Having pulled in over $30 million, good for the top spot at the box office over Labor Day weekend, Rob Zombie’s Halloween is a bonafide success, and one that couldn’t come a moment too soon for the hit-starved, re-formulated Weinstein Company. It’s also a complete creative misfire, indicative of Hollywood’s backwards thinking with respect to how to build (or re-start) a horror franchise.

the Halloween franchise, but only in the most wan and nominal fashion imaginable. The manner in which traditional notions of development were clearly abdicated here speaks volumes about how and what Hollywood thinks of horror franchises — which is to say certainly not anything seriously, but rather only as a slick, goosing means to an end, that end being dollars. For the Weinstein Company, the notion of a Halloween movie directed by Rob Zombie — a not-untalented guy who’s made increasingly savvy use of his devil’s minion image in both music and film — clearly had more appeal than a Halloween movie directed by just about any other established filmmaker who could be coaxed to tackle such an assignment. The film’s box office results seem to bear out the fruit of this line of reasoning.

To that end, Halloween is a thrown-together mixture of Zombie’s usual company of actors (wife Sheri, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Danny Trejo, et al), other horror “faces” (Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, Clint Howard, Brad Dourif, Halloween veteran Danielle Harris, Udo Kier) and a few bizarre stunt cameos (Mickey Dolenz, Richmond Arquette), all then given a merrily depraved punch of gore and slashing. Casually misogynistic and at times almost comically over-the-top in its vulgarity, Halloween is essentially partially a yawning prequel exploration of the roots of a psychopath and partially a remake of the first film in the series, John Carpenter’s 1978 genre classic.

Zombie’s last film, The Devil’s Rejects, was unapologetically degenerate, but completely streamlined in its exploitative impulses. Here there’s a split focus. Halloween follows a recent trend of horror prequels, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which delve into the back stories of genre icons, attempting to answer the “hows” and “whys” of a faceless killing machine’s inner motivations. The problem, here as in there, is that the answers to these questions are so perfunctory as to lend the franchise no additional psychological weight or menace. Furthermore, Halloween additionally undercuts their set-up by spending the first 25-30 minutes of its running time explaining how Michael is to some degree a victim of circumstance — and thus loving to his little sister, the one person in his life who causes him no pain — only to then hurriedly throw that conceit under the bus when it becomes most convenient. Credulity is bent to pretzel-like extremes, and because of the film’s elongated set-up we don’t know or care about these characters. Ergo, the violence and other acts of intrusion hold absolutely no meaning. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

With young star and Pavel Checkov-to-be Anton Yelchin‘s long-delayed Fierce People just around the bend, what better time to swell the rolls with this only slightly redacted look at David Duchovny’s directorial debut, House of D, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005? To wit:

X-Files
star David Duchovny, House of D, is a
loose-knit coming-of-age tale for which perhaps the best word is baffling.
Just: baffling choices, baffling incongruities, bafflingly touching scenes
followed closely by ones just as bafflingly recondite, half baked or otherwise
not fully formed. House of D will
find a limited warmhearted reception in American art house audiences with a
special fondness/tolerance for New York-set “filmic postcards” where no
knuckles of indulgence are ever rapped. Others, however, will find the movie
too tedious and its emotional rewards too minuscule to bother investing their
time.

After opening on an American ex-pat artist living in Paris,
the bulk of the film centers on young Tommy (Hearts of Atlantis’ Anton Yelchin), a bright and facile private
school teenager who nurses a crush on a sweet girl, Melissa (Zelda Williams,
daughter of Robin), and enjoys using his French instructor’s tenuous grasp of
English slang to his humorous advantage. The death of Tommy’s father has left
him alone with his well-meaning but emotionally crippled mother (Téa Leoni), so
he spends as much time as he can out of the home. Tommy runs delivery routes
with his best friend Pappas (Robin Williams), a 41-year-old mentally
handicapped man who is also an assistant janitor at his school. Tommy and
Pappas hoard the bulk of their delivery savings in a buried tin can just
outside a women’s detention center (hence the title); Tommy one day strikes up
a conversation through the bars with an unnamed lady (Erykah Badu), and
eventually comes to value her warped advice when his life further unravels.

Duchovny is, off camera, a pretty smart guy, something you
might have gleaned from any number of interviews with him — where, given their
collective self-conscious preening, actors frequently come off as a bit dim —
or even just his screen performances. So as a writer’s piece, House of D has a few brief passages of
literary mellifluousness, particularly an auspicious opening narration which
compares blooming adolescence to old Hollywood noir flicks, and talks about
“the safe of life” opening up at age 13. But as directed, the film never really
coalesces into anything more than a bunch of jumbled musings starring the same
faces.

Reportedly based on unfastened recollections of his own Greenwich
Village youth and stories from Duchovny’s mother, House of D has a few moments of uncommon
tenderness, such as when Tommy fishes from the toilet several of his mother’s
cigarette butts in an instinctive play at holding on to her memory. Too often,
though, issues of logic and pacing belie the film’s sort of itinerant artistic spirit. It
makes absolutely no sense for Tommy and Pappas to bury their money blocks from
their brownstone apartments (Pappas has an alcoholic father, but there’s no
reason Tommy couldn’t hold it), and I’m not sure I understand the merits of the
delivery boy buddy system, other than its narrative convenience. House of D, in other words, feels deeply, intrinsically personal,
but it lacks a universal cohesiveness. Too many of its narrative elements seem
utterly arbitrary (Tommy is an aspirant artist whose connection to art we
barely see and never understand), dashed off descriptors and twists in a
headlong dash toward raw, uncalculated emotional expression. (LionsGate,
PG-13, 95 minutes)

Another Sean Penn flick looms just around the bend — his adaptatin of Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed bestseller, which I’ll be seeing next week. To stuff the archives in anticipatory fashion, a re-posted review of the little seen but highly worthwhile The Assassination of Richard Nixon, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2004. To wit:

The
Assassination of Richard Nixon tells the story of Sam Bicke, a
self-described grain of sand on the beach of America, and as such isn’t
destined to find the audiences of Ray,
The Aviator or Finding Neverland, bigger pictures with insurmountably larger
palettes. In fact, its rewards are so modest and reserved that it’s a small but
appreciated wonder that the film is seeing a theatrical release at all.
Nonetheless, anchored by an emotionally arresting lead performance by Sean
Penn, the movie stands as a gripping portrait of run-into-the-ground, working
class decency teased up into a furious rancor.

Inspired by a true story, the film is set in the early
winter months of 1974, when a rising tide of social inequities and injustices —
the fallout of the CIA-sponsored killing of Chilean leader Salvador Allende,
the stand of Russell Means and others at Wounded Knee, campus violence, and the
slow, creeping sprawl of the Watergate scandal — have come to make the very air
aspirant small businessman Bicke breathes seem oppressively thick and full of
bleakness. Sam believes that a man doesn’t give up his rights at a job, nor
should he have to lie to make a decent living, but he finds his values and
mores being tested in his new post selling office furniture and equipment for a
pop-and-son outfit.

There — goaded, hectored, humiliated and hazed, his
marginalization increasing tenfold every day — the socially awkward Sam slowly
falls out of favor with the few people in his life keeping him at all grounded,
namely his estranged wife Marie (Naomi Watts)
and would-be business partner, Bonny Simmons (Don Cheadle). President Nixon,
for him, embodies the sneering face of elitist and discriminatory contempt, and
so Sam eventually decides — in less a hatched plan than a followed flight of
fancy — to head to Washington D.C. and kill the commander in chief.

Mueller doesn’t fully connect the dots between Sam’s
desperate, choking personal uncertainty and anger and the full-blown mania of
his assassination plot (at just over 90 minutes this is a movie of
masterful mood more than psychological substance) and Cheadle and Watts aren’t
given enough to do. But Penn, in his angsty, swallowed depression, totally
sells this soul-crushing portrait of besieged civility. He takes what could
easily be tongue-in-cheek scenes of high-camp disaffection — strolling into a
Black Panthers office with $107 and pitching them earnestly on a more inclusive
mascot to draw in untapped Caucasian donations; awkwardly re-enacting a
potential “honest sales pitch” to an indifferent loan officer during a meeting;
and suffering the indignity of having to shave his mustache in order to look
more like a family man — and makes them heartrending mini-portraits of
uniquely American estrangement and alienation. Spare and unassuming, just like
its subject, The Assassination of Richard
Nixon doesn’t have the flash and pop of many of this awards season’s bigger
biopics. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a solid film, one of the better
character studies of 2004. (THINKFilm, R, 96 mins.)

A big, sprawling ensemble in which the events leading up to and following a drug deal are told from three different points of view, Go crash-landed in 1999. Starring Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Jay Mohr and Timothy Olyphant, among others, it was a perfect marriage of sorts between the stuttering, alternately wry and flippant style of screenwriter John August (who would go on to slave over the Charlie’s Angels films and pen a trio of movies for Tim Burton, including Big Fish) and the kinetic, hipster visual sense of director Doug Liman (who would go on to helm the first installment of the Bourne franchise). Even if one didn’t like the film, I think they’d concede that it felt of a piece in its construction. There wasn’t a jarring, at-odds collusion of visions; Go was sleek and lupine, if not exactly a box office hit.

The Nines, loosely retains the same triptych structure as Go, as well as the same sort of healthy disregard for purely linear pleasantries. The Nines is also notable because it’s August’s feature debut behind the camera. Unlike the thematically timid, familiar stories of half measures that many a writer make for their directorial debuts — more intimately scaled movies that feel like reaches across the table for salt and pepper — August’s The Nines is, psychologically speaking, a big, freewheeling affair, stuffed back within the confines of a tightly framed story.

Featuring three actors playing three parts apiece in three different stories — roles that, apart from their place within discrete narratives, may or may not have something to do with one another — The Nines could be described as being about the concentric circles of creativity, and getting lost in the hazy mist of formation and development, both personally and professionally, spiritually and emotionally. It’s about creation and responsibility, and where those ideas overlap and end. Confused? We haven’t even started yet.

The film’s first strand, dubbed “The Prisoner,” tells the story of a troubled actor, Gary (Ryan Reynolds), the hunky star of a small screen cop show, who goes on a boozy binge and finds himself placed under house arrest, with a chipper junior publicist Margaret (Melissa McCarthy) and disillusioned next-door neighbor Sarah (Hope Davis, above right) as his only links to the outside world. Eventually, Gary comes to wonder whether one or both women are deceiving him about the nature of his incarnation.

“Reality Television,” the movie’s second segment, charts the production of a half-hour episode of a Project Greenlight-type show tracking the creative progress of a network television drama making its way through pilot season. Having shot the series opener, writer-creator Gavin (Reynolds) faces some tough post-production hurdles and challenges from development executive Susan (Davis) about the suitability of his best friend and lead actress (McCarthy, playing a same-named iteration of herself).

Finally, in “Knowing,” an acclaimed videogame designer, Gabriel (Reynolds), faces car trouble deep in the woods. Leaving behind his wife Mary (McCarthy) and mute daughter (Elle Fanning) to track down help, Gabriel runs into Sierra (Davis), who regards him suspiciously at first, but then slowly reveals that she knows more about him than she was initially letting on.

In the film’s press notes, August talks about The Nines being “a question, not an answer” — that its three sections are deliberately incongruous, overlapping rather than snapping together neatly. Despite, or maybe because of this tack, The Nines doesn’t really cohere in a meaningful way; to call it too cute by half would be terse, but also not at all inaccurate. The casting of Reynolds, Davis and McCarthy give August a home run, and he additionally has an undeniable touch with dialogue, finding artful ways for his characters to say things in a manner that imparts both necessary information and true personality. But the movie, never moving much beyond the feelings it generates solely in the moment, doesn’t work one’s id into a tizzy in the same manner that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or François Ozon’s Swimming Pool, two films that bear loose association, do, and its ending induces only sort of a shrug. If songs could sire movies, Brit pop band James’ “Born of Frustration” would be the father of The Nines. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Newmarket, R, 102 minutes)

I’ve already mentioned The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, but it’s really worth repeating, the charms of this humorous and involving, to-scale documentary from Seth Gordon. The film centers on family man and middle-school science teacher Steve Wiebe (above right), who’s the
upstart hero of the piece, about the
battle for the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized high score on
Donkey Kong, generally regarded as the most difficult classic arcade
videogame.

Wiebe is a straightforward, earnest guy who bests the long-standing record
for Kong and submits his accomplishment via videotape to a recognized governing body of videogame history and minutiae.
But the old record-holder — a crafty, smirking, self-proclaimed Jedi
Master of gaming turned hot-sauce mogul named Billy Mitchell — doesn’t
plan on going quietly into the night. Protecting his name and record,
he unleashes a fascinating scheme of proxy psychological warfare that
dredges up old grudges between now-adult arcade opponents.

The King of Kong is in equal measure about intrapersonal competition, rivalry
and compulsive obsession, and it’s for this reason that the project has already been tapped, à la
skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, to be made into a
narrative feature. Though on the surface it sounds wonkish and severely
limited by its subject matter, it’s actually anything but. Director-editor Gordon really knows the value of contrasting and incidental footage (read: letting
characters hang themselves with their own words), and as such The King of Kong
achieves pleasingly squirmy moments of slack-jawed recognition, as well
as some surprisingly affecting beats. The lesson learned, once again?
Life is still high school, just writ large. For the original capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

U2 for a
show in his hometown of Monterrey. To finance the event, he coerces his
girlfriend Gloria (Martha Higareda) into a scheme in which they place a
bogus $500,000 bet with local mob boss Moro (Dino Garcia) on a soccer
match. They lose, yet are saved by the mobster’s son, Tony (Jaime
Camil), who so loves U2 that he prays to a little statuette of lead singer Bono in
his car. Given a week’s reprieve, Claudio and Tony set out to make
their joint dream come true — creditor oddly helping debtor through a
careening kaleidoscope of sticky business dealings.

Writer-director Fernando Kalife’s 7 Dias rides into the States on a
crest of interest in Mexican cinema largely affirmed by last year’s
acclaim for Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, and Babel, which
collectively rang up 16 Oscar nominations. It has the advantage of some
rooted specificity: U2 granted the project limited rights and music
licenses, though Kalife originally shot without them, making for some
disconnected scenes. But it is Camil’s colorful performance — part
gruff goomba, part oversized man-child — which gives the movie the
occasional bounce in its step.

Fatally, though, much action of consequence is constructed around
universally held regard for Claudio’s deceased brother, a character
whom we never glimpse, nor really understand Claudio’s relationship
with. This, combined with Tony’s vibrancy, render Claudio a cipher in
his own story. The film’s quick-reversal ending, too, is a cheap
gambit, hardly earned and even less understood. With a lot more visual
flair and some sense of real danger, this could be a
south-of-the-border Guy Ritchie flick, but with heart. As is, it’s a
diverting cultural curio, pretty much gone from your mind the moment it
ends. To view the review in its original capsule form, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Rocket Science isn’t
jet-propelled, that’s for sure. The very
loosely autobiographical narrative feature debut of Jeffrey Blitz, the director
of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound,
the movie is a slow-burning comedy of coming-of-age frustration — though like
its predecessor, it’s a work interested in the weight of words, and the power
attached to them.

The quick wit of lanky high school introvert Hal Hefner
(Reece Thompson, above) is masked by his stuttering problem, which dooms him to
outcast status. Ambitious, hyper-articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) senses
something in him, though, and recruits Hal to the school’s high-powered debate
team. A warped romantic awakening ensues, though Ginny eventually manipulates
Hal to her own ends, leading him to team up with an older, brilliant dropout —
Ginny’s ex-partner, Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) — in an effort to wow the judges at
the New Jersey state championship.

Canted tales of adolescent angst like these are a festival
circuit staple (see Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, et al), but what Rocket Science most has going for it is
its own strong sense of style and identity and a great, deadpan lead
performance from Thompson. Tossing aside the typical pat conventions and
rigidly defined solitary motivations of such stories, Blitz conjures up a rich world
of pubescent bewilderment and ecstatic agony. The flip side of something like
the forthcoming Superbad, which
presents its characters as walking bags of surging hormones, Rocket Science doesn’t completely shortchange
hormonal hijinks and acting out (at one point a character puts a cello through
a window… just because), but it does more fully present the awkwardness and
uncertainty that go hand in hand with teenage years, and shows how that as
often as not informs impulsive decisions and behavior that, on the surface, isn’t
necessarily sexual.

The supporting characters around Hal — from his perpetually
sweaty, snarling, obsessive-compulsive brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), to his
fractured mom’s new boyfriend (Stephen Park), the father of a classmate — are
all terrifically sketched, and the underplayed exchanges give the movie the
feel of a slowly developing Polaroid. It grows more substantial and rewarding
as it goes along. Funny, too, are the teasing, purposefully cornball
instrumental versions of the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up” and “Blister in the
Sun” that eventually explode into the cathartic renditions that have become alt-rock
radio staples. For the original redacted capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Audition-style
revenge, Descent
tells the story of a promising young co-ed, Maya (Rosario Dawson), whose upward
academic trajectory is bumped off course in sudden, nasty fashion. After a week
of wooing by smooth-talking jock Jared (Chad Faust), Maya is date raped. She
then floats through summer in a glassy-eyed haze, shacking up with beefy drug
dealer Adrian (Marcus Patrick) before eventually returning to school as a
teacher’s assistant — a position that uncomfortably puts her back in contact
with Jared.

Working largely in tight, saturated close-ups, feature debut
writer-director Talia Lugacy gets around the need for large crowds of extras in
ways occasionally artful (the whispered run-through of a commencement ceremony)
but just as often awkward (a radio broadcast over an empty football stadium).
Lugacy takes her time with the material; this isn’t some tawdry version of a quick-plotted after-school special. Yet after a nice set-up, the middle of the film sags like the creaky floorboards of
a condemned house. You see a physical and emotional transformation in Maya —
she’s pallid and sullen — that more or less reinforces the arc of her acting
out. Yet there’s no correlative connection to this damage, largely the result
of Lugacy’s indulgence of far too many impressionistic musical sequences. It
all builds to a climax that’s both shocking and thought-provoking, but one that,
since it’s partially pegged to unknowable elements, only scratches the surface of the true, self-regenerating nature of victimization. Points for degree-of-difficulty effort,
then, trump execution, if only marginally. For the original capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Stardust is a diversionary
treat — a lively little pop fairytale that flits back and forth from one
colorful character to another. Reminiscent, in swatches, of Willow, The Princess Bride and The NeverEnding Story,
the movie is part comedic fantasy adventure yarn, part lilting romance about awakening to the love right in front of one’s eyes; it works best as a grab-bag of brightly colored whimsy and
wonderment.

In an attempt to win the heart of Victoria (Sienna Miller), the prettiest girl in the
sleepy English village of Wall, young Tristan Thorne (newcomer Charlie Cox, above right)
makes a wild-eyed promise to bring her back a fallen star. Crossing the ages-old
barrier that rings the city and gives it its name, Tristan enters a supernatural
parallel universe known as Stormhold. There, he discovers that the fallen star
is not an object, but actually a spirited young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes),
injured by her cosmic tumble. Sought by both a handful of scheming princes vying to
secure the throne of their dying father (Peter O’Toole) as well as a powerful witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) desperate to use the star to achieve eternal youth and beauty for her
and her sisters, Yvaine rather disobligingly elopes
with Tristan on a series of incredible adventures heading back toward Wall, crossing paths along the way with a quirky
pirate, Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro), who may not be all he seems. Like a sure but slow-dawning sunrise, love eventually blossoms between the pair.

Penned by freshman scribe Jane Goldman and directed with a spry, light touch by Matthew Vaughn, Stardust greatly favors tone over particulars.
What differentiates Stormhold from Wall is never much explained, nor
the relationship between the two cities, or certain other character
bits; one either goes with the general flow of “fairytale questing” or
becomes stubbornly resistant to the entire affair. More pleasantly distractible than enthralling, Stardust lacks either the epic-scale frosting that a more experienced genre hand (like Peter Jackson) would give it, or the skewed, hallucinatory pop vibrancy of a bolder visual stylist (like Tim Burton). Overall, though, one can’t reasonably bear ill will toward the film, and they certainly can’t hold a grudge, not the least of which because Stardust is busy not taking itself at all that seriously. In sum,
there’s much, much more right here than wrong. For my full review, from Reelz, click here.

Directed by Saturday Night Live writer and fellow Lonely Island collaborator Akiva
Schaffer, Andy Samberg’s willfully doofy film debut, Hot Rod, is a comedy powered by the twin turbines of
over-baked emotion and adolescent alienation. Live-at-home amateur stuntman Rod Kimble (Samberg, above) is desperate for the admiration of his
gruff stepfather Frank (Ian McShane), who picks on Rod and tosses
him around like a rag doll in their weekly sparring sessions. When
Frank falls ill, Rod — still believing a physical beatdown is the only
way to gain Frank’s respect — concocts a plan: jump 15 buses, raise
enough money for Frank’s emergency heart operation, and then… kick his
ass.

Napoleon Dynamite and Billy Madison, which indulged a similar fondness for hallucinatory asides.
Hot Rod applies the former film’s zonked-out petulance and clumsy
inelegance to a little-engine-that-could underdog story, while taking
the serial silliness of the latter to occasionally dizzying new
heights. To the movie’s credit, it cannily overplays its hand in
virtually every scene requiring sincere emotion or plot advancement
(including a fetishistic recreation of the wooded training sequence in
Footloose). Still, the relationships are all phony, since the comedy is
discrete and scene-specific, with characters and motivations changing
to suit various moments. In essence, this is a comedy destined to play in college dorm rooms over the next couple of years, with plenty of inebriated holler-backs. While often funny, Hot Rod doesn’t quite have the
steadying, consistent throughline of a fellow ramshackle comedy like, say, Tommy
Boy. Wow, I can’t believe I just typed that…

For my original review text, from CityBeat (from which the above is expanded), click here and scroll down. I’ll have more thoughts on the film — including why its taco versus grilled cheese sandwich sequence may be a metaphor for the immigration debate — hopefully later in the day, or possibly early tomorrow.

In 2002, The Bourne Identity drew a large part of its pop and verve from the attached-at-the-hip nature of its conceit and action — as Matt Damon’s overwhelmed, memory-impaired CIA operative Jason Bourne experienced the action in bewildering fashion, so too did the film’s audience. With elements of his personal identity uncovered, the sequels have each in their own way extended Bourne’s search for professional closure. To his former employers, however, Bourne is the loosest of loose ends, and so they’re still looking to tie him off.

The Bourne Ultimatum, then, serves as an involving and fitting bookend to Damon’s character-powered spy thriller series, paying off in a thrilling manner his amnesiac assassin’s search to uncover the roots of his identity while also delivering plenty of slam-bang, real-world action set across a sprawling variety of locations. The film opens at a dead sprint, and doesn’t much slow down; even its quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease and their own careening forward momentum.

Anchoring the movie in resolute fashion, Damon delivers another intense performance, absorbing information at a high rate of speed and translating that into both rapid analysis and breathless deed. The combination of massive raw intelligence and swallowed grief and self-torture that inform Bourne is captured as much in Damon’s clenched jaw and hard-set eyes as any dialogue (after all, who is left for Bourne to really open up to?), and he feels every bit the chariot driver here.

The film’s narrative proper is very contemporary in its subject matter — a covert intelligence program targeting, and in some cases eliminating, American citizens — but returning director Paul Greengrass (United 93) keeps the focus quite tightly personal. He does this by staging large swathes of The Bourne Ultimatum in crowded public places, settings where Bourne is palpably uncomfortable, and forced to constantly react and improvise.

As always, too, Greengrass trades in small details that mightily inform character, and thus help elevate The Bourne Ultimatum above and beyond its genre roots. In a game of high-stakes cat-and-mouse at a packed Waterloo Station in London, a single quick glance conveys that Bourne knows the angle of a gunshot that has felled a bystander; later, after a ferocious close-range action sequence, the director indulges Bourne a moment of quiet, broken shame over the fact that he’s been forced to kill again. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 111 minutes)