Shapeshifter (1999)

Directed by Philippe Browning
Written by Louis DeLoach
Starring
- Paul Nolan
- Bill MacDonald
- Catherine Blythe
- Emmanuelle Vaugier
- Teodor Danetti
Produced by Marek Posival
Executive produced by David M. Perlmutter, Lewis B. Chesler, Vlad Paunescu, Peter Locke, Dana Scanlan, and Charles Band (uncredited)

Someone runs down the hall at the production offices of Kushner-Locke with at least two screenplays in his hands– one the first draft of a half-baked teen spy movie script, the other the first draft of a half-baked teen shapeshifter script. He slips on a banana peel and crashes to the floor, and all the combined pages fly up into the air and settle gently like nuclear fallout. He gathers up the mixed pages, puts them in a rough semblance of numeric order, and hands them off in that format to someone in charge of pre-production. And thus, Shapeshifter is born.

Our prologue shows us a CGI meteor streaking through earth’s atmosphere, landing near a gypsy encampment; a young boy sees it fall, waits until it cools, and gathers it up. You are now advised to forget this scene, as it won’t help one whit in understanding or appreciating the rest of the movie. (Of course, using those standards, the entire movie could be skipped outright and we’d all be happier.)

Moving to the present: teen Alex Brown (Paul Nolan) and his parents (Andrei Finti and Marioara Sterian) are on a plane back to the U.S. from abroad. The Browns are no ordinary nuclear family, though; they’re professional spies. And it’s easy to see their qualifications: they blend in by sheer dint of mediocrity. Alex resembles Anthony Michael Hall in his prime, minus all the charisma. (Yes, I’m being facetious.) Mom speaks in a thick Eastern European accent; Dad, meanwhile, speaks in a heavily dubbed middle American voice — apparently, this actor wasn’t even able to intelligibly recite his lines by rote, like Mom or most of the rest of the cast.

Oh, and Dad has a GPS-enabled wristwatch. Not that this fact was introduced to us skillfully or naturally; no, Alex tells us that in a voiceover, almost as soon as we meet him. Gee, do you think there’s a reason we need to know this?

Well, Alex and his folks move into their midwestish house, and the parents cheeerfully announce that they’ve retired from The Company, and are going to live like normal Americans with heavy accents/dubbed voices. They even have some leftover spy equipment, though The Company might want it back. (Cheapstakes.) Boy, all seems rosy for Alex…

…until three Eastern European goons in ski masks (hey, what’s with all the Eastern Europeans? Isn’t this movie set in America?) burst in in the middle of the night, tranquilize Mom and Dad, and drag them off. Alex manages to elude capture, and after he puts out the fire that the goons set — Wait. Why did they set the fire? I mean, here’s a family that’s just moved in that very day; would any of the neighbors think it suspicous if they left again? But no, professional spy goons know that the best way to conceal their covert operations is to make sure that obvious arson destroyed the house.

“IF YOU ARE READING THIS, YOU ARE ALREADY MONUMENTALLY SCREWED.”

Anyway. Alex checks in with CIA headquarters wondering what to do, and his keeper Gelardis (Bill MacDonald) tells him to, you know, chill out and stay put. (Noted: It’s the middle of the night where Alex is, but it’s bright and sunny outside the CIA agent’s office. How big is this country called “America,” anyway?) Alex, though, decides that one teenager is more capable of international intrigue than a professional espionage organization, so he tracks Dad’s watch (oh, THAT’S why the big deal was made) on his computer to… Bucharest, Romania! Hey, there IS an Eastern European angle here! Who would have thought?

He takes his emergency money and flies to Romania, where he finds Dad’s watch in a pawn shop. Somewhat disappointing, sure, but at least he got to take a cab past all those long touristy views of prominent Romanian architecture on the way — that’s gotta count for something.

He decides to spend the night at the Hostel Internationali (that’s “International Hostel,” for those of you who don’t speak Romanian as well as I do), where the girl behind the counter, Anika (Emmanuelle Vaugier), is all cool and businesslike until she figures he’s from America, and then suddenly she opens up with the shy smiles. What, does she think he’s brought along some blue jeans and Coke products to trade with the locals? From there, he gets dragged by a couple of the hostel’s clients to a nearby nightclub (where, golly, it’s rumored that Bjork is going to make an unscheduled appearance!), and then…

See, here’s where I get to balance out my pointed criticism of the quality of the script earlier. No, I’m not going to praise the script now; it’s still dumb. Instead, I’m going to snark at the direction. Even with a script this stupid, a halfway-competent director should be able to find something to work with in the subject matter. I mean, it’s an international spy story, for crying out loud! Can’t you wring some entertainment value from that? Alas, the answer appears to be “No” — the direction is listless and without momentum, bringing to mind nothing so strongly as a diet cola which has been sitting open, flat and lukewarm, for a couple of days. The expected zing is entirely absent.

I bring this up now because here is where the directorial missteps ramp up from background mediocrity to intrusive incompetence. Alex lingers at the club, wandering around… then starts wandering outside, as if he’s following someone or something. Thanks to the periodic slo-mo and the pseudo-New Age soundtrack, I was wondering if someone slipped him a mickey. (I was also wondering if they had any to spare.) He meanders past a trash fire and notes that the smoke is forming itself into the shape of a butterfly. Um, okay… And finally he ends up at a run-down stone building, occupied by a decrepit old gypsy (Teodor Danetti — ooh, yay, more English-by-rote dialogue!), who is about to turn him away when Alex tells him that he followed the music there.

Hello. I’m the requisite exotic hottie. And I warn you, I don’t shave where you expect me to.”

Oh, that vaguely ethereal music was supposed to be what he was following? Here I just thought it was part of the cheap score. Great.

Well, the old gypsy, Janos, invites him in and shows him a cot. When Alex wakes, Janos is playing a bizarre glass musical contraption which he calls a “glass armonica,” which splays colored lights around the room and spits out music suitable for ascended meditation and boring elevators. (The glass armonica is an actual instrument, by the way, invented by Ben Franklin and based on the idea of rubbing the rims of water glasses to get a crystalline tone. I bet Ben’s just pleased as punch to have his creation immortalized here.) Janos was so impressed with Alex, see, because the only people who can even hear the music are those who are “tuned to the cause of greater cosmic harmony.” (Now playing: the Emperor’s New Symphony. Ain’t it great?)

Not only that but, Janos tells him, Alex is a shapeshifter:

“Do you know what a shapeshifter is?”
“I think so — something that can shift from one shape to another.”

Somebody took home money for writing that, folks.

Janos declares that Alex is the shapeshifter prophesied in gypsy legends, and to prove it, Janos starts playing his glass armonica… and Alex morphs into a German shepherd. (And you were wonder how shapeshifting would enter a spy plot.) Alex the Dog immediately takes off to the huge imposing government fortress in the center of town, stares through the fence, and smells his parents being held. Then he panics and runs from the guards, morphing back into himself as he evades their poor shots. Lucky for him that Anika (‘member, the chick from the hostel?) shows up out of nowhere on a little motorbike and rescues him. Boy, there’s a girl who WORKS for her Levi’s. She’s also a gypsy and knows Janos. (Ah, but how many degrees is she removed from Kevin Bacon?)

Alex then makes for CIA spook Gelardis, whose come to Bucharest on a hunch. See, Alex’s parents’ captor is one Petrov (Serban Celea), whom they had spied on before; he’s a standard-issue power-mad post-Cold War villain, who wants to amass enough plutonium to nuke most of the western world just for the hell of it. Gelardis thanks Alex for news of his parents’ whereabouts, but then wants to send him home for safety – by coercion, if necessary. Good thing Alex can morph into a bird to get away from all the junior spooks chasing him, who react to his transformation with a sort of “huh – well!” sort of aplomb.

“I wonder what this would go for on ebay?”¹

(Just to prove Petrov’s oh-so-bad, we get to see him zap into ash the underling who brings him news of the shapeshifting teenager. Bullets are too darned icky for fare aimed at juveniles, but vaporization is apparently hunky-dory.)

Janos’ next advice for Alex is to get into the fortress building via the network of tunnels beneath the city. Janos just happens to know a certain dwarf who can leads him where he wants to go, so off they go, traipsing past the security cameras which reveal all of their movements to the Cyberwitch (Catherine Blythe), Petrov’s partner-in-crime. And either she’s a gypsy gone bad herself, or every damned person in Bucharest is intimately familiar with this prophecy about an upstart shapechanger kid.

Listen, I gotta tell you; we’re only forty-five minutes in, and this movie seriously kicked my ass. I thought I had seen some bad cinema up until this point: verveless dialog, a meandering plot, and acting that would make you cry if it didn’t leave your soul so numb. But what comes after is so much a continuation of the downward trend that it would scar me emotionally to continue to describe it to you with the same level of detail, so let me give you the highlights/lowlights of the rest of this misbegotten feature:

The dwarf sends Alex the rest of the way into the fortress alone, where he naturally encounters the Cyberwitch. She shrinks him to pint-size and puts him in a jar, she and Petrov gloat over him, and then they leave him on a stool in front of his parents’ cell to taunt him. Anika runs to Janos and tells him thing she couldn’t possibly know (like the fact that, um, Alex have been shrunk and put in a jar), and in return Janos tells her things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, like the fact that he was the gypsy boy who found the meteor – the “lifestone” – way back at the start of the movie, and it’s kept him alive for 363 years. Then Janos directs the music of the glass armonica at the fortress, where it makes the stool shudder and the jar fall to the floor, freeing Alex from the shrinking spell. Boy, good thing Alex has such powerful friends, because there’s no way he would ever have thought of knocking the jar over on his own.

Watch out! Those things crap in mid-air!”

He immediately springs his parents and they run through the poorly guarded fortress until cornered on a balcony. Alex then morphs into a really, really embarrassingly-bad CGI griffin. (Why a griffin? Mostly because Janos had at one point mentioned how plentiful griffins had been when he was a boy. Damned DDT.) Well, Mom and Dad are rescued and all, but thanks to the torture and such, they’ve forgotten Alex completely. He takes them back to be cared for by the CIA, then rushes back to Janos’ place, where Petrov’s secret police have just paid a call and beaten the old man within the last inch of his life. He gives Alex a solemn charge – “You much continue to play” – before dying and disappearing in a cloud of twinkles like Yoda. Well, Alex starts playing the glass armonica, and it summons an ethereal human figure from the lifestone, made of ones and zeros. (Man, even thinking about telling you this part is giving me a migraine.) She’s a digital being sent from the future through the lifestone, which was meant for Alex all along, to give him the help he needs because he’s the chosen one and such. Oh, and Petrov’s about to get his hands on all of the plutonium he needs to be really antisocial, so Digital Girl sends Alex out to stop armageddon singlehandedly.

But hey, he’s still got some of his parents’ spy stuff like a gasmask and some smoke bombs, and it really doesn’t take more than that to interrupt a criminal exchange. He even learns (from the dwarf, who reappears conveniently) that he has the power to shift other people’s shapes, so he changes Petrov into a cockroach. So the movie’s over, right?

No, not hardly. Because the Cyberwitch still has his parents’ souls, which is why they don’t remember him. (See, I would have thought that forgetting all about him was the most natural thing in the world. I’m trying to do it right now, in fact.) But the dwarf is happy to help, since Alex gives him back the plutonium, which is sacred to “his people,” who use it “for peaceful ways.” What, gypsies worship plutonium? Nope, it’s not gypsies; there’s a whole community of subterranean dwarfs, so that’s who he means, I guess. (I wonder if they gather in a large cavern to sing hymns to a big-ass bomb?) To help Alex regain their souls, the dwarfs form a circle around him and start chanting. He find himself in a maelstrom of badly-composited fire, grabs two wispy-looking souls, and presto! Done!

So now the movie’s over, right? Aw, hell no. The end credits aren’t scheduled for a few minutes yet, so somebody’s gotta make up more stuff to happen between now and then. The CIA guys are all slapping Alex on the back when someone finds out that the “Finger of God” missile system is compromised, and they’re at Defcon 4. The Cyberwitch is in the system! At the advice of Digital Girl, Alex himself becomes “pure digital matter” and enters the Cyberwitch’s cyberworld, which looks pretty much like her brick-and-mortar lair. She fires post-production lightning bolts at him until he fires up the ol’ glass armonica, which he somehow towed into the digital world with him, and reflects her powers back on her. Threat over.

So NOW it’s over? Yes. Well, almost. CIA guy Geraldis makes sure Alex knows that the Company will definitely want to talk to him later about a job. Oh, and Anika gets to come back to America with the family. And she settles in and becomes a well-adjusted teenager. And Alex still plays the glass armonica every once in a while, for old time’s sake. And… oh, we’ve fulfilled out contractual obligation for feature length? Good; I was afraid we were going to see Alex and Anika go to the prom and take their SATs.

“HEY! Watch the fingers, spy-boy!”

Sometimes, a movie just makes you say, “Wow. Wow, wow, wow.” I mean, somebody wrote this – sat down and typed the whole thing out, just like it had been a competent story or something. Then somebody aimed a camera at it, as if it were worthy of the director’s time and effort and eternal soul to do so. And worse, someone then thought it a good idea to release it on an unsuspecting public.

Want to know where I think the problem stems from? From the five credited executive producers (plus Charles Band – you just know his fingers were in there somewhere). Each of them had a movie they wanted to make in Romania this year, by golly, and each of them did their best to makes sure that this was that movie, even if their different cinematic goals mixed as well as oil and water.