Month: April 2012

In Safe, Jason Statham leaves you reeling as he lashes out nasty recriminatory punishment to both sides of a warring set of guttersnipes, and tacks on for good measure an added rancor towards a bunch of crooked cops.

The cops who have it coming are former colleagues of Statham’s and they’re all on the take from both a Russian and a Chinese pair of mafias, both who are pursuing a mysterious number memorized by a kidnapped precocious 12-year-old Chinese girl . Got it? Human trafficking takes on a new dimension when Mei (Catharine Chan), the child prodigy, gets whisked over to America, “adopted” by a particularly vicious hood, Quan Chang (Reggie Lee). Right about the same time after failing to throw an MMA fight that had a ton of jingle riding on it, Statham is served a fate worse than death by the Russian baddies who lost out on the bet. After murdering his wife, they spare him a similar fate but promise to brutally murder anyone with whom he comes in close contact. So Statham takes to the streets and goes homeless, when he eventually runs into Mei–

–but why am I bothering to make it sound like plot really matters in a Statham movie. All you need to know is everybody around Statham is corrupt and evil and once he gets ticked off they’re messing with an innocent young girl, watch out New York City, and, seemingly, the entire bad-guy world. Long an invincible son-of-a-bitch, Statham finds himself with a screenplay where he may actually for a moment be falsely mistaken for a softie version of himself, given his penchant to protect Mei. So director Boaz Yakin knows enough to step up the violence a few more notches than in other Statham films, which is a little like pouring grain alcohol into 151 proof rum.

The dizzying effects of Safe provide a definite buzz for action film fans as the body count approaches a month in Afghanistan. Killings and assorted violence occur in subways, luxury hotels, the mayor’s mansion, crowded discos, and of course on the streets of Lower Manhattan, which holds up pretty well. Even if much of the film was shot in Philadelphia. Oh, and it’s not really giving anything away to reveal that Mei, who seemingly can memorize an entire phonebook in the time it takes kids her age to eat their cereal, survives alongside Statham. For him, it’s been a long, exciting ride since Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. For the two of them together, it may be the start of a franchise. Call the next one Safe 2, or How I Overcame A Stiff Kidnapping.

7 Barrels of Dead Bodies (out of 10)

The Lucky One, the newest airbrushed pseudodrama based on the umpteenth bestselling Nicholas Sparks novel, immediately raises cackles of disbelief. War veteran Logan (Zac Enron) walks from his native Colorado to Louisiana to find the previously anonymous girl whose motivating photo he found in the rubble of his third tour in Iraq. The photo pledged “stay safe” while his thousand mile walk pledges more hogwash to come.

And there’s hogwash coming out of this movie’s ears. The girl, Beth (Taylor Schilling, no Meryl Streep) runs a kennel and since Logan happens to have his dog along for the walk, he ends up taking a job with her. Not that she wants to hire a mysterious drifter (he doesn’t tell her about the photo and how much it meant to keeping him together while in combat) but she has this witty grandmother, see. Enter Ellie (Blythe Danner), who hires the guy anyway since she seems to know what’s best, especially for Beth.

Beth has a young boy, Ben, who takes a shine to Logan. A glaring ex-husband/cop, Keith (Jay R. Ferguson) is along to start jealous trouble. The venerable Mark Islam composed the score. His presence is equivalent to having Thomas Keller take a shift as line cook at Olive Garden.

When Beth and Logan finally get around to the down and dirty, they make love with their clothes on since Sparks films aren’t about steamy sex nor certainly about any sort of reality other than an eerie celebration of nirvana as an utmost blandness (Ephron seems to endure more than enjoy the rainswept passion. Once Beth tosses aside her feckless initial reservations about Logan, their only problem remains Keith, a cartoon villain straight out of the Gomer Pyle Show realm. Any Southern cracker penchant for military man exceptionalism is trumped by Keith’s doggone envy of Logan and mistrust of Beth, who he still pops in on uninvited.

Redolent of all cliche-driven films, The Lucky One keeps its eye on overcoming the Major Obstacle, a seemingly insurmountable force with an impossibly dire consequence. Here it’s Keith’s threat to use his influence in the small town power structure to wrest total custody of Ben if Beth ups and shacks up with Logan. Needless to say, Keith’s character soon loses any of an already barely existent subtlety when he goes off the deep end and then some. Bad guys in films of this ilk certainly aren’t treated with an iota of ambiguity, but rather with a sledgehammer. Yelling “fire”in crowded theater is definitely prohibited, but screaming out loud less so, and you may well consider it.

As an antidote to the piffle, Danner does the I-told-you-so stuff rather well and something about Efron is more believable than the rest. Yet with barely a scintilla of real-life credibility, The Lucky One mucks around in dangerous territory. Trying to have its vision of fantasyland and also have that vision come up against the all too real emotional residue of war, its gears clash so grindingly it’s a film in desperate need of an oil change even as the Nicholas Sparks machine keeps firing on all cylinders.

3 Louisiana Kennels Gone Schmaltzy (out of 10)

“Fishface.” That’s what many of his classmates call the 12-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears Alex of Sioux City, Iowa, when they’re not slapping or smacking or stabbing him in the school bus, or in between episodes of sitting on his face (a feat which requires specially adjusting the school bus seat). Seems in Iowa and elsewhere oblivious school bus drivers and school administrators are as blind to bullied kids as Mitt Romney is to poor people. Alex’s parents feel his Assistant Principal “politicians” them in a meeting concerning the problem. It’s not their first meeting but it is their first after the filmmakers share school bus footage with them. This time she’s patronizing to the point of showing them a photo of her own young child in a plea of inappropriate defensiveness. For the first time in the film, though, an investigation of sorts begins and the perpetrators of the bullying are brought in for questioning.

That’s the closest the new film Bully comes to demonstrating the presence of any sanity regarding any specific responses to the bullying phenomenon. Five interweaving stories, all in America’s heartland or Deep South, give accounts of bullied kids facing a wall of inaction or hostility. An Oklahoma girl who comes out of the closet demonstrates mettle and conviction beyond her years when seemingly the entire town and school population ostracize her. Her parents, of an evangelical bent themselves, show a newfound empathy but they’re alone in their backwater environs. Would that Alex’s impassive dad shared their sensitivity. His initial answer to Alex’s plight is to blame Alex, encouraging him to get tough.

Then there’s a black girl from Mississippi who decides she’s had enough and grabs Mom’s gun to bring onto the school bus, not to hurt anyone but just to “scare them.” Though no one dies in the film, two of the stories depict parents’ agony after their tortured kids committed suicide. By the film’s end they’re all organizing awareness groups to prevent other families from experiencing a similar fate. The film operates in its own little microcosm, ignoring the macrocosm of any overview of the extent of the problem or expert opinion on its causes and prevention. Cyberbullying isn’t even mentioned. There’s plenty of time, however, for numerous superfluous scenes that make the 99-minute film seem much longer.

Nonetheless, elements of this film will stick with you. Despite the film’s thematic blurriness, the human spirit prevails. None more so than Alex, who demonstrates a tenacious optimism even when he finally admits, when asked how he feels, that he’s afraid he doesn’t “feel anything anymore.” Word has it that he was quite the rock star among prepubescent female fans when he made an appearance at a promotional screening of the film. While he may not be entirely healed, that’s probably a good start.

7 Fishfaces (out of 10)

The hidebound traditionalist in me recoils at the numerous changes in Mirror Mirror, a remake of 1937’s Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Better that you add something of substance than just throw a few new ingredients in for the hell of it. Before you rush to stream the the trashy 1961 remake, Snow White and The Three Stooges, however, you could do a lot worse for your nine-year-old than drag him or her to Mirror Mirror.

First, the changes (in ascending order of banality)…Phil Collins’ daughter Lily plays Snow White with all the modernity of a fledgling Saoirse Ronan in Hanna. No passive slouch like the original Snow White, she gets special fighting tutorials from the savvy dwarfs themselves. (No, she’s not expressing latent anger at Phil for driving Peter Gabriel out of Genesis). While the action scenes of her brandishing swordwork are largely boring, at least the decision to empower her in this age of Hunger Games is audience-friendly and simultaneously politically correct. Equally inoffensive if pure vanilla are the dwarfs’ name changes. Gone are Dopey and Grumpy. In are Chuckles, Half Pint, Grim, Grub, Wolf, etc. A couple of the little guys are genuinely amusing.

Then there’s the Queen (Julia Roberts) and her magic mirror image. Passivity out the window again. Yeah, Julia, her Mirror Image seems to say, you’re the fairest of them all but as your Mirror Image who you must cross a moat to get to, I’m also here to taunt you and provide some guilt to your callous decisions to best your own step-daughter for the Prince’s good graces. Really?

Even more ludicrous are the dwarfs donning stilts when they’re doing due diligence as highwaymen, or the Prince of Valencia (Arnie Hammer, liberated from the cakey makeup in J. Edgar) compromised by the Queen’s love potion to scamper around like a hapless dog, complete with requisite sniffing and licking. By the time we get to the beast that lurks in the forest to buffer all of the Queen’s enemies, we’re definitely in La-La land.

But as I said, you could do a lot worse if you want an innocuous kids’ flick that strives to look pretty, pretty much all the time. Director Tarsem Singh sure knows his way around art direction and costuming. Going to a movie exclusively for visuals may be like going to a baseball game simply because it’s a beautiful baseball park. There are worse ways to kill an afternoon. By the eighth inning, though, you may be thinking how much more fun it would be if the home team could actually play the game. Here, despite valiant efforts by Roberts and Nathan Lane as her servant, the realization sneaks up on you that Singh may have just been going for an easy out.

4.5 Easy Outs (out of 10)