The Yellow Sea (**3/4)

I made a point of seeing this at the Philadelphia Film Festival because it was South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s follow-up to The Chaser, one of the best action films of the last decade.

In this case, Chaser star Jung-Woo Ha plays a hapless Chinese taxi driver and gambler offered a contract killing job to pay off his debts. Both the driver and his intended victim are ethnic Koreans, but the driver lives in a Korean enclave just north of the Korean peninsula, while the man he plans to kill is in South Korea.


I strongly preferred the first half, which shows the driver’s being perilous transported into South Korea, stalking his prey, and making inquiries about his wife, who had already left China in search of work. Although only background to the story, it’s an interesting parallel with American immigration issues. The driver has to work so as not to appear like a rube, as immigrants everywhere sometimes do to those more assimilated.

The second half will no doubt appeal to real action junkies. With less time given to sentimental concerns, it ups the violence quotient significantly. One thing different about many Asian action films—versus Hollywood ones—is that films like this don’t mind making the hero unsavory, or the violence seem as brutal as it is. Here, not only are guns a rarity, so you get a lot of murders with knives and other implements (and lots of blood), but even the car crashes feel louder and crunchier, frightening like a real car crash, if you’ve been in one. Technically, the movie seemed pretty flawless, but way too brutal for my taste. Once the main character’s transformation from meek cabbie to fearless killer is complete, I lost some interest, although there are twists and turns as he becomes the target of a slew of Korean and Chinese mafioso. Too bad, because the final sequence is very well done.

IMDb link

viewed 10/28/11 9:15 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/3/11

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.

IMDB link

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

Eastern Promises (***1/2)

Viggo Mortensen reunites with History of Violence director David Cronenberg for another story in which ordinary people get mixed up in the criminal underworld. Naomi Watts plays the London nurse whose attempts to find a home for a baby whose teen mother died in childbirth lead her to a restaurant that turns out to be a front for Russian mobsters. Mortensen’s character is merely the driver for the family of the boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), but he’s clearly smarter and more competent than the heir apparent (Vincent Cassel). We can see this as he calmly snips off the fingers of a recent murder victim so that the corpse can’t be easily identified. The nurse’s earnest attempts to do the right thing figure into the internecine conflicts.

Working from a script by Steven Knight (Amazing Grace, Dirty Pretty Things), Cronenberg uses the nurse as a audience proxy to draw us into a dangerous world. This isn’t a Russian Godfather, emphasizing brutality rather than myth in its Mafia tale, but it does bring in particulars of the Russian criminal culture, notably the elaborate role of tattoos in establishing heirarchy. The brutality doesn’t translate into frequent violence, but the violent scenes that do exist remove any sense that there is honor among thieves. I won’t describe the incredible fight scene in which the film climaxes except to say it’s original, utterly realistic, and extremely memorable.

There’s something detached about Cronenberg’s cinematic approach, yet this only emphasizes the ugliness of what’s being depicted and draws us into the story, which offers a couple of shocks of its own.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/21/07

Smokin’ Aces (*1/4)

? Rival teams of assassins target a magician/gangster (Jeremy Piven) who’s holing up with hookers and bodyguards in a Lake Tahoe penthouse after agreeing to turn state’s evidence against his mobster cohorts. Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta are the primary FBI agents

+ The movie’s obviously set up to end with a spectacular orgy of violence, and the one thing I liked is that the inevitable shoot-out actually comes before the end, which features a revealing plot twist that some may find clever (if far-fetched), though I’d long since stopped being interested. There are a couple of good performances, including singer Alicia Keys as one of the assassins, and Curtis Armstrong as the witness’s lawyer.

- Every couple of years a movie comes along that I flat out can’t stand from the get-go, and this is one of them. It starts out with an FBI agent tossing about 50 names at you, and already I didn’t care and couldn’t remember, although that turns out not to be crucial. The main thing, though, is that nearly every moment of this movie felt forced and contrived, like a lesser version of a Quentin Tarentino movie, most notably Reservoir Dogs. Now there’s a movie with a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters who are nonetheless interesting. Here’s a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters (excepting the agents, who appear only occasionally) who are just unreal, like the lesbian assassin who’s so stealthy that she randomly lets loose a profane tirade on a hotel desk clerk. This is one of a few left-field attempts at comic relief. Two of the others involve the killers stopping to chat with the corpses of their victims. The witness (Piven) is sleazy, obnoxious, depressed, and unpleasant to be around. There’s a story to the movie, but most of it is explained in about three minutes at the beginning and end by having a character simply recite it. Lame.

= *1/4 The one thing I can say about this is that it’s not simply a Hollywood studio throwaway. That is, it has a personality, as you’d expect from something with a single credited writer-director, Joe Carnahan (Narc). I therefore expect that a fair number of people will disagree with me about the movie’s virtues. Carnahan utilizes overlapping visuals and speech and generally keeps things moving fast. He also delivers the heap of violence (with some degree of novelty) that viewers will be expecting. And that may be enough for some. But only really good writing can make a movie as stylized as this work, and I just found the characters both fake and irritating, and the plotting absolutely silly.

IMDb link

10th and Wolf (**3/4)

? A mobster’s son (James Marsden), dishonorably discharged from the Marines, is forced by circumstances to re-enter the world he’d tried to escape. Brian Dennehy plays a Philly cop who offers him a chance to avoid jail and protect his brother (Brad Renfro) and cousin (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s angling to control the local sin trade. The story largely revolves around this struggle for control and Marsden’s efforts to get his cousin’s rival on tape for the cops.

+ The brisk-moving story has a couple of surprises and kept me interested. Renfro is effective as Marsden’s loyal, simple brother, and Piper Perabo is all right as a childhood friend with whom Marsden gets reacquainted.

- This was the follow-up to Crash for its co-writer, Bobby Moresco, who makes his directorial debut here. But if Crash arguably suffered from an excess of self-importance, this could use some of that Oscar-winning film’s heft. Once the plot has placed the main character back on the street, Moresco mostly forgets about what made him want to escape that lifestyle. You expect the flashback scenes to explain some of this, but they really don’t. The film hits all the usual mob film touchstones—there’s misguided loyalty, there’s a trigger-happy nut (Ribisi), there a big showdown, and so forth. But it never coalesces into something richer like Goodfellas or The Godfather. Leslie Ann Warren’s character, the mother/aunt of the principals, is mostly superfluous. And if you’re going to have PT Transit buses obviously visible and have pivotal scenes take place at Wholey’s seafood market in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, why not just set the film there? The movie has the feel of being set in a somewhat smaller city, anyway. Watching this, I had the idea that the whole Philadelphia mob consisted of about half a dozen guys. (It’d be nice if that were true.)

= **3/4 If you’ve seen other mob movies, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before. But if you like mob movies, the lack of originality might not bother you.

IMDb link

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.

IMDb link

posted 9/6/13

The Ice Harvest (***)

A subdued film noir (with mild comedy elements and good dialogue) starring John Cusack as a Wichita mob lawyer who steals a couple of million from his employer.

John Cusack stars in this downbeat Christmas tale, which probably won’t linger in theaters until the holiday. He, an attorney, and Billy Bob Thornton have just swiped a couple of million dollars from the local mob in Wichita, Kansas. (Even if the movie does take its setting from the Scott Phillips novel on which it’s based, and even if it makes it look it like a small town consisting largely of strip joints rather than a city of 300,000 people, I have to give an extra quarter of a star just based on this novelty.) The director is Harold Ramis of Caddyshack, Ghost Busters, and Groundhog Day fame, but this isn’t much like those, or like Thornton’s other Christmas cheer-down, Bad Santa. In fact, it has the feel of the last movie on which writers Richard Russo and Robert Benton collaborated, Twilight with Paul Newman. It’s a subdued, old-fashioned film noir, complete with a femme fatale (Connie Nielsen). It’s probably boring if you’re looking for much action or even scenery, and the story elements are familiar, at least if you’ve seen some old detective films, but it does have well-written dialogue, suspense and some humor. Oliver Platt is amusing as Cusack’s drunken friend, who tells anyone in earshot that he’s pals with a mob lawyer (i.e. Cusack), though Thornton has movie’s only real laugh-aloud line.

IMDb link

circulated via email 12/15/05 and posted online 9/20/13