Sometimes perfectly met expectations are a great thing. Case in point: Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Written and directed by Michael McCullers, a Saturday Night Live veteran and co-writer on the last two Austin Powers flicks, the comedy reunites the former “Weekend Update” co-anchors, and lets them butt heads and play off one another in exactly the mode, tone and fashion one could have predicted from the trailer, or a logline synopsis of the plot. And that’s enough, that’s what best serves this concept and story.

Kate Holbrook (Fey), a newly promoted vice president for Round Earth, an organic market chain, feels her biological clock ticking. Thirty-seven years old and unmarried, Kate has everything else in her life in perfect order: a nice apartment in a tony section of Philadelphia, a pony-tailed guru of a boss, Barry (Steve Martin), who values her, and of course all the financial security that brings. After trying to conceive through artificial insemination, and being told her chances are slim, Kate considers adoption, but is put off by the wait.

She then turns to a surrogacy center run by Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), which sets up a meeting with Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) and her common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard). Impressed by both Kate’s “aura” and her bank account, Angie agrees to be her surrogate. When Angie’s pregnancy test brings good news, Kate goes into nesting mode, but her well-organized plans are thrown into disarray when Angie shows up at her doorstep after a fight with Carl. All of Kate’s structure and patience is tested by the loudmouthed Angie, an under-educated caffeine addict, and the working definition of a “downmarket” voter who would surely be targeted by Hillary Clinton in a direct-mail campaign. Naturally, there’s also a potential love interest, in the form of juice shop owner Rob Ackerman (Greg Kinnear).

Fey’s innate likability and self-effacing demeanor keep Kate from ever becoming shrewish or overbearing. Poehler of course specializes in playing rude, screwy and chaotic, and here she plays the sort of woman who is just a rung-and-a-half, maybe two rungs up the socioeconomic ladder from one of the chicks from Rock of Love. The pair’s shared chemistry is what makes the movie work, and gives it some lift. Martin, meanwhile, is also a hoot, “transferring [his] success” by touching foreheads and gazing wordlessly into his workers’ eyes. Baby Mama doesn’t have a lot of complications, but it is witty enough, well paced, and tailored to its stars’ strengths and charms, which is all that it need be, truth told. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)

Made for only $9 million, and released in the summer of 2004 the week after The Bourne Supremacy, as rib-nudging counter-programming to the seriousness of both The Manchurian Candidate and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, New Line’s raunchy, pot-driven teen comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle may be one of the more simultaneously unlikely and inspired movies to spawn a spin-off in the past decade-plus.

After courting high school and college kids in coded fashion (“Fast food, high times” was the poster’s tagline), the movie grossed a respectable $18 million in theaters. But it became a true sensation on DVD, where a cultish following developed around the wild hijinks of the two namesake New Jersey pals (John Cho and Kal Penn) as they attempted to sate a case of the munchies, and in the process crossed paths with both a cheetah and the erstwhile Doogie Howser, M.D. — Neil Patrick Harris, playing an obscenity-spouting, drugged-up, hyper-masculinized version of himself.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay ups the ante even further. Picking up right at the conclusion of the first movie, the guys head to Amsterdam to track down Harold’s crush, Maria (Paula Garcés). En route, they bump into Kumar’s former girlfriend Vanessa (One Tree Hill‘s Danneel Harris), now engaged. After Kumar’s smokeless, battery-operated bong is mistaken for a bomb, though, he and Harold are assumed to be terrorists, and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Harsh forms of subjugation that even former Justice Department official John Yoo couldn’t have crafted a loophole memorandum around seemingly await the pair, but they escape, and make their way back to the States.

On the lam, they make their way west to Texas. The intent is to seek help from Vanessa’s fiancé, and make good on his professional connections; Kumar has the secret intention, though, of busting up their marriage. It’s not long before a chance reunion with Neil Patrick Harris occurs. Meanwhile, the entire time, federal agent Ron Fox (Rob Corddry, above right, playing one of the most brazenly racist film characters in recent memory) is feverishly hunting down Harold and Kumar. He finally catches them, but they again escape his grasp, and end up meeting with the president, and helping him work through some daddy issues.

The writers of the first movie, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz, make their joint (get it?) directorial debut here, and improve upon the original in virtually every way. Naturally, things are driven by some of the same coarse, rapid-fire patter (i.e., “Shotgun anus!”), and certain other structural similarities remain; in both movies the guys have a moment with nature, and come across a strange married couple living in seclusion. And then there’s Neil Patrick Harris, who is an integral, if zonked part of the films’ careening, out-of-left-field charm.

Stoner flicks of course have a rich screen history all their own, from Dude, Where’s My Car?, How High and Half Baked to of course just about anything starring Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. But that’s just a small part of the world of Harold and Kumar — the spark to their fire. While weed was a big part of the comic misunderstandings that fueled the plot of the first movie, and works in similar fashion here as well, the fact is that both films operate on a higher plane than an awful lot of sludgy spliff flicks.

The drugs — and in particular Kumar’s voracious appetite — are a means to an end. They’re what fuels the outrageousness of the scenarios (a “bottomless party” in Miami, Harris branding a prostitute, sky-diving to safety over Crawford, Texas), and otherwise allows Schlossberg and Hurwitz to tackle sacred cows and semi-topical socio-political humor. The relationship at the core of both movies is essentially a riff on The Odd Couple, with Kumar living sloppily and in the moment, and Harold fretting about consequences.

The nerviness of the film is impressive. There’s a KKK beer party in the woods, and Corddry’s agent attempts to wheedle a confession out of an African-American by opening up a can of grape soda and pouring it out on the ground; the ethnicity of its leads gives its makers some extra leeway, no doubt. But Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay mostly works not because of its baser instincts (of which there is plenty of indulgence), but because it’s well cast, wildly written and full of good, old-fashioned comedic friction. That’s a formula for success, no matter the age, ethnicity or drug intake level of your protagonists. (New Line, R, 100 minutes)

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Oren Jacoby’s fascinating documentary explores some of the massive amount of violence and ill done in God’s name throughout history — a skipped-stone journey of remembrance and reckoning. Starting with the story of conservative Christian ideology being peddled at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (where fliers for Mel Gibson’s The Passion were handed out, and Ted Haggard’s New Life ministries touted) and winding back in time, the movie follows author and former Roman Catholic priest James Carroll as he interweaves his own family history with a grander inquisition into faith, and in particular the nasty, tangled intersection between Christianity and Judaism.

Neither naked provocation nor burrowing analysis is a part of Jacoby’s agenda here. In fact, as soon as the film alights on some engrossing historical nugget — Roman general Constantine’s 310 A.D. conversion, which ushered in the iconography of the cross — it’s just as quickly off to something else. This occasionally makes for some minor frustration, since one wants a deeper probe and massage of certain topics. Carroll, though, is a fantastic and articulate guide, and this exceedingly contemplative and engrossing work is both topically important — warning of what happens when military might and religious fervor are mixed — and intellectually stimulating as all get out. For more information on the film, click here. (First Run, unrated, 95 minutes)

The civil rights struggle holds thousands of stories, and this
clear-eyed documentary focuses on St. Augustine, Florida, which in 1963
and ’64 found itself at the center of this great social upheaval. Much
of the movie centers around the business establishment primarily
targeted in the protest, the Monson Motor Lodge, and embittered, now 81-year-old owner
James Brock (below right), makes for an interesting interview subject, along
with former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and other former field organizers of the demonstrations.

Directed by Jeremy Dean, Dare Not Walk Alone successfully avoids the trappings of many well-meaning civil rights docs that serve only as grief mops for white liberal guilt. This movie comes by its solicited emotions honestly, simply, plaintively. Eschewing overly explicative narration, it isn’t afraid to trade in silences, or let 8mm or newsreel footage unfold under a trip-hop spiritual beat. The effect is often mesmerizing, and certainly heartrending; it’s the grandness of history writ in personal strokes.

Still, there are a few small bumps; a little more than halfway into its running time, the film makes a hairpin, and not entirely convincing, turn into the present day, tying the story of the allure of hip-hop’s upward social mobility with current-day St. Augustine residents, where over a quarter of the African-American population lives in poverty. It’s not so much a stretch to try to tie together the ugly history of racial divide with a gaping socioeconomic chasm that still exists, it’s just that it’s not foreshadowed or particularly smoothly interwoven here. One feels like they’ve been jerked out of one movie and put into another one. That whiplash is almost forgotten and entirely forgiven, however, with moving closing footage of a church reconciliation ceremony for African-American parishioners turned away from shared worship 40 years earlier. For more information on the film, click here. (Indican Pictures, unrated, 71 minutes)

Lost in all the parsed, leading man analysis of the recent trend of schlubby, “beta-male” comedies, largely pioneered under the purview of multi-hyphenate filmmaker Judd Apatow, is the fact that movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad — which was at its core about high school male separation anxiety — have all been willing to heartily embrace, and indeed exploit, the theatrical emotionality of their characters’ fears and pain. It’s that same sense of stringently self-effacing humor that’s at the heart of the success of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a ribald comedy about a regular guy caught up in the spin cycle of a relationship flame-out with a much more famous gal.



Directed by Apatow protégé Nicholas Stoller (a writer on Undeclared), Forgetting Sarah Marshall centers on composer Peter Bretter (Jason Segel, also the movie’s screenwriter), who’s labored outside of the limelight of his namesake, longtime girlfriend, an up-and-coming television star (Kristen Bell, above left). He’s the awkwardly lingering, purse-holding guy barked at by paparazzi to get out of the photo… until, that is, Sarah does the unthinkable, and breaks up with him.

Emotionally devastated, Peter tries to lose himself in a couple meaningless flings, but finds no solace there, so, against the advice of friend and stepbrother Brian (Bill Hader), he takes a trek to Hawaii. There, he runs into Sarah, who’s vacationing with new beau, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, above right), a libidinous, unapologetically self-centered enviro-rocker who comes off a bit like the lost Gallagher triplet. Peter also meets Rachel (Mila Kunis, of That ’70s Show), the very pleasant and very cute hotel concierge, and thus the opportunity for all sorts of serial awkwardness is born.

There’s an interesting undercurrent of abandonment and male depression at being subjugated to his mate in matters of career that comes surging to the forefront in one scene late in the movie, where Sarah and Peter rehash their relationship and she (almost tearfully) asserts how hard she tried to punch through his hermetic veneer, with everything from self-help books to sex seminars. Nothing else much in the film touches upon this provocative meme like this tantalizing scene — a real shot to the solar plexus — but in the end it doesn’t much matter. Even if it often seems comprised of conveniently strung-together set pieces rather than a free-flowing story of open possibility, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is well cast, powered by affable performances and consistently funny. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Universal, R, 111 minutes)

In 1989, Winona Ryder appeared alongside Christian Slater in Heathers,
written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehman, and the result
was akin to a bunker-penetrating bombshell — something that bore
results with a bit of time. A darkly comedic attack on the cozy pieties present in most teen flicks, Heathers — an even more wickedly canted take-down of adolescent social cliques than its most recent descendant, Mean Girls
— assayed popularity, teen suicide and downright sociopathic behavior
with equal, cold-water-to-the-face irreverence. Though the film grossed
only a bit above $1 million in theaters, it became a sensation in the
rental and nascent sell-thru market — the very definition of a cult
hit.

Sex and Death 101
represents a reunion between Ryder and Waters. And while she isn’t the
lead, per se, it is the most many fans will have had an opportunity to
see from a “real” Ryder in some time, after several indie flicks, a
small role in the anthology comedy The Ten and a prominent role in Richard Linklater’s rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly.
Weird, funny, engaging and spiritedly thoughtful even if not always
successful, the pairing seems to celebrate a certain reunion of like
minds.

Waters’ first film behind the camera since 2001’s Happy Campers, his only other directing credit, Sex and Death 101 centers around Roderick Blank (Something Different‘s
Simon Baker), a successful advertising executive who, just weeks before
his marriage to Fiona (Julie Bowen), gets a mysterious email that
contains the names of everyone he’s ever had or will have sex with, 101 women in
total. The rub is that it doesn’t end with his wife-to-be — in fact,
she’s nowhere near the last name. In the midst of this “sacrilegious
epiphany,” and finding no relief from a trio of bizarro-world
comptrollers (Robert Wisdom, Patton Oswalt and Tanc Sade) from whom the
list originated, Roderick throws himself headlong into the sheer,
delicious variety (centerfolds, bisexual astronauts) of his predicted
future, but soon finds matters dulled without the thrill of the chase,
and even worse when a new, true love (Leslie Bibb) turns out not to be
on the list. All this is crosscut with and eventually complicated by,
meanwhile, the story of a woman, known only as “Death Nell” (Ryder),
who’s gaining a media following as a murderous femme fatale, putting
all sorts of bad men in comas.

From start to conclusion, Sex and Death 101
is an exercise in wheel-spinning hijinks much more than any analysis.
(“I’m sure there’s some logical explanation for all this, but I’m not
going to wait around for it,” says Roderick at one point.) Waters has
in the past described his personal sensibility as “Bunuel meets Caddyshack,” and that description aptly captures some of the wild tonal shifts that mark Sex and Death 101
— a movie that includes a gross-out bait-and-switch reminiscent of
Stifler’s clandestine closet hook-up in American Wedding, but also
sincere questions and insight about the existential crises to be found
in knowing beforehand one’s lovers (and, by extension, non-lovers). How
much of life, and the appropriation of our time, is in pursuit or
purchase of these tangible acts? While Baker is the lens through which
the story is told, Ryder is its scythe-bearing, no-BS conscience, and a
late diner scene in particular offers up powerful proof of (no pun
intended here) her ability to kill softly.

In the end, Sex and Death 101
isn’t so much profound in and of itself as it is a fun, sloppy
treatment of a profoundly interesting premise. It’s a movie that feels like it should
be reverse-adapted into a book. As a reunion project between Waters and
Ryder, though, it feels right, leaving one wanting for thirds. For the
full original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Anchor Bay/Avenue Pictures, R, 116 minutes)

From the hoo-ah! delivery of its lines to a parade of scrupulously
groomed facial hair and tattoos, machismo comes oozing out of every
pore of Street Kings, a corrupt cop drama that expends so much energy
trying to convince audiences that it’s hardcore that it rather quickly
devolves into serial silliness.

Los Angeles Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is the stalest of clichés — a boozing, world-weary police officer with a dead wife. He’s also the more-than-willing tip of the spear for his boss, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), a social-climbing captain with an eye on higher office. When there are issues that need to be taken care of without the hassle of warrants and pesky paperwork, Ludlow is more than happy to shoot first, and let his captain vouch for him and answer questions later.

Things come to head, though, when Internal Affairs Captain James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) starts poking around. Then bad goes to worse when Ludlow’s whistle-blowing ex-partner (Terry Crews), with whom he had a very nasty falling out, gets brutally murdered with Ludlow on the scene. Shifted to a pencil-pushing desk job, Ludlow steels himself to settle the score, but finds the hunt for the chief suspects more complicated than usual. Forced to go up against the corrupt culture of which he’s been a part his entire his entire career, Ludlow is left not knowing whom to trust.

Noir heavyweight James Ellroy has a story and script credit on Street Kings‘ much-tinkered-on screenplay, but don’t let that — or the movie’s heavily peddled list of co-stars, which includes some requisite eye candy (7 Dias‘ Martha Higareda), a couple holding-deal 20th Century Fox favorites (Laurie, Chris Evans) and a pair of hip-hop musicians (Common, The Game) — fool one into thinking that this film has either the involving, ensemble, labyrinthine swirl of L.A. Confidential or the menacing punch of Training Day, the two movies with which it most desperately wants to be associated. (Other similar films include To Live and Die in L.A., Dark Blue and Dirty, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.)

In fact, Street Kings evinces no particular insight or thought other than the sum of its component commercial parts. It’s that attempt to create an easily marketable genre piece that quite obviously led Fox Searchlight and the film’s producers to the doorstep of Training Day‘s writer and Street Kings‘ helmer, David Ayer, who made his directorial debut with the similarly gritty Harsh Times, but can’t be judged one way or another here, so convoluted is the story.

There’s a certain credibility in some of the film’s detail, and its salty, politically incorrect dialogue. “You dress white, talk black and drive Jew, so how am I supposed to tell (your ethnicity)?” spits Ludlow early on, baiting some Korean bad guys into beating him up. But the conspiracies on display in Street Kings are so hollow, and its characters, particularly Wander, are required to so frequently verbalize their supposedly illicit intentions or deeds that any legitimate tension or sense of believability simply evaporates.

Appreciatively, a few new unintentionally hilarious “Keanuisms” (“This thing you want, you think you want, you don’t want!”) get minted along the way, but it’s long before the finale involving both a long-winded explication of the cover-up that’s just been unraveled and a character proudly displaying his secret, wall-hidden stash of cash, guns and other valuables that Street Kings has moved from passingly ridiculous to boring to flat-out ludicrous. For the full original review, from Reelz, click here. (Fox Searchlight, R, 108 minutes)

Adapted from Wendy Orr’s same-named children’s novel, Nim’s Island tells the story of 11-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine), a precocious girl who lives alone on a remote island in the South Pacific with her widowed, marine biologist father, Jack Rusoe (Gerard Butler, of 300). The lack of human companionship doesn’t bother them, though — Nim plays with and talks to her pet lizard and sea lion, and enthusiastically devours a once-a-month shipment of adventure novels featuring a swashbuckling, fedora-sporting character named Alex Rover.

But when a storm unexpectedly sweeps her father out to sea, Nim finds herself truly alone, and scared. A series of research email queries from the real-life author Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), in actuality an agoraphobic recluse living in San Francisco, awakens, to degrees, adventurous and heroic impulses in both parties. As Nim looks to protect her island home from the intrusive tourism inroads of Buccaneer Cruise Lines — a company peddling virginal beach expeditions to their loud, gawking clientele — Alexandra faces up to her own considerable fears, packs a suitcase full of Progresso soup and Purell hand sanitizer, and embarks on a far-flung voyage to help her young fan.

More intimately scaled than a lot of other recent children’s book adaptations, the sweet-natured and light-hearted Nim’s Island nonetheless achieves a nice hold over its audience, courtesy in no small part to Barry Robison’s superb production design. Co-directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin (Little Manhattan), the movie is pitched just a little to the left of naturalistic but it’s never so outlandish as to come off as completely unrealistic, as long as one is prepared to make a few acquiescences — mostly with regards to the interacting-with-animals bits.

The obvious touchstone here is Disney’s 1960 family adventure classic Swiss Family Robinson, a sick-day staple for many a kid courtesy of its theatrical reissue and subsequent VHS peddling in the 1980s. (There are a few brief allusions to that movie, and Nim and her father’s last name, Rusoe, is another nod of homage, to Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale Robinson Crusoe.) Many other movies, though — from Matilda and Zathura to Jumanji and even The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep — share the same sort of fantastical, flight-of-fancy imagination that powers this movie. While Nim’s Island is in the end far less explicitly effects-driven than some of those films, it does open and close with hand-crafted credit sequences that frames this tale as a metaphorical yarn as much as anything else.

As for the performances, Breslin is suitably bright-eyed, and energetic. Butler, meanwhile, has great fun portraying both Jack and the more rugged, roguish Alex, who appears both in Nim’s imagination during her reading and in several spirited arguments with Alexandra, who is the antithesis of the best-selling character of her own creation. The movie also benefits greatly from a pitch-perfect manic turn by Foster, who knows how to take formulaic bits of slapstick and uptight unease and make them ring amusingly true.

Nim’s Island isn’t without a few moments of over-familiarity, and in some ways it’s actually demure when compared to a lot of other movies aimed these days chiefly at kids — which may be a bit of a strike for those raised on the Harry Potter films and The Chronicles of Narnia. Its greatest success, though, is the manner in which it taps into the pleasurable feeling of awakened imagination that surges during adolescence. Rekindling fond memories of childhood is never a bad thing. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Fox Walden, PG, 94 minutes)

Cut from loosely the same cloth as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg, the exquisitely French (in every sense of the phrase)
mini-musical Love Songs, which played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last year, tells a tale of “indigestible love,” in
the form of longtime Parisian couple Ismaël (Louis Garrel, below right) and Julie (Swimming Pool‘s Ludivine Sagnier, below left),
and their recently added third lover, Alice (Clotilde Hesme). How
they got to this point no one seems quite certain, and just as up in
the air is where things are headed. When unforeseen tragedy strikes,
though, everyone copes in different ways.

In mostly rearranging the preexistent pop songs of Alex Beaupain and having his cast perform them in intimate, naturalistic registers, writer-director Christophe Honoré (Ma Mere, Dans Paris) crafts a few very effective lit-pop scenes of quarter-life ambivalence, but the overall cumulative effect is a bit twee. Nothing much here cuts psychologically deeply, so Ismaël’s fraught relationship with Julie’s family, and his subsequent emotional meandering come off as hollow. In fact, so concerned with self-analysis yet totally free of any tangible angst are Love Songs‘ main characters that one might feel the entire movie — a cinematic valentine-cum-diagnosis — could just easily be performed by their therapists. Still, the work here is pretty engaging and delightful, if some of the arcs a bit dubious in their direction. For the slightly truncated original review, from CityBeat, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

In 1998, well-reviewed cardsharp flick Rounders, starring Ed Norton and Matt Damon, grossed under $23 million its entire run. Director Robert Luketic’s 21, on the other hand, outperformed that in only three days.

The film made a big splash this past weekend, refusing to hold in the high-teens, and instead rushing all the way to a $24.1 million opening at roughly 2,650 theaters, easily outgrossing spoof flick Superhero Movie, despite that film playing on more than 300 more screens. The rise in blackjack and poker as both a recreational pastime and somewhat unlikely spectator sport (more on this in a moment) has something to do with 21‘s better-than-expected success, since distributor Sony reported over half the film’s audience was comprised of those 25 and under, mostly males. But clearly this movie — about a motley group of can-do M.I.T. kids and their roguish professor taking Las Vegas casinos for a spin with a complex card-counting-and-probability scheme — also tapped into a hearty aspirant vein. That it’s based on real events, too, only likely increased fall enrollment in statistical variance classes in colleges across the country.

The story centers on Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess, above left, of Across the Universe), a brilliant but decidedly middle-class student and son of single working mother who, needing money for medical school, finds himself recruited to join an extracurricular group that most definitely isn’t listed in the student directory. Fronted and relentlessly drilled by unorthodox math professor and stats genius Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), a quintet of the school’s most gifted students — including the sexy Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth) — head to Vegas every weekend, armed with fake IDs and an intricate system of signals that tilt the odds of blackjack in their collective favor.

At first Ben only wants to set himself up for debt-free doctoral studies, should a much-needed scholarship not come through. Seduced by the money and upgrade in lifestyle in affords, him, though, Ben begins to push the limits. When he reneges on the agreed-upon protocol and costs Micky some money, his former mentor harshly turns on Ben. This leaves him and his peers in a difficult position, trying to quickly earn back the lump-sum nut they’d built up. The challenge becomes not only keeping the numbers straight, but staying one step ahead of the casinos’ menacing, old-school enforcer, Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne).

Chalk it up to a need for fraternal diversion in the midst of a cruel world, or perhaps just the proliferation of cable sports channels desperate for new programming, but over the past five to seven years poker (celebrity, professional and otherwise) has experienced a surge in popularity. It’s become a staple of both the college relaxation circuit, and a surprisingly durable form of spectator entertainment in its own right. Las Vegas and Atlantic City have benefited (tourism is up 17 and 11 percent, respectively in the last half-decade), but so have any number of ancillary market players, from videogame manufacturers to how-to authors.

Still, despite the spike in popularity, recent cardsharp and gambling movies haven’t always made a killing at the box office. Sports bookie flick Two for the Money did under $23 million in the fall of 2005, despite the presence of Matthew McConaughey and Al Pacino. Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana’s Lucky You, meanwhile, wasn’t so lucky, grossing a meager $5.7 million last spring after being traded around from release date to release date like a low-value chip by distributor Warner Bros.

Sturgess, for those that didn’t see Across the Universe, reaffirms himself as a sympathetic, highly likable screen presence — perhaps even more so than in that film because here he’s front and center, without any outlandishly colorful production design and musical numbers to overwhelm him. But what helps give 21 a leg up is its story as much as its execution.

Legally Blonde helmer Luketic delivers a slick, engaging and well cast movie. Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction tome Bringing Down the House, and adapted for the screen by Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) and Peter Steinfeld, 21 artfully condenses all the necessary math-and-code bits one needs to know to decipher the art of the M.I.T. gang’s con. Then it just lets you go along for the ride. Of all the turns that the movie takes — including Spacey changing from rakish to menacing back to somewhere in between — 21 never stops surfing along on a surplus of cool. For for those that like games of chance, it persuasively pitches a winning rap — that big-play success, and all the fortune and accouterments that come with it, is right there for the taking, in the next hand. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 122 minutes)

Part screwball, love-triangle romance, part sports comedy, George Clooney‘s third film behind the camera, the period piece Leatherheads, tells the story of American professional football’s “salad days,” and one man’s very self-interested attempts to push it into the public view. Loose-limbed, loquacious and exceedingly affable, the movie checks off many of the boxes of its genre forebears, but comes totally unglued in the final third, when forced to awkwardly try to pay off its tangled inducements.



When his Duluth Bulldogs finish their latest barnstorming tour broke and out of opponents to play, wily, charming owner-player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) turns his attention toward figuring out a scheme to keep alive his dream of avoiding a real job. A jack-of-all-trades who even dictates grand post-game reports to the local reporter, the rakish Dodge sets his sights on wooing into the fold a wealthy investor, C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce).

Frazier’s latest business client is golden-boy Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski), a Princeton student, football star and war hero who, legend has it, single-handedly forced an entire German squadron to surrender during service in World War I. What Dodge doesn’t originally know, but quickly finds out, is that hotshot, tart-tongued reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), ostensibly there for a fluff profile piece, has in fact been sent by her editor to craft a take-down article on Carter, whose war story they don’t believe. As Lexie gets close to Carter, so too does Dodge to Lexie. Powered by Carter’s stardom, the team is revitalized, but for how long?

Leatherheads‘ screenplay, an old piece penned in the early 1990s by sports magazine writers Rick Reilly and Duncan Brantley, and presumably tinkered with by Clooney and a number of uncredited script doctors, wallows, to largely winning effect early on, in detail (the team having to forfeit a game because of the lack of a ball, and drying laundry on the outside of a moving train) and dialogue. Great fun is had in mocking Clooney as a “middle-aged boy wonder,” and the actor-director and Zellweger share a number of enjoyable, rapid-fire exchanges, their just-concealed attraction masked by surface irritation.

But Leatherheads‘ third act is about as muddy as the action on the field. A few sequences (an energetic bar-room brawl, for instance) seem thrown in merely for affectation, while most others are rife with wan obligation. There are no sharp angles here, no clear delineation of motives, particularly as it relates to Dodge’s feelings about Carter, whom he knows Lexie is angling to take down and yet whom he needs as a public draw for his own financial survival.

That might be fine if Leatherheads made a few different narrative choices, and just wholeheartedly embraced existence as a ramshackle character piece. The problem is that the film also tries to capture the transitional phase of a sport moving from an independent and inherently irresponsible endeavour to a corporate-backed game with rules and regulations. It does this nicely in a few shorthand visual ways, but awkwardly as applied to its characters. For a movie so invested in whimsy and tone to finally end with a conventional “big game” feels disingenuous at best, and even more tacked on given the lack of concrete stakes tied to the outcome.

If the story winds down in disappointing fashion, the role of Dodge is never less than a perfect fit for Clooney, who pulls out his Cheshire cat grin to twinkly, mischievous effect. Yet Clooney the director also does quite right by his other actors, drastically reducing, if not entirely eliminating, Zellweger’s penchant for squinting, and guiding Krasinski (the small screen American version of The Office) through his best big screen role and performance to date.

Technically, Leatherheads is Clooney’s most ambitious film thus far behind the camera, and he and his collaborators ably deliver on all counts. There’s a warmth to the cinematography of Newton Thomas Sigel (Three Kings, X-Men) and a smart, simple, inviting sense of detail to Jim Bissell’s production design, which ranges in scale from intimate (starch, toothpaste and shaving cream ads featuring Carter’s grinning visage) to the massive scope of an Ennis Field practice and game, abetted by a few nice effects shots. Randy Newman’s horn-waggling, tin-pan alley score, meanwhile, serves as optimistic, ironic counterpoint to the hard-knock economic realities so many of the Duluth footballers face. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

For the most part a dispiriting, tedious send-up of superhero origin story clichés, Superhero Movie starts out with a full head of steam but quickly flags, struggling to fill out both its costume and its running time. Like the worst of its downmarket, quick-buck spoof brethren, the film isn’t so much a satire or even clever re-contextualization of well-worn story threads as it is clamorous regurgitation, with just more flatulence jokes.



Despite opening at 300 more theaters than ensemble blackjack picture 21, Superhero Movie, which didn’t screen in advance for critics, placed third for the weekend, ringing up an estimated $9.4 million at just over 2,960 venues. That total was well off the pace of fellow genre spoofs Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie, which each grossed more than double that amount en route to final domestic tallies in the high $30 millions. Seemingly a rare case of a proper snap judgment by the marketplace at large, Superhero Movie will eke out the bulk of the rest of its modest earnings via pay-cable and ancillary outlets.

Modeled around Spider-Man, with a pinch of Batman’s parents’ deaths as an extra source of “motivation,” the film’s story centers around Rick Riker (Drake Bell, of TV’s Drake & Josh), a gangly high school student who lives with his aunt and uncle and nurses a crush on his knockout next-door neighbor, Jill Johnson (Sara Paxton). After being bitten by a genetically altered bug on a school field trip, Rick finds himself blessed with superpowers, and caught up in a life of crime-fighting as Dragonfly. Naturally, his path crosses with Lou Landers (Christopher McDonald), the uncle of a classmate and the terminally ill CEO of a pharmaceuticals company who tests out a new drug invention and develops a maniacal, bloodthirsty alter ego.

One doesn’t head to a spoof like Superhero Movie for artful interplay or newly tilled narrative terrain, but the laugh quotient here feels especially padded, and the film needs an extended, very slow crawl of closing credit outtakes to even crack the 80-minute mark. Some of the bigger names in the movie, featured prominently on the poster (Pamela Anderson, Craig Bierko, Simon Rex) are reduced to single-scene appearances of far less than a minute, while others (Tracy Morgan) seem to play characters whose comic potential is not fully tapped.

Writer-director Craig Mazin did script duty on the last two Scary Movie flicks (in addition to Senseless and RocketMan), so he in theory knows about both stitching referential jokes together and tailoring material for specific stars. His script here, though, seems designed to have garnered an initial production green light, and little more. After the first 20 to 25 minutes (i.e., roughly all that would have been scrutinized by some studio executives), funny scene ideas (like Dragonfly bumping into another superhero at his new rooftop brooding spot) are either dashed through in unfulfilled fashion or discarded altogether, in favor of goosing, arguably topical spoofs of public figures, like Stephen Hawking, Barry Bonds and Nelson Mandela.

Back in the director’s chair for the first time since 2000’s independently produced superhero spoof The Specials, Mazin evidences no great skill one way or another. To his nominal credit, he doesn’t solely reference other movies, and he does endeavor to work in a number of visual gags to supplement the writing. The mad-dash pace, though, wrecks Superhero Movie, along with slapstick sequences with no lasting (or even immediate) consequences.

As for performances, Bell is passable but somewhat unmemorable as the lead, unlike the great find of the Scary Movie series, Anna Faris, whose wide-eyed blitheness radiated a charm that announced a bubbly new comedic presence — something her subsequent turns in Lost in Translation, Just Friends and Smiley Face would confirm. Seeing Nielsen here, though, only whets one appetite for a rental of Naked Gun or Police Squad! Special note, meanwhile, goes out to Miles Fisher, who nails the vocal intonations of Tom Cruise in his parody of a sit-down interview with the star.

Technical credits are for the most part adequate, with James L. Venable’s opening score providing a credible appropriation of manufactured comic book-style emotional uplift. Likewise, Bob Ziembicki’s budget production design does a capable job of subtly, smartly recreating spaces from the Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman franchises. On the downside, a cash infusion for some more effects work would have given the movie a slickness that it’s missing, and one that any real spoof of the superhero genre seemingly demands. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (MGM/Weinstein Company, PG-13, 85 minutes)

International Film Circuit, the independent distributor of Adam Carolla’s new and loosely autobiographical movie The Hammer, must be breathing a big sigh of relief in the wake of the acid-tongued radioman’s continued presence on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Carolla’s survival of the first round, two-week vote-off, after all, seems integral to any modestly-scaled success The Hammer
might experience, given that it means millions of viewers will still
have a chance to see and enjoy him during the very weeks that his film
expands nationally.

Taking a story credit but ceding the screenplay work to The Man Show
writer Kevin Hench, Carolla stars as Jerry Ferro, a 40-year-old, once-promising
amateur boxer who’s been knocking around from one construction job to
another, his last connection to the fight game being the evening boxing class he teaches at a Pasadena Bodies in
Motion. Impressed with his sparring and take-down of his client, a
legendary coach floats the notion of Jerry training for a shot at the
Olympic trials, thinking that way he’ll save on having to actually pay
him. With his friend Ozzie (Oswaldo Castillo), Jerry begins an unlikely
quest, and also strikes up a burgeoning relationship with one of his
workout clients, public defender Lindsay Pratt (Heather Juergensen,
above right, also Hench’s husband), along the way.

Shot two summers ago in Sherman Oaks,
Burbank and Van Nuys, and featuring many of the old haunts that Carolla
toiled in and around, The Hammer tries to milk its threadbare production value for all it’s worth. The movie is rather poorly directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (Kissing Jessica Stein), and the romantic stuff plays awkwardly. In some ways, it’s fair to say the movie succeeds in spite of itself.
But its affection for the blue-collar working class is so deeply and honestly felt, and Carolla, while not a natural actor in any sense of the word, is a pleasantly tart screen companion. He’s a
guy for whom you root, because while he takes it on the chin and tries
to change things, he’s also a hardcore realist aware of his own
strengths and limitations.

“Success isn’t a big part of my DNA,” says
Jerry, who at one point takes a fellow boxer’s salty put-down of him
being middle-class and deftly twists it into a sarcastic comeback. “I’m
having trouble focusing on what else you said, because that may be the
biggest compliment anyone has ever paid me.” Now a millionaire several
times over in real life, Carolla has the means to distance himself from the
socioeconomic traumas of his roots — to buy his way up, in essence.
Instead, he surrounds himself with folks like Castillo, a Nicaraguan
immigrant he met on a construction gig in 1989. That sincerity and
loyalty makes Carolla real, and very relatable. The quick-jab wit,
meanwhile, has made him wealthy. For more on Carolla, and the full review of the movie, from FilmStew, click here.

The remake of a same-named 2004 Thai film, enervated horror flick Shutter, which opened last week without benefit of advance screening for critics, tells the story of a young American couple vacationing in Japan who cope with a vengeful ghost and try to unravel the mystery of a woman they may or may not have hit with their car. Listless performances, overly familiar visual iconography and unimaginative set-ups render the movie worthy of nothing more than a shrug — even from the less demanding under-15 set for which it was chiefly designed.

Among wide new releases, Shutter placed third for the weekend, pulling
in $10.4 million at just over 2,750 theatres. That total fell well
short of fellow freshman entry Meet the Browns, but somewhat
surprisingly edged out the more aggressively marketed Drillbit Taylor,
starring Owen Wilson. Steep fall-off and a lack of positive
word-of-mouth will hardly matter with this modestly budgeted picture,
designed from the get-go to earn a quick, quiet buck. Two or three more
overshadowed weekends in theaters will eventually yield to modest, par
pay-cable and DVD earnings, placing Shutter even or slightly ahead of
2006’s Pulse ($20.2 million domestically, $9.5 million
internationally), another PG-13 horror film remade from an Eastern
property.

Following their wedding, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) head straight to Japan, their honeymoon doubling as a work
assignment for Ben, a fashion photographer. En route to Tokyo by car at
night, the pair suffer an accident on a snowy back road; Jane insists
they struck a woman. Plagued by both unnerving visions and spectral
distortions in photographs they’ve taken, Jane and Ben deduce the woman
to be Megumi (Megumi Okina, above right), a translator and former needy girlfriend
of Ben’s from a previous work stint in the country. More havoc ensues,
and Jane, already a bit grabby and needy, begins to wonder if Ben is
telling the full truth about the extent of his relationship with Megumi.

For a fleeting moment or two early on, Japanese director Masayuki
Ochiai (Infection) seems committed to at least crafting a movie with a
definitive sense of style, but a small handful of in-frame effects and
interesting compositions quickly give way to pedestrian framing and
desultory jump-scares.

That the film’s signature moments of dread and shock come via another
pale-faced, wet, dark-haired girl — a figure of menace already roundly
skewered by the Scary Movie series, among others — is perhaps
unfortunate, but not an insurmountable impediment to tension. The
sociocultural isolation of the setting could be used to the story’s
advantage, to feed especially Jane’s sense of unease and
discombobulation. Instead, though, Luke Dawson’s script offers up lame set-ups (visits to
a psychic investigator and Megumi’s house) and perfunctory dialogue
that requires Jackson’s character shift back and forth in sympathy to
his new wife. As such, even the nominal twist in the film’s final third
feels tacked on, and silly.

As in last summer’s Transformers, which at least had the excuse of
giant, clamorous robots distracting one’s attention, Taylor utterly fails to make an impression one
way or another. Former Dawson’s Creek star Jackson, meanwhile, invests wholeheartedly in exactly
one emotion for each scene, and otherwise just lets his stubble shade
the characterization. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

As devoid of narrative ambition as it is of accomplishment, post-viral action flick Doomsday artlessly cobbles together its many apocalyptic influences, and offers itself up as reformulated genre pap, plain and simple. Written and directed by Neil Marshall, though, it’s atrociously staged, full of baffling incongruities, and not much fun to boot.



Obviously pitched at fans of the popular Resident Evil series and 28 Days/Weeks Later films, the film — which opened yesterday without screening for critics — should have a short but decent Stateside theatrical window with young males, courtesy of a slick, effective, turn-out-the-base advertising campaign and lack of direct genre competition. Aiding international totals will be in particular the foreign embrace of Marshall’s 2006 sci-fi spelunking thriller The Descent, which rang up $57 million worldwide, $31 million of that overseas. Overall, though, poor to middling word-of-mouth should dent theatrical earnings. The DVD marketplace will be kinder, with the film’s splat-and-squib work being more able to be appreciated in piecemeal fashion.

A narrated, seven-minute prologue, set in the present day, opens Doomsday, detailing the spread of the highly infectious “Reaper” virus. Having decimated the population of Scotland, the decision is made to halve England via a 30-foot-high wall of reinforced steel just south of Newcastle. More than 25 years later, with a new strain of the virus now threatening an overcrowded London, Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra, above) is drafted by her boss (Bob Hoskins) to head to the infected zone and suss out a cure from survivors that the government has been keeping secret. Upon arrival, she finds herself confronted by a population gone wild, descended into utter savagery and cannibalism.

On some level Marshall obviously wants Doomsday to be “timely,” and assay governmental conspiracy, but his script addresses this in only the most perfunctory and purposeless way, through an ineffectual prime minister (Alexander Siddig) under the spell of a scheming second-in-command (David O’Hara). The Reaper virus survivors, meanwhile, are weirdly divided into a medieval constituency, headed up by disaffected former doctor Kane (Malcolm McDowell), and the more outlandishly roguish, Road Warrior-type thugs under the sway of his mohawked son, Sol (Craig Conway). It’s as if crucial story points were based on what costumes were most readily available.

Marshall doesn’t have the imagination to scratch beyond the surface of his conceit, let alone explain why and how post-apocalyptic survivors have the time and inclination to style their hair into purple mohawks. Other narrative decisions (including Eden having a removable eyeball that she can use as a portable DVR, as well as a messianic rave/human cook-out set to… the Fine Young Cannibals’ 1989 pop hit “Good Thing”?) are merely odd, or come across as parody, definitely out of step with the rest of the movie. Most plainly damning, though, is the fact that Marshall simply cannot firmly establish any sense of space within his action scenes, leaving audiences awash in nonsensical cross-cuts and jump-cuts. For the full, slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here. (Rogue, R, 105 minutes)

In 1997, Radiohead famously, if quietly, described the process of producing their album OK Computer as an act of deconstruction and defiance — necessarily destroying the more comfortable parameters of radio-friendly rock ‘n’ roll, and the distinction afforded them by the success of their previous album, The Bends, in order to “save themselves.”

For 66-year-old French writer-director Michael Haneke, film is a similar medium of confrontational statement more than corporate-vetted entertainment. Many of his movies are, in whole or part, sociocultural critiques foremost — labyrinthine morality tales, goosing psychological inquiries and jabs to the solar plexus that just happen to unfold on celluloid.



A painstaking recreation of his own 1997 film, Haneke’s Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, is at once buttoned-up and brutal, a provocative drama of domestic kidnap and torture in which an idyllic holiday turns nightmarish for a well-off married couple. Ann (Watts) and George (Roth) arrive at their vacation home with their young son (Devon Gearheart) in tow, and notice that their neighbors are acting strangely. They soon find out why when they’re visited by a faux-simpleton (Brady Corbet, above right) and his friend/possible brother (Michael Pitt, above center), who are dressed in preppy tennis-whites and alternately address one another by names actual and fictional (e.g., Peter, Paul, Tom, Tubby). A feigned dust-up, over dropped eggs and perceived discourteousness, gives way to a stand-off, with the boys’ sing-song politeness belying their true psychopathic nature.

Spiked with a few dark streaks of morbid humor, Funny Games is chiefly powered by lingering menace, both out of frame (that the family dog is going to meet a bad end is a queasy certainty, especially when one character borrows a golf club to try out) and especially on screen (most notably in an excructiatingly long take in which a bound, beaten Watts eventually tries to wriggle free from her awful predicament). Just don’t call it a psychological “thriller.”

Haneke likes aerial and topographical framing, which early on gives the movie the cool, detached sheen of a high-end linens catalogue, with its discrete shots of unviolated domesticity (shoes, a staircase, the refrigerator and the like). As the nasty chess game between captors and captives unfolds, though, the film becomes a series of isolated single- and two-shots.

There are any number of examples of siege films that Funny Games recalls, from Straw Dogs and Bruce Willis’ Hostage to a throwaway thriller like Unlawful Entry and, believe it or not, 1994’s underrated The Ref — all if mostly in formal antecedent rather than execution. Yet to try to comparatively experience or air-quote enjoy the film on this level is to miss Haneke’s point. To him, the story itself here is almost incidental. The story serves as an elongated exercise in demasculinization — George is forced to watch as his child is imperiled, his wife forced to strip, etcetera — and a case could be made that the movie is partly about the folly of denying an animalistic side to humanity. But Funny Games is mostly about the consumption of violence for entertainment’s sake, its commodification, and how in turn this warps our expectations of it, and relationship with it in the real world.

Haneke addresses this by breaking down the fourth wall in a few moments, not in a radical, Ferris Bueller-type of way, but rather with an unnerving, offhand line or two from our psychopathic ringmasters (“You’re on their side, aren’t you?”). For Haneke, violence is undeniably a virus, as it moves here quite literally from one house to another. Without any of the normal sort of shock, gore or jump-scares lurking in the camera movements, though, a new type of grim uneasiness develops: that of the nasty and brutish reality of violence as it exists off the edges of the screen. Funny Games posits that we are a persuadable lot, humanity — willing to accept almost anything in the name of entertainment.

That the movie is being sold in furtive, mock-thriller clips set to the “William Tell Overture” (a classical tune popularized as the theme of The Lone Ranger) only reinforces and highlights the irony on display here. A button-pushing, master-class example of manipulation, the designed-to-divide Funny Games is a fascinating indictment of what a lot of film has become. It feeds on audience discomfort, and even, to a certain level, distaste. That it’s getting a theatrical release at all, let alone from a major studio (albeit via its boutique label), is a strange thing indeed. (Warner Independent, R, 108 minutes)

With the $135 million (and counting) commercial success of Juno, the bar has recently been re-set for whimsical tales of headstrong, intelligent young women grappling with life difficulties. So it’s both surprisingly appropriate and something of a cruel irony that in the week after screenwriter Diablo Cody’s Oscar triumph for the latest “little film that could” from indie powerhouse Fox Searchlight, Christina Ricci’s Penelope finally sees the light of day, after a long delay in release.

Acquired by IFC Films for theatrical distribution at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006, the movie was set to bow in first April and then August of last year, before IFC reorganized its priorities, choosing to focus on its core business of smaller-budget independent films. Sold off to upstart Summit Entertainment (whose first release was last autumn’s P2, starring Rachel Nichols), the movie was then shelved again (even though it had already begun screening for critics), repackaged with a new PR company and marketing scheme, and finally slated for this February — a leap year release date of the 29th, fittingly enough. The result was a disappointing ninth place opening last weekend, to $3.8 million in 1,196 theaters. Reviewers weren’t much kinder, either.

Clumsy and wanly farcical, Penelope veers jerkily between fairytale fantasy and more tenderhearted reality. The story centers the title character, the intelligent daughter of a fantastically rich family (Catherine O’Hara and Richard Grant are her parents) who is the victim of a curse that renders her with a pig’s snout for a nose. The spell can only be broken if Penelope bonds with a young man from a similarly sociable and well-heeled family, which is where Max (James McAvoy) comes in. Written by Leslie Caverny and directed by Mark Palansky, Penelope is a slender, sort of self-esteem booster shot of an idea given no sort of rigorous workout beyond its base, rah-rah components and one distinguishing narrative hook.

Perhaps most, though, the movie suffers from the weight of unreasonable expectations. A beloved child starlet of the 1990s, in both Mermaids and two Addams Family movies, Ricci came of her own as an indie queen in the post-Parker Posey landscape of the American independent film scene. Roles in Buffalo ’66, The Opposite of Sex, Pecker, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, most notably, The Ice Storm gave Ricci the glow of an actress on the rise — a young, real world, thinking guy’s sex symbol. But Ricci was never a reliable box office indicator. And holding back Penelope with the thinking that her rising star, or that of producer Reese Witherspoon (who has a small cameo in the movie) or McAvoy (Atonement), might give the movie some sort of commercial bump was foolhardy at best.

This was always a movie for the interstices, especially considering Ricci’s biggest adult hits (a short list to begin with) have all landed in the $10 to $35 million range. For all her respect amongst peers, Ricci’s mainstream prospects have come across as… well, cursed, much like the 2005 horror movie of the same name from director Wes Craven and Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson — a $40 production that had to shut down filming to get its script problems ironed out, and then released, in derisible form, to $19 million, with only Ricci‘s face on the poster.

Then there’s the matter of Ricci’s complicated history with starring roles in delayed movies beginning with the letter “P.” 2002’s Pumpkin bounced around for a while, finally grossing only $300,000 and change; the much-hyped Prozac Nation, meanwhile, was completed in 2001 and then sat on by Miramax for two years before being released straight to DVD. In that regard, perhaps Penelope has already outperformed its station. None of this bodes particularly well for the theatrical haul of this summer’s Speed Racer, from the Wachowski brothers. At least that movie doesn’t begin with the letter “P,” though. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Summit, PG, 103 minutes)

There is, rightly, a lot of talk and
hand-wringing about the dearth of studio-generated movies made for
adults, and the lack of success (or even effort) in creating a new
generation of film fans, rather than just entertainment junkies and
trend-following sheep who will occasionally fork over cash in
exchange for colorful stimulus response.

As long as there are older white
people, though, and producers like Scott Rudin who shrewdly
capitalize on literary and publishing trends, there will be movies
like the oh-so-well-heeled The Other Boleyn Girl,
a bodice-ripper by turns passably intriguing and dreadfully inert.

If there’s anything that
upper-middle-class and predominantly Caucasian adult audiences like,
speaking in the broadest terms, it’s big screen adaptations of
literary hits about historical figures that they didn’t pay attention
to in high school or (if they matriculated at all) college. Heck, it
explains half or more of the entire audience, if not the very
existence, of the History Channel. I had a former boss — the type of
guy who barely skated through high school, afforded his position in
life by the success of his father — who would come in to work and
regularly regurgitate these narratives, meandering monologues of
half-truths, mangled detail and certainly no proper contextual
motivation. My guess is that it made him feel smart, worldly and more
relevant, collecting these discrete, deep-fried nuggets of historical
trivia.

Based on Philippa Gregory’s best-selling novel of the same name, The Other Boleyn Girl
is a scattershot, overwrought drama of cloak-and-dagger plotting,
romance and betrayal set against the backdrop of a defining moment in
British history. Against the wishes of his wife Lady Elizabeth
(Kristin Scott Thomas), Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) and his
brother-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), impress their
ambitions for familial advancement on the Boleyn’s two daughters.
Knowing that the aging Queen Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) has
again recently failed to give King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) a male
heir, Sir Thomas and the Duke of Norfolk contrive to attempt to have
first Anne (Natalie Portman) and then younger Mary (Scarlett Johansson) seduce the king, no matter that Mary is already wed.
Initially Mary wins King Henry’s favor, and bears him an illegitimate
son. But Anne, clever, conniving and fearless, eventually edges her
sister aside in her pursuit of an even bigger prize — the throne.

Like a made-for-TV, two-hour history of
World War II, The Other Boleyn Girl doesn’t
have a clear sense of how to artfully collapse its narrative
(ignoring, for instance, the matter of Catherine being first married
to Henry’s deceased brother), and it certainly doesn’t plumb the
psychology of Anne or its other characters in any lasting or
insightful way. In TV ads for the film, two lines appear (“We’re
sisters,” says Mary, followed by Anne’s response, “And therefore
born to be rivals”) that would seem integral to the main
relationship under the microscope. And yet that exchange doesn’t
appear in the movie, and Mary and Anne vacillate between games and
favors in arbitrary fashion, at least based on what we see on screen.
British director Justin Chadwick’s television experience evidences
itself, in both the best and, more frequently, worst, most
constrictive senses of that description.

As Henry VIII, meanwhile, Bana —
already too virile to play the fat, in-poor-health king who would
die less than a dozen years after the events depicted here — is
required to do ridiculous things. There’s no sense of independent
thought with him, let alone the authoritativeness, capriciousness or
vindictiveness associated with King Henry’s later years. He seems to
exist merely to pull levers of power as directed by Anne, and to a
lesser extent Mary. While it’s true that the relationship between the
Boleyn sisters is extremely interesting, and at the crux of this
film, the lack of insight into King Henry is such that it makes for a
rather severe isosceles triangle, and is a disservice to the entire
story.

Full of the swelling strings, pursed
lips and clenched fists that we’ve come to expect from Masterpiece
Theatre, as well as plenty of histrionics, The Other Boleyn Girl plays like a Cliffs Notes version of a
master text. There are no significant career lessons to be learned
here for Portman (who has a much better natural grasp of the tone of
these sorts of period pieces) or Johansson (who has a pout and
old-school, pie-faced beauty to suit tales of yore, but not much
else). There is a lesson, however, for authors of historical fiction: the literary market may be shrinking in comparison to other forms of
entertainment, but if you write it, Hollywood will still come
knocking, because there will presumably always be a market of adults
who want to catch up on, in quick-bite fashion, the history lessons
they slept or passed notes through during their younger years. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 115 minutes)

Characteristically anarchic, loosely structured and unabashedly blue, Will Ferrell’s new comedy Semi-Pro rather ably skewers both second-tier professional basketball and the regrettable fashion of the early 1970s, ranking in the top half of the comedian’s personal roster of sports parodies, a list which includes Kicking and Screaming, Talladega Nights and last year’s bloated Blades of Glory.



Semi-Pro centers around Jackie Moon (Ferrell), an affable if dimwitted former singer who has parlayed and elongated the fame surrounding his one hit song into local celebrity status as the owner-player-coach of the Flint Tropics, a floundering team in socio-economically depressed small town Michigan. As part of the struggling ABA league, Moon relies more on half-time gimmicks and wild promotions to get people in the door than any actual basketball acumen.

That has to change, though, when Moon receives word of the ABA’s impending merger with the NBA, the country’s preeminent hoops conference. The Tropics have to both win games and pack the stands if they want to be one of the two teams to survive consolidation. To that end, Moon trades the team’s washing machine for Flint native and former NBA champion Ed Monnix (Woody Harrelson), and begrudgingly takes more of a backseat to he and the high-flying Clarence Withers (André Benjamin), the squad’s most talented player.

The film is the feature directorial debut of Kent Alterman, the former executive vice president of production at New Line Cinema, and a producer on small screen fare like Strangers with Candy and TV Nation. As a filmmaker, Alterman evidences a genial style neither disastrous or particularly memorable; he simply gives his actors a wide berth. As penned by Old School co-writer Scot Armstrong, many of the movie’s bigger laughs, including a Deer Hunter-inspired roulette scene and the alternately sardonic and uncomfortable asides of the Tropics’ announcers (Will Arnett and Andrew Daly), lean on the improvisational talents of its stars. More discretely scripted set piece bits (the wrestling of a bear, a lurching dance of vomitous pantomiming from Moon, who’s never before thrown up) don’t seem quite fully fleshed out. The notable exception of the latter category involves the invention of the alley-oop, now a staple of basketball highlight reels.

While Semi-Pro is not graphic in any other regards, the film’s language is willfully profane, which could be a bit of a commercial stumbling block with respect to the theatrical admittance of younger teens, though Ferrell’s core audience has presumably aged with him and won’t mind. Within the film, the issue isn’t necessarily the vulgarity itself, but the fact that it frequently seems so arbitrary, substituting for stronger jokes. A little bit less of this would go a long way.

No amount or combination of shame, absurdity and unflattering outfits seem to dint Ferrell’s fierce commitment to character, and here he again amusingly jumps through all sorts of hoops of humiliation, proving himself quite possibly the least vain actor working today — a matter which is much to benefit of his films. Harrelson, who famously displayed his hoops skills in 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump, seems perfectly at home back in this setting. As announcer Dick Pepperfield, meanwhile, the aforementioned Daly (who also appears in the forthcoming What Happens in Vegas) makes a strong, breakout impression.

Composer Theodore Shapiro’s unobtrusive score is the perfect counterpoint to energetic musical selections from the period, including songs from Barry White, The Ohio Players, Brothers Johnson, Sly & The Family Stone and Kool & The Gang. All horns and buttery whispers, meanwhile, Ferrell’s credible performance of Moon’s signature R&B-themed hit “Love Me Sexy,” produced by Nile Rodgers, is another high point. Should acting begin to bore Ferrell, he could easily make do as a lounge singer. There’s no word yet on whether Alterman and Ferrell’s flick matches Michael Moore’s memories of his hometown. No matter, though; like basketball, comedy is a game of percentages, and Semi-Pro hits enough shots to be called a winner. (New Line, R, 90 minutes)

Given the vast amount of money Columbia Pictures has spent marketing
the film — and the fact that apparently a decent portion of the
audience at this week’s Los Angeles media screening still weren’t aware
of its split points-of-view style, and the somewhat ironic nature of
its title — it’s worth pointing out, as two-thirds of film critics are
wont to do, that Vantage Point is a “Rashomon-style” political thriller in which eight strangers with eight different viewpoints try to unlock the single truth behind an assassination attempt on the president of the United States.

The easy, and perhaps fun, critical tack would be to turn this same sort of filter back upon the film and its participants, assaying in sequestered fashion the component parts (screenplay, direction, acting, editing, photography, etcetera) that make up the whole. The truth is that Vantage Point doesn’t merit quite that much consistency of analytical effort. There are some good parts, but the movie is an enterprise hamstrung from early on, and thus its faults can be traced quite easily and non-fussily back to the major cornerstones (writing and directing) of its rendering.

Set in Salamanca, Spain, the story unfolds at a summit of world leaders at which the American president (William Hurt) is set to unveil a bold new anti-terrorist measure. Assigned to protect him are Secret Service agents Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox) and Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid), the latter of whom is a recently returned-to-work hero who’s already taken a bullet for his boss. When President Ashton is shot on stage in a large, public square, chaos ensues. A bomb explodes outside the walled-off venue, and then another larger explosion rips through the main platform. Among those present are a reporter (Zoe Saldana), a local cop (Eduardo Noriega), three mysterious, whispering bystanders (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer and Domino‘s Edgar Ramirez) and an American tourist, Howard (Forest Whitaker), who thinks he might have captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.

Vantage Point feels very much like what it is, which is to say a screenplay written by television development executive turned debut screenwriter Barry L. Levy. Vantage Point‘s conceit affords the audience an aerial view of matters, but there’s no significant investigative mooring (apart from two bits that Barnes glimpses in camera footage, which apparently tells him everything he needs to know) to make the forward-push of the narrative matter, so upon the fifth rewind of the event in question, an exasperated audience member let loose an, “Oh, God!”, which was promptly met with nervous laughs of increasingly sympathetic identification.

Director Pete Travis has previous experience with political violence; his debut film, Omagh, focused on a 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, and picked up a few festival prizes, though no Stateside distribution. Here, though, he’s given a script that substitutes whiz-bang car chases and cheap emotional gambits (a child imperiled, standing in the middle of a busy road) in place of anything slightly more interesting. That means, as the movie wears on, more and more jittery, Bourne-style-lite mayhem, with edits every one-half to one-third a second.

Vantage Point is essentially a single, episodic set piece of an episode of 24, stretched like taffy into a mad-dash exercise in button-pushing exploit-ainment. The air-quote explanation of the entire plot basically distills down to the line, “This war will never end,” which is offered up in a raspy, death-rattle confession by one of the complicit terrorists. The motivation (religious fanaticism? political disenfranchisement? old-fashioned greed?) is never really explained, though we’re led to believe it’s perhaps elements of all of these, as well as… blackmail? Sorry, that just doesn’t pass the smell test.

To render all this carnage in PG-13 strokes seems additionally ludicrous, and requires that Travis and editor Stuart Baird cut away from and otherwise “stunt” (including a slight, stuttering-frame effect) more than a dozen gunshots that are by implication lethal. Poor Dennis Quaid tries, and is as much of an anchoring presence as the story will allow. Vantage Point, though, has no unifying vision of purpose — either of its own, or the world at its center. For a slightly tweaked version of this review, from FilmStew, click here.

A fresh slate of young performers
combined with energetically staged and photographed sequences that
convey the cathartic joy of dance easily outweigh some of the more
predictable rhythms of formulaic storytelling in Step Up 2 the
Streets, a fun, flirty and engaging teen drama and stand-alone
sequel that serves as the latest entry in a line of pan-ethnic dance
films pitched chiefly at teens and big-city twentysomethings.

In August of 2006, Step Up, the
$12 million directorial debut of choreographer turned 27 Dresses helmer Anne Fletcher, used a
deft, direct-appeal marketing campaign that included a MySpace.com
contest which let users submit their own dance videos to ring up a
surprising $20.6 opening weekend, part of a $114 million worldwide
gross that included just under $49 million in international receipts.
The movie was just the latest underdog hit in a consistently viable
new subgenre; 2001’s Save the Last Dance kickstarted the
nascent trend, catching fire with a $23 million domestic opening en
route to over $130 million in cumulative receipts. The more
aggressively urbanized You Got Served danced its way to $40
million Stateside in 2004, while Stomp the Yard opened to $21
million en route to a $61 million domestic gross in last year’s first
quarter.

Delivering a gender inversion of the
same loose, wrong-side-of-the-tracks narrative of the first film, Step Up 2 the Streets‘
story centers on rebellious, teenage street dancer Andie (Briana
Evigan, above right), a Baltimore-bred orphan on the brink of being sent by her
deceased mother’s friend to live with her aunt in Texas — a fate
akin to permanent exile. Given the opportunity of an audition at the
prestigious but achingly proper Maryland School of the Arts, the
street-wise Andie improbably wins a spot. Her unique talent, as well
as her attractiveness, catches the attention of the school’s hottest
dancer and reigning big man on campus, Chase (Robert Hoffman, above left), whose
older brother Blake (Will Kemp), a legendary ballet performer in his
own right, has returned to lead the school and oversee its artistic
re-shaping. Andie is caught up between two worlds, and the different
rules and expectations that go with each. So when her old friends
abandon her, she joins forces with Chase and a new posse of classmate
outcasts and unconventional types to form a crew to compete in
Baltimore’s big underground dance battle, The Streets.

One of the movie’s great successes is
the sense of scale apportioned its conflicts. Like, interestingly enough, Curtis Hanson’s 8
Mile, Step Up 2 the Streets assays urban tension
and class/race conflict without needlessly getting into gunplay and
all the distasteful and/or stereotypically overwrought chest-thumping
that often stems from that. Just as that former film — a slightly
re-contextualized biopic about rapper Eminem’s rise from gritty
Detroit — featured fisticuffs and a scene with paintball guns which
served to define the ceiling of acceptable violence within the
characters’ world, so too does Step Up 2 the Streets. When
Chase and Andie’s new crew crosses her old gang with a prank they
post on the Internet, retribution takes the form of vandalism, a
“simple” but brief assault by fist and, inevitably,
feverish dancing competition, all in equal measure. This careful
modulation lends credence to the notion of dance as an expression of
(adolescent, not just underclass) frustration, an important
underpinning of the story.

Step Up 2 the Streets is the
feature directorial debut of USC Film School graduate Jon Chu, and he
locates the exuberance and thrill of personal expression in capturing
its dance sequences. If there’s a knock, it’s that several of these
dance-feud and performance set pieces — particularly a climactic
group showcase that moves from a crowded, warehouse-style dance club
outdoors, into the rain — come across as too tightly choreographed
to be truly improvised, and thus undercut some of the loose-limbed
energy present in other sequences.

A lot of the screenplay’s dialogue, by
writers Tori Ann Johnson and Karen Barna, is of the boilerplate
variety, but the cast evidences a warm rapport that masks much of its
awkwardness. Both Evigan and Hoffman, in particular, make strong,
winning impressions. It certainly helps that Chu places an obvious
value on low-key, natural charm. By allowing the characters’
personalities to come forward a bit more incrementally than usual for
such teen-pitched product, one’s identification with their plights,
respective and shared, evolves more naturally. Only a few scenes of
artificial headbutting between Andie and her surrogate guardian ring
false or strident. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here.

A languid, thinly sketched and habitually
unfunny supernatural comedy that never scratches beyond the surface of its
conceit, Over Her Dead Body quickly
wears out its welcome in both this world and the next. Delving into a love
triangle comprised of a pleasant guy, the psychic who falls for him and the
former’s vengeful, deceased fiancé trying to keep them apart, the movie works
neither in the vein of an exaggerated, farcical romantic rivalry, a la Death Becomes Her, or a more traditional
romantic comedy. With 27 Dresses still in theatres and performing strongly, and the more
high-profile pairing of Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson swooping in the
following weekend in the adventure comedy Fool’s Gold, anything beyond a final
haul of $30-40 million domestically would represent Over Her Dead Body
drastically outperforming its worth.

A year after his tightly wound bride, Kate
(Eva Longoria Parker), is crushed by a falling ice sculpture on their wedding day,
veterinarian Henry (Paul Rudd) gets roped into seeing a psychic by his well-meaning
younger sister Chloe (Lindsay Sloane), who just wants to restore some easygoing
normalcy to her mopey brother’s life. The initial reading with Ashley (Lake Bell), a psychic
who also runs a catering company with her gay best friend, Dan (Jason Biggs),
doesn’t reveal anything, leaving Henry more skeptical than ever. Not easily
deterred, though, Chloe steals the late Kate’s diary and gives it to Ashley, so
she can use the private information to pretend to communicate with Kate’s
ghost, and thus “release” Henry from obligation. As Ashley begins to slowly fall for Henry,
and vice versa, a disgruntled Kate reveals herself, and stakes a possessive
claim on her former fiancé. Gamesmanship ensues, as Ashley — the only one who
can see and hear Kate — alternately fights for and considers ceding Henry to
the spectre of his vengeful ex.

The directorial debut of Jeff Lowell, an
episodic television writer who also penned 2006’s John Tucker Must Die, Over
Her Dead Body is a movie of phony raucousness. Owing to the small screen roots
of its creator, the tone veers wildly from scene to scene; comedy writ large
and obvious (hapless Dan creating a mess in the kitchen in slapstick fashion,
Kate making sounds of mock-flatulence that she believes Ashley will mistake for
Henry) rules the day. Absent a laugh-track, though, the staleness of these gags
reveals itself.

The staging is frequently awkward, from the
opening scene of Chloe and Henry’s introduction to Ashley (in which Dan implausibly
remains in the kitchen, in order to lamely conceal his identity for a joke
later in the film) to a hallway-set scene involving the revelation of Kate’s
diary. Dialogue, too, is frequently stilted and wooden; many scenes seem
comprised of placeholder jokes, given no sort of additional subtlety or
shading.

Despite the film’s billing, Bell is essentially
the female lead. Yet the “combative spat” portion of the conceit — potentially
the richest comedic terrain — is hazily defined, and Longoria Parker’s Kate
isn’t very well integrated into the movie as a whole. She comes and goes,
haphazardly. Additionally, there’s no soft side to Kate to make us see she and
Henry as a legitimate couple in the first place.

Points go to Lowell and the film’s makers
for rounding up capable comedic actors (Sloane, Stephen Root, et al) for some
of the movie’s bit supporting parts, but the script consistently lets them
down. It takes ill-conceived, cardboard-thin stereotypes and somehow makes them
worse. Even a big story reversal at the end of the second act fails to give the
film any punch. Because nothing about the characters or any of their
relationships is in the least way believable, even in any world of heightened
affect, the ludicrous twist falls painfully flat.

Longoria Parker trades on the broadly
conveyed arch indignation that serves her well on the small screen, but
otherwise brings nothing new to her character. Similarly, Rudd is left to
define Henry solely through sardonic parrying. That brings us to Bell, who has big
parts — opposite Colin Farrell and Edward Norton in Pride and Glory, and
Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas — looming on the
horizon. Here she displays affability and an admirable willingness to indulge
in pratfall hijinks, but there’s absolutely no palpable romantic chemistry with
Rudd, and her canted, slightly off-center interpretation seems more ideally
suited to secondary lead roles.
For the full, original, slightly longer review, from Screen International, click here.

Hollywood, like
the Ivy League, is rooted in legacies, so it’s not surprising that certain
opportunities would present themselves to Colin Hanks, the now 30-year-old son
of Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks. At the same age, the older Hanks had under his belt a solid
commercial showing (to the tune of $70 million) with 1984’s Splash, a decent follow-up with that
summer’s Bachelor Party, and was
treading water in comedies like The Man
with One Red Shoe, Volunteers and
The Money Pit. His niche, if
certainly not completely his future success, seemed somewhat determined.

For Colin Hanks, things are a bit different. But with a
mushrooming body of work (his latest film, The
Great Buck Howard, which includes his father playing his father, recently
unspooled at Sundance), a future once cloudy is coming into a bit sharper
focus. Heading into 2008, the younger Hanks has a number of high-profile
commercial gigs, along with some idiosyncratic-sounding indie fare.

First up is this week’s Internet thriller Untraceable. Hanks already has some
experience with unsettling depictions of voyeurism, in 2006’s
consigned-to-video Alone with Her,
opposite Ana Claudia Talancón and Jordana Spiro. In Untraceable, however, he’s on the other side of the law, playing a
young FBI agent opposite Diane Lane
as they attempt to take down a killer who’s broadcasting live, streaming video
of his ghastly crimes and using a complicit audiences’ viewership as a weapon.

At a Portland-set field office of the FBI, a special
subdivision of the bureau investigates cyber-crime, mostly tracking identity
predators and other white-collar-type crimes. Soon they get a grisly tip,
though. A tech-savvy predator is displaying graphic murders on his own website,
with the fate of each of his tormented captives left in the hands of the
public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. It starts with
a kitten stuck to a glue-trap — which helps special agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane)
and her partner, Griffin Dowd (Hanks), determine that the events are of a local
origin — but quickly the ante is upped with a series of kidnappings and more
rapidly unfolding deaths. With the assistance of a local homicide detective,
Eric Box (Billy Burke), single mother Marsh tries to unravel the mystery, even
as she herself becomes the target of the killer.

Like some bastard offspring of Fear Dotcom, The Net and
the Saw films, Untraceable suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen; it wants to
be topical, or of-the-moment, but also cling to conventions for the sake of
narrative ease. To assuage worries about any lingering, lasting unpleasantness,
the movie’s scripters (it’s a cobbled together affair, written by Allison Burnett, Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker, with the latter two getting story
credit) ascribe a very specific motivation to the killer — there’s a reason for
his acts, as well as the selection of many of his victims.

This sort of directly air-quote competitive antagonism —
nipped from more assertively rooted serial killer flicks like Seven, Zodiac and the second Saw
film — is of course hogwash, utterly incongruous. It just doesn’t play. General implausibilities
aside, though, it’s matched by both a substandard execution that doesn’t measure
up to the best of the rest of director Gregory Hoblit’s work (Fallen, Primal Fear, Fracture),
as well as a third act steeplechase that includes a baffling direct
confrontation on a rainy bridge; a long, explanatory passage of revelation
about what we’ve seen, and the offscreen events that brought us there; and a
“ripcord ending” that wraps things up in faux-sober and thought-provoking
style.

Untraceable could
have been a much more interesting film — one to live up to its poster — if it had simply stayed closer to its wonkish
roots, Internet-flavored thriller. (Instead we get the one obligatory
e-takedown, showing how cyber-patrolling busts porn-loving gun-runners and
their deadbeat minor sons.) The melding of this new-fangled milieu with a more
tawdry narrative, however, just doesn’t work.

Whether it nominally succeeds or fails at the box office,
however, not much of Untraceable’s
failings should be able to be traced back to Hanks. His is a solid supporting
part unrelated to the movie’s shortcomings, and he does capable work that
doesn’t hurt himself — an analysis that might befit a lot of his steady upwards
trajectory. After getting his start on the small screen, playing Alex
Whitman on Roswell for parts of three
seasons, Hanks made his big screen leading man debut in Orange County, a second-generation comedy of college anxiety costarring
Schuyler Fisk (daughter of Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek), and directed by Jake
Kasdan. Hanks then signed on for a tour of duty in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, whose long production in New
Zealand explains a little gap in his
filmography.

Other, forthcoming projects, however, shine a light on lessons
Hanks may have learned from his father, from choice costars to branching out
into life behind the camera. Out of Sundance comes word that Hanks will be
directing a documentary about the decline of the music industry over the past
decade and a half. Also, in writer-director George Gallo’s My Mom’s New Boyfriend, the younger Hanks will follow further in
his father’s footsteps, playing a federal agent tasked with spying on his
mother and her new beau, suspects in an art heist ring. The twist? Meg Ryan, a
frequent costar of his father, will play not his love interest, but said mother. Wow. Time flies… (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 100 minutes) For the full, slightly tweaked review, from FilmStew, click here.

Cynically using the decades-long Burmese civil war as a
backdrop for grisly and unremitting violence, muscle-headed action flick Rambo
comes off as a sad and empty attempt to be politically relevant. Coming almost
two decades after the last series entry, and on the heels of the successful
commercial and critical reception of 2006’s Rocky
Balboa, which located fresh narrative terrain and provided a perfect
emotive bookend to multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone’s other signature
franchise, this sloppy, nihilistic effort feels especially sour and out of step
with modern convention.

Picking up Vietnam
veteran John Rambo’s story some 20 years later, Stallone posits the character
as psychologically unable to return home, now living a solitary, monastic
lifestyle in southeast Asia. That would be fine, except that this element is
pure window dressing — an excuse for a parade of brutality (including bayoneted
kids) that does nothing except showcase several dozen different ways to take a
life.

The film opens in northern Thailand,
where Rambo ekes out a subsistence catching poisonous snakes for cash
and running a longboat along the Salween
River. It’s this latter fact that
brings him to the attention of a group of Colorado
missionaries headed up by Sarah Miller (Julie Benz) and Michael Burnett (Paul
Schulze). Sarah, Michael and their group want to go to Burma
to lend moral support to the Karen tribe, an ethnic Christian minority at war
with the internationally isolated ruling military junta. Rambo at first spurns
their request for transport, but eventually relents. Along the way, there’s a
confrontation with Burmese river pirates, and Rambo is forced to abandon his
newfound pacifism in defense of his passengers.

Weeks later Rambo learns that the missionaries are now being
held captive by a particularly sadistic unit of the Burmese military, obviously
outside of diplomatic reach. He’s hired by the missionaries’ leader to ferry a
team of mercenary soldiers, including gruff director Lewis (Graham McTavish)
and sniper Schoolboy (Matthew Marsden), to the point he last saw the group.
Naturally, Rambo’s conscience kicks in, along with old killer instincts, and
the limbs, heads and throats of many a swarthy Burmese soldier pay the price.

Rambo opens with real-life images from the quelled
pro-democracy demonstrations in late September of last year, protests which
were met with brutal force. Whether by function of budget constraint or edit, the
rest of the film seems pared down to relatively straightforward action set
piece entanglements, an ill-advised strategy which casts further doubt on the
movie’s wishes to be taken as anything more than a barely linked series of
lopped arms and exploded chests.

The character of Rambo, a Reagan-era re-branding of the
forward-leaning, wounded ego vigilantism that was left over from the United
States’ Vietnam debacle, was always going to be more of a relic of time and
place than Rocky, and thus harder to update. The movie’s script, a shared
credit by Stallone and Art Monterastelli, has nothing interesting to say about
that, though, and plumbs its lead character’s psyche solely by way of one
nightmare montage featuring black-and-white footage from the first three films.
There’s an uncomfortable subtext to be found, too, in the uninterrupted
debasement and abuse of local women, while the same sort of violence against Sarah
is only intimated.

Unanchored to anything of substantive emotional value, the film’s action is suitably explosive and over-the-top —
at one point Rambo rigs an unexploded World War II shell to take out several
hundred yards of jungle — but it reaches such a level of cartoonish extreme so
as to seem almost desperate in its attempt to woo an audience who know the Rambo
films only as late-night cable TV entries.

Shot on location in and around Chiang
Mai, Thailand,
the movie certainly makes good use of its natural surroundings, at least during
daylight exteriors. A night-time, rain-soaked rescue operation, though — a
centerpiece of the movie’s second act — seems designed chiefly to cheat the
fact that a similar sequence in the light of day would have been much more
costly. Stallone’s staging here is messy and confusing, and cinematographer
Glen MacPherson (16 Blocks, One Missed Call) loses a battle to shadow. The
result is much more irritating than thrilling. Brian Tyler’s very
literal-minded musical compositions, meanwhile, are in perfectly ridiculous
lockstep with the movie’s demonstrative finale. For the full, original, and slightly longer review, from Screen International, click here.