Movie Reviews: Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Genre: War Drama  

Director: Spike Lee  

Starring: Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chadwick Boseman, Jonathan Majors, Melanie Thierry, Jean Reno, Paul Walter Hauser  

Running Time: 156 minutes  

Synopsis: Four black Vietnam War veterans (Delroy Lindo as Paul, Clarke Peters as Otis, Norm Lewis as Eddie, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Melvin) return to the country on a dual mission: find a cache of CIA gold they buried in the jungle during the war, and recover the remains of the inspirational fifth member of their group Norm (Chadwick Boseman). They are unexpectedly joined on their trek by Paul's estranged son David (Jonathan Majors). Although united by friendship, a sense of racial injustice, and wartime experiences, the group is tested by greed, mistrust, and trauma.

What Works Well: Spike Lee presents the Vietnam War experience as an epic collision between an unpopular overseas war and the continuing struggle for black rights at home. This is a sprawling journey into the past, the men's present psychology (especially Paul's PTSD) ill-equipping them to retrace hostile terrain. The country may have modernized, but not so much the jungle, where dangers from snakes to mines persist. With strong echoes of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, greed is the most mammoth disrupter, and the seemingly tight knit group will discover that unimaginable wealth can threaten decades-long friendships forged under fire. Lee adds generous helpings of flashbacks to fill-in the men's combat-fueled backstory, as the war spills from the past into present moments of reckoning.

What Does Not Work As Well: The running time is excessive, with look-at-me editing adding to the test of endurance. Delroy Lindo's performance is powerful, but slips into over-the-top theatrics in the final act. The political preaching is of the in-your-face variety, the plot used as an unsubtle device to deliver rage-against-the-machine civics lessons.

Key Quote:

Paul: We fought in an immoral war that wasn't ours for rights we didn't have.

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Movie Review: The Last Face (2016)

Genre: Epic Romantic Drama  

Director: Sean Penn  

Starring: Charlize Theron, Javier Bardem, Jean Reno, Adèle Exarchopoulos  

Running Time: 132 minutes  

Synopsis: Dr. Wren Petersen (Charlize Theron) grew up in the shadow of her father, founder of Médecins du Monde. Having focused her life on fund raising, she meets and falls in love with field doctor Miguel (Javier Bardem) while on a trip to war-torn Liberia. They become a couple and Wren resumes practicing field medicine in conflict zones, but traumatic experiences, exposure to atrocities, and Miguel's jaded attitude take a toll.

What Works Well: The ambition to set a grand romance against the backdrop of world shaping events is admirable, and carries echoes from Dr. Zhivago and The English Patient. Despite patchy writing, Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem throw themselves into their roles, while the scenes of strife and violence on the African continent are packed with painful impact. Director Sean Penn captures the scope of unfolding tragedies in medical procedures under fire, hazardous treks through the jungle, terrifying encounters with soldiers crazed on drugs, and massive UN-run refugee tent cities.

What Does Not Work As Well: From the opening text, writer Erin Dignam is intent on conflating mass suffering on a continental scale with a routine love between a woman discovering herself and a scrappy doctor. The mis-directed focus is disturbingly sustained through dismissiveness of any context to the pervasive violence, while Wren doubles down on tiresome and repetitive "you don't know me" assertations. Mopey narration does not help, nor does a miserable failure of a scene featuring teeth-brushing as foreplay. The supporting cast, including Jean Reno and Adèle Exarchopoulos, is largely wasted.

Conclusion: Good intentions undermined by unbalanced emphasis.



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Movie Review: Léon: The Professional (1994)

A thriller drama, Léon: The Professional delves into the psyche of two lost souls to unearth the humanity within.

In New York City, Léon (Jean Reno) is a low profile but efficient hitman who fulfills assassination assignments on behalf of mafia front man Tony (Danny Aiello). Léon is uneducated and lives a lonely and well regimented life, his small plant the only thing he cares for. But he is friendly towards Mathilda (Natalie Portman), the 13 year old daughter of the family living in the next door apartment.

Mathilda's father crosses corrupt and psychotic Drug Enforcement Agency agent Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), and in the ensuing violence Mathilda's family is wiped out. She survives by taking refuge in Léon's apartment. The hitman is reluctant to take care of his unexpected visitor, but gradually they warm up to each other. She learns of his profession and insists that he train her to also be a killer so that she can pursue revenge. Meanwhile, she teaches him to read, and for the first time in his life Léon starts to care about someone.

Written and directed by Luc Besson,  Léon: The Professional features Natalie Portman's debut, an epic Gary Oldman villainous performance and an understated Jean Reno as a uniquely introverted assassin. With elegant action and character development mixed in just the right doses, the result is a captivating, and sometimes haunting, film.

Steering far clear of typical assassin characterizations, Besson creates in Léon an almost miserable man, a stranger in a strange land, out of place in New York City, unable to read, barely ever sleeping and living diametrically opposite from the glamour and riches often associated with efficient killing machines. Léon does not even care to receive the money he earns, Tony theoretically holding it for him.

Meanwhile Mathilda is suffering through her own hell, regularly beaten up by an abusive father who has gotten himself embroiled in the drug trade. Mathilda only cares about her innocent younger brother, and when he is hurt in the Stansfield-instigated bloodbath, the 13 year old girl starts to understand the appeal of revenge as a life calling.

Most of the film is occupied in nurturing the relationship between hitman and young girl, and Besson injects the full range of emotions. Léon goes against every instinct in his body to even open the door for Mathilda to escape with her life, and his second thought is to kill her why she sleeps to save both of them the trouble of creating a bond. From there they learn to care about each other, he assumes an imperfect fatherly role and she carries her infatuation towards a girl's immature ideas of love.

But with the out-of-control Norman Stansfield always nearby, the film is not short on action, and Besson includes plenty of exquisitely executed high-tension highlights, often in cramped surroundings, culminating in an all-or-nothing climax for all three main characters. Léon: The Professional is about learning to love, and plenty of education takes place under a hail of bullets.

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Movie Review: Godzilla (1998)

A rampaging monster movie, Godzilla enjoys some moments but is otherwise overlong and underpowered.

Radiation caused by nuclear weapons testing on South Pacific islands causes the mutation of a lizard into a building-sized monster. A Japanese fishing vessel is attacked and sunk, then the creature leaves footprints in Panama and Jamaica. Dr. Nick Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), an expert in the long term effects of radiation exposure, is recruited to join scientist Dr. Elsie Chapman (Vicki Lewis) and Col. Anthony Hicks (Kevin Dunn) to understand and subdue the beast.

Finally Godzilla emerges onto the docklands of Manhattan causing chaos and carnage before suddenly disappearing. Nick's ex-girlfriend Audrey (Maria Pitillo) is struggling to break into serious journalism, and along with television cameraman Victor (Hank Azaria) they latch onto the story. Meanwhile a group of French intelligence officers led by Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno) join the search.

Hollywood's first attempt to adapt the cautionary legend about the dangers of nuclear armament from its Japanese origins to an American context, Godzilla is a misfire. At an astonishing 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film is endless, the bloat evident in a disjointed script devoid of emotion. The monster itself gets bored and disappears for a long stretch from its own movie, replaced by a gaggle of angry and hungry baby Godzillas.

Director Roland Emmerich co-wrote the script with Dean Devlin, and baked in a fundamental weakness in not providing the gigantic creature with a personality. Neither despicably evil as in Alien nor gradually sympathetic such as King Kong, Godzilla just romps around Manhattan every now and then, and then ridiculously disappears. How a high-rise sized creature can hide underground is just one of the film's many jaw-dropping internal inconsistencies.

With most of the budget obviously dedicated to the bloodless, painless and goreless special effects, the film is hampered by a second-rate cast. Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno and Hank Azaria would have provided terrific support to a couple of bona fide leading stars. Here they are required to carry the film, and are crushed by the load.

Godzilla takes a long detour for an elaborate set-piece at Madison Square Gardens, a hide-and-seek film-within-a-film featuring hundreds of baby (but still large and nimble) monsters besieging the main characters. From a narrative perspective it's an ill-conceived distraction, but ironically provides some of the movie's most entertaining tongue-in-cheek moments. But regardless, no amount of creatures on the loose is going to save this monstrosity of a movie.

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Movie Review: The Da Vinci Code (2006)

The most famous book of its era comes to the screen, and The Da Vinci Code is magnetic and muddled in equal measures.

While on a trip to Paris, symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is summoned to the Louvre, where Police Captain Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) is presiding over the gruesome murder scene of Jacques Saunière. Although he was killed by the assassin Silas (Paul Bettany), before dying Saunière left cryptic clues potentially implicating Langdon. Fache's interrogation is interrupted by detective Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), who claims to be Saunière granddaughter and helps Landon escape the Louvre and set out on a wild hunt to find the real killer.

By sequentially solving Saunière's art-related puzzles, many involving the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Langdon and Neveu conclude that Saunière was a grand master of the Priory of Sion, a secretive organization dedicated to protecting one of the most explosive religious secrets in history. Langdon connects with his old colleague Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) and starts to piece together a murderous conspiracy involving the someone called the Teacher working with Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) of Opus Dei to either find or destroy the Holy Grail. Neveu's family history increasingly becomes part of the story.

The adaptation of Dan Brown's runaway bestseller was always going to be a challenge, and director Ron Howard nearly buckles under the pressure. Seemingly overawed by the material, Howard delivers a bloated 149 minutes consisting mostly of characters debating undoubtedly compelling and competing versions of religious history, punctuated by a few implausible action scenes. What was exciting on the written page often becomes rather mundane on the screen, as the cerebral puzzles central to Brown's thrill ride only partially translate to a captivating visual experience.

The Akiva Goldsman script tries hard but is only successful in patches. He stubbornly refuses to shed any of the book's complexities. Every character and every twist and turn contained within almost 500 pages are crammed into the film, and the result is almost incomprehensible to anyone who has not read the book (admittedly, that's a small number). Despite the long running length, the film struggles for balance: most of the talk is about history, but when it comes to explaining the here-and-now conspiracy, Goldsman and Howard leave behind scattered fragments of a difficult to follow plot.

And yet The Da Vinci Code survives despite itself. There is enormous power in Brown's imaginative story, and the underlying strength of the material holds the drama together. Extrapolating the implications of the purported mission of the Priory of Sion and the supposed clues hidden in Da Vinci's Last Supper is a mind bending experience, and with help from an excellent Ian McKellen performance, Howard handles these scenes well. Paul Bettany is the other stand-out performer, providing the killer Silas with an intriguing mix of tortured pathos and grim determination.

Simultaneously astute and awry, The Da Vinci Code is a puzzle of partially perfected promise.

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The Movies Of Jean Reno

All movies starring Jean Reno and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Godzilla (1998)

Ronin (1998)

Hotel Rwanda (2004, uncredited)

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

The Pink Panther 2 (2009)

Couples Retreat (2009)

The Last Face (2016)

The Promise (2016)

Da 5 Bloods (2020)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Ronin (1998)

A high energy action thriller about a group of mercenaries on the hunt for a mysterious briefcase, Ronin is non-stop rollercoaster ride with showcase car chase scenes and many ruthless guns for hire looking out for their own interests.

In France, Irish revolutionary Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) assembles a group of mercenaries to forcibly seize a heavily protected briefcase from a group of criminals looking to sell it. The patchwork team include the American Sam (Robert De Niro), the Frenchman Vincent (Jean Reno), low-key wheelman Larry (Skipp Suduth), former KGB agent Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård) and the tightly wound Spence (Sean Bean).

Despite being outnumbered, Deirdre's group prepare an ambush and strike hard. But there is a mole in their midst who will betray them, forcing Sam and Vincent to team up and try to salvage the operation while avoiding ruthless Russian terrorists, while Deirdre's boss Seamus O'Rourke (Jonathan Pryce) is forced out of hiding to try and mop up the mess with extreme measures.

Ronin, which is the Japanese term for disgraced Samurai wandering the land in search of a cause, is a surprisingly good film about not much. The story is patchy at best. The briefcase is the most MacGuffiny of MacGuffins, an undefined, never explained target, and the groups competing for its ownership are faceless shadows, labelled simply as "The Irish" and "The Russians".

John Frankenheimer focusses instead on the dynamic within the group of mercenaries, where trust is in short supply, and hired guns conceivably working for the same cause could turn out to be the most lethal of enemies. For an action movie this requires superlative performances to highlight diverse personalities, and Ronin is blessed with an abundance of subtle acting talent. De Niro and Reno hold the centre of the film together with understated steel, while McElhone, Skarsgård and Pryce provide animated support dripping with the self-serving juice that powers the dark profession.

And within the context of desperate mercenaries unsure of any cause except their own, Ronin unleashes an elated celebration of the car chase, Frankenheimer delivering not one, but two prolonged scenes of choreographed vehicular carnage through the narrow, twisty streets of France. Directed by Frankenheimer himself on a mix of rural roads, busy freeways, and congested city streets, and featuring jaw-dropping stunts, no special effects and rational editing, the car chases are there to be celebrated as among the most kinetically thrilling ever put to film.

And as if to prove that he can also create drama out of almost static scenes, Frankenheimer also throws in an extended bullet extraction sequence not for the faint of heart.

Ronin ends with a few too many characters rising up after being shot, and a rather contrived climax around an ice skating rink to give unnecessary profile to Olympic champion Katarina Witt. But this film is never about what is happening, just how stylishly it can be done.

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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible (1996)

An action film that relies almost solely on two set-piece scenes needs to get these scenes right. Mission: Impossible almost pulls it off, but ultimately both scenes are not as good as they need to be, and the movie as a whole is vaguely unsatisfying.

The plot, which isn't pretending to be too important, is all about the Impossible Missions Force attempting to prevent spy secrets from falling into the wrong hands.

In the first showcase scene, Tom Cruise as agent Ethan Hunt and his buddies break into a CIA safe room to steal a computer file. Cruise spends the scene horizontally suspended from the ceiling and unable to touch the floor to avoid triggering a motion sensor alarm. The tension is good; the ease with which the computer gives up the secret file is ridiculous.

In the film's climactic and second poster scene, a helicopter chases a train into the Chunnel. Needless to say that while the idea may have seemed good on paper, on film this sequence gets ridiculous early and often.

Mission: Impossible is hampered by a couple of strange creative decisions: Brian De Palma is not an action film director. His action-oriented successes like The Untouchables and Scarface are about the characters first. The Mission: Impossible script by David Koeppe and Robert Towne is nowhere near providing enough depth for the characters to compete with the need for an action-driven narrative.

Equally out of place is Vanessa Redgrave as the mysterious Max, buyer of US spy secrets. She looks uncomfortable in an underdeveloped, mostly unexplained, and finally dumbfounding role. In contrast Tom Cruise is credible as Hunt, and the rest of the actors and personalities are as predictable as any run-of-the-mill action movie. Mission: Impossible is passable fun, but no more.

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