The punishingly witless action flick Homefront is more a movie from the 1980s than of these times. Starring in a script from Expendables mate Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham delivers all the expected scowls and growls, but there’s no originality, nuance or even dumb-fun catharsis to recommend this inept exercise in punch-’em-up justice.
Statham (skating through this material, his glowering charisma set comfortably on autopilot) stars as Phil Broker, an undercover DEA agent by way of Interpol who’s working to bring down a Louisiana biker gang peddling meth when things go sideways. Flash forward a couple years, to when retired single dad Broker’s 10-year-old daughter Maddy (Izabela Vidovic) has a schoolyard altercation with a bullying classmate. The offending kid’s junkie mother, Cassie (Kate Bosworth), takes exception and leans on her meth-cooking, boat mechanic brother Gator, (James Franco), to try to intimidate the small town newcomer.
When Gator finds out about Broker’s past, however, he sees an opportunity. Hoping to ingratiate himself with those who can expand his little drug empire, Gator taps his carnal acquaintance Sheryl (Winona Ryder) to offer up Broker’s location and identity to the imprisoned gangster whose son was killed in the aforementioned undercover sting gone wrong. Said crime boss then dispatches an emissary, Cyrus (Chuck Zito), who turns out to be even more of a psychopath than Gator, putting Broker and many others in danger.
Homefront is adapted from one of a series of novels by Chuck Logan featuring the character of Broker, and there’s the core of an interesting, layered study of modern-day rural rot here — of a morally compromised sheriff who probably doesn’t really want the worst for his town, and other characters who at various points recognize the danger of things spinning out of control. Any subtext from the novel, though, is sacrificed at the altar of lowest-common-denominator stupidity.
Stallone’s screenplay is full of empty, puffed-up talk of “backwoods reckoning.” It doesn’t effectively sketch out Gator’s villainous plot, and if his absence of a good plan is really the point, it doesn’t successfully exploit that either. Instead, the script ineffectually passes the baton of chief threat back and forth between Gator and Cyrus, tossing in some tone-deaf matchmaking instincts on the part of Maddy, who surely wouldn’t mind her dad getting together with school psychiatrist Susan (Rachelle Lefevre). The fumbled result plays like a dumb-jock, steroidal riff on Walking Tall, or a cousin of 1989 cult classic Road House, minus any of the latter’s fun or sense of self-awareness.
Cinematographer Theo Van De Sande captures what pungent, on-location humidity of the Louisiana bayou he can, but is undercut by the dictums of action-thriller filmmaking. Director Gary Fleder has a filmography that leans more on dramatic and psychological thrillers, a fact that certainly shows when it comes time for Homefront‘s fisticuffs and explosions, which are terribly staged, with Fleder and editor Padraic McKinley committing spatial awareness homicide via quick cuts from contrasting angles.
Housed in a regular plastic blue case, Homefront comes to home video in a two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, complete with an Ultraviolet digital HD download code for the movie, allowing for playback on televisions, computers, tablets and smartphones. In addition to the requisite chapter stops, supplemental features consist of a three-minute EPK featuring a few interview clips with the major players, plus an eight-minute-plus collection of deleted scenes that focuses chiefly on Broker’s relationship with Maddy. To purchase the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack via Amazon, click here; to purchase via Half, click here. Or if brick-and-mortar retail establishments are still your thing, by all means, have a go at that. D+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
Daily Archives: March 21, 2014
Enemy
The chance to portray twins or at-odds characters in a single film is catnip for actors of a certain level of ambition, though not without potential pitfalls. The impulse to chew scenery or present grand differentiation is often difficult to resist. Enemy, though, which reteams Jake Gyllenhaal with Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve (though it was actually shot before that film), finds the actor trading in similarly subdued and thoughtful tones as he did in last year’s well received kidnapping drama. And, adapted from the late Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s 2004 novel The Double, the film offers up more than just a meaty pair of roles for Gyllenhaal. A woozy, mesmeric, danger-infused rumination on identity that triggers tripwires of personal panic and awakened sexual compulsion, Enemy is like a cold glass of water to the face of cinematic formalism. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (A24 Films, R, 90 minutes)
Divergent
Divergent, the latest big screen stab at adapted young adult franchise lucre, is about a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t fit into one group, who is several different things at the same time, and at odds with herself. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the film, based on the first in a series of best-selling novels by Veronica Roth, is itself two things, and with much friction between them — attractively mounted and boasting some nice performances, but also peddling a thunderously stupid conceit whose dodgy details ask viewers to ignore what they know of basic human psychology.
Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future within a walled-off Chicago, where, based on personality attributes and virtues, people are divided into five distinct factions as they pass out of adolescence: Erudite, who are the intelligent; Amity, who are the kind and happy; Candor, who are the honest; Abegnation, who are the selfless; and Dauntless, who are the brave. (Oh, there are also those who are factionless, but they’re basically homeless and invisible within this story.)
Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) and her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) are of the ruling Abegnation clan, but disappoint their parents (Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn) when they take their government-mandated personality tests and then choose other clans. Tris’ test actually showed her to possess traits of multiple factions (hence the movie’s title), but this is rare and must be guarded as a secret, she’s advised in hushed tones. Tris opts for Dauntless, and while training with a bunch of new pledges under a taskmaster, Four (Theo James), she eventually stumbles across a conspiracy by Erudite leader Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) to enlist a compromised Dauntless battalion in an overthrow of the Abegnation.
It’s easy, on a certain level, to understand the inherent young adult appeal of the source material, which trumpets emboldening life lessons like, “Trust yourself!” and “You are more than just one thing!” Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay may have other failings, yet it does a good job of establishing these bona fides out of the gate. But there are all sorts of things that just don’t track, starting with feebly delineated faction inter-relationships and the fact that the entire social order of this world hinges on this aptitude test for teenagers that is binding and super-important (“Faction before blood!”)… except, though, when it’s not, since kids are in the end free to choose their faction. Also, the Dauntless are supposed to protect everyone with an equal level of respect, but some of their members mock the factionless, which undercuts the rigidity of these distinctions and makes it just seem like these are arbitrary clubs with the typical spread of asshole members.
More fundamentally, though, Divergent asks viewers to accept — nay, embrace — a very stupid and poorly articulated worldview. The movie assumes that lost in whatever war that occurred 100 years earlier was all sense of what was known about genuine human behavior — that in the aftermath of a great and violent conflict pitting nation states against one another, the universal salve designed by survivors was… more tribalism, basically? When you have leaders and proponents of the faction system, who are attempting to consolidate their power grip over said mechanism but basically preserve this status quo, says things like, “It goes against human nature, but that’s the weakness we need to eradicate,” it begs the question — do you think your audience is brainless?
Counterbalancing (to a degree) this innately flawed logic is a very attractive technical package. Director Neil Burger oversees a visual palette that’s pleasingly engaging, poised somewhere halfway between grungy disrepair and futuristic rebirth. It helps Divergent feel a bit more real, like there are things with regards to infrastructure that people would get around to fixing (trains, for instance), and other stuff where they’d be like, “Ahh, fuck it.”
Woodley and especially James (looking like a cross between James Van Der Beek and Dave Franco) deliver nice performances, too, a fact which helps mitigate the awfulness of having to watch Winslet play a villain whose motivations are shiftless. But large swaths of Divergent don’t really work, at least not as a stand-alone movie. Conflict takes too long to develop; there’s not really enough intrigue here to hook and hold those outside of the tween and tween-sympathetic set.
Broadly, it’s true that Divergent lays enough groundwork to leave one more sincerely interested in the idea of future installments than a lot of other movies of its ilk. And if one could turn off their brain and simply enjoy the film as one girl’s future-camp coming-of-age story amidst a bunch of fanciful physical fitness routines, it might almost work. Unfortunately, Divergent has to keep reminding viewers of the stupidity at its core, by way of the outside world. That proves a recipe for failure. (Summit/Lionsgate, PG-13, 140 minutes)