Considering “Java Heat”

Sometimes a film doesn’t need a great actor.  Sometimes a film needs the right actor.  For all his Oscars, would Daniel Day-Lewis have made as memorable a character as Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator?  For all his limitations, would one replace Jason Statham with Brad Pitt in Crank?  No and no.  A camel hair jacket may be finer, but sometimes it’s the cotton hoodie that fits right.  Even against these icons, though, there may be no greater fit of actor and role and film than Kellan Lutz as Jake Wilde in Java Heat.

Java Heat is what we are blessed with when someone decides that it’s been too long since Final Justice was released.  A new generation needs its own ugly, violent American abroad film.  Indonesia is the new Malta, Lutz is the new Joe Don Baker and Mickey Rourke is the new Eurotrash villain.

There’s not much to the plot.  Lutz’s Jake Wilde has gone rogue seeking the man who killed his brother and others in a bombing.  Ario Bayu’s Lieutenant Hashim is investigating the bombing that killed the Sultana.  They meet.  There is enmity and cultural misunderstandings.  The two realize they need each other.  Lessons are learned, and villains are murdered.  It’s boilerplate.

What about Kellan Lutz?  He’s perfect in the role.  Jake Wilde, for lack of a better word, is a moron and willing to prove the fact at every possible opportunity.  One of his first lines in the film is dismissing batik as Hawaiian shirts.  He lies that his name is John Jason Wilde and that he is a graduate student in art from Cornell University.  He is very insistent on this Cornell detail and its Ivy League associations.  This lie is discovered when Hashim’s wife, who is “good with technology,” does a Google search and finds a clip of a much older John Jason Wilde lecturing on art.  Wilde insults nasi goreng, Indonesian fried rice, as full of gluten.  He chains a prostitute to a pipe to interrogate her before ducking behind a couch when a death squad fills his apartment with bullets.  After successfully jousting a man off his motorbike, Wilde takes the opportunity to turn backward and flip off his fallen foe  before promptly crashing his own motorbike into a wall.  When the villain pulls the classic “hide behind the hostage” maneuver, Wilde pulls out a shotgun.  And he does it all so eagerly with a complete, beguiling lack of self awareness.

To prove that it’s not simply lazy writing, Wilde is juxtaposed against the aforementioned Hashim.  Not only does Hashim take pains to correct every one of Wilde’s stereotypes about Indonesia and just educate him in general, but also he also knows Shakespeare and Rambo better than Wilde.  There can be no doubt: Wilde is someone to whom Ryan Lochte could feel he’s meeting on an equal playing field.

It’s possible that Lutz is just playing the role as written, but anyone who has seen his performance as Emmett “as you’ll recall from the first movie, is an idiot” Cullen in the Twilight series (which receives a bizarre call out) knows the man has a type.  His interviews on Conan and Entertainment Tonight suggest it may be less a type and more the only role he can play.  And that’s fine.  Kellan Lutz has achieved a sort of perfection in this melding of role and abilities.  Very few of us can be so lucky.

Considering Garry Kilworth’s Navigator Kings Trilogy

Garry Kilworth’s Navigator Kings trilogy is not good.  The pitch, a fantasy set in a mythical Oceania with a full and active pantheon which culminates in an assembled fleet of Tahitians, Hawaiians, Tongans, Fijians and all the rest invading Great Britain is excellent.  It obviously worked on me, but it was a trick.  Little in the series works.

The writing is flat, repetitive and mostly expository.

With that the matter was closed, but a festering jealousy was growing in Kapu which others recognized might one day by he downfall.  Already he was beginning to hate his sister.  In recent days he was much in the company of Prince Daggan and his sorceress wife, Siko.  They both seemed to have a lot to talk about, considering Daggan was an enemy of the boy’s family.

Kapu’s darkening heart was already clear in the preceding dialogue when he complained that his sister was gifted a leather cloak made from the hide of a cow she slew, a cow that he ran away from.  Everything we see about Daggan here we already learned earlier, and any chance that Kapu’s traitorous turn would come as a surprise when it does happen is well quashed in this paragraph.  There’s no subtext.  There’s overtext.  That’s the writing in micro.

It doesn’t improve in macro.  The first two novels are straight quests.  In The Roof of Voyaging the prince Tangiia is looking for a new island to settle.  In The Princely Flower Kieto seeks the Maori to learn the arts of siege and war.  Along the way they and their crews encounter strange islands and peoples as storms and dead air divert them from their path.  They escape cannibals.  They outwit ogres.  They kill monstrous birds favored by the Oceanian gods.  They discover a fountain of youth.  I apologize if I made any of that sound exciting.  Just imagine those things happening in writing the equal of that excerpted above.  They arrive at their destination.  None of the intervening adventures matter.

I was excited for the third book, Land-of-Mists, and by the promise of the Oceanian invasion breaking this cycle of nothing plots, but the two leads quickly find themselves wandering the countryside, meeting elves and making deals with witches.  None of it matters.

Which would be fine if the characters were more interesting, but they aren’t.  The characters always say what they are thinking and feeling.  If they don’t, the author makes it clear in the next sentence.  The characters are defined by a single trait.  Boy-girl is sassy.  Kikamana is wise.  Ragnu is evil.  Polahiki is gross.  Kieto, the boy who sails on that first voyage to Britain and is destined to return to it as a conqueror, is the worst offender.  He is the flattest, least interesting  character in all the books, his only trait already described.  It’s not even a trait.  It’s a plot device.

Despite all these complaints, I still think it’s worth reading, probably just The Roof of Voyaging, the first book in the series when Mr. Kilworth still attempted characters with some depth, a prince too proud to leave his brother’s kingdom without kidnapping the brother’s betrothed, a man stolen from his home and coming to terms with an alien culture.

If that’s too much, the first chapter of Roof is solid.  It opens with the rolling head of Ulupoka tearing out a sleeping sailor’s throat and ends with the great navigator Kupe fighting an octopus by hand because it had stolen his fishing bait.  There’s atmosphere, there’s an unexplored setting, there’s action, there’s a feeling of momentum.  Too bad the rest of the series can’t keep it up.

It’s the setting that makes it worth it.  It’s a fantasy not entirely indebted to Tolkien.  That counts for a lot with me.  Even though minor deities like Dakuwanga, the shark god that devours lost souls, and Amai-te-rangi who fishes for men from the clouds are little more than flavor, they’re a tasty flavor.  The Arioi, a traveling fleet of dancers, actors, singers and other entertainers whose greatest performers are known by a leg tattooed entirely black?  That’s pretty great.  It’s even worked into the plot.

When the canoes arrive at some new island, you don’t know what to expect.  I eventually began to dread these diversions as it became clear that Mr. Kilworth was determined to somehow wedge in every Oceanian folktale he had learned in his research, for a while it was refreshing to see the heroes encounter monsters and challenges unfamiliar in the West.

It sounds like HBO already has a successor to Game of Thrones in Westworld, but if it wanted to expand its reach, I would certainly suggest HBO look at Navigator Kings.  Shot on location with a solid design team?  It would be a visual feast, if nothing else.  The greatest adaptations often come from merely adequate works.  No one cares about Mario Puzo or Peter Benchley’s original works.  Navigator Kings could be as big as The Godfather or Jaws.