Movie Review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

Genre: Drama Thriller  

Director: Jeremy Saulnier  

Starring: Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, James Cromwell  

Running Time: 131 minutes  

Synopsis: While biking to the small town of Shelby Springs to pay the bail money for his jailed cousin Mike, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) tangles with local police officers who wrongly confiscate his money as proceeds of crime. He appeals with no success at City Hall, but finds an ally in junior clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), who hints at a culture of judicial corruption involving the local judge (James Cromwell). Terry confronts police chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), and when Mike's fate is compromised and Summer is targeted, Terry's feud with Sandy intensifies.

What Works Well: This is a slow-burning yet sustained drama, always hinting at the potential for violence but impressively seeking cerebral off-ramps. The protagonist Terry is forced to innovate in the face of hostility, and Aaron Pierre's physical dominance is an intriguing contrast with his character's preference for words and negotiations. He is matched by Don Johnson as a police chief leading a local force tinged by racism and tainted by hide-in-plain-sight fraud within a middle-of-nowhere setting. The action scenes, when they arrive, focus on the clumsiness of aggression rather than stylized violence.

What Does Not Work As Well: The running time is 20 minutes too long, and some sloppy scripting leaves behind plenty of questions. Terry's connections to a Chinese restaurant remain murky, the police corruption details get tied up in an incomprehensible knot, and a key covert character is lost in the shuffle. The climactic showdown unleashes sudden interventions and is more confused than effective.

Key Quote:

Summer: Was that your plan?

Terry: I ran out of plan.

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Movie Review: Guilty As Sin (1993)

Genre: Crime Mystery Courtroom Drama

Director: Sidney Lumet

Starring: Don Johnson, Rebecca De Mornay, Jack Warden

Running Time: 107 minutes

Synopsis: After winning her latest case, fast-rising Chicago-based defence lawyer Jennifer Haines (Rebecca De Mornay) accepts wealthy gigolo David Greenhill (Don Johnson) as a new client. He is accused of murdering his rich wife, but claims she committed suicide and arranged to frame him. Jennifer is at first intrigued by David, but he soon reveals his dangerously twisted and obsessive character, intruding into her private life and placing her at risk.

What Works Well: Larry Cohen's script contains nuggets of a mostly unexploited psychological nightmare. Rebecca De Mornay's performance is inconsistent, but she does enjoy a few good moments as Jennifer experiences an emotional rollercoaster. Jack Warden bings veteran frumpiness into a welcome supporting role as Jennifer's investigator, while the final tussle is of the so-bad-it's-good variety. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Director Sidney Lumet is unable to generate neither eroticism nor suspense, and the production settles into mechanical and uninspired beats, the plot succumbing to preposterous twists. Don Johnson overplays the villain role, taking quick refuge in smarminess. His character's meticulous care gives way to literal bludgeoning, and police investigations of the mounting crime count are conspicuously absent. The courtroom scenes are frequently edited into microclips, failing to generate the requisite drama.

Conclusion: Case dismissed due to flimsy plotting and slipshod execution.



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Movie Review: The Hot Spot (1990)

A film noir drenched in immorality, The Hot Spot enjoys suitably depraved characters but surrenders to excess.

Drifter Harry Maddox (Don Johnson) arrives in the small town of Landers, Texas, and secures a job as a used car salesperson at the dealership owned by George Harshaw (Jerry Hardin). Harry immediately sets his eyes on the dealership's young accountant Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly), and learns she is being blackmailed by local sleazoid Frank Sutton (William Sadler).

Harry finds the local bank's security extremely lax, with no electronic surveillance and all the tellers quick to abandon their posts on volunteer fire-fighting duty. He starts to plot a bank robbery, but then tangles with George's over-sexed wife Dolly (Virginia Madsen), who wants Harry all for herself. 

Adapting the book Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams, director Dennis Hopper unleashes and modernizes all the noir artefacts. The Hot Spot features selfish motives, criminal behaviour, unconstrained lust, and characters stooping to base instincts. It's also set in an abstract, isolated small town that appears to exist on its own desert-like planet somewhere between the 1950s and 1990s. Everyone is perpetually drenched in sweat, the daylight scenes bathed in the yellows of a scathing sun.

With Don Johnson in excellent form as a man resigned to drift, the morally flawed Harry Maddox is stuck between desire for Gloria's fragility and an inability to resist Dolly's malevolence. Harry has flashes of conscience hinting at a better man within, perhaps worth salvaging. He rescues a drunk from a burning building, and pulls back from his aggressive advances on Gloria upon learning how young she is. But driven by crass instincts, he is also less smart than he thinks he is and all too easily sinks into Dolly's clutches.

Hopper exploits the cinematic era with scenes of steamy sex and nudity, this noir less about suggesting and more about demonstrating lust in full flow, losing the artistry of less is more. Commendably but also excessively, Virginia Madsen plunges into the deep end as an out-of-control vamp in heat, her performance like her character devoid of subtlety. And at 130 minutes the film drags on well past the story's limits, several scenes awkwardly padding the running length with lazy editing.

Colourful riff raff surrounds the main characters, most notably William Sadler having fun as the seediest kind of redneck pornographer and blackmailer. Charles Martin Smith as another salesperson and Barry Corbin as the local sheriff add interest to the supporting cast. 

Abandoning constraint out in the desert, The Hot Spot is admirably dedicated to bad behaviour.



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Movie Review: Tin Cup (1996)

A sports romance and comedy, Tin Cup does not lack charm but struggles to justify itself.

In West Texas, Roy "Tin Cup" McAvoy (Kevin Costner) runs a ramshackle golf driving range with his friend Romeo (Cheech Marin). In his college years, Roy and his friend and rival David Simms (Don Johnson) both showed great promise on the golf course. Simms is now a star on the PGA tour, while Roy never tamed his aggressive play with the necessary discipline to compete.

Simms and his girlfriend Dr. Molly Griswold (Rene Russo), a psychologist, show up at the driving range and old rivalries are rekindled. Simms convinces Roy to be his caddie for a charity tournament, an experience that ends badly, while a mutual attraction develops between Roy and Molly. To prove himself worthy of her love, he decides to enter the U.S. Open.

A bloated exercise in celebrating a maverick character, Tin Cup attempts to recreate the vibe of Bull Durham. Director and co-writer Ron Shelton re-teams with star Kevin Costner, and the setting switches from baseball backwaters to golf hinterlands. This is a retread with less interesting characters who really don't deserve the attention, the seams showing in a patched-up attempt to remix an old formula at an inexcusable length of 134 minutes.

For a movie about golf, there is too much golf. The final chapter is an endless recreation of Roy's US Open run, passing through all the regional qualification tournaments, and the pacing starts to resemble a long night of tedium watching the Golf Channel with no off button on the remote. An unknown's Quixotic quest to win a major tournament carries traditional underdog appeal, but it's still a relief when the William Ross music soars to predictable levels of nauseous melodrama to celebrate a heroic inability to compromise principles.

Nuggets of enjoyment do rescue a basic level of watchability. Kevin Costner admirably invests in a man content with his chosen lot in life, a living example that raw talent alone is far from a sufficient condition for success. The west Texas desert milieu provides a beautifully desolate backdrop to a proud life happily wasted, and Don Johnson is quite good as the suitably smarmy but still quite clever counterpoint.

Rene Russo struggles with the underwritten and frequently unconvincing role of Molly - for a doctor she is none too clever and quickly falls for the charms of a flawed man - but nevertheless provides some comic relief and the occasional spark. Cheech Marin is a classic sidekick, equally entranced and frustrated by his hero.

Despite a wild swing aiming for old glories, Tin Cup settles for a middling round.



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Movie Review: Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017)

A prison drama with a difference, Brawl In Cell Block 99 layers on violence, gore, attitude and plot twists in a grindhouse celebration.

Physically imposing recovered alcoholic Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) is laid off from his tow-truck driver job, and on the same day discovers his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter) having an affair. After he vents his frustration they decide to stick together and try to repair their relationship, and their economic fortunes improve once Bradley starts working as a mule for drug distributor Gil.

18 months later Bradley and Lauren have graduated to a nice house, Lauren is pregnant and Gil leans on Bradley to help establish a partnership with a Mexican cartel. But a pickup operation goes wrong, Bradley is involved in a shootout with police, arrested and sentenced to seven years at a medium security prison. Lauren vows to wait for him, but Bradley is soon visited by a Placid Man (Udo Kier) and realizes his troubles are only just beginning.

As bad as things are when Bradley initially loses his freedom, it is sufficient to note things will get a lot worse, and not in accordance with any familiar prison drama conventions. Not much more should be revealed about the plot of Brawl In Cell Block 99, because writer and director S. Craig Zahler uses the basic premise as a jumping off point to a mazy, often startling prison-set thriller where genre expectations are teased then stomped. Zahler's follow-up to the excellent Bone Tomahawk is equally brilliant, with punctuations of humour and gobs of jaw-dropping violence sparring with a deeply human core.

The character of Bradley (not Brad) is a memorable creation, brought to life by an almost unrecognizable Vince Vaughn achieving an unlikely career highlight. Zahler contrives to amplify Bradley's dimensions to giant bruiser levels, and an early man-versus-car battles establishes his credentials at tolerating pain and inflicting damage.

Demonstrating patience in deploying violence, the first half concentrates on build-up and feints disinterest in confrontations, Bradley almost going out of his way to avoid harming others. But driven by the imperative of protecting family, base instincts are unleashed behind prison walls. Carnage on the human body is doled out with relish, made just about tolerable by a cartoonish embrace.

The grim aesthetics enhance Bradley's ordeal. The early scenes are saturated in depressing blues and greys as Bradley accepts bad luck as the only luck he will ever have, then dank browns and oranges take over as he falls ever deeper into prison system hell. The relatively sparse cast includes Don Johnson having great fun as a cigar-chomping prison warden seasoned in separating vicious men from their freedom.

Surprising, wicked and proudly brutal, Brawl In Cell Block 99 pulls no punches.



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Movie Review: Knives Out (2019)

A whodunnit crime mystery spiced with humour, Knives Out features an ensemble cast having fun in a convoluted Clue-like milieu.

In Massachusetts, celebrated and wealthy crime mystery author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead by apparent suicide, after the family had gathered at his mansion to celebrate his 85th birthday. Police detectives interrogate the family members, while private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is anonymously hired to investigate whether a murder was committed.

Potential motives for murder are soon revealed. Harlan was about to expose the extramarital affair of his son-in-law Richard Drysdale (Don Johnson), husband of Harlan's daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis). He was also terminating financial support for daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette); cutting entitled grandson Ransom (Chris Evans) out of his will; and firing his son Walt (Michael Shannon) as head of his publishing company.

But Benoit takes greatest interest in Harlan's quiet nurse and close confidant Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas). The daughter of an illegal immigrant, she is well liked by all the family members and incapable of lying, and Benoit trusts her to help connect the dots.

A throwback to old-fashioned Agatha Christie-type mysteries, Knives Out presents a rich cast of characters, plenty of reasons to suspect everyone, layers of lying, and clever detective work. Writer and director Rian Johnson assembles the puzzle with a light touch, the film never taking itself too seriously. A few good pinches of well-placed humour help to keep the mood airy.

The first two thirds of the film, mostly confined to the mansion, are excellent. Johnson expeditiously introduces all the characters, gives most of them reasons to kill, and recreates snippets of the evening before the death when Harlan was clearly cleaning house and putting his affairs in order, threatening the economic future of many heirs in the process.

The final act unravels with the late introduction of Chris Evans' Ransom characters followed by an ill-advised and poorly executed blackmail sub-plot, the film hitting the road and losing its assured footing in the process.

Within the labyrinth of greed and backstabbing fueling the mystery, Johnson does include snide contemporary social commentary. Marta is an immigrant and the one seemingly pure soul, her work ethic placing her at the center of the family and yet outside it. Harlan's will upturns everyone's expectations, forcing a fundamental reassessment of the economic power dynamic.

With a star name is almost every role each performer gets the one scene to shine, and they are all adequate with a hint of theatricality. Daniel Craig works hard with limited success at an exotic accent to project a vaguely foreign detective. Ana de Armas delivers by far the film's best performance as the conscientious nurse Marta, combining sly panicked comic timing with an ability to say plenty by not saying anything at all. When everyone else is busy revealing sordid secrets, it's wise to listen more and talk less.

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