thriller

Haywire: an action star is born

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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.

 

DVD of the Week: Source Code

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Source Code is a gripping thriller, and I admired both its intelligence and its heart.  The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley.  The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again.  Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity?  Gyllenhaal is excellent.  So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes.  Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.  Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.

It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Other recent DVD picks have been Potiche, Step Into Liquid and Riding Giants, and Another Year.

Coming up on TV: Strangers on a Train

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On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.

Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history.  The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.

DVD of the Week: Diabolique

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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.  Criterion has released the Diabolique DVD.

Source Code: a gripping thriller with a heart

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I admired both this gripping thriller’s intelligence and its heart.  The key is a breakthrough screenplay by Ben Ripley.  The scifi premise is that supersoldier Jake Gyllenhaal can inhabit the brain of a terrorism victim for the same 8 minutes – over and over again.  Each time, he has 8 minutes to seek more clues. Can he build the clues into a solution and prevent the terrorist atrocity?  Gyllenhaal is excellent.  So is Vera Farmiga as his handler and Michelle Monaghan as a girl you could fall in love with in 8 minutes.  Jeffrey Wright chews the scenery with his homage to Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.  Director Duncan Jones solidly brings Ripley’s screenplay home.

Carancho: seamy and steamy

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Well, they have ambulance chasers in Argentina, too, and that seamy world is the setting for this dark and violent noirish thriller.  Ricardo Darin (The Secrets of Their Eyes, Nine Queens) stars as a suspended lawyer running insurance scams.    (I think of Darin as the Argentine Joe Mantegna.)  Set in the gloom of urban nighttime emergency rooms and funeral homes, it’s a love story between the lawyer and an equally troubled doctor (Martina Gusman), nestled into a crime thriller.

The story is as cynical and dark as it comes.  The handheld camera keeps it out of the noir category, but the story is as hard-bitten as Kiss Me Deadly or any of the really nasty noirs. The violence is realistic, and there’s lots of it – I had never seen anyone beaten to death with a file drawer before.  If you like dark and edgy (and I do), this is the film for you.