A Good Day to Die Hard review

                 Apparently it’s a bad day to ‘Die Hard’. There, I did it. I made the obvious pun, and you know what, I don’t feel at all bad about it. I say, if the people responsible for this film are so lazy that they can’t bother to come up with an actually story for their fifth-coming sequel to this beloved American franchise, then I shouldn’t feel too bad about reducing their cynical output into a simplistic blurb. In case you were wondering, I didn’t really care for “A Good Day to Die Hard”.

                In 1988, when the original “Die Hard” was release, Bruce Willis wasn’t seen as a muscle-bound action hero like his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The character of John McClane was relatively normal looking, unsure of himself and he wasn’t invincible, but he got the job done and cracked wise while he did it. It was a refreshing nudge towards realism—or at least relatability— in action cinema and the genre was changed for the better because of it. Now, 25 years later, when this franchise has been so disconnected from its origins, the “Die Hard” brand has morphed into something else altogether. 

                Bruce Willis returns as McClane, who is looking a bit older and is a little bit more embittered with the world at large. When he hears that his son Jack (Jai Courtney) is in some trouble in Moscow Russia, he decides to go down and sort things out himself. Later, he finds out that Jack is actually a CIA operative and by trying to save him from some Russian terrorists he accidentally blows his son’s secret mission. Together they have to try and salvage the assignment and stop a generic missile heist.

                From the first few minutes on, this film thrusts you into the ultra-violence and for the entirety of its running time it barely lets up. Once the momentum of its kinetic destruction starts, almost nothing can get in its way; including character development, ample motivations, or a sense of establishing a clear setting. Did the movie need to be set in Russia? No. Did it have a good reason to include Jack McClane? Not really. Did it have any need to connect with the “Die Hard” series at all? I can’t say that it did.   

                Rather than getting angry at how hollow this experience was, I am more just disappointed by what a wasted opportunity this is for everyone involved. With that said, it’s not that it’s excruciating to sit through, as it is just tediously one-note.  Unlike its 80’s predecessor, it doesn’t test the endurance of its male protagonist by purposely throwing a normal dude into ridiculous situations and seeing how he deals with it. Instead Bruce’s presence is incidental, as this new addition just fetishizes the design of an action set-piece and how tightly it can be edited. Though some of those massive scenes of devastation and demolition are impressively manufactured, in the context of this movie, they serve no real purpose to what little plot there is or raise any interesting stakes for its characters.

                I guess I will give “A Good Day to Die Hard” some props for its tenacity and its energy. However, even as the bass of the house-speakers were rumbling and the screen was blasting forth another shoot out, or a car flipping over, or something else blowing up, in my head I constantly found myself editing my shopping list or preparing my evening, due to how profoundly unengaged I was. Where the first film (and some of its better copycats) drew the audience in through a sneaky sense of humanistic inclusiveness, this film waves it’s arms, barks and squeals so persistently that it unintentionally shuts out the viewer.

Grade: D+  

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013

Side Effects review

                “Side Effects” marks the (supposed) last theatrical output by the commercially and critically popular director, Steven Soderbergh (“Ocean’s Eleven”, “Traffic”, “Sex Lies and Videotape”).  Though he has been threatening his departure for over two years now, his creative flame seems to be burning brighter before it goes it out.  Between September 2011 and now he has released four very different films that have one similar interest; taking on low-brow, genre material and classing it up in that cool, laid-back and somewhat-detached Soderberghian way.

                With “Contagion” he turned a traditional disaster movie into a sociological allegory about how the media and governments deal with international catastrophe. Likewise, “Magic Mike” tricked many ladies into the theater with the promise of sleazy male beefcake, but instead gave them a downbeat movie about the current economic crisis. “Side Effects”, his latest film, seems to reverse this trend by setting up the groundwork for a politically taut, procedural deconstruction of Big Pharma, but lurking within the picture is a unabashedly twisted B-movie—and I mean that in a good way.

                The movie begins by introducing us into the troubled mind of Emily Taylor (Roony Mara) as she begins to suffer from severe depression after her husband (Channing Tatum) is released from prison for insider trading. When she seeks the counsel of a court-ordered shrink named Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), she is then prescribed a new, experimental antidepressant called Ablixa. At first everything seems fine, until she begins act out in strange episodes of sleep walking and random violence that she has no recollection of. After a particularly bad incident she’s put into psychological observation and the negative media attention is pointed towards Dr. Banks, since he prescribed the drug without knowing the details of its side effects…Or that’s what the movie would lead you to believe it’s about.

                This is a somewhat difficult movie to review because so much of its joy is predicated on its twisting and shifting plot.  Every time you think you know where the story is going or you think you know what kind of movie you’re watching, it deflects your expectations and throws another strange flavor into the stew.  The first half of the film establishes it’s characters masterfully and the joint narrative seems to be split right down the middle, bouncing back and forth from the complicated perspectives of Roony and Jude—both giving one of their best performances yet.  When things start to complicate and the pressure starts to build, these characters begin to act out of their predictable state and the stakes are raised into a feverishly entertaining frenzy.

                “Side Effects” essentially gives you two movies; one that’s really intelligent and slick but seems to lack a sense of cinematic immediacy and one that’s wild and pulpy but isn’t very smart. Depending on your disposition, these two flawed halves will either cancel each other out or blend to make a better whole. Coming out of the theater I might have thought it was the first thing but after days of reflection I feel a little closer to latter.  Nevertheless it’s a well-made, well-acted, interesting throw back to something like the RKO noirs of the 40’s, Hitchcock’s wrong-man mysteries of the 50’s and 60’s or even the sex-thrillers that Joe Eszterhas (“Basic Instinct”, “Jade”)  would have written in the late 80’s and early 90’s. What I mean to say is it’s the type of movie you don’t see any more and though it isn’t as ambiguous as it originally suggests or as subtle as I might have preferred, I could definitely appreciate the slow-building madness of its intentions.

Grade: B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013

Warm Bodies review

                With the rise of horror ideas and monster icons in teenage mainstream media, it might look like horror as a genre is finally crawling out of its niche markets. Vampires, werewolves, slasher killers and now zombies have officially been placed, center stage into the tween zeitgeist.  But is it the mainstream that has changed to comfortably enter this morbid world or has horror been watered down and muted to fit into something more conventional? After all, we now have vampires who won’t kill to drink blood, buff, shirtless, werewolf heartthrobs, a serial killer who only kills the “bad guys”, and with Jonathan Lavine’s newest feature, “Warm Bodies”, we are introduced to a restrained, misunderstood zombie, with an extraordinary sense of self control.

                Nicholas Hoult plays a zombie named R, who lives amidst the end of civilization, after an infection kills most of human society, leaving only a few camps of gun-toting survivors.  When he and a horde of his shuffling, corpse companions attack a nearby base, R finds himself unexpectedly falling for the affections of a young, blonde girl named Julia (Teresa Palmer). Just after devouring her boyfriend, he then decides to protect her until he can manage his newly rekindled feelings and guide her to safety. Things get more complicated when a feral, skeleton army—known as the bonies—catches wind of their love, and they won’t have it. What’s worse is Julia’s militantly anti-zombie father (John Malcovich) can’t understand their adorable necrophilia either.

                I didn’t hate this movie but honestly that’s the best thing I can say about “Warm Bodies”. Structurally and technically I can’t fault the film too much. The direction is good, the effects are believable, the acting is actually solid, the pacing is efficient, and the soundtrack is pretty groovy. So why is it that I couldn’t help but be annoyed through most of it?

                When dealing with fictional creations like monsters and zombies, one’s allowed to change things a bit and riff on old tropes, as long as they don’t fundamentally alter the mythology beyond recognition.  If we are able to accept the rising dead as flesh eaters, why shouldn’t we accept that they could fall in love? For that matter, if we can accept that they can fall in love, why shouldn’t we accept that they don’t need to feed on human flesh anymore, or why shouldn’t they be able to talk fluently, or why shouldn’t they have a preference for vinyl records instead of digital music..? Are you catching my drift yet? 

                Also, let’s discuss these “bonies”: they’re malevolent, they run on instinct alone, they hunt in packs and they are dangerous; in other words, they're zombies!  I find their placement in this story to be very telling of the thematic problems that peppers the entire script. Because the writers have worked so hard to strip away the horror element of what a zombie is and does, they’ve contrived an uber-monster to put the danger component back into the fold. I say, why fix something that isn’t broken? Wouldn’t it be more exciting if R could kill and eat Julia at any moment? What if her instincts were wrong? What if their love was made more complicated because of R’s natural zombie hunger? Unfortunately, this movie isn’t concerned with anything too complicated.

                I know that I am probably not the demographic for this thing and I can appreciate that. Considering “Warm Bodies” is basically a post-twilight iteration of George A. Romero’s post-apocalypse, Jonathan Levine’s confident direction and Nick Hoult’s expressive performance almost elevates the obnoxiously hip and precious material to tolerable levels. Gothy, Hot-Topic-shopping, teens will surely go bananas, but I can’t help but feel that everyone involved in this production doesn’t have the respectable interest or even a general appreciation for the genre they are trying to subvert.

Grade: C-

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013

Parker review

 

 

                 With Arnold and Stallone coming back into the fold again, one has to wonder how the star power and celebrity of the British brute Jason Statham will reflect off of the obvious clout of his forerunners. When the original progenitors of 80’s “Badass cinema” fell by the wayside in the late 90s a bulky, dude-with-a-gun shaped void was left in their place. Enter Statham: a mumbley character actor, drafted in from Guy Ritchie’s school of English rapscallions. Unfortunately, Statham left behind his whit, his humor and his subtly when he came over. After all, us American’s don’t need our action heroes to have any personality as long as they can load a firearm and jump away from explosions, all while looking casually stoic as they do it.

                To be fair, I don’t hate the entirety of Statham’s post-Ritchy career. The first “Transporter” was big and gaudy but it was unassuming and it knew exactly what it needed to be. Likewise, the “Crank” movies amped up the model of the got-to-get-to-the-thing-before-the-thing-happens genre in an aggressively satisfying way. But with those movies the fading distance, American filmmakers were left a balding Brit with no home and nothing to do; so we slapped a gun in his hand, put him in a suit and shoved him in to a slew of would-be rejected Nick Cage projects—sometimes at the rate of two or three a year.

                In this film Statham plays “Parker”, a professional thief who is double crossed by his crew when a robbery at a county fair goes wrong. After they shoot him and leave for dead on side of the road, they head to Palm Beach in hopes to pull off a multi-million dollar jewelry heist.  When Parker recovers, he follows them undercover and meets a disgruntled and underpaid real estate agent named Leslie Rodgers (Jennifer Lopez), who is hired to show him around the rich neighborhoods in which his enemies plan on targeting. Once she finds out Parker’s true identity, Leslie is unable to keep herself out of all of the excitement and lends her realty skills to aid in his revenge.

                Certainly Statham has been in worse films, but that doesn’t change the fact that nothing here really works that well and the positives don’t outweigh its inherent weaknesses. It tries to satisfy a kind of spy-gone-rogue, man-in-disguise thing, but too much of Statham’s persona is embodied in his reckless, thuggish physicality. Simultaneously, It wants to be a tough exercise in manly ultra-violence (which admittedly contains the movie’s best moments) , but the scarce action is bridged by long stretches of badly edited and poorly plotted, meandering nothingness, and these moments are too sluggish to maintain the audience’s adrenaline.  

                All of the characters, as they are presented on the page, are simple at best but poor Jennifer Lopez gets the brunt of it. The movie tries to tease a possible desire and sexual tension between the two leads but that’s undercut by the fact that we know Parker already has a mostly off-screen girlfriend.  Since there isn’t a chance for romance and Lopez never becomes a strong fighter herself, she is left with a thankless damsel-in-distress role that leaves her character bland at best and whiny and superfluous at worse. I’m used to seeing this kind of thing from Katherine Heigl, but a screen presence like J-Lo (despite her numerous cinematic sins) deserves better in an action movie.  If you don’t believe me, go back and rent the underrated “Out of Site”. In fact, go back and watch any movie besides “Parker”.

                A bad action movie can be forgiven for its cheese and camp as long it can keep people entertained and stimulated, as classic, low-calorie films such as “Cobra” and “Commando” have proven. However, “Parker” isn’t dumb enough to be quaint, and it isn’t loud enough to be memorable, so instead it just settles for boring, which is the one thing a Jason Statham movie isn’t allowed to be.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2013