At the Art House

The gangster movie that the World Cup rescued from obscurity: Jerusalema

I’m guessing that we have the World Cup to thank for the arrival of Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema at the Angelika.

The film is from South Africa, and the Jerusalem of the title refers (very ironically) to the crime-infested neighborhoods of Johannesburg. The film apparently only had a limited release in South Africa in 2008, then references to it disappear from the Internet until the first day of the World Cup, when opened in New York, Los Angeles, and … Houston.

Weird. I hadn't been able to find a single review online until Friday — the day of the re-release.

But how’s the movie, you ask? It’s actually quite good, maybe even important.

Its hero, Lucky Kunene (Rapulana Seiphemo), is one of the most memorable and affecting movie gangsters I’ve seen in some time. He’s apparently based on a real-life Johannesburg crime lord. His story has the heft and detail of reality, and Seiphemo is very charismatic. He’s violent, but he has vision, and I found myself rooting for him almost without reservation.

The film starts with young Lucky and his friend Zakes in the early days of their criminal career. Lucky had wanted to be a university student, but Zakes convinced him that, in post-apartheid South Africa, school was for suckers. Get a pistol in your hand and you can start making money right away. The film is actually pretty humorous as they begin a carjacking career, which is limited at first because neither one knows how to drive.

The film deepens after the young men flee the countryside where they grew up, with the police on their trail, and take refuge in the no-man’s land of Johannesburg. At this point the adult actors take over and the characters deepen. Lucky comes up with a brilliant way to make a lot of money, and, not entirely coincidentally, help his impoverished neighbors.

He and his henchmen take over apartment buildings that are neglected by their slumlords. They kick out the drug dealers and the hookers, clean the building up, and then collect the rent for themselves, shutting out the slumlords. If the slumlords don’t like it, they can begin legal proceedings in South Africa’s very creaky justice system.

Seiphemo and writer/director Ralph Ziman balance Lucky right on the razor’s edge of right and wrong. To make him a simple Robin Hood would be sentimental, and Ziman appears to want to show South Africa in all its injustice and terror. But despite being a very hard man, Lucky’s far from the worst.

Thanks to the intelligence of the script and Seiphemo’s performance, it’s believable when the daughter of a prominent, suburban Jewish family falls for Lucky, and dreams of making her own post-apartheid life with him. The sight of a yarmulke-wearing Lucky seated at her family’s Seder was good for a belly laugh, but the scene also revealed the depth and complexity of his character.

When his girlfriend’s mother asks him what he does for a living, Lucky answers, “I’m a gangster,” with a truly penetrating wit. He laughs his answer off as a joke, but now we’ve seen him as both a gangster and as good dinner-party company, and both roles seem equally real.

Himan perhaps tries to force too much significance onto Lucky’s character by the film’s end, but that doesn’t take away from his accomplishment. He’s made a terrific, eye-opening film that is far superior to the mediocre Tsotsi, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006.

I hope that Jerusalema finds aHouston audience.

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Movie Review

Denzel Washington brings new spectacle to the Colosseum in Gladiator II

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Paul Mescal in Gladiator II.

There are some films for which making a sequel is natural, and others where a follow-up is wholly unnecessary. Gladiator, which made both tons of money and was named Best Picture at the Oscars, told an impactful stand-alone story that ended with the protagonist dead and no real loose ends. And yet because there’s always more money to be made, here we are 24 years later with Gladiator II.

The lead character this time around is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a general in a North African army who becomes a prisoner of war when the Roman army led by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) bests him and his troops in battle. Taken back to Rome, he is put in the pool of captured men forced to fight at the Colosseum for the amusement of twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracella (Fred Hechinger).

Lucius is controlled by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an ambitious schemer who bets liberally on his prized fighter and always has an eye to move up in the world. Meanwhile, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), the sister of Emperor Commodus from the first film, is now married to Marcus Acacius and has a unique connection with Lucius that is fairly obvious from the get-go.

Directed once again by Ridley Scott and written by David Scarpa, the film commits a number of sins throughout its 150-minute running time, the most blatant of which is that, aside from a few embellishments, it essentially tells the same story as the first film. Lucius, like Maximus, is a deposed military leader who’s out for revenge on the person who killed his family. Instead of one obnoxious emperor, there are now two. And the only way for Lucius to earn his freedom is to fight his way out.

Stories told in the same world can echo each other and, if done well, overcome those similarities. But Gladiator II is shockingly boring for a purported sword-and-sandals epic. Scott and his team try to introduce new elements to the fights, like a gladiator riding a rhinoceros or a ship battle inside the Colosseum (with sharks!), but most of the sequences are inert with no propulsion to them.

The action fails because none of the relationships in the film amount to much. There are stand-out characters like Macrinus and the twin emperors, but instead of creating antipathy or strong feelings of triumph or defeat, the story just kind of happens without any sense of excitement or importance. Much of that issue lies at the feet of Lucius, who simply doesn’t inspire in the same way that Russell Crowe’s Maximus did.

Mescal is a fine actor who’s done good work in more intimate roles, but he’s not up to the task of being an action star, at least not in this film. Any bombast he shows with the character feels forced, and the story doesn’t give him enough opportunities to counteract that lack. Washington, however, fills up the screen with his charisma, and it’s during his scenes that the film comes closest to being rousing. Quinn and Hechinger are a lot of fun as the twin emperors, but in the end they feel like retreads of Joaquin Phoenix from the original.

Any sequel should have a purpose that sets it apart from what came before, but Scott, Scarpa, and the rest of their team fail in that respect in Gladiator II. It’s a mostly lifeless film that delivers scenes that would be exciting if they had any kind of good story to back them up.

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Gladiator II opens in theaters on November 22.

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