In short: The Way of the Gun (2000)

Two intellectually stunted small time criminals (Benicio del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) accidentally overhear a telephone call that suggests to them – not beholden to The Way of the Brain(s) – a brilliant plan: kidnap the surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) of some rich guy’s (whose name they don’t even know nor attempt to find out) baby during the latest stage of her pregnancy and blackmail said rich guy into paying them a fortune. Turns out things go wrong in any which way they can, for the mysterious rich guy (Scott Wilson) is indeed highly involved in organized crime, so our idiot protagonists soon have problems with the surrogate mother’s surviving bodyguards (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) and rich guy’s chief bagman Joe “The director named me after the master of psychological softcore movies for no discernible reason” Sarno (James Caan).

And to drag a simple plot out into a two hour movie, every single damn character involved (plus a few I haven’t even mentioned) has his or her own private agenda, too, leading to the usual twists and turns.

Which to me is the core problem of Christopher McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun: the way the film is set up, every single character on screen needs to function as a plot device, too, so most of them don’t act like people grasping for the things they want but rather like walking talking clichés who do what they do to complicate the plot. In theory, most of the characters do have motivations for what they do, but for some reason (might be the titular way of the gun, or a self-destructive attempt at making every twist a surprise, even though there’s little surprising for anyone vaguely savvy concerning films about guys with guns), McQuarrie decides to present most of them as ciphers and clichés, never actually letting them express any of the emotions or thoughts that are supposedly driving them. This leads to a film full of characters about whose bloody deaths one can’t bring oneself to care even the tiniest bit, not because they are very bad people (which they surely are), but because nobody would ever confuse these two-dimensional beings with people at all.

Adding insult to injury, the film actually features a cast of fine actors (well, and Ryan Phillippe, but what can you do?). Alas, it is a cast of fine actors who aren’t allowed to do more than just go through the motions in service of the over-plotted abomination of a script they’re trapped in.

Visually, McQuarrie’s film is rather on the beautiful side, slick and bloody and pretty and technically accomplished – and just as empty and meaningless as its script. There’s just nothing there not in a nihilistic sense, mind you, but following the Way of the Undernourished Script.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Evelyn Stockard-Price (Famke Janssen) has decided that the ideal place for throwing her next birthday bash is the titular House on Haunted Hill, a former psychiatric institution once under the charge of a mad man (Jeffrey Combs, as a matter of fact), and claiming a history of death and destruction during and after that particular stint. Despite their marriage having come down to the point where it is a series of entertainingly bitchy dialogue sequences and murder attempts, her husband Stephen Price (Geffrey Rush), a stinking rich carnival barker style rollercoaster tycoon, obliges. Well, sort of, for Stephen invites rather different guests to the party than Evelyn had in mind, because he has decided to run with a gimmick for the evening - survive the night in the house and get a million dollars! – and does consequently go for a rather more desperate clientele than the rich friends of rich people.

The victimsguests who eventually show up at the House – as played by Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher and Bridgette Wilson – aren’t the ones Stephen had invited either, though, for some mysterious force has changed the guest list yet again. It comes as no surprise to the audience when the guests, the Prices and the owner of the place (Chris Kattan) soon find themselves locked in the mansion by a neat mechanical lock-up device, nor that things will get rather dangerous for everyone involved.

It’s not just that Stephen has rigged up the house with all kinds of spooky contraptions so the guests have to work for their million, there are also quite real, and very nasty, ghosts to cope with, as well as a little murder conspiracy, and…the Darkness.

When it comes to remaking films, going for something like the great William Castle’s original House on Haunted Hill makes a lot of sense: it’s a well loved film to some – like me – but it’s not well-loved for being particularly artful, nor deep, nor complex, nor important to the development of genres or lives. Rather, it’s loved as an extremely fun example of the movie as carnival ride, made out of funny and sharp dialogue, some hokey yet great effects, Vincent Price, and Castle’s very distinctive impresario personality and all that it brought. Apart from Price, these are things a film in the late 90s could provide.

And while Geoffrey Rush certainly is no Vincent, his performance, which is about in equal parts a homage to Price and one to William Castle himself, is pretty damn fun. Particularly so in Rush’s scenes with a Janssen who clearly also gets the joke and enjoys herself.

I’m fond of director William Malone’s decision to set the film’s first half hour or so mainly up as an extended Castle homage, be it through the very Castle-like prominent billing of people like James Marsters and Jeffrey Combs who barely have cameos, or through the sheer insistence of Rush’s character on the sort of gimmickry and overcooked showmanship Castle loved so well.

Once that part of the film is over, things settle down to a competent horror romp through some very cool looking sets - mechanical gothic by way of art deco style in design –, hokey yet fun scares, and featuring a bit too much late 90s shock rock music video editing. The whole affair is scandalously lacking even a single moment of depth but fully delivers on all promises of cheap thrills. As a little extra, this House on Haunted Hill does also belong to the tiny minority of horror films whose shared main sympathetic character is a black man who even survives the movie.