Word: raimi
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...film nearly so mindless as the violence done to it. The rating system was preserved, the film's intricate internal rhythm destroyed. "My work is like my child," the mild-mannered director says. "If too many things are cut, it's like cutting my own flesh." Executive producer Sam Raimi, himself an auteur of high-style violence (The Evil Dead), admits he didn't have any good advice for Woo -- "except that one day it would all be over...
...matter. There is personality aplenty in Woo's editing and camera style. ! Here, you feel, is a moviemaker, a popular artist with an infectious joy in his craft. What Raimi calls Woo's "supercharged adrenaline" -- the reckless intelligence he applies to solving the most familiar action scenes -- is evident in each precise, superpotent frame. He could be a cleaner, leaner Sam Peckinpah, or Sergio Leone: the next generation. And in his best work, Woo is a critic and elegist of movie manhood. His Vietnam film, the amazing A Bullet in the Head, is an atrocity picture with a conscience...
...just the outline. Rodriguez, who's been making films since he was 12, and whose short comedy Bedhead won prizes at 14 festivals, realizes that even splattered blood can get tired if there's no wit and bustle in the execution. His mentors -- Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Sam Raimi -- knew how to do it, and Rodriguez is a fast learner. Every shot (of an astounding 2,000 in the movie, about four times the average) is an aerobic workout for the eyes -- a delirious too much of a muchness...
Darkman wants to be Batman. Its hero, a scientist (Liam Neeson) scarred in body and soul after being left for dead by venal thugs, is a cloaked crusader bent more on vengeance than on justice. Director Sam Raimi, whose cheapo slasher film The Evil Dead achieved cult status, mines familiar comic-book terrain with a plucky heroine (Frances McDormand), a couple of corporate villains -- one slick (Colin Friels), the other slimy (Larry Drake) -- and plenty of explosive violence that virtually reads KA-BOOM! in block letters across the screen...
...like Batman, this comic-book movie is anything but comic; every plangent chord of Danny Elfman's splendid pop-Wagnerian score underlines the scientist's twisted nobility. Raimi isn't effective with his actors, and the dialogue lacks smart menace, but his canny visual sense carries many a scene. And he knows how to give resonance to a tinny plot: by portraying a character so powerful and warped that he is urban America's perfect patron saint...