Mutant Chronicles (2008): Meat Your Maker
Say there, movie lover, do you love mutants? How about swords? How about mutants with swords… for hands? And other people killing sword-hand mutants with swords? Well, if so, Mutant Chronicles is the movie for you.
As the title deftly implies, Mutant Chronicles is the chronicle of some mutants, and how they killed some guys with swords and were later killed by other guys with swords. I know it might seem like I’m being reductionist here, but I’m really not. Aside from some turgid exposition on the front end, Mutant Chronicles is one long, queasy, disjointed series of fight scenes, bursting with cheap-looking computerized gore and devoid of even the most rudimentary characterization.
Our story opens in the one billionth century A.D., where (according to the narration) a mysterious machine came down from space and started turning everyone into mutants for reasons that never become even remotely clear. But then the machine was buried, so that the machine would stop turning people into mutants. Tragically, the machine is unburied in the first five minutes of the film, and thus starts turning people into mutants. A crack team of soldiers is dispatched to blow up the machine, so as to stop the flood of mutants… well, I hope I didn’t lose you anywhere.
The cast is surprisingly decent. Ron Perlman stars as Brother Samuel, a two-fisted fightin’ priest who must lead the gritty Dirty Dozen into the tunnels to blow up the mutant machine. Of all the actors, Perlman gives the most to the film; he chews the scenery with the kind of remorseless intensity one has come to expect from him. John Malkovich plays the same role as Sean Connery in Highlander II, or Christopher Walken in any of the Prophecy sequels; that is to say, he’s in the movie for five minutes in order that the movie might contain five enjoyable minutes. Thomas Jane, Devon Aoki, and some other guys round out the team of hard-bitten mercenaries, but ultimately they’re all pretty interchangeable. One of them shows off a picture of his kids and talks about the restaurant he’s going to open, and is then impaled on a piece of rebar. Okay, not really. But had that happened, you would not have been surprised.
Stylistically, Mutant Chronicles is like Sky Captain’s grubby cousin who comes over to your house and puts his muddy feet all over the furniture. It’s a gritty future that looks like 1914, complete with pot helmets, potato-masher grenades, and rainy trenches. The World War I iconography is so ruthlessly cribbed that if it weren’t for the spotty, blurry CGI work, you might think you’re watching the end of Gallipoli.
Clearly shot on the cheap, Mutant Chronicles looks decent enough for its budget, but suffers from the same problems as Sky Captain, and then some. Everything’s out of focus, and the computerized elements lack any sort of weight. Surrounded by green screens on every side, the characters look, shoot, and talk past the camera frame, leading the viewer into a foggy world without any sense of place. Despite the vast scale afforded by the CGI backdrops, even the wide-open spaces seem curiously claustrophobic. The movie’s color palette consists almost exclusively of reds and grays, with the occasional orange explosion for variety.
Things change for the worse when the crew goes underground, trudging their way through dimly lit air shafts and featureless antechambers. The protagonists are plagued at every step by an unyielding horde of identical baddies, transforming the movie into something remniscent of a game of Doom. Even the guilty pleasure of watching the choreographed swordplay gives way to boredom after a solid half-hour of non-stop killing. After enough of this, the fingers start yearing for a game controller to steer one of the heroes toward the power-up.
As mindless action-adventure goes, there are worse offerings out there than Mutant Chronicles… the Sci-Fi epic Mansquito, for instance, might fare a little worse. The story is rudimentary and the characters so one-dimensional they could do a guest spot in Flatland, but if you like your action served up in heaping portions like sides of charred beef, Mutant Chronicles will give you your fill.