Movie Mashup: Solomon Safe
Would you care for some violence with your redemption?
That’s the question the latest brace of movies asked me (loudly, and with lots of blood). Solomon Kane, the newish adaptation of Robert E Howard's stories about an ass-kicking Puritan, is heavy on both mysticism and mud. And then there’s Safe, which pits modern-day ass-kicker Jason Statham against…well, most of New York City.
Wanna know a secret? This mashup is soooo easy. Both movies are the same movie. Really, exactly the same. In each one, a guy with a violent past and some preternaturally powerful enemies swears off the warpath for a while, to the extent of almost ending his life. But then a chance encounter with a young girl (not in a creepy way) serves to resuscitate his connection to Life. Then, of course, the girl is put into a type of danger that only a major ass-kicking can mitigate.
YEAAAAAAHHHHH!
That is both movies, right there. Not just a hero quest, but a very specific “rescue the princess, save your soul” quest. One happens in 1600s England (plus witches and wizards!), and the other happens in 21st century Muggle New York, but the two protagonists could swap places with nary a raised eyebrow, since they have virtually the same morals and methods.
Solomon Kane is the weirder, and more visually compelling movie (which isn't to imply that the special effects are necessarily good). Opening on a dark night somewhere, we see our protagonist slicing and dicing his way into a castle like he’s got the game on Easy Mode. In fact, he’s just that good a fighter. Redshirts fall like bloodied leaves before him. But the boss fight goes less well, and Kane not only loses the battle, he gets a vicious curse slapped on him. It seems the Devil has a special interest in Kane’s soul. The only way to keep alive and ensouled is to follow a strict path of peace. No fighting, no killing, and certainly no revenge. So our ass-kicker hangs up his sword and heads to a monastery. Gee, I wonder how long that will work out.
Safe probably had a larger budget than Solomon Kane, but it spent it on star and firepower rather than demonic special effects. Jason Statham plays a very down on his luck dude. Due to an unfortunate run-in with Bad Guys, which in this movie are mobsters rather than actual demons, he's lost his family and things have gone downhill. In fact, he's homeless and near-suicidal at the start of the film. But in the subway, Wright crosses paths with a little Chinese girl named Mei (the snarktastic Catharine Chan) who is being used as a living computer by a Chinese cartel. She’s on the run, being chased by bad men who want what’s in her brain. So Wright steps in and appoints himself her protector…as you do. After only a few misunderstandings, man and girl team up to take advantage of their respective skills, take a lot of money out of a safe (get it?), and then make a bid for freedom.
Just like Wright, Kane also crosses paths with a innocent lass, part of a nice Puritan family heading for America. Meredith is sweet and kind (so is the whole family, including the late Pete Postlethwaite as the gentle patriarch). Of course, Evil attacks, killing everyone but Meredith, who gets taken for nefarious purposes. Kane quickly hooks into the notion that the dying Postlethwaite gives him: Save the girl, and your soul is redeemed.
In both Safe and Solomon Kane, the heroes realize that violence is not the answer.
Violence is the question. And the answer is yes.
As soon as their embodiment of redemption is endangered, each man goes on a lethal shit-kicking bender that leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. In both, the hero gives one sign of conflict about hopping back on the warpath (Wright vomits off the side of a subway car following the first fight, and Kane has a wee vision of hellfire), but once that’s out of the way, they both turn back into stone cold killers for the rest of their respective movies. And thank Jeebus, because that moment is exactly when both films pick up and get fun.
Is either movie great? No.
Does it really matter? No.
I found both to be pretty tolerable and even sort of interesting in parts. Both deliver on their implicit promise, which is that there will be a good guy regulating on all sorts of badness in the service of innocent peeps. And who can really argue with that?
To summarize:
Still here? Nice.
Can we talk about character? Good.
I'd like to put a few notions forth. This is a good mashup to do that with, since the plot and stuff are all equivalent.
Solomon Kane is way more interesting of a character than Luke Wright. Which is to say, he has a character at all. Wright a cipher. He's practically the Man with No Name. His personality is molded around focus-group notions that a leading man be strong, committed to the idea of Life and Family, but not have any troublesome quirks or opinions that might alienate any viewers or slow the action down. The problem with Wright is that he's hard to like because there's nothing to like…just as there isn't anything to dislike.
Kane is weirder and more conflicty, probably because he's a few novels which which to develop a personality. Granted, those novels were pulpy and quite often racist (which was ink daddy Howard's fault, not Kane's, of course) but at at least there was something to work with. Wright is nothing more than a hopeful idea attached to a roundhouse kick. Kane, with his shifts from Neutral Evil to True Neutral and then to Chaotic Good, gives the movie some arc. Because he does start out in the movie as rather a selfish person, and in fact has to sort of learn what it means to be good (hint: stop pirating whole cities). By contrast, Wright is good the whole time; it's just a question of potential vs kinetic good.
That's the heroes. What of the princesses? Kane's Meredith is as bland as he is interesting, unfortunately. She doesn't have many lines, and they only serve to reinforce the idea that she is sweet and innocent, in order to give Kane a reason to rescue her. Yawn. Mei, despite being years younger than Meredith, is about ten times smarter than most of the adults in Safe, and she's got an attitude as well. Watching her decide on the morality of an action (usually, whether she should lie) actually engages the viewer. We have a stake in what she decides, and we understand her conflicts. Too bad we don't see Wright consider some of those moral issues too…but then, the writers were pretty careful to leave the path well-marked, so our hero doesn't have to make any tricky decisions.
What would be truly sweet, of course, would be an action movie that offered both a hero and a princess with flaws and interesting wrinkles. Those movies exist, I'm sure. But I can't think of any right now. And Hollywood seems allergic to them.
*Please note that Safe is about a cage-fighter by the name of Luke Wright, not a right-fighter by the name of
, which would have been a different, and probably more awesome movie. You hear me, Marvel? Get
on
that.