The third entry in the ESCAPE PLAN franchise, ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS was already completed when ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES went straight-to-DVD exactly one year ago, and it seems to inherently realize that everyone would hate it. That includes star Sylvester Stallone, who hyped ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS in a recent interview by declaring ESCAPE PLAN 2 the worst movie he's ever made. An interesting approach to plugging your latest project, but at the same time, he's not wrong. More or less pretending the dreadful ESCAPE PLAN 2 never happened before anyone even had a chance to see it, THE EXTRACTORS abandons the high-tech, borderline sci-fi of the first sequel and instead expands on a storyline from the 2013 original, which only did modest business stateside but was a blockbuster hit in China, thus leading to these two cheaply-made and largely China-targeted sequels. Chinese tech giant Zhang Innovations is looking to set up shop at an abandoned factory in Mansfield, OH. But the delegation, headed by Daya Zhang (Malese Jow), is ambushed at the local airport by a heavily-armed crew of mercenaries led by Lester Clark Jr (Devon Sawa), and whisked away to Devil's Station, a black site, hellhole prison in Latvia (but played by the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, as seen in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), with Clark demanding a ransom of $700 million and all of Zhang Innovations' secrets from its CEO, Daya's father Wu Zhang (Russell Wong). En route to Latvia, Clark also abducts Abigail Ross (Jaime King), the girlfriend of prison security expert Ray Breslin (Stallone), in a calculated effort to kill two birds with one stone: Clark Jr's missing-and-presumed dead father was once Breslin's corrupt business partner (played by Vincent D'Onofrio in the first film) and he had a side deal going with Wu Zhang that didn't end well. Obsessed with avenging his father, Clark Jr has devised a way to exact vengeance on both Wu Zhang and Breslin by kidnapping the most precious things in their lives. Of course, this means Breslin assembles his team to attempt an extraction, including Trent (Dave Bautista) and Hush (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), and they're joined by Daya's disgraced current bodyguard Bao (Harry Shum Jr.) and her former bodyguard and ex-lover Shen (Max Zhang, who also teamed with Bautista in this year's earlier Chinese import MASTER Z: IP MAN LEGACY)
Boasting a ludicrous 52 credited producers (shockingly, Stallone isn't one of them), ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS is as by-the-numbers as it gets, though at the very least, it's an improvement over the miserable ESCAPE PLAN 2. Bautista probably put in two, maybe three days work ("I'm gonna go check it out," Trent says as he splits from the rest of the group, disappearing for long stretches as Bautista likely headed to straight to the set of AVENGERS: ENDGAME), and I'd be surprised if 50 Cent was there for more than one. But Stallone gets a bit more to do here, and has a well-choreographed and quite brutal climactic throwdown with Sawa, the now-40-year-old FINAL DESTINATION star surprisingly convincing as the bad guy. Stallone can't possibly need this gig, he but seems to be somewhat more invested in the proceedings, perhaps because his buddy John Herzfeld (2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, 15 MINUTES) is at the helm rather than ESCAPE PLAN 2's DTV/VOD hack Steven C. Miller, the helmer of many of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series (Stallone and Herzfeld previously collaborated on 2014's ill-advised, barely-released REACH ME, the IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD of inspirational self-help dramas). The bottom line: it's utterly inessential Stallone, but it's got a couple of nicely-done fights (including one with Max Zhang and Daniel Bernhardt, as Clark Jr's chief henchman), it isn't afraid to kill off characters you least expect, and it doesn't overstay its welcome, with the super-slow closing credits rolling at the 78-minute mark, and that's counting the first two minutes of the film being nine straight production company logos. (R, 87 mins) DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF (Canada/US/UK - 2019)
Steven Soderbergh's 2012 action thriller HAYWIRE was supposed to make a star of former MMA fighter Gina Carano. It didn't quite pan out that way, but she's had supporting roles in FAST & FURIOUS 6 and DEADPOOL while keeping busy starring in several straight-to-VOD titles like IN THE BLOOD, EXTRACTION (one installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series), SCORCHED EARTH, and now DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF. Carano is Clair Hamilton, a career military vet with an estranged son named Charlie (Anton Gillis-Adelman), who's been living in the Pacific Northwest with her father. But when her dad dies, and with Charlie's father out of the picture (killed in an IED blast in Afghanistan when Charlie was an infant), Clair has no choice but to be the parent and repair the fractured relationship with her son. Her plan hits a snag when Charlie is kidnapped and the ransom demand is exactly the substantial inheritance left to her by her wealthy father. She hands over the money as instructed, but two of the three kidnappers try to kill her anyway. She returns fire, killing two and seriously injuring the third, Larsen (Brendan Fehr), forcing him to take her to her son, who's being held by the plan's mastermind, "Father" (Richard Dreyfuss). Father, a grizzled mountain man unencumbered by the law, has a longstanding history of abducting boys and either taking them in as pseudo-adopted sons or selling them off to potential buyers, which is his intent for Charlie as his ultimate vengeance against Clair's dad for an unpaid loan from years earlier. Human trafficking seems like a rather extreme way to get back at a dead guy, plus Father--whose living conditions don't seem to gel with his inexplicable financial security--didn't count on Clair using all of her extensive military training and survival skills to take them on in the brutal cold of the snowy, treacherous mountain terrain.
Directed by David Hackl (SAW V, INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE, and the John Travolta lineman dud LIFE ON THE LINE), DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF is a pretty dull and tedious affair, plodding along at a slow pace as Carano and Fehr do little but trudge through the snow on their long journey to Father's hideout. There aren't any Oscars in Carano's future, but HAYWIRE proved she's capable of headlining a well-made action vehicle, but that's not what she gets here with its predictable plot, clumsily-staged shootouts, primitive CGI splatter, and phone-app-level explosions. Speaking of Oscars, the only real point of interest here is a slumming Dreyfuss, who's become quite the hammy VOD fixture of late between this, BAYOU CAVIAR, ASHER, and the Netflix movies THE LAST LAUGH and POLAR. He's embarrassingly bad here, playing this supposed criminal mastermind as the deranged love child of Walter Brennan and Strother Martin. The character isn't threatening or scary in any way and half of his dialogue is unintelligible, but Dreyfuss at least seems to be enjoying himself, which is more than can be said for anyone watching DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF. (R, 88 mins)
2013's ESCAPE PLAN was an enjoyable prison-break pairing of aging '80s action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that failed to generate much interest and flopped at the box office. Like some other underperformers, it proved to be a huge hit in China, which explains the existence of the needlessly convoluted, partially Chinese-financed ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES, the first of two sequels shot back-to-back for DTV release in the States and a theatrical rollout in Asia. Schwarzenegger is out and top-billed Stallone is back, albeit in largely a supporting role, but the nominal lead is popular Chinese actor and singer Huang Xiaoming as Shu, the newest member of security expert Ray Breslin's (Stallone) Atlanta-based team. After a botched extraction from a Chechen prison results in the death of a hostage, Breslin fires one of his men, Kimbral (Wes Chatham), for deviating from their set routine. A year later, Shu is in Thailand visiting his tech mogul cousin Yusheng Ma (Chen Tang) when both are abducted and thrown into Hades, a super high-tech prison nine stories underground that holds regular fighting showdowns (that's original) in "The Zoo," where the victor earns time in "The Sanctuary," a room with virtual reality imagery that provides a brief respite for the prisoners. Jake (Jesse Metcalfe), another Breslin staffer, goes rogue and tries to investigate Shu's disappearance on his own only to end up in Hades himself, where he and Shu encounter an incarcerated Kimbral. It then becomes clear--to them but perhaps not to the viewer--that it's all a set-up against Breslin as revenge for him escaping from "The Tomb" in the previous film, which means one thing: Breslin must do what he does best and get himself thrown into Hades, essentially breaking in to find a way to get his guys out.
Though Stallone is playing the same character, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson is back as his right-hand man Hush, and co-writer Miles Chapman also returns, ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES seems like it takes place in a different world than its predecessor. It's got such heavy futuristic sci-fi leanings that it could almost pass as a FORTRESS or CUBE reboot, and at the rate this franchise is going, ESCAPE PLAN 3 could very well be set in space. Director Steven C. Miller, who's helmed several chapters of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, churned this out in an undistinguished fashion, with constantly jittery cinematography and motion-sickness inducing shaky-cam in the action scenes, and some of the most unacceptably shoddy CGI in recent memory (a couple of iPhone-app-level explosions and Stallone administering a CGI neckbreak that's just atrocious). Huang is a dull hero, though to his credit, he's not acting in his first language. Half-asleep and sporting a terrible rug, Stallone is largely relegated to the sideline, almost-but-not-quite-Willis-style (Breslin actually leaves his office), until he ends up in Hades about an hour in and more or less becomes the focus. Dave Bautista has little to do but manages a couple of laughs as a fixer colleague of Breslin's who gathers intel for their search for Shu, strong-arming assistance from a hacker played by Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz (and speaking of pointless cameos, Atlanta Falcons RB Devonta Freeman can briefly be glimpsed as a Hades inmate). ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES is lazy, cheap-looking, and laughably cliched, right down to its (ostensibly) chief villain, evil warden "The Zookeeper," played by Titus Welliver. A reliable ringer when it comes to character roles, a glowering Welliver looks like he's in physical pain being forced to gravely intone lines like "I know everything about my animals...I'm the Zookeeper," while one inmate helpfully waxes poetic with "That's why they call it The Zoo...we're all animals here...survival of the fittest." Between these hastily-shot sequels that were only made to satisfy the demand of the Asian market and the apparently ill-advised direction CREED 2 seems to be headed from the sound of things (why is Ivan Drago back?), it looks like Stallone is completely squandering the serious cred he got from that CREED Oscar nomination. Had he won it like he should have, we might've been spared ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES. Or at least Miller could've rewritten the script to keep Breslin completely confined to his office so Bruce Willis could've stepped in and taken over the role. (R, 93 mins) CHINA SALESMAN (China - 2017; US release 2018)
It's pretty clear from the moment CHINA SALESMAN begins that it's gonna be something special. There's an opening certification stating that it's commissioned by the Chinese government, one of the 16 (!) production companies is represented by a typo ("Gloden" God Video & Culture), there's 72 (!!) credited producers, and former action star and current sleeper agent Steven Seagal is listed as "Steve Segal" in the opening credits. A $20 million epic that tanked in China a year ago, CHINA SALESMAN was picked up for the US by Cleopatra Entertainment, the company that gave us the Kazakh shitshow DIAMOND CARTEL, and prominently features Seagal and Mike Tyson in its advertising, making it a veritable Who's Who of #MeToo. But, like ESCAPE PLAN 2, the Hollywood guest stars have relatively minor roles, with the focus on Li Dongxue as Yan Jian, an ambitious representative from Chinese tech company DH Telecom, who's in Uganda trying to negotiate a lucrative contract to establish 3G wireless communication at newly-constructed cell phone towers in the civil war-torn country. Pretty scintillating stuff, with a lot of screen time devoted to captivating meetings and boardroom backstabbing as Yan Jian and his associate Ruan Ling (Li Ai) are in constant danger of being railroaded by duplicitous Eurotrash shitbag Michael Duchamp (Clovis Fouin), who's also trying to close the deal for his company and seems to be on the good side of Susanna (Janicke Askevold), the head of the independent committee charged with deciding the victor in the 3G bidding war. But Susanna eventually sides with Yan Jian, who's heroically depicted as the only person who can save Uganda, right down to a patently ridiculous scene where he risks life and limb to plant a Chinese flag, which he and Susanna then passionately wave as they drive past cheering Ugandan soldiers.
Tyson, who relooped his dialogue but still can't match his own lip movements, plays Kabbah, a religious mercenary from an unnamed African country who ends up as a flunky for Duchamp. Seagal has little more than a cameo as Lauder, an expat bar owner ("Of all the gin joints in the world...") and arms dealer on the side who, for some reason, has a framed action still of Steven Seagal on his desk. CHINA SALESMAN shows its only signs of life in the first ten minutes during an out-of-nowhere bar brawl between Tyson and Seagal's double, which starts when Kabbah refuses a drink for religious reasons, prompting Lauder to have one of his goons piss in a mug and try to force him to drink it. There's an admittedly amusing moment when Seagal('s double) flicks Tyson's ear in a way that has to be an Evander Holyfield dig, but what perfectly caps the scene is an enraged Kabbah shouting "You serve me pee...YOU DIE!" Beyond that, CHINA SALESMAN is an oppressively overlong bore, filled with the kind of crummy greenscreen and CGI that only Chinese visual effects teams can pull off, and populated by actors so stiff and uncomfortable with English (even Tyson) that Seagal ends up looking like a world-class orator by default. (Unrated, 111 mins)
THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 (US - 2018)
It's rare that you encounter a movie that has no reason to exist. One of the most self-defeating films of 2018, THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 initially appears to be a B-grade, Redbox-ready take on HELL OR HIGH WATER by way of the Coen Bros., with nitwit sheriff's deputies Jim Doyle (FREAKS AND GEEKS' Martin Starr) and Thurman Hayford (Jake McDorman of CBS' LIMITLESS spinoff) idling their days away in the sleepy and sparsely-populated rural town of Shandaken in upstate New York in the late 1960s. They have little to do but play cops & robbers in the woods and get on-the-house pie at the local diner, and without a single arrest in the last year, the stern, no-nonsense sheriff (Ron Perlman) comes down from Albany to fire them. But they find a way to regain their jobs when they get word of an escaped convict known only as Prisoner 614 (George Sample III) on foot and headed their way. They hike deep into the woods--idiotically wasting all their bullets in a pissing contest where neither of them can shoot a beer can at ten paces--finding 614 and taking him into custody. 614 is wanted for killing a deputy from a neighboring county, but insists he's innocent and that the deputy died of a heart attack, and as time goes on, Jim and Thurman believe him. Once they get back to Shandaken, they can't convince the sheriff, even with a sworn statement from a witness that the obese deputy had a heart attack while 614 was simply standing near him. Their actions get Jim and Thurman rehired, but then they risk it all by going against the sheriff and aiding and abetting a fugitive to get 614 to freedom in Canada.
It's hard telling who this movie is even for. Nothing sums up its utter futility like having a character unknowingly guzzle Ipecac in a set-up for what must be a showstopping comedic projectile vomiting set piece, but then it has that very character drop dead of a heart attack before the Ipecac kicks in. Is that like making a porno where two people are about to fuck and then just watch TV? THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 subverts your expectations to the point where the entire movie just feels like one long dick move. Is it a comedy without laughs or a thriller without suspense? And is it that way by design? Starr and McDornan seem like they'll be playing affable goofballs but then just seem to wander aimlessly through the movie with no real character arcs or progression, while Sample has even less to do, even when writer/director Zach Golden throws in a cursory mention of the charges against him being racially-motivated. Perlman pops up here and there to slow burn at the deputies and basically be "Ron Perlman," but Golden doesn't seem to know what kind of movie he was trying to make, so he plays it too safe and makes what amounts to a movie about nothing that goes nowhere. The period detail is atrocious, and you can only gauge that it's 1967 or thereabouts from Jim mentioning that he recently saw COOL HAND LUKE (you should probably do the same). There's a few old cars and people chain-smoking indoors, but no one looks or sounds like they're in the late '60s. Speaking of sounds, if this is upstate New York in the Catskills, why is everyone breaking out overbaked Southern drawls like they're auditioning for a community theater version of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT? (PG-13, 97 mins)
DEN OF THIEVES (US - 2018) Written and directed by Christian Gudegast. Cast: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Meadow Williams, Brian Van Holt, Evan Jones, Eric Braeden, Dawn Olivieri, Jordan Bridges, Mo McRae, Maurice Compte, Cooper Andrews, Kaiwi Lyman, Sonya Balmores, Oleg Taktarov. (R, 140 mins)
After a shootout resulting from the hijacking of an empty armored car, O'Brien can't figure out the motive. That is, until a clue leads him to Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr), who turns out to be the wheelman for Ray Merriman (Pablo Schreiber), the leader of a crew of skilled, coordinated bank robbers, all ex-military with Kevlar masks and body armor and high-tech assault rifles. O'Brian has a backlog of unsolved robberies with similar MOs and unusual circumstances going back to 2004. He's convinced this is Merriman's crew, as he's just been paroled after ten years, during which time no heists have displayed the tell-tale signs of the unsolved jobs. O'Brien uses Donnie as an informer, but it doesn't accomplish much, since he's just the wheelman and he's kept largely in the dark on the intricate planning. Merriman and his right-hand man Levi (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) are plotting their most outlandish job yet: robbing the Federal Reserve in downtown Los Angeles, a building where every inch of the premises is under surveillance and only authorized security and armored car personnel are allowed in. The plan? Get in to steal $30 million in old bills being taken out of circulation--thereby making them untraceable--before they're put in the shredder. O'Brien doesn't really hide the fact that he's on to Merriman and his gang, even showing up to harass and embarrass them as they dine at a Japanese restaurant ("The food here sucks...I'm just here for the ass!" O'Brien bellows in DIPSHIT HEAT's version of this), so Merriman changes the game, plotting a decoy heist to throw O'Brien and his guys off their trail. Of course, things don't quite go as planned.
DEN OF THIEVES bulldozes forward in constant motion, often glossing over the specifics--I'm still not sure what initially leads O'Brien to Donnie, and even as it's happening inside the Reserve, the heist itself makes little sense--but as a scuzzy guilty pleasure, it's undeniably entertaining. Much of that is thanks to Butler, who plays O'Brien as an uncouth, corrupt lout of an antihero who's frequently more unhinged than the perps he's trying to nail. He's introduced hungover and looking like shit, surveying a murder scene outside a coffee shop and helping himself to a donut out of the box dropped by one of the victims. Like most movie cops of this sort, he answers to no one, he straddles the line between cop and criminal, and he does what's necessary to get under his target's skin, like screwing Merriman's stripper girlfriend (Meadow Williams) and then engaging in a shirtless, morning-after staredown in her apartment when Merriman shows up unexpectedly. Schreiber (younger half-brother of Liev, and best known for his roles on THE WIRE, ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, and as a recurring Olivia Benson nemesis on LAW & ORDER: SVU) is all stoic and barely-contained fury as Merriman, and with Butler's scenery-chewing, their relationship is much like that of Pacino and De Niro in HEAT and William Petersen and Willem Dafoe in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (with Williams functioning as the Darlanne Fluegel stand-in). The difference between then and now is that today, everything requires a twist ending, so what better route to take than cribbing from THE USUAL SUSPECTS in a convoluted finale that probably takes a couple of run-throughs to fully comprehend? The Reserve heist not only involves a) a decoy robbery, but also b) the improbability of heavily armed security personnel letting a delivery guy out when they never saw him come in, as well as c) a take-out order of rotten Chinese food. Don't ask. Gudegast gets the HEAT love going right away with a huge opening shootout, plus there's a later nod to the SICARIO traffic jam shootout. Is it fair to call this DIPSHIT HEAT? Yeah, probably, even if Gudegast doesn't let his tough guy dialogue ever get quite as magical as LONDON HAS FALLEN's "Why don't you pack up your shit and move back to Fuckheadistan?" But it's diverting enough and it's the kind of movie you'll end up watching until the end when you're channel-surfing and stumble on it, which is really the best compliment you can pay to something like this. Plus, Gudegast does earn some points for getting daytime soap icon Eric Braeden back on the big screen for just the third time in 20 years--probably not difficult since Braeden is his dad--in a small role as a bar owner named "Ziggy Zerhusen." Top that, Michael Mann!
SOUTHPAW (US - 2015) Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Kurt Sutter. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Naomie Harris, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Oona Laurence, Miguel Gomez, Skylan Brooks, Victor Ortiz, Beau Knapp, Dominic Colon. (R, 124 mins)
SOUTHPAW is the first big-screen project scripted by Kurt Sutter, who made a name for himself as a writer and producer on THE SHIELD and went on to become the mastermind behind SONS OF ANARCHY. As any viewer of those classic TV shows is aware, Sutter is drawn to strutting, tough-talking bro-huggers whose macho bravado masks a torrent of pain and anguish, men who play by their own rules and go outside the law if necessary if that's what it takes to get to another day because that's what they do. SOUTHPAW plays a lot like a whittled-down series that Sutter might've produced for FX, and as such, there's jumps in the narrative where things can be easily glossed over but there's no natural flow or feel for how one event leads to another. Plus, if you were to remove a few Eminem songs, the constantly spitting blood, and the plethora of F-bombs, and SOUTHPAW is every bit as hokey and melodramatic as any late 1930s/early 1940s Warner Bros. boxing programmer with James Cagney or Arthur Kennedy as a scrappy, wunderkind pugilist and Humphrey Bogart or Barton MacLane as his unscrupulous manager. SOUTHPAW is certainly watchable and has moments that are fine, but it hits every genre trope and cliche like it's bulldozing through a checklist, and yet it behaves as if it's somehow the first boxing movie with a down-and-out hero, once on top of the world, now kicked to the curb with something to prove, going the distance in the fight of his life.
Jake Gyllenhaal is light heavyweight world champion Billy Hope (Sutter never was one for subtlety), currently holding a 43-0 professional record but being urged to slow down by his Noo Yawk-talking wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams). Billy and Maureen both "came up through the system," and met in a Hell's Kitchen orphanage when they were 12 years old. They've been blessed with fame and fortune and only want the best for their young daughter Leila (Oona Laurence). Maureen, or "Mo," wants Billy to call it a career, but with all of his homeboys on his payroll and his opportunistic manager Jordan Mains (50 Cent, cast radically against type as a piece of shit) always pushing him, Billy has to keep the money rolling in, with a $30 million offer from HBO already on the table for his next fight. All of that goes south when mouthy up-and-comer Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) keeps publicly calling him out to grant him a shot at the title. During one such encounter at a gala benefit for the orphanage, Miguel threatens to "take your title and your bitch," and a brawl ensues that results in Mo being shot and killed. Almost overnight, Billy's lawyer informs he's in serious debt and owes back taxes. When a drunk, depressed Billy crashes his car into a tree on the front lawn, the house goes into foreclosure and Child Protective Services take Leila into custody. Almost all of his friends abandon him and Mains dumps him in favor of Escobar (cue Fiddy with the mandatory "Nothin' personal...it's just business, baby"). Billy moves into a shithole apartment in the projects and when a grieving Leila refuses to see him during one of his supervised visits, he has nowhere to go but the ramshackle gym of Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), an old-school trainer, blind in one eye from his days in the ring, the kind of taskmaster who charges fifty push-ups for swearing and whose speed and heavy bags are barely held together with duct tape. Through Tick, will Billy learn back-to-the-basics boxing and earn the respect of the kids at the gym, thereby attaining respect for himself? Will he find the fire--the "eye of the tiger," if you will--that once propelled him into the upper echelons of the sport, win back the love of his embittered daughter and symbolically avenge his wife's death by regaining the belt that's has since been won by the ever-boasting Escobar? If you've ever seen a movie before, you'll know where SOUTHPAW is going long before it gets there.
Sutter and director Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY, THE EQUALIZER) leave no cliche untouched throughout SOUTHPAW. They also gloss over subplots that range from undeveloped (the home situation of a kid who hangs out at Tick's gym) to outright abandoned (Escobar's crack-addled wife and the investigation into who shot Maureen). The film seems to think that it can coast by solely on Gyllenhaal's startling physical transformation into the ripped Billy Hope. It's quite a contrast to last year's NIGHTCRAWLER, where the actor lost weight to appear wiry and gaunt as a sleazy, greasy tabloid videographer. Gyllenhaal's lack of an Oscar nomination for NIGHTCRAWLER remains one of the more outrageous Academy snubs in recent years, but his performance in SOUTHPAW reeks of transparent Oscar bait. The role was originally conceived with Eminem in mind, and that seems to be who Gyllenhaal is trying to emulate. As a result, his performance too often feels like mannered posturing and a collection of twitches and flinches. Billy Hope is a man who has a hard time articulating himself to the point where exploding in violence is all he can do, but Gyllenhaal's performance is too much of a performance. Compare his work to that of Channing Tatum in FOXCATCHER--a film I really didn't like, but Tatum is a revelation in it--and you see the difference. Gyllenhaal is simply trying too hard and it ends up backfiring on him. Whitaker makes some good moments out of a stock, cardboard character. Young Laurence does a good job of capturing the sass and fire demonstrated by McAdams in her brief screen time (she's gone by the 30-minute mark), enough that they're both quite believable as mother and daughter, while Naomie Harris can't do much with a superfluous supporting role as Leila's child services case worker (why is she at the final fight between Billy and Escobar?). Fuqua's staging of the fight sequences is mostly well-handled, but occasionally demonstrates an overuse of today's quick-cut, shaky-cam approach--not to the point where it's overwhelming, but enough that you miss the in-the-ring intensity of ROCKY or RAGING BULL. Never boring but instantly forgettable, SOUTHPAW is one of Fuqua's weakest films and as far as recent boxing movies go, it isn't even as interesting as last year's DTV Dominic Purcell B-movie A FIGHTING MAN, with the film's sporadic positive elements negated by a thoroughly predictable and maddeningly formulaic presentation. Regardless of how much time Gyllenhaal spent getting physically prepped for the role, there isn't a single thing here that hasn't been recycled from a hundred other boxing movies before it.
There's been no shortage of ambitious, gifted, and intelligent artists-turned-working-stiff actors who put their game face on, punch a clock, and schlep their way through movies they'd rather not be doing, but few are worse at masking their utter contempt for a project they know is beneath them than Bruce Willis. The odd thing about Willis is that, unlike a journeyman mercenary who doesn't command an eight-figure salary, he's still an A-lister and doesn't need the work or the money. But here he is, in the grand tradition of unseen, streaming-ready duds like CATCH .44, SET-UP, FIRE WITH FIRE, LAY THE FAVORITE, and THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY, coasting through for another easy payday and doing as little work as possible. Willis isn't alone, as THE PRINCE is also the latest piece of evidence in the ongoing autopsy of John Cusack's career. Cusack, the once-iconic star of SAY ANYTHING, GROSSE POINTE BLANK, and HIGH FIDELITY, has spent the last couple of years on an relentless kamikaze mission to accept every role Val Kilmer probably turned down. But Willis and Cusack are just prominently-billed guest stars in THE PRINCE. The actual star is Jason Patric, hailed briefly in the early '90s (AFTER DARK, MY SWEET and RUSH) as the great actor of his generation, but now reduced to appearing in movies like THE PRINCE. Patric's place in popular culture is forever cemented by THE LOST BOYS and in tabloid history by being the guy Julia Roberts ran off with three days before she was supposed to marry his friend Kiefer Sutherland, but he hasn't appeared in a major movie since playing the villain in 2010's underrated THE LOSERS and, like Willis and Cusack, has often been cited as being mercurial and difficult on a movie set. Unlike Willis and Cusack, however, Patric has been spending most of his offscreen time fighting a legal battle with his ex-girlfriend and California lawmakers for sperm donor parental rights, and seems to be in THE PRINCE because he probably needs the money and it's the best gig he can get right now. It's also his second consecutive film (after this year's earlier THE OUTSIDER) with director Brian A. Miller, whose resume is littered with forgettable, mostly 50 Cent-produced cop movies. Miller and Willis have already completed something called VICE, coming to a Redbox kiosk near you in early 2015.
Hideously shot, with garish lighting and a smeary, smudgy color palette and everyone looking waxy like a Blu-ray with too much DNR (moonlight coming through the blinds on a bedroom window looks like the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND mothership is parked outside), THE PRINCE has 33 credited producers and a plot that's virtually identical to THE OUTSIDER. Patric had a supporting role in that film, but here he's the star and he brings more grit and gravitas than a going-through-the-motions TAKEN ripoff like this deserves. Patric is Paul Brennan, a hardworking Mississippi mechanic and widower whose daughter Beth (Gia Mantegna) has gotten hooked on heroin and gone missing from college in New Orleans. Brennan also happens to be an ex-criminal and a once-legendary Big Easy hit man known as "The Prince." He vanished without a trace 20 years back after a botched hit on New Orleans crime lord Omar Kaiser (Willis) resulted in Kaiser's wife and daughter getting killed instead. Brennan drags Beth's dramatically-sighing friend Angela (Jessica Lowndes) along to New Orleans with him, which results in much back-and-forth banter, as Angela can't even. They get to New Orleans and find Beth has hooked up with a ruthless drug kingpin known as "The Pharmacy" (50 Cent), and after numerous instances of Brennan walking into a club and asking about his daughter only to be promptly told to fuck off, he's amassed enough of a body count that word gets to Kaiser that his arch-enemy is back in town. This leads to the inevitable showdown at now-successful businessman Kaiser's company headquarters, which looks suspiciously like the hotel where Willis was likely staying during his 3-4 days on the set. Most of Willis' scenes have him seated at a desk surrounded by surveillance monitors and mumbling orders while his top flunky (South Korean pop star and NINJA ASSASSIN lead Rain) does the leg work. Fiddy and Jonathan Schaech (as a gun shop owner) have about three minutes of screen time and a tired-looking Cusack, barely conscious in a nothing supporting role, first appears 50 minutes in and has a few scenes as an ex-sidekick of Brennan's who briefly helps him take on Kaiser's goons before vanishing from the film. With his steely, intense persona, Patric is surprisingly effective here and seems much more comfortable in action mode now than he did in 1997's disastrous SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL. It's too bad his efforts are wasted in something so trifling and dumb. If Brennan had to change his name and his safety and the security of his future family depended on him never again setting foot in New Orleans, then perhaps he should've moved further than one state away when he went into self-imposed exile. Perhaps he should've attempted to talk his daughter into going to college anywhere other than in New Orleans. Perhaps he should've considered storing his stash of weapons somewhere other than in the back room of a gun shop in, yes, you guessed it, New Orleans. (R, 91 mins)
GOOD PEOPLE (US/Denmark/Sweden - 2014)
Another VOD dump-off by Cannon cover band Millennium, GOOD PEOPLE is a good example of the kind of commercial, popcorn suspense thriller that would've cleaned up at the box office in the mid-to-late '90s, but just doesn't get much distributor support today. Based on a 2009 book by Chicago-based Marcus Sakey, a prolific mid-level crime novelist who specializes in the kind of brisk, well-crafted page-turners that people used to read on long flights, GOOD PEOPLE moves the setting of the novel from the Windy City to London for no particular reason, but other than that, retains the same basic plot. Financially-strapped American expat couple Tom (James Franco) and Anna Wright (Kate Hudson) have invested all of their money into renovating a dilapidated home left to them by Tom's British grandmother. Tom is a construction contractor and Anna is a schoolteacher, but there isn't enough money coming in, Anna desperately wants to start a family, and they've resorted to renting their basement to a tenant. Tom finds the tenant dead and discovers a duffel bag filled with £220,000 (approximately $350,000) stashed above the ceiling tiles. Rumpled detective Halden (Tom Wilkinson) comes snooping around and Tom is being followed and harassed by both vicious drug dealer Jack Witkowski (Sam Spruell) and French crime lord Genghis Khan (Omar Sy), each of whom claim the missing money belongs to them. Tom and Anna have stashed the money, but catch the attention of Halden when they start doing stupid things that people in movies who fall into dirty money usually do, namely Tom making large bank deposits and paying off long-gestating bills and Anna splurging on an expensive washer-dryer set for her single-mom best friend (Anna Friel) and paying for expensive tests at a fertility clinic. Before long, Tom and Anna are in the middle of a war between Witkowski and Khan, which leads to the inevitable showdown between all interested parties at the grandmother's abandoned house.
Sakey's book was a compelling and uncomplicated read, but GOOD PEOPLE is a bland and unexciting film. The script by BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD and SNOWPIERCER screenwriter Kelly Masterson, having a bit of an off-day here, and the direction by Danish TV vet Henrik Ruben Genz (FORBRYDELSEN, the original Danish version of the TV series THE KILLING) are exceedingly routine and by-the-numbers. Genz really drops the ball in the climax, which is very badly-staged, too dark, and confusingly executed. GOOD PEOPLE is watchable enough, but it never really tries to be anything more than that. Franco and Hudson do what's required of them, but only Wilkinson seems invested enough to try and create something a little deeper with his cynical and melancholy character, one of those "last honest cop" types wading through a department full of corruption and who lost his junkie daughter to drugs dealt by Witkowski. So yeah, this is...personal. In the end, there's absolutely nothing here you haven't seen before, and even the actors seem to know it. (R, 90 mins) LOCKED IN (UK/US - 2014)
If you've seen the barely-released 2008 film PASSENGERS, you've got a good idea where LOCKED IN is headed. Both films share the same screenwriter (Ronnie Christensen) and both owe a tremendous debt to the heyday of M. Night Shyamalan. Josh (Ben Barnes), his wife Emma (Sarah Roemer), and young daughter Brooke (played by twins Abigail and Helen Steinman) are in a bizarre car accident that leaves Brooke comatose with "locked-in syndrome"--she's alive and her brain is active, but her body is in a state of total paralysis. It isn't long before Josh starts getting voice mails from Brooke and is certain she's attempting to communicate with him. He believes she's doing this to convince Josh and Emma to reconcile, as they've recently separated after he had a one-night fling with psycho ex Renee (Eliza Dushku). Josh even finds what he believes is evidence that Renee ran their car off the road and caused the accident. What's going on is a bit more spiritual, as Josh's older brother Nathan (Johnny Whitworth) directs him to sympathetic medium Frank (Clarke Peters), who insists that "time is a factor" and "it's not too late" to rescue Brooke from wherever she may be. There's a barrage of revelations in the closing minutes, followed by one final twist that doesn't make much sense.
But then, not much does in LOCKED IN, a troubled production that was shot in Boston in 2009 and shown at some film festivals in 2010. It was tied up in legal wrangles for several years and existed in various cuts on the bootleg circuit (the festival version ran 85 minutes), before indie distributor Wrekin Hill finally sent it straight-to-DVD with a running time of 78 minutes and three credited editors obviously on a doomed salvage mission. It doesn't seem like any of the editors looked at what the others did--whole chunks of story seem to be missing. Sometimes it seems like Josh lives at the house, sometimes it seems like he's living in a motel. There's no consistency to how some characters behave, especially Emma's mom, played by MY LEFT FOOT Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker. And why is John Carpenter favorite Peter Jason wearing a bear costume as a boozy mattress king shooting a TV commercial in one scene? He's listed rather high in the credits for such a throwaway bit part--surely he had more to do at one point than slur a couple of lines before declaring "I gotta take a shit." Maybe he just ad-libbed that last part and fled the set? Both Barnes and Roemer were almost Next Big Things five years ago (Barnes was Prince-then-King Caspian in the CHRONICLES OF NARNIA franchise, and Roemer was Shia LaBeouf's love interest in the surprise 2007 hit DISTURBIA), and Roemer had enough momentum going at the time to get a producer credit on this, but LOCKED IN is a catastrophe that isn't doing anything for anyone's career, especially the great Peters (THE WIRE, TREME), who's entirely too good an actor to play such a stock, cardboard "Magical Negro" stereotype. The end result can't possibly be what Christensen and veteran British TV director Suri Krishnamma had in mind when they went into this. LOCKED IN is one of those movies that wasn't finished--it was abandoned. (R, 78 mins).
Directed by Mikael Hafstrom. Written by Miles Chapman and Arnell Jesko. Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel, Vincent D'Onofrio, Amy Ryan, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Sam Neill, Vinnie Jones, Faran Tahir, Graham Beckel, Matt Gerald, Caitriona Balfe. (R, 115 mins)
Though THE EXPENDABLES and its sequel proved to be surprise hits, they failed to kickstart a geriatric action movement for aging warhorses like 67-year-old Sylvester Stallone and 66-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their early 2013 solo releases--BULLET TO THE HEAD and THE LAST STAND, respectively--tanked at the box office as audiences stayed far away despite generally positive reviews for both. The sad fact is that teenagers make up most of the theatrical audience, and kids today aren't really interested in what '80s action icons are doing. Hell, they won't even go see Jason Statham movies at this point, and he's only 46. Much like aging rock bands going out on four-band package tours, these dinosaur action fossils only seem to generate some box office when they're all together, hence, next summer's EXPENDABLES 3. For fans of these guys in their prime, these things are a blast. I can't think of a more giddy moment in a 2012 movie than Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis standing side-by-side with guns blazing in THE EXPENDABLES 2. If you can't get behind that, then we don't have anything more to discuss.
Here, Stallone is Ray Breslin, who makes a lucrative living breaking out of prisons. A legend in his field, Breslin literally wrote the book on correctional facility security measures. His business partner Lester (Vincent D'Onofrio) presents him with an offer for double their usual fee: incarceration at The Tomb (the film's original title), an off-the-grid, privately-funded, state-of-the-art facility that houses the worst of the worst. Going in undercover as a South American terrorist named Porthos, Breslin immediately tangles with Warden Hobbes (Jim Caviezel) and his crew of masked security guards led by Drake (Vinnie Jones, cast radically against type as "Vinnie Jones"). But he finds an ally in Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger), who's been dumped into The Tomb for his association with his boss, an international criminal named Mannheim. After trading barbs and busting one another's balls, Breslin and Rottmayer concoct an elaborate escape plan (duh) when Breslin learns that someone has paid big money to keep him locked in The Tomb so he'll disappear for good.
ESCAPE PLAN obviously doesn't compare with the best from these fellas' heyday, but if you miss the feeling of old-school '80s action, it gets the job done. It may be a tad longish at 115 minutes, and it could probably use a more appropriate director than Swedish journeyman Mikael Hafstrom (DERAILED, 1408, THE RITE), who does a workmanlike job but doesn't really bring a lot to the proceedings (why isn't Isaac Florentine getting a job like this?), but it's undeniable fun. Hafstrom at least has the sense to somehow get the two stars dangling from a chopper for the climax. Stallone and Schwarzenegger work so well together that you wish they'd teamed up two decades ago and spared Stallone from the likes of STOP! OR MY MOM WILL SHOOT. Stallone glowers and grumbles his way through the film, surprisingly letting Schwarzenegger be the showy comic relief and the Governator runs with it, whether he's starting fights and insulting other inmates, getting thrown in lockdown and ranting in German, or telling Breslin "You hit like a vegetarian." Schwarzenegger even gets the film's best moment, grabbing a machine gun (Hafstrom gives him a close up of his eyes squinting) and turning around in slo-mo as he starts blasting Hobbes' goonish guards.
The big guys are obviously the show here, but there's a sizable supporting cast of reliable pros, and 50 Cent. Fiddy and Amy Ryan play Breslin's associates, and it's nice to see Sam Neill on the big screen again, even if it's in a thankless role as the prison doctor. As far as movie wardens go, Caviezel is an appropriately sneering, cartoonish bad guy, snapping his fingers at the guards in lieu of giving orders and introduced tending to his butterfly collection and prissily dusting lint from his perfectly-pressed suit. D'Onofrio turns in yet another mannered, tic-heavy turn as Lester, sporting a goofy fedora, a grating "Da Bearsss!" accent, and constantly squirting hand sanitizer into his palm. When's the last time D'Onofrio gave a real performance in anything? The guy's done some great work (admittedly, when you start with FULL METAL JACKET, you set the bar pretty high), but since his divisive run on LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT (I thought he was terrific), it seems like everything he's done is filled with exaggerated accents, off-the-wall quirks, fidgeting, and a crutch-like reliance on props as a way of establishing a character. D'Onofrio's the kind of actor who needs a strong director to rein him in, and he rarely gets it. Some of his recent overdone turns in films like CHAINED and PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES make his work as noseless meth kingpin Pooh Bear in THE SALTON SEA look restrained and low-key by comparison. When did he throw it all away to become the Nicolas Cage of supporting actors?
I dug ESCAPE PLAN, but I'm admittedly grading it on a curve. It's nowhere near the level of the best work of either of its stars (and even they fall victim to trends with some janky CGI in the second half, but it's not a deal-breaker) and it gets by largely on their presence alone. But it's just nice to see these guys still headlining action movies at their age. There isn't much in the way of star power at the multiplex these days--sure, you've got the occasional George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, or Brad Pitt, but when's the last time you heard anyone say 'That new Chris Hemsworth movie ruled!"? When's the last time you were standing in line at the concession stand and overheard someone declare "I never miss a Chris Pine movie!"? Where are the big screen action stars? There's only franchises and brands. Like going to see a past-their-prime band at a small club instead of the arenas they once played, a new Stallone/Schwarzenegger flick is a nostalgia trip dismissed by many, but as long as they keep offering them, they can count me in.
It's hard for any 1970s set mob thriller to not swing from Martin Scorsese's nutsack, and while THE ICEMAN, based on the true story of career hit man Richard Kuklinski, is predictably episodic and formulaic as far as these things go, it stands out from the crowd thanks to some strong performances and some unusually diligent attention to period detail. Most of today's films that are set in NYC of 40 years ago have a pronounced CGI artifice to them that's distracting to the point of looking cartoonish. While those techniques are used here, it's obvious that director Ariel Vroman and the production design team made the extra effort to make it look as convincing as possible. Michael Shannon, one of modern cinema's great character actors, stars as Kuklinski who, as the film opens in 1964, is a low-level flunky dubbing movies for the porn operation of powerful Jersey mobster Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta). Kuklinski works his way up to hit man after Demeo shuts down the porn operation, and after he lets a witness go (he doesn't kill women or children), Demeo takes Kuklinski out of commission and refuses to give him any work. Kuklinski, whose ruthlessness at his job is at odds with his being a devoted husband to Deborah (Winona Ryder) and loving father to their two daughters, ends up working with freelance killer Mr. Freezy (Chris Evans), so-called for his driving an ice-cream truck and storing bodies for up to two years before thawing them out and chopping them into pieces.
Written and directed by Scott Walker. Cast: Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Vanessa Hudgens, Radha Mitchell, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Dean Norris, Kevin Dunn, Olga Valentina, Michael McGrady, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Kurt Fuller, Brad William Henke, Katherine LaNasa, Ryan O'Nan, Matt Gerald, Gia Mantegna, Robert Forgit. (R, 105 mins)
Considering that the nearly $30 million-budgeted THE FROZEN GROUND has been banished to VOD Oblivion by Lionsgate, is only playing in a few theaters across the US, arrives in August 2013 sporting a 2011 copyright date, opens with the logos (among several others) for Emmett/Furla Films and Cheetah Vision, counts co-stars Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson and Olga Valentina (one other acting credit: Fiddy's FREELANCERS) as two of 29 credited producers, and is headlined by Nicolas Cage and John Cusack, both of whom are a long way from CON AIR and not exactly riding a wave of recent box office success (though Cusack appears as Richard Nixon in LEE DANIELS' THE BUTLER), it comes as a pleasant surprise that the film is a quite engrossing serial killer thriller/police procedural. While it's nowhere near the level of ZODIAC, it's unexpectedly well-done for a film that has so many things working against it. I could be wrong, but this may mark the first time the words "pleasant surprise," "quite engrossing," and "50 Cent" have appeared in the same review.
Based on a true story, THE FROZEN GROUND is set in Anchorage, AK in 1983. Young prostitute Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens) is found raped, beaten, bloodied, and handcuffed after escaping from the mystery man who abducted and planned to kill her. While the local cops decide to blame the victim, Alaska state trooper Sgt. Jack Halcombe (Cage) is investigating the murder of a young woman found badly decomposed and partially eaten by animals in the frozen wilderness. Sensing a link between the discovered body, several other missing women--mostly prostitutes--and Cindy, Halcombe starts looking into Anchorage records and becomes fixated on bakery owner and all-around likable guy Bob Hansen (Cusack) as a suspect. Hansen fits the profile, has had several run-ins with the law in his younger days, and 12 years earlier, abducted and threatened a woman but only served a minimal jail sentence. Halcombe's hunch is right: Hansen is a serial killer of at least 17 victims over the years, and he's got another prostitute (Gia Mantegna) chained up in his basement while paying a brutal bouncer (Brad William Henke) to track down Cathy's pimp Clate (Fiddy, in a startling bit of against-type casting) and find out where she is.
This idiotic 50 Cent-produced thriller skipped theaters altogether despite a $20 million budget, most of which appears to have gone toward paying a large cast of slumming actors. Fiddy has a small role and was one of 36 (!) credited producers, but the focus is on Josh Duhamel as a Long Beach firefighter who's in a carry-out when the owner and his son are killed by white supremacist crime lord Vincent D'Onofrio, who wants to run out the Crips who control the area. At the urging of cynical narcotics detective Bruce Willis, who's obsessed with putting D'Onofrio behind bars, Duhamel agrees to testify but has to enter the federal witness protection program and goes into hiding in New Orleans. Of course, D'Onofrio finds out where Duhamel is--largely because this film's version of witness protection bears no resemblance to reality--and sends hapless assassins Julian McMahon and Arie Verveen after him. Duhamel, meanwhile, has been secretly dating the federal agent (Rosario Dawson) in charge of his case (and it seems as if her boss Kevin Dunn doesn't have a problem with it), and of course, she's now in danger as well, narrowly missing a bullet to the head that was meant for Duhamel. Duhamel makes his way back to Long Beach and tries to start a war between D'Onofrio and the Crips, but ends up abandoning that idea and opting for the One Man Wrecking Crew approach, which means all involved parties--actors' availabilities permitting--will eventually meet for a showdown at an abandoned warehouse.
Directed by TV veteran David Barrett (THE MENTALIST, CASTLE), FIRE WITH FIRE is bland, dull, and completely witless, filled with unconvincingly cheap CGI fire (they even CGI'd a speeding SUV in one hilarious shot that's visible in the above trailer) and bored performances by the cast: Fiddy shows up for one scene as a gun dealer, Richard Schiff plays D'Onofrio's attorney, Bonnie Somerville is the district attorney, UFC champ Quinton "Rampage" Jackson and Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha are a couple of Crips, Eric Winter and James Lesure are Duhamel's firefighter buddies, and Vinnie Jones is in full-on blustery fookin' 'ell, mate! mode as one of D'Onofrio's flunkies and just your typical Long Beach white power soccer hooligan. Willis, in his third 50 Cent production since fall 2011, probably put in two or three days' work, mostly sitting at a desk looking concerned and/or constipated. He has a scene where he's on the phone yelling at Dunn that constitutes some of the worst acting of his career, or at least his worst acting since CATCH .44. (R, 97 mins)
MAXIMUM CONVICTION (US/Canada/Luxembourg - 2012)
Perhaps miffed at not being invited to the party, Steven Seagal attempts to headline his own straight-to-DVD version of THE EXPENDABLES, just minus action, humor, pacing, recognizable names, acceptable acting, chemistry, and inspiration. MAXIMUM CONVICTION pairs the aging action star with pro wrestling legend Steve Austin (who was actually one of the bad guys in the first EXPENDABLES) as, respectively, Cross and Manning, the leaders of "Storm," a mercenary security contracting crew of former black ops badasses. They're hired to decommission a decrepit prison that's being shut down, but trouble comes in the form of a team of rogue US marshals led by Blake (Michael Pare). They're after a pair of females who are temporarily being held at the prison, one of whom (Steph Song) has a chip implanted under her skin with damaging top-secret government intel. In addition to that, some of the prison's more dangerous inmates manage to get free, causing further headaches for Seagal and Austin. Pare actually appears to be trying here (even though he's forced to utter that old standby "We've got a lot in common, you and I," when he and Seagal finally meet face-to-face), but it's hard to get excited about these Storm guys. The only other one anyone might recognize is British Tae Kwon Do champ Bren Foster, who comes off like a second-string Scott Adkins. There's a reason Austin hasn't moved beyond the world of DTV: he just has no screen presence or charisma whatsoever. The one thing working in his favor is that he's awake, which is more than you can say for Seagal. I had somewhat elevated hopes for MAXIMUM CONVICTION being a solid DTV actioner since it was directed by Keoni Waxman, who's handled two of Seagal's better DTV efforts (the 2009 releases THE KEEPER and A DANGEROUS MAN, the latter of which easily measures up to much of the stuff from Seagal's big-screen heyday) and clearly has the potential to move on to bigger things. Seagal must've recognized this on their previous collaborations, because he actually seems to give a shit when Waxman is directing. That's not the case here. He's in total coast mode, maybe not relying on his stunt double as much as in other films, but he's still using his ridiculously affected Memphis Cajun accent, and much of his dialogue is completely unintelligible. Seagal is frequently looking down or off to the side in scenes where he's talking to other people, obviously reading his lines from cue cards or a crib sheet just out of camera range. And the whole idea of Seagal and Stone Cold teaming up is a moot point since they're separated for most of the film and obviously not even on the set at the same time in their final scene "together." Pretty far from Seagal's worst, but there's still no reason at all to watch this. (R, 98 mins)
FREELANCERS got a contractually-mandated "select theaters" release on probably a single-digit number of screens 11 days before its DVD/Blu-ray release, but don't let that fool you into thinking this isn't yet another garbage Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson DTV outing with a terrible screenplay and shoddy production values that make the Master P rapsploitation flicks of the mid '90s look professional by comparison. FREELANCERS, a dreary, cliche-filled combo ripoff of TRAINING DAY and STREET KINGS, has received a little more attention than most Fiddy vehicles because of the baffling presence of Robert De Niro in a prominent supporting role. Fiddy is rookie cop Jonas Maldonado, an ex-thug who gets pulled in with a squad of rogue cops led by his late cop dad's ex-partner Sarcone (De Niro), whose crew is brazenly on the take and answers to no one expect powerful drug lord Baez (the late Pedro Armendariz, in his last film). Jonas is paired with coked-up psycho cop LaRue (an embarrassing Forest Whitaker, who was actually in STREET KINGS and seems to be turning into the African-American Nic Cage) and quickly spirals into a life of drugs and corruption until he teams up with a DEA agent (Michael McGrady) to bring down Sarcone.
Everything here is the definition of by-the-numbers and the only surprise is that Val Kilmer is nowhere in sight. The script by L. Philippe Casseus is riddled with cumbersome exposition, laughable contrivances and no character consistency at all (Jonas: "Sarcone's been like a father to me!" Really? Because you just met him; and Jonas doesn't recall that he witnessed his father's murder until the plot requires him to), and the amateur-night direction by Jessy Terrero (reuniting with Fiddy after their GUN triumph) is filled with continuity errors and he makes no effort at all to rein in an overacting Whitaker, turning in another in an alarming string of excruciatingly awful performances after THE EXPERIMENT and CATCH .44. Whitaker does little more here than yell, twitch, snort blow, strut, and wave a gun around while barking absurd lines like "I can make you vanish! POOF!" What's going on with him? THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND was only six years ago, folks. And of course, being that Fiddy is one of 29 (!) credited producers, he gives himself a gratutious sex scene with hot bartender Beau Garrett (who co-starred with Whitaker on the awful CRIMINAL MINDS: SUSPECT BEHAVIOR). Vinnie Jones shows up long enough to do his "Fookin' 'ell, mate!" schtick as a Sarcone-Baez go-between who seems to be making a killing on old-ass 1990s computer monitors. Dana Delany appears briefly as the wife of a dead D.A. and is rewarded with 19th billing and her name misspelled "Delaney" in the closing credits. But the real story with FREELANCERS--other than the shocking decline in Forest Whitaker's acting ability--is a totally disinterested De Niro in the "Richard Harris-in-STRIKE COMMANDO 2" role of his career. De Niro sleepwalks through this and looks mildly irritable throughout, forced to utter lines like "This is about money, fear, and respect!" Eternal respect, Mr. De Niro, but I fear this one is just about the money. (R, 96 mins)
ONE IN THE CHAMBER (US - 2012)
Dull and derivative Romania-shot thriller has hired assassin Carver (Cuba Gooding, Jr) botching a job and inadvertantly starting a war between rival Eastern European mob families. One family calls in a second assassin, a burly Russian known as "The Wolf" (Dolph Lundgren) to finish Carver's job as well as Carver himself. Any chances they'll come to some mutual respect and understanding and turn on the guys who hired them? Maybe...if they don't kill each other first! The confusing script leaves a lot unresolved or at the very least underwritten (Gooding's near-stalking of expat American Claudia Bassols is explained, but still doesn't make much sense), and Gooding is just a brooding bore throughout. ONE IN THE CHAMBER is buoyed considerably by a funny and inspired performance by Lundgren as The Wolf. Wearing loud Hawaiian-style tourist shirts and various porkpie hats, and with a cute dog sidekick he acquires from a target early on, Lundgren pretty easily walks away with the whole film, and you almost wish he was the central character. He doesn't appear until nearly 30 minutes in, and from that point on, things really drag when he's offscreen. Lundgren and the dog aside, ONE IN THE CHAMBER is generic and forgettable, but a step up from director William Kaufman's previous efforts, 2011's lame THE HIT LIST (also with Gooding), and the awful SINNERS AND SAINTS from earlier this year. (R, 91 mins)
ASSASSIN'S BULLET (US - 2012)
With insane DTV cult hits like U.S. SEALS II (2001), UNDISPUTED II: REDEMPTION (2006), and UNDISPUTED III: LAST MAN STANDING (2010), director Isaac Florentine has built a reputation as a genuine auteur in the world of straight-to-DVD. It's hard to tell what he's up to with the painfully bad ASSASSIN'S BULLET. A two-decades-late LA FEMME NIKITA redux fused with vaguely Hitchcockian elements, ASSASSIN'S BULLET might be Florentine trying to go "serious," but the results are simply dreadful. There's a couple of passable foot chases, complete with Florentine's trademark zooms and whooshes, and one spectacularly-staged fight scene early on, but those high hopes are soon deflated. Busy DTV star Christian Slater, who's starting to make Michael Madsen look choosy, is Robert Diggs, an attache at the US embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. Diggs is a former FBI agent who ran as far away from the job--and apparently, from common sense--as he could when his wife was killed by bullets meant for him. He's recruited by Ashdown (Donald Sutherland), the US Ambassador to Bulgaria, to work with the Sofia police to search for a vigilante who's been offing suspected terrorists. The vigilante is a brunette in tight leather pants and shades (Bulgarian actress/writer Elika Portnoy, who gets a "Story by" credit), who looks a lot like Vicky, the wife of a Sofia businessman as well as Ursula, a dancer at an area "folk club" with whom Diggs falls in love.
It all has something to do with multiple personalities and brainwashing, and of course, you can never trust any big name actor who doesn't appear to have a lot to do with the plot, especially when he has the hero join up with people we know are killers and tell him "Your life's in their hands!" as the camera zooms in on his untrustworthy, grinning face. Slater and Sutherland are competent pros who are just on working Eastern European vacations here, but the film's biggest problem is Portnoy, who's not only a terrible actress, but--and there's no way to say this without sounding like a total dick--she has a bit of a crooked face and just looks...odd. Which would be fine if she weren't playing a role that requires the hero to not know that she's wearing disguises. It's never believable for a second that a former FBI agent (or anyone with functioning eyesight) can't tell that blonde Vicky and red-wigged Ursula are the same person, especially when they both have a rather large mole above their right eye.
Vicky
Ursula
Idiot
And who the hell watches an Isaac Florentine joint for scenes with Slater sensitively strumming an acoustic guitar as Portnoy improvs a Bulgarian folk song? Florentine is the man when it comes to crazy DTV action, but he's seriously out of his element here and it feels like an Elika Portnoy vanity project that he simply ended up directing. Also featuring Timothy Spall for some reason, ASSASSIN'S BULLET is a major disappointment from Florentine, and easily the director's worst film. (R, 91 mins)
