Captain Phillips (***1/2)

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viewed 12/1/13 5:05 at AMC Cherry Hill

A Hijacking (***)

This is the Somali pirate version of a police procedural. The particulars of the story are fictional, but everything is realistic enough that it seems otherwise. The story does not offer twists and turns, or any action —even the hijacking itself takes place off camera, experienced from the point of view of the Danish CEO being notified — but the slow buildup of tension on the part of both the captives and their families back home. The ransom negotiations are the main focus, a fascinating exercise in game theory. The CEO (Søren Malling), certainly the most memorable, and intense, character, heeds the advice of the negotiator he hires and lowballs the Somali negotiator (who denies that he himself is a pirate). But as time passes, and the captives suffer further deprivations, he must decide on his own course.

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viewed 6/20/13 7:30 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

Argo (***1/2)

I always enjoy it when movies do more than one thing well. Ben Affleck’s third directorial effort (after Gone Baby Gone and The Town) is a three-for-one. In the first, shortest sequence, it is a docudrama (incorporating news footage) showing, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries taking over the American embassy. The mass hostage-taking that followed was the year’s top foreign-policy story and, perhaps, the thing that lost Jimmy Carter re-election.

The flight, in secret, of a handful of embassy employees to the nearby Canadian embassy is a lesser-known story that makes perfect fodder for an elliptical thriller, with a rescue plan that was literally straight out of Hollywood. The satirical midsection would not be ought of place in Get Shorty. John Goodman and Alan Arkin play the colorful movie folks who helped produce the operation, the details of which are too amusing to recount.

But then Affleck, who plays the CIA operative who arranges the whole plan and sells it to his agency superiors, deftly pivots again and shows the operation in action in a most suspenseful way. He pays attention to the individual hostages, who included a married couple and one man who is heavily skeptical of the plan, which requires them to play, among other things, Canadians.

The script, while not perfectly fidelitous to history, particularly in the third act, gets some points for casting, as can be seen in the photographs of the actual hostages, looking remarkably like the actors who portray them (as does the John Goodman character). The story is based on a book by Tony Mendez, Affleck’s character, with a screenplay by Chris Terrio. It’s a fine blend of Hollywood thrills and nervous tension, with a touch of comedy.

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viewed 11/4/2012 2:05 pm at Ritz 16 NJ; review posted 2/21/2013

Buried (***)

This is like some kind of stunt moviemaking exercise. Come up with something you can make with one actor who never leaves a space not much larger than the size of the actor. Oh, and nothing can be brighter than the light from a cell phone or a cigarette lighter. And make it suspenseful. There you’ve described the cinematic challenge director Rodrigo Cortés and his leading man, Ryan Reynolds, had in adapting a script by Chris Sparling. Surprisingly, perhaps, they succeed.

Fading in from a black screen, Cortés dispenses with flashbacks or complicated back stories. Reynolds pants and grunts a lot. Lucky he has the lighter, since he doesn’t appear to be a smoker. A cell phone that shortly rings, and is his lifeline, shows Arabic text. We learn that the unfortunate man is an American working as a truck driver in Iraq, and he is in a coffin, underground. For some reason, at no point does he use the helpful explanatory phrase “buried alive.” The action is mostly, though not entirely, a series of phone calls. Varying the camera angles, Cortés manages to convey the claustrophobia without the film becoming monotonous. Air and light and the cell-phone battery may all run out, and they’re not the only peril. A couple of plot points I found questionable—would a man whose phone battery shows only one bar really call his senile mother unless he’d already given up hope? But mostly the behavior we witness is that you’d expect of someone scared, desperate, and unprepared for what might be his last 90 minutes of life.

For me this was still a little gimmicky—I didn’t have that much of an emotional response to the man’s predicament. I felt as I had watching the thriller Phone Booth, in which Colin Farrell was frozen in place by a sniper. Ironically, the cell phone, the key to this movie’s plot, has rendered the pay-phone-oriented plot of that 2003 movie nearly obsolete at this point. But in any case, in both movies it’s the puzzle aspect of the story that is the prime interest. The endings I had in mind for Buried were all a bit trite, so I was pleased that the actual conclusion was not one I’d foreseen.

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viewed 9/22/10 [screening at Ritz East] and reviewed 10/1/10

Nothing to Lose (***1/2)

As in The Fugitive, a convicted killer (Theo Maassen) escapes and sets out to prove his innocence, yet this story, based on an actual case, is far removed from that. That it’s the work of a Belgian, Pieter Kuijpers, who made another good crime drama, Godforsaken, is one reason. Another is that, for much of the film, the escapee is in the company of a thirteen-year-old girl (Lisa Smit) he’s taken as a hostage. Most significantly, the characters make the film unique. For one thing, it’s clear that, innocent or not, the convict is no Richard Kimble. His escape is from a facility for the criminally insane. At times the film operates like a thriller, as when he tries to flee the country. At others, it is more of a drama, but with the tension of wondering whether the girl is right as she begins to trust him, and without undue sentimentality.

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viewed 4/13/08 (Philadelphia Film Festival); reviewed 8/8/2010

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.

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posted 9/15/13