Movie Review: Manhunter (1986)

A crime drama and thriller, Manhunter is a stylish mass murder investigation, combining psychology with dogged detective work. 

FBI criminal profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) retired after sustaining physical and psychological injuries apprehending cannibalistic genius Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). When two families are slaughtered one month apart in two different states, the FBI's Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) coaxes Will back into service to help identify the killer. Will reluctantly agrees despite concerns for his wife Molly (Kim Greist) and their young son.

Will visits the crime scenes, reviews home videos of the slaughtered families, and consults Lecktor in his prison cell to get into the mind of the killer. Lecktor seizes on the opportunity to pursue his own revenge agenda, and sleaze journalist Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) salivates over Will's return and the new sensational case. Meanwhile photography lab technician Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), an awkward and self-conscious loner, initiates a romance with his blind co-worker Reba McClane (Joan Allen).

Written and directed by Michael Mann, Manhunter oozes visual beauty. Eschewing the traditional gritty look of police work, Mann adapts Thomas Harris' book Red Dragon and opts for cool, calm, blue and purple views of oceans and skies kissed by idyllic sunsets. The characters slide in as silhouettes against stunning backdrops, offering moments of reprieve from the crime milieu. Will appears to live several neighbourhoods above the compensation level of a retired FBI agent, but Mann allows the discrepancy to capture nature's inherent beauty surrounding the human propensity for warped evil.

The investigative elements are busy, bordering on cluttered. Mann threatens to overwhelm the 120 minutes of running time by throwing plenty of evidential details into the script. Will's strength is his ability to connect the few dots and adopt the mental and visual perspective of assailants, an emotionally exhausting attribute. The second half shifts gears but only moves sideways to introduce Dollarhyde as the antagonist placing the vulnerable but still feisty Reba in danger.

William Petersen brings a requisite nervy coolness to the central role, inching towards the edge of snapping as Will gets closer to his target. Brian Cox as Lecktor and Tom Noonan as Dollarhye are adequate as the twin villains, but they are provided only limited opportunities to toy with genuine terror.

For a thriller about an unhinged mass murderer, the suspense scenes are few but mighty. A secondary character is a convenient ingredient for a flaming midway exit, and the climax builds to a satisfying just-in-time showdown. Manhunter delivers thrills when needed, but revels in all the necessary in-between mental jousting.



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Movie Review: Chain Reaction (1996)

A doltish thriller set in the world of science, Chain Reaction has an incomprehensible plot and defaults to a tiresome series of repetitive and routine chases.

In Chicago, a group of University-funded researchers are working on a new hydrogen-based power source to produce plentiful and free energy. Dr. Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) and Dr. Alistair Barkley (Nicholas Rudall) head the project, and the team includes physicist Dr. Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz), machinist Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves) and project manager Dr. Lu Chen (Tzi Ma). When the team finally achieves a breakthrough, their warehouse headquarters is invaded and destroyed in a spectacular explosion by unknown assailants. Barkley is killed, Chen disappears, and Sinclair and Kasalivich are framed as spies for a foreign government and go on the run.

FBI Agents Ford (Fred Ward) and Doyle (Kevin Dunn) lead the investigation, but Eddie and Lily stay one step ahead of their pursuers as they try to reconnect with Shannon. Meanwhile, the secretive C-Systems Research company headed by Lyman Earl Collier (Brian Cox) emerges as a shadow organization trying to control the science behind hydrogen energy.

Directed by Andrew Davis three years after his success with The Fugitive, Chain Reaction attempts to recreate the same formula of innocents-on-the-run and fails miserably. The fault lies entirely in a lame script credited to J.F. Lawton and Michael Bortman that places the focus squarely on scientific discovery and a large-scale conspiracy, and then fails miserably to explain itself even at the most rudimentary level.

This is a film where none of the villainous actions make any sense. The murder, large-scale destruction and mayhem caused by the explosion that launches the film appears to have achieved nothing, in that the bad guys flattened half of Chicago but did not manage to steal the secrets of the technology that purportedly triggered their action. The science is reduced to a series of noisy lasers, flashing lights and violently shaking cylinders, none of it deemed worthy of any clarification. The conspiracy is hurriedly explained in vague terms about world economic collapse, but the script does not bother to reveal what the antagonists' intentions are.

Elsewhere the lack of attention to basic details is evident. Eddie and Lily are supposedly smart people on the run for the entire film and never try to change their appearance. Perhaps Reeves demanded that his flowy long hair remain untouched during the shoot. Lily is a physicist, but the unfortunate Rachel Weisz is reduced to an almost mute appendage being pulled along by Reeves as they look for the next narrow escape. Not once does she say anything remotely smart or contribute to the plot.

With an acute lack of anything resembling thoughtfulness, Chain Reaction offers a never ending series of cheap thrills. This is bad guys chasing good guys in circles for close to two hours, less a sequential reaction and more of a downward spiral of dumbness.

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Movie Review: Red Eye (2005)

A reasonably enjoyable action thriller that personalizes the danger posed by terrorists, Red Eye may be full of large plot holes but nevertheless offers up rousing entertainment.

Lisa (Rachel McAdams) is a proficient manager at the Lux Atlantic Hotel in Miami. After attending her grandmother's funeral in Dallas, she boards an overnight flight back to Miami. She finds herself seated next to a handsome man calling himself Jackson (Cillian Murphy) who had shared a drink with her at the airport prior to departure.

Soon after departure, Jackson quietly reveals himself to Lisa as a terrorist. He has associates waiting to kill Lisa's father Joe (Brian Cox) at his house in Miami unless Lisa cooperates. Jackson demands that Lisa use the plane's in-flight phone to call the Lux Atlantic and change the suite assigned to the United States Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, to place him in the kill zone of a terrorist plot. A terrified Lisa has to hold her nerve, delay making the call, and try to thwart the plot and save her father's life.

Directed by veteran horror master Wes Craven, Red Eye offers up a unique premise that is both it's success and failing. Confining most of the action to a single overnight plane ride creates a claustrophobic environment ripe for cranking up the psychological suspense, and hems Lisa into an effective "no where to run" scenario.

But even at the economical running length of 85 minutes, the Carl Ellsworth script is stretched to fraying as it prolongs the drama in the sky. The film needs to keep finding new ways to make sure that Lisa avoids fulfilling Jackson's demand, and after the first couple of sidesteps, the mind begins to wander towards questions such as why did Jackson not get his mission done while stalking Lisa on the ground, before the plane ever took off. It would have been helpful to spend a bit less time on the plane and bit more time fleshing out the terrorist plot, to provide some additional context to Jackson as a man and a mission.

The final 20 minutes, after the plane lands, are undeniably exciting as Lisa races to try and prevent a catastrophe, but they also turn Red Eye into a more conventional cat and mouse, hide and seek thriller. Lisa, pushed over that mythical edge that frequently exists in action movies, is transformed into an all-action heroine and leads Jackson on an extended chase, complete with old-school horror elements featuring the always popular "behind which door is the killer hiding" trope.

Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy both do well in what is essentially a two-person drama. McAdams is as ever irresistibly perky and likeable, and Murphy capitalizes on his almost too-good-to-be-true looks to prove that indeed, Jackson is no good.

Red Eye provides a compact shot of adrenaline that may not be perfect, but is enough to make any overnight trip an exhilarating blur.

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Movie Review: The Boxer (1997)

A look inside the tired twilight of the troubles in Northern Ireland, The Boxer is a fictional story of one man caught in the shifting political and paramilitary sands. The third collaboration between Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Sheridan yields a powerful drama, if hampered somewhat by an accent barrier and the overall opaque nature of the conflict.

After serving 14 years in prison, Danny Flynn (Day-Lewis) is released back into a fractured Belfast. Still only 32, his crime is never fully fully revealed, but involved participating in an Irish Republican Army (IRA) operation under the leadership of local commander Harry (Gerard McSorley). Although he has the opportunity to relocate to England, Flynn decides to stay in Belfast, eschew politics, and focus on reviving his boxing career. He teams up with friend and trainer Ike (Ken Stott), and they re-open a non-sectarian training gym.

Flynn also reconnects with his old flame Maggie (Emily Watson), although she is now married to another still-imprisoned IRA operative, and she has to be seen to remain loyal. Maggie's father Joe Hamill (Brian Cox) is a senior figure in the Republican cause involved in negotiating an end to the troubles. Although a deal appears tantalizingly close, it is not yet final. Harry does not agree with the peace process, causing a rift between him and Joe. Harry is also unhappy with Danny's attempts to foster non-sectarian relations and the increasing heat emanating from Danny's rekindled relationship with Maggie.

The Boxer is not necessarily an easy film to watch. The Irish accents are only slightly tempered, creating a hurdle in understanding a talk-heavy narrative in which most of the characters already speak in the hushed tones of a city simmering with unconcealed resentment. And the script, co-written by Sheridan, assumes a basic understanding of not only the background of the Irish troubles, but also the fractured politics of factions within the IRA heading to a stand-off as the possibility of peace approaches.

Within these constraints, the human drama is commanding. Danny, Joe and Harry represent the three points of the Republican triangle, Danny wanting to get on with life, Joe trying to create a context for a new future, and Harry eager to continue the violent struggle. The tension between the three increases in delicate increments as realization grows that their individual objectives may be mutually exclusive. There is a continuous current of dread running underneath each man's actions, Danny risking his life in pursuit of normalcy and to regain Maggie's love, Joe hoping that men who have sacrificed everything will march with him from war to peace, and Harry convinced that the British understand only the language of violence.

The performances are uniformly excellent, Day-Lewis, Cox, and McSorley continuously eyeing each other to determine the depth of allegiance and to which cause, where any miscalculation could mean death. Ken Stott adds unbridled natural passion for boxing as a way out for children of the troubles, and throws in undisguised disgust at the futility of violence. Emily Watson as Maggie walks the tightrope between falling in love with Danny all over again and remaining faithful to the role of stoic prisoner's wife.

In the relatively brief outdoor scenes, Sheridan recreates a Belfast buckling under the weight of a decades-long conflict. A divided city filled with watching eyes and watchful soldiers, populated by angry men, widows, wives of prisoners, grieving parents, and children growing up without fathers, where everyone has reasons to fear and better reasons to hate. All walls are covered with sectarian graffiti, and the sound of deadly explosions causes only the briefest of pauses among the exhausted population.

The Boxer has blood inside and outside the ring, brutality reigning everywhere Danny turns, but at least the rules of his chosen sport are clear. In the chaos of his city, death follows no logic except to widen the spiral of violence.

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Movie Review: Troy (2004)

An epic adaptation of Homer's Iliad, Troy is a wildly enjoyable romp through ancient Greek mythology.  The mammoth scope of the Trojan War and the intriguing mix of characters involved in the siege, including kings, combatants, and their women, are brought to life with a lavish treatment enhanced by stunning cinematography and sweeping special effects.

It's the 8th century BC, and after years of warfare, king Agamemnon (Brian Cox) has almost succeeded in unifying all the Greek kings and armies under his command. The demi-god Achilles (Brad Pitt), the most fearsome warrior in the land, holds no respect for Agamemnon but does help in battles, as his destiny is to engage in constant war. King Odysseus (Sean Bean) is loyal to Agamemnon and one of the few men that Achilles respects, and acts as intermediary between the two.

Odysseus: Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity. And so we ask ourselves: will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?

While the coastal city of Troy remains independent behind its imposing defensive walls, Agamemnon's brother king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) negotiates a peace treaty with Troy's two princes, Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris (Orlando Bloom). Hector is older and more mature, but the younger Paris is less experienced, more impetuous, and foolishly falls in love with Helen (Diane Kruger), Menelaus' wife. When Helen decides to join Paris on his return journey to Troy, Menelaus is personally outraged, but Agamemnon recognizes the opportunity to use the illicit love affair as an excuse to launch an all-out assault to subjugate Troy.

Agamemnon: Peace is for the women, and the weak. Empires are forged by war.

Assembling a massive army of 1,000 ships and 50,000 soldiers, including Achilles and his young cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund), Agamemnon wages a vicious war against a stubborn Troy and its king Priam (Peter O'Toole). The campaign is full of bloody battles, unexpected triumphs, and setbacks for both sides, in the midst of which Achilles nurtures a romantic relationship with Hector's cousin the priestess Brisies (Rose Byrne), before the most famous ruse in warfare history is conceived by Odysseus to turn the tide of battle.

Thetis, Achilles' mother, to her son: If you stay in Larissa, you will find peace. You will find a wonderful woman, and you will have sons and daughters, who will have children. And they'll all love you and remember your name. But when your children are dead, and their children after them, your name will be lost. If you go to Troy, glory will be yours. They will write stories about your victories for thousands of years and the world will honor your name. But if you go to Troy, you will never come back, for your glory walks hand-in-hand with your doom. And I shall never see you again.

The Troy script by David Benioff is a modern-day masterpiece of cinematic literature. Deriving an elegant and relatively compact narrative out of Homer's sprawling story, and adopting a historical rather than mythological approach, Benioff successfully achieves the difficult task of introducing a large number of essential characters and events, and ensuring that they remain distinct and memorable. He also conjures up an impressive number of epic dialogue lines, which, while undoubtedly self-consciously pompous, help to capture the cross-millennial significance of ancient history's most intriguing war.

Odysseus: This war will never be forgotten, nor will the heroes who fight in it. 

With a solid screenplay to work from, director Wolfgang Petersen can focus on breaking out of his typical love of confined spaces, and he simply soars into the wide expanse of mythology. Working with cinematographer Roger Pratt, Petersen fills Troy with a succession of stunning images, including the thousand Greek ships approaching Troy's shoreline, and directs the combat scenes with brilliantly choreographed zest.

Petersen's fluid aerial cameras capture armies marching and then crashing into each other with dreadful force, the horrors of war elevated to meet the merciless standards of mythological legend. The computer-generated enhancements are seamlessly integrated, and Petersen keeps the humans at the centre of Troy, using the microchips to full advantage but never allowing them to seize control.

Odysseus, to Achilles: War is young men dying and old men talking. You know this. Ignore the politics.

It would have been easy for the actors to be swallowed up by the spectacle, but Brad Pitt delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance as Achilles, a man born for war but finding nothing worth fighting for.

Achilles: Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn't that be a sight?

A killing machine, a keen observer of the world, and a magnetic lover, Pitt creates an Achilles worthy of his exalted place in legendary history. Eric Bana almost matches Pitt, sword swing for sword swing, Hector emerging as by far the most noble character in Troy, protective of his younger brother, defender of Troy, caring for his family, respectful of his father, and an expert combat warrior.

Hector: All my life I've lived by a code and the code is simple: honour the gods, love your woman and defend your country. Troy is mother to us all. Fight for her!

The good performances continue, with Peter O'Toole a distinguished Priam, Rose Byrne feisty as Brisies in the face of prolonged physical threat, Sean Bean thoughtfully effective as Odysseus in his relatively few minutes of screen time, and Vincent Regan memorable as Achilles' faithful lieutenant Eudoros. Julie Christie gets one scene, but delivers one of the best lines in the movie (quoted above), as Thetis, Achilles' mother. Slightly less convincing are a couple of the younger actors, both Orlando Bloom and Garrett Hedlund lacking the necessary presence to hold their own amidst the overwhelming grandeur.

The James Horner music score is appropriately exalted, and employing a less-is-more philosophy, at times makes use of minimal sounds to brilliant effect, as in the drums that provide the backdrop for the battle between Achilles and Hector. Vocalist Tanja Carovska adds a few anguished passages to lament the mass slaughter of men in meat grinder battles, and to the credit of Horner and Petersen, the soundtrack is never repetitive despite the film's 162 minute running length.

Troy is an ambitious and immersive experience, a magnificent cinematic achievement worthy of representing the monumental legends that inspired it.

Odysseus: If they ever tell my story, let them say... I walked with giants. Men rise and fall like the winter wheat... but these names will never die. Let them say I lived in the time of Hector, tamer of horses. Let them say... I lived in the time of Achilles.

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The Movies Of Brian Cox

All movies starring Brian Cox and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Manhunter (1986)

Braveheart (1995)

Chain Reaction (1996)

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Kiss The Girls (1997)

The Boxer (1997)

Desperate Measures (1998)

The Bourne Identity (2002)

The Ring (2002)

Adaptation (2002)

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Troy (2004)

Match Point (2005)

Red Eye (2005)

Zodiac (2007)

RED (2010)

Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011)

Her (2013, voice only)

Morgan (2016)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: RED (2010)

A lighthearted romp with old spies reliving former glories, RED is entertaining, funny, loud, and almost instantly forgettable.

Retired CIA special operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is living in Cleveland and lonely to the point of destroying his pension cheques just so that he can nurture a long distance romance with Kansas-based call centre employee Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker). Suddenly Moses finds himself the target of a ruthless professional hit squad. He eliminates the danger and swings back into action, trying to piece together why someone wants him dead.

Moses takes refuge with Ross and reconnects with several fellow retired CIA colleagues: mentor Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), wacked-out conspiracy theorist Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich) and understated sharpshooter Victoria (Helen Mirren). With the help of the ancient CIA records keeper (Ernest Borgnine) and a former Russian foe (Brian Cox), they uncover an elaborate political plot to silence a reporter and all loose ends related to a botched 1980s secret mission in Guatemala involving the CIA and many dead civilians. Moses and his friends have to stay one step ahead of ambitious current CIA agent William Cooper (Karl Urban), while figuring out the shady role of their former colleague Alexander Dunning (Richard Dreyfuss).

With a recognizable star face in every role, RED (which stands for Retired, Extremely Dangerous) just wants to have fun. The action is exaggerated, the coolness amplified, the explosions extremely frequent and noisy, and the humour sharp and delivered dry. Director Robert Schwentke keeps the action hurtling fast enough to almost conceal the large absurdities in the plot. An adaptation of a limited comic book series, RED is not a film to question the logic of a large hit squad marching through a sleepy Cleveland suburb with machine guns blazing to further the supposedly top secret cause of a sitting politician.

Bruce Willis holds the action together with his weathered, seen-it-all-before grimace, poking fun at his overall screen persona as much as the character. Mary-Louise Parker is in the movie solely to provide a non-combatants perspective to the joyous mayhem, and she sparkles with a charming freshness, television's gain (The West Wing, Weeds) proving to be a significant loss for the world of film. While it is a remarkable pleasure to see Borgnine on the screen at the grand age of 93, the rest of the cast does not rise much above barely concealed comic stereotypes, with a gawky romance between the characters of Mirren and Cox only helping to trip up the frantic action.

RED has plenty of style, limited substance, and an abundance of attitude. It adds up to an easy couple of hours, with no aftertaste.

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Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

A high velocity thriller, The Bourne Supremacy delivers bone-jarring stunts and highly kinetic chase scenes from within an intellectual premise. The human story of Jason Bourne still governs, and while the action is unstoppable, the characters dominate.

CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) runs a dangerous mission in Berlin to try and reveal the identity of a mole within the agency. The mission is disrupted by rogue Russian agent Kirill (Karl Urban) and turns into a disaster for Landy, with two men killed and a fingerprint left behind to implicate Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), the former black ops agent now living off the grid in India. Kirill is working on behalf of Russian oil tycoon Yuri Gretkov (Karel Roden), the beneficiary of $20 million in dirty CIA money. Deputy Director Ward Abbott (Brian Cox) and operations technician Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) join the effort to find and capture Bourne.

Kirill tries to dispatch Bourne but only succeeds in killing his girlfriend Marie (Franka Potente), spurring Bourne back into action. With Landy hot on his trail, Bourne has to clear his name, expose the mole, convince Landy that he had nothing to do with the Berlin killings, and survive Kirill's dogged attempts to eliminate him.

Director Paul Greengrass sprinkles mesmerizing action scenes at all the right moments throughout The Bourne Supremacy, none more effective than a superbly edited and violent car chase through the streets of Moscow. It is difficult to imagine that cinematic car chases can still offer something new, but parking the realities of occupant injuries aside for just a few minutes, Greengrass allows Bourne's taxi to get clattered, swiped and spun around repeatedly and brutally as the chase hurtles towards its climax, Bourne deliberately bouncing his vehicle off other cars and obstacles to abruptly change direction and seize the upper hand.

The other action set-pieces are not as eye-popping, but they are never less than professional.

The dangerous cat and mouse game between Bourne and Landy is managed well, as they take turns in gaining the initiative and gradually build an understanding in a high stakes game where careers and lives are threatened at every decision. Matt Damon puts on his stone face and bulldozes his way through the movie, leaving Joan Allen to play the more expressive Pamela Landy. The barely concealed strain on Allen's face conveys both the risks she is forced to take and the unspoken tension of a woman ordering men around in the most masculine of covert activities.

Franka Potente, Brian Cox and Julia Stiles lend strong support in small but pivotal roles, Cox particularly memorable as the senior CIA presence who has hatched and weathered more conspiracies than he cares to remember.

The Bourne Supremacy mixes all the ingredients of the action genre in almost exactly the right proportions. Some originality may be lacking, but the tried and tested elements are polished to an impressive shine.

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