Animal Kingdom (***1/4)

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viewed 11/26/11 [Netflix rental]

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (***1/4)

The gangster film had already been around awhile when the early classics The Public Enemy and Little Caesar were released in 1931. These formed the template for countless films that followed the rise and, usually, fall of a would-be mob boss. Arguably, this formula reached its zenith with the Godfather saga, which also incorporated the trope of family conflict that is nearly as frequent an ingredient in these stories. But filmmakers still try their hand at making something original of the genre. Just a few months ago there was A Prophet, another French film that is superior to this, probably, though this does have a certain visceral energy to it.

These films vary in location, time period, criminal proclivities of the antihero, and so on, but the primary characters generally fall into two types. One is the type who under other circumstances might have done something else with his life, but learn the ruthlessness that underlies criminality. Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Henry Hill in Goodfellas are such characters. So is the hero of The Prophet, who starts off as a scared prisoner. This suspense drama, a true story, is of the other type. If Jacques Mesrine ( Vincent Cassel) was once an ordinary young man, it was at a young age. In an early scene the young Jacques, just back from fighting in Algeria, berates his father for cooperating with the Germans during World War II. "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" he asks. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get for the remarkable criminal résumé that Mesrine would amass, on two continents, in the 1960s and ’70s. It's a record so extensive as to have been compiled in two parts, of which this is the first. (Even with that, the film skips ahead and omits several of Mesrine's documented adventures.)

What most gangster films have in common is the man who disregards all rules, and our fascination with that is why they keep making them. Attracting comely women and escaping from prison were among Mesrine’s talents, but it is sheer cockiness that propels him. Cassel is quite charismatic in the leading role. In terms of story, there is not much order to all that happens. Mesrine seems to have been an improviser, which is perhaps why he got caught and ultimately killed. No spoiler this, since it’s shown at the start of the film. The movie never returns to it, though. Instead, it stops in the middle, the story to be picked up in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, whose title is an homage to one of its classic forebears.

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viewed 8/29/10 at Ritz 5

A Prophet (***1/2)

It took a mistake to land him in jail. It took prison to make him into a criminal. That would be my imaginary tagline for this French drama from director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped).

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viewed 3/25/2010 at Ritz 5

American Gangster (***1/2)

The seemingly generic title of this drama actually reflects a central fact about its subject, one Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). This was not, as you might imagine, his race, though he was a black man who came of age during the civil rights movement. No, it’s that Lucas’s would be a quintessential American success story had his success not been based around illegal activities. Lucas had been the driver for his predecessor, a mentor of sorts, but by applying a time-tested principal—buy low, sell high—he was able to expand considerably and came to dominate New York City’s heroin trade in the early 1970s.

Racial issues do play a part in the movie, but around the edges. When Lucas wants to expand, he finds it helpful to have a white partner in the South. On the other hand, having a black-run organization, involving his younger brother (Chewetel Ejiofor) and other family members, seems to have kept him under the government’s radar for a long while. This brings us to the other primary character in the movie, the New Jersey police detective played by Russell Crowe. Despite the title, the movie is more or less equally about the gangster and the man trying to bring him down. Crowe, reuniting with his Gladiator/Good Year director, Ridley Scott, has the more intriguing character in some ways, since Lucas never really changes throughout the movie. Tapped to lead a narcotics squad while also finishing law, the detective operates among shady characters while trying to remain honest. He also has an ex-wife and a young son. Though we don’t learn much about his past, Crowe’s performance and accent betray both a working-class background and the desire to transcend it.

Steve Zaillian’s reliably intelligent script is built more around its two main personalities than its time and place. In this way it is different from Gangs of New York, the Martin Scorcese movie Zaillian wrote, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, both sweeping epics. Nor is it like Goodfellas, which dwelt much more on the brutality of gangsters. As the first scene of the movie makes quite clear, Lucas was perfectly willing to deal out violence when it was useful, which is perhaps the other American thing about this story. But the suggestion is that Lucas did this, like most everything he did, with cool logic, only when necessary to make a point.

The same could be said about the movie, in fact. Compared to Scorcese’s gangster movies it’s sedate, and there is really only one action sequence of any consequence. But the storytelling is clear and tight, covering a fair span of time without feeling like it’s skipping ahead too much or becoming confusing. While I didn’t feel like I was watching something completely original, as with Godfather or Goodfellas, to be a notch below those is not bad.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

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

Lucky Number Slevin (**3/4)

A cleverly twisty plot about a regular guy (Josh Hartnett) mixed up with rival crime lords can’t completely overcome an air of contrivance.

Slevin, played by Josh Hartnett, is a regular guy who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, mistaken for someone else by not one but two rival crime lords. One, called the Boss, is played by Morgan Freeman. The other, called the Rabbi, is played by Ben Kingsley. Why is he called the Rabbi? “Because he’s a rabbi.” That’s the sort of movie this is. You can almost hear first-time screenwriter Jason Smilovic saying, wouldn’t it be interesting to make one of the kingpins a rabbi? The dialogue is like that too, so a lot of what you think about this movie will depend on what you think about lines like “Nick set me up like a bowling pin.” Kind of clever, kind of contrived. It sounds sort of like a film noir, but, with bright lighting and direct camera angles, doesn’t look like one.  Rather than a femme fatale, it has likable Lucy Liu as a perky, fast-talking coroner who pops in on Slevin like the kind of next-door-neighbor usually seen on TV. She’s a counterpoint to the dispassionate Slevin (or is that the passionless Hartnett?). Bruce Willis plays a killer whose relation to the other characters is a mystery. Lucky Number Slevin will appeal to people who like their thrillers with muted violence but lots of twists and turns, though it relies too much on having the characters explain the convoluted plot. You can almost hear them saying, “Please allow me to explain to you and the people in the theater why I’m killing you.” So, I can almost recommend this.

IMDb link

posted 9/3/13