THE HIGHWAYMEN (US - 2019) Directed by John Lee Hancock. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Mann, Kim Dickens, W. Earl Brown, William Sadler, David Furr, Joshua Caras, Dean Denton, Jason Davis, David Born, Brian F. Durkin, Jake Ethan Dashnaw, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert. (R, 132 mins) Chronicling the notorious Depression-era Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killing spree from the law enforcement side, the Netflix Original film THE HIGHWAYMEN centers on legendary retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955), played by Denver Pyle in Arthur Penn's trailblazing 1967 classic BONNIE AND CLYDE. As great as that film is, it played a little fast and loose with the facts, most egregiously when it came to its depiction of Hamer, so much so that his widow filed a defamation of character lawsuit and won an out-of-court settlement in 1971. Hamer is presented as a bit of a buffoonish, walrus-mustached punchline in BONNIE AND CLYDE, particularly when he's captured and humiliated by the title duo. In truth, Hamer never saw Bonnie and Clyde in person until the moment he and his posse ambushed them on the side of a rural Louisiana country road and took them down in a hail of bullets. That's the Hamer portrayed here by Kevin Costner, who's introduced in 1934 barely tolerating a mostly forced retirement after the Texas Rangers were disbanded years earlier for their often lawless tactics. When Texas' "lady governor" Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates) exhausts all other options for bringing Bonnie and Clyde down, she reluctantly agrees, at the suggestion of Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to make Hamer a special "highway agent" assigned to essentially hunt down and exterminate the pair.
Joining Hamer is his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), now an unemployed drunk living in a foreclosed home with his daughter and grandson. Both men are haunted by the violence of their past and dealing with it in their own ways, and Hamer is hobbled by chronic pain from an estimated 16 bullets still remaining in his body from various skirmishes over the years. Their biggest obstacle in the pursuit is dealing with the movie star-like following that Bonnie and Clyde have with the general public, excited by their Robin Hood tactics of robbing banks at a time when everyone is in dire financial straits, but they seem to turn a blind eye to their brutality and the dead bodies left in their wake. It's even strongly suggested that one naive young deputy helping them (Thomas Mann), a childhood friend of the pair, may have even tipped them off about a plot to nab them at the home of Clyde's father (William Sadler).
Right down to its slightly overlong 132-minute length, THE HIGHWAYMEN has the leisurely feel and pace of a post-UNFORGIVEN Clint Eastwood film, which isn't surprising considering that director John Lee Hancock (THE BLIND SIDE) scripted two Eastwood works from that era (1993's A PERFECT WORLD, which starred Costner, and 1997's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL). As written by John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, YOUNG GUNS II, THUNDERHEART), THE HIGHWAYMEN has the comfortable, familiar feel of the kind of uncomplicated procedural that your dad would enjoy, and I mean that in a good way. Aside from setting the record straight on the distinguished career of Hamer and paying lip service to the idea of fawning over dubious celebrities (America's women make Bonnie an inadvertent fashionista by copying her clothing and hairstyle, while 20,000 people attended the pair's funerals, mourning them like heroes), THE HIGHWAYMEN is content with familiarity of well-worn cliches and character arcs, like Hamer's devoted wife (Kim Dickens) just wishing he'd stay home and paint the kitchen but acknowledging "I knew what you were when I married you," Hamer flagrantly disregarding Ma's "stay in Texas" orders and heading out of his jurisdiction, a haggard Gault seeing the pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde as the standard-issue One Last Shot at Redemption, and the usual banjos-and-fiddle soundtrack that's required by law for any crime drama set during the Great Depression or in Dust Bowl migrant towns. The most unexpected decision that Hancock and Fusco make is keeping the faces of the villains largely offscreen, with Clyde (Edward Bossert) seen fleetingly during speeding getaways and Bonnie (Emily Brobst) represented mostly by her dragging, injured left leg.
In some ways, Hamer and Gault almost feel like castoffs from THE WILD BUNCH, stuck in a modern era they don't quite understand and don't want to. Hamer has adapted better than Gault, who has no idea that the FBI can wiretap party lines, which becomes an amusing running gag throughout the film. Obviously, THE HIGHWAYMEN isn't on the level of BONNIE AND CLYDE, but it's reasonably entertaining and the stars are terrific together. It's easy to see Costner's Hamer as a morose, older version of his earnest, "Let's do some good!" Eliot Ness way back in 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES, and looking past the actor's ill-fated hubris years that gave us WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN, it's been a pleasure to watch him age into a top-notch character actor in his 60s, where he's carved himself a niche as the Robert Duvall of his generation.
CRIMINAL (US - 2016) Directed by Ariel Vroman. Written by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. Cast: Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Eve, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Pitt, Jordi Molla, Antje Troue, Scott Adkins, Amaury Nolasco, Colin Salmon, Natalie Burn, Lara Decaro. (R, 113 mins) Your tolerance for the high-concept sci-fi espionage actioner CRIMINAL is dependent upon a number of things: how much you can suspend your disbelief, how much you can stomach graphically brutal and gleefully over-the-top violence, and how perversely fascinating you find serious, award-caliber actors slumming it in a trashy genre offering from Cannon cover band Millennium (I'd recommend running the Cannon intro on your own as the movie starts to get the maximum effect). To Millennium's credit, they brought their A-game to this, opting to actually shoot a London-set story in London instead of their usual unconvincing Bulgarian backlot. Even their go-to CGI clown crew at Worldwide FX seems to have admirably stepped up to the challenge and produced possibly the best splatter and explosions they've ever done. At a cursory glance, CRIMINAL has "straight-to-VOD" written all over it, but with a wild script by the late Douglas Cook (he died in July 2015) and David Weisberg, the same duo who wrote THE ROCK (Michael Bay's one legitimately awesome movie), assured direction by the promising Ariel Vroman (the little-seen 2013 mob movie THE ICEMAN), and an absurdly overqualified cast, CRIMINAL ultimately transcends its dubious first impression and if you're approaching it in the right mood, ends up a hell of a lot more enjoyable than it has any business being.
When London-based CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds, who's all over the trailers but not in the print ads or the poster) is tortured and killed by international terrorist Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Molla--was Rade Serbedzija busy?), his London CIA bureau chief Quaker Wells (a ranting Gary Oldman) needs vital info Pope had but has no way of obtaining it. Enter Dr. Micah Franks (Tommy Lee Jones), who's spent 18 years working on the transplanting of memories but is still five years away from human trials. Wells decides that time is now when the dead Pope's brain is kept alive and Franks--short for Frankenstein?--springs Jerico Stewart (Kevin Costner) from a maximum security hellhole to be their guinea pig. Stewart, a psychotic, sociopathic, zero-remorse killing machine who feels no emotion and no pain thanks to a broken home and a childhood abuse incident where he suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of his enraged dad that caused his frontal lobe to stop forming at the age of ten, is flown to London and has Pope's memories injected into his brain. The experiment doesn't initially take, and despite the sympathetic Franks insisting Stewart needs more recovery time, an impatient Wells orders him terminated. Of course, Stewart ends up escaping custody and heading on a rampage across London when Pope's memories start materializing in his head. Stewart is alarmed to find that he can suddenly speak French (though he thinks it's Spanish) and has tastes for the finer things in life like lattes, but he's still Jerico Stewart and can't stop himself from killing innocent people in cold blood or beating the shit out of a pompous asshole in a coffee shop ("Who punches someone in a patisserie?" the outraged victim yells, in one of the many intentionally funny bits). With Wells and the CIA as well as Heimdahl's ruthless hit woman Elsa Mueller (Antje Troue) in hot pursuit for the information that is becoming clearer by the minute, Stewart eventually hides out with Pope's widow Jill (Gal Gadot), and feels genuine emotion for the first time when Pope's perceptive and impossibly cute daughter Emma (Lara Decaro) is nice to him. Stewart finally grows a conscience and decides to act on Pope's memories, which involved negotiating a CIA deal with hacker Jan Strook, aka "The Dutchman" (Michael Pitt), who has the ability to override all US military launch codes and intends to sell that info to the megalomaniacal Heimdahl, a crazed anarchist hell-bent on bringing down all of the world's governments.
Costner, introduced in chains with long hair and a madman beard like Sean Connery in THE ROCK and speaking in a guttural, Nick Nolte grumble, has never cut this loose onscreen before, whether he's hamming it up as the insane Stewart or bopping his head Roxbury-style as he steals a van and cruises around London looking for trouble. But when Stewart grows more human thanks to the gradual clarification of Pope's memories that trigger actual feeling within him, Costner gives Liam Neeson some serious competition in the "60-and-over asskicker" club by demonstrating acting chops that a Van Damme or a Dolph Lundgren wouldn't had this been a typical Millennium/NuImage offering. Jones remains low-key and somber and doesn't have much to do after the initial surgical procedure, and the same goes for Alice Eve, prominently billed in a thankless supporting role that gives her nothing to do. Likewise for DTV action hero Scott Adkins, who's in the whole movie as one of Wells' flunkies but is tragically underused, only getting a few "Yes, sir, whatever you say!"s to Oldman and no action scenes of his own (speaking of Adkins--while Vroman does a fine job, here's another larger-scale Millennium/NuImage project that would've been perfect for Isaac Florentine). With his hair flopping all over the place and froth forming in the corners of his mouth, Oldman works at two speeds here: irritable and apoplectic. He paces around what looks like a vacant BOURNE crisis suite as everyone watches monitors, waiting for just the right time to bellow "Find Jerico Stewart!" and "It's him! Let's go!" or, in his more introspective moments, "FUCK!" like a bloviating jackass who seems blithely unaware that he's got a ridiculous name like "Quaker Wells" (Adkins' character is listed as "Pete Greensleeves" in the credits, but I don't recall any of the agents working under Wells ever being referred to by name). CRIMINAL is total empty calorie junk food, but it's junk food of the highest caliber. Like sweets and snacks that really do nothing good for you, you just need them once in a while, and CRIMINAL scratches that '80s/'90s throwback itch not just with its ridiculous premise and hooky electronic score by Brian Tyler and Keith Power (yes, like nearly everything else these days, it's "Carpenter-esque"), but with the casting of real actors--I wonder if Costner, Oldman, and Jones did any JFK reminiscing between takes--to seal the deal.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (US - 2016) Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer. Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Tao Okamoto, Callan Mulvey, Harry Lennix, Christina Wren, Kevin Costner, Michael Shannon, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Ralph Lister, Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Michael Cassidy, voice of Patrick Wilson. (PG-13, 151 mins) There's no getting around the fact that the awkwardly-titled BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE is a disjointed, bloated mess that still feels incomplete even at two and a half hours (a three-hour, R-rated version will be released on Blu-ray in July, though I can't imagine that being much help). The reviews have been devastating and the toxic response from critics would lead some to believe that the film is some kind of cinematic Ebola. I'm not especially keen to engage in a round of "reviewing the reviewers," and some of the vicious reviews make their points in a professional, even-handed manner but it's obvious that a lot of the critics had their reviews pretty much written before they even saw the film. As if workshopping jokes for a Comedy Central roast of director Zack Snyder, many no doubt jotted down their snarky comments and nit-picky complaints and pithy zingers and constructed their reviews around them to fit the narrative that was constructed the moment the project was announced.
This is a recurring issue with the films of the much-maligned Snyder, a guy nobody had a problem with when his surprisingly solid 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD got good reviews and 2007's influential--for better or worse--300 became a surprise blockbuster. Then around the time he directed 2009's WATCHMEN, critics and internet fanboys decided it was time for him to pay because that was a treasured property that frankly, nobody could've done in a way that would've satisfied its most obsessive fans. 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, one of the strangest and most original major-studio, big-budget movies of the last decade, got eviscerated and Superman fans took it as a personal attack that he was chosen to helm 2013's MAN OF STEEL. The response to BVS is indicative of a recurring problem in today's film criticism: the pile-on. A Hitfix article listing 20 "baffling questions" that BVS "refused to answer" gets several of the details completely wrong. Did the author of that article watch the movie or were they watching how the Rotten Tomatoes percentage was dropping? Does the author know that an unanswered question isn't necessarily a "plot hole"? Is BVS a good movie? Eh, it has its moments, but it's OK at best. There's plenty of legitimate beefs with a lot of what's here. But is it as offensively godawful as you've been led to believe? Not even close. Nevertheless, the pile-on is the most intense since Ridley Scott's THE COUNSELOR, a film so unjustifiably lambasted ("Meet the worst movie ever made," crowed one particularly smug review) that its reputation improved and a cult following had formed before it even left theaters. So here's BVS, and like the villagers storming Castle Frankenstein, here's critics, fanboys, and message board mouth-breathers victoriously celebrating an imagined defeat--this had a $166 million opening, so it's not as if a movie like this depends on good reviews--with the tone being set by the "Sad Ben Affleck" viral sensation over the weekend.
Essentially a feature-length prologue to Warner Bros' DC Extended Universe franchise, BVS also functions as a reboot of the Christopher Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy and as a sequel to MAN OF STEEL (Nolan gets an exec producer credit here). It bites off more than it can chew taking on too many responsibilities, and it shows in the choppiness (Jena Malone was completely cut from this version of the film) and the frequently confusing developments. Opening with yet another replay of young Bruce Wayne witnessing the murder of his parents (Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan), the action cuts to MAN OF STEEL's climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Zod (Michael Shannon) and the destruction of Metropolis (played by Detroit, MI) witnessed on the street by Bruce Wayne (Affleck), who sees a Wayne Enterprise building collapse in yet more of the standard-issue 9/11 imagery. Blaming Superman for the mayhem, Wayne vows to bring down the Man of Steel with help from his faithful butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons). There's a lot of plot, usually involving a globe-trotting Lois Lane (Amy Adams) constantly getting into trouble and Superman bailing her out, and the evil plot of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, more on that shortly) to, well, get some Kryptonite from the bottom of the Indian Ocean and do something to revive Zod and take on Superman. It's never really clear why Luthor hates Superman, but he actually gets the edge on the Man of Steel when he kidnaps and threatens to kill Martha Kent (Diane Lane) if he doesn't kill Batman, which leads to the brief title showdown, followed by about 17 endings.
There's also Gal Gadot as Diana Prince, and it's hardly a spoiler at this point to mention she's Wonder Woman. First seen looking sleek and mysterious and crossing paths with Wayne at a Luthor fundraiser, Diana doesn't figure much into the story until Bruce figures out her long-buried secret and she ends up helping Batman and Superman take on a late-arriving, Luthor-generated villain in the climax. Gadot's first appearance as Wonder Woman doesn't take place until after the two-hour mark, but it's a highlight of the movie and she gets what's by far the biggest response from the audience, but the way she's shoehorned in is clunky. Speaking of clunky, Gadot is also integral to one of the film's clumsiest scenes, where she opens an e-mail with video files of future JUSTICE LEAGUE franchise players Aquaman (Jason Momoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) in a five-minute sequence that stops the movie cold and cumbersomely plays like Gal Gadot watching movie trailers on her laptop. Cavill looks the part and doesn't really do anything wrong as Superman, Adams is too smart an actress to play someone so perpetually helpless, and Affleck is an ineffectual Bruce Wayne/Batman, speaking in a dour monotone and mumbling a good chunk of the time. He's trying to go for that Christian Bale intensity but he honestly just looks bored. Others appear throughout: Irons as the most cynical and tech-savvy incarnation of Alfred yet to be seen (he functions more like Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox from the Nolan trilogy), Laurence Fishburne as a blustering Perry White, and Holly Hunter as the head of a Senate panel investigating Superman (another underdeveloped subplot that doesn't make much sense) as well as standing in the way of Luthor's master plan, but they don't really get to make an impression. Oh, and for some reason, Jimmy Olsen (Michael Cassidy) is now a covert CIA agent posing as a Daily Planet photographer. He's killed off early when he's made by terrorists, the first tip-off probably being that he was still using a camera with film in the year 2016.
For all its flaws--the messy structure, the inconsistent performances, the frequently ugly and smudgy look of the whole thing (closeups look really bad)--BVS is never dull and there are some spectacular action sequences and somewhat better CGI than the destruction porn that dominated the botched second half of MAN OF STEEL. The film's biggest obstacle, and one thing about which critics have been completely right, is the truly mind-bogglingly awful performance by Eisenberg, who plays Lex Luthor as an obnoxious, insufferable trust-fund brat. Eisenberg's whole approach to Luthor seems to have been to study Heath Ledger's Joker and filter it through his Mark Zuckerberg repertoire. He flails his arms, twitches, smirks, preens, poses, and breaks up and punctuates his sentences with "hmm"s like Deltoid in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. It's a grating, appalling, Razzie-ready spaz attack of a performance, one of the most off-putting and abrasively unpleasant in recent memory. Eisenberg is never convincing and never threatening, never coming off like a feared megalomaniacal villain but rather, an attention-seeking, spoiled little shit in dire need of a time-out.
BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE, has been universally panned but everybody's still going to see it. The sizable crowd with whom I saw it didn't seem to hate it. They loved Wonder Woman. They laughed at the very few intentionally funny lines. There's the oft-mentioned disconnect between critics and audiences, and while it's got a surplus of flaws and dubious decision-making, it never succeeded in pissing me off at any point, and I can't say the same about MAN OF STEEL and its second-half implosion. Let's face it, whether it was the casting of Affleck or the decision to bring back Snyder or the various ways it deviates from the comic books (I've never been into comic books, so these filmmakers can do whatever they want with the material, I don't care), the trolls and the haters were never going to give this a chance. Going back to Tim Burton's BATMAN in 1989, has there ever been an initially positive response to any announcement of who's playing Batman? Do comic book fans ever not have a hissy fit and react to these kinds of things in a way that makes THE SIMPSONS' Comic Book Guy the most accurate. Representation. Ever? Critics don't need to sink to that level. The trolls and the haters will always be there because what else do they have? But they shouldn't be the ones making a living as objective reviewers resorting to clickbait tactics in a dying field whose continued relevance is constantly being questioned. Maybe it's lowered expectations, but this movie isn't that fucking bad, and if film criticism is going to continue to be a thing, everyone--from career reviewers to hobbyist bloggers--needs to step up their game. Leave the irrational pile-on to the IMDb message board denizens.
DRAFT DAY (US - 2014) Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman. Cast: Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Frank Langella, Chadwick Boseman, Ellen Burstyn, Sam Elliott, Tom Welling, Sean Combs, Terry Crews, Arian Foster, Josh Pence, Timothy Simons, David Ramsey, Wade Williams, Chi McBride, Patrick St. Esprit, Rosanna Arquette, Brad William Henke, Kevin Dunn, Griffin Newman, W. Earl Brown, Pat Healy. (PG-13, 108 mins)
It's only April and DRAFT DAY is already the third major release this year to star the busy Kevin Costner, after taking the aging mentor role in JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT and trying a Liam Neeson-styled Luc Besson actioner with 3 DAYS TO KILL. DRAFT DAY is more in line with vintage Costner, a sort-of "give the fans what they want" move that finds him back in the realm of the sports dramedy, where he's had some of his biggest successes. DRAFT DAY's beleaguered Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver Jr. is cut from the same cloth as BULL DURHAM's Crash Davis, TIN CUP's Ray McAvoy, and FOR LOVE OF THE GAME's unsubtly-named Billy Chapel: the no-bullshit straight-shooter who got where he is by going against the grain, following his gut, being his own man, and doing what's right. Sonny also has something to prove: it's 2014 draft day, he's in his third year with the team and he's still in rebuilding mode. He's also living in the shadow of his legendary father Sonny Sr., a former Browns coach who just died a week earlier, just a year after retiring from football--a retirement that he got after he was fired by his own son. He's got an irate new head coach in Penn (Denis Leary), who got a Super Bowl ring coaching the Cowboys and wants more say in the direction of the team. He's got a flashy billionaire owner in Anthony Molina (Frank Langella) who doesn't care about the team's strategic needs and just wants a superstar draft pick and the media circus guaranteed to follow. He'd rather make linebacker Vontae Mack (Chadwick Boseman) their top draft pick but he already had to make a deal with the Seahawks to trade draft picks so he can please Molina and secure Heisman Trophy winning QB Bo Callahan (Josh Pence), even though he senses some red flags and they already have a top-notch QB in Brian Drew (Tom Welling). And finally, he's got a secret relationship with Browns front-office financial exec Ali (Jennifer Garner) and she just told him she's pregnant.
DRAFT DAY juggles a lot of story for a film that takes place over just a 12-hour period, but it effectively portrays the hectic nature of the business world that exists behind the scenes of the NFL. Sure, the script by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman is completely formulaic in its structure, but director Ivan Reitman keeps the pace fast and the story compelling, even when the film has to stop and overexplain things for non-football fans, like the opening shot of the Space Needle accompanied by the caption "Seattle," a whoosh, and "home of the Seahawks." Though he's got a large supporting cast working under him (perhaps too large as Ellen Burstyn just seems to drop in for her few scenes as Sonny's mom, and a prominently-billed Sam Elliott has just one scene as a grumbly college coach), this is completely Costner's show, and enough time has gone by that we can forget about all the rumbling, bumbling, and stumbling he did in the mid '90s when, post-DANCES WITH WOLVES and THE BODYGUARD, hubris and bloated films like WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN turned him into a punchline bordering on pariah. Starting with 2003's OPEN RANGE, he very slowly started to rebuild his career and while there were a few missteps along the way (I'm still not convinced anyone in the world has actually seen SWING VOTE, including myself) and even a dumped-on-DVD horror movie (THE NEW DAUGHTER), he's turned in some excellent performances in underappreciated films like THE UPSIDE OF ANGER (2006) and MR. BROOKS (2007). More recently, he did terrific work on the History Channel's HATFIELDS & MCCOYS miniseries and his performance as Pa Kent was one of the better things in the otherwise disappointing MAN OF STEEL. He's got a likably laconic, almost Gary Cooper-like screen persona that, in the right movie, always gets you on his side. DRAFT DAY isn't anywhere near the level of a BULL DURHAM or a FIELD OF DREAMS, but Costner, pushing 60, still has that screen presence that a genuine movie star never loses, and that's not something you see enough of these days. The DRAFT DAY Costner is the kind of actor who's smart enough to not worry about capturing a demographic, choosing instead to play mostly to an adult audience that's aged and matured with him, and some of his best years might actually still lie ahead if he chooses the right projects. Yeah, it's comfort food to a certain extent, but it's entertaining, and when Costner's in his wheelhouse like this, he's awfully hard to dislike.
While it secured the cooperation and involvement of the NFL for maximum realism--including appearances by commissioner Roger Goodell and numerous on-air personalities like Chris Berman, Jon Gruden, and Mel Kiper, and even a brief bit by Browns legend Jim Brown--it's important to note, from the perspective of a die-hard NFL fan, just how deeply entrenched in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy DRAFT DAY can be. While it gets the business and boardroom elements down, it's also a pipe dream of a movie that Cleveland-area sons and daughters will be giving their perpetually-disappointed Browns superfan dads on Father's Day for decades to come. It's a love letter to the perpetually hapless, "This is our year!" Browns while acknowledging that the team's pursuit of a championship is largely futile. As they are, the Browns are incapable of having anyone in their organization with as much draft day savvy as Sonny Weaver Jr. Also, no promising college star entering the draft wants to play for Cleveland. But perhaps most hilariously, in a plot point so utterly absured that it threatens to take the film into the realm of science fiction, DRAFT DAY insists on playing along with the myth that the Dallas Cowboys are a feared team that consistently wins championships.
Directed by McG. Written by Adi Hasak and Luc Besson. Cast: Kevin Costner, Amber Heard, Hailee Steinfeld, Connie Nielsen, Tomas Lemarquis, Richard Sammel, Eriq Ebouaney, Raymond J. Barry, Marc Andreoni, Bruno Ricci. (PG-13, 115 mins)
Luc Besson didn't put forth much effort in the construction of his latest Paris-based actioner 3 DAYS TO KILL. The whole thing feels like a cut-and-paste job comprised of elements pilfered from past Besson projects like THE PROFESSIONAL (1994), TRANSPORTER 2 (2005), TAKEN (2009), and FROM PARIS WITH LOVE (2010). Just a month after we saw him playing the mentor role to the inexperienced titular hero in JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT, 59-year-old Kevin Costner tries to horn in on Liam Neeson's aging action hero turf but it doesn't work nearly as well. TAKEN was a lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon, a surprise blockbuster that was almost sent straight-to-DVD before Fox decided to dump it in US theaters a year after its European release. Neeson's career was in a commercial slump and nobody expected much from it. Instead, it became a genuine word-of-mouth hit--something we don't see much of anymore--and it revitalized Neeson's career, making him more popular than ever and now, at 61, he can still be counted on for a TAKEN knockoff almost annually (NON-STOP, aka TAKEN ON A PLANE, is out next week). With his "very particular set of skills," everything just fell into place for Neeson with TAKEN. Costner tries, but doesn't quite pull off the "dangerous badass" bit, though with his character's gravelly voice and his grumpy, sardonic demeanor throughout, he almost approximates what might've happened if the Clint Eastwood of 20 years ago ended up in a Luc Besson joint.
But Costner's not the problem with 3 DAYS TO KILL. With the possible exception of WATERWORLD, he's never really done the "indestructible action hero" thing and seems to be enjoying himself and his paid Paris vacation. Costner is Ethan Renner, a covert CIA operative with a nagging cough who lets a pair of targets--Eurotrash terrorist The Wolf (Richard Sammel) and his right-hand man The Albino (Tomas Lemarquis)--slip away during a botched assignment in Belgrade. While hospitalized, tests show that Ethan is terminally ill with brain cancer that's spread to his lungs. Given three months to live, he decides to quit the business and spend what little time he has left reconnecting with his estranged wife Tina (Connie Nielsen), who works in Paris, and teenage daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld, from the TRUE GRIT remake). It's easier said than done, since they're not pleased that he essentially abandoned them for his job five years earlier (Zooey thinks he's a salesman), but especially when he's hounded by sultry CIA assassin Vivi Delay (Amber Heard), who demands that he finish the job. She even offers him an experimental cancer treatment that might extend his life. The Wolf and The Albino tried to set off a dirty bomb in Belgrade and Vivi has tracked them to Paris, conveniently enough. But when Tina goes away on business for the weekend, Ethan is left to take care of Zooey for three days, which really interferes with his ability to knock off this One Last Job.
Brainless action flicks can be a blast when done right and for a while, under the direction of CHARLIE'S ANGELS hack McG, 3 DAYS TO KILL zips along just fine. But then it starts exhibiting some of the same problems that plague many recent Besson works (especially last year's THE FAMILY) in that he can't settle on a tone or style and the whole thing ends up feeling like a patched-together jumble. 3 DAYS TO KILL is an action thriller, a slapstick comedy, disease-of-the-week melodrama, and sappy daddy/daughter weepie all awkwardly crammed into one. Costner's crankiness provides some amusement (when confronted with one intentionally trite bit of dialogue, he growls "Did you really just say that to me?"), but his scenes with Steinfeld feel forced and never ring true. Sloppy editing doesn't help--after they have a huge blow-up, there's a cut to him showing her how to ride a bike like nothing ever happened. A lot of time is devoted to Ethan shaking down a pair of Wolf flunkies--driver Mitat (Marc Andreoni) and accountant Guido (Bruno Ricci)--with ripped-off armpit hair and car battery-cables-on-the ears torture scenes played for laughs. There's also a "heartwarming" subplot that has Ethan bonding with a family of squatters led by wise patriarch Jules (Eriq Ebouaney, best known as the killer Black Tie in De Palma's FEMME FATALE) who have taken up residence in his Paris apartment. There's also time for Ethan rescuing Zooey from an attempted gang rape at a rave where McG winkingly restages a famous image from THE BODYGUARD, plus a strange scene where Ethan teaches Zooey how to slow dance to Bread's "Make it With You" in a moment that invokes the kind of squirming discomfort not seen since Michael Bluth and Maeby Fünke sang "Afternoon Delight" on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
All of this could be entertaining if Besson could settle on what movie he was telling McG to make. The film often feels like it's been edited at random and may very well have been victimized by post-production reshoots and restructuring. There's a few scenes where the pitch of actors' voices change and the dialogue doesn't match their lip movements. Heard sounds dubbed in a lot of her scenes. She's pretty terrible here in the latest failed attempt to make Amber Heard happen. It doesn't help that Besson and McG have no idea what to do with her, so they just let her periodically drop in, preen, and strut in a variety of wigs and provocative outfits and flirt with Costner. She's basically another incarnation of Kate Nauta's memorably lethal killer in TRANSPORTER 2, but Heard isn't believably intimidating, has no screen presence, and is all vamping and smirks. She looks stunning but there's nothing else there (imagine how much fun someone like Besson's ex-wife Milla Jovovich would've been in this role). You could argue that she doesn't feel like she belongs in the film, but you could say that about every subplot that's randomly inserted by the filmmakers. McG also gets careless when it comes to covering Costner's stunt double, including one badly-blocked fight scene where "Costner" is only shown from the shoulders down with occasional cuts to close-ups of his face in what feels like an homage to the last decade of Steven Seagal's career.
Despite some good work by Costner, it's doubtful 3 DAYS TO KILL will lead to future endeavors for him as a Neeson-esque asskicker for the Social Security set. He's credible in the part and looks much younger than a guy pushing 60, but Costner is an actor whose heroic characters have always been more the pensive, earnest, introspective sort. 3 DAYS TO KILL gives him a nice change of pace but it fails to play to his strengths (though, to its credit, an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower isn't accompanied by the caption "Paris"). Of course, Neeson wasn't an action guy either until TAKEN happened to make him one, but by this point in time, it's a formula that's getting too predictable to even function as time-killing comfort food. From the moment 3 DAYS TO KILL's trailer bowed a few months back, it was obvious that this was "Kevin Costner's TAKEN." The busy actor (who was also very good in last year's disappointing MAN OF STEEL) will next be seen as the beleaguered general manager of the Cleveland Browns in Ivan Reitman's football saga DRAFT DAY, due out in April, putting Costner back in his familiar BULL DURHAM/TIN CUP/FOR LOVE OF THE GAME sports stomping ground that's always been a proven winner with his fans. But second-rate action movies with Amber Heard? He's getting too old for this shit.
Directed by Kenneth Branagh. Written by Adam Cozad and David Koepp. Cast: Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Kenneth Branagh, Keira Knightley, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Colm Feore, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Peter Andersson, Alec Utgoff, Nonso Anozie, Elena Velikanova, Gemma Chan, David Paymer, David Hayman, Kieron Jecchinis. (PG-13, 105 mins)
Bounced from the busy Christmas 2013 schedule and dumped in January, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is the second reboot of Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" series, and the first since 2002's THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. In that film, Ben Affleck played a younger version of the CIA analyst previously portrayed by Alec Baldwin in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990) and, in the best Ryan incarnation, Harrison Ford in PATRIOT GAMES (1992) and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER (1995). Now, in SHADOW RECRUIT, essentially a re-reboot, Chris Pine is introduced as a collegiate Jack Ryan, who enlists in the Marines after 9/11. When he's shot down over Afghanistan and heroically saves two soldiers even with a broken back, he's visited at Walter Reed by CIA official Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), who presents an offer: go back to school to get his doctorate in economics and work for the CIA as a covert agent on Wall Street, where his job will be to monitor global financial accounts to search for transactions that may be tied to terrorist activity and the funding of sleeper cells in the US.
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT is the first film in the Ryan franchise that isn't based on a novel by Clancy, who died in 2013. It's an original screenplay by David Koepp and Adam Cozad, and it's pretty clear that it's heavily influenced by the BOURNE series and Daniel Craig-era 007. As directed by Branagh, who seems to have taken a respite from Shakespeare adaptations to reinvent himself as a genre gun-for-hire after 2011's THOR, SHADOW RECRUIT is brisk popcorn entertainment that moves along at such a relentless clip that it's easy to overlook its many derivative and frequently ludicrous elements. There's nothing here you haven't seen before--from the shaky-cam (but still watchable) action sequences to Ryan's improbable metamorphosis from desk-jockeying numbers nerd to Indestructible Action Daredevil to the rapid-fire brainstorming of the analysts as they pinball ideas around to figure out the location of the terrorist attack and have all the info they need instantly available on their laptops (of course, Cathy's the one who figures it out) to Ryan's sweat-on-the-brow high-tech break-in at an impregnable fortress of an office to steal computer files as Harper is observing from a nearby building to gravely intone "Five minutes, Jack," and "He's on the move...two minutes, Jack." It's almost as if the filmmakers are working from a checklist instead of an actual script. They also don't seem to trust the audience with too much in-depth information: this is one of those films that opens with a shot of Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the Westminster Bridge, and the London Eye ferris wheel, yet still feels the need to include the caption "London." Of course, soon after that, there's an aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline accompanied by a helpful "New York City."
Directed by Zack Snyder. Written by David S. Goyer. Cast: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Antje Traue, Ayelet Zurer, Christopher Meloni, Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, Michael Kelly, Dylan Sprayberry, Cooper Timberline, Julian Richings. (PG-13, 143 mins)
It's only through sheer luck that Zack Snyder, the director that fanboys love to hate, hasn't become a Hollywood pariah of M. Night Shyamalan proportions. Love him or hate him--and if internet message boards are to be taken seriously, most movie fans fall under the latter--there's no denying that Snyder's got balls. This is a guy who not only had the chutzpah to remake a classic like George A. Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, but shocked even the most doubtful naysayers (myself included) when that 2004 remake turned out to be surprisingly good. After his 2006 blockbuster 300, Snyder helmed 2009's WATCHMEN, an ambitious fool's mission that had no possibility of pleasing fans of the legendary graphic novel, but works very well taken on its own terms, especially in the 186-minute director's cut. Following the 2010 animated film LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA'HOOLE, Snyder unveiled his most divisive film yet with 2011's SUCKER PUNCH, which opened to devastating reviews in what looked a lot more like a critical pile-on rather than an objective analysis of the film. It's amazing that Snyder got a major studio to bankroll his bizarre pet project, especially considering that WATCHMEN didn't live up to box-office expectations. SUCKER PUNCH is one of the most misunderstood and unjustly maligned major-studio films in recent years, and if you got caught up in the rabid bloodlust that took it down, it might be worth another look. In just two years, it's already acquired a fervent cult following, and if there's such a thing as "Zack Snyder's masterpiece," I'm almost certain it will be SUCKER PUNCH.
A lot of directors with more clout than Snyder would've been bounced off the A-list after a commercial failure like SUCKER PUNCH, but he's obviously got believers in his corner at Warner Bros., who tapped him to helm the SUPERMAN reboot MAN OF STEEL. Teaming with producer Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer, Snyder's revisionist take on the Superman saga tries to go for a dark and ultra-serious DARK KNIGHT approach and for about half of the film, it looks like they might pull it off. We don't really need another Superman origin story, but we get one anyway, and it doesn't really look or feel like any previous SUPERMAN outing. On the dying planet Krypton, scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) refuses to go along with a coup by irate military leader General Zod (Michael Shannon). Jor-El and his wife Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer) have just accomplished the unthinkable and had a child via natural birth, which hasn't happened on Krypton in 3000 years. That child, Kal-El, is sent to Earth with a device known as the "codex," which will be able to preserve the Kryptonian people.
30 years later, the infant Kal-El has grown into drifter Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), who works a series of odd jobs, never staying anywhere too long since hints of his true nature always start to manifest, as they have since childhood when his spacecraft was found in Smallville, KS by the childless Kents. Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha (Diane Lane) raised Clark, living in constant fear that the government would come and take him away, but as Jonathan explains, "nobody ever came." Teenaged Clark's superhuman powers--demonstrated when he pulls a bus filled with students out of the river--make him a misunderstood outcast, and following Jonathan's death, he leaves Smallville on a quest to find himself. The secret to his nature lies in a frozen spacecraft where he learns about his true self from the holographic image of Jor-El. Meanwhile, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is chasing a story that brings her together with Clark, right around the same time that the banished Zod figures out that the codex is on Earth, and that Jor-El's son might be in possession of it.
So far, so good. Maybe not for the purists, but as a radically different take on a familiar subject, MAN OF STEEL gets off to a promising start. But once Zod arrives on Earth, Snyder seems to check out and the film becomes just another loud, blurry, ugly alien invasion epic with wall-to-wall video-game CGI and endless 9/11-inspired destruction porn straight out of a TRANSFORMERS movie. Throughout the film, but especially in the second half, Snyder uses--and overuses--an incredibly annoying shaky-zoom move in nearly every scene. I don't even mind the changes they made to the origin story. I don't read comic books and I'm not slavishly devoted to any of these characters or stories and filmmakers are free to show me any interpretation of them that they so desire. But the constant sense of destructive spectacle--and it's really not spectacular--just goes on forever and gets dizzyingly dull around the time the 43rd Metropolis skyscraper slowly collapses. The actors take a good chunk of the climax off, replaced by CGI doppelgangers who pinball all over the screen. I thought the CGI backlash and eventual moviegoer rejection of it would've happened by this point, but I guess I just need to put up or shut up. This is obviously just how movies look now.
Cavill is physically an impressive, imposing Superman, but we don't see much in the way of emotion beyond moody and sullen. Christopher Reeve is a tough act to follow in this role, and it's not Cavill's fault--he's just not working with much of a script. From a story and screenplay standpoint, Nolan and Goyer seem to be having a rare off-day here, or maybe the dark and grim post-9/11 motif just works better for Batman. Then again, Nolan's BATMAN films had some thematic depth to them and didn't turn into Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich joints in their second halves, so it's hard to say whether it was Nolan's or Snyder's call to dumb it down to lowest common denominator destruction. MAN OF STEEL starts strong but ultimately, there's just no story here. It makes the hero dull and uninteresting, and the villain one-dimensionally cartoonish, with Shannon's overacting a weak substitute for Terence Stamp's Zod from SUPERMAN (1978) and SUPERMAN II (1981), and he's not helped by a ludicrously distracting hipster goatee. Reliable pros like Laurence Fishburne (as Perry White), Christopher Meloni and Harry Lennix (as military officials), and Richard Schiff (as a scientist or something) are onscreen a lot but have little to do. Crowe makes an interesting, man-of-action Jor-El and has much more to do than in Marlon Brando's check-cashing interpretation of the character, which seemed scripted around how little work Brando really wanted to do while still getting top billing.
The film's most human, sympathetic moments come from Lane and Costner. Costner only has a few scenes, all flashbacks, but he projects the same loving, fatherly warmth that Glenn Ford did so masterfully in only two brief scenes in the 1978 film, which handled Pa Kent's death in a way that seemed more authentic. [SPOILER] In MAN OF STEEL, it's an excuse for another big special effects scene, and no matter how heartbreaking that shot is of Costner holding his hand up and silently telling Clark to not save him, the circumstances are just too hard to buy [END SPOILER]. But therein lies the central problem with MAN OF STEEL: it has no heart and ultimately, no purpose after the midway point. After setting up what would seem to be a unique take on the Superman story in Snyder's typical expectations-be-damned way, it all gets chucked to make another faceless, soulless, instantly disposable Hollywood summer product, completely interchangeable with countless others that have come before it. Snyder has proven himself a fearless filmmaker, but in giving MAN OF STEEL the DARK KNIGHT treatment, he's made an intermittently interesting misfire that, when it's finally over, feels less like an auteur's vision and more like something that's been focus-grouped into immediate irrelevance.
