Eleven (count ’em, eleven) main characters traipse through Paris, London, Bratislava and Denver and each faces choice that can change the direction of a life. Unfortunately, we don’t care that much about any of the characters and their stories aren’t that compelling or even original. It’s not a bad movie, but the story (stories) make it a snoozer.
360 is otherwise well-made by acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) and well-acted by an international ensemble cast that includes Jude Law and Rachel Weisz (completely unrecognizable behind a full set of bangs). The two most interesting characters are the father of a missing crime victim (Anthony Hopkins) and a convicted sex offender in a very fragile recovery (Ben Foster). Foster (The Messenger, Rampart, 11:14) is one of my favorite actors, as is also Jemel Debbouze (Let It Rain, Angel-A, Amelie). But even these actors can’t really punch up a story that isn’t there.
It’s no surprise that we open August with some thrillers. In The Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town) takes over the lead role from Matt Damon. (Except the protagonist is named Aaron Cross, not Jason Bourne.) Tony Gilroy, who wrote the two earlier Bourne films, directs this one.
The oft-delayed Killer Joe is a dark crime comedy/thriller. A white trash family gives a hitman (Matthew McConaughey) the teen daughter (Juno Temple) as a deposit. It is directed by 70s guru William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist). I’ve seen it, and it rocks.
In 360 , acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener), intersects the stories of several relationships in a film with some very suspenseful moments. The ensemble cast includes Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins and an even creepier than usual Ben Foster.
You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To. Here’s the trailer for 360.
Prometheus is a striking and well-acted sci fi adventure with a horror film tinge. What you want in a sci fi movie is cool alien worlds and cool alien creatures – and, for that, it’s hard to top director Ridley Scott, who made the classic sci fi thrillers Blade Runner and Alien (as well as Gladiator, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down).
In Prometheus, there is a space mission to find out if a species of aliens created us and returned to their world in another solar system. The mission successfully finds the answer, finds the aliens and finds some terrifyingly lethal space monsters.
Don’t think too much about the premise. The movie is a little ponderous when it drills down to the existential questions here. We’re far better off enjoying the cool visuals and just rooting for the good guys to escape the space monsters. And the space monsters are damn scary. The final sequence, however, makes the inevitable sequel all too obvious.
If you’re looking for a girl that can take a licking and keep on ticking, you can’t do any better than to cast Noomi Rapace, the star of the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. As the lead scientist on the mission, Rapace needs to survive a an impressive series of perils, including an alarming self-surgical procedure.
Michael Fassbinder is even better as an android with punctilious correctness and insincere charm, which some reviewers have compared to the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Idris Elba (The Wire) is also notable because he plays the commander of the spaceship more as a tugboat captain than Captain Kirk. Guy Pearce plays the elderly mogul who is financing the mission; distractingly, he is apparently wearing the same makeup as Dustin Hoffman did to play 121-year-old Jack Crabb in Little Big Man.
Sci fi is not one of my favorite genres and I won’t recommend it as a “must see” to a general audience, but if you’re a sci fi fan, then by all means, see Prometheus.
3D or not 3D? If you’re gonna see Prometheus, I’d recommend forking over the premium and seeing it in 3D, especially for some scenes in which Fassbender’s android activates some floating holographic images in the alien HQ.
Safe House, the first big Hollywood movie of 2012, is a fine paranoid spy thriller. Ryan Reynolds is a green but determined CIA agent who finds himself isolated in South Africa and forced to bring in rogue superspy Denzel Washington. Like Hannibal Lector, Denzel’s character Tobin Frost over matches everyone he faces; it takes entire teams of elite commandos to trap and transport Frost, so Reynolds has his hands full. Not to mention that more teams of elite commandos keep popping up, trying to kill them both. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa keeps his pedal jammed to the floor, and this two hour movie flashes by in what seems like 90 minutes.
It takes a screen presence like Denzel’s to make Tobin Frost, with his unique mix of charisma, menace and lethal skills, credible. Reynolds holds up well against Denzel, and the always excellent Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepherd round out the cast.
I wouldn’t rate Safe House at the very top of the genre. Espinosa didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to flesh out the characters played by Farmiga, Gleeson and Shepherd, who all end up playing oft-recycled types. And there are some holes in the plot that you’ll recognize in the few moments when you can catch your breath (See spoiler below the trailer).
But the action and thrills are there, and the extremely well-paced Safe House is a satisfying watch.
Spoiler alert: Since the CIA knows about Reynolds’ girlfriend, why don’t they kidnap her or at least tap her phone to help them track down Reynolds?
The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie: at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners. As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures. So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie. But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos, and a firm intention to make Roger dead.
Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive. As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.
Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo. There are reports that Headhunters will be remade soon by Hollywood. In the mean time, see Headhunters and have a fun time at the movies.
If you like suspense, you will want to check out Diabolique, to be broadcast by Turner Classic Movies on May 12. The headmaster of a provincial boarding school is so cruel, even sadistic, that everyone wants him dead, especially his wife and his mistress. When he goes missing, the police drain the murky pool where the killers dumped the body, and the killers get a big surprise. Now the suspense from director Henri-Georges Clouzot really starts.
A master of the thriller, Clouzot was nicknamed the French Hitchcock. In an achingly scary scene from Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, two truck drivers try to get a long truck around a cliff side hairpin curve – and the truck is filled with nitroglycerin. If you like Diabolique, you’ll probably also like another domestic murder – this time set in Paris – Quai des Orfevres.
One of the first 2012 releases, Haywire is a rockem sockem spy action thriller by Steven Soderbergh, starring Gina Carano. I was not familiar with Gina Carano, who is an accomplished star of mixed martial arts. Haywire is a vehicle seeking to launch her as an action film star. And why not, for she is attractive (with “real girl”, not Hollywood, looks), well-endowed and can kick ass? She can, after all, kick ass for real, not just pretend to in a movie.
As an actor, Carano is plenty good enough. She’s way better than Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and the Rock, and is at least as good as Schwarzenegger. And, when she beats up a swat team, it is believable (and fun).
Soderbergh is always interesting, as he moves between high brow/arty (sex lies and videotape, The Good German) and lowbrow/popular (Ocean’s Twelve, Contagion). Here he takes an inexperienced leading woman and an unremarkable story and makes the most of it. It’s a good watch.
Soderbergh delivers fast pacing and great locations (Barcelona, Dublin, New Mexico). Soderbergh and Carano benefit from a top rate cast: Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano and Bill Paxton. Overall, it’s good entertainment and, for once, I’m actually looking forward to the sequels.
In this paranoid thriller, a sinister corporation sends a professional hunter (Willem Dafoe) to Tasmania to find the Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct. He is given a cover identity as a scientist, which immediately makes him a target of hostile loggers He is renting a room in the primitive cabin of a scientist who searched for the Tasmanian Tiger and has been missing and is presumed dead by everyone except his traumatized family. The scientist’s wife is so heavily sedated that she only briefly wakes into a stupor, the 6-year-old son has become mute and only the 10-year-old daughter is resilient enough to converse. The suspense begins immediately. Will he find the Tasmanian Tiger? What happened to the scientist? Is he being hunted himself?
The weirdly beautiful scenery and breathtaking vistas of Tasmania enhance the dramatic tension. The forests are so primordial that you expect to see a creature from Jurassic park bursting out.
Dafoe’s hunter spends much of the movie alone in the wilderness with no one to talk to and, being on a secret mission, he can’t tell other people what he finds anyway. So his discoveries have to be depicted by the director and their impacts reflected in Dafoe’s expressive eyes.
Overall, it’s a fine genre film, although the paranoia is over the top and some will find the ending too stark. The scenes of Dafoe’s driven hunter, solitary in the wilderness, make up for the flaws.
Safe House, the first big Hollywood movie of 2012, is a fine paranoid spy thriller. Ryan Reynolds is a green but determined CIA agent who finds himself isolated in South Africa and forced to bring in rogue superspy Denzel Washington. Like Hannibal Lector, Denzel’s character Tobin Frost over matches everyone he faces; it takes entire teams of elite commandos to trap and transport Frost, so Reynolds has his hands full. Not to mention that more teams of elite commandos keep popping up, trying to kill them both. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa keeps his pedal jammed to the floor, and this two hour movie flashes by in what seems like 90 minutes.
It takes a screen presence like Denzel’s to make Tobin Frost, with his unique mix of charisma, menace and lethal skills, credible. Reynolds holds up well against Denzel, and the always excellent Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson and Sam Shepherd round out the cast.
I wouldn’t rate Safe House at the very top of the genre. Espinosa didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to flesh out the characters played by Farmiga, Gleeson and Shepherd, who all end up playing oft-recycled types. And there are some holes in the plot that you’ll recognize in the few moments when you can catch your breath (See spoiler below the trailer).
But the action and thrills are there, and the extremely well-paced Safe House is a satisfying watch.
Spoiler alert: Since the CIA knows about Reynolds’ girlfriend, why don’t they kidnap her or at least tap her phone to help them track down Reynolds?
Drive is a movie that you haven’t seen before – a stylishly violent noir tale unfolding on a brilliantly filmed canvas.
Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night. He hardly talks and doesn’t emote. Indeed, his character is listed in the credits as “Driver” and sometimes referred to in the dialogue as “The Kid”. He is motivated only by his pursuit of adrenaline rushes and the opportunity to do something good for a vulnerable mom (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, Gosling is superb.
But the real star of Drive is its Danish writer-director, Nicolas Winding Refn. The film has a noir plot but Refn eschews the shadowy black and white of traditional noir for especially vivid scenes of Los Angeles. For example, early in the film, Gosling enters a convenience store and the screen is filled with the garish colors of junk food packaging. It’s one of the most artfully lit and photographed scenes in the last year.
Drive abounds in nice touches. While being hunted by the cops, Gosling’s driver is listening to both the police scanner and a radio broadcast of the Lakers game; unexpectedly, it turns out that there is an essential reason that he’s listening to the Lakers.
This movie contains some extreme violence – violence that is intentionally extreme for its effect.
The cast is excellent, with especially memorable turns by Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Oscar Isaac.
(I admired Refn’s 2008 Bronson, the story of a Britain’s “most dangerous convict” who parlayed a seven-year sentence into 34 years (30 of them in solitary) by repeatedly taking hostages and beating up the SWAT teams that rescue them. Roger Ebert called Bronson “92 minutes of rage”.)
Drive has been nominated for the Sound Editing Oscar (but is up against some tough competition).
