POUND OF FLESH (Hong Kong/Canada/China/US/Monaco - 2015)
In a solid performance, Jean-Claude Van Damme does his best to salvage this overwrought, heavy-handed actioner, but he can't overcome a terrible script by Joshua James, uninspired direction by Ernie Barbarash that relies too much on quick-cuts and shaky cam in the action sequences, and some embarrassingly bush-league CGI and greenscreen work that's inexcusable in 2015. JCVD is Deacon Lyle, a former kidnap-and-rescue black ops specialist who arrives in Manila, is promptly roofied by the seductive Ana (Charlotte Peters) and wakes up in his hotel room the next morning with an envelope full of money and a fistful of painkillers, but minus a kidney. This poses a problem since he was in Manila to donate a kidney to his deathly ill niece Isabella (Adele Baughan). Deacon and his widower brother George (John Ralston), a minister having a crisis of faith, have some bad blood between them, the cause being something the filmmakers think is a big reveal later on but is obvious almost instantly. Desperate to save his niece's life, Deacon goes on a rampage across Manila to recover the organ, almost like TAKEN if Liam Neeson's kidney was abducted instead of his daughter. He gets help from former enemy and now trusted friend Kung ('80s Cannon stalwart Aki Aleong, credited as "Leonard Gonzales") as well as Ana who, being your typical Hooker with a Heart of Gold, isn't really a bad person but was forced into it by her vicious pimp (Philippe Joly), who was paid off by Drake (the late Darren Shahlavi, who died during production of his next teaming with Van Damme, a KICKBOXER reboot due out in 2016), who orchestrated the kidney heist at the behest of his rich and powerful employer.
With JCVD gouging out someone's eye with the corner of a hardcover Bible and shouting things like "Last chance...where's my kidney?" this could've been goofy fun if James' script wasn't so awful. An action movie with a crazy Belgian in search of a missing vital organ shouldn't be this depressing. The film really gets bogged down with George's endless, melodramatic hand-wringing over taking a life to save a life. POUND OF FLESH is the kind of film where it's not enough for George to question if taking part in Deacon's ruthless pursuit of his kidney is for the greater good and saving Isabella at the expense of the person who had it stolen. No, he has to pause and look at his hands--which literally have blood on them--as a cross dangles from his necklace, forcing him to ponder What I've Become. It's also the kind of film where George has a clandestine meeting with a computer hacker and they have to speak in clumsy exposition that laboriously lays out their shared history that the characters should already know ("You testified on my behalf...if I'm caught near a computer, I go back to prison!") despite the urgency of the meeting. It's the kind of movie where the protagonists are on the run and have nowhere to go, only to have George chime in with a convenient "I have a cabin near here," and when Deacon and Kung desperately need to scrape money together to get the information and weapons they need, only much later, after the Hooker with a Heart of Gold throws in her own $20,000 to help Deacon, does George say "I have $50,000 in this account...here's the password," and no one says "Thanks, asshole...we coulda used it earlier." The climax involves Deacon somehow planting explosives all around the exterior and interior of Drake's employer's fortress-like mansion--it's never explained how he gets around an army of bodyguards patrolling the perimeter. And the film has so little use for Ana that while gunfire and explosions that look like they came from apps on Barbarash's iPhone are going off inside and outside of the mansion, she just patiently waits in Kung's van, right there in the driveway. It's a combination of idiotic plotting and ham-fisted seriousness that derails the cheap-looking POUND OF FLESH. Less George angst and more Bible eye-gouging by Deacon would've been a good thing. Though the 54-year-old Van Damme is relying on obvious stunt doubles a little more than he did as a younger man (he does do his signature splits move while being dragged by a car, which is pretty cool), as an actor, he gives it his all and is quite good, especially in the closing scenes. It's too bad he's stuck in a badly-written and very ugly film that often appears to be unfinished. JCVD deserves better. (R, 104 mins)
THE FORGER (US - 2015)
THE FORGER finds John Travolta in one of the frequent lulls of his notoriously up-and-down career and is his second consecutive film to both a) go straight to VOD, and b) feature him with ridiculous facial hair. 2013's little-seen KILLING SEASON was hardly worthy of pairing a chinstrap-bearded Travolta and a slumming Robert De Niro for the first time, and while THE FORGER isn't terrible, it's also not even remotely noteworthy other than for the sight of 61-year-old Travolta sporting a velcro dot of a soul patch and a flowing, rock star wig that looks in danger of sliding off at any moment. Ray Cutter (Travolta) comes from a long line of small-time Boston criminals. He's also a master art forger ten months away from being paroled. He has neighborhood crime boss Keegan (Anson Mount) get him sprung from the joint early so he can be with his cancer-stricken Will (Tye Sheridan of MUD and JOE), who has an inoperable, stage IV brain-stem tumor. Will's spent the last four years living with his crotchety but tough-loving Irish grandfather Joseph (Christopher Plummer) and Ray wants to be able to spend what little time he can bonding with his son. Keegan has other ideas, especially since Ray owes him a favor: forge a Monet painting and plot a heist to swap it with the real thing at the Museum of Fine Arts. Ray's also being hounded by an ambitious FBI agent (Abigail Spencer) who's looking to bust Keegan, who needs the Monet to satisfy a debt to a ruthless Latin American cartel boss. In between working on the forgery and plotting the heist, the three Cutter men bond as Will gets sicker by the day.
Directed by British TV vet Philip Martin and scripted by Richard D'Ovidio (THE CALL, THE DAMNED), THE FORGER is uneven, to say the least. It tries to be a gritty crime drama, low-key character piece, crowd-pleasing tearjerker, and One Last Job heist thriller and doesn't fully succeed at any of them. The heist itself is ludicrous and the broad performances by Travolta and the usually infallible Plummer don't help. Travolta's cartoonish accent isn't really Baaah-ston and instead sounds like he opted to dust off his Vinnie Barbarino voice, while Plummer seems on the verge of breaking into a gravel-voiced rendition of "Danny Boy" at any moment and falls into the trap that so many geriatric actors do in modern cinema: hamming it up and dropping a ton of F-bombs. Jennifer Ehle, a great actress who should be much better-known than she is, does some good work as Ray's drug-addict ex-wife, who walked out when Will was a small child. She briefly re-enters the picture when Will wants to see her one last time, and the day they spend together, with Will awkwardly but politely going along with her obvious lies about being successful and living in NYC instead of popping pills in a trailer park. It's one of the rare instances when THE FORGER feels genuine. The other is at the very end, with the empty look in Ray's eyes showing the kind of pain and heartbreak that Travolta knows all too well offscreen. In that moment, Travolta brings his own personal grief to the forefront and, if only briefly, manages to overcome the soul patch and whatever it is on his head. (R, 96 mins)
SWORD OF VENGEANCE (UK - 2015)
A sluggish GAME OF THRONES and VIKINGS-inspired look at the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, SWORD OF VENGEANCE is a dull, dreary sword & splatter epic with a story credit for Matthew Read, who wrote the equally drab HAMMER OF THE GODS and helped Nicolas Winding Refn script the Viking saga VALHALLA RISING. SWORD has tyrannical William the Conquerer flunky The Earl of Durant (Karel Roden) and his two sniveling sons Romain (Edward Akrout) and Artus (Gianni Giardanelli) ruling the Saxons in their region with an iron fist. The Saxons are given hope in the form of corn-rowed, nomadic, lone-wolf warrior Shadow Walker (Joel Kinnaman lookalike Stanley Weber), who helps lead their depleted forces in revolt against the Durant reign of terror. Loaded with desaturated cinematography that looks sepia-bordering-on-black & white and copious amounts of CGI and slo-mo battle scenes, SWORD OF VENGEANCE is about as forgettable as they come, with lifeless direction by Jim Weedon, tired action sequences that are almost entirely presented in ultra-stylized, 300-like slo-mo, and absolutely no character development or chemistry among its mumbling cast, especially Weber's Shadow Walker, one of the most boring and charisma-deficient heroes in recent memory. Roden, a veteran big-screen villain, is sleepwalking through his performance, hindered by some really unconvincing burn makeup stretched across his face. An empty and incoherent mess with nothing to recommend other than an occasionally interesting electronic score by Steven Hilton, SWORD OF VENGEANCE also features Annabelle Wallis, the late Dave Legeno (best known for SNATCH and as Fenir Greyback in the HARRY POTTER films), who was found dead from heat exhaustion in Death Valley in summer 2014, and Ed Skrein, one-time Daario Naharis on GAME OF THRONES (he was replaced by Michiel Huisman) and star of the upcoming reboot THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED. (Unrated, 87 mins)
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)
