The Brave One - Review

With Panic Room, Flight Plan, and now The Brave One, Jodie Foster is on the verge of becoming an action star. And odd career move for an actress on the down side of forty. If she has to get wrapped up in ass-kicking though, The Brave One is the way to do it. The movie takes a familiar genre, the vigilante revenge flick, and for a change takes it seriously. I’m not talking about the way Christopher Nolan takes Batman seriously, after all it’s still a guy in a cape running around overreacting to his parents’ death. Let’s face it, that never made a whole lot of sense. Get over it already Bats. The Brave One is an examination of what it might take for a real person to become a vigilante, an examination of what might drive a normal woman to become judge, jury, and executioner.

The normal woman in question is Erica (Foster), host of a low-rent weekend radio show in New York City and engaged to a sexy, swarthy doctor. During and evening stroll in Central Park, Erica and her fiancée are attacked by a gang of thugs. Her future husband is beaten to death, and she’s left severely injured and hospitalized. When Erica gets out, she’s not consumed by a need for revenge, but rather completely overtaken by fear. The city she’s known and loved her entire life now terrifies her. After several failed attempts she finally makes it out her front door, jumping at shadows and fighting down the constant, overwhelming urge to run home screaming. Her tragedy has left her irrevocably altered, but she’d determined not to let the fear she now feels rule her. So, as so many have before her, Erica buys a gun.

Still frightened but feeling empowered, she walks the city, fighting down her terror until tragedy strikes again. She witnesses a convenience store robbery and in an act of self-defense shoots the robber dead. It’s as if her eyes have been opened to an entirely new world. Erica faced her fears, and shot them dead. Determined never to be afraid again, Erica takes to the streets, intentionally putting herself in more and more dangerous situations as if daring the world to give her its best shot. The criminals of the city are more than happy to oblige, seeing only a seemingly defenseless white woman in a place where she probably shouldn’t be. When she attacks, Erica responds with deadly force, becoming a vigilante. With every encounter she grows more confident, but begins to wonder if she’s losing herself in the process.

Tracked by the police and hounded by her own conscience, The Brave One uses her vigilantism as a way of exploring the terrible emotional toll taken on survivors of violent crime. Whether or not Erica gets the bad guys, or whether or not the police catch her becomes much less interesting than understanding what it is that’s driven Erica to this. More than anything The Brave One is about dealing with fear and surviving in spite of it. In exploring what it’s done to Erica, Jodie Foster gives one of the best performances of her career. So does Terrence Howard as a conflicted, honest police detective who befriends her, and then ends up hunting her.

Director Neil Jordan’s carefully crafted film doesn’t have Jodie Foster swooping down from rooftops on a zip line, but it’s one of the best vigilante themed movies I’ve ever seen. The Brave One takes a fairly obvious, overused movie conceit and uses it to explore something much deeper and more real than you’d ever expect. That only serves to heighten the film’s tense, utterly believable action sequences, even if they aren’t the real focus of the script. If there’s any flaw in the movie at all, then it happens in the last five minutes when Howard’s policeman character makes an unlikely decision. His actions undermine some of the realism of the rest of the film has worked so hard to set up, but those five minutes aren’t enough to kill the smart work that came before it. Before you get all excited about the next man-in-tights superhero flick or watch Kevin Bacon shave himself bald and put on revenge-themed eye makeup for Death Sentence, make it a point to seek out The Brave One.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Review

Resident Evil: Extinction is the third film in this zombie franchise, so let’s take a minute to figure out where we’re at. The first Resident Evil was a blast due in part to blind stupid luck, and in greater part an ensemble cast containing, in addition to Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez in her last good performance before becoming that alcoholic from TV’s Lost. The second one fell flat on its ass; Paul W.S. Anderson’s script was a mess and Alexander Witt, the guy they hired to direct it, managed to make it even worse. For Extinction, they’ve brought in helmer Russell Mulcahy who takes another terrible Paul W.S. Anderson screenplay and redeems the franchise by hitting it out of the park.

Like the others in this series, Resident Evil: Extinction is an action movie first, and a zombie movie second. Milla Jovovich’s Alice character could be fighting anything, it doesn’t have to be zombies, that just happens to be what they’ve settled on for this particular set of stories. And that’s fine, since zombies have been done to death and I for one am getting sick of watching them. Resident Evil: Extinction doesn’t need to be a good zombie movie, or even a good horror movie in order to work. It does however need to be fast-paced and fun; thankfully Mulcahy pulls that off admirably.

It’s five years since the last Resident Evil movie, and things have gone badly. The zombie-making virus unleashed in the first movie has since spread across the entire planet, turning the world into a wasteland desert inhabited by mindless, flesh-eating baddies. On the surface, only a few ragtag bands of humans survive. To live they must keep on the move, if they stop the undead flock to them and chow down. Underground, the evil Umbrella corporation still exists. You remember them, the all powerful capitalist monolith which created the zombie virus in the first place and in the past worried more about its profit margins than saving the human race. Now they’ve all retreated to underground bunkers where they create and kill clones of Alice in an attempt to find a cure for that which ails the world, or at least a way to make things better for themselves. After watching her beat the hell out of everything in the first and second movies, they believe Alice is the key, and so they’d love to get their hands on the original.

The original Alice we know and love is one of the few people left living on the surface, and like everyone else she’s on the move. She joins up with a convoy of survivors traveling Road Warrior style, and attempts to help their leader Claire take them to Alaska where rumor has it, the infection hasn’t spread. The movie works surprisingly well early on as a post-apocalyptic survival tale. I’m not kidding with that Road Warrior comparison, there are definitely moments when the film nearly has a sweet Mad Max vibe going for it, or at least a little bit of Thunderdome. Sadly, it doesn’t last and soon those Umbrellla Corporation bastards get in the way, ruining the survivor’s zombie smashing run to the Great White North.

What’s most surprising about Extinction is how tame the franchise has become. The film is rated-R, but only barely. I had to go home and look it up, because it plays like it’s PG-13. Gone is the now trademark Milla Jovovich full-frontal nudity which usually graces these movies. The film is also pretty light on zombie decapitations. Evidently you now only need to slash their throats in order to kill them, presumably because that’s less gruesome than chopping off heads. This would make sense if they were bucking for a PG-13, but the movie is R so you’ve got to wonder why they didn’t take it all the way.

Speaking of taking it all the way, it wouldn’t have hurt to make it longer either. It’s one thing to be fast paced, but it’s another to jump from scene to scene so fast that you’re left with silly coincidences and unbelievable logical gaps. The script is incredibly thin, and there really should be more to it. Pacing isn’t necessarily dictated by running time, and a few more minutes tacked on could have worked wonders for the film’s plot without sacrificing the quick beat Mulcahy sets for it. Extinction is good enough even as it is that I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with it.

Thin or not, Extinction is a fast, well staged action movie with giddy, creative sequences involving things like zombie birds and a genius moment in which Oded Fehr blows everything to hell while toking on a joint. More importantly, Milla still looks great doing her karate moves. Gone is some of the wildly over-the-top, annoying action prevalent in the second film. This time when Milla strikes her superhero pose, you’re cheering for her instead of wondering how the hell she managed to suddenly become Spider-Man. The script is undeniably shoddy, full of wild coincidences and it often seems more concerned with setting things up for yet another sequel than finishing the film at hand. The end in particular suffers from that, the movie’s finale seems like rush to get to the franchise’s next movie rather than a big finish to this one. Still Mulcahy and his cast overcome all of that to delivery an enjoyable experience, back in the twisting, zombie-infested levels of the Resident Evil world.

Mr. Woodcock - Review

Mr. Woodcock. Does just saying that name aloud make you giggle? Then you might have the underdeveloped mental capacity necessary to truly enjoy this movie. You might also enjoy hanging out behind the building after school with mid-high students who are desperately failing at trying to insult each other and chortling over dirty slang terms for having sex. Actually, there’s not a whole lot of difference between that and watching this film.

There is a semi-sweet storyline in the midst of all the repetitive jokes and predictable setups. Inspired by his own efforts to overcome his traumatized childhood, John Farley (Sean William Scott) has written the latest cult-craze self-help book “Letting Go – Getting Past Your Past”. Most of Farley’s demons revolved around his abusive mid-high gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who seems to enjoy embarrassing and belittling his students.

While on tour Farley learns that his little mid-western hometown has decided to bestow upon him its greatest honor: the Corn Cob Key (think key to the city, but with a giant ear of corn on the end). It’s handed out during the town’s annual Corn-ival, a festival full of corn-tests and corn-gratulations to the winners. Do you seem the theme there? It’s only one of several dull running jokes that the movie beats to death during the mind-numbing hour-and-a-half. Farley comes home only to discover that town has also decided to honor Mr. Woodcock, naming him Educator of the Year.

Much to Farley’s further dismay, his mother (Susan Sarandon) is engaged to Mr. Woodcock. Apparently she loves him for his meat. Of course, she’s referring to his talent for cooking steaks, but cue up another series of lame jokes repeated way too many times to be funny. Tossing all of his own self-help principles to the wind and making a complete idiot of himself along the way, Farley desperately tries to prove to his mother and the town just what a horrible person Woodcock really is.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that nearly every gag has been done in another movie before (and usually done better), every single setup is also absurdly predictable. It might have helped if Farley was the kind of guy you could rally around, but the character is too pathetic to cheer. All I could see through the whole movie was a grown-up Steve Stifler who was reprising his American Pie chore of running around complaining about the guy sleeping with his mother.

Sarandon and Thornton are no help either. It’s not entirely their fault as they both do the best with the material they’re given; but there’s the rub: the script is completely worthless. I can’t help but wonder if they were both drunk when they read it or maybe took the roles on a dare. Blackmailed maybe? I don’t care how many times Sarandon and Thornton have won or been nominated for an Oscar, there’s no excuse for wasting time on Mr. Woodcock

I’ll grant the movie this: it made me laugh once. I’m not sure if I laughed because it was the only gag I didn’t see coming from a mile away or if I was so desperate for a chuckle that I would have cracked at a knock-knock joke. If you’re willing to wait seventy minutes for a laugh or the name Mr. Woodcock alone is enough to keep your infantile sense of humor afloat, this may just be the film for you.

License to Wed - Review

Anyone who has gotten married is more than familiar with the stress that comes with the shift from being just a couple to being a married couple. Over years you discover differences of opinion on all sorts of things you never had any idea you would disagree with your spouse on: political differences, how many kids you want to have, those sorts of mundane details that just happen to come up over time. License to Wed takes those kinds of differences and has one couple face all of them over a period of days and weeks, all courtesy of a special “marriage preparation course”.

The course is conducted by the irreverent Reverend Frank, played by a slightly less energetic than usual Robin Williams. Many people told me, after seeing the trailers for License to Wed, that it looked like more of Williams doing his usual spurts of stand-up comedy. This is only partially true. While Reverend Frank does have a couple of comedic eruptions, they are kept to a minimum. One gets the sense that Williams probably didn’t control himself any more than usual on the set of this film, but the editors just kept it out of the movie. The story pairs Frank with a cute little apprentice character to give Williams someone to play off of, but it doesn’t work, particularly because the kid is too young for Williams to have too much fun with. Instead the choir boy gives off a bit of a creepy Oompa-Loompa vibe, especially when he’s stalking the designated couple and planting listening devices. By the end I was hoping someone would stuff the kid in a storage chest, never to be seen from again.

The primary humor comes from the trials of Ben (John Krasinski) and Sadie (Mandy Moore), the couple who comes to Reverend Frank for their wedding. At first a perfect couple who has never had a single fight, the duo discover their own shortcomings as they endure Frank’s marriage course. Of course, many of the couple’s problems are apparent from the start. Sadie is a big organizer and wants everything laid out in its place while Ben frequently doesn’t get his way, conceding to make his girlfriend happy. Those aren’t the problems the movie’s story really tackles however, as the marriage course pits the couple against problems most couples learn to deal with over time – communication, the rigors of having children, etc. It’s mostly manufactured problems, compressed down to a time span that creates added pressure for the characters, crumbling their relationship. One has to wonder how long the characters will put up with this, but “for the sake of the marriage” they keep at it… or that’s why Sadie puts up with it. Ben puts up with it for Sadie, and that right there shows the biggest problem the two have. Alas, it’s a problem that’s never really addressed.

Let’s be clear: this is a romantic comedy and, if there’s anything I’ve learned from romantic comedy stories over time, it’s to not expect anything bearing any similarity to reality. That’s why plot devices such as having to choose between holding a wedding three weeks away or two years away don’t even faze me anymore. A couple accepting to put up with creepy robot babies that spit up and poop as part of the marriage preparation program? Sure, why not. Ben finally getting so fed up with the program that he starts to try and dig up dirt on the minister instead of talking things over with his girlfriend? Bring it on. There is humor here, but very little of it has much to do with the actual storyline; garnering laughter from moments like Williams’s banter and Ben’s reactions to things that really are irrelevant and unbelievable. The truth is, License to Wed rivals other silly comedies like Anger Management in ludicrousness. It’s clearly a fluff movie; quite possibly the king of fluff movies in recent years. You can check your brain at the door, because the movie just tries to play on your sappy emotions with some chuckles thrown in.

The big draw for License to Wed is John Krasinski, who’s really made a name for himself as Jim in the American version of “The Office”. Director Ken Kwapis is also an “Office” alum (director for a number of episodes) and clearly wants you to remember the television series as a selling point for this movie, so the film is stuffed with cameo appearances from most of the secondary cast of the show. An appearance from Steve Carell or Rainn Wilson might have gone farther than the less memorable members of the ensemble, but you work with what you can get, I suppose. For those who want to see this cute romantic comedy because of Krasinski’s affable “Office” character, fear not. This movie is essentially an hour and a half of that same performance, minus the not-so-subtle glances at the camera. For those who don’t like Jim Halpert or don’t know “The Office”, there’s really nothing lost by missing this movie in theaters. It’s the kind of cute little comedy you might leave on the television if it happens to be on, but there’s no need to go out of your way to catch it.

Shoot 'Em Up - Review

Websters defines a “shoot’em up” as a “movie, television show, or computer game with much shooting and bloodshed.” In the simplest of terms, this film is exactly that. Writer/Director Michael Davis basically thought up the most ridiculous circumstances for a shootout (while delivering a baby, having sex and skydiving were the obvious choices) and then formed an interesting, if unbelievable plot around those moments. What results is like a John Woo movie on crack, with non-stop action, cheesy but deliciously quotable one-liners and bad ass performances that make up for the just plain bad plot.

Shoot ‘Em Up begins along a deserted street where Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), a jaded loner who hates just about everyone (especially people who don’t signal or slurp their coffee), notices an extremely pregnant mother chased down by a gun-toting bad guy. Armed with only a carrot (his favorite snack), Mr. Smith plays the reluctant hero, telling the bad guy to “Eat your vegetables” as he shoves the carrot full on through his throat. Already the film has set the cartoonish violence bar very high. As the woman goes into labor, Smith helps deliver the baby while using her gun to ward off the rest of the goons. The shootout ends when the mother takes a bullet in the crown, leaving Smith with the innocent child.

Not your typical family man, Smith enlists the help of a lactating prostitute Donna Quintana (Monica Bellucci) or DQ for short (yes the Dairy Queen pun comes back later), to help care for the baby as he fends off a seemingly endless supply of goons courtesy of uber-villain Hertz (Paul Giamatti). Meanwhile, Smith slowly unravels a convoluted political plot involving an ill presidential candidate, a “baby factory,” and a large gun corporation. It’s best to ignore all the preposterous details and just concentrate on the main points: Smith has baby, Hertz wants baby dead, Smith and Hertz try to kill each other, 87 minutes of movie fun ensues.

If you’re not a fan of suspending disbelief to watch a character miraculously avoid getting shot while using MacGyver-like skills to turn ordinary objects into murder accessories, then you probably should skip Shoot ‘Em Up. With all its highly stylized action sequences, the film wastes no time on character development or believability and even some of the shootouts fall flat (e.g. the skydiving sequence….literally). But for those action-junkies looking for cool characters, innovative shots (both with a gun and camera), and some memorable dialogue, there is little to complain about. Clive Owen is perfectly cast as Mr. Smith (who else could make shoving a carrot through someone’s eye so unbelievably sexy?), while Paul Giamatti’s villainous Hertz is simply delightful.

Ultimately, what the film lacks in story it makes up for in sheer entertainment value and with such a short runtime, the film ends before that runs out. Head into Shoot ‘Em Up prepared for ridiculous violence and some very poor taste… also be prepared to laugh at said violence and taste. If you can appreciate the film as a stylized tribute to action classics like Woo’s Hard Boiled, you won’t be disappointed. If not, well, no one has a gun pointed at your head, which is more than we can say for Smith.

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising - Review

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising is the latest entry in the Harry Potter clone-on-a-budget genre. You can pick movies like this out, usually by their awkward and unnecessary subtitles. It’s as if they think giving the movie a secondary title makes it twice as cool, or somehow makes up for the film’s meager budget and even more meager script. But it’s not all bad with The Seeker. Obvious attempt to cash in on the kids fantasy craze it may be, but of that bunch of opportunist, lower-tier movies it’s one of the best.

The film casts young Alexander Ludwig as Will Stanton: special boy. As it is in all these movies, Will has secret, special powers nobody knows about until, on his fourteenth birthday things get a little weird. Will is told by his neighbors, who he instantly accepts as ancient beings with mystical powers of light (which we never see any evidence of), that he is “The Seeker”. He and his neighbors represent the forces of Light, while lurking somewhere out there is The Rider (Christopher Ecclestein) who represents the forces of Dark. Pretty obvious symbolism here. You know where this is going.

The Rider wants to cover the Earth in darkness and it’s up to Will to stop him. As The Seeker he has five days to uncover the six signs he’ll need to stop The Rider. If he fails, the world will get really dark and cold and he’ll get really dead. Big fun, and the plot is every bit as vague as that. The script, simply stated, is awful. Things just sort of happen because they’re supposed to, and Will runs around collecting signs and spouting contrived, expositional dialogue that sounds like it was copied off the back of a soap box.

Somehow, in spite of that, there are times when the movie really works. In spite of whatever limited means he might have been working with, director David Cunningham gives his movie an inviting sense of warmth and energy. There’s a neat little gimmick with the signs, where Will has to step through time to retrieve them. When he’s walking through a medieval battlefield or watching a cock fight in an ancient pub the movie has life. Unfortunately these moments aren’t taken far enough. They’d have been better off focusing more on Will and his mentors stepping through time to battle their way to his talismans, but this is a modestly budgeted film, and there’s only so far they can take it.

In those places where The Seeker truly grabs your attention, it’s due mostly to the film’s awesome cast. Christopher Eccelstein is magnetic as the movie’s mysterious dark rider, and he threatens and charms his way through the film with unbelievable grace in the face of almost insurmountably bad writing. Even more exciting is the performance as Ian McShane, cast as the movie’s cliché mentor character/neighbor. Except there’s nothing cliché about McShane’s performance. Rather than riffing on the usual wizard persona these characters are saddled with, he comes off more as a man’s man, a Sean Connery type who strides through the film and gives you a sense of real power… even though aside from his performance there’s no evidence of it. The same is true of his group of “old ones”, played by great character actors like Frances Conroy. They come off like a new spin on the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, or what the League should have been had the screen version of it been any good.

The same can’t be said of young Alexander Ludwig, who seems as if he’s playing a game of “let’s pretend” rather than actually facing up to the strange fantasy dangers the movie presents. It doesn’t help that he’s asked to spout such awful dialogue. Will whines about his powers while spouting embarrassing lines about being unable to talk to girls and staring blankly at the screen. You just feel bad for him. Veteran actors like McShane and Eccelstein are able to overcome the script’s shortcomings, but poor Ludwig is just too young to have that kind of unstoppable gravitas.

Still, Ecclestein and McShane are so captivating it’s almost worth putting up with The Seeker’s inept script. They deliver moments of real magic and imagination in the film, and I’m not talking about hokey scenes where a character just stands there emitting light as a way of fighting the bad guy. The Seeker’s cast makes you want to believe in the movie, and that’s almost enough to make it good.

Rocket Science - Review

What is so difficult about rocket science? It’s merely the combination of complex scientific systems such as aerodynamics, propulsion, control engineering, materials science and electronics. Alright, so the subjects might be a tad over most of our heads, but those problems pale in comparison to the multitude of life questions and quandaries we all deal with on a daily basis, and that’s exactly the point the aptly named Rocket Science makes.

Born from the brain behind the 2002 documentary Spellbound, which followed middle schoolers working toward spelling bee greatness, Rocket Science is film that is obviously close to writer and director Jeffrey Blitz’s heart. Blitz’ fondness for his home-grown story is good and bad as we follow Hal Hefner, a high school student whose disabling stutter isn’t enough to stop him from joining the debate team in hopes of winning the heart of the fast-talking girl who recruited him. Although the genre has changed to indie comedy, the setting and a few themes aren’t that far off from Blitz’s previous documentary work. Spellbound subtly wove themes of isolation and a loss of childhood through its story, and Rocket Science expands on those ideas through Hefner’s first lost love.

But Rocket Science is far from subtle. From Hal’s ironic last name (he’s not the greatest ladies man) to his stutter-plagued debate arguing the importance of abstinence taught in public schools, the themes of losing one’s childhood innocence through the first romantic relationship are painfully obvious. Perhaps no more so than the scene where Hal looks at his love’s bedroom window, pounding down a bottle of brandy like there’s no tomorrow, while his two friends play cowboy and Indians behind him. Despite all the transparent symbolism, there is a lining of honesty and humor. We’ve all been in Hal’s position at one time or another. The difference is that while his childhood is literally behind him, he gets up and throws a cello through the window of his beloved’s home. How many heart-broken lovers have ever wanted to do that? You can all put your hands down.

The straight-played ridiculousness of the film rings true because of how we relate to it. We’ve all wanted to throw that cello, and we cheer for Hal when he does. Much of the honesty and humor credit is due to Reece Thompson’s performance and Blitz’s direction. Hal’s sympathetic trump card is his stutter, which could have been a cinematic disaster. Blitz, however, handles it with the delicacy of first-hand knowledge, knowing when to make it painful, when to make it funny and when to make it meaningful – like when Hal bumbles through the line, “I want to do this for love… or revenge. Love or revenge.”

Unfortunately, that same finesse doesn’t spill into the rest of Blitz’s aesthetics. While the film isn’t a pretentious indie comedy, or “dramity,” it does have a fixation on quirky music, like an a capella version of The Blob’s pulpy theme song and a piano and cello duet of the Violet Femme’s “Raisin in the Sun,” causing Rocket Science to come off stylistically like a poor man’s Wes Anderson film. Even the voice over seems like practice takes from The Royal Tenenbaums. While Anderson wears his French and Italian influences on his sleeve while injecting his own stile, Blitz’s filmmaking feels like a documentary filmmaker lost on a dramatic palette. Yet, Blitz’s inability to define his directorial voice is what keeps Rocket Science from standing out of the indie crowed, but its honesty and humor hold promises of great films from Blitz.

The Nanny Diaries - Review

There’s something you need to know about The Nanny Diaries right off the bat. It’s not a comedy. I know, you’ve seen the film’s cutesy poster with Scarlett Johansson in a potentially comedic position next to her “awww” inspiring little ward; and you’ve seen the commercials with their lighthearted, potentially funny music and awkward situations. This is not that movie. There is not a single laugh anywhere in it, and if there’s supposed to be then the film does an awful job of delivering. No, there’s nothing funny about The Nanny Diaries and I’m going to go ahead here and give them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that, advertising to the contrary, there’s not supposed to be.

Instead The Nanny Diaries has more in common with last year’s Oscar contender Little Children than it does with any kind of rom-com, minus of course the pedophile. In much the same way that Little Children was narrated by an omniscient voice delivering pithy, distant observations; Johansson narrates The Nanny Diaries as if she’s reading a diary she’s written from the perspective of an anthropologist in the middle of a grand social experiment.

Except it isn’t a social experiment or anything nearly so noble. Johansson plays Annie Braddock, a recent college grad who falls into nannying because she’s afraid to live in the real world and most of all, afraid to tell her mother that she doesn’t want to become a boring, corporate muckity-muck. Annie Braddock is afraid of her own life, and though when she moves out of her Mom’s place and into the city she seems to exalt in the freedom that comes with not being at home, she turns right around and throws herself into a situation with even less freedom by becoming a live-in Nanny for a rich, self-absorbed, absent mother who treats her as if she’s a personal slave. Nanny Annie narrates a lot about how much she’s bothered by the way she’s treated, but while her narration protests she simply stands around and takes it, muttering platitudes and “yes maam’s” as if she’s a dog who’s been beaten.

To me, that’s the biggest problem with The Nanny Diaries. It’s hard to watch Annie without dismissing her as simply weak or cowardly. She’s not a bad person, but she’s an empty vessel who seems willing to be pushed and prodded in whatever direction her overbearing employers/slave masters want her to go, while making excuses for her own complicity in their awful behavior as parents. For most of the movie she’s not motivated to do anything or become anything. She barely has a personality. Annie’s employer Mrs. X thrusts her into the role of societal inferior and she accepts it gladly, bumbling around at doing what she’s told, only breaking out of her meek servitude when she’s forced to by circumstances beyond her control.

I guess I’m saying that I don’t know what The Nanny Diaries is about. If it’s about Annie, well that’s a problem since she’s not interesting enough to serve as the focus for this, or any other movie. If it’s about the selfish, wealthy, bad parents of high-society; then my answer is: who cares. Personally, I think The Nanny Diaries is all about trying to be cute, and anything else that happens in it is merely ancillary. It succeeds at that. The film is frequently cute because even at her worst Scarlett Johansson is pretty cute and so is the kid she’s stuck paling around with. Sadly, the movie doesn’t manage much else. Its message, if there is one, is muddled and even with all the heavy handed narration to tell us what we’re supposed to be thinking, it’s hard to figure out why we’re supposed to want to be watching. Still, the film isn’t entirely unentertaining. For at least some of its running time it’ll keep your attention while you try to figure out where it goes. At worst, Scarlett Johansson is fun to look at, even if she doesn’t seem to know what to do with this flaccid character. But Annie’s resolution is unsatisfying and feels tacked on, while the trip to get there is even less than the sum of the film as whole.

Death Sentence - Review

Death Sentence stars Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a bookish insurance adjuster who inexplicably turns into Rambo when his family in threatens. To call the film ludicrous is something of an understatement. It’s clunky and poorly thought out; the only thing worse than the movie’s cliché vengeance script is the clunky way James Wan directs it.

It starts when Nick’s oldest son is murdered by a bunch of cartoonish thugs in the middle of a robbery. When I say they’re cartoonish, I really mean it. They drive around in formation, hauling ass in noisy muscle cars with flames painted on the side of them. The gang he’s up against looks like something that fell off the back of a bad pulp novel, white guys running around with shaved heads and cheap leather jackets, wielding machetes in the middle of the city for no other reason that I can think of than that they generate more blood for Wan to splash on his camera.

The murder of his kid pushes Nick over the edge, and he declares war on the gangbangers who did it. Soon his entire family is in jeopardy, and the movie becomes about whether or not he can save him. It’s all of course, utterly ridiculous since five minutes ago Nick was sitting in a glorified cubicle pouring over risk assessments. Now he’s suddenly a badass weapons expert and hand to hand combat specialist. Come on Death Sentence, at least give us one of those idiotic training montages.

For most of its running time, the film alternates between overly emotive, poorly delivered speeches and clunky action sequences. The movie’s heavy emotional components never work, because the actors are clueless and don’t ever seem to know what to do with them. The film’s gritty action beats fall flat on their face because they’re clumsily staged and impossible to buy into. For instance in one of the movie’s most tense, big-action moments Kevin Bacon is supposed to climb out the front window of a car right before it falls off a building. Instead of getting the hell out of there as fast as he can, he hangs out just sort of biding his time, only leaping out of the car right as it gets to the edge, as if he somehow knew there was an audience watching and it’d make things more exciting if he escaped at the last minute.

On the positive side, John Goodman has a passively enjoyable cameo as a fat, sweaty arms dealer and at least Death Sentence isn’t loaded down with bad CGI and cheesy special effects. Wan sticks to practical stunts and does his best to deliver gritty, hard edged action. He fails, but at least the guy tried. That’s more than we usually get in the standard, modern revenge flick.