Movie Review: We Are Marshall (2006)

A sports drama, We Are Marshall is an inspirational but also frequently melodramatic rise-from-the-ashes story.

In 1970, a plane crash kills 75 people, including most of the Marshall University football team. The survivors include team captain Nate Ruffin (Anthonie Mackie), who missed the trip due to injury, and coach "Red" Dawson (Matthew Fox), who gave up his seat on the doomed flight at the last minute. The university's community of Huntington, West Virginia, descends into shock, including influential local business leader Paul Griffen (Ian McShane), who lost his son in the crash. 

President Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) considers shutting down the football program, but Ruffin rallies support to rebuild the team. After being turned down by all leading candidates, Dedmon hires Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) as head coach. Lengyel has no prior association with Marshall but plenty of energy, and convinces Red to join him as assistant coach. A frantic recruitment program results in a group of young and untested freshmen and walk-ons being cobbled together into a team to tackle the new season.

An undoubtedly touching story of grief and recovery afforded the full Hollywood treatment, We Are Marshall draws strength from a real-life tragedy giving birth to resilience. Director McG translates Jamie Linden's script into a polished and well-staged narrative, combining the search for meaning with the difficulty of life marching on, regardless. For all the tender emphasis on loss, the film is also unabashedly manipulative, seeking opportunities to pause and deliver rousing moments, motivational speeches, and fists-in-the-air demonstrations of togetherness, always accompanied by requisite musical flourishes.

The focus is on a small group of community members navigating numbness and fury, survivor's guilt, a father's sorrow, and overwhelming helplessness, fuelling different opinions on whether reactivating the football program benefits healing. With Matthew McConaughey in full charm-on mode, coach Lengyel becomes the outside catalyst not personally affected by the tragedy and therefore able to prod the community on the path to recovery. 

But grief this deep lingers, and to the film's credit, not all the characters are eager to join the rebirth process. While the overblown climax casts a long shadow, thankfully the journeys of grieving dad Paul Griffen and diner server Annie (Kate Mara), who was engaged to Paul's son, end on a more wistful note away from sports heroics. David Strathairn adds eloquent touches of hesitant humanity as the university president with no playbook on how to navigate a mammoth tragedy.

A gesture of respect by a rival school's football team asserts the unifying power of sport, and the on-field scenes are well-staged, capturing the grit, agony, and ecstasy of college football. We Are Marshall knows where the goal is, and despite bombastic tendencies, registers an assured victory.



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Movie Review: The Hollow Point (2016)

A crime thriller with occasional dollops of gore, The Hollow Point is visually inviting but offers a baffling jumble of poorly executed ideas.

Prodigal son Wallace (Patrick Wilson) is appointed Sheriff of his rural Arizona hometown, located on the Mexico border. He replaces the grizzled and hard drinking Leland (Ian McShane), who is growing increasingly disillusioned and has just killed an ammunition smuggler after a violent struggle. Wallace reconnects with his ex-lover Marla (Lynn Collins), whose current boyfriend Ken has gone missing after killing a cartel member and helping himself to some cash

Wallace goes looking for Ken and soon tangles with corrupt used car dealer Shep Diaz (Jim Belushi), who appears to be profiting from the illegal ammunition trade. But much worse is to come in the form of ruthless and mysterious murderer Atticus (John Leguizamo), who is working his way through a kill list.

A good cast, impressive rural and remote landscapes and stylish cinematography cannot save The Hollow Point. The script is muddled beyond redemption, and in the absence of wit, depth and soul, the ambitions to recreate a No Country For Old Men vibe fall well short.

The story by Nils Lyew appears to have been haphazardly reassembled after going through the business end of a shredder, with key characters and events popping in and out of the story in random disorder. Director Gonzalo López-Gallego ploughs ahead, oblivious to the incomprehensible mess on his hands. What starts out as cross-border ammunition smuggling thriller morphs into a pseudo-horror indestructible killer drama without breaking stride. Intended victims routinely survive close-quarters gunshots with minimal scratches and no explanations.

And with no prior or subsequent context, one scene appears intent on infusing twisted religious demagoguery as the root of all evil. A clunky romance between Wallace and Marla never registers, and John Leguizamo is horribly miscast as a ruthless machete wielding killing machine.

Only Ian McShane stands above the carnage, his emotionally drained and craggy presence an order of magnitude better than the material around him. Otherwise, The Hollow Point is hollow but pointless.

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Movie Review: Case 39 (2009)

A suspense and horror film, Case 39 offers predictable evil child elements but in chillingly effective packaging.

In Portland, Oregon (but filmed in an undisguised Vancouver, British Columbia), Emily (Renée Zellweger) is a social services child support worker with a high case load. She has no family of her own, but is friends with psychologist Doug (Bradley Cooper). Emily's boss Wayne (Adrian Lester) assigns her the case of Lily (Jodelle Ferland), a young girl demonstrating signs of a stressed household. Emily investigates and finds Lily's parents Edward (Callum Keith Rennie) and Margaret (Kerry O'Malley) weird and evasive, but the child in no apparent danger.

Emily nevertheless perceives a potential risk and seeks help from detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane). Together they are forced to intervene when Lily's safety is suddenly jeopardized. Separated from her parents and about to be placed in a group home, Lily makes an appeal to temporarily live with Emily. Initially reluctant, Emily eventually agrees, unwittingly exposing herself to horrors to come.

A surprisingly good and spooky slow-burning horror film completed in 2006 but released in 2009, Case 39 carries stirring low-key echoes from The Omen. With building momentum and some effective possession-based scares, director Christian Alvart and writer Ray Wright freshen up horror fundamentals, finding room for insidious evil to worm its way into Emily's already overextended life.

Emily is caught between an adult's natural instinct to help and self-preservation, with Lily gradually exposing her ability to override the agenda. The underlying themes are familiar but still cleverly conveyed. Fear breeds incapacity, the worst anxieties can either be confronted or allowed to fester, evil takes root when invited into inner sanctums, and the radical disruption caused by the well-intentioned arrival of children are among the narrative threads weaving through Case 39.

The film's clout resides with Jodelle Ferland's fine performance and some cunning writing. Wright leaves enough room to debate how much control Lily has over the menace residing within, and Ferland does the rest with an unsettling performance filled with winning contradictions.

Renée Zellweger delivers wistful regret as a caring woman with her own set of emotional scars wondering about her life's trajectory, while Ian McShane, Callum Keith Rennie and a pre-stardom Bradley Cooper add depth to the cast.

Featuring no shortage of gruesome acts, mental disintegration and waking nightmares, the Case 39 file promises potent threats, and delivers.

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Movie Review: Sexy Beast (2000)

A crime thriller with comic touches, Sexy Beast rides a wave of profanity in a patchy story of multiple dueling gangsters.

In Spain, retired British criminal Gal (Ray Winstone) is living the easy life with his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman) and their friends, fellow-Brit couple Aitch and Jacki. After surviving an errant boulder that tumbles into his swimming pool, the out of shape but happy Gal gets a visit from notorious thug Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), who is recruiting a bank vault heist team for a job in London on behalf of mobster Teddy Bass (Ian McShane).

Gal is not interested, but the combustible Don will not take no for an answer, and over two days escalates the pressure and hurls steely insults at Gal, DeeDee, Aitch and Jacki. In the meantime, the ice cold Teddy will have the final say about Gal's fate.

An irreverent peek into the lives of thugs, Sexy Beast collects a cross section of retired and active operatives and throws them into a different kind of conflict. The script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto uses the actual heist as a secondary objective, and focuses attention instead on the personalities of men at different stages in life influencing each other. Gal and Aitch have serenely settled down to a post-work world in sunny Spain, Don is very much still engrossed in plotting the next job, and Teddy is an aging but effective master plotter.

Don's irresistible force methods to pressure and shame Gal into coming out of retirement is the film's centrepiece. First time director Jonathan Glazer comes from the music video world and jacks up Don's level of intensity into the vivid absurd. With Don Kingsley not holding back, this recruiter is more a force of nature than a man. His persuasive communication methods consist of a never ending stream of insults, mercilessly probing his target's emotional weaknesses to achieve the desired outcome.

Don also serves as a catalyst, his re-emergence forcing secrets from Gal's past life into the open and exposing vulnerabilities that either hold ex-cons together or tear them apart.

With every second word of dialogue a profanity, Sexy Beast often slips into stylistic excess at the expense of plot coherence, and the third act starts to sketch in events with minimal explanation. Ian McShane's Teddy Bass is an intimidating presence, his piercing eyes capable of boring into any skull, but Gal is almost reduced to a side observer in his own story as the film rumbles erratically towards a conclusion.

The beasts are human and their sexy days well behind them, but they still make for colourful subjects.

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The Movies Of Ian McShane

All movies starring Ian McShane and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Battle Of Britain (1969)

The Last Of Sheila (1973)

Sexy Beast (2000)

We Are Marshall (2006)

Case 39 (2009)

John Wick (2014)

The Hollow Point (2016)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Last Of Sheila (1973)

A mystery thriller, The Last Of Sheila is clumsily mounted and poorly executed.

In Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheila is killed in an unsolved hit-and-run. A year later, her film producer husband Clinton (James Coburn) invites six members of the film world, all potential suspects in Sheila's death, to spend a week on his yacht in the Mediterranean.

The invitees are fading film director Philip (James Mason), starlet Alice (Raquel Welch) and her husband/manger Anthony (Ian McShane), talent agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), struggling writer Tom (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett).

Clinton introduces them to a mystery game they will play during the week, with each assigned a secret card denoting a transgression, with one to be revealed every night through a treasure hunt style contest at successive ports of call. Mishaps start to beset the yacht, and suspicions emerge that Clinton may have a sinister motive related to Sheila's death.

Directed by Herbert Ross, The Last Of Sheila is co-written by actor Anthony Perkins and musician Stephen Sondheim. The lack of writing discipline is evident in a muddled premise, lack of character development, a midway jarring change in tone, and a tired, highly illogical resolution featuring dozens of late-arriving factoids introduced in inept flashbacks. This was a troubled production beset by on-set tensions betrayed by distracted and incohesive cast performances.

The mystery, once revealed, is far beyond plausible, The Last Of Sheila falling into a trap of trying to justify a murder solely for the pleasure of the script. Along the way, the first half of the film rushes towards an ill-defined game, but only plays two out of six find-the-sinner rounds before abandoning the concept altogether in favour of a stage-bound Agatha Christie whodunnit, absent a clever detective.

The morsels of enjoyment are few and far between, and include Mason digging deep to try and salvage the outcome late in the proceedings, with the grounded Joan Hackett the only other cast member appearing to care. A clever clue appears early in the film and offers a late blip of a pulse upon re-emerging towards the otherwise limp finale.

The Last Of Sheila carries some potential, but is fumbled into the murky Mediterranean waters.

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