Retroactively non-fatal

The following post contains spoilers about The Lost City.

When I sided with my one son over my other son and picked The Lost City over Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore for our Easter Monday viewing, I knew I was taking a minor content risk. The film is rated M by the Australian ratings scale, which means it's supposed to be appropriate for children over 15. 

My younger son is barely half that old, so it may seem like bad parenting of the highest order to expose him to this. But you have to consider that movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home are also rated M, and we've pretty much opened the floodgates to all Marvel movies, even for the eight-year-old. I'm still hemming and hawing on the Avengers movies, which get pretty intense as they go along, but he's already expecting to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in a few weeks, and I don't expect to stand in his way.

Besides, an obvious corollary for The Lost City seemed to be Uncharted, which we watched a couple months back, which he handled just fine -- with the exception of the single "graphic" scene in that movie. But even that scene didn't scar him and I would have been happy to accept about that much "graphic" content in The Lost City.

Which is what I was expecting. A parental guide I read online said that there was a shooting, but that it had a "happy resolution." I didn't realize at the time that this was kind of a spoiler, but they were vague about it and didn't even mention who got shot, or what that happy resolution was.

Well, the shooting victim in question was Brad Pitt's Jack Trainer, who appears in what amounts to an extended cameo. (That's also a spoiler, unless you've seen the trailers, which give it away.) And it's actually pretty graphic.

When he disappears from view after being taken out by a sniper's bullet, you don't see him again. But you do see parts of him. Namely, his blood spatters on nearby Channing Tatum, and it's not just blood, but some viscera as well. In fact, the writers could not resist some panicked dialogue from Tatum in which he talks about the character's brains being on his face and in his mouth.

I grimaced. My eight-year-old son did not need this.

But the parent guide had said there was a happy resolution to the issue, and indeed, I was not surprised to see the character pop up in the middle of the closing credits, apparently fine to the naked eye as he drops in on our other two leads during their yoga class. Tatum mentions the brains again, and Trainer quips "We only use ten percent of our brain anyway. I'm just using a different ten percent."

So the movie's one gruesome death was retroactively ruled not to be a death.

I immediately started wondering: Does this change my son's impression of how violent the movie was?

For starters, I should say that my son seemed far more disturbed by the scene where Sandra Bullock picks leeches off Tatum's back and butt. And I don't think the bare butt was the concern. He just finds leeches gross, and I don't blame him. 

He did seem okay with the shooting. At the end he told me it wasn't possible, if someone got part of their brains blown out they probably couldn't survive. He's not wrong, though I suppose some brain loss is survivable.

Knowing right away I might want to write this post, I asked him on our way out of the theater whether knowing that the character survived changed his impression of that moment after the fact. Sure, he was led for the whole movie to believe that he'd watched a man get his brains blown out, but now that he knew that wasn't what happened, and the man was alive making jokes in a yoga class, did that change his impression of the graphic content itself?

He told me that it didn't. He was pretty firm on that topic and couldn't be swayed from it. But it didn't seem to disturb him much either, so that's good.

I suppose if you want to fake out the audience that a character died, you have to reveal the fakeout fairly soon afterward, otherwise the trauma of that moment will live with that viewer for the rest of the movie -- even as he or she may be having fun with, and enjoying, the rest of the movie.

For a great example how to do this, you need to go to another Bullock movie: Speed. This contains one of the great fakeouts in movie history, where the Bullock-driven bus hits a baby carriage as a woman, presumably the mother, is pushing it across the street. You have long enough to watch the carriage hurtle through the air, an instant pit of nausea in your stomach, before the carriage crashes harmlessly to the street, spilling only the aluminum cans it was carrying. You only have to live with the possibility of a dead infant for about five seconds.

"Killing" a character and then bringing him back an hour later during a totally unwarranted and frankly unbelievable end credits sequence is not the same kind of fakeout. If you didn't want us to think of this loveable rogue as having died, don't give us an hour to sit with his death, his brains splattered all over Channing Tatum and our mourning consciousness.

I guess Channing Tatum is back

When I was in the cool old cinema in Ballarat (as mentioned yesterday), I noticed the two adjacent posters you see here. Both movies feature Channing Tatum. It's the sort of detail you don't usually see in real life, often because stars' movies tend to be spaced out at greater intervals, each one intending to capitalize on the next fertile release period of the calendar year. But you'd see it plenty in a movie about a movie star, to show just how famous he or she actually is.

One of the reasons I went beyond noticing it to writing about it here was that a few years back, I examined how Tatum was sort of on the verge of losing his fame.

In this post, which is already two-and-a-half years old now, I wrote about Tatum's unexpected disappearance from the scene, which was already in full bloom by then. Both of the two movies I mentioned at the end of that post -- America: The Motion Picture and Free Guy -- finally came out in 2021, but his roles were so small in them, and it's just voice work in the former, that that hardly felt like a reclaiming of the spotlight. In fact, his cameo in Free Guy had such a sort of desperate quality to it, it felt like an attempt by a filmmaker to prop up the sagging career of a guy we used to know who now needed our help. Free Guy suggested to me that Channing Tatum had forgotten how to be a movie star.

I guess he's remembered.

Now, Dog is probably not anyone's idea of a big return to form. In fact, there's something about its "soldier and his dog" story that seems like a logical step further into the ghetto of obscurity, an attempt at a comeback that just proves how marginalized he's become. At a certain point in some people's careers, they become suited for no better than movies that are intended purely for the consumption of American conservatives, who love their soldiers and their dogs. (Side note: I noticed Dog is being advertised at a local cinema with upcoming BYOD -- Bring Your Own Dog -- sessions. That sounds ... messy.)

But then The Lost City stars Sandra Bullock, who isn't in her peak period either, but is still close enough to it to retain her spot on the A list. For now. 

In any case, having two movie posters side by side in a mainstream movie theater is a sure sign of something.

The Lost City hasn't come out either here or America, but the early verdict is in on Dog, which has a 61 on Metacritic. Promising start. Maybe even the coastal elites will want to watch this one.

Tatum, he may yet return to the elite, though it will take a concerted effort over the next few years. As he is now the parent of at least one young child -- the thing that caused him to sort of step away in the first place -- it remains to be seen if he's got the hustle to get back to the top, or prefers a few paychecks here and there to put food on the table for his son.

Me, I hope we see him back filling that niche he filled ten years ago, when he could make both action movies and comedies come to life. Because cinema needs a Channing Tatum, a loveable lunkhead who feels comfortable in his own skin, and not the one who seemed so awkward and out of place in Free Guy.