Previously, “Twilight” was my one-word rebuttal to those who claim I have the best job in the world. But the relatively streamlined “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” dispenses with much of the caramel gooeyness of the first two episodes in favor of decent action, some heartfelt tender moments and even a splash of wit. This time they’re actually Twi-ing.
Bella (Kristen Stewart) is still begging her vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) to “change” her with love’s tender carotid severing. Her best buddy and local Wolfman, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), asks that she choose him instead. Inviting Edward’s fangs, sexy as they are, into her neck would leave Bella immortal, frozen inside and probably soulless.
Jacob counters that his heart beats and he possesses a warm body. I couldn’t persuade the girls I knew in high school to take up with me on account of my being a mammal, but then again maybe I should have, like Jacob, chosen to be shirtless at all times (even in a snowstorm). Meanwhile, as the swift, red-haired rival vampire Victoria (the elfin Bryce Dallas Howard) flits through the woods, in nearby Seattle, some freshly commissioned vampires called the Newborn Army are creating havoc in G-20-protesting style. Just bitten, they remain for those first few months of vampirehood as charged-up as middle-schoolers issued with their first Super Soakers.
Inching closer to Forks, Wash., they promise a mighty challenge to the Cullen clan, which is trying to maintain a strategic peace. The vampires’ truce with the werewolves is mirrored by Jacob and Edward’s détente. They agree that Victoria’s crew is after Bella’s blood — and that neither the good vampires nor the werewolves are a match for the Newborn Army by themselves. So, deploying their dream-girl chum in a school of sharks, they take her into the woods in hopes of ambushing the Newborns.
Bella has firmly chosen Edward, but she has a couple of reasons for hanging out with Jacob, too. Her father agrees to let her go on dates with Little Lord Fang-leroy if she also spends time with Dogboy, plus she literally needs Jacob’s wolfie body warmth on a snowy night in the woods. Her Foreigner dilemma — whether to go with Hot Blooded or Cold As Ice sets up several of the movie’s fun one-liners. I laughed more during this picture than I did in Adam Sandler’s “Grown Ups.” (OK, the final score was only 4 to 3, but Sandler’s flick had far more cringe-inducing moments.)
Jacob and Edward’s Heat Miser/Cold Miser shtick smartens up the atmosphere, and there is a teen poignancy to Jacob’s honesty as he tells Bella he loves her and wants her to choose him — and that she need not turn into a monster for him. Bella, who wears his wolf pendant around her wrist and often seems to find herself wrapped up in his beefy paws, seems surprised that Edward is jealous. The comedy of her begging the two, Bridget Jones-like, to stop as she revels in their fighting over her could have been played up.
The digressions and the hokey “romantic” parts of the first two movies are mostly absent. The leads have grown into their roles, particularly RPatz, who at last (after a mere 500 magazine covers!) is confident enough to underplay Edward and simply be handsome instead of trying to “smolder” with his previously adorable would-be “intensity.” (Still, the “Twilight” films are the first blockbusters since “Tootsie” in which the leading man’s lipstick is a shade brighter than the leading lady’s.)
Thanks to battles that are fairly well done (though the wolf effects still look cheap), a convincing love triangle and a playful self-awareness, the movie has bark as well as bite.
But most important, it limns the real appeal of the best-selling series of books: Two generations after their grandmothers let the chastity horse escape from the barn, girls feel sexually besieged and devalued. They ache for old-school boyfriends who beg to get married first, naked second (and who might also be made to lie in blooming fields listening to poetry).
In a speech soaked in genuine feelings (no 2010 male would ever talk this way, which is exactly the point), Edward tells Bella that, if he had his way, he would court her on chaperoned dates, with iced tea on the porch and her father to be asked for her hand in marriage. The woods of Washington will be ruled by vampires and werewolves before this ever again becomes the norm — which gives “Eclipse” the kind of plaintive minor-key undertone lacking in the first two episodes, and in most blockbuster movies.
kyle.smith@nypost.com