Movie Review: Phone Booth (2002)

A single-setting suspense thriller, Phone Booth is a compact psychological sniper drama, although the one-note premise unsurprisingly bumps up against obvious limitations.

In Manhattan, Stu Sheppard (Colin Farrell) is a cocky and fast-taking publicist, happy to obfuscate his way through life. Married to Kelly (Radha Mitchell), he is also romancing waitress Pam (Katie Holmes) and calls her regularly from a phone booth near Times Square to avoid cell phone records.

But today Stu answers a call at the booth from a mysterious Caller (Kiefer Sutherland), who threatens Stu's life with a sniper rifle. The Caller wants Stu to reveal his infidelity to Kelly, and apologize for all his other transgressions. After the Caller shoots dead a pimp interfering with the call, the police descend on the scene, as do Kelly and Pam. Captain Ed Ramey (Forest Whitaker) has to try and untangle a dangerous situation.

Written by Larry Cohen and directed by Joel Schumacher, Phone Booth was filmed in ten days and in sequence. The film's events take place in real time, Stu's ordeal wrapping up in 81 minutes, and the desired mood of taut efficiency is effectively sustained. Schumacher's agitated camerawork adds to the disorienting sense of suspense caused by an unseen foe.

The basic theme of repentance and owning up to a pattern of nefarious behaviour is compelling, but also dragged out as Cohen struggles to keep Stu in the phone booth. The plot details surrender to illogic, most obviously to keep Kelly and Pam in danger, and some of the dialogue exchanges meander towards superfluous profanity in search of cheap shock value.

But Colin Farrell stands up to the role's rigours and carves a sweaty path from slick to desperate and frantic, literally holding the film in his hand. On the other end of the line Kiefer Sutherland's voice suggests a worthy villain. Unfortunately the script affords him God-like powers until the moments that matter most, and the duel between the two men deserves better motivation than Stu's small-scale sleaze. 

Without withstanding much scrutiny, Phone Booth answers the call.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie review: Freeway (1996)

A crime drama infused with dark humour, Freeway thrives on unexpected twists, but the surprises are blunted by cartoonish disorientation.

In Los Angeles, 15-year-old high school student Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon) comes from a white trash family and barely knows how to read. Her mother Ramona (Amanda Plummer) is a prostitute and her drug addicted step-father Larry (Michael T. Weiss) is sexually abusive. When both Ramona and Larry are arrested, Vanessa slips away from her social worker and starts driving north towards the home of a grandmother she has never met.

When her car breaks down on the freeway, Vanessa hitches a ride with the seemingly helpful Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland), who claims to be a counselor. On the long drive he starts asking increasingly awkward questions, then reveals himself to be a twisted psychopath and murderer of women. But when faced with a threat, the scrappy Vanessa is more than capable of fighting back.

A reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood with Oliver Stone as one of the executive producers, Freeway aims for an irreverent, anything goes vibe. A sun-drenched, vivid aesthetic enhances the fairytale-for-adults mood, and writer/director Matthew Bright rides the wave of his central character Vanessa all the way to extremes of cheeky violence. The wacky energy is unflagging and undoubtedly infectious, if often misdirected.

The plot intentionally toys with fundamentals but carries every intention of subverting the familiar. Vanessa is introduced as a survivor of a chaotic upbringing and the girlfriend of a drug dealer. In an early scene, she fends off Larry's latest sexual advances with impressive determination. Still, the extent to which this potential victim is willing and able to resort to physical harm is revealed only gradually, setting up a war of equals with Wolverton.

Bright does eventually carry this premise too far. Vanessa approaches indestructible status (as does Wolverton), robbing the movie of tension, and extreme bloodlust threatens her standing as a sympathy-deserving protagonist. The plot detours to a meandering women-in-prison stint, and a couple of detectives (Dan Hedaya and Wolfgang Bodison) are more inept than effective. Another shift finds Wolverton and his wife (Brooke Shields) playing the victims with no scrutiny. The final act hastily, and artificially, reverts back to Red Riding Hood origins.

At 20, Reese Witherspoon almost convinces as five years younger, and cuts through the increasingly wacky action by channeling a combination of Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil. When it comes to fairytales, Freeway is happy to explore the corkscrew off-ramps.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Promised Land (1987)

A drama about dreams both broken and non-existent, Promised Land threatens to say something important but remains mired in the company of uninteresting characters.

It's 1984, and in the small town of Ashville, Utah, David Hancock (Jason Gedrick) is the high school basketball star, dating cheerleader Mary Daley (Tracy Pollan) and destined for a college scholarship. Their classmate Danny Rivers (Kiefer Sutherland) is socially awkward and sarcastically nicknamed Senator. He also has a crush on Mary. Despite having no plans or prospects, Danny quits school and leaves town without telling his parents.

Two years later, David is a police officer back in Ashville, his college and sports dreams already shattered. Mary comes back from her college for a Christmas visit. Meanwhile, Danny is in Nevada, squatting in an abandoned warehouse. On a whim, he marries Bev Sykes (Meg Ryan), a woman he met just three days prior. Danny and Bev start the long drive to Ashville where he wants to reconnect with his parents. Meanwhile, David and Mary are unsure where their relationship is going.

Apparently based on real events, Promised Land never quite gets to whatever profound statements it was seeking. With the backing of executive producer Robert Redford, writer and director Michael Hoffman has potentially interesting small-town social topics to work with and an eye for beauty within sparse landscapes. But the movie lands flat, bogged down with David and Mary as one bickering maybe-couple, while Danny and Bev embark on an tedious road trip. 

The jock who peaked in high school, the cheerleader blossoming in college, the misfit still discovering himself, and the wild free-spirit are all defined within the opening 30 minutes. The script lacks meaningful context, progression, and compelling arcs, and the acting often dips into melodramatics. The young cast members do their best while in some cases still learning their craft, but are far from rescuing the sparse material and clunky dialogue.

David as a police officer loves shooting his service revolver at a makeshift shooting range, and the borderline unstable Bev also has a gun, so the hints of something bad about to happen are clear. Similarly obvious is the theme of young men from small towns struggling to make something of themselves with minimal familial support, while Ronald Reagan hovers over the country from his television perch. Promised Land is an idea waiting to happen, getting lost both in small town angst and the featureless desert.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Flatliners (1990)

A drama and thriller with some horror elements, Flatliners offers an intriguing premise and proceeds to bungle it with wayward execution.

At a prestigious medical school, Nelson (Kiefer Sutherland) is a student obsessed with exploring the death experience. He convinces his friends and classmates Rachel (Julia Roberts), David (Kevin Bacon), Joe (William Baldwin) and Randy (Oliver Platt) to participate in flatlining experiments, killing themselves with electric shocks for a few minutes before being revived with a defibrillator and CPR.

Nelson goes first, followed within days by David, Joe and Rachel, with each student prolonging the death stretch ever longer. The troubling visions they experience during their brief deaths are derived from their past and present lives, and continue to haunt them in the days after the experiments. Nelson, David and Rachel encounter figures from their childhoods, while the womanizing Joe confronts the consequences of his selfish actions.

Directed by Joel Schumacher, Flatliners is most notable for featuring a good collection of up-and-coming talent in the form of Sutherland, Roberts and Bacon. Despite the lack of adequate character depth, the often pouty star potential is potent, their hair carries flowy vestiges of the 1980s, and they collectively improve the film's otherwise ragged watchability factor.

The proposition around keen young medical students with Nobel Prize stars in their eyes eager to make a name for themselves by experiencing death and living to talk about it from a scientific perspective has the basis for a good film. Unfortunately, Schumacher and scriptwriter Peter Filardi lose their way early. Schumacher goes for a faux gothic aesthetic featuring gargoyles and a spooky old building under renovations where Nelson and his group set up shop to conduct their experiments. The decision to steer the film towards horror-lite territory is questionable, and displaces what was proclaimed as an intellectual pursuit.

And so the students one by one undergo the flatlining experience in increasingly repetitive scenes, and not once does Nelson follow through on his initial scientific quest to question, explore or discuss what it all means and where does science go with the visions experienced during death.

It is ironically left to sceptical and secular David to figure out some semblance of how to beat back the diabolical threats haunting the students after they return to life, in what proves to be a most tepid resolution about the need to seek absolution by confronting past misdeeds, real or imagined. Flatliners claims to seek inventive ideas, and ends up with lukewarm guilt leftovers.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: A Time To Kill (1996)

An overstuffed legal drama, A Time To Kill offers an all-star cast and plenty of incident, but quickly sprawls into too many crimes and loses touch with reality.

In rural Mississippi, two redneck white trash supremacists brutally rape Tonya, a ten year old black girl. She survives and identifies the attackers, who are summarily arrested. Before their trial can start, Tonya's dad Carl Lee (Samuel L. Jackson) approaches his friend and lawyer Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) and strongly hints that he will be seeking vigilante justice and would want Jake to subsequently defend him. Sure enough, Carl Lee goes ahead and guns down the two perpetrators and seriously wounds police officer Dwayne Looney (Chris Cooper) in the process.

The case generates a media circus, with District Attorney Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey) seeking the death penalty. Brigance reconnects with his retired mentor Lucien Wilbanks (Donald Sutherland) and prepares a defence based on temporary insanity. Young and idealistic law student Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock) offers her help to the defence team. Meanwhile, the black community rallies behind Carl Lee, while Freddie Lee Cobb (Kiefer Sutherland), a brother of one of the victims, reaches out to the Ku Klux Klan. They start a campaign of intimidation against Brigance, placing his wife Carla (Ashley Judd) and young daughter in harm's way. With the small town rocking with violence and protests, Jake has to find a way to defend a distraught black father in front of an all-white jury.

Another John Grisham adaptation and again directed by Joel Schumacher, A Time To Kill is a glossy production, filled with familiar faces in every role, and with enough going on to maintain interest over 150 minutes. The performances are solid within the courtroom and on the streets, and Schumacher creates a sweat-drenched Southern aesthetic where different rules apply, and deep racial divides are hidden just below the surface. The search for justice in a straightforward vigilante violence case made much more complicated by racial overtones presents a juicy social dilemma.

But the film suffers from several issues, not the least of which is the multiplicity of crimes that cascade from the original murders but seem to come and go with no consequence. In the course of the film a cross is burned on the front lawn of the Brigance house, an old man is badly beaten, a house is burned down, a woman is kidnapped and left to die tied to a tree, and a national guardsman is shot in the neck, in broad daylight, with a high powered sniper rifle. Not one of these crimes receives any follow-up attention or investigation, and the perpetrators remain free to roam the streets.

A Time To Kill also suffers from an Akiva Goldsman script that can only be called lazy. In an attempt to perhaps pack in too much of the book's content into the film, many sub-plots are casually introduced and barely developed, and characters flounder on the rocks of poor advancement. There are a couple of scenes showing the jury grappling with the case over a meal; they then disappear from view and don't even get the privilege of being seen to deliver the verdict. An entire sub-plot related to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People insisting on replacing Brigance with a high profile hired gun consumes valuable screen time and adds very little. An informant within the Klan plays a key role; his seemingly compelling story is dangled tantalizingly and then abandoned. And the characters of Ellen Roark, Lucien Wilbanks and Jake's friend and rival Harry (Oliver Platt) vie for screen time and barely get one meaningful scene each.

But the presence of McConaughey, Jackson and Spacey ensures that the film is never less than watchable, as they whack away at the thicket of an overgrown plot and towards a final courtroom confrontation. A Time To Kill is decent, but would have greatly benefited from an old fashioned pruning.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Taking Lives (2004)

A serial murderer chase thriller that is more curious than effective, Taking Lives has a few interesting ideas but then stumbles into some large and fateful plot holes and execution deficiencies.

Set in Canada, the film opens in the early 1980s when teenager Martin Asher (Paul Dano) kills another young drifter called Matt and takes over his identity. Martin is assumed to be dead. Twenty years later, FBI profiler Illeana Scott (Angelina Jolie) is summoned to Montreal to help the local police force crack a series of unsolved gruesome murders. At the same time Martin's mother Rebecca Asher (Gena Rowlands) steps forward to inform the police that she has spotted her supposedly dead son on a crowded ferry.

Illeana explores Martin's past and eventually identifies him as a serial killer who takes over the lives of his victims because he cannot face who he is. Martin's current identity is not known, but there is a break in the case when the latest murder is witnessed by art dealer James Costa (Ethan Hawke). Illeana and her team work with James to draw a portrait of Martin, now intent on killing James to eliminate the witness. But just when it seems that the police are gaining the upper hand and Illeana start a torrid affair with James, the case takes a strange and even bloodier twist.

Directed by D.J. Caruso, Taking Lives never establishes a consistent tone. An FBI agent in Canada with landmark scenes of Quebec City being misrepresented as Montreal are not good foundations for a thriller. The film is littered with some fundamental unexplained events, including a decomposed body in the attic and a random assailant below the bed that serve as cheap thrills but demand a lot more exposition that never arrives. The narrative is often pushed forward in a rapid rattle of dialogue and jumbled names as Illeana jumps into the car to get to the next scene, leaving behind a bewildered mess. There are two major twists in the film, and both are fairly easy to spot.

Taking Lives does do a few things well. The tension between Illeana and the local detectives (portrayed by Olivier Martinez, Tchéky Karyo and Jean-Hugues Anglade) is healthy. The group works together despite the men never fully welcoming Illeana's intrusion onto their turf. The serial killer's background is viable in cinematic terms, with Illeana uncovering the household secrets that triggered Martin's self-hate and murderous tendencies. And there is a well-mounted highway car chase scene that finds a good balance between carnage and technical thrills.

In the lead roles Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke are serviceable without convincingly committing to their characters, and they do enjoy a scorching sex scene. Meanwhile, Kiefer Sutherland receives an inordinately prominent billing, but is hardly in the film. Taking Lives has its moments, but ultimately does not offer nearly enough to stand apart from the myriad other, better serial killer films.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

The Movies Of Kiefer Sutherland

All movies starring Kiefer Sutherland and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

At Close Range (1986)

Stand By Me (1986)

The Lost Boys (1987)

Promised Land (1987)

Young Guns (1988)

Flatliners (1990)

A Few Good Men (1992)

Eye For An Eye (1996)

Freeway (1996)

A Time To Kill (1996)

Phone Booth (2002)

Taking Lives (2004)

Juror #2 (2024)

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

Movie Review: Eye For An Eye (1996)

A mother's vigilante justice drama, Eye For An Eye works hard to raise a sweat but remains just one notch above TV movie fare.

Karen and Mack McCann (Sally Field and Ed Harris) have two daughters, teenager Julie (Olivia Burnette) and the much younger Megan (Alexandra Kyle). On the day of Megan's birthday, a home intruder violently rapes and kills Julie. Detective Joe Denillo (Joe Mantegna) arrests lowlife delivery man Robert Doob (Kiefer Sutherland), and with strong DNA evidence linking him to the crime, a conviction appears likely. But Doob escapes justice on a technicality and is released, infuriating Karen.

She joins a victim support group where she befriends the sympathetic Angel Kosinsky (Charlayne Woodard), and secretly starts plotting to take justice into her own hands. She tracks Doob's movements and begins to suspect that he is about to rape and murder again. In desperation, Karen turns to a group of grieving parents who appear to be facilitating vigilante justice, including Sidney Hughes (Philip Baker Hall). But Karen will learn that extracting revenge is much more difficult than she imagined.

Directed by John Schlesinger and adapted from the Erika Holzer novel, Eye For An Eye has above-average talent working with below average material. The urbanite victim frustrated by the justice system and deciding to turn to vigilantism is at least as old as Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974). That movie and all its sequels and imitators, including women revenge fantasies in such fare as Ms. 45 (1981), squeezed the concept dry a good 15 years before Eye For An Eye.

The film does try, and Schlesinger raises the violence quotient by ensuring that the two rape and murder scenes are harrowing and painful to watch. Forcing Karen McCann to listen-in over a cell phone as her daughter is assaulted adds to the sense of a parent's helplessness and increases the justification for her fury. Sally Field dominates the film and delivers a committed performance, while Kiefer Sutherland does his part by creating in Robert Doob a truly hate-worthy piece of white trash, a psychopath driven by the basest animal instincts to copulate and kill. Doob taunting Karen and Mack in the courtroom after the case against him is thrown out is a classic piece of despicable behaviour.

But the weaknesses of the material are quickly apparent. This is a film in which nothing will be known about Doob's backstory, and most of the strong supporting cast is wasted. Ed Harris, Joe Mategna and Beverly D'Angelo (as Karen's business partner) are derivative characters reduced to the shallowest of line readings, and several potentially interesting sub-stories featuring Angel and Sidney are abandoned when convenient.

Eye For An Eye is predictable revenge fare, arriving late to the party and leaving next to no impression.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: A Few Good Men (1992)

A military court drama with a superb cast and a razor sharp script, A Few Good Men is an exhilarating story of murder, cover-up, honour and unexpected determination.

When Private Santiago is killed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) is put in charge of representing the two defendants. Marines Dawson (Wolfgang Bodison) and Downey (James Marshall) don't deny that they intended to rough up Santiago as a disciplinary measure, but they claim that they were ordered to do so. Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore) and Lieutenant Weinberg (Kevin Pollak) join Kaffee's defence team.

Initially, the cocky Daniel is looking for a quick plea-bargain with his counterpart Captain Ross (Kevin Bacon), but a visit to the Naval Base and a meeting with Guantanamo's commander Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) begin to reveal a deeper story. Santiago was an underperforming Marine, Jessup wanted him kept on the base and "trained", and Lieutenant Kendrick (Kiefer Sutherland) was eager to please, over the objections of Lieutenant Colonel Markinson (J. T. Walsh). But Jessup tells Kaffee that Santiago was granted a transfer, and was murdered shortly before he was due to leave the base. Egged on by Galloway, Kaffee finds the courage to keep investigating. He takes the case to a court martial and argues on behalf of the defendants, resulting in a titanic battle for the truth.

Jessup, talking to Kaffee: I run my unit how I run my unit. You want to investigate me, roll the dice and take your chances. I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4000 Cubans who are trained to kill me, so don't think for one second that you can come down here, flash a badge, and make me nervous.

Written by Aaron Sorkin (adapting his play) and directed by Rob Reiner, A Few Good Men is a gripping experience. The film engages immediately, the complex mystery of what happened to Private Santiago providing layers of depth, the Guantanamo crime setting adding a stab of danger, while the evolution of Daniel Kaffee from carefree arrogance to intense commitment provides a compelling arc. For the entire running length of 138 minutes Reiner does not release the tension, instead building a courtroom emotional rollercoaster as Kaffee's case ebbs and flows, the plucky defence team taking on the establishment and trying to shake the defendants loose from the grip of a seemingly straightforward verdict of guilt.

Sorkin's script gains power as it cleverly transitions from what happened to why it happened. A Few Good Men keeps probing until it arrives at the heart of the issue: the need to maintain a unit's essential code of honour versus an individual's irrefutable rights. In an Army that depends on both to thrive, the collision between what the collective needs and what an individual stands for could have unintended consequences, and a lot can go wrong even when the best of intentions are steeped in a traditional code of conduct.

The film's central clash is translated into a climactic confrontation between Kaffee the unsure attorney and Jessup the wily Colonel on the witness stand. As the sparks finally fly, Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson are both brilliant, bouncing off each other in a battle of wills that is destined to destroy either the lawyer or the soldier. Cruise grows from boy to man as he accepts his destiny to dominate courtrooms, while Nicholson delivers one his all-time great performances as the arrogant base commander, as sure of his methods and motives as he is oblivious to his creeping maniacal tendencies.

Jessup: I'll answer the question. You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled!
Jessup: You want answers?!
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessup: You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like "honor", "code", "loyalty". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!

The supporting cast is filled with superior talent in every key role. Moore is sometimes awkward but in keeping with JoAnne Galloway's slightly misfit character, and Kevin Pollak as Weinberg provides the calm brains to complement Kaffee's instinctive charisma. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, and J.T. Walsh round out the men in uniform holding different moral perspectives on the same incident.

A Few Good Men finds soldiers of all ranks believing that they are doing the right things for the right reasons. When the outcome is tragic, the foundation is set for an epic showdown in search of justice.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Young Guns (1988)

A western with a cast dominated by a batch of up-and-coming Hollywood male stars, Young Guns is a fairly faithful account of Billy the Kid's early days. Rampant youthfulness dominates the film but cannot make up for the lack of depth.

It's the 1870s in Lincoln County, New Mexico. English cattle rancher John Tunstall (Terence Stamp) specializes in rescuing troubled youth, giving them jobs and an education at his ranch. His latest recruit is young Billy Bonney (Emilio Estevez), a boyish and cocky troublemaker who has apparently already killed a man. Billy joins the other ranch hands in Tunstall's employment: the romantic Doc (Kiefer Sutherland), the serious Dick (Charlie Sheen), the half-Indian Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips), the appropriately nicknamed Dirty Steve (Dermot Mulroney) and his friend Charlie (Casey Siemaszko). Collectively they call themselves the Regulators.

Tunstall is locked in a nasty dispute over control of the cattle business with Lawrence Murphy (Jack Palance), who has bought the law and is trying to monopolize the local industry. Tunstall has an ally in respected lawyer Alexander McSween (Terry O'Quinn), but this does not save him: Murphy's men kill Tunstall in cold bold. The Regulators vow revenge and are initially deputized to act as lawmen, with Dick assuming a leadership role. But Billy has his own version of dispensing justice, and starts killing rather than arresting men associated with Murphy, further inflaming what became known as the Lincoln County War.

Young Guns forms a cactus pack of sorts to maraud across the west, the six Regulators boasting the presence of Sheen (Platoon), Phillips (La Bamba) and Sutherland (The Lost Boys) soon after their break-out roles. Estevez was already hot property with the success of Stakeout, Repo Man, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire. It is an impressive collection of burgeoning talent, and Young Guns is brimming with the potential of ambitious young men. That some of their hairstyles and mannerisms are more suited to the 1980s rather than the 1870s does not seriously diminish the available enjoyment. Estevez gets the showiest role as Billy The Kid, and he enjoys the self-propelling wild-eyed thrill that comes with leaving morality to one side and just engaging in mischievous killing.

The story itself is a slightly fictionalized account of a real and violent dispute characterized by mindless tit-for-tat killings, where men with more guns than brains tried to muscle each other out of the cattle business, and violent revenge took precedence over justice. It was fertile territory for the likes of Billy to shoot first and ask no questions, and director Christopher Cain inserts scenes of well-staged, noisy and often violent gunfights at regular intervals throughout the movie.

It's when the guns are silent that the film is caught short. After the relatively early demise of John Tunstall, the John Fusco script struggles to find a weighty presence capable of carrying the movie. The Regulators are young, naive and simply not very interesting people when they are not engaged in shooting or being shot at. The elementary attempts at some meaningful exchanges of dialogue are quickly blown into the winds of shallowness.

And so Young Guns awkwardly gropes around trying to find various methods of killing time between the action set pieces. Doc falls in love with Murphy's Chinese slave; Dick and Billy compete for the group's leadership, Chavez sneers at everyone who insults his ethnicity, and Dirty Steve spits a lot. None of it is deep, and all of it is mundane.

A rough and ready supporting cast does succeed in bringing to life some real wild west characters. Lawman Pat Garrett (Patrick Wayne), Sheriff William Brady (Danny Kamin), frontiersman Buckshot Roberts (Brian Keith) and outlaw / bounty hunter John Kinney (Allen Keller) make brief but often noisy appearances to play their roles in a nasty little war.

Young Guns fires away at the legends of the west, generating plenty of energetic movement but limited substance.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Stand By Me (1986)

A nostalgic ode to the innocence of childhood friendships based on a Stephen King novella, Stand By Me is a trip down memory lane enlivened by a willing young cast.

It's 1959 in rural Oregon, and the small community of Castle Rock is buzzing with rumours about a missing teenager. Four 12-year-old friends stumble onto crucial information: the teenager is dead, his body lying by the rail tracks, a two-day walk away. Street-smart Chris (River Phoenix); intellectual Gordie (Wil Wheaton); eccentric Teddy (Corey Feldman) and overweight Vern (Jerry O'Connell) decide to embark on an unlikely trek to find the body and gain the resultant perception of fame.

The dead body is a classic McGuffin and this is of course a journey of self-discovery, with the boys finding themselves and awakening to each other as human beings. The trip along the rail tracks represents the boys' struggle to overcome the travails of childhood and learn the responsibilities of adulthood, while engraving into their psyche a memory of a life-time.

Gordie is haunted and traumatized by the death of his football star older brother Denny (John Cusack). Gordie is sure that his parents would have preferred him to to be dead instead. Gordie is also carrying the hopes of his friends: he is the only one among them expected to go to college and achieve anything in life. Chris is cocky and self-confident, but has already decided on his destiny: he comes from a tough family, and a challenging future is all he sees ahead, although his self-awareness provides him with a remarkably sharp perspective on the world.

Teddy is physically and emotionally scarred: his abusive dad held his ear to a stove, and Teddy hides behind a facade of eccentric bravado. Vern is surprisingly timid and pushed deeper into his shell the more he is bullied about his weight.

Rob Reiner extracts mature and honest performances from his young cast, and keeps most of Stand By Me focused on the kids. The film is very much a perspective on life at age 12, and older teenagers are the dark forces: Kiefer Sutherland is at his snarliest leading a gang of thugs racing to beat Gordie and his friends to the site of the dead body. There are hardly any adults in the movie, with Gordie's parents portrayed as detached and cold hearted, while Richard Dreyfuss mails in a cameo as the grown-up Gordie narrating the story. The soundtrack of classic 1950s tracks increases the wistful sentimentality of the simple story.

Being a pre-teen may be all about simplifying life's complexities down to a tussle among friends; Stand By Me recognizes that at age 12, friendships are the essence of life.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Lost Boys (1987)

Before movie vampires were cuddly, hunky, and tragically romantic, they were pretty rotten creatures, none more so than the small colony of murderous blood suckers in The Lost Boys. These vampires have no redeeming features whatsoever, and they look fairly hideous whether in human or monster mode.

With Joel Schumacher directing, Richard Donner co-producing, and a cast of characters that brought together some of the better young talent of the era, The Lost Boys is a classy tongue-in-cheek horror flick with a few good moments of humour thrown in to spice up the fun.

Teenager Michael (Jason Patric) and his younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) are new arrivals to the small coastal California town of Santa Carla, where their mom Lucy (Dianne Wiest) has relocated their lives following a divorce. Beyond perpetually cheesy fairgrounds, Santa Carla has little going for it, and it loses it's minimal appeal when Michael and Sam realize that they are now in the murder capital of the country. Someone or something is committing a lot of violence in what should be a sleepy little resort community.

Things brighten up momentarily when Michael meets the flirty Star (Jami Gertz); but she turns out to be just a lure to attract Michael to a group of rowdy vampires led by David (Kiefer Sutherland). The impressionable Michael shares a drink of blood and is half-way to becoming a vampire; he just needs to kill something to complete the transformation, and Sam looks like a reasonable target. Sam enlists the help of local vampire hunters Edgar (Corey Feldman) and Alan (geddit?) to fight off Michael, destroy David and his gang, and find out whether Lucy's new friend Max (Edward Herrmann), a meek but creepy video store manager, has anything to do with the local carnage.

The Lost Boys brings together a talented young cast that sparkles, sometimes under heavy make-up, despite the Santa Clara darkness. Kiefer Sutherland has rarely had a better opportunity to growl and drip evil on the big screen, while the role of Sam is perfect for Corey Haim's screen persona of scrappy resourcefulness. His regular screen partner Corey Feldman is also a natural as Edgar, all fake bravado, surviving thanks to equal measures of dumb luck and misguided initiative.

The Lost Boys also benefits from a sultry Jami Gertz at the peak of a career that promised much but fizzled too early. Jason Patric gets the most central role, but delivers a less interesting performance, all 1980s hair and little engagement. Dianne Wiest and Edward Herrmann add a dose of classiness to the movie.

Schumacher creates an atmosphere of silly dread, never aiming to be really scary but still managing to engineer a few effectively bloody moments. The Lost Boys has no message of value, but enjoys itself all the same delivering  high quality nonsensical fun.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.