The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Peter Stormare. Show all posts

Saturday, 8 April 2017

Movie Review: The Last Stand (2013)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's post-politics big screen comeback kicks off with The Last Stand, a ridiculously fun B-movie running on surplus adrenaline.

In an audacious escape during a prisoner transfer in Las Vegas, drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Eduaro Noriega) is freed from the clutches of FBI Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker). Cortez takes Agent Ellen Richards (Génesis Rodríguez) hostage and using a souped-up Chevrolet Corvette speeds towards the border with Mexico. Meanwhile his heavily armed goons under the leadership of Thomas Burrell (Peter Stormare) are constructing a bridge over a narrow ravine near the dusty town of Sommerton Junction, Arizona. Cortez blows through every barricade and check point that Bannister throws in his way along the desert highway. The only thing standing between Cortez and ill-gained freedom is Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger), the grizzled Sheriff of Sommerton.

A former Los Angeles police force drug enforcement agent, Owens moved to Sommerton in search of a quiet life as he fades into retirement. His deputies Mike (Luis Guzmán), Sarah (Jaimie Alexander) and Jerry (Zach Gilford) are inexperienced and generally inept. Outgunned and outnumbered, Owens nevertheless decides to make a stand to stop Cortez, with the help of eccentric local gun collector Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville) and bad boy Frank Martinez (Rodrigo Santoro).

A cross between Rio Bravo, The Fast And The Furious and a Roadrunner cartoon, The Last Stand is a slick exercise in mindlessly clever action. Directed by Kim Jee-woon with an eye for sly style, the film pops with vivid colours, loud noise, over-the-top violence and quite a bit of wicked humour.

Amidst the calculated mayhem, The Last Stand also manages to throw in some lines of satire and wry observations. Owens is an immigrant seeking rustic calm, and he personally resents Cortez for giving immigrants a bad name. There are references to the craziness of Los Angeles, and a wink towards the carnage about to be unleashed on a sleepy border town. Kim injects copious amounts of local flavour, and the secondary characters populating Sommerton provide an animated backdrop fuelled by dry humour.

But this is a film all about action, and Kim does not disappoint. Once the guns start firing in earnest they really don't stop, and the final 30 minutes feature a sublime battle followed by an old-fashioned man-to-man showdown. The havoc is filmed with almost balletic artistry, Kim demonstrating an eye for cohesive composition and eloquent scene construction. Before the climactic gun battle, Cortez provides all the kinetic energy as he speeds along the highway in a missile of car. The driving scenes are exquisite, capturing unbridled speeds generated by a monstrous engine and sleek aerodynamics along the open road.

Despite all the gloss, The Last Stand never threatens to be anything other than implausible. The story is contrived and shallow, the acting stiff, and the characters lack any semblance of depth. But none of that matters; in many ways this is a throwback to the earliest Arnold movies, when brawn ruled and brains stayed outside the theatre. The man may be much older, but he can still haul around the biggest available machine gun.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Thursday, 23 March 2017

Movie Review: Premonition (2007)

A supernatural psychological drama, Premonition offers an intriguing premise but is handicapped by sloppy attempts at sappiness.

The marriage of Linda and Jim Hanson (Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon) has hit the doldrums. The passion has seeped out despite a seemingly idyllic life, two young daughters and a large house in the suburbs. Things get much worse when Linda learns that Jim has died in a fiery car crash on the highway while on a business trip. Linda's mother Joanne (Kate Nelligan) and friend Annie (Nia Long) arrive to offer comfort.

But the next day Linda wakes up and Jim is still alive. Dumbfounded, she starts to question her sanity. Other scary incidents over the coming days include one of her daughters smashing through a glass door, and a gory encounter with a dead crow. Not knowing what each new day may bring and confused over the health of her marriage and the sequence of events in her life, Linda reaches out to psychologist Dr. Norman Roth (Peter Stormare), but he may be more of a hindrance than a help.

Directed by Mennan Yapo and written by Bill Kelly, Premonition plays with the idea of a mind under stress mimicking a marriage spiralling in all the wrong directions. The film offers a puzzle built on jumbled time, and once the framework is set, all sorts of possibilities emerge. Premonition in this case is a vivid experience which may have either already happened or could still be prevented, and with the failing dynamic between Linda and Jim, she has interesting choices to make.

The theme of preordained destiny or a future potentially shaped by human decisions bubbles to the surface, and Premonition deserves credit for presenting an eternal debate through a fresh lens. The final third of the film veers towards some maudlin moments, and Linda's last-ditch attempts to save her marriage are less than convincing.

Brief but effective horror moments punctuate the film and add to the sense of unease. The encounters with the glass sliding door and the dead crow provide opportunities for gory and sharp shocks, signposts that all is clearly not well in Linda's week.

Sandra Bullock capably carries the weight of the film, mixing incredulity with determination while handling the time shifts with increasing confidence. The rest of the cast members are given relatively little to do, with Julian McMahon operating at a particularly bland television movie level.

Premonition offers decent quality and thought-provoking entertainment without necessarily reinventing the wheels of time.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Movie Review: Minority Report (2002)

A science fiction thriller, Minority Report offers up thoughtful questions about societal justice, the nature of crime and free will, packaged with plenty of futuristic action.

In the year 2054, the PreCrime corporation has successfully implemented a crime prevention pilot program in Washington D.C. Using the predictive powers of three "Precogs", police detectives can uncover the intent to commit murder, and stop the killers before they strike. Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the main enforcement officer who swings into action to arrest would-be murderers. He is both haunted and motivated by the abduction of his young son Sean, an incident which fractured John's marriage to Lara (Kathryn Morris). Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow) is the founder of PreCrime, and the plummeting murder rate in Washington has resulted in his rise to prominence and a push to expand the program nationally.

The Department of Justice sends in agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) to audit the program before it expands, and he uncovers John's drug habit, as well as the program's dependence on the three Precogs: a woman named Agatha (Samantha Morton) and twin brothers kept in a drugged state of suspended animation where they see visions of the future and predict the names of would-be victims and perpetrators. With PreCrime's future looking good, John's life is thrown into turmoil: the Precogs predict that he will murder a man named Leo Crow. John has to go on the run, his own team in hot pursuit, to clear his name, uncover who Crow is, and why the Precogs could possibly be wrong.

An adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story directed by Steven Spielberg, Minority Report is a glossy, well-polished thriller, featuring an athletic Tom Cruise in fine form and a thought-provoking premise. The film grapples with the fundamental issue of whether a crime is still a crime when it has not yet been committed, and weighs society's desire for public safety against the liberty of individuals apprehended for their thoughts.

While some key plot points are lost in the dazzling early barrage of technology, Spielberg generally controls the pacing with expert precision, taking the necessary time to introduce a fairly complex premise before delving deep into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving a secret from the past threatening the march towards a society free of murder.

The action scenes are not as strong, and do drag the film down. Spielberg adopts a CGI-heavy aesthetic featuring plenty of pod-like cars zooming at insane speeds in all directions, including vertically. It's a child-like idea of transportation's future, all image and no logic, and sure enough John is thrown into Frogger-type situations of hopping from pod to pod to escape his pursuers. Not much better and just as juvenile are officers equipped with cumbersome jet packs, all too easily dispatched by the under-equipped John in over-the-top hand-to-hand combat scenes.

The film is lengthy at 145 minutes, and fortunately Spielberg steers the final third towards the more cerebral elements, as John continues to peel away the layers of his own destiny to uncover a convoluted but clever plot. Here again the film asks good questions, about the value of one crime being committed to help prevent many others from taking place.

Tom Cruise slices through the film with professional ease, never stretching as John Anderton but finding the requisite intensity as a hero forced to clear his name. Max von Sydow lends his distinguished brand of gravitas to the role of Lamar Burgess, the old man gradually emerging as a key character in the second half of the film. In relative terms, Colin Farrell is a black hole, unable to bring any convincing menace to the role of Danny Witwer.

Late in the film, Samantha Morton steps out of the small precognition pool of milky fluid and into a more active role as Agatha. Peter Stormare enjoys a small but memorable turn as an underground surgeon who helps John with a new pair of eyes to defeat the pervasive retinal scan security systems.

Minority Report has its flaws, but provides substantive futuristic entertainment with plenty of bristly concepts worthy of debate.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Wednesday, 17 June 2015

Movie Review: Playing God (1997)

A poorly executed action drama, Playing God aims for a cerebral angle in the story of a flawed surgeon falling into the sphere of a criminal, but fails on every count.

In Los Angeles, Eugene Sands (David Duchovny) is a disgraced former doctor who lost his licence after his persistent drug use caused the death of a patient undergoing an operation. While buying his latest batch of drugs at a dingy bar, the emotionally down and out Eugene is in the right place at the right time to save the life of a gangland shooting victim. Eugene's heroics are witnessed by the enigmatic Claire (Angelina Jolie). Her charismatic boss is mobster Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton), and he quickly connects with Eugene and unofficially appoints him as his personal medic, responsible for patching up injured friends or foes as the situation requires.

Eugene learns that Raymond is involved in a dispute with Russian mobsters (including Peter Stormare as Dimitri), but wants to move into bigger illegal business deals with Chinese racketeers. Meanwhile Eugene and Claire start to develop feelings for each other, and the FBI move in to try and pressure Eugene to inform on Raymond's activities.

Flush from success on TV's The X Files, Duchovny attempted to carve out a film career but instead landed in this mess. Filmed in 1995 but not released until two years later due to negative audience test scores, Playing God trips all over itself and lands in a bloody puddle of incompetence. This is a shoddily produced film filled with barely coherent scenes, and no attempt to delve into characters, motivation, or context beyond the most superficial level.

Duchovny's contribution to the shambolic failure is not insubstantial. His approach to the role of Dr. Sands is to stand aside with an expression of drugged-out stupor, and then spring into action with life-saving medical heroics. A scene later, repeat. He may be a victim of an astonishingly bad script by Mark Haskell Smith, but Duchovny's blankness certainly does not do much to better the material.

Director Andy Wilson tries for a narration-heavy neo-noir vibe, and gets nowhere. The tone oscillates wildly between serious, comic, violent and gory, but is never actually smart or engaging. To keep the character of Eugene relevant, almost every scene has to end with someone close-to-death and needing the doctor's intervention, and the film inadvertently encourages a distracting "guess the next victim to be saved" parlour game.

Meanwhile, Timothy Hutton gradually slips into madman persona as the villain Raymond Blossom, and by the end enters full-on wild psychotic mode, fully eroding any sense of serious drama. Angelina Jolie, in one of her earlier and very forgettable roles as Claire, is given instructions to look serious and sultry without being told what exactly she is doing in the movie other than providing decoration. A clutch of faceless FBI agents enter the action late in the proceedings and just add to the overall amateurish feel.

The premise of a humiliated doctor getting embroiled in gang warfare must have seemed like a good idea on paper. Resoundingly botching the concept, Playing God is a plain dog.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Friday, 12 June 2015

Movie Review: Henry's Crime (2010)

A quirky heist movie wrapped into an unlikely love story, Henry's Crime adopts a low key approach and serves up a fine mixture of drama, comedy and romance.

In Buffalo, Henry Torne (Keanu Reeves) is a highway toll booth attendant, very much at an emotional dead end. His soulless life is disconnected from any dreams or ambitions, and he is oblivious to his wife Debbie (Judy Greer) wanting to start a family. When old high school friends Eddie Vibes (Fisher Stevens) and Joe (Danny Hoch) come calling, Henry almost sleepwalks his way into being the getaway driver for a botched bank hold up. He is caught and sentenced to three years.

His cell mate is long-term prisoner Max (James Caan), a grizzled con man now much more comfortable behind bars than in the real world, and the two men become friends. Debbie leaves Henry, who serves his time and decides to do something with his life. When he revisits the scene of the attempted bank robbery, Henry is accidentally struck by a vehicle driven by Julie (Vera Farmiga), an actress rehearsing for Chekov's The Cherry Orchard in a theatre across the street. From an old newspaper article Henry discovers that a prohibition-era tunnel connects the theatre and the bank, leading straight into the vault. He decides to rob the bank in a plan that will involve Max, Julie, Joe, plenty of digging, amateur theatrics and some unwanted plot crashers.

An independent film directed by Malcolm Venville and co-produced by Reeves, Henry's Crime is an elegant story of transformation. The ending may be a bit contrived and the attempts at some comic farce come across as forced. But Venville taps into a rich vein of cool serenity, and lovingly places at the heart of his film three characters who are well worth knowing.

The script by Sacha Gervasi and David N. White zooms into the lives of Henry, Max and Julie, and finds three sympathetic people ready for a change. Henry's life was at a standstill before he went to prison, and having served the time and lost his wife, he finally decides that he may as well enjoy the thrill of committing the crime. Henry's slow paced thought process is perfectly suited to Reeves' deliberate method of almost non-acting.

Max injects the animation as the confidence man now short of confidence and happy to spend the rest of his life behind bars, despite being eligible for release. Henry offers Max a no-lose proposition: get out, commit a crime, get caught and go back to prison, where Max wants to be anyway, or evade capture and make it rich. James Caan rolls back the years and delivers a cleverly engaging performance, giving Max plenty of sarcastic wisdom from the school of hard knocks.

And Julie also wants out, in her case out of Buffalo towards Hollywood. Julie is cold and her acting talent is limited at best, but she at least talks the good talk about seeking a bigger dream. In Henry she finds a man who may light the flame in her heart, but as luggage goes, Henry, a convict planning a heist, is carrying plenty. Vera Farmiga delivers a lively performance befitting a stage actress labouring to please an imperious director (played with panache by Peter Stormare).

The three characters provide Henry's Crime with softly glowing core, and they play off each other with wacky humour. The film never takes itself too seriously, and thrives off an undercurrent of character-driven wit. Meanwhile life works hard at imitating art, The Cherry Orchard rehearsals providing an apt backdrop for unfolding modern day weirdness. The dreary Buffalo setting encourages thoughts of new beginnings anywhere else, while a bouncy soundtrack and music score by Blake Ley rounds out the movie's relaxed vibe. Henry's Crime may not be perfect, but it's an enjoyable frolic.