Movie Review: Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

A romantic comedy, Sweet Home Alabama celebrates cultural differences but never overcomes a distinctly unlikeable protagonist.

In New York City, Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) is carving a name for herself as a fashion designer, and after a successful show is designated the next big industry talent. Her love life is also thriving and she accepts a marriage proposal from Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), a most eligible bachelor, successful businessman, and the son of New York's Mayor Kate Hennings (Candice Bergen). Andrew ignores his mother's politically driven concerns about Melanie's southern roots.

In the meantime Melanie rushes back to her humble small Alabama hometown to look after unfinished business. She is technically still married to Jake Perry (Josh Lucas), her soulmate since childhood before she abandoned him and ran off to the big city seven years ago. Now Jake still refuses to sign the divorce papers, forcing Melanie to prolong her stay. She reconnects with her parents Earl and Pearl (Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place) and confronts her questionable past actions. But her life becomes even more complicated when first the media then Andrew chase her to Alabama.

Despite a valiant effort by Reese Witherspoon, Sweet Home Alabama crashes against a fairly despicable central character. Melanie abandons her husband, adopts a fake identity to cover up her actual hometown, accepts a marriage proposal while still married, and once back among her childhood friends, proceeds to degrade them. And when Jake does sign the divorce papers, she still fumbles the transaction and humiliates others.

Director Andy Tennant and writer C. Jay Cox are either hoping no one notices, or else believe Melanie's actions are somehow justified and she can undergo a miraculous transformation to a good person worth caring about. It's a nice try, but Andrew and Jake as the two men in her life should both aim higher, and Melanie most deserves to be on her own, at least for a while.

This being a romantic comedy, the outcome is predetermined from the opening scene of Melanie and Jake as children witnessing lightning striking twice on the same spot of beach. To consume 109 minutes and actually arrive at the required ending, Tennant does manage to salute southern culture with a combination of affection and satire, although the frequently expressed local views on the Civil War fall somewhere between insensitive and crass.

Whenever a boost is needed on the soundtrack, Lynyrd Skynyrd's title song is cranked up at whatever event the characters happen to be attending. The movie rolls into a distasteful mess, but at least one song rocks.



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Movie Review: Stealth (2005)

A science fiction military thriller, Stealth throws wild technology at the screen with admirable if mindless panache.

In the near future, Lieutenants Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) and Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) form the elite US Navy airborne Talon strike force, tasked with covert anti-terrorism bombing missions. After successfully destroying enemy targets hidden in desert caves, Talon's commander Captain George Cummings (Sam Shepard) introduces the team's latest recruit: the top-secret Extreme Deep Invader (EDI), a Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) operated by artificial intelligence developed by Dr. Keith Orbit (Richard Roxburgh).

Gannon has reservations about EDI, but the artificial intelligence proves its worth in a mission to assassinate terrorist leaders. But a lightning strike impacts EDI's circuits, leading to erratic behaviour. Despite the risks Cummings insists on sending EDI back into combat, and this time the unmanned aircraft goes rogue over hostile Asian airspace, endangering the other three team members and threatening to cause multiple international incidents.

An unlikely mashup of Top Gun and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stealth also predicts the expanded role of drone technology in modern warfare. Never pretending to be anything other than a wild ride packed with cheap thrills, the film deserves credit for decent special effects, a better-than-expected focus on the pilots, and even conjures up a nominal character arc for the artificial intelligence.

The script by W.D. Richter capitalizes on the available assets. Stealth is packed with imagery of the fictional F/A-37 Talon stealth bomber, and while plenty of the pilot-perspective computer generated flight action pushes into ridiculous territory, enough of the visuals are real enough to engage. And director Rob Cohen conjures a few moments of truly enjoyable spectacle, including a refueling mission gone wrong for Gannon, and an ejection, self-destruct and harrowing parachute drop for Wade.

And while the romance elements between Gannon and Wade are as clunky as expected in a milieu overrun by macho hardware and mumbo-jumbo software, Stealth conjures up a human-centred climax with plenty of on-the-ground action featuring a low-probability run-to-the-border and a high-odds search-and-rescue mission under enemy fire.

Cohen finds time to make his leads and locations as attractive as the sleek planes, a rest-and-recreation sojourn in Thailand providing a flimsy excuse for the stars to parade in bathing suits, not to mention providing a tourism boost for the Thai economy.

Stealth never threatens to be taken seriously, but delivers its entertainment payload on target.

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Movie Review: Poseidon (2006)

A film about a big boat without the big boat, Poseidon is what happens when computer technology is allowed to replace good film-making. While the thrills are there, a lot of what happens in Poseidon is hopelessly contrived, and the few external shots are entirely manufactured from bits and bytes.

Aboard the luxury cruise ship Poseidon carrying thousands of passengers, professional gambler Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) meets New York's former Mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), a retired firefighter. Also on the grand boat as New Year's Eve approaches are Robert's daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel); the gay Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), who was recently dumped by his partner; stowaway Elena (Mia Maestro); and single mother Maggie (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Connor (Jimmy Bennett).

As the midnight celebrations die down, a giant rogue wave strikes the Poseidon, killing hundreds and turning the boat upside down in the water. The main banquet hall holds a giant air pocket and that is where most of the survivors are urged to stay. But a small group led by Dylan and Robert correctly believe the air pocket to be a death trap, and decide to venture upwards towards the bottom of the ship, now the only part that is above the water. They have to navigate numerous dangers to try and make it.

A questionable remake of 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, Poseidon is unfortunately not much more than an elaborate and mostly claustrophobic obstacle course, with the cast members shepherded along from one physical challenge to the next like mice in an upside down maze. Director Wolfgang Petersen is a master of squeezing tension out of confined wet spaces, and Poseidon completes his trilogy of peril-in-the-water movies that started with Das Boot (1981) and continued with The Perfect Storm (2000). The perils of Poseidon are undeniably exciting and well executed, and Peterson keeps tightening the tension screws with ever more creative puzzles that need to be solved for the survivors to make progress on their desperate journey through the bowels of the stricken boat.

But precious little time is allowed for any true human emotion to develop or connections to grow. The opening few minutes of the movie are almost as ridiculously scripted as the weekly guest star introductions on the Love Boat television series, and all that is revealed about the main characters is crammed into a few stiff scenes. Once the boat is upside down, the survivors stick to strictly predefined boundaries of behaviour, and eventually fade into the insignificant background behind the heartbreaking glory of a ship dying a slow death on its back. Destroyed grandeur, explosions, fire, floods, large falling obstacles, and floating dead bodies dominate the visual experience, and all the actors may as well be extras.

Josh Lucas gets it quickly and displays all the depth of an anonymous extra, trying but failing miserably to channel a Matthew McConaughy type persona. Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss add some talent but generally appear to be wondering how they ended up playing second fiddle to a rack of computers. Jacinda Barrett, Emmy Rossum, and Mia Maestro are largely wasted among the hardware, software and flood of masculinity required to lead the survivors to safety.

For all the complex and heart-pounding death traps that have to be negotiated, Poseidon is disappointingly mechanical, the actors swallowed up by the spectacle, and the spectacle devoured by enough processing power to sink a large ship.

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