Dog days of summer: ‘Resurrecting the Champ’ and ‘The Invasion’

After a somewhat suspect prologue that offers a tortured metaphor likening the life of a writer to that of a boxer, “Resurrecting the Champ” introduces us to Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett), a sports writer for the Denver Times struggling to make a name for himself.

It’s a difficult task, considering that he shares a name with his father, a famous sportscaster—and the fact that his editor (Alan Alda) explains that Kernan’s work is consistently buried in the back pages of the paper for being terminally boring. Then he meets an alcoholic bum (Samuel L. Jackson) who claims to be iconic postwar boxer Bob Satterfield. Smelling a career-making story, Kernan goes over his editor’s head to the publisher of the Times’ accompanying magazine feature—a move that eventually culminates in a cover story that earns him nationwide acclaim and the promise for a steady gig at Showtime. Only one problem there—Kernan’s budding friendship with the bum, his skyrocketing career and his desire to impress his young son (Dakota Goyo) cause him to overlook a few minor facts... namely, that the man he calls “Champ” is not actually Satterfield.

“Resurrecting the Champ” earns itself a look-see on the basis of its performances: Josh Hartnett manages to turn his usually wooden delivery into a sense of genuine earnest; and Jackson manages to offer some genuine pathos to a role that could have easily descended into a roundelay of hobo-mockery. The problem lies in trying to determine how much sympathy the film has, per se, for Kernan’s journalistic stupidity. “Resurrecting the Champ” does seem to have an infinite number of excuses for why Kernan cannot go out and search for the facts himself: he lives in his father’s shadow, which prevents him from attaining an interview with Satterfield’s son; he doesn’t go looking for trainers or ringmen on the pretense that no one from that era seems to know who’s dead or alive. No doubt that Kernan’s crises of conscience both before and after the piece is published (such as routinely lying to his son about who he knows in the sports world) amount to an interesting examination of the perpetually intertwining coils of a writer’s personal and professional lives—with both Kernan and “Satterfield” looking to give each other new opportunities, that one last shot at attaining greatness, no matter what the cost—but “Resurrecting the Champ” takes a wishy-washy stance on Kernan’s worth as a writer that ultimately defines the sense of apathy that has turned late August into a cinematic dumping ground.

Speaking of twisting around tales from the ‘50s to fit modern day sensationalism, German director Oliver Hirschbiegel gets his hands on Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers” in order to cobble together its fourth cinematic incarnation, after Don Siegel’s 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of the same name, and Abel Ferrara’s streamlined 1993 “Body Snatchers.” This time it’s called “The Invasion,” which finally exhausts all naming permutations associated with the title—and brings to question whether or not we really needed another version for this brave new world. Psychiatrist Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) has encountered numerous claims from her patients that their friends and relatives have been replaced by identical, deadpan strangers; with the help of her boyfriend, Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig, the source of a lot of goodwill), she soon discovers that it’s all thanks to an elaborate intergalactic takeover. This time around, however, the aliens do not spread their special brand of love via large, foreboding seed pods, but through a contagious virus that restructures human DNA to erase our emotions.

Discounting the last three films’ unique generational concerns (and this one is about, I dunno, the average American’s ignorance to the outside world?), the common, terrifying link between all of them was the fact that you and everyone you loved were susceptible to the pod-person process; and, once their bodies had been snatched, everything you knew and loved about them was gone forever. It’s not a matter of purist rambling, then, to take issue with this re-imagining, which severely minimizes the horror by spelling it all out and revealing (spoiler!) that certain folks are immune to the alien treatment and, through them, it can be “cured” in everyone else. Those major gaffes may be easy to explain, however; apparently Warner Bros. was not pleased with Hirschbiegel’s cut of the film, so they brought in those masters of big loud noises and non-philosophy, the Wachowski brothers, to rewrite the script and add a lot of incomprehensible action scenes. Accounting for the relative flop of the resultant disaster, perhaps we will one day see Hirschbiegel’s original version and determine the ultimate worth of the exercise. Until that time, however, the only good thing that can be said of “The Invasion” is that it has resulted in the release of that new two-disc DVD of Kaufman’s downright brilliant version that has been promised to us for several years now.