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.