The Bounty Hunter

Posted on July 13, 2010 at 8:00 am

Jennifer Aniston is a beautiful and talented woman, but this film had me thinking some very mean thoughts about her, thoughts like, “She is too old for this kind of movie” and “Probably not a good idea to make a movie that seems like a lesser version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, best known for documenting her real-life husband falling in love with his co-star.”

If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen this movie: battling exes squabble as he (Milo the bounty hunter played by Gerard Butler) tries to take her (Nic the journalist played by Aniston) to jail while she tries to persuade him that she’s working on an important and very dangerous story. Will they get shot at? Will there be chases? Will there be a romantic interlude interrupted by a mis-communication? You don’t even have to see the trailer to have seen this movie. You already know everything that’s going to happen.

Aniston is too old for this movie. Butler looks pudgy-faced and uncomfortable. Despite rumors of an off-screen romance, there are no sparks between them and we never get any sense of what brought them together or any relationship between what we are told about their issues and any aspect of their behavior toward each other or anyone else. This is one of those films where if anyone behaved in a rational manner, the whole thing would have been over in 20 minutes.

It does have a good chase scene at the beginning and a couple of briefly interesting goons (Milo owes some gambling debts). But it lets us down repeatedly by wasting the time and talents of the fabulous Christine Baranski (as Nic’s glamorous mother), SNL’s Jason Sudeikis as Nic’s co-worker, and Carol Kane (with a new set of teeth) and Adam LeFevre as bed-and-breakfast owners. It is supposed to be heartwarming and humorous that Nic’s mother has some boundary issues when it comes to Nic’s romantic life. It’s just icky. It’s supposed to be funny that her co-worker keeps trying to persuade her to get romantic with him. It’s just icky — until he is mistaken for Milo and gets beat up by the goons, when it becomes not just icky but ooky. It’s even supposed to be funny that Nic tases Milo. Nope. This falls into that category of movie that exists to be perpetually playing on airplanes — because when the pilot interrupts to tell you to look out the window you won’t miss anything.

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Brooklyn’s Finest

Posted on July 6, 2010 at 8:00 am

This bloated, pretentious mess is the slowest action movie I can remember, weighted down with over-used characters, situations, and dialog. The dialog is over-used within the movie itself. It isn’t enough for a character to say, “I want my life back!” He has to repeat for emphasis, “I want my life back!” only to evoke the response, “You want your life back!” “Brooklyn’s Finest” is movie-dom’s mediocre.

Make a list of every police movie cliche and you will find them all here. The disillusioned uniformed officer a week from retirement. The dedicated cop who has been undercover for so long his loyalties are getting blurred. The detective whose money pressures overwhelm his integrity. The cop who falls for a hooker. The rookie who find that real life is more complicated — and dangerous — than the academy. The kid who gets shot and turns out to be an honor student. The charismatic drug dealer. The higher-ups who engage in cover-ups. The ambitious and ruthless politician. The even-more ambitious and ruthless crime boss. And not one single moment with any freshness or sincerity or interest.

Director Antoine Fuqua returns to the genre of his greatest success, “Training Day,” after a series of disappointing follow-ups like “King Arthur” and “Shooter.” But without Denzel Washington’s galvanizing performance in a larger-than-life role, the material feels at the same time thin and heavy-handed. It isn’t enough that the cop’s wife is pregnant. She has to be pregnant with twins and getting sick from the mold in their old, over-crowded house. Another cop has to literally wash literal blood off his hands. The cops and the bad guys both communicate primarily by grunts, insults, profanity, and meaningful stares. “There’s no such thing as right or wrong,” says a character at the beginning of the film, “Only righter and wronger.” Well, if there’s such a thing as gooder and badder, this movie falls into the second category.

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Crime Drama

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Posted on July 5, 2010 at 9:49 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content including rape, grisly images, sexual material, nudity, and language
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing violence including rape
Diversity Issues:	Strong female character, character with possible Asperger syndrome
Date Released to Theaters:	November 7, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	July 6, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003FBNJ4U

If you have not read any of the Millennium trilogy of novels by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, someone near you has. A worldwide sensation published after the death of the author, the books follow the title character, Lisbeth Salandar, a slight but tough and determined young woman who is a genius with computers but possibly Aspergian in her inability to connect to other people.

This film, based on the first of the books, comes out on DVD just as the second film with the same cast is released in theaters and the third book has been published in the US. It won the Swedish equivalent of the Oscar for best film and best actress for Noomi Rapace as Salander.

They are already working on an American version, but it is hard to imagine that it could match this superb adaptation, utterly true to the book and yet completely cinematic. As the story begins, a character much like Larsson takes center stage. He is Mikael Blomkvist (superbly played by Michael Nyqvist), a journalist in disgrace and about to go to jail for publishing false information about a powerful businessman. As he waits to begin to serve his term, he is offered an intriguing opportunity — a wealthy man hires him to investigate the disappearance of his favorite niece, forty years ago. Salander finds out what he is doing and begins to help him, at first anonymously, and then more directly. Together, they get tangled up in a world where every rule is violated, every promise broken, every loyalty betrayed.

From Paris With Love

Posted on June 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm

John Travolta loves to be bad. And so he is clearly having a blast — in both senses of the word — in this film, playing a bald guy with an earring who likes to shoot first and think later. As Charlie Wax, a top ops guy who loves to break rules and mess with heads, he gives new meaning to the word trigger-happy.

If only it was as much fun for the audience. But this movie was clearly more about entertaining the star than the ticket-buyers. Wax arrives in Paris noisy and obnoxious, arguing with security about bringing his “energy drink” into the country. Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a straight-laced, chess master, embassy aide who is hoping for a promotion to black ops, slaps a diplomatic sticker on Wax’s bag to get him through. Then they are off for an odd-couple buddy-cop joy ride that involves drug dealers, terrorists, and many opportunities for shooting first and not sticking around to ask questions later. For no particular reason, Reece ends up carrying a vase filled with cocaine through many different locations like takeout.

Even by the low bar for this genre, “From Paris With Love” feels under-scripted. There are a few good set-ups from director Pierre Morel (“District B13”), including a scene in a stairwell where our updates on the action come from the bodies falling past a stunned Reece and a shoot-out in a warehouse filled with mannequins lined up like terra cotta warriors. But it misses when it asks us to take Wax even a little bit seriously as a good guy. The title’s reference to James Bond and a painful reminder of Travolta’s better days in “Pulp Fiction” just ring hollow. Return to sender.

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Action/Adventure Crime Spies

The Square

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 8:06 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violence and language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and graphic violence including guns, arson, and car crashes, many characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	May 7, 2010

When the first 10 minutes of film introduce us to an illicit affair, a kickback scheme, and a hidden bag filled with money, we know we’re in for a twisty thriller, and “The Square” delivers.

Brothers Nash and Joel Edgerton have been compared to the Coens, and “The Square” is in some ways a tribute to the Coens’ “Blood Simple,” with its theme of the tangled web of deception and betrayal. Ray is a successful construction manager working on a resort project, comfortably married but having an affair with Carla (Claire van der Boom), a pretty, young hairdresser uncomfortably married to a man who has never told her about the hidden bag of cash in their laundry room ceiling and doesn’t know she knows about it.

Carla tells Ray she will get the cash so they can run away together. But in order to deflect suspicion from them, they will have to make it look like the money was burned in a fire. Ray hires Billy (co-screenwriter Joel Edgerton) to burn her house down while they are all enjoying a Christmas picnic and therefore thoroughly alibi-ed. Things start to wrong, and then wronger, and then, well, if you’ve ever read a novel by James M. Cain (or tried to make a cell phone call with a fading battery or leave a message with an unreliable person) you know that things will spin sickeningly out of control with the inevitable logic of a nightmare.

The noir-ish plot works well in the sunny Australian setting. It’s summer in December Down Under, which adds to the disorienting tone of the film for Northern Hemisphere-ites. The Edgertons keep us wavering from support of the characters who are our on-screen representatives to horror as they cross over line after line, finally giving up any pretense of rationalization as each step gets them more directly involved and more deeply enmeshed. Every encounter leaves them more culpable, their victims less deserving. No wonder Ray doodles row after row of men in claustrophobic little boxes stacked on top of each other. They look like tiny prison cells, or maybe the filmed frames of a movie thriller.

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Crime Drama Movies -- format