RABID DOGS
(France/Canada - 2015; US release 2016)
Mario Bava's RABID DOGS was shot in the summer of 1974 but went unseen for 23 years after being caught up in a bankruptcy quagmire involving producer Roberto Loyola. A departure for horror icon Bava, RABID DOGS (also seen in the inferior alternate cut KIDNAPPED, with scenes added two decades later by Bava's son Lamberto) was a crime thriller that crammed all of its characters into a getaway vehicle commandeered by a trio of robbers, with a hostage, and the carjacking victim who's trying to get his sick kid to a hospital. Now that the long-lost RABID DOGS has been readily available in the home video age (unfortunately, only the KIDNAPPED cut is currently on Blu-ray in the US), fans of Bava and Eurocrime have had a chance to see one of the director's strongest efforts from the latter days of his career. Directed and co-written by Eric Hannezo (THE HORDE director Yannick Dahan also co-wrote, and Oscar-winning ARTIST star Jean Dujardin is one of the producers), the remake of RABID DOGS follows the same basic concept but consistently displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Bava's film work so well. Sure, RABID DOGS '15 is a lot more flashy and stylish than Bava's minimalist thriller, but that only goes so far. Hannezo spends much more time on the robbery and the getaway, and makes some incidental changes: here, it's not a random flunky who gets killed, but the ringleader (Laurent Lucas), leaving his protege Sabri (Guillaume Gouix) in charge of two volatile hotheads, Vincent (Francois Arnaud) and Manu (Franck Gastambide). During a badly-staged shootout at a mall and a standoff in the underground parking garage, they take an innocent bystander (Virginie Ledoyen) hostage and eventually carjack a father (Lambert Wilson), who only has a few hours to get his gravely ill daughter to a hospital for a kidney transplant.
That's more or less how Bava's film starts, minus the remake's specificity of the child's illness and the gaudy visual flourishes. Bava got his characters in the car a lot quicker than Hannezo does, and unlike Bava, he can't wait to keep getting them out of the car, never establishing the sweaty tension and increasing claustrophobia that makes RABID DOGS '74 so intense and nerve-wracking. No, Hannezo insists on giving us backstories of the bank robbers--who gives a shit that Manu is participating in the bank robbery to get enough money to get to see his estranged son? It doesn't humanize him at all, and it doesn't make him as dangerous as Aldo Caponi's comparable Bisturi in Bava's film. All we knew about the bad guys in Bava's film is that George Eastman's psychotic "32" had a huge dick. Hannezo's characters encounter various obstacles along the way, with a traffic jam of almost Godard/WEEKEND proportions slowing them down, and when they stop so the father can change a flat tire, the film completely falls apart. Even though the clock's ticking on the transplant, they take time to bullshit in the woods, share some smokes, and talk about themselves, as Hannezo cuts to a flashback of Vincent and Manu in some FIGHT CLUB-type activities in a garishly-lit red hallway seemingly on loan from Gaspar Noe. Later on, they get stuck in a WICKER MAN situation, with a town of gun-toting weirdos celebrating "The Feast of the Bear," which shuts the whole area down, preventing them from getting through or back out. The filmmakers do keep the devastating twist ending from the Bava film, but don't pull it off nearly as effectively. There's a few good moments that come mostly early on, though a later one, in the Bear town where an elderly, mute woman paralyzed by a stroke recognizes Manu from TV news reports and keeps incessantly ringing her little bell for help that never comes, is a memorable little set piece of which RABID DOGS '15 doesn't have nearly enough. There's some nice scenery in the Quebec location shooting (even though it takes place in France), but Hannezo is too focused on style over suspense here, as when he stops the climax cold for a slo-mo scene of everyone in the car bathed in more Gaspar Noe lighting schemes to the tune of Scala & Kolacny Brothers' cover of Radiohead's "Creep," featured prominently in the trailer for THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Why? Who knows? Who cares? On one hand, it's nice to see an obscure Bava film getting props from a fan who must love the movie (there's even a music cue that recalls Stelvio Cipriani's score for the 1974 film), but on the other, if he loves it so much, it's too bad Hannezo didn't do better by it. Then again, revisiting Bava's RABID DOGS right before watching the remake probably didn't do it any favors. (Unrated, 94 mins, also streaming on Netflix).
GRIDLOCKED (Canada - 2016)
When you wade through enough DTV B-movie swill, you're bound to accidentally find a pleasant surprise every now and again. The NYC-set, Canadian-made GRIDLOCKED is an unabashed homage to the late '80s-to-mid '90s heyday of action producer Joel Silver, though the chief influence, according to director/co-writer Allan Ungar, was John Badham's THE HARD WAY (1991), with James Woods as an angry cop forced to chaperone a spoiled movie star (Michael J. Fox) who's riding along with him to prep for an upcoming role. Ungar goes so far as to have HARD WAY villain Stephen Lang play the bad guy here, but the whole movie is an affectionate mash-up of Silver-produced classics like LETHAL WEAPON, DIE HARD, and THE LAST BOY SCOUT, with a big nod to John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 to cap it off. When Canadian-born child actor-turned-Hollywood bad boy Brody Walker (Canadian karate champ Cody Hackman) has yet another public meltdown when he punches a cameraman for a TMZ-like tabloid show and gets the latest in a string of DUIs, his foul-mouthed agent Marty (Saul Rubinek, cast radically against type as "Saul Rubinek") tells him his next mega-budget, pre-packaged blockbuster will be canceled if he doesn't get his shit together. Brody's lawyer plea bargains a cushy deal for him: community service in the form a ride-along with a local cop. The cop turns out to be Hendrix (Dominic Purcell), a badass SWAT legend busted down to patrol duty after a botched raid that resulted in too many casualties. The stoical, humorless Hendrix isn't excited about the assignment and resists any attempt by Brody to bond, sighing in disgust as the pampered Hollywood brat takes selfies with perps and generally makes an ass of himself.
Wanting to visit his old pals, Hendrix takes Brody on a late-night tour of his old Strategic Response outpost and armory about 40 miles outside of Manhattan, where the staff includes elderly Sully on desk duty, running the check-in. That Sully is a) near retirement, and b) played by LETHAL WEAPON star Danny Glover, it should come as no surprise that he ends up dead not long after declaring that he's gettin' too old for this shit. A dull and quiet night comes to an abrupt end when disgraced former SRT commander Korver (Lang) leads a team of mercenaries in an attempt to raid the facility, which the government has been using to covertly store assets seized both legally and illegally. Korver is after several hundred thousand dollars in bonds acquired from a raid involving a Central American drug lord, and he's not about to let his old buddy Hendrix stand in his way. Of course, the SWAT team on duty, plus Hendrix and Brody, have to work together--if they don't kill each other first!--to survive the night and keep Korver's guys (Vinnie Jones among them, as a corrupt and improbably Cockney, fookin' 'ell, mate!-accented NYC cop) from getting in. Purcell is an actor who has specialized in the unwatchable since PRISON BREAK went off the air, and relative to 98% of his headlining filmography, GRIDLOCKED is pretty damn good, right up there with his surprisingly solid boxing drama A FIGHTING MAN. He's perfectly cast and a great seething foil for the snotty Brody, who's obviously meant to be Justin Bieber several years from now (strangely, the film never makes use of Hackman's martial arts skills). GRIDLOCKED doesn't have an original thought in its head, but it wears its love of a specific era of action cinema on its sleeve and replicates it quite convincingly in a John Badham/Richard Donner/Walter Hill kind-of way, from the glossy production values to the smartass buddy action comedy bickering, and it's punctuated with some occasionally shocking, stomach-turning violence. Against all odds, this is definitely one of the better straight-to-DVD titles to come down the pike in quite a while, even if it's several years too late: had Purcell had this in theaters with some major studio backing right after PRISON BREAK ended, he would've never returned Uwe Boll's phone calls. (R, 113 mins) THE ABANDONED
(US - 2016)
Not to be confused with Nacho Cerda's 2006 Lucio Fulci homage with the same title, THE ABANDONED (shot in 2013 under the title THE CONFINES) is an intermittently effective chiller with some terrific atmosphere but it's saddled with a story derived from a hodgepodge of influences ranging from THE ORPHANAGE to SESSION 9 to CROPSEY to the jump-scares of Blumhouse to the facepalm-worthy twists of M. Night Shyamalan. Julia, aka "Streak" (Louisa Krause) is a troubled single mom in danger of losing her daughter if she screws up one more time. Her last chance is a gig as an overnight security guard at a posh, abandoned NYC apartment building. Her co-worker is bitter, wheelchair-bound Cooper (Jason Patric), who mans the control room and watches the monitors as Streak patrols the premises. They get off to a rocky start, with Cooper tired of breaking in newbies only to have them flake out after a week over the tedious nature of the job (though it could be that he's just an unpleasant asshole) and not even masking his contempt for Streak. She doesn't win him over by breaking the rules on her first night by letting a homeless man (Mark Margolis) and his dog stay in one of the rooms. It gets worse when she finds a bolted door blocking off a section of the building that Cooper claims was unfinished. Of course, Streak unlocks the door and finds that it leads to a series of dark, ominous underground tunnels branching off of the basement, along with the requisite checklist of things you find in dark, ominous underground tunnels, like hidden rooms with filthy mattresses, creepy childrens' drawings on the walls, and occasional taunting whispers and banging on doors. Of course, this used to be a secret orphanage from decades back, used to stash away deformed or mentally and physically challenged children of parents too poor to care for them or too embarrassed to acknowledge them at all, and of course, their vengeful spirits still haunt the premises. Or do they?
Making his feature directing debut, Eytan Rockaway has a good eye for chill-inducing atmosphere with his use of darkness, light, and shadows. But the script by Ido Fluk seems like the end result of a particularly wild weekend video roulette binge with his DVD collection. As messy as THE ABANDONED's story is, it's a film that's obviously trying hard. Maybe too hard, as if its makers weren't confident they'd ever corral the cash to make another movie, so they're cramming everything they've got into this one. They had to be happy to get access to even a faded star like Patric, who helps the young filmmakers out by turning in a surprisingly strong performance and giving this low-budget affair what little commercial value he can (it still took three years to get released). The final twist packs a punch, but at the same time renders much of what's happened before meaningless. THE ABANDONED falls apart by the end, but it's not fair to bag on it too much--Rockaway and Fluk give it their best shot, and even when you're shaking your head as the plot collapses and the cliches abound, it looks too good to just dismiss. He's not quite there yet, but if Rockaway can find a script that's up to par with his command of the camera and his staging of set pieces, he might go places. (PG-13, 87 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
A Brian Wilson biopic that doesn't follow the standard formula of music biopics, LOVE & MERCY is an original and often deeply moving look at two significant periods in the life of the Beach Boys mastermind. Director Bill Pohlad, a busy producer (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, THE TREE OF LIFE, 12 YEARS A SLAVE) helming his first film since 1990's barely-released and long-forgotten OLD EXPLORERS, and screenwriters Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and Michael Alan Lerner structure LOVE & MERCY as two parallel, GODFATHER PART II-type narratives as we see the beginning of the 1965 psychological breakdown of young Wilson, or "Brian Past" (Paul Dano) with the fragile shell of a man that is "Brian Future" (John Cusack) in 1988. The cracks are already starting to show with Brian hearing voices in his head before retiring from touring in 1965 to work exclusively in the studio on the Beach Boys' landmark Pet Sounds, which drives a wedge between him and bandmate/cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel). In 1988, an awkward and eccentric Brian stops into a car dealership to impulsively buy a Cadillac and meets salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), when a team of handlers headed by his therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) arrive to escort him out. As Brian and Melinda grow closer, she sees Landy's mistreatment of Brian--misdiagnosing him as a paranoid schizophrenic, overmedicating him, psychologically abusing him, and bringing along his own group of hangers-on to essentially live off of Brian's fortune, even taking over Brian's larger beach house and moving him into a smaller one nearby.
Telling two stories with two different actors playing the same role (shades of the multiple Bob Dylans in I'M NOT THERE) is an unusual choice that pays off. While Dano strongly resembles Brian Past, Cusack looks nothing like Brian Future, but it doesn't matter. Dano handles the breakdown while Cusack plays the result, with their performances brilliantly complementing one another. In his best role in years, Cusack inhabits Brian Future through halting and nervous body language that never crosses the line into becoming a mannered Brian Wilson impression. He approaches the role not unlike Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford on SNL--he looks and sounds nothing like the person he's playing, but he uses his skills to bring the character alive in a way that's accurate and very believable. Many actors would've turned it into an Oscar-baiting tic-fest, but Cusack is effectively understated, reminding you what a terrific performer he can be when he's not slumming it and vaping his way through bad VOD thrillers. While Dano and Cusack are the dramatic focus, Banks also does career-best work as the emotional core of LOVE & MERCY, the woman who would become his second wife (one of the film's few missteps is the short shrift given to Brian's first wife Audree, played by a barely-there Joanna Going). Giamatti is fine, though he's largely playing "Paul Giamatti," with Landy prone to outbursts of blustery rage, which works as Landy was accurately the villain in the Wilson story, along with, to a lesser degree, the unsympathetic Love and the stern, impossible-to-please Wilson patriarch, played here by Bill Camp (COMPLIANCE). A minor word-of-mouth sleeper hit over the summer of 2015, LOVE & MERCY is, thus far, one of the standout films of the year, with performances from Cusack, Dano, and Banks that deserve to be remembered come awards season, and one that refreshingly avoids the pitfalls and cliches of the music biopic genre. (PG-13, 121 mins) WELCOME TO NEW YORK (France/US - 2014; US release 2015)
NYC auteur Abel Ferrara is no stranger to unflinching provocation and getting his actors to bare their souls and more--he is, after all, the mad genius who directed Harvey Keitel's legendary performance in 1992's BAD LIEUTENANT. A long way removed from his '80s and '90s flirtations with commercial film and television, Ferrara has spent most of the last decade and a half making documentaries and little-seen films that didn't even get any US exposure beyond a sporadic festival screening. 2012's bohemian end-of-the-world drama 4:44: LAST DAY ON EARTH was the first narrative Ferrara film to get US distribution in a decade. WELCOME TO NEW YORK finds Ferrara reaching back to his BAD LIEUTENANT side for a not-very-thinly-veiled account of the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, when the French economist, politician, and IMF managing director known to his friends and the media as "DSK" was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel employee who arrived to clean his suite at the Sofitel New York Hotel. Charges were eventually dropped due supposed credibility issues of the accuser and that much of the evidence was inconclusive, but DSK soon faced other allegations in France in what seemed to be a behavioral pattern. Gerard Depardieu stars in WELCOME TO NEW YORK as the DSK figure, here named "Devereaux," a high-powered exec at a French financial behemoth who's in NYC for one day on business. Once that's done, he decompresses in his hotel suite with an all-night-long parade of prostitutes. The next morning, a maid (Pamela Afesi) enters the suite, announces she's from housekeeping, but a showering Devereaux doesn't hear her. Once he's out of the shower, he drops his towel and pushes her down to her knees, grunting "Do you know who I am?" He's on his way to JFK Airport when he realizes he's left his phone at the hotel, so the cops, already taking the maid's statement, intercept him at the airport under the guise of returning his phone and arrest him, forcing his long-suffering wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) to fly over from Paris to bail him out and set up a legal team while he's equipped with an ankle bracelet and confined to a $60K per month apartment she's rented.
All the while, Devereaux remains calm and relaxed, spending his house arrest watching movies under the assumption that something--his constant invocation of diplomatic immunity, his wealth and privilege, the ambitious Simone's political connections, his attorneys' manipulation of the media--will get him off the hook. Of course, he assumes correctly, but at the same time, Ferrara presents a portrait of a man both entitled and ill, who's convinced himself he's done nothing wrong while admitting he's powerless to combat what he is. Similar to the fearless work he got from Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT, Ferrara convinced Depardieu to abandon all illusions of shame and modesty and literally let it all hang out. Whether he's being strip-searched or attempting to force himself into the maid's mouth--during which a shot from behind captures the legendary actor's dangling scrotum--Depardieu throws all of himself into WELCOME TO NEW YORK in ways he hasn't done for many years. Likewise for Bisset, who first appears around 40 minutes in and quickly becomes the focus of the film. Simone is a woman with social and political aspirations for her and her husband (cue obvious Clinton analogy) who comes from money but is fully aware of what kind of man she married. She accepts his excesses--the booze, his predilection for prostitutes, his sex addiction--because they need each other. Simone doesn't buy Devereaux's claim that the rape accusation is false, and his excuse of "I just jerked on her! I just jerked on her mouth! That's all!" doesn't win him any sympathy. Ferrara goes for ultra-realism in the early going, in terms of the profoundly uncomfortable sequence between Devereaux and the maid, and with the police pursuit of him, where Ferrara makes the decision to cast the roles of the Port Authority and NYPD cops with real Port Authority and NYPD cops, who do a very good job of lending a gritty immediacy and not coming across like amateur actors. The first half is a riveting tour de force for Depardieu and represents some of Ferrara's best filmmaking since his early '90s heyday. There's a bit of a shift once Bisset arrives and she gets a couple of astonishingly vicious tirades to remind us that she's a terrific actress who hasn't been used to the best of her ability over the years.
Things bog down a bit in the home stretch, with some ponderous voiceover by Devereaux and some arguments with Simone that start to get repetitive. The cranky Ferrara loudly complained about both US distributor IFC and French co-producer Vincent Maraval preparing a 108-minute, R-rated US cut and not releasing Ferrara's 125-minute cut that was slapped with an NC-17 rating. While some of the more salacious material may have been eliminated, mostly from an early orgy sequence (we still get Depardieu's nutbag, however), WELCOME TO NEW YORK could still use some trimming near the end, which seems a little draggy even in the cut version. The only other weakness in the film is Ferrara's odd choice of showing a prologue that has Depardieu as himself being interviewed by reporters about why he chose to take this role--it's not even a real interview, as one of the reporters is played by Ferrara's girlfriend and associate producer Shanyn Leigh, demoted to bit player after her terrible lead performance in 4:44. While what's here was released under vehement protest by its maker, WELCOME TO NEW YORK is still a welcome return to vintage form for Abel Ferrara and, if you're so inclined, an opportunity to see more of Gerard Depardieu than you ever thought possible. (R, 108 mins) ELIMINATION GAME (Australia - 2014; US release 2015)
ELIMINATION GAME was released in its native Australia as TURKEY SHOOT, much like the film it remakes, Brian Trenchard-Smith's 1982 cult classic TURKEY SHOOT, released in the US in 1983 as ESCAPE 2000. A future dystopian take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, ESCAPE 2000 was a mean and ultra-violent exploitation film that became a huge hit on cable throughout the '80s. The remake, which counts Trenchard-Smith among its producers, is an abomination: amateurishly-made and thoroughly shameless in the way it cribs from other, better movies. More of a satire on reality TV along the lines of THE RUNNING MAN and Paul W.S. Anderson's DEATH RACE, ELIMINATION GAME finds disgraced Navy SEAL Rick Tyler (a more lifeless-than-usual performance by former PRISON BREAK star and new Yoplait pitchman Dominic Purcell) rewarded for taking out a Libyan dictator (ESCAPE 2000's Roger Ward) at the behest of his commanding officer Gen. Thatcher (late 1970's TV Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond) and US President Sheila Farr (Carmen Duncan) by being thrown under the bus and sentenced to death for fabricated war crimes. Three years later, he's given a chance at freedom: being the target on "Turkey Shoot," the world's most popular TV show, which pits him in a fight for his life as expert assassins try to take him out, all for the entertainment of a global audience. Of course, Tyler manages to emerge victorious against his foes or there'd be no movie, and he's keeping top killer Ramrod (LONGMIRE's Robert Taylor, trying to make something out of nothing) alive for a reason.
ELIMINATION GAME wants to think it's perceptive satire, but its targets--vapid TV show hosts, bitch-on-wheels programming executive, corrupt government officials--are pitifully one-dimensional and obvious and its attempts to win over the audience with ESCAPE 2000 references--Ward's cameo, a scene from the 1982 film visible on someone's TV--just makes you want to watch ESCAPE 2000 instead (speaking of references to better movies, legendary Ozploitation producer Antony I. Ginnane has a cameo as Australasian president Charley Varrick). Purcell has never been worse, though putting yourself in his position, would you try? The lumbering lummox is defeated by any number of things, whether it's director/co-writer Jon Hewitt's tired use of shaky-cam, endless DOOM-like first-person shooter POV shots and crummy CGI, or letting whole sequences play out through CCTV footage and security cameras. The editing is very choppy and whole chunks of story seem to be missing. Also, for "Turkey Shoot" being as popular as it is, we never get enough of a sense of the outside world or how everyone would drop what they're doing to watch it. All of this would be petty nitpicking if ELIMINATION GAME was even reasonably clever or entertaining, or offered anything remotely worthwhile. There's no shortage of dark-humored avenues to travel if you're going to roast the concept of reality TV, but this is lazy and uninspired on an almost Friedberg/Seltzer level, and it easily supplants Mark Hartley's well-intentioned but botched PATRICK as the worst remake of an Ozploitation classic. When the best moment of your remake is a shot of the film it's remaking seen on a character's TV, then that's all the evidence you need to confirm that you really needn't have bothered. (Unrated, 90 mins)
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and once in a while, a combination of forces that, under any normal circumstances, would portend certain doom actually turns out to have unexpected merit. Consider the case of A FIGHTING MAN, a low-budget, straight-to-DVD Canadian-made drama that would appear to be the epitome of every melodramatic boxing cliche you've ever seen going back to the 1930s Warner Bros. programmers. Consider that it stars Dominic Purcell, the once-promising PRISON BREAK star-turned-lumbering charisma-vacuum whose constant employment is one of the great mysteries of the modern DTV era. Consider that it's written and directed by veteran Canadian hack Damian Lee, who's somehow managed to be in the business of making movies for 30 years without ever making a good one (yes, Purcell and Lee also teamed on last year's abysmal BREAKOUT). There's absolutely no reason for A FIGHTING MAN to be anything but a steaming shit sandwich, but...this is actually...pretty good? Lee's script piles on a checklist of tropes and contrivances. Purcell is Sailor O'Connor, an aging ex-boxer with a record somewhat south of mediocre. He's not even worthy of being called a has-been. He's a never-was. If Sailor O'Connor was an actor, his stage name would be "Dominic Purcell." Sailor's only claim to fame is that, while he's lost almost all of his fights, he's never been knocked down. He hasn't been in the ring in four years, but wants to fight the proverbial One Last Fight. And it's not for the obligatory One Last Shot at Redemption: it's because he needs the money to give his fiery, cancer-stricken Irish mom Rose (Sheila McCarthy, thickly laying on the feisty Maureen O'Hara sass) one last trip to the old country since she's got six months to live. He's too proud to accept a handout from his trainers Brother Albright (James Caan) and Max (Michael Ironside), and he won't be talked out of fighting by his mom or by concerned Father Brennan (co-producer Kim Coates), who seems to spend more time fretting over Sailor than he spends in church. Sailor's opponent is King Solomon (Izaak Smith), a cocky and ambitious young fighter who's trying to escape his hellish life in the projects with his crack-addict mother (Emma Campbell). King needs a fight because he's been reduced to appearing in porn flicks to make ends meet and all he wants is to marry his pregnant girlfriend Peg (Jenessa Grant).
There's also Louis Gossett, Jr. hamming it up with a ridiculous Jamaican accent as King's irascible trainer Cubby, Adam Beach as reptilian promoter Fast Eddie, who's as big a conniving, untrustworthy piece of shit as his name would imply, famed trainer Freddie Roach as himself, and Famke Janssen as Diane, a recovering alcoholic linked to Sailor through a past tragedy that haunts both of them to this day. Lee also manages to cram in some mid-fight contractions for Peg, a visit to a bar for Diane where she almost falls off the wagon, and a traumatic backstory from Sailor's childhood about his abusive, drunken father that explains why he's the bullheaded fighter he is and how nothing can knock him down. Lee's structure of the film is interesting in the way that the fight is already underway at the very beginning, and between rounds, we're given the fragmented flashbacks detailing the events that led up to the fight we're seeing, and the timelines converge by the end. I never would've guessed a straight-to-DVD Damian Lee joint starring Dominic Purcell would have an ambitious Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu structure combined with the profound sense of melancholy and grief you'd find in the EXOTICA/THE SWEET HEREAFTER heyday of Atom Egoyan, where all the pieces of the puzzle are slowly put in place and you see how everything fits together in the end. Yes, it's hokey and manipulative, but its straight-faced sincerity sucks you in. And for all the cheap shots I've taken at Purcell, he may have found his perfect role with Sailor O'Connor, whose terrible boxing record, dead-eyed stare, monotone mumble, and the shuffling, tired gait of a defeated man with nothing left to lose and who's had nothing but shitty cards dealt to him for his whole life allow the actor to use his lackluster screen presence to his utmost advantage. To quote the poet laureate Harry Callahan, "A man's got to know his limitations," and while Purcell looks comatose when he has to do action movies, here, he's perfect. Look, I'm not saying this is some undiscovered classic or anything. We're not talking ROCKY or THE SET-UP or THE HARDER THEY FALL here--it's a maudlin and overly earnest B-movie for sure, but it somehow works, even as it plows head-first into shameless man-weepie territory by the end. Maybe it's Purcell finally finding a role that suits his somber persona, maybe it's the better-than-expected supporting cast (Caan is very good, and really, you had me at "Caan and Ironside as his trainers"), but against all odds, A FIGHTING MAN is an unexpectedly not terrible surprise. Purcell and Lee...who knew? Eye of the tiger, guys. Eye of the tiger. (R, 88 mins)
THE OUTSIDER (US - 2014)
Caan also turns up as the villain in THE OUTSIDER, which marks veteran British actor Craig Fairbrass' first attempt at becoming a headlining action star in America. Fairbrass starred in a couple of British horror films that became mid '90s video store staples (NIGHTSCARE and PROTEUS), and frequently turns up in various D-grade fare like Uwe Boll's FAR CRY, the Randy Couture actioner HIJACKED, and the Dominic Purcell dud VIKINGDOM, but he's best-known for TV's EASTENDERS and for his voice work in various CALL OF DUTY video games. He's got an imposing, square-jawed presence with a Vinnie Jones "fookin' 'ell, mate!" demeanor that could make him an acceptable fourth-string Liam Neeson with the right vehicle, but THE OUTSIDER, which surrounds Fairbrass with the best supporting cast that 2002 had to offer, isn't it. Utterly generic in every way, THE OUTSIDER, conceived by Fairbrass and writer/director Brian A. Miller (a repeat purveyor of completely forgettable Wal-Mart bargain-bin clutter like the 50 Cent-produced CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE and the Stephen Dorff cop thriller OFFICER DOWN), is patched together from elements of THE LIMEY and TAKEN (Fairbrass is even referred to as "the Limey" at one point). Fairbrass is tough-as-nails British mercenary Lex Walker, called away from a contract gig in the Middle East when his daughter Samantha turns up dead from an apparent drug overdose in Los Angeles. When he arrives at the morgue to identify the body, it's not his daughter, who went missing from her job at tech giant Most Industries a week earlier. Walker doesn't get anywhere with evasive Most CEO Karl Schuuster (Caan, who couldn't have put in more than two, maybe three days on the set), who obviously knows something he's not telling. Walker teams up with Samantha's waitress friend Margo (Shannon Elizabeth), and her sometime boyfriend Ricky (Johnny Messner), who leads him right to Samantha (Melissa Ordway). She had to fake her death because Schuuster's goons were coming for her after she uncovered a massive identity theft scam he was masterminding from the Most headquarters. Meanwhile, Walker forms an uneasy alliance with cynical detective Klein (Jason Patric) to bring down Schuuster and expose his shady dealings.
Lethargically paced and drably shot, THE OUTSIDER offers no surprises or suspense, with Patric and Caan sleepwalking through their performances, everyone else unconvincingly spouting vague techno-jargon, and Fairbrass proving to be a dull action hero. Sequence after sequence follows the same formula: Walker blusters and bulldogs his way into somewhere, wants ta ask someone some queestions 'bout 'is daw 'er, gets some guff, and promptly smashes the person's head into a wall or through a door until they staaht tawkin'! The kind of movie that provides an adequate level of white noise while you peruse your Netflix queue for something else to watch, THE OUTSIDER is as bland and paint-by-numbers as it gets. Nothing overtly terrible about it, but there's really nothing to see here. (R, 94 mins)
IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION (Canada/Germany/Pakistan - 2014)
When the hit series PRISON BREAK ended its run in 2009, co-star Dominic Purcell dove straight into movies and seemed to have what it takes to become a tough, chiseled big screen action guy. The problem is that all of his starring vehicles are terrible. He can be alright in supporting roles (the not-as-bad-as-everyone-says STRAW DOGS remake, KILLER ELITE, and the recent THE BAG MAN), but when he's left to carry a film, he seems to be going for the "man of few words" thing, but something in his line delivery and his body language makes him come off like a lumbering oaf. Regardless, the guy's phone apparently never stops ringing and he hasn't stopped working since PRISON BREAK wrapped up. He starred in five films--almost all DTV--in 2013 and has already been in four this year, with another on the way. I suppose it was inevitable that Purcell would get sucked into the orbit of Uwe Boll. The director's latest, the in-name-only DTV sequel IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION ("Too intense for theaters!" the packaging boasts), the third entry in this improbable franchise (Purcell follows the first film's Jason Statham, and the second's Dolph Lundgren, neither of whom got along with Boll at all), is also the third pairing of Boll with his current favorite actor, after the deck-stacking histrionics of ASSAULT ON WALL STREET and the pointless remake of the Presidential assassination thriller SUDDENLY. It's a partnership that's yielded nothing worthwhile, and while they may get along just fine, it likely exists simply because Purcell works cheap, and cheap is where Boll's at as he still adjusts to his post-German tax loophole world.
Purcell, knowing he's in another Boll joint and not trying any harder than he needs to, grunts his way through this ARMY OF DARKNESS/GAME OF THRONES ripoff as Hazen Kaine, a present-day American hitman working in Sofia for Bulgarian crime boss Avaylo (Marian Valev, who looks like Bulgarian Sean Bean). Avaylo orders Kaine to kidnap the two daughters of the heir to the Bulgarian throne, and Kaine finds one of them possesses a strange medallion. The medallion matches one of Kaine's tats. Yep...he's The Chosen One. Cue the wormhole portal sucking Kaine back to medieval times as he aids two sisters, Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva) and Emeline (Daria Simeonova), and their uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) in their battle against the tyrant Tervin (Valev, again) and his giant, flying, fire-breathing dragon. Boredom ensues (watch Boll pad the running time by having Purcell make an espresso and drink it in real time!), both in terms of story and Purcell's performance, but the batshit Boll of old shines through in the last 15 minutes, when Kaine and the dragon get sucked back into the wormhole and dropped in present-day Sofia. The dragon is chasing Kaine through the streets of Sofia as Kaine carjacks some Bulgarian guy, as if the dragon can't follow a car by flying over it ("Take a right!" Kaine tells the hapless driver. "Lose it!" IT'S A FLYING DRAGON! IT CAN STILL SEE YOU!). Realizing the error of his ways, Kaine, who's somehow eluded the dragon, releases the two kidnapped girls he's kept in a shipping container, while the dragon, now apparently a good guy, shows up and carries away one of Avaylo's flunkies. Kaine kills Avaylo and takes the girls back to their father, who's OK with the fact that, even though Kaine returned them unharmed, they wouldn't have been missing in the first place had Kaine not abducted them, and lets him go ("Thanks...appreciate it," Purcell mumbles). As Kaine ambles away, the dragon can be seen taking a leisurely flight through the skies over Sofia. Nope, no worries. Everything's fine. Nobody's taking cover. There's no police or emergency personnel anywhere. Everyone's just back to their business, disregarding that a fire-breathing dragon just appeared out of nowhere and destroyed half the city and is now apparently a permanent resident of Sofia, but hey, just let it fly around and do its thing, it won't bother anyone. (R, 86 mins)
VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE (Malaysia/US - 2013)
Purcell also stars in this "300 Meets THOR in Middle-Earth" would-be epic that was shot in 3D by Malaysia's KRU Studios, founded by three Halim brothers who, since 1992, also comprise that country's leading chart-topping pop group KRU when they aren't being movie moguls. Boasting embarrassingly primitive CGI and the same quality of greenscreen backdrops usually favored by local TV meteorologists, VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE was supposed to be KRU's big splash in the US (CLASH OF EMPIRES went straight to DVD in 2011), but it only made it to a few screens and VOD, and even that's a stretch considering how shoddy it looks. The visual effects, including some tame CGI splatter, aren't even on the level of a typical Asylum title, though in a few scenes, the sets have that cheap-but-charming quality that brings to mind early '80s Roger Corman productions like THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS or DEATHSTALKER. But still, that's probably not what director/set designer/visual effects supervisor Yusry A. Halim (or, "Yusry KRU" in his teen idol years) was going for with a budget equaling $15 million US. Sure, that's not big bucks by today's standards, but for that amount, one should be able to say something more positive than "some of the sets come close to looking like a 30-year-old Roger Corman production." The incoherent plot has Viking leader Eirick (Purcell) killed in battle and resurrected by the ghost of his dead betrothed Freya (Tegan Moss) in order to take on an evil Thor (Conan Stevens), who's plotting some scheme to gather ancient relics for the apocalyptic "Blood Eclipse." Eirick assembles a crew of warriors, including Sven (Craig Fairbrass) and Brynna (Natassia Linn Malthe), as well as martial arts expert Yang (Jon Foo, from the ill-fated TEKKEN movie) to battle the forces of Thor, which includes a papier-mache dragon that looks like a rejected prop from a high school drama club production of THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.
The action scenes try to copy both the speed-ramping of 300 and the choreography of wuxia, but Halim doesn't quite pull it off, and while he might be going for that graphic novel artifice in the visuals, it ends up looking like a laughably cheap, dated ripoff. If this film and IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION show us anything, it's that Dominic Purcell doesn't get your movie into theaters--he gets it a spot on a Wal-Mart DVD department planogram. Halim should've known he wasn't going to find success in the US market when his lead is Uwe Boll's go-to guy (Malthe and Fairbrass have also logged time with Dr. Boll), but even Boll's movies look better than this. VIKINGDOM's cheapness--the wigs look like mop heads, and Thor's hammer appears to be a block of silver-spray-painted packing styrofoam stuck on a broom handle-- might've had some B-movie charm if Purcell wasn't once again sleepwalking his way through the whole thing. This is easily the narcoleptic thespian's worst performance yet. He speaks in a monotone that doesn't even mask his utter boredom with the project, and with his often halting and hesitant moves in the battle scenes, he looks like someone who's nursing a recent back injury. He frequently looks confused and irritable, not even hiding that he's just in this for the free Kuala Lumpur vacation. VIKINGDOM does little other than establish Halim as the Uwe Boll of Southeast Asia, getting stilted performances from his cast of C-listers, and his staging of the action scenes is awful: it's obvious he's got about 25 extras that he unsuccessfully tries to make look like an army. Old-school directors back in the day knew how to pull that off. (Unrated, 115 mins)
This low-budget, Bahamas-financed thriller was shot in Louisiana in 2012 and released on 15 screens a month ago. It plays like one of those forgettable post-PULP FICTION Tarantino knockoffs that flooded video stores well into the late 1990s. There's an added bit of THE USUAL SUSPECTS tossed in, along with some occasional would-be David Lynch eccentricity that provides a few fleeting amusing moments but mostly just feels rote and tired, with cinematography so dark and murky that it's often hard to tell what's going on. Based on an unfilmed screenplay titled MOTEL (the film's original title) penned by veteran actor James Russo, THE BAG MAN is the debut of writer/director David Grovic, who manages to corral a pair of slumming big names like John Cusack and Robert De Niro for a sort-of THINGS TO DO IN NEW ORLEANS WHEN YOU'RE COASTING. By now, it's no surprise to see Cusack or De Niro in this kind of Redbox-ready clunker that keeps a roof over the heads of guys like Michael Madsen or Tom Sizemore or Val Kilmer or Christian Slater, but not that long ago, this would've been a major release in theaters nationwide. De Niro's been taking mercenary jobs for a few years now (you think he even remembers making RED LIGHTS?), and once in a while, a SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK might accidentally happen, but Cusack's fall from the A-list has been shocking in its suddenness because nothing really brought it on. It's not like he got old or was involved in a scandal or had a string of bombs or a reputation for being unusually difficult. What gives? Who did he piss off? What the hell happened to John Cusack?
Here, Cusack is Jack, a flunky for Dragna (De Niro), a powerful New York mobster prone to windy, overly-scripted speeches that reference the likes of Herman Hesse and Sun Tzu. Dragna gives Jack an easy, quick-money assignment: retrieve a bag, don't look inside, drive it to no-tell motel in an off-the-beaten-path podunk town, and wait for him to arrive. Jack arrives at the motel with complications already in tow--a guy who tried to get the bag from him is now a corpse in his trunk. The situation doesn't improve once he goes through the hassle of checking in (Crispin Glover is the twitchy, wheelchair-bound desk clerk): Jack shoots some mystery men waiting for him in the next room, then finds himself paired up with Israeli hooker Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), who's being hassled by a pair of vicious pimps, one an eye-patched Nick Fury lookalike (Sticky Fingaz), the other a bad-tempered Serbian dwarf (Martin Klebba). Bodies start piling up and the sheriff (Dominic Purcell, who's actually good here) keeps nosing around before Dragna makes his explosive reappearance to inform Jack why he was selected for this job, and it's a front-runner for 2014's dumbest plot twist. There's lots of would-be Tarantino dialogue ("If you could fuck any woman from history, who would it be?") and quirky touches (Glover sternly telling Cusack "Don't touch my wheelchair...it belonged to my dead mother!" gets a big laugh), and De Niro, hamming it up and sporting near-George Romero-eyeglass frames and a big silver pompadour in a role that seems like it was written with Christopher Walken in mind, has a long monologue that centers on an episode of FULL HOUSE, but those moments are disbursed in a stingy fashion throughout a drab, dull, stagy noir that's going nowhere fast, much like Cusack's career if he doesn't stop seemingly choosing his scripts at random. (R, 109 mins) AT MIDDLETON (US - 2014)
If you happen upon AT MIDDLETON in its last five minutes, you might think you missed a powerful, heartfelt look at two people who make a connection over the course of a day and are forced by the circumstances and the realities of their lives to part ways and return to their respective spouses. But if you watch the rest of the film leading up to that finale, you'll get a grating, phony, and pandering middle-aged rom-com filled with obvious jokes, cliched plot turns, cardboard characters, and some frequently atrocious acting, the kind of fawned-over festival favorite that ultimately gets dumped on 20 screens with little fanfare. There's a good film to be made--one that could deftly balance drama and comedy--about parents of an only child facing an empty nest when that kid goes off to college, but until its surprisingly poignant ending, AT MIDDLETON takes the easy route to stale laughs and even staler drama nearly every time and has almost nothing substantive to offer. Taking place over one day at the mid-level, mostly average Middleton College, the type of place no one really wants to go but they just sort-of end up there, AT MIDDLETON finds heart surgeon George Hartman (Andy Garcia) and his son Conrad (Spencer Lofranco) arriving for a campus tour when George has a meet-cute with Edith Martin (Vera Farmiga), when she steals his parking spot. Edith is there with her ferociouly ambitious daughter Audrey (Farmiga's little sister Taissa of AMERICAN HORROR STORY; there's a 21-year age difference but they look so much alike that the initiallly odd casting works). George is a milquetoast sort who wears a bow tie, while Edith is brash, loud, and free-spirited and prone to embarrassing Audrey. Gee, is there any way opposites won't attract and that dweeby bow tie won't be undone before the end of the movie?
George and Edith get separated from the tour group and spend the afternoon on their own, stealing a couple of bikes, crashing a drama class, going into the music building and playing "Chopsticks," climbing the campus bell tower, watching THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, watching a young couple have public sex, running through a fountain, and generally making nuisances of themselves campus-wide. In the film's worst stretch, George and Edith blaze up with a couple of stoner pre-med students. Can you do anything new with the concept of square parents getting high? As evidenced by a baked Garcia rapping "I'm a cardiac surgeon!" over some background reggae beats, the answer is a resounding "no." It just gets worse when one of the stoner dudes starts talking about a diseased dog's distended ballsack, which leads to the mantra "The ballsack is life," which is at least a brief respite from the film busting its ass to make "feckless" a punchline. A mannered Vera Farmiga, who appears to have prepped for the role by visualizing the worst of Diane Keaton and running with it, is really hard to take at times, and in the most unintentionally telling shot, she actually grabs a crutch and starts using it for no reason. The younger actors don't fare much better, though they aren't required to embarrass themselves quite as much. Still, Taissa Farmiga gets one of the worst lines after a spat with Conrad--when he puts his earbuds back in and walks away, she yells "Confusion has a lot of great soundtracks!" What? What does that even mean? Peter Riegert appears briefly as a cynical DJ named Boneyard Sims, who gives communications major Conrad some pointers. The best performance is a two-scene bit from Tom Skerritt as a famed linguistics professor who advises the driven Audrey to slow down and use college to explore her options when she melts down after he declines her request to be her mentor. Skerritt brings a quiet, scholarly dignity to the role that's completely at odds with the cookie-cutter histrionics going on almost everywhere else, and with about four minutes of screen time, he succeeds in making you wish this was a film about his character. As George and Edith grow closer over the day, they question the decisions they've made and the complacency that's set in, but AT MIDDLETON isn't interested in that. It's the kind of movie where a staid, uptight guy loosening his bow tie and rapping after a couple of bong hits is supposed to be instantly hysterical. And there's the moment when Edith starts crying because the day's coming to an end, and she looks at George with tears streaming down her face and says "I thought you fixed hearts!" Really? Pros like Garcia and Vera Farmiga read that line in director Adam Rodgers' script and said "Yep...sounds good! Let's do this!"? But then at the end, something happens. It gets serious, and the final moments are genuinely emotional as the two parties go to their respective vehicles and get on the road home, presumably never to see each other again. The expressions on Garcia's and Farmiga's faces convey the pain, the missed opportunities, the uncertainty over the future. They're exhibiting the best acting they've done in the whole film and then you realize why: because they aren't talking. (R, 100 mins)
If you can imagine SHOCK WAVES caught in the Polar Vortex and paired with UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, but brought down by sluggish pacing and lackluster greenscreen and CGI, then you've got a pretty good idea of how ICE SOLDIERS plays out. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, while America is focused on Cuba, the Russians have deployed three genetically-engineered super soldiers to launch a terrorist attack on NYC. But their plane crashes in the barren tundra of northernmost Canada and they're discovered by some scientists at a nearby military base, who are promptly killed as the "Ice Soldiers" vanish in the endless, frozen wilderness. 50 years later, scientists Malraux (Dominic Purcell) and Lobokoff (Nicu Branzea) get funding from an oil company to ostensibly drill for crude but really to search for the Ice Soldiers, who Malraux believes are still at large. Also along are micro-managing oil company ballbuster Frazer (Camille Sullivan), who hired a crew of money-hungry crew of mercenaries led by Col. Trump (the great Michael Ironside). With a blizzard on the way, Frazer and Trump call an early end to the expedition until Malraux discovers the frozen bodies of the three Ice Soldiers who, miraculously, still show faint signs of life. Frazer and Trump see endless riches but Malraux has a change of heart and tries to terminate the life support for the Ice Soldiers, who proceed to kill everyone but Malraux and again escape. On his own in the middle of nowhere, Malraux encounters Native American TC Cardinal (Adam Beach) and hires him to help track the Ice Soldiers, who have retained their intelligence and still plan to go forth with their half-century-old plan of attacking NYC.
There's a sharp satirical bite to the concept behind this faux-documentary from NYC-based British indie filmmaker Ashley Cahill. Filmed in 2010 under the title CHARM and shown on the festival circuit under that title as well as MALCOLM before its current rechristening, RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE stars writer/director/producer/editor Cahill as Malcolm, a seemingly affable Manhattan doorman who moonlights as a serial killer whose exploits are being chronicled by documentary filmmaker Bob (Dominic Ciccodicola). Citing Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and Scorsese's MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER as influences (and dedicating the film to Samuel Fuller), Cahill's biggest debt is probably owed to Remy Belvaux's MAN BITES DOG as Malcolm sets out to avenge the gentrification of NYC and return it to its sleazy and dangerous glory days of the '70s and '80s. AMERICAN PSYCHO-as-a-mockumentary wears a little thin after a while and Cahill falls victim to intermittent self-indulgence, but there's a lot of genuinely sick laughs throughout, whether Malcolm is confronted with such offenses as homeless people asking for his pizza but complaining because it's not vegetarian ("You're a bum, you're begging for food and you won't eat meat? What happened to this city?"), vacuous poseurs who wear homemade Truffaut and Godard tees but don't appreciate Clint Eastwood and HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER ("Is that the one with the monkey?" someone asks), vegans, thumb rings, movie theater texters ("Do you know how difficult it is to get a film released? Have some respect for the cinema!"), and trendy bands ("If I could kill any band in the world, it would be Kings of Leon"). There's also some hints at sly meta commentary on battles between producers and directors when Malcolm starts clashing with Bob over the goals of the documentary and the direction in which it's heading. Cahill doesn't really explore the ramifications of his actions until an admittedly inspired finale that feels like TAXI DRIVER if rewritten by Larry David. Not everything in RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE works and it ultimately feels like a drawn-out MAN BITES DOG tribute as seen through the lens of a trust-fund Abel Ferrara, but when it works--which is more often than not--it works well, and I liked the vibe that Cahill captures amidst the jarring mix of laugh-out-loud humor and shocking violence. As an actor, he comes off as an odd and funny combination of Stephen Merchant and William Fichtner. Also with Dustin Hoffman's dead ringer son Jake as a gun dealer and a cameo by Cahill pal Kirsten Dunst as herself. Co-produced by Wes Craven's son Jon. (Unrated, 87 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
Note: though in English, this is the French trailer for the film, hence the "Un Film de Ashley Cahill," which is not some pretentiously douchey stab at humor on his part.
Yes, this is indeed a remake of the cult classic 1954 presidential assassination thriller that was unseen for many years but is now a public domain staple. The original SUDDENLY was MIA from 1963 until the late 1980s after star Frank Sinatra erroneously believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it on TV less than a month before the assassination of JFK and had the film pulled from circulation. SUDDENLY resurfaced around the same time as the Chairman resurrected another long-dormant film of his that dealt with politics and assassination--the much better-known THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). This Canadian-made remake doesn't bring much new to the table other than F-bombs, cell phones, a Barack Obama lookalike, and the unlikely Uwe Boll in the director's chair. SUDDENLY '13 finds Boll in rare hired-gun mode, working away from his usual producing partners and assorted enablers but bringing a few old and presumably financially-strapped pals along for the ride. Ray Liotta, somehow working with Boll again after 2008's IN THE NAME OF THE KING, stars as a booze-addled deputy sheriff who ends up in the middle of a plot to assassinate the President when his motorcade's drive through the small town of Suddenly is preceded by a team of shady, professional assassins disguised as Secret Service agents. They're led by Baron (ASSAULT ON WALL STREET's Dominic Purcell, Boll's current favorite actor, also in the upcoming IN THE NAME OF THE KING 3), a disgruntled Iraq War vet with a vendetta against the US government. Liotta's character is a vet as well, and has been wallowing in an alcoholic haze since he accidentally killed his war hero best friend. Liotta now pines for his buddy's widow (Erin Karpluk, also of ASSAULT ON WALL STREET) and is a dad of sorts to her troublemaking, Bieber-coiffed son (Cole Coker), who sports the improbable nickname "Pidge," which may have been quaint and nice and wholesome in 1954 but is just asking to be bullied in 2013.
As far as Boll joints go, SUDDENLY is, relatively speaking, one of the "better" ones. It's fairly straightforward and Boll avoids his tendency to poke people with sticks to get a reaction (the closest he comes to ruffling any feathers is presenting the president as "Obama-esque," though the actor looks like an Obama who might appear in a jokey local TV spot for a used car dealer). The problem is that even though Boll got to hang out with his friends (regulars like Michael Pare and Brendan Fletcher also turn up), he isn't really into the gig here. SUDDENLY is dull and slowly-paced, rarely suspenseful, and if it weren't for the profanity, it could easily be a TV-movie. Purcell fares a bit better here than in some of his other recent films, where he's little more than a lumbering lummox, but that sort of plays to his advantage in SUDDENLY. Liotta doesn't try any harder than he needs to, but he looks pretty convincing when his character is completely hammered. Whether he was going all Method as an excuse to cope with the trauma of once again finding himself on an Uwe Boll set is anyone's guess, but he looks legitimately shitfaced throughout. Bland and forgettable, SUDDENLY shows that, if nothing else, Boll can handle generic assignments if he ever chooses to quit making a bad-movie spectacle of himself. (Unrated, 90 mins)
BREAKOUT (Canada - 2013)
Wasn't Brendan Fraser an A-lister just a few years ago? What happened? Was FURRY VENGEANCE that bad? Other than voicing the hero in the recent animated film ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH, his recent output is pretty dire: 2013 saw very limited theatrical runs for STAND OFF (shelved for two years) and the awful PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES, and now BREAKOUT has skipped theaters completely. BREAKOUT is written and directed by Canadian exploitation vet Damian Lee, who made 1989's FOOD OF THE GODS 2 and a bunch of DTV Jeff Wincott movies in the '90s. He worked sporadically in the '00s but has been busy the last few years with bigger actors in films that have been duds nonetheless (like A DARK TRUTH with Andy Garcia and Forest Whitaker), as they were still directed by Damian Lee. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Fraser is hooking up with Uwe Boll, and they already have a mutual friend since busy Boll man-crush Dominic Purcell is conveniently onboard here. The idiotic BREAKOUT has fugitive Purcell on the run to Canada with his mentally-challenged brother (Ethan Suplee), when two kayaking teens (Holly Deveaux, Christian Martyn) witness Purcell killing a guy. The kids are on a camping trip with their dad's friend (Daniel Kash). Their dad is Fraser, an environmental activist who's been in prison for the last seven years after accidentally killing someone during a scuffle at a protest. Purcell kills Kash and pursues the kids through the woods. Meanwhile, their mom (Amy Price-Francis) visits Fraser to tell him what's going on, and Fraser is able to conveniently walk away from a work furlough cleaning up in the very woods where Purcell is maniacally hunting the kids. Fraser manages to quickly find the kids, proves to be a natural at operating a shotgun with one hand, and so begins a cat-and-mouse game with Purcell while the kind-hearted Suplee finds Deveaux's dropped cell phone and spends the rest of the film talking to Fraser's ex, convinced he's talking to his late mother.
It's mostly implausible nonsense with a really bad performance by Fraser, who does little more than yell "Run!," "Go!," "Gaaah!," "Aaaah!," and "Waaaah!" I've never been a huge Fraser fan but I never really had a problem with him. He was fine in his early roles like SCHOOL TIES and showed some range with GODS AND MONSTERS, and maybe it's that he's been bolstered by big budgets during that decade-or-so run in big event movies like THE MUMMY, but now, in his mid-40s, between this and PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES (I haven't seen STAND OFF), he's suddenly become an absolutely terrible actor. He's so bad here that he makes Purcell look OK, and both of them are upstaged by a surprisingly credible, sympathetic performance by Suplee, who's the only one of the three main actors who appears to be trying. Indifferently directed by Lee (check out the wrong placement of a "Seven years later" caption in the beginning; it's shown during the prologue, which is still taking place seven years before the main plot; was anyone paying attention?) and with little logic or suspense, BREAKOUT is probably a career-low for Fraser, who finds himself in the same boat as former '90s/'00s sure things Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. Did Fraser burn some bridges somewhere? Piss off the wrong studio exec? Did that Golden Globes spaz attack become a scarlet letter? Or is it just simply a slump that many actors experience? (R, 89 mins)
FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY (US/Czech Republic/The Netherlands - 2013)
There's two things that simply need to end, and end now, when it comes to the horror genre: 1) found-footage films, and 2) prefab hipster/horror scenester cult movies. FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY gives us both in one dull, shrill, shrieking, headache-inducing, shaky-cam package. Earning generally positive reviews and currently sporting a baffling 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY is the kind of horror flick with a seemingly irresistible premise but the filmmakers don't know what do with any of it and make one ill-advised decision after another. Since they bungle the found-footage aspect in record time (and it makes no sense that stuff supposedly shot in the 1940s would look crisp and modern and be 16:9, but I digress), director Richard Raaphorst (the abandoned zombie film WORST CASE SCENARIO) and writers Chris W. Mitchell and Miguel Tejada-Flores might've been better off just making a straightforward, old-school horror movie without all the found-footage bullshit. All we get for nearly an hour are thickly-accented Russian soldiers (speaking English, of course) behind enemy lines, walking around and yelling at each other before they encounter an abandoned warehouse where one Viktor Frankenstein (Karel Roden) is carrying on the work of his famous grandfather. Soon, the soldiers are battling Frankenstein's "zombots"--steampunk-inspired creatures pieced together from body parts and machines. How difficult would it have been to make this a fun, freewheeling horror film? It tries to go for an anarchic, early Sam Raimi/Peter Jackson vibe but doesn't give its actors anything more to do other than run around and yell, practically turning the film into a combination of a video game and a door-slamming farce by the end. It's not scary, it's not funny, and it wastes an enthusiastic performance by veteran character actor Roden, who tries hard but isn't onscreen long enough to accomplish anything. Obviously, some people liked this but I found it excruciating. THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY might actually be better. (R, 84 mins)
When he isn't helming crummy video-game adaptations, Uwe Boll has made a habit of belatedly jumping on bandwagons that have already passed through long ago, be it torture porn horror (SEED), an end-of-days LEFT BEHIND ripoff (THE FINAL STORM) or a late '80s-style Vietnam exploitationer (1968 TUNNEL RATS). Dr. Boll is slightly more topical with his latest, ASSAULT ON WALL STREET, which boasts his best--relatively speaking--cast in years in a hysterically hyperbolic attack on big-money fat cats and assorted one-percenters while putting his "hero" through an introductory hour of deck-stacking misery. Dominic Purcell stars as armored truck guard Jim Baxford, a decent, hard-working, blue-collar guy just trying to make ends meet in the aftermath of his wife Rosie's (Erin Karpluk) battle with a brain tumor. The prognosis is good, but she still needs some expensive treatments, and Jim's reached his insurance cap. At the same time, the economy crashes and he loses his savings in some bad investments, and through some legal fine print in a real estate deal, finds he's on the hook for an additional $60,000 that he doesn't have. He borrows $10,000 from his buddy (a haggard, bleary-eyed Edward Furlong) to retain the services of a high-priced attorney (Eric Roberts), who then never takes his calls. Then the bank forecloses on his house and his boss is forced to let him go after a collection agency tries to garnish his wages. Then Rosie kills herself. Jim decides to make Wall Street pay for ruining his life and does all the textbook things that pissed-off-guys-on-rampages do in movies: wanders the streets, glowering and chain-smoking; rents a room in a fleabag hotel; has maps, newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and pics of the financial bigwigs he's targeting pinned to the wall (of course, he draws a big red "X" through their mugs after he kills them); spends hours listening to talk radio; lets his calls to go voice mail; buys some guns and ammo from a skeezy creep (Clint Howard!); and practices drawing his weapons in front of a mirror. Stopping just short of giving himself a mohawk and saying his name is Henry Krinkle, Jim arms himself to the teeth with various guns and grenades and goes after the firm that mishandled his savings.
Boll's glamorization of Jim is appalling. Of course we're supposed to hate these financial assholes, but the way it pans out--with Jim confronting callous, heartless, egotistical CEO Jeremy Stancroft (John Heard, seated at the same desk in all of his scenes, probably shot in one day) and turning the tables on him in the most improbable way imaginable--makes Jim out to be some avenging superhero of the middle class. There's supposed to be a gray area when it comes to vigilante protagonists. Movies like DEATH WISH (the first one, not the later ones), TAXI DRIVER, and ROLLING THUNDER justify the cathartic actions of the vigilante in the context of the film but stop short of legitimizing them as "heroes." Not here. It's probably just his way of again poking people with sticks, much like POSTAL's jokes about 9/11 and concentration camps, but in POSTAL's defense, it is a comedy. When Jim starts mowing down investment brokers, is the audience supposed to stand up and cheer? Boll's done ripped-from-the-headlines drama before with surprisingly competent results--his ATTACK ON DARFUR really isn't that bad--but his frothing histrionics over the Wall Street implosion and eventual bailout don't make for a credible film. It would be one thing if Boll presented this as some anarchic, absurdist, satirical fantasy but up until Jim goes on his rampage, ASSAULT is humorlessly stone-faced and serious, handled with zero subtlety (does any character name scream "rich asshole" like "Jeremy Stancroft"?), and prone to ham-fisted proclamations by the characters (Michael Pare and Keith David, as Jim's disgruntled cop buddies, almost serve as a Greek chorus, spouting dialogue like "We bust homeless people and issue citations for jaywalkin', but the real criminals are downtown, on fuckin' Wall Street, wearin' suits that cost more than we make in a year!"). Purcell doesn't help matters. This guy's a lumbering bore in everything he does, and even from the outset, Jim comes off like a ticking time bomb with a huge chip on his shoulder, so it's hard to really "like" the guy. It's also hard for a film to establish any credibility when it casts Edward Furlong as someone who has $10,000 readily available. (R, 99 mins)
BLACK ROCK (US - 2013)
Upon first glance, BLACK ROCK looks like writer/producer/mumblecore icon Mark Duplass (BAGHEAD, CYRUS, JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME) designed it as a vanity project for his wife Katie Aselton, who directed and co-stars. But it's actually a surprisingly effective fusion of character piece and wilderness/survivalist thriller, a sort-of chick flick version of DELIVERANCE or SOUTHERN COMFORT. Sarah (Kate Bosworth) arranges a weekend getaway with Lou (Lake Bell) and Abby (Aselton) to a distant, abandoned island they explored as children. It's also a chance for Sarah to play peacemaker for Lou and Abby, who haven't spoken in six years since Lou drunkenly slept with Abby's then-boyfriend. Tensions flare between the two and when they seem to be making progress toward a reconciliation, they find they aren't alone on the island. Henry (Will Bouvier), Derek (Jay Paulson), and Alex (Anslem Richardson) stumble upon the girls' camping area, carrying hunting rifles. They recognize Henry as the younger brother of Jimmy, a guy in their graduating class (Abby to Lou: "Didn't you blow Jimmy in high school?") and Abby invites them to hang out. Married Abby gets drunk and starts aggressively flirting with Henry, eventually luring him into the woods where they start making out while Derek tells Sarah and Lou about their dishonorable discharge from the military for a murderous act that they justify by saying "you do what you have to do." Abby tries to stop it from going to far and when Henry gets forceful, she bashes him in the head with a rock. Enraged, Derek and Alex decide to kill the women but they manage to get away, leading to an all-night pursuit through the island's dense forest.
BLACK ROCK admirably doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is: a suspenseful B-movie. There's some clever sleight-of-hand in the way what seems like a mumblecore drama focused on three old friends having a weekend getaway quickly shifts gears and becomes a gritty, intense, brutal thriller. There's nothing particularly inventive here, but it's well-acted, fast-moving, wastes no time, and does what it does, all in the span of 80 brief minutes. The three stars have a solid chemistry and really feel like old friends in the way they read each other and know how to push one another's buttons and in the way the set aside the baggage of the past and deal with the serious shit at hand. The lean and admittedly slight BLACK ROCK isn't a threat to the supremacy of DELIVERANCE or SOUTHERN COMFORT (or even RITUALS) in this sort of genre offering and it only made it into a handful of theaters in early summer, but it's likely to find an audience on DVD, VOD, and its inevitably long life as an eventual Netflix streaming title. (R, 80 mins)
