A cyborg finds her true identity

Alita: Battle Angel boasts lots of CGI razzle-dazzle and a story that doesn't sustain.

Alita: Battle Angel revolves around an avalanche of CGI, production design, 3D and motion-capture acting, enough razzle-dazzle to satisfy those who want to be razzled and dazzled -- at least for a while. Director Robert Rodriguez and producer James Cameron, neither strangers to the world of effects, have teamed for a massive display of technical prowess.

I'm wondering then why screenwriters Cameron, Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis, working from a 1990 manga series by a Yukito Kishiro, couldn't come up with at least one scintillating line of dialogue.

To summarize my reaction to Alita: The visual environment created by Rodriquez and Cameron held my interest for three-quarters of the movie. After that? Not so much.

So who is Alita? She's a cyborg who has been tossed onto a scrap heap in Iron City, the lower-class part of a society that survived what every dystopian movie insists on, an apocalypse. Named by Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a doctor who rebuilds cyborgs, Alita comes to life as a teenager with a bad case of amnesia. She remembers nothing about her origins.

Once she's mobile and active, Alita meets Hugo (Keean Johnson), another scavenger. A kid of the streets, Hugo has an interest in the futuristic sport of Motorball, which looks depressingly like the sport that director Norman Jewison and writer William Harrison cooked up in the 1975 thriller, Rollerball.

A super-charged version of Roller Derby wasn't especially interesting in 1975 and it's no more interesting 43 years later, even as Alita emerges as one of the game's stars. Guys and enhanced cyborgs are no match for her, especially when she gets a spiffy upgrade in the form of a sleek new body.

Villains, of course, are on call. They arrive in the form of Dr. Ido's former wife (Jennifer Connelly) and Vector (Marhershala Ali), the man who controls the game of Motorball. Vector promises that Motorball champions will ascend to a mysterious upper region to which all the downtrodden residents of Iron City aspire.

The arc of Alita's journey -- the discovery of her past and of her true destiny -- is, I think, meant to give the movie its emotional heft. But as a character, Alita (Rosa Salazar) has a juvenile quality that may not please those who prefer sci-fi served with an intellectual garnish.

It's not her character but her physical qualities that seem most interesting, providing you can overlook (and you probably can't) orb-like eyes that might have been inspired by a Keane painting.

A romance between Alita and Hugo skates along the surface, ignoring obvious questions such as how they're going to ... well... you know.

Cameron (Titanic and Avatar) reportedly has been interested in this story for 20 years. He enlisted Rodriguez to help execute his long-standing dream. Rodriguez (Spy Kids and Sin City) seems like a natural for a megaton cyberpunk fantasy. The whole thing should have resulted in a killer collaboration. Instead, we get a movie in which early promise eventually fades and the prospect of sequels -- yes, they're suggested -- fails to create much by way of anticipation. Scrappy at the outset, Alita eventually loses its kick.

A return trip to 'Sin City'

It's lurid and creative, but what's the point?

It's rare that one's expectations are entirely met by a movie -- and it's not always a good thing when it happens.

Case in point: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Prior to the movie's preview screening, I imagined that this follow-up to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's 2005 Sin City would be another stylish immersion in a fantasy world composed of pulp impulses, noir gestures, brutal violence and fan-boy prurience.

Miller is a graphic novelist and sometime moviemaker. Rodriguez is a director of variable achievement. Together, they again serve up a movie that feels as if one is leafing through the pages of a graphic novel, entering a purportedly forbidden world where politicians are murderous, women are dressed for sex and half the male characters look as if they're mutants from an another planet.

And, yes, the movie is precisely what you expect.

Rodriguez and Miller create a world of uber-shlock that seems to derive from an exaggerated reading of noir ingredients and second-rate pulp fiction.

Noir, of course, had a socially critical dimension that completely eludes this second helping of Sin City. Besides, in combining several of Miller's stories, the movie challenges one's ability to sustain interest.

This helping of Sin City -- in which occasional splashes of color intrude on the heightened black-and-white imagery -- features a scorecard cast of names, some recognizable on screen, some not.

Among those who stand out are Josh Brolin, who takes over the role that Clive Owen played in the original; Eva Green, who plays the movie's sexy, deadly femme fatale; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who stars in what ultimately feels like a satellite story about a young man who's lucky in cards and not so lucky at everything else.

Powers Boothe portrays the brutally smooth Senator Roark, a politician for whom the word "corrupt" would be a euphemism. Mickey Rourke returns as Marv, the freakish looking, motor-cycle riding avenger.

Some of the actors have extended roles, some (Ray Liotta as a lecherous businessman who's caught with his pants down) have cameos.

In the movie's best story, Brolin's character is irresistibly drawn to the duplicitous Ava. No matter what his brain tells him, he can't resist her siren call.

Miller and Rodriguez can't seamlessly blend the movie's several stories, and when the primary tale -- the one involving Green's Ava ends -- the movie essentially is over.

The rest feels like a death rattle, an obligatory advancement of loose ends that march zombie-like through what remains of the movie's 102-minute running time.

Devotees of Miller's work probably will be won over by the snide humor and outre violence. At one point, one of the character's eyes is plucked out.

But Sin City: A Dame to Kill For seems like a lot of work devoted to building a fantasy edifice that may tell us more about the sensibilities of those who dreamed up the fantasy than about the world it purports to describe.

To get back to where I started: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is exactly what I thought it would be: creative, lurid, immature, and, perhaps, a bit pointless.

Butt-kicking galore in 'Machete'

OK, Machete, we won't ask you to text.
Three years ago, director Robert Rodriguez included a trailer for a movie called Machete in his portion of Grindhouse, the Rodriguez/Tarantino B-movie revel. The trailer was a spoof. The movie didn’t exist.

The spoof has become reality with the release of Machete, a full-blown, helping of butt-kicking, B-movie action. Rodriguez, who shares directing credit with Ethan Maniquis, serves up a hunk of grindhouse fare that has been amped-up and given booming production values that make you wonder whether it's possible to mix movies and steroids.

Can we think of this as a surprise? Hardly. Rodriguez's love for exploitation-style movies was apparent from the start. He kicked off his career in 1992 with El Mariachi, a super-cheapo riff on exploitation movies.

Like its predecessors, Machete mixes over-the-top violence, humor, severed body parts, beautiful women and growling machismo. But this particular concoction is designed to boot the guilty pleasure of the grindhouse into mainstream multiplexes. For me, the mainstreaming of cultish fare always diminishes its power, and Machete is no exception. These movies might have been funnier when the people who made them weren't looking for laughs.

The story revolves around an ex-Federale named Machete (Danny Trejo), a super-strong Mexican who knows how to wield his weapon. Trejo's Machete is thrown way off his game when his wife and daughter are murdered by a Mexican drug lord named Torrez (Steven Seagal with a Spanish accent). Machete crosses the border into the U.S., keeping a low profile until he’s drawn into a plot to assassinate a State Senator (Robert De Niro with a southern accent) who wants to build a border fence.

Linking the movie to immigration issues ultimately turns Machete into a Latino revenge saga aimed at all the folks who rail against illegal immigrants. Trejo, who has the kind of look that could frighten small children, makes an unexpected hero who must fight off drug lords, corrupt vigilantes and a mysterious political operative (Jeff Fahey).

As you can tell from De Niro’s presence, the movie is cast for fun. Don Johnson shows up as a ruthless vigilante who likes to shoot people who cross the border; Cheech Marin signs on as Machete’s brother, a priest who never will serve as a model for non-violent behavior.

Say this: Rodriguez understands his audience. There’s plenty of pulchritude, notably from Michelle Rodriguez, as a woman who runs a network that offers support to illegals, and Jessica Alba, as a customs agent who prefers justice to law and who enjoys jumping Machete’s bones. If that’s not enough to make macho pulses race, Rodriguez includes nude scenes from Lindsay Lohan, who plays Fahey’s character’s wayward daughter.

Note: Given her recent troubles, Lohan has turned into an instant sight gag, not really where any actress wants to be.

Most of the action has been engineered to draw whoops from the multitudes, including a signature line for Trejo’s character: “Machete don’t text.”

Of course, with this kind of movie, the violent envelope must be pushed: An escape scene involving a ropey strand of intestine provides what either can be regarded as a high or low point, depending on how much tolerance you have for gore.

Rodriguez seems to have achieved his goals here, but I’m more than a little tired of the adolescent humor and super-charged energy of movies that exult in their pulpy origins. Rodriguez is good at what he does in Machete, but I half wonder whether it's worth doing at all.