Tag Archives: action

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Watts?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

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the-impossible-movie-review

“Water Works”

Grade: B

TWO ASPECTS OF Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster film “The Impossible” will haunt you.  The first is the tsunami itself, which slammed into south-west Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, killing nearly a quarter-million people and leveling scores of luxury hotels.  “The Impossible” begins and ends with the Bennett family, Maria and husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), flying to and fro a high-end Thai resort where they open Christmas gifts and lounge poolside. The film’s first fifteen minutes are the lull before the storm and Bayona is even able to extract a frisson of terror out of something as quotidian as a red rubber ball that the Bennett boys – Lucas, Thomas, and Simon – bop around the pool area; they’ll soon find themselves floating out to sea like the ball itself.  Wilson!  A loose page is blown out of the book Maria is reading and gradually, the vacationers notice that something sinister is in the air.  One of the most terrifying images is of the palm trees just beyond the hotel walls being felled, one after another, as the Indian Ocean violently overruns the lazy sunbathers.  Bayona gives us numerous underwater shots in which we see a soup of twisted metal, palm trees, bodies, automobiles reduced to matchbox cars, even a drowned elephant.

The-Impossible-PosterBeyond such verisimilitude, which is agonizing indeed, there is also Naomi Watt’s performance as Maria, a doctor who has temporarily hung up her stethoscope to raise her three young sons while living abroad in Japan.  Bayona built the biggest water tank in Europe to simulate the disaster and, currently making the rounds on TV talk shows prior to Oscar night next month, Watts reports that she was strapped to a chair, submerged, and brought to the brink of drowning in order for the director to elicit true terror from her.  But Watts’s performance is a marvel not simply because of her lung-busting cries – she gave us plenty of those one decade ago in “The Ring” – but because of her relationship with Lucas (Tom Holland), the eldest of her sons. There’s that uncomfortable moment when Lucas is ashamed to see his mother’s mangled and exposed breast; there’s another when Maria insists on helping an abandoned boy whom she and Lucas hide in the treetops. Dehydrated, leg badly injured, Maria shares a soda can with the two boys and stares up at the younger one like he’s a cherub on high.  A good actor, like a good tennis partner, brings out the best in her scene-mate and Watts is able to elevate Holland so that he, too, becomes the emotional core of “The Impossible.”  You don’t doubt for a second that it’s her love for Lucas and the other family members that keep her fighting for her life.

The film’s title is trite, the family’s reunion never really in question, and Bayona (“The22003 Orphanage”) either forgot or simply didn’t feel the need to close the film with the official death toll or some kind of acknowledgment that most, if not all, the tsunami-victims weren’t as lucky as the upper-class Bennetts who had health insurance and private planes at their disposal.  It’s as if every other survivor is put there to either facilitate or frustrate the family’s predictable reunion. The Bennetts are actually an Anglicization of the real-life family that survived the disaster, the Alvarez Belóns of Spain, and it’s a shame that European actors were swapped out for blond-blue-eyed ones. Nevertheless, it’s Watts who powers “The Impossible.”  That’s her kilowatts.

Review: “Gangster Squad”

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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GANGSTER SQUAD

“Hey Mickey”
Grade: B- (RENT IT)

BY THE TIME the members of the Gangster Squad toast to their crime-fighting conquests in postwar Los Angeles, mobster Mickey Cohen is already red-in-the-face and shouting that they’ll never take him down.  Cohen, the legendary gangster who went west from his native Chicago to scope out Bugsy Siegel, is played by a pruned Sean Penn.  This is a performer who normally avoids uni-dimensional characters, but here, as a straight-up evil thug, he is crime incarnate.  “Gangster Squad” is indebted to Penn and his cast-mates, but it’s derivative in every way of a whole squad of other – make that, better – genre greats like “LA Confidential” and “Chinatown.”

Nevertheless, writer Will Beall, in an adaptation of “Gangster Squad: Cover Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles” by reporter Paul Lieberman, arms Penn’s Cohen with tommy-guns and zippy one-liners like “That’s wasn’t murder; it was progress” and gangster-squad-movie-image-emma-stone-ryan-gosling“L.A. belongs to Mickey Cohen.”  Not if Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) can help it.  Despite his pregnant wife’s protestations, he forms a group that  Cohen derisively nicknamed the “Stupidity Squad.”  Here, it’s comprised of Harris (Anthony Mackie), gun-slinger Kennard (Robert Patrick), Ramirez (Michael Peña), and techie Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi).  Ribisi is usually the chameleon who brings unique voices to supporting roles, as he did in last year’s “Contraband,” but in “Gangster Squad,” Ryan Gosling (as Sgt. Jerry Wooters) regresses to the pitch of his pubescence for some odd reason.  As Cohen’s girlfriend, Grace (Emma Stone) is less concerned with Wooters’ voice than she is with his looks. Gosling and Stone only recently romped in “Crazy Stupid Love,” but the results were neither lovely nor crazy (for the latter, see “Blue Valentine”).  These are two actors too keenly aware of their own allure to mix and melt in the way real chemistry on screen requires, so it’s a mystery why they’re reunited (and so soon).

That’s the work of Rubert (“Zombieland”) Fleischer whose “Gangster Squad” opens with a grizzly gangland murder that will make Gangster-Squadyou avert your eyes.  (Think of being snapped in half like a human biscotti as two cars pull you apart – oh, and there are coyotes around to eat your innards.)  Then, in keeping with the conventionality of “Gangster Squad,” Fleischer’s film ends with a hero hugging his wife and infant son on a beach in Southern California.  Order, family, justice have been restored: The End.  It’s this turn from the lurid to the lovely that makes “Gangster Squad” lopsided.  In short, it needs target practice.

Review: “Skyfall”

17 Saturday Nov 2012

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“Gold Bond”

Grade: A-/B+ (SEE IT)

VAMPIRES, LINDSAY LOHAN, AGENT 007: some things never die. After the franchise flatliner that was 2008’s “Quantum of Solace,” James Bond bounces back to life in the Sam Mendes-directed “Skyfall.”  It’s staggering to think that 45 years ago, the fifth Bond film appeared under the title “You Only Live Twice,” starring its originator: the incomparable, martini-swilling Sean Connery.  He set the gold standard for a Bond as slyly confident undercover as he was under the covers. “Skyfall,” starring the sixth actor (Daniel Craig) to embody Ian Fleming’s hero of the British Secret Service, proves that Bond has more lives than that white cat on the lap of Dr. Evil. “You expect me to talk? Connery asked Goldfinger in the eponymous 1964 film.  “No. . .” replies Auric Goldfinger – all together now! – “I expect you to die.”

Not going to happen. The twenty-fourth Bond installment, “Skyfall” marks Craig’s third turn as 007 and the role, like his tailored silver suit, fits him like a glove. The action sequence that opens “Skyfall” – followed closely by the opening credits in which Adele belts the title song over an opus of a music video – plunges the viewer back into that world of improbable but entertaining stunts.  Set in Turkey, a fight atop a high-speed passenger train recalls the iconic fight scene of “From Russia with Love,” and Bond, like Bourne, appears to plunge to his death after Eve (Naomie Harris) takes a shot but misses.  The order comes from the all-seeing Judi Dench (as M) who won’t see her beloved Bond again until the offices of the MI6 are incinerated in a terrorist attack.  Ralph Fiennes, likely to serve a larger role in the forthcoming Bond films – Craig is contracted for two more – and Ben Winshaw (as the gadget-geek Q) are superb supporting cast members. Behind the camera, the cinematography of Roger (“No Country for Old Men”) Deakins is opulently lush, notably in the Macau chapter.

“Skyfall” could be the best Bondarama since Pierce Brosnan hang up his hat in 2002’s “Die Another Day.” That’s when Halle Berry rose, Ursula Andress-style, like a bikini’d nymph from the sea and Madonna offered a bizarre cameo as a lesbian fencing coach.  Ah, the Bondian world is a strange world indeed.  Recall the goofiness of the Roger Moore years when, in “Octopussy,” circus clowns were killed for smuggling Fabregé eggs and, in “Moonraker,” Bond orbited the earth in a space capsule.  Bond’s world is basically a hetero-male’s fantasy world designed for his pleasure.  Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead; need we say more? That’s why the queering of Javier Bardem’s villainous Silva gives “Skyfall” a much-needed edge.  When Silva interrogates the agent, he draws in close, strokes Craig’s chiseled face and legs, and tells him not to be nervous as it’s his first time.  “What makes you think it’s my first time?” Bond shoots back.  The scene made the woman seated to my left uncomfortable – or was it the bottle of champagne she and her husband had stashed under the seat? – but the audience erupted in laughter.  Clearly, Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan are having some fun with Bond’s archetypal straightness and forcing him (and us) to loosen up a little.

“Skyfall” also succeeds in large part because it looks back to the Cold War days – the reappearance of that classic chrome Aston Martin DB5 is a welcomed one – and because the conflict between Silva and MI6 is personally motivated. Bardem, whose yellowy wig is reminiscent of Robert Shaw’s peroxide coif in “From Russia with Love” (1963), was disfigured by another reckless call made by M and he’s out for revenge. Could Silva be based on Wiki-leaker Julian Assange?  He essentially duplicates the role of the killing machine he played in “No Country,” but he’s the right actor to simultaneously titillate and terrify.

Ever since Timothy Dalton took over as Bond in 1987’s “The Living Daylights,” an air of artificiality has hung over many of the later Bond films.  Product placement, mannequin-like models come (barely) to life, gadgets that are more Sky-Mall than “Skyfall” – many Bond flicks are like the golden corpses that litter 1964’s “Goldfinger,” roundly considered the best of the lot.   There is still no escaping some of these conventionalities.  Silva forces Bond to shoot a shot-glass, William Tell-style, off the head of a bleeding and bound Berenice Marlohe – a misogynistic spectacle indeed – and the final show-down at the Skyfall estate, where a young Bond grew up, is overlong and ultimately tedious.  Still, the backstory opens up some new territory for the franchise as it could continue to peer into Bond’s early years as an orphan in Scotland.

“Skyfall” is proof that a solid Bond – like a diamond – is forever.

Review: “Total Recall”

06 Monday Aug 2012

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“Where is my Mind?”

Grade: C (SKIP IT)

REMEMBER, BACK IN THE NINETIES, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was gladiatorial and not yet gubernatorial, and two words, “Sharon” and “Stone,” spelled the very apex of the filmic femme fatale?  They were all there in Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall,” based on a Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and adapted by the writing team that gave us “Alien.”  The film grossed over a quarter-million dollars over the summer of 1990 and the sequel, in true sci-fi style, transmuted itself not into “Total Recall 2” but into Speilberg’s “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell.

The latter actor now leads “Total Recall,” a remake not exactly worthy of the suffix “2.0” due to its repetitiveness and lack of inspiration. The premise remains a fascinating one and something of a Lockean nightmare: what if an authoritarian form of neuroscience could reduce its enemies into a tabula rasa with just the flip of a switch?  As everyman Doug Quaid, Farrell has only vague memories of being a secret agent in the ongoing war between Chancellor Cohaagen (Bryan “Breaking Bad” Cranston) and a resistance led by a wasted Bill Nighy.  Visiting a laboratory called Rekall, the scientist tells Quaid: “Tell us your fantasy and we’ll give you the memory.”  Outside the lab, a chemical attack has cleaved the earth into the Fall, a version of Great Britain, and an imperialized Australia known as the Colony.  All the Marxist animosities between workers and over-lords would appear to be in place, but are soon squandered in a film that clings to flying-car chases and endless sequences in which Farrell and sidekick Jessica Biel fall from rooftops.  Even more nightmarish is the idea that in the distant future, in a decimated London-like metropolis, “Phantom of the Opera” is still being advertised on double-decker buses.

Directed by Len Wiseman, from a script by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback, this “Total Recall” is a gumbo of other, better, films:  Cohaagen’s synthetic drones look like the Storm Troopers of “Star Wars” and the Colony resembles the LA of “Blade Runner” (only wetter).   Wiseman should have wised up to the fact that the Verhoeven’s original was full of grotesque splendors: triple-breasted prostitutes, red-hot martian sands, and a human face that came apart like a Rubik’s cube.  This was Verhoeven after “Robocop” but before “Showgirls,” and he brought a campiness to the original sadly absent in the reboot.

Then again, Kate Beckinsale (also Mrs. Wiseman) goes for the throat as Quaid’s wife, but if it’s Beckinsale karate-chopping her way through a film you’re after, the “Underworld” franchise will better whet your appetite.  Alongside Farrell and Biel (not so much a thespian yet but a very high pair of cheekbones), the cast is comprised of some of Hollywood’s blandest actors: poor Farrell is a hard worker, but he has an empty coolness that keeps him from truly vaulting himself into mega-stardom once and for all.  Here, the cast is upstaged by gadgetry, especially a glowing cell phone implanted in the palm.  Talk about keeping a phone on hand.

The best bit of dialogue transpires between him and Beckinsale with the query: “If I’m not me, then who am I?”  “How do I know?” she replies, “I just work here.”  Despite this, however, the sour irony of “Total Recall” is its total forgettability.

Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”

23 Saturday Jun 2012

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“The Exsanguination Proclamation”

Grade: D (SKIP IT)

WHAT A PITY that “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” fails to live up to the fun of its name.  This deadly dull take on the American icon and vampirism’s imagined complicity in nineteenth-century slavery comes from the horror novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote the screenplay here, and Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (“Wanted,” “Day Watch”).  But long before the runaway train carrying Abe (Benjamin Walker) and arch-enemy Adam (Rufus Sewell) crosses a burning bridge at the film’s climax, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” derails into a whole stockpile of horror film clichés.  If you opt for the 3-D version, prepare yourself for at least a dozen shots, compliments of cinematography Caleb Deschanel (Zooey’s papa), of a piranha-mouthed vampire swallowing his close-ups whole.  This is just as tiresome as the Civil War battlefield scenes which dispense with the realities of actual warfare and mobilize instead an onslaught of CGI simulacra.

The film’s narrative is conventionally chronologic: we see the bushy-bearded president in middle-age in the Oval Office, penning his memoirs, before we flashback to 1818 and the waterside set of “Anaconda.”  A young Abe passionately defends his black friend Will (a wasted Anthony Mackie) from Jack Barts, the first piranha-mouthed bloodsucker played by Marton Csokas.  When Barts drains his mother in her sleep, the aspiring lawyer vows revenge on the undead roaming in Indiana.  (Lincoln’s real mother, Nancy, died of tremetol vomiting in 1818 when Lincoln was just nine years old.)  Vampirism is such a fetish in contemporary culture – think of Bella and Edward’s virginal antics or the queerish hedonism of HBO’s “True Blood” – that it always involves some sacred sort of initiation ceremony, and here, Henry Sturgess (played by up-stager Dominic Cooper) opens Lincoln’s eyes to all things vampiric, from the silver-edged axes he’ll need to slay them to the powerful cult led by Adam and sidekick Vadoma (Erin Wasson).  But whose side is he on?

Refreshingly, there’s a bit of bromance at play between Abe and Henry, perhaps a playful take on Lincoln’s romantic friendship with Joshua Fry Speed, the leader’s lifelong friend and “partner,” in the literal sense, at the general store they ran together in Springfield, Illinois.  One has to wonder why it is Henry’s voice that comes to Lincoln’s mind when he kisses his future first lady, Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).  But this is the only whiff of transgression in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” which, fatally, had the potential for campy humor but takes itself too seriously by following the rules.  What can we do but laugh when we see the sixteenth president of the U.S.A., Benjamin Walker, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Liam Neeson, wielding an axe and splitting heads like they’re watermelons?  If only Grahame-Smith and Bekmambetov had milked that absurdity for crimson laughs and not the black blood that repetitively splatters the screen.

If only this bloodless time-waster came with its very own John Wilkes Booth to sneak up behind you in the theatre and put you out of your misery.

Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”

03 Sunday Jun 2012

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Mirror, Mirror…Temper! Temper!

Grade: A-/B+ (SEE IT)

THERE ARE REALLY ONLY two great times of the year to go to the movies: summertime, when they’re garish and loud, and just prior to the holiday season when Oscar is rearing his golden head.  In all actuality, the visual treat that is “Snow White and the Huntsman” is a winter film, chockfull as it is of doom and gloom, blood and mud.  It is worth remembering that the Disney-produced “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released in December of 1937 at the Carthay Circle Theatre, the famed movie palace in Los Angeles.  There are dwarfs, here, too – digitally rendered dwarfs played by Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, and Toby Jones – but they’re a motley crew with names like Gort and Muir, much dingier than the cartoon versions we know as Grumpy and Sneezy.

 “Snow White and the Huntsman” is from first-time director Rupert Sanders, writers Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini; it’s also the second Snow White-inspired film of the year (following the more light-hearted “Mirror, Mirror” with Julia Roberts).  When one thinks of Snow White, one doesn’t think of her in a suit of armor brandishing a sword, but Sanders’ take on her is closer to Snow-Storm White.   With a focused and fierce Kristen Stewart in the title role, the princess, daughter of King Magnus, must do battle with the dark queen, the aptly named Ravenna, who has banished her to the Dark Forest.

As the foil to Snow White’s purity, Charlize Theron has just the kind of sharp beauty for the part.  In league with her albino brother Finn (Sam Spruell), she literally sucks the life out of her young subjects when she’s not preening before her magic mirror.  Here it resembles a golden gong that, “Terminator 2”-style, mutates from liquid metal into a man with a Darth Vader-like baritone.  That this version of the Grimm Brothers myth doesn’t shy away from the sexual dynamics inherent in most, if not all, myths is a relief.  Straddling Snow White’s father in his bedchamber, Ravenna quivers a bit after plunging a dagger into her husband’s chest.  There’s something not a little devious, too, in the way she must drain her virginal victims of life to keep herself going and going.  At one point, she oozes from a bleeding flock of crows back into a demonic diva crawling on all fours.  Eat your heart out, Mr. Hitchcock.

Where there are apples, there is allegory, and “Snow White and the Huntsman” is nothing if not a war between good and evil with the slight sprinkling of a love story.  The widower Huntsman, played by Chris Hemsworth, is originally hired to capture Snow White, but soon becomes her protector.  Four words in the film’s final showdown point to the film as allegory; Ravenna hisses: “I’m everything you’re not!”  Duh, girl!  Ravenna and Snow White may look human but they’re really oppositional forces, intertwined like the eagle and the serpent.  Snow doesn’t even hate the witch who stabbed her father and stole her sovereignty; instead, she pities her.  In keeping with Snow White’s fall, there is an eden to occupy, if only temporarily. One of the real wonders of this film’s top-shelf production value is its take on fairyland; inside, there are epicene nymphs, mushrooms with eyes, snakes and turtles so ingrained in their ecosystem that they have backs made of bark and moss.  The terrain suggests that the human and the nonhuman fuse into one environment, and that the rivalry between the black Ravenna and the white Snow is a ferocious force of nature, always at work around us.

Far from being Sleepy or Dopey, “Snow White and the Huntsman” demands a new dwarf name to describe itself: It’s Icy.

Review: “Safe House”

10 Friday Feb 2012

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“Off the Res”
Grade: B+ (SEE IT)

TO SAY THAT “Safe House” moves at breakneck speed is an apt description given one dazzling sequence in which rogue CIA operative Tobin Frost (played with great aplomb by Denzel Washington) escapes a BMW’s trunk, through the backseat, only to strangle the car’s driver, fellow agent Ryan Reynolds, from behind.  The unrelenting action of “Safe House,” expertly choreographed by Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, makes the film more unstoppable than Washington’s last film, “Unstoppable,” more full of bullets ricocheting than his “Ricochet” of 1991.  “Safe House” barely slows down to catch its breath and when it does, it’s aided by a strong cast including Vera Farmiga, Sam Shepard, and Brendan Gleeson, all of whom demonize Frost for going, as they put it, “off the res.”

Frost’s first line in the film, “This is not a negotiation,” along with the remarkable deftness with which he pulls of a high-stakes operation, alerts us to his steely, sociopathic nature.  Intermittently captured, then lost, by Reynold’s character Matt Weston, Frost is a supreme source of mystery: like a Dr. Lecter, he uses his psychological acumen to get under Weston’s skin with a probing I’m-just-like-you/you’re-just-like-me approach.   The CIA, meanwhile, describes him as a “notorious” and “expert manipulator of human assets,” but we’re not sure why.  Only later in “Safe House” do we realize our alliances are misguided, thereby proving another of Frost’s aphorisms, which he imparts to Weston: “Everyone betrays everyone.” The relationship between the two men, which begins as a simple cat-and-mouse pursuit but develops into something deeper, unfolds in a Bourne-like world in which political espionage and double-crosses collide.  In fact, David Guggenheim’s script is well served by editor Richard Pearson (“The Bourne Supremacy”) who juggles multiple scenes like he’s spinning plates.

There are some minor improbabilities in “Safe House” that catalyze the action but make no real sense.  Why would the CIA dispatch Weston, for example, to a crowded sports arena to pick up a GPS device when all hell can, and does, break loose with a wily Frost in custody?  Are there no quiet spots, like a Mailbox Etc., in Cape Town?  Does it really take more than 24 hours for the brass in Langley, Virginia to catch a flight to South Africa and help out the flailing Weston with Public Enemy #1?

Then again, it’s all about the action in “Safe House,” which crashes into you with shoot-outs, screaming mobs, sniper fire, and a veritable bloodbath that sends Reynolds flying through windshields and windows, all of which make it safe to say that “Safe House” is the first true action film of 2012.

Review: “The Grey”

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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“Wolves on Film”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

REMIND ME TO shell out the extra forty bucks and check action star Liam Neeson as my carry-on luggage when I next traverse Alaska in the dead of winter, in a howling storm.  To the passengers of the luckless aircraft that makes a crash landing, the experience is terrifying – a plane breaking apart hasn’t sounded this cacophonously life-like since “Cast Away” (2000) – but to the wolves on the ground, it’s lunch and dinner.  Where is Sarah Palin and her high-power rifle when you need her?

In “The Grey,” directed by Joe Carnahan (“The A-Team,” “Smokin’ Aces”) from a script co-written with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (from his story “Ghost Walker”), Neeson plays a survivalist man on the ground named Ottway, conveniently a wolf-hunter working for a big-oil company who, post-crash, becomes the hunted.  The solemn voice-over narration, alongside the lupine howls of the white wilderness, that open Carnahan’s film alert us to some of its more unconventional aspects: a suicidal protagonist, pauses in the action to meditate on faith and providence, and the utter irresolution of the ending which left one loud-mouth in my local theatre yelping: “That better not be the ending!”

Then there’s Neeson himself who, Roman nose and all, hasn’t exactly hung up his acting hat but turned, as of late, to fast-paced action films in which he stoically takes on European prostitution rings and identity-thieves (i.e. the convoluted “Unknown”).  Since “Taken,” the finest action film from the 2000s in terms of sheer pacing, Neeson has been honing a particular set of skills – “skills,” as he menaces there,” that make me a nightmare for people like you.”

He’s met his match in “The Grey” wherein a bloodthirsty pack of wolves and the unrelenting forces of nature bear down on him and his men, an equally fine group of actors including Dermot Mulroney, Nonso Anozie, Dallas Roberts, and Frank Grillo.  It’s a motley crew – all bearded and bellicose – and the most surprising thing about “The Grey” is that the men collectively ponder spiritual matters – “Did you feel him go?” one of the men asks as a priest-like Neeson administers last rites to a dying man, “I felt him go!” – as the noose around them tightens.  There’s also a touch of humor: after killing a wolf which Neeson describes as the pack’s “omega,” they fire up the spit-roast and remark: “I’m really more of a cat person.”  As the stolid Ottway, Neeson follows in the footsteps of Robert Shaw’s Captain Sam Quint in “Jaws” (1975).  The wolf is his land-shark and he instructs the men: “They’re man-eaters and there’s blood in the air and death.”

“The Grey” doesn’t exactly rise above predictability – we know that when seven survivors set out, at least one has to wind up in a body-bag (or is it doggy-bag?) – but the filmmakers do “go there” in terms of the film’s homosocial conditions.  There’s a passing reference at the start to the late Timothy “Grizzly Man” Treadwell as that “fag who likes bears.”  And when the fur starts to fly, so do anti-gay epithets like “girls” and “fairies” as each man’s masculinity is tested.  When Neeson is forced to keep his drowning friend alive via mouth-to-mouth, the film’s interest in men-in-cramped-conditions, well, bubbles to the surface.

It was at that queer moment in “The Grey” that the old diddy from Duran Duran came to mind: “I’m on the hunt/I’m after you/Mouth is alive with juices like wine/And I’m hungry like the wolf.”

Review: “Contraband”

19 Thursday Jan 2012

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“Smuggling with the Enemy”

Grade: C+ (SKIP IT)

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

That’s not Mark Wahlberg, of course, but Al Pacino in “The Godfather III” and it might just as well serve as the premise of the new action(less) film “Contraband” with Wahlberg as Chris Farrady, an ex-smuggler from New Orleans who’s gone legit for the sake of his hairdresser wife (played by Kate Beckinsale in cheap highlights) and two young sons.

We don’t go to the movies to see former criminals go straight, so it comes as no surprise when all four family members are soon staring down the barrel of a gun.  (And poor Beckinsale takes a beating in this film, from pistols and fists to fenders and a cement mixer.)  Chris’s quiet life working in security quickly crumbles after his dipshit of a brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) bungles a hand-off and ex-con Tim Brigg (Giovanni Ribisi) comes back to town, demanding his money or else.  Chris will have to carry off one last heist to repay Brigg and protect his family.  “Contraband” suffers from the same moral problem that beleaguered “Inception”: it’s hard to root for thieves, so the film struggles to keep Chris out of the cocaine and heroin trade he traverses, insisting instead that it’s those Andrew Jacksons on starch-free paper he’s really after.

As one half of the film’s villainous pair of con-men, Ribisi (“Boiler Room,” “Lost in Translation”) can always be counted on for a performance freshly inspired and here he affects a voice that’s half helium and half hatred.  Before the two wage war against each other, Wahlberg visits his corner-bar and pleads for a reprieve: “Do you know how many passes I gave your brother?”  The reptilian Ribisi replies: “I hated my brother.”  Performances aside, the plot of “Contraband” is bafflingly improbable.  Once Chris sets sail to Panama City to carry out the heist, all kinds of unanswered questions are raised: are the transport-ships that travel the Panama Canal really this easy to hop aboard?  Who knew tanker ships carrying imports were as easy to penetrate as your local Denny’s?  Paintings by Jackson Pollock are so vulnerable to thieves that they can be rolled up like painter’s drop cloths?  Director Baltasar Kormakur, who starred and produced in the 2008 Icelandic original entitled “Reykjavik-Rotterdam,” has a problem with momentum as “Contraband” never leaves the port.

January is customarily the dumping ground for major studio release for two reasons: first, after the first of the year, ticket-buyers are looking at their Christmas credit card bills and cutting back and second, most are still trying to catch up with the Oscar-bound films from the previous fall.  “Contraband” is exactly the kind of film to release while no one’s really looking.  Fresh off the boat in Panama, Wahlberg utters the film’s most telling lines in this exchange with a  Panamanian druglord alarmed that Chris isn’t happy with the product: “No bueno?”

“No,” says Wahlberg, “No fucking bueno.”