Despite critical acclaim and some major pre-release awards buzz, 99 HOMES fizzled in theaters, topping out at 691 screens and grossing just over $1 million. Directed and co-written by Ramin Bahrani, the film takes place in the greater Orlando, FL area circa 2010, after the housing bubble burst and foreclosures were big business. Unable to hold on to his home is unemployed construction worker Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), who supports his mother Lynn (Laura Dern) and his young son Connor (Noah Lomax). Sheriff's deputies and a team of movers are present when constantly-vaping real estate foreclosure vulture Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) shows up at Dennis' front door to begin the eviction. Powerless to fight the system despite being given 30 days to appeal, Dennis moves his family into a motel filled with other foreclosure families and when he's unable to find a job, he reluctantly accepts a job offer from Carver to do repair work on his properties. Carver admires Dennis' persistence and the way he stands up for himself, especially in confronting one of Carver's men who stole some of Dennis' tools during the eviction. This leads to Dennis being complicit in Carver's various scams and schemes in the way he takes advantage of federal government loopholes to maximize his own profits, and before long, Dennis is essentially Carver's right hand, evicting good people in the exact position he once was, but doing so for the sake of supporting his family and doing whatever he needs to do to repurchase the family home.
Basically a housing bubble redux of WALL STREET, 99 HOMES is sincere in its look at hardworking people victimized by the system and by bad luck, and the performances of Garfield and especially Shannon are excellent. Shannon even gets a big Gordon Gekko-style "Greed is good" speech about how "America was built by bailing out winners, by rigging a nation of the winners, for the winners, by the winners." There are powerful moments throughout, particularly the agonizing and intense sequence where Carver coldly and methodically has Dennis and his family forced out of the house, and a heartbreaking one later on when Dennis has to evict a frail and obviously mentally-diminished elderly widower who just keeps helplessly repeating "We had a reverse mortgage...my wife signed the papers..." These scenes are very effectively done and are certain to get your blood boiling, but Bahrani and co-writer Amir Naderi give Dennis a far too familiar character arc. He doesn't tell his mother he's working for the man who evicted them, and she doesn't seem to question anything as long as he keeps getting paid, and Dern is saddled with playing a character too dim and oblivious to garner much sympathy. Of course, the more money Dennis makes, the more seduced he is by Carver's Mephistophelian appeal, which extends to him leaving Lynn and Connor in a dangerous situation at the motel to go to a swanky, boozy party with Carver and some hot women that of course results in a drunk Dennis with his head in his hands as he ponders What I've Become. 99 HOMES becomes far too predictable in it second half, especially with a by-the-numbers subplot about a deal with an even bigger real estate mogul (Clancy Brown) and Carver's plan to discredit and sabotage one man's (Tim Guinee) attempt to avoid foreclosure. There are moments of gut-wrenching power in 99 HOMES, but there's also a lot of formulaic melodrama. Overall, it's a good film, but not the great one the early buzz predicted. Bahrani dedicates 99 HOMES to the late Roger Ebert, who championed the filmmaker when he was just starting out and spoke very highly of his 2005 indie breakout MAN PUSH CART. (R, 112 mins)
MI-5 (UK - 2015)
A feature-film spinoff of the ten-season BBC television series SPOOKS (retitled MI-5 in most areas outside the UK; the film's UK title is SPOOKS: THE GREATER GOOD), MI-5 is a fairly standard-issue espionage/terrorism thriller, with enough action and genuinely suspenseful set pieces to make it worthwhile, even if it doesn't exactly blaze new trails in its genre. Recurring series director Bharat Nalluri and writers Jonathan Brackley and Tim Vincent stick to the style of the show, but make it accessible for the uninitiated, primarily by relegating most of the participating series stars to minor supporting roles or killing them off not long after they're introduced. Though the series featured the likes of Matthew Macfadyen and David Oyelowo in its earliest years, its only constant throughout its decade-long run was Peter Firth (EQUUS, LIFEFORCE), who reprises his role as Harry Pearce, the no-nonsense head of MI-5's counter-terrorism unit. MI-5 kicks off with a botched convoy transport of apprehended terrorist Adem Qasim (Elyes Gabel) ends up with several agents dead after Pearce lets Qasim go free in order to minimize the risk of civilians getting caught in the crossfire. Decommissioned and with his career and reputation ruined, Pearce publicly jumps from a bridge into the Thames but it's all a ruse that his superiors, namely MI-5 Director General Oliver Mace (Tim McInnerney) quickly see through. As a fugitive Pearce goes on an off-the-grid hunt for Qasim, Mace calls in rogue agent and former Pearce protege Will Holloway (GAME OF THRONES' Kit Harington) to track down his disgraced one-time mentor.
What follows are the usual shifting alliances and double crosses, with Pearce and Holloway engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse while acknowledging that they're both on the same side, while also dealing with old grudges since it was Pearce who decommissioned Holloway from MI-5 and derailed his career. Pearce is convinced that someone in his unit tipped off Qasim's people about the convoy transport, and of course, he's right. The problem is, Mace and his deputy director Geraldine Maltby (Jennifer Ehle) think the traitor is Pearce. Journeyman director Nalluri, who's spent most of his career in British TV (TORCHWOOD), but has also helmed a variety of features including the 1998 LA FEMME NIKITA ripoff KILLING TIME, 2000's THE CROW: SALVATION, and 2008's minor arthouse hit MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, does a solid job with the action sequences and the intense climax is very well-handled save for one dodgy-looking CGI explosion. Of the holdovers from the TV series, only Firth and McInnerney get any significant screen time, with Harington, Ehle, and Tuppence Middleton (JUPITER ASCENDING) as another agent helping Holloway, being new additions to the MI-5 universe. MI-5 doesn't offer much in the way of surprises, but it's engaging, it moves fast, and it does exactly what it sets out to do. (R, 104 mins)
FREAKS OF NATURE
(US - 2015)
KITCHEN SINK was a horror spoof script by Oren Uziel (22 JUMP STREET) that spent several years on Hollywood's "Black List" of best unfilmed screenplays that floated around town waiting to get the green light. Something clearly got lost on KITCHEN SINK's way to becoming FREAKS OF NATURE, a dreary and almost completely laughless slog that was shot in 2013 and spent two years on the shelf before Columbia decided to cut its losses and quietly snuck it into 100 theaters last October. Co-produced by Uziel's buddy and two-time Academy Award-nominee Jonah Hill and featuring a cast of all-star comedy ringers, FREAKS OF NATURE is a total misfire that, aside from maybe two lines and a couple of throwaway sight gags, makes SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE look like SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Set in the small town of Dillford, FREAKS presents a society where vampires (the rich and privileged), zombies (the destitute dregs of society) and humans (the middle class) co-exist. The film doesn't do anything more with the class struggle notion than that, instead focusing on three high-school protagonists: affable, sensitive, baseball-playing stoner Dag (Nicholas Braun) and his hapless attempts at romancing Lorelei (Vanessa Hudgens), who keeps him in the Friend Zone but likes his access to weed; nice-girl Petra (BAD TURN WORSE's Mackenzie Davis), who lets stud vampire Milan Pinache (Ed Westwick) transform her only to break her heart immediately after; and geeky loser Ned (Josh Fadem), who finds love with zombie girl Jenna (Mae Whitman) and lets her turn him into one of the walking dead if it means no longer putting up with his braying jackass of a jock brother (Chris Zylka as Seann William Scott as Stifler). Chaos erupts when an alien invasion (aliens, vampires, zombies, and eventually werewolves figure in, hence the original KITCHEN SINK title) turns Dillford into a war zone, which means Dag, Petra, and Ned (played by actors in their late 20s to early 30s) end up barricading themselves in the school basement in a half-assed re-staging of THE BREAKFAST CLUB, because that's what makes a great horror spoof.
Some very qualified comic performers are wasted in nothing supporting roles: Denis Leary as the asshole owner of Dillford's chief source of income--the processed-meat riblet factory (one of the very few laughs comes from him crowing about firing Dag's mom after she tried to unionize his zombie workforce); Patton Oswalt as a paranoid survivalist hiding in a bunker with his elderly mother; Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack as Dag's hippie parents; Ian Roberts and Rachael Harris as Ned's parents; and Keegan-Michael Key as a perpetually angry vampire high-school teacher who's burned out after dealing with 97 years of apathetic students. If you make it to the end, you'll hear Werner Herzog as the voice of the alien leader, announcing their peaceful intentions by quoting Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," which might sound amusing, but in the context of this disastrous failure, is emphatically not. A comedy that throws in everything except the kitchen sink and comedy, FREAKS OF NATURE is staggeringly awful. A documentary about what went wrong here in the hands of director Robbie Pickering would be far more interesting than anything in the finished product, but hey, garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter. Audiences grading it on the horror fanboy's "everything is awesome" curve and insisting it's this week's new genre classic will scarf it up and ask for seconds. (R, 93 mins)
DRAFT DAY (US - 2014) Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman. Cast: Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Frank Langella, Chadwick Boseman, Ellen Burstyn, Sam Elliott, Tom Welling, Sean Combs, Terry Crews, Arian Foster, Josh Pence, Timothy Simons, David Ramsey, Wade Williams, Chi McBride, Patrick St. Esprit, Rosanna Arquette, Brad William Henke, Kevin Dunn, Griffin Newman, W. Earl Brown, Pat Healy. (PG-13, 108 mins)
It's only April and DRAFT DAY is already the third major release this year to star the busy Kevin Costner, after taking the aging mentor role in JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT and trying a Liam Neeson-styled Luc Besson actioner with 3 DAYS TO KILL. DRAFT DAY is more in line with vintage Costner, a sort-of "give the fans what they want" move that finds him back in the realm of the sports dramedy, where he's had some of his biggest successes. DRAFT DAY's beleaguered Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver Jr. is cut from the same cloth as BULL DURHAM's Crash Davis, TIN CUP's Ray McAvoy, and FOR LOVE OF THE GAME's unsubtly-named Billy Chapel: the no-bullshit straight-shooter who got where he is by going against the grain, following his gut, being his own man, and doing what's right. Sonny also has something to prove: it's 2014 draft day, he's in his third year with the team and he's still in rebuilding mode. He's also living in the shadow of his legendary father Sonny Sr., a former Browns coach who just died a week earlier, just a year after retiring from football--a retirement that he got after he was fired by his own son. He's got an irate new head coach in Penn (Denis Leary), who got a Super Bowl ring coaching the Cowboys and wants more say in the direction of the team. He's got a flashy billionaire owner in Anthony Molina (Frank Langella) who doesn't care about the team's strategic needs and just wants a superstar draft pick and the media circus guaranteed to follow. He'd rather make linebacker Vontae Mack (Chadwick Boseman) their top draft pick but he already had to make a deal with the Seahawks to trade draft picks so he can please Molina and secure Heisman Trophy winning QB Bo Callahan (Josh Pence), even though he senses some red flags and they already have a top-notch QB in Brian Drew (Tom Welling). And finally, he's got a secret relationship with Browns front-office financial exec Ali (Jennifer Garner) and she just told him she's pregnant.
DRAFT DAY juggles a lot of story for a film that takes place over just a 12-hour period, but it effectively portrays the hectic nature of the business world that exists behind the scenes of the NFL. Sure, the script by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman is completely formulaic in its structure, but director Ivan Reitman keeps the pace fast and the story compelling, even when the film has to stop and overexplain things for non-football fans, like the opening shot of the Space Needle accompanied by the caption "Seattle," a whoosh, and "home of the Seahawks." Though he's got a large supporting cast working under him (perhaps too large as Ellen Burstyn just seems to drop in for her few scenes as Sonny's mom, and a prominently-billed Sam Elliott has just one scene as a grumbly college coach), this is completely Costner's show, and enough time has gone by that we can forget about all the rumbling, bumbling, and stumbling he did in the mid '90s when, post-DANCES WITH WOLVES and THE BODYGUARD, hubris and bloated films like WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN turned him into a punchline bordering on pariah. Starting with 2003's OPEN RANGE, he very slowly started to rebuild his career and while there were a few missteps along the way (I'm still not convinced anyone in the world has actually seen SWING VOTE, including myself) and even a dumped-on-DVD horror movie (THE NEW DAUGHTER), he's turned in some excellent performances in underappreciated films like THE UPSIDE OF ANGER (2006) and MR. BROOKS (2007). More recently, he did terrific work on the History Channel's HATFIELDS & MCCOYS miniseries and his performance as Pa Kent was one of the better things in the otherwise disappointing MAN OF STEEL. He's got a likably laconic, almost Gary Cooper-like screen persona that, in the right movie, always gets you on his side. DRAFT DAY isn't anywhere near the level of a BULL DURHAM or a FIELD OF DREAMS, but Costner, pushing 60, still has that screen presence that a genuine movie star never loses, and that's not something you see enough of these days. The DRAFT DAY Costner is the kind of actor who's smart enough to not worry about capturing a demographic, choosing instead to play mostly to an adult audience that's aged and matured with him, and some of his best years might actually still lie ahead if he chooses the right projects. Yeah, it's comfort food to a certain extent, but it's entertaining, and when Costner's in his wheelhouse like this, he's awfully hard to dislike.
While it secured the cooperation and involvement of the NFL for maximum realism--including appearances by commissioner Roger Goodell and numerous on-air personalities like Chris Berman, Jon Gruden, and Mel Kiper, and even a brief bit by Browns legend Jim Brown--it's important to note, from the perspective of a die-hard NFL fan, just how deeply entrenched in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy DRAFT DAY can be. While it gets the business and boardroom elements down, it's also a pipe dream of a movie that Cleveland-area sons and daughters will be giving their perpetually-disappointed Browns superfan dads on Father's Day for decades to come. It's a love letter to the perpetually hapless, "This is our year!" Browns while acknowledging that the team's pursuit of a championship is largely futile. As they are, the Browns are incapable of having anyone in their organization with as much draft day savvy as Sonny Weaver Jr. Also, no promising college star entering the draft wants to play for Cleveland. But perhaps most hilariously, in a plot point so utterly absured that it threatens to take the film into the realm of science fiction, DRAFT DAY insists on playing along with the myth that the Dallas Cowboys are a feared team that consistently wins championships.
