Movie Review: Seven Days In Utopia (2011)

Genre: Faith-Based Sports Drama  

Director: Matt Russell  

Starring: Robert Duvall, Lucas Black, Melissa Leo, Deborah Ann Woll  

Running Time: 98 minutes  

Synopsis: In Texas, amateur golfer Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black) has a meltdown in a qualifying tournament, damaging his professional prospects. Distressed and distracted, he crashes his car near the tiny community of Utopia. There he meets grizzled rancher and retired golfer Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall), as well as local girl Sarah (Deborah Ann Woll). As they wait for the car to be repaired, Johnny works with Luke for seven days to improve his golf game. 

What Works Well: Robert Duvall is almost able to save a few scenes through his effortless presence.

What Does Not Work As Well: This is an adult version of The Karate Kid as filtered through the Bible. Lucas Black at 28-years-old is unconvincing as a fresh-faced aspiring pro golfer, and Melissa Leo is wasted in a nothing role. The faith-saves-all hokey plot points include Luke improving his mental game by spending one day painting, one day fly fishing, one day playing a version of horseshoes, and one night avoiding a charging bull while hanging on to a folding chair. It's as as bad as it sounds, and all before the villain of the piece (Luke's father) undergoes a remarkable transformation and helps his son in the corniest of tournament showdown endings.

Key Quote:

Johnny: You don't choose the game, it chooses you.

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Movie Review: Oblivion (2013)

A post-apocalyptic science fiction drama, Oblivion is visually gorgeous but compromised by substantive logic gaps.

In 2077, the moon has been destroyed and Earth is uninhabitable after a war with invading alien scavengers ("scavs"). The humans won the war but relocated to Saturn's Titan moon, leaving the gigantic Tet spaceship to orbit Earth. 

Maintenance technician Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his communications partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) are among the few humans on Earth. Taking instructions from their commander Sally (Melissa Leo) on Tet, they are completing a five year stint maintaining military drones that hunt remaining scavs and protect massive generators converting the ocean's waters to energy.

Jack and Vika are supposed to have had their memories wiped before their maintenance mission, but Jack suffers from persistent flashbacks featuring a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko). He has also discovered a pasture where nature is recovering, and he yearns to stay on Earth. After he locates a signal broadcasting into space, a human spaceship crash lands. The behaviour of the drones at the crash site and the story of the sole survivor force Jack to question everything he knows.

A combination of dystopian nightmare and hopeful resiliency-of-humanity epic, Oblivion offers plenty to admire. Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski, the cinematography is a feast for the eyes. With seamless CGI effects, the destroyed and abandoned Earth is a desolate, engrossing place, haunted by the remnants of an exploded moon. The command centre in the sky is sleek, and the spacecrafts and drones are clever, agile machines. 

Starting with a well-constructed premise but always hinting at the potential for curves, the plot basics are intriguing. Kosinski reveals the hidden layers of his story in increments, maintaining a good level of curiosity with a succession of twists. Unfortunately, many of the highlights are also familiar from other movies, and under any cursory level of examination the plot details disintegrate.

Also less successful are a couple of unnecessary action scenes thrown in as a check-box exercise. These are notably out of place and poorly executed. The drones invade a hideout, and then pursue a craft in canyon-like terrain, and both sequences are derivative, choppy, and edited with a hatchet.

The cast is small and led by a typically magnetic Tom Cruise performance. Jack Harper benefits from a complex backstory, and Cruise savours it with inquisitive conviction. Andrea Riseborough teases out the tension within a conflicted character, but Melissa Leo has less to. Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau enter the narrative about halfway through in smallish but pivotal roles.

Oblivion works best as a tableau of artistry, a vision to be admired from a distance, the details best left unexamined.



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Movie Review: 21 Grams (2003)

A drama about life, death and atonement, 21 Grams deploys an unsettling but ultimately rewarding puzzle structure to enhance a story of three lives colliding.

Multiple plot lines unfold non-linearly from the perspective of three key characters. In simplified form:

• Paul Rivers (Sean Penn) may die unless he receives a heart transplant. His marriage to Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is strained, but she is anyway eager to get pregnant by artificial insemination before he dies. 
• Jack Jordan (Benicio del Toro) is a petty criminal and repeat offender trying to go straight. He has embraced religion and now volunteers at the church run by Reverend John (Eddie Marsan). Jack is married to Marianne (Melissa Leo) and they have two young children. 
• Cristina Peck (Naomi Watts) is a recovering drug addict, now happily married to Michael (Danny Huston) and raising two young daughters.

After Jack loses his job as an apprentice golf caddy because of complaints about his tattoos, a horrible car crash disrupts many lives. Paul receives a new heart, but his relationship with Mary appears unsalvageable. He makes a determined effort to get close to Cristina, who reverts back to drug use and now has retribution on her mind.

The opening 45 minutes of 21 Grams dance on the edge between maddening and exhilarating. In a hyperactive editing job, director Alejandro González Iñárritu, working from a script by Guillermo Arriaga, fragments the plot into tiny morsels across time and space, the character connections and event timelines unexplained. The structure presents a concentration and patience challenge.

The dividend is worthwhile. Once the puzzle pieces start to fit, 21 Grams (the title is a non-scientific reference to the supposed weight of the soul) offers a compelling exploration of life's fragility and the often exasperating lines between actions and consequences. Paul bounces from looming death to euphoric reprieve upon receiving his transplant only to encounter another crisis. Cristina has turned her life around and is enjoying domestic bliss when everything is snatched from her. And Jack has made a compact with God to become a better person, and yet is struck by his most massive setback yet. 

The three protagonists merge at the intersection of new starts, old scores and burning passions, their interactions again altering all prior trajectories. With lives hanging in the balance and plenty of reasons for pessimism, children represent hopes and dreams for a better future, and also active resistance against despair. Paul's wife Mary desires his child despite - or maybe because of - his impending death. Cristina's two daughters are her greatest reward for overcoming her past addiction. And Jack's children are a cause to reform and return, more than once. 

Despite sharing the screen time almost equally, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro all bring a laudable intensity to their roles, with Watts in particular excelling in moments of crisis and uncertainty. Melissa Leo brings working class steeliness to the role of Jack's wife Marianne.

The bravura scene construction and core motifs are marginally stronger than the film's resolution, as the final act opts for a twisty road with a few too many trick turns, Arriaga hammering home the futility of seeking fulfilment through impetuous actions. But while the overall character arcs are mostly grim, 21 Grams allows rays of optimism to shine through. Few individual plans survive, but the convoluted tangle does gestate faint new pathways to a different future.

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Movie Review: Frozen River (2008)

A crime drama, Frozen River is a low-key yet tense exploration of two mothers forging an unlikely bond under extreme economic hardship.

Christmas time is approaching in frigid upstate New York. Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is a working class mom struggling to raise her two boys, 15 year old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and five year old Ricky. Her gambling-addicted husband has just abandoned the family, taking with him money set aside to buy a new double-wide trailer. While out looking for her husband, Ray meets and initially clashes with smuggler and car thief Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a member of the Mohawk nation.

Lila lives alone, having lost custody of her infant son at birth. Recognizing that Ray desperately needs money, Lila introduces her to the people smuggling trade across the frozen river straddling the border between Canada and the United States but within Mohawk territory. Money starts to roll in just in time for Christmas, but with state troopers starting to get suspicious and the human cargo business rife with risks and murky characters, life for both Ray and Lila gets ever more complicated.

An uncompromising sojourn to rarely explored territory, Frozen River seeks the warm flickers of humanity attempting to survive frigid physical and economic realities. The frozen St. Lawrence River presents an intimidating but open border opportunity rife with possibilities and risks, and for two women with almost nothing to lose, quick profits from makeshift human smuggling runs are impossible to resist.

But Ray and Lila are both mothers trying to safeguard or reclaim the sanctity of their families, and rather than motives of greed or power, director and writer Courtney Hunt is interested in the plight of ordinary women reduced to choices of starvation, ostracism or felony. Frozen River avoids any notions of lecturing or juvenile dot connections. The dire economic circumstances in the form of derelict housing, missing responsible males, microwaved popcorn and Tang as meals, no job opportunities, and property repossessions are just stark realities to be navigated for the basic cause of survival.

Hunt and cinematographer Reed Morano capture startling imagery of hauntingly beautiful and sparsely populated rural America and native reserve territory. The on-location filming near Plattsburgh creates a unique aesthetic and a sense of place detached entirely from modern urbanism, feeding the notion of people forgotten on the margins of what constitutes economic success.

Melissa Leo is a sturdy presence at the heart of the film, her mama bear performance filled with stripped-down determination and resourcefulness to do what it takes. The tragic Misty Upham provides a more subdued counterpoint, Lila's Mohawk heritage embedding a resigned disposition and quicker understanding of the tradeoffs that come with challenging laws.

With Ray as a primary focus Frozen River does shortchange Lila's background story, her child custody battle and troubled relationship with the Mohawk leadership receiving just perfunctory attention. And the ending is rushed compared to the preceding build-up. But Frozen River is a deep and fresh breath of filmmaking, carrying the sting of painfully cold realities.

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Movie Review: The Equalizer 2 (2018)

An action thriller, The Equalizer 2 is a solid second chapter in the story of a troubled ex-government killer who now works on his own terms.

Former Special Forces operative Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) eliminates a band of thugs on a train in Turkey, returning an abducted American child to her mother. Now working as a Lyft driver in Boston and still grieving the loss of his wife, McCall next tangles with a group of men who nonchalantly abused and drugged an escort. At his apartment complex, McCall takes aspiring artist Miles (Ashton Sanders) under his wing and tries to steer him away from a life of crime.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, a deep undercover American agent is killed along with his wife. McCall's close friend Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) is sent to investigate on behalf of the CIA. She is soon in trouble, and McCall teams up with his former colleague ex-agent Dave York (Pedro Pascal) to investigate and dole out his unique brand of justice.

Again directed by Antoine Fuqua, The Equalizer 2 does not stray far from the original, which makes it both comfortably entertaining and just as comfortably predictable. This is a good quality film with excellent action scenes and plenty of space and time allocated for introspection and side-plots, but it never threatens to surprise.

Washington is by far the best thing on show, and his sheer presence and unflappable demeanour maintain a high degree of interest. Fuqua allows his star critical opportunities to reminisce about his past life and lost love, and McCall as a rounded and emotionally wounded character is so much more gratifying when he lets his anger loose. The Equalizer 2 is the first sequel project ever for both Washington and Fuqua, and their level of care for the central character is evident.

Helping matters along are several small stories enriching McCall's character. The episode in Turkey, the drugged escort, the old man droning on about his missing sister and his stolen painting, and the Miles salvation project all add texture and a mostly welcome warmth to the proceedings. However, the incidental chapters do pad the running time towards the upper limit of what is tolerable, the film clocking in at a flabby two hours.

The core plot starts with the brutal assassination in Belgium and culminates in McCall seeking cold revenge on those who have wronged Susan. The vigilante theme is as worn out as it sounds, and neither Fuqua's often clever visuals nor Washington's silky delivery can reinvent it. The bad guys are easy to guess and utterly lacking in personality.

The Equalizer 2 hits most of its targets, but most of them already carry the old bullet marks of many previous not dissimilar efforts.

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Movie Review: London Has Fallen (2016)

A mindless action thriller, London Has Fallen is a disappointing sequel, going far beyond suspension of disbelief and into ridiculous territory.

American intelligence services destroy the desert hideout of international arms dealer Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul) with a drone strike. Two years later the British Prime Minister dies suddenly. All the world's leader make plans to attend the funeral in London, including US President Ben Asher (Aaron Eckhart). His Secret Service Director Lynne Jacobs (Angela Bassett) is nervous about the lack of security planning time, and agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is entrusted with keeping the President safe. With his wife Leah (Radha Mitchell) pregnant, Banning is contemplating resigning from active duty but accepts the London assignment.

Just before the funeral is set to start at St. Paul's Cathedral, a large number of heavily armed terrorists  disguised as police officers launch coordinated attacks throughout London, causing mass casualties. Banning is barely able to extract Asher from the main attack zone, and the two go on the run. The attack is funded by Barkawi, seeking revenge for the death of his family members. With London swarming with terrorists, Banning has to keep the President alive long enough for friendly backup forces to arrive.

While 2013's Olympus Has Fallen was a laudable riff on Die Hard, London Has Fallen chucks out all that was good about the original, and leaves only brain dead action behind. After just 15 minutes of rudimentary set-up, director Babak Najafi unleashes the noise and fury of a London overrun by terrorists, and the film does not take a breath for the remainder of its 99 minutes.

There is a fine line between a far-fetched premise and just a lazy idea. Olympus was a far-fetched premise very well executed. London lands with a thud on the wrong side of that boundary. The script requires a massive number of police officers -- even Buckingham Palace guards! -- to be secretly replaced with an army of bad guys armed to the teeth with machine guns and grenades in the run up to London's biggest ever security operation, without anyone noticing.

And after the initial attack things get worse, with hordes of terrorists on motorcycles, in cars and with stinger missiles having free run of the city, and no genuine enforcement types of any stripe even attempting any sort of intervention. Of course the same terrorist leaders who carefully planned this secret but massive operation consisting of thousands of undetected attackers will now be stupid enough to be defeated by a single secret service agent.

Despite all its faults and some cheap special effects, London Has Fallen occasionally captures the freewheeling spirit of a third-person shooter console game, Najafi at least staging his numerous action scenes with some panache. And in Gerard Butler he has an actor willing to grit his teeth and get on with all the killing necessary to save his President, while almost giving the impression that he is taking it all seriously.

In addition to Eckhart and Basset, the supporting cast also includes Morgan Freeman in another throwaway performance as the Vice President, while Melissa Leo and Robert Forster are utterly wasted in tiny roles.

London may have fallen, but the quality of this franchise fell faster and deeper.

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Movie Review: The Equalizer (2014)

A polished action thriller, The Equalizer offers plenty of style and an immersive Denzel Washington performance, but also a limited premise stretched over an unnecessarily long running time.

In Boston, former CIA operative Bob McCall (Denzel Washington) lives a lonely quiet life, works at a home improvement store, and still grieves the loss of his wife. Most nights he is unable to sleep and whiles away the hours at a 24/7 diner, where young prostitute Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) is also a regular. Bob and Alina strike up conversations and become friends of sorts. When Alina gets badly roughed up by her Russian mobster pimp, Bob hunts down the den of gangsters and kills five bad guys in 28 seconds.

Unfortunately, the dead Russians are part of a much larger criminal cartel controlled by the Moscow-based Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich) and involved in bribery, corruption and extortion on a national scale. Pushkin dispatches his top henchman Nicolai (Marton Csokas) to find out who killed his men. Nicolai teams up with corrupt police officer Frank Masters (David Harbour), and they start to hunt down McCall to seek revenge.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua and based on the 1980s television series, The Equalizer oozes with  elegance. While the story is standard fare involving hissing Russian villains and an incredulously indestructible hero, Fuqua's weapon is Denzel Washington in fine form. Together director and star create enough depth in the central character to elevate the film above the merely ordinary.

McCall suffers from a combination of obsessive compulsive disorder, insomnia, and leftover depression from his wife's death. These ailments are hinted at on the margins of the film, creating enough of a tantalizing taste that this is a person with a rich emotional history worth spending time with, despite his loner tendencies.

Fuqua's best and worst attributes are revealed in the two highlight action scenes. McCall's cool invasion of the gang hangout to eliminate the scum responsible for Alina's agony is a masterpiece of build-up and execution. But later McCall has to deal with a dozen or so heavily armed goons in a home improvement warehouse store. That scene is both prolonged to the point of exhaustion and starts to resemble a slasher film parody, with McCall taking down his enemies one by one with an assortment of power tools rigged into weapons of death.

Marton Csokas provides a sturdy enough counterpoint to Washington, but Chloë Grace Moretz is shortchanged as she disappears from the film for a very long time. Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman appear in one scene as McCall's former colleagues from his prior life with the CIA.

The Equalizer is effective in what it does, but it does relatively little and for too long.

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Movie Review: Snowden (2016)

A biographical thriller dramatizing recent events, Snowden recreates the story of one of America's most famous whistleblowers. The film is never less than competent, but also struggles to add much that is revelatory.

It's 2013, and former CIA employee Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo). Snowden is in possession of a microchip with thousands of files he stole from the National Security Agency (NSA) revealing the depth of illegal surveillance being perpetrated on the unsuspecting American public under the guise of counter terrorism. In flashback, Snowden's story is revealed. Stymied from joining the special forces due to injury, computer wizard Snowden joins the CIA where his mentor Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans) exposes him to the world of intelligence. He also meets Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage), a technology wizard from an earlier era now marginalized after a whistleblowing incident.

Snowden starts a relationship with photographer, dancer and model Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), and her more liberal views gradually rub off on him. Assigned to Geneva, Snowden grows disillusioned with the intelligence world after experiencing first hand how global surveillance serves the world of dirty tricks. He continues to work in intelligence as a contractor, to the detriment of his health and relationship. Back at the hotel room, reporters from The Guardian newspaper arrive, including Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). Snowden wants the newspaper to break the story, but the international manhunt has already started.

Directed by and co-written by Oliver Stone, Snowden is a relatively straightforward story told too soon. As of the film's 2016 release date, Edward Snowden is still a guest of convenience with the Russians and the true impact of his spectacular data theft is perhaps yet to be fully understood. The story of his remarkable hack and subsequent escape played out in real time on television screens and websites across the world in 2013. The wisdom of dramatizing fresh events from three years prior while the implications are still reverberating is fundamentally questionable.

Nevertheless, the story is undeniably provocative and Stone, operating well within his passion and expertise in dramas with broad political dimensions, delivers a decent package. The relationship between Snowden and Mills is the one new area that the film explores well, and the film hits its bright spots conveying Snowden trying to hold the relationship together while wrestling with increasing paranoiac discomfort. His bottled up awareness of the government machine spying on everyone takes an increasingly worrisome toll on his health, as he observes the carefree Mills, like most millennials, sharing her life on the computer, including government-questioning liberal views and uninhibited eroticism.

Less interesting are the scenes in the Hong Kong hotel room. Stone tries to wring tension from Snowden's interaction with Poitras and The Guardian reporters, but it's choppy viewing culminating with a not exactly gripping shouting match between journalists and editors across a laptop connection. The scenes with Snowden's CIA mentors and influencers in the form of Corbin O’Brian and Hank Forrester carry more promise and deserved more screen time.

While the software capabilities at the core of Snowden's growing resentment of the NSA's surveillance programs are briefly presented, this is another film where technology is deemed too complex for anything beyond a cursory description, much like The Theory Of Everything and The Imitation Game.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries the film and is fine in the title role, although the personality of Snowden as a pale-faced and introverted techno-geek does not necessarily provide the opportunity for expansive acting. Shailene Woodley gets more freedom to explore the breadth of Mills' emotions, a woman genuinely in love with a man transforming before her eyes into a tortured enigma.

Snowden contains enough of Stone's stylistic touches to maintain interest. But this is a biography that arrives too soon and carries too few surprises to register as a genuinely effective drama.

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Movie Review: The Big Short (2015)

A sharp and irreverent take on the 2007 housing market collapse that precipitated the Great Recession, The Big Short excels at transforming a dry subject into a gripping, character-based financial thriller.

The film focuses on the few independent-minded investors who foresaw the rot at the heart of mortgage backed securities and bet heavily that the banks, rating agencies and regulators did not know what they were doing. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is a socially awkward investment fund manager. He digs deep into reams of data, and confirms his instinct that too many mortgages are high-risk. He practically invents shorting the housing market, and the banks are happy to take his money, confident that real estate can only ever go up.

Banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) hears about Burry's play and approaches Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a pessimistic, high-strung investment fund manager. Baum's research team uncover huge mortgages being approved to unqualified buyers, using teaser rates to simulate affordability and the promise of a remortgage against a higher house value. With the number of buyers dwindling and a high proportion of teaser rates expiring in 2007, Baum arrives at the same conclusion as Burry and bets big with Vennett that the mortgage market will collapse. He is further horrified when he realizes that bundled bad investments in the form of "collateralized debt obligations" (CDO) and secondary and tertiary "synthetic" CDOs are flooding the market, amplifying the risks to the economy.

Small-time young fund managers Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) stumble onto Vennett's findings and seek the help of Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a retired banker who quit the financial industry in disgust. The trio along with Vennett, Baum and his team converge on the annual mortgage securities forum in Las Vegas to meet the bankers bundling and selling mortgage backed securities and CDOs, trying to understand whether the industry is corrupt, stupid or both.

An adaptation of the Michael Lewis book directed by Adam McKay, The Big Short deploys a disarmingly light touch to makes a serious and complicated topic accessible. Characters regularly break the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience, while on three occasions the film is interrupted to allow celebrities like Margot Robbie (in a bathtub), Anthony Bourdain (in a fish kitchen) and Selena Gomez (at a blackjack table) to demystify the needlessly complicated jargon that Wall Street traders hide behind.

The end result is a quite ingenious semi-documentary. The Big Short is fast-paced, glitzy, funny, brash, flippant and derisive when it needs to be. This is not a story that has heroes and villains, just bankers blinded by greed and investors who spot an opportunity to profit from incompetence. It is also a story of how it takes outsiders to see what insiders cannot, and the strength of conviction required to swim against the masses.

The film particularly shines as a study of Burry and Baum, two dissimilar individuals who nevertheless share a healthy disrespect for what constitutes prevailing wisdom. The script by McKay and Charles Randolph sketches in a background for each, but it is left to excellent performances from Christian Bale and Steve Carell to bring to life the dangerously dogged determination that Burry and Baum both deploy to stick to their beliefs.

The contrasting styles to arrive at similar conclusions is fascinating. Burry is very much the loner, a numbers man, routinely isolating himself from the world to listen to thumping heavy metal music while fending off panicked investors threatening to either pull their money or sue him as the long awaited collapse is temporarily but agonizingly staved off by the increasingly desperate banks. Baum is acerbic, intrusive, a bull in a china shop and joins his team in on-the-ground research that includes interviewing over-leveraged strippers with multiple mortgages and brokers happy to sell expensive homes to poor immigrants who cannot understand what they are signing.

Gosling does a fine if relatively routine job as the slick banker and narrator Vennett, one of the few insiders who grabbed the opportunity to bet against his own industry. The stellar cast also includes Melissa Leo in one scene as a literally and figuratively near-blind securities rating agent, and Marisa Tomei as Baum's long-suffering wife.

Amidst the dizzying pace of a stock market on a head-long rush towards a cliff, McKay does also serve reminders of the human tragedy that is about to unfold. Rickert and Baum both have corners of their souls that are tortured by the true societal cost, measured in despair, poverty, unemployment and indeed unnecessary death, that is about to be unleashed by the housing market collapse.

But in a measure of pervasive greed trumping all, both men don't mind deriving enormous profits from the impending economic catastrophe. Rickert has signed off on a career as a banker but comes back to help enrich youngsters Geller and Shipley, while Baum perceives the crisis as his long awaited chance to stick it to a system he has always perceived as inherently corrupt.

Yes there will be millions of devastated innocent victims when the economy tanks, but true to the most fundamental principles of capitalism, somebody may as well profit.

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The Movies Of Melissa Leo

All movies starring Melissa Leo and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

21 Grams (2003)

Mr. Woodcock (2007)

Frozen River (2008)

Righteous Kill (2008)

The Fighter (2010)

Seven Days In Utopia (2011)

Flight (2012)

Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Oblivion (2013)

Prisoners (2013)

The Equalizer (2014)

The Big Short (2015)

London Has Fallen (2016)

Snowden (2016)

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Flight (2012)

A modern day tragic hero fable, Flight asks smart questions about heroism and personality flaws. Denzel Washington is admirable as the alcoholic pilot who miraculously lands a stricken plane, but Flight loses some thrust in a second half that circles the runaway a few too many times before landing.

William "Whip" Whitaker (Washington) is routinely consuming alcohol, and has never admitted to himself that he has a problem. Using cocaine to mask his drinking and carrying on a relationship with flight attendant Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), Whip is divorced from a wife who had enough of his lies, and he has no meaningful contact with his teen-aged son. Despite being legally drunk, Whip takes control of a flight from Orlando to Atlanta and expertly navigates through severe turbulence. With the worst seemingly behind him, Whip consumes more alcohol during the flight. He is then startled when due to a catastrophic mechanical failure, he loses control of the plane at the start of the descent into Atlanta.

Clear headed and calm, Whip miraculously glides the plane upside down and crash-lands into an open field. Only six out of 102 passengers and crew die, with Katerina one of the fatalities after she helped to save the life of a child. Proclaimed in the press as a hero but with investigators crawling all over the causes of the crash, Whip knows that it's only a matter of time before his drinking is exposed, and he goes into hiding on his late father's farm. With lawyer Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle) assigned by the pilot's union to help him, Whip starts a relationship with recovering drug addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly), but even she finds it difficult to tolerate his out-of-control alcohol consumption.

Can a man simultaneously be a hero and a villain, and what fate does an alcoholic saviour deserve? The John Gatins screenplay briskly jumps to the point, Whip's harrowing disregard for his health competing with the terrifying plane crash in an exhilarating race to frame the moral dilemma. Director Robert Zemeckis delivers the crash sequence with plenty of adrenaline spilling from the overhead bins, as Flight quickly ascends at a steep angle, the opening 45 minutes rushing by in the jet-stream of Whip's ambivalence and the spectacular crash landing of a non-functioning aircraft.

In the remaining 75 minutes, the movie struggles at times to maintain cruising altitude. Whip's battle with the bottle, whereby he tries to stop drinking through sheer will power only to easily slip back to excessive consumption, stretches for too many scenes.

The relationship with Nicole is full of promise, with the two struggling addicts understandably drawn to each other, and the more determined Nicole fighting a seemingly losing battle in trying to pull Whip out of his alcoholic stupor. Frustratingly the potential for an earthy romance fades in and out of story without being fully explored.

Denzel Washington's performance is never less than first class, and he brings to painful life the internal struggle against denial faced by alcoholics, who first and foremost learn how best to lie to themselves.Washington allows Whip to be arrogant and self-assured in public, brooding and wracked by guilt in private, but never able to resist the next bottle of beer, no matter what is at stake.

Nicole is also an addict but a bit further along in her journey, willing to admit her dependency and seek help for it. Kelly Reilly brings to Nicole the vulnerability of the fragile healing process in a performance of building strength. Cheadle, John Goodman as Whip's colourful friend and drug supplier, Bruce Greenwood as a pilot union's representative and Melissa Leo as the lead crash investigator ensure a high level of quality in all the supporting roles.

Flight does have its moments of turbulence, but the star pilot delivers a stellar performance and the trip serves a meal full of hearty moral questions.

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Movie Review: The Fighter (2010)

Based on the true story of unlikely boxing champion Micky Ward, The Fighter is an enjoyable celebration of family ties and irrepressible spirits.

Brothers Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) are both boxers from the working-class Massachusetts town of Lowell. Older brother Dicky is long past his prime, but remains a local legend for having once fought and knocked-down Sugar Ray Leonard, although it was more of a Leonard stumble. Dicky now pretends to train Micky for upcoming bouts arranged by their overbearing manager mother Alice (Melissa Leo), but Dicky is really just an addict, spending most of his time at the local crackhouse while Micky's career stalls.

After Micky is pummeled in a mis-match that he is pushed into by Dicky and Alice, he questions the ability of his family to properly guide his career. He develops a romantic relationship with local bartender Charlene (Amy Adams), and she encourages him to distance himself from his brother, mother and his numerous ugly sisters. Dicky lands in jail after a run-in with the police, but uses the opportunity to break his addiction. With Charlene's support and new management, Micky's career takes a turn for the better, winning several bouts as he starts getting closer to a shot at a world title. Dicky, now clean, is released from prison and has to find a way to reconnect with his brother without jeopardizing his one chance at career success.

While Mark Wahlberg is relatively subdued as Micky Ward, playing the family meal ticket and black sheep not quite fitting in with his brash surroundings, Christian Bale delivers a remarkable performance as Dicky Eklund. Bale's shifty, restless, yet charming portrayal as the drug-addicted Dicky, living in the past and building his entire life's legend on a single moment that he barely contributed to, is mesmerizing. Dicky discovering his true calling and contributing to his brother's success is the heart of the movie, and director David O. Russell lands an emotionally devastating knock-out punch when the brothers enter the hostile arena for the climatic bout, Dicky leading Micky in softly signing, only to themselves,Whitesnake's Here I Go Again. It's a moment of quiet movie magic.

Amy Adams as the trigger for Micky leaving the nest and Melissa Leo as the domineering matriarch of the family both give memorable performances, filled with passion, pride, and mastery of every button that women push when struggling to gain or maintain control.

The Fighter does not flinch from portraying life in the lower classes of depressed industrial towns, and the societal bleakness is an obvious reason for the lure of boxing as an escape to a better paycheque. Russell's cameras find excellent drama both on the streets and in the boxing ring, and The Fighter scores a victory in both arenas.

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