On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOSE RANGE (2015); SHANGHAI (2015); and ASHBY (2015)

CLOSE RANGE
(US - 2015)

The latest teaming of B-movie action icons Scott Adkins and director Isaac Florentine has about as straightforward an action movie set-up as you can get. Adkins is Colton MacReady, an on-the-run Iraq War deserter who turns up in Mexico and takes out a good chunk of the soldiers working for drug lord Fernando Garcia (Tony Perez). Among the dead are Garcia's nephew (Ray Diaz), who kidnapped MacReady's teenage niece Hailey (Madison Lawlor), after her lowlife stepfather Walt (Jake La Botz), the go-between for Garcia's operation north of the border in Arizona, stole a hefty sum of money belonging to the cartel. MacReady brings Hailey home to her mother, his sister Angela (Caitlin Keats), with what's left of Garcia's army in hot pursuit. The bad guys have some help from corrupt sheriff Calloway (Nick Chinlund), who's morally conflicted over his duty to the law and the money that being on the Garcia payroll brings him. In addition to periodic attempts to show Calloway's decent side, there's also some brief overtures at characterization in the way MacReady scolds his widowed sister for settling on a shitbag like Walt for a second husband, but Florentine wisely keeps the focus on action, with MacReady, Angela, and Hailey holed up inside the family farmhouse while Garcia keeps sending his guys in only to get roundhouse-kicked, stabbed repeatedly, or just shot in the head point-blank by MacReady.

If you've ever seen a Florentine/Adkins collaboration, you know that over-the-top action is the main focus, and CLOSE RANGE delivers to almost absurd levels. Florentine fluidly moves the camera around to keep as much of the expertly-choreographed confrontations going with as few cuts as possible. Things get a little sped up at times, as is the norm, but he makes an effort to avoid going for the quick-cut, shaky-cam approach, which showcases exactly how much work went into these sequences by the actors and the stunt crew. Story-wise, CLOSE RANGE is pretty standard and predictable--of course, MacReady deserted for the right reasons, as he was defying incompetent orders that would've disgraced his unit and led to certain death--and Florentine gets a little too winking at times with the fun but repetitive spaghetti western homages. But it steps up where it matters, and again, you're forced to wonder why Adkins isn't headlining bigger movies (Florentine likely prefers the autonomy of low-budget cinema). It's not quite on the level of their UNDISPUTED sequels or the outstanding NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR. but it's more entertaining and satisfying than a lot of what passes for major action movies these days. Short, simple, and to the point (except for a drawn-out title card intro for each minor villain, which only seems to be there in order to pad the brief run time), CLOSE RANGE's only goal is to have Scott Adkins glower and kick ass for an hour and a half, and on that end, it achieves everything it sets out to do. (R, 85 mins)


SHANGHAI
(US/China - 2015)

Filmed in Bangkok in the summer of 2008 and released in Asia and other parts of the world over 2010-2011, this lavishly-mounted, $50 million US/Chinese co-production was shelved stateside for seven years by Harvey Weinstein before getting a stealth release on 100 screens in the fall of 2015. SHANGHAI fancies itself a Far East, historical noir CASABLANCA, set in the title city that's doing its best to stave off the encroaching Japanese occupation in October 1941, but the lugubrious pacing, lackluster direction by Mikael Hafstrom (who made the Anthony Hopkins demonic possession film THE RITE and the Stallone/Schwarzenegger pairing ESCAPE PLAN in ensuing years before this finally came out) shoddy CGI, and a hopelessly muddled script by Hossein Amini (DRIVE) prove to be flaws too fatal to overcome. US Naval Intelligence spy Paul Soames (John Cusack) arrives in Shanghai, posing as a Nazi-sympathizing journalist but drawn into a murder investigation when his Navy buddy and fellow agent Conner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is found dead with his throat slashed. Soames is at the center of an incredibly convoluted story that involves Triad crime lord Anthony Lan-Ting (Chow Yun-Fat) and his mysterious wife Anna (Gong Li), with whom Soames will of course have a clandestine fling. There's also Japanese Intelligence officer Capt. Tanaka (Ken Watanabe), who's suspicious of Soames' true intentions, plus Soames also seduces Leni (an underused Franka Potente), in order to get intel on her husband, a German engineer (Christopher Buchholz), who may have Nazi business to conduct with the Japanese.

A couple of months go by in what feels like real time, and all of these parties converge for a boring climax that takes place on a certain date which will live in infamy--by which I mean the bombing of Pearl Harbor and not the date that Harvey Weinstein greenlit SHANGHAI--with the exception of Leni and her husband, who are completely forgotten by the filmmakers. Rinko Kikuchi (then a recent Oscar nominee for BABEL) turns up as Conner's opium-addicted Japanese girlfriend, and David Morse has a few inconsequential scenes as Soames' contact at the US consulate in Shanghai, warning Soames to not get involved and forced to utter trite dialogue like "This isn't black or white...we're caught in the middle!" SHANGHAI is a tedious, plodding mess that never gets going and never gels together. There's no consistency to the characterizations and everyone wanders in and out of the story with the kind of clunky randomness that suggests this was a much a longer film at some point. Made when Cusack was still getting A-list work but fitting in perfectly with his current string of unseen, Cusackalypse Now paycheck gigs, SHANGHAI reunites the star with Hafstrom, who directed him in the decent 2007 Stephen King adaptation 1408. Cusack is completely unengaging as the hero here and has no chemistry with either Gong or Potente. Beyond that, a fine cast is completely stranded in this incredibly dull misfire that bombed everywhere, grossing just $46,000 in the US. (R, 104 mins)


ASHBY
(US/UK/UAE - 2015)

Mickey Rourke has squandered so many opportunities and burned so many bridges over the last 30 years that it's hard to feel sorry for the present state of his career. But Rourke isn't the problem with the indie comedy-drama ASHBY, an appallingly tone-deaf and wildly inconsistent quirkfest that won raves on the festival circuit because of course it did. The film gives the veteran actor his best role since his Oscar-nominated turn in THE WRESTLER, but ASHBY is an otherwise total failure that's simplistic, insulting, and absolutely insufferable whenever he's not onscreen. In one of the most loathsome performances in recent memory, Nat Wolff, the former NAKED BROTHERS BAND star and current third-string Michael Cera, plays Ed, a 17-year-old who's probably supposed to be a snarky wiseass but comes off as a smug, smirking prick. Ed lives with his divorced mom June (Sarah Silverman) and is put on the backburner by his always-too-busy dad, who traded his old family in for a new one. Ed hates jocks but inexplicably wants to be one anyway, making the football team while befriending quiet neighbor Ashby Holt (Rourke), a withdrawn man who claims to be a retired napkin salesman. Ashby has two secrets he's keeping from Ed: he was recently diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and has three months to live, and he's really a decommissioned CIA assassin, Ed discovering the latter while snooping in Ashby's basement and promising to keep it a secret. Ashby takes Ed under his wing, teaching him how to be a better man than his self-absorbed father (though after spending 100 minutes with Ed, you'll probably at least somewhat see the deadbeat dad's side of things), and Ed improbably becomes the star of the football team while pretending he isn't falling for bespectacled, quirky, and all-around adorkable Eloise (Emma Roberts), the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl (© Nathan Rabin) who only exists in movies like ASHBY, and whose neurologist dad has an MRI machine in their house, just in case Ashby will need to use it to prove to Ed that he's indeed terminally ill.

Writer/director Tony McNamara can't seem to decide what he wanted ASHBY to be. It's like the worst parts of Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson got jumbled in with a RUDY ripoff, a little GRAN TORINO, and a discarded draft of the Kevin Costner-as-a-terminally-ill-assassin movie 3 DAYS TO KILL. When Ashby finds out that one of his assigned contracts was not a threat to the country, but an innocent guy who got in the way of some old associates making a profit on a business deal, he starts taking those associates out--and having an oblivious Ed chauffeur him around--in order to right a wrong while he's still able. Ashby is an anguished man plagued by guilt and regret--he's already lost his wife and daughter and wants nothing more than to be absolved of his countless sins (he estimates he killed 93 people over his career) in order to be permitted into Heaven to be with them. It's a great role for Rourke, but McNamara would rather focus on Wolff's Ed, who's presented as the only smart kid in his class, and the only one with a vague notion of history but who has somehow never seen a cassette tape and, in his clueless fascination, unspools the tape on one of Ashby's Peter Frampton cassettes and smirks "I don't think I can get this back in there." Mind you, it's the entire tape. All of it. How much of the tape do you unspool before you ascertain that it's probably not a good thing?  And why would he unspool it in the first place? Is that how he found it? How can a jaded millennial douchebag like Ed not know what a goddamn cassette looks like?  Can he possibly be that stupid? And if the scene is played for laughs, then it's even worse, because now Ed is a complete dick for fucking with Ashby's Frampton tape. Wolff goes through the film with a cocky "Aren't I just a stinker?" look that renders his the most punchable face this side of Justin Bieber or the Affluenza kid. It's a wonder why Ashby would even dispense life lessons to this little turd. McNamara's characters are unreal, from Roberts' stock quirky girl who serves as whatever the story needs her to be at any given moment, to Kevin Dunn's bombastic football coach who still uses terms like "the Japs" when referencing WWII,  to Zachary Knighton's improbably hipster cool-guy priest with alt-rocker hair who says "fuck" and eats hot wings. The situations are inane, like Ed commandeering the coach's pregame speech--what coach would allow a player to rally the team with "Fuck the coaches!"? ASHBY doesn't exist on any level of reality, and speaking of which, do you know anyone Sarah Silverman's age named June?  I don't. Does she have younger sisters named Edith and Myrtle? And there's even stabs at raunch humor with Ed walking in his mom blowing a guy. Rourke brought his A-game to ASHBY, but his efforts were wasted. Rarely has such an excellent performance been stuck in a movie this bad. Paramount picked this up for distribution but the buyer's remorse must've hit quickly: they only released it on 15 screens and VOD for a total gross of $4600. (R, 103 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: STARRY EYES (2014); EXISTS (2014); and HORNS (2014)

STARRY EYES
(US/Belgium - 2014)

In horror circles, STARRY EYES was hailed as an instant cult classic almost immediately after it played the festival circuit and hit the VOD rounds last fall. I always get a little skeptical when today's horror fans latch on to something, because that's when you get conned by things like The Legend of Ti West and the absurd notion that THE INNKEEPERS is a good movie, or that Alexandre Aja's PIRANHA is "like, totally old-school exploitation!" Mind you, there's a great idea at the heart of STARRY EYES, and there's some cutting observations about the culture of Hollywood, the pretentiousness and the catty one-upmanship and those would-be stars working mundane day jobs when they aren't trying to catch a break at an audition. It also sports a supporting cast filled with minor cult figures like SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR and DEADGIRL's Noah Segan, RED, WHITE & BLUE stars Amanda Fuller and Marc Senter, COMPLIANCE prank caller Pat Healy, and a KISS Kameo by professional wealthy offspring Nick Simmons.  But in its execution, STARRY EYES is impossibly heavy-handed, making its points in the most suffocatingly ham-fisted and overly literal ways imaginable, and it just gets dumb and dumber as it goes along. In an undeniably strong and demanding performance that hints at deeper issues haunting the character, Alexandra Essoe is Sarah Walker, a Big Taters waitress struggling to make it as an actress. She gets an audition for a horror film called THE SILVER SCREAM, produced by Astraeus Pictures, a once-notable studio now sort-of on the skids. It's an unusual audition held by a pair of eccentrics, but she gets a callback that consists of a lot of flash photos in a dark room. She's then called to meet with the producer (Louis Dezseran), an aging Roger Corman-type who unsubtly tries to get her on the casting couch. Initially rejecting but having a change of heart after she quits her job and sees her roommates and friends going nowhere in their own acting and filmmaking pursuits, she caves to the producer's demands that she "show" how dedicated she is and that she make the appropriate "sacrifice."

Of course, there's something more sinister afoot, as the writing/directing team of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer have shown the producer with a pentagram burned into his hand and his assistant (Maria Olsen, fast becoming the Michael Berryman of today's DIY hipster horror scene) wearing a pentagram necklace. Yes, they're all Satanists, and their cult is fame, the central conceit of STARRY EYES being a literal death and rebirth as your old self dies--the sacrifice--and a star is born. After fellating the producer, Sarah's body starts breaking down in Cronenbergian fashion, and also in ways very similar to the awful slut-shaming body-horror film CONTRACTED. There's a cynical message here that all Hollywood success stories are rooted in evil, soulless vanity, but that shouldn't surprise anyone after ALL ABOUT EVE. By the time Sarah vomits maggots and starts offing her friends in ways that will even have the most seen-it-all gorehounds flinching, the filmmakers have her literally stabbing one in the back in order to make sure you're getting the message that she's not the same old Sarah. It's all rather obvious and while Kolsch and Widmyer take the L.A. scenester-types to task early on, the notion of "breaking through the gate" and achieving fame and fortune by selling your soul to Satan isn't exactly a high concept if you've ever heard of Faust. This has its moments, augmented by a very John Carpenter-esque synth score by Jonathan Snipes, but I'm really at a loss as to what movie everyone saw when they got on the STARRY EYES love train and declared it a modern horror classic. (Unrated, 96 mins)


EXISTS
(US - 2014)

After co-directing the 1999 phenomenon THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, Eduardo Sanchez has stayed busy with DTV or limited theatrical release horror titles like ALTERED (2006), SEVENTH MOON (2009), and the critically-acclaimed LOVELY MOLLY (2012). Sanchez has never had the accolades nor the success that BLAIR WITCH brought him, so now, 15 years later, he's back sucking from the faux-doc/found footage teet with EXISTS, just as the subgenre he helped make mainstream is falling out of favor with fans. Obviously, Sanchez is an old pro at this kind of thing, and EXISTS has a handful of well-done set pieces, but you have to wade through an hour of dudebro dialogue, idiotic characters, several long sequences in night-vision or almost total darkness, and plenty of time to ponder the age-old question in this type of horror film: why are you still filming? Five dumbasses (two couples and the obligatory comic-relief fifth wheel who does all the filming) head to a remote cabin in the woods (owned by the uncle of two of the dudes, who actually are bros) for a weekend of beer, weed, and doing generally EXTREME! shit, all to be documented in its entirety on their GoPro cameras. Their SUV hits something, and only a blurred figure is seen on the playback, but once they're at the cabin, a howling in the woods convinces the goof of the group (Chris Osborn) that they're dealing with Bigfoot. Even if EXISTS wasn't rendered moot arriving so soon after Bobcat Goldthwait's Bigfoot-themed WILLOW CREEK, one of the better recent found-footage offerings, it can't overcome a deadly first half with some of the most irritating characters the subgenre has ever offered. Most of the dialogue is along the lines of "What the fuck was that, bro?" or "What the fuck's goin' on here, bro," and "You killed my friend, motherfucker!" as one fires a shotgun blindly in the dark, which of course attracts the creature and promptly gets the trigger-happy bro's head bashed in. To his credit, Sanchez does get some serious momentum going as the five get whittled down to three and they try to venture through the woods to find the highway. Naturally, one's surefire shortcut results in them getting lost, but Sanchez knows how to do this right. He gets that climactic BLAIR WITCH vibe going in the last 20 or so minutes with the sprinting creature's relentless pursuit (one sudden appearance through a cloud of fireworks smoke is a good example of a jump scare done right), but it's still not enough to counter the damage caused by such a shitty script, penned by Sanchez's usual post-BLAIR WITCH writing partner Jamie Nash. It's maybe worth a Netflix stream on a really slow night if you're still a found-footage completist, but in returning to the woods to recapture some of his dwindling mojo, Sanchez remains doomed to spend the rest of his career in BLAIR WITCH's shadow. (R, 81 mins)

HORNS
(US - 2014)

Anything would be a step up for French horror director Alexandre Aja after his smug and miserable fakesploitation 2010 remake of PIRANHA, and while it's not always successful, HORNS is certainly ambitious. Based on Joe Hill's novel, the very busy HORNS crams a lot of story into two hours and even though plot points are rushed through or not fully fleshed-out, it still feels overlong, like it either needed to lose 20 or so minutes or just be extended to a cable miniseries. Letting the story breathe might've done a lot to smooth over the rough tonal shifts as HORNS careens from love story to murder mystery to dark satire to CGI-heavy supernatural horror in ways that probably read a lot better on the page than they play on the screen. That doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in HORNS, which has its moments before collapsing into contrivance, convenience, and stupidity in its third act. Radio station DJ Ig Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) is besieged by media and outraged citizens of his small town when his longtime girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple) is found brutally murdered in the woods. Nobody believes he's innocent except his older brother Terry (Joe Anderson) and his lawyer best friend Lee (Max Minghella). The town thinks Ig is the devil, and it doesn't help his case that he sprouts a pair of horns out of his forehead overnight--horns that not everyone can see, but when they do, they feel compelled to confess their deepest secrets and their most bluntly honest thoughts. It's this portion of HORNS that works best, as Aja wrings much dark humor out of a mom openly admitting she hates her screaming child, a bartender crowing about his dogfighting ring and how his dream is to torch his bar and collect the insurance money, or Ig being hassled by two bullying cops who casually admit they'd rather be sucking each other off. It also generates some well-handled drama as Ig's mom (Kathleen Quinlan) and dad (James Remar) admit they think he's guilty and would rather never see him again ("I don't want you to be my son anymore, sweetheart," his mother explains). People of genuinely good character--like Lee and Merrin's grieving father (David Morse)--can't see the horns, and over time, Ig learns to use their power to his advantage, with a highlight being one hilarious sequence where he's followed by a small army of reporters and uses the horns to convince them to beat the living shit out of one another, with the winner getting an exclusive, tell-all interview (there's a great callback to this scene much later, as reporters are all outside a courthouse with cuts, bruises, and bandages). Flashbacks to their childhood fill in the blanks of how Ig and Merrin got together, the effect it had on Ig's relationship with his buddies, and what exactly led to his being accused of her murder.

Admirably gory and going all-in with hard-R glee, HORNS works best in its periodic black comedy phases. No matter how silly a film's premise, it can always work if it follows its own rules, which HORNS doesn't always do. The more it goes on, the more uneven it becomes, as Aja and screenwriter Keith Bunin (the HBO series IN TREATMENT) juggle elements of DONNIE DARKO, TWIN PEAKS, HELLBOY, GHOST RIDER, early Peter Jackson splatter comedy and, in a possible shout-out to Joe Hill's dad Stephen King, STAND BY ME and THE DEAD ZONE until they just drop the balls and let them scatter. It's entirely too easy to figure out who the real killer is and once it's revealed, there's still over 40 minutes to go as Aja embarks on a Peter Jackson climax spree and can't seem to decide where the movie should end. Even with all the plot, it still loses track of several major characters (Kelli Garner as the no-self-esteem, self-described "town whore" who's carried a torch for Ig since childhood, seems especially shortchanged), and Merrin's dad's eventual sympathizing with Ig feels rushed and unconvincing. It's definitely worth seeing once, as Radcliffe is quite good and the film is really firing on all cylinders when it's being funny--Heather Graham has a great bit as a diner waitress giving false info about Ig to the police in the hopes that it makes her the star witness at the eventual trial ("I'm gonna release my own sex tape and have a reality show and be on the cover of Us Magazine!" she squeals with wild-eyed glee)--but the more it goes on, the more of a unwieldy, undisciplined mess it becomes. (R, 120 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MCCANICK (2014) and SQUATTERS (2014)

MCCANICK
(US - 2014)

David Morse has long been one of those respected character actors whose presence always gives a boost to whatever he's in, whether he's making good projects better or bad projects bearable. He'll go down as one of the greats of his kind, but MCCANICK, which gives the actor a rare big-screen lead, offers the unthinkable:  a bad David Morse performance. MCCANICK didn't get much of a release--eight screens for a gross of $2000--but it did get some notoriety as the final work of GLEE star Cory Monteith before his overdose death in July 2013.  It's a departure for Monteith and his performance is enough to show that he had ambitions beyond GLEE, but aside from him, the cliched MCCANICK is an almost complete disaster, and it pains me to say that star/producer Morse is a big reason why.  Morse stars as Philadelphia narcotics detective Eugene "Mack" McCanick, the kind of cop who has a punching bag hanging in his kitchen.  It's his 59th birthday and he just found out that Simon Weeks (Monteith) has been paroled.  Seven years earlier, McCanick busted a 17-year-old Weeks, then a small-time hustler and male prostitute, for the murder of a closeted Congressman who regularly cruised for young men.  McCanick is enraged about the early release, but is warned by boss Quinn (Ciarin Hinds) to stay away from Weeks.  Of course, McCanick ignores him and misleads his partner Floyd (Mike Vogel) into pursuing Weeks, which only results in McCanick accidentally shooting Floyd.  Ordered to go home, McCanick instead gets drunk and goes on a city-wide rampage trying to find Weeks.

Director Josh C. Waller and writer Daniel Noah are intentionally vague about the truth behind McCanick's motivations: does he have a score to settle with Weeks?  Does it have something to do with McCanick's estranged cop son?  Does he feel a paternal instinct to help Weeks?  Did he frame Weeks?  Does Weeks, as Quinn suggests, have some information on dirty cops that might bring them all down? Once revealed, the ultimate answer is ludicrous at best and offensive at worst once you consider the absurd lengths McCanick goes to in order to "just talk" to Weeks. MCCANICK starts out as a tough, gritty cop thriller, and for a while, it works in spite of the cliches.  But then the silliness kicks in and it starts to drag badly--why would Floyd call McCanick in a dingy apartment building where he knows McCanick is trying to stealthily corner a suspect?  And watch the filmmakers awkwardly cram in a bunch of exposition in the middle of a pursuit, as if McCanick would really choose that time to go into why his marriage fell apart and why his son hates him. Most laughable of all is McCanick demolishing someone's apartment then pausing to pensively regard his distorted reflection in a mangled toaster.  Oh, the symbolism!  As McCanick's actions become increasingly illogical and cement-headed, Morse's performance goes off the rails.  His strengths as an actor have always been in his quiet, controlled intensity, not in sub-Nicolas Cage meltdowns. By the end, it starts to look a lot like a David Morse vanity project that was understandably hijacked after the fact by Monteith's death.  How else do you explain the closing credits starting not with an "In loving memory of Cory Monteith" (which is saved for the very end), but instead with with a lone "David Morse as Eugene 'Mack' McCanick," then a fade, then the rest of the cast scrolling by in the typical fashion. Morse is a great actor, but MCCANICK shows that even the best in the business can have a really off day. (R, 96 mins)



SQUATTERS
(US - 2014)

Or, "OMG I'M, LIKE, SO HOMELESS! :(" Debuting on DVD two years after it was completed, the useless SQUATTERS has vague cover art and a trailer that suggests it's a home invasion suspense thriller of sorts, but it's really a sappy, simplistic drama that comes off like a homeless version of TRUE ROMANCE with all the insight of a spoiled 13-year-old who hasn't heard the word "no" nearly enough. Riddled with one plot convenience and hackneyed contrivance after another, SQUATTERS tells the not-very-compelling story of Kelly (Gabriella Wilde, from the already forgotten ENDLESS LOVE remake) and Jonas (Thomas Dekker), two homeless Pacific Palisades teenagers who spend their days dumpster diving, shoplifting, and scoring drugs.  While rooting around inside a parked car in a lot, Jonas overhears wealthy Evelyn Silverman (Lolita Davidovich), who's standing a few cars down, telling her Mexican cleaning lady "We'll be going on vacation to Greece, and remember, the alarm code is the address backwards," as Evelyn and the cleaning lady get in separate cars. Now, let's pause here for a moment.  Evelyn appears to be picking up her dry-cleaning.  Why is the cleaning lady meeting her there in her own car?  If Evelyn is picking up the dry-cleaning herself, why does the cleaning lady even have to be there?  Couldn't Evelyn have given her that information over the phone? Did they really have to drive in two cars to a parking lot just to talk about an alarm code so Jonas could happen to overhear it?  Anyway, Jonas steals a bike, follows Evelyn and gets a look at the house, and then with Evelyn and her wealthy businessman husband David (a slumming Richard Dreyfuss, whose presence is either a nod to DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS or a sad realization that DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS was a long time ago) away, Jonas and a reluctant Kelly crash there, where Jonas spends two, perhaps three seconds rifling through a few random scattered papers on David's desk and, based on that thorough research, manages to crack David's safe combo after three attempts, because yeah, that's how it works.  Jonas tries to broker a deal with obnoxious, fey British crime lord Ronald (Andrew Howard as Jason Statham as Vinnie Jones) to fence all of the Silvermans' belongings, including cars, jewels, and a gun, while the more sensitive Kelly spends time watching the Silverman's home movies and getting the sense of family she never had.  Of course, the Silvermans return from Greece early and find they've been burglarized, and after a chance meet-cute with the Silvermans' son Michael (Luke Grimes) at a screening of Chaplin's THE KID, Kelly ends up back at the house as Michael's love interest as Jonas tries to contend with the "Fookin' 'ell, mate!" histrionics of Ronald, a character who seems to have gotten lost on his way back to a bad late 1990s Guy Ritchie knockoff.

Written by Justin Shilton (grandson of F TROOP's Larry Storch and a co-writer on Chris Messina's upcoming directorial debut ALEX OF VENICE) and directed by Martin Weisz (the repulsive GRIMM LOVE and the 2007 THE HILLS HAVE EYES II), SQUATTERS is about as dumb as it gets. It's hard to tell exactly what audience the filmmakers are pursuing, considering it has all the depth of a bad YA novel but has enough violence and F-bombs to warrant an R rating.  There's an interesting film to be made about situations where homeowners find themselves forced to contend with squatters, and it certainly would've been more interesting than the cookie-cutter blandness that develops in this one. Shilton's writing is just lazy and amateurish, whether he's piling on the improbable coincidences, magically pulling contrivances out of his ass or clumsily trying to work in Chaplin references to establish critical cred.  He's matched by Weisz's bumbling direction, which includes perhaps the worst sex scene of 2014, composed entirely in pretentious, zooming still-life freeze frames, much like the climactic shootout at Ronald's, a CGI splatter-filled fiasco that inexplicably looks like the Slo-Mo tripping scenes in DREDD.  And it all ends not with "The End" but with the cutesy "And THIS is where our STORY ends," followed by on-set photos during the closing credits showing how much fun everyone had.  Everyone, that is, except the audience.  Come on, Mr. Dreyfuss...you've gotta have better things to do than this.  (R, 106 mins)

In Theaters: WORLD WAR Z (2013)

WORLD WAR Z
(US - 2013)

Directed by Marc Forster.  Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard, Damon Lindelof.  Cast: Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, Matthew Fox, James Badge Dale, David Morse, Fana Mokoena, Peter Capaldi, Pierfrancesco Favino, Moritz Bleibtreu, Ruth Negga, Elyes Gabel, Ludi Boeken, John Gordon Sinclair, Michiel Huisman, Sterling Jerins, Abigail Hargrove, Fabrizio Zacharee Guido. (PG-13, 116 mins)

The film version of Max Brooks' acclaimed 2006 novel World War Z was in various stages of development before filming finally started in 2011.  It was an infamously troubled shoot that had multiple script rewrites and clashes between producer/star Brad Pitt and director Marc Forster (MONSTER'S BALL, QUANTUM OF SOLACE) that got to the point where the two eventually stopped speaking directly to one another.  The ending was completely scrapped and most of the film's second hour was completely rewritten and reshot, which bumped the film's December 2012 release date to summer 2013 and ballooned the budget to $200 million.  There's no denying that the completed version of WORLD WAR Z is the biggest zombie movie ever made, with an epic and occasionally legitimately stunning hugeness that looks terrific on a big screen.  But it's very episodic and lacking in cohesion, which is bound to happen with so many cooks in the kitchen, and it has little do with Brooks' book other than the title and zombies.  J. Michael Straczynski's original script was tossed and rewritten by Matthew Michael Carnahan (THE KINGDOM, STATE OF PLAY), and then Carnahan's ending was ditched as LOST co-creator and mercenary screenwriter Damon "Will Rewrite for Food" Lindelof (PROMETHEUS, STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS) was brought in to devise a new closing act.  Lindelof eventually left and his contributions were reshaped by THE CABIN IN THE WOODS director Drew Goddard.  And somewhere in there, Oscar-winning USUAL SUSPECTS scribe Christopher McQuarrie reportedly had an uncredited go at it as well.  It's amazing that WORLD WAR Z isn't a complete fiasco, but while it has its strong points, it certainly begs the question:  did anyone ever consider just adapting the book?

The film opens in Philadelphia as retired UN investigator Gerry Lane (Pitt) is taking off on vacation with wife Karin (THE KILLING's Mireille Enos) and their daughters Rachel (Abigail Hargrove) and Constance (Sterling Jerins).  In a traffic jam with chaos erupting around them, the Lanes take off to New Jersey as zombies sprint 28 DAYS LATER-style through the streets, biting their victims and spreading a contagion that reanimates their victims in approximately ten seconds.  Gerry makes contact with his old UN boss Thierry (Fana Mokoena) who has them airlifted from the top of a Newark apartment building and onto a Navy ship 200 miles off the coast of NYC.  Thierry tells Gerry that they need his help, and the commander in charge (John Gordon Sinclair) is prepared to boot the Lanes off the ship if Gerry doesn't play along.  A UN doctor (Elyes Gabel) has traced the outbreak to South Korea and from there, the trail leads to Jerusalem, where the Israeli government pre-emptively built walls around the city to keep out the dead, which are officially called "zombies" in government memos.  The zombies eventually force their way over the perimeter by climbing atop one another--an impressively-executed idea that looks a lot better in its final CGI polish than it did in those early trailers.  Gerry gets out of Jerusalem with Segen (Daniella Kertesz), a dedicated Israeli military officer, and the two board a departing flight and direct it to Cardiff, Wales, the location of the nearest functioning World Health Organization facility. They barely make it after a zombie stowaway infects most of the passengers on the plane, which conveniently crashes just before reaching Wales, with Gerry and Segen the only survivors.  Once at the WHO outpost, Gerry tells the doctor in charge (Pierfrancesco Favino) that he's witnessed some living people being ignored by the dead.  Gerry believes these people are terminally ill and that the zombies can sense it and therefore don't attack them.  He thinks that if they can develop a vaccine using deadly bacteria to camouflage signs of "life," that they may be able to move among the dead, who shambles about like old-school zombies if there's no one around to pursue.

By now, it's no secret that Lindelof's restructuring of the plot begins once Gerry and Segen get on the plane to Wales.  That plane was originally going to Moscow in Carnahan's version of the script, and that's what was shot until no one was happy with how it played out.  The entire Moscow section of the film was cut out and everything that happens from the plane to the end was concocted by Lindelof and/or Goddard.  The epic feel of the film gets whittled down to a more traditional claustrophobic, George A. Romero-style zombie movie as Gerry and Segen team up with the WHO doctors (Favino, Peter Capaldi, Moritz Bleibtreu, and Ruth Negga) to outwit the zombies being kept in a quarantined part of the Wales facility where the deadly bacteria and viral samples are conveniently being stored.  WORLD WAR Z gets off to a solid start and it's fast-paced and mostly engrossing, but one of its biggest problems is the recurrent utilization of ludicrous character stupidity to get the zombie set pieces in motion.  Whether people are forgetting to turn off their phones, letting doors slam, carelessly banging into things, or not closing doors behind them (or, on the plane, Gerry lobbing a grenade from first class into coach and watching the non-infected passengers get sucked out of huge hole he just created in the aircraft), a good chunk of the mayhem that takes place in WORLD WAR Z is because its characters act like idiots for the sake of plot convenience.  The finale in the Wales facility feels like it belongs in a different movie and seems designed more for Pitt to play an action hero than as a natural extension of the story, and it's amazing how well he can navigate his way around the maze-like building that he's never before visited.

WORLD WAR Z's messy production is apparent by what's on the screen, but it gets a lot right.  The first 40 or so minutes do a very effective job of conveying the chaos and the terror of a zombie outbreak and provides a rare example of the jumpy shaky-cam technique being used in a positive way.  A lot of these expansive shots of city-wide devastation in Philly, Newark, and NYC are very impressively done.  But after that huge opening, the story focuses on Pitt's Gerry, and this is a bland character that could've been played by anyone.  There's a reason Pitt hasn't had a potentally huge action franchise dropped in his lap before:  he's not that kind of an actor.  For all his fame and Brangelina tabloid ubiquity, he's an actor who, as he's gotten older (it's hard to believe he's going to be 50 this year) and more serious about his craft, feels more at home in character-driven pieces like THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD or KILLING THEM SOFTLY, or in auteur exercises like Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE.  Pitt doesn't seem at ease in a $200 million action/horror zombie movie, and it's not helped by the patchwork nature of the film where, particularly in the second half, everything seems like it's in imminent danger of coming apart at the seams.

Just for comparison's sake, it would be nice if the eventual Blu-ray edition included Forster's original cut with the Moscow ending as a bonus feature.  WORLD WAR Z is entertaining as a mega-budget spectacle, but it leaves hardcore zombie fans wanting more.  There's hardly a drop of blood spilled onscreen--these aren't flesh-eating zombies--and you can see more splatter in a TV commercial for the AMC series THE WALKING DEAD than you'll see here.  When Pitt, Kertesz, and Favino are making their way down the dimly-lit corridors of the Wales facility searching for the undead, it brings to mind similar sequences in European zombie classics like Jorge Grau's THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE (1974) and Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND (1981), both of which will undoubtedly enjoy a longer shelf life with genre fans than the diverting-while-you're-watching-it-but-forgettable-afterwards WORLD WAR Z.  Will zombie fans still be talking about WORLD WAR Z 30 or 40 years from now?  Will they even be talking about 30 or 40 days from now?

On DVD/Blu-ray: LAY THE FAVORITE (2012), CALIFORNIA SOLO (2012), and COLLABORATOR (2012)

LAY THE FAVORITE
(US/France/UK - 2012)

This one probably looked good on paper--an all-star gambling comedy that reunites HIGH FIDELITY director Stephen Frears and co-writer D.V. DeVincentis--but the end result is an absolute mess, mostly incoherent and blandly shot in almost sitcom fashion, and easily Frears' worst film.  Based on a memoir by journalist Beth Raymer, played here by Rebecca Hall in one of the most annoying performances in recent memory, LAY THE FAVORITE has Raymer, a porn web site model and in-home private stripper, leaving Florida to head to Vegas for her dream job as a cocktail waitress.  That she ends up taking her previously untapped math and memorization skills to become a major player in the operation of renowned Vegas bookie Dink Heimowitz (Bruce Willis) is likely a fascinating story, but Frears and DeVincentis bungle this at every turn.  Hall is a fine actress and approaches the role with fervent enthusiasm, but she comes off as a wide-eyed, white-trash Judy Holliday from BORN YESTERDAY with daddy issues.  It's never plausible for a moment that she so quickly picks up on the intricacies of Vegas bookmaking, or at least from the incomprehensible way DeVincentis' script conveys it.  There's too many subplots with too many characters and no consistency in how they behave from scene to scene.  Beth falls hard for Dink, who's devoted to his seemingly bitchy wife Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones), leading to Dink firing Beth to keep the peace...but then Tulip lets Dink rehire her and they become friends.  Beth eventually moves to NYC and falls in love with a boring journalist (played by the boring Joshua Jackson) and starts working for an obnoxious, fast-talking, hot-dogging bookie named Rosie (Vince Vaughn, cast radically against type as "Vince Vaughn"), and it's Tulip's idea to head to NYC to help Beth when one of her regular gamblers (John Carroll Lynch) is set up by the feds and Beth and her innocent boyfriend might get busted.  Of course, it all leads to a sentimental, feel-good ending with dialogue like "You know when you don't need to be taken care of anymore?  It's when you decide to take care of someone else," a line that Willis seems to be in actual physical pain trying to say.  Then the whole cast dances while mugging shamelessly over the closing credits.  With Emmett/Furla Films and 50 Cent among the boatload of credited producers and Corbin Bernsen also in the cast, it's not surprising that LAY THE FAVORITE received only scant US theatrical distribution, grossing $21,000 on just 61 screens against a $20 million budget.  Who was this movie even made for in the first place?  (R, 94 mins)

CALIFORNIA SOLO
(US - 2012)

In many ways a CRAZY HEART for the always-interesting Robert Carlyle, CALIFORNIA SOLO offers the veteran Scottish character actor his best big-screen role in years, though it's too bad no one saw it.  Released on just two screens, the film stars Carlyle as Lachlan MacAldonich, the former guitarist for a (fictional) Next Big Thing '90s Britpop group called The Cranks.  Hailed as the British Nirvana, the Cranks imploded when the band's frontman Jed--Lachlan's older brother--died from a drug overdose in Hollywood.  After a solo album bombed, Lachlan left the music business and settled into a life of anonymity, and is now working on an organic farm in California, living paycheck to paycheck and hosting a podcast called "Flame-Outs," that chronicles the tragic deaths of famous rock stars.  Lachlan's quiet life slowly starts to unravel after a DUI brings a 1996 charge of marijuana possession back to haunt him, and now INS is threatening to revoke his green card and send him back to Scotland.  This turn of events causes Lachlan to both self-destruct and face the long-buried demons of his past--the daughter he abandoned, his failed career and unrealized potential, and the guilt he feels over his brother's death (Lachlan gave him the drugs). 

Writer-director Marshall Lewy doesn't avoid formula but also doesn't let Lachlan off the hook or make excuses for him--he's very flawed and can be a bit of a self-centered dick at times (watch how quickly he abandons the niceties when he meets his ex-wife and daughter for coffee), and Carlyle very deftly balances those aspects of this complex character.  Throughout the film, Lewy and Carlyle continue to reveal layers of Lachlan that make you look at some of the film's earlier events in a different light, particularly the devastating scene where he asks the Cranks' former manager (Michael Des Barres) to loan him $5000 for his attorney's fees, and the manager just unloads 15 years worth of rage on Lachlan (Des Barres absolutely nails this one-scene performance).  Carlyle also gets excellent support from A Martinez as his boss (who gets one of the film's best lines: "All the Mexicans I got workin' for me and it's the Scottish guy who has the immigration problems?"), Alexia Rasmussen as a regular customer at Lachlan's Farmers' Market booth and possible love interest, and a natural, unaffected performance by Savannah Lathem as Lachlan's estranged 14-year-old daughter.  CALIFORNIA SOLO is one of those really under-the-radar gems that nobody's heard of, which is a shame.  It deserved better treatment.  (R, 95 mins)



COLLABORATOR
(US/Canada - 2012)

Shot in 2009 and exhibited mainly on the festival circuit before getting a one-screen release in NYC last summer, COLLABORATOR is an occasionally interesting acting exercise that ultimately feels too stagy and implausible for the screen.  It does give two veteran character actors a chance to stretch out, and while the performances are fine, there's just not much else here.  Making his writing/directing debut, Martin Donovan stars as a NYC playwright fleeing to L.A. after critics savage his latest work. Telling his wife (Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, transitioning nicely to acting) that he needs some time to ponder the future of his career, he crashes in Reseda with his mother (Katherine Helmond), while mulling over an offer to do an uncredited script polish on a horror film or work on adapting a book for a film to star his ex-girlfriend (Olivia Williams), now a major movie star.  With Helmond out with friends, he's tempted to rekindle his romance with Williams when childhood acquaintance David Morse, an ex-con who still lives across the street with his mother (Eileen Ryan, Sean Penn's mother), shows up and badgers Donovan into having a couple of beers.  Within a few minutes, a SWAT team shows up at Morse's house across the street.  The cops are after Morse for something, and he takes Donovan hostage.  With the cops surrounding the house and the hostage drama playing out on TV, Donovan and Morse...talk and improv, as the lifelong issues of both men and why they are what they are bubble to the surface.

Essentially a one-act play stretched out to feature length with a few additional characters, COLLABORATOR doesn't accomplish much and was likely a low-budget labor of love and a chance for some friends to hang out and make a movie.  As a director, Donovan (not to be confused with the other Martin Donovan, who directed 1989's brilliant APARTMENT ZERO) acquits himself well with some observational bits early on that are reminiscent of vintage, pre-Dutch angle-fixated Hal Hartley (Donovan starred in several Hartley films, like TRUST, SIMPLE MEN, AMATEUR, and FLIRT), and never gets self-indulgent.  It's nice to see guys like Morse (a great actor) and Donovan in lead roles and both are excellent, so for that aspect, COLLABORATOR is worth seeing if you're a fan of these dependable character actors.  Others will likely be bored.  (Unrated, 87 mins, also streaming on Netflix)