DVD Review: Get Low

A cast of legends can’t get Oscar-winning director’s dark comedy off the ground.

As we’ve said before, Robert Duvall has played the eccentric, misunderstood loner so many times now that his screen persona has become virtually synonymous with the performance. Defining a character as a “Robert Duvall” type will in the years to come likely provide an efficient verbal shorthand for such parts, at the same time providing a benchmark against which similar performances can be measured. In the same way no one played an angsty teen like James Dean or a swaggering badass like Lee Marvin, no one plays a wily old coot like Duvall.

Get Low, the feature debut for Oscar-winning short film Aaron Schneider, lets Duvall go through the motions of his trademark performance yet again, cementing a based-on-true story about a 1930′s-era Tennessee mountain man’s odd final chance at redemption. It also features Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and prolific character actor Bill Cobb in parts they too could play standing on one leg. The film sinks, however, beneath arrhythmic direction from Schneider and an undercooked script by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell. Despite its veteran cast and wooly, lived-in production design, ultimately the film is a journeyman effort that feels unfinished and unrealized,.

Duvall plays Felix Bush, an irascible mountain man who’s kept to his own woody property for 40 years - long enough to become a local bogeyman among the nearby townsfolk; children dare each other to throw pebbles at his windows, and his infrequent visits to town offer an occasion for gossip. But Bush is getting old, and fearing his impending demise he contacts the local minister (Gerald McRaney) for help in staging a “funeral party” in which guests will share the lore he’s acquired over the long, lonely years. When the minster refuses, Bush turns to the town funeral parlor managed by Frank Quinn (Murray), a semi-hucksterish salesman fled into the hinterlands after an unhappy divorce in Chicago.

Desperate for business, Quinn agrees to Bush’s plan, even helping him orchestrate publicity for the event. When Bush announces on a radio program that he’ll raffle off his 300 acres of virgin timber woods at the party, expectations and attendance begins to snowball. Amid the ensuing hoopla Bush is reunited with old flame Mattie Darrow (Spacek), who’s returned to town after the death of her husband. There’s a spark of deferred romance between the two, and the rumpled Bush is still able to charm her until secrets of a long-buried affair come to light. Meanwhile he’s also restarted communication with a distant preacher (Cobb) who’s aware of his shameful past but reluctant all the same to grant him the absolution he more or less demands.

They mystery of that affair drives the script towards its climax, when Bush finally comes clean with the assembled townsfolk about the fateful night that drove him into seclusion. Interestingly, and not completely successfully, the revelations are presented not as narrative flashback but as a long, rambling address by Bush to the crowd. Duvall is a master actor, of course, able to command attention simply by opening his mouth. But as presented the revelations feel anticlimactic, and too familiar to gather much shock value or depth of tragedy. For as well as Duvall carries his character’s secrets, the secrets themselves are strangely inert, and rote.

Schneider won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2004, for adopting the William Faulkner short story “Two Soldiers.” Get Low, with its hinterlands setting and impoverished atmosphere ripe with secret passions and desperation, is by its nature and scope Faulknerian to the point of derivation. But the film stops short of dwelling on the psychological darkness that motivated so many Faulkner characters – good and evil alike – in favor of a redemptive ending that falls flat for that exact lack of character depth. Bush confesses and everything more or less falls into place, and everyone gets what they want.

There also sometimes doesn’t seem to be enough story to stretch the plot through to its 103 minute runtime. Scenes drag on, and plot elements are introduced but not fleshed out or followed through. The funeral home is burglarized, but the thief is never revealed; Bush’s confrontation with a local bully implies forthcoming retribution that doesn’t materialize. Of the principal characters, Quinn’s assistant Buddy (Lucas Black) has lots of screen time but his importance to the events remains opaque.

Of all the performances, it’s only a slight surprise to find Murray doing the best work, investing yet another sad sack with subtle gestures of compassion, anxiety, and fear. Quinn is a lifelong salesman, not proud of his work but not ashamed of it, either, and Murray seems at home in that sliver of acute self-awareness (Small wonder. After a decade of superb dramatic work he’s still largely known for comedies he made twenty-five years ago.) As we used to say about Jeff Bridges, that Murray doesn’t have an Oscar yet is a more damning comment about the Oscars than it is about Bill Murray. Duvall, Cobb, and Spacek are handsome and comfortable in handsome and comfortable roles, and Black is workmanlike.

Ultimately, Get Low is a modest film. Modestly budgeted, with modest aims and modest accomplishments, it’s entertaining enough and not too much of a disappointment to feel as if you’ve wasted your time. Its cast and crew didn’t waste time making it, either, and Schneider could yet prove himself a director to watch. For the film to be better, with the exception of Murray everyone might have set their sights a little higher.

- Michael Kabel

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70′s Crime Cinema: The French Connection

William Friedkin’s gritty masterpiece defined cop movies for a more cynical era.

The obsessive, street-hardened detectives on a collision course with a charming, elegant villain. The friction between local police and their arrogant, meddling federal colleagues. The urban decay that whittles morality down to killer instinct. 1971′s The French Connection might not have invented all the tropes that have since become the vocabulary of police procedural movies and television, but it brought them all together and made telling a cop story any other way seem like bullshit. The film was a game changer, much like Citizen Kane was for the biography and Blade Runner was for science fiction. And like those other classics it’s sometimes tricky to watch the film now without letting its legions of derivatives distract from its gripping audacity.

Based on real-life events and constructed with meticulous attention to realistic detail by director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), The French Connection was adapted in part from Robin Moore’s book of the same name but drew additional technical advice from the main characters’ real-life counterparts, who also played supporting roles in the film. The story’s premise is brutally simple: two NYPD narcotics detectives, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, stumble upon word of a major drug influx while staking out a low-level wiseguy (Tony Lo Bianco). Sensing something big, the detectives resolve to stop the importation no matter how much extra work that entails.

The two are nobody’s idea of white knights: Doyle especially drinks too much, bullies women and minorities, and smacks around suspects and informants with an almost palpable glee. Russo, quieter and more methodical, abets Doyle’s rampages through intelligence gathering and measured consideration. They want wire taps to pursue the investigation, but the mistakes of Doyle’s past make the necessary clearance harder to obtain from their captain (Eddie Egan, the real-life Doyle). Russo gets the court orders but also the hostile assistance of two federal agents (legendary stuntman Bill Hickman and Sonny Grosso, the real-life Russo) who want the case for themselves.

Meanwhile the drugs, about $35 million worth of grade-A heroin, arrive in  the city hidden within the car of a French television personality, placed there by Marseilles shipping magnate Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) and his enforcer Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi). Upon their arrival in New York, Charnier and Nicoli find themselves under surveillance by Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents. But Doyle especially finds himself outmatched in short order by the suave Charnier, who smugly dismisses Doyle’s tail by outwitting him on a subway platform.

The film is distinguished throughout by its lack of explanation. There are no moments of clarification in the Captain’s office, no recanting of the details so that the audience can vicariously refresh their awareness of plot points. Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman build an undertow into the film’s momentum, so that the viewer is pulled into and then along for the events as they happen in furious succession. Frankly, that speed does the movie a service, because careful or dogged examination will reveal any number of plot holes and gaps in logic that will likely annoy the very left-brained among its audience. But the filmmakers meant to engage the senses, not the mind, and in that sense the fluid plot works like a Swiss watch.

The centerpiece of the film, of course, comes in the legendary car-vs.-subway chase, in which Doyle madly attempts to overtake Nicoli’s hijacked train car on its overhead track. It’s here that the detective’s relentless drive gets stripped bare of job or duty and the obsessiveness beneath its surface grows exposed. What’s amazing, and what future derivatives would cheat, is the realism of the chase. The traffic lights don’t turn themselves off, and the streets don’t empty of pedestrians. The entire sequence took weeks to shoot over several locations, and included all manner of clever lens techniques and editing sleight of hand.

Make no mistake: Friedkin, Hickman and their crew accomplished all that without a single pixel of CGI.

The film’s third act relates the taking apart and reconstruction of the drug-laden car and the eventual bust of the New York criminals as the sale is concluded. Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents corral the criminals inside a trash-collecting facility on a tiny island outside the city (New York in miniature, really), precipitating a bloody shootout that moves Doyle’s character completely over the edge of morality. The tortuously ambivalent ending denies the viewer any real satisfaction, followed by postscripts that play out almost tauntingly rote. The film doesn’t end so much as it ceases to share information with the viewer.

But like the tonally similar Bullitt three years previous (the films share a producer in Philip D’Antoni) that sense of lacking resolution captured the decade’s mood of weary cynicism. There are no easy answers and no one heads home satisfied or even vindicated, if they get to go home at all. Though Doyle and Charnier would have their reckoning in a largely forgotten sequel released four years later, the ambiguity of this film keeps its point separate and inviolate. In displaying Doyle and Russo’s brutality, The French Connection along with Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (released the same year) began to craft what would soon be known as the anti-hero, and their success opened a floodgate of tough-guy performances good and bad that have continued ever since. Though modern actors like Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and many others have made a career out of such parts, in 1971 they were a new film species as different from their more heroic predecessors as those characters were of the Keystone Kops a generation before them. They were heroes of their time, for better but especially for worse.

And while future marketing wizards would label their approach to the world as “in your face” attitude, nevertheless there’s something more slippery at play in Hackman and Sheider’s performances. It would seem somewhat stupid, in retrospect, if cinema came out of the 1960s with the same perspective it had before that decade’s upheaval. By building protagonists out of flawed men, Friedkin, Tidyman, Hackman and Sheider were moving closer to true realism by accepting the world everyone was handed and then willfully grounding their performances and their entire films inside it. “Realistic” has since become an empty phrase in describing fiction, but forty years ago it was a goal to chase.

In our next installment we’ll look at The French Connection‘s creative and spiritual true successor, a great movie that’s grown  lost in its predecessor’s long, dark shadow.

-Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Due Date

Robert Downey, Jr. and Zack Galifianakis in a road comedy that never gets up to speed.

Mismatched-buddy comedies are a long and vaunted tradition in Hollywood, dating at least as far back as the Abbott & Costello/Laurel & Hardy films of the 1940s and continuing most notably, at least to Gen-X audiences, with John Hughes’ 1987 Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Director Todd Phillips’ follow-up to The Hangover borrows the structure of that beloved Steve Martin – John Candy effort, teaming an uptight professional with an easygoing, misunderstood slob on a cross-country trek with a clearly defined deadline involving the straight man’s family.

Comparisons between the two films are unavoidable, and that’s bad news for Due Date, which relies too much on co-star Zach Galifianakis’ weirdo schtick without building enough jokes around it to lend the story any comic vitality. Robert Downey, Jr., continuing his streak of always playing the smartest guy in any given room, lends his acerbic poise perhaps too much, inadvertently weighing the already-dark script with too much straightman snark. That’s not to say there aren’t occasional funny moments, but like highway rest stops they always seem too far apart when you need them and perpetually available when you don’t.

Architect Peter Highman (Downey, Jr.) is desperate to return to Los Angeles from a business trip to Atlanta before his wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) gives birth to their first child. But a preflight mixup with wannabe actor Ethan Tremblay (Galifianakis) gets them both kicked off the flight and placed on a no-fly list. Highman somewhat incredibly leaves his wallet on the plane; while attempting to steal a rental car from the airport lot he’s reunited with Tremblay, who offers to drive him to Los Angeles by way of apology.

A whirl of fuzz in layers of 1990s-era fashions and a delicate hair perm, Tremblay is a gentle if self-sabotaging soul, the owner of a Two and a Half Men fansite who admits to once running himself over with a car and pronounces Shakespeare as “Shakesbeard.” But he’s also grieving for a recently diseased father whose ashes he carries in a can of coffee grounds, seeking closure but putting off several opportunities to get it. Conversely, Highman is all white-collar privilege and suburban entitlement. You can imagine him readily enjoying the same amenities as George Clooney’s similar road warrior from Up In The Air while sneering at the slobs flying business class.

The two are severely underqualified to attempt a 3000 mile drive separately, let alone together, and the interpersonal friction as they reach strange locations ought to propel the comic give-and-take. Yet the script from former King of the Hill writers Alan R. Cohen and Adam Freedland (with additional work by Adam Sztykiel from Phillip’s story) doesn’t have the duo go very many places, with the ensuing result that the story… doesn’t really go any place. Instead, the stops they make are long, protracted, and disjointed: a trip to a vendor of “medical” marijuana in Alabama; a Western Union branch in Louisiana; incredibly again, the Mexican border and the Grand Canyon. Despite the time-table crucial to the plot, there’s seldom any sense of urgency, despite Highman’s frequent, panicked calls home.

One of Planes, Trains and Automobiles‘ most endearing – and enduring – virtues rested in the commonality of its situations: Martin’s yuppie snob and Candy’s blue-collar lummox negotiated the impersonal, indifferent hurdles of cross-country travel over a grueling three-day odyssey, facing soulless hotel rooms, numbingly incompetent customer service, and many, many other small setbacks that seemed incomprehensible in their banality. But where that film mined the everyday, the shock value of Phillps et al.’s script explores only the less ordinary, and frequently for shock value: Highman is busted for drugs at the Mexican border; Tremblay forgets his own name as the two try to receive a wire transfer; Tremblay’s dog masturbates alongside his owner.

Stalling things even further is a wasted, unnecessary subplot involving Highman’s college friend (Jamie Foxx) and the possibility that he’s actually the father of Sarah’s child. It’s an unexplored, inert distraction from the rest of the story, and the payoff at film’s end is mostly flat as a result. An earlier gag involving a crippled war veteran (Danny McBride) beating Highman with a club for his arrogance is almost painful to watch; meant to be outre, it’s just mean-spirited to both characters. Finally, a late revelation from Tremblay will seem to anyone who’s seen The Hangover as too derivative by half of another plot twist also involving Galifianakis’ character in that film.

Ultimately, Due Date is an unfunny comedy that’s possibly more rewarding on home video than in the theatre, and maybe then only for devoted fans of its several stars. But in one sense it doesn’t matter: the director and performers will make better films, many of which will likely look just as good within their previews, too. (Due Date is the epitome of a film whose best moments appear in its ads.) By the time these things happen we’ll have forgotten all about this misfire. Honestly, we’ve already started.

- Michael Kabel

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70′s Crime Cinema: Bullitt

Celebrating some of the great crime films of the decade known for moral ambivalence.

American cinema experienced a golden age in the 1970s, and no genre had more of a rebirth than the crime thriller. Films such as The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, the Dirty Harry series, and The Conversation (among many others) gave a new voice to the structure and narrative of the typical cops-and-robbers saga, which spent much of the 1950s and 60s languishing beneath a pontificating morality. Reflecting the uncertainty of the era, the new crime films boasted ethically ambivalent protagonists who often brandished the same ruthlessness as their opponents. The films were an idea whose time had come, and their brooding relativism would inform not only other crime movies but also the science fiction and Western genres throughout the 1980s and 90s.

But as proof that time hates a calendar, the new breed began two years ahead of their decade with the 1968 release of Peter Yates’ Bullitt. The taut, engrossing story (based on the novel by Robert L. Fish) centered on titular loose cannon Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), a San Francisco police detective charged with protecting a mob witness until a district attorney (Robert Vaughn) can bring him to trial. When Bullitt’s assistants fail to guard the witness from mob hitmen, it falls to him to uncover the wide-ranging conspiracy behind the attack.

As a character Bullitt is archetypal of the 70s crime cinema anti-hero: noncomformist even among other cops but especially with respect to his superiors, he’s what in today’s jargon would be considered a “rogue.” Ignoring the district attorney and a writ served against him, he enlists his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) into the investigation, which soon reveals that the witness Bullitt’s men guarded was not actually a mob witness at all but someone else entirely.

The two are not quite Nick and Nora Charles: horrified by the scene of a dead body, Cathy attacks Bullitt with recognition of his world. “You live in a sewer, Frank!” she screams. (Her dread represents another new archetype that screenwriters have used to soften their cop characters edges ever since: the everywoman love interest, in turns nurturing and supportive yet terrified by the main character’s reality.) Despite her revulsion, Bullitt has to stop the true mob turncoat from escaping the country that same day.

The centerpiece of the film is the gripping 11-minute car chase through the San Francisco streets, a set piece that proved so popular with audiences that dozens of imitator films would make its use cliché by the end of the 70s. Yates (Breaking Away) shot the sequence on location, keeping the action not on deserted streets but rather on crowded avenues and through intersections, narrowing the viewer’s perspective while raising the tension.

Small wonder that the film proved a boon to the Ford Motor Company, whose 390 CID V8 Mustang essentially enjoyed a co-starring role as Bullitt’s vehicle of choice.

Other smaller details almost seemed aggressive in promoting a new image of masculine cool: Bullitt’s all-black wardrobe, his sleek underarm shoulder holsters (inspired by legendary SFPD Inspector David Toschi, who served as technical adviser on the film), and the aforementioned anti-authoritarian attitude all resonated with audiences grown bored with the straight-arrow lawmen that had populated crime movies and television since the heyday of Dragnet in the 1950s.

Similarly, Bullitt and Cathy enjoy a very modern relationship: highly sexualized but with little sense of real commitment. They each have their own careers (she’s an architect) but their lives intersect easily and without strain. Watching the film now, it’s easy and even tempting to misunderstand their dynamic as bullying or one-sided. But Bullitt only pulls Cathy into his world when he has no alternative, implying a protectiveness and trust towards her that stays powerful by remaining unspoken. The film ends with him staring at himself in a mirror while she sleeps in the next room, possibly reasserting his dedication to self-reliance in the future.

- Michael Kabel

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(We’ll be republishing more of our 70s Crime Cinema series of articles in the coming weeks.)

DVD Review: Red

Bruce Willis leads a great cast into an espionage comedy-adventure that’s often too much for just one film.

“It’s not the years,” Indiana Jones famously observed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “it’s the mileage.” When that film was released in 1981, the graying stars of the uneven, intermittently entertaining Red had perhaps the best days of their careers still ahead of them. Jump forward three decades, and the central conceit of the movie is that its trio of leading men, with an assist from British perennial Helen Mirren, can still shoot-em-up with the best of them. Though not a career highlight for anyone involved, the film’s sense of carefree, still-got-it fun holds out more often than not, even if director Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife) sometimes struggles to maintain a pace that keeps things vibrant.

Bruce Willis, who could teach a doctoral course in conveying stoic weariness, plays Frank Moses, a one-time CIA black ops super-agent since retired to a bland life outside Cleveland  (“Red,” we learn later, stands for “Retired – Extremely Dangerous.”) With plenty of time on his hands and not much to do except discipline himself not to reminisce about the good old days, Moses passes the time romancing Social Security agent Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker) via telephone. Starved for conversation material, he tears up his monthly checks as an excuse to talk to her.

The two have a halting, gentle flirtation until Moses’ house is attacked in the dead of night by a team of gun-happy commandos. Several thousand spent bullet casings later, Moses kidnaps Ross from her Kansas City apartment and takes her to New Orleans, to recruit fellow retired agent Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman.) Weary thanks to end-stage liver cancer but spry enough to ogle the nurses in his palatial retirement home, Matheson stays behind while Moses and Ross head to Florida to find Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), another agent who’s been driven the paranoid, wacky kind of crazy thanks to years of daily LSD ingestion.

Hounding their trail are a CIA operative (Karl Urban) with most if not all of Moses’ asskicking chops and his conniving supervisor (Rebecca Pidgeon), as well as an endless stream of body-armored gunmen. The pitch and momentum of the film heat up once Malkovich joins the plot, as his convincing lunacy allows some of the sleek, well-staged violence to assume a goofy tenor. The connect the dots structure of the second act serves largely to send the gang on a mission to kill the U.S. Vice President (Julian McMahon), after discovering he committed war crimes in the Nicaraguan jungle in the 1980s. Along the way they recruit a British ex-agent and her Russian paramour (the always welcome Brian Cox) to help shoot people and blow things up, and vice versa.

The film’s biggest struggle comes not from want of material but from a sometimes debilitating  embarrassment of riches. Willis, Freeman, and Malkovich are all commanding screen presences, and adding habitual scene-stealers like Urban and Cox and oversized personalities such as Dreyfuss (playing a smug political insider) and Mirren to the story only further blurs the center of audience attention. At the same time the action sequences are plentiful and well-done, and even sometimes manage to give off sparks of imagination and genuine energy.

Still, the problems arise when compressing all that star power,  action and story into a 110 minute bundle. Screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber (Whiteout) loosely adapt and expand the 2003 comic series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, adding a post-Bush Era spin to its villains while retaining the basic concept of retired spies on the hunt again. But with so much to juggle, the actual story – the what’s happening now, sustaining interest story – loses coherence as everyone moves from one action set piece to the next. If the film were longer – and yes, it’s strange to wish an action film were longer - maybe everything would better balance out.

The film also provides some gorgeous location photography of New Orleans.

The cast, all of them, are relaxed and elegant in their performances, bringing just the right amount of suspense or levity to any given scene. Willis and Louise-Parker have a charming chemistry that’s not dependent on making bedroom eyes at one another (“I was hoping you’d have hair,” she tells him, “so it looks like none of our dreams are coming true at the moment.”) Mirren seems to have the most fun, making her British killer alternately pixie-like and lethal, while Cox’s camping as the gallant ex-Soviet torpedo steals entire scenes; their sexagenarian chemistry even manages to be erotic without becoming tacky.

Urban has probably the hardest job, as a virtuous bad guy who has to seem a match for the older veterans. As a character actor Urban is one of those performers who never seems to get his due, but improves everything in which he participates: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Bourne Supremacy, Star Trek, among others. He’s long overdue for a higher caliber of fame, his starring roles in B-movie sludge like Doom and Pathfinder notwithstanding.

Too much movie with too much story and too many characters, Red of course leaves room for a sequel – in fact, all but telegraphs it with a goofy epilogue that almost undercuts its accumulated good will. But the film works more often than not, entertaining in its own way and getting out of its own way whenever it gets into trouble. It could be more, it’s too much for its own good and sometimes it’s not enough. Ultimately, most of the time it’s good enough.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Mechanic

Statham and Foster spin their wheels in the remake of a Seventies crime genre favorite.

A decade ago, around the time of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake, someone involved with the film (maybe the director himself) said you can more easily remake a mediocre film than you can a well-made one. It’s a good theory: presumably the audience is more forgiving of mistakes made in the retrofitting of the story material, and at the same time possibly more eager to embrace improvements. American culture is proudly all about the upgrade, and for better or worse consumers are predisposed by tradition to equate the new with the improved, whether the connection is true or not.

The target audience of director Simon West’s The Mechanic, a thunderous and messy remake of the little but fondly remembered 1972 Charles Bronson actioner of the same name, won’t give a shit if the film improves or denigrates its predecessor. Why should they? Within the narrow scope of shoot-em-up action films it’s neither remarkable nor terrible, and largely indistinguishable from star Jason Statham’s franchise of Transporter adventures. If you like those films, here’s more of the same.

Statham takes over Bronson’s role as Arthur Bishop, a contract hitman employed by an international company that contracts assassinations, murders, and vengeance killings to its stable of operatives. The organization permits no lapses in judgment or mistakes in assignments, giving their hitmen specific directives. As Bishop explains, some killings need to be staged to resemble accidents and some need to send a clear message; both kinds seem to require meticulous planning and preparation, including the opening set piece execution of a vaguely defined South American millionaire. Bishop kills the man under in his tightly guarded mansion and then stages an unnecessarily elaborate escape.

Returning to his New Orleans base of operations, he meets with his mentor and friend McKenna (Donald Sutherland) but shortly thereafter learns the company has marked the older man for termination. A company executive (Tony Goldwyn) tells Bishop that McKenna sold information about a mission, resulting in the deaths of several operatives. Bishop reluctantly agrees to execute McKenna himself, carrying out the hit but staging the event to look like a carjacking.

Mulling over his guilt, Bishop is reunited with McKenna’s estranged son Stephen (Ben Foster), a ‘neer-do-well with a bad temper and, thanks to his father’s death, an aimless well of rage. Bishop stops Stephen from executing a small time criminal and agrees to train him as an assassin, a regimen that includes buying a chihuahua and loafing around an Uptown coffee shop.

The revelation of those instructions’ hidden purpose, along with the final triple-cross conclusion, offer the only true – if moderate – surprises of the film. The rest is go-through-the-motions shoot-em-up, albeit motions handsomely and engagingly staged by West and his stunt team. Statham has done this enough now to make it look easy, and the gunfights have a kinetic brutality to them that’s reminiscent – most likely deliberately so – of the early films of John Woo.

Wikipedia tells us the critics reviewing the 1972 version noted both the “father-son” rivalry between Bishop and Stephen and also a “latent homosexual bond.” West and this latest version don’t bother with infusing the 2011 version with a murky subtext. The script lets the two men keep their thoughts to themselves tough-guy style; even when Stephen willfully disobeys instructions Bishop is slow to criticize, and their final confrontation outside a gas station is played with a minimum of pathos. It’s a lucky thing Statham and Foster have the laconic acting tradition to fall back upon – watching them open up might prove embarrassing.

As for the performances as they are, as noted above Statham is by now an old hand at this. Foster, though improved since his dreadful performance in 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma, doesn’t often do more than smirk or act cocky when on-camera. His mugging, meant to telegraph detached, contemptuous cool, comes off as bratty next to Statham’s reserved-to-the-point- of-boredom swagger. Swedish actress Mini Anden gets the only substantive female part, playing Bishop’s prostitute love interest; their sex scene early in the film is a textbook example of “gratuitous nudity.” (I’m guessing her character is a prostitute, though she sometimes acts like a girlfriend; Bishop gives her money and she doesn’t know his name.)

After two weeks the film has enjoyed only middling box office, though to be fair the planet’s biggest football game did keep that aforementioned target audience home its second weekend of release. Statham will certainly make more action movies, and Foster seems a durable screen presence already. The Mechanic isn’t a bad film: it’s not a disappointment or travesty to the original, and it’s not a good film or improvement either. It’s just in the middle all the way around, until the last five minutes when things get very hairy and very unpredictable all at once. Once the film appears on DVD, skip to the best part and watch those first.

- Michael Kabel

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Noir Cinema: The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, City of Fear

Concluding our reviews of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics Volume II collection.

With Warner Brothers’ once-mighty film noir compilations nearing the end of their quality barrel and Fox’s library of single-servings discs seemingly DOA, Columbia Pictures’ recent box set releases have a good claim on sitting atop a genre market that, despite the flood of product available, is nowhere near exhausting itself. It’s been fairly said elsewhere that the studio waited a long while before getting into the back-catalog noir marketplace, yet the second half (or so) of this second volume – we reviewed the first two films a couple of weeks ago – offers some rare and unexpected treats for the noir fan, with only one comparatively weak film in the bunch.

Adapted from Georges Simenon’s bleak novel and arriving pretty close to the end of the classical noir era (and perhaps creaking a bit under the weight of the genre’s advancing years), director Phil Karlson’s The Brothers Rico (1957) nevertheless features one of the genre’s great leading men, Richard Conte, in a storyline that sometimes plays like a coda to both the gangster films of the 1930s as well as the more classical noir cycles of the 40s. It’s overly simplistic and chronologically inaccurate to say it’s a “last call film noir,” but it’s hard not to see it as such while you’re watching.

When his wiseguy brother (Paul Picerni) begs him to find the younger sibling (James Darren) who’s disappeared after driving the getaway vehicle on a contract killing, former mob accountant Eddie Rico (Conte, older than his 1940s heyday but no less commanding as a leading man) gets badgered by his former capo (Larry Gates) to bring the brother back into the fold “for his own good.” Despite a legitimate business and a wife (Dianne Foster) hoping to adopt a child (an odd subplot, especially for the mid-50s) Eddie travels first to New York and then out West on his brother’s trail, uncovering a snarling tangle of duplicity and treachery within the same organization that used to command his loyalty.

Perhaps that sense of changing times fuels the sense of finality to much of the plot – the gangs and fraternal mobs that the Rico brothers grew up within have mutated in the sunshine of 1950s wealth (the film is largely shot in sparkling, sun-drenched Florida towns) into impersonal, ruthless “organizations” with little sense of personal worth or individual dignity. The screenplay’s ‘s sharp contrast between the amiable malice of the organization’s underlings and the Old World emotionality of the Rico brothers’ mother (Argentina Brunetti) drive such comparisons home, as does Conte’s turn as a man slowly realizing the integrity and honor he believed in for much of his life has come to nothing.

Karlson and screenwriters Lewis Meltzer, Ben Perry and Dalton Trumbo do right by the Simenon’s story until a cluttered third act works too hard to shuffle all the plot threads into a happy, Americana ending. As with set companion film Human Desire, cinematographer Burnett Guffey’s composition work is engaging and  flawless, giving the syndicate scenes a flat, sterile look while investing Conte’s boyhood neighborhood and his brother’s hideaway homestead with depth and texture.

Guffey also worked on Nightfall, teaming with director Jacques Tourneur; for the lay audience, Tourneur directed Out of the Past, the 1947 Robert Mitchum thriller that’s become both paragon and poster child for the genre as a whole. The teaming of the two, and with a screenplay from Sterling Silliphant (In The Heat of the Night) adapting George Goodis’ novel, ought to be a better film than it is, even if determining why it’s not seldom proves especially difficult.

Aldo Ray plays James Vanning, a commercial artist from Chicago who stumbles across two stranded bank thieves (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) while camping in Wyoming with a friend. The thieves kill the friend and leave Vanning unconscious, but a simple twist leaves Vanning with their stolen $350,000. Fleeing to Los Angeles because he suspects he’ll be accused of the murder – the friend’s young wife was making a play for him – Vanning tries to lay low but is soon discovered by a curious insurance investigator working for the bank (James Gregory). He also starts reluctantly, irresistibly pursuing a fashion model (Anne Bancroft) with whom he crosses paths.

Keith and Bond are fantastic as the ruthless, persistent thugs dogging Ray’s every step, and an early interrogation scene at a darkened oil derrick provides the kind of shadowy brutality that will leave noir fans drooling. Keith is sharp as the methodical brains of the two, but Bond brings such sadistic glee to his part that his every movement is chilling:

If only the protagonists were so exciting. Ray was seldom accused of grace or fluidity in his acting, and as the straight-arrow Vanning he’s believable but stolid, though the script sometimes gives him enough edge to allow for desperate outbursts of violence and fear. Bancroft is less compelling as the good girl who falls into Vanning’s orbit and never quite comes out. The film stalls whenever their romance revs up, including a mid-film fashion show that’s as prolonged as it is unnecessary. Gregory’s insurance investigator is no Jim Reardon of The Killers, and most of his scenes – except for a dull domestic interlude with his wife – serve merely to move the plot forward.

Ultimately, all those side elements ballast the film from getting either dark enough or violent enough to really work on its own, with the promised retribution and vengeance taking a last-minute back seat to the extraneous plot motions. Nevertheless Guffey excels at framing both the city and the Wyoming countryside (at times matching or even exceeding George E. Diskant’s glorious rural noir photography of On Dangerous Ground), and Tourneur’s agile manipulation of the flashback-heavy narrative keeps the story crisply suspenseful.

Cool poster, though.

If Nightfall‘s greatest sin is a surplus of its story elements, 1959′s City of Fear labors under a paucity of details. Starved for plot despite a head-swimmingly weird – and incredible – premise and padded out to even its 81 minute runtime, it sometimes succeeds when sticking strictly to the noir playbook. Other times it’s not so competent, with too many stalls and doldrums to allow any real momentum to build under its meager machinery.

Vince Edwards, a little while yet before becoming television’s Ben Casey, stars as an escaped convict racing to L.A. with a canister of what he believes is pure-grade heroin. He plans to cut the dope up and sell it, the better to live in luxury with his sexpot girlfriend (Lee Remick lookalike Patricia Blair), with help from his former boss at a ladies’ shoe boutique (Joseph Mell). But the white powder in the canister isn’t heroin, it’s… well, best to let the film explain:

If you can accept that the government allowed San Quentin inmates anywhere near “the most deadly thing in existence,” you’ll enjoy the film so much more.

The manhunt for Edward’s crazed, ailing Vince Ryker forms the film’s second and third acts, which too often include long, establishing takes that allow suspense or tension to fizzle. Director Irving Lerner often seems at a loss for where to point the camera, and given the obvious small-scale budget that’s somewhat understandable. But given the outrageous premise, the building of desperation – 84 hours to save every man, woman, and child! – seems to deserve more ratcheting.

Regarding the performances, Edwards and Blair are comely in that uniquely 50s American sort of way, sexy without every really becoming carnal, and Mell is ferret-like in his turn as the scheming Crown. And though most of the film’s law enforcement types seem sent directly from central casting, trash film cinemaphiles will recognize Lyle Talbot, co-star of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda?, as Police Chief Thorsen. City of Fear isn’t quite on those film’s humble level, and it’s obviously not meant to be great cinema, either. But when matched with the other films in the compilation, its great sin lies in showing its poverty among such proud company.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Cinema: Save The Tiger

Jack Lemmon reigns in a character study that only gets better with age.

“Quarterbacks get knocked down, nurses get knocked up, somebody invented the Edsel. Everybody misses.” - Harry Stoner

Character-driven studies of men and women in crisis are commonplace in modern cinema, especially featuring movie stars eager to expand their acting chops and resumes with a project that might get them respect or – even better – awards. To a greater or lesser extent, modern films like Up In The Air,  American Beauty and even The Fighter all owe a debt to 1973′s Save The Tiger, the pater familias of American men-in-meltdown character pieces and probably the apex of Jack Lemmon’s formidable screen career – as well as the role that won him the Best Actor Academy Award.

Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a World War II veteran  experiencing simultaneous career and personal meltdowns as both his business and personal lives take a turn for the worse. As he explains first to his wife and then his business partner Phil (Jack Gilford), Harry feels the world has passed him by. A veteran of the World War II battle at Anzio, he feels deep survivor’s guilt that’s been complicated by years of ethical and personal compromises in his dress-making company. He expresses his guilt and nostalgia by reminiscing about the baseball of his childhood, reconstructing team lineups and explaining how pitchers wound up before throwing. In less capable hands such weariness would come across as heavy-handed and self-pitying, but Lemmon’s tightly controlled performance communicates such emotions as fatigue rather than self-indulgence.

Meanwhile Harry has some difficult decisions to make. The previous year, it seems, he and Phil performed some creative accounting to keep their business solvent. With a government audit looming, Harry considers hiring an arsonist to burn down their warehouse for the insurance money. Then, with a fashion line debut happening just downstairs, an important client has a heart attack while enjoying two prostitutes Harry arranged to visit him. Enraged at the client, the prostitutes and at himself, but reacting to the injury as if back on the Italian front, Harry nearly snaps. “This isn’t a man, it’s a casualty,” he tells Phil. Obliged to make a speech to his buyers, he visualizes the men he saw die in battle staring at him from the seats. The screen trick of putting the wounded on camera, visible only to Harry, will likely seem overly familiar to modern audiences, thanks to its legions of imitators. Director John G. Avildsen (Rocky) keeps the camera going back in forth in rhythm, making one of a series of clever camera movements that keeps the story’s momentum brisk.

Perhaps unfortunately Harry and Phil’s new line is a success, increasing the pressure to get themselves out of their financial hole. A mob shylock breezes through, offering them money the banks won’t. Harry drags Jack to consult the arsonist (Thayer David) instead, a Sydney Greenstreet-esque professional who explains what he does as a faux-documentary porno plays on the movie theater screen before them. Phil wants out, but Harry recognizes the grim necessity of the move.

“I want another season,” he explains later, to his senior tailor (William Hansen.) The rest of the film becomes increasingly loose in structure, as Harry spends the night stoned with a hitchhiker he’d met that morning. Aching and weary, he rambles a long monologue about 20th Century America while the girl (Laurie Heineman) looks on in helpless pity. “I want… to walk in that rain that never washes perfume away,” he tells her. “I wanna be in love with something. Anything. Just the idea. A dog, a cat. Anything. Just something.” The next morning, he agrees to the arsonist’s stipulations but begs to keep Phil out of the deal.

The final scene is one of those symbolic 70s endings that people discuss and argue about until the meaning becomes clearer but always up for debate. Wandering the streets, Harry finds a group of children playing baseball in a park. Given the opportunity to throw the ball, he winds up and sends it soaring into the trees behind the dugouts. “Why’d you do that, mister?”  the kids ask. “I wanted you to see it once,” Harry tells them. The children are unforgiving – “You can’t play with us!” one of them shouts – and the final image is of Harry watching the game go on from behind a fence, a short but crucial distance separating him from the world for which he aches.

- Michael Kabel

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