Based on the 2010 novel The Postcard Killers, a collaboration between America's James Patterson® and Sweden's Liza Marklund, THE POSTCARD KILLINGS manages to be both a post-SE7EN serial killer thriller and the kind of wintry Scandinavian mystery that came in the wake of Stieg Larsson's best-selling phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And for about 45 minutes, it's a terrific, expertly-crafted nailbiter that would've been a huge hit a decade and a half ago. But after an unexpected, gasp-inducing bait-and-switch that you won't see coming, the film loses the thread, stumbling and bumbling along with contrivances, confusion, and sloppy editing on its way to a dumb and unsatisfying conclusion, almost as if another team of filmmakers came in to take charge of the second half. NYC homicide detective Jacob Kanon (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is in London to claim the bodies of his murdered daughter and son-in-law, who were just married and on their honeymoon when they became the victims of a deranged killer who "posed" them in an embrace, with their eyes pinned open, an arm (not belonging to either of the them) stuffed in the son-in-law's mouth, and his daughter's left hand missing, among other disturbing details. A postcard was sent to a London journalist and Kanon learns from the unhelpful inspector in charge (Steven Mackintosh) that a similar M.O.--newlywed couple murdered and posed, dismembered body parts from another killing, a taunting postcard sent to a journalist--was recently found in an almost identical case in Madrid. Stonewalled over his repeated attempts to take an active role in the investigation, an irate Kanon heads to Berlin after another newlywed murder happens there and gets more collaborative cooperation from rumpled Inspector Bublitz (Joachim Krol). Then he ends up in Stockholm after American expat journalist Dessie Lombard (Cush Jumbo of THE GOOD WIFE and THE GOOD FIGHT) gets a postcard before police discover a nearly identical crime scene, at which Kanon's daughter's knit hat was placed in the hands of one of the victims.
There's a parallel storyline involving...well, let's not get into that. The victims are staged like art exhibits currently in museums in the city where each killing occurs, and they're done so in such horrifically macabre ways that bring to mind an episode of HANNIBAL if directed by a young Dario Argento. Morgan does a fine balancing act of being overcome with grief and seething with entitled American rage when one European cop after another won't let him have his way and allow him to take over the investigation. Of course, he ends up doing that anyway, and he and Jumbo establish a nice rapport and make a solid detective team. But they're let down by an abrupt shift in direction after that whopper of a mid-film reveal, and things just start to get silly, like a typical episode of a CBS police procedural or any one of these elaborate serial killer potboilers where the murderers have way too much time on their hands. Making his first English-language film since 2009's neglected and barely-released TRIAGE with Colin Farrell and Christopher Lee in a great late-career performance that almost nobody's seen, director Danis Tanovic (a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner for 2001's NO MAN'S LAND) just falls asleep on the job in the second half, introducing an incarcerated Wall Street asshole (Denis O'Hare) and having no idea what to do with Famke Janssen as Kanon's ex-wife, who seems to be off in a completely different movie most of the time. And the end lands with a complete thud, made even more frustrating by the door being left open for a sequel. It's enough to make you wonder if something went wrong in post-production or if it was just too many cooks in the kitchen, with Marklund one of five credited screenwriters and Morgan among the small army of 28 producers. (Unrated, 104 mins)
LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY (UK - 2020)
A ludicrous thriller being simultaneously dumped on VOD and Blu-ray after two years on the shelf, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY is admirably resourceful in the way it manages to pass Norfolk, VA off as NYC, Los Angeles, and Paris (!), but that kind of ingenuity doesn't extend to its asinine plot. Sam (blank void Zach Avery) has been living a solitary life in Paris (played by Norfolk's Freemason District) in the three years since the death of his girlfriend Georgia (READY OR NOT's Samara Weaving), who perished in a NYC gas leak explosion caused by a stray bullet when gunmen entered their apartment and started shooting. He managed to escape and flee overseas and now works at a cafe owned by Scottish expat Gilles (Brian Cox, who must've happened to be in Norfolk that day). Gilles doesn't know Sam's troubled past, but admonishes him to forget about whatever happened and move on. But Sam can't, especially after he goes to see a movie and one of its stars looks exactly like Georgia, only with blonde hair. He Googles the actress, Lauren Creek (also Weaving) and finds that she's a model, tabloid fixture and rising movie star in the States. Convinced Lauren is Georgia, Sam packs his bags and heads to L.A. He attempts to crash her latest movie premiere but is recognized by Kat (MR. ROBOT's Carly Chaikin), a gofer for Lauren's PR firm who happens to be the long-forgotten little sister of Sam's best friend in high school. They catch up, but Kat isn't buying his story, especially after she tries to arrange an introduction at the post-premiere party and Lauren doesn't recognize Sam. Undeterred, Sam persists in trying to prove Lauren is Georgia, even following her and her fiance Vince (Hal Ozsan) to a bar and selecting Willie Nelson's version of "Georgia On My Mind" on the jukebox to get her attention.
That's a bit too on the nose, but nothing about LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY, is subtle or smooth, especially the eventual involvement of some Eastern European gangsters led by cancer-stricken Ivan Denisovki (Udo Kier), and more background info that Sam keeps from Kat until it's convenient for the plot. With its rampant stupidity and a surprising amount of nudity from Weaving, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY often feels enough like a deliberate throwback to an early '90s DTV erotic thriller that you almost expect it to open with the Prism Entertainment logo. But the sibling writing/directing team of Colin and James Krisel can't stop tripping over their own feet, telegraphing twists way too early, and never explaining why someone on the run and hiding from a ruthless crime organization would decide that becoming a model and movie star, and being in the tabloids after altering nothing about their appearance beyond switching from brunette to blonde and removing two tiny tattoos would be the ideal way to lay low. Weaving is uncharacteristically dull, though at least Kier gets to shout "What do you know about death?" giving you brief hope that he'll resurrect his signature line from 1973's FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN. Otherwise, LAST MOMENT OF CLARITY gets its biggest boost from Chaikin, who turns in a terrific performance in an otherwise lousy movie. She imbues her character with a sense of humor that's snarky without being affected, and does a great job of conveying the seen-it-all jadedness of L.A. without turning the character into a cartoon. She does a lot with just a look and works wonders with a throwaway line (when Sam asks why she's helping him, Kat replies "Because you rejected me and I'm just sick enough to be attracted to that"), and ends up becoming the film's most compelling character. The Krisels try to develop some intriguing parallels between Lauren and Kat, but not enough to do justice to Chaikin's efforts. It's also perfectly fitting that Chaikin gets the line that perfectly sums everything up, at one point screaming "This is so fucking dumb!" (R, 90 mins)
PRIMAL (US/UK - 2019) Directed by Nicholas Powell. Written by Richard Leder. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Famke Janssen, Kevin Durand, Michael Imperioli, LaMonica Garrett, Jeremy Nazario, Sewell Whitney, Braulio Castillo Jr, Tom Walker, Isaac Santiago, Leon Joseph, Ray Hernandez, Jaime Irizarry, Pablo Tufino. (R, 96 mins) Nicolas Cage continues to squander the potential Cageassaince that last year's MANDY quite erroneously portended with what feels like his 17th straight-to-VOD effort this year, PRIMAL, dropping the same week that trailers for another two upcoming Cage movies went online. With Cage battling an escaped lunatic and a bunch of wild animals set loose on a cargo ship, the Puerto Rico-shot PRIMAL sounds like the kind of high-concept hit the actor would've made for Jerry Bruckheimer two decades ago, with a no-expense-spared budget, a top-notch supporting cast, and a solid genre craftsman like Renny Harlin, Stephen Hopkins, or Simon West at the helm. But PRIMAL has none of that other than the always-slumming Cage, reunited with his OUTCAST director Nicholas Powell, who, like his leading man, had his best days a generation ago, back when he was a stuntman and stunt coordinator on blockbusters like BATMAN, BRAVEHEART, GOLDENEYE, GLADIATOR, and THE BOURNE IDENTITY.
Opening with a shot of a rotting goat carcass that also serves as an inadvertent metaphor for the current state of Cage's career, PRIMAL has the LEAVING LAS VEGAS Oscar-winner as big-game hunter Frank Walsh, who's in the Brazilian rain forest where he's just captured "La Gato Fantasma," an elusive, mythical "ghost jaguar" that the superstitious locals call a "white devil." He's got a contract to deliver it to a Madrid zoo for a huge payday, and he's also caught some various other beasts of the jungle--some spider monkeys, toucans, and a few extremely venomous snakes--for some smaller side payouts. Commissioning the Mexican cargo ship Mimer Brando, he's about to set sail with his hired crew until the ship is commandeered by US marshals and a black ops team led by Ringer (LaMonica Garrett) under the supervision of US attorney Freed (Michael Imperioli) and US Naval officer and neurologist Dr. Ellen Taylor (Famke Janssen). They're transporting rogue Special Forces officer-turned-international assassin, mercenary-for-hire, and indestructible madman Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand), who was caught in South America and is being taken back to the States to stand trial. Loffler has a brain condition that makes him prone to seizures, and of course, he fakes one to get out of his makeshift holding cell. And of course, after killing the two guards on duty, he lets all the wild animals loose, forcing Walsh and everyone else to contend with crazed spider monkeys, poisonous snakes that could be hiding anywhere, and a pissed-off jaguar created with the best CGI that 1995 had to offer, not to mention Loffler, who starts methodically offing them one by one.
This CON AIR/SNAKES ON A PLANE mash-up sounds so foolproof that you almost have to tank it on purpose. How can PRIMAL possibly be this boring? Maybe a better director would've helped, as Powell brings no energy or style to the table, and even a couple of fight scenes are unexciting and incoherently-edited in that shaky-cam style that was all the rage a decade ago. For such an unstoppable killing machine, Durand is pretty dull, and something like this needs a hammy, scenery-chewing John Malkovich as "Cyrus the Virus." It also needs a hero more engaged than Cage, who's on total autopilot here. No outbursts, no meltdowns for the Nic Cage YouTube highlight reel--just some inconsistent beard continuity, a lot of cocky swagger ("Is that all ya got?" he sneers as Loffler is beating the living shit out of him), and some 100% chemistry-free banter with Janssen, who appears to be actively contemptuous of the material. Cage can still summon his mojo when he gives a shit, but those glorious occasions are happening with much less frequency. You know he's just not feeling it when he allows himself to be out-acted by a wisecracking macaw named Einstein.
THE POISON ROSE (US/Italy - 2019) Directed by George Gallo. Written by Richard Salvatore. Cast: John Travolta, Morgan Freeman, Famke Janssen, Brendan Fraser, Robert Patrick, Kat Graham, Peter Stormare, Ella Bleu Travolta, Blerim Destani, Julie Lott, Nick Vallelonga, Devin Ellery, Chris Mullinax, Melissa Greenspan, Sheila Shah, Nadine Lewington, Ashley Atwood, Anson Downes, Bill Luckett. (R, 97 mins) It's always unfortunate when great movie stars don't team up until the downside of their careers. This means you get things like Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins having a one-scene confrontation in the 2016 straight-to-VOD dud MISCONDUCT, but they're never in the same shot together as it quickly becomes obvious that they weren't even there at the same time. That's not quite the case with John Travolta and Morgan Freeman in THE POISON ROSE, but it's just as dispiriting that these two never worked together until the era of VOD Travoltablivion. A neo-noir that feels like it's been frozen in ice since the waning days of Savoy Pictures and boasting the finest ensemble that 1997 had to offer, THE POISON ROSE opens in 1978 Los Angeles, as low-rent private eye Carson Phillips (Travolta, sporting a career-worst wig) is offered a job by a mystery woman (Julie Lott) to verify the whereabouts of an elderly relative named Barbara Van Poole, who's supposedly a patient at a sanitarium in Phillips' hometown of Galveston. Phillips is reluctant, as he got as far away from Texas as he could 20 years earlier when he was disgraced in a point-shaving scandal that ended his gridiron career. And before we go any further, yes, THE POISON ROSE is the kind of movie that asks you to buy 65-year-old John Travolta as a guy who was a college football star 20 years earlier.
Phillips arrives in Galveston and is promptly stonewalled by Dr. Miles Mitchell (Brendan Fraser, a last-minute replacement when Forest Whitaker backed out), the weirdo in charge of the sanitarium, who insists that Ms. Van Poole is undergoing intense treatment and cannot be bothered. Using his downtime to renew old townie acquaintances like Sheriff Bing Welsh (Robert Patrick), aging hippie Slide Olsen (Peter Stormare), and obscenely wealthy mover-and-shaker Doc (Freeman), Phillips gets involved in another mystery when college football star Happy Chandler (Devin Ellery) takes a nasty hit on the field and dies. An autopsy reveals speed, meth, and an overdose of a cancer drug in his system, and the chief suspect is his wife Becky (Ella Bleu Travolta), who has plenty of motive since Happy was abusive and was sleeping with several other women, including Doc's sultry chanteuse daughter Rose (Kat Graham). Further complicating matters is that Becky's mother is Jayne Hunt (Famke Janssen), the woman Phillips left after his football scandal and the widow of a Galveston oil baron who was Doc's chief competitor. Doc wants part of Jayne's empire and for her to talk a snooping Phillips into going back to L.A., and Jayne wants Doc to grease Sheriff Welsh and the local law to take the heat for Happy's death off of Becky. All the while, Phillips keeps investigating and uncovers a conspiracy of corruption, a cancer cluster resulting from groundwater contamination, rampant medical billing fraud, and disappearing sanitarium patients, with random people threatening and taking shots at him to let him know he's no longer welcome in Galveston.
This is more or less DIPSHIT CHINATOWN, with the period detail primarily limited to the cars and people smoking indoors, with no real point to it taking place in 1978. Freeman's Doc is straight out of the Noah Cross playbook ("He owns everyone and everything!" Jayne says) and the story is so convoluted that you'll ultimately stop caring. In relation to Travolta's recent output that's almost enough to make John Cusack and Bruce Willis look away in embarrassment (GOTTI, SPEED KILLS, TRADING PAINT), THE POISON ROSE has a little more going for it--it's hard to dislike any movie that opens with GREEN BOOK Oscar-winner Nick Vallelonga getting kneed in the balls--and its biggest disappointment is that it takes itself too seriously and never fully embraces its inherent insanity. This is a film where Peter Stormare is shown singing a country music ditty and even he doesn't have the weirdest accent in it. It's been a while since Fraser was in a feature film, and if he's gunning to reinvent himself as a character actor in the Sidney Lassick mold, he's off to a promising start with his fey, lisping, whiny Dr. Mitchell. Fraser gives THE POISON ROSE its biggest spark and it's entertainingly weird whenever he's onscreen, plus his final scene is a viral YouTube clip waiting to happen. There's a hilarious scene where local drug dealer Lorenzo (Blerim Destani) is firing at Phillips in an empty football stadium, and Phillips grabs a football and takes him down with a perfectly-thrown spiral. It's also nice to see Travolta acting with his daughter Ella Bleu, even if it's something dumb like Phillips teaching Becky how to properly dunk donuts in coffee. Screenwriter and Travolta pal Richard Salvatore, working from a self-published novel by, uh, Richard Salvatore, gets off a few good P.I. zingers in the requisite noir narration, with Phillips cracking that "the next big case Bing solved would be his first," but usually it's cliches along the lines of "This is a bad place...worse than you can imagine," or this groan-worthy exchange more fitting for DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID:
Phillips: "You're tough as nails."
Jayne: "Those nails got rusty."
The film was directed by George Gallo, best known for scripting the 1988 buddy classic MIDNIGHT RUN and co-writing 1995's BAD BOYS, but has done little else of note. IMDb and some reviews are crediting two Italian filmmakers--Francesco Cinquemani and Luca Giliberto--as additional co-directors, though their names are nowhere to be found on the film itself. Shot in Savannah, GA, THE POISON ROSE is a US/Italian co-production from Cannon cover band Millennium and Italian producer Andrea Iervolino, and the closing credits list an Italian unit. Cinquemani--who also directed the abominable Italian HUNGER GAMES ripoff ANDRON that somehow starred Alec Baldwin--has been actively plugging THE POISON ROSE all over social media but it's not clear from this exactly what his or Gilibertro's contributions were. The inclusion of numerous Italian actors in the cast listing on the film's IMDb page who aren't even in the movie--among them Claudia Gerini (JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2) and Bruno Bilotta (DEMONS 2)--could indicate either some serious post-production tweaking or that Iervolino had Cinquemani and Giliberto shoot additional scenes specifically tailored for the Italian and/or European market, though I really can't imagine this being a hit anywhere.
AMERICAN RENEGADES aka RENEGADES (France/Germany/Belgium - 2017; US release 2018)
Remember the Luc Besson-produced Navy SEALs actioner RENEGADES that was supposed to hit theaters in the summer of 2016? Distributor STX kept bouncing its release date around (a local Cinemark multiplex near me had a RENEGADES poster in a Coming Soon display for most of 2016) and by late 2017, removed it from the schedule completely. While it played everywhere else in the world in 2017, it didn't open in the US until the last week of 2018, unceremoniously dumped in a handful of theaters and on VOD by the financially-strapped EuropaCorp and sporting the nostalgically jingoistic, Cannon-esque retitling AMERICAN RENEGADES. That's probably not quite what everyone involved in this $75 million production had in mind, but looking at it now, it's not difficult to see why it panned out that way. AMERICAN RENEGADES is lugubrious, dead-on-arrival dud that must rank among the dullest men-on-a-mission military actioners you'll ever see. In a prologue set in 1944 Nazi-occupied France, German officers confiscate priceless art and 2000 bars of gold and move them to a secret vault in a bank in the small Yugoslav town of Grahovo. Local partisans exact revenge on the Nazis by blowing up a dam and destroying the village. 50 years later (1994 period detail is largely limited to a fight scene set to Ini Kamoze's "Here Comes the Hotstepper"), an elite team of Navy SEALs led by Matt Barnes (STRIKE BACK's Sullivan Stapleton) and Stanton Baker (Charlie Bewley) extract war criminal Gen. Milic (Peter Davor) from his Sarajevo stronghold and turn him over to their commander, Adm. Levin (J.K. Simmons, cast radically against type as "J.K. Simmons"). Meanwhile, Baker is romantically involved with local bar server Lara (Sylvia Hoeks), who informs him that her grandfather was one of the Yugoslav partisans who blew up the dam and that the 2000 gold bars are safely nestled in the ruins of the bank, now 150 feet down in an area lake. She offers Baker and the rest of the team a deal: the gold is currently valued at $300 million, half of which is theirs if they can use their SEAL skills to retrieve it, with her ultimate goal to give $150 million to the displaced and the suffering in war-torn Bosnia. They go along with the plan, but only have 36 hours to pull it off since Adm. Levin has decided to ship them back home, as pro-Milic insurgents have put a price on all their heads.
There have been countless "men-on-a-mission" movies going back to the 1960s. How does this KELLY'S HEROES premise not work? Well, if you're co-writers Besson and Richard Wenk (THE EXPENDABLES 2, THE EQUALIZER), you come up with tired one-liners that clang to the ground and if you're director Steven Quale (FINAL DESTINATION 5, INTO THE STORM), you handle the action scenes as lifelessly as possible, with half the movie taking place underwater where it's impossible to tell what's going on. It also doesn't help that, with the exception of Bewley because his character is involved with Hoeks' Lara, there's almost nothing to differentiate any of the square-jawed SEALs on the team. Top-billed Stapleton registers zero (remember how he was the star of the 300 prequel and had it stolen right out from under him by Eva Green?) and the climax only comes to life once they're above water and have their asses saved by a hot-dogging chopper pilot improbably played by Ewen "Spud from TRAINSPOTTING" Bremner. Simmons had just won his WHIPLASH Oscar when this began filming in the spring of 2015, and he's clearly bringing some of that demeanor to this, as his bloviating admiral provides an R. Lee Ermey-esque spark when he's chewing out the SEALs. AMERICAN RENEGADES looks like a pretty expensive, large scale action movie, but the script needed some punching up, the actions sequences need more energy, and the cast needed to be populated by more engaging actors than Sullivan Stapleton and Charlie Bewley. (PG-13, 105 mins)
ASHER (US - 2018)
A longtime pet project for producer/star Ron Perlman, ASHER is the kind of indie that probably would've gotten some film festival accolades and ended up being a modest sleeper hit 15 years ago, but in 2018, it's inevitably relegated to the VOD scrap heap. It's really no great shakes, and fans of the '80s TV series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST already know that Perlman can play someone with a soft side, but ASHER is really just a harmless, low-key character piece that's a nice showcase for the more introspective side of a veteran actor who's spent most of his career under a ton of makeup or playing ruthless bad guys. Perlman is Asher, a disciplined, loner hit man for Brooklyn-based Jewish crime boss Avi (a kvetching Richard Dreyfuss). Spending most of his time in solitude listening to old records, cooking, and enjoying fine wine when he isn't on jobs assigned to him by his dry-cleaning handler Abram (Ned Eisenberg), Asher feels the years catching up with him, especially since Avi's only been using him sparingly and giving all the prime jobs to his younger ex-protege Uziel (Peter Facinelli). Bullet fragments remaining in his back from years earlier have affected his blood and weakened his heart, and when an out-of-order elevator forces him to walk six floors up for a hit, he's sweating profusely and so winded that chest pains cause him to collapse in the doorway of the target's neighbor, Sophie (Famke Janssen). Sensing his own mortality and wanting more to his life than killing people, Asher takes tentative steps toward romancing Sophie, a ballet teacher who's preoccupied with taking care of her dementia-stricken mother (Jacqueline Bisset). It isn't long before Asher finds both his and Sophie's lives are in danger when Avi gets word of an attempted coup by his own men, something Asher knows nothing about but is lumped in with the guilty when Avi decides to bring in a new crew to clean house and wipe out his old one.
Watching ASHER, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Ben Kingsley/Tea Leoni-starring YOU KILL ME, another generally light-hearted hit man comedy from a decade or so ago. It's all very familiar, but in the hands of a journeyman pro like Michael Caton-Jones (MEMPHIS BELLE, THIS BOY'S LIFE, ROB ROY, THE JACKAL, and uh, BASIC INSTINCT 2), ASHER is happily content to be what it is. Perlman is excellent as the tried-and-true "hitman with a heart of gold" who's so old school that he still presses his clothes and shines his shoes before heading out on a hit. He feels like a relic surrounded by increasingly younger colleagues, including loud and arrogant new guy Lyor (Guy Burnet), who's introduced mouthing off to Asher and mocking his heart problem, to which Asher replies "Is this your first job? You'll probably be the one who fucks everything up." Jay Zaretsky's script indulges in some humor that ranges from dark to quirky, whether it's Sophie, who has no idea what Asher does for a living, telling him that her mother wants to die and jokingly suggesting that he kill her, or the amusing sight of Dreyfuss' Avi dishing up steaming bowls of matzah ball soup for his goons. Other than one truly awful CGI explosion that looks like stock footage from a 25-year-old Bulgarian action movie, ASHER is an enjoyable and often sweet look at a lifelong old soul looking for something more in his twilight years. It isn't anything deep and meaningful, but the two stars are very appealing together, and it's a must-see if you're a Ron Perlman fan. (R, 104 mins)
In the late '90s and into the early 2000s, movies like CHILL FACTOR, SNOW DOGS, BOAT TRIP, and RADIO managed to successfully squander any momentum Cuba Gooding Jr. had after winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1996's JERRY MAGUIRE. He floundered in the world of straight-to-DVD for the better part of the next decade and a half, generally regarded as a worst-case scenario of the myth of the "Oscar curse," though it's safe to say THE PIANIST's Adrien Brody has usurped the title from him by now. Gooding occasionally managed to nab supporting roles in A-list productions like AMERICAN GANGSTER and THE BUTLER, but he finally enjoyed a bit of a career resurgence with his acclaimed, Emmy-nominated turn as the defendant on FX's 2016 limited series AMERICAN CRIME STORY: THE PEOPLE VS. O.J. SIMPSON. With the sleazy New Orleans noir BAYOU CAVIAR, the 51-year-old Gooding not only stars but makes his writing and directing debut and, right on schedule, the momentum of his PEOPLE VS. O.J. SIMPSON comeback comes to a screeching halt. Over-plotted and unfocused, the absurd BAYOU CAVIAR has some potentially interesting ideas and intriguing twists, but Gooding and co-writer Eitan Gorlin just can't pull it together, the film tripping over itself with a surplus of extraneous characters and go-nowhere subplots that are abandoned as soon as they're introduced.
Gooding is Rodney Jones, a one-time Olympic silver-medalist boxer who's fallen on hard times and is now a bouncer at a New Orleans club. The club's douchebag manager Rafi (Sam Thakur) mouths off to the owner one too many times, and when that owner is powerful Russian crime boss Yuri (Richard Dreyfuss), it's inevitable that Rafi is killed and his body chopped up and fed to the 50 alligators kept in a giant pond at Yuri's compound. Now in the non-negotiable employ of Yuri, Rodney is given an assignment: stage some incriminating photos of Isaac (Gregg Bello), the lawyer son-in-law of Yuri's Jewish attorney Schlomo (Ken Lerner). The aging Schlomo wants to retire to Israel with his wife and has been preparing Isaac to take over his duties, but Yuri only trusts Schlomo and doesn't want to lose him. In the meantime, Rodney makes the acquaintance of Kat (Lia Marie Johnson, who has a strong resemblance to Miley Cyrus, which might've been inspired casting if she wasn't way out of this film's price range), a young woman who lives with her shut-in, bayou trash mother and green card-seeking Mexican stepdad and dreams of being the next Kardashian-esque reality TV/social media star. Brainstorming for a way to put Kat on the map, Rodney talks his photographer friend Nic (Famke Janssen), who has a history of being sexually inappropriate with her clients, into shooting a sex tape. They've got the perfect patsy with Isaac, who's introduced pouting when his pregnant wife doesn't want to have sex, and who happens to be Kat's mother's landlord. Kat ends up seducing Isaac and Nic, hiding in Kat's closet, captures it all on video, but no one involved--Rodney, Nic, or Isaac--is aware that Kat is only 16 years old.
Yuri wants the tape but all hell breaks loose with a series of double-crosses--including Kat's stepdad trying to blackmail Isaac (which requires him stealing Nic's laptop in one of the most laughably contrived scenes in recent memory)--and time-killing plot detours, like Katherine McPhee as a married woman having a torrid lesbian fling with Nic, which serves no purpose other than Gooding wanting to see McPhee and Janssen make out. BAYOU CAVIAR sounds like it should be trashy fun, but Gooding treats the material much too seriously and with a far too heavy hand (Nic, complaining about a client accusing her of harassment, grumbles "Welcome to Trump's America" for no reason whatsoever). If Rodney and Nic were affable ne'er-do-wells haplessly getting in over their heads, say in a BIG LEBOWSKI kind-of way, BAYOU CAVIAR could've been an enjoyably tacky B-movie, but only Dreyfuss seems to recognize the material as the swamp-dwelling junk that it is, hamming it up with a garbled Russian accent in his few brief appearances. Gooding doesn't even have the sense to exploit the completely bonkers idea--straight out of Tobe Hooper's EATEN ALIVE--of Yuri having 50 flesh-hungry alligators on his property. If you've got an gator-infested pond and Dreyfuss chewing on a dubious accent, ready and willing to gorge himself on the scenery like it's a pot full of steaming borscht and you don't take advantage of that, then what's the point? (Unrated, 111 mins) THE SUPER (US - 2018)
Like Cuba Gooding Jr., Val Kilmer had it pretty good in the 1990s. His iconic performance as Doc Holliday in 1993's TOMBSTONE even gave him a catchphrase in "I'm your Huckleberry" that was quoted almost as much as Gooding's "Show me the money!" from JERRY MAGUIRE. And like Gooding, Kilmer's career precipitously nosedived with a series of box-office flops like AT FIRST SIGHT, RED PLANET, THE SALTON SEA, WONDERLAND, and SPARTAN. But unlike Gooding, who seems like a genuinely good guy and remained well-liked by his peers even as his star dimmed, the abrasive Kilmer torched almost every bridge on his way down, with his mercurial, bullying behavior on the set of 1996's THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU the stuff of Hollywood legend, and so beyond the pale that even Marlon Brando--no stranger to causing all sorts of calamity and hostility on a movie set--had to step up and tell his younger co-star to take it down a notch. Like Gooding, Kilmer has spent the bulk of the 2000s and onward lost in the world of straight-to-DVD paycheck gigs, their paths inevitably crossing in 2009's HARDWIRED. Luck didn't seem to be on Kilmer's side when he did manage to land a major-studio job--he proved surprisingly adept at comedy in Shane Black's 2005 masterpiece KISS KISS BANG BANG, and he was fun as megalomaniacal supervillain Dieter Von Cunth in 2010's MACGRUBER, but Warner Bros barely released KISS KISS and nobody went to see MACGRUBER. Around 2006, Kilmer began appearing in some truly awful films (PLAYED, MOSCOW ZERO, THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, AMERICAN COWSLIP, and several ill-advised collaborations with one-time BFF 50 Cent) and was as relentlessly busy as Nicolas Cage is today. But his appearances at your nearest Redbox kiosk tapered off around 2014 and speculation about his health became a popular tabloid subject after he was repeatedly seen in public with large, bulky scarves covering his neck. In 2017, after repeatedly denying rumors that he was gravely ill, Kilmer finally fessed up and revealed that he'd been battling throat cancer for two years. His voice reduced to a raspy whisper, Kilmer returned to acting with a small role in the 2017 bomb THE SNOWMAN, unconvincingly and distractingly dubbed by someone who sounded nothing like him.
Given the condition of his voice, it's likely that the now-59-year-old Kilmer will be dubbed in all future projects going forward (he's in the TOP GUN sequel currently in production), much like the beloved British actor Jack Hawkins in the last decade of his career, when throat cancer robbed him of his voice and actors Charles Gray and Robert Rietty were called upon to expertly mimic him until his death in 1973. As in THE SNOWMAN, the person dubbing Kilmer in THE SUPER makes no effort to sound like him, giving him a thick Ukrainian accent as a voodoo-practicing building super in a Manhattan high-rise. Notable as a rare big-screen (or, least VOD) project for producer and LAW & ORDER creator Dick Wolf, THE SUPER stars Patrick John Flueger (of Wolf's NBC series CHICAGO P.D.) as Phil, a widower ex-cop who quit the force following his wife's death in a fire so he could take care of their daughters, Violet (Taylor Richardson), now 14 and rebelling, and Rose (Mattea Marie Conforti), now 7 and a daddy's girl. Phil gets a job as a super at the building, working with weirdo Walter (Kilmer), who spends a lot of time chanting in the basement and creeping around Rose, and ladies man Julio (Yul Vazquez), whose services go above and beyond the janitorial for some of the more attractive female residents.
Building manager Mr. Johnson (Paul Ben-Victor) is doing his best to ignore the string of disappearances from the high-rise, and the cop in Phil is sure that Walter is behind it, even framing him by planting evidence--the handle of a cane belonging to an elderly tenant who's gone missing--in his apartment. But there's clearly something more going on than a mere serial killer, including Phil suffering from horrific dreams of the victims, Rose repeatedly wandering off in a trance and staring at the boiler, and the possibility that obvious red herring Walter's chants and spells are being deployed to ward off something supernatural. Written by John L. McLaughlin (BLACK SWAN) and directed by German filmmaker Stephan Rick, THE SUPER opens big with a very nicely-done 13-minute prologue that could function as a stand-alone short film, and after establishing Kilmer's Walter as a total creep in what's shaping up to be a throwback to a '90s "(blank) from Hell" thriller, it pulls the rug out from under you, especially with a third-act twist so ridiculous in its Shyamalanian chutzpah that you can't help but shrug and roll with it. It's not necessarily a very good movie, and the ending lands on the side of unsatisfying, but it has enough good moments to qualify it as decent guilty pleasure material, and it's twisty enough that it probably would've been a huge hit in theaters 15-20 years ago. (R, 89 mins)
This fact-based chronicle of future tech entrepreneur and ecological activist Yossi Ghinsberg's harrowing three weeks spent lost in the uncharted jungles of Bolivia in 1981 provides a chance for Daniel Radcliffe to give it everything he's got and he certainly runs with it. Looking to see the world after serving three years in the Israeli military, Tel Aviv-born Yossi upsets his parents by not going to university, but he's a wandering, curious soul who does what he must do. After venturing through Alaska and down into the States, with stops in NYC and Vegas, Yossi ends up in Bolivia where he meets Swedish tourist Marcus Stamm (Joel Jackson) and noted American hiker and photographer Kevin Gale (Alex Russell). A chance encounter with Austrian adventurer and treasure hunter Karl Ruprechter (Thomas Kretschmann) leads to the quartet venturing deep into uncharted territory in the foreboding Bolivian jungle on a trip they'll soon regret taking. An infection in Marcus' feet slows them down, but after building a raft and attempting to travel via river, increased tensions and the discovery that Karl may not be what he claims to be have them turning against each other as much as they're fighting the forces of nature. Hopelessly lost, Marcus and Karl decide to hike their way back to civilization while Kevin and Yossi proceed along the river on the raft. The raft is destroyed in a dangerous stretch of rapids and Kevin and Yossi are separated. So begins Yossi's three-week journey into the heart of darkness, with a useless map and delirium sending him in circles, battling the elements, fungal infections, a persistent parasite, red ants, and quicksand.
Sporting a convincing Israeli accent, Radcliffe looks like he went to hell and back shooting this thing, but director Greg McLean (WOLF CREEK, ROGUE, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT) keeps things moving at a detrimentally glacial pace, and by the third act, gets totally sidetracked with Yossi's flashbacks, hallucinations, and random Jesus Christ poses. Based on Ghinsberg's memoir, JUNGLE admirably doesn't sugarcoat its characters and their passive-aggressive treatment of Marcus, and is appropriately grueling and unflinching (though as icky as the parasite-extraction scene is, readers of the memoir may wonder why they left out the bit where Yossi lands ass-first on a sharp pole, penetrating and severely injuring his rectal area), but McLean meanders all over the place, torn between making a Werner Herzog homage and a standard survivalist adventure, and coming up short at both ends. Still, Radcliffe fans will definitely want to check it out, but they'll probably end up wishing his work was showcased in a better movie. (R, 115 mins)
THE SHOW
(US/UK - 2017)
THE SHOW wants to be a blistering takedown of reality TV, but it has no idea how satire works, taking its place alongside AMERICAN VIOLENCE as the most embarrassingly heavy-handed film of 2017. After a rejected woman on a BACHELOR-like reality show kills the bride and groom and turns the gun on herself on live TV, smarmy host Adam Rogers (Josh Duhamel, sporting the douchiest haircut you'll ever see) pitches a new show to his boss (Famke Janssen as Faye Dunaway) called THIS IS YOUR DEATH (the film's original title when it played the festival circuit), where contestants come up with various elaborate ways to commit suicide in front of a live studio audience and millions watching on TV, with the winner's designated survivors getting a huge payday. Meanwhile, hard-working family man Mason (Giancarlo Esposito, who also directed) has fallen on hard times and works two jobs--one as a janitor and the other as a dishwasher at a posh restaurant--and ends up losing both of them in the same night (the dishwashing one because he sees Rogers sitting at the bar and criticizes THIS IS YOUR DEATH, prompting dickhead Rogers to complain to the manager). With his wife on his case, his disabled son needing new crutches, his bills mounting, no job prospects, and close to his breaking point thanks to the deck that the script has stacked against him, Mason decides to audition for the season finale promising $1 million to the winner, and of course, he makes the cut.
Approached with a sardonic, DEATH RACE 2000 or NETWORK attitude, THE SHOW could've been the bitter, bile-soaked screed that the subject deserves. But it comes off as obnoxiously pushy and utterly humorless wokesploitation, taking itself completely seriously, and Duhamel's impossibly smug caricature of a TV host is hard to take after a while (imagine how subversive this could've been simply by casting someone like Ryan Seacrest as Rogers). The only thing that saves THE SHOW from total oblivion is a genuinely effective performance by Sarah Wayne Callies (THE WALKING DEAD) as Rogers' sister, a nurse and recovering addict whose life takes a downward spiral thanks to her brother's notoriety as the man behind the most controversial show in America. THE SHOW gets more sanctimonious and full of itself as it goes along, pointing fingers at everyone, from Rogers' increasingly monstrous behavior to the ghoulish, rubbernecking audience that can't get enough (there's one guy holding a sign that says "Show Me the Bloody") and Mason on live TV shouting things like "WHY ARE YOU WATCHING THIS?" and "TURN IT OFF!!!" Considering Esposito is the director, that may be the most accidentally satirical thing THE SHOW has going for it. (R, 104 mins)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE (US - 2017) Directed by Mark Cullen. Written by Mark Cullen and Robb Cullen. Cast: Bruce Willis, John Goodman, Jason Momoa, Thomas Middleditch, Famke Janssen, Adam Goldberg, Kal Penn, Wood Harris, Stephanie Sigman, Christopher McDonald, David Arquette, Elisabeth Rohm, Jessica Gomes, Maurice Compte, Ken Davitian, Billy Gardell, Tyga, Victor Ortiz, Sol Rodriguez, Sammi Rotibi, Adrian Martinez, Ron Funches. (Unrated, 94 mins) While it seems like a good idea for former actor Bruce Willis to take a break from his landmark "Phoning in his performance from his hotel room" series of Lionsgate/Grindstone VOD titles by actually legitimately headlining a movie again, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE shows he needn't have bothered. Unceremoniously dumped on VOD by RLJ Entertainment after two years on the shelf, VENICE is an episodic shaggy dog story with Willis as Steve Ford, the only licensed private eye in Venice Beach. He's a disgraced LAPD detective (as shown in a framed newspaper headline on a wall in his house, which seems like an odd memento to display) who ambles about from case to case and spends his plentiful downtime beach-bumming and skateboarding. He's got a protege in young John (Thomas Middleditch), who also serves as the narrator (he gets the first lines of the film over an establishing shot: "Ah...Venice Beach...") and gets involved in various ongoing cases that Steve is barely working: a missing young Samoan woman named Nola (Jessica Gomes), who's found and promptly hops into bed with Steve, which leads to her angry brothers chasing Steve, who makes a getaway by skateboarding around Venice Beach nude; an artist known as "the Banksy of Venice" who keeps spray-painting sexually explicit graffiti on an apartment building owned by scheming businessman Lou the Jew (Adam Goldberg); and an auto repossession involving powerful drug lord Spyder (Jason Momoa) that ends up propelling the central story. Seeking revenge on Steve, Spyder's guys burglarize his sister's (Famke Janssen) house and steal Steve's beloved Parson Russell terrier Buddy. When Spyder's girlfriend Lupe (Stephanie Sigman) runs off with Buddy and a shipment of Spyder's cocaine, Steve reluctantly agrees to recover the coke for him if it means finding Buddy.
Bruce Willis at the exact moment he was told
he'd have to leave his hotel room to work on this film
Some of the plot threads come together, but most don't. VENICE feels like a semi-improvised series pilot that got rejected by Seeso and Crackle. It's a mix of KEANU (which was in production at the same time) and a quirky detective story with shades of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, THE BIG BOUNCE, and INHERENT VICE, but with no chemistry between the actors and 99% of the jokes landing with a thud. The LEBOWSKI aspirations are apparent in the casting of John Goodman as Steve's best friend Dave Jones ("No, not the legend from the Monkees," explains SILICON VALLEY's ever-punchable Middleditch), a surf shop owner who's being taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife (Elisabeth Rohm) and comes across like a morose, self-pitying, sad-sack version of Walter Sobchak. It's a character that plays to exactly none of Goodman's strengths, and you know you're in a bad movie when John Goodman can't make it better. There's also Wood Harris as a money-laundering crime boss, David Arquette getting prominent billing for one shot of skating past Steve and shouting "We're putting the band back together!," Kal Penn as a convenience store clerk, BORAT's Ken Davitian as a ruthless loan shark who promises a "Belarus Bowtie" to anyone who doesn't pay him back within a day ("You cut off balls, stuff them down throat, you slit throat, and..." "They pop out like a bowtie," Steve says, echoing a line you'll already hear coming), and Christopher McDonald, cast radically against type as "Christopher McDonald," in this case an asshole real estate mogul trying to sabotage a lucrative deal for Lou the Jew.
Though he's in nearly every scene, Willis, whose level of commitment to his craft can be ranked somewhere between "senioritis" and "Seagal," coasts through this with a half-assed smirk and a visible ambivalence. He's always been good with wisecracks but rarely adept at comedy past the days of MOONLIGHTING and Blake Edwards' BLIND DATE, back in 1987 when he was young and still gave a shit. At 62, Willis is at the age when he should be tackling serious work and thinking about his legacy rather than slumming through D-grade VOD thrillers and unfunny comedies for a paycheck he doesn't even need. It's hard to believe he'd want to reunite with the sibling writing team of Mark & Robb Cullen, best known for their TV work (LAS VEGAS) but also the writers of the awful 2010 comedy COP OUT, Kevin Smith's buddy-cop movie homage that stood as the director's worst film until YOGA HOSERS. Willis hated making COP OUT and infamously clashed with Smith, so his beef must not have been with the Cullens, but VENICE is ample proof that they aren't exactly on their way finding sponsors for a membership at the Friars Club. While there is one legitimately funny line (a throwaway from a bartender when a nude Steve skateboards across the bar: "Steve, you can't have a gun in here!"), the pacing is laborious (it takes 40 minutes for Buddy to go missing), the credits riddled with careless gaffes (Elisabeth Rohm's name is spelled correctly in the closing credits but misspelled "Elizabeth" in the opening, and the closing credits show Goldberg's character as "Low the Jew"), and it goes without saying that the best performance comes from the dog. Buddy deserves better than ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE.
TAKEN 3 (France/US - 2015) Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast: Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Don Harvey, Dylan Bruno, Sam Spruell, Andrew Howard, Jonny Weston, Al Sapienza, Wallace Langham, Steve Coulter. (PG-13, 109 mins)
With no one else in his family left to be abducted by evil Albanian human traffickers and their vengeful relatives, retired CIA special ops badass Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) channels his inner Richard Kimble when he returns to his apartment, picks up a knife on the floor and finds the dead body of his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) just as the cops barge in and he looks guilty as hell. A fleeing Mills takes advantage of his extensive knowledge of the layout of every home in the neighborhood, eventually evading his pursuers via a secret door in someone's garage that leads to the L.A. River. Mills goes on a city-wide rampage to prove his innocence--causing millions of dollars of damage in the process--while being doggedly pursued by Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard--er, I mean, Detective Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), who demonstrates his eccentricity and intelligence by constantly twirling a knight chess piece between his fingers and marveling at the wily Mills' ability to evade capture.
NEESON!
TAKEN 3 is the least and hopefully last of this Luc Besson action franchise. Neeson stumbled into a second career as an aging action hero with the surprise success of the first TAKEN back in 2009. That film seems like gritty neo-realism when held up against the events that unfold in TAKEN 3, in which everyone involved is simply going through the motions, starting with Neeson. The actor's seemingly effortless gravitas just fizzles here, and for the first time in his action-star phase, Neeson looks bored and completely checked out. One can't blame him, considering the idiocy of Besson's and Robert Mark Kamen's script and the abysmal direction of Besson protege and returning TAKEN 2 helmer Olivier Megaton, who previously steered another solid action series to its nadir with 2008's TRANSPORTER 3. It's bad enough that the story is essentially a ripoff of THE FUGITIVE (with one of the guilty parties missing a pinky instead of an arm), but TAKEN 3 is dumb even by Besson standards. There's one sequence where Mills' daughter Kim (31-year-old Maggie Grace, still apparently playing 20 or 21), who jokes about inheriting her father's "OCD gene," is on her way to school and makes her morning stop at a carryout for a peach yogurt drink (always grabbing the fourth drink from the front) only this time, there's a note from her on-the-run dad on the fourth container back saying "Drink this now." It's been drugged with something to make her sick a bit later, but he did so in order to get her to leave her class and head to the restroom to vomit, where he's waiting with an antidote, so he can talk to her. Is there some reason he couldn't just put a note on the container telling her to meet him in the ladies' room near her class? Why spike the yogurt smoothie and deliberately cause gastrointestinal distress? What if she didn't make it to the restroom? It just seems like more work than necessary. I'd say Mills was overthinking it, but there's absolutely no way that "overthinking" and "TAKEN 3" should be mentioned in the same sentence.
NEESON!
The plot is as standard-issue and by-the-numbers as it gets and a better script would've provided some more back-and-forth phone banter, mind games, and grudging respect between Neeson's Mills and Whitaker's Dotzler. Both actors are capable of more than TAKEN 3 allows them to do or cares for them to attempt. Of course Mills is being framed. Of course some stock Russian mobsters--led by ruthless ex-Spetsnaz killing machine Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell)--are behind it all. And of course it has something to do with Malankov seeking revenge for some shady and collapsed business deal with Lenore's asshole husband Stewart, now played by Janssen's HEMLOCK GROVE co-star Dougray Scott (replacing Xander Berkeley), bland and lifeless here and looking like he still hasn't recovered from losing the role of Wolverine in 2000's X-MEN to second-choice Hugh Jackman after being stuck working on reshoots for the behind-schedule MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II. As dumb and uninspired as TAKEN 3 is (don't miss Mills driving a car down an elevator shaft), it's really Megaton's directing style that's the biggest deal-breaker. There is no scene that Megaton can't chop into nanosecond increments that would give Michael Bay a bout of vertigo. Action sequences are just a blurry smear of colors and quick cuts. Featuring three nausea-inducing car chases that make GETAWAY look like THE SEVEN-UPS, TAKEN 3's action is lost in a headachy haze of CGI vehicle flips and shaky-cam incoherence, much of which seems to be orchestrated around Neeson's stunt double. There are a few shots where you can tell Neeson is involved (the brawl in the carryout, for example), but most of the time, there's some alarmingly Seagal-esque chicanery going on where you see Mills fighting but not his face, as Megaton cuts to a close-up of a grimacing Neeson before cutting back to Mills fighting, as "Neeson" is either shot from behind or his head is out of the frame. On one hand, sure, at 62, Neeson's not a young man anymore, but in his other action movies, he's made a point of doing as much as he could. One can hardly blame him for not caring enough about the quality of TAKEN 3 or rightfully concluding that it wasn't worth risking injury on something so subpar. TAKEN was a surprise, lightning-in-a-bottle blockbuster that became a modern action classic. TAKEN 2 was an unnecessary but stupidly enjoyable victory lap. TAKEN 3 shows the franchise in a downward spiral worthy of the last two DIE HARD movies and is just no fun for anyone, from the actors to the audience. Liam Neeson is the man, and in films like THE GREY and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, he brings a "thinking man's asskicker" complexity to his roles, and in something like NON-STOP, he manages to overcome the obstacles and still deliver a strong, convincing performance. But even Neeson can't conceal his TAKEN burnout with his half-hearted clock-punch of a performance here. Perhaps it's time for him to use the very particular set of skills that he's acquired over a long career and move on to something new.
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)
