Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Nov 19 2014
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Movie Reviews

Older, Not Wiser

Jim Carrey & Jeff Daniels return to roles as grownup nitwits

Dumb and Dumber To

 

Dumb and Dumber To

Starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels

Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly

Rated PG-13

 

It’s dumb, all right, more stridently dumber, even, than its predecessor, which made a dynamic duo of dummies out of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels playing clueless, nitwit grownups stirring a raging sea of stupidity. Now, 20 years later, Lloyd (Carrey) and Harry (Daniels) are older, but certainly—most definitely—not wiser.

Dumb and Dumber To reunites Carrey and Daniels with the directors of the original movie, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who turned slapstick, gross-out gags, crude jokes and potty humor into a cinematic calling card in pretty much everything they went on to make, including There’s Something About Mary, Kingpin and a big-screen reboot of The Three Stooges.

When the first movie came out, in 1994, Carrey’s comedy star was already red hot, thanks to TV’s In Living Color and the hit movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Despite occasional forays into semi-serious comedy-drama, he continued to find that audiences connected with him best as a rubber-faced, loose-limbed goofball.

Daniels’ career sent him in a slightly different direction, through dozens of diverse film and TV parts and finally into his current Emmy-wining role in the TV political drama The Newsroom.

Dumb and Dumber ToTogether again here, they’re a pair of 50-something stooges on a cross-country comedy collision course—which isn’t to say that I didn’t find some of it laugh-out-loud funny. (But parents and other concerned citizens, take note: Even though it’s rated PG-13, it seems to be straining to see how far it can nose into R-rated vulgarity without actually going over the line.) There’s a cat that farts bird feathers, a little old lady in a nursing home who tricks a visitor into “feeling her up,” and a steady stream of jokes about poop, pee, boobs and butt cracks. Are you laughing yet?

Twenty years ago, the idea of a couple of adults who acted like 10-year-olds in an otherwise “normal” world seemed like the latest bit of inspired idiocy on a long entertainment timeline running all the way back to silent movies. Now, with characters who’ve aged without maturing, in a story that seems sometimes too lazy to have tried to do much of anything different from the first time around, it just looks sad. And Carrey’s character’s clueless “craziness” now seems cruel and even pathologically twisted, taking advantage and making fun of people, insensitive to everyone and everything—not just dumb, but loathsome, pathetic and truly crazy.

Dumb and Dumber To

Kathleen Turner

Carrey and Daniels are game for just about anything, throwing themselves (sometimes literally) into all sorts of physical shtick. Rob Riggle is a hoot in a dual role, one of them as a special-ops assassin with special concealment skills. Kathleen Turner sends up her “sexy” image from the ’80s. Rachel Melvin, who portrayed Chelsea Brady-Benson on TV’s Days of Our Lives, plays a young woman who causes Lloyd and Harry to set out on a trip to a convention of brainiacs—where, of course, they cause quite a stink

At one point, Lloyd is asked if Harry has Aspergers. “Probably,” Lloyd replies. “I know he doesn’t wipe very well.” If that joke makes you grin, this may be your kind of movie. If it makes you groan, well, steer clear—because there’s a lot more like that where it came from.

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Nov 14 2014
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Movie Reviews

Mind Over Matter

Eddie Redmayne is superb as physicist Stephen Hawking

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The Theory of Everything

Starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones

Directed by James Marsh

PG-13

 

You may have seen Eddie Redmayne as the young lovestruck movie production assistant who squires the famous Ms. Monroe around London in My Week With Marilyn, or as Marius, the noble rebel fighter who sings the lovely “Empty Tables at Empty Chairs” in Les Misèrables. Those were fine, standout roles, and they got him noticed.

But this role, as physicist Stephen Hawking, will likely get him an Oscar nomination.

Based on a 2007 memoir by Hawking’s ex-wife, Jane, The Theory of Everything stars Redmayne in an amazing, bravura performance as Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease—similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—at the age of 21, while working on his doctorate studies at England’s University of Cambridge in the early 1960s.

His physician delivers the news without much hope; he gloomily gives Hawking only a couple of years to live, during which time his body functions—movement, speech, breath—will slowly, inexorably shut down. Hawking wants to know about his mind.

“The brain isn’t affected,” the doctor tells him. “Your thoughts won’t change. It’s just that, eventually, no one will know what they are.”

How wrong that doctor turned out to be. Hawking, now 72, went on to become a superstar in the world of theoretical physics, writing a bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that sold 10 million copies, communicating through a speech-generating device and advancing his groundbreaking theories wrapping around time, space, black holes and the mind-bending mechanisms of quantum physics.

As Hawking, Redmayne is phenomenal, starting out as a gangly, chipper young university student, looking for “one single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe,” eventually morphing into the crumpled genius in the wheelchair who can only move one finger…and then nothing but an eyelash.

TTOE_D04_01565-01568_R_CROP1409353846British actress Felicity Jones does a fine, forthright job as Jane, the charming coed who becomes Hawking’s first wife. And although Stephen’s hard “science” doesn’t mesh with Jane’s hopeful “faith,” the movie paints a sweet, sweeping picture of their courtship, marriage and young parenthood, and of the intense devotion that Jane brought to the increasing needs of Stephen’s debilitating physical condition.

It would have been nice for the movie to dig in even a bit deeper to Jane’s side of the story, especially when she’s tugged away to stray from her years of love and sacrifice with the young church organist who becomes the family’s friend and Stephen’s caretaker (Charlie Cox). Likewise, it feels a bit glossed-over and rushed when Stephen falls for the doting nurse, Elaine, who becomes his second wife, in the mid 1990s.

But one thing that’s never less than rock-solid is Redmayne, who makes you believe every minute he’s onscreen that he is Stephen Hawking, with all his genius, wit and determination intact even as his body withers around them. He never quite nails down that one, single unifying equation that explains everything—but this one role may be everything Redmayne needs to take home the first major awards of his acting career.

—Neil Pond, Parade and American Profile Magazines

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Nov 07 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Time Warped

Matthew McConaughey stars in mind-bending deep-space yarn

INTERSTELLAR

Interstellar

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway & Michael Caine

Directed by Christopher Nolan

PG-13

Outrageously ambitious, deliriously far-out and epically geeky, director Christopher Nolan’s sprawling Interstellar is a space movie with one foot on the ground and one in the stars, a story of both humanity and the heavens, with a thumping heartbeat driving its spewing intergalactic fountain of dazzling, digitized special effects.

In this mind-bending yarn about gravity, time and the power of love, Matthew McConaughey plays a family-man space cowboy on a mission to save the Earth. As its story unfolds, sometime in the not-so-distant future, our planet’s resources have been all but exhausted; the world’s a big dust bowl. McConaughey’s character, Cooper, a former moon-exploring astronaut, is selected for a top-secret, last-ditch NASA dash across deep space to chase down a probe signal that may possibly signal a new planetary home.

Big problem: The widowed Cooper will have to leave behind his sage old dad (John Lithgow) and his two young children, teenage son Tom (Timotheè Chalamet) and spunky young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy). Even bigger problem: Once he takes off, Cooper doesn’t know how long how he’ll be gone—or if he’ll be able to return.

INTERSTELLARCooper tries to reassure Murph—he gives her an old-school wristwatch and tells her that whenever she looks at it, she can know he’ll be looking at his, too, wherever he is, up there in space, for however long, until he comes home. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

Nolan, whose other films include the Batman Dark Knight trilogy and the mind-scrambling Inception, sets off an explosion of images and ideas as the tale unfolds both “on the ground” and “out there.” We’re taken through a space “wormhole,” a shortcut expressway compressing and expanding space and time, to a watery planet prone to monstrous tidal waves, where every hour counts for seven years of Earth time, and another that’s so cold, even the clouds are solid ice. We watch as Cooper, whose own aging has been halted by the time-warp of space travel, sees video feeds of his children grown into adults (Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck)—and bitter that their father has apparently abandoned them, “decades” ago.

INTERSTELLARAnne Hathaway plays one of Cooper’s fellow explorers—a key role in more ways than one because of her connection to her NASA scientist father (Michael Caine) back on Earth, and also to someone the astronauts will meet on their journey to the outer reaches of the cosmos.

Along the way, we’re introduced to some lofty concepts: Are we alone in the universe? Is it possible to go backward and forward in time, or to make it stand still? Is love a quantifiable force? Nolan lays out a narrative path between Odysseus, Albert Einstein and Buck Rogers, then paints it with bold cinematic brushstrokes inspired by the masters—Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, John Ford.

It doesn’t always work, but man, is it ever something to see. It gets pretty trippy (and even a bit hokey) in the end, and at nearly three full hours, it’s quite a journey. And this rip-roaring Rip Van Winkle rocket tale is unlike anything else you’ve seen at the movies this year, if ever. Hang on for the ride and you may come out on the other side feeling a bit wobbly and time-warped yourself.

And afterward, you might never look at the tick-tock of your wristwatch the same way again.

—Neil Pond, Parade and American Profile Magazines

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Oct 31 2014
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Movie Reviews

Brutal Bedtime Story

Nicole Kidman’s an amnesiac damsel in distress

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Before I Go To Sleep

Starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong

Directed by Rowan Joffè

Rated R

 

“Who are you?” asks Nicole Kidman’s character, Christine, in the opening scene to the man she’s just woken up next to in the bed.

It’s not a particularly unique movie situation—a lot of characters have found themselves in hazy morning-after scenarios. But in Christine’s case, she really, truly has no idea: She has a form of amnesia that makes her wake up every day totally blank about everything that happened the day before—and every day before that.

“You store up information for a day, and when you wake up in the morning, it’s all gone,” her husband of 14 years, Ben (Colin Firth) explains to her, and to us. We also learn, through Ben, that Christine’s memory loss was due to the head trauma of a terrible automobile accident, 10 years ago.

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Christine (Nicole Kidman) wakes up each day not recognizing the man who repeatedly explains to her he’s her husband (Colin Firth).

But was it? That’s only one of the questions that soon begin to pile up in director Rowan Joffè’s adaptation of British author S.J. Watson’s bestselling psychological thriller. Why doesn’t Christine trust Ben? Why does she have flashbacks of an airport hotel room, a violent assault by a man with a scar, and a woman named Claire? Why does her psychologist, Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong), insist on seeing her without Ben’s knowledge, often in his parked car in a damp, underground garage?

Each morning, Christine receives a call from Dr. Nasch, instructing her to retrieve a digital camera from its hiding place in her closet. She watches the recording(s) she’s made on it previously, as her memories painfully, partially begin to rebuild again bit by bit every day. Suspicions mount, secrets are revealed, and things turn out to be different from what they seem—and from what Christine has been led to believe.

To say more would spoil the surprises (although probably not to anyone who’s read the book). But fans of contemporary mystery-suspense thrillers will get a kick out of following the twists and turns, and of cheering on Christine as she struggles to piece together her life from the scattered, shattered shards of her past—not to mention the even greater, bloodier struggle she faces in the movie’s final act.

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Mark Strong plays Christine’s psychologist, Dr. Naish

Kidman has become quite adept in roles that suggest a certain physical frailty and vulnerability, especially when it can be stoked into wounded fury and ferocity. She evokes the audience’s total sympathies as Christine, not only operating in a memory vacuum, starting every day from scratch, but also seemingly being manipulated by those she’s come to trust. Firth and Strong, two terrific actors, only have one brief scene and one snippet of dialogue together, but they weave the tangled, mangled web of dramatic tension from which the entire movie is suspended.

Released just as Hollywood prepares to launch a barrage of box-office fall and winter heavy hitters, Before I Go To Sleep will likely get lost in the shuffle of bigger, flashier movies. It’s a little slow to get going, it sags and drags it bit in the middle, and its heavy-handed ending seems stitched on from a hammy, leftover Nicholas Sparks project. But for anyone who wants a stylish, somewhat brutal, Brit-centric bedtime story about deception, danger and Nicole Kidman in distress, well, sleep tight!

—Neil Pond, Parade Magazine

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Oct 23 2014
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Movie Reviews

‘Wick’-ed, Dude!

Slam-bang revenge thriller puts Keanu Reeves back in action

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John Wick

Starring Keanu Reeves

Rated R

He became a star in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Speed and The Matrix. But as the years clicked by and Hollywood kept churning out newer stars, Reeves—and his best movies—came to feel more and more like relics of a bygone era.

But not anymore, as the 50-year old actor stages one of the year’s most robust comebacks in a movie that defies many of Hollywood’s most basic conventions while covering some of its most familiar ground. In the action-packed John Wick, he plays a retired assassin drawn back into the underworld, where his lethal skills once struck fear into everyone unwise—or unfortunate—enough to cross his path.

TMN_8943.NEFAfter Wick, recovering from the death of his wife, is assailed by a group of young Russian mobsters, it reawakens his dormant killer instincts. What the thugs do his adorable new puppy and his ’69 Mustang has a lot to do with it, too.

Although the revenge/assassin plotline is a very familiar one, what makes John Wick feel so refreshingly original is how directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, and writer Derek Kolsatad, handle it. Stahelski, making his directorial debut after serving as Reeve’s stunt double on all the Matrix movies, funnels all his rough-and-tumble experience into a powerful, sometimes astonishing display of artfully orchestrated, staccato violence—close-rang shooting, grappling, kickboxing, punching, biting, bashing and stabbing. (Kudos as well to cinematographer Jonathan Sela, a veteran of Law Abiding Citizen, Die Hard, Max Payne and other adrenaline-fueled flicks.) It’s an all-out action junkie’s buffet, served up with the finessed intensity of a master chef. You’d never guess the director had never been “behind” a camera before.

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Adrianne Palicki

Writer Kolstad’s story, although following a somewhat traditional trajectory, reveals some colorful original flourishes, especially the “world” of the movie: a teeming contemporary metropolis populated entirely by crooks, mobsters, hit men and those who provide them goods and services—a pulpy Sin City of hip nightclubs, elegant hotels and dens of iniquity fronting as churches, all of them stylishly, slavishly corrupt, although operating within a “code of honor.” It’s a place that the movie brings vividly, originally to life, with a supporting cast of Willem Dafoe, Alfie Allen (from Game of Thrones), Dean Winters, Ian McShane, Adrianne Palicki and Michael Nyqvist.

And Reeves—wow. For a man squarely at the mid-century mark, he’s amazingly athletic, and he absolutely “sells” every punch, blow, thud, slam, stab, wham and bam. He’s never been the most expressive of actors, but this role suits just him fine—mysterious, brooding, silent, sullen and super-cool, but capable of releasing an unstoppable torrent of deadly force in an instant.

_1JW7056.NEFAt one point, Wick is warned about continuing his spree of vengeance, one that takes him deeper into his former life with at every turn. “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond,” he’s cautioned, “you might find something reaches out to drag you back down into the depths.”

But in he goes, and it’s quite a dive. Like a lot of action movies these days, this one ends in a way that suggests another might follow. That’s OK: I’d gladly return to John Wick’s (under)world for another adventure with an actor who’s obviously so ready, rejuvenated and rarin’ to go. It was a blast!

—Neil Pond, Parade & American Profile Magazines

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Oct 16 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Tanked

Gutsy, grimy war flick drives home the horrors & haunts of combat

Brad Pitt;Shia LaBeouf;Logan Lerman;Michael Pena;Jon Bernthal

Fury

Starring Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman & Shia LeBeouf

Directed by David Ayer

Rated R

War is hell, and this gripping WWII battle drama brings you about as close to the angry, anguished flames as anyone would ever want to get.

Brad Pitt stars as Sherman tank commander “Wardaddy” Collier, leading his battle-weary crew across Germany to finish off Hitler’s forces in early 1945. Wardaddy’s tank is nicknamed “Fury,” with its name written in white paint along its barrel.

Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt is the commander of the Sherman tank nicknamed “Fury.”

Even though the war is almost over, the Nazis are desperate and determined to fight to the end, they greatly outnumber the Yanks, and their tanks are bigger, heavier and better fortified.

“Why don’t they just quit?” wonders an exhausted senior officer, who’s just learned of the slaughter of his men by a pocket of heavily fortified, entrenched Germans, who mowed them down in an open field. “Would you?” responds Wardaddy.

Indeed, the “would you?” question hangs heavy over much of the movie, as Wardaddy and his crew confront situations that force them to make instantaneous life-or-death, kill-or-be-killed decisions, and mounting atrocities become everyday occurrences. “This ain’t pretty,” explains grizzled Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal) to the tank’s newest team member, wide-eyed Norman (Logan Lerman), who’d never seen combat until assigned to Wardaddy’s command. “This is what we do.”

Lerman’s character becomes the audience’s surrogate, as we share his shock, his revulsion and his reluctance to relent to what seems like madness. We wonder how much we could see before it starts to “do” something to us. We wonder what we’d do with our finger on the trigger of a turret-mounted machine gun, if we could kill other people on sight, without question, without pausing to think about who they are, what they might be planning to do, or what’s right and what’s wrong.

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Michael Peña plays “Gordo” Garcia.

Wardaddy’s crew also includes Mexican-American “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña) and Scripture-quoting “Bible” Swan (Shia LeBeouf), who sings hymns to pass time and prods his tank mates to think if “Jesus loves Hitler.”

Writer-director David Ayer, whose other work includes Training Day and End of Watch, makes us feel every cramped, claustrophobic inch of Fury’s crowded interior space, a dreary metal dome where Wardaddy’s crew barely has room to move—or breathe, or bleed. The landscapes are all mud and muck; faces are dirty and grim; violence is intense; fear is everywhere.

We’ve seen other war movies, certainly—they’ve been a Hollywood staple for decades. But I can’t remember another movie—and certainly not another contemporary one—that’s taken such a hard, gritty, gutsy look at World War II tank warfare. There’s nothing glamorous or glorious about the battles, or the war, depicted in Fury. It’s tough, rough stuff, hard going, and—indeed—it “ain’t pretty.”

But it’s raw, it’s powerful and it sticks with you, especially in a scene when the crew rolls into a German town square, where a little bit of everything occurs. That square becomes a microcosm of war itself, and how it compresses and contorts the world, like a busted telescope with a smudged, shattered lens: life, death, love, hate, past, present, future—they’re all there, and then they’re not, gone in an instant, goodbye.

You won’t be cheering when Fury ends. But you’ll be thinking.

—Neil Pond, American Profile and Parade Magazines

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Oct 10 2014
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History, Movie Reviews, Movies

Bat Man

Dracula Untold

Misguided Dracula mash-up has few teeth, even less bite

Dracula Untold

Starring Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper & Sarah Gadon

Directed by Gary Shore

PG-13

Dracula, the world’s most famous vampire, has spread all across the pop-cultural spectrum, from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel and actor Bela Lugosi, to goofball cartoons and the inspiration for chocolate breakfast cereal. Historically, he’s been linked—at least in name—to the 15th century Romanian ruler Vlad III, “the Impaler,” whose grotesque signature touch was decorating the Balkan countryside with the writhing bodies of his enemies stuck on poles.

This misguided monster mash of a movie tries to bring the two legends together, in a tale that seems like a 90-minute episode of TV’s Game of Thrones garnished with lots of computer-generated bats.

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Luke Evans and Sarah Gadon

We meet Vlad (Luke Evans, a “days of yore” veteran of two Hobbit movies, Immortals, Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers, plus Fast and Furious 6) after his “impaling” days are over and he’s settled down as a benevolent monarch, carving out a kingdom and making peace with the neighboring Turks that were once his favorite Pinterest subjects. But when pushed again toward an unjust war, he makes a desperate deal to protect his castle, his people, his wife and his son.

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Charles Dance from TV’s ‘Game of Thrones’ places an ancient vampire.

That “deal” is the back story of how Vlad became count Dracula, and it involves an encounter in a bat-filled cave with an ancient über-vampire (Charles Dance from Game of Thrones), who offers him a “test drive” of supernatural powers—with a devil of a catch-22. If Vlad can last three days without feeding on human blood, all is well. If not, he’ll become an undead bloodsucker for eternity.

Vlad’s new powers include super-strength, super-speed, super-hearing, super-sight, and the ability to summon bats, control bats, become a swarm of bats, or un-become a swarm of bats.

One of the movie’s major misfires is trying to meld “historical” Vlad into “mythical” Dracula. It just doesn’t work—the handsome Evans makes his character seem way too nice to ever be convincing as someone who terrorizes his opponents by putting them up on pikes by the thousands. First-time director Gary Shore never finds the right tone—be it frightful, funny, funky, horrifying, shocking or sexy—that viewers would expect from a modern flick about the most neck-fetish-ed, nocturnal daddy-o of them all. The whole production looks pieced together from murky videogame graphics, cable-TV soundstage sets and leftover Lord of the Rings costumes.

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The mostly British cast also includes Dominic Cooper (from Captain America: The First Avenger), Zach McGowan (TV’s Black Sails), Sarah Gadon, and young Art Parkinson (another import from Game of Thrones). The movie ends with a couple of jarring leaps, one of them into what’s reportedly intended to be the beginning of a new modernized “monster squad” franchise based on the iconic beasties of Universal Studios, which also includes the Wolf Man, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster.

“Sometimes the world no longer needs a hero,” says Vlad. “Sometime it needs a monster.” And sometimes it needs a monster movie—hopefully one with a bit more bite than this one.

 —Neil Pond, Parade and American Profile Magazines

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Oct 03 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Gone But Not Forgotten

Best-selling novel comes to screen with creepy, cold precision

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Gone Girl

Starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike

Directed by David Fincher

 One of the most anticipated movies of the year opens with a close-up shot of Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) running the blonde hair of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) through his fingers and musing, “What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What have we done to each other?”

Those three questions set the stage for almost everything else that follows, as director David Fincher brings author Gillian Flynn’s wildly successful 2009 best-seller, a shocking mystery sizzler about one marriage’s dark descent into mayhem and madness, to the screen.

Gone Girl begins with Amy’s disappearance, on the morning of her and Nick’s fifth wedding anniversary, in what looks like a home invasion and abduction. But was it? Nick quickly becomes the prime suspect, clues begin to pile up, suspicions mount, secrets are revealed—and things start to feel like they’re not what they seem to be.

DF-05063_05054_COMP5_rgbFincher unspools the mystery with the same cool narrative precision he demonstrated in Fight Club, The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. He toggles back and forth between past and present, and presents he-said/she-said versions of Nick and Amy’s story through flashbacks and cutaways to Amy writing in her journal—which later becomes a key piece of evidence, and another strand in the plot’s tangled web.

The casting is first-rate. Affleck adeptly balances Nick’s jock-ish “homecoming king” likeability with the deep, troubling doubts that swirl around his character and his motives. Although she’s appeared in numerous other movies, this is absolutely Pike’s breakthrough; Amy is a complex, complicated character, one that you’ll remember long after the movie is over—and so will, in all likelihood, voters for next year’s Academy Awards. Tyler Perry is terrific as the big-city, top-dollar defense attorney Nick hires to take his case. TV and Broadway actress Carrie Coon brings both heat and heart to the role of Nick’s twin sister, drawn into the vortex of small-town news gone national. Neil Patrick Harris and Scoot McNairy appear as two of Amy’s old flames, both of whom may have gotten a little too close to the fire. Sela Ward and Missi Pyle play TV mavens who fan the media feeding frenzy.

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Tyler Perry is terrific as a top-dollar defense attorney.

The tone of the movie—the look, the pace and the music (by Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor) mirrors the material: Dark, creepy, ominous, unsettling, cold. If you’re one of the six million people who’ve read Flynn’s book, you’ll know where everything’s headed (mostly) before it gets there. But if you haven’t, you’ll be swept away in the masterfully crafted brew of mind-bending misdirection, outright lies, psychotic scheming, and detailed criminal procedural that will keep you guessing right up until the end.

This isn’t a snuggle-up movie by a long shot, and its bleak view of marriage—and what might be going on beneath its seemingly placid surface—won’t send date-night couples home feeling warm and fuzzy. In an early scene, Nick and his sister play an old board game from their childhood, The Game of Life, as they discuss Nick’s upcoming anniversary—which, as he’s about to discover, won’t play out quite the way he’s planned.

In Gone Girl’s game of life, there aren’t any winners, only players playing each other in a toxic, brilliantly twisted endurance match from which no one emerges unscathed.

-Neil Pond, Parade & American Profile magazines

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Oct 01 2014
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Movie Reviews, Movies

Bloody Balancing Act

Denzel Washington is avenging angel in re-do of ‘80s TV show

Denzel Washington

The Equalizer

Starring Denzel Washington, Chloë Grace Moretz & Marton Csokas

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Rated R

A quote from Mark Twain gives a stately, dignified opening to this avenging-angel saga before Denzel Washington gets down to business with some serious lethal skills.

“The two most important days in your life are the day were born and the day you find out why,” reads the words of the great American man of letters, setting the stage for the epiphany that will put Washington’s character, Robert McCall, on a path of bloody retribution after a young teenage prostitute he has kindly befriended (Chloë Grace Moretz) is beaten to a pulp by members of a vicious Russian mob.

Chloe Grace Moretz

Chloë Grace Moretz

Former music-video director Antoine Fuqua, who also steered Training Day and Olympus Has Fallen, continues a “literary” thread throughout the film. Washington’s character is working his way through 100 books “every American should read,” like The Old Man and the Sea and Don Quixote. The chief Russian baddie is named Vladimir Puskin, a mashup of Vladimir Putin, the current Russian president, and Alexander Puskin, one of that country’s iconic authors and poets of yore.

But that’s just a bunch of blah-blah-blah when it comes down to what this movie’s really about, which is Denzel Washington snappin’ necks, slicin’ veins and takin’ names as he unravels a web of crime and corruption that spreads high, low, deep and wide. Some viewers may recall the TV show from the late ’80s, starring British actor Edward Woodward. The flick takes some liberties, but keeps the concept basically the same: When big, bad guys start pushing little, good guys around, someone has to step in and stabilize—“equalize”—things.

And usually, those “things” get violent—and messy. Washington is a fine actor, as he’s demonstrated many times before, but The Equalizer doesn’t gives his character any real depth or dimension as he stoically, sternly navigates the muddy, bloody moral ground of revenge and reprisal. And his “numbness” only adds to the movie’s feel of “dumbness,” of a story that’s punctuated with moments of gory, hyper-stylized action but hollowed out of anything smart, meaningful, purposeful or original.

For her star billing, Morenz has little actual screen time. Melissa Leto and Bill Pullman make late appearances as acquaintances of McCall’s that help explain how such an ordinary-looking guy honed such extraordinary fighting chops. Marton Csokas plays a particularly nasty Russian “fixer”—ladies, believe me, you never want him behind you, purring into your ear, telling you how beautiful you are, slowly wrapping your head in his hands. And roly-poly Johnny Skourtis becomes an audience favorite as one of McCall’s coworkers (at a “big box” home-improvement store) who later comes through in a pinch.

Denzel WashingtonThat “pinch” is the movie’s big climatic showdown between McCall and the Russian mobsters, set in the store, which provides not only a dramatic setting—with long corridors, deep shadows and high ceilings—but also an arsenal of weaponry, including a cordless drill, barbed wire, a tree pruner and a nail gun, for McCall to even the score

Some viewers may cheer the new Equalizer in all his “valiant” violence, at a time and on a planet spinning seemingly out of control with mayhem, madmen and monsters. But I’m willing to bet Mark Twain would probably be aghast at all the angry blood spilled and smeared over his homespun affirmation about coming into this world, and simply finding out what you’re supposed to do now that you’re here.

—Neil Pond, American Profile and Parade magazines

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Sep 19 2014
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Movie Reviews

Grim Reaper

Liam Neeson takes a stroll on the Big Apple’s dark & seedy side

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A Walk Among The Tombstones

Starring Liam Neeson & Dan Stevens

Directed by Scott Frank

R, 113 min.

“Behind you! Behind you!!!” the lady seated beside me urgently whispered to the screen, to Liam Neeson’s character, as unseen danger crept toward him from the shadows.

At this stage of his career, Neeson is fairly accustomed to threats in the shadows—and often it’s him. At 62, he has emerged as one of Hollywood’s leading “older” action stars, playing weathered, well-worn men well-versed in covert ops, and more extreme activities when needed, in the successful three-movie Taken franchise and the recent high-in-the-sky airplane drama Non-Stop.

A Walk Among The TombstonesIn the new thriller-chiller A Walk Among the Tombstones, based on a novel by popular crime-mystery writer Lawrence Block, he’s Matt Scudder, a rumpled, crumpled New York City ex-cop loner on the trail of two pervs plucking women off the streets and subjecting them to unspeakable horrors. The title helps set the creepy stage right off the bat, and the opening credits—which play over a “dreamy” scene that you slowly realize is actually a nightmare—hit you like a punch to the gut. The grim atmosphere is orchestrated by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., who shoots the grungy New York locations in muted, washed-out tones and smoky pastels that match Scudder’s bleak, bleached emotions, drained of color and joy after all that he’s seen…and done.

The story is set in 1999, which also plays into the look of the movie—it was a time before much of the Big Apple’s modern urban-renewal polishing, and it burrows into the city’s shabbier side streets and seedier locations to give real-life dimensions to its down-and-out drama. Scudder’s a recovering alcoholic, which also contributes to the theme of brokenness—and also the hopeful idea of working toward reparation.

A Walk Among The TombstonesBrian “Astro” Bradley plays a homeless teen—and aspiring detective—who becomes Scudder’s tag-along sidekick. Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey) is a prosperous heroin traffiker whose wife’s kidnapping draws Scudder down an ever-darkening trail that ultimately leads him to the tombstones of the title.

This is a movie about violent, twisted people, although much of the violence is left to the imagination rather than depicted. Most of the story is about the process, the escalating cat-and-mouse game, the “procedural” that will be familiar to anyone who watches TV shows like CSI, Law and Order or Criminal Minds. But that doesn’t make it any less unsettling, especially when one of the victims is a 13-year-old girl, or when the camera lingers on a kidnapper fondling the bloodied tools of his torture trade, or asking one of his terrified, bound captives a question that should make the skin crawl on any woman, of any age.

“People are afraid of all the wrong things,” says the movie’s tagline. The wrong things, it suggests, are “scary” but benign places, like cemeteries, or the fear of death. The true terrors, and the real monsters, it so chillingly reminds us, can be ordinary-looking people in a cargo van cruising up and down the street, in a house next door—or sneaking up from the shadows right now, behind you, behind you!

—Neil Pond, American Profile Magazine

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