Movies: April 2007 Archives

Next has a pretty good premise — thanks to the Philip K. Dick story it’s “based” on — and a fun setting. Nicolas Cage is a fourth-tier Vegas magician who has the power to see two minutes into his own future, which gives him the handy ability to clean up at the blackjack table, duck a gunshot, or try out multiple pick-up lines on the hot girl in the corner booth at the coffee shop. As represented visually, it’s less of a see-into-the-future proposition than a quick rewind — we see him trying out different strategies inside his head, then essentially backing up and trying a different angle until he finds one that works. (Maybe it should have been called Tivo.) So the concept is kind of fun, but the screenwriters (there are three of them credited) kill the buzz in several ways.

Wipe those bad memories of Hannibal Rising out of your head. This year’s real Silence of the Lambs sequel is Fracture, which has Anthony Hopkins chewing up his role as a more generic but equally diabolical psychopath — Ted Crawford, an engineering genius who confronts his unfaithful wife and shoots her point blank in the face. Sweetening the deal is the terrific Ryan Gosling as Willy Beachum, an ambitious prosecutor assigned to a seemingly open-and-shut case that ends up collapsing spectacularly. Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear) keeps things brisk and stylish, which is good enough. Cat-and-mouse scenes between Gosling and Hopkins generate the kind of sparks that keep decent screenwriters in business, with the older actor’s cutting remarks playing in hilarious counterpoint to Gosling’s repertory of tight-lipped smirks and squints. Those two performances help you forget how the story relies on the kind of preposterous coincidence that would derail a narrative train pulled by less powerful thespian locomotives. David Strathairn is effective as the District Attorney who provides Willy with a conscience, but the beautiful Rosamund Pike, playing a potential colleague who comes on like Mata Hari, is a non-starter — instead of sex, you really just want Hopkins back on screen. B

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

Don’t stay at the motel! The lodging facilities in Vacancy, which double as a low-budget snuff-film factory using unfortunate travelers as fresh meat, are clearly not AAA-approved, and the “cleaning crew” is a gang of small-time thugs who aim to butcher you on video. When bickering Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson, a married couple waiting out the paperwork on their divorce, exit the interstate and break down at the side of the road, they end up with top billing in the next torture-porn fest coming out of the Pinewood Motel. Director Nimrod Antal directs at a suitably nerve-jangling pace, leaving plenty of room in the early scenes for audience members to shout ineffectually at the screen, beseeching the dopey twosome to get the $%#& out of there already, and then turning the screws in the final reels so that the movie feels like wall-to-wall action. What doesn’t work is the combination of seedy exploitation with Hollywood slickness — the idea that casting name actors like Beckinsale and Wilson in a movie about adversity bringing an emotionally estranged couple back together makes a nasty horror movie somehow life-affirming. It’s not a terrible film, but it has the whiff of cynicism about it. C+

This review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

If you’ve seen Shaun of the Dead, you already know more or less exactly what to expect from Hot Fuzz, the new comedy from the same writers, director and stars – just as Shaun was a rollicking send-up of zombie movies, Hot Fuzz is a genial (and surprisingly gory) spoof of buddy cop movies — as well as a particularly British subgenre of horror movies that has to do with conspiracies in small villages. Simon Pegg plays Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a gung-ho London policeman transferred to the countryside by bosses who fear he’s making them look inefficient. (Pegg’s performance is hilarious – wiry and fixed with a perpetually piercing glare, he could be playing a parody of Daniel Craig’s James Bond.) After he uncovers the existence of an apparent serial killer amidst the townspeople, Hot Fuzz targets Bad Boys II for mockery, with double-fisted gunplay and overly dramatic camera angles. The story is shamelessly formulaic and drifts briefly into the same kind of tedium that afflicts the genre movies it apes. But there are stretches of brilliant Brit humor and a few huge laughs – it’s all the better if you can see it with the kind of enthusiastic audience that will cheer wildly as the filmmakers recreate an emotional high point from the 1991 Keanu Reeves movie Point Break. B

A version of this review originally appeared in the White Plains Times.

If you’re going to make a thriller about bored suburban teenagers, you could do a lot worse than use Hitchcock’s Rear Window as your template. The screenwriters of Disturbia have concocted a scenario that has high-schooler Kale (Shia LaBeouf) confined to house arrest and wearing an ankle bracelet after slugging his Spanish teacher. With his Internet entertainment options terminated by single mom Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss of Matrix fame), Kale starts snooping on his neighbors – including the new, bikini-sporting girl next door (Sarah Roemer) and a strange guy (the great character actor David Morse) who mows his lawn a lot and may or may not be piling up bodies in his garage. The story takes its time to get moving, with director D.J. Caruso (who has helmed episodes of The Shield and Smallville) paying an attention to character detail that’s rare in Hollywood movies these days, especially youth-oriented thrillers. LaBeouf is no Jimmy Stewart, but his performance has an engaging everyman appeal, while Roemer brings something extra to the requisite flirtyness. Disturbia is no masterpiece, but it gets a lot of things just right — including some sweet and engaging romantic-comedy business between the awkward-cool LaBeouf and the slyly self-possessed sexpot Roemer, who responds to the intrusion of the male gaze by heading into the voyeur's house and having a look around to see if anything there suits her. Alas, just when you think Caruso is well on the way to ensuring that what's on screen will add up to something more than meets the eye, the film's impressively character-driven narrative descends quickly and shamelessly into horror-movie clichés. It's a sudden comedown. B-

A version of this review was originally published in the White Plains Times.