When last we saw Rosebud, the most famous sled in all of filmdom, she was burning in the citizen flames of the stately Xanadu boiler room. Now, forty-six years later, she’s risen phoenix-like from the ashes of movie history and Charles Foster’s mansion to carry on her centuries-long reign of terror. A prologue, stylishly shot in black-and-white and Tolandesque deep focus, reveals that Rosebud was first constructed during the French Revolution, as a gift from the King and Queen to their darling, devilish little Dauphin. But faster than you can say “Ski the Bastille!,” the King and Queen are eating cake and losing their heads, run through with those nasty, rusty runners while blood splatters the screen and shrieking French curse words fill the air.
After the opening credits (think Saul Bass meets David Fincher), we’re back in Kane’s basement warehouse, watching one of those silhouetted reporters pull that menacing sled from the fire and promise to donate it to an orphanage in Miami. But we’re not in Xanadu anymore, Frodo; there won’t be any sunshine or blue skies where that sled appears. The 95-minute forecast is for dark and stormy nights, with a 100-percent chance of blood, gore, and graphic dismemberments.
Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as Buffy Bernstein, a former bobsled-rider and current star reporter who investigates a series of brutal murders in New York City and soon realizes that these sleigh-ings may have something to do with her own haunted past. Gellar takes her role seriously enough to make us do the same from time to time. She has a mildly interesting subplot with a charming lawyer (Freddie Prinze Jr.) who sweet-talks her into bed, then sour-talks her into chasing after that sled. Could he have a secret longing in his past too?
The script's prose is arguably a degree or two snappier than that in the Yellow Pages. Which is apropos, since the New York Inquirer in the original film was a searing commentary on the Yellow Journalism of William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal, which was surely not as interesting as the journal I kept while writing biographies of Greta Garbo, Louise Brooks, and Audrey Hepburn, all of which — the biographies, not the actresses — are available at Amazon.com.
I digress. But I shall try not to regress. Unless I am under duress.
Director Hideo Nakata, the head of this "Kane" mutiny, gives precious little help with his predictably fragmented photography and choppy editing. This film may as well have been cut at a sushi bar. Yes, it's that fishy. And smelly.
Now don’t get me wrong. If you knew sushi like I know sushi, especially at Pacific Ring in Squirrel Hill, you’d like it. But you still wouldn’t like this film. Or its over-the-top finale, in which the now romantically entangled grandchildren of Mr. Leland and Mr. Bernstein try to outlive their curse and destroy that thorny sled forever by setting it on fire, throwing it over a cliff, and battling its army of sled-dog zombies in the Iditarod from Hell.
Where is Orson Welles when we need him? Well, in all fairness, he's dead. Just like all of the people I write about. But there must be some living writer-directors who could and should come to the rescue of great films desperately seeking horror movie sequels worthy of them.
Still, it doesn't do much good to kvetch about kvality. This generation of the Brothers Warner — would that be the Warner Great-Grandsons? -- is betting there are enough gore hounds and Kane-y cats out there to return its “Rosebud’s Revenge” investment. I’m betting they’re right, and that it won’t be long before we see Citizen Kane 3: Sled II. Because these days, nothing sells like bloody horror and edgy, unnecessary sequels from aptly named producers like James Wan.
Oh, well. What Xan a critic du?
