AIR STRIKE (China - 2018) Directed by Xiao Feng. Written by Chen Ping, Yang Hsin-Yu, Zhang Hongyi, Yushi Wu, Xiaoqi Li and Qiao Wa. Cast: Bruce Willis, Ye Liu, Rumer Willis, Seung-Heon Song, William Chan, Wei Fan, Nicholas Tse, Bingbing Fan, Chen Daoming, Adrien Brody, Lei Jia, Gang Wu, Su Ma, Yongli Che, Yuanzheng Feng, Le Geng, Ning Chang, Simon Yam. (R, 96 mins) Shot in 2015 and initially known as both the prophetically self-fulfilling THE BOMBING and later as the more inspirational UNBREAKABLE SPIRIT, with a price tag reported to be anywhere between $65-$90 million, this mega-budget Chinese government-funded epic has been hacked down by about 25 minutes for its straight-to-VOD US release under the generic, Redbox-ready title AIR STRIKE. Embarrassingly cheap-looking despite being the most expensive Chinese film ever made at the time it went into production (it was also shot in 3-D, but that was scrapped during post), with aerial dogfight sequences and visual effects that recall the kinds of computer animation that looked dated in the 1990s, AIR STRIKE looks like INCHON if remade by The Asylum. The making of the film seems far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen, a jumbled hodgepodge of characters and events taking place in 1939 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, where Japan launched near-constant bombing raids that decimated Chongqing. There's three different storylines, with characters sometimes intersecting and ending up in places and you have no idea how they got there (the Chinese characters are badly dubbed in English, while the Japanese villains get subtitles). There's former pilot Xue Gangtou (Ye Liu), injured on a mission and reassigned to military intelligence, where he's to ensure that a truck with a secret McGuffin cargo must gets to Chongqing, complete with a half-assed WAGES OF FEAR crossing over a precarious bridge. There's a team of fighter pilots overseen by constipated-looking US military adviser Col. Jack Johnson (top-billed export value Bruce Willis), who barks orders and has to whip them into shape. And there's tons of gratuitous mahjong at a local bar.
The fact that Lionsgate is AIR STRIKE's US distributor might make it a backdoor installment in the studio's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, but he's onscreen quite a bit here and actually takes part in some of the--albeit mostly greenscreen--action sequences. But he finds other ways to make his participation something special and display his utter contempt for what he does for a living, whether it's vacillating between several-day stubble and being clean-shaven in a single scene with no regard for continuity (this happens several times, and what kind of by-the-book US military honcho in 1939 sported trendy stubble?) or, in one scene that has to be seen to be believed, breaking out an anachronistic, open-mic-night-level Christopher Walken impression when the Chinese pilots throw him a surprise birthday party, going off on an obviously improvised monologue about a watch his father gave him. Did Chinese director Xiao Feng even realize his star was amusing himself by dropping a PULP FICTION reference into the middle of a scene? Willis is even visibly smirking while he's doing it. His daughter Rumer gets third billing for a 20-second bit part as a nurse, and she's been unconvincingly dubbed over with a British accent. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody turns up for two brief scenes in the not-even-remotely-pivotal role of "Steve," an American volunteering at a Chongqing orphanage and getting blown up before we even figure out who he is (an entire subplot with his character has been cut for the US release, perhaps as a bizarre tribute to the actor's mostly scrapped work in Terrence Malick's THE THIN RED LINE). Bingbing Fan, the hugely popular actress, model, and pop singer and China's highest-paid superstar, also puts in a few sporadic appearances. Her summer 2018 disappearance and subsequent re-emergence and tax evasion scandal (she's reportedly been fined the equivalent of $130 million by the Chinese government), combined with one-time producer Zhi Jianxiang being a fugitive on the country's most wanted list after fleeing China when he was hit with fraud and money laundering charges related to this project and 2015's IP MAN 3, resulted in the cancellation of the long-shelved film's belated Chinese release just a week before its American debut.
It's worth pointing out that the shots of Bruce Willis
above AND below come from the SAME scene.
Adrian Brody pleading with his
agent to get him in a better movie.
It's hard to imagine AIR STRIKE being good in any incarnation. The original Chinese version reportedly ran 120 minutes, but given its legal issues at home, the truncated, 96-minute American cut, supervised by veteran editor Robert A. Ferretti (TANGO & CASH, DIE HARD 2, UNDER SIEGE) might be the only one available for the foreseeable future. Prior to taking on this massive epic, director Xiao Feng only had one other film to his credit, the 2012 war drama HUSHED ROAR, which was unreleased outside of China. Helping out under the credited guise of "consultant" and creative adviser is the unlikely Mel Gibson, then in one of his periodic Hollywood pariah periods prior to his Oscar-nominated resurgence as a filmmaker with 2016's HACKSAW RIDGE. Ostensibly brought aboard because of his experience in hard-hitting battle scenes, it's possible Gibson had a hand in directing Willis and Brody, as almost all of the combat and action sequences are just a blurred blizzard of atrocious and aggressively unconvincing CGI. Other experienced Hollywood pros were hired by the Chinese producers in an advisory capacity, including cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (PANIC ROOM, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN), credited as "special effects consultant," and the late, great Vilmos Zsigmond as a "cinematography consultant" to the film's own D.P. Shu Yang. An Academy Award-winner for his work on 1977's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and also the renowned cinematographer of MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, DELIVERANCE, and THE DEER HUNTER among many others, Zsigmond was a legend in his field when he died in 2016 at the age of 85. Sadly, AIR STRIKE will go down as his final work, though there's nothing here to indicate that he, Hall, or Gibson were able to help in any way. The kind of movie where six screenwriters are credited and the best any of them can come up with is the one man who knows the contents of the truck's secret cargo's last, dying words being "The truck...is carrying...aaaaggghh..." as he keels over, AIR STRIKE is one of the most bewilderingly awful films of the year. I mean, seriously. What the fuck happened here? What can you say about a movie that's such a garbage fire that 2018 Bruce Willis is one of its positives?
AIR STRIKE director Xiao Feng on the set with "consultant" Mel Gibson.
I'm not sure how you can take a set-up more foolproof than the one offered by BULLET HEAD and end up botching it almost instantly, but writer/director Paul Solet manages to do just that. Solet, who got some acclaim in indie horror circles a while back with 2009's GRACE, jumps right into the story with BULLET HEAD, which has three criminals--level-headed Stacy (Adrien Brody), cynical old-timer Walker (John Malkovich), and irresponsible junkie Gage (Rory Culkin)--making off with a safe from a bungled department store robbery that left several customers and their wheelman dead after trigger-happy Gage decided to raid the pharmacy and open fire. They hole up in an abandoned factory to wait for their contact to arrive to open the safe but that plan goes to shit when they encounter an unexpected obstacle: a battered, bloodied, furiously vicious and very intelligent pit bull who charges at them and has them running from room to room trying to get away and stay alive. But as soon as that simple, to-the-point pitch is established, Solet can't wait to get away from it, giving each of these low-rent reservoir dogs verbose backstories that eat up entirely too much screen time and kill any suspense and momentum the film had going. Brody gets a ludicrously long monologue about a past job involving "truffles" that goes absolutely nowhere, and likewise Malkovich and Culkin get their own long-winded filibusters as the film starts to resemble a David Mamet workshop. Even the dog gets a backstory, as we learn his name is "De Niro," and he's the champion of an underground dogfighting ring (other dogs are named "Eastwood" and "McQueen") based in that very abandoned warehouse and run by powerful crime boss Blue (Antonio Banderas), who inevitably shows up and isn't happy to find intruders. Other than a couple of blurred bits from the dog's POV early on, Banderas doesn't really enter the story until the last 15 minutes, when he immediately shoots someone and follows it with--what else?--a ten-minute speech.
In addition to the movie tough guy shout-outs with the names of the dogs, there's also a lot of Tarantino-esque riffing where Brody and Malkovich debate the merits of being a dog person vs. a cat person, and there's some occasionally witty dialogue after Culkin's idiotic Gage goes off to shoot up so he can get back to normal, and after he's gone for a while, Malkovich's Walker quips "Maybe we should go find him before he takes a selfie on the roof and posts it to Instagram." There's a couple of really good scenes--the discovery of a room filled with rotting canine corpses, and one outstanding suspense set piece just after the one hour mark that looks like Solet came up with that first and then struggled to build a movie around it--but this thing is all over the place. It's pieces of a '90s throwback Tarantino ripoff, a talky Mamet homage, a botched "one last job" heist thriller, a riff on AMORES PERROS, and a killer dog horror movie all cobbled together. It's obvious that the long, actorly monologues seemed appealing to the lead actors (though for some reason, Malkovich decided mumbling would be a good character trait), and to its credit, BULLET HEAD is a lot more ambitious and well-shot than most Bulgaria-lensed productions by Cannon cover band Millennium. But the end result is a rambling, aimless mishmash that sells itself as a nailbiting suspense thriller and can't wait to run as far away from its own premise as quickly as possible. (R, 94 mins)
THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA
(US/UK - 2017)
Based on the 2011 book The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World by Canadian journalist Jay Bahadur, the South Africa-shot THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA is, for the most part, a tone-deaf misfire. It doesn't help that Evan Peters' bland and unappealing performance as Bahadur doesn't really do much to make you care about the central character, but we learn so little about Bahadur before he takes off on his adventure that it just never seems plausible. It's 2008, Bahadur is a year out of college with a degree in business and economics and a newfound desire to be a journalist. Stuck in a dead-end job and living in his parents' basement, he impulsively decides to travel to Somalia to track down and interview pirates and hope that some magazine or book publisher back home will buy the story. What follows is part serious drama and part FEAR AND LOATHING IN SOMALIA, as Bahadur meets up with affable and well-connected interpreter Abdi (Barkhad Abdi, one of the film's few positives) and learns that in order to get interviews with the right people, he needs to bring along the drug khat as payment. This leads to several sequences of Bahadur and his newfound Somali pals chewing khat and writer/director Bryan Buckley (THE BRONZE) segueing into trippy, hallucinatory animated sequences that look like CHEECH AND CHONG'S WALTZ WITH BASHIR. Bahadur spends six months in Somalia, and while he never actually witnesses any piracy firsthand, the film does work in some references to the situation depicted in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (including an animated recap), which of course co-starred an Oscar-nominated Abdi, almost serving as some kind of bizarro auto-critique on the pitfalls of typecasting. A subplot involving Bahadur growing smitten with the wife (Sabrina Hassan Abdulle) of pirate leader Garaad Mohamed (Mohamed Osmail Ibrahim) only adds to the tedium. The film goes on forever, which allows an embedded Bahadur to grow a shaggy, unkempt beard, which only succeeds in making Peters look like the Geico caveman. A disheveled-looking Al Pacino shows up for a day's work as a grizzled, burned-out, and completely fictional journalism legend who inspires Bahadur to go to Somalia, and Melanie Griffith has even less screen time as Bahadur's concerned mom. Bahadur's story is an interesting one, and he's become a respected journalist in the years since, but you'd never know it by watching THE PIRATES OF SOMALIA. (R, 118 mins)
An infamously troubled production that changed directors and cinematographers and went through multiple rewrites and several cast switch-ups before filming began and then spent nearly three years on a Weinstein Company shelf before bombing in theaters, JANE GOT A GUN is rivaled only by EXPOSED and FLIGHT 7500 as the biggest catastrophe of the first quarter of 2016. A longtime pet project of Natalie Portman (one of 31 credited producers), JANE was set to go in early 2013 with director Lynne Ramsey (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) at the helm, and with SEVEN and frequent Woody Allen collaborator Darius Khondji as director of photography. Even before Ramsey quit over a dispute with one of the producers over final cut and Khondji left with her, co-star Michael Fassbender was forced to back out over a scheduling conflict with X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. Joel Edgerton was already cast as the villain, but that role was given to Jude Law and Edgerton was shifted over to Fassbender's vacated role. Law signed on specifically to work with Ramsey, and when she left, he followed suit. Gavin O'Connor (WARRIOR) took over as director and Bradley Cooper signed on to replace Law, but quit over a scheduling conflict with AMERICAN HUSTLE and was replaced by Ewan McGregor (now the fourth actor to be cast in the villain role). In addition, Edgerton pulled double duty by rewriting Brian Duffield's original screenplay. Filming was completed in the fall of 2013, and after multiple canceled release dates that stretched back to summer 2014, the $25 million production was finally released in theaters in January 2016, grossing just $1.5 million.
JANE GOT A GUN has all the hallmarks of compromise, clashing ideas, and behind-the-scenes rancor: released with little fanfare after languishing in limbo, a truncated running time, choppy editing, slack pacing and stretches where important scenes seem to be missing, and a couple of prominently-billed actors who are barely in the movie. In the New Mexico territory in 1871, feisty rancher Jane Hammond (Portman) tends to bullet wounds on her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich), who informs her that the gang of outlaw John Baxter (McGregor) is headed their way. She enlists the help of ex-fiance and hired gun Dan Frost (Edgerton), while flashbacks fill in the complicated backstory of the quartet of characters. It's filled with darkness and tragedy, from Civil War prison camps to sex slavery to a dead child, with Jane forced into a hellish life servicing Baxter's gang until she's rescued and whisked away by one of his men, the kind-hearted Bill. For obvious reasons, Baxter remains enraged at the couple and when some of his men spot Bill and soon pay with their lives when Bill guns them down, he leads the rest of the gang after them for revenge (it does beg the question, if Bill ran into the gang and killed some of them, how does he manage to get several days ahead of the rest, back to his ranch with time to warn Jane that they're coming?). While Bill lies immobile in bed, Jane and Dan fortify the ranch and get their guns ready for the showdown. This should've been a RIO BRAVO situation, but it plays out in almost total darkness with intermittent breaks for flashbacks and long dialogue scenes that are incoherently mumbled by Portman and Edgerton. McGregor's appearances are so fleeting and brief that he has no chance to make any kind of impact as a threatening presence, and the best you can say for it is that it looks nice for a while, but even that ceases to help by the climax since you can't see a damn thing. Nothing works in JANE GOT A GUN, a doomed project plagued by pre-production turmoil from which it never recovered. Stick with HANNIE CAULDER instead. (R, 98 mins) BACKTRACK
(Australia/UK/UAE - 2016)
A horror movie that feels like it should've gone straight to video in 2002, BACKTRACK is a shameless ripoff of THE SIXTH SENSE, with some STIR OF ECHOES, JU-ON/THE GRUDGE, and INSIDIOUS thrown in, perhaps to prevent M. Night Shyamalan from suing. Continuing his post-Oscar slide into irrelevance, Adrien Brody offers a fairly credible accent as Peter Bower, an Australian psychologist who's still reeling over the tragic death of his daughter Evie a year earlier when she was hit by a truck while riding her bike. While Peter is at least doing slightly better than his shattered wife Carol (Jenni Baird), who can't even get out of bed, he's haunted by visions of a dead girl named Elizabeth Valentine (Chloe Bayliss), and the realization that all of the patients referred him by his mentor Duncan (Sam Neill) seem to be people who died in an accident on July 12, 1987. This prompts him to return to his childhood home and visit his estranged father (George Shevtsov), triggering memories of a traumatic incident from his teen years (lemme guess...July 12, 1987?) that may have indirectly had a hand in his daughter's eventual death nearly 30 years later. Writer/director Michael Petroni (who scripted QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, THE RITE, and THE BOOK THIEF) thinks he's being clever by introducing incredibly hackneyed elements that would be painfully obvious twists to any seasoned viewer and revealing them almost immediately, like Elizabeth Valentine's initials E.V. sounding out "Evie" and that Duncan's really a ghost, which isn't a spoiler since it's revealed 20 minutes in. But he just keeps piling on one coincidence and absurd contrivance after another until you're too busy rolling your eyes and shaking your head to catch all the post-INSIDIOUS jump scares preceded by that distinctive JU-ON croak, which is something filmmakers in 2016 are still fucking doing. Some shoddy greenscreen work and a hilariously awful CGI train derailment provide some unintentional laughs, but BACKTRACK is stale, cliched, and dated, obviously a script Petroni's had stashed in a drawer for at least a decade. Though it does provide a brief role for THE ROAD WARRIOR's Bruce Spence as a ghost, there's not much to recommend with BACKTRACK, which continues Brody's fool's quest to become Nicolas Cage. I see dead careers. (R, 90 mins)
#HORROR
(US - 2015)
Actress and artist Tara Subkoff, best known as the kidnapping victim in 2000's THE CELL, makes her writing and directing debut with this ambitious horror indie that succeeds and stumbles in equal measure, amounting to 98 uneven minutes. It's a social media-savvy slasher film that admirably doesn't approach its subject with snarky irony, but too often overstates its message to the point of harping. It's set over one night at a sleepover at the isolated Connecticut mansion of bitchy Sofia (Bridget McGarry), the 12-year-old queen of a group of Mean Girls who tear one another down in vicious hashtags using a Bejeweled Blitz-type app (Subkoff really overuses this visual motif), tagged to their endless postings of selfies. Their targets change by the minute, whether it's Cat (Hayley Murphy), whose mother recently died; overweight Georgie (Emma Adler), who they've fat-shamed into bulimia; tomboyish Francesca (Mina Sundwall), who they've labeled a "dyke," or lesser-income Sam (Sadie Seelert), who's new to their school and has cut scars on her arm from past self-harming. And these girls are friends. When Cat tears into Georgie about her weight in a way that even Sofia thinks is over the line, Cat is expelled from the party. She leaves a hysterical message on the voice mail of her preoccupied cosmetic surgeon dad (a furious Timothy Hutton), while Sofia's alcoholic, ennui-drowning mom (Chloe Sevigny) leaves the girls alone to go through the motions at an AA meeting, completely unaware that her philandering husband (Balthazar Getty) has had his throat slashed by the same maniac who's now in the house and offing the girls one by one.
Let's address the elephant in the room that is the terrible title, which does the film no favors and makes it tempting to dismiss outright. And things get off to a dubious start with the gimmicky ENTER THE VOID-style opening credits that look like a bunch of rapid-fire Candy Crush images. But amidst the catty bitchery of the mostly overprivileged, underparented kids, Subkoff manages some small accomplishments that start to add up. The massive house is a great location that allows Subkoff to really take advantage of open space in the 2.35:1 image, especially when the creepy-masked killer starts materializing anywhere in the frame. The film takes place in the dead of winter and there's a vividly chilling, uniquely Canadian-inspired coldness that's conveyed in striking imagery both outside in the snowy setting and inside in the Cronenberg-like design and decor of the house (I'm willing to bet Subkoff is a big fan of the 1983 cult classic CURTAINS). There's also a pronounced giallo influence, particularly in one Argento-styled murder that takes place in a glass-enclosed tennis court, and it's all supplemented by an unsettling, driving score by EMA. Subkoff does such a solid job with the horror elements that you wish it didn't take her 70 minutes to get to them. With the exception of the opening murder (Getty's in the film for about seven seconds), the first hour and change focuses on the Mean Girl bullying, with the girls supporting and turning on one another with no notice, exploiting weaknesses and pushing to the breaking point, and it goes on long after Subkoff has made her point. The young actresses are convincingly unlikable, and Hutton is outstanding in his few scenes, one in particular when he barrels through the house in a frothing rage searching for Cat. Hutton plays it like a vein-popping homage to Alec Baldwin, screaming at the girls and shredding them for their shallow, nasty actions, and it's a scene that's destined to become a YouTube favorite. There's a lot to appreciate in #HORROR, especially a devastating reveal at the very end, but there's a lot of missteps as well. Call it a flawed but nonetheless interesting film that shows it's worth keeping an eye on what Subkoff does next. Incidentally, nothing's made me feel older lately than seeing Sevigny, Getty, and Natasha Lyonne now playing the parents in a horror movie. (R, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
DRAGON BLADE (China - 2015) Written and directed by Daniel Lee. Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Sharni Vinson, William Feng, Lin Peng, Mika Wang, Lorie Pester, Siwon Choi, Xiao Yang, Sammy Hung, Jozef Liu Waite. (R, 104 mins)
When the $65 million IMAX 3-D Chinese epic DRAGON BLADE became a blockbuster hit throughout Asia in February 2015, it didn't take long for a badly photo-shopped trade poster to explode on the internet thanks to the presence of John Cusack as a Roman centurion and Adrien Brody as a villainous nobleman in 50 B.C. Many even questioned if the poster was some kind of prank. No, it's a real movie, primarily a vehicle for star/producer Jackie Chan who, aside from his KUNG FU PANDA voice work, hasn't headlined an American film since the 2010 remake of THE KARATE KID. The 61-year-old action legend has instead settled into a series of generally serious Asian films like the period epic 1911 (2011) and typical--albeit with less death-defying stuntwork--Chan outings like CHINESE ZODIAC and the recently-released POLICE STORY: LOCKDOWN. DRAGON BLADE was a pet project for Chan, a story of disgraced warriors who team with an outcast faction of the Roman Army to defeat a power-crazed despot intent on taking control of the famed Silk Road.
The end result is a mess, at least in Lionsgate's re-edited, 104-minute American cut that's just arrived in a handful of theaters and on VOD (memo to Lionsgate's trailer team: you can't call something "a worldwide phenomenon" while dumping it on VOD). They cut nearly 25 minutes out of the film, among other things jettisoning an entire present-day prologue and epilogue involving archaeologists studying the Silk Road battle site. The Mandarin-language opening section is whiplash-inducing in its choppiness, making it impossible to figure out who's who except for the most familiar faces and a select few of the main supporting characters (YOU'RE NEXT's Sharni Vinson is prominently billed but has a role so small that it's literally blink-and-you'll-miss-her, so perhaps she was among the cuts made by Lionsgate). Chan is Huo An, a captain of the Silk Road Protection Squad, a close-knit group of warriors assigned by the government to keep peace among the many peoples who live in the Silk Road region. When the group is set up by one of their own and accused of gold smuggling, the entire squad is sentenced to the prison outpost Wild Geese Gate. It's here that they live in banishment until they're raided by a Roman army headed by General Lucius (Cusack). English-speaking Lucius instigates a one-on-one battle with English-speaking Huo An until a sandstorm approaches and the peace-seeking Huo An offers the soldiers food and shelter. Lucius is leading an army of rebel officers who have absconded with Publius (Jozef Liu Waite), a child prince chosen by his father to be the next heir, skipping over Publius' scheming, treacherous older brother Tiberius (Brody). Like most passed-over royals, Tiberius didn't take the news well and reacted by killing his father and poisoning his baby brother's eye medication, causing him to go blind. Tiberius is leading a 100,000-man army along the Silk Road in hot pursuit of Lucius, who is determined to keep Publius alive.
It's not a bad story, and at times, some of the visuals and battle scenes are pretty good, even if the CGI and greenscreen gets a little wonky-looking (boy, I get tired of writing that). But in the attempt to please the Chan faithful, the tone is all over the place. You get everything from slapstick comedy to blood-splattered battle with arterial spray and eye gougings. There's an absurd amount of over-emotional male bonding as Chan and writer/director Daniel Lee (BLACK MASK) try to turn this into a BRAVEHEART-level man-weepie (interestingly, Chan offered Cusack the gig after Mel Gibson turned it down). But nowhere is DRAGON BLADE sillier than in a long early sequence when Huo An is informed that Chinese officials will be arriving at Wild Geese Gate in 15 days to ensure that they've completed their assignment of rebuilding the fortress and the surrounding area. If it's not done, they'll all be executed and it's a job that would take six months of round-the-clock work. Fear not, Huo An's new bro Lucius says. With Roman ingenuity and good old-fashioned teamwork, the Romans and the Chinese can work together to rebuild this city with nothing less than an energetically plucky display of "Let's put on a show!" verve and moxie that would've made Mickey Rooney proud. They even have time to take a break where each army shows off its pageantry and formations in what amounts to a sort-of 50 B.C. Far East version of BRING IT ON. Then they sing war songs, drink, and bond and cry some more, as Publius declares Huo An an official Roman centurion. These kinds of radical tonal shifts play better with Asian moviegoers than they do with their western counterparts--the first half of DRAGON BLADE is so earnest and corny that it's honestly hard to dislike, but then it decides to get relatively serious when Tiberius takes center stage, and the shift just feels like too much after all the slapstick and shameless sentimentality that came before it. I say "relatively serious" since Brody, no doubt still basking in the glow of his INAPPROPRIATE COMEDY triumph, seems to be inspired by Nicolas Cage at his most Cagey. With a ridiculous wig, preening mannerisms and an inconsistent fey British accent that comes and goes without warning, Brody is obviously opting for the hammy route in his silliest performance since groping himself as the anagrammed "Byron Deidra" in Dario Argento's GIALLO. Cusack is ludicrously miscast but fares better than in most of his recent Cusackalypse Now trifles. Sure, the idea of him playing a Roman centurion is amusing--and he's more or less admitted he did it as a lark--but it's hardly any worse than most of his other recent jobs, with the exception of his acclaimed performance as Brian Wilson in LOVE & MERCY.
Asian audiences flocked to DRAGON BLADE and made it a huge hit, but they'll flock to anything and make it a huge hit. All the movies that go straight to VOD in the US are box office smashes in Asia. Make no mistake--this is strictly VOD material here, ready-made for Redbox. It might've had some potential as a word-of-mouth, sleeper crowdpleaser once it hit Netflix Instant, but well over half of the film is in Mandarin with English subtitles, so that's out, though I respect Lionsgate's decision to leave it Mandarin and not dub the Chinese cast members in English. At the end of the day, DRAGON BLADE's only notoriety is the unlikely sight of Cusack and Brody playing Ancient Roman dress-up on a Chinese vacation, but once the snickering dies down and the novelty wears off, you're left with a fairly middling, forgettable adventure.
Is there a more reviled Best Picture Oscar winner in recent memory than 2005's CRASH? It has its effective moments and a strong performance by an Oscar-nominated Matt Dillon, but the film's preachy and simplistic messaging has made it a punchline over the last decade. CRASH writer/director Paul Haggis scripted MILLION DOLLAR BABY for Clint Eastwood a year earlier, and his earlier career triumphs included such landmark achievements as co-creating WALKER, TEXAS RANGER. But since CRASH, he's mainly focused on hired-gun scripting gigs like co-writing CASINO ROYALE (2006) and QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008). He wrote and directed IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (2007) and the lackluster THE NEXT THREE DAYS (2010), but he's refrained from repeating his Robert Altman-inspired, "everything-is-connected" motif that spawned an entire self-important subgenre of similar films in CRASH's wake. That is, until his most recent film, the star-studded, little-seen THIRD PERSON, which only made it to 225 screens this past summer. Rather than lecturing us on why racism is bad, Haggis instead looks inward, and there are many moments throughout THIRD PERSON that reveal it to be a confessional of sorts. He gets surprisingly self-critical at times, practically acknowledging the complaints that have been leveled at him post-CRASH. At one point, the central character, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael (Liam Neeson, in a departure from his now-standard action hero persona) is treated with kid gloves by his publisher, who tells him that he rejected his latest book because "the business has changed...I don't know how I'd even market it." Michael calls bullshit on it, and his publisher lays into him: "Your first book was brilliant...it was dangerous. Your second, less so. Then the third, and the fourth. When I read your latest, I was just embarrassed for you." This is not to suggest that THIRD PERSON is Paul Haggis' 8 ½--the interweaving, multi-story structure is too gimmicky and Haggis doesn't have enough to say to justify the film's gaseous 137-minute running time-- or that CRASH was a brilliant and dangerous piece of filmmaking, but however self-aggrandizing it may sometimes come across, it does offer some unexpected soul-searching and harsh self-critiquing by its creator.
THIRD PERSON takes place in Paris, Rome, and NYC (the whole film was shot on sets at the legendary Cinecitta in Rome). The Paris scenes focus on Neeson's Michael as he struggles to put his latest novel together while dealing with the erratic behavior of his much-younger mistress Anna (Olivia Wilde), an aspiring writer for whom Michael has just left Elaine (Kim Basinger), his wife of many years. The Rome storyline centers on Scott (Adrien Brody), a slick operator in corporate espionage who works for a company that specializes in cheaply-made knockoff fashions. He encounters Monika (Moran Atias), a Romanian prostitute whose young daughter is being held captive by her vicious pimp Carlo (Vinicio Marchioni). The NYC thread follows Julia (Mila Kunis), a one-time soap opera actress and perpetually unreliable screw-up in the middle of a protracted custody battle with her ex-husband Richard (James Franco), a successful artist. Julia harmed their son in an unspecified way and even her fiercely-dedicated attorney Theresa (Maria Bello) is losing patience with her. For the bulk of the film, Haggis cuts back and forth between the three stories, but then strange things start happening, like a note written by Julia in NYC suddenly appearing in Michael's hotel room in Paris, and bouquets of flowers delivered in Paris are seen in a similar room in NYC. Haggis delays the reveal of how everyone is connected as late as he possibly can, and when that reveal comes and neatly and conveniently explains away all of the various inconsistencies you've been mentally noting the whole time, it almost feels like you've been duped by a riff on one of the hoariest cliches in all of storytelling. If Haggis wasn't so focused on being clever, he might've had a Fellini-esque self-examination of how he went from Toast of the Town to the face of tone-deaf Hollywood sanctimony so quickly. The actors are generally good--Kunis is a standout and fans of obscure '70s counterculture cinema may be interested to see DRIVE, HE SAID co-star Michael Margotta in a small but pivotal role, and the horror nerd in me can't help but wonder if GIALLO's Brody and MOTHER OF TEARS' Atias spent their downtime on the set discussing the late-career decline of Dario Argento. The foundation of THIRD PERSON is a potentially interesting one, but Haggis takes a ridiculous amount of time to say what he has to say and ultimately shoots himself in the foot with a finale that pretty much obliterates any goodwill he might've accumulated over the preceding two hours and change. The clues are scattered throughout and the ending should induce "Whoa!"s but instead provokes an annoyed "Really? That's it?" (R, 137 mins)
SPACE STATION 76 (US - 2014)
Opening on two screens a week and a half before its DVD release, SPACE STATION 76 has to be the oddest and most unmarketable release of the year. Directed and co-written by actor Jack Plotnick (a veteran of all three of Quentin Dupieux's films, which explains a lot), the film is rather difficult to describe but let's just say that it's approached from a 1976 vantage point and would seem to be a comedy at first glance, but it's a drama disguised as a kitschy spoof. It's like THE ICE STORM filtered through ANCHORMAN and shot on what look like leftover SPACE: 1999 sets. It's filled with all manner of 1970s conventions, from chain-smoking to self-absorption to pop psychology and new age therapy, with adultery, closeted homosexuality, and women's lib, all on a space station that's in the path of an oncoming asteroid. SPACE STATION 76 is not brazenly terrible. It's a well-made, good-looking film with remarkably dead-on production design but it's one of the most anti-entertaining pieces of cinema I've ever seen. It's a film that defies convention to a fault. What is the point of telling this story in this fashion? It's a three-minute Jean Doumanian-era SNL skit padded out to 95 minutes. It's the world's first dead-serious, straight-faced spoof. Other than a robot shrink that resembles a tiny R2-D2, it's almost completely unfunny, and it's that way by design. Is this some kind of stunt? Was it made on a dare? Is it some sort of psychological experiment? Was the goal to be so dark-humored and deadpan that it circles back to completely depressing seriousness? Is it part of some newly-launched "post-spoof" movement? Though it will no doubt be lovingly embraced by the most consistently contrarian member of your cult film circle, this is one of the most jarring, baffling, and ultimately off-putting film experiences that I can recall. That it only managed a two-screen theatrical release less than two weeks before its DVD dumping isn't the least bit surprising. What is surprising is that it was even made in the first place.
Jessica (Liv Tyler) arrives at Space Station 76 as the new second-in-command to surly, Harvey Wallbanger-swilling Capt. Glenn (Patrick Wilson), who's not happy about having a woman as part of his crew. There's also ship mechanic Ted (Matt Bomer), whose boozing, Valium-addled wife Misty (Marisa Coughlan) is having an affair with Steve (Jerry O'Connell), who's married to her friend Donna (co-writer Kali Rocha). Ted and Misty are only together for their daughter Sunshine (Kylie Rogers), who's routinely neglected by her mother and left in the care of educational VHS tapes and TV shows. Ted develops feelings for Jessica, who's always been career-focused since she's unable to have children. Glenn, meanwhile, plays up his hard-edged chauvinist act but everyone knows he's a closeted gay man getting over a relationship with his previous second-in-command (Matthew Morrison), who transferred to another space station when things soured between them. All the while, there's montages of misery, emptiness, and loneliness set to Ambrosia's "How Much I Feel," Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me," and Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain," a cameo by Keir Dullea as Jessica's dad to remind you of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, along with '70s signifiers like waterbeds, feathered hair, wide collars, top-loading VCRs, and wood paneling on the space station interiors. The dramatic elements are things we've seen in countless other films, but what's here beyond the novelty of the setting? Sure, we already have GALAXY QUEST and since it's stood the test of time, we don't need another, but who in 2014 would possibly need an R-rated, outer space PEYTON PLACE set in a 1976 version of the future? What is this? What is it supposed to be? Who is it for? Why? (R, 95 mins)
Full-time provocateur and part-time filmmaker Tony Kaye returns with his first released narrative feature since 1998's AMERICAN HISTORY X (his cop thriller BLACK WATER TRANSIT was shot in 2007 but remains shelved in the same production company bankruptcy case that's kept David O. Russell's NAILED unreleased since 2008). Always more concerned with getting a gut reaction from viewers rather than being a disciplined director (and why does he have to glibly label this "A Tony Kaye Talkie"?), Kaye's DETACHMENT has a lot of ideas and characters to juggle, not always successfully bringing things together, but if a film's biggest crime is that it's too ambitious and tries to accomplish too much, then one can overlook the flaws and occasional pretentiousness and self-indulgence. Heading a very impressive cast, Adrien Brody stars as a short-term sub in a declining NYC high school that's seen better days. Haunted by a troubled past that involves his mother's suicide and some deep secrets of his Alzheimer's-stricken grandfather (Louis Zorich), Brody chooses to work as a sub as a means of avoiding extended contact with students and colleagues, providing him with the perfect opportunity to keep his distance and remain detached from everything around him. Forces beyond his control end up tearing down those walls--an overweight girl (Betty Kaye, the director's daughter), who's bullied at school and at home, starts to feel misplaced affection for him; and he also ends up giving temporary shelter to an underaged prostitute (Sami Gayle) after he witnesses her being assaulted by a creep she just serviced on a bus.
DETACHMENT refers not just to Brody, but also to the teachers, the students, the parents, and the world in general. Teachers sit in silent classrooms waiting for parents to show up on Parents Night. No one comes. Students write "You suck!" on tests, they openly threaten teachers with gang rape, and one even kills a cat in the gym. Teachers internalize their frustrations or self-medicate. Communication breaks down, tempers flare, friendships disintegrate, marriages fail. The world is falling apart and the only feeling anyone can muster is complete and utter apathy. Kaye and screenwriter Carl Lund clearly make the point that if we want change, it has to start on the ground level in the schools, and everyone has to be an active participant. Kaye too frequently resorts to being Tony Kaye, with zooms and handhelds, and changing film stock for no reason other than showing off, but there's some undeniably strong and powerful scenes throughout. There's also some nice character turns by James Caan (who's very good here) as a cynical, pill-popping, seen-it-all teacher who can throw the insults right back at the students (handling detention, he tells a student "Wait here, when I get back we can discuss your bright future") and Marcia Gay Harden as the beleaguered principal. Other familiar faces drift in and out of the story but aren't on screen enough to make a big impact: Christina Hendricks as an idealistic teacher and potential Brody love interest; Tim Blake Nelson as a ticking timebomb about to go off on his students; Lucy Liu as the burned-out guidance counselor; Blythe Danner (who gets a really nice bit with Caan as they dance in an empty classroom, two longtime co-workers reminiscing about a time when people gave a shit), William Petersen, Bryan Cranston (given very little to do in two brief scenes as Harden's husband), Doug E. Doug, and Isiah "Sheeeeeeeeeeeit!" Whitlock, Jr as an unctuous district hatchet man who tells Harden she's on her way out (points deducted for not letting him do his signature schtick). Shot in 2010, DETACHMENT only made it to ten screens at its widest US release, grossing just $71,000. It's a bit of a rambling mess on occasion, but as one has come to expect from Kaye (whose 2006 documentary LAKE OF FIRE dealt with the abortion debate), it's raw and uncompromising, and when it works (which is most of the time), it works very well. (R, 98 mins; also streaming on Netflix)
BAIT (Australia/Singapore - 2012)
If anyone was still talking about SNAKES ON A PLANE, this would-be high-concept thriller could've easily sported the title SHARKS IN A SUPERMARKET. Anchor Bay acquired this shot-in-3D Australian shark flick and actually released it in a scant few theaters this past weekend (just a couple of days before its DVD/Blu-ray release) instead of where it really belonged: on SyFy at 9:00 pm last Saturday night. Taking itself far too seriously for a film with such vapid characters and terrible special effects, BAIT puts a bunch of unlikable assholes--including NIP/TUCK's Julian McMahon as a criminal who was in the middle of an armed robbery--in a supermarket as a tsunami hits and they find themselves trapped with a great white shark swimming through the submerged store aisles, periodically leaping out of the water to devour someone. And of course, the hero (Xavier Samuel) is still traumatized by watching his best friend get eaten by a shark a year earlier. This does lead to a rather amusing scene of Samuel doing the Roy Scheider "Everybody out of the water!" freakout from atop the freezers in the frozen section. Director Kimble Rendall logged some time as second unit director on films like the MATRIX sequels and he directed the 2000 Australian slasher film CUT with Molly Ringwald and Kylie Minogue, but before any of that, he was a founding member and bassist for Australian cult rockers Hoodoo Gurus (Rendall also performs a gothy, Tiamat-tinged cover of "Mack the Knife" that's played over the closing credits). BAIT inexplicably sports six (!) credited writers, including co-producer and HIGHLANDER director Russell Mulcahy. Watchable but stupid (there's a cop and two other guys with guns--no one ever tries shooting the shark?) and kinda boring, BAIT is still better than the useless SHARK NIGHT, though if you're looking for recent shark thriller that's solidly-done and has Australian accents, you're better off checking out THE REEF. (R, 93 mins)
SALVATION BOULEVARD (US/Australia - 2011)
Shot in Ann Arbor, MI, the megachurch satire SALVATION BOULEVARD strands a cast of several Oscar winners and nominees in a meandering, pointless story that just registers zero across the board. Even if it mustered the courage to be nothing more than smug and condescending, it would be something. But instead, it's just...there, wasting the time of everyone from the cast down to the viewer. You can tell there's a Coen Bros.-type story lurking somewhere in this mess, but it just never materializes. When Rev. Dan Day (a woefully miscast Pierce Brosnan, in probably the worst performance of his career), the beloved leader of a community megachurch, accidentally shoots atheist Prof. Blaylock (Ed Harris) in the head, he tries to stage it as a suicide attempt before pinning it on hapless doofus Carl (Greg Kinnear), a former Deadhead who abandoned his debauched, sex/drugs/rock n' roll lifestyle to marry the devoutly Christian Gwen (Jennifer Connelly). While Blaylock languishes in a coma, Carl gets abducted by a Mexican drug lord (Yul Vazquez) who's trying to strong-arm Rev. Day over a land deal. Who gives a shit? Brosnan and Kinnear fail to replicate the magic of THE MATADOR from several years ago (Brosnan should've gotten an Oscar nomination for that), but also lost in the wreckage are Marisa Tomei as a stoner campus security official, Ciarin Hinds as Carl's cranky father-in-law, Isabelle Fuhrmann as Carl's stepdaughter, and Jim Gaffigan as one of Rev. Day's flunkies. There are nothing but solid pros in this cast and you know the material's sporting a toe tag if they can't do anything with it. There's no mystery at all why this was buried and released on DVD with no fanfare 14 months after a four-screen theatrical release, seemingly forgotten by its own distributor. A total misfire. (R, 96 mins)
