3:10 to Yuma (R)
The Western is back! And in a sea of excessively jerky, seasick motion films being released these days, it’s refreshing to finally see a movie that employs camera tripods and professionally filmed scenes with cuts lasting longer than 1.3 seconds.
3:10 to Yuma stars Russell Crowe as the leader of a gang who robs the Pinkertons every time they try to race the railroad’s cash across the plains by armored stagecoach. Christian Bale is cast as the gimpy rancher (part of his leg was lost in the Civil War) who happens onto the most recent robbery, which then involves both he and his son in the later confrontations. Eventually, a group of bounty hunters are hired to bring the ruthless Crowe to the 3:10 train to Yuma, where he will no doubt be later hanged for his crimes. But the power of the film is not in the violence of the gunfights but in the relationships that are set in motion by the opposing forces of good and bad people.
It’s interesting to see if a town full of good, god fearing folk would really take arms against other good men for a buck from bad men. And would a top-level rebel would really long for the slow pace, poor life of a good, hard-working man with a wife at home waiting for him?
It’s human nature to want what you don’t have, no matter what side of the fence you’re on. Here, we get to see multiple players struggle with the thought of switching sides – even when their hearts are telling them not to do so.
Westerns are rare in today’s theaters. Support this film if you want to see more Westerns like it.
– See it on the Big Screen
Hatchet (R)
I’m a sucker for a horror movie. Unfortunately, too few of them actually deliver the frights.
This film stars no one you know, but my, are these characters annoying! This is another movie where I was rooting for the killer to kill off select characters as quickly as possible to help the movie’s chances of being good.
In Hatchet, we have a retarded, ugly child who lives with his father in a small house near the New Orleans swamps of the bayou. He’s relentlessly tormented by the local children. To add insult to injury, the retard’s father accidentally puts a hatchet in his son’s head while trying to save him from a fire. It kills the retard – but you know those tormented spirits – they just refuse to die.
So now, anyone who ventures into those swamps around his house dies in brutal, limb-tearing manners at the hands of the huge, savage beast with a split head. My kind of movie. Unfortunately, the characters are too lame (live far too long) and the budget is about $500,000 short of anything more than a made-for-cable movie.
– Wait for HBO
Right At Your Door (R)
This movie – about philosophical questions when dirty bombs go off in Los Angeles – would make a much better play than a film.
We see a couple waking up after having an argument the night before. The husband tries to play nice to put the bad night behind them, but the wife, Lexi (well played by Mary McCormack), is still a bit tepid toward the whole make-up routine. So she drives off to work just in time to be involved in the fallout when a series of nasty biological dirty bombs explode in the city.
The husband hears the news reports on the scratchy-sounding home stereo (as if this takes place in 1968, or on stage at your local dinner theater). He then leaves the house to:
A) Look for Lexi on the Los Angeles side roads that are surprisingly void of any real traffic at rush hour.
B) Runs into surprisingly empty convenience stores for supplies and miles of duct tape.
Once back home, he gets a visit from a panicked hired handyman from next door who wants to stay and start “taping the house shut” from the falling ash of death. The problem is, Lexi has not yet returned, and her husband can’t reach her on her cell phone either. Unfortunately for us and the handyman, far too many other various phones ring and buzz throughout the film. After 15 minutes, I was ready to get the hell out of that taped-up house and walk out into the toxic ash.
Eventually, Lexi turns up on the front porch, like an abandoned dog finding its way back home. Though he loves her, it’s apparent that she’s infected with the deadly fallout, and there’s no way he’s letting her into the house to infect both men taped off inside.
This is the crux of the film. There’s much dialog and dry coughing from the dying wife. All the characters do things that I would hope “real” people wouldn’t do in the same situation, but there are some mighty strange folks out there.
If you get through ten minutes of this thing, you’ll want to see how it turns out. Afterward, you’ll likely never think about the film much again.
One poignant moment occurs in the film when the authorities dressed in protective breathing apparatus show up outside the front door and ask the husband, “Do you own a gun?” This isn’t the only answer he gets wrong, but if you take anything away from this movie, it’s this: Americans are allowed to own guns. Not owning one allows all others to take full advantage of you any time they want. Always answer, “Yes, I’m armed. Don’t screw with me. I’m a hot-headed American, and if you force your way in here, I’ll likely blow your head off. ”
That will keep armed people from just casually walking into your house anytime they want. Although not as shaky as some of the recent releases, there is zero use of a camera tripod in this Shot On A Hand Held Camera film.
– Wait For HBO
Stardust (PG-13)
Stardust, starring Charlie Cox (Huh? Who?), Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes and Robert De Niro, is a whimsical tale from the past about a young man who sees a meteorite fall from the sky while trying to win the love of a woman, who doesn’t even like him. He promises this woman that he’ll cross “the forbidden wall” in order to bring her a piece of that “star” that has fallen oh so many miles away, to show her that he would do anything for her hand in marriage.
That sentence doesn’t even begin to explain the strange tale that unfolds in front of us as we journey with this young man into a world as strange as Saturn.
There are witches (one is well played by Michelle Pfeiffer) who have waited endless years for such a star to fall to Earth in order to win back their youth.
There are brothers of a dying king who need the necklace that hangs around the neck of the star (woman) who fell to Earth, so that they too can rule the kingdom after the death of their father. That is, unless they kill each other off first. To give you a feel for this movie, it’s the dying king himself who makes the necklace fly into space to bring a star down to Earth.
And then there is Robert De Niro, as a strange captain of a flying vessel straight out of a Leonardo da Vinci pencil (quill-ink) drawing, who is a lightning bolt collector. Sounds weird, but “that ain’t the half of it,” so to speak when you see the movie. Strange bit, but being the top-notch actor he is, De Niro actually pulls off this peculiar role. On a side note, it’s impressive that De Niro got to capitalize his full last name when da Vinci was not allowed to.
Anyway, there is a lot going on here, and the story moves at a fairly good pace. I do have an issue with Claire Danes playing the main love interest and “falling star,” as she’s no doubt the least pretty of this cast (except for the old witches, who are made up to be ugly). She’s got the face of a man in drag, and in some scenes, her eyes focus in different directions, all splashed across a 50′ movie screen. There, I said it.
However, big fans of Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro will feel they got their money’s worth, especially if you think your friends will spill the beans about what De Niro is doing in this movie. These two deserve the Hollywood Star stamp of approval.
Otherwise, I’d wait for the rental.
– Wait for Rental
The Bourne Ultimatum (PG-13)
Matt Damon hooks up with director Paul Greengrass for the latest in the Bourne action thrillers.
Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to reminisce unkindly about a time in American history when Hollywood forced us to sit through hours of MTV shaky-cam movies.
Not so many years ago, it was considered amateur hour when someone put shaky movie camera footage on the home movie screen from their 8mm projector. All budding movie makers start out excitedly moving the camera from subject to subject, causing a blur on the screen. Here, Greengrass goes back to his childhood roots, where every movie shot is off target, and jiggles and swings back and forth and around each subject as if suspended by a wobbly outdoor tire on a rope. Yeah, we all get it when it’s done in a public place and gives the viewer a voyeuristic shot as if seen from the adjacent table. BUT NOT WHEN THERE ARE ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN THE ROOM! It’s like Michael Myers is constantly lurking in the room, ready to kill someone.
If you are looking for an action adventure where Jason Bourne is still trying to find out his own identity, and he’s going to fight, drive and run for his life for nearly two hours – this film will certainly not disappoint you. It’s action-packed to the max. But if you expect to actually see how he fights, or see how he drives, forget it. The camera moves so wildly and amateurishly that it’s quite possible Matt Damon wasn’t really in most of the action footage.
This has to stop. American audiences do not have the attention span of small children. I hope we see the day where tripods and Steadicams® are again used in Hollywood. But I’m not holding my breath.
– Wait for DVD (so you can stop and take a Dramamine® tablet)
Rescue Dawn (PG-13)
This movie is about the true story of Dieter Dengler, a fighter pilot who was shot down in the early stages of the Vietnam War. This is NOT your typical prison camp movie, where we endure countless scenes of torture and mayhem. This film shows us a more realistic view of what a prison camp probably looked like in the 1960’s, based on his account.
If Dieter seems overly cocky to you in his dire need to immediately plan his escape from the camp, just remember he’s a hot-shot Navy pilot. Their bulldog approach to life is what separates them from us. He’s one of them.
The movie gives us all sides of a grand argument. Do you sit back and accept your predicament, which will give you better treatment from your captors, and wait for your eventual release? Do you risk everything for your freedom and plan a daring escape that could well end in your death? Do you worry that if only one of your comrades escapes, will this get everyone else’s goose cooked once the guards discover it?
There were moments in this film where my heart was actually pounding along with the tension on the screen. This is a well-done, even-handed story of one POW’s account of his time in Vietnam. Playing in limited release at “art house” theaters, thus…
– Wait for Rental
Transformers (PG-13)
This review is for the grownups out there…
Having grown up a full generation (or two) before the Hasbro Transformer toys were all the rage, perhaps I’m missing that mental adrenalin that so many fans show when these toy-like “bots” show up on the screen. But the biggest disappointment about this 2-hour, 24-minute film is the fact that the makers couldn’t decide whether it should be a “kiddie” movie or for adults.
There are times where they could have stopped shooting the film and gone completely animated for use on Saturday morning cartoons. At one point, these massive, destructive, U.S.-Military-eating-for-breakfast killer machines befriend a high school boy, and in a scene straight out of something from the Banana Splits (a kids’ show from 1968-1970), they trash the kid’s backyard like a bunch of drunken teenagers, all the while hiding from his parents in a silly manner that only a youngster (or a HUGE Transformer bot fan) would find amusing.
The Banana Splits
This terribly written, flimsy as angel hair pasta plot has these red, yellow and blue bots, both good bots and bad bots, coming to Earth to recover a huge block of power. (Each bot has its own color and name, just like the toys!!! Oh Boy!) I’m sure fans of the Transformer storyline would gasp at my lack of knowledge about the “special block” or its significance. Guess what, fans – I couldn’t care less if that lame yellow Transformer lives or dies, so there. There’s also a very annoying mini Transformer villain bot that I’d call Jar Jar Binks Jr. And he’s just as annoying as his daddy was.
Anyway, it hardly matters, as really we just watch as a super nerdy boy (Shia LaBeouf) gets the high school class hottie (Megan Fox, who looks ten years older than any high school girl on this planet) into his car, (it’s REALLY a Transformer! Cool!!) and then the new unlikely as hell couple enters the role of kids working hand in hand with the GOOD Transformers to save the world from the BAD Transformers! Yeaah!! Clap now, kiddies, clap! Are we clapping our hands now? Look, it’s the BLUE transformer, yeaah!!
Transformers has its moments. Certainly when the bots are blasting Earth beings, military hardware and buildings, it’s super cool. The film opens with an ominous wallop that led me to believe we had ourselves a mega hit for people older than 13. But 15 minutes later, it was as if they suddenly changed gears and wished it to be a made-for-TV movie. And let me tell you, when bots fight bots, it looks a lot like toys fighting toys.
Then there’s the dreaded shaky cam. I’ve mentioned this crazy phenomenon countless times, but here I’m not whistling Dixie. Every scene of robot mayhem is filmed in shaky cam. I’m warning you that the camera must have been mounted on a pAiNt ShAkEr mAcHiNe for these scenes. Never in all my years have I seen such loose canon use of the camera. The makers of The Blair Witch Project wouldn’t dare go this far.
This film also stars Jon Voight, Bernie Mac and John Turturro. Do not go just to see these actors. It’s NOT their best work.
This film is playing to sold-out crowds.
You’ve been warned.
– Wait for DVD (on a weeknight when you have NOTHING else better to do).
Live Free or Die Hard (PG-13)
Yes, he’s as indestructible as Gumby, but we’ve all come to expect and accept that from Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) as he saves the world, one episode at a time. Bruce has attained that Rambo/Arnold aura that lets everyone in the theater suspend their beliefs for over two hours at a time.
In Live Free or Die Hard, the latest installment of the Die Hard movies, Detective McClane finds himself accidentally mixed up in the middle of a plot to bring America to its knees, with focused hackers throwing a wrench into every software system from traffic signals to Wall Street. Next, the lights literally go out across America. With wall-to-wall action and CGI aplenty, there’s hardly time to question the plausibility of any of it.
The supporting cast is excellent. Most movie fans know by now that Bruce’s sidekick in this film is the Mac Nerd from the famous Mac VS. PC commercials. But this Apple kid (Justin Long) is no newbie to movies. You might remember him starring in two other excellent films, Jeepers Creepers, a great horror flick from 2001, and Dodgeball, the 2004 comedy that really was terrific – it just sounded like it would suck.
Here Justin plays… a super computer geek that knows a lot about hacking. So much for trying to shake his “Mac persona” typecasting! Perhaps he needs to lose his agent. They even show him hacking away using a Mac in his apartment in his first scene. But even with the Mac idea firmly planted in your head as you watch him (it never really goes away), he pulls off this sidekick role well as he and Bruce save the world as if they should be wearing capes.
The eye candy women of this action film (every successful movie’s got to have eye candy – and Bette Midler ain’t it) are exceptionally played by Maggie Q (Mission: Impossible III), who kicks butt as a menacing techie bad girl, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (the girlfriend in Sky High), playing Detective McClane’s feisty daughter. Everyone here is trying to do more than ride Bruce’s coat tails. These folks are all trying to break open their acting careers. It’s good stuff.
Don’t wait for DVD on this one. Summer’s here, and Live Free or Die Hard has arrived to entertain you for the full 128 minutes.
– See it on The Big Screen
1408 (PG-13)
Stephen King stories tend to lose their sting when moving from book to movie screen. But here, John Cusack really delivers as the just-getting-by writer of books about haunted hotels and the like. Cusack is like your neighbor next door. It’s easy to just hang out with a low-key guy like Cusack. So when Mike Enslin (Cusack) purposely checks into the haunted room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York, it feels OK to just hang with him. He’s like us. There’s no such thing as ghosts and monsters. Even after Snakes on a Plane star Samuel L. Jackson (sorry, I couldn’t resist the dig) tries to dissuade Mike with a barrage of stories and facts about those who didn’t survive the room, Mike is still intent on spending the night.
We get to go along too.
Everyone gets scared to death, but we get less bloodied than Mike does. It’s worth noting, this movie is not a gore-fest film like the other 20 that have hit the screens over the last year. This is typical Stephen King-style horror, turned up a notch or two. This one is worth a trip to the theater.
– See it on The Big Screen
Hostel 2 (R)
Last year, in my review of the original movie Hostel, I asked the burning question: How were young women lured to these death chambers? Like moths to a light bulb, it’s easy to lure young men anywhere with the promise of sex – but women? I then added, “Perhaps we’ll have to wait for Hostel 2 to find out.”
Sure enough, Hostel 2 shows us how young American women are lured to Slovakia – land of the death factory. And it’s actually a better film than the first installment.
Poor Slovakia. This Hostel movie franchise can’t be good for their tourism efforts.
The inner workings of the sick, torture/murder operation are explained in more detail this time around. We see how the passport photos of the unfortunate souls are scanned and mass-e-mailed to people on the club’s list. Rich folks around the world who have a fetish for torture and killing get to choose their victims by seeing these photos and descriptions. Each e-mail recipient then bids, eBay style, for their chance to partake in the gruesome acts.
Two girls (played by Bijou Phillips and Laura German) are the sexy, young, carefree Americans on a trip to Europe. They are soon lured to Slovakia by a hot model (played by Vera Jordanova). Vera Jordanova was born in Helsinki, Finland, and was perfectly cast for this role. The girls never see it coming until each becomes a victim. Having traveled extensively around the world myself, I found this particular storyline of entrapment entirely plausible and slick, with no way for the girls to have defended against it.
Actor Roger Bart stars as one of the killers who flies into town to slaughter one of the young American captive girls. Unfortunately, Bart plays the same wimpy “George the Druggist lusting for Bre” style character from his Desperate Housewives stint. His obvious lack of acting range bothered me personally, and his scenes were the weakest of this otherwise well-acted film.
Make no mistake, the shocking scenes of torture and death are not something you have likely seen before. It’s not easy to watch, but not quite as graphically sick (in my opinion) as the first film. No eyes were poked out here, if that’s an indication for you. But both films (and all Eli Roth directed films in general) are certainly demented in their delivery.
As with the first film, a bit of justice is doled out in the end to give the audience a sense of hope in this otherwise twisted part of the world. For horror fans, this will be a great rental.
– Wait for DVD
28 Weeks Later (R)
This is the worst example yet of everyday normal people showing their sudden ability to run endlessly like Forrest Gump. What’s worse, not once do any of these folks stop for food or water! They are in such terrific shape, they only need the air that they breathe as they run, run, run for their lives.
This movie takes place 28 weeks after the first installment (28 days later), where a green zone of sorts is set up outside London by the American military. Those English folks that were lucky enough to be out of town when their families and countrymen were wiped out by a virus that turned everyone into flesh-eating zombies can now happily return home again! The flights full of folks stream back to the UK, and each person is screened medically before reentry. Movie viewers that have a keen interest in science and nature will guess what’s ahead when they see the young boy with two different colored eyes enter the story. This was the only impressive nugget of the screenplay.
Everyone is warned NOT to leave the green zone. The rest of the country is still a hot zone filled with the dead and possible latent infection. But those crazy kids, don’t ya know? They can breach any heavily guarded area of barbed wire and electronic surveillance as if the Keystone Cops were in charge. With an infectious disease, far worse than any wimpy Ebola virus, wiping out all of England, one would find it hard to believe that a simple pair of kids could breach the containment area, putting the lives of the entire world in danger.
But that’s hardly the problem here. It’s the running. The constant running for their lives. I can just hear the actors during filming…
Actor A, “Man, I tell you I ran all day today. I haven’t read my lines for tomorrow’s shoot yet, but I’m hoping for something different.”
Actor B, “Don’t bother. I read it, and tomorrow we run through tunnels and in and out of various buildings. We even run from the American military. We run from everything that moves.”
Actor C, “I have eight lines of intense dialog tomorrow.”
Actors A & B, “Really?”
Actor A, “Then what happens?”
Actor C, “I see zombies coming and I run as fast as I can. I run for the entire day… nonstop… every scene. My legs are killing me.”
Actor A, “Will we ever stop running? Maybe we’ll die and can stop running.”
Actor B, “Nope. The dead zombies run too. Everybody runs. And the movie people have the rights to 28 Months Later and the final chapter, 28 Years Later. A lot more running to do.”
The other offending item that brings this movie to its knees is the frenzied, violent shaky-cam that occurs whenever zombies are onscreen. It’s so bad you can’t really tell what’s going on when the zombies attack, as if the director forgot to tell the zombies not to attack the cameraman.
One more ridiculous item in my “only in the movies” rant: When a group is walking in pitch blackness through a tunnel of obstacles (like corpses), the person with the night vision equipment should ALWAYS walk ahead of the group, with the others clinging to the back of their shirt – not BEHIND the entire group, yelling at their blind partners to, “Move right! Sally, STOP! Now move left two steps! Jacob, grab the wall. Now move, no… Sally, WAIT!” It was at this moment I realized the smartest people in this movie were the rotting zombies.
– Wait for HBO release
Spider-Man 3 (PG-13)
A totally forgettable five-hour film in the series. At least it seemed like five hours. With a story thinner than a saltine cracker, Raimi (Sam Raimi directed this dud) throws expensive special effects at us, in mind-numbing, fast-pace close-ups that fail to show us any scale. But mostly, Raimi gives us long, boring scenes of poor actors (yes, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, the jig is up) plodding through a “woe is us” melodrama.
Everyone knows the easiest emotion to draw out of an audience is sadness. If you’re around someone who is crying, or you’ve seen a competent actor crying on screen, it makes you want to cry. Here, actors are crying deeply a lot, and yet no such emotion takes hold of any audience member. Why?
1) Bad story. No one really cares. Get on with the action, Spidey.
2) Poor acting all the way around.
I’ve said it before, but Kirsten Dunst should never have made it past the first reading of Spider-Man 1, yet here they give her two whole songs to sing on stage. Now we know she can’t sing either. No one thinks so. Not even people in the story! Yet she sings two full songs. What’s going on here? Best agent in Hollywood is my guess. Even with her vampire fangs jutting out to full strike mode, she’s still working in Hollywood. Dunst has been in 41 movies. How many can you name? Pathetic. In music, they call that a one-hit wonder.
Just when you think only Dunst will show us what a no-talent she is, wait until you get a load of Toby when he gets his “black goo from space” jive going. What an embarrassment, but at least this isn’t the part of the movie where you’ll want to catch up on your sleep.
The Sandman villain comes out of a nighttime covert test site accident at an apparently low-security but double-secret facility where anyone can (and do) enter freely by simply climbing a fence. Even after he becomes a sandy shape-shifter, the special effects don’t outshine the molten man of Terminator II, and that was 1991! This bodybuilding actor of sand isn’t better at acting than Schwarzenegger – and that’s not a compliment.
Then there’s the old nemesis, the Green Goblin’s son, zipping around on his flying disc of death like a skateboarder from hell. You’ve seen that before when his daddy did it. Here it is again! Whoopee! The only element that could have been great, but wasn’t, was that black goo from space that comes down like a meteorite, crawls around like a cross between a spider and a creeping vine, and paints itself onto whatever it wants like a $200 Maaco special. And after the black substance from space covers people, they become very angry folks – even angrier than the people who buy a $200 Maaco paint job.
With all the hype, it will be difficult to stay away from this awful film, but hopefully you can.
– Wait for HBO release
Disturbia (PG-13)
Run, don’t walk to the nearest theater to see Disturbia, the latest thriller starring a bunch of newcomers and David Morse as the bad guy neighbor.
This movie strikes the voyeuristic side of all of us. Oh, sure, there have been more than a few of these types of movies, but this film, directed by D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives), will more than hold its own against the rest. Call it a modern update on the genre.
Here a young man under house arrest has a lot of time on his hands, so he ends up neighbor watching to pass the time. When a sexy young girl moves in next door, things immediately get better for him.
Until another neighbor comes into focus.
The movie starts out with a bang and never lets up. This is definitely a theater movie. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in a theater full of screaming folks when watching The Descent, but that was nothing compared to the audience reaction from this top-notch thriller.
– See it on The Big Screen
Grindhouse (R)
Grindhouse takes us back to the days when the theaters (drive-ins mostly in my suburban neck of the woods) would show double or triple features of relatively badly directed, and even worse acted, films. We’re talking the ‘60s and ‘70s here, folks. “B” movies, as they were called, were OK with us. Especially when you were male, young, and looking for lots of action sequences and T&A. Since the VCR wasn’t yet available, T&A shots were found on the silver screen.
The 3 hr. 20 min. Grindhouse has surprise cameos and a big star in Kurt Russell, but he’s in the dud of this double feature. But Kurt’s not the problem. More on that in a minute.
After a few fake trailers for upcoming films, director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) starts this double feature off with Planet Terror. A military gas is released causing all exposed people to become flesh-eating zombies. Sounds like a retread of too many other films, but Rodriguez hits his stride here and shows everyone he’s the real deal.
With his mix of exotic women, funny zingers, over-the-top special effects, and damaged film stock, you can almost smell the dusty gravel under your tires while sitting in the 1973 drive-in theater of your past. Fighting zombies never felt this fun.
The audience loved it.
Next, there is a fake intermission with fake coming attractions for fake movies that won’t be made. Here’s your cue to get up and leave. Take my word for it (you’ll thank me later). You didn’t pay double the movie price, and you’ve already seen a full-length movie, so you’re even. Save yourself the (wasted) time.
Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed the second movie of this double feature, Death Proof. There was a lot of dialogue in Pulp Fiction. But that film was amusing because the actors delivering the lines were polished professionals and they were able to keep the intended audience interested. Here, the utterly unknown actresses are not so finely polished, and the dialogue goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on…
Tarantino has proved himself to be quite a wordsmith. We all get it. Here he exposes his War and Peace agenda, and we just want no part of it. By the time he gets to the car chases, we’re already bored to death with Death Proof.
The two car chase scenes (separated at length by talking and chatting, talking and chatting, talking and chatting, talking and chatting) are amazing, loud, crazy and intense. But the pain you’ll endure listening to these foul-mouthed gals babble and banter endlessly will make you want to… press the Fast Forward button.
And that, my friends, is exactly what you should do.
This is not 1973. So go ahead and see the first half of Grindhouse, in all its glory on the big screen. Then leave at the fake intermission and rent the movie a few months from now so you can fast forward to the action sequences where Kurt Russell is driving “the car.”
– See it on The Big Screen (At least the first half)
The Lookout (R)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Chris Pratt, a star high school hockey player who suffers brain damage during a nighttime car accident. Because of his disability, he’s relegated to life as a janitor at the local bank in rural Kansas. Before we know it, he’s involved in the bank heist of that very same bank.
Other than the fact that Kansas seems an odd place for a high school hockey player story (our family lived in Kansas for six years and never once heard mention of the sport until we moved to Massachusetts), the story is both well conceived and well acted.
The opening of the movie shows Chris taking his pretty high school sweetheart and another couple on a midnight drive in his Mustang convertible. He turns off the headlights to give them the best view as they speed through the magical swarming fireflies. Impressive as it is, the passengers soon want Chris to turn the headlights back on. Though the Midwest empty highways are straight as arrows for what seems endless stretches of miles, they fear he’ll veer off the road.
Chris waits too long to turn the lights on, and the inevitable life-changing crash (for all of them) happens.
Chris goes into a coma – then wakes up – with brain damage.
We see the life that Chris leads, along with his blind roommate, played by Jeff Daniels. Both get by as well as can be with their limitations. But because of his affiliation with the bank, Chris falls prey to the lure of sex, villains and a bank heist. The sexual bait is played by Isla Fisher (the kooky, rich, redhead chick in Wedding Crashers). She certainly shows her acting range in this non-comedy.
The movie is tense, the characters complicated, and the whole thing believable. For folks that consider themselves “people watchers,” this film is right up their alley.
The Lookout would hardly be touted as a blockbuster “Big Screen” movie, but you won’t be disappointed if you go. At the very least, it will make a great weekend rental.
– Wait for DVD