In honor of Clive Owen’s 44th birthday, I’ll drop a DVD review of Derailed, originally published on IGN in March, 2006, upon its release. To wit:

The first release under the Weinstein brothers’ eponymous new distribution and production company, Derailed is definitely a throwback to ’80s cinema, when the threshold for on-screen twists was much lower. So much so, in fact that the “reveal” here — more a function of a sly marketing campaign, which played up the tempted infidelity angle — will actually serve as little more than a narrative hiccup for those that have heard of and are thus anticipating some brilliant and labyrinthine surprise herein.

There’s a reason this film was a bit of a domestic theatrical disappointment, grossing only $36 million Stateside, and it’s not because it’s too smart and slick for average filmgoers. Clive Owen stars as Charles Schine, a Chicago advertising executive sort of floating through life. He and his wife Deanna (The Amityville Horror‘s Melissa George) have drifted apart from one another, focusing all their attention on their pre-teen daughter, who’s on dialysis and needs either a transplant or some new, experimental drugs that both cost a lot and have yet to be approved by the FDA.

One day Charles meets Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Aniston) on a commuter train, and Lucinda pays for his fare after Charles forgets to purchase a ticket. They strike up a conversation, and when he pays her back the next day, more generally innocent but somewhat flirtatious conversation leads to an evening drink, and the two eventually make their way to a hotel for a more intimate encounter. Plans go awry, however, and their one-night stand becomes a night from hell when a stranger explodes into their room and robs them. To say more is to give away nothing exceptional save part of the narrative bent that the movie’s marketing campaign aimed to purposefully muddy… so I will say more.

The thug in question is a Frenchman named Laroche (a gleefully malevolent Vincent Cassel, lacking only the moustache to twirl), and he pistol-whips Charles and rapes Lucinda for good measure. Several weeks later, blackmail follows, with Laroche and his right-hand man Dex (rapper Xzibit) threatening to expose the pair’s infidelity unless Charles ponies up thousands of dollars. Instead of merely getting matching “Worst One-Night Stand Ever!” friendship rings or novelty T-shirts, Charles relents, pays Laroche and takes, in bitch-like fashion, an additional punch to the stomach. Laroche then has his hooks in Charles, and some weeks later makes another cash call. At this point Charles leans on his friendship with mailroom employee Winston (the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA), who agrees to scare Laroche off. Things go horribly awry, of course, and Charles is eventually forced — despite the time-honored advice of The People’s Court‘s Doug Llewellyn — to take matters into his own hands.

Adapted by Stuart Beattie from a novel by James Siegel, and directed by Mikael Hafstrom, Derailed is obviously supposed to be on some level a less willfully incendiary, thriller genre updating of the galvanized male insecurity on ripe display in Straw Dogs, yet the casting of the virile, square-jawed Owen — and his quiet but hardly cowardly performance — undercuts this notion. The compression of key dramatic turns hardly helps, either. One absolutely awful third act scene finds a character being shot, Charles having his money taken, an inquisitive hooker rolling up on the scene and the police arriving in tow all in a manner of a single minute or so. I get it. It’s supposed to be tense. It’s ludicrous, though.

There is a cathartic thrill to the tables eventually being turned, but little about Charles’ plan makes concrete sense, and the movie doesn’t particularly dote on repairing its shattered domesticity, either. This leaves one time to ponder Derailed‘s ridiculous tangential elements, like the RZA, as Winston, playing an ice hockey fan and frequenting Irish bars, or Xzibit, as Dex, writing coffee commercial jingles. (Don’t ask.)

Hafstrom points and shoots in functional if not necessarily memorable fashion (though the movie’s central seduction scene is quite well done) and Owen is perfectly passable as a leading man. The utilization of various supporting characters doesn’t make sense, though, and Aniston cycles through three hairstyles, making one wonder about re-shoots. Everything else, alas, is utterly forgettable. In that sense, Derailed proves an apt title.

Presented on a single disc in a regular Amray case, Derailed offers up a sparse collection of supplemental features. Presented in a 2.55:1 widescreen format, preserving the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition, the movie certainly looks nice on the small screen. The film’s blue-grey color palette is captured with precision and clarity, and detail is excellent close up. Blacks are deep consistent, though shadow detail could be a bit better. There are no problems with grain or compression artifacts.

Derailed features both English and French Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks (so Cassel can switch back and forth, one presumes), and they are equally solid. While Charles’ daughter’s beeping dialysis machine gets nicely foregrounded in one scene — making a dramatic point, if a little heavy-handedly — much of the rest of the movie’s mix is straightforward, with rear channels rarely engaged. English and Spanish subtitles are also available.

As for bonus material, alongside the theatrical trailer three deleted scenes total a whopping 10 minutes, mostly adding further depth and shading to the illness of Charles’ daughter via an interminable hospital scene where he’s required to tell her a story to distract the family from the gravity of the situation. There’s also a brief, one-minute bit, also set at the hospital, where Deanna confesses an affair to Charles, and he unblinkingly says that he doesn’t care. Whether part of the book or not, this smidgen of desperate parallelism is obviously designed to let Charles off the hook for his behavior, and was rightly cut. The only other bonus feature is a cursory eight-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with the cast, writer Beattie, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and director Hafstrom, who puzzlingly refers to the movie as a “Kafka nightmare.” This is all a pure back-slapping, EPK-type love-fest, but the unintentionally comedic high point comes when whitest-of-white Jennifer Aniston talks about and praises Xzibit. I don’t know quite why, but this 20 seconds had me in stitches, and almost cries out for a rental itself.

Overall, Derailed is serviceable but hardly memorable mash-up of Unfaithful, Tempted, Unlawful Entry (believe it or not) and a dozen other adulterous con flicks. While it has a few stylish set pieces early on, its reaches for Hitchcockian suspense or zeitgeist profundity come up empty-handed. C (Movie) D (Disc)

In the realm of straight-to-video, almost more than anywhere else in the movie business, ironically, topicality and zeitgeist matter. The margins are thinner, so being able to reliably turn out a particular genre “base” is quite important; there’s not the muscle of a $35 million-plus P&A budget to bail you out. Ergo, in these troubled times in which the term “bad guy” remains somewhat vague and shadowy, enter Tortured, a moral-quandry suspense drama about the psychological fraying of an undercover cop as he works a domestic underworld case.

Going by the name Jimmy Vaughn, a young, ambitious war veteran and FBI agent (Cole Hauser) undertakes a mission infiltrating a long-established underworld gang run by a mysterious, Keyser Soze-like figure named Ziggy, who has evaded the federal government for decades. Despite the warnings of caution from his bureau chief father Jack (James Cromwelll), Vaughn feels he has the strength and skills to take Ziggy down. What he doesn’t expect is the brutal initiation rites into Ziggy’s grim, violent, paranoid world. After enduring beatings and interrogations to prove trustworthy and gain admittance, Vaughn receives his task — to extract information via torture from Ziggy’s kidnapped accountant Archie Green (Laurence Fishburne), whom Ziggy alleges stole money from him.

From here, Vaughn’s double life starts to truly unravel. Already beset by doubts, his longtime girlfriend Becky (Emmanuelle Chriqui, displaying a fleeting bit of side-boob) leaves him, and the FBI psychiatrist (Kevin Pollack) he’s seeing recommends aborting the mission. Still, Vaughn plugs ahead. Horrific twists and unknown old alliances finally emerge as he dives deeper into the criminal underbelly, leading to a grim finale with lasting consequences for all involved.

Tortured is written and directed by Nolan Lebovitz (Dr. Benny, a 2003 “gynecological comedy” that as best I can determine went undistributed domestically), and it on the surface would seem a fairly disposable and anonymous slice of action drama. The cramped production schedule is evidenced in the tight framing and cramped visual scheme for the film, a lot of the who-knows-what inter-agency scenes early on come across as a bit pat, and the examples by which the movie raises points about the nature of how torture warps those who commit it are fairly boilerplate (post-coital arguments with a teary Becky, nightmarish visions of Archie talking about his family). But the film is also fairly well cast (Jon Cryer and James Denton also have small roles), and peppered with some smart dialogue. It’s ironic that the moral inquiry portion of the movie (and the reason for its double-meaning title) doesn’t play nearly as well as the more traditional, Donnie Brasco-type drama, which is nicely layered. A coiled ball of swallowed feeling, Hauser is so-so in the lead role. Lebovitz, though, effectively surrounds him, and also works in a couple nice twists to keep things lively and engaging.

Housed in a regular Amray case housed in a cardboard slipcover, Tortured comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with audio tracks in English, Thai, French and Spanish, and a vast array of subtitles in those languages plus Korean and Chinese. The disc’s sole bonus feature is a 19-minute making-of featurette which includes interviews with almost all the chief players, behind-the-scenes and on-screen. Lebovitz makes an articulate case for what interested and inspired him to make the movie in the first place, and Fishburne talks about having done another movie in which he doled out torture (that would be 21, actually), and wanting to experience the other side of the moral equation. To purchase the movie on DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)

Settling down with an old movie, one wouldn’t necessarily expect the over/under on Robert Loggia being called “a spic bum” to be set at two occurrences, but that’s totally true of 1957’s The Garment Jungle, a quite serviceable, black-and-white pro-union urban thriller from director Vincent Sherman.

Set on the mean streets of New York City’s garment district (“a teeming world of conflict, brutal competition and terror,” as the opening voiceover hard-sells us), the film centers around returning war veteran Alan Mitchell (Kerwin Matthews, a sort of cross between Fred MacMurray and Paul Rudd), an only son who discovers that the fabric and dress business owned by his father Walter (Lee J. Cobb) is being controlled by the mob. The movie opens with Walter, vehemently anti-union, having a heated argument with his pro-union designer and business partner, who then plunges 27 floors to his death in an elevator “accident.”

Walter isn’t explicitly aware of his partner’s erasure — he in fact is legitimately heartbroken — but he is in a way complicit in his death, having for years used Mafioso muscle, no questions asked, to crack heads and maintain the status quo. Times are changing, though, and Walter’s beginning to feel the squeeze of that change. Enter Alan, who wants to finally learn the ropes of his father’s built-from-scratch business. While he at first finds some of the charges hard to believe, Alan is at least willing to listen to labor leaders out to unionize the whole district, including headstrong organizer Tulio Renato (Loggia), whose fiery wife Theresa (Gia Scala) constantly worries for his safety. When bodies start turning up, Alan is even more apt to believe the worst about the puppet-masters controlling his father’s company. So he sets out to cleave them from the business, eventually enlisting the assistance of dress buyer Lee Hackett (Valerie French), an air-quote friend of the widowed Walter.

Written by Harry Kleiner, based on articles by Lester Velie, The Garment Jungle is fairly on-the-nose with respect to both dialogue and structure. There aren’t many surprises within the narrative, and those that do pop up are easily foreshadowed. In essence, this is a meat-and-potatoes urban issue drama, but director Sherman helps give it some pop, as do committed, intense performances by Loggia and Cobb. Matthews, for his part, is the perfect Everyman foil — a squeaky-clean guy discovering the world is a fucked-up place. The loss of innocence and subsequent discovery of steel-backed resolve may both be telegraphed, but it’s done in an engaging enough manner so as not to be a turn-off.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Garment Jungle comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with complementary English and French Dolby digital audio tracks, and optional subtitles in each language. Apart from the theatrical trailer and static scene selections, the only supplemental bonus feature is a “Martini Minute” segment (running 90 seconds, actually) entitled “How to Play the Leading Man.” This basically is a mash-up of clips from other leading male turns in other films in the “Martini Movies” series (Sony’s packaging strategy for a handful of catalogue titles), and has very little to do directly with The Garment Jungle. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)

Written, directed and produced by David Dugan and narrated by Harrison Ford, Lord of the Ants profiles E.O. Wilson, an emeritus professor at Harvard still going through his “little savage” phase of boyhood exploration of the natural world. This soft-spoken Southerner is an acclaimed advocate for ants, biological diversity and the controversial extension of Darwinian ideas to human society.

A gray-haired, crinkle-smiled 78-year-old who looks a pinch like a less irascible Ralph Nader, Wilson is renowned for two seemingly unrelated roles. First, as the “ant man,” his infectious enthusiasm for his scientific specialty has encouraged many house dwellers to reach for a magnifying glass instead of ant traps when faced with these tiny invaders. (One gets the feeling that David Lynch is especially a fan, for those who recall his experiment with a small head fashioned out of cheese and turkey.) Secondly, as a lightning rod in academic circles for his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Wilson put forth the notion that evolutionary principles could explain large swatches of social behavior throughout the animal kingdom — including in humans, an idea that many detractors found uncomfortably similar to those that fueled the eugenics movement.

Yet these two elements of Wilson’s work, ants and sociobiology, are intimately connected, as this engrossing, hour-long NOVA title ably showcases, since it was Wilson’s understanding of the social nature of ant society that gave rise to his ideas of sociobiology. An engaging portrait of a ceaselessly active scientist and eloquent writer who’s accumulated two Pulitzer Prizes among his many other honors, Lord of the Ants but skims the surface of its subject, it’s fairly true, but it does leave one with some interesting questions to ponder on their own time.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Lord of the Ants is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen. Apart from closed captions and video descriptions for the visually impaired, the only special feature is a small bundle of downloadable materials for educators. To order this title or any DVD or VHS release from distributor WGBH Boston Video, including A Walk to Beautiful, The Secret Law of Attraction or Cracking the Maya Code, phone (800) 949-8670 or click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)