The Mayo News

The girl, the vamp and the werewolf


Cinema
Daniel Carey

THERE’S a great scene in the 1988 comedy ‘The Great Outdoors’ where an out-of-breath Chester ‘Chet’ Ripley (John Candy) arrives back at his lake resort cabin. He’s clearly terrified and tries to guard the door, but his warnings are completely misunderstood by his fellow holiday-makers.
“Big,” he muses, which is interpreted as a demand for a large sandwich. “Big bear”, he clarifies, which his sister-in-law takes to be a reference to himself. “Big bear chase” he says, but he’s still gasping and nobody is paying any heed to him. He manages to get the full sentence out – “Big bear chase me” – seconds before the large animal breaks down the door.
Chet has some previous experience with bears, given that he and his wife Connie were terrorised by one while on their honeymoon. Chet talks of skinning the fur off its scalp with a shotgun, thus turning it into a ‘Bald-Headed Bear’. As events unfold, it becomes clear that this legendary animal still roams the woods.
There are lots of references to bears causing havoc in the first half of ‘New Moon’, the second instalment of the ‘Twilight’ saga. But those stories prove wide of the mark. What we’re dealing with here, it emerges, are wolves. Werewolves, to be precise.
And the vampires of the first film? To borrow a phrase, they haven’t gone away, you know. Well actually, they have – which is a major problem for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart).
Bella, is an 18-year-old human who’s dating 109-year-old vamp Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). But her coming-of-age party almost ends in a bloodbath, so the Cullens leave town, and Bella is broken-hearted. She mopes around, and occasionally Edward pops up in non-corporeal form to warn her against danger. What eventually shakes Bella out of her rut is a growing friendship with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), and we have a cinematic reversal as two hunky guys fight over a plain girl.
The climax involves the risk of a ‘Romeo and Juliet’-type tragedy, and there’s plenty of intensity, but what exactly was going on in the last 20 minutes, I’m really not sure. It involves Michael Sheen, who pops up as some kind of vampire God. The man who played Tony Blair and Brian Clough recalled on BBC last week that he recently emerged from a clothes-shop cubicle in Los Angeles to be met by a ‘Twi-Hard’ who said, with shaking hands and quivering voice: “You’re Aro!”, referring to his character’s name.
The ‘Twilight’ series of four books, written by Stephanie Meyer, has attracted a fanatical following, and they seem happy enough with what director Chris Weitz has come up with here. There’s a lot of angst and introspection – it’s no coincidence that the cinema was full of teenage girls.
There are nice touches – Bella, having spent too long with vampires, apologises to Jacob for bleeding; her preference for action movie ‘Face Punch’ over a weepy romantic comedy; Jacob condemning her date as a ‘marshmallow’ for his lack of a strong stomach.
The action sequences aren’t bad either, although the wolves are computer-generated, and look it. Give me the real bear used in ‘The Great Outdoors’ any day – apparently, his ‘bald spot’ was created with artificial prostheses.
I had been warned to watch ‘Twilight’ before seeing ‘New Moon’, and the sequel certainly left me with enough questions to rue not doing so. But aside from that, the film is too slow, too long and too often repetitive. The amount of navel-gazing done by the characters may ring true with the fans, but its unremittingly depressing tone means it could struggle to win over newcomers.

Rating 5 out of 10

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