(Hollywood Grind is a column that examines filmmakers working within the studio system to produce and/or distribute their work.)
Guy Ritchie and Brad Bird hail from very different backgrounds, which is what makes it so fascinating to compare and contrast their approach to big-budget action scenes in their new movies, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, respectively.
Born in the U.K. in 1968, Ritchie decided he wanted to make movies from a young age, skipped film school, and instead worked his way up in the world of music videos and television commercials. His 1995 short film The Hard Case, paved the way to Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, his feature directorial debut, and that led to Snatch. Both were rude, fresh, jolting bolts of action filmmaking, and both did well financially.
He tumbled into the celebrity jungle due to his relationship with Madonna. On the film side, they made the ill-advised Swept Away together, which benefited neither, career-wise. Revolver and RocknRolla were evidence of diminishing returns; Ritchie's style was no longer fresh and the material felt threadbare. And then "Boom!" He gets the job directing Sherlock Holmes, most people like it, it makes hundreds of millions, and he's in the franchise business.
Born in Montana, U.S.A. in 1957, Bird's family moved to Oregon and he grew up in the college town of Corvallis. He began drawing at the age of 3, drawings he later recognized as a child's attempt at sequential art. He started learning about movies in his teens, completed his own, and sent it to Disney; the company offered him a mentorship, and later awarded him a scholarship to attend Cal Arts, the famous training ground for visual artists, where he became friends with John Lasseter.
After working briefly at Disney, Bird moved swiftly into television, with credits including Steve Spielberg's Amazing Stories and the early seasons of The Simpsons, while also sharing screenplay credit for *batteries not included. He made the beloved The Iron Giant, a terrific story told with clarity, heart, and thrills, which, sadly, did not connect with audiences in 1999. But then he bounced back with his old friend John Lasseter, now at Pixar, and made the resoundingly successful The Incredibles in 2004.
He had plans to move into live action, but those got sidetracked when he stepped in as a replacement on Ratatouille, refashioned the story, and earned his full credit as director. His planned live-action movie, the earthquake-themed 1906, was further delayed by concerns about the budget, and he moved onto the directing job for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which had been developed by Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams.
As I've written before, Abrams' Mission: Impossible III was a crisp, efficient thriller, if somewhat anonymous. Abrams has a good sense of story, but his execution has, so far, lacked any great flair for originality. Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, who worked with Abrams on his TV series Alias, receive full credit for the screenplay, so from all outward appearances, Brad Bird is a hired gun on the newest installment. He may have a couple of Academy Awards on his mantle, but it shouldn't be considered his baby.
Bird may not have given birth to Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, but he makes it his own, and this is especially evident in the action scenes. Any big-budget action sequence owes a considerable amount of credit to dozens of people, from the stunt people to the camera crew to the location managers to the production managers and on and on.
Having in mind his earlier films, however, you can't miss the similarities to the action scenes in Bird's The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Not only do they fly like bats out of hell, they keep going ... and going ... and going, in clever, logical permutations. His action scenes are wonderfully fluid; there's little confusion about who's doing what to whom and where the good guy and the villain are in physical relation to each other, even in the middle of a blinding sandstorm. His films as a whole generate great momentum and tension.
Ritchie is going for something different, but the same, with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. By the rules of big-budget sequels, he's obligated to provide fan service and make everything bigger and (theoretically) better. But he's also hemmed in by his own sense of style. He can only resort to dipping into his same bag of tricks, which are no fresher today than they were six years ago, when it seemed (with Revolver) that he had reached the limits of his skills as a filmmaker.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is crowd-pleasing entertainment, bolstered by the considerable buddy-buddy charms of Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. It hits the same notes over and over again; if you love that particular note, you're in luck. Otherwise, it becomes tedious and a bit boring.
Relatively few filmmakers can marshal all the forces involved in making big-budget projects like Sherlock and M:I. Both Guy Ritchie and Brad Bird have demonstrated that they can do it, and both will likely be rewarded richly for their efforts.
Bird, though, remains the one with still-untapped potential.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens wide tomorrow across Canada and the U.S. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol opens at selected North American IMAX theaters tomorrow before opening wide on Wednesday, December 21.