Movie Review: Girl (2020)

Genre: Thriller

Director: Chad Faust

Starring: Bella Thorne, Mickey Rourke, Chad Faust

Running Time: 92 minutes

Synopsis: A young woman (Bella Thorne), referred to only as Girl, heads into a small rural community armed with a hatchet. She intends to kill her estranged father, who abandoned the family when Girl she was a child, leaving her mother with a bad back and financially destitute. Once she locates her father's house, Girl is shocked to find him recently murdered by someone else. She tangles with the local Sheriff (Mickey Rourke) and his ironically nicknamed half-brother Charmer (Chad Faust), and starts to uncover sordid family secrets.

What Work Well: Director, writer, and co-star Chad Faust delivers a neatly packaged story of revenge, revelation, and hidden loot. The damp, decrepit, and isolated setting provides an impressively depressing grey aesthetic, perfect for challenging Girl's deeply held convictions. Bella Thorne delivers a moody and dark performance, while Mickey Rourke (oily) and director Faust (smiley) make a great pair of brotherly villains, fine specimens from generations of in-breeding.

What Does Not Work Well: Budget limitations are on display in a sparse cast (the town's population appears to be in the single digits), and some of the chase scenes are awkwardly mounted. The final familial confrontation is rather listless.

Conclusion: The ambience is ramshackle, but the menace carries an edge. 



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Movie Review: Man On Fire (2004)

A revenge action thriller centred on a child kidnapping, Man On Fire is gripping, violent, and stylish.

With Mexico City experiencing a high rate of abductions for ransom, businessman Samuel Ramos (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell) hire Creasy (Denzel Washington) as a bodyguard for their young daughter Pita (Dakota Fanning). Creasy is ex-military, but now has a drinking problem. He remains friends with Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken), a former colleague who runs a security firm.

The dour and despondent Creasy gets off on the wrong foot with the talkative and curious Pita, but they then establish a deep bond of friendship. When heavily-armed kidnappers do target Pita, Creasy is unable to save her despite killing four assailants and being shot several times. While he recuperates, Samuel and lawyer Jordan Kalfus (Mickey Rourke) handle the ransom negotiations. But with corruption reaching the highest levels of the police force, the deal goes bad. Creasy vows revenge on all those who harmed his young friend.

Directed by Tony Scott from a Brian Helgeland script adapting A.J. Quinnell's 1980 novel, Man On Fire is a standard revenge story spiced-up by strong character development, hyperactive cinematography, and star power. While the man-on-a-mission-wasting-bad-guys premise offers little that is new, here the people are made to matter with smart pacing choices.

The first hour patiently introduces the flawed and self-aware Creasy, the smart and precocious Pita (short for Lupita), and the connection between them. At first she irritates him but then he helps her develop competitive swimming techniques and becomes a friend and trusted mentor. Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning invest genuine humanity into the roles, adding a potent emotional punch to the subsequent violence.

Once the killing starts it does not stop, Creasy working his way up the criminal food chain from foot soldiers to mid-level operatives, corrupt officials and finally the masterminds. He is calm, methodical and outwardly emotionless, dismantling a shadowy organization consisting of thugs and sleazoids hiding behind uniforms and officious titles. All the bad guys call themselves professionals, but Creasy demonstrates what the term really means. The usual methods of torture are deployed to expeditiously extract the necessary information in time for the next rocket-propelled grenade to impart the required damage. And along the way a conspiracy twist is revealed, adding internecine venom.

Creasy is helped by a couple of locals to balance out the Mexican portrayals. Rachel Ticotin is reporter Mariana Garcia Guerrero, eager to expose government corruption and incompetence, and Giancarlo Giannini plays Miguel Manzano, a federal police director willing to provide assistance in exchange for the right perks.

The Mexico City locations add vibrant authenticity, while Scott's insistence on manic visual flair and demented editing borders on nauseating but achieves the intended kinetic buzz. Man On Fire is both cool and blazing.



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Movie Review: A Prayer For The Dying (1987)

A character study set in the shadow of the Irish Troubles, A Prayer For The Dying offers a plethora of moral dilemmas but is hampered by choppy momentum. 

In Northern Ireland an Irish Republican Army unit including Martin Fallon (Mickey Rourke) and Liam Docherty (Liam Neeson) mistakenly blows up a bus full of school girls. Martin flees to London and attempts to put violence behind him, but mortician and mobster boss Jack Meehan (Alan Bates) and his psychotic brother Billy (Christopher Fulford) pressure Martin into one last murder to eliminate an underworld rival in exchange for a new passport and money.

Martin reluctantly commits the murder, but is witnessed in the act by Father Da Costa (Bob Hoskins). Martin spares the priest's life but follows him to his church and confesses to the murder in the confession booth, forcing the Father into silence. Meehan is unhappy about the loose end and sets about intimidating both Martin and Da Costa. Docherty embarks on his own search to bring Martin back into the revolutionary fold, while Martin starts to develop feelings for Da Costa's blind niece Anna (Sammi Davis).

A drama with snippets of action and tension, A Prayer For The Dying works best as an examination of regret as the dark shadows of Martin Fallon's victims finally catch up with him. The film's focus is on the collision between his intentions to start anew and the reality of his reputation as an expert in killing. A hardened criminal cannot just walk away, and everyone from his former IRA colleagues to the gangsters of London and English enforcement authorities are interested in finding and pressuring him.

The film is based on a Jack Higgins novel, and he helped to co-write the script. Mike Hodges directs, and both are victimized by content spread too thin. By the time the characters are all introduced and the tense dynamic is established between Fallon, Da Costa and Meehan, the film stalls. Hodges has to find a rickety excuse to keep Fallon hanging around near the church, and chunks of screen time are consumed by uninteresting side quests including the unhinged Billy running loose, the clunky romance between Fallon and Anna, and Da Costa tangling with Meehan.

Mickey Rourke sports bright red hair as a neon sign to his Irishness, but does not bother to change it to any other colour once Fallon is designated Britain's most wanted fugitive. Rourke's performance walks a tightrope between cool and disinterested, and ultimately he does just enough to hold the film together. Bob Hoskins never quite convinces as an ex-military operative now playing at being a man of religion. Alan Bates bites into the role of Jack Meehan with an expensive overcoat, shiny teeth and a snarky smile, taking immense pride in preparing corpses for burials and ordering his goons to create more.

Fallon has to decide whether to kill or not, Da Costa whether to betray his vows and talk or not, and Meehan whether he can tolerate witnesses to his dirty work. A Prayer For The Dying asks the right questions, but is not as good at concentrating on the answers.

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Movie Review: Diner (1982)

A coming of age drama with some humour, Diner navigates the crevasse between youth and adulthood through the story of six men grappling with growing up.

It's Christmas time in Baltimore, 1959. As both the year and decade draw to a close, a group of college friends converge in preparation for the upcoming wedding of sports trivia fan Eddie (Steve Guttenberg). His five buddies include the already married music trivia addict Shrevie (Daniel Stern), the rich, aimless and frequently drunk Fen (Kevin Bacon), charismatic gambling addict Boogie (Mickey Rourke), New York-based Billy (Tim Daly) and circumspect Modell (Paul Reiser).

The local Fells Point Diner is their favourite hangout and meeting point. Eddie is planning to subject his fiancée to a sports trivia test before finalizing the wedding. Shrevie and his bride Beth (Ellen Barkin) are already running into trouble in their young marriage. Boogie is in debt trouble and encourages bets on his dating exploits to raise cash. Billy has trouble defining his relationship with his close friend and television producer Barbara (Kathryn Dowling). And Fen is living a carefree prankster life, refusing to grow up.

With no traditional narrative structure and plenty of improvisation, first-time director Barry Levinson crafts a fine spiritual successor to American Graffiti. Diner features a brilliant cast full of pre-stardom talent, and a fluid tone allowing the men to reveal their stories through natural conversations punctuated by often misguided adventurism.

The film is set in Levinson's home town, and inspired by his own experiences. The common theme is the struggle for emotional growth, as the men confront the collective challenge of transitioning from what mattered in their youth to embracing the responsibilities of being men.

Eddie is hiding insecurities behind the pointless test he is imposing on bride-to-be (and never properly seen) Elyse, and will face his own test on what matters. Shrevie is childishly upset at Beth because she does not understand or appreciate his useless talent for knowing the song, label and colour of every hit single's B-side. She turns to Boogie for comfort, triggering another test of responsibility. Boogie himself is busy pretending to be a law student to attract the ladies while accumulating debt, and before the new decade dawns will need to confront the consequences.

Billy is close to Barbara, a woman embracing her career. Circumstances force them to contemplate the future, and the relatively simpler answers of the 1950s won't work anymore. Fen's life is wasting away in the arena of irresponsibility, and an encounter with his grounded brother reveals the breadth of separation possible between siblings. Modell is more of an observer and witness, pushing buttons as appropriate, but other than never directly asking for anything, his character is the least developed.

Levinson's remarkable achievement is in convincingly portraying the cast members as friends. He encouraged the young men to hang out together before filming, avoided excessive rehearsals and stimulated improvisation. The result is an undeniable vibe of close friendship, and Diner glows with the warmth of men most at ease hanging out together.

Mickey Rourke was third billed after Guttenberg and Stern, but exudes the undeniable star charisma that would soon catapult him into stardom. The other cast members are all steady, with Steve Guttenberg demonstrating sufficient promise to suggest he chose the wrong career path upon veering to mostly trivial comedies.

For the six friends Diner is simultaneously about not much and everything, the future hanging in the balance as young men confront short-term decisions carrying long-term implications.

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Movie Review: Sin City (2005)

An adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novels, Sin City is an artistically stunning anthology crime thriller. With every frame a stylistic triumph, the film jolts the comics to life, ironically in a grim and crime-infested city where life is cheap and hope goes to die.

After a brief prologue featuring an assassin (Josh Hartnett) and his target (Marley Shelton) at a rooftop party, the film features three loosely related stories, with the adventure of detective John Hartigan (Bruce Willis) split into two chapters. With his heart close to failing, Hartigan is about to retire, and as a final mission sets off to rescue 11 year old Nancy Callahan (Makenzie Vega) from child killer Roark Junior (Nick Stahl). Hartigan's partner Bob (Michael Madsen) tries to convince him not to go through with it, but Hartigan is determined to end his career with a bang. The film's final major chapter returns to this story, with Junior identified as the son of Senator Roark (Powers Booth), and a grown-up Nancy (Jessica Alba) still in peril.

In the second story, ugly brute Marv (Mickey Rourke) is enchanted by prostitute Goldie (Jaime King), but finds her dead in his bed after a night of passion. Marv bruises his way through town to identify the killer, a revenge quest that involves his parole officer Lucille (Carla Gugino) and Goldie's twin sister Wendy. The trail leads Marv to maniac cannibal Kevin (Elijah Wood), who is protected by the all-powerful Cardinal Patrick Henry Roark (Rutger Hauer).

The third story takes place in Old Town, where a group of prostitutes rule the streets. Gail (Rosario Dawson) is their leader, and her man is Dwight McCarthy (Owen Wilson). When a gang of thugs led by corrupt cop "Jackie Boy" Rafferty (Benicio del Toro) first intimidate Shellie (Brittany Murphy) and then Gail's girls, a bloodbath ensues, with silent martial arts expert Miho (Devon Aoki) having a field day. The carnage destroys the fragile balance between the working girls and the cops. An epilogue again features the return of the assassin, as well as Becky (Alexis Bledel), one of Gail's girls.

Co-directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez with Quentin Tarantino credited as a special guest director, Sin City is a visual feast of cinematic artistry. Filmed in black and white but with isolated splashes of vivid colours, the film dives into the deep end of adult graphic novel territory, where extreme violence is a shortcut to every problem and every scene threatens to end with a gory punctuation mark.

To survive for any length in this milieu, the men possess superhuman strength, and the women use a combination of weaponry and seduction to carve out their territory. Heads are routinely bashed or severed and body parts are chopped off for fun: Sin City has no pretense of law and order and film is not for the faint of heart.

Across all its stories, Sin City easily lands its punches on traditional targets: politicians and priests are the symbols of corruption hiding behind dirty veils of authority, literally spawning and protecting generations of evil and mayhem. Prostitutes (Goldie, Gail and her entourage), cynical but honest goons (Marv), righteous killers (Miho) and honest cops willing to bend the rules (Hartigan) are the heroes of Miller's world.

Men propelled into action to protect or avenge women, who may or may not need help, is a prevailing theme powering the film. Hartigan's final mission is to rescue Nancy; Marv will tear up the town in memory of the only woman who was ever nice to him; and Dwight risks his life to try and save the ladies of Old Town from annihilation.

The Old Town segment is relatively the weakest, Dwight and the gaggle of girls tangling with Jackie Boy never quite clicking as individual characters worthy of attention, and a few too many mob and mercenary baddies show up to muddle the objective. Jackie Boy himself and the dialogue-challenged Miho emerge as the most memorable contributors, which probably wasn't the intent.

In contrast, the Marv story works best and is delivered as pure cinematic gold. The relentless revenge quest of a most ugly man perfectly fits the film's dank soul, his indestructible forward momentum cutting a swath through sin city and all the way to its religious core. Mickey Rourke as Marv has never been better, transformed into a half-monster yet with his damaged moral compass somehow still functioning.

Slick, hyperkinetic and cynical to a fault, Sin City is an enthralling experience.

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Movie Review: 9½ Weeks (1986)

A romantic drama drenched in eroticism, 9½ Weeks hints at a serious exploration of an emotionally perilous sex-obsessed relationship. But the film too often betrays its subject matter with an over-glamorized aesthetic.

In New York, divorced art gallery employee Elizabeth McGraw (Kim Basinger) meets and starts a relationship with handsome, mysterious and very rich Wall Street trader John Gray (Mickey Rourke). John expresses full devotion to Elizabeth, but also pressures her into kinky sex, including playing with blindfolds, food, cross dressing, sex in public, increasing levels of submission / domination scenarios, and threesomes.

Elizabeth is worried but also enthralled and plays along, captivated by the attention and the new experiences. Gradually she finds her limits, and has to decide how far she can tolerate John's proclivities.

Directed by Adrian Lyne and based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Elizabeth McNeill (a pseudonym for Ingeborg Day), 9½ Weeks pushed into new territory for mainstream films in its on-screen portrayal of raw human sexuality. Riding a bumpy wave of controversy, the film initially bombed in the United States but found an audience in Europe. The movie is sometimes erotic, often boring and always frustrating.

A serious and worthwhile story of a vulnerable woman falling under the spell of a charismatic all-powerful man and yielding to a sexual arrangement both thrilling and uncomfortable is hidden under layers of style emphasizing eroticism at the expense of compelling emotional drama. Lyne creates a combination of style-drenched music video and soft-core pornography, celebrating a minimalistic script, little dialogue, and plenty of silhouettes, rain spray, and gyrations to thumping music. The sets are sleek, with the SoHo art gallery and John's bachelor pad representing streamlined ideals.

The character development takes a back seat, and for a film with only the two principals, Elizabeth and John are short changed and reduced to sketches. They do exchange the most rudimentary of backstories, but these are written in shorthand and in John's case arrive way too late to resonate. Instead of investing in the characters and taking substantive risks 9½ Weeks defaults to plenty of creatively filmed animal magnetism set to sensual music, with Joe Crocker's You Can Leave Your Hat On, the soundtrack to Elizabeth's private striptease for John (no, she's not wearing a hat), best signifying the film's intentions.

Mickey Rourke does not help matters by gliding through the film on a wave of handsome visual appeal and nothing else: his perpetual smirk gets annoying after the first 10 minutes, yet never departs his face. Kim Basinger, in one of her best roles, does all the heavy lifting to convey a woman torn between the potential for genuine romance and sexual pleasure dancing on the edge of degradation and danger.

25 years later British writer E.L.James would import her own version of wealthy businessman Mr. John Gray into the Twilight young adult series, borrowing many of the themes from 9½ Weeks to create Fifty Shades Of Grey. The world of 2011 was more ready to embrace a story of a woman's fantasy bumping up against a powerful but damaged man's kinky sexual demands. Back in 1986, Elizabeth and John were the pioneers for exploring chic displays of twisted pleasure, winning points for artistic merit if not much else.

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Movie Review: Angel Heart (1987)

A mix of film noir, horror and the supernatural, Angel Heart finds a good mood but veers towards literal and figurative overkill in its second half.

New York, 1955. Two-bit Manhattan private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is called to Harlem and hired by the mysteriously well-dressed and wealthy Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find out whether a pre-war crooner by the show-biz name of Johnny Favorite is alive or dead. Favorite was badly hurt in the war, and is supposed to be in a vegetative state in hospital, but Cyphre suspects a ruse. He claims to have a contract with Favorite and wants to make sure that the singer is not reneging on his end of the deal by faking long-term sickness or death.

Angel snoops around the hospital and indeed finds a cover-up. A doctor Fowler was paid a lot of money to pretend that Favorite remained a long-term patient. Instead, the bandaged but recovering singer was smuggled out of the hospital in 1943 by a man and a woman who took him south. Angel's investigation leads him to New Orleans, where he meets Favorite's pre-war associates including fortune teller Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Rampling), musician Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee),  and the passionate Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet), the daughter of Favorite's former lover. Angel finds himself embroiled in the dangerous world of the occult, just as people start showing up dead all around him, victims of gruesome murders.

Director Alan Parker himself created the screenplay out of the William Hjortsberg 1978 novel Falling Angel, and the emphasis is on atmosphere, symbolism and a prevailing sense of dread. The film is punctuated by hallucinatory interludes featuring figures shrouded in black, blood-splattered walls, slowly rotating fans, mirrors, clattering elevator doors throwing large shadows on the wall, and disturbingly omnipresent chickens. Parker plays with light, silhouettes and the juxtaposition of reality, imagination and memory fragments, and Angel Heart works well as an unhinging, dangerous and stylish piece of film making.

The plot is less successful. The second half of the film starts to resemble a train wreck, as characters are introduced and unceremoniously killed-off in macabre fashion. Chickens are sacrificed, rabid dogs are unleashed, henchmen jump out of the shadows, and both internal and external organs are misused for heinous purposes. It's all in the service of a narrative arc that firmly sets its course towards a supernatural resolution, but in the process Parker shortchanges his characters. When the twist ending arrives, it feels rushed. A more thorough, less sensationalist-obsessed exploration of both the contract between Cyphre and Favorite and Favorite's attempt to escape his obligations would have helped maintain a better balance between mysterious and mythical.

Mickey Rourke is quite excellent, and delivers a confident performance as a low-profile gumshoe thrust into a high stakes maze riddled with death. Robert De Niro makes a theatrical impact in just a few scenes, focussing on enigmatic presence as he eats an egg as a history lesson in domination and fills out large empty rooms with oozing manipulation. Lisa Bonet shocked the world at the time by jumping from a wholesome image on television's family-friendly The Cosby Show and into the earthy role of the 17 year old chicken-killing, voodoo dabbling, single mother Epiphany, and sharing a steamy and yet horrifying sex scene with Rourke.

Angel Heart is dark, unsettling, and imaginative but also ultimately too quick to favour gore over noir.

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Movie Review: Domino (2005)

A case of all style and almost incomprehensible substance, Domino dazzles the senses in a vain attempt to cover up the lack of any meaningful content in the turgid story of a female bounty hunter.

The bloodied but defiant Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley) is being questioned by FBI agent Taryn Mills (Lucy Liu) about a $10 million heist that has gone terribly wrong. Domino recounts her life story. The daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, she was drifting through life until she joined the team of grizzled bounty hunter Ed (Mickey Rourke) and his sidekick Choco (Edgar Ramirez). Domino quickly establishes a reputation as fearless and resourceful and she catches the attention of television producer Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken), who launches a reality show about the bounty hunters despite the objections of Domino's mother Sophie (Jacqueline Bisset).

Ed's main client is bail bondsman Claremont (Delroy Lindo), whose mistress Lateesha (Mo'Nique), an employee of the Department of Motor Vehicles, needs $300,000 for her granddaughter's operation. Claremont concocts a plan to steal $10 million from Las Vegas tycoon Drake Bishop (Dabney Coleman), with the intention of having his squad of bounty hunters "recover" the money in exchange for a $300,000 finders fee. When Lateesha's illicit licensing activities land her in trouble, she unintentionally gets the teenaged children of mob boss Anthony Cigliutti (Stanley Kamel) involved in the heist. Domino and her crew get dropped into a mess of an explosive situation, starting with an armed and bloody standoff at the mobile home of getaway driver Locus Fender and his shotgun-toting mother Edna.

Director Tony Scott starts with the true story of the real Domino Harvey, but uses her only as a loose inspiration. Screenwriter Richard Kelly creates an out of control narrative that tries and fails to emulate Tarantino's intertwining multi-character story construction. Instead Scott allows his worst trickster impulses to take over, resulting in a film that calls attention to its director in every scene. Domino is a land of spaced-out narration, repeated snippets of dialogue, editing that is in turns jarring and dreamy, and vivid green and yellow colours dominating the screen.

The film's visual style is either distractingly overwrought or artistically stunning, but regardless cannot compensate for a story that is a strange mix of ludicrous and vacant. With the cardboard characters offering no wit and eliciting no sympathy, the gory violence and ridiculous shootouts carry no impact. It really does not matter who among the snide collection of lowlifes lives or dies from scene to scene. The entire reality television show sub-plot is a needless exercise in unfunny bloat, and the endlessly hesitant romance between Domino and Choco never gets past the stuttering stage. The complicated heist component of the film then arrives late and starts to veer into unfathomable territory, transforming Domino's 127 minutes of running time into a true endurance test.

Keira Knightley delivers a suitably glum performance, the rich girl who takes up big guns to compensate for an absentee famous daddy. Mickey Rourke is the only cast member trying to inject a human depth to his character, but the script offers him little to work with.

Domino is a jazzy feast for the eyes, but otherwise tumbles with an unseemly clatter.

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Movie Review: The Rainmaker (1997)

A David versus Goliath courtroom drama with plenty of appeal, The Rainmaker enjoys a stellar cast in fine form and hits all the right notes, but never quite reaches the emotional heights that it strives for.

Rudy Baylor (Matt Damon) graduates from law school in Memphis, and the only job he can land is with the office of ambulance-chaser "Bruiser" Stone (Mickey Rourke) and his crony Deck Shifflet (Danny DeVito), who has never been able to pass the bar exam. Shifflet takes Baylor under his wing and teaches him the ropes. Soon Rudy has three clients: the elderly Miss Birdsong (Teresa Wright) wants to rewrite her will; low-income mother Dot Black (Mary Kay Place) wants to sue the Great Benefit insurance company for denying coverage for her leukemia-afflicted son Donny Ray (Johnny Whitworth); and Kelly Riker (Claire Danes) is being regularly physically abused by her husband.

Bruiser runs into some serious trouble with the law, prompting Rudy and Deck to establish their own business, as the insurance company lawsuit starts to occupy most of their time. Great Benefit hires a crack team of lawyers headed by the slick Leo F. Drummond (Jon Voight) to defend the case, and Rudy finds himself out of his depth in terms of experience and resources. But Dot refuses to settle, and the case lands in court, with Judge Tyrone Kipler (Danny Glover, in an uncredited performance) presiding. As Kelly's confrontations with her husband grow ever more dangerous, Rudy has to uncover Great Benefit's unethical practices to convince the jury that Donny Ray never received the medical treatment that he deserved.

By the time The Rainmaker arrived in movie theatres as a big-budget, high-quality adaptation of a John Grisham novel, the 1990s alone had already offered a multitude of quality courtroom dramas including three Grisham adaptations. A Few Good Men (1992), The Firm (1993), In The Name Of The Father (1993), The Client (1994), Sleepers (1996), and A Time To Kill (1996) featured big name stars, big name directors and some seminal courtroom moments, and The Rainmaker unfortunately suffers from the nagging feeling that Hollywood was perhaps going to the same well one time too many. There was little new that the genre was able to offer by 1997, and while The Rainmaker does everything right, it doesn't do much that is particularly memorable.

Director Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, and in one of his more traditional outings, steers the film safely through all the tight corners. The 135 minutes of running time pass by smoothly, and the Memphis setting, mostly in the grungier parts of town, enriches the context. Rudy Baylor is a likable if somewhat bland protagonist, and Matt Damon applies his boyish charm in the right doses to make the rookie lawyer a scrappy hero worth investing in. The narration provided by Baylor, is, for the most part, unnecessary.

The three stories compete for attention in the first half of the movie, but the insurance lawsuit dominates the second half, and the movie evolves as expected into a satisfying high-stakes courtroom showdown to influence the jury. Jon Voight does his part and creates in Drummond a worthwhile adversary who justifies his high fees by shredding witnesses just when Rudy starts to believe that he might gain an unlikely upper hand.

The other two legal cases, involving Miss Birdsong's will and Kelly's domestic abuse, do get short changed, and ultimately get in the way of the main narrative thrust and are almost all but discarded. Miss Birdsong's ordeal with the will is a great excuse to see Teresa Wright on the screen one last time. Kelly's wife abuse story takes a turn towards mayhem that has all the appearances of a desperate attempt to occupy Rudy with something other than the insurance firm lawsuit.

Danny DeVito, Mickey Rourke and Danny Glover add plenty of animation and some moments of humour, while late in the case Virginia Madsen and Roy Scheider make telling contributions in the courtroom.

Despite having its heart in the right place and working the big bad corporation theme to perfection, The Rainmaker lacks a killer moment of impact to differentiate it from other legal dramas. This does not make it a lesser film, just a lower profile but still enjoyable adventure in the jungles of the law.

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Movie Review: The Pledge (2001)

A thoughtful psychological crime drama, The Pledge plays with a patient mood while grappling with a brutal murder and the search for the mysterious predator.

In Reno, Nevada, police detective Jerry Black (Jack Nicholson) is retiring. On his last working day, the brutalized body of a young blonde girl named Ginny is discovered in a snowy field. Jerry pledges to the victims' mother (Patricia Clarkson) that no matter what, he will bring the murderer to justice. Toby (Benicio del Toro), a dimwitted vagabond aboriginal, is arrested and detective Stan Krolak (Aaron Eckhart) extracts a confession from him, declaring the case closed.

Jerry doubts that Toby is the killer, and after retirement he continues his informal investigation, interviewing Ginny's grandmother Annalise (Vanessa Redgrave); the victim's best friend at school; and the father (Mickey Rourke) of another young blonde girl who met the same fate as Ginny. He gains a vague picture of the killer's car model and colour, and a murky connection between the crimes and porcupines.

Jerry purchases a gas station along the main highway in the rural area where he believes the next murder may happen. As the months pass, he befriends single mom Lori (Robin Wright Penn), who has a young blonde daughter Chrissy (Pauline Roberts) about the same age as the previous victims. Gradually, Jerry starts to encounter men who could be suspects. But Jerry is also hearing voices in his head, and may be starting to lose his grip on reality.

Directed by Sean Penn, The Pledge is an adaptation of the Friedrich Dürrenmatt book. This is a film that takes a deep breath from the surrounding landscape, and focusses on characters, atmosphere and emotion. There is little action that takes place on screen, but plenty that goes on in the thoughts, fears, and hopes of Jerry Black as he tries to fulfill the promise he made to the distraught mother of a young victim.

Penn's pacing is deliberate, but nevertheless engrossing. Within the forgotten back road setting where time is slow, towns are small, cars are old and technology is outdated, the film is packed with tiny unsettling moments, indications that all is not well, neither in the rural community stalked by a vicious child killer, nor in Jerry's mind. Jerry could be suffering from old-age, post-retirement emotional turmoil, the stress of his pledge, or something else altogether more serious. Penn provides hints, but never any clear resolutions. What is for sure is that some danger is lurking and closing in, and Jerry is welcoming, almost eager to face his nemesis. Whether or not he is ready is another question.

While The Pledge unfolds on its own terms towards a rich and rumpled conclusion, it does suffer from almost too much silence, as the details of Jerry's deliberate actions are sacrificed in search of style and a brooding aesthetic.

Jack Nicholson provides a thankfully subdued performance, staying well within himself despite the mounting stress. Jerry Black is a stoic, calculating character, well past the days of running after suspects and now more interested in laying an elaborate trap and waiting for the right time to pounce. Nicholson conveys a man under self-imposed pressure, with his judgement increasingly clouded. He may or may not be using Lori and Chrissy as a lure; he likely does not quite know anymore whether his need for a family is in conflict with the burning desire to solve a crime.

In support, almost every one-scene role is brought to life by a prominent actor. In addition to Clarkson, del Toro, Eckhart, Wright Penn, Rourke and Redgrave, Helen Mirren makes an appearance as a psychiatrist, Harry Dean Stanton is the original owner of the gas station purchased by Jerry, and Sam Shepard is a police detective.

The Pledge weaves a spell and luxuriates in its foggy density, as much a crime mystery as a thought-provoking sojourn to the place where promises become obsessions.

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Movie Review: Rumble Fish (1983)

A stylistic exploration of lost youth, Rumble Fish searches for a reason to exist but finds none. The central characters are only mildly interesting, and there is hardly anything going on to create a narrative hook.

Rusty James (Matt Dillon) is a tough kid and the leader of his pack, consisting of Steve (Vincent Spano) and Smokey (Nicolas Cage), among others. Rusty harkens back to mythical old days when gangs ruled the streets, and idolizes his absentee brother Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), a former gang leader. With Rusty trying to hang on to Patty (Diane Lane) as a girlfriend of sorts despite her disapproval of his rough life, Motorcycle Boy suddenly returns to town after a trip to California.

In a rumble with an opposing gang, Rusty is injured, while police officer Patterson (William Smith) keeps a suspicious eye on Motorcycle Boy, disapproving of his return and believing him to be nothing but trouble. Both Rusty and Motorcycle Boy have to put up with a drunk of a father (Dennis Hopper), who wastes his life downing bottles of alcohol. After a few more violent skirmishes, the two brothers meet at a pet store selling colourful fish, and decide to cause some mischief in the name of freedom.

Francis Ford Coppola collaborated with author S.E. Hinton to create a screenplay out of Hinton's book, and Coppola filmed Rumble Fish immediately after the moderately more successful The Outsiders. Filmed by Coppola in crisp black and white with plenty of smoke, theatrical sets and flashy camera angles, Rumble Fish tries to be about something meaningful, but the artistry of presentation fails to mask the lack of substance.

Rusty James, Motorcycle Boy, and the rest of their cohorts have nothing new to offer. They are supposed to elicit sympathy just because they are who they are, their father is a drunk and their mother has fled. But the film stalls within a few minutes, trying too hard to make heroes out of outcasts, never giving the characters the chance to earn their place as people worth caring about. They rumble, they argue, they chase girls, and they lament their miserable parents. It's all too trite, territory that has been covered too many time in too many films dating back 30 years and more.

Coppola's directing calls attention to itself at every turn, a reasonably welcome distraction from the non-event of the plot, but creating an all too obvious case of all packaging and no package. A few small fish in an aquarium contribute the only splash of colour, and the freedom of the fish is supposed to represent Something Important. By the time Rusty James and Motorcycle Boy decide to heroically Free the Fish, any climactic cause is acceptable just to bring proceedings to a close.

The young ensemble cast of Dillon, Lane, Cage and Spano are pure intensity but no real humanity. Rourke smirks through the movie in one of his exceedingly annoying I'm-bored-so-I'll-pretend-to-smile-as-if-I'm-hiding-something-but-really-I'm-not performances. Hopper hides behind a bottle and Williams hides behind his shades, two veteran performers sticking closely to stereotypes.

Rumble Fish may look tasty, but it emits the unmistakable odour of a spoilt catch.

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The Movies Of Mickey Rourke

All movies starring Mickey Rourke and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

1941 (1979)

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Body Heat (1981)

Diner (1982)

Rumble Fish (1983)

Year Of The Dragon (1985)

9½ Weeks (1986)

Angel Heart (1987)

A Prayer For The Dying (1987)

The Rainmaker (1997)

The Pledge (2001)

Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)

Man On Fire (2004)

Sin City (2005)

Domino (2005)

The Wrestler (2008)

Girl (2020)

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