Jack Reacher

Posted on December 22, 2012 at 1:02 pm

Jack Reacher, the hero of a series of books by Lee Child, is as much an idealized fantasy figure as any adorkable chick-lit single girl rocking her Jimmy Choos and self-deprecating quips until Mr. Perfect puts a ring on it. The testosterone version has the observational and analytic skills of Sherlock Holmes, the “who was that masked man” righting-wrongs-and-leaving-town career path of the Lone Ranger, and the single-minded devotion to righteous indignation firepower of Rambo, and he will never, ever, ever put a ring on anyone.

Reacher is ex-military, and ex-pretty much everything else. He has no strings, no relationships, no commitments — also, no id, no phone, no home, and no baggage, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. When he needs to change clothes, he picks up something at Goodwill and throws away whatever he was wearing before. When he needs a car, he has a very effective way of persuading people to let him drive theirs. Or, he just takes one. And he keeps moving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK7y8Ou0VvM

In the books, Reacher is 6’5″ and 250 pounds and blond. But that did not stop Tom Cruise, who is none of those things, from taking the role. He more than makes up for the lack of physical stature with pure movie star charisma, a fair trade.

The movie is based on Child’s One Shot, written and directed by “The Usual Suspects” screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie. It opens with a scene of a sniper shooting random passers-by, and it is especially jarring when we see him aiming at a child. I would say that it might have made sense to delay the release of the film because it is unfortunate to have it open a week after the shooting of children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, but it may be that after that horrible tragedy there will never be a good time for a movie that turns carnage into entertainment. Within the world of the movie, a world people willingly enter because they want to see some guilt-free fights, chases, and shoot-outs, it is reasonably effective. But if it is harder to enter that world these days, perhaps that is not a bad thing.

Law enforcement tracks down the sniper, a military vet, and the case seems open and shut. But before he is beaten into a coma by other prisoners, he scrawls “Get Jack Reacher.” Reacher can’t be contacted, but somehow he knows where he is needed, and he shows up. The sniper’s lawyer Helen (Rosamund Pike) believes her client is guilty, but wants to do her best to represent him. It turns out Reacher knew the sniper in Iraq. He has reason to believe the sniper is guilty. And, as Reacher tells us, he is not a hero.

Oh, who is he kidding, of course he is. Surprise! The case is not as open and shut as we thought. There are some dreary detours into Helen’s relationship with her father, who happens to be the DA, and to a hideous torture scene with a bad guy known as “The Zec” (Werner Herzog, better known as a director), and a five-on-one bar fight, and than, thankfully, we meet up with Robert Duvall as a ex-Marine shooting range owner. He is the only one who seems to understand what kind of movie this is, bringing a delicious zest to his scenes that almost make us forget that this is a movie in which a man is asked to bite off his own fingers and everyone seems to speak Russian.

It delivers what it intends to and what fans of the series are looking for. But I’d say it’s too soon, and maybe it’s never going to be the right time for a mindless shoot-em-up again.

Parents should know that this film includes extensive, brutal and graphic violence including a sniper who kills innocent people and executions, many fights, many guns, car chases and smashes, torture, some disturbing images, characters injured and killed, some strong language (one f-word, crude epithets), drinking, and references to drug use and drug dealing.

Family discussion: Why does Jack stay on the move? Did Emerson have a choice?

If you like this, try: the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child

Killing Them Softly

Posted on November 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violence, sexual references, pervasive language, and some drug use
Profanity:	Constant very strong language with crude and explicit sexual references
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drug use and drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing violence with disturbing images, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	November 30, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	March 26, 2013
Amazon.com ASIN:	https://amzn.to/30b53Do

Brad Pitt plays Jackie Cogan, a hit man who prefers to kill people “softly,” meaning with as little fuss and muss as possible. But because he is a hit man, he is constantly surrounded by messes that he is asked to clean up. Two dumb crooks (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) are recruited by a dry cleaner to rob an illegal poker game run by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Since it is generally understood that Markie had arranged the robbery of one of his own games in the past, the dry cleaner figures that he will be assumed to be behind this one, too, so no one will come after them. In other words, a mess.

Time for Cogan. But Cogan knows the dry cleaner, and he prefers to kill people he doesn’t know. Not because he has scruples — it’s just because the ones who know him know why he is there and they get all upset and start crying and begging. And that is messy. So Cogan brings in some help from out of town, another hit man named Mickey (James Gandolfini). They’ve worked together well in the past, but since the last time Cogan saw him, Mickey has started to unravel. More mess.

Prosecutor-turned novelist George V. Higgins had a rich appreciation for his underworld characters and the complexity of their compromised and thuggish connections. His dialog-driven books are filled with tough talk that feels authentic and poetic at the same time. This film is based on a book published in 1974, set in Higgin’s lifelong home town of Boston. Here it is updated to the summer of 2008 and relocated to Louisiana, where the dialog is counterposed with television broadcasts of a panicked George W. Bush explaining the financial meltdown following the collapse of the subprime market and candidate Barack Obama is making speeches filled with optimism and promise. The violent scenes, with slo-mo spurts of blood, are counterposed with cheery pop songs, Petula Clark singing “Windmills of Your Mind” and Cliff “Jiminy Cricket” Edwards warbling “Paper Moon.”

(Note: “Windmills of Your Mind” was the theme song of the original “Thomas Crown Affair,” with Steve McQueen as a millionaire businessman with a sideline as a criminal mastermind.) One of those moments would be plenty. We get it, we get it, the real crooks are on Wall Street and in Washington. Balletic blood spatters juxtaposed with songs are ironic. Or something like that.

Choice moments — Gandofini’s monologues, the conversations between Cogan and his bureaucratic contact known just as “The Driver” (Richard Jenkins), and juicy talk cannot make up for the feeling that this is Mamet Lite, and just the kind of messiness Cogan is wise enough to resist.

Parents should know that this story concerns criminals and thugs including drug deals and hit-men. It includes very graphic violence with disturbing images, dead bodies, constant very strong language, explicit and crude sexual references, a prostitute, smoking, drinking, and heroin.

Family discussion: What is the point of the news broadcasts about the financial meltdown? How does this community establish their rules? What does Jackie want?

If you like this, try: Layer Cake, American Buffalo and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

Alex Cross

Posted on October 18, 2012 at 6:00 pm

In “Alex Cross,” Tyler Perry is called upon to: show devastating grief, show incendiary fury, make threats, throw punches, and take over a part played twice on screen by Morgan Freeman. He is not up to any of those things. Perry is a powerhouse as a writer/director/impressario and I am a fan of his unique blend of high melodrama, low humor, and true-hearted faith in God and family. But here, in a prequel to the gritty detective films “Along Came a Spider” and “Kiss the Girls,” based on the best-selling thriller series by James Patterson, Tyler is not a good fit. It opens with Tyler as Cross in run-with-a-gun mode, chasing after a bad guy, and then we see him bantering with his long-time best friend and partner (Edward Burns) and with his gorgeous wife (Carmen Ejogo). There isn’t a persuasively authentic moment in any of that. Indeed, the 6’5″ Perry’s most believable performance is when his character has to reach something from a high shelf. That feels real.

Cross is supposed to be a Sherlock Holmes-style hyper-observant detective with a degree in psychology who is also a devoted family man with a cute-cranky mother (Cecily Tyson) who is also gangbusters in chasing, shooting, and beating up bad guys, not to mention some vigilante-style rough justice. He is always right. How do we know? His best friend/partner says, “Just once I would like it if you got something wrong because this is really getting annoying.”

And the bad guy here (an unrecognizably strung-out Matthew Fox) is also something of a super-villain who has mastered every kind of weapon and technology and has an evil genius command center with marked-up maps and mechanicals pinned to the wall (how retro) and a champion mixed martial arts combatant and specialist in torture and charcoal drawings, who leaves meticulously detailed clues that are only revealed by an Al Jaffee-style Mad fold-in.

The story begins with the murder of a gorgeous and very wealthy woman with a kinky side. She explains a statue of the god of war in her bedroom: “War is a passionate undertaking of strategy and skill just like sex. So it belongs beside the bed.” She is butchered and her three bodyguards are shot and burned. That leads to a botched attempt on one of her colleagues, an arrogant German guy who does something with money that is so important he has the kind of super-security they usually reserve for places where there is actual money and not just computers people use to move it around, except in movies where we have to show how smart the villain is by having him surmount all of the obstacles. And then it all gets very personal and very, very ugly. The body count rises, including a lot of collateral damage as well as some that hit close to home. The exposition-heavy dialog is clunky (“But this building is impenetrable!” someone says as the building is being penetrated). The banter is clunkier: “I’d rather take advice from a ham sandwich.” “Love you too, it goes without saying.” And yet, he says it.

I was not a fan of the last Alex Cross film, Along Came a Spider, because of its plot holes and factual clangers. (No, the Secret Service does not protect the children of Senators and the Russian President does not live in America.) Once again, the plot becomes increasingly more preposterous when super-detective figures out that super-villain is targeting someone who is about to make a presentation to the city council. Now, in that situation I might suggest moving the meeting to a different time or place, but no, these braniacs decide to send every cop in the city to the location to lock it down. For a presentation. That must be some power-point. It goes without saying that someone claims it’s the equivalent of impenetrable and it goes without saying that our Energizer bunny of a bad guy is way ahead of them. But they say it anyway.

Parents should know that this is an R-level movie. It has very intense and graphic violence for a PG-13 with torture including severed fingers as well as brutal fighting, guns, and bombs, very sad deaths of characters including a pregnant woman, explicit sexual situations for a PG-13 including bondage and partial nudity, some language, and references to drug use and drug dealing.

Family discussion: Who was right, Dr. Cross or his mother? What makes him so aware of the revealing details all around him?

If you like this, try: Morgan Freeman’s performances as Alex Cross in “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”

Looper

Posted on September 27, 2012 at 6:00 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity, and drug content
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug use and addiction
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and graphic violence with adults and children injured and killed, suicide
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 28, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	December 24, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	B005LAII8A

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play the same man in a twisty time-travel thriller about “loopers,” assassins who use short-range guns called blunderbusses to kill targets sent back in time from the future. The first thing we see is an ornate antique pocket watch as young Joe (Gordon-Levitt) waits next to a cornfield, a cloth spread out on the ground in front of him. The seconds tick by and then the target appears on the cloth, hands cuffed behind him with a bag over his head. Joe shoots, turns over the victim to retrieve the silver bars under his jacket, and disposes of the body. The criminals in the future have found a neat (in both senses of the word) method of dispatching their enemies.

It is 2044. The dead man was sent back from 2074.

Young Joe goes out clubbing with other loopers, the hapless Seth (Paul Dano) and another looper who has been retired. In what is called “closing the loop,” his last target is his future self. These final assignments bring payment in gold along with the knowledge of what will happen to the young assassin when he faces himself in three decades. Seth lets his future self escape and gets in trouble with Abe (a superb Jeff Daniels) the man in charge of the loopers. There are some special challenges that come with the problem of two different versions of the same person running around at the same time; apparently, you can’t just shoot him/them without disturbing the time-space continuum or something like that. Old Joe and Young Joe know themselves/each other too well to trust each other and too well to hide from or outsmart each other. And just like Marty McFly, they have to reckon with the fact that any big changes they make in the now will result in even bigger changes in the future. Which is Old Joe’s past.

Still with me?

As with his brilliant and ground-breaking “Brick,” also starring Gordon-Levitt, writer/director Rian Johnson has an engaging and compelling way of mixing genres. There are some overlays of the Western, the noir crime story, and a “Terminator”-style time travel mind-bender. The efforts to make Gordon-Levitt and Willis look even a little bit like they might be the same guy are ineffective and distracting, but other than that, this is a smart, exciting, mind-bender and a lot of fun.

Parents should know that this film has intense and graphic violence and peril. Adult and child characters injured and killed. The film includes a suicide, disturbing images, drinking, drug use and drug addiction, nudity, sexual references and situations, and very strong language.

Family discussion: Do you agree with Joe’s decision at the end? How did his experience with Seth affect his choices later on? What elements of today’s society inspired this idea about the future?

If you like this, try: “Brick,” from the same writer/director and star and time travel stories like “12 Monkeys” (also with Bruce Willis) and “Frequency”

Lawless

Posted on August 30, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Musician Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat are Australians who are drawn to bleak internal and external landscapes. They worked together on “The Proposition,” a western-style and very violent crime story about brothers. “Lawless” is another crime story about brothers, again very violent and, like “The Proposition,” with a bleak setting and compromised characters. This one is a true story, based on Matt Bondurant‘s book about his Prohibition-era grandfather and great uncles, who were ran illegal hooch in Franklin County, Virginia, described by writer Sherwood Anderson as “the wettest county in the world.”

“There’s a feeling around these parts that these Bondurants is indestructible,” one character says. Forrest Bondurant (a quietly powerful Tom Hardy) came back from WWI without injury and the community almost believes the legend that he cannot be stopped. That’s good for business; you might even say it is their brand. But just as in legitimate enterprise, the success of a local operation selling moonshine in mason jars attracts the interest of the competition. The big bootlegging organization out of Chicago is thinking about what one might call a very hostile takeover. The Bondurants have a good relationship with the local sheriff, who is happy looking the other way for a small piece of the action. But a federal agent named Charlie Rakes (an oily and twisted Guy Pearce) arrives and for him it is not about law, morality, or directions from his superiors. It is about power. The Bondurants are not afraid of him and that is why he wants to destroy them. Pearce, in gloves and slicked-down hair parted in the middle, is one of the best villains of the year.

Forrest is the leader and he has an unspoken understanding with his brother Howard (Jason Clarke). Indeed, a lot that goes on here is unspoken. The youngest brother, Jack (Shia LeBoeuf) wants to prove himself to his older brothers. And he wants to prove something to a pretty churchgoing girl named Bertha (Mia Wasikowska). Brash and flashier than his brothers, he has the nerve to try to make a deal with machine gun-toting Chicago hood Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman) and the entrepreneurial instinct to improve and expand production and delivery. When he sees a brutal gangland slaying, his only thought is to grab a souvenir shell case. He will have a Michael Corleone moment when the violence gets closer to home. “It is not the violence that sets men apart,” Forrest says. “It is the distance he is prepared to go.” The Bondurants do not give up. It is not about the money. It is about defending their home and their right to make their own choices.

Maggie (Jessica Chastain) shows up out of the blue one day, offering her manicured hand to Forrest’s rough one and offering to work for the brothers. “The city can grind a girl down,” she tells Forrest. “Gets to a point where you start looking for somewhere quiet.”

Franklin County is far from quiet. But the noise Maggie wanted to escape was the cacophony of heartlessness she was surrounded by in the city. Everyone in this story is breaking the de jure law, but Maggie knows that the Bondurants have a core of integrity and loyalty that she can count on. And she will show that she can be counted on as well.

Strong performances and an evocative sense of time and place anchor the film and the unexpected tenderness of the romantic interludes balances the brutality. A coda provides perspective that just because someone is willing to go the distance does not mean he cannot come back home.

Parents should know that this is the true story of moonshiners during Prohibition, so the good guys are law-breakers and the police are corrupt. The movie includes extremely graphic violence with characters tortured, injured, sexually abused, and killed, strong language including a racial slur and segregation, sexual situations including prostitution, female nudity, and alcohol and smoking.

Family discussion: How were the brothers alike and how were they different? The script was written by musician Nick Cave – how does the music help tell the story?

If you like this, try: Lawless: A Novel Based on a True Story by the real-life grandson of the youngest Bondurant brother