What's a Homo? Tin Man - A Review

"Your father is a homo."

Seriously? Seriously. About 10 minutes into the third installment of Sci-Fi's Tin Man came these classic lines. Now, technically, they pronounced it "hommo," but when those lines were first uttered, I'm pretty sure everyone else in the audience did what I did: a double-take.

"What? What the hell? Did she just say... what are we watching?"

This pretty much sums up Tin Man: a whole lot of, "What the hell? What's the point of that? What does that even mean?"

Tin Man was ostensibly an "update" of the classic Wizard of Oz, but it's about as much an update as Army of Darkness is an update of Evil Dead; it had a lot in common with the original, but nowhere near enough to justify calling it an "update" or "remake."

For the most part, there's no real reason to update Wizard of Oz - Disney tried to do it sometime back and it bombed famously - because Wizard of Oz is a true classic and classics do not need to be remade or updated; they are classics for the very fact that they are timeless in nature - that's what they mean by "classic." But a retelling of any story, if good, is always welcome, and the trailers looked really hip, so I watched the whole thing - twice, actually.

In the end, Tin Man is worth viewing, if only for the lush scenery and largely subdued special effects, but the dialogue is downright laughable, usually when that wasn't its intention. Even the Big Dramatic Lines - the ones you expect to be kind of cheesy - are bad. Overall, Tin Man fails for the most basic of reasons: the writing sucks. And I mean it sucks out loud. I was particularly jarred by the pointed references to the original, as in, "She's gone to see the Wizard." And how about replacing the word "witch" with "bitch." I mean, come on - didn't we all get enough of that in, like, the 5^th-grade? Everything was so obvious and so tragically hip, even the actors couldn't save it.

And the acting was quite brilliant, largely because they had such great actors. Kathleen Robertson, of IFC's The Business, turns in a stellar performance as the evil witch. She really, really shined in this role; anyone could have done the larger-than-life Wicked Witch scenes, but Robertson deftly integrates the subdued duplicity of the character to create a truly dark, truly wicked woman, far removed from the cardboard "baddie" of the classic film.

The sore thumb in the midst of all this is the actress in the title role. Like I said before, I don't know if she was directed to act like she couldn't act or not; I sincerely hope she was told to do that because otherwise, she was really awful! She, like anyone, had her moments - moments when you forgot how breathtakingly bad she was in the scene right before they cut to commercial - but that's like saying, "Falling on your face from 10-feet doesn't hurt as much as falling on it from 20." Just a terrible performance... unless, again, she was specifically directed not to act. Still a pretty bad performance from that standpoint.

Everyone else in the cast was great and they really threw themselves into their roles. That's what makes me think the lead was told not to act, because it would be hard to not take yourself seriously in the midst of so many great actors so deep into their characters.

Really, when you get right down to the entire production as a whole, Tin Man somehow just missed the mark and I can't quite put my finger on it, except to say: What was the point?

I mean, why "The O.Z. - The Outer Zone"? Why was The Wizard called The Mystical One and why was he drugged by the witch before she imprisoned him instead of just being imprisoned in the first place? The entire thing with Toto - the character, his place, the way it played out, etc.

That sums-up what could be said for the entire thing: Why? Just... why?