Jason Statham caught in tiny spaces)

Bettany might be the better actor, although you really couldn't say based on his recent work, but Statham knows that if you got it, you should flaunt it!

Grades (based on factors beyond the beef)

Priest *

The Mechanic **

Legion **

Director: Scott Stewart
Cast: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Kate Walsh
Kevin Durand, Charles S. Dutton, Tyrese Gibson, Lucas Black
Adrianne Palicki, Willa Holland, Jon Tenney

It's angels in dirty places in Scott Stewart's "Legion"; a post apocalyptic thriller that uses biblical references to back up its emptiness while giving us the sight of badass angels fighting each other with machine guns.
Bettany plays the Archangel Michael who lands in an L.A. gun warehouse one night, stocks up on ammo and leads a rebellion against god, who asked him to destroy the human race.
He chooses a lonely diner in the middle of the Mojave desert as his headquarters. That the diner is filled with the kinds of people that constitute disaster movie ethnic and gender quota is just a nice coincidence.
Among the people are the owner (Quaid) and his son (Black), the faithful cook (Dutton) and a pregnant single waitress (Palicki) whose unborn child might represent the faith of humanity (nobody said the movie was subtle).
Soon they start receiving all sorts of plagues which range from knife bearing six year olds, to good ole fashioned teenage daughter (Holland) vs. mom (Walsh) drama.
You don't have to be a scholar to know this isn't the kind of movie to revisit and uncover new layers in subsequent viewings, it's main aim is probably to entertain us and itself, to a degree, with its oh so serious attempt at delivering faith-cum-fun.
The actors are great in how they manage to keep straight faces when the screenplay often verges into the ridiculous. When the characters are made to deliver lines like "not everybody can play a hero" you just know you're in the land of Ah-nuld and to find any trace of method genius or Shakespearean classicism here would be most likely a miracle.
Anyone who chooses to ponder too deeply into the contrived spiritual matters at the center of "Legion" (as many extreme Christian groups will obviously do) wouldn't need to be so enlightened to figure out that the movie is all about praising god.
For how else could Michael be the hero if it doesn't mean that even this rebellion is part of god's design?
Those less theologically inclined will be thankful that this supreme being didn't just choose to snap his fingers and destroy mankind, but he created a zombie massacre out of it for them to enjoy their pop corn.
What you need to ask yourself while watching "Legion" is: will you give that leap of faith and surrender to its cheesiness?
If not there's probably thousands of movies which will be more heavenly than this.

Creation **

Director: Jon Amiel
Cast: Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly
Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, Martha West, Benedict Cumberbatch

"Creation" opens with the promise of telling us how "the biggest single idea in the history of thought" came to occur.
Said idea is none other than Charles Darwin's publication of "On the Origin of Species" but the film is very far from fulfilling its intellectual promise. What we get instead is a by-the-numbers production that tries to put historical figures in cinematic forms to make us empathize with them.
Here Darwin's (Bettany) genius is reduced to a simplistic battle between religion and science filtered through his feelings for two people. On the science side he has to make justice to his deceased, daughter Anne's (West) memory. Her ghost appears to him constantly and reminds him of all that he taught her about dinosaurs and natural selection.
On the other side he has his wife Emma (Connelly) a devout Christian who questions his need to quarrel with God and separate his family from society.
Where Anne's death (which is told in strange uneven fractured narration) could've been a smart propeller towards intellectual debate (Emma clings to faith while Charles sees science fail) it's turned into a cheap plot device to create tear inducing scenes and melodramatic moments.
Bettany gives a marvelous performance and convinces us of his aging by a mere change in his facial expressions. His inner struggles are much more effective than his loud conversations with Annie's ghost.
The actor is able to tap into a source of creativity that creates brilliance along with frustration. He's immensely watchable even when the screenplay forces him to concentrate more on forced ideas than authentic actions.
Connelly is equally good, perhaps because she's already played this part before (and won a heap of awards for it as well) when we see her dealing with a genius husband who talks to imaginary figures we realize this might just be an 1800's version of "A Beautiful Mind".
When Amiel should've trusted Darwin's ideas to be sufficiently original to catch our interest, he prefers to recur to visually pleasing allegories that try to digest the theories for us.
Therefore when Darwin narrates about his thoughts on sea creatures we see the actual Darwin undergoing hydrotherapy...this unimaginative angle goes as far to make us believe that he actually wrote the book out of a Graham Green-esque vendetta with God.
For a movie about someone who was so fascinated by nature, "Creation" ironically lacks a spark of life.

The Young Victoria **

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend
Miranda Richardson, Paul Bettany, Mark Strong
Thomas Kretschmann, Jim Broadbent

Before she became the symbol of all that is frumpy, strong willed and well, Victorian, Queen Victoria of England was a free spirited young woman with problems like every other teenager; including repressed passions, irrational decision making and a, Royal, family that didn't understand her.
Or so we are told by director Jean-Marc Vallée, who takes us to the years before and right after the Queen's coronation.
When the movie begins, with portentous title cards suggesting the melodramatic chaos that will ensue, Victoria is a child "jailed" within a palace under the watchful eye of her mother, the Duchess of Kent (Richardson) and her controlling adviser Sir John Conroy (Strong).
"What little girl does not dream of growing up as a princess" asks Victoria before Vallée turns her into Jane Eyre.
But this lasts only for a few scenes and before long the child grows up into Emily Blunt. As she approaches her eighteenth birthday, the soon to be queen, is harassed by the people who have some sort of interest in her.
On one side there's her mother and Sir John, who constantly try to make her sign regency papers to take over her crown. Then there's also her uncle, King William IV (Broadbent) who's set on having his niece marry his son and rule the country.
Across the channel there's her uncle King Leopold I of Belgium (Kretschmann) who needs British support to continue his kingdom and enlists Prince Albert of Germany (Friend) to go and seduce his cousin Victoria for him.
Before the Princess goes "nervous breakdown" on them all, her uncle dies and she is crowned. She moves to Buckingham Palace (the first English monarch to live there!), befriends Prime Minister Lord Melbourne (Bettany) and falls in love with Albert, while surviving political crisis (over ladies in waiting?), giving birth to nine children and an assassination attempt.
Told with absolutely no scandalous theories, shocking sexual romps in the royal chamber (despite the Prince's famous ring), or even the most minimal attempt of questioning, the film plays out as very by the numbers and becomes pretty forgettable.
The screenplay, written by Julian Fellowes, is stacked with over the top lines meant to be opulent and Vallée's directorial tactics don't help in toning down the cheesiness.
"Do you ever feel like you're a chess piece in a game being played against your will?" asks Prince Albert to Victoria, while they play chess and are surrounded by her family and advisers...
Vallée is certainly not the master of subtlety (his previous film "C.R.A.Z.Y" was an exercise in coming of age/coming out clichés) and he fills "The Young Victoria" with obvious symbols, lazy time fluidity and dramatic tension that is only suggested by ominous music, fast editing and actors with eyes wide open (or the hairs in their arms raised in what proves to be an almost laughable moment).
The ensemble provides the job one would expect from renowned British actors in period costume; Richardson plays regretful meek, Strong is cartoon villain and Broadbent screams like only a King would be allowed to.
Friend is rather delightful and surprising, playing Albert with the suave coquetishness of a silent film movie star and his scenes truly give the film the spark of naive romance that would make Jane Austen TV adaptation fans fall in love with him.
While Blunt, who looks absolutely radiant, gives Victoria a sense of serenity and ironwill. She is able to play Victoria like a woman full of life, while infusing her with the stern, melancholy she would acquire in latter years and the one we have come to know of her.
But even if their work is good, the director makes sure they never feel like actual human beings, but as movie characters.
On the hands of someone with more expertise, the romance between Albert and Victoria wouldn't have been so sure, they would've had you doubting your knowledge of history or even popular culture.
The director could've taken two paths and either make this an ironic melodrama or a tempestuous postmodernist revision of history, instead he takes the safest path and doesn't do a single thing with the material.
Fans of shallow costume drama will go ga-ga over this queen as visually it's stunning (every pan and tilt seem to be designed to make audiences drool and Sandy Powell's costume design is, unsurprisingly, excellent), but there is little emotional or cerebral background to keep you interested.
The director's seeming fear of disrespect leaves him with flat characters and no spice. You can note this in how we see Victoria drawing in several occasions, yet the camera never shows us the results. Is it because the pictures might not satisfy us and we would end up thinking the Queen to lack talent?
During one scene Victoria sits in the theater under the sneaky, judgmental watch of the entire audience, Lord Melbourne asks her to kick them out to which she replies "if I ban everyone who thinks me wrong, you and I will be left alone."
In his too reverential "The Young Victoria" even she has been banned by Vallée.