Movie Review: The Grand Seduction (2013)

Genre: Comedy  

Director: Don McKellar  

Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch  

Running Time: 115 minutes  

Synopsis: The tiny harbour village of Tickle Head, Newfoundland, is suffering economic malaise due to the closure of cod fishing. Unemployed fisher Murray (Brendan Gleeson), his friend Simon, and banker Henry are desperate to attract a new petrochemical factory to the area, but the deal hinges on securing a resident doctor in the village. When Dr. Paul Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) arrives for a month, Murray mobilizes all the residents to embellish the realities of village life to convince Paul to stay permanently. Postmistress Kathleen (Liane Balaban) is the only local resident reluctant to play along.

What Works Well: This remake of a Quebec production benefits from a laid back attitude, rustic edge-of-the-continent scenery, and salt-of-the-earth characters. The comedy is underpinned by serious issues including the declining traditional fishing industry, erosion of dignity due to living on welfare, and families split apart in search of better fortunes. The running gags are strong, including the villagers pretending to like cricket (Paul's favourite sport), listening in on Paul's phone calls, planting money for him to stumble upon, and artificially elevating his hapless fishing skills.

What Does Not Work As Well: The fundamental premise is, of course, rickety (the factory can surely provide a doctor), and the portrayed process for selecting this village for an investment is amateurish. The longish running length is padded with some repetitive beats and unnecessary scenes, while the ending is both predictable and emotionally truncated.

Key Quote:

Simon (watching cricket on TV): It's like watching baseball, only longer.

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Movie Review: 21 Bridges (2019)

A crime thriller, 21 Bridges is a relatively routine action flick enhanced by a good cast and slick production values.

In Brooklyn, hardened criminal Ray Jackson (Taylor Kitsch) and his more circumspect accomplice Michael Trujillo (Stephan James) stumble into a large haul of pure cocaine stashed in the basement of a bar. Police officers unexpectedly interrupt the robbery, and in the ensuing shootout Ray kills seven officers. Police Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) is furious at the loss of life in his precinct, while Ray and Michael flee with the drugs into Manhattan. 

Detective Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) and narcotics agent Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) are assigned to the case. Andre is the son of a slain police officer and has a trigger-happy reputation. He now orders all the bridges connecting Manhattan to the outside world closed and floods the borough with police officers. Meanwhile Ray and Michael are desperate to convert their cocaine haul into cash, and connect with money launderer Adi (Alexander Siddig). As Andre closes in on the fugitives, he starts to sense a large-scale corruption conspiracy.

The 21 bridges of the title are little more than an extraneous headline. This is a standard hunt-the-dangerous-bandits plot featuring good guys and bad guys, with a few shades of grey and hidden agendas thrown in to spice up motivations. The action takes place over one long night, the imperative of reopening the bridges by dawn for the city to function creating the time-constrained framework.

Director Brian Kirk has a robust cast to animate the running and gunning. Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller and J.K. Simmons never need to move out of their comfortable gears, but add plenty of quality. The criminals are also provided with welcome texture. Taylor Kitsch as the highly strung but still methodical killer is well-matched by Stephan James as his more hesitant accomplice, and their contrasting dynamic opens intriguing avenues for Boseman's detective to exploit.

Cinematographer Paul Cameron makes good use of the nighttime aesthetic, and as one breathless chase follows another, Tim Murrell's editing finds balance between frantic and coherent. The opening shootout is an exhilarating demonstration of advantages afforded by weaponry and military training, while a couple of guns-drawn showdowns between Michael and Andre allow intellect to compete with instinct.

What starts as a robbery-gone-bad morphs into something much more nefarious, and as the night turns to dawn the dead body count rivals the bridge count. If nothing else, 21 Bridges is always happy to run up the score.



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Movie Review: American Assassin (2017)

A straightforward action thriller, American Assassin enjoys a few good moments of mindless excitement but is otherwise fully constructed from recycled components.

Mitch Rapp (Dylan O'Brien) has his life shattered when his fiancee Katrina is killed during a terrorist attack on a Spanish beach. He dedicates himself to intensive combat training and attempts to infiltrate the Libyan-based jihadist cell behind the attack. His misadventure ends with capture by the CIA. Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan) spots his raw talent and recruits Mitch into the black ops Orion unit led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton).

Mitch excels in training and is deployed to the field when stolen weapons-grade plutonium appears on the black market. In Istanbul Mitch and Stan are joined by agent Annika (Shiva Negar) to try and disrupt a plot by rogue Iranian officials to secure a nuclear bomb. The plotters are enabled by ex-CIA agent Ghost (Taylor Kitsch), who shares a dark background with Stan and harbours a personal agenda.

An attempt to launch a franchise based on the Mitch Rapp series of novels by author Vince Flynn, American Assassin is an inauspicious start. A troubled production cycled through a series of writers, actors and directors before yielding a routine script cobbled together by four writers, with director Michael Cuesta at the helm.

Some of the action scenes are effective, a torture sequence may be unnecessary but is certainly memorable, and Cuesta does nail an imaginative ending despite some clunky imagery. But in a cinematic world where James Bond, Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne have each completed multiple and complex counterterrorism missions, Mitch Rapp is more than anything redundant.

The film is not helped by insufficient character depth and an absence of intelligent discourse. Mitch as an angry young man unable to separate revenge from patriotic duty is a cliche of eye-rolling proportions, not helped by Dylan O'Brien's dour and one-dimensional demeanour. Michael Keaton tries his best to inject some gravitas, but is marginally miscast as the grizzled leader of a clandestine unit. The two men's macho posturing and barbed exchanges about motives and orders never rise above slipshod and circular.

Rather than waste time on any thoughtful pauses, American Assassin rushes to the next destination where an action set-piece awaits, bullets and bodies flying until a rudimentary clue pops out, pointing the way to more of the same.

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Movie Review: Lone Survivor (2013)

A war endurance story, Lone Survivor is a harrowing recreation of a mission-gone-wrong in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The setting is June, 2005, in Afghanistan. Four Navy SEALs are deployed on a remote mountaintop near an isolated village on a reconnaissance mission to identify and track a Taliban leader. The team consists of sniper Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), Lieutenant Michael Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Communications Specialist Danny Dietz (Emile Hirsch) and sniper Matthew Axelson (Ben Foster). Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen (Eric Bana) tracks their progress from a forward operations base, but communications are patchy due to the difficult terrain.

The mission is compromised when three local goat herders stumble onto the SEAL's observation point. Murphy and his men decide to retreat from the area, but local anti-American militias are alerted to their presence and the four men are caught in a vicious firefight, vastly outnumbered and cut off from any support.

Directed by Peter Berg and based on the book of the same name by Luttrell, Lone Survivor stays close to the facts and pays respectful attention to the events of the ill-fated Operation Red Wings. Similar in tone to Black Hawk Down, Lone Survivor looks for the acts of valour and unshakeable brotherhood emerging in the midst of a ruinous military misadventure.

Berg steers clear of any politicizing or examination of why the US troops are in Afghanistan in the first place. This is a story zoomed-in on four highly-trained warriors attempting to execute a mission, and forced to innovate their way out of trouble while under fire. The ordeal is agonizing, the casualties are high, and Berg's cameras do not flinch in the face of bullet strikes, physical and mental suffering, and death.

Berg's script relied on actual mission reports and autopsies to capture the details of individual wounds, and Lone Survivor is a testimony to the eternal horrors of war, up-close and personal. More than once the SEALs tumbled down steep rocky embankments to try and escape their pursuers, and the images of human bodies hurtling out of control and bouncing repeatedly off hard objects are painful to watch.

Once the combat starts at around the 45 minute mark, Lone Survivor unleashes and sustains unrelenting intensity, the bonding between the men rising as their casualties mount and the inevitable arrives. Berg achieves a memorable combat and heroism climax when Murphy, under intense fire, insists on reaching a rocky but exposed high point to try and establish communications and call for help.

Given the film's focus on just the four men, Lone Survivor could have invested more time in their backstories. Berg provides a few perfunctory and abstract references to wives and girlfriends, and leaves it at that. The film also unfortunately falls into the tired Hollywood trap of over-juicing the final drama, placing Luttrell in perils that he never actually faced, when his actual ordeal should have been sufficient.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. Lone Survivor is a superior and forceful war film, capturing soldiers at their best under the worst possible conditions.

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