Posts Tagged ‘Bruce Willis’

SURVIVE THE NIGHT: 1 STAR. “you won’t root for anyone, good or bad.”

The idea of stalling for time in a bad situation makes perfect sense in real life. In “Survive the Night,” a new home invasion film now on VOD, a disgraced doctor tries to buy time to protect his family as some very bad men hold them hostage. Trouble is, it’s a movie, and his stalling techniques bring the action in this plodding thriller to a dead stop.

“One Tree Hill” star Chad Michael Murray is Rich, a doctor whose once-promising career was cut short by a malpractice suit. “I cut when I should have stitched or stitched when I should have cut,” he says. “I don’t even know!” Disgraced, he now lives on a remote farm with his parents, (Bruce Willis and Jessica Abrams), his wife (Lydia Hull) and their teenage daughter (Riley Wolfe Rach) and works at a small clinic, patching up injured farmers.

It’s there that Jamie (Shea Buckner), a low-level crook with impulse control, first sees the doc and hatches the plan to invade Rich’s home and get some much-needed medical treatment for his brother Mathias (Tyler Jon Olson). If Rich doesn’t operate, Jamie promises to fill the family with lead. Rich fears that if he operates and Matthias dies, chaos will ensue.

Cue the stall tactics.

The suspense free plot of “Survive the Night”—which should really have been titled “Survive the Night and Most of the Next Morning”—relies on characters doing unrealistic and just plain stupid things in almost every scene. If you took a drink every time Rich did something that only made his situation worse, you’d be hammered by the second act. Or, if you’re not a drinker, take a sip every time Bruce Willis looks like he’s happy to be part of this movie. You’ll be stone cold sober as the end credits run.

“Survive the Night” is the rare “thriller” where you don’t root for anyone, the heroes or villains. Even a car chase goes nowhere… literally and figuratively. It’s like a thriller made by people who have never actually seen a thriller and who based this one on stuff their friends told them about “Panic Room” and “Funny Games.”

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN: 3 ½ STARS. “ambitious, overstuffed movie.”

Edward Norton spent twenty years trying to bring Jonathan Lethem’s bestselling novel “Motherless Brooklyn” to the big screen. Lethem set his detective story in the 1990s but Norton takes liberties, adding new characters and moving the action to the 1950s, lending a retro “Chinatown” vibe to the proceedings.

Norton, wrote, produced, directed and also stars as Lionel Essrog, a gumshoe with Tourette syndrome and an obsessive-compulsive eye for the little details that solve cases. “It’s like I got glass in my brain,” he says. When Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), his mentor and only friend, is killed while investigating a case no one is surprised. His colleagues, Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts), accept that death is an almost inevitable part of the job but Lionel thinks there is more to the story. He is convinced Frank was about to blow the lid off a conspiracy involving Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), a ruthless politician who clears out African American communities to make way for redevelopment. “There’s something going down,” says Lionel, “and it’s big, and they were not happy about what he found.” His sleuthing leads him to Randolph’s hinky brother (Willem Dafoe), community activist Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and a tale of corruption, lust and power where everyone is at risk.

Norton has created a detailed noir with “Motherless Brooklyn” that, while engaging, overstays its welcome in a long, drawn out conclusion. Terrific performances (there is some capitol A acting happening here), effective dialogue and anxiety-inducing music plus great 1950s era flourishes (even if Baldwin does smoke a recent vintage American Spirit cigarette in closeup) entertain the eyes and ears but as Lionel uncovers clues we are drawn further into a rabbit hole of murky motives, many of which are left dangling by the time the end credits roll. It’s an ambitious movie that feels meandering and overstuffed with plot.

It does, however, have its high notes. Norton is careful in his portrayal of a person with Tourettes and while he may have an extreme case of the syndrome it is never used as a gag or a gimmick. Instead it’s a sympathetic representation of a person with neurological tics making his way through life.

As for Baldwin, it’s hard to not see echoes of his Donald Trump impression in Moses Randolph. He’s an aggressive anything-to-win type who plays the power game to the disadvantage of anyone who gets in his way. It’s a big, blustery performance and one of the film’s pleasures.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw brings both vulnerability and steel to Laura, elevating her from a plot device to a living, breathing character.

“Motherless Brooklyn” is frustrating. It contains many interesting, thought provoking ideas on gentrification, some nicely rendered scenes and fine acting but errs on the side of self-indulgence to the point where the audience loses interest in its machinations.

GLASS: 2 STARS. “more twists in ‘Glass’ than you can shake a Syd Field book at.”

I’ll start this review with a spoiler to a movie that came out almost three years ago. This will be the last spoiler you’ll see here. Here we go, the twist at the end of M. Night “Let’s Twist Again” Shyamalan’s “Split” revealed that his story of serial killer with twenty-three established personalities also had a twenty-fourth, a superhuman character known as The Beast. What’s more—because why settle for one twist when you can have two?—The Beast lives in the same universe as the 2000 film “Unbreakable.”

Shyamalan’s new film “Glass” acts as a sequel for both films, bringing together James McAvoy as “Split’s” Kevin Wendell Crumb and “Unbreakable” stars Bruce Willis as the heroic David Dunn and Samuel L. Jackson’s mass murderer Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass.

Here’s the spoiler free synopsis: Dunn, the invulnerable security guard with the extrasensory ability to sense the crimes people have done by touching them, is hot on the heels of Crumb’s collection known as The Horde, looking to end his killing spree. “When I find the Horde,” Dunn says, “I’ll take a mental health day.”

Following a confrontation Crumb and Dunn psychiatrist Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) captures them, placing them in Ravenhill Memorial Pyschiatric Research Hospital, the same institution as Price. “It’s a place for people who think they are comic book characters,” says Hedwig, one of Crumb’s personalities. Convinced they all suffer from delusions of grandeur, her treatment involves convincing them that they are human, not superanything.

That’s all you get from me. Cue the plot twists.

I like a twist as much as the next person. I still remember having my head knocked back by movies like “The Crying Game” and Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” but can we now call a moratorium on multiple twists? Shyamalan has made a career out of subverting people’s expectations but there are more twists in the last twenty minutes of “Glass” than you can shake a Syd Field book at. In this case more is not more.

Leading up to the twist-o-rama is an examination of what would happen if we learned that superheroes are real. To accomplish this Shyamalan has Paulson’s good doctor spend a good portion of the running time trying to convince the superhero that there is nothing special about them. It’s less than dramatic. Worse, the film’s ideas on the existence of extraordinary beings (AGAIN, NO SPOILERS HERE) have been beaten to death in everything from the “X-Men” films to “Watchmen” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

Despite a bit of fun from McAvoy’s ever shifting characters and Willis’s Gandalf / action hero robe “Glass” is a slog. Talky and meta, it’s being billed as a “film that took 19 years to make,” but doesn’t feel worth the wait.

DEATH WISH: 2 ½ STARS. “the normalization of dangerous behaviour.”

For twenty years, from 1974 to 1994, Charles Bronson starred in “Death Wish” films as Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect turned vigilante after his wife was murdered and child assaulted. “If the police don’t defend us,” he growled, “maybe we ought to do it ourselves.”

In “Death Wish,” the new Eli Roth-directed reboot of the series, Bruce Willis steps in, beating out—but not beating up— Sylvester Stallone who was originally cast as Kersey.

This time around the backdrop is Chicago. Dr. Kersey (Willis) is a surgeon whose work in the ER gives him an up-close-and-personal look at the effects of violence in his city. He gets an even closer look at the carnage when home intruders viciously attack his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and young daughter (Camila Morrone). The healer turns killer, exchanging the scalpel for a gun, which he learns to fire by watching a YouTube show called Full Metal Tactics. “I love my family and when they needed me most I failed to protect them.” As bad guy bodies (and snappy one-liners) pile up he becomes headline news—the newspapers billboard “Grim Reaper Alerts”—but is he right to take the law into his own hands? Is he a folk hero or domestic terrorist?

With gun control front and center in public debate right now “Death Wish” could have been a timely and relevant film. It could ask questions. When does a good guy with a gun, shooting bad guys with guns, become a bad guy with a gun? It could have been a poignant film about a man pushed too far but there is nothing poignant about Roth’s reboot of the seventies series. It’s not a character study of grief or a portrait of Chicago’s escalating crime rate. Satisfied to take the low road, it’s a revenge film pure and simple. Audiences are meant to applaud every time Kersey blows away a bad guy and not think too deeply about the normalization of dangerous behaviour.

Willis, whose resume is dotted with charming hero types, plays Kersey as a wounded man who finds strength in his revenge. He’s locked, loaded and ready to rock. His most famous character, off-duty New York City Police Department officer John McClane, was always keen to dispatch a villain but he didn’t go hunting random victims or torture them once he found them. We are supposed to get the great contradiction of Kersey’s life—he’s a healer in the O.R. but a killer on the street—but the movie gives equal weight to the yin and yang. He’s a good guy because he cures people and a patriot because he rids the streets of undesirables. To be truly effective he must be one or the other. The muddy antihero middle is an ugly, exaggerated male violence fantasy. Is Kersey a folk hero or a killer? The movie can’t seem to decide.

“Death Wish” will provide ammunition for discussion, so that’s something. Gun violence has been a hot button topic when the first movie came out in 1974. It still is, but the conversation has changed.

SPLIT: 4 STARS. “the ziggiest zagger of a storyteller in Hollywood.”

Let’s twist again, like we did last summer! Or in this case, like we did a decade or so ago when director M. Night Shyamalan became the master of the trick ending. Remember the twist in “The Sixth Sense”? It was one of the best surprises in movie memory. Ever since little Haley Joel Osment uttered those four words that sent chills down audience’s spines—“I see dead people”—Shyamalan has been largely unsuccessful in recreating that kind of jolt for his audience.

His new film, a psychological horror called “Split,” comes close to re-establishing Shyamalan’s reputation as the ziggiest zagger of a storyteller in Hollywood.

The dark story begins in broad daylight with the kidnapping of teens Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy). The three friends are plunked down into an airless basement dungeon, held captive by Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder. In other words his mind has cleaved into twenty-four separate and distinctive personas. Think “Psycho” times 12. To escape the girls must appeal to Kevin’s better nature or natures before the final personality, The Beast, shows up and they become, “sacred food.”

Shyamalan will earn a good chunk of the credit for “Split,” for writing the twisty-turny story, for choosing the anxiety-inducing soundtrack, for constructing a (mostly) taut and tense pulpy thriller with loads of black humour but it is McAvoy that makes the movie memorable.

From the button-down, neat-freak Dennis, to nine-year-old Kanye West fan Hedwig to the sinister Patricia, he jumps from personality to personality, breathing life into each of his characters. The changes are frequently lightening fast. A furrow of a brow, the tightening of the lips and presto-chango, he’s someone else. It’s bravura work, unafraid to go over-the-top, embracing each and every character as if they were the star of the show.

Like all good Shyamalan movies (and some bad ones too) there is a twist, and a good one, but you’ll have to buy a ticket to find out what it is. There will be no spoilers here. Suffice to say the curve ball works thematically as well as providing several ‘What the Hell!!’ moments.

“Split” is wild and wooly, uniting, for the first time in a long time, Shyamalan’s talent for keeping the audience on the edge of their seats and his ability to change the game in the final act.

PRECIOUS CARGO: 2 STARS. “b-movie—the “b” stands for bullets, bikinis and bombs.”

There’s nothing particularly precious about “Precious Cargo,” a new crime thriller starring Mark-Paul Gossalaar, Claire Forlani and Bruce Willis. A b-movie—in this case I think the “b” stands for bullets, bikinis and bombs—with wild heists, action scenes and bad dialogue delivered badly, it’s as subtle as a slap to the face.

Gossalaar is Jack, a cocky guy who thrives on the adrenaline rush that goes along with doing bad things. At the beginning of the film he is almost killed when a deal to sell guns goes bad. In the aftermath he tries to lay low but is drawn back into the life when his former partner in bed and out, Karen (Forlani), shows up pregnant with an offer and a bunch of bad guys on her tail. The villains (who are luckily very bad shots) are the henchmen for Eddie (Willis), a vicious crime boss who Karen conned. Seems she owes Eddie $12 million and wants Jack to help her steal the money.

“The last time I helped you I almost ended up on the wrong side of the grass,” he moans before agreeing to lift an armoured car full of diamonds.

The job goes well, until Jack has a gut feeling something is amiss. Turns out Karen hasn’t been completely upfront (“She’s always going to be Karen,” says sniper Logan (Jenna B. Kelly). “Now she’s just Karen with a kid.”) and from this point on the movie turns into a criminal “Inception,” a heist within a heist, complete with double-crosses and improbable alliances.

“Precious Cargo” is an enjoyably forgettable shoot ‘em up. Short on plot believability but long on hard-boiled dialogue, (“You’re not dead yet?” “Only on the inside.”) it’s the kind of movie where getaway drivers are drunkards (“I never drive drunk. Buzzed, maybe. Hungover? Absolutely.”) and where characters say things like, “I got to put a bullet in somebody’s brain before I put one in my own.” In its dialogue and not-exactly-enlightened attitude toward women it almost plays like a satire of b-movies, but director Max Adams’s background as a writer on po-faced hardboiled potboilers like ”Heist” and “Extraction” suggests otherwise.

At a tight 90 minutes—including bloopers and a tagged on post-heist scene—“Precious Cargo” is here for a good time and blessedly not a long time.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR: 2 ½ STARS. “resembles a graphic novel sprung to life.”

From the perspective of an adult here’s how I would describe the new Robert Rodrigues film: “An exercise in extreme neo-noir aesthetics, the movie resembles a graphic novel sprung to life.”

Here’s how my fourteen-year-old self would express his thoughts on the same film: “WOW. Eva Green is naked. Did I mention she has no clothes?”

Neither description gets it wrong. “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” is the most heavily stylized movie of the year, maybe the century so far. Rodrigues and co-director Frank Miller (the comic book legend who created the original “Sin City” series in print) have created a dark vision of a shadowland known as Sin City, a corrupt place where crime is a way of life for both citizens and all femmes are fatale.

Four stories interweave. The thread that ties them together is Marv (played by noted Putin booster Mickey Rourke), a massive hulk of a man who aids Dwight McCarthy (Josh Brolin) in his efforts to free his former flame Ava Lord (Eva Green) from her abusive husband. He also helps stripper Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba) settle an old score with a corrupt senator (Powers Booth), the same man who savagely beat gambler Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to teach him a lesson about power.

“Sin City” A Dame to Kill For” feels like it was made by someone with an eye for the aesthetics of noir but the interests of a 14-year-old boy. It’s an exercise in style over substance that will make your corneas tingle, tickle your prurient side and provide an experience that may be memorable (especially if you are a fourteen year boy) but not particularly rewarding.

These unendingly grim crime stories aren’t so much hard-boiled as they are over-baked. Rodrigues and Miller’s outlook is as bleak as the stark black-and-white palette they use to illustrate the movie. “Death is just like life in Sin City,” they say, hammering the point home that the only relief from the ennui many of these characters live with is a bullet to the head. The characters seem to welcome it. “He’ll eat you alive,” a bartender tells Johnny about the senator. “I’m a tough chew,” he replies, playing chicken with his life.

The directors try to distract from the cynical goings on with hyper-German Expressionist cinematography and the abovementioned Ms. Green’s wardrobe, or lack thereof, but no matter how much style or skin are exposed, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” remains a slickly styled exercise in pointlessness.

The new Sin City has a cast many directors would kill for

GagaSinCity_2989923aRobert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.

Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.

Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.

“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”

When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.

For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”

In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.

Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”

Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”

Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”