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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: anthony mackie

Review: “Gangster Squad”

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

action, anthony mackie, crime, emma stone, gangster squad, giovanni ribisi, josh brolin, los angeles, michael pena, mickey cohen, nick notle, rubert fleischer, ryan gosling, sean penn

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: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”

23 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

abraham lincoln, action, anthony mackie, bejamin walker, caleb deschanel, civil war, dominic cooper, erin wasson, horror, joshua fry speed, liam neeson, mary elizabeth winstead, rufus sewell, seth grahame-smith, timur bekmambetov, true blood, vampire hunter, vampires

 

“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.

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