SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (US/Canada/China - 2019) Directed by Andre Ovredal. Written by Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman. Cast: Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Gil Bellows, Dean Norris, Lorraine Toussaint, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Austin Abrams, Kathleen Pollard, Javier Botet, Troy James, Mark Steger. (PG-13, 108 mins) Based on the beloved trilogy of YA books written by Alvin Schwartz and vividly illustrated by Stephen Gammell, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK takes some of the series' more famous tales of terror ("The Big Toe," "The Red Spot," "Me-Tie-Dough-ty Walker!") and weaves them into a more ambitious narrative rather than going for the anthology structure. It's also got the fingerprints of producer Guillermo del Toro all over it, especially with some of the nightmarish monsters recalling The Pale Man from PAN'S LABYRINTH and the title character in the GDT-produced MAMA, who was played by Javier Botet, called upon once again by del Toro, this time to play a corpse searching for his missing toe. Though he had a hand in shaping the script in its early stages (along with Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the duo behind the FEAST and THE COLLECTOR franchises, as well as writing SAWs IV-through-VII), del Toro farmed out directing duties to Andre Ovredal, director of the found-footage cult hit TROLLHUNTER and the terrifying THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE. Despite the source being a series of books written in the 1980s and being in various stages of development for several years, it's a safe assumption that SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK probably wouldn't exist in this cinematic form were it not for the massive success of both IT and the Netflix series STRANGER THINGS. Comparisons are inevitable and observing that this is kinda just a more age-appropriate IT that tweens and younger teens can get a ticket to is an argument that's not without merit, but SCARY STORIES manages to be its own beast. That's due in large part to an appealing cast of young actors and it being a rare throwback sort-of project that actually conveys genuine affection for what it's doing beyond misremembered nostalgia and the resurrection of a short-lived disaster of a reformulated soft drink that anybody who was conscious during 1985 and still of sound mind today can verify that absolutely fucking nobody liked. Nobody.
Set in 1968 in the small Pennsylvania town of Mill Valley Township with an America at war in Vietnam and in the days leading up to the election of Richard Nixon, SCARY STORIES centers on three outcast teenagers--aspiring writer and horror fanatic Stella (Zoe Colletti), lanky, sarcastic Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and goofball jokester Chuck (Austin Zajur)--who are introduced on Halloween throwing a flaming bag of shit (Chuck's, in case you were wondering) into the lap of jock bully Tommy (Austin Abrams) as he passes by them in his car. Fleeing for their lives, they end up at a drive-in showing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and hide out in the car of Ramon (Michael Garza), an 18-year-old drifter who drove into town earlier that day. Stella talks Ramon into taking them to the shuttered and reportedly haunted Bellows mansion on the edge of town, home to the once-powerful family that built Mill Valley. Tales have been passed down for generations about Sarah Bellows, the black sheep of the family and all-purpose Mill Valley urban legend who was kept in a locked room in the house after she allegedly poisoned some local children at the turn of the 20th century. While roaming around the mansion, Stella and the others find the secret room and in it, Sarah Bellows' book of scary stories, handwritten in her own blood. Stella takes the book home, where she lives with her dad (Dean Norris) after her mom left them years earlier, the cause of some cruel rumors that still persist, and finds that a new story is writing itself--in blood--in the pages of the book. Sarah is seeking vengeance for the theft of the book by punishing all who were there when it was taken from the house--including Tommy, who followed them and spray-painted a racial slur on Ramon's car, and Chuck's older sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn), who's secretly been going out with Tommy. Using this set-up, SCARY STORIES takes some of those more popular tales from Schwartz's books and uses them as comeuppances against Stella and her friends, like a local folklore-based FINAL DESTINATION that condemns all of them as Sarah Bellows will not stop until she has her revenge on them and the entire town of Mill Valley Township.
As a 46-year-old child of the '80s, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK feels like the kind of movie I would've seen with my dad in 1984 and still have an affectionate soft spot for today. It's the kind of "crowd" movie that you don't see much of these days, where you can sense that nervous communal tittering going across the theater when everyone knows something's about to happen. Ovredal does a really good job of playing the audience, often delivering the payoff jolt right before or right after you've been conditioned to expect it. It's about as icky as a PG-13 horror film can get, but like the books, it's the kind of grossness where the eew-factor provides much dark-humored fun (a beef stew with a toe and an eyeball among the ingredients; a seriously infected spider bite that's about to explode on a girl's face), and it works all the creepy tropes (scarecrows, ghosts, long, ominous corridors in a dark basement with something approaching from the distance) in an effective fashion. The weaving in of a Vietnam subtext lends some social commentary to the proceedings (and the setting allows the use of Donovan's always-creepy "Season of the Witch"), but the attempted contemporary allegorical implication doesn't really land, even if it adds some texture to Garza's character and helps explain why the local sheriff (Gil Bellows, presumably no relation to the Mill Valley Township Bellows) is giving him such a hard time. A film that would've been better suited to hit theaters near Halloween instead of the second week of August (it's probably coming out now so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle with next month's IT sequel), SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK is a fun ride with solid scares and an engaging cast playing well-written characters, the kind of goofy horror crowd-pleaser that Joe Dante (GREMLINS), Fred Dekker (NIGHT OF THE CREEPS), or maybe Tom Holland (FRIGHT NIGHT) would've made in the mid '80s.
BEIRUT (US - 2018) Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Tony Gilroy. Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Dean Norris, Shea Whigham, Mark Pellegrino, Larry Pine, Jonny Coyne, Douglas Hodge, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Idir Chender, Kate Fleetwood, Leila Bekhti, Hicham Ouraqa, Ahmed Said Arie, Sonia Okacha, Mohammed Attougui. (R, 109 mins) At the risk of sounding wistful or cliched, BEIRUT is the kind of movie you don't see in theaters very often these days. It's a smartly-written, mid-budget political thriller whose target audience is middle-aged adults. It's a star vehicle for Jon Hamm, whose place in pop culture history is cemented thanks to MAD MEN but who hasn't really had a breakout leading role on the big screen, instead standing out in supporting roles in films like THE TOWN and BABY DRIVER. With Hamm's biggest success being on TV and SESSION 9 and THE MACHINIST director Brad Anderson settling comfortably into hired-gun TV journeyman mode in recent years (FRINGE, TREME, BOARDWALK EMPIRE), BEIRUT almost feels like the kind of period piece project that's designed more for a limited series on HBO, FX, or Netflix. On one hand, that's a depressing commentary on the changing landscape of mainstream moviegoing over the last couple of decades that a solid piece of suspenseful escapism like BEIRUT seems like a pleasant surprise. However, in the capable hands of veteran screenwriter Tony Gilroy (the BOURNE series, MICHAEL CLAYTON, and most recently, ROGUE ONE, for which he also handled the reshoots when director Gareth Edwards was relieved of his duties), BEIRUT, which does share a few core plot ideas with 2000's Gilroy-scripted PROOF OF LIFE, is a riveting thriller about the delicate nature of political gamesmanship and double-crossing diplomacy making an already volatile region even more dangerous and unpredictable.
Opening in 1972, Mason Skiles (Hamm) has a pretty cushy gig as a US diplomat based in Beirut. He's a smooth negotiator and spends most of his time schmoozing and entertaining visiting politicians and intellectuals. He and his wife Nadia (Leila Bakhti) are hosting a dinner party when his State Department buddy Cal Riley (Mark Pellegrino) shows up with CIA officials who want to haul in Karim, a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan the Skileses are currently sponsoring and hope to adopt, for questioning. Skiles was unaware that Karim had an older brother, Abu Rajal (Hicham Ouraqa), who is being hunted by Mossad agents for his role in the Munich massacre that killed eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team. Abu Rajal has been in contact with his little brother, and Cal has photographic evidence. As Skiles attempts to placate the agents with as little disruption to his party as possible, Abu Rajal and his men storm Skiles' house, whisk Karim away, with Nadia among those killed in the ensuing skirmish.
Cut to 1982, and widower Skiles is an alcoholic wreck, living in Boston and skating by as a mediator on various local union disputes as something to do during the day until he can get to the bar in the evening. He's summoned by the State Department and told he's needed in a civil war-torn Beirut. He's offered $6500 and a passport and is instructed to be on a flight in six hours. Once on the ground in Beirut, everyone--State Department guys Gary Ruzek (Shea Whigham) and Donald Gaines (Dean Norris), and glad-handing US politician Frank Shalen (Larry Pine)--hems and haws about why he's there and why he's been provided with CIA handler Sandy Crowder (Rosamund Pike) to babysit him. Skiles has been requested by name to lead the negotiation to release a kidnapped Cal, who's being held by a splinter group of the PLO. A meet is arranged and Skiles comes face to face with the group's leader, a now-grown Karim (Idir Chender), who's threatening to kill Cal if Israel doesn't turn over his brother in exchange for Cal, and he knows Skiles is the only negotiator sharp enough to get it done. Skiles meets with multiple Israeli officials who agree to look into Abu Rajal's whereabouts and all come back with the same story: "We don't have him." Things get even more complicated, forcing Skiles to go rogue when Ruzek and Gaines reveal their true motive: making sure Cal, who's been based in Beirut for 13 years and is a walking encyclopedia of classified intel, doesn't talk about the things he knows, both on and off the books.
Given Gilroy's expertise in screenwriting, the cynical BEIRUT does a good job of keeping the copious exposition of the various Middle East conflicts as concise and succinct as possible. It also gets some terrific location work from Tangier doubling as Beirut, with some chilling atmosphere throughout as we see the almost nonchalant, business-as-usual reaction of citizens when guns and bombs go off around them. Hamm displays enough gravitas to convey Skiles' cut-the-shit attitude once he figures out that Ruzek and Gaines consider Cal expendable, even if "Mason Skiles" is a name that could only exist in a Hollywood screenplay. Likewise, we of course get the obligatory scene where the drunkard hero finally his shit together and pours all of his booze down the drain while regarding his aging visage in the mirror and pondering What I've Become, but Gilroy and Anderson aren't making a documentary here. They do, however, incorporate actual events and historical elements into a fictional story that's tense, fast-paced, and well-acted by its cast. Pike, in her second terrorism thriller in the last month after the inexplicably dance-crazed 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE, does what she can with an underwritten role (Sandy is dismissed by Gaines as a "skirt," but then Pike still isn't given that much to do other than yell at Skiles when he needs a kick in the ass), but Norris is perfectly cast as a duplicitous, untrustworthy dick with an Oscar-caliber rug, while Whigham is at his sneering best, barely tolerating Skiles' meddlesome involvement in the entire negotiation process. But BEIRUT is Jon Hamm's show from start to finish, and he proves himself a capable leading man who probably would've been better served by Hollywood movie studios if he was around in the '70s and '80s. He's displayed a gift for comedy and proven his versatility in supporting roles and ensemble feature films, and BEIRUT leaves no doubt that he can carry a movie but it's an anomaly in today's distribution model that declares everything a disappointment if it doesn't make $100 million out of the gate. BEIRUT is the kind of mid-range film that used to turn into a word-of-mouth sleeper hit in April or September and maybe make $25-$30 million and everyone would be happy. But those days are gone. It's not going to make a ton of money, but it'll enjoy a long life on streaming and cable, acquiring fans shocked that they'd never heard of it before.
DEATH WISH (US - 2018) Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Joe Carnahan. Cast: Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Dean Norris, Kimberly Elise, Beau Knapp, Camila Morrone, Len Cariou, Mike Epps, Wendy Crewson, Stephen McHattie, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Jack Kesy, Ian Matthews, Stephanie Janusauskas, Luis Oliva, Moe Jeudy Lamour. (R, 107 mins) Shot in 2016 and with its release date bumped once already after the Las Vegas mass shooting last October, the long-gestating remake of the 1974 classic DEATH WISH is finally in theaters, and once again timed in close proximity to another tragedy with the horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, FL. Given the frequency of mass shootings in America, it's likely that any DEATH WISH release date would coincide with one and unintenionally leave a bad aftertaste. But honestly, that's giving it too much credit. DEATH WISH '18 is empty-calorie junk-food entertainment that stacks the deck against its vigilante hero and throws red meat at the audience. It's designed to get a response, and judging from the crowd applause at key moments--like one guy getting his sciatic nerve sliced open and doused in brake fluid before a jacked-up car falls and smashes his head like a watermelon at a Gallagher show--it's mission accomplished in "Good Guy with a Gun" fantasy wish-fulfillment. This had a rocky journey from the start: in various stages of development since 2006, with Sylvester Stallone, Liam Neeson, Benicio del Toro, Frank Grillo, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt either attached or approached to star, Joe Carnahan (NARC, SMOKIN' ACES, THE GREY) wrote the script and was set to direct until he departed in 2013 over the usual "creative differences." That led to the BIG BAD WOLVES team of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado coming aboard to direct, with Bruce Willis signed on to star. They split when Willis and the producers wouldn't let them rewrite Carnahan's script, but when Eli Roth (HOSTEL) ended up getting the directing gig, the script wound up being completely overhauled by an uncredited Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writing team behind ED WOOD and THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. The end result still has Carnahan receiving sole writing credit, even though he left the project three years before production even commenced.
Taking a break from his ongoing, landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series of interchangeable Lionsgate VOD releases, Bruce Willis steps into the iconic Charles Bronson role as Paul Kersey, this time a Chicago ER surgeon instead of a mild-mannered NYC architect. Where DEATH WISH '74, based on a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, addressed the rise of urban violence and decay in a NYC that was rapidly growing scuzzier and more dangerous by the day, DEATH WISH '18 offers rudimentary commentary on Chicago being one of the most dangerous cities in America, even though the Windy City is mostly portrayed here by Montreal. Of course, that violence hits home when Dr. Kersey is called into work one evening and his wife Lucy (Elisabeth Shue) and college-bound daughter Jordan (Camila Morrone) are the victims of a home invasion by a trio of scumbags. Lucy is killed and Jordan is left in a coma, and a shell-shocked Kersey is inevitably frustrated when well-meaning but ineffectual detectives Raines (Dean Norris) and Jackson (Kimberly Elise) can't do much besides wait for a break in the case. His rage simmering to a boil, unable to sleep or focus on work, and possibly thinking of his Don't Mess with Texas father-in-law (Len Cariou), Kersey lucks into obtaining a gun when a gang-banger is brought into the ER and no one sees or hears his gun hit the floor, which Kersey stealthily stashes into his scrubs. He then tries out the gun at an abandoned warehouse and becomes a crack shot over the course of one split-screen montage set to AC/DC's "Back in Black." Donning a series of hoodies he swipes from hospital laundry, Kersey begins roaming the most dangerous areas of Chicago, blowing away thugs, drug dealers, and every shitbag he encounters, becoming a folk hero and viral video sensation dubbed "The Grim Reaper." In a development worthy of the Plot Convenience Playhouse Hall of Fame, Kersey gets a break the cops never could when a gunshot victim lands in the ER sporting the watch Lucy gave him for his birthday, one of the many expensive items stolen in the home invasion. Of course this leads to Kersey vigilantism getting "personal," with one-step-behind Raines and Jackson (who seem to be the only Chicago detectives on duty at any given time) taking way too long to put it together that Kersey is The Grim Reaper.
Roth offers frequent talking head cutaways to Chicago radio personality Mancow and Sirius XM's Sway Calloway discussing the Grim Reaper phenomenon on their morning shows, and DEATH WISH '18 makes the era-appropriate adjustments with smartphone videos and Reaper memes going viral, but this new take seems to split the difference between the grittiness and social commentary of the 1974 original and its increasingly silly sequels. Bronson's Kersey was shocked and repulsed by his own propensity for savage violence, so much so that he throws up after committing his first murder before finding catharsis in his actions. Willis' Kersey sees those actions making him a hero and smirks like Bruce Willis and starts cracking wise, which didn't happen with Bronson until the sequels (much the way A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's ominous and evil "Fred Krueger" morphs into stand-up comic Freddy Krueger over the course of the subsequent entries). Everyone remembers Bronson's "You believe in Jesus? Well, you're gonna meet him..." from DEATH WISH II and Willis gets his version of that when powerful drug lord "The Ice Cream Man" (Moe Jeudy Lamour) asks "Who the fuck are you?" with the inevitable reply "Your last customer," and...BANG!
Willis' transformation from upper-middle class family man to John McClane circa LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD keeps DEATH WISH '18 from being anything more than a schlocky, instant gratification vigilante thriller, and it's also worth noting that Bronson's Kersey never did find the creeps who killed his wife and left his daughter in a coma, an impossible closure that this new film feels the need to provide. It isn't any better or worse than, say, 1987's DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN, but there's some missed opportunities here, particularly one bit that speaks volumes when Kersey's ne'er-do-well brother Frank (Vincent D'Onofrio) shows up at his house when he isn't home and finds his weapons and ammo stash in the basement rec room where he's been sleeping. The entire room is filled with empties, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, and looks like a particularly nightmarish episode of HOARDERS. Surely, Kersey has gone insane to some degree as evidenced by the living conditions in his basement. At one time, Willis would've been interested in exploring that aspect, but DEATH WISH '18 is more concerned with fashioning this as a throwback Bruce Willis vehicle. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since Willis actually shows up and it's probably his best movie in several years simply by default. And for really hardcore cult movie nerds, Roth does include a cameo by Sorcery's STUNT ROCK jam "Sacrifice." It has its moments, but at the end of the day, chalk this up as another remake that's an acceptable time-killer but didn't really need to be.
Despite the title, this isn't a sixth installment of the long-running Tom Berenger action franchise. Instead, it's another "Steven Seagal" movie where the 64-year-old star and co-executive producer does as little as possible, is always shot solo and never directly interacting with his co-stars, and is obviously doubled in any shot where his face isn't visible. Indeed, there's several instances here of Seagal's double using props--and in one instance, actually holding up his hand--to obscure his face as he exits a room or walks away. Filmed on some still-standing sets from AMERICAN SNIPER at the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch facility in California, SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS is written and directed by exploitation vet Fred Olen Ray who, like his contemporary Jim Wynorski, almost could've had a big(ish) career in the 1980s but has instead dabbled in any number of DTV genres under a plethora of pseudonyms. On the commentary--yes, this actually has a commentary--Ray talks of this being a return to the style of his '80s action movies like ARMED RESPONSE and that it was a special project for him, but it's really just a blatant ripoff of ACT OF VALOR (Ray says his original draft of the script was titled HOUR OF VALOR). Seagal and pro wrestler Rob Van Dam have their last names above the title (I guess hoping to confuse Redbox rubes who don't follow wrestling and don't know how to spell "Van Damme"), but the real star is third-billed Tim Abell, a Ray regular who's been carving out a living on the fringes of D-list DTV since the early '90s when he headlined a number of erotic thrillers and the syndicated series SOLDIER OF FORTUNE INC. A gravelly-voiced and DUCK DYNASTY-bearded Abell is Sgt. Vic Mosby, the head of an Army special ops unit that rescues a US senator taken hostage by Taliban insurgents. Two of their unit--sniper Jake Taylor (Seagal) and his spotter Rich Cannon (Daniel Booko)--are left behind in the skirmish, with young Rich shot and unable to feel his legs. Back at the base, the commander (ex-Marine and go-to movie military advisor Dale Dye, who's had better assignments) assigns Mosby and his men, among them second-in-command Vasquez (Van Dam), to head into dangerous territory to retrieve a stranded military truck filled with explosives and fuel.
Of course, there's extensive firefights with terrorists, who aren't after the truck as much as they are the person in the truck, Jada (Rita Khori), the daughter-in-law of a major Taliban leader. Jada has renounced her terrorist ties and is trying to find safe passage with the Americans for herself and her infant son, which makes Mosby a bit more grumbly than usual, as does the presence of stowaway photojournalist Janet (Charlene Amoia). Mosby hatches a plan to use Jada as leverage to ensure the safe release of Taylor and Cannon, who are still holed up and under siege where Mosby was forced to leave them behind. In other words, what you have with SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS, is really a Tim Abell movie where he tries to rescue Steven Seagal. Seagal's laziness is rivaled only by Bruce Willis, and he's in SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS even less than he is his more recent "efforts." Seagal's amusing performance in 2014's GUTSHOT STRAIGHT was a good indication that he could have a credible career as a character actor if he gave a shit, but all the hallmarks of modern-day Seagal are on display in SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS: the barely-concealed double, the mumbling, fake N'awlins accent, the mid-film sabbatical where he's gone for somewhere around 20-25 minutes of screen time. I guess SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS isn't bad as much as it is by-the-numbers. Ray's handling of the action scenes is perfunctory at best, with a 15-minute opening sequence that should have you on the edge of your seat but never builds any momentum and just meanders on its way to nowhere. Abell does what's expected of him but none of these characters are interesting and we don't really get invested in anything they're doing. It's a standard, undemanding, streaming-ready, jingoistic military actioner with a lot of "Roger, sir!" and "Copy that!" and "Let's go!" and "You got it, Sergeant!" Seagal is practically a non-factor in what's being sold as a Seagal movie, and nothing sums that up more succinctly than Ray saying almost nothing about him on the commentary, probably because he has yet to actually meet him. (R, 86 mins) REMEMBER
(Canada/Germany - 2015)
The wildly inconsistent Atom Egoyan is so far removed from his 1990s EXOTICA and THE SWEET HEREAFTER heyday that it's best to approach his new films with diminished expectations. He's been working at a fairly steady pace the last few years, with 2014's pointless West Memphis Three misfire DEVIL'S KNOT and the same year's missing child thriller THE CAPTIVE, which started good but got increasingly goofy as it went along. With REMEMBER, it's goofy pretty much from the start, its story so distant from any plausible reality that, given its subject matter, it's almost admirably tacky in its execution, In a nursing home in New York, 90-year-old Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is a recent widower suffering from early-onset dementia. Zev is an Auschwitz survivor, like fellow facility resident Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau). Max has to remind Zev of a plan they intended to carry out once Zev's cancer-stricken wife passed: to find and kill the Nazi blockfuhrer who ran their section of the concentration camp. The blockfuhrer goes by the name "Rudy Kurlander," and though Max, who has dedicated his life to tracking down former Nazis, has located four elderly men with that name living in the US, he's now confined to a wheelchair, hindered by emphysema, and too ill to do it himself. He gives Zev a detailed letter and a pile of cash and sends him to Cleveland, where that Rudy Kurlander (Bruno Ganz) turns out to be the wrong guy. Zev will venture through Michigan into Ontario, Canada and back into the US to Reno on his quest for the other three Rudy Kurlanders, the second being surprisingly poignant and heartfelt before Egoyan and first-time screenwriter Benjamin August (a former casting director on the reality show FEAR FACTOR) hop on the crazy train, turning REMEMBER into a bizarre and strangely compelling exercise in discomfort and disbelief, sort of what you'd get if you dropped Simon Wiesenthal into a DEATH WISH or HARRY BROWN scenario. There's a twist ending you'll probably see coming, a sweating Zev getting trapped in a place he shouldn't be and pissing himself while blowing an anti-Semite's brains out, and the great Jurgen Prochnow (as a Rudy Kurlander) sporting what might be the least convincing old-age makeup ever seen in a movie.
From the moment a visibly scattered Zev walks into a Cleveland gun shop and effortlessly walks out with a Glock, REMEMBER is pretty much full of shit but scores a few points for chutzpah. On top of that, the specific reminders in Max's letter and Zev writing "Read letter" on his arm seem too indebted to MEMENTO and it doesn't seem likely that a frail Alzheimer's patient can Leonard Shelby his way across the country on a mission of vengeance. Committed performances give this a lot more class than the story can possibly offer, with an excellent Plummer apparently under the impression that he's in an old-school Egoyan film, carrying this on his shoulders and reminding us what a great actor he's been all these years. Landau is fine in his few scenes, and Ganz and Prochnow have little more than cameos, much like the second Rudy Kurlander (Heinz Lieven), who's memorable even with very little dialogue. Henry Czerny plays Zev's concerned son who spends the entire movie trying to find him, and Dean Norris has a small role in the film's darkest and most over-the-top segment, at least until the surprise reveal in the finale. Egoyan bungles things by adding one more scene after where it should've ended, almost like he didn't trust the audience to figure out the machinations of a key character and had to explicitly spell it out for them. I'm not sure whether that's a sign of Egoyan's slipping as a filmmaker or him recognizing that he needed to dumb it down for audiences that might not be as sharp as they were circa EXOTICA. REMEMBER is better than Egoyan's most recent films, but that's a pretty low bar. He hasn't made a recognizably "Egoyan" film since 2008's ADORATION, and REMEMBER finds him in what's best described as his "trashy pulp paperback" mode, along with the sleazy, NC-17-rated WHERE THE TRUTH LIES or the laughably dated CHLOE, a decade-and-a-half-too-late contribution to the 1990s erotic thriller cycle. REMEMBER is better than those films, for what that's worth, and that's largely because of Plummer, who probably shook his head at some of the scenes as he read the script for the first time, but still gives it everything he's got. (R, 94 mins) EMELIE
(US - 2016)
Directed by veteran live concert DVD director Michael Thelin and written by J.J. Abrams protege Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck (is all that necessary?), EMELIE works best in its ballsy early stages, where it seems like it's willing to go into some pretty dark places (there's also a cringe-inducing scene of young Christopher playing with Joe's gun that Emelie found in a closet and left out). But it starts collapsing midway through, with Emelie's motivation being traumatic but handled in a much stronger fashion in the very disturbing PROXY from a couple of years ago. Once the pieces are in place, it's ultimately nothing more than HOME ALONE re-imagined as an R-rated psychological/home invasion thriller, with the smart Emelie suddenly required to do stupid things in order to keep the story moving. But all that's just a warm-up for the climax, which kicks off with her accomplice doing something so impulsive and recklessly idiotic that it undermines all of the careful planning they've done, all leading up to a dumb non-ending that lands with a resounding thud. Bolger is terrific as the psychotic Emelie, and young Rush does a solid job as a pre-teen just starting to rebel (and explore other things, as Joe expresses concern to Joyce about the boy's web browsing history) and stepping up to protect his younger siblings. Thelin and Richard Harris Raymond Burr Tom Dick Harry Dean Stanton Herbeck offer an intriguing set-up (even though we're not sure how Emelie knows Anna or that she'd be filling in for her friend at the Thompsons, but it's not really a necessary detail) that becomes increasingly ordinary and dumb as it fizzles to its conclusion. (Unrated, 82 mins)
SECRET IN THEIR EYES (Spain/US - 2015) Written and directed by Billy Ray. Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Alfred Molina, Michael Kelly, Joe Cole, Zoe Graham, Don Harvey, Amir Malaklou, Niko Nicotera, Patrick Davis, Ross Partridge. (PG-13, 111 mins)
Juan Jose Campanella's 2009 Argentine thriller THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES dealt with the reopening of a 25-year-old murder case that was hindered in its initial stages by the tumultuous political upheaval of 1970s Argentina. It won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and is the source for the THE-less English-language remake SECRET IN THE EYES, written and directed by Billy Ray, who previously helmed SHATTERED GLASS and BREACH and whose CAPTAIN PHILLIPS screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination. SECRET '15 makes some major changes to the story (though Ray does restage the original's much-ballyhooed soccer stadium zoom at a Dodgers game) and works fine for a good chunk of the way. But then it starts collapsing under the weight of too many contrivances and coincidences, and a third-act twist that's just too ludicrous to accept, though it does give us a brief preview of how an Oscar-winning, A-list actress might handle a 1960s-inspired Bette Davis "horror hag" renaissance in another 25 or so years.
Alternating between 2015 and flashbacks to 2002, the film opens with former FBI agent Ray Kasten (Chiwetel Ejiofor), now the head of security for the New York Mets, arriving in Los Angeles to visit district attorney Claire Sloan (Nicole Kidman). Claire was an assistant D.A. in 2002 when Ray was on loan from the FBI in the months following 9/11, working a joint anti-terrorism task force with L.A. cops Jess Cobb (Julia Roberts), Bumpy Willis (Dean Norris), and bootlicking department company man Reg Siefert (Michael Kelly). They were part of a post-9/11 surveillance operation on a mosque believed to be housing a sleeper cell when a young woman's body was discovered in a dumpster adjacent to the building. The dead girl turned out to be single mom Jess' high-school senior daughter Carolyn (Zoe Graham). Devastated by Jess' inconsolable grief, Ray disregarded his own job and the orders of D.A. Morales (Alfred Molina) and conducted his own investigation after seeing a suspicious-looking young man (Joe Cole) staring at Carolyn in photos taken at a police department picnic. Nobody seemed to know who the kid was until Siefert confessed that his name was Marzin, and he was his snitch inside the mosque. With the department and Morales' office deciding that preventing another 9/11 trumps bringing Carolyn's killer to justice, the case against Marzin was buried and he was declared "untouchable" and set free, with Morales and Reg opting to instead railroad a mentally-incompetent Muslim (Amir Malaklou) for the murder.
But Marzin vanished shortly after, and Ray has spent 13 obsessive years tracking him down and he's finally found him, recently paroled, sporting a new nose and the name Beckwith. Claire is now the D.A. (Morales is now the governor) and is hesitant to reopen the investigation. Jess agrees, a broken shell of what she once was and having thrown herself into her job, concluding "I don't think I can stomach seeing him walk away again." Ray won't let it go and along with a hobbling Bumpy, now on desk duty and using a cane after suffering a serious knee injury in a 2002 pursuit of Marzin, and against the wishes of a sneering Reg ("Hey, Ray...the Mets just called and they need you...somebody stole second base!"), goes rogue in pursuit of "Beckwith."
When SECRET IN THEIR EYES focuses on the dual-timeline investigations in 2002 and 2015, with director Ray and editor Jim Page doing a fine job of handling the back-and-forth time element, it's a thoroughly engaging thriller with some potent observations about the post-9/11 War on Terror that ultimately get cast aside as the story progresses. It's got a sturdy foundation in the always-excellent Ejiofor's commanding performance as a man haunted by regrets--he was supposed to meet Carolyn at a bakery to pick out a cake for Jess' surprise birthday party, but he was swamped with work and blew her off, and two hours later, she was found dead in a dumpster. His obsessive pursuit of Marzin--spending several hours a night for 13 years in a needle-in-a-haystack search combing hundreds of thousands of mugshots in the parolee database hoping to find Marzin using an alias--is fueled more by guilt than a sense of legal justice. Ejiofor and Norris make a great team who deserve their own buddy-cop movie, but the romance angle between Ray and Claire is half-baked and eventually fizzles completely. It's not helped by Kidman's stilted, zombified performance--she's just not good here, aside from one terrific 2002-set scene where she just shreds Marzin, emasculating him in the most cutting ways imaginable. It's almost enough to redeem her otherwise weak performance, though it's a mystery why she does so well in that scene but almost seems under hypnosis in the rest of the film.
In what amounts to a supporting role, Roberts has a couple of Oscar-baiting breakdowns as the devastated Jess, but is solid throughout and keeps it real, looking like she hasn't slept in weeks and going without makeup and with unflattering bangs in her frumpiest and least-glamorous role this side of MARY REILLY ("You look a million years old," Ray tells her at one point). It's decidedly not a standard "Julia Roberts" role and those expecting a Roberts starring vehicle will likely be as disappointed as everyone else who sees an otherwise entertaining--if more than slightly unbelievable--procedural careening off the rails with a ridiculous climax that seems more fitting for a horror movie. The finale of SECRET IN THEIR EYES may seem ludicrous, but it's really just the entire film's Plot Convenience Playhouse nature crescendoing into a symphony of silliness, commencing right around the time three different stops on the way down puts all of the principal parties (Ray, Claire, Jess, and Marzin) on an elevator together. SECRET IN THEIR EYES abandons any illusions of subtext and commentary and despite the powerhouse headliners (a Roberts/Kidman teaming seems like it should've happened at least a decade ago, doesn't it?), it won't be getting any Oscar consideration, but if you're looking for a reasonably entertaining time-killer, it's worth a glance when it hits Redbox and Netflix in about three months.
Debuting to widespread dismay and derision at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival and opening to toxic reviews on 608 screens in October, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is currently ranked fifth on the list of all-time worst box office openings on 600 or more screens. Its total gross stalled at $705,000 but honestly, no film that allows you to hear Emma Thompson utter the words "titty-fucking cum queen" can possibly be completely worthless. Based on a novel by Chad Kultgen, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN finds director Jason Reitman, once the toast of Hollywood and the Next Big Thing after THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005), JUNO (2007), UP IN THE AIR (2009), and the underappreciated YOUNG ADULT (2011), crashing and burning with this on the heels of the universally-lambasted apple pie fiasco LABOR DAY (2013). MW&C is an hysterically overwrought look at Our World Today and examines the ways technology and everything else in our environment makes us strangers to one another. People drift apart, communication is non-existent, and everyone lives in their own insulated bubbles. Written by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson, best known for scripting 2002's SECRETARY and Atom Egoyan's ridiculous 2010 erotic thriller CHLOE, MW&C is another of these "everything is connected," big ensemble movies along the lines of CRASH, but miraculously manages to out-Haggis Paul Haggis in hackneyed sanctimony. Reitman is only 37 years old, but he's somehow directed a film that seems to have been made by an embittered and out-of-touch 80-year-old with its "Old Man Yells At Cloud" attitude about the state of the world with all the texting and the internet and the oversexed kids with the selfies and the hooking up. Most of that stems from one character: Jennifer Garner's Patricia Beltmeyer, arguably the most smothering helicopter parent in the history of cinema, a killjoy of Nurse Ratched proportions, a drunk-with-power sadist who makes Piper Laurie's Margaret White in CARRIE seem lenient and easy-going. Patricia is a mom so fixated on controlling every aspect of her teenage daughter Brandy's (Kaitlyn Dever of SHORT TERM 12) life that she seems to spend all of her waking hours scrolling through her daughter's texts and Facebook profile, systematically unfriending anyone she deems a "threat," and even plugging in a keylogger that monitors every one of Brandy's keystrokes. There are no redeeming qualities about this character and no reason given for her behavior to be as extreme as it is. But that's MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN in a nutshell: everything is black or white, with no shades of gray. It exists in an ennui-drenched suburbia where everyone's neuroses, dysfunctions, and emotional voids are right there in their browser histories. Everyone is selfish, everyone is miserable, and if there's anything that disrupts that simplistic view--like Patricia's useless husband (Jason Douglas)--then they're just cast aside by the filmmakers. Ray's there, but only exists to shake his head as Patricia sifts through pages upon pages of Brandy's text message printouts, like a driven detective obsessively digging through cold case files. It's no fault of Garner, who does what Reitman requires her to do, but Patricia Beltmeyer is one of the most ludicrously conceived villains to pop up in a movie in ages, and it was that character who bore the brunt of the film's overwhelmingly negative reception.
Elsewhere, we get quite the parade of sad sacks, all accompanied by the soothing tones of Thompson serving as narrator, at least until Reitman seems to forget about her and we go an hour without hearing her, and when she breaks out the aforementioned "titty-fucking cum queen," you're kind of interested in what else she has to say. Instead, we get Don Truby (a schlubby Adam Sandler in drama mode) and his wife Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt), bored parents of two sons whose stagnant sex life is separately rejuvenated by Helen creating an account with Ashley Madison and Don hiring escorts. This provides him with a nice break from sneaking home from work in the middle of the day to rub one out at his son Chris' (Travis Tope) laptop since Don's computer is completely shut down due to malware and viruses from all the porn sites he's visited. Chris has spent so much time jerking off to bondage and creampie videos that he can't even function during "normal" sex with hot cheerleader and self-aggrandizing would-be model Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia), even after he practices by drilling a hole in a Nerf football and filling it with hand lotion. Hannah and her single mom Donna (Judy Greer) spend all their time working on making Hannah a star, taking photos of dubious merit--often with Hannah scantily-clad--and selling them online through Hannah's web site, where her "fans," unbeknownst to the impossibly naive Donna--who raised Hannah alone after being ditched by the father, a shitbag who promised to make her a star--are primarily pedophiles. Donna begins dating Kent (Dean Norris), whose wife abandoned him and star quarterback son Tim (Ansel Elgort) a year earlier. A disillusioned Tim has since quit the football team and spends all of his time playing a WORLD OF WARCRAFT-type game online, at least until he meets the similarly disconnected Brandy, who's looking for any way to escape her mother's psychosis. There's also the formerly overweight Allison (Elana Kampouris), who spent the last year starving herself and developing an eating disorder only to lose her virginity to an asshole jock (Will Peltz) who instantly ignores her. MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is overbaked and hopelessly melodramatic, but it's hardly the grease fire that many reviews made it out to be. Despite the cartoonish characterizations, the cast acquits themselves well, especially Norris and Greer, at least until the script requires the characters to do something stupid. Norris' Kent is handled in a surprising fashion in the sense that he initially supports his son's decision to quit the football team, giving him his space to deal with an accept his mother walking out on them. In most situations like that, the dad would be an abusive bully pressuring his son to man up and get back out on the field. Even Sandler puts forth some effort, but eventually everyone is defeated by the ham-fisted, reactionary story that only provokes guffaws instead of serious thought. (R, 119 mins)
HONEYMOON (US - 2014)
This North Carolina-lensed indie horror film looks at the disintegration of a relationship through an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS filter. It's an alien invasion film with the intimate brutality of Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION and Lars von Trier's ANTICHRIST. While the derivative "pod people" angle sometimes feels like it's being forced into functioning as a metaphor by director/co-writer Leigh Janiak, HONEYMOON ultimately succeeds thanks to a pair of gutsy performances by its leads--the only actors onscreen for about 95% of the film--and a general queasy discomfort and one scene that recalls the kind of horrific set piece that fans cut their teeth on back in the '80s. Young newlyweds Paul (Harry Treadaway of PENNY DREADFUL) and Bea (Rose Leslie, best known as Ygritte on GAME OF THRONES) head to an isolated cottage in the middle of the woods for their honeymoon. After a couple days of wedded bliss, the party comes to an abrupt end when Paul finds Bea naked and confused in the woods in the middle of the night. She claims to have been sleepwalking but over the next day or so, she begins behaving oddly. She starts using familiar terms in a strange fashion (calling her suitcase a "clothes box") and forgets how to make coffee and French toast. She makes excuses for avoiding sex and has what look like deep bug bites on her inner thigh. She won't answer Paul's questions, leading him to believe she stepped out for a tryst with violent, hot-headed townie Will (Ben Huber) who owns the local diner and with whom Bea was obviously friendly as teenagers. Paul notes that Will's wife Annie (Hanna Brown) was also behaving in a disoriented manner. Strange lights shine into the cottage in the middle of the night and Paul catches Bea writing "My name is Bea, my husband's name is Paul" over and over in her journal, as Paul is convinced that something has happened to Bea and something has replaced her. "You look like her. You smell like her. You taste like her. But you're not her," he says.
One of the interesting things HONEYMOON does is flirt with the idea that maybe it's Paul who's cracking up and that his concern over Bea is really just his jealousy boiling over after he quickly concludes from their brief meeting that Will is a long-ago ex of Bea's. The BODY SNATCHERS motif is a tried-and-true formula for utter paranoia, and applying it to what's essentially a two-character piece mostly taking place in a cottage makes for an intriguing contrast with the usual widespread, large-scale scope of most films of this sort. If ever there was an alien invasion character study, HONEYMOON would be it. The concept seems a little forced when Janiak tries to use it to illustrate the idea that no matter how much you love someone and think you know them, you can never really know everything about them. Mostly low-key and character-driven, HONEYMOON makes great use of light and shadows, and Janiak is to be commended for avoiding cheap jump scares and setting HONEYMOON up as a narrative feature when it would've been very easy to turn it into yet another found-footage offering. Instead, she keeps it old-school by building the characters and getting to know them, then letting the tension escalate and deftly handling not just the innately horrific concept of being a stranger in your own body, but the horror of realizing the person you married is not that person at all. The "been there, done that" BODY SNATCHERS-esque plot elements aside, HONEYMOON is a creepy and effective horror movie that Magnet only released on three screens, grossing $9300. (R, 87 mins) REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS (US - 2014)
Martin Scorsese's 2006 Oscar-winner THE DEPARTED was a remake of Andrew Lau and Andy Mak's acclaimed 2002 Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and Scorsese "presents" and serves as one of 20 credited producers on REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS, collaboratively co-directed by Lau and Andrew Loo. Lau hasn't had much luck trying to crack the American market--his 2008 Richard Gere/Claire Danes serial killer thriller THE FLOCK was taken away from him in post-production and partially reshot by an uncredited Niels Mueller (2004's THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON) before it was given an unceremonious straight-to-DVD release. He gives it another go after his 2010 Donnie Yen hit LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHAN and the 2012 period epic THE GUILLOTINES, and the results are a mess. "Inspired by true events," GREEN DRAGONS desperately wants to be a Chinese GOODFELLAS or MEAN STREETS, but it's a cliche-laden disaster that only serves as a reminder that you should just watch those films one more time, along with Abel Ferrara's KING OF NEW YORK and Michael Cimino's YEAR OF THE DRAGON. Populated by stock characters and weak performances in a film whose story is typically advanced by montages, the confusing and often completely incoherent GREEN DRAGONS plays like an epic crime saga cut down to about half its length, but even at 95 minutes, it feels four hours long. It had potential, with its look at Chinese street gangs in Queens and Flushing in the 1980s, seen through the eyes of Sonny (THE TWILIGHT SAGA's Justin Chon), an orphan adopted into the Green Dragons gang after being brought to the US in the illegal immigration operation overseen by Snake Head Mama (Eugenia Yuan). Sonny and his adoptive brother Steven (played as an adult by Kevin Wu) serve as soldiers under the command of Green Dragons boss Paul Wong (GLEE's Harry Shum Jr) as Lau, Loo, and co-writer Michael Di Jiacomo essentially proceed with a watered-down remake of GOODFELLAS.
The chief problem is that Sonny registers a complete zero as a character, with Chon's bland performance doing nothing to make him sympathetic or even remotely compelling. So many other characters appear and disappear throughout that it's often impossible to tell how they relate to wherever the filmmakers are in the story. Of course, the hot-tempered Steven (the Tommy DeVito of the story) will be the major troublemaker in the Green Dragons. Of course Wong (the Jimmy Conway surrogate) is a ruthless leader who thinks nothing of throwing his own partners and subordinates under the bus if means saving his own ass by bringing down his chief competitor in smuggling heroin inside Hong Kong mooncakes. And of course, like the Henry Hill stand-in he's supposed to be, Sonny will turn against the Green Dragons when it becomes clear Wong intends to kill him. Also adding to the GOODFELLAS love-fest is a pointless supporting role for Ray Liotta as a hard-nosed FBI agent obsessed with busting up Wong's operation and getting no support from his do-nothing bosses at the Bureau. Liotta's character basically serves as a cipher for racist white America's ignorance of Chinese culture and customs, as Lau and Loo engage in laughably clumsy exposition drops like having Liotta ask an undercover Chinese-American NYPD detective (Jin Auyeung) "Do you speak Chinese?" to which the cop responds with a lecturing "Chinese is not a language. It's a family of languages...Cantonese, Fukienese..." Aimlessly meandering throughout its duration, GREEN DRAGONS only manages to be intriguing when it's focused on Shum's duplicitous, self-serving Paul Wong, constantly looking out for number one and a far more interesting character than either Sonny or Steven. Lau and Loo also sacrifice "true events" for a dramatic but phony twist ending, which is completely disingenuous considering the real Sonny is in witness protection and made contact with Loo to give him pointers on the film, which the co-director clearly disregarded. Elsewhere, it says nothing about the immigrant experience, opting instead to rely on every post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino gangster/crime movie cliche in the book, starting with Sonny's Henry Hill-style narration, right down to numerous instances of guys in a room shouting at each other until one yells "Fuck you!" and gets a "NO, FUCK YOU!" in response as everyone draws their guns for a standoff. REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS is a straight-to-DVD-level misfire completely at odds with the exemplary work Lau has done in his Asian films, and it's hard to believe Scorsese would even attach his name to it. (R, 95 mins)
The story of the West Memphis Three, accused of the ritualistic murder of three little boys in West Memphis, AR, has been told in many ways since the horrific events of the summer of 1993. Books, countless investigative pieces, TV news profiles, and most notably, four documentaries--Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger's PARADISE LOST trilogy and the Peter Jackson-produced WEST OF MEMPHIS--seem to have covered the story from every possible angle. With that in mind, it seems odd to make a dramatization of the events now and odder still that it's directed by the great Egyptian-born Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (EXOTICA). Egoyan's been in a slump for going on a decade now, with only 2008's ADORATION showing signs of the Egoyan of old: 2005's WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and 2009's CHLOE are easily his weakest films, with CHLOE in particular looking like a laughably dated erotic thriller that was found sealed in a film canister marked "1995." Egoyan's been spending a lot of his time in recent years making short films and documentaries, so it's likely that TRUTH and CHLOE were just mercenary director-for-hire gigs that provided a financial cushion. Unfortunately, DEVIL'S KNOT, based on Mara Leveritt's 2002 true-crime account of the same name, falls into the same category. Other than some familiar Egoyan actors like Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas, and some shots early on that recall the remorseful sense of melancholy of Egoyan's 1997 masterpiece THE SWEET HEREAFTER, DEVIL'S KNOT takes the story of the West Memphis Three and turns it into a perfunctory, workmanlike courtroom drama that offers no new perspective on the case other than to belatedly suggest that the father of one victim and the stepfather of another may have been involved in the murders. Despite some early signs that Egoyan might take a David Fincher/ZODIAC approach to examining the story, it doesn't take long to devolve into rote storytelling that anyone familiar with the case already knows, laid out in thoroughly by-the-numbers fashion by the screenwriting team of Paul Harris Boardman and SINISTER director Scott Derrickson, whose previous credits together include HELLRAISER: INFERNO, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT and THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. With that pedigree, it's pretty obvious Egoyan's just punching a clock on this one.
All the expected story elements are here: the parents demanding revenge, the town, the lazy police, and a stone-walling judge going into full-on, witch-hunt, "Satanic panic" mode. They're all in a frothing-at-the-mouth quest to pin the murders on a trio of social outcasts who had an interest in the heavy metal and the occult and a ringleader in Damien Echols (played here by James Hamrick) who was a loner from a broken home who dressed in black and was simply deemed "weird." The police work in this case was horribly shoddy, with one suspect, Jessie Misskelley, Jr (Kristopher Higgins), obviously mentally incompetent and thought to be "mildly retarded," coerced into confessing to the murders with wrong timelines and details completely inconsistent with the crime scene, but the cops ran with it anyway. Since these details, and the eventual Alford Plea release of the three convicted murderers in 2011 are old news, a lot of DEVIL'S KNOT focuses on the grieving Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), the mother of victim Stevie Branch, and her late discovery of Stevie's pocket knife in a box kept by her husband Terry (Alessandro Nivola). This, along with another knife that was given to Sinofsky and Berlinger (who briefly appear as themselves) by John Mark Byers (a hammy Kevin Durand), the father of victim Christopher Byers, and the police department's botched handling of a bloodied African-American man who was found in the ladies' room of a fast-food restaurant the night of the murders, would appear to indicate DEVIL'S KNOT's agenda in probing deeper into the case. If Egoyan was really interested in that, why not pursue Terry Hobbs and John Mark Byers for a documentary? Why devote time to defense team investigator Ron Lax (a miscast Colin Firth, struggling with a Southern accent) moping around after his wife (a one-scene drop-in by Amy Ryan) serves him with divorce papers? Who gives a shit about Ron Lax's failed marriage? This is the kind of film where the judge decrees to a packed courtroom that Misskelley will be tried separately from the others, but Lax still has to immediately lean over to his assistant and whisper "Separate trials...Jessie's gonna be tried on his own" just in case the audience is having trouble keeping up. With Oscar-winners Firth and Witherspoon onboard, and with justice for the West Memphis Three a longtime cause for many in the entertainment industry, DEVIL'S KNOT looks suspiciously like transparent Weinstein Company awards bait, but this time it backfired. The film got such a unanimously negative response at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival that Harvey Weinstein unloaded it on RLJ Entertainment, who rolled it out on VOD and a handful of screens a month before its DVD/Blu-ray debut. It's a strangely appropriate burial for such a shallow endeavor that barely scratches the surface as it treads down a path that's already been explored in much more insightful detail by others. (Unrated, 114 mins) IN THE BLOOD (US/UK - 2014)
Steven Soderbergh's HAYWIRE arrived with much publicity and positive reviews in early 2012 as the starring debut of former MMA sensation Gina Carano. It had a unusually highbrow supporting cast for such action fare and promised old-school fight scenes and delivered, but mainstream audiences weren't especially taken with Carano or with Soderbergh's directing style, which turned HAYWIRE into more or less an MMA arthouse film. Nevertheless, while it's a fixture in DVD bargain bins at a retailer near you and already little more than a footnote in Soderbergh's filmography, it has a minor cult following and Carano's future as a B-level DTV action star seemed inevitable. After a supporting role in last year's FAST & FURIOUS 6, she's back with the rather pedestrian IN THE BLOOD. For all the complaints action fans had about Soderbergh's artsy-fartsy pretensions with HAYWIRE, at least he made the action sequences count. Here, sometime hack actor-turned-fulltime hack director John Stockwell weighs things down with too many characters with too many subplots and not enough Carano ass-kicking. Shot in Puerto Rico, the first half-hour of IN THE BLOOD looks like a typical Stockwell effort, demonstrating his endless fascination with exotic, scenic tourist destinations (since 2002, he's also made BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE, TURISTAS, and DARK TIDE) as recovering heroin addicts and newlyweds Ava (Carano) and Derek Grant (Cam Gigandet) honeymoon in the Caribbean. They met in rehab--she came from the wrong side of the tracks and saw her father (Stephen Lang in flashbacks) murdered by drug dealers, he's the scion of a wealthy family whose asshole father (Treat Willliams) disapproves of Ava and tries to bully Derek into signing a pre-nup. While at a restaurant, Ava and Derek meet affable local Manny (Ismael Cruz Cordova) who talks them into a zip-lining excursion. While careening down the aptly-named "Widowmaker," Derek's line snaps and he plummets into the forest below. The medics won't let Ava ride in the ambulance and no hospital in town has any record of Derek being brought in. The local cops, led by the predictably useless chief (Luis Guzman), and her sneering father-in-law think she staged a kidnapping, or even killed him to gain access to the family's wealth. So, of course, under the tutelage of her father, she's been schooled in the ways of MMA (much to the surprise of Derek during an early nightclub skirmish), and she becomes an inevitable one-woman wrecking crew in the quest to find her missing husband.
Once Stockwell finally gets to the action, IN THE BLOOD has its moments, but they're few and far between. This should be a tight, fast B-movie, but at 108 minutes, it's at least 20 minutes too long and the pacing is laborious. Did we really need clunky subplots about Guzman's police chief or the feud between island crime lords Lugo (Amaury Nolasco) and Big Biz (Danny Trejo)? At least Nolasco's character eventually figures into the increasingly ludicrous plot, but Trejo has almost nothing to do until the script (written by Farrelly Brothers collaborator Bennett Yellin and THE HOWLING: REBORN screenwriter James Robert Johnston) clumsily has him turn up at the end and somehow be the hero, which seems completely counterproductive considering that this is supposed to be a Gina Carano vehicle. Carano would do better to work with an Isaac Florentine or a John Hyams, both the kind of low-budget action auteur who can really bring out the best in action stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, and Dolph Lundgren. Carano's niche is practically pre-carved, but ponderous duds like IN THE BLOOD aren't going to do much to help her make her case. You're better off watching HAYWIRE again. (R, 108 mins) SMALL TIME (US - 2014)
Since his acrimonious departure from LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT in 2011 over a salary dispute, Christopher Meloni has been jobbing around from gig to gig, with an acclaimed but short-lived recurring role on TRUE BLOOD, supporting roles in 42 and MAN OF STEEL, and, more recently, the Fox sitcom SURVIVING JACK, which survived four episodes before being cancelled, and a hilarious arc as Julia Louis-Dreyfus' personal trainer/secret paramour on VEEP. In 2012, Meloni shot the low-budget SMALL TIME, written, directed, and self-financed by 24 creator Joel Surnow. It gives the veteran TV actor a rare big-screen lead, but it's also the kind of small, personal film that just doesn't generate much interest outside of film festivals. It opens strongly and succumbs to cliche and formula in its second half, but a decade ago, a film like SMALL TIME probably would've become a minor, word-of-mouth sleeper hit instead of getting the VOD dump-job from distributor Anchor Bay Films. Meloni is Al Klein, a master used-car salesman and co-owner of Diamond Motors, along with his best friend Ash Martini (Dean Norris). Al is going through a midlife crisis and can't commit to girlfriend Linda (Garcelle Beauvais), and as his son Freddy (Devon Bostick) is graduating from high school, Al fears the years have slipped away. Despite the protestations of his ex-wife Barbara (Bridget Moynahan) and her wealthy investment broker husband Chick (Xander Berkeley, the go-to actor for "asshole second husbands"), Freddy wants to skip college and work as a salesman with his dad. Wanting some father-son bonding time, Al welcomes Freddy onboard as he and Ash school him in the ways of wheeling and dealing.
Despite some funny scenes of car-lot hustling, SMALL TIME isn't another USED CARS-type comedy. The focus remains on Al and the realization that maybe this isn't the life he wants for his son, especially since his gift for closing deals almost immediately gives the impressionable Freddy a swelled head, which isn't helped by the encouragement of Ash, a well-meaning guy who loves Freddy but often comes off as a bad-influence uncle, and some cynical salesman friends who teach Freddy that "people are shit and they'll believe anything." Al and Ash may be fast-talking salesmen, but they're generally honest, and Al worries about the side of Freddy that the job is bringing out. SMALL TIME is a small labor of love for all involved, but once Freddy starts getting a shitty attitude, Surnow's script devolves into too many standard-issue tropes and conventions, culminating in a really bad moment when Bostick gets in Meloni's face and yells--what else?--"You're so...small-time!" There's also too many whimsical elements that film fest folks love: set in an undetermined period that would appear to be the early '80s, the film opens with an older Freddy narrating "It was the summer that changed my life"; montages set to soul and/or Latin music; gregarious ethnic supporting characters; and a kooky and improbably Scottish secretary (EXTRAS' Ashley Jensen) who has no idea how to make coffee. There's a lot in SMALL TIME that should completely derail it, but the consistently-underrated Meloni is the glue that holds it together. He's terrific here and his rapport with both Bostick and Norris (as well as in the seemingly improvised scenes with their lunch group of crass, old-school salesmen buddies played by Kevin Nealon, Ken Davitian, and Barry Primus) really manages to redeem the film's many inherently self-destructive elements. SMALL TIME is slight and predictable, but it's enjoyable enough, moves very briskly, and is a must-see if you're a Meloni fan. (R, 94 mins)
