Cold Eyes (***1/4) [screening]

You’ve seen movies like this before. (You could have even seen one very much like it, since this is a remake of a Hong Kong film.) A criminal gang with a polished mastermind faces off against an elite law enforcement squad. (A movie like that called Elite Squad is one of Brazil’s biggest hits ever.) The squad specializes in surveillance. They identify; they trace; they tag; they track. But, when it comes time to engage, they call in the tactical team, following protocol. They use tactics that, when employed against Will Smith in 1998’s Enemy of the State, seemed to obviously exceed the possible, and now, with electronic eyes surveying major segments of major cities around the world, seem increasingly plausible.

The heroine of this saga (Hyo-ju Han) is the squad’s newbie — code name Piglet. Perhaps because she is female, she gets to show a broader range of emotion than one might expect. The hero is the squad leader, Falcon, who gives her a stringent memorization test in the type of set piece that’s often a staple of this kind of movie. All of the squad have animal nicknames, and Falcon literally moves them (or wooden representations, actually) around on a chess board that represents the streets of Seoul. They even give their first suspect an animal nickname. Caught on camera buying a soft drink, he becomes a “thirsty hippo.” The movie begins with a bank heist and climaxes with a lengthy chase sequence. They’re quite well done, and while I think I missed a link or two in the chain of evidence that allows the squad to identify the mastermind, the chases are clearly shot, and the two directors have a strong visual sense generally. 

The level of violence is moderate. There’s some humor in the banter between the squad members. Again, nothing entirely new here, but a well-done thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 10/24/13 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and posted 10/25/13

The Robber (***)

An aloof drama about an aloof character. Though adapted from a novel by Martin Prinz, the main character is based on real-life bank robber and marathoner Johann Kastenberger, called Rettenberger in the film. Rettenberger/Kastenberger (Andreas Lust) uses his running skills (and a mask) to evade the police, and so there are a number of chase sequences. But director Benjamin Heisenberger takes such a clinical approach to his subject that it’s hard to call this a thriller. Whether or not the real Kastenberger was like this I don’t know, but the character here comes off as nearly emotionless, and it’s as if the robberies are done more for the jolt of adrenalin than the money, which he doesn’t use. As such, this is something like a psychological drama about someone whose psychology is obscure. The girlfriend character is also difficult to understand; the source of her devotion is uncertain.

IMDB link

viewed 6/7/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/7 and 6/8/11

The Town (***1/4)

I never thought Ben Affleck deserved his reputation as a mere pretty boy, having co-written Good Will Hunting and appeared in a number of smart films like Changing Lanes and Chasing Amy. But this, his second effort as a writer-director, confirms that, and shows that Gone Baby Gone was no fluke. (Affleck, adapting a Chuck Hogan novel, shares the screenplay credit with Peter Craig and Gone Baby Gone’s Aaron Stockard.) This is slightly more of a crowd-pleaser, being about boys causing mayhem, not the kidnapping of a junkie’s daughter. There’s even a car chase. But Affleck, who also stars, retains the intelligent approach he took before.

Take the opening sequence, where Affleck’s character Doug robs a bank with his three masked accomplices. Director Affleck keeps the music down, cuts back and forth from the victims to the perpetrators, and even shows the security cameras. It’s done in a way that shows the excitement of the robbers, but also the fear and confusion of the victims. One of them is a bank manager played by Rebecca Hall, whose expressive face conveys everything Affleck is trying to show. That Doug will wind up courting her—albeit without disclosing his profession—is the crux of the plot.

As with Gone Baby Gone, the film takes place in a Boston neighborhood, Charlestown. There, bank robbery is practically the chief source of employment, a profession handed down from father to son. Doug’s father (Chris Cooper in a small role), is in prison. The use of location is key to both the feel and the plot of the movie.

I’d say this falls just short of the earlier film, if only because it slightly sentimentalizes Doug in a not entirely convincing way. The more overt brutality of his partner and childhood pal (Jeremy Renner) seems meant to make Doug more likable by comparison, although Doug is happy enough when they’re shooting at police after a car chase. Meanwhile, the police detective played by Jon Hamm isn’t exactly a villain, but the character is (under-)written almost as if he’s someone nursing a mysterious grudge rather than one trying to protect the public. His badass line is “This not-fucking-around thing is about to go both ways.” But most of the time the movie is more subtle. Affleck, who went Hollywood, has come back strongly.

IMDB link

viewed 9/14/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17/10

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (***1/4)

Picking up about where Mesrine: Killer Instinct left off, this is nonetheless a different film than its predecessor. You don’t particularly need to have seen part one to make sense of part two, and in fact there is hardly any character overlap, save Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) himself. Here Mesrine is no longer the angry young man. He is older and has settled into a career, albeit as a bank robber only dabbling in other crimes. He is still capable of violence but it seems more measured. He reserves most of his hatred for the police and those running France’s maximum-security prisons. He believes himself to have a credo, to be a man of his word even as he publishes an exaggerated memoir aimed at increasing his fame and notoriety.

Lacking some of the vitality of Killer Instinct, this installment is nearly a character study, though its prison-escape sequence bests the one in the first film, and there are multiple shootouts. Here his penchant for disguises is more prominent. Like the first film, this one starts off with his death in 1979. Since it begins in 1973, it doesn’t skip ahead in time as much. It’s still episodic, but less so. Unlike the first film, this ends where it begins, with the police killing Mesrine. We now see this, for the first time, from the viewpoint of the police, a clever reminder that, to them, this was no master criminal, no gentleman bandit, but a thug they were determined to take down.

IMDB link

viewed 9/8/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8–9/10