The Rant Aisle

“How does Josh Hartnett keep getting work?” Those were the first words that went through my head after 30 Days of Night. I wasn’t thinking about the movie’s look, about the characters or the premise. It’s always a shame when a leading man submarines a movie that effectively, but it’s indicative of the attitude that ultimately sinks 30 Days of Night: “Enh. That seemed good enough.”

I’ve not read the original graphic novel, but I’m not talking about it. I’m talking about the movie, which should stand on its own. I’m not one of those people that thinks an adaptation needs to stick to the source material just for the sake of sticking to the source material. V for Vendetta did a great thing when it excised the subtle misogyny from the original, and Jackson’s Lord of the Rings took extensive and necessary liberties with the text. So take my remarks as a comment on the movie by David Slade, and not the book by Niles and Templesmith. I have no idea if the movie would have been better had it stuck to the book, and moreover, I don’t care.

The movie’s “good enough” attitude is apparent as soon as you know vampires are involved. “We need a nocturnal bogeyman. How about vampires? Enh. That seems good enough.” As villains go, there’s nothing more tired than vampires. At this point, the concept itself is on a respirator, with its family thinking about pulling the plug to inherit some screen time. Fun fact: the most written-about fictional character is Dracula. What is any movie about vampires going to do that I’ve never seen before? This movie gets points for bringing bloodsuckers out of the wire-fighting kung fu mode back into horror, but that’s about it. Even the niftiness of vampires active 24/7 wears out when you start wondering why the vampires stick around after butchering almost all of the town’s population in the first half hour. Why not hoof it through the snow for the next town only 80 miles down the road? Vampires are immune to the cold and can walk all day and night, so what’s the big deal?

The acting is not anything special, which is surprising, considering the director, if not the cast. Director David Slade’s brilliant debut feature Hard Candy is a two-person psychodrama that effectively lives and dies with the acting, and both leads are hypnotic throughout. In 30 Days of Night there isn’t a single memorable performance, and the audience I was with was actually laughing out loud in the final reel when Hartnett really starts trying to emote. If Harnett’s your lead, you’re never going to make an A film. You’re settling for a B at best.

You can’t lay it all on the director or the actors. After all, to craft an interesting performance, it helps to have interesting characters. Not every writer obsessively populates his movies with weirdos the way the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson or Savage Steve Holland do, but a couple might be nice. 30 Days of Night suffers once again with “Enh, seems good enough.” All of the characters are cookie-cutter, and the relationship at the center - that of an estranged husband and wife – is so tired you can recite the stilted dialogue before Hartnett non-committally mumbles it. Classic survival horror pictures tend to reduce characters to quirks and one-liners, but 30 Days of Night doesn’t even have that. The heroes are just walking sacks of red stuff and the villains are merely walking teeth.

The film flirts with greatness in its look. Although the editing is noticably bad, many of the shots have a certain haunting ugliness to them that sticks with you. These look to be taken directly from the source material, bearing the stamp of Templesmith’s genius. But the movie never takes these tableaus and runs with them, like 300 did to great result. That movie is nearly plotless, just two hours of slow-motion pwnage, but it was an incredible success because it completely surrendered to Frank Miller’s homoerotically sublime insanity. 30 Days of Night refuses to take the risks 300 did, and suffers for it. As I said, I didn’t read the book, so I don’t know if Niles and Templesmith had the same kind of cockeyed vision, or if this was more or less what they had in mind.

One of the central conflicts in writing horror is the tension between surprise and suspense. For those not familiar with the concept, the classic film school comparison is the idea that two guys are having a conversation at a table, and under the table, is a ticking bomb. Surprise means that the audience doesn’t know about the bomb until boom, it explodes. Suspense means that we know it’s under there, but the characters don’t, so we’re on the edges of our seats waiting for that thing to go off or for them to get the hell out of Dodge. Both have their place, but suspense is much harder to create and maintain. Alien is the undisputed king of horror suspense movies. You never know where that thing is lurking, ready to turn another one of the heroes into hamburger. Surprise still has its place, best used to make the audience more jittery than a ferret with unlimited access to Pixy Sticks before the suspense turns us into nervous wrecks. 30 Days of Night takes the lazy way out, substituting genuine scares with cheap vampires-crashing-through-windows and lingering shots of gore. The only stab at suspense occurs in a few scenes in which the bloodsuckers play with their food, scenes that are equally unsatisfying to fans of torture-porn as they are to those who dislike it. For Eli Roth fans, these scenes are entirely too tame, for Neil Marshall fans they come off as cheap.

I’m not saying 30 Days of Night is a bad film. It’s merely a lazy one, every frame suggesting that everyone involved had better things to do. Do yourself a favor and wait for a rental. It’s good enough for that.