Showing posts with label Clive Owen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clive Owen. Show all posts

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Most straight-forward action film ever?

Shoot 'Em Up (2007)
Starring: Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Bellucci
Director: Mike Davis
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

A mysterious drifter known as Mr. Smith (Owen) inadvertently ends up the protector of a newborn baby who is being hunted by a hoard of violent gunmen, led by a former FBI profiler named Hertz (Giamatti). It's a good thing that Our Hero is a one-man army will skills that James Bond and Jason Bourne would envy, and an imperviousness that only Bugs Bunny can match.


"Shoot 'Em Up" is perhaps one of the most honestly titled and promoted films of all time. It truly is about shooting holes in people, cars, planes... just about anything that appears on screen. It can only be summarized as Frank Miller's "Sin City" graphic novels meet John Woo's "Hardboiled" and collides with Marvel Comics' "The Punisher" as he was portrayed in the mid- to late-1990s.

It is perhaps one of the wildest action movies ever put on screen, and, with the exception of one romantic interlude and sex scene (that itself leads into one of the most outrageous action scenes I've ever seen) the action doesn't stop once it gets going some five seconds into the film. And as the movie spirals further and further into outrageousness, action movie fans will and cheer and not give one whit that the plot linking the cartoony, gory violent set-pieces makes increasingly less sense.

"Shoot 'Em Up" succeeeds due to its great cast, but even more because of its precisely choreographed gunfights that get evermore rediculous--culimating with a shootout that takes place while characters are skydiving. The film is also fun, because it acknowledge its silliness--most evidently when the carrot-chomping hero asks the villian, "What's up, Doc?"--while every actor in the film plays their role with utmost seriousness. (Owen and Giamatti are especially fun, as a pair of characters who emerge as a sort of live-action Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.)

Another reason the film succeeds are some very odd touches and elements that appear as the film unfolds. Without spoiling too many surprises, I can mention that the first of these is the gunfight that Mr. Smith has with a gang of assassins while helping a woman give birth--as he is snuffing out lives left and right, he is bringing a new one into the world. There's also a recurring theme of gun control and gun safety that keeps cropping up. And there are also some very odd quirks on the part of both Mr. Smith and his foe Mr. Hertz that essentially end up defining them.

If you have a sense of humor, and you like your action movies light on plot and characterizations but heavy with action and heroic good guys and utterly dispicable bad guys, you absolutely must see "Shoot 'Em Up".



Friday, February 12, 2010

Badly plotted movie showcases more about incompetent writers than evil bankers

The International (2009)
Starring: Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Brian F. O'Byrne, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Allesandro Fabrizi
Director: Tom Tykwer
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

An Interpol agent on the verge of a breakdown (Owen) and a dedicated New York Asst. District Attorney (Watts) team up to investigate a powerful international bank that will stop at nothing to achieve its business goals.


"The International" is a sluggishly paced thriller with a script that could have done with at least one more revision and an end product that should have gone back to the editor.

The bankers featured in this film must be the same guys who were in charge at Washington Mutual or maybe Freddie Mac in recent years, because they're the sort of idiots who would keep issuing loans to people who would never pay them back. If they didn't seem so incompetent, maybe the conspiracies they are engaged in would seem less far fetched and pointless.

The main plot point around which the film revolves--the bank is going to collapse if they don't make a convoluted arms investment scheme work--would have been solved 20 minutes in, if, as a character says in the third act, "You should have come to me first." Of course, that would have meant this would have been a really short movie without any action scenes... but that would have been preferable to what we end up with here.

As it stands, the bankers here are nefarious for no reason other than to be nefarious, and they are so stupid that it boggles the engaged mind our heroes (or even some bumbling US Senator in search of headlines) can't nail them. Of course, the script is so badly written that many of the setbacks are heroes suffer are just as much due to bad luck as the eeeevil powers of the International.

Almost worse than the bad script is the way the film is padded. It's just a few seconds here and few seconds there, but after a while it becomes annoying and obvious. Time and again, we're given establishing shots to establishing shots. Because the film takes its sweet time getting just about every scene underway--presumably because the director thought this would help build suspense--we're given plenty of time to reflect on the story problems in what we are watching unfold.

Tip to future filmmakers: If you have a bad script for your thriller, speed things up rather than slow them down. The audience won't have time to catch all the stupidity, and, even if they do, they'll be grateful that the film was only 85 minutes long as opposed to 111 minutes.

"The International" is rather like the conspiracy theories it tries to bring to life as it unfolds--you know, the ones about the Gnomes of Zurich running the world through international banks--in that if you apply any thought to them, they collapse under their own illogic.

Don't waste your time and money on this film. It has decent performances from every featured actor and a very cool shoot-out at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but these aren't enough to make it worth two hours of your life. (The four rating I'm giving it is a low four.)

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

'Inside Man' is overrated

Inside Man (2002)
Starring: Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer
Director: Spike Lee
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A bank robbery turns into a hostage situation, but during the siege, Detective Frazier (Washington) starts to suspect that robbers wanted to be cornered in the bank. As he attempts to solve this puzzle (and get the hostages out safely), the bank's owner (Plummer) hires a mysterious power-broker (Foster) to protect dark secrets he's hiding in a safe deposit box.


"Inside Man" is a crime thriller with some great ideas at its heart, and a decent script, but one which is ultimately done in by the filmmakers' wanting to tell the story out of order for no discernible reason.

It's obvious to all but the stupidest of viewers how the robbers intend to get out of the bank when they insist on everyone dressing like they are dressed. It likewise becomes obvious that the bank robbers will get away once the billionaire's secret comes to light--"murder will out", as one character says. There was no need for Lee and the screenwriter to reassure the intelligent viewer they've already guessed where the story is going (and to blow it for the stupid ones) by interspersing snippets of interrogations after the situation has resolved itself with the unfolding story to show how the seige turned out.

The film also suffers from an ending that just sort of dribbles to its conclusion instead of ending with a nice, solid moment. Denouements are a must for most films, but here we have two of them... and one is just plain dull. Perhaps Lee figured the viewer would care about Detective Frazier's homelife and how things were looking up for him in the future... but if so, he should have taken another look at the script.

"Inside Man" is a decent crime thriller, but its a thriller populated by stock characters. There isn't a character in the film that hasn't appeared in dozens of movies like this before--the only way Frazier could be more stereotypical was if he was divorced instead of engaged--and there isn't a character in the film where even a half-hearted attempt is made to develop some real depth or shades of originality.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because films like this are plot-driven rather than character driven, but it seems that Lee thought his characters were actual characters that the viewer would care about once all the mysteries of the story are resolved. They aren't. This is an enjoyable and competently made thriller (that almost qualifies as a heist movie, but not quite, despite what some critics claimed), but it's not a film that will stay with you, nor is it one that's worth seeing more than once. It's dead-even average.

Frankly, as average as this film is, I suspect that if it hadn't been directed by Spike Lee, there would have been a lot fewer positive reviews of it... this film's high marks can be credited to the Emperor's New Clothes Effect. ("Gosh! It's a Spike Lee movie! I don't even have to see it to know it's good, so if the press-kit calls it a heist movie, I'll go with that! If I don't slobber all over it, I'm not a real movie critic!")