Killer Elite

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 6:11 pm

Like this year’s “The Devil’s Double,” this film would be much more satisfying and believable if it was not so self-serving in favor of the people telling the story. The oddest part is that the fight scenes are brutally, authentic while the non-fight scenes are laughably ridiculous. While it says it is “based on a true story,” the book that inspired it is labeled as a work of fiction and has been discredited by family members of those involved.

It opens in 1980, with the world in unrest and an oil crisis. Danny (Jason Statham), ex-special forces, works various dangerous jobs with his long-time ally Hunter (Robert De Niro) until he decides to leave it all behind and have a new, peaceful life in Australia. But he gets pulled back in when Hunter is kidnapped by a sheik who wants Danny to hunt down and kill the men from British forces who killed his three sons in an armed conflict in Oman. But Danny can’t just kill them. The sheik wants taped confessions from each and then Danny has to make each death look like an accident (which of course makes it impossible, 30 years later, to say that the accidental deaths were not really homicides). Danny gets the band back together, with, of course, one newbie just to act as a wild card, and goes after the sheik’s three targets.

But in this nasty, brutish world, everyone’s a bad guy; it’s just a question of degree. While Danny and his group are going after the guys who killed the sheik’s sons, the guys who think those guys were the good guys go after Danny. And while all of that is going on, the desiccated old men sitting around in expensively furnished board rooms are moving them all around like chess pieces, with even less regard for whether they get knocked off the board. These are the “feather men” (because of their light touch) who like some third-rate Batman villain actually leave their calling card to let the men who do the actual killing know that they’ve been there. Just to make sure we get the point, the old guys in suits actually say things like, “What we did there was questionable,” “We all know our people went too far,” and “We’re businessmen and bankers now. We can leave no trace of our activities.” Meanwhile, the guys who kill people (as opposed to ordering other people to do it) say things like, “Killing is easy. Living with it is the hard part.” So we know they have feelings, get it?

Statham is always a pleasure to watch and De Niro is superb as the man who has given his life to adrenaline and rough justice but is loyal to his friend and his family. The fight scenes are not the usual choreographed carnage but believably rough and exhausting. There are some nice shifts of allegiance back and forth and some good points to be made about how behind the killing is profits from oil. But the whole premise becomes increasingly ludicrous until it falls apart.

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I Don’t Know How She Does It

Posted on September 16, 2011 at 8:21 am

This film takes the most wrenching and universal dilemma of family life and turns it into a sitcom-y love letter to Sarah Jessica Parker. Not the character she plays, the whippet-thin, stiletto-wearing financial whiz with the adorably mussed hair, but the actress herself, whose appeal as a performer continues to diminish in direct proportion to her increasing need to make us love her and expectation that we must. Carrie has been very bad for SJP.

Parker plays Kate Reddy (the names are thuddingly on the nose here), a Boston mom of two, married to an architect (winningly played by Greg Kinnear), and trying hard to cope with both the intensely competitive professionals at the office (Olivia Munn and “SNL’s” Seth Meyers play work-obsessed underminers) and the even more intensely competitive stay-at-home moms (one asks plaintively whether a birthday cake is made with organic flour and another sighs sweetly and explains that she just couldn’t allow anyone else to raise her children as she spends all day at the gym). These are cheap shot caricatures with little wit and less heart. If the film had a smidgen of sympathy for anyone else in the story or any convincing moment with Kate and her children when they were awake it would not ring so hollow. It’s hard to connect to a character who is feeling judged when her point of view is itself so petty and judgmental. Even Kate’s one friend (a dishy Christina Hendricks) cannot be permitted to be at Kate’s level. She’s a single working mother, so points off for her.

Kate and her husband both get their professional opportunities of a lifetime and shift into higher gear, missing their son’s first haircut and neglecting his delayed speech and a dangerous hole in the carpet on the stairs. Up all night making lists that never end, Kate promises everything to everyone and discovers that sometimes jugglers drop all the balls at once. Sometimes you get a call to fly out of town for a big meeting in the middle of Thanksgiving. And sometimes you get the message that your child has lice just as you walk into the big meeting. Infestation turns out to be just an opportunity to dish at the delousing salon with a friend (compare that to the more realistic hazmat treatment of the same problem in last year’s “The Change-Up”), another example of the gap between the way this film makes everything about Parker, I mean Kate.

I understand that motherhood seems fresh and new and unfairly not communicated about properly for each new generation of women who wonder how they got from the snarky authenticity of their post-college years to searching for a presentable outfit that (1) has no spills or spit-up on it and (2) fits (this is a problem grey-hound thin and beginning to look stringy SJP does not have). It will feel a bit stale to anyone who has either lived through it or seen any sitcom or family comedy of the last decade. Even the derided “Motherhood” with Uma Thurman felt more authentic than this. A mis-sent email with a crude joke? That’s so 2008. And when Kate’s colleague (Pierce Brosnan) starts signing his emails “XO” and, despite her denials, Kate just manages to keep all those balls in the air to the breathless admiration of even those who once failed to appreciate her, we can’t help feeling that we do know that in fact she doesn’t do it very well.

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Drive

Posted on September 15, 2011 at 6:40 pm

Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn said that “Drive” is his vision of a contemporary fairy tale about a princess who has to be rescued from a dragon. It is a highly stylized, brilliantly acted, and brutally violent story about a man we know only as “the Driver” (Ryan Gosling), a mechanic, sometime movie stunt driver, and occasional getaway driver. He befriends a young mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son while her husband is in prison.

“You put this kid behind a wheel and there’s nothing he can’t do,” says a gimpy guy named Shannon (“Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston), who runs the garage where the Driver works. “How’s the leg?” asks Nino (Ron Perlman). “I paid my debt,” says Shannon, acknowledging the real question. This is a world where debts must be paid and reminders of that fact can be painful.

And this is a world where the Driver is not the only one who has a range of roles that include both sides of the law. And there are bad guys and really bad guys and really, really bad guys. Irene’s husband Standard (a superb Oscar Isaac) gets out of prison. When he is sucked into one more robbery, the Driver goes along to make sure nothing bad happens. And then a lot of very bad stuff happens, and that makes him a target. Irene and her son are at risk and so is a woman named Blanche (“Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks, looking great in tight jeans, even when she’s terrified). Behind much of what goes on are the deceptively genial Bernie Rose (look for a Supporting Actor nomination for Albert Brooks) and the hot-tempered and impetuous Nino.

It is a volatile situation, and Refn plays that off the minimalist storyline, stripped-down dialog, retro electronic soundtrack, and cool compositions, with each frame as perfectly laid out as a still life waiting to be painted, each movement as swoon-worthily choreographed as a ballet.

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Action/Adventure Mystery

Warrior

Posted on September 8, 2011 at 6:09 pm

Imagine if Rocky, instead of fighting Apollo Creed, got into the ring with another Rocky. And they were brothers.

I know, I know, but somehow it works in a surprisingly affecting story of the sons of an abusive alcoholic who have not seen each other since they were teenagers and end up fighting each other for a mixed martial arts championship title.

That’s the magic of movies. Somehow, they can take a story of a welder who does post-modern dance numbers in a Pittsburgh bar and dreams of being a ballerina or cartoon characters are live in old-time Hollywood and feel real-er than real life. As cheesy as this movie gets, it keeps raising the emotional stakes over and over again until we just tap out and go with it, largely because of full-hearted, powerhouse performances from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton.

Tommy (Hardy) comes home. He’s been away a long time. His father, Paddy (Nick Nolte) is glad to see him, but Tommy says he wants to deal with his father only as a trainer. He has no interest in catching up or mending their estrangement. He just has one goal, to win a $5 million mixed martial arts championship.

Brendan (Edgerton) has a good life as a high school science teacher with a family. His wife says, “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to raise our children in a house were their father gets beat up for a living.” But paying for his daughter’s health care has put the family at risk of losing the house. He needs a lot of money fast and the only way he knows to get it is to win the mixed martial arts championship. He goes into training with an old friend. Cue the montages.

The script by writer/director Gavin O’Connor (“Miracle”) is as corny as an “up close and personal” Olympics athlete profiles, but as effective, too. Every time you think you’ve made up your mind who to root for, it switches around on you, and then switches around again. The fight scenes are powerful, but in large part due to the emotional weight given to Tommy and Brendan by Hardy and Edgerton. The final bout, well, its a knock-out.

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Drama Family Issues Sports

Seven Days in Utopia

Posted on September 1, 2011 at 6:38 pm

Sports psychologist David L. Cook wrote a book called Seven Days in Utopia: Golf’s Sacred Journey about a young golfer who runs away after a meltdown at a big tournament, gets stuck in a small town, and meets a mentor who was once a champion and teaches him important lessons that he takes with him back to the next competition.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like Cars?

It’s still a good story. And I give Cook and co-writer/director Matthew Dean Russell credit for avoiding some of the usual sports-as-metaphor details. They refrained from making their main character spoiled or hot-headed. Even more unusually, they refrained from making his father a monster. Both are well-intentioned but misguided. This eliminates the easiest routes to dramatic intensity but demonstrates a confidence in the characters that is most welcome. It would be too much to say that adds subtlety to the story. This story is not subtle in any way; its biggest failing is that it does not trust its audience enough. It hammers its points home and then does it a few more times, and then a few more, just to make sure. If only the filmmakers had trusted their audience as much as the movie’s teacher trusts his student.

Lucas Black (“Cold Mountain,” “Friday Night Lights“), who co-produced, plays Luke Chislom, a young golfer who has been driven all his life by his father. When they get into an argument on a crucial shot in an important competition, Luke’s father walks off the course and Luke snaps his club in half and runs away.

Swerving to avoid a cow in the road, Luke crashes his car into a fence in the small town of Utopia, Texas. While the car is being repaired, a local rancher named Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall) offers to give him some golf lessons to help him “find his game.” In true Mr. Miyagi “wax on, wax off” fashion, many of these lessons do not involve hitting a golf ball with a golf club. They are lessons about focus, faith, patience, confidence, and grace. They have Luke pitching washers, taking the controls of a plane, painting a picture, and literally burying the lies that hold him back. And there’s a pretty girl in town who is training to be horse whisperer and seems to know something about whispering golfers as well.

Black is an engaging performer and he and Duvall have an easy, natural quality together and many scenes have a refreshingly quiet quality, not so much of volume but from a spirit of humility and sincerity. Luke is a good kid, open to learning but not naive, and the film will reward those who are willing to give it a chance.

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