Watched: Gabriel

Okay, first let me say that anyone with half a brain can see that this Australian "supernatural action thriller" (Wikipedia's words, not mine and more on that later) clearly inspired Legion, although to be fair, Legion itself borrows heavily from other entries in the genre. The plots are disturbingly similar. Somewhere in the ether between heaven and hell there is a city known simply as Purgatory, where six archangels made human and six fallen angels (so, the devil's minions type of deal? It's implied at one point that if the baddie angels- bangels, if you will- fail, they'll be sent back to hell to answer for their selves and that will not be pleasant) have to sort of fight for the fate of all the little lost lambs dwelling there. Except we never really see them attempting to sway the actual people, because apparently if the "dark" or the "light" rule the city then so goes the neighborhood. So much for free will right? So really what's going on is that the angels are all fighting each other, and there's even some infighting on either side. The "Fallen" are all jostling for control over the city and a lot of the Scoobies have more or less given up by the time that, yes you guessed it, Gabriel arrives to set things straight.


So this is kind of cool right? I mean it's not a bad premise, in a sort of been done but still interesting *fighting for the souls of the humans* vein of filmmaking that I happen to enjoy. But it is Legion-y. I said it when I wrote my Legion review and I will say it here again- Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine was tops for me and no one else will ever be better- but I grew to really like Andy Whitfield over the course of watching the entire horrible, cliched and unbelievably entertaining series, Spartacus: Blood and Sand and he is not hard on the eyes, so there's that. And as much as this movie is blatantly copying cinematography and effects from The Crow (I mean for God's sake, when Gabriel forces the heroin from the veins of his prostitute/former angel lover Amitiel, I practically expected some little tomboy to pop up and rouse us all with an "it can't rain all the time!"), it still does some pretty cool things visually. There were a few things that were hilarious to me, and I'm going to share them with you now.

This is the poster for Gabriel. (Sidenote: check out how Whitfield just mysteriously doesn't have a shirt on under the trench in this picture. SO CHEESY. I love it.)

This is the poster for Legion. Equally cheesy/epic/hilarious. Suspiciously so.

Reference point: this is the poster for Constantine. So we're all ripping off of each other then, okay? Okay.This is Amitiel, she of the clipped wings, or Jade the prostitute, as she prefers to go by. THIS. is the supposed love interest of the movie? And I think she's like, supposed to be beautiful? Yeah okay. But she's so pathetically and stereotypically useless that after Gabriel finds her, kills the men attempting to rape her, heals her, and sleeps with her, she spends the rest of the movie basically like this. Looking out the window. Crying. Also, this actress is not good. There. I said it. I meant it. Not only is she kind of weird-looking, but this isn't about her having a great body or something because she's in a trench coat for most of the movie. And she keeps sort of trying to do the British-ish thing that Andy Whitfield does but then she just reverts to sounding sort of like, well... girls from my high school. She sounds like she's from Jersey. Which she's not, since I think most of these actors are Australian. They cover it with varying degrees of success, the WORST attempt coming from the actor who plays Sammael:
I mean he does the weirdest, like stilted type of speaking and his Australian accent is still so so obvious but he just sounds crazy, and maybe like he has a delay. He makes Sam Worthington sound like a master of dialects. This picture brings up another hilarious point that I want to explore: the director/makeup person's obsession with weird contacts. Observe.

Herein can be seen the law of diminishing returns. Sammael looks pretty badass and the black guy, Ahriman, racist stereotypes aside, is pretty intense. But the rest just kind of look like people overacting with silly contacts.

Here's the thing. There comes a point in every bad movie when you, as an audience member, must realize that the director, screenwriter, and probably most of the cast and crew have realized that the film they are working on is, in fact, a bad one. Or at least an obviously low-budget one, that perhaps they should have some fun with. I remember going to see The Covenant with Ben and Casey when it came out (remember, the one about the teen male witches? That didn't really catch on the way vampires did, huh? Weird.) and at one point one of the dudes says to some other dude (I really can't be bothered to remember more specifically than that) "I'm gonna make you my wee-otch!" and there you go. That's the wink, the sign that we're all on the same page about what exactly it is going on here. Last night I saw The Human Centipede and there's a moment when the first person in the chain cries (in Japanese, which means there are subtitled for added effect) "Oh shit, I have to shit!" and the middle's face kind of screws up and suddenly, we're all kind of in on this incredibly stupid, horrific joke. While The Human Centipede has plenty of these moments, Gabriel has just one. Sammael turns to his second-in-command Asmodeus, who has just blown up one of the remaining "arcs" and says ,"Well done." Asmodeus smiles and replies, "I'd say medium rare."

Yes. This really happens. And it's not really needed, because the fight scenes are so obviously choreographed and impersonal as to be laughable, and the dialogue is equally unnatural and entertainingly bad. But stupidity and lone joke from the film aside, ripping off the aesthetics from The Crow is not a bad well to draw from, so the movie does achieve the atmosphere that it strives for.

I can only say that I wish that this movie had Legion's budget, so that the tattoos didn't look like they were painted on with printer ink and the characters' eyes weren't the only effect the filmmakers had in their pocket.

But at least we have Andy Whitfield.