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.)

Double Feature: Sandra Bullock does 'Speed'

Lovers of actions movies should keep the following in mind when it comes to the "Speed" cinematic duology: The first one is a must-see, and the second one you should pass on unless it's the very last rental at the video store.

(Both films can be had in a single package, even if that version is out of print. If yuou can find it, it's the only way I'd get "Speed 2" if I were so inclined, because that way I could at least just consider it a bonus feature.)


Speed (1994)
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Daniels
Director: Jan deBont
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

When SWAT officer Jack Taven (Reeves) foils a mad bomber's (Hopper) extortion plot, it becomes personal. He traps Jack and along with a dozen passengers onboard a bus that is rigged to explode if its speed drops below 50 miles per hour. While the police try to figure out where the bomber is hidden, Jack must attempt to keep the busload of passengers calm while trying to find a way to save both them and himself.


This is one of those pressure-cooker action movies where things go from bad, to worse, to really bad--and the final bit of villainy from the bad guy gives the third act a twist that truly rocks. Aside from some hackneyed dialogue, "Speed is well-paced, well-filmed, and all the actors give excellent performances. Reeves, who usually annoys me, is even good, and Bullock (as Annie, a particularly resourceful bus passenger) also shines as her usual Girl Next Door character, even if she spends virtually all her time on-screen behind the wheel of the doomed bus. Dennis Hopper plays his part with a gleeful evil that is great fun to watch.



Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Wilhem DeFoe and Jason Patric
Director: Jan deBont
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Annie (Bullock) goes on a cruise with her new boyfriend (Patric) only to find the ship hijacked by a mad-dog murderous terrorist (DeFoe) who is bent on crashing the ship into the harbor going at full speed. Much mayhem and property damage ensue... but very little that's particularly interesting or suspenseful.


Everything that director deBont did right in the original "Speed" he does wrong here. The setting is too open, the villains don't seem sinister enough, and whenever the story starts to build a little tension, it is dispelled by a ludicrous action sequence for the same of action, an unfunny bit of attempted humor, or something inane that defies description. I suspect that the writers and marketeers thought the subtitle "Cruise Control" was really clever ("it's set on a cruise ship, and it's under the control of bad guys, and it's a pun on cruise control in vehicles... get it, huh, get? [giggle-giggle]"), but instead it stands a description of how this exceedingly bad follow-up to an excellent movie was made: The creative and production staff were operating on cruise control, not really paying attention to what they were doing.

Kenau Reeves was smart to pass on this one. I wish Bullock had too, because her talent is completely wasted in this stinker. In fact, all the principles give decent performances, given what they have to work with, so they're all pretty much wasted.






For more reviews of awful movies, check out the companion blog Movies to Die Before Seeing.

Corpulent Seagal faces 'Black Dawn'

Black Dawn (aka "The Foreigner 2") (2005)
Starring: Steven Seagal, Tamara Davies, Nicholas Davidoff, and Timothy Carhart
Director: Alexander Gruszynski
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

When CIA agent Amanda Stuart (Davies) sees her supposedly dead mentor Jonathan Cold (Seagal) show up with a armsdealer meeting with a crazed Muslim rebel (Davidoff), she knows something very big and very bad is coming down. But little did she know that soon she and Jonathan would be battling both terrorists and renegade CIA agents bent on detonating a nuke in downtown Los Angeles.


"Black Dawn" is absolutely, totally predictable; it's decently acted, with okay stunts, but there's nothing you haven't seen done better elsewhere. What's more, the cast is too small for there to ever be any doubt as to the identitiy of the traitor within the CIA. Then, to add insult to injury, we don't even get treated to decent fight scenes.

I don't know if Seagal is too old or too fat (and I know I'm not one to criticize someone for packing on the pounds come middle-age... I've turned into a true porker over the past five years) or if he may have been sick during the two-week schedule I assume this cheap quickie must have had, but not only were all three of the potential fight scenes over virtually before they started, they were done using stand-ins!

Yes, iconic Akido tough guy Seagal--the guy who in an interview on the DVD of "Black Dawn" talks about how he was in hundreds of fights before he lost one--doesn't do a single one of his fight scenes in this film. In fact, the stand-ins aren't built like Seagal (one doesn't even have similar hair, and we're treated to several seconds of the back of his head!) and there doesn't even seem to be an attempt to match the style he used when he DID do his own fight scenes.

I wonder if "Black Dawn" spells the end of Seagal's career. He's not really much of an actor, and if he can't do his own fight scenes, what's left? Maybe it's time for him to move behind the cameras and let others star in films that he produces? (On the other hand, he could well have been sick. There are several scenes where he seems to be carrying himself strangely, particularly with the way he crosses his arms.)

Sheesh... I seem to be going on about Seagal... but that's because I ran out of things to say about the movie in the second paragraph, and because I think he's done some pretty good action flicks (like "Hard to Kill", "Under Seige", "Half Past Dead" and even "The Foreigner"), and it's a bit sad to see him go out on such a pathetic note, if that is indeed what's happening.

If you want to see a fairly generic, relatively low-budget action flick with some sorry blue-screen shots, you want to pick up "Black Dawn." If you're looking for a good Steven Seagal flick, stay away from this one. You'll be very dissapointed.

'Perfect Stranger' should remain unknown

Perfect Stranger (2007)
Starring: Halle Berry, Giovanni Ribisi, and Bruce Willis
Director: James Foley
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

An investigative reporter (Berry) goes undercover at a top ad agency to prove that its face man Harrison Hill (Willis) murdered her best friend. But can the truth be discoverd when the investigation is mired in hidden agendas?


"Perfect Strangers" is a thriller that is completely devoid of tension, partly because the viewer is never convinced that the supposed murderer is all that dangerous and partly because we're not given a reason to like any of the characters enough to care whether they too get poisoned with an overdose of belladonna.

To add insult to injury, the films lazily written--to the point where every character on screen even sounds alike--and it's got one of those annoying, unnessecary twist-endings that in a desperate attempt to breathe some life and excitement into the film only manages to underscore how haphazard and badly executed it is. (I will grant that it's an ending better supported by what has gone before than in other films, but it's still false, hollow and a bit of a cheat. It's made more of a cheat because of the audience-manipulating flashbacks that appear throughout the film; I despise this movie even more for its refusal to play fair with the viewer and provide ligitimate clues so we can "play along" in solving the mystery at its core and instead feeding us distortions.

One of Seagal's best in years is still weak

Urban Justice (aka "Renegade Justice") (2007)
Starring: Steven Seagal, Eddie Griffin, Carmen Serano, and Kirk B.R. Woller
Director: Don E. FauntLeroy
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A violent man with a mysterious past, Simon Ballester (Seagal), moves into the worst area of Los Angeles' gang dominated neighborhoods so he can locate and kill the gangbangers who gunned down his police officer son. As he investigates (kicking copious ass as he goes), he discovers the truth about his son's death was far more than just another random gang shooting.


"Urban Justice" is one of the Steven Seagal's better movies in recent years. He's playing a character whose background and style is suitable to his age and bulk; he's working with a director, fight choreographer, and cinematographer who understand how to set up a scene so it looks like Seagal is actually doing some martial arts-so we avoid the embarrasingly obvious stunt doubles who have made him seem to laughable in recent years; and the script gives him some fairly decent lines to deliver... the way Simon Ballester so calmly and good-humoredly discusses death and violence is both funny and chilling.

However, Seagal's lines and the way fight scenes are filmed are just about the only decent thing about the flickhow to shoot a scene. Everything else is Standard Issue Direct-to-DVD Low-Budget Action Film Cliches, with the villains being of a kind we've so many times before they are uninteresting even after the scope of their evil ways has been revealed. The film also suffers from a problem all-too-common in one written by writers who are lazy or of limited talent--every character sounds like every other character, a grave sin in film-writing where characters are defined to a degree by what they say and how they say it. To make matters worse, the writers here also seemed to be shooting for some sort of record for how many times the word "fuck" was used in a single screenplay. I've no doubt that many people are so inarticulate that they say things like "I'm gonna fuck that fuckin' fuck the fuck up!", but to have an entire city full of them gets tiresome. And it dragged the movie down from a rating of 4 to a rating of 5.

If a little more effort had been put into developing the script's story and giving the actors better lines to say, this film could have risen to the level of the projects Seagal did in his glory days--the director and photgrapher certainly did great jobs, and Segal was better here than he's been in a while.

Maybe, just maybe, he's done embarrassing himself, and we can start enjoying his movies again

Sherlock Sunday: The Deadly Necklace

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962)
Starring: Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters and Hans Söhnker
Director: Terence Fisher
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Sherlock Holmes (Lee) and his arch-nemisis Professor Moriarity (Söhnker) matching wits over an Egyptian necklace owned by Cleopatra, as it is stolen, recovered, and restolen.



This 1962 German film, with its two British stars and a British director, has surprisingly little to recommend it. The script is like a reject from the Universal Pictures series starring Basil Rathbone (with everything I don't like about the weaker efforts among those amplified ten-fold here, most notably Watson being portrayed as a bumbling, retarded simpleton), with an unbearably bad score.

It's amazing that a film with so much potential--Christopher Lee as Holmes and Terence Fisher directing... should be a sure winner!--could go so wrong. While Christopher Lee is absolutely right in his opinion that he and Thorley Walters more closely resemble the literary Holmes and Watson than any other on-screen pair, and there's no question that Lee gives a good performance as Holmes, there is very little else that works in this movie.

There are a couple of interesting moments between Holmes and Moriarity (who is played by the appropriately sinister German actor Hans Söhnker), but the downside is that they feel like they belong more in a hard-boiled, pulp fiction detective novel than a Holmes adventure.

'The Glimmer Man' is beginning of end for Seagal

The Glimmer Man (1996)
Starring: Steven Seagal, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Bob Gunton, and Johnny Strong
Director: John Gray
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A Bhuddist New York City homicide detective with a mysterious past (Seagal) and his street-smart, wise-cracking Los Angeles counterpart (Wayans) form an uneasy partnership as they persue a serial killer known as the Family Man, because he viciously butchers entire households.


"The Glimmer Man" is a film with a "Lethal Weapons" vibe that also anticipates the "Rush Hour" films with its structure and mixture of martial arts and (partially racially based) humor. Unfortunately, it's dragged down by jokes that simpy aren't funny, action sequences that leave alot to be desired, and lead characters that are just too close to being cliched carticatures to be enjoyable. To make it a perfect storm of crapitude, the film also has an unneccesarily complex script into which the writer apparently felt obligated to draw every single bad guy and sinister organization that you'd expect to find in an action flick from the late 1980s and early 1990s--street gangs, organized crime, serial killers, the CIA, FBI... probalby even the PTA if you look close enough. Too many players in the story cause it to be a muddled mess beyond the writer's meager talen to control.

It's actually a shame that the script isn't better, because this is the last movie where we'll see Steven Seagal in full fighting trim. He has a couple of okay fight scenes, and he actually doesn't do that bad a job with what he has to work with. The same is partially true about Wayans, although while Seagal's character shows the occassional twinkle of charm, Wayans character is just obnoxious from the get-go, and never rises above that state.

"The Glimmer Man" is the demarcation line between the Mostly Good Seagal Movies and the Mostly Crappy Seagal Movies. It's a point beyond which you should not pass if you want to remember when he still had a shot at a respectable acting career.

Consider leaving 'The College Girl Murders' unsolved

The College Girl Murders (1968)
Starring: Jaochim Fuchsburger, Uschi Glass, Tilly Lauenstein, and Gunter Meisner
Director: Alfred Vorherer
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

The students and staff are dropping like flies at an all-girl's college: They are being gassed with an unusual poison and having their necks snapped by a mysterious, whip-wielding figure in a red cloak and hood. Will brilliant sleuth Inspector Higgins (Fuchsburger) find the connection between the killings and find the murderers before so many of the characters are killed there won't be a mystery left?


"The College Girl Murders" is a mess of a movie that fails at whatever it is it's trying to be. As a comedy spoofing mystery movies, it fails because it isn't very funny. It also fails as a mystery movie, it collapses under its own ludicrous, far-fetched storyline (which involves a mysterious mastermind who commands a network of minions from his secret, fishtank-lined lair, a character dressed in a red KKK robe-like outfit who murders people by snapping their necks with a bullwhip, and a scientist who invents a deadly new gas that is used on unspecting college girls via trick bibles and goofy-looking sprayguns.

(Actually, that list of negatives sounds like any number of movies I like, but it's the presence of all those elements in a single film that I think sours me on them. I like curry and I like chocolate ice cream... but I wouldn't want chocolate ice cream in my curry.)

On the upside, the movie does spare us the go-go dance scene that most 1960s era movies of this type feature. It also features some nice sets--the villain's lair is interesting, and the access point to the ultimately pointless plot-wise secret passageways within the girl's dormatory is also nifty. The camera-work and lighting are well done--with a night scene where one of the characters is being chased both by the whip-wiedling monk and a gas pistol-weilding thug managing to bring some real tension to the film--and the actors also perform their parts adequately, both the Germans on the screen and the Americans doing the dubbing.


The film is also fairly fast paced, and it kept my attention throughout... even if part of the reason I kept watching was to see if the film could get any dumber. (It didn't dissapoint; toward the end, a couple of twists are offered that are stupendously idiotic.)

I can't really recommend this movie to anyone. It's technically well made with average acting all around, but the story is too silly, and un-funny, to make it worthwhile.

Playing video poker with highest stakes(and holding a losing hand)

The Card Player (2004)
Starring: Stefania Rocca and Liam Cunningham
Director: Dario Argento
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Police detective Anna Mari (Rocca) becomes the point of contact for a serial killer who kidnaps young women and forces Rome's homicide detective squad to play online video poker for their lives.


"The Card Player" has enough plot- and logic-holes large enough to drive the train featured in its intense climactic moments through, not to mention an unfortunate tendency on the part of the characters to do stupid things just because if they didn't, the already feeble and shaky plot would fall apart completely. There is, however, enough tension and mystery here to keep viewers engaged.

Regular viewers of Argento's movies are used to characters having extreme moments of idiocy because the plot needs them to... his films have depended on this since "Deep Red" (review here). Here, though, the affliction strikes multiple characters far more than is acceptable even by Argento standards.

There is the further strike against the film that its characters, both minor and major, are a collection of tired cliches with not even quirks about them to make them different from the characters you've seen in other mysteries and thrillers--the cranky police chief, the jaded coroner, the disgraced renegade cop, the computer hacker who now works with the police, the killer with the "mysterious inside knowledge of the police department" are all here, and they play exactly the sorts of roles you expect them to, in exactly the way you expect them to. This collection of cliches, coupled with the fact they all suffer from plot-dictated stupidity, further damages the film and at times even ruins some of the mounting suspense.

Despite a nice idea at its core and a tense final confrontation between cop and killer, "The Card Player" is a fairly weak effort. Save it for the day when there's nothing else you're interested in watching.