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

Firewall (**1/2)

 Sophisticated thieves hold a family hostage and force a bank security expert to help them steal. A decent premise gives way to dull conventionality.

Harrison Ford is a bank’s computer security expert. One day, armed men take his wife and young kids hostage so he’ll help them steal. In the most suspenseful scenes, he’s forced to pretend to his coworkers that everything’s okay. Meanwhile, the family hunkers down. The boy innocently makes friends with the bad guy (Paul Bettany). Virginia Madsen, who could play Ford’s daughter but plays his wife, tries to stir things up by telling one of the nicer bad guys that Bettany plans to kill him. (You never get to find out if this is true, though.) Bettany, an excellent actor, helps make the villain interesting. In this kind of film, that he doesn’t actually enjoy dishing out violence (though willing to do so) counts as novelty. But, finally, Firewall is yet another Hollywood thriller rendered dull by rigid adherence to formula. You know this formula. For example, you won’t be too worried that, when the killer threatens to maim one of the kids, he’ll actually do so. It would have been intriguing to see the IT guy use his computer skills to outsmart the bad guys, but convention requires that physicality be the solution to all problems. (At least we see that, not being Indiana Jones, the hero does get a bit winded at times.) So, we have an old guy, his architect wife, and two kids against well-trained young men with guns. Gotta be obvious who wins that one.

IMDb link

posted 9/15/13