Directed by Brad Anderson. Written by Richard D'Ovidio. Cast: Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin, Morris Chestnut, Michael Imperioli, Michael Eklund, David Otunga, Roma Maffia, Justina Machado, Denise Dowse, Jose Zuniga. (R, 94 mins)
It's always frustrating to watch a film that's solidly, briskly, and efficiently doing its job only to have one illogical decision snowball into a calamitous chain reaction that causes the entire thing to crash and burn. That's exactly what happens with THE CALL, a high-concept suspense outing from director Brad Anderson, a long-ago indie darling (1998's NEXT STOP, WONDERLAND, 2000's HAPPY ACCIDENTS) whose 2001 cult classic SESSION 9 led to him finding his niche with thrillers like 2004's THE MACHINIST and 2008's TRANSSIBERIAN. Anderson mostly does hired-gun TV work these days (FRINGE, TREME, BOARDWALK EMPIRE, THE KILLING), and his last film, 2011's VANISHING ON 7TH STREET, was easily his worst, but for about 2/3 of its running time, THE CALL finds Anderson in fine form and reinforces the idea that genre films of this sort are indeed his true calling. But around 65 minutes in, THE CALL makes a fatal mistake from which it never recovers.
Overcoming an initially distracting wig, Halle Berry delivers a strong performance as Jordan, a veteran 911 operator at "The Hive," the centralized complex for Los Angeles emergency services and first responders (sample clumsy exposition from wide-eyed trainee: "Why do they call it 'The Hive?'"). In the opening sequence, Jordan is on the line with a teenage girl who's home alone and trying to hide from an intruder when a brief lapse in judgment ultimately leads to the girl's death. Six months later, still shattered by the mistake (the girl was hiding, the call was disconnected and the intruder was about to give up and leave, but Jordan hitting "redial" inadvertantly alerted him to the girl's location) and unable to forgive herself, Jordan pops Diazepam and works as an operator trainer behind the scenes. She's forced back onto the console when a 911 call comes in from 16-year-old Casey (Abigail Breslin), who's been abducted from a mall parking garage by a mystery man (DTV fixture and Uwe Boll vet Michael Eklund) and stashed in the trunk of his car. It's here where THE CALL really starts cooking, as Anderson and screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio focus on Jordan digging deep within herself to find the confidence to talk Casey through what's happening to her and using her wits to help her alert other motorists to her plight. Since Casey is using the disposable phone left behind at the mall by a friend who had to leave, the police can't pinpoint its location. Jordan instructs Casey to kick out the taillight and stick her arm out of it and wave. When Casey finds some paint cans in the trunk, Jordan tells her to pour the paint out of the taillight opening. At a stoplight, a motorist in the next lane (Michael Imperioli) gets a funny feeling about the missing taillight and the paint and when he tries to intervene, he ends up in the trunk of his own car with Casey when the kidnapper realizes the police are on to his vehicle and switches cars.
THE CALL is moving along at a nice clip and going just swell when it suddenly gets an urge to fix what isn't broken. It's working because the tension builds by keeping its characters interacting while trapping them in their own confined, claustrophobic spaces (Casey in the trunk, Jordan at her desk). But when Jordan ends up talking to the kidnapper and realizes that it's the same perp who killed the teenage girl six months earlier, THE CALL makes the conscious decision to shit the bed by having Jordan leave "The Hive" and take this 911 call...personal. When the cops--including Jordan's understanding, supportive boyfriend (Morris Chestnut)--get the kidnapper's identity from a partial print on a shattered chloroform bottle near his abandoned car, they visit his house and his clueless wife (Justina Machado) and find the motive for his behavior and his possible location in a photo. When a trip to that location turns out to be a dead end (they don't even turn the lights on--Chestnut walks in, looks around, and says "This is a dead end," and leaves), Jordan is unconvinced and drives out there herself. At 2:30 am. With just a flashlight.
And with that, what was a somewhat implausible but thoroughly entertaining, crackling thriller with strong, believable characters (it's also great fun watching Eklund go from cool and confident to a twitchy, blubbering mess as his day encounters one unforeseen obstacle after another) abruptly turns into a trashy, exploitative horror film with Eklund's psycho having a secret underground torture bunker where he scalps his victims and makes out with a mannequin head and touches himself because, after his turns as a post-apocalyptic cannibal in the atrocious THE DAY and a post-apocalyptic necrophile rapist in the loathsome THE DIVIDE, this is apparently what Michael Eklund does. Of course, Jordan discovers the subterrenean SAW/HOSTEL death dungeon and decides to rescue Casey, who's strapped to a table and stripped down to her bra for no other reason than to show us that, yes, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE is growing up and now has ample cleavage. The jarring shift in tone is a tacky metamorphosis that ruins an otherwise exemplary nailbiter and would reek of studio exec interference and reshoots were it not for the film's last shot of Berry's Jordan pulling a Roy Scheider and using Eklund's catchphrase ("It's already done") against him. The last third of the film is a train wreck (I haven't even mentioned Casey's eye injury being badly CGI'd; really, everything has to be CGI'd now? We can't even apply practical makeup and a small prosthetic to simulate a swollen eye anymore? I'm just glad ROCKY and RAGING BULL were made when they were), but the final five minutes in particular, are so utterly, stupidly senseless and at odds with everything we've seen and learned about these characters that when the closing credits roll, you just sit there slack-jawed at the implosion of what was a pretty good movie. At one point during their phone conversation, Jordan promises Casey that she'll get her through this and that they'll go see a movie together that weekend. What a nice, believable, well-rounded ending that would've been. Instead, apropos of nothing and against all established logic, it culminates in vigilante vengeance, a cheap laugh, and red meat tossed out to the audience.
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (Italy/France/Ireland - 2011; 2012 US release)
The Weinstein Company acquired this eccentric, glacially slow-moving road film from IL DIVO director Paolo Sorrentino and sat on it for over a year before sneaking it onto 15 screens in the US last fall. It's certain to attain at least some minor cult status thanks to Sean Penn in perhaps the strangest role of his career as a reclusive, aging, Robert Smith-lookalike goth rocker named Cheyenne. Living in Dublin with his firefighter wife Jane (Frances McDormand), Cheyenne, who still dresses the part despite having not performed or recorded in 20 years, is forced to travel home to America upon hearing that his estranged father has died. Once back in NYC, Cheyenne is reminded of his Jewish heritage and learns from aging, foul-mouthed Nazi hunter Mordecai Midler (Judd Hirsch) that his father (whose letters are read in voiceover by an uncredited Fritz Weaver) devoted his life to tracking down a Nazi officer who tortured him at Auschwitz and is now living somewhere in the US. Cheyenne, haunted by his own demons--he quit writing "depressed songs for depressed kids" and withdrew from public life when two teenaged Irish fans committed suicide after listening to his music--and permitted by his wealth and celebrity to remain a child in many ways, believes he's finally found his true purpose when he decides to finish his father's work and locate the Nazi war criminal.
Sorrentino's film functions as an homage to road films past, particularly the work of Wim Wenders, a point driven home by the presence of PARIS, TEXAS star Harry Dean Stanton as a chatty old-timer who claims to have invented the wheeled suitcase. Cheyenne becomes quite the detective on his quest down the back roads of America, awkwardly meeting a retired teacher (Joyce Van Patten) who was once married to the alleged Nazi, which leads him to the man's granddaughter (Kerry Condon), a widowed waitress with a young son. Filming in Dublin, NYC, New Mexico, Utah, and Michigan, Sorrentino does a nice job of capturing the peculiar sounds and rhythms of rural America, and commendably doesn't go for cheap, fish-out-of-water laughs, with the mumbling, vaguely effeminate Cheyenne often finding accepting, kindred spirits among these misfit souls who live off the beaten path. This is an enigmatic and sometimes frustrating film that leaves several vital pieces of the puzzle open to interpretation, particularly Cheyenne's friendship with Mary (Eve Hewson, daughter of U2's Bono), a Dublin teenager with a delusional mother who hasn't been right since Mary's brother mysteriously vanished, but if you give it chance, it has its rewards, especially with some frequently arresting visuals and Penn's performance, while initially affected, off-putting, and feeling a bit like a stunt, gradually finds its place after a scene where he dumps all of his emotional baggage on old friend David Byrne (playing himself), whose Talking Heads song gives the film its title. The US theatrical cut was shortened by seven minutes from Sorrentino's original version, completely removing Shea Whigham's appearance as a fast-talking businessman and the explanation of how Cheyenne is suddenly driving a pickup truck on his journey (Whigham apparently asked him to drive it cross-country for him). THIS MUST BE THE PLACE isn't an easy film to like and anyone who assumes from a cursory glance that it'll be a Cure-inspired goth-rock CRAZY HEART will bail in record time, but road flick nerds and Penn completists will certainly want to give it a look. (R, 111 mins)
STORAGE 24 (India/UK - 2012; 2013 US release)
Uninspired at best and dreadful at worst, STORAGE 24 feels clumsily torn between being a horror movie and a Noel Clarke vanity project. British TV star Clarke, who wrote and co-directed the moderately entertaining Tarantino/Guy Ritchie knockoff 4.3.2.1, is still trying to mount some kind of Simon Pegg/Edgar Wright breakthrough in the US market, with little success thus far. Clarke co-produced, co-wrote, and stars in STORAGE 24, which starts its cribbing with a set-up straight out of SUPER 8 as a military cargo plane crashes near Hyde Park in central London. As the military closes in, the area is locked down and a group of people in a 24-hour storage facility (very) slowly discover that they've got company in the form of a rampaging alien that looks an awful lot like PREDATOR minus the rasta braids. But before any of that, director Johannes Roberts overindulges Clarke, who seems like he wanted to write a boring breakup drama intermittently interrupted by gory alien kills. Far too much time is spent on Charlie (Clarke) bellyaching to his best buddy Mark (Colin O'Donoghue) about getting dumped by Shelley (Antonia Campbell-Hughes), who's also at the storage facility and, it turns out, has been secretly seeing Mark for months. Even when the alien starts offing people one-by-one and the film just starts to blatantly copy other, better movies (mostly ALIEN and ALIENS, but also PREDATOR, DISTRICT 9, and ATTACK THE BLOCK just to name a few), with the alien dragging people up through the ceiling tiles, people crawling through air shafts, John Carpenter-esque score, etc. without any sense of style, fun, humor or homage, Charlie is still fixating on why things didn't work out. Ploddingly-paced with a dull cast and shoddy CGI gore effects, STORAGE 24 accomplishes nothing other than reminding you of past films that you'd be better off rewatching instead. (R, 87 mins)
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev. Written by J.H. Wyman. Cast: Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, Dominic Cooper, Terrence Howard, Isabelle Huppert, F. Murray Abraham, Armand Assante, Franky G, Luis Da Silva, Jr., Roy James Wilson, Jr., James Biberi. (R, 116 mins)
DEAD MAN DOWN is the Hollywood debut of Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev, reuniting with his GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO star Noomi Rapace. On the surface, it's a conventional mob/revenge thriller and the script by FRINGE writer/co-executive producer J.H. Wyman is frequently silly, but DEAD MAN DOWN is compelling and stylish throughout, bolstered by strong performances and Oplev bringing an offbeat sensibility and unexpected elements to some largely familiar proceedings.
Colin Farrell is Victor, a Hungarian enforcer who's part of the crew of NYC mobster Alphonse Hoyt (Terrence Howard). For months, someone's been offing Alphonse's guys and sending him cryptic handwritten messages accompanied by puzzle pieces of a photograph. He's got everyone on high alert after the latest member of his crew to be killed is found crammed into a freezer in the basement of his home. Victor is a dutiful soldier--he's relatively new but earns Alphonse's trust by saving his life during a drug den shootout with some turf rivals that Alphonse mistakenly blames for the killings--but lacks the ambition of his friend Darcy (Dominic Cooper), also a relatively new face but one who really wants to work his way up in the organization now that he's a husband and father. Loner Victor has no one except Beatrice (Rapace), a scarred young woman who lives with her mostly-deaf mother (Isabelle Huppert) in the neighboring high-rise and with whom Victor shares frequent nods and waves while both are looking out of their windows. Darcy senses great pain in Victor's past, but doesn't press the issue, instead passing on something his wife once told him: "Whatever it is, even the most damaged hearts can heal."
25-year-old Beatrice is still recovering from reconstructive surgery after her face was shattered a year earlier when she was hit by a drunk driver. She works up the courage to slip a card into Victor's mailbox with her phone number, and the two go out to dinner. But then Beatrice drops the bomb: she's got cell phone footage of Victor killing a man in his apartment--the guy stuffed into Alphonse's freezer--and she won't go to the cops if Victor agrees to kill the drunk driver who disfigured her. Victor reluctantly agrees but has other things on his plate: namely--and this isn't a spoiler--he's the guy killing Alphonse's goons and sending the notes and puzzle pieces, and he's been doing the same thing with a rival Albanian crime organization in an attempt to turn them both against each other as part of an elaborate revenge plot.
Oplev and Wyman fuse numerous genres and styles throughout: the film is equal parts noir, Hitchcock, chilly Scandinavian gloom, early 1990s Luc Besson, and vintage Abel Ferrara grit. Maybe it's the notion of a foreign filmmaker's take on NYC (most of this was shot in Philadelphia), but much of DEAD MAN DOWN reminded me of Besson's THE PROFESSIONAL (1994), another film that succeeds despite its many inherently absurd elements. Stripped to its barebones, the basic vengeance storyline is nothing new, but elsewhere, the film journeys down other, less predictable avenues. The tentative, baby steps relationship that Victor and Beatrice embark upon is very nicely-played by both Farrell and Rapace and suprisingly appealing in its own strange way, with added help from Huppert as the merrily oblivious mom who keeps trying to play matchmaker while looking for her hearing aids and badgering Victor into taking some cookies home with him (Beatrice puts some of her mom's lemon chicken in Victor's sparse fridge in one scene, leading to this odd bit of dialogue: "I'll just wedge it in here between the mustard and the plastic explosive").
DEAD MAN DOWN isn't the kind of film that's going to generate much business at the box office and, like THE PROFESSIONAL, it's being met by critics with general indifference at best to outright scorn at worst. But THE PROFESSIONAL has come to be regarded as a classic of sorts, and while I'm not saying DEAD MAN DOWN will be held in that same high esteem, I did find it highly entertaining and with enough off-kilter quirks and peculiarities to keep my interest, and it's the kind of film that will prove endlessly rewatchable during its long future life as a cable and Netflix streaming staple. There's also small supporting turns by reliable character aces like F. Murray Abraham and Armand Assante, an elaborately ludicrous sniper sequence, and one insane bit with an SUV driving into a house and down into the basement. It's not a film that's meant to be taken too seriously and it might even fall under "guilty pleasure," but I liked how Oplev presents a standard-issue revenge flick in non-standard ways, focusing on the actors and the performances and giving the characters room to grow and be established. Not everything in DEAD MAN DOWN works--Darcy is meant to be a conscience or beacon of some sort for Victor, but the character is mostly intrusive, relegated to annoying Victor by sucking up to Alphonse and doing some detective work that threatens to derail Victor's entire plan--and some might find the villain's comeuppance too abrupt, but the story ultimately isn't about that. It's more about two very damaged people dealt some extraordinarily shitty cards and finding a very strange--and incredibly violent--path to healing.
Written and directed by Todd Robinson. Cast: Ed Harris, David Duchovny, William Fichtner, Lance Henriksen, Johnathon Schaech, Jason Beghe, Sean Patrick Flanery, Kip Pardue, Julian Adams, Jason Gray-Stanford, Matt Bushell, Dagmara Dominczyk. (R, 99 mins)
About two months ago, I saw a poster for the nautical thriller PHANTOM at the theater. Having heard nothing about the film prior to this, and noticing it was from a company (RCR Media Group) whose name I was seeing for the first time, my first thought, even with solid actors like Ed Harris and David Duchovny, was "No way this is opening in theaters." Imagine my surprise when I got online and saw that PHANTOM was set to open on 2000 screens nationwide on March 1. 2000 screens? How? Either this was going to be an OOGIELOVES-level box-office disaster or this mysterious RCR Media Group was one of these grass-roots Christian organizations that busses megachurch congregations to the theater and somehow Harris and Duchovny got roped into a religious submarine movie. But it had an R rating. What the hell was going on here? What kind of tax loopholes do movie distributors of today have access to where production companies frequently spend anywhere from $20 million to $40 million on a movie that grosses $30,000 domestically and yet somehow still end up making money? There's probably a great expose to be written about this (and the great German co-production tax incentive scam of a decade ago) by someone with more insider knowledge than me, but that's another story for another time.
Several days prior to March 1, the 2000 screens got bumped down to 1118, but RCR Media Group's debut feature as a theatrical distribution outfit (after years of producing DTV titles like HOSTEL III that were distributed by others) was still set to go. And the box office take was as apocalyptically ugly as expected: allegedly budgeted at $20 million (I don't believe that figure at all), PHANTOM grossed just $500,000, landing in 24th place and currently ranked as the seventh-worst all-time opening weekend for a wide release on more than 1000 screens. Who knows what RCR was thinking or if this is their first and last theatrical release? Regardless of how good or bad it was, PHANTOM was doomed to be a victim of bad marketing and limited commercial appeal (they weren't kidding around with the "You'll never see it coming" tag line). But guess what? It's actually a pretty good little B-movie that will probably find a much bigger audience when it inevitably turns up on Netflix Instant three months from now. Maybe it should've debuted there in the first place.
In 2013, PHANTOM would've been a tough sell for anyone: a Cold War submarine thriller set in 1968, centering on a crew of Soviet Naval officers played by American and Canadian actors sans affected Yakov Smirnoff accents. This was a fairly common practice back in the old days of Hollywood (have you ever heard anyone complain about Kirk Douglas and Ralph Meeker playing French military officers in Stanley Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY?), but tends to not go over as well in the era of internet trolling and the inevitable WROST MVOIE EVER!!!111 IMDb commenters (remember all the pre-release bitching about Tom Cruise and a British supporting cast playing Germans in VALKYRIE?). Older movies seem to get a pass for this sort of thing, and PHANTOM's story is compelling enough that you get invested in the characters and the drama and the lack of cartoonish Boris & Natasha accents is quickly forgotten. A speculative story inspired by a 1968 incident involving a Soviet K-129 sub, PHANTOM follows aging, weary, booze-soaked Capt. Demi Zubov (Harris), who's being forced into retirement by his reluctant, emphysema-stricken commander Markov (Lance Henriksen). But Markov first wants Zubov and his crew, headed by second-in-command Koslov (William Fichtner) to take a decrepit, old-school diesel sub out for one last mission before the Soviet military sells it to the Chinese. Zubov's crew is joined by a few replacement officers and Bruni (Duchovny), a mysterious government projects official who's tagging along to test some prototype equipment, but soon reveals his true intentions. A Spetsnaz commando working for a rogue faction of the KGB, Bruni and his men--surprise...the replacement officers!--are testing a top-secret cloaking device known as the Phantom, which imitates the signal and appearance of other vessels. Bruni's plan is to launch a nuclear missile and trick a US sub into thinking it's the work of the Chinese, with the rationale being "Our two enemies can destroy each other while we sit back and watch." Bruni seizes control of the sub from Zubov, who's haunted by both the legacy of his legendary Naval hero father and a tragic accident that happened under his command years earlier--that the Soviet military buried so as not to shame the Zubov name--and left him prone to epileptic seizures. Zubov, who has no interest in going down in Soviet history as the man who started WWIII, rallies his crew to regain control from Bruni.
Writer-director Todd Robinson (the little-seen LONELY HEARTS) does a terrific job of conveying the tight, suffocating sense of claustrophobia in the close quarters of the ancient, rickety sub, and for about an hour, the fast-paced PHANTOM is a surprisingly effective, genuinely suspenseful nailbiter. While the film plays like an old-fashioned Cold War drama, it starts to unravel in the last 30 minutes or so when Robinson starts making concessions to modern audiences. When PHANTOM stays in the close confines of the sub, it works very well. It's when it goes outside the sub with exploding torpedoes and the like that it collapses. The CGI explosions are total amateur night and their utterly laughable, cartoonish execution takes you right out of the film. In addition, the miniatures used in the underwater exteriors are pretty shoddy-looking, and it's in these scenes that PHANTOM starts to resemble a low-budget, HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER ripoff that Roger Corman might've had cranked out by Concorde Pictures in 1991. Robinson also lets his script really stumble in the last third as well, with the conveniently-timed revelation that one of Zubov's crew (Sean Patrick Flanery) suffers from claustrophobia despite being a veteran of numerous missions with Zubov and it never being mentioned before. Robinson's decision to turn the last sequence into something straight out of FIELD OF DREAMS by way of M. Night Shyamalan also does the film a huge disservice. But despite those faults, the film gets enough right in its top-notch first hour to still warrant a recommendation. Harris is outstanding as the tortured Zubov, Fichtner does an excellent job as the conflicted Koslov, torn between his loyalty to his longtime captain and friend Zubov and his own military ambitions, and Duchovny mostly hangs back, never raising his voice or taking the easy route of being an evil bad guy, instead doing a lot of subtle acting with his eyes and very quietly conveying a sense of increasing menace as the film proceeds. PHANTOM isn't a submarine classic along the lines of DAS BOOT, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, CRIMSON TIDE, or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP, but even with its third-act stumbling and bumbling, it's a diverting, suspenseful, well-acted thriller that doesn't deserve its lowly status among the biggest box-office bombs of all time.
This one probably looked good on paper--an all-star gambling comedy that reunites HIGH FIDELITY director Stephen Frears and co-writer D.V. DeVincentis--but the end result is an absolute mess, mostly incoherent and blandly shot in almost sitcom fashion, and easily Frears' worst film. Based on a memoir by journalist Beth Raymer, played here by Rebecca Hall in one of the most annoying performances in recent memory, LAY THE FAVORITE has Raymer, a porn web site model and in-home private stripper, leaving Florida to head to Vegas for her dream job as a cocktail waitress. That she ends up taking her previously untapped math and memorization skills to become a major player in the operation of renowned Vegas bookie Dink Heimowitz (Bruce Willis) is likely a fascinating story, but Frears and DeVincentis bungle this at every turn. Hall is a fine actress and approaches the role with fervent enthusiasm, but she comes off as a wide-eyed, white-trash Judy Holliday from BORN YESTERDAY with daddy issues. It's never plausible for a moment that she so quickly picks up on the intricacies of Vegas bookmaking, or at least from the incomprehensible way DeVincentis' script conveys it. There's too many subplots with too many characters and no consistency in how they behave from scene to scene. Beth falls hard for Dink, who's devoted to his seemingly bitchy wife Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones), leading to Dink firing Beth to keep the peace...but then Tulip lets Dink rehire her and they become friends. Beth eventually moves to NYC and falls in love with a boring journalist (played by the boring Joshua Jackson) and starts working for an obnoxious, fast-talking, hot-dogging bookie named Rosie (Vince Vaughn, cast radically against type as "Vince Vaughn"), and it's Tulip's idea to head to NYC to help Beth when one of her regular gamblers (John Carroll Lynch) is set up by the feds and Beth and her innocent boyfriend might get busted. Of course, it all leads to a sentimental, feel-good ending with dialogue like "You know when you don't need to be taken care of anymore? It's when you decide to take care of someone else," a line that Willis seems to be in actual physical pain trying to say. Then the whole cast dances while mugging shamelessly over the closing credits. With Emmett/Furla Films and 50 Cent among the boatload of credited producers and Corbin Bernsen also in the cast, it's not surprising that LAY THE FAVORITE received only scant US theatrical distribution, grossing $21,000 on just 61 screens against a $20 million budget. Who was this movie even made for in the first place? (R, 94 mins)
CALIFORNIA SOLO (US - 2012)
In many ways a CRAZY HEART for the always-interesting Robert Carlyle, CALIFORNIA SOLO offers the veteran Scottish character actor his best big-screen role in years, though it's too bad no one saw it. Released on just two screens, the film stars Carlyle as Lachlan MacAldonich, the former guitarist for a (fictional) Next Big Thing '90s Britpop group called The Cranks. Hailed as the British Nirvana, the Cranks imploded when the band's frontman Jed--Lachlan's older brother--died from a drug overdose in Hollywood. After a solo album bombed, Lachlan left the music business and settled into a life of anonymity, and is now working on an organic farm in California, living paycheck to paycheck and hosting a podcast called "Flame-Outs," that chronicles the tragic deaths of famous rock stars. Lachlan's quiet life slowly starts to unravel after a DUI brings a 1996 charge of marijuana possession back to haunt him, and now INS is threatening to revoke his green card and send him back to Scotland. This turn of events causes Lachlan to both self-destruct and face the long-buried demons of his past--the daughter he abandoned, his failed career and unrealized potential, and the guilt he feels over his brother's death (Lachlan gave him the drugs).
Writer-director Marshall Lewy doesn't avoid formula but also doesn't let Lachlan off the hook or make excuses for him--he's very flawed and can be a bit of a self-centered dick at times (watch how quickly he abandons the niceties when he meets his ex-wife and daughter for coffee), and Carlyle very deftly balances those aspects of this complex character. Throughout the film, Lewy and Carlyle continue to reveal layers of Lachlan that make you look at some of the film's earlier events in a different light, particularly the devastating scene where he asks the Cranks' former manager (Michael Des Barres) to loan him $5000 for his attorney's fees, and the manager just unloads 15 years worth of rage on Lachlan (Des Barres absolutely nails this one-scene performance). Carlyle also gets excellent support from A Martinez as his boss (who gets one of the film's best lines: "All the Mexicans I got workin' for me and it's the Scottish guy who has the immigration problems?"), Alexia Rasmussen as a regular customer at Lachlan's Farmers' Market booth and possible love interest, and a natural, unaffected performance by Savannah Lathem as Lachlan's estranged 14-year-old daughter. CALIFORNIA SOLO is one of those really under-the-radar gems that nobody's heard of, which is a shame. It deserved better treatment. (R, 95 mins)
COLLABORATOR (US/Canada - 2012)
Shot in 2009 and exhibited mainly on the festival circuit before getting a one-screen release in NYC last summer, COLLABORATOR is an occasionally interesting acting exercise that ultimately feels too stagy and implausible for the screen. It does give two veteran character actors a chance to stretch out, and while the performances are fine, there's just not much else here. Making his writing/directing debut, Martin Donovan stars as a NYC playwright fleeing to L.A. after critics savage his latest work. Telling his wife (Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, transitioning nicely to acting) that he needs some time to ponder the future of his career, he crashes in Reseda with his mother (Katherine Helmond), while mulling over an offer to do an uncredited script polish on a horror film or work on adapting a book for a film to star his ex-girlfriend (Olivia Williams), now a major movie star. With Helmond out with friends, he's tempted to rekindle his romance with Williams when childhood acquaintance David Morse, an ex-con who still lives across the street with his mother (Eileen Ryan, Sean Penn's mother), shows up and badgers Donovan into having a couple of beers. Within a few minutes, a SWAT team shows up at Morse's house across the street. The cops are after Morse for something, and he takes Donovan hostage. With the cops surrounding the house and the hostage drama playing out on TV, Donovan and Morse...talk and improv, as the lifelong issues of both men and why they are what they are bubble to the surface.
Essentially a one-act play stretched out to feature length with a few additional characters, COLLABORATOR doesn't accomplish much and was likely a low-budget labor of love and a chance for some friends to hang out and make a movie. As a director, Donovan (not to be confused with the other Martin Donovan, who directed 1989's brilliant APARTMENT ZERO) acquits himself well with some observational bits early on that are reminiscent of vintage, pre-Dutch angle-fixated Hal Hartley (Donovan starred in several Hartley films, like TRUST, SIMPLE MEN, AMATEUR, and FLIRT), and never gets self-indulgent. It's nice to see guys like Morse (a great actor) and Donovan in lead roles and both are excellent, so for that aspect, COLLABORATOR is worth seeing if you're a fan of these dependable character actors. Others will likely be bored. (Unrated, 87 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
Another batch of cult hits on Blu-ray from the unstoppable Shout! Factory!
JOSHUA TREE aka ARMY OF ONE (US - 1993)
Some outstanding car chase sequences highlight this Dolph Lundgren actioner that was shot in 1992, bypassing US theaters and retitled ARMY OF ONE when it belatedly hit video stores in late 1994. Looking much bigger than its relatively lean budget, JOSHUA TREE benefits from having experienced stunt coordinator and veteran second unit director Vic Armstrong (whose career as a stuntman dates back to 1967's YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) making his directorial debut. Armstrong's storytelling and directing of the non-action scenes are frequently clunky and lacking polish, but when the focus is action, which is quite often, JOSHUA TREE really works, coming off very much like a hard-R, John Woo-inspired version of the Charlie Sheen comedy THE CHASE, which came out around the same time. Lundgren is Santee, who transports stolen cars in a big rig with his buddy Eddie (Ken Foree). Eddie is killed and Santee is framed for the murder of a highway patrolman by corrupt L.A. cop Severence (George Segal), who runs a hot-car operation with his partner Rudy (Beau Starr). Santee escapes custody during a prison transport, taking local deputy Rita (Kristian Alfonso) hostage and hellbent on vengeance against Severence. Armstrong takes a while getting things revved up, but the second half of the film is basically one long car chase after an incredible shootout at a chop shop owned by Asian mobster Jimmy Shoeshine (Michael Paul Chan, perhaps best known as the Korean convenience store clerk in FALLING DOWN).
When it was released on VHS as ARMY OF ONE, the film was apparently snipped of some of its more over-the-top violence to secure an R rating. This Blu-ray is R-rated, but it almost has to be the uncut version. There's gore galore, all done with practical effects as stomachs are shot open, throats are sliced, and brains splatter against walls. Not without its structural and pacing flaws, but overall, JOSHUA TREE is a very fun B-movie gem, with Lundgren an engaging antihero (Armstrong says the character is based on Humphrey Bogart in HIGH SIERRA, which is seen on a TV set at one point), and Segal enjoyably over-the-top as the bad guy. Also with Michelle Phillips, Geoffrey Lewis, Bert Remsen, Khandi Alexander, Denver Mattson, Nick Chinlund, and the great Al Leong. Shout's Blu-ray is 2.35:1 and the bonus features include the alternate ARMY OF ONE ending in 1.33:1 (including some extended Lundgren/Segal brawling), a commentary with Armstrong and his co-producer/second-unit director brother Andy, both of whom are featured with Lundgren in a 25-minute documentary retrospective. Either ending works nicely and doesn't make much of a difference--the Armstrongs admit that the ARMY OF ONE ending is probably more satisfying, but they prefer the original JOSHUA TREE finale. Ideally, both versions would've been included, but with the ARMY OF ONE ending in 1.33:1, it's likely the elements didn't exist for a proper widescreen transfer. (R, 102 mins)
THE NEST (US - 1988)
"They're Creeping Up on You," the E.G. Marshall vs. cockroaches segment of George A. Romero's CREEPSHOW (1982), and Guillermo del Toro's MIMIC (1997) are the standard-bearers in grossout cockroach cinema, but this enjoyably icky 1988 Roger Corman production is a close third (in fact, MIMIC borrowed one of its major plot elements from THE NEST). The small coastal town of North Port finds itself under siege by a mutant strain of cockroach thanks to the usual scientific experimentation gone awry. To combat the cockroach nuisance, a breed of cannibalistic cockroach was created with the intention of consuming the existing roaches. Bred to die out after one generation, the flesh-eating cockroaches adapted and survived, developing an immunity to pesticides and an ability to mimic what they consume. Boasting better production values than many Concorde/Corman releases of that era, multiple visits to Corman's beloved Bronson Canyon, memorable gore scenes, and headed by a veteran actor (aging TV star Robert Lansing as the mayor) who seems to be taking the project seriously, THE NEST still plays very nicely today. The film also benefits from solid supporting turns by Stephen Davies (best known as the American mob lawyer deemed a "long streak of paralyzed piss" by British gangster Bob Hoskins in THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY) as the requisite eccentric, comic-relief exterminator and Corman regular Terri Treas as the human villain, a man-hating mad scientist responsible for the cockroach mutation and who seems perversely turned-on by the mayhem she's created. THE NEST marked the directing debut of THE HOWLING co-writer Terence H. Winkless, who continued working for Corman for a number of years, most notably helming one of Concorde's biggest successes, 1989's Don "The Dragon" Wilson kickboxing classic BLOODFIST. Winkless contributes an engaging commentary track that covers pretty much anything you want to know about THE NEST (even pointing out various bits of footage recycled from other Corman productions) and working for the Corman factory. THE NEST is entertaining B-movie trash at its finest, and certainly in the upper echelon of Corman's extremely prolific late '80s Concorde output. (R, 88 mins)
PRISON (US - 1988)
Made in the waning days of the beloved, short-lived Empire Pictures, PRISON didn't get much of a theatrical release but did get enough coverage in Fangoria that it became an instant cult hit on video. It was also an early directing effort for one Renny Harlin, who helmed A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER later the same year and was in the majors by 1990 with THE ADVENTURES OF FORD FAIRLANE and DIE HARD 2 opening on consecutive weekends. Over the years, Harlin earned a rep as a bit of a Hollywood uber-hack, but PRISON is the work of a young and ambitious filmmaker and in retrospect, is probably one of his best films. It holds up remarkably well, thanks in large part to some unusually strong performances for a low-budget, late '80s horror flick. The late, great character actor Hall of Famer Lane Smith has one of his rare lead roles and absolutely runs with it in a terrific performance as the edgy, paranoid warden in a decrepit prison that's haunted by the ghost of a vengeful convict wrongly executed 20 years earlier when Smith was a guard. The prison's been closed since that execution, but state budget cuts have forced its reopening as an alternative to building a state-of-the-art facility. Of course, it doesn't take long for the evil to be unleashed as Smith, his guards, and the convicts (including a mysterious Viggo Mortensen in an early role) are all fair game for supernatural vengeance. Harlin and screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner let the film unfold at a (perhaps too) leisurely pace (it could probably lose about 15 minutes), but it does effectively establish an ominous and atmospheric mood and once it gets rolling around the midway point, it doesn't let up. Convincing special effects and a solid cast of recognizable character actors from movies and TV (Chelsea Field, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Arlen Dean Snyder, Hal Landon, Jr., and Tiny Lister among others) add to the quality of this very well-done chiller that was one of several entries in a strange 1988-89 prison and/or vengeful-prisoner-back-from-the-dead horror craze (along with DESTROYER, SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK, THE CHAIR, THE HORROR SHOW, and Wes Craven's SHOCKER). Shout's Blu-ray/DVD combo pack presents the film in 1.78:1 and features a 40-minute retrospective documentary and a commentary with Harlin. RE-ANIMATOR and TRANCERS may get all the glory, but PRISON also ranks as one of the very best films that Empire made before they folded and Charles Band parlayed that notoriety into '90s video store and horror merch staple Full Moon. (R, 103 mins)
Directed by Nick Love. Written by Nick Love and John Hodge. Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Drew, Hayley Atwell, Damian Lewis, Steven Mackintosh, Paul Anderson, Alan Ford, Steven Waddington, Kevin Michaels, Ronnie Fox, Caroline Chikeze. (R, 110 mins)
This big-screen version of the popular British TV cop show that ran from 1975-1978 didn't really win them over in the UK, but in the States, where it's much less familiar and without the baggage of appealing to a massive fan base, it can be appreciated more on its own modernized terms. Aside from one legitimately great 15-minute action/chase sequence at the midway point, there's nothing at all inventive about the big-screen SWEENEY. The script by director Nick Love (OUTLAW) and former Danny Boyle collaborator John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING) recycles pretty much every "plays by his own rules" Hollywood cop movie cliche imaginable, but despite that, THE SWEENEY still entertains with action, suspense, humor, outstanding use of London locations, and the smart decision to just let the entire project rest on the broad shoulders of the great Ray Winstone, easily the burly badass bloke you'd most want on your side in a bar brawl.
Winstone!
Winstone is veteran detective Jack Regan, who leads an elite robbery investigation unit known as "The Sweeney." Known for their disdain of proper procedure, laws, and basic rights in general, the Sweeney handle things their own way, often relying on clubs and beatdowns in the occasional instances when they aren't shooting first and asking questions never. They're generally left alone because they get results, but uptight, desk-jockey Internal Affairs head Lewis (Steven Mackintosh) wants to bust Regan--not so much for his ways but rather, Regan is having an affair with Lewis' estranged wife Nancy (Hayley Atwell), who's also a member of the Sweeney. When a woman is senselessly killed in a jewelry store heist, Regan recognizes it as the M.O. of past nemesis and international criminal Francis Allen (Paul Anderson). An investigation leads them past Allen to a trio of Serbian nationals who have been carrying out jobs in the style of Allen, knowing it would get Regan's attention and draw him into their orbit.
Winstone!
Winstone!
THE SWEENEY works almost entirely due to the mighty screen presence of the perfectly-cast Winstone. He even manages to sell the idea that the much-younger Nancy would be interested in him, though that's due almost as much to Mackintosh's performance as the prickly, weak Lewis. Regan isn't a particularly nice or even a good guy on the surface (he steals gold bars from a bust in order to pay off his informant), but he gets the job done and he takes care of and looks out for his people. He's got no use for bureaucrats who sit behind a desk all day and has no problem getting in the shit with those he supervises, so it's easy to see why he's so admired by the members of his team, especially second-in-command Carter (Ben Drew, better known as British rapper Plan B), who's torn between his devotion to Regan and being groomed for a bigger position with the force by the manipulative Lewis.
Winstone! And other Sweeney!
Elsewhere, it's business as usual for a cop movie: Regan is constantly being harangued by his company-man boss Haskins (HOMELAND's Damian Lewis), who prefers to look the other way like Harry Guardino did for Clint Eastwood in the DIRTY HARRY movies. Despite constantly telling Regan to cool it and play it by the book, Haskins knows that won't happen and, to the surprise of no one, does what every boss of a maverick cop does: shuts up and gets out of the way. And Regan also joins the never-ending list of movie cops who solve the case and bring in the bad guys long after they're ordered to turn in their gun and badge and are suspended indefinitely. The connect-the-dots cliches would be almost comical if Winstone wasn't so great in the lead. But Love does a solid job throughout, and the big chase sequence right in the middle of the film, which has the Sweeney in a shootout with the three Serbians that turns into an epic foot chase--with guns blazing through Trafalgar Square, through parks, a museum, a library, and a parking garage--that easily rivals the ballsy intensity of the instant classic Guggenheim shootout in 2009's THE INTERNATIONAL. The only other Love film I've seen is 2007's OUTLAW, and it was filled with endless jittery shaky-cam of the worst Tony Scott sort. Love's definitely dialed that down significantly and as a result, THE SWEENEY is a much more accomplished film. It's not high art and it's not particularly creative, but THE SWEENEY aims to entertain and succeeds.
