The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Victor Garber. Show all posts

Wednesday, 9 June 2021

Movie Review: Legally Blonde (2001)

A comedy about looking past superficialities, Legally Blonde celebrates do-anything empowerment with gloss, humour, and old-fashioned kindness.

Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is a fashion merchandising major at a California college, living the sorority lifestyle centred on shopping, make-up, and manicures. She is crushed when boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) dumps her because she is unsuitable for his senator-in-the-making lifestyle as he heads out to Harvard Law School.

Stung into action, Elle applies herself and remarkably gets accepted into Harvard Law School, but upon arrival finds Warner already has a new girlfriend in Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair). Elle persists and makes a good impression in the class of Professor Callahan (Victor Garber). She earns an internship opportunity while catching the eye of Callahan's assistant Emmett (Luke Wilson), and still finds time to teach dowdy manicurist Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge) some sassy skills.

An adaptation of Amanda Brown's book based on her real-life experiences, Legally Blonde is fun, frivolous and wears its silliness with pride. The story of a smart woman deciding to ditch the ditzy lifestyle and focus on academics embraces concepts of self-belief and re-defined focus, but all themes are treated with feather touches. Director Robert Luketic keeps the mood bouncy, and pokes away with equal measures of playfulness at the vacuous sorority lifestyle and law school arrogance.

However, the air of dismissiveness sometimes borders on grating. Elle and her sorority sisters are treated as total airheads. The effort required to enter law school is reduced to Elle cramming for one exam and flaunting her bikini body in the application video. At Harvard the students are a combination of snarky and instinctively rude, and Elle's pathway to influencing a high-profile murder case is ridiculously short.

But this is a comedy, and Reese Witherspoon makes the most out of the role, ensuring Elle emits flashes of wit and a continuous stream of kindness, whether in her sorority or serious modes. Selma Blair is a suitable brunette nemesis, but Matthew Davis is an unfortunate non-entity, although his lack of presence underlines the futility of sorority women obsessing over useless men.

Within the final act of the brisk 96 minutes, Legally Blonde crams in courtroom antics featuring a murdered patriarch, his snooty daughter (Linda Cardellini), an accused step-mother (Ali Larter) and her alleged Latin lover, with no less than Raquel Welch making an appearance. It's a story-within-a-story, all to prove that understanding the latest shoe fashion trends and the fundamentals of a perm are essential legal skills.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Saturday, 24 June 2017

Movie Review: You Again (2010)

A bland retribution comedy, You Again has neither laughs nor romance, and proceeds to waste a good cast.

In her high school years Marni (Kristen Bell) was an outcast ugly duckling, regularly and mercilessly bullied by J-J (Odette Yustman), the coolest cheerleader at the school. Six years later, Marni has moved to Los Angeles and blossomed into a confident public relations executive. Marni returns home to the house of her parents Gail and Mark (Jamie Lee Curtis and Victor Garber) to attend the wedding of her brother Will (James Wolk), and is shocked to discover that Will's fiancée is none other than J-J, who now goes by Joanna.

Joanna pretends to not remember Marni at all, and presents herself as a kind-hearted family-oriented charitable do-gooder. The situation gets more complex when Joanna's aunt Ramona (Sigourney Weaver) arrives ahead of the wedding, as Gail and Ramona were best frenemies during their high school years. Ramona is now a high powered owner of a luxury hotel chain, while Gail, who was the most popular girl in school, has settled for domestic bliss. In the face of Joanna's charm assault Marni feels belittled and starts to regress into her high school victim persona, and decides to do all she can to unmask Joanna's true character and disrupt her brother's wedding day.

Directed by Andy Fickman, You Again has a couple of good ideas but does not do much with them. The long shadows cast by high school experiences should be a rich environment for both comedy and personal growth, and Marni wilting under the pressure of being back home and playing second fiddle to Joanna is an interesting enough set-up. But Fickman and screenwriter Moe Jelline default fairly quickly to witless juvenile antics and childish execution.

The script is nowhere near sharp enough to overcome the characters' wide-eyed cluelessness, and the film is caught in no man's land where outlandish actions are devoid of any sense of irony or satire. The dull lowlights include physical altercations, dishes being thrown, food dumped on heads and people pushed into swimming pools, the latter prosaic climax telegraphed in bold letters.

The cast has too much talent for the material. Kristen Bell is game and commits herself to the role, but cannot pull the film out of the doldrums. Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis enjoy a few dueling moments but then succumb to the tedious surroundings.

You Again flickers with some promise but is extinguished by listless delivery.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Monday, 19 October 2015

Movie Review: Sicario (2015)

A drug trafficking action drama set on the US/ Mexico border, Sicario offers plenty of style and occasional tension, but undermines itself by frustratingly leaving blank key plot and character elements.

In Chandler, Arizona, FBI agents Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) and Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) lead an FBI raid on a house owned by drug lord Manuel Díaz. The grisly discovery of dozens of dead bodies hidden in the walls of the house, followed by a large explosion, announce a new phase of brutality in the Mexican drug trade. Kate is nominated by her boss Dave Jennings (Victor Garber) to join the special team of CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), working to identify and stop Diaz's boss.

Kate soon meets the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), who appears to have a dark past in the drug trade, and accompanies Matt every step of the way. With Reggie her only trustworthy ally, Kate also realizes that her involvement is intended to provide cover to Matt's barely-legal CIA operations. She joins the CIA team on a tense raid into Mexico to apprehend one of Diaz's associates, which kicks-off a chain reaction of events intended to flush out the head of the drug cartel. With the violence escalating on both sides of the border, Kate begins to question whether the solutions offered by Matt and Alejandro are any better than the problems they are trying to solve.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Sicario (hitman in Spanish) dives into the deep end of the underworld drug war raging along the southern United States border. The film is frequently visually stunning and bursting with muscular action, Villeneuve deploying fluid cameras to capture shady government operatives flaunting the rules of law in two countries, in response to drug lords elevating the levels of brutality and violence to unimaginable decibels of horror.

The story is revealed through Kate's eyes, and her by-the-book FBI training is torn asunder by the CIA running roughshod over anything that resembles due process. Matt, and more mysteriously Alejandro, make up their own rules, provided with cover by faraway faceless politicians eager to gain some measure of control and not worried anymore about the niceties of national laws and jurisdictional boundaries. The film is filled with dead bodies, heavily armed and thick necked Delta Force types who shoot first and never get around to asking questions, and plenty of armoured black SUVs and nifty helicopters lending heft to the battle against drug traffickers. Kate may be worried about the unauthorized imprisonment, torture, shoot-outs and killings, but rarely has a deadly conflict looked like so much fun.

But beyond the adrenaline-packed scenes of burly men pointing big guns at each other, Sicario seems to want to say a lot more. The blurry lines of the CIA's authority to carry out operations on US soil are hinted at, and the briefest outline of a plan to ease the drug violence by controlling but not stopping the industry is sketched in. But the Taylor Sheridan script takes only tentative steps in these directions, and then backs away. Instead of delving, justifying or debating the issues, the film loses energy with plenty of repetitive scenes featuring a frustrated Kate asking the same questions and getting the same non-answers from Matt.

The character development is also lacking. Kate, Matt and Alejandro are three clearly fascinating people who are very much worth knowing. But the film ends and it is disheartening how little is known about them, beyond the here and now. The missing depth adds to a cold emotional core, and beyond Kate's abject horror at the extrajudicial methods callously used by men like Matt and Alejandro, there is little resonance to all the action. Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro are never less than committed, without being able to delve into any personal contexts.

Sicario hints at having important things to say past all the blazing guns and impressive hardware, but actually offers disappointingly little in the way of enduring substance.