Movie Review: Trial By Jury (1994)

Genre: Legal Drama Thriller  

Director: Heywood Gould  

Starring: Joanne Whalley, Armand Assante, Gabriel Byrne, William Hurt, Ed Lauter, Kathleen Quinlan  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: Notorious crime boss Rusty Pirone (Armand Assante) is facing a trial by jury, with prosecutor Daniel Graham (Gabriel Byrne) confident of a conviction. Ex-cop-gone-bad Tommy Vesey (William Hurt) is now Pirone's "jury consultant", and targets juror Valerie Alston (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) with an intimidation campaign, threatening her son and father unless she sabotages deliberations and achieves a hung jury. But Vesey also starts to care for Valerie, leading to conflicted loyalties and violence.

What Works Well: Wayward plotting is saved by a gloss of production quality and an exceptional cast. Director Heywood Gould sets the context in short sharp strokes, and introduces a large set of characters with admirable efficiency. From courtroom jousting to the various threats unleashed on Valerie's life, the energy is maintained at a high level. Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is at her best when she tangles up the jury deliberations, Armand Assante drips oily villainy, William Hurt finds complexity in a memorably unlikely role, and the likes of Gabriel Byrne and Ed Lauter provide depth.

What Does Not Work As Well: The plot gets increasingly more outlandish and ultimately discards any pretense of logic or grounding. The opening sequence demonstrates what Pirone's criminal enterprise is capable of, undermining most of the subsequent pussyfooting to manipulate a jury outcome.

Key Quote:

Rusty Pirone: I'm the guy who falls into a sewer and comes out with his pants pressed.

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Movie Review: Louder Than Bombs (2015)

A drama about unspoken truths eroding family ties, Louder Than Bombs quietly pokes at the tender scars of tragedy.

Renowned photojournalist Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) covered the world's hotspots for the New York Times. She died in a car crash soon after retiring, leaving behind her husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and two teenage sons Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and the younger Conrad (Devin Druid). Several years later, a gallery retrospective of her photos is being planned, and Isabelle's ex-colleague Richard (David Strathairn) is writing a comprehensive remembrance article, in which he will reveal her death was a suicide.

Jonah is now a college professor married to Amy (Megan Ketch), and they have a newborn child. The troubled and non-communicative Conrad still lives with his dad and is addicted to video games. Jonah visits Gene and Conrad to help sort through Isabelle's belongings, revealing the hidden emotional pain still haunting the family.

An exploration of lies and half-truths that appear convenient but only lead to more difficult junctures, Louder Than Bombs achieves the desired discomfort despite uneven plotting. Director Joachim Trier (who co-wrote the screenplay with Eskil Vogt) creates intrigue by gradually revealing multiple sources of unease gnawing at the Reed family, but the multi-pronged insecurities compete for attention.

The promising material splits into at least three streams, and ultimately meanders into shallowness. Gene is a grieving husband and a failed actor who resented Isabelle's globe-trotting success but also feels responsible for pressuring her into career abandonment. Jonah is a smug new parent, but his young marriage to Amy is already in trouble. Conrad is a moody student at the edge of being labelled a danger to himself and his high school, but is also attracted to classmate Melanie (Ruby Jerins). All three are failing to communicate and hiding their feelings from themselves and each other. As the revelatory article draws near, Conrad makes the most progress, his creativity offering an outlet.

In flashbacks, the fourth and perhaps most compelling character is brought in focus. Isabelle was torn between a career that splashed her photos and name across the world, and a family where she felt like an intruder. Only some of her scars were visible, and she was also hiding her own secrets. Isabelle's story makes Louder Than Bombs a good companion piece to 2013's A Thousand Times Good Night.

The cast members deliver earnest performances consistent with the downbeat mood. But hampered by overlapping layers of pretense, the characters are only allowed to aim for safe landings. Louder Than Bombs settles for exposing rather than elaborating on multiple cracks in a family's foundation.

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Movie Review: Hereditary (2018)

A supernatural horror film, Hereditary takes far too long to unveil what proves to be a limp plot.

Annie (Toni Collette), her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), teenaged son Peter (Alex Wolff) and 13 year old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) live in a secluded house in a rural setting. A miniature artist preparing models for an upcoming show, Annie is more relieved than sad when her difficult and mysterious mother Ellen passes away. Ellen was close to Charlie (Milly Shapiro), while Annie has a strained relationship with Peter.

In addition to a history of mental illness and strange deaths in her family, Annie suffers from incidents of sleepwalking. She is further unhinged when she catches glimpses of Ellen's ghostly presence, but then a shocking incident tears the family apart. Annie struggles to cope, but gets some help from the kindly Joan (Ann Dowd), a member of a support group who claims that she can teach Annie to be a medium and conjure up the dead.

Directed and written by Ari Aster, Hereditary clocks in at a laborious two hours. And while the initial investment in characters and family dynamics is promising and appreciated, eventually the film comprehensively collapses under the weight of all set-up and no pay-off. A threat of some sort has to emerge to sustain the horror, but Aster leaves it all too late, and the tension is long gone by the time the film starts to bother to explain itself.

Finally, in the closing 15 minutes, really bad things start to happen, but the mumbo jumbo that passes for an explanation barely registers, and the impact is minimal. What is supposed to be climactic horror instead evokes "whatever" shrugs and threatens to descend into unintentional laughs.

Annie's dedication to her miniature art offers interesting cinematography opportunities but is ultimately discarded as a narrative theme. A fully invested Toni Collette performance is wasted, while the rest of the cast is largely dreary, with only young Milly Shapiro able to inject a healthy dose of spookiness.

Hereditary's best horror moment occurs relatively early, an unexpected and violent loss that doubles down on Annie's agony. The distraught mother at her darkest hour should have been a powerful premise, but presented with an opportunity to genuinely frazzle, Hereditary fizzles instead.

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Movie Review: A Dangerous Woman (1993)

A peculiar romance drama, A Dangerous Woman attempts to explore some relatively original territory but fails to coalesce.

Martha (Debra Winger) is a socially and physically awkward and lonely woman, able to function by herself but suffering from some form of mental illness. She lives in a guesthouse next to her aunt Frances (Barbara Hershey), who is carrying on an affair with aspiring politician Steve (John Terry), who in turn is married to the alcoholic and potentially violent Anita (Laurie Metcalf).

Martha is fired from her job at a laundromat, wrongly accused of a petty theft actually committed by sleazy co-worker Getso (David Strathairn). Meanwhile handyman drifter Mackey (Gabriel Byrne) shows up to repair Frances' porch. Hunky but frequently drunk, Mackey forges an unusual bond with Martha, who is having trouble letting go of the injustice perpetuated by Getso.

Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (and featuring his kids Jake and Maggie in tiny roles), A Dangerous Woman features a terrific Debra Winger performance and little else. Martha's behaviour often falls just outside the normal range, causing her no end of grief, and Winger immerses herself into the quirky mannerisms of a woman-child who has difficulties engaging in the logic of the adult world. The performance tugs at the heartstrings of sympathy and is almost aching in its sustained intensity.

Everywhere around Winger, the film falls short. An adaptation of a novel by Mary McGarry Morris, the story meanders along irrelevant pathways and fails to set a direction. The entire subplot featuring Frances, the politician Bell and his highly-strung wife Anita drops in and out of the film and goes exactly nowhere. Character depth, motivation and evolution is fundamentally lacking, and time passes very slowly with plenty of repetitive drunken episodes featuring Byrne stumbling about. A late incident of violence is followed by an unsatisfactorily pat resolution.

The film does wade into the thorny territory where the nature of sexual consent can be debated. Multiple impairments come together to give Martha both unexpected pleasure and a downstream conundrum. It's an interesting question but arrives too late and is almost entirely bypassed by the Naomi Foner script.

Stephen Gyllenhaal has spent most of his subsequent directorial career in television territory, and A Dangerous Woman has the small-time look and truncated sophistication of an episode from the third season of tired network series. One woman gives her all, but all else is dangerously stale and familiar.

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Movie Review: End Of Days (1999)

A supernatural horror thriller, End Of Days finds Arnold Schwarzenegger delving into unusually dark territory. The film is laden with over-the-top special effects, but nevertheless strangely compelling.

With midnight on December 31 1999 approaching, the spirit of the devil infiltrates the body of a nameless New York City investment banker (Gabriel Byrne). The devil's plan is to mate with a pre-ordained woman by the stroke of midnight to conceive satan's child and fulfill Biblical end of days prophecies. Christine York (Robin Tunney) is the 20 year old intended victim, and the Vatican has been searching for her since her birth. The Papal faction of the church wants to protect her, but the rogue Vatican Knights believe that she should be killed.

Ex-cop Jericho Cane (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a private security expert still grieving the murder of his wife and child. Along with his partner Bobby Chicago (Kevin Pollack), they think they are doing their jobs by foiling the murder of the banker by a deranged priest. Jericho investigates further and finds Christine unknowingly protected by satanists, awaiting the arrival of the mating hour. With Father Kovak (Rod Steiger) and the murderous Vatican Knights also looking for Christine and the devil closing in, Jericho has to find a way to protect the young woman from all threats while figuring out who can be trusted and sorting out his own demons.

End Of Days is an extrapolation of Rosemary's Baby and The Omen for the Schwarzenegger international fanbase. After a two year hiatus, the action superstar returns and resets with one of his darkest outings, both in subject and style. As directed by Peter Hyams, End Of Days is frequently gloomy and brooding, with many scenes claustrophobically located in poorly-lit settings. The grim aesthetic is punctuated by over-the-top but still impressive supernatural special effect extravaganzas courtesy of the devil's antics. The Arnold super-sized action scenes are of the unnecessarily spectacular variety.

What stands out most in End Of Days is that beyond the ridiculous premise, the film adopts a somber tone. The Bobby Chicago character wisecracks on the sidelines, but Arnold's Jericho is depressed and near suicide as the film starts, and then sucked into a battle with the devil himself, leaving no opportunity for irony or satire. By avoiding self-awareness the film demands to be treated seriously, and generally overcomes its own silliness with large doses of uncompromising violence.

In the body of Gabriel Byrne, the devil is given a decent opportunity to make his case. And insofar as these who-should-be-in-charge-of-humanity debates go, a prolonged scene with the devil offering Jericho attractive inducements to side with him is much better that it needed to be. The exchange straddles the line between absurd and existential and lands just on the right side of explaining human propensity to sell out in favour of selfishness.

And credit to Hyams, Schwarzenegger and screenwriter Andrew W. Marlowe for conjuring up and then sticking with a bittersweet ending. The special effects may consume most of the budget, but amidst the rampant destruction at the End Of Days happiness is found in a serene reunion.

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Movie Review: Miller's Crossing (1990)

A gangster drama with neo-noir elements and a mean streak of humour, Miller's Crossing is a character rich story about the sordid but engrossing business of crime.

Mobster Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) rules an unnamed city during the Prohibition. He refuses the request of fellow gang boss Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) to kill bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro). Caspar believes that Bernie is an unethical cheat when it comes to fixed boxing bouts, but Leo is in love with Bernie's sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) and wants to maintain the peace. Leo's second in command Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) is unsuccessful arguing that liquidating Bernie is a cheap price to pay in order to avoid a conflict with Caspar.

What Leo does not know is that Tom, who is saddled with gambling debts, is also carrying on a steamy affair with Verna. Leo does suspect Verna enough to have her followed, but things start to get complicated when the tail shows up dead in an alley. Meanwhile Caspar is fed up with taking orders from Leo and a full-fledged violent turf war erupts between the two. Tom and Leo have a public falling out, and with Caspar appearing to gain the upper hand in the fight to control the underworld, Tom joins Caspar's inner circle.

Directed by Joel Coen and written by his brother Ethan, Miller's Crossing builds slowly but surely to some magnificent peaks of tension and drama in the criminal world. Deploying a measured pace, grim aesthetics and a narrative that smoothly swerves with divided loyalties and suspect alliances, the film works both as a salute to the genre and a memorably unique story.

Inspired by the novels of Dashiell Hammett, the canon of gangster films and sharing some man-in-the-middle story principles with the likes of A Fistful Of Dollars, the Coens create a matter-of-fact world where the mobsters own the law and the politicians, and the prize at the heart of the struggle for power is nothing less than economic control of an entire city. The film does not question the reasons behind this reality; with a combination of jarring violence and sharp wit, Miller's Crossing proceeds to reveal the cunning, conspiracies and collusion required for survival and success in the world of mob rule.

Leo and Caspar will settle their conflict with bullets rather than votes; Tom just has to find a way to navigate and manipulate the dirty war without losing his head, no easy task when he is sleeping with the boss's girl. A black fedora becomes a symbol for loss and death, while a cold blooded crime in the titular forest clearing provides a neat twist and a reminder for Tom that there is a price for everything, but sometimes others pay to play. Verna is a classic woman desired by many but truly attainable by probably none, and her magnetism tugs at the raging egos to make every dangerous situation worse.

Miller's Crossing is punctuated by manic action scenes, ranging in scale from raids and battles involving hordes of cops and gangsters exchanging hot lead from blazing Tommy guns, to quiet one-on-one showdowns prolonged to reveal the fragility of life. Tom's one big advantage is that he is smarter than everybody around him, and particularly wise enough to stand close to power but not cling onto it. In a world gone crazy with killings, Tom slices through the drama using brains instead of brawn. Reluctant to use a gun, he also counts on the incompetence of the goons supposedly running the show to wriggle out of tight spots.

Gabriel Byrne carries the role with requisite intensity, an intelligent man working overtime to design outcomes in a shifting landscape. Albert Finney, Jon Polito and John Turturro humanize a trio of enduring gangsters circling each other looking for the duplicitous kill. Marcia Gay Harden pouts her way through the role of Verna, fully understanding her influence but not feeling any better for it. A woman in a man's world gone mad has every reason to want to land on the winning side of a merciless conflict.

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Movie Review: Assault On Precinct 13 (2005)

A police-under-siege action thriller, Assault On Precinct 13 tries to find some balance between a hail of bullets and character interaction. But by dumping logic into the Detroit snow, the film achieves guff rather than grit.

Undercover detective Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) leads his small team into a botched drug sting operation, resulting in the loss of two officers. Eight months later, Roenick is still traumatized, killing time at a desk job and making no progress with psychiatrist Alex Sabian (Maria Bello). It's New Year's Eve, Detroit is smothered by a snow storm, and Roenick, secretary Drea de Matteo (Iris Ferry) and veteran Sergeant Jasper O'Shea (Brian Dennehy) are staffing the otherwise abandoned Precinct 13 for the final time before the station closes for good.

Crime boss Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne) is arrested after killing an undercover police officer, and the snow storm forces his prisoner bus to unexpectedly divert to Precinct 13 for the night. Roenick places the high profile Bishop and a bunch of petty prisoners into the station prison cells, and soon enough Precinct 13 is under armed assault. It's not Bishop's men who are out to free him, but rather rogue cops under the leadership of Captain Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne) who need to silence Bishop and all witnesses before he reveals the depth of corruption in the police ranks. With no help in sight, Roenick has to hunker down for the night and organize a defence, which forces him into an uneasy alliance with Bishop.

A remake of the 1976 John Carpenter film of the same name, Assault On Precinct 13 features no shortage of gruesome action. Bullets to the brain and icicles in the eye are just some of the treats director Jean-François Richet throws at the screen for full splatter effect. On the more cerebral level, there is an honest attempt to give Roenick a backstory, but the narrative is not well served by the very tired premise of the hero hiding in a bottle to escape a bad episode in his life.

The third and final attempt to distinguish the film is the complex relationship between Roenick the honest cop and Bishop the master crime lord, two men from opposite sides of the law forced to work together against a common enemy for just one night. Thanks to fine performances from Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne, the dynamic between the reluctant protector and the supremely confidant target brings a trace of depth to an otherwise rudimentary film.

But any good intentions to deliver a quality thriller are severely undermined by the stupid bad guys syndrome, which ultimately obliterates any promise held by the film. Gabriel Byrne as lead villain Marcus Duvall fails miserably in a lame attempt to convey evil intent. Meanwhile his army of heavily armed and fully equipped murderous men are somehow outsmarted in every confrontation by Roenick and his ragtag group made up of prisoners, one beat cop and a couple of civilians.

There is no escaping the sense that the assault could have been over in about three and half minutes had Duvall brought his full force to bear, as any smart antagonist aiming to murder a group of people in cold blood would have done. Matters are made much worse when the equivalent of a mini-war rages for hours at Precinct 13, and no external force responds to all the gun fire. Detroit may be bad; it's not this lawless, yet.

Inside the besieged building Maria Bello gets a couple of good scenes but then dissolves into victimhood when the shooting starts, while Iris Ferry's take on secretary Drea as an oversexed doll seems to be entirely incongruous. The other prisoners offer roles for John Leguizamo and rapper Ja Rule.

Assault On Precinct 13 ends at daybreak with combatants pursuing each other in a forest shrouded by fog. They can't see each other, and neither can anyone see much point in this unnecessary remake.

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The Movies Of Gabriel Byrne

All movies starring Gabriel Byrne and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Excalibur (1981)

Miller's Crossing (1990)

Point Of No Return (1993)

A Dangerous Woman (1993)

Trial By Jury (1994)

Little Women (1994)

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Enemy Of The State (1998)

End Of Days (1999)

Ghost Ship (2002)

Assault On Precinct 13 (2005)

Louder Than Bombs (2015)

Hereditary (2018)

Lost Girls (2020)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Enemy Of The State (1998)

A classy techno-thriller, Enemy Of The State finds a groove where political conspiracy meets sleek action and rides it all the way to excellence.

At a secluded park, Washington DC National Security Agency official Thomas Brian Reynolds (Jon Voight) arranges for the murder of Congressman Phil Hammersley (Jason Robards), who is opposed to the passage of legislation that would give security agencies expanded powers of surveillance. The murder is captured by a hidden camera deployed to film wildlife. The digital file of the assassination ends up with corporate lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), who is grappling with an ugly case involving mafia corruption. Dean gets help on his court cases from old flame Rachel Banks (Lisa Bonet), a go-between with a mysterious investigator known only as Brill.

To recover the incriminating file Reynolds activates an illicit operation to track Dean's movements, infiltrate his life, and destroy his credit, marriage and reputation. By using satellites, commandeering surveillance networks and deploying the latest spy bugs and tracking devices, Reynolds' team force Dean into a life on the run. An attempt to frame Dean for murder forces him to seek help from the reclusive Brill (Gene Hackman), an ex-NSA agent. Together Dean and Brill have to find a way to end Reynolds' reign of terror.

One of director Tony Scott's more intelligent outings, Enemy Of The State was perceptive in 1998 but became a frightful predictor of reality 15 years later when whistleblower Edward Snowden lifted the lid on the actual surveillance reach of intelligence agencies. If Enemy Of The State was exaggerated by the imagination of screenwriter David Marconi, it ironically became a template for agencies to strive for in the Patriot Act era.

Intersections with reality aside, the film is a slick thrill ride. Scott creates an almost plausible narrative to hang the action on, and the story of an innocent but smart victim getting snagged into a sprawling conspiracy is a modern interpretation of a classic Hitchcock theme, but with a better MacGuffin in the digital assassination file.

The pacing is brisk, and the visual style is consumed with all that satellite, camera, computer and snooping technology has to offer. The opening 30 minutes set up the premise with professional care, allowing the hectic middle third to launch with breathless precision as the technology is unleashed to turn Dean's life into a living nightmare. The final act is clever, as Marconi finds a blood-soaked but satisfying climax, Dean arranging for his problems old and new to meet in a greasy kitchen filled with hidden weapons and short tempers.

Enemy Of The State was the first serious role that Will Smith tackled after achieving superstardom, and he demonstrates plenty of charisma and control to channel his energy away from comedy and towards the rollercoaster man-on-the-run structure. Smith still gets to unleash some funny ad-libbed lines, but for the most part Dean is a man hunted by much greater forces, and has to deploy wit and desperate physicality rather than humour to stay alive.

Two veterans provide distinguished support, Jon Voight and Gene Hackman carrying their well-earned battle scars into a final confrontation between political expediency and lone wolf ideology. The film also gets the demographics of the techno-wizards right, a young and dishevelled group including Jack Black, Scott Caan, Jake Busey and Loren Dean tapping away at the array of keyboards to deploy surveillance technology as a weapon of mass intimidation. In addition to Robards as the world-weary Senator, Gabriel Byrne shows up in a small role as the frantic Dean tries to track down Brill.

Prescient and pointy, Enemy Of The State is a frightful vision of what could happen when glitzy tools fall into the grubby hands of the paranoid and power hungry.

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Movie Review: Ghost Ship (2002)

A horror movie that mixes gore with suspense, Ghost Ship cannot fully overcome an identity crisis. There is reasonable talent in the cast and kernels of intriguing ideas in the script, but too much time is wasted decapitating bodies and skulking around dark corners rather than exploring the ghost themes and developing the creepy psychological elements.

In 1962, passengers enjoying lavish entertainment on board the Italian luxury liner Antonia Graza suffer a horrible fate: a taut thin wire chord is unleashed like a blade, slicing through bodies and heads, causing mass death by dismemberment. Katie (Emily Browning), a young girl travelling alone, survives the carnage.

Forty years pass. Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) is the captain of the Anchorage-based salvage tugboat Arctic Warrior and her scrappy crew, including Epps (Julianna Margulies) and Greer (Isaiah Washington). They are approached by Jack (Desmond Harrington), a small plane pilot who has spotted a large vessel floating aimlessly in the Bering Sea. Jack joins the Arctic Warrior crew and they soon intercept the mystery ship, which turns out to be the Antonia Graza. When the salvagers board the abandoned ship, it does not take long for eerie things to start happening. 

With Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver among the co-producers, Ghost Ship had some Hollywood heavyweights behind it. But the push towards greater commercial potential appears to have also resulted in a significant shift away from the more subtle psychological suspense journey initially planned and towards a more shocks-and-blood narrative, with the final product falling into the cracks between two sub-genres.

The better moments are undoubtedly the calm but chilling encounters between the salvage team members and the on-board ghosts. The scenes between Epps and Katie; Murphy and the Italian captain; and Greer and the sultry lounge singer are gratifying ghost encounters tapping into fragile human psychology. Epps has no family of her own and Katie is a metaphorical daughter. Murphy's career is stalled at the tugboat level, with alcohol issues a likely cause; he gets to share a drink with the captain of a bygone era's grand luxury liner. And Greer is about to get married: the passion he feels for the seductive singer is the farewell to his old life.

Despite some good visual moments delivered by director Steve Beck and the best effort of Margulies and Byrne, Ghost Ship is hampered by significant levels of triteness. There are gruesome deaths aplenty, grotesquely deformed bodies hidden behind closed doors, and endless stock scenes of search lights peering into dark shadows within the bowels of the massive ship.

Ghost Ship eventually sails away quietly, leaving faint memories of what could have been a good movie.

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Movie Review: The Usual Suspects (1995)

A clever caper movie, The Usual Suspects is certainly engaging but ultimately a bit too clever for it's own good. A solid cast enjoys a combination of energetic verbal sparring and old-fashioned heist action infused with more modern blood and violence, but an excess of criminal characters all attempting to outsmart one another causes an imbalance that threatens to overwhelm the movie.

A lot of bad people are lying dead in and around a ship at the San Pedro Harbour in Los Angeles, victims of a full-blown shoot-out between rival gangs. One of only two survivors is Roger Kint (Kevin Spacey), known as Verbal, a small time hood with a pronounced limp, who has survived the carnage without a scratch. US Customs and FBI Agents, including Special Agent Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) round on Verbal, interrogating him to unravel why so many criminals met their bullet-perforated fate at the waterfront. Through flashbacks, Verbal recounts the story of his now-deceased criminal gang colleagues: mastermind and former corrupt cop Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), trigger guy McManus (Stephen Baldwin), the almost incomprehensible Fenster (Benicio del Toro), and Hockney (Kevin Pollack).

After the gang forms in a jail cell, Keaton leads them in holding up a corrupt police taxi service in New York, and then, at the request of a mysterious Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaithe), robbing a Los Angeles jeweler. Kobayashi then reveals that his employer is the legendary criminal Keyser Soze, and asks Keaton to lead an assault on a boat belonging to a Hungarian gang, who are rivals of Soze in the drug trade. The attack would be dangerous, but the pay-off for Keaton and his men is huge: 91 million dollars.

Keaton asks Verbal to sit-out and witness the assault, which goes a bit better than planned, with Keaton and McManus surviving the vicious shoot-out. But a mysterious figure appears from the shadows, eliminates them both and disappears. Kujan needs to decide how much of Verbal's story he can believe, and what to make of some really odd pieces in the convoluted puzzle.

The Usual Suspects climaxes with a double twist ending. but while initially the final revelation appears ingenious, it actually disintegrates under it's own weight: If Keyser Soze is as brilliant and resourceful as the film reveals him to be, he certainly chose a very rudimentary, brute-force method to achieve his ultimate objective. The film is essentially a character study, and while Kevin Spacey and Gabriel Byrne provide Verbal and  Keaton with some depth and interesting texture, the rest of the criminals and cops are vaguely sketched by Christopher McQuarrie's script, and quite forgettable.

Director Bryan Singer maintains a brisk pace and brings out the tension in the dialogue exchanges and narration that underpin the unfolding plot, and just about maintains control of the increasing layers of complexity. The Usual Suspects is enjoyable, mostly for being a quite unusually intelligent movie, but it does chase itself into a corner where the smarts overpower the logic.

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Movie Review: Point Of No Return (1993)

A remake of Luc Besson's film Nikita, the Hollywood treatment not unexpectedly strips the soul out of the story and replaces it with abject superficiality. In Point Of No Return the action sequences are over-muscled on steroids, the character motivations are non-existent, the romance is phony, and the tits-and-ass are plentiful and utterly superfluous. Bridget Fonda tries hard to bring some depth and conviction to the central character of Maggie (nom de guerre Nina), but is undermined by a dull script and director John Badham insisting on filming her in her underwear at every opportunity.

In Washington DC, Maggie is a drugged-out criminal, running with a gang of lost and vicious youth. A robbery of a drug store goes wrong, and in the ensuing shoot-out Maggie blows out the brains of a police officer. She is convicted and sentenced to death.

Bob (Gabriel Byrne) rescues Maggie from the lethal injection by enrolling her, initially very much against her will, into a top secret agency that does the government's dirty work by eliminating high profile undesirables. In addition to combat and weapons training, Maggie's instructors include Amanda (Anne Bancroft), who teaches her social etiquette. As she is polished into an expert assassin, Bob naturally takes a much more than just professional interest in Maggie's progress.

Upon mastering all the required skills, Maggie is given the code name Nina and unleashed into society, where she quickly meets and falls in love with J.P. (Dermot Mulroney), although she cannot share much pillow talk with him since her job includes tasks such wiping out criminal cartels by blowing up entire hotel floors and targeted assassinations using high powered sniper rifles. Eventually Maggie grows tired of the killing, Bob grows tired of J.P., and a mission-gone-wrong activates The Cleaner (Harvey Keitel) to kill everyone in sight.

There are some slick moments in Point Of No Return, and with a healthy suspension of disbelief, the action sequences are entertaining in a Schwarzeneggeresque way, with plenty of high-tech weaponry, fiery explosions, an endless number of goons materializing from nowhere to get killed by Nina, and no shortage of impressive stunts. And the small portion of the film with The Cleaner starts to become funny in a good way, whether intentional or not. Fonda tackles her role fearlessly and manages to progress with the character, while everyone else around her spouts cliches with statuesque fluidity.

But there is no escaping the ham-handed approach of Point Of No Return, a point where apparently subtlety is a lost art, and where all the points need to be driven home with a sledgehammer.

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