Directrospective: Jaume Collet-Serra
Notes on the films of contemporary cinema’s finest hitter of doubles, Jaume Collet-Serra. Most of this comes from my Letterboxd account.
HOUSE OF WAX (2005)
HOUSE OF WAX star Paris Hilton, seen here unfairly skewered.
If there’s a unifying theme to Collet-Serra’s career, it’s his finesse with genre schlock that should be forgettable but isn’t. He has an eye and an imagination beyond what his material demands or deserves, and he consistently exceeds the low expectations usually placed on films with his sort of premise and budget. He’s like a Michelin-star chef who for some reason just really, really likes making french fries.
2005’s HOUSE OF WAX, his first feature (incidentally most of which is the color of used cooking oil), is a prime example. As others have noted, this is much more a remake of the 1979 rednecksploitation nightmare TOURIST TRAP than the 1953 Vincent Price film with which it shares a name. Where 1953’s HOUSE OF WAX is about dead bodies hidden within the wax figures in a very popular and successful wax museum in New York City, this one puts the titular wax house in an empty podunk Louisiana town that clearly only exists to do horrible things to city folk with car trouble. A gang of supremely unlikable idiot teens played by unlikable twenty-something TV actors go through the slasher movie motions, getting waxed and mutilated thanks mostly to their own foolishness, and then the relatively upstanding one (Elisha Cuthbert) and her shithead brother who I guess deserves redemption (Chad Michael Murray) barely make it out of a collapsing museum which has turned out to be a literal house of literal wax.
Collet-Serra’s overachieving comes across visually. He and his cinematographer dial up the grime on every surface. Even the air looks like motor oil. The kills are nasty as hell, often literally visceral. The skin crawls. Collet-Serra gets an early kick out of dropping Elisha Cuthbert into a pool of liquefying deer corpses. People get stuck shin-deep in melting wax stairs, which is very viscerally upsetting for me as it is so reminiscent of my childhood nightmares where I’m on the beach with a tidal wave coming and the sand just keeps falling away as I try to run. As unlikable as the teens are, images from the film have stuck with me in the years since I first saw it. Collet-Serra’s compositions leave a waxy residue on the mind.
And not all the teens are unlikable. Paris Hilton is genuinely great in this, playing a version of her public persona minus some of the obscene wealth. Cruelly, part of the movie’s marketing played up the opportunity to “Watch Paris Die,” I guess for the crime of being horrifically exploited as an 18-year-old and having the audacity to try to do something with her unasked-for notoriety. Here she certainly has a good sense of humor about herself and on the balance she comes across smarter than many of the rest of the victims. In a just world, Hilton should have had a string of feature roles in horror movies where she walks around in Juicy sweatsuits texting and complaining about the obviously bad situation the other characters have dragged her into. Sometimes she might even make it to the end of the film. With her presence and self-awareness I hope it’s only a matter of time before she ends up in a semi-fictionalized reclamation project from someone like the Safdie brothers or Harmony Korine.
GOAL II: LIVING THE DREAM (2007)
Seemed like too much trouble at the beginning of quarantine to track down this sequel to a soccer movie I haven’t seen and then decide whether I wanted to sit through the first one, too. I didn’t watch either. In a sense, this is a really a retrospective of every Jaume Collet-Serra film that is available on very affordably-priced Region A Blu-ray disc. Those first weeks were a hard time and we were all just doing our best to get through it. Sorry!
ORPHAN (2009)
Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular ORPHAN, who seems like a perfectly nice child with nothing unusual going on.
Just like with HOUSE OF WAX, Collet-Serra brings much more artistry and cleverness than one would expect to a script that could easily have been completely disposable multiplex trash. JC-S offers an alternative to the often nasty, underlit, proud-of-itself A24-ass "elevated horror" of the last few years, an alternative that is to my mind much more fun and valuable: finely crafted, deeply memorable multiplex trash.
After a stillbirth, a well-off couple (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) decide to adopt a sister for their son and hearing-impaired daughter. They settle on a nine-year-old Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) who’s been through some shit but has very nice manners. Then things get nasty. And JC-S lets things get very nasty. Where another director would have the first sign of Esther’s dark side, her cold and unhesitating execution of an injured pigeon with a big rock, play out offscreen, he cuts to the bird bursting into a puddle of fake guts. We see Esther try to smother her hospital-bound brother with a pillow. We see Vera Farmiga strike a child more than once, and we’re not always invited to condemn her. We see Esther bury a hammer in a nun’s skull while her five-year-old adoptive sister looks on. Once Esther’s true identity as a murderous growth-stunted adult is revealed, she tries to seduce Sarsgaard. Nothing really happens between them, but regardless of the fantastical situation she’s playing, we’re still watching a romantic scene between Peter Sarsgaard and a literal child.
It’s thoughtfully composed, as is JC-S’s usual mode, and the large modern house where most of the film takes place is designed, like homes from films like PSYCHO and PARASITE, to facilitate the film’s suspense sequences. Farmiga watches nervously through the big windows as the kids play on the edge of the woods. The color palette of bluish whites and yellowed greys recalls THE ICE STORM. He’s a real filmmaker, this guy. Even if he’s making a movie about an evil little girl who turns out to be a psychopathic thirty-something with a rare form of dwarfism.
UNKNOWN (2011)
Liam Neeson confronts his wife January Jones about her surprising recent claim that he is UNKNOWN to her.
JC-S’s first move from horror to action thriller is a riff on Hitchcock and De Palma (so, Hitchcock) that melts from the brain as soon as it’s over. One of the first Liam Neeson Old Guy Thrillers, it feels interchangeable with most of them (excepting films like THE WOLF ONE or THE ONE HE SAID THE RACIST THING PROMOTING) despite what should be a very distinguishing hook. We meet Liam Neeson as Dr. Martin Harris, a scientist in Berlin with his 28-years-younger wife January Jones to attend a biotechnology conference. On his way back to the airport to retrieve a forgotten briefcase, his taxi goes off a bridge and he wakes up a John Doe in a German hospital. January Jones now insists she doesn’t know him and is married to Aidan Quinn, who says his name is Dr. Martin Harris, and he has the documents to prove it. Clearly something very unknown is going on here.
But the action is mostly by-the-numbers and little stands out beyond a clever homage to the art gallery scene in DRESSED TO KILL and a great, exhausted turn by Bruno Ganz as a retired Stasi agent who helps Neeson out. Ganz was considerably closer to Neeson’s age than Jones, by the way. The plot twists with all their assassin rings and very precise amnesia are pulpy enough, but I don’t think Jones or Quinn are quite right to sell the coded gestures asked of them. As great as the wintry landscapes of ORPHAN looked, JC-S casts snowy Berlin in a samey blue that I don’t like looking at, frankly. As far as early-2010s Germany-set spy thrillers go, give me A MOST WANTED MAN over this one any day.
NON-STOP (2014)
Air marshal Liam Neeson making the passengers on his flight feel safe.
This middling DIE-HARD-on-a-plane joint has a bonkers cast for any film, let alone one that screams "C+ At Best." Filmed pre- but released post-Oscar Lupita Nyong'o???? Screen legend Julianne Moore???? A Downton Abbess? Anson Mount from CROSSROADS??????
Most of the film is one of those excruciating things where a guy being framed makes every bad decision available to him while trying to clear his name. Some people can't watch excessive violence or onscreen vomiting; I have trouble watching somebody dig a hole this deep. Just awful stuff for me. Hard to imagine that it’s exactly pleasurable for anyone, but I guess it must not grate others the way it does me. At the beginning of this he’s a few choice sentences away from getting the whole plane on his side, but he doesn’t stop to explain himself, and then more needs explaining, and more and more. It’s grueling. Not that I don’t want a film to have stakes, but somebody trying to do the right thing and only making themselves look worse is not my idea of fun.
NON-STOP ends up being kind of a #NotAllAirMarshalls thing, which also sucks. But once the true threat is revealed (in a move cribbed from SCREAM) and the crash sequence gets cooking I had a good time. Reminded me of how much I liked watching the movie FLIGHT with Denzel Washington. Love the movie FLIGHT with Denzel Washington! It’s like the year 2000 never ended.
RUN ALL NIGHT (2015)
Liam Neeson in one of RUN ALL NIGHT’s CGI bullet-time sojourns.
Less a film in itself than a spotty combined description of several other recent non-Italian-mafia organized crime thrillers. JC-S is very invested in an effect where the scene becomes a static 3D model of itself around which the camera can flip and zoom and shoot up into the air to cross all of New York City; it looks expensive, complicated, and dumb. Half-expected some shocking reveal that the whole thing was taking place in a simulation. Turns out Jaume just has a boner for Google Earth.
I find it difficult to get invested in a movie so much about how important it is to have a son. There is also the Joel Kinnaman problem - guy just doesn’t have the movie star thing. He looks a little too innately villainous, and it’s hard to see him thinking onscreen. Ed Harris is notably shorter than everyone else in the film; I had always figured him for a tall man. Decently fun car chase at one point. All considered, probably my least favorite Jaume.
THE SHALLOWS (2016)
Blake Lively and friend.
Not the first Jaume I saw (that was HOUSE OF WAX), but the first one I took note of as the work of a serious craftsman. I’d seen the trailers and became aware of its growing reputation as “actually pretty good,” and as an avowed JAWS Boy, I’m always willing to see a shark movie.
The hook is gimmicky - nearly the whole running time finds Blake Lively alone on a semi-submerged rock in a hidden surf spot in Mexico, trying to fend off a big assed hungry shark. Well, alone except for a very charming, very real seagull.
The drama and variety that JC-S is able to wring and sustain from such a contained story is impressive, all the more so once you’ve seen the making-of featurette on the Blu-ray; the blue screen tank they shot the bulk of the movie in only allowed the camera to move halfway around the rock before the blue behind Lively ran out, so the crew had to rotate the entire floating set 180 degrees every time they wanted to get coverage.
What I noticed most on my first viewing, and only appreciated more the second, was JC-S’s clever use of picture-in-picture to incorporate things like video chat and a ticking stopwatch without interrupting the action at all. He layers semi-transparent screens on top of what we’re already looking at, just like real life. Between THE SHALLOWS and PERSONAL SHOPPER, 2016 was an enormous year for innovation in the cinema of the smartphone.
THE COMMUTER (2018)
Liam Neeson talking to Vera Farmiga on the phone. This is most of what THE COMMUTER is.
Not as clunky as UNKNOWN, certainly, but the endless identical train cars made me long for the (relative) geographical clarity of NON-STOP. With SOURCE CODE, this is now Vera Farmiga's second (?) film where she gives high-stakes instructions to a man riding a commuter train. I think the lack of tension comes from the extreme vagueness of it all: of Neeson's goal, of the threat to his family, of his methods for achieving the vague goal. Part of the fun of this kind of movie is the clever puzzle-solving that you watch the hero do, and there isn't much of that here. Just something to do with ticket punching, I guess. It's kind of a snooze. The big CGI derailment sequence is ludicrously bombastic and drawn-out. I'm no Kevin Corrigan as FRA inspector Scott Werner in the 2010 film UNSTOPPABLE, but I don't think real train derailments have nearly as much fire or upward velocity.
Damn, have y’all seen UNSTOPPABLE? What a picture, that one. Wish I'd watched it again instead of this.
I first saw this during its theatrical release and wasn’t terribly impressed, but the opening sequence alone - praise for which on the Film Comment Podcast drew me to see it in the first place - demonstrates the level of craft Jaume brings no matter what. Also cool to see posters for PADDINGTON 2 in the background when Neeson’s at the train station.
So what makes a JC-S film a JC-S film? Dude tries shit out. It seems like he has an allergy to scripts that rise above the level of Functional, but maybe that's part of his plan. When you start with a low bar it's always clear that the material is being elevated by his ideas. My dude takes a slice of discount bologna and puts the good deli mustard on it, the heirloom tomato, maybe some exciting kind of lettuce, lays it all on a nice piece of bread. This just happened to be a pretty far gone slice to begin with.
If JUNGLE CRUISE ever comes out, and who knows if it will, I'll be very interested to see how much of that JC-S mustard is allowed to come through between the Disney producers and the very hands-on Dwayne "Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson" Johnson. Same goes for BLACK ADAM, which I guess he's attached to. But maybe he's the perfect kind of filmmaker for a big studio movie - plenty of style with no particular thematic hangups to speak of.