Movie Review: 2 Guns (2013)

A buddy movie with plenty of action and a streak of humour, 2 Guns offers oodles of star charisma but a nonsensical plot involving a drug cartel, bank heist, and numerous far-fetched hidden agendas.

Bobby Beans (Denzel Washington) and Michael "Stig" Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) have partnered to infiltrate and profit from the Mexican drug cartel of Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos). Maintaining a thorny friendship, they keep their identities hidden from each other and both pretend to be easy-going underworld types, but Beans is actually with the DEA and Stig is with Navy Intelligence.

Beans is romantically involved with the DEA's Agent Deb Rees (Paula Patton), and arranges for Stig to be arrested after they rob a small bank holding $3 million in cartel money. But to everyone's surprise the bank heist yields a mammoth $43 million in cash. Beans and Stig start to suspect each other, and then have to evade killers from the cartel as well as rogue Navy assassins and an angry CIA dark ops unit.

An adaptation of a comic book series by Steven Grant, 2 Guns is a stylish exercise in wild action riding a ridiculous story. The film demands compliant brain disengagement and simple vibe enjoyment. Director Baltasar Kormákur tries for a while to maintain control of the narrative, but then the logic gaps expand into yawning canyons, brain-twisting double crosses multiply, and various groups of barely defined shady operatives show up with big guns intent on killing other groups of less defined shady operatives with bigger guns. 

As a good complement to the uncontrolled energy, the film's visuals pop off the screen. The vivid colour palette draws inspiration from the Mexican and southern US locales, the incessant sunshine and stark desert offering bright yellows and browns as backdrops for the frequent fire fights, car chases and macho posturing. Kormákur keeps the action moving at a breakneck pace, a good strategy to avoid coherence probes, and wraps up the adventure in 109 minutes.

Stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are in fine form and immediately click as a pair, zipping through banter and biting quips with pleasing buoyancy. Washington is more serious and circumspect and often provides a cool anchor amidst the mayhem. Wahlberg is restlessly jovial, his best plans consisting of antagonism mixed with straight-ahead bulldozing. Bill Paxton enjoys himself as the CIA's Earl, but the rest of the cast members are given little to work with and probably never quite knew which side they were on in any given scene.

2 Guns contains a lot more than just the two guns, but it's the two stars who carry the day.



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Movie Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

A spectacular spy action film, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is an expertly crafted thriller with terrific set-pieces and breathless yet controlled pacing.

Agent Hanaway of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) is killed by assassin Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux) in Budapest while on a mission to retrieve Russian nuclear missile launch codes. Agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is rescued from a Russian prison by agents Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton), and immediately sent on a mission to infiltrate the Kremlin in search of records belonging to a man known as Cobalt, intent on initiating a global nuclear war.

The mission goes wrong, the Kremlin is destroyed and Hunt's team is blamed. The IMF is shut down but the Secretary (Tom Wilkinson, uncredited) surreptitiously gives Hunt instructions to stop Cobalt, but with no back-up resources. Cobalt is revealed to be Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a mad scientist who believes world peace can be achieved after a nuclear holocaust. Hunt, Dunn, and Carter are joined by analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and head out to Dubai, where Moreau is planning a meeting to sell the nuclear launch codes to Hendricks.

Directed by Brad Bird, Ghost Protocol is the fourth installment in the Mission:Impossible franchise. The film gets everything right: a good and always coherent story drives the action, the main characters are well-defined and each gets an opportunity to shine, and the right doses of sly humour pepper the proceedings. The action scenes are exquisitely crafted, the stunts are innovative and genuinely thrilling, and finally, the editing is sublime. Editor Paul Hirsch finds the sweet spot where the scene composition conveys risk and excitement without resorting to jerkiness, micro-edits or losing the stunt context.

A large part of the Ghost Protocol charm resides in Hunt's team often screwing up. Many of the ruses that they try do not quite work, forcing the team to innovate to Plan B, and sometimes Plan C, on the fly. These are protagonists prone to failures, sometimes overestimating their own trickery, and having to rely on quick thinking to rescue each subsequent situation.

Many of the set-pieces are nothing short of magnificent. Hunt and Dunn infiltrate the Kremlin with the help of an unwieldy on-the-fly virtual reality screen to simulate an empty hallway. Hunt (with Cruise doing his own stunt work) has to climb on the outside of Burj Khalifa in Dubai, using unreliable sticky gloves. And as if the climb up was not challenging enough, the return down is even trickier, this time without the gloves.

The deception in the Dubai hotel rooms, where Hunt's team attempts to smoothly disrupt the transaction between Moreau and Hendricks, contains wonderfully staged suspense. The venerable car chase finds new life within a raging sandstorm. And the climax occurs at an automated multi-level parkade in Mumbai, a vertical and uncooperative jigsaw puzzle.

The film is elegantly paced. Quiet scenes intermingle with frantic chases, and room is created for the team to regroup at regular intervals. Special effects are used strategically, and most of the film offers a grounded, realistic aesthetic. The slower-paced but still tension-filled interludes include an elegant cocktail party in Mumbai and a couple of heist-style break-ins.

Amidst all the action, the script (by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec) finds time to add to the backstories of the main characters. Carter has her personal reasons for going after Moreau; Brandt has a painful history with IMF which will take time to emerge, and Hunt himself has an elaborate background plan churning away, barely perceptible underneath the main plot.

Fun, gripping and wildly entertaining, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol strides to the pinnacle of the action spy movie genre.

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Movie Review: Precious (2009)

A story of horrific inner-city abuse, Precious places domestic violence under the magnifying glass but fails to offer a credible narrative for the unexplained heroism of its central character.

Claireece Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is a 16 year old obese girl living in a filthy New York apartment with her domineering mother Mary (Mo'Nique). Claireece is the target of Mary's unrelenting physical and emotional abuse and humiliation, and has already given birth to one child after being raped by Mary's boyfriend.

Claireece quits public school after she becomes pregnant with her second child, after again being raped by the same man, and despite strong opposition by Mary enrols in an alternative school. She joins the class of teacher Blu Rain (Paula Patton), and also starts to meet with social worker Miss Weiss (Mariah Carey), who insists that Claireece disclose her home situation in order to receive welfare checks. The teacher and the social worker provide a steadying influence, but Claireece still faces the challenge of escaping from her mother's house of horror.  

Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire (Romona Lofton), was boosted from a small film into a widespread success by the Oprah Winfrey marketing machine, and while there is always the potential for good in publicizing the issues associated with domestic abuse, the film itself struggles to live up to the hype. Precious is a simple story about triumphing, somewhat, over severe social adversity, but precious little is revealed about how and why Claireece is so strongly motivated and inspired to break free from the suffocating orbit around her mother. A girl brought up on a steady diet of physical, emotional,and sexual abuse needs powerful opposing forces to summon the inner strength and courage to change her destiny, but the Geoffrey Fletcher screenplay offers no clues about what drives Claireece to seek a better future.

This weakness in storytelling does not take away from a chilling performance by Mo'Nique as Mary, an awful and monstrous woman hiding her utter failings by unleashing on her daughter a torrent of devastating negativity wrapped in a thick coating of manufactured guilt.

Gaboury Sidibe, plucked from obscurity for the film, is less successful at giving life to Precious, her performance generally consisting of glaring, shuffling and mumbling.

Mariah Carey (in an inspired piece of casting) and Paula Patton have the easy roles of portraying social workers and teachers in a glowingly positive light. The slightly worrying message is that all an abuse victim needs to do is reach out for help, and larger than life, supremely confident women will ride to the rescue.

Precious is a hopeful, well-made film tackling a most difficult subject. But it is precisely because the issues associated with domestic abuse amidst abject poverty are so complex and serious that Precious stumbles on its own simplicity.

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