Movie Review: The Captive (2014)

A child abduction drama, The Captive peels away layers of secrets in frigid terrain to reveal a complex web of interconnected raw emotions.

The film is presented non-sequentially and in multiple timeframes, with all events occurring around Niagara Falls, Ontario (but also filmed in Sudbury). Chronologically, married couple Matt and Tina Lane (Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos) are rocked by the abduction of their young daughter Cassandra, an aspiring figure skater. Tina blames Matt, because Cass was kidnapped from his truck when he popped into a diner.

Police detectives and child abduction experts Nicole (Rosario Dawson) and Jeffrey (Scott Speedman) investigate, with Jeffrey suspecting Matt of selling his daughter for financial reasons. Years pass and the case goes cold. Tina and Matt separate but Tina maintains annual contact with Nicole. Meanwhile Cass grows up in captivity, held in a secret room by wealthy businessman and child pornographer Mika (Kevin Durand). Matt never gives up hope of finding his daughter, while the grown-up Cass (Alexia Fast) starts to exert her power over Mika to try and end her nightmare.

An intricate multi-faceted mystery, The Captive is spellbinding but also congested. Director, co-writer and co-producer Atom Egoyan weaves a fascinating multi-pronged tale of insidious evil hiding in a perpetually snow-covered small town, with the story ambitiously spanning many years of agony as Cassandra's disappearance casts a long shadow over the community.

The frequent jumps back and forth to multiple points in time are at first disconcerting, and for a movie clocking in at under two hours, there is a lot going on. But Egoyan maintains reasonable control as the narrative spreads its wings. The film is not just about grieving parents; it is also about Cassandra's burgeoning adulthood in a bewildering captivity, and the enticing but infuriating dead-ends well-intentioned detectives can be sucked into.

Still more sub-themes feature Mika deriving pleasure from torturing Tina with artefacts from her missing daughter's life while cameras secretly record her reactions, and Nicole herself becoming a target of the powerful pornographer cartel. The online luring menace, a pornographer's psychological weaknesses and a relationship between cops Nicole and Jeffrey also sneak their way into the film.

As the multiple threads intertwine The Captive inhales the icy coldness of working class desperation. The Niagara Falls are frozen in the background and stubbornly refusing to release any economic advancement. Matt struggles to run a one-man landscaping business while Tina works as a hotel room cleaner, their relationship comprehensively ruptured by her fury at what she perceives to be his carelessness in losing Cass. Ironically, the only moment of glitz is provided by two-faced slimy child porn merchants hosting a banquet.

The Captive appears to run out of either time or money, the climax rushed into an unsatisfying blur with a few threads left hanging. But the ever expanding ripples of trauma caused by one child's disappearance do leave a lasting impression.

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Movie Review: Parts Per Billion (2014)

An end-of-the-world drama and romance, Parts Per Billion features three loosely connected storylines but adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

A war in the Middle East results in biological weapons being launched. Winds spread the lethal airborne germs, triggering massive death on a global scale. In Michigan, three couples await the arrival of the end, with flashbacks filling in their backstories.

Anna (Teresa Palmer) is intently following the news and the looming disaster increases the intensity of her jealous attachment to fiancé and musician Erik (Penn Badgley). He is calmer and less interested in world events. Lawyer Mia (Rosario Dawson) has a successful career, while her husband Len (Josh Hartnett) is underemployed but supportive. Their relationship is under stress because she did not discourage the advances of an office colleague. They take refuge in their sealed basement as the germs arrive.

The elderly Andy and Esther (Frank Langella and Gena Rowlands) are at the hospital for medical tests when the airborne contamination strikes. Oxygen masks help them survive. He is struggling with feelings of guilt, as he was paid large sums of money to help develop the biological weapons now destroying humanity. The three couples share some associations: Erik is the grandson of Andy and Esther, Mia successfully defended and acquitted Andy in a legal case, and Len's sister Sarah (Alexis Bledel) is a nurse looking after Esther at the hospital.

Sharing some of the same contaminant properties as 2011's Contagion, Parts Per Billion focuses more on people and less on events. Writer and director Brian Horiuchi is interested in the lives and loves of relatively ordinary people, and leaves the broader response to the crisis, if any, off screen. The six central characters are relatable, but far from profoundly interesting. They are also passive victims and observers rather than protagonists.

From the vantage point of the three couples, people are dying en masse, television reports reveal powerless elected officials fleeing, and opportunities for salvation or rescue are not even mentioned. A sealed basement and stocks of supplies offer hope for Mia and Len, but only if they can tolerate each other in confined surroundings. Oxygen masks extend life for Andy and Esther as long as they can find more canisters at the hospital. Anna and Erik just embrace the end with understandable anxiety but overall ambivalent acceptance.

With the title referring to the measure of contamination but also the miniscule relevance of every individual in a global context, it may be fully Horiuchi's intent to highlight the banal nature of life and predictable appreciation of love as the end comes into focus. But the movie suffers mightily from the absence of momentum. Other than small revelations about the couples, not much of anything actually happens over 98 minutes spread thin across three sub-stories. The repetitive shallow expressions of love, anger, frustration and regret struggle to leave an impression.

Parts Per Billion rides in on an evil wind, but exits in a whimper.

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Movie Review: Seven Pounds (2008)

A redemption drama and romance, Seven Pounds is fervent but structurally over complicated and slow moving.

Ben Thomas (Will Smith) phones 911 to report his own suicide. In flashbacks, Ben verbally abuses Ezra (Woody Harrelson), a blind call center operator, and uses his IRS credentials to track down multiple people who owe taxes but also appear to have serious medical or social problems. They include Emily (Rosario Dawson), who suffers from a serious heart condition, and Connie (Elpidia Carrillo), a single mom being abused by her boyfriend.

Other flashback snippets show Ben as an aeronautical engineer; enjoying the company of his girlfriend; reliving the trauma of a car crash; having tense conversations with his brother (Michael Ealy); and moving into a motel room. He refuses to give a tax break to seniors' care centre manager Stewart (Tim Kelleher), who is mistreating patients. Ben comforts Emily after a medical scare and a mutual attraction develops, but he remains mysterious and refuses to reveal too much about himself.

After 2006's The Pursuit Of Happyness, Smith reunites with director Gabriele Muccino, and the result is a thick broth of sincerity and self-sacrifice. Although undeniably thought-provoking and debate-inducing, Seven Pounds also unmistakably tries too hard. Through its convoluted structure the film hides plenty from its audience and the jumbled fragments of flashbacks are confusing for the sake of confusion. Unraveling both the why and the what of Ben's actions is a big load for the film to carry, and suggests Muccino did not believe in the inherent strength of the core material.

And maybe that's because beneath the film's well-intended message, the plot holes are massive for what is intended as a grounded soul-searching drama. Seven Pounds skips over the ease with which government agents can be impersonated; transplants administered; families relocated; and vintage machinery repaired.

When the threads of the plot finally start to make sense, the film gains some traction, but then far too much time is invested in the romance between Ben and Emily. Many of the other good deeds Ben commits are treated in almost dismissive morsels, and for a long stretch Seven Pounds transitions from a dramatic story of penance to a straightforward, old-fashioned romance between two damaged individuals.

Will Smith stretches his more serious acting muscles and is suitably dour for most of the film. Rosario Dawson emerges as the emotional centre, and radiates a joyful determination to appreciate life in the face of Emily's seemingly unalterable impending rendezvous with death.

Seven Pounds asks big questions, but though jumbled delivery comes up with only partial answers.

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Movie Review: The Rundown (2003)

An action-packed buddy comedy adventure, The Rundown (also known as Welcome To The Jungle) is mindless fun, and often much better than it has any right to be.

In Los Angeles, Beck (Dwayne Johnson, credited as The Rock) is a hard hitting but soft-at-heart "retrieval expert" (bounty hunter) looking to get out of the business and open his own restaurant. His boss Billy Walker (William Lucking) offers him one last job with a big payoff: retrieve Billy's wayward son Travis (Seann William Scott) from the wilds of the Amazon and bring him home.

Beck travels to the Brazilian jungle, connects with pilot Declan (Ewen Bremner), and finds Travis in the ramshackle mining town built by nasty businessman Hatcher (Christopher Walken) to exploit local resources. Travis has no interest in surrendering to Beck, as he is on his own quest to find the mythical El Gato de Diablo treasure, and trying to sweet talk bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson) into helping him. Beck's assignment gets much more complicated when Hatcher demands that Travis lead him to El Gato's location, and Mariana reveals her own agenda.

A big budget production lavishly co-funded by WWE Films and directed by Peter Berg, The Rundown features Johnson relatively early in his transition from popular professional wrestler to action film superstar. The film celebrates its high ridiculous quotient, and locks into an action packed, irreverent groove.

The showcase fight sequences arrive at regular 10 minute intervals, with Beck's insistence that he does not use guns channeling the brutality into inventive one-against-many brawls. The multiple fracases are artistically choreographed and coherently handled, with an ever-present  shadow of a smile anchoring the flying bodies and flailing limbs. In an apt summary of the film's mindset, one fight scene finds Beck trapped upside down on a swinging rope in the heart of the jungle, his leg dry-humped by a crazed wild monkey.

As for the plot and the story, The Rundown is a combination buddy movie, treasure hunt, social justice comedy adventure. Enough disparate stuff is thrown onto the screen to ensure something kinetic is always going on, and Berg does not linger in any one place long enough for the preposterous attitude to deflate. The jungle colours are vivid, the settings teaming with sweaty life forms from both the human and animal kingdoms.

Seann William Smith's take on Travis is irritating enough to get under Beck's skin, and while Christopher Walken mails in his performance as prime evildoer Hatcher, his presence lends heft to the exploitation sub-plot. As for Johnson, he lumbers through the movie carving out his screen persona, a slightly more emotive Schwarzenegger without the accent but with a dash of vulnerable self-awareness.

The Rundown never wavers from its mission to deliver satisfyingly silly entertainment, and yes, for the final mop-up Beck does yield and pick up guns -- many guns.

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Movie Review: Unstoppable (2010)

A runaway train thriller, Unstoppable is visually appealing but has an extraordinarily limited premise.

At a Pennsylvania rail yard, a sloppy worker jumps out of slow moving train AWR 777 to throw a track switch. The train kicks into gear, and with the air brakes unattached, accelerates and leaves the yard unattended. The runaway train is half a mile long with four of the cars carrying dangerous cargo that could ignite on impact. Train yardmaster Connie Hooper (Rosario Dawson) swings into action to clear the track ahead of the runaway. Her boss Oscar Galvin (Kevin Dunn) tries to take charge, but makes all the wrong calls.

In the meantime veteran railroad engineer Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) is winding down his career and spending the day training rookie conductor Will Colson (Chris Pine). Barnes lost his wife to cancer and has a strained relationship with his two daughters. Colson is in trouble with his wife, who has issued a restraining order. In their own freight train 1206, Barnes and Colson barely avoid the runaway. They take off after it in reverse, hoping to catch it, couple to it and slow it down before it derails at a dangerous curve in an urban area.

The last film directed by Tony Scott, Unstoppable is inspired by an actual, if much less dramatic, runaway train event that occurred in Ohio in 2001. The film contains no shortage of astounding cinematography capturing the raw kinetic energy of an out-of-control red beast on rails, cutting a swath through the countryside. And of course this being a Tony Scott film, a news helicopter or three always clatter away, inches from the train, just to add flair, drama and fury to the sound and visuals.

Unfortunately, Unstoppable offers precious little else beyond the obvious feast for the eyes. "Two men stop a train" is about as far as as the plot goes, and milking a 98 movie out of that flimsy premise proves to be as challenging as it sounds. Attempts to flesh out family stories for Frank and Will come across as contrived in the extreme, as does the awkward portrayal of dufus and incompetent managers back at the train company's headquarters. And while it is difficult to keep count, Unstoppable likely violates all the laws of physics before the drama comes to a smokey halt.

Denzel Washington and Chris Pine are workmanlike but constrained by the material, although the evolving level of respect between the two men within the train cab's confines maintains marginal interest. Rosario Dawson tries to inject some energy into proceedings back at the yard.

Unstoppable whizzes by, great visuals on rails, everything else an inconsequential blur.

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The Movies Of Rosario Dawson

All movies starring Rosario Dawson and reviewed on the Ace Black Blog are linked below:

The Rundown (2003)

Shattered Glass (2003)

Alexander (2004)

Sin City (2005)

Eagle Eye (2008)

Seven Pounds (2008)

Unstoppable (2010)

Parts Per Billion (2014)

The Captive (2014)

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
The Index of Movie Stars is here.