The Tourist

Posted on March 22, 2011 at 3:05 pm

Behind this forgettable trifle are some very talented people, all punching below their weight when they’re not just calling it in. The screenplay is by Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park”), Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”), and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”), based on the 2005 French film, “Anthony Zimmer.” Two of the biggest stars on the planet, Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp do their best to put some sizzle in this would-be romantic thriller, but they are both poorly used and have no chemistry whatsoever. Venice is pretty, though.

Jolie is the veddy proper Elise Clifton-Ward, whose role in this film is somewhere between femme fatale (drawing the poor schlub who happens across her path into a world of intrigue and peril) and Girl from Ipanema — she spends a lot of time walking slowly while those she passes say, “Ahhhhhhh.”

Elise receives a note from Alexander Pearce, the man she loves and has not seen for two years, asking her to find a man on the train who resembles him to use as a decoy and distract the various Interpol teams that are trying to track him down. Enter the shlub, a math teacher from Wisconsin so (apparently) incapable of dishonesty that his very name is Frank. And yet, we see him tell a lie very early on. It’s a small one, perhaps understandable, but still….

Elise invites him to spend the night in her lavish hotel suite (on the sofa) and kisses him on the balcony, thus drawing the fire, and the attention, of Interpol and of someone even more bent on tracking Pearce down, the man he stole from. It’s a nice set-up, but the execution depends on three things that never happen: a witty script, a spark between the leading characters, and an understanding of tone. The script sags. Jolie and Depp are both poorly cast (she may be more of a serene and elegant mother earth in her real life these days but on screen she only comes alive when she is aggressive and a little wicked and Depp can do just about anything but act like an ordinary guy). And von Donnersmarck has no sense of humor or lightness to make the sillier aspects of the story endearing instead of annoying. This is yet another example of an American remake of a French film that just misses the fun, the romance, and the point.

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The Next Three Days

Posted on March 8, 2011 at 8:00 am

Paul Haggis loses his way in “The Next Three Days,” a labored prison escape drama that never recovers from a serious miscalculation midway through and then goes completely off the rails in the end.

Russell Crowe plays a sometimes deliberate and over-thinking professor named John Brennan who is completely devoted to his sometimes hot-tempered and impetuous wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks). After a public quarrel, Lara’s boss is murdered and Lara is arrested. She protests her innocence, but the circumstantial evidence is too persuasive, and she is found guilty. Three years later, all of her appeals exhausted, she cannot bear the thought of a life in prison, and attempts suicide. John, who teaches “Don Quixote” and knows something about righteous quests, decides he will find a way for her to escape. “I promise you, this will not be your life.” He consults an expert (a brief movie-brightening moment with Liam Neeson), watches a video on YouTube about skeleton keys, and comes up with a plan.

Every movie creates a world for us, and each of them can be plotted along the continuum between real world (a verite documentary) and movie world (flying dragons, superheroes, planets with long blue people). It does not matter at which point a movie locates itself, but once it does, it has to stay there. If you tell us horses can fly in one scene, then don’t tell us they can’t in the next. This movie tells us that justice matters, killing people is wrong, and that John is an English professor. It establishes itself as being on the drama-about-people-like-us point on the continuum. It then veers into a whole other over-the-top heist-style scenario with one of those plans where a lot of things have to go exactly right and then somehow they all do and killing people might not be such a bad thing after all. And then it insults the intelligence and goodwill of the audience with an ending that is jarringly out of place. One of the worst mistakes a movie can make is to assume greater fondness for its characters than we are willing to feel. This movie never lets us like its characters and then tries to make that seem like our fault.

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Drama Thriller

Drive Angry

Posted on February 24, 2011 at 7:22 pm

The movie is called “Drive Angry.” It stars Nicolas Cage. It’s in 3D.

What more do you need to know?

Cage is such a fan of comic books he took his screen name from a comic book superhero and starred as “Ghost Rider.” Cage and co-writer/director Patrick Lussier have brought a stylish and mythic comic book sensibility to this story about a man determined to kill cult members who murdered his daughter and plan to kill her baby.

Cage plays John Milton (I did say mythic), a mysterious loner, who hitches a ride with Piper (Amber Heard, as terrific here as she was in “The Jones”), a waitress who just dumped her fiance and took his Dodge Charger, the one with the license plate that says DRV ANGRY. They go after Jonah King (Billy Burke, looking like a cross between Jim Jones and the Pick-Up Artist) and his Satan-worshiping followers, who are preparing to sacrifice Milton’s granddaughter under the full moon. And they are chased by cops following up on the trail of dead bodies they leave wherever they go and by a man in a suit who calls himself “the accountant” (William Fitchner, like a civilized Terminator with the nose of a bloodhound and the demeanor of an elegant viper). There’s a series of dust-ups and then the final confrontation/conflagration.

This is the kind of movie they used to show in drive-ins and clearly everyone in it is having a blast. It’s nicely twisted and even a little fierce, willing to take on some big questions that provide as much fuel for the story as the cars and carnage. The movie’s highlight is Fitchner, who can sniff the air or toss a coin with as much on-screen power as all the chases and shoot-outs.

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3D Action/Adventure Thriller

Unknown

Posted on February 17, 2011 at 6:35 pm

What would you do if everything you thought you knew about your life and your identity suddenly seemed to be untrue? If even your wife kept insisting that another man was you?

Liam Neeson plays Martin Harris, or a man who thinks he is Martin Harris, a scientist on his way to a conference in Berlin. We see him with his wife, Liz (“Mad Men’s” January Jones) as the plane is landing and they seem the picture of tender domesticity. But he is in an accident shortly afterward, when his cab goes off a bridge into the water on his way to retrieve a briefcase left behind at the airport. He wakes up after a four-day coma. “Memories get lost or fractured,” the doctor cautions him. “Most of them return.”

Even though the doctor insists that he needs time to recover, he races back to the hotel only to find that Liz does not recognize him and Martin Harris (played by Aiden Quinn) is already there.

The Spout movie site calls this plot “the right man,” a variation on the popular “wrong man” storyline. Instead of the character’s being mistaken for someone else, these films show us a man who for some reason cannot be seen as who he really is. As the man I will continue to call Martin begins to doubt himself, we also question what we have seen. Why does Liz insist that she is married to Martin #2? How can Martin #2 seem to inhabit the Martin Harris world so completely and seamlessly? He even has the identical photo in his wallet, Liz on his lap at a romantic restaurant. But the man with her is Martin #2.

And why are ruthless killers chasing our Martin? “It’s like a war between being told who you are and knowing who you are,” he says.

He tracks down the cab driver (Diane Kruger as Gina, an illegal immigrant from Bosnia) and goes to an ex-Stasi interrogator-turned detective (Bruno Ganz, the highlight of the film as JÃ¼rgen) to help him find some answers, even as he is just beginning to formulate the questions.

There are some good chases through Berlin and even twistier plot developments. JÃ¼rgen’s “proud” Stasi background and Gina’s experience with Bosnian thugs turn out to be very helpful and Frank Langella shows up in the last act for one last set of complications. For some reason I can’t figure out, thrillers always have detours into nightclubs with pulsing music (really, what is the deal with these — some sort of physical manifestation of the internal chaos?). This one is thankfully brief and insignificant. Don’t think about it too hard. The plot will unravel in your head on the drive home. But while you’re watching, Neeson, Ganz, and Langella will keep you connected to the story and hoping that Martin remembers who he is.

(more…)

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Action/Adventure Thriller

Sanctum

Posted on February 3, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, some violence and disturbing images
Profanity:	Constant very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drug reference
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril with many injured and killed, disturbing graphic violence, mercy killing
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	February 4, 2011

The stunningly beautiful cave scenes are breathtakingly realistic in this James Cameron-produced 3D “inspired by a true story” saga of a cave-diving expedition gone wrong.

The plot and characters, not so much.

It’s the basic “and then there were none” plotline. Foolish humans take big risks, get into trouble, and have to find their way out — literally. At first the group is hard to tell apart, but soon those who are least differentiated either escape or get killed and we are left with the core group. And it isn’t enough that they have to escape from a whole series of life-threatening perils (too wet, too high, too cold, too deep, too far); the experience also has to serve as family and couples therapy as a reluctant young cave-diver has to confront his tough old boot of a father (the expedition leader) and the arrogant, impulsive adrenaline junkie of a funder has to deal with his date on her first-ever cave experience.

Cameron’s use of 3D is splendid on this real-world Pandora. The film conveys the cathedral-like spaciousness, the claustrophobic passageways, and the vertiginous drops of the cave very well. But the structure of the film is so predictable and the characters so thin and unengaging that it feels more like watching people at a theme park than anything with any sense of peril or involvement. The best thing about the dialogue is that the actors’ Australian accents sometimes make it unintelligible. And a painful series of complicated moral choices are deployed for sensation, rather than depth — just like the hubristic expedition itself.