WATCHMEN

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And Now For Something Completely Different
The Good, the Bad, and the Nude
By Cole Smithey

Dave Gibbons's hardboiled superhero graphic novel is brought to stunning visual life by director Zach Snyder.

Here is a convoluted adult fantasy that provides an off-key political tone to its alternate reality of 1985 America.

Richard Nixon is still President and the Doomsday Clock forever sits at five minutes to the hour of imminent apocalypse thanks to a Soviet nuclear threat.

Put out of work by Nixon's decree outlawing masked avengers, unless they work for the government, a group of former superheroes known as the Watchmen variously reconnect after the violent murder of their macho former member the Comedian AKA Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) whose demise implies a similar fate for the rest of the group.

Rorschach (devilishly played by Jackie Earle Haley), in his ever-morphing inkblot mask and raspy voice, narrates the complex mystery that plays out with richly designed flashbacks that reveal the personal histories of the likes of Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) and her atomically transmogrified yet anatomically correct love interest Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).

Outrageous sexual elements and extreme violence give "Watchmen" its well-deserved hard R rating. Opposed to its child-friendly poster, this is not your run-of-the-mill action/adventure movie for the kids. At over two and a half hours, "Watchman" is a full-frontal adult sci-fi satire that's as enjoyable as it is thematically confounding. There's something here to make every member of the audience squirm.

Heroism is an occupation for freelance reprobates in the cynical deconstructionist world that writer Alan Moore ("V for Vendetta") concocted for the Watchmen. The cigar-chomping, Hustler-reading rapist, the Comedian leaves behind him a trail of pain, death, and  disaster--from Viet Nam to America's protest-filled streets that he uses as an excuse to blast away at dissenters in jubilant fits of vengeance. But revenge for what? For his own self-loathing?

Blake's rape of Laurie Jupiter's Betty Page-inspired hero mother Sally, turns a crucial plot key later in the movie. If Edward Blake's Comedian, a government sponsored nihilistic wack job, is a representation of the "good guys," then who's on the other side and where are they? The ominous quote "Who watches the Watchmen?" hovers over the movie.

There's an inherent dynamic tension that comes from Moore's iconography of dysfunctional identities, even if their philosophical ideas typically come across as ambiguous or, at their worst, just plain wrongheaded. As is the case for "smartest man in the world" Ozymandias AKA Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) whose preoccupation with Genghis Khan fuels his plan for world domination. Veidt is an effeminate polar opposite of the testosterone oozing Edward Blake.

The film's opening assassination sequence is a disorienting spree of ultra violence that's a close cousin to the stylized brutality of "A Clockwork Orange." Edward Blake watches Nixon on an old television in his high-rise apartment when his attacker bursts through the door and we get a wall-smashing fist fight from the Gene Hackman era of ass-kicking. On his black costume, Blake wears a smiley face yellow button that was a symbol of the drug happy '60s, and donates to it a lovely red blood drop that captures the film's ketchup-on-mustard visual appeal.

Director Zach Snyder ("300") has a field day emphasizing explicit aspects of the colorful characters' sexualities to tweak the emotional underpinnings of their actions. It's in this soft-core realm that the movie smashes into walls of physical and psychological disturbance that offer the audience graphic sexual consolation for a barrage of blood spurting and splattering that goes on. Billy Crudup's scientist Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan is the only genuine superhero of the group by way of a 1959 science lab accident that found him trapped in an Intrinsic Field Subtractor. Osterman's atoms were separated and have left him in a quantum universe devoid of time.

Snyder parades the blue-skinned Dr. Manhattan's sculpted physique and semi-erect penis through the second half of the film as a definite phallic talisman of male domination overseeing humanity. Snyder's illustrative decision is a departure from Dave Gibbons' graphic novel renderings that gave the character a more understated nude profile. The government sent Dr. Manhattan to Viet Nam to end the war, and his ability to change his size to a King Kong-scaled giant won the hearts and minds of the Viet Cong. These are the kind of pushy ideas and propaganda images that Snyder wants the audience to stew over indefinitely after seeing the movie.

Pop songs like Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable," and Leonard Cohen's ubiquitous "Hallelujah" provide familiar if ironic musical counterpoint. There's a self awareness here of the rippling effect that the filmmakers clearly intend "Watchmen" to have on its modern cult audience.

"Watchmen" is campy fun. It's not hard to imagine audiences yelling retorts to the screen in the same way "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" set off its a social phenomenon of audience interaction. There's plenty here to draw viewers back for repeat screenings to dissect every shiny piece of eye-candy, gore, and skintight appeal.

The dialogue is snappy and raw. It's a movie that has a lot more in common with midnight movies than it does with Batman or Spider-Man. For its salivating fans and audiences itching for something completely different from the Hollywood superhero model, there's much ferocity to sample here.

Taste the fury Babyface.

(Warner Brothers) Rated R. 160 mins.