From the folks at Quiver Distribution, the company that gave us THE FANATIC, comes the pre-fab cult heist flick MONEY PLANE, which would've been much more entertaining as a viral fake trailer instead of the actual terrible movie it's selling. Feeling drawn-out even at a mere 82 minutes, MONEY PLANE manages to corral the kind of slumming cast that Uwe Boll would put together if he was still in the game. But the guilty party here is director/co-writer Andrew Lawrence, the least-known of the Lawrence brothers, though he does provide Joey and Matthew with supporting roles. MONEY PLANE seemingly wants to be the SNAKES ON A PLANE of heist movies by letting you know that it's on the joke, but it fumbles so badly that it has a character exclaim "Whoa!" and it's not the one played by Joey Lawrence. After a botched attempt to steal a $40 million painting from an art museum only to find that it's already gone when they get there, man-bunned professional thief Jack Reese (Adam Copeland, aka WWE's "Edge") and his crew realize they've been set up. The mastermind? Self-aggrandizing crime lord Darius Emmanuel Grouch III, aka "The Rumble" (Kelsey Grammer), a cigar-sucking, art collecting asshole who bought a huge debt belonging to recovering gambling addict Reese and now expects him to work it off (cue The Rumble growling "I own you"). The job? Reese and his crew--Isabella (Katrina Norman), Trey (Patrick Lamont Jr), and Iggy (Andrew Lawrence)--are going to steal $1 billion in cryptocurrency and $40 million cash from the "Money Plane," an illegal "casino in the sky" that caters to rich criminals and is untouchable since it only flies in international airspace. The stakes? If Reese doesn't play ball, The Rumble will have his wife (Denise Richards) and daughter (Emma Gordon) killed.
Anything goes on the Money Plane (The Rumble: "You can even bet on a man fuckin' an alligator!"), and the clientele includes the world's highest-paid assassins and international weapons dealers, so Reese fits right in going incognito as a notorious human trafficker. But he manages to break away and commandeer the cockpit (he's also an experienced pilot) as Isabella and Trey are left to hack the database while Iggy does tech support on the ground. Overseen by the coldly lethal Concierge (Joey Lawrence), things start off easy on the Money Plane with Texas Hold 'Em but soon graduate to the kinds of games more akin to HOSTEL, like bets being placed a man vs. a cobra, or how long some poor guy can stay alive in a piranha tank (you can imagine how those turn out), and Trey is forced to go against J.R. Crockett (Matthew Lawrence), the Money Plane's "undefeated Russian Roulette champ" (wouldn't his being "undefeated" already be understood?). Copeland, who looks like he's in a perpetual state of shock, is a dull hero who spends most of the film confined to the pilot's seat. Thomas Jane shows up for a day's work as Harry, Reese's pipe-smoking Air Force buddy who gets a bunch of exposition that never ends up coming into play ("Remind me again why you made me your daughter's godfather!"), and there's no way Richards was on the set for more than an afternoon. But it's a scenery-chewing Grammer that's the main selling point here, dropping bon mots like "How about I just blow your brains out and I'll create my own damn Pollock?" and barking "Bring me my money!" every time he appears. Like Samuel L. Jackson bellowing "I have had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!," watching a shouty Frasier Crane drop F-bombs and take out his own henchmen in a fit of rage is the stuff of a great YouTube clip, but if you drink every time he says "money plane," you'll be passed out before you even get the chance to see him hoist an assault rifle and declare "It's Rumble time!" He quite obviously knows this is dog shit and is just amusing himself, but it also seems like he and Jane (working that prop pipe like John Cusack with a vape pen) are the only ones in on the joke. (Unrated, 82 mins)
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (Italy - 2020)
At the age of 80, Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist and essayist J.M. Coetzee tries his hand at screenwriting with WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, based on his 1980 novel. The book--also turned into an opera in 2005 by Philip Glass--was conceived as a period apartheid allegory, set in a non-specified military outpost manned by officers of "The Empire," forever on guard for an attack by desert nomads--derisively termed "barbarians"--that never comes. Coetzee cited Dino Buzzati's 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe as a major influence, itself made into the 1976 film THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS by Italian director Valerio Zurlini. If you've seen the Zurlini film, the idea of the perpetual wait for a threat that looks increasingly existential and absurd with each passing year will certainly be familiar. And where Coetzee repurposed the idea for apartheid with his novel, he does so once again for the film with allusions to more present-day political concerns. Directed by Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra (his 2015 film EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT was a Best Foreign Film Oscar-nominee), WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS opens at a small town-turned-Empire outpost run by an unnamed magistrate (Mark Rylance), who's been left in charge for years and has found it's become a comfortably cushy assignment. The nomads roaming far out in the desert keep to themselves and the few that do make it near the walled-off outpost and attempt petty theft are generally given a night in jail and sent back on their way with no harm. The magistrate has developed a peaceful rapport with the locals and everybody gets along fine until the sadistic Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp) arrives for an "inspection," which involves "enhanced interrogation" of an uncle and nephew accused of trying to steal some sheep, resulting in the uncle being killed and the nephew nearly beaten to death. Deciding he still hasn't quite made his point, Joll commandeers a small group of officers and forces the nephew to guide them back to their camp, where Joll instigates an attack that results in more brutality and death.
One of the survivors (Gaya Bayarsaikhan) is brought back, bloodied and blinded by a heated fork that Joll repeatedly prodded near her eyes until she lost most of her sight. When Joll leaves the outpost, the magistrate is left to clean up the mess, nursing the girl back to health and returning her to her people. It's an arduous journey and when he arrives back at the outpost, Joll has returned, and with him is psychotic protege Officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson), both waiting to charge him with treason and abandoning his duties. The magistrate is thrown in jail with the other "barbarians" they've rounded up as they prepare for an attack from the nomads that wouldn't have happened had Joll not gleefully goaded them into it. WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS plays the heavy hand at times--you almost expect a CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST moment where Rylance's dour magistrate will observe "I wonder who the real barbarians are"--and for the most part, it moves at the pace of Merchant-Ivory. But it's a slow-burner that's beautifully shot by the great and ageless Chris Menges (who won Oscars for his work on THE KILLING FIELDS and THE MISSION) and has a trio of excellent performances by Rylance, Pattinson, and especially Depp in his best work in quite a while. It's also among his least-mannered characterizations, a welcome surprise considering his wardrobe and quirky sunglasses make him look like he took a wrong turn on his way to a steampunk convention.
Coetzee takes some liberties with his own work, drastically toning down the magistrate's rather healthy sexual appetite on the page and making him generally chaste for the screen, though it's implied that he's a regular with an area prostitute (Isabella Nefar) and he spends enough time tending to and washing the blinded woman's bloodied, battered feet that this may end up at the top of Quentin Tarantino's Best of 2020 list. The Italian-made WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2019, but US distributor Samuel Goldwyn Films sat on it for a nearly a year--no doubt due in part to the pandemic, but possibly because of Depp's very public personal dramas. But then in June 2020, multiple women accused Guerra of sexual harassment and rape in incidents dating back to 2013. Given the potential for negative publicity and toxic blowback, it's little wonder that WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is being given an ignominious DTV burial after nearly a year in limbo, but it's a quaint throwback to the kind of old-school desert epics they used to make, and worth a look for patient fans of the three stars. (Unrated, 114 mins)
Even though he showed himself to be a credible actor as the Winklevoss twins in 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK and other serious films like J. EDGAR and THE BIRTH OF A NATION, it's easy to see what drew Armie Hammer to a project like MINE. It's the kind of Acting-with-a-capital-A exercise toward which an actor generally known for undemanding commercial fare like THE LONE RANGER and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. gravitates when they want to demonstrate some real chops. But after establishing its nail-biting premise that echoes a variety of other films (127 HOURS, BURIED, PHONE BOOTH, OPEN WATER, THE SHALLOWS, LIBERTY STANDS STILL), MINE blows up in Hammer's face thanks to the hackneyed choices made by the Italian filmmaking team "Fabio & Fabio"--writers/directors Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro. In North Africa, Marine sniper Mike Stevens (Hammer) and his buddy Tommy (Tom Cullen) are perched atop a cliff overlooking a desert wedding, with orders to take out a man (Agustin Rodriguez) believed to be the leader of a major Middle East terror cell. Mike botches the operation when he gets a clear shot and hesitates. A skirmish results and Mike and Tommy are left to walk through a long stretch of desert to get to the nearest safe haven--a stretch that a discarded sign in the sand warns of being filled with mines. Sure enough, a cocky Tommy steps on one and it blows off his legs. Taking a step to help him, Mike feels a click under his left foot and realizes he's stepped on one as well. With Tommy soon out of the picture and sandstorms plus, it would seem, retaliatory petulance over the bungled mission preventing an attempted extraction for 52 hours, Mike must keep his left foot planted on the mine, standing as still as possible until help arrives.
That's the first 20 minutes of MINE, and it's around the 21st minute that it falls apart. There's significant suspense to be generated by Mike's predicament, but Fabio & Fabio instead have him reflect--on his fiancee (Annabelle Wallis), his cancer-victim mother (Juliet Aubrey), his drunkard father (Geoff Bell), whose physical and psychological abuse sent Mike running off to escape to the military in the first place, and all the things he should've done differently, like Dewey Cox having to think about his entire life before he goes on stage. MINE works just fine when it deals directly with Mike battling thirst, the elements, exhaustion, and unseen threats in the darkness at night, but that momentum is constantly interrupted either by hallucinations or the periodic appearances of a good-natured berber (Clint Dyer), who gives him the equivalent of pep talks with a bunch of inspiring platitudes straight of a self-help book. The shifts are jarring, to say the least, and the attempts to expand the story with cutaways and people real and imagined only lead to tedium, with Fabio & Fabio seemingly unaware that MINE is working just fine when the camera's planted on the star. Hammer gives this everything he's got, but his above-and-beyond efforts are sabotaged by his indecisive and unfocused filmmakers. (Unrated, 106 mins)
BITTER HARVEST (Canada - 2017)
After a long career spent in exploitation movies and television, one gets the feeling that journeyman Canadian director George Mendeluk saw BITTER HARVEST as a magnum opus of sorts, a serious, sweeping historical epic that showed the world that a hired gun pushing 70 was perhaps a secret auteur who just never got his chance. To that end, BITTER HARVEST is about the best you can expect a serious, sweeping historical epic from the director of 1987's MEATBALLS III to be. It deals with a subject that's only been tackled by a couple of Russian films to this point: the Holodomor, the forced, man-made famine inflicted on the Ukrainian people from 1932-33 by Joseph Stalin (played here by GAME OF THRONES' Gary Oliver, looking suspiciously like a heftier Soup Nazi), after he declared that the farmers of the region must supply grain for all of the Soviet people while leaving themselves hungry and dying. Historians have debated the cause of the genocide and a majority agree that it was Stalin's way of quashing a Ukrainian independence movement, ultimately claiming the lives of anywhere between seven and ten million Ukrainians. Those people deserve something better than BITTER HARVEST, a heavy-handed and insipid melodrama that uses the Holodomor as a backdrop for the old standby of one man trying to get home to the woman he loves. Yuri (Max Irons, Jeremy's son) is a sensitive artist who's uninterested in fighting the Stalin regime like his father Yaroslav (Barry Pepper, not the first actor who comes to mind when you're looking for a Ukrainian guy named Yaroslav) and tough-as-nails grandfather Ivan (a slumming Terence Stamp), who has no use for his soft grandson's fancy book learning. After his father is killed in a skirmish (Pepper exits the film at the 18-minute mark), Yuri marries his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks) and is forced to leave her behind as he goes off to a factory job in Kiev in order to feed his family. Jailed in a gulag and narrowly avoiding a firing squad, Yuri joins the resistance and fights to return home to fight for his wife, family, and community, who are all suffering at the hands of sadistic Stalin strongarm Sergei (Tamer Hassan).
Striving to be DOCTOR ZHIVAGO but saddled with a basic cable budget and left on the shelf since 2013, BITTER HARVEST is cliched and simplistic throughout, as evidenced in a scene where a random stranger sees Yuri sketching and emphatically declares "You are an artist! You have a duty to tell the world the truth!" The film feels like one of those mid '80s Cannon productions where Golan and Globus would indulge in some blatant historical awards-bait but it would still end up looking unmistakably Cannon (THE BERLIN AFFAIR, THE ASSISI UNDERGROUND, HANNA'S WAR). For all its high-minded aspirations of being the definitive chronicle of the Holodomor, BITTER HARVEST is still the kind of movie that has a stock, brutish, '80s-style commie bad guy in Sergei, ends with the hero mowing down scores of Soviet officers with his back to a huge explosion, and credits occasional Steven Seagal director Lauro Chartrand (BORN TO RAISE HELL) with second-unit duties (it's also produced by Oscar-nominated editor Stuart Baird, for some reason). There's nothing wrong with being a career journeyman, and while Mendeluk may have gone into BITTER HARVEST with noble intentions, his best films are still the 1980 Canadian tax-shelter two-fer of STONE COLD DEAD and THE KIDNAPPING OF THE PRESIDENT. (R, 103 mins)
ALTITUDE (US - 2017)
We last heard from Alex Merkin back in 2013 when he directed two movies--the horror film HOUSE OF BODIES and the Master P-style rapsploitation throwback PERCENTAGE--that quietly debuted on Netflix streaming within two weeks of one another with a level of stealth secrecy usually reserved for likes of the Baltimore Colts packing up and moving to Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Both films appeared to be micro-budgeted home movies with production values that ranked somewhere between "sex tape" and "snuff film." Neither looked to be in a releasable or even finished condition, both featured real actors (Peter Fonda and Terrence Howard in HOUSE OF BODIES, Ving Rhames and Macy Gray in PERCENTAGE), and both were inexplicably produced by Queen Latifah, who also Skyped in a cameo in HOUSE OF BODIES. The only conclusion I could draw at the time--and for a long time, mine was the only external HOUSE OF BODIES review on IMDb, making me seriously wonder if I imagined the whole thing--was that Merkin did such a consistently terrific job cleaning Queen Latifah's pool that she agreed to repay the favor by financing his two movies. PERCENTAGE is merely amateurishly awful, but HOUSE OF BODIES is so bad that it deserves to mentioned in the same breath as THE CREEPING TERROR and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE. and regardless of Queen Latifah's career accomplishments, the only question I have for her in the event I ever meet her is "HOUSE OF BODIES and PERCENTAGE. Seriously, what the fuck?"
Needless to say, ALTITUDE ("From Director Alex Merkin," the artwork brags, with zero justification at all) is by default a better film, only because it couldn't possibly be worse. Merkin still has no business being on a movie set unless he's manning the craft services table, but ALTITUDE is, at best, barely watchable. Other than scenes involving visual effects, it at least looks like a real movie, albeit a very familiar one. If you've ever wanted to see DIE HARD ON A PLANE with Denise Richards as a hardass FBI agent, here's your chance. A plays-by-her-own-rules hostage negotiator who plays by her own rules once too often, Gretchen Blair (Richards) is busted down to desk duty and sent back to Washington. Her plane is hijacked by a crack team of jewel thieves after one of their own, Terry (Kirk Barker), who made off with their recent take and is of course, seated right next to Blair. Among the baddies are the psychotic ringleader Sadie (Greer Grammer, Kelsey's daughter), who's disguised as a flight attendant, plus burly Rawbones (Chuck Liddell, doing nothing and getting killed off early as usual), and no-nonsense Sharpe (Dolph Lundgren), who takes over as the pilot when Sadie kills the entire crew, including endlessly chipper flight attendant Rick, played by a grown-up Jonathan Lipnicki--yes, the kid from JERRY MAGUIRE--who gets fourth billing for getting his neck snapped 20 minutes in. Blair spends most of the movie hiding in the cargo hold, eliminating Sadie's bad guys one by one and getting little help from a useless air marshal (daytime soap vet Jordi Vilasuso). Somehow opening with seven (!) production company logos and boasting 40 (!!) credited producers, including Lipnicki (!!!), the impossibly cheap-looking ALTITUDE is dire even by the low standards of Redbox-ready DTV/VOD actioners. Lundgren and Liddell are just cashing checks here, but one good thing to say about the whole project is that Grammer is a surprisingly engaging villain and would've held her own in better circumstances. A more ambitious film would've done something with the possibilities of a DIE HARD/PASSENGER 57/NON-STOP scenario with female adversaries. And while Richards isn't particularly well-cast or believable, she doesn't embarrass herself, at least not until she delivers the death blow to Sadie, tossing her out of the plane while quipping "You need to check your altitude, bitch!" (R, 88 mins)
Discounting 2012's 55-minute experimental lark TRICKED, ELLE is Paul Verhoeven's first feature-length work since 2006's BLACK BOOK and it's immediately obvious from the opening scene that he hasn't lost his edge as a provocateur. Verhoeven, whose Dutch films SPETTERS and THE FOURTH MAN led to Hollywood hits like ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL, and BASIC INSTINCT, delivers a dazzling psychological thriller with ELLE, a complex and nasty exercise in misanthropy with a wicked pitch black streak. A legend in French cinema who's only sporadically worked in America (HEAVEN'S GATE, THE BEDROOM WINDOW, I HEART HUCKABEE'S), an Oscar-nominated Isabelle Huppert delivers the performance of her five-decade career as Michele Leblanc, the CEO of a video game software company who's being brutally raped on her dining room floor by a masked intruder as the film begins. Instead of calling the cops, she throws away her clothes, takes a bath, cleans up the mess and orders take-out sushi for dinner with her visiting son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet). Her company is months late delivering its latest product and most of her employees hate her except for her business partner and best friend Anna (Anne Consigny), who is completely unaware that Michele is having an affair with her husband Robert (Christian Berkel), who seems to be turned on by the fact that Michele was sexually assaulted. Michele is also jealous about her ex-husband Richard's (Charles Berling) blossoming relationship with younger yoga instructor Helene (Vimala Pons), going so far as to host a dinner party and plant a tiny piece of a toothpick inside an hors d'oeuvre in the hope that it jabs the roof of her mouth when she bites down (it does). Michele is openly contemptuous of her aging, Botoxed mother Irene (Judith Magre), who's shacked up with a decades-younger gigolo (Raphael Lenglet) in an apartment she pays for, and she's also helping support and is completely dismissive of dim Vincent, a former weed dealer who's in manager training at a fast food joint and whose girlfriend Josie (Alice Isaaz) has just given birth to a baby far too dark-complected to be Vincent's but looks a lot like Vincent's black friend Omar (Stephane Bak), a fact that's obvious to everyone except Vincent. Michele begins having violent revenge fantasies and is also being taunted by her rapist, who sends her texts like "You're pretty tight for a woman your age," and breaks into her house while she's away, leaving a copious amount of semen on her bed next to her laptop, the screen reading "I just couldn't stop myself."
As if that's not enough tumult, Michele's serial killer father is in the news again for his once-per-decade parole hearing after 40 years in prison for "The League Street Murders," a series of slayings that branded a ten-year-old Michele a potential accomplice, helping her father burn the bodies though it's argued that she wasn't fully aware of what she was doing. Her father's legacy is why she's reluctant to call the police after she's raped, and she still doesn't call when she's attacked a second time. She's also attempting to seduce Patrick (Laurent Lafitte), a nice-guy neighbor who lives across the street with his devoutly religious wife Rebecca (Virginie Efira). There's a lot of story and subplots in David Birke's script that are expertly balanced by Verhoeven. They don't all come together and they aren't supposed to, but every one of them is vital to influencing the increasingly sociopathic, scorched earth behavior of Michele. Verhoeven originally planned to set up ELLE--based on Philippe Djian's 2012 novel Oh...--with a Hollywood studio, but when he couldn't settle on an A-list actress and knew he'd have to compromise too much to make the film he wanted to make, he took it to France and had American Birke's (whose credits include DTV thrillers like DAHMER, GACY, and THE FREEWAY KILLER, none of which would indicate any of the thematic depth of ELLE) script translated to French. It ended up being a smart move, as Verhoeven gets a bold and brazenly fearless performance from Huppert, whose Michelle learns the identity of her rapist and instead opts to use it for continued psychosexual head games. That and a lot of ELLE just feels wrong, and you find yourself laughing at things you shouldn't find funny, like Vincent being completely oblivious to the fact that he's clearly not the father of Josie's baby, or Michele asking a drone at the office to "take out your dick" when she thinks he might be the rapist. Michele can be heartlessly cruel at times (when an enraged Vincent calls her a "cunt," it's not so much a response to what she's just said but rather the pent-up rage of a lifetime of snide condescension), and it's a ballsy move for a film to present a rape victim as an unsympathetic bitch. It's something that would instantly be labeled misogynistic if this was a major-studio American film, but Verhoeven handles the difficult and complex nature of this high-wire act in a way that can only be pulled off by a great and experienced filmmaker. A lot of ELLE is designed to shock, but it does so in a natural, non-sensational way, sometimes so subtly that it takes a few seconds to hit you (a perfect example would be a seemingly throwaway line from Rebecca near the end that's loaded with major implications). With a galvanizing performance by a never-better Huppert (no stranger at exploring characters with dark sides, having been in several Michael Haneke films), ELLE is a challenging, thought-provoking work from a director who's as vital as ever as he approaches 80. (R, 131 mins)
THE EYES OF MY MOTHER
(US - 2016)
A minimalist, slow burn horror mood piece whose sole purpose is to get a reaction, THE EYES OF MY MOTHER suggests, more than anything else, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER if remade by Bela Tarr. The debut of writer/director Nicolas Pesce, EYES' use of stark black & white helps establish the pervasive sense of melancholy and dread that dominates virtually every frame. An opening shot of a truck encountering a staggering, disheveled woman on a deserted country road would hint that Pesce is venturing into Tobe Hooper/Rob Zombie hicksploitation horror, but EYES has other things in mind. Told in three chapters, the film opens with "Mother," where young Francisca (Olivia Bond) lives in an isolated rural farmhouse with her Portuguese mother (Diana Agostini) and American father (Paul Nazar). Her mother was a surgeon in her homeland, and bonds with Francisca by showing her how to perform surgical procedures on severed heads of cattle. Her mother is killed by creepy stranger Charlie (Will Brill) who is in turn beaten and shackled in the barn by the father when he returns home to find Charlie killing his wife with a hammer while Francisca sits at the kitchen table. In the second chapter, "Father," years pass and Francisca has grown (now played by Kika Magalhaes). Charlie is still shackled in the garage, a virtual animal with his eyes removed, sockets sewn shut, and vocal cords severed. When her father dies, she keeps the body around the house, bathing it, talking to it, and sleeping beside it until she finally dismembers and disposes of it and invites the feral Charlie into her bed for sex. Francisca drives around in search of "friends" to bring home and keep prisoner in the barn, which leads to the third chapter, "Family."
There's no denying Pesce has a knack for shot composition and maintaining tension, even if EYES is as glacially paced as the slowest of the post-Ti West slow burners, clocking in at a brief 76 minutes and feeling a lot longer. But other than getting a response, there's really nothing of substance here. The film was met with equal amounts of applause and walkouts when it screened at Sundance a year ago, and that seems to what Pesce was after. The final scene is too conventional for all the arthouse transgression that preceded it, and it's too abrupt and ambiguous, and not the good kind of ambiguous. The whole thing could be written off as taking place in Francisca's deranged mind until the sudden normalcy in the climax, which ends up leaving more questions than answers--namely, how does she pay the bills? And why haven't the cops been looking for any of the missing people? Pesce's got talent and there's no shortage of unsettling sounds and images here (the gurgling noises made by the chained captives, accompanied by the visual of the sewn-shut eyes will haunt you for days), and Magalhaes is excellent, but when it's all over, it just feels like a film school stunt, no matter how sporadically effective it is at times. It's got all the hiccups and stumbles usually associated with a first-time filmmaker, but there's enough here to warrant keeping an eye on Pesce's next project. (R, 76 mins)
AMERICAN VIOLENCE
(US - 2017)
AMERICAN VIOLENCE wants to be a "message" movie taking a stance against the death penalty, but it quickly abandons its serious pretensions to become just another DTV-level crime thriller from prolific D-grade hack Timothy Woodward Jr. Woodward, whose films usually premiere on the new release shelf at Walmart, has made seven movies over the last two years, almost all of which co-star the likes of Michael Pare and Johnny Messner who, of course, are on hand in small roles here. Woodward managed to corral some unexpected names for AMERICAN VIOLENCE, but it's as cheap and inept as his other movies, demonstrating that no matter how high-minded and hard-hitting he thinks this is, Woodward still has a ways to go before he's even at the level of an Uwe Boll or an Albert Pyun. A film like this needs a strong performance at its core, and it doesn't get it from Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau as Texas death row inmate Jackson Michael Shea. Shea's set to be executed by lethal injection in 72 hours, and psychologist/professor Dr. Amanda Tyler (Denise Richards) has been asked by the district attorney (Columbus Short) to interview him to see if the Governor should order a stay of execution. What follows is Shea telling his story to Dr. Tyler, one that begins with him melodramatically glowering "Tick...tock...tick...tock...the sand in my hourglass has just about run out," and it just gets more trite and heavy-handed from there. As a boy, Shea was molested by his uncle. After a stint in prison, he falls in with low-level mob flunky Marty Bigg (Pare, doing his best Ray Liotta) as they team up doing small-time safecracking jobs. One of the safes belongs to loan shark Belmonte (Nick Chinlund), who strings Marty up and slashes his throat as Woodward pans the camera to an illuminated crucifix on the wall. Subtlety is not a word in Woodward's vocabulary.
After avenging Marty's death, Shea falls in love with Olivia (Emma Rigby), the daughter of Texas crime lord Charlie Rose (Patrick Kilpatrick), for whom Shea begins working. Eventually, Shea ends up in prison again where he's gang-raped in the shower before being recruited as a hired gun for corrupt warden Morton (top-billed Bruce Dern, squandering any NEBRASKA/HATEFUL EIGHT renaissance he might've had). AMERICAN VIOLENCE stacks the deck against Shea from the start, excusing everything he does to make ham-fisted points. Of course, Dr. Tyler has her own traumatic backstory--she's a death penalty advocate and widow whose cop husband was killed in the line of duty but she naturally changes her tune after spending an afternoon with perpetual victim Shea. It would be one thing if AMERICAN VIOLENCE made any convincing arguments, but it just offers sanctimonious lip service about "breaking the cycle of violence" while wallowing in every cliche imaginable and offering irrefutable proof that the only cycle that needs breaking is that which provides funding for future Timothy Woodward Jr. movies. Al Lamanda's script is atrocious, whether it's Shea having flashbacks to things he couldn't possibly have witnessed or known about to the laughable dialogue (Shea to Tyler: "Don't you get it, Doc? We're all just caged animals with animal instincts;" Belmonte to Shea: "Untie me, you pissant fuck!;" Tyler, staring off after Shea confesses to killing Belmonte and seeing the path it paved for him: "The catalyst that launched you into Hell." Lyman-Merserau can't act and Richards isn't any more believable as a college professor than she was as a nuclear physicist nearly 20 years ago in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH. Dern only has a few scenes and seems to be making it up as he goes, from bitching to his wife about the poor quality of her PB&J sandwiches to licking an ice cream cone while watching Shea strip, doing anything to keep himself amused while looking mildly disgruntled that no one's yet asked him to play Bernie Sanders. You expect to see guys like Pare, Chinlund, Messner, Short, and Kilpatrick ("The Sandman" in the early JCVD actioner DEATH WARRANT) in a piece of shit like AMERICAN VIOLENCE, but what is New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski doing here? Making his dramatic acting debut (he appeared as himself in ENTOURAGE) as one of Rose's strongarms, Gronk is prominently billed but has little to do after turning up about an hour in. He has a couple of scenes and is limited to dialogue like "Consider it done," and "We gotta get outta here!" and gets a slo-mo shot where he's diving sideways while firing two guns but then isn't seen again after driving Olivia off in a getaway car. Hey, Gronk--stick to clubbing in the offseason and hope Tom Brady and Bill Belichick never find out about this. (Unrated, 107 mins)
