The Movies Of January Jones

All movies starring January Jones and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Glass House (2001)

Anger Management (2003)

American Wedding (2003)

Love Actually (2003)

We Are Marshall (2006)

Unknown (2011)

Good Kill (2014)

God Is A Bullet (2023)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Good Kill (2014)

An anti-war film about the modern art of remote combat, Good Kill makes its point early and then struggles to find a purpose.

On the outskirts of Las Vegas, Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) works at a U.S. Air Force base remotely controlling killer drones over places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, seeking and killing the enemies of the US in the war on terror. Egan is a veteran pilot used to flying actual combat missions in real war zones, and he is starting to seriously struggle with the detached remoteness of his drone assignment. His wife Molly (January Jones) takes the brunt of his descent into depression and alcoholism.

Things go from bad to worse when Egan, his commander Lieutenant Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood) and Airman First Class Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz) are placed under the command of missions ordered by the CIA with instructions received directly from Langley (via the detached voice of Peter Coyote). The intelligence agency is much less concerned about the rules of war and civilian casualties, and Egan finds himself growing increasingly uneasy with who he is being asked to kill and how he is doing the killing.

An independent film directed by Andrew Niccol, Good Kill is a companion piece of sorts to the more well-rounded American Sniper. While also delving into the ravaging effects of contemporary war on the soldier at the tip of the spear, Good Kill adds the innovation of isolating the combatant from the combat zone. The video-game aspects of modern warfare are ironically intended to secure the soldier's health, but for Egan, who has experienced the thrill of being at personal risk over a live battlefield, the complete lack of danger as he control a joystick 7,000 miles from his targets is an emotionally unhinging experience.

Niccol's script sets its course early and sticks to it, and as a result Good Kill cannot avoid falling into a repetitive trap. The psychological study of Egan's tumble into non-functionality features a recurring series of well-executed and often tense "good kills" on the monitor, alternating with snippets of a disintegrating home life and Egan staring at the sky. The one inflection point comes with the heavy-handed intervention of the CIA, demanding more kills that are maybe not so good. There are some debates among Egan's crew about the morality of the war and the method of killing, but precious little depth is achieved in character or narrative arc.

Ethan Hawke does all that he can with the character of Egan, starting off uneasy and restless and linearly progressing towards an abyss where the personal and professional career self-destruct buttons begin to look tempting as seen through the bottom of a bottle. The rest of the characters are strictly predicable.

Good Kill provides instructive commentary on the unexpected hazards of soulless, robotic bloodshed. Much like the world of controlling drones, the action on the monitor is immersive, but it is ultimately stuck in a box.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Unknown (2011)

A slick and nimble thriller with all the requisite chases and stunts, Unknown distinguishes itself with a cunning story that gets progressively better as the film peels away the outer layers of characters and events.

American scientist Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his wife Liz (January Jones) fly into Berlin to attend a high profile international conference on biotechnology, hosted by Dr. Bressler (Sebastian Koch) and sponsored by Prince Shada (Mido Hamada). Upon arriving at the Hotel Adlon, Martin realizes that he forgot his briefcase at the airport. The ride back to the airport ends in disaster: a multi-vehicle crash launches the taxi off a bridge and into a river. Martin is saved from drowning by the taxi driver Gina (Diane Kruger), but loses consciousness and wakes up in hospital a few days later.

Martin rushes back to the Hotel Adlon and is shocked to find Liz insisting that she does not know him. Furthermore, Liz is with another man (Aidan Quinn) claiming to be Dr. Martin Harris. Thrown out into the street in a foreign city, Martin has to struggle to re-establish his identity, and he seeks the help of Gina as well as local private investigator Herr Jurgen (Bruno Ganz) and colleague Professor Cole (Frank Langella). Before long, Martin also finds himself the target of brutal assassins.

Unknown is a clever, high intensity thriller. It starts out on familiar stranger-in-a-strange-land territory, with many elements borrowed from movies like Frantic. But once the intricate plot behind the case of lost identity starts to reveal itself, Unknown is elevated to that unique sub-set of action movies where all the pieces of the puzzle fall smartly into place, and even the wilder stunt scenes are provided with context.

The script by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwall makes the most of Berlin, with a specific tip of the hat to the history of the city as a Cold War cauldron, as Jurgen openly reveals himself to be a former Stasi agent, a cue for Unknown to take a pleasurable journey that links vintage spy methods with modern-day economic challenges and terrorist threats.

Liam Neeson is excellent in a role that would have been offered to Harrison Ford a decade earlier. Neeson is better at expressing tortured frustration, and conveys Martin's boiling emotions as he doggedly sets out to reclaim his identity. January Jones only needs to be the icy blond and she does it well, while Diane Kruger builds on her role in Inglourious Basterds with an affecting performance as an illegal immigrant who finds herself unwillingly pressed into service as Martin's guardian angel.

As it hurtles to an explosive climax, Unknown nails a most difficult stunt: the thriller that is thoughtful, exciting, and unpredictable.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: American Wedding (2003)

Too much Stifler. Not nearly enough sizzler. American Wedding, the second sequel to American Pie, attempts a withdrawal from the account of bankrupt ideas, and emerges with a stained handful of excrement.

Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are planning to get married. Before he gets to the big day, Jim has to overcome two main hurdles: impress Michelle's parents (Fred Willard and Deborah Rush), and keep his vulgar friend Stifler (Seann William Scott) as far away from the wedding as possible. Nothing goes according to plan, with Jim embarrassing himself in front of his future in-laws at every opportunity, and Stifler forcing himself into the wedding planning arrangements and proceeding to instigate or fall victim to one disaster after another.

In the meantime, Michelle's game sister Cadence (January Jones) attracts the attention of both the boorish Stifler and the relatively more suave Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas), while Jim's hapless dad (Eugene Levy) doles out his dorky advice when it's least needed.

American Wedding huffs, puffs, and works up a smelly sweat to create a series of set-piece comedy tableaux, to place either Jim or Stifler in the most contrived and awkward situations possible. So Jim is contorted to appear as though he is shagging a dog when he first meets Michelle's parents, and Stifler has to endure both eating dog poo and having intercourse with a hideous grandmother in the dark. The comedy stubbornly stays at this sewage-dwelling level throughout, and it's clear that writer Adam Herz ran out of  clever ideas a couple of scripts back. And if director Jesse Dylan inherited any creative genes from his father Bob, he certainly did not display them here.

American Wedding aims for the lowest common denominator and still manages to under-deliver.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.