Movies
by Bob Cipriano
At the Movies Dim the lights, lower the bar This season’s B-grade films
that bridge the gap between 2012’s end-ofyear award winners and the summer’s big productions are particularly dreary. Except for a pleasant surprise or two, like last month’s Parker and this month’s Side Effects, there’s little to discuss and even less to savor at the cinema. Currently hanging around are: Snitch: Sandbagged, framed and betrayed, Dwayne Johnson’s 18-year-old son (Jon Bernthal) is facing ten years in prison. Johnson must make an unholy alliance with the US government, embodied by a ferocious Susan Sarandon and her snake of a right-hand man, Barry Pepper, to get some time off of the kid’s sentence. So far, so good. The first half of Snitch features some good father-son moments and even better negotiation tension as Johnson reluctantly agrees to transport drugs to catch bad guys and further Sarandon’s career. But when the plan inevitably falls apart, Snitch becomes a series of highway chases and shootouts. They’re all well filmed, and director Ric Roman Waugh, who co-wrote the script with Justin Haythe, doesn’t allow the mayhem to completely obliterate the father-son drama or the political implications of Sarandon’s high-handedness. It’s just that Johnson can’t quite play a regular guy who’s got action hero chops. He is body and soul an action hero who isn’t much credible as a regular guy. Snitch is okay, but to really work, Johnson would have to stretch as an actor beyond what he seems capable of. A Good Day to Die Hard: Bruce Willis can stretch, as we all know. Five Die Hards, one Sixth Sense and so many others. In fact, it seems safe to say that in the increasingly prevalent geezersgone-wild genre, no geezer is more glorious that Bruce. Film historians may well cite, “Yippee-ki-yay” over, “I’ll be back” as the 20th century’s most memorable action tag line. But this is the 21st century, and even Mr. Willis can’t overcome a simplistic, cliché-ridden plot consisting of elaborate but ultimately boring action set pieces filled with car chases, fireballs and automatic weapons. Another father-son dilemma is at the
artificial heart of this enterprise, with Willis in Russia to help his superspy son out of a jam. That’s the plot. Make way for all special effects all the time, cowboy-wit replaced by grumpy old man one-liners (the aforementioned “Yippeeki-yay” notwithstanding), and no villain remotely reminiscent of Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons, whose existence ensured the two classic Die Hards a place in action movie history. Phantom: Ed Harris plays Dmitri, the physically and emotionally wrecked captain of a Soviet sub, sent on a final mission tied to the 1968 sinking of another sub. He drinks, he suffers badly filmed epileptic seizures, and is further unhinged by the replacement of his usual crew with a bunch of K.G.B. punks led by a miscast David Duchovny. Needless to say, nuclear missiles and World War III are in the mix, but you wouldn’t know it, given the most monotonous filming technique ever applied to what is supposed to be a tension-filled submarine. If you stick around until the end, you’ll find the finale is even more ridiculous than the film’s premise and all the nonsense in between. The Last Exorcism: Part II: this opportunistic sequel, here mainly to take advantage of the first film’s deserved success, at least features the fine Ashley Bell, reprising her role as the Louisiana teenager possessed by the demon, Abalam. Also like the first film, this one concentrates on atmospheric tension and minor scares, as opposed to graphic violence, sex and nudity. It belongs to the Paranormal Activity school of horror, suggesting there is some intellect behind the mayhem, some puzzle to be solved if you watch closely enough. The reason to see this film would be to get some answers about the abrupt but effective ending of the first film. They’re not here, any more than they have shown up in Paranormal Activity 2, 3 or 4. The atmosphere and Ashley Bell’s strengths as an actor make the film watchable, but too many of the first film’s characters and too much of its intrigue have been exorcised from this one, leaving just another teasing demonic possession to endure without a pay-off. Dark Skies: Another horror thriller, this one steeped in the threatened family/haunted house tradition. So it’s the
Dark Skies
children who are in serious jeopardy, the youngest of whom dreams about a menacing ‘sandman’ that claims to be his friend. Add suicidal birds, and that scene where somebody has tacked up newspaper clippings and photos of previous victims. Paranormal surveillance footage is here, too, as the skeptical Dad films bedrooms and staircases to find out what’s really going on in his house. All this is shot well by director/writer Scott Charles Stewart. And he’s added little sub-plots about middle class life, where a compromised job market keeps dad unemployed, and the compromised real estate market forces mom to try and sell bad houses to people who can’t afford them. There’s even a little bit about the effect of Internet porn on teenagers struggling to mature into having romantic relationships. There’s also a terrific performance at the center of the film, as Keri Russell effectively juggles absolutely everything thrown at her, including those damn birds. But it all goes nowhere. Someone must have suggested that we’ve been deluged with demons of late and so this time aliens from another world are the villains, out to literally steal the kid, not possess him. Why? What’s the point? At least demons have plans to wreak some havoc once they’re inside you. When the inevitable climactic scenes kick in they are listless, un-scary and, finally, preposterous, even in a genre
we’re familiar with and usually happy to accept on principle. Side Effects: By far the best of the lot, Side Effects, like Dark Skies, has two plotlines going for it, but this film makes the most of its psychological thriller plot before sleekly turning it into a surprising melodrama of greed, betrayal and murder. Director Steven Soderbergh, venturing into Hitchcock territory, concentrates on Rooney Mara struggling to maintain her sanity as her hedge fund criminal husband (Channing Tatum) unrepentantly returns from a four-year prison stretch. Psychiatrist Jude Law, sensitive but more than willing to push the pills provided by the highest pharmaceutical bidder, puts Mara on a regimen that produces some scary side effects. The fragile Mara seems in constant jeopardy from her husband’s callousness and her doctor’s prescriptions. But the pharmaceutical industrial complex and Wall Street greed get pushed aside when the film’s central event occurs and changes not only every life on screen but also every perspective in the audience. Things happen fast, almost too fast (Hitchcock would have taken a little extra time to separate the wheat of his characters’ motivations from the shaft of their actions). But no matter. Soderbergh’s skill in changing character identities via dynamic shifts in plot is a thing to behold. April 2013 East Side Monthly
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