Prisoners review

            

               “Prisoners” is a bleak and dramatic look into the fears of the American middle class. It’s about the corruption of law and religion, the defilement of our youth, and the pain and trauma of recovery.  It’s a film that gazes into the abyss and looks back without any consolation. It’s an ambitious movie that casts a wide net with its narrative goals.  Unfortunately, what draws back is a tangled plot full of promises that it can’t fulfill. 

                This film tells the story of two families, Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello as Keller and Grace Dover and Terrance Howard and Viola Davis as Franklin and Nancy Birch. During thanksgiving dinner, while playing outside unsupervised, their two preteen daughters go missing. Shortly after their disappearance, the police, led by a hot-shot detective named Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), find the RV that was parked and identified outside of the Dover’s home just before the children went missing.  After an attempted and failed getaway, Loki arrests the inhabitant; a troubled and frightened young man named Alex Jones (Paul Dano), a squirrelish loner who suffers from an obvious learning disability.

                The meat of this picture deals with the reconciliation between justice and morality. After Jones is brought in for questioning and his vehicle is found clean of evidence, he set free. This then leads Keller to enact his own form of punishment, in which he kidnaps and tortures Jones until he can force the whereabouts of his daughter out of him. Being a doomsday prepping survivalist, Keller builds a small wooden box inside of the dilapidated bathroom of an abandoned house, where, unbeknownst to his wife or the police, he exposes his captive to scalding hot shower water and/or whatever else he deems appropriate to coax from Jones the information that he needs.

                 Of course, most media savvy viewers might recognize the name Alex Jones as the far-right radio personality who is himself an extreme second amendment proponent and controversial conspiracy theorist. Though his moniker is handed to Dano instead of the Jackman character, who more closely exhibits his ideological stance, it was hard not to derive some sort of connections between his type of American fanaticism and the movie’s thematic intentions.

                The other chunk of this plot is a far more traditional hard-boiled detective story, following Loki, as he descends into the Dante’s metaphorical circles of hell, in search for not only the endangered children, but also his dignity as a policeman, as well as his masculinity—all standard noir stuff. Much like Gyllenhaal’s character in David Fincher’s similar film “Zodiac”, he is thrown into many false leads and frustrating red herrings and as the story intercuts between his dark odyssey and the torture-bathroom scenario, the film asks the audience to place their bet on who's right, who's wrong, and who's wasting their time.

                I commend this film for its unrelenting nihilism, and for its subtlety subversive use of common genre elements to explore the dark side of humanity. Without being too literal, it asks interesting questions about capital punishment and the efficiency of the modern justice system. However, as the film digs deeper into its plot it becomes increasingly implausible and convoluted. Too much time is spent following Loki’s wild geese and in trying to stay ahead of the audiences expectations the movie loses touch with its challenging ideas and its emotional core.

               While anything but perfect, “Prisoners” isn’t a total wash. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is rich and moody, the direction by Dennis Villeneuve is effectively studied and most of the performances are raw and confrontational. But the film as a whole loses itself in its labyrinthine storyline, culminating in a final reveal that is somewhat underwhelming, given all of the time devoted to its winding, ‘whodunit’ lead up. Though it could have (and almost did) find its own unique identity, it instead settles to be yet another “Silence of the Lambs” or “Zodiac” retread—albeit a very well-made and well-acted one.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013

The Family review

               It’s been a while since director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro have worked together. Since their first collaboration in 1973’s “Mean Streets” they have reinvented the gangster genre, and with films such as “Goodfellas” and “Casino” they raised the bar impossibly high. But through the proxy of French action director Luc Besson (“Le Femme Nikita”, “Leon: The Professional”),with Marty now on the side-lines as an executive producer, “The Family” is merely a confused mobster comedy, with only a hint of the better movie that it could have been.

                Besson’s company has always targeted American audiences with actors that they are comfortable with and genres that traditionally do well in the states—best exemplified by the massively successful Liam Neeson vehicle “Taken” and “Taken 2”.  With this film, as if he had never seen “Analyze This”, he tries to flip the mobster movie on its head and laugh at the seriousness of the De Niro tough-guy image. However, Besson doesn’t decide whether this film is a parody of the Scorsese thing or an homage.  Either Way, it’s not particularly good at being either.

                De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer play Giovanni and Maggie Manzoni, a mobster marriage, trying to raise their two teenagers Warren (Dianne Agron) and Belle (John D’Leo). After Giovanni rolled over on his organized crime associates, he and his family are moved to Normandy France by the FBI, under witness protection.  While having to carefully avoid the watchful eye of their case-officer (Tommy Lee Jones) they must assimilate into this foreign culture by making friends with the neighbors and by trying to fit in school. Of course, being Brooklyn fish of water, their attempts at discretion are compromised when Fred tries a little too hard to get the plumbing fixed, Maggie blows up a grocery store, and their kids get caught up in violent displays of passion, and black market wheeling and dealing.

                It’s too bad that sometimes it isn’t obvious when a script needs some revision until the movie has already been made.  While this film ultimately doesn’t go anywhere, it had enough positive attributes to keep me interested, even when I knew it couldn’t possibly pull together all of its desperate parts.  Structurally the screenplay is a mess but the characters are well drawn and Besson gives each member of the family a unique and somewhat engaging arc within the story.  But when the plot starts to happen and the characters begin to fulfill their narrative purpose, the movie loses itself in muddled clichés and disappointing resolutions.

                By the end, Besson actually has the audacity to explicitly evoke “Goodfellas, a gesture that doesn’t do this movie any favors. During the climax, when the action gears up, the guns go off, and the genre starts to gravitate closer to that sort of ambition, the “Goodfellas” comparison only makes it clearer where the film falls short.  What we end up with is something genetically closer to a marinara soaked “Adams Family”.

                More egregiously, “The Family” isn’t as funny as it thinks it is or as vicious as it needed to be.  It rides the line between being a dark satire and a broad farce but never really chooses a style, and in wobbling back and forth between these two approaches it just becomes watered down and tone deaf.  The script is chockablock with set-ups and the dialogue is filled with one-liners and punch lines, but while these characters might have had me interested in their foibles they rarely made me laugh, especially when they were trying to.

                 

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013

Riddick review

                 The statute of limitations for long-awaited—but not necessarily strongly desired—sequels has been tested with “Riddick”, the third film in the pulp sci-fi trilogy that help put actor Vin Diesel on the map. With four years between “Pitch Black” (2000) and “The Chronicles of Riddick” (2004), and another nine before now, “Riddick” has more to live up to than just satisfying the tropes and trappings of its predecessors. Now it must remind the fans why they cared in the first place, while at the same time enticing the non-initiated, Miley Cyrus generation.  Despite a promising first act, and a consistent lead performance from the stoically masculine Vin Diesel, this lazily titled offering suffers greatly from junior-slump.  

                The story picks up right where the “Chronicles of Riddick” left off. The Necromongers, a ruthless space-cult that has been living under Riddick’s rule after he managed to slay their leader in a ritualistic battle, winning their throne by religious default (Seriously, did you remember any this?), figures out how to banish Riddick to a barren desert-planet, tricking him into thinking it’s his alien home-world, Furia. Not-Furia, resembles a pulpy Martian landscape, filled with dangerous creatures like elongated Tanzanian-tiger-jackals, and poisonous, frog-shaped, dino-scorpions. Riddick learns how to live and survive on this planet without tools or weapons, hoping for a chance to find a way back to civilization.

                Eventually hope comes in the form of a couple of mini-crafts filled with mercenaries and space-swat, on a bounty hunt for our hero.  One of these crews contains rough-rider, mad-maxish types like wrestler turned (surprisingly capable) actor Dave Bautista and Spanish actor Jordi Malla, who manages to deliver each line of his dialogue in a way that reeks of screen-grabbing desperation and total incompetence at the same time. The second ship includes Matt Nable as the father of a character you will have completely forgotten from the first film and “Battlestar Galactica” actress Katy Sackhoff, as a strong female, lesbian character; a  gesture that would have been bravely progressive if the film didn’t have to remind us that she is both female and a lesbian every chance it had, by having two of the male characters, including our hero, threaten to rape her, and by showing her nude for basically no reason.

                Once the ‘plot’ begins and Riddick is ghosting from ship to ship trying to steal, hide, and protect giant batteries and hordes of those poisonous space-frogs come back into the picture, this movie completely loses whatever narrative traction it started out with.

                 Though ultimately buried in bad acting and poor plotting, the survivalist, space-Conan stuff at the beginning is actually pretty cool. But instead the film decides to re-tread the creature-feature tropes of the much-better executed “Pitch Black”—which in and of itself was re-tread of the “Alien” franchise.

                However, this film isn’t without its selling points. Depending on how geeky you are, you could enjoy the fact that it doesn’t seem to care at all if anybody recalls the minutia of the previous two chapters of this franchise. This movie is steeped in the Riddick mythology and if you were expecting a soft-reboot to ease you back in, you may be confused and bewildered. And good for it that it refuses to fill the audience in on its distinctly weird world and its idiosyncratic sci-fi rules and widgets.

                I wanted to fully enjoy this movie but I can’t say that I did entirely. I enjoyed the creative creature designs and the graceful simplicity of its first forty minutes. I did not enjoy the member-measuring, macho, plot-grafting of the second act, or the too-little- too-late monster mayhem at the end of the film. I left “Riddick” disappointed and frustrated, not only because so much of it was bad, but because it had started out so good.

Grade: D+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013

Getaway review

            I assume the direct to DVD market exists for smaller, cheaper films to have some kind of distribution, even if studios don’t feel they have enough of a draw to garner a fully theatrical release. I assume that “Getaway”, a middling cyber-terror, car-chase programmer, was made with the intentions of premiering at a Redbox near you, but was perhaps elevated to a wide-release due to the combined star power of Ethan Hawk and Disney’s Selena Gomez. I assume this because nothing about this film feels worthy of the eight to thirteen dollars you might pay to see this garbage.

                I don’t care about teen culture enough to have a knee-jerk reaction against it. When Bieber broke up with Selena Gomez I didn’t care. However, I gave my full support to Gomez and her tweeny sisters in Harmony Korine’s day-glow satire “Spring Breakers” and actually, though you could call her involvement stunt-casting, her performance wasn’t half-bad. I want it to be perfectly clear that Selena Gomez didn’t ruin “Getaway”. Frankly, she didn’t save or serve the picture either. She’s merely a barbell tied to a sinking titanic of problems. 

                Ethan Hawk plays Brent Magna, an ex-race car driver who is on the search to find his kidnapped wife in a stolen muscle car full of cameras and microphones, connecting him with the mysterious Russian voice of his spouse’s abductor.  He is forced to crash into innocent people, wreck into unknowing vehicles, and shut down the cities power supply. More dangerously, he is forced to simultaneously attract and neutralize the police force.

                 While enacting the random acts of violence that he has to perform against his will, Brent is stopped by a trouble teen(Selena Gomez), who claims the bugged car to be her own. Credited in the film only as “The Kid", Gomez is seen carrying a nine millimeter and every current Apple product on the market. The voice then forces Magna to kidnap Gomez’s nameless character and by the movie’s close they have to learn to trust each other in order to safely end their terrible thrill-ride and to find Brent’s wife before she’s hurt.

                I don’t ask a lot of ninety minute car-crash movies, but every single aesthetic decision in this film is so mishandled and misbegotten that you almost have to give director Courtney Solomon some credit for sheer consistency.  Made for a modest eighteen million dollars, it’s surprisingly that you still can’t see where every dollar was spent.  The action is over edited and choppy and half of the coverage is seen from the perspective of webcams, iPads, and cellphones. What results is an impatient, seizure-inducing montage of grainy, low-resolution explosions and reaction shots.  The tension is non-existent and since we never have a clear sense of where we are or how fast the cars are going the endless chase scenes become redundant.

                When the film does slow down long enough for the leads to have a conversation we are primed again for another ugly, jumbled sequence were they’re not required to talk. Gomez is miscast for sure, but I am not sure anyone else would have made this movie much better. She has practically nothing to work with but there is something about her character’s tom-boyish snarkiness, along with her unusually pitched voice, that becomes grating and difficult to root for. Ethan Hawk does fine with his thankless role, but if you look close enough into his stern gaze you can see him counting down the days until he gets paid for participating in this mess.

                Don’t go see the “Getaway” in theaters.  Don’t rent it and don’t even bother watching it on cable. It’s not bad enough to be entertaining or creative enough to be insanely misjudged. It’s even not so bad that I hate it. To hate it would be to exert too much energy for this sloppy, late-summer, slot-filler.

Grade: D –

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2013