The Angels’ Share (***1/4)

“Comedic” is not  a word one would generally apply to the films of Ken Loach, whose films spotlight the struggles of working-class Britain (or Los Angeles, in the case of 1999’s Bread and Roses). Like Sweet 16 (but with older teens), the setting here is (primarily) Glasgow, and, like that movie, it’s helpfully subtitled. The variety of English is both distinctively accented and filled with delightfully unfamiliar lingo, and that’s even before the plot’s oddest and most unique element, which is its central character’s newfound interest in high-end whiskey, comes up.

Why, it’s just like Sideways, if instead of California wine snobs the central characters were a Scottish trying-to-reform teen thug and his “community payback”-serving friends. He has a family vendetta against him, a newborn son, and a scar on his face that further dims his job prospects, yet this film is indeed a comedy. Its sympathies lie, as always with Loach, with the underdogs, and he has collaborated with his frequent screenwriting partner Paul Laverty (who also wrote Sweet Sixteen), yet the approach is a touch lighter, more likely to appeal to a mainstream sensibility, especially the second half, wherein the group of friends embarks on an unlikely caper. And, yes, some of it is pretty funny.

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viewed 3/21/2013 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22–4/28/13

Wild Target (**3/4)

Some fifteen million people went to see a movie featuring Bill Nighy and Rupert Grint this past weekend. For nearly all of them, that movie was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. But a much smaller number, whose fantasies presumably involve hired assassins, like the one Nighy plays, rather than teen wizards, would have seen this lightweight caper film. The essense of the caper film is to make the heroes criminal, if not by trade, then by circumstance, and to make the crime seem fun. Nighy is Victor, the middle-aged professional and Grint the callow “apprentice,” though he thinks his mentor is merely working “undercover.” In between is delightful Emily Blunt, who, though British, has somehow managed not to appear in any of the Potter films, perhaps because she is too young. Her character is neither assassin nor innocent. Having clumsily masterminded an art-forgery scheme, she is in fact Victor’s target.

If a threesome rather than a duo can be said to “meet cute,” and meeting cute can involve people getting shot in a parking garage, then that is how the professional, his target, and the bystander wind up teaming up. The bystander is Grint’s character, and although he is kind of a third wheel—Ron Weasley to Nighy’s and Blunt’s Harry Potter and Hermione—he does show some additional range. In predictable fashion, the other two bicker a lot, then suddenly not. The young lady’s change of heart is too facile, and the film is more fun when they are at odds.

A notable thing about this caper film is that the protagonist is a murderer, even if he is impeccably mannered, as is typical for the caper film. Usually we are encouraged to root for the hero of the caper film via the time-honored technique of making the villains scummy. That’s true here, as the targets are rival hit men, but it’s still unusual for the hero to be seen as having (mistakenly) shot innocent bystanders. In fact, part of the reason we are supposed to root for Victor is that he’s a better hitman than his rival, London’s top assassin. (However, he cannot bring himself to kill a parrot who keeps saying his name after he kills the owner. So he steals the bird.) When the apprentice—who feels bad even upon shooting a man in self-defense—finds out that Victor is not just a detective, one might suspect he’d feel some unease, but that would be more emotional heft than anything on display here.

Nighy, among the most ubiquitous UK actors (Love, Actually, Shaun of the Dead, Pirate Radio), gives credibility to the repressed Victor, who has always been a solo act ever since he took up the trade of his father. The humor is light, but generally on target, in this remake of a French film, but it is inessential.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/24/10

The Brothers Bloom (**1/2)

The greatest trick in any film about con artists is to get the audience to buy the tale. Alas, in writer Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, they may not. That the brothers are played by non-lookalikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo doesn’t help; nor do they look like the child actors in the opening sequence. But that’s not a big deal. More significant is that in that sequence the two boys look like bowler-hat-wearing twits, and their elementary-school swindle is not rendered convincingly. The first scene with the adult brothers—still conning—is rendered in such a stagy fashion that I expected the camera to pull back and reveal that Brody and Ruffalo had become actors in a play.

I liked the movie somewhat better once I got used to its rhythm. There are two other members of the brothers’ team. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel), as their mysterious, nearly mute Japanese explosives expert, is equal parts cute and coy, even if her role is contrived. And Rachel Weicz does well enough with the character—the wealthy mark—who actually has the most dimensions. She’s supposedly an expert in, among other things, several musical instruments, a martial art or two, juggling, and unicycling, and speaks multiple languages. Except for the last, she doesn’t get to use any of these abilities. Now why have such a character and not use that? Of course, her primary function is to pair up with Bloom, the brother played by Brody, but if you don’t figure that out immediately you may have never seen a movie.

So the usual questions get raised. Will Bloom choose love or money? Will his brother Stephen the supposed genius of the operation, let him decide? And what is real and what’s just a con? All of the ingredients of the classic caper film, but The Sting it’s not. Johnson can evoke a style, but it never feels very organic. I thought the same thing about Brick, in which high schoolers used 1930s detective-novel slang, although plenty of people seemed impressed. Here, Johnson has Stephen drawing elaborate diagrams and using Herman Melville novels (no, not Moby Dick) as inspiration for his con jobs, but they never seem as clever as they’re supposed to. It would also have been nice if the grand finale, in which all of the themes (finally) come together with more action than the rest of the movie, had actually been comprehensible. Stephen says, in the movie’s best line, that the best cons are the one that leave everyone feeling they got what they want. And if you want to give the audience what it wants, you need to let them feel like they’re in on the action.


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viewed 6/6/09 at Tilton 9 and reviewed 6/7/09