Deception - Review

Deception is a lean, well-crafted sex thriller with a polished European feel and a striking visual style courtesy of first time Swiss director Marcel Langenegger. It’s a quieter sort of thriller than we’ve become used to after so many Bourne flicks, but that doesn’t mean it’s boring. To the contrary: there are plenty of thrills (and plenty of sex) packed into this briskly paced film, but at its core Deception is a character driven meditation on alienation in regimented world (The Metamorphosis, anyone?). Sure it’s as fizzy as a glass of champagne in most other ways, but who says entertainment can’t also be intellectually stimulating?

Ewan McGregor plays the nebbishy Jonathan McQuarry, an 18-hour a day workaholic accountant with no social life to speak of. He spends his evenings alone in glass buildings, staring out blankly from behind his laptop screen at the lighted streets of New York. Langenegger creates visual metaphors for Jonathan’s ghost-like isolation, many of them lifted from Antonioni. In one scene Jonathan rides an elevator while two women chat about their sex life, blatantly unconscious to his presence. In another he is left stranded between two concrete pillars, just having had the subway doors slam in his face.

His colorless existence changes dramatically when Jonathan meets the charismatic, snake-like lawyer Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman). With a charming smile and an invitation for tennis, Wyatt slowly coaxes Jonathan out of his unsociable shell. The plot picks up steam when a cell phone switch up between the two men leads the hapless Jonathan to a Sex Club informally called “The List” (“Intimacy without intricacy” is its motto). Soon the fairly virginal Jonathan is taking a giddy tour of the most fancy hotels in New York, meeting Wall Street women for consequence free sex (including the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling as the “Belle of Wall Street” with a self-declared soft spot for “bashful boys”). It is not until he meets the luminous, if remote ‘S’ (Michelle Williams) that Jonathan truly begins to blossom. Alas, a good thing never lasts as an ill-fated tryst throws Jonathan into the midst of a sex scandal, engineered by the dubious Wyatt – obviously not the white-collar type he pretended to be to entrap the naïve Jonathan in his web. It is now clear that Jonathan will have to outmaneuver the crafty Wyatt in order to save himself from social ruin.

The lead performances are uniformly solid. McGregor plays Jonathan as an inelegant numbers man uncomfortable in his own skin. His severely parted hair and geeky glasses are a shield, a layer of protection between him and the world. As the film progresses McGregor subtly changes his character’s tics, showing how Jonathan is changed, not just by his passion for ‘S’, but by a newly found sense of self-worth. Jackman glitters as a cruelly suave conman with a taste for international crime. Williams has eyes the size of platters and lips to match, but sadly doesn’t have enough screen time here to truly give an effective performance. Still, her empathetic presence is a welcome one; its obvious Jonathan would fall in love with ‘S’ at first sight, which is all that’s really required of her (this is a sex thriller, after all).

Mark Bomback’s (Live Free or Die Hard) script for Deception is exceedingly tidy; there are no extraneous scenes or plot lines left unresolved. The narrative hurtles smoothly towards the satisfying, if somewhat predictable ending. Any predictability in the last 20 minutes can be forgiven however, because the rest film is put together in such an appealing, thoroughly entertaining way. We are left with the sense that every part of Deception was as carefully plotted out as Wyatt’s takedown of Jonathan. Deception knows exactly where it’s going and exactly how it’s going to get there. It may be popcorn, but it’s well-made popcorn and that makes all the difference.

Balls of Fury - Review

There are a few surprises in Balls of Fury. For instance it’s not the direct rip-off of Dodgeball that you might expect it to be, and the sport of ping-pong is more exciting to watch than you’d think. But the jokes are stale and the movie’s best moments come courtesy of Christopher Walken who, let’s be honest, gets bonus points just for being Christopher Walken.

The film stars a relatively unknown comedic actor named Dan Fogler. Calling him a comedic actor may however, be somewhat generous. Dan’s comedic repertoire consists mostly of being fat and sweaty, and that stops being funny after about five seconds. Fogler plays disgraced former child ping-pong champ Randy Daytona, and the once great kid ping-pong player he was has grown up into a hairy mess. For rather stupid reasons he’s recruited by the FBI and asked to infiltrate the ping-pong tournament of a notorious criminal named Feng. He agrees, since Feng is the man who killed his father or something.

Doesn’t matter. The result is that Randy is teamed up with a loser Mexican FBI agent (George Lopez), a blind master ping-pong instructor named Wong (James Hong), and the master’s super-hot niece Maggie (Maggie Q). Together they travel into Feng’s lair and then we’re treated to 90 minutes of gags designed to poke fun of Wong’s blindness. Yep, most of the movie’s jokes have nothing to do with ping-pong. Instead the film is scene after scene after scene of Wong walking into things, falling over, and pointing in the wrong direction. This is a one-joke movie, and it’s a joke that’s been done dozens of times before in movies a lot funnier than this one. Personally, my favorite incarnation of the hapless blind sidekick bit was in Robin Hood: Men In Tights, in which Robin’s trusty blind sidekick Blinkin ends up dueling a stone column to the death.

Chris Walken plays the movie’s villain and while funny, would been funnier if I hadn’t seen him playing this same character in The Rundown. Walken’s performance, as usual, boils down to him parodying himself. He’s not playing a guy named Feng, he’s playing a Christopher Walken playing a guy named Feng, and that’s funny because, well, he’s Walken. It’s entertaining even if it is recycled.

The weird thing is that I found myself wishing they’d drop all pretense of doing comedy and simply shown us more ping-ponging. Like all Americans, I find table tennis incredibly boring, but director Ben Garant shoots it in a way that actually makes hitting a tiny white ball across a kitchen table strangely exciting. If only he’d been able to work that same kind of magic on Balls of Fury’s lifeless, derivative script.

Live Free or Die Hard - Review

This fourth Die Hard movie is a pleasant surprise. Though they’ve taken the annoying tact of truncating the “f” word off the end of John McClane’s trademark catchphrase, otherwise the hard-hitting, beat to a bloody pulp edge that these movies have always had remains. Director Len Wiseman accomplishes that inside a PG-13 rating by taking the film right to the MPAA’s edge. He’s appeased the Fox executives desire to make it teen friendly by shaving inches (blood spatters only 4 inches instead of 11), and still leaves enough room for McClane to punch the shit out of all of that prime demo pandering crap.

Die Hard 4 fits together in much the same way Die Hard 3 did, with maybe a little bit of True Lies mixed in. Instead of being locked in a building or an airport the way he was in 1 and 2, McClane is sent roving across the countryside with a sidekick. In 3 that sidekick was Samuel L. Jackson. In this one it’s Justin Long as Matt Farrell, a computer hacker in over his head. The country’s computer infrastructure is under attack by high-tech terrorists, and McClane and Farrell end up being our last line of defense through a series of completely bogus, silly plot coincidences which you won’t care about since you’ll be too busy watching McClane fall down an elevator shaft.

The action is faced paced and hard hitting. Wiseman has done a meticulous job of editing the film, staying right with the action and the gore until the last possible second, when it might push the film over the R-rated edge, and then jumping away from it to something else. He does it so skillfully you probably won’t even notice the Hard that’s missing, by the time you walk out of the theater your brain will have automatically filled it all in. However, maybe he should have also edited out most of the movie’s driving scenes. It’s hard to believe when you consider how seamless the rest of the effects work in the movie is, but most of the film’s driving scenes look like something that fell out of 1957. It’s so bad it’s jarring. At times it’s almost laughably obvious that Willis and Long are sitting in a fake car in front of a green screen. You’d think they’d be able to do something that Hollywood has been doing right for decades. I guess they spent their effects budget on helicopters. Given the choice, I’d have gone with exploding whirlybirds too.

Willis is still great as McClane and I’m starting to think this is one character that’s only going to get better as he gets older. By the time Willis is 80, I’d be perfectly happy to see McClane wheeled in to take over for Bruce Campbell’s Elvis in some sort of nursing-home based Bubba Ho-Tep sequel. The older he gets, the crankier he gets, and the more fun there is to be had. It helps that he has such a good rapport with Justin Long. Long is sometimes hit or miss. He’s good in movies like Galaxy Quest and Idiocracy, but he’s sort of a waste of space in Accepted. In Live Free or Die Hard he’s at his best, and his chemistry with Willis works. Special thanks to the script, which doesn’t turn Long’s character into one of those boring hacker fountains of techno-babble. Instead that role is filled by Kevin Smith, in a cameo as the stereotypical, basement dwelling, computer nerd. Kevin’s a master communicator so he’s great on screen, but the films seems to treat him as if he’s twelve instead of thirty-seven. Something about that’s not right, and it’s no fault of Kevin’s.

If there’s any real criticism to be leveled at Live Free or Die Hard though, it’s that the movie never really shows us anything new. The action is big and fun, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking and for the most part it’s a bunch of riffs on action sequences we’ve seen before either in Die Hard movies or in other, inferior action films. It doesn’t help that the villains and their master plan are kind of a bore. Sure they’ve cooked up an intricate scheme, unfortunately it’s a lot like the one used by Simon Gruber in Die Hard: With a Vengeance except instead of dump trucks these bad guys are doing everything with computers. Dump trucks are a lot more interesting. Because the script is so intent on being hip with modern technology, a good portion of the film’s most evil moments are spent watching bad guys type furiously at computers. Luckily it’s not long before the not so technologically savvy McClane picks up a laptop and uses it to bash someone over the head.

The bottom line here is that Live Free or Die Hard will fit pretty comfortably on a shelf with the rest of the Die Hard movies. If you’re one of those people who thinks that the only good Die Hard movie was the first one, then this isn’t going to change your mind. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you think Die Hard: With a Vengeance was a blast, then you’re going to feel much the same way about this one. McClane is back!