If you find yourself flipping through the channels or browsing Netflix and come across the movie Blitz you will find the description goes something like this:
"With a serial killer on the loose in London, a detective takes on the case while working out his aggression issues with a police-appointed shrink."
And then you will see that it is starring Jason Statham and you will immediately think to yourself "I know what this movie is." You will be wrong, mostly. This movie isn't The Transporter or The Expendables or The Mechanic or Killer Elite or choose your recent Statham vehicle. This is an attempt to be Great Britain's version of Dirty Harry where questions of the means justifying the ends play out against the horror of a serial killer, the muddled frustration of bureaucracy and the immorality of the news. Heady stuff for an action star. The problem is the film is a mess, where characters and plot lines are introduced and then disappear, where performance are rich but characters suddenly do things entirely out of character with no explanation, where we are told how clever people are when they continue to do nothing even remotely clever on screen. Here is the other thing about Blitz, I enjoyed watching it. Why did I enjoy it? Maybe it was a simple as hearing British street slang and profanity (something about hearing that stuff makes watching fun, Guy Ritchie made an early career out of that phenomena). Maybe it was watching Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger on Game of Thrones) chew up scenery as the serial killer. Maybe it was the fact that Statham managed to keep his shirt on for the entire movie. Maybe it was the nonsensical plot turns that made you scream "wait! what?" at the screen (particularly at the ending). Of course the truth is it was all of the above. Blitz is a massively flawed movie (read plot summary below if you want to see just how flawed) and yet somehow entirely watchable. Blitz = Level VII movie (flawed yet ambitious)
Don't you hate it when you see a movie full of people you like but you just don't like the movie? That is The Change-Up, a movie that is filled with likable actors but can never find any balance between raunch and heart and can't find the comedy behind the overt attempts at shocking. The plot is as simple and straight forward as you can imagine. One guy is an uptight lawyer who is about to be made partner at his firm and is unsuccessfully juggling career with his wife, young daughter and twin babies at home. The other dude is his life long friend who is a high school drop out and wannabe actor who spends his days getting high, having sex and doing not much of anything else. One night the boys go out, get drunk, pee in a fountain, lie to each other that they wished they had each other's life and wouldn't you know it, the next morning the arise to find that they have switched places (and bodies). In a panic they hurry back to said fountain only to find it has been removed by the city (making these the most efficient city workers on the planet since they were able to remove a fountain entirely before lunch on the day they started the project).
With the plot set the movie moves about as obviously and unrealistically as you can imagine. It seems like they knew the movie was dreadfully trite so they decided to add as much raunch as they could in an excruciatingly vain attempt to make the material seem fresh (oooh, look we got Leslie Mann to show her boobs twice, isn't this crazy?! And look, the actor isn't just an actor, he is a soft-core porn actor. Didn't see that coming, did ya?). After spending way too much time dropping f-bombs around the kids and discussing how big or small each other's penis is and focussing on the merits of trimming your pubic hair the plot begins it wrap up exactly as you know it will from the moment the movie starts. Anal lawyer learns to relax, slacker actor realizes he has to grow up, and they run to a mall (where the fountain was moved to), pee in the fountain and all is well. All is well except the awful feeling you are left with knowing you just wasted 2 hours of your life. Of course, as bad as I felt for myself I somehow felt worse for Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann and even Olivia Wilde who all deserve better material than this.
The Change-Up = Level II. It is just a train wreck through and though.
From the first frame of Drive Angry you can tell this is an insanely silly film. Scratch that, from the first time you saw a preview or heard anyone's description of Drive Angry you knew it was an insanely silly film. In fact, after watching it, silly isn't really the right word, it's stupid. But whether it is silly or stupid or dumb or schlock or whatever other derogatory term you want to label it the other inescapable truth while viewing it is that it knows EXACTLY what it is and never even for an instant tries to be anything else. If you make it past the first two minutes of Drive Angry you have entered into a pact with the filmmakers, you have agreed to throw reason out the window and they have agreed to never try to interject reason into the movie. And that can be a good thing.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Milton (played by Mr. "I'll Make Any Movie" Cage), an all-around bad dude who, while in Hell (because he is dead and like I said, is a bad dude) sees his daughter murdered by a cult and his granddaughter kidnapped and pegged for human sacrifice in a couple of days. Milton then does what any good father would do, he escapes from Hell and goes about trying to rescue his granddaughter from the crazy satan cult by driving around the south angrily and killing a lot of people. Along the way he helps out a spunky and attractive waitress (played by "I know the name but I can't think of anything she has been in" Amber Heard, who looks great and really seems to be having a lot of fun playing Piper) who for truly inexplicable reasons sticks with Milton through his killing spree. Of course, Piper and Milton don't just have to contend with Billy Burk's cult (man, Billy Burk must really hate being seen as Bella's dad because he seems to be choosing any and every part he can find that plays to the anti-Twilight crowd) they also have to deal with William Fichtner's The Accountant, the man sent from Hell to pursue Milton and bring him back. Sex, violence, over-acting and some surprising effective comedy ensue.
Like I said, just hearing a brief description kills some brain cells.
William Fichtner Was Having The Time of His Life as The Accountant
The movie is saved, in as much as this kind of flick can be saved, how thoroughly everyone embraces its stupidity. Billy Burk plays the cult leader so ridiculously and stupidly and gleefully huge that you never feel like he is trying to be as good as Michael Parks in Red State and coming up short, he is being the goofy cult leader this movie needs, nothing more. Fichtner's The Accountant is really the role that sets and maintains the tone to perfection. He plays the role straight, but with a wink, as he goes about confronting witnesses in his pursuit, all the while telling them in passing how long they have to live. When The Accountant sees a satanic symbol branded into one of the cult members he asks "what's that supposed to be" and when the cult member responds telling him it is the sign of satan and how they are going to bring satan back to Earth The Accountant chuckles, rolls his eyes and says "funny, he never mentioned it" (as it turns out satan is just a warden of a very large prison and is a bit lonely).
As for Nicolas Cage, he's Nic Cage.
No one, EVER, would claim Drive Angry is a good movie (if you see it in 3D by the way, they do some hysterically overt 3D shots). I don't think the people who made Drive Angry would claim it is a good movie. But what it is is a movie where the audience and the filmmakers all knew what they were getting into right from the start. If this is the kind of car you want to take for a ride at midnight when you can't sleep, then you won't regret the ride.
Here are some of Fichtner's scenes just for fun. FYI, they ARE NOT edited!
To All Of You Who Complained "There Is No Way Angelina Jolie Could Beat All Those Guys Up In Salt, It's Just Too Unbelievable" I Give You Gina Carrano
Haywire (Level IV)
I almost started titled this "Yes, Gina Carrano is hot, but..." then I realized that is the way I titled Columbiana and since Zoe Saldana is hotter than Gina Carrano (both beautiful, I just prefer Zoe) it seemed a bad way to start this one. It's funny that my original thought would be to use the same opening, because in a lot of ways they are movies with similar strengths and weaknesses -- the main strength being how well the female star performs in action sequences. While the makers of Columbiana rightly made Zoe Saldana sneaky and graceful (like a cat burglar, which is why she would have made a great Catwoman) Soderberg can do something with Gina Carrano that no director has really been able to do before with a female lead -- put her in straight ahead, hand to hand fights with male stars and have her believably kick their collective asses (for the few that don't know Gina Carrano was a world champion MMA fighter). Frankly, there is a power to her fighting, her punching and her kicking that few male hollywood action stars can come close to duplicating, so much so that when she fights Ewan McGregor near the end of the movie your only thought is "he wouldn't last three seconds against her" and you feel your suspension of disbelief crumbling when the fight goes on for a few minutes. It's not just the fighting of course, it is everything about the way she moves. She's an athlete and therefore moves with a certain physical self confidence that is hard to duplicate, and it works well in her role as a freelance spy.
So if Gina Carrano in action and motion is the movies undeniable strength, where is it lacking? Critics have pointed to a lot of the issues, like:
Gina Carrano is great in action sequences and out of her depth when she just has to act (true to a degree, although I think she was good enough generally)
It was almost too Soderberg-ish, his "Oceans" style having too completely taken over the way he films action (true to a degree, particularly during a kidnapping early on that feels exactly like an Oceans 13 sequence, but I don't think anyone can claim a director as talented as Soderberg ruined a movie)
None of the male leads seemed overly invested in the movie and it felt almost like they were dropping their games so they wouldn't show up Gina Carrano (true to a degree, there was certainly a general aloofness and a dispassion to most of the performances, almost to a fault, but they were spies after all and aren't spies supposed to be aloof and dispassionate?)
No one did anything that clever and they all did things, or didn't do obvious things, that would have put an end to the plot rather quickly (true to a degree, although I could make that statement about a lot of spy thrillers, even good ones. They all lean often lean on plot devices that require a real suspension of disbelief and even logic)
I could go on and on, but the truth is none of those are the real problem (in medical terms they are the symptoms not the cause). The real problem is that this movie never does the one thing an action thriller must do (really, any movie must do), it never successfully brings you into the world. I don't know why but you always feel like you are watching a movie, watching people act, and never that you are watching a story unfold. And what happens if you aren't transported into the story? You start seeing all of the little things that you would usually ignore. You notice Gina Carrano's "acting". You notice things like, if they had the connections to have the entirety of Dublin's SWAT team to chase our hero, why didn't you call them in to get her when she was sitting in her hotel room trying to decide what to do, instead of waiting until she was on the street and could get away. You recognize the Fasbender is lacking the intensity he usually has when acting in action movies or why, when Gina Carrano has already figured out Fasbender's a bad guy, that she casually walks into a secluded room in front of him allowing him to hit her from behind. Plot holes jump out at you, the warts of performances become obvious, and the movie almost crumbles under the scrutiny of eyes that will no longer go along for the ride.
I'm sure you all have movies like this that you remember. Movies that you can't quite put your finger on why it didn't work, but it just didn't work (Russell Crowe's Robin Hood was that way). Sadly that is Haywire. I sincerely hope another director will give Gina Carrano one more chance at the action star thing, because for all of those problems I would still watch it again to see her fight (well, I would fast forward to the fight sequences, I wouldn't sit through the rest of it again).
But, that's just my opinion. And, as always, what do I know, I'm fat.
Maybe It Is Harder To Write Like Tarantino Than You Thought
Quentin Tarantino is one of my all time favorite directors without caveat or equivocation. When I watched Catch .44 last night I couldn't help but feel like Quentin Tarantino inadvertently set movie making back*. How? Because he made movies that thought of themselves as being clever. Before Tarantino that was considered bad writing, now it is considered meta or hip or some such thing. Like I said, I love Tarantino so obviously in the right hands a self congratulatory movie can work but in less talented hands, like the hands that made Catch .44, woof, it makes for some bad movie making.
The only thing that saves Catch .44 from being unwatchable is the cast. Malin Akerman is watchable and versatile as always as she leads her little gang of hot, gun toting, tough talking women that includes Nikki Reed (really trying to break out of the Twilight stereo type) and Deborah Ann Wall (not showing any of the innocence that makes her so great on True Blood). The movie is plenty slow enough to allow for elongated conversations between the three to show off how clever the writers are, but to their credit, all three women give it their all and show something between flashes and proof that they have more talent than merely looking good. Bruce Willis and Forest Whitaker are also here, chewing up scenery and following the direction of "what your character as weird as you want". Still, they are both pros and know how to make weird a little interesting. Shea Wingham and Brad Douriff even get nice little turns in bit parts.
From the disjointed timeline, to the conversations as prelude to action this movie is an homage to all things Tarantino, just with a female "crew" instead of a male one. It is always winking, always patting itself on the back, and while I like watching most of the people in it not even they could overcome material that was something other than clever, it was trite.
Catch .44 is a Level III movie.
*Three non movie examples of greatness that did long term damage to their field. First, Magic Johnson, who killed low-post basketball and the age of the center because all big men think they can dribble now and play outside. Second, Bill Simmons, who, with his relaxed and longer form writing style has convinced sports bloggers that they don't need to be "tight" when they write. Third, Picasso, by going abstract and then simple made artists feel like they didn't need to lear how to paint "realistically" and lear the techniques of good painting because they were just going to go for the weird right away (I also could have put Pollock here, but it was the same pint either way).
No, but it could have been, maybe even should have been.
One of my favorite weekly podcasts is The Firewall & Iceberg Podcast. Dan Feinberg and Allan Sepinwall, two TV critics for HitFlix.com, spend an hour or more discussing in detail everything that is happening on TV (great to listen to while you are doing mindless work). I mention this because they often say, when reviewing a TV show that isn't good, that they could seen an alternate universe where the premise or the star or some element of the show would work. I can clearly see an alternate universe where Columbiana is a crowd pleasing blockbuster. But in this universe ... in this universe it is hard for me to imagine someone who wasn't annoyed and distracted by the lack of logic, lack of common sense, lack of explanation and sheer stupidity of nearly every person and plot point. And that is a shame because anyone who watched Columbiana I'm certain can picture Zoe Saldana as an action movie star, just not here.
Note: Spoilers Ahead, If You Think It Is Possible For Columbiana To Be Ruined Don't Read On
NOT Available on Netflix - Definitely Hard To Find
Anyone who has suffered from insomnia, or even just the occasional night when you have trouble getting to sleep, has shared the experience of trying to decide if a movie they have never heard of is worth watching based on the five line description from your cable guide. Is a "silly romp" worth a few minutes of watching? Does the phrase "Brad Pitt stares in this gritty ..." make you push the select button on your remote (BTW, if a big name star is in a movie you have never heard of chances are that movie is REALLY bad)? What if you saw "a young man with a phobia of sheep returns to his family sheep farm to find his fears were justified in this horror spoof from New Zeland"? Is there any conceivable way you wouldn't watch if only for a moment? Of course there is, in fact the question is probably inverted. Fortunately I am not most people and the idea of a sheep horror movie caught my eye and I couldn't push select fast enough. And I am very glad I did.
Why was I fortunate? Well, how often do you get to see a man cowering int the back of a taxi because it is surrounded by sheep? How often does a movie try to make the sound BAAA scary? When was the last time you saw a vegetarian environmentalist become infected by genetically manipulated sheep which turns him into a carnivore and he then cries when ever he eats anything because he feels he is betraying his environmental vegetarian beliefs? Have you seen many films when another vegetarian eats a mountain oyster because they "sometimes eat seafood"? Yes, this is a film that has everything from evil brothers and scientist to a goofy, down home aunt who loves guns and is always trying to feed people hag as, the afore mentioned mountain oysters and rabbit stew.
Of course every movie of this genre will have many of those kinds of scenes and character, what separates Black Sheep is what separates every film in the spoof genre that succeeds, An indescribable sense for tone and pacing. It is a tightrope that a film maker walks when trying to make the absurd entertaining and surprising (I know that sounds oxymoronic, but it it true) and almost all fall off less than two steps in. The makers of Black Sheep make it all the way across, not without the occasional near fall and nervous moment, but they made it and that counts for a lot.
