Seven Psychopaths (***)

I am pretty sure of this: Like the alcoholic and aspiring screenwriter played by Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of this comedy, came up with the title first. The fictional screenwriter has only a couple of ideas, like one about a Buddhist psychopath, but he also has the advantage of a helpfully nutty friend (Sam Rockwell) and some real-life events to inspire him. Whereas McDonagh, I think, largely made all this stuff up, which shows he has quite an imagination, but also that much of what passes here strains credulity.

As with In Bruges, McDonagh’s previous effort, or even more so, I felt too aware of the attempts at cleverness, though possibly I laughed more anyway. The Ferrell character dreams of creating a movie about psychopaths that’s nonetheless “life-affirming,” and so does McDonagh, I imagine, even though he’s mostly trying to be funny. The story largely revolves around a dognapping ring. Rockwell’s character is caught up in it, and so is another one played by Christopher Walken. Their dognappers’ victims include one of the psychopaths, played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson’s character doesn’t hestitate to prey on the weak, or to pretend to kill someone just for a gag, but his quest is the return of his beloved dog, Bonnie, for whom his heart melts. So there’s the life-affirming part.

McDonagh does some of the same mixing of creative plotting, oddball characters, and arch dialogue that Quentin Tarantino employs with much less visible patchwork. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to have such colorful actors as Harrelson, Rockwell, and Walken in the same movie and have it be forgettable, or humorless. And, in fact, McDonagh meets his own challenge by coming up with an original conclusion, or a couple of them, actually, that’s dramatically satisfying, though “life-affirming” would be stretching things.

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viewed 10/4/12 7:30 at Rave University City and reviewed 10/5-12/12

Kill the Irishman (***)

You’d think they’d run out of true-life gangster stories to tell, but they never seem to. Just last year brought the excellent two-film French saga Mesrine, which isn’t that much like this one, but begins the same way, with someone trying to kill the title character, then flashing back a couple of decades to see how it all went down. Jacques Mesrine moved around a lot, but Irish American Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) stays in Cleveland, his hometown. His rise from poor boy growing up to longshoreman to union boss is probably the best segment of the film and depicts the mixture of characteristics (a loan shark enforcer who worries about cholesterol—in the 1960s!) that made him such a force of nature. The second half of the movie covers the turf wars and deal-making that are typical of the genre.

As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.

The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.

These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11

The Magic Hour (***)

This Japanese gangster comedy takes the premise of Bowfinger and reverses it. That is, instead of a film star not realizing he’s in a movie, the lead is a hammy bit-part player who thinks he’s gotten the role of his life. In a way he has; he’s impersonating a real hit man, and the “movie” is the ruse concocted by the “director” to save his own skin. (He’s been sleeping with the boss’s girl and can save himself only by arranging for a meeting.)

I didn’t care for Bowfinger in large part because I never really believed the scheme would have actually worked. I can’t really say I found this strictly believable either, but the scenes were crafted carefully and cleverly enough that for large stretches I was able to suspend my disbelief. The star’s mugging for the camera—not to mention his insistence on wearing makeup—translates into some behavior that’s pretty odd from the viewpoint of the very real gangsters, and pretty funny from the viewpoint of the audience. Overlaid on this is a gentle parody of old Hollywood, in particular the last scene of Casablanca. Even the setting, a town called “Sucago,” is an homage; it intentionally looks like a studio backlot. The intentional anachronisms and well-timed comic bits make strict believability beside the point. This is silly fun.

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viewed 3/28/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/29 and 4/16/09

Pistoleros (**1/4)

A whole mess of Danish gangsters double-cross and kill each other over a cache of cash hidden after a botched heist…as told to a couple of aspiring Copenhagen filmmakers. Director Sparky Gonzalez comes off as a low-rent Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Revolver), though with some spaghetti western touches, like the soundtrack. Without Ritchie’s sense of style, and a script that’s less clever than convoluted, the whole thing comes off as contrived.

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viewed and reviewed 4/4/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival.

War (**1/4)

Jet Li and Jason Statham have made a number of above-average action movies between them. Li has appeared in Fearless and Hero, which incorporated stunning martial-arts sequences into mythical storylines. Statham is best known for the Transporter films and Crank, no-nonsense action films that hardly slowed down and didn’t clutter their stories with sentimentality. Both are non-Americans, which may or may not be why they rarely seem as cocky as American action stars.

Here Statham plays a San Francisco FBI man who obsesses over the mysterious and little-seen assassin who three years earlier killed his partner. He spends the movie hunting down this assassin, who is called Rogue (Li). Rogue has shifted his allegiance from the Chinese Triads to their Japanese rivals and is ensured with the safe transfer of some valuable antiques that are to finance the expansion of the yakuza empire to the new world. Rogue is deadly but seems violent by trade rather than by nature. His motivations seem shrouded. There’s more to the story, but that’s the gist. The movie is quite violent—lots of shooting, lots of cutting—without there being a great deal of action. Li barely displays his martial arts skills. One decent chase sequence stands out, but the movie feels long. The twist ending, which you may or may not guess, isn’t enough to redeem a turgid movie with a higher body count than intelligence quotient. The way Rogue plays off his enemies against one another would be of more interest if those enemies were less one-dimensional.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07

Rush Hour 3 (*1/2)

It’s been six years since Rush Hour 2, and six years since Chris Tucker made a movie. I swear I kind of liked the first two movies in this series, so either this one is a lot worse or it just took awhile for me to become completely annoyed by Tucker’s character, James Carter. We first reacquaint ourselves with Carter, now a traffic cop, as he’s being berated for falsely arresting some Iranian scientists and trying to pick up some “sushi-grade” women for himself and Hong Kong-born Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan). Presumably, Carter thinks Japanese and Chinese are the same thing. As for the Iranians, just because they’re scientists “doesn’t mean they won’t blow shit up.” Carter’s too busy to socialize, acting as the bodyguard of Ambassador Han, who’s making a big speech about the Chinese Triad gangsters at the World Criminal Court. Thus reacquainted with our heroes, we follow the Triads’ trail to…France.

The movie shows a side of Paris you can only see on a studio backlot, the halfway decent climax in what’s supposed to be the Eiffel Tower the only apparent justification. That and a silly bit in which the boys question/threaten a Chinese-looking thug with the help of a multilingual nun because he only speaks...French. This may be the comic highlight, notwithstanding the civil-liberties violations, so you can imagine the lowlights. Incidentally and idiotically, the thug’s the only character in the movie who doesn’t speak English. A couple of the French characters can barely speak French, it would seem, notably the variably accented cabbie sidekick Carter and Lee acquire, who later argues with his wife...in English. It’s an odd contrast to the multiple scenes in which Lee speaks Chinese to other Chinese characters. Language also figures in what’s supposed to be a showcase scene for Tucker. Wandering into a dressing-room full of showgirls, he tells them he’s the costume designer. Having clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t know French, he nonetheless speaks in a French accent so he can a) blend in and b) have an excuse to ask the women to strip. Seen in a random sitcom, this would have been corny already. What really made it cringe-worthy was that the apparently lobotomized dancers appear to believe him. Watching this in a fairly crowded theater, I listened for laughter and heard not a peep.

Admittedly, the same audience pretty much stayed intact to watch the predictable outtakes at the end, so what do I know? Whether you like the movie pretty much will depend if you think Tucker’s Carter babbling a 90-minute stream of bullshit is funny. Yes, the plot is perforated like Swiss-cheese, yes, Brent Ratner’s direction and Jeff Nathanson’s script are uninspired, and yes, martial-arts expert Chan has lost a step or two, but that I didn’t laugh at all is what made the movie a truly trying experience. The mismatched partners schtick has worn very thin, too. Rush Hour 3 counts on distant memories of past installments to establish what these guys are doing together. The action parts, fewer than before, are fair to middling, the best being the one in the Tower. Chan there displays some of the dexterity he did in movies he made as a younger man. Overall, though, I felt like I was watching three episodes of a sitcom that had long since “jumped the shark.”

IMDB link

reviewed 8/12/07

Brick (**1/2)

If you can suspend your disbelief at 25-ish actors playing high-schoolers who spout Dashiell Hammett-inspired gangster slang and rule over unreal-seeming crime fiefdoms, there’s a half-decent, tricky mystery here.

They’re giving out booklets with this movie, a glossary for the old-school slang used by the characters, who are mostly new-school gangsters. High school gangsters, actually, who don’t use expressions like “old-school” but call cops “bulls” and drugs “hop” or “jake,” and who mostly look about 25, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the charismatic star. He’s kind of a James Dean type, a loner, but a call from his ex-girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin) brings him into contact with a drug-dealing subculture. The dialogue and action take on a film noir feel, which jarring contrasts with the drab, flat settings. Aided by a tinkling, minimalist score, writer-director Rian Johnson sets his nefarious plot in empty highways, bland tract houses, parking lots, and the ordinary-looking school, the visual counterpoint making a virtue of low-budget cinematography. There’s a half-decent, tricky mystery here if you can sort it out with all the mumbled, slangy dialogue, but I felt that the film was more pretentious than clever. I was too aware at times that I was watching a movie.

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Find Me Guilty (***)

An amusing portrait of an amusing guy, real-life gangster Jackie DeNorscio. Vin Diesel is pretty good in the lead, and the courtroom scenes that dominate the picture seem fairly realistic.

Vin Diesel’s bid for respectability finds him (cosmetically and follically enhanced) essaying the role of a real-life gangster, the late Jackie DeNorscio. Alleged gangster, that is. When he and his pals were tried for conspiracy in Manhattan 20 years ago, Jackie decided to fire his lawyer and defend himself. “I’m a gagster, not a gangster,” he tells the jury, which is funny only because he’s goofy enough to think it is. He also really believes the stuff about the code of loyalty, which only infuriates the D.A. (Linus Roache), who in one of the better scenes rages that the people he’s loyal to cost everyone money, and occasionally kill people. However, the movie mostly takes place in the courtroom and focuses on the interactions between DeNorscio and the often-exasperated judge (Ron Silver), the lead counsel for the other defendants (Peter Dinklage), and the contemptuous head of the “family” (a fearsome Alex Rocco). An on-screen title notes that actual trial testimony was used, and indeed the scenes have an almost documentary-like feel to them. For director Sidney Lumet, this isn’t likely to rank up with Twelve Angry Men, Network, or The Verdict. It’s not an examination of organized crime. But it is a well-acted, amusing portrait of an amusing character.

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posted 9/6/13