LAKE PLACID
What a croc
Ive got two and a half words that say what's wrong with this movie: David E. Kelly. What he's basically done is taken one of his TV brainchildren, the show Ally McBeal, set it in the Maine wilderness and tossed in a giant crocodile. Put aside all "Allygator McBeal" jokes - this is precisely what he's done. You can't listen to Bridget Fonda's whiny, I'm-actually-surprised-that-my-affair-with-my-boss-didn't-have-a-happy-ending twit and not think Kelly had Calista Flockhart in mind when he wrote her.
Now, I'm actually a little more receptive to Ally McBeal - the show - than most guys, certainly more than most will admit. Sure, most of the time I lump it in with the more wretched The Practice as one of those oh-so-cute shows which chicks love and guys pretend to like in order to get chicks to put up with us. But really, all Ally McBeal - the show - has to do to make me a fan, a real fan, is get rid of Ally McBeal - the character - and retitle the show "Fish & The Litigators". The supporting cast in that show is so good, that they'd easily carry the show on their own.
'course, that's just fantasy. There's no way that show's gonna get rid of its title character - for some reason, chicks can relate to her, even though the flakiest women I know don't have a patch on her. Ladies, I just don't understand you, and I don't think I ever will. So you can have Ally McBeal - the show, and the character.
So when I go to a movie about a giant crocodile, I don't wanna see Ally fucking McBeal on the screen, but that's what I got today.
Bridget Fonda, doing everything she can to mimic Flockhart short of (insert "Calista Flockhart is so thin" joke here), plays Kelly Scott, a paleontologist sent out to investigate just what it was that bit some unlucky bastard in half over at Black Lake. No, it's not called Lake Placid. One scene throws in the name Lake Placid but says that some other lake already took it. I get the feeling that that's meant as an in-joke, but I don't get it.
Anyways, Ms. Scott of course was sent out by that boss (Adam Arkin) she was sleeping with. These David E. Kelly chicks are always doing dumb shit like that and wondering why it went wrong. She gets there, and acts exactly how you'd expect Ally McBeal to act in a wilderness environment ("Where are the flush toilets?"). She meets a hunky fish-n-game warden (Bill Pullman), a less hunky local sheriff (Brendan Gleeson), and soon enough, Fish flies in. Okay, it's not really Fish (for the uninitiated, he's the coolest character on Ally McBeal - the show), but he's written as exactly the same guy, played by Oliver Platt, nowhere near as well as Greg Germann does it on the TV show. Kelly appears to only know how to write a very few different characters.
As you might imagine, yes, there is a giant crocodile in that lake. Just how it got so big is never explained, how it got there, never explained. Why it takes about fifty minutes to finally show up (in an 82-minute movie!), never explained. And I must ask, did ALL the ancient civilizations worship crocodiles? Even the Celts and the Vikings? Bet they saw a lot of crocodiles.
Of course, there's also Betty White, playing (oh, here's originality) a sweet old lady who swears like a sailor. Her only good line is given away in the ads, and actually, it works better in the ads than in the movie because she draws it out and waters it down in the movie.
Pullman just does his Pullman thing, sort of a REALLY lightweight Harrison Ford standing a little outside the material, as if a little embarrassed by it. As for Fonda, it's so sad to see an actress who's capable of being so good (note her stunning performance in last year's A Simple Plan) settle for such a dipshit role. Platt is just lousy; his comic relief doesn't even always make sense (he calls the sheriff fat, but nothing here suggests an awareness of the irony of this line coming from, well, a fatass like Platt).
The only character of even the slightest interest is Gleeson as that sheriff. Respect for the guy dwindles when you see how he handles the old lady's candid admission that a couple of years before she bludgeoned her husband to death with a skillet (that is, he doesn't). But still, at least he doesn't have the insufferable cutesy of everybody else. He seems like a more or less regular guy, a regular guy who way overuses the word "mental" (thank you again, Mr. Kelly. In case I haven't made it clear enough, Kelly's dialogue is the most inane, cutesy crap I've heard all year).
The croc itself is pretty good, all things considered. It's mostly CGI, and looks great, although it acts like a big idiot. It just sits there while staring down one character, when you'd think it'd put the bite on him. It bites big logs, while trying to get at its prey, and just keeps chewing the logs instead of spitting the damn thing out and chasing after its intended victim. And in the climax, it actually manages to defeat itself! You've REALLY got to see this croc's behavior here. I'm stunned. (don't worry, that's not quite the end, so it's not much of a spoiler - let's just say that when one character is given the climactic dilemma of to kill or not to kill the croc, Kelly writes in a way to have both outcomes at the same time)
I did like, however, what was used to signal the croc's presence. In Jaws, we knew the shark was in town when we heard the music and saw its fin. Here, we see a whole bunch of whitefish flopping around the surface of the lake, so scared of this giant croc that couldn't possibly be interested in them that they're actually trying to fly away. Next time you're in a canoe, keep this in mind.
This is pretty gruesome, considering that locally this is a PG movie - severed heads, disembowelment, a hemicorpeectomy (I learned that word watching Chicago Hope back when it still amused me), and of course the worm-ridden toe. Brief research has uncovered that yes, it is rated R in the states. And since PG is really just a G with a P, what we have is, like The Ghost And The Darkness, another G-rated R-rated movie. Cool!
Directed by Steve Miner (like it matters), Lake Placid isn't terrible, but make no mistake, it's bad. Not that you couldn't tell - the closest thing to a good "giant alligator/crocodile" movie ever made was Alligator, and even it wasn't all that good. There ain't no rule saying these have to suck, but they tend to do just that anyway, even when they have the only "false scare by beaver" on record (and I'm not talking about that infamous crotch shot of Courtney Love). And when you throw in all that Ally McBeal, well, the only way to make it suck less would be to feed Ally to the croc.
Anyone care to guess whether or not Fonda gets eaten by that croc?