Fans of 1980s action will recognize “London Has Fallen’s” set up. A veteran Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler) is about to hang up their holster but gets sucked in for one last, dangerous job. It’s a heady mix of “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” where characters say things right out of the tough guy playbook like “Do me a favour… Stay alive,” and ethnic stereotypes never die.
After saving POTUS from a terrorist attack inside the White House in “Olympus Has Fallen,” Butler is back for a second go round as Mike Banning, secret service agent extraordinaire. He’s about to become a father and wants to leave his old life behind. In fact, he’s typing out a letter of resignation when he gets a call from the Oval Office. The British Prime Minister has died suddenly and President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) has to go to England for the state funeral.
With only twenty-four hours to plan the trip Banning is nervous about security but is assured that this will be “the most protected event on earth.” Of course the funeral is not protected enough or the movie would be called “London Has Not Fallen.” A massive terrorist attack kills several world leaders, hundreds of innocent bystanders and decimates most of the landmarks in the British capital. Turns out the man responsible for the attack, an arms dealer named Barkawi (Alon Aboutboul), has a personal grudge against Asher and doesn’t care how many people he has to kill to get his vengeance. Banning is a formidable one-man army—his Spidey senses are always tingling—but will he be able to keep the President safe and prevent the what’s left of London from collapsing into the Thames?
“London Has Fallen” is terror-porn of the highest order, but while half of London is covered in CGI ashes, there is an inherent lack of stakes because you know in your heart that nothing is going to happen to the President. He may be bloodied but by the time the end credits roll it is a guarantee he will be unbowed.
So, with no real tension, what’s left? Plenty of 80s inspired action, that’s what. Like a lost relic from John McClane’s heyday the movie presents a main character who could be a case study in ‘Hero or Psychopath’ 101. He causes carnage with a twinkle in his eye, torturing and killing people in the name of protecting the Prez. It’s all action, all the time, feeling like a throwback to a time when grim faced heroes took on impossible odds—“There’s nearly 100 terrorists in there,” Banning is told before entering a terror hive alone. “They should’ve brought more men,” he grunts.—spouted one liners and the bad guys were anyone with an exotic accent. It’s not particularly enlightened in its world outlook and dismisses the female members of the cast—all of Oscar winner Melissa Leo’s lines could be written on the head of a pin—but if you choose not to think about it much, it’s good, high-octane fun.
Just as dangerous as the bullets and bombs on display is the minefield of tough guy clichés Butler navigates. “I never thought you’d outlive me…” BOOM! “The only person you trust right now is me!” BANG! Like an endlessly looping GIF the banalities never stop. Butler delivers them with gusto, but don’t go to “London Has Fallen” looking for witty or original dialogue. Very little has been done to update the story from its 80s roots. Now the bad guys broadcast on the internet—“It’s on social media!” screams a near hysterical Deputy Chief Mason (Jackie Earle Haley)—but that’s about it for new ideas.
To sum it up: You’ve seen “London Has Fallen” before, but you’ve never seen it quite like this.
Career gearshifts are tough. For every McConaissance there is a Gerard Butler or Katherine Heigl who can’t seem to make the change from rom coms to more serous roles.
For a while it looked like Jennifer Aniston was stuck in the same rut. Forgettable movies like “Love Happens” and “The Bounty Hunter” seemed to pigeonhole her as an American Sweetheart type in a movie market filled to bursting with dramatic darlings.
Lately though she’s been doing some career busting, appearing in raunchy comedies like “Horrible Bosses” and “We Are the Millers” and now “Cake,” a low budget drama about putting the broken pieces of a shattered life back together that should put Rachel on the shelf forever in favor of the more daring work she used to do in movies like “The Good Girl” and “Friends with Money.”
She plays Claire, a churlish woman suffering with chronic pain brought on by a car accident that crushed her leg and took the life of her son. The near death experience blew apart her marriage to Jason (Chris Messina), leaving her alone with her tough-but-tender housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barazza) and the members of her support group. When Nina (Anna Kendrick), a member of the group, commits suicide Claire becomes obsessed with Nina’s life and death. Her search for answers leads her to Nina’s husband’s (Sam Worthington) door and to a new way at looking at life.
“Cake” has many nicely played dramatic scenes. Putting Aniston’s crusty Claire next to Barazza’s warmhearted Silvana is inspired. Their scenes are by far and away the best things in the movie. When they aren’t sparking off one another the movie loses much of its sizzle.
Not that Worthington fails, he doesn’t, but as part of the Nina/Claire-redemption story arc he’s the engine that drives the most predictable and least interesting part of the story.
Aniston, however, is terrific. The pain that wracks her body and tortures her psyche is evident in every movement, in every word that tumbles from her lips. That doesn’t mean she can’t still deliver a funny line. Ten seasons of sit com work honed that skill to a fine edge so when she asks if Nina’s husband where he got the granite for her gravestone because, “I’m thinking of putting a kitchen rail in my backyard,” it’s prickly but hilarious.
“Cake” is a great showcase for the new, dramatic Aniston but it isn’t a great film. In it’s final moments the movie grasps for a feel good ending which is just slightly out of reach.
“300: Rise of an Empire,” the sequel to the 2006 Gerard Butler ab-fest, should rightly be called “300: Buckets of Blood” or perhaps “300 Sweaty, Screaming Men & A Lady.”
A parallel story to the original film, the movie shows what else was happening while Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, who only appears briefly in flashbacks) and three hundred brave men battled against Persian “god-King” Xerxes’s (Rodrigo Santoro) 300,000 soldiers.
This one is a showdown between the freedom-loving Themistocles of Athens (Sullivan Stapleton, from HBO Canada’s “Strike Back”) and Artemisia of Caria (Eva Green), and that old foe of democracy, King Xerxes. Once again the Greeks are wildly outnumbered but put up a valiant fight against Artemisia, who not only wants to beat the Greek army but humiliate them as well.
This is a manly movie, filled with super macho advice like “don’t get killed on the first day,” and “there is no more noble action than lying in the blood of your brothers.” It’s a violent, testosterone soaked story, drenched in gore and more battle scenes per minute than any war movie in recent memory. There’s so much combat that a fight choreographer appears to have called in to devise the one and only sex scene.
The amount of man flesh on display might shame most of us into renewing our gym memberships, but swinging the biggest sword is Artemisia. She’s ruthless, driven by thoughts of revenge and is an all round awesome movie villain. How evil is she? Early on she plants a kiss on the lips of a man she’s just decapitated… and gets nastier from there.
The movie mimics “300‘s” highly stylized visuals. Much of the film resembles gothic oil paintings, but the addition of 3D introduces a “splatter zone” effect in the theatre as gallons of gore are sprayed across the screen. Also, like the first film, slow motion is used to emphasize the action. It’s so prevalent that if you played all the slo mo scenes in real time the 140-minute movie would only be about an hour long.
“300” was a heavy metal blast of sword and steel, an epic story with larger-than-life visuals but almost ten years on “300: Rise of an Empire” feels a bit old hat. A great villain and some fun action scenes almost make up for the plodding plot but the brutishness of the storytelling makes the original feel positively light hearted by comparison.
For many performers playing the Metropolitan Opera alongside Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti would be a career crowning achievement. To Emmy (that’s short for Emmanuelle) Rossum it was just another day at work. She made $5 a night singing with the children’s choir. “There was a horse on stage in a Zeffirelli production that got one hundred and fifty a night,” she laughs, before adding that the experience taught her to never take a job for the money. “You really realize you’re there because you love it,” she says.
Rossum, the New York City raised star of Shameless (which airs on TMN and Movie Central this month), left the opera at age twelve, frustrated that solos were only handed out to the boys. She took with her a work ethic: Be prepared, be on time. It’s a privilege to perform for a living. “Those are the ideas I’ve taken to every set with me.”
Her early resume looks like a lot of New York City based actor’s. A stint on As the World Turns here. A guest shot on Law & Order there. But it was a role as gap-toothed Appalachian orphan in the film Songcatcher that made people stand up and notice her. The movie showcased the preteen’s acting ability—she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance—and gave her the chance to show off her singing skills, performing five tunes on the soundtrack, including a song with one of her idols.
“Having a chance to record with Dolly Parton was something I’ll never forget,” she says of When Love Is New, a country duet that appears on the soundtrack.
The low budget film—just 2 million dollars total—led to more work, including playing title character from ages 12 to 16 in the television movie The Audrey Hepburn Story and the small, but crucial part of Katie Markum, Sean Penn’s daughter murdered daughter, in her first major studio film, Mystic River.
“When I arrived on the set the first day, [director Clint Eastwood] was incredibly warm,” she says. “But before the day ended, he was yelling at me for calling him Mister Eastwood. He’s a very quiet man who doesn’t say much, but you better listen, because, if he says something, it’ll be damned important.”
Working with Eastwood was exciting, but every career has a moment, a crack in time when an actor goes from unknown to known and for Emmy it was yet to come. Her career had been a slow build, from small roles in big films (Mystic River) and big roles in small films (like the urban fairy tale-romantic comedy Nola), that lead to 2004, her breakout year.
First the 18 year old spent six months shooting the wild end-of-the-world epic The Day After Tomorrow. With a budget of $85,807,341 the global warming disaster movie probably cost more than all of Emmy’s previous films combined, but it gave the young actress a showcase for one of her pet causes. “One of the reasons I’m glad I did The Day After Tomorrow is because it opened a dialogue about the effects of global warming,” she says, despite the movie being listed by Yahoo! Movies listed the film as one of the Top 10 Scientifically Inaccurate Movies of all time.
The second part of her 2004 breakout took her back to her stage roots. Fresh from Day After Tomorrow’s grueling shoot she auditioned for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber who hired her to play Christine in the film version of The Phantom of the Opera. “Actually I didn’t think I would get it just because it was too big. They don’t normally give Hollywood ninety-million dollar budgeted musicals to un-famous sixteen-year- olds.”
Amazingly she had never seen the stage show before taking the role, but she put an indelible stamp on the character, but it wasn’t easy. “I was wearing corsets the entire six months which were insanely uncomfortable and prohibited me eating any solid food all day long besides ice cream which would melt and actually pass my esophagus. It had enough sugar to actually sustain me and give me enough energy.”
Since then she has worked steadily. Her CD Inside Out was a mixture of pop-rock electronica, new age and classical. She’s lent her name to causes like breast cancer awareness and Global Green USA and of course, has stared in high profile films like Poseidon and the wild action flick Dragonball Evolution.
But despite all her achievements she hasn’t let Hollywood go to her head. “I would say a big accomplishment is that I’ve stayed true to who I am and not let fame affect me.”
Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t waste any precious time getting to “Law Abiding Citizen’s” action. About thirty seconds into the movie there is a scene of striking ultra-violence that sets up the revenge story which is to follow. It’s just too bad that he allows the pace to go downhill after the opening scene. It’s a thriller without many thrills.
Gerard Butler and his finely carved abdominal muscles play Clyde Shelton the law abiding citizen referred to in the title. His life is changed forever after a home invasion leaves his wife and small child dead. When Assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a slick up-and-coming lawyer at the DA’s office, makes a deal with one of the killers to testify against his partner in return for a reduced sentence it doesn’t sit well with Clyde. Cut to ten years later. Bad things start happening to everyone involved in the case, starting with the bad guys who both perish in excruciating ways. Clyde is arrested and confesses. That should be the end of it, but very bad things continue to happen. By the time Nick figures out how Clyde is doling out his own form of cruel and unusual punishment from jail it may be too late to save his own life.
There are a lot of words that could be used to describe “Law Abiding Citizen.” Here are some of them: goofy, implausible, ludicrous, inane, far-fetched, daft, nonsensical, illogical, preposterous, outlandish… I could go on, but you get the point. The story is a little silly, but that’s OK. It’s a revenge flick and if it was loaded with wall-to-wall action and some fun dialogue I could deal with the silliness. Look at “Taken” from earlier this year. Silly, silly, silly but fun in a check your brain at the door kind of way.
Unfortunately “Law Abiding Citizen” doesn’t have that kind of verve. There’s too much lag time between the big action set pieces. Every time the movie works up a head of steam the momentum evaporates into talky and mostly badly written dialogue sequences.
A red pencil could have made this script much more palatable but it’s likely that if you removed every line where a characters states the obvious and mundane there’s be very little left, dialogue wise. It’s the kind of movie that shows you a bomb with a cell phone trigger. Comments on it and then, for good measure, has another character say something like, “Do you mean to tell me that if that cell phone rings the bomb will go off?” Anyone who’s ever watched “Mission Impossible” or any other thriller involving bad guys and bombs knows that yes, if the cell phone rings the bomb will go off. It’s movie watching 101. You know it just like you know that the guy in the red shirt will always be the first to die on any given episode of “Star Trek.”
When the characters aren’t speaking in clichés they’re trying to comment on the state of a broken justice system that could let a child killer off with a light sentence. It’s an interesting premise for a revenge film, but again, Wimmer overplays his hand, putting sentences like, “I’m going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head! It’s going to be biblical” into Butler’s mouth.
Too bad the action isn’t as over-the-top as the dialogue. If so “Law Abiding Citizen” might have had a chance to be a great bad movie, as it is, it’s just a bad movie.
“Machine Gun Preacher” is set in a world where the line between mercenary and humanitarian is very thin. Gerard Butler plays the title character, a man who preaches fire-and-brimstone and can shoot the tail feathers off an ostrich at fifty yards.
When we first meet Sam Childers (Butler) he’s a tough guy fresh out of jail. He finds that old habits die hard—especially old drug habits. When his hell raising ways catch up to him something remarkable happens; he finds God. The former biker shifts gears and becomes a model citizen, even funding and building his own church. A sermon about the plight of Sudanese children prompts him to become a crusader for thousands of orphaned African children. He earns a reputation as a gun toting savior but his faith is severely tested when all his efforts to save the children seem to be for naught.
“Machine Gun Preacher” is based on the real life story of Sam Childers, a former trigger-happy biker who founded the Angels of East Africa orphanage. It’s a very compelling story, almost in the territory of stranger than fiction, but this fellow’s colorful life hits a few rocky patches in its translation to the screen.
In an effort to hit all high points of Childers’s life director Marc “Monster’s Ball” Forster speeds through the early part of the story, the transformation from hellion to angel, very quickly. The conversion is a crucial plot point and if we don’t buy into it we’ll have a hard time being on side for the rest of the story.
The rest of the movie skips and jumps around as well, as though it was cut down from a much longer movie. Luckily it moves along at such a clip that the strange blend of revenge and religion is never given the chance to settle for too long. That’s a good thing because it’s an uncomfortable mix. One minute he’s preaching, the next he’s gunning down Sudanese rebels. He’s Rambo with a bible.
The movie is inspirational and shines a light on some poignant issues, but feels more movie-of-the-week than serious drama about a man’s transformation.
Butler brings some intensity to the role, but Michael Shannon and Michelle Monaghan, as the junkie biker who learns to walk a different path and the born again ex-junkie stripper wife respectively, are wasted in roles that give them little to do.
“Machine Gun Preacher” suffers from playing fast and loose with the events that lead up to the story’s main thrust—one man’s ability to change not only his life, but the lives of people around him—and as a result the transformation doesn’t have the impact it should.
Nim’s Island is a fantasy film aimed at the under ten crowd. Based on the popular Wendy Orr kid-lit novel of the same name, it is a gentle fantasy-adventure story featuring an all-star cast including Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler and Abigail Breslin.
Nim (Breslin) is an 11-year-old who lives with her marine biologist father Jack (Gerard Butler) on an uncharted Pacific island. They are the Swiss Family Robinson for a new generation. When she isn’t dancing or playing soccer with best friend, a sea lion, she passes the time reading adventure novels about a fictional character named Alex Rover written by a phobic San Francisco author also named Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster). When Jack is lost at sea, abandoning Nim on the lonely island, she turns to the only person she thinks can help—her heroine Alex. Thinking she is e-mailing her hero she actually is in touch with the neurotic author who drops everything to come to the rescue. As they work together to find Jack they overcome their fears and Alex becomes the mom Nim never had.
Nim’s Island will likely entertain young girls born after 1998 but may be a tough sell for anyone over the age of ten. Bogged down by bad dialogue, lame action and blatant product placement—Apple Computers anyone?—the whole thing feels lackluster despite the efforts of the cast.
Abigail Breslin sparkles in the lead role, but doesn’t have the depth of personality she usually shows while Jodie Foster gives her worst performance to date. She’s a great actress but her efforts to inject some life into the proceedings fall flat as she proves once and for all that she has no gift for slapstick. Butler fares best of all in a double role that is both charming and fun.
Nim’s Island is an unremarkable movie that does have good values for kids but suffers from a predictable story and a misguided performance from Foster.
When a judgment call costs him his job as a personal security guard to the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is reassigned to a desk job in the Treasury Department. He wants his old job back, a second chance to show he has the right stuff. He gets another crack at it when North Korean terrorists invade Washington, overtake the White House, killing POTUS’s entire security team and kidnapping the Prez. As he only man left with a gun and knowledge of the White House’s security systems, he alone must protect the future of the free world!
“Olympus Has Fallen” is about as standard as action movies get. It’s so standard that the two most presidential of actors—Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman—both play the Commander in Chief. This movie has everything you expect, which, if you have low expectations—and you should—is guns, bombs and at least one character who comforts a mortally wounded man with the words, “C’mon! Hang in there!”
Imagine “Red Dawn” with fewer teenagers and a bigger body count.
And this movie is all about the body count. The first twenty minutes or so is spent on “character development,” an attempt to make stock characters—like the charming but fearless Secret Service agent—but it really begins with the audacious attack and the ensuing mayhem.
From then on it is all bash, boom, bang with a side of motive—evil North Korean mastermind Rick Yune wants to reignite the Korean civil was the U.S. interrupted—and the kind of patriotism that only ever shows up in movies like this (ie: Banning crushes a bad guy’s skull with a statue of Abraham Lincoln).
Director Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua embraces the 80s-style b-movieness of it all, liberally mixing melodrama with mano-a-mano old-school action. If you had a poster of Dolph Lundgren on your wall in 1984 or rent JCVD movies today you’ll find a kindred spirit in “Olympus Has Fallen.”
I tried hard to pin point exactly the thing that bugged me about this new Gerard Butler romantic dramedy. Thought long and hard and I’ve come to realize that we don’t have enough space here for me to fully explain why this doesn’t work but let’s start with the idea that the women are simply treated as sexed-up plot points and move on from there.
Butler plays George Dwyer, former soccer superstar, now sidelined by injuries. Broke and reduced to selling his own memorabilia to make ends meet, he moves to Virginia to be closer to his ex-wife (Jessica Biel) and their son Lewis (Noah Lomax). When the charming Scot begins coaches his son’s soccer team all the soccer moms (Judy Greer, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Uma Thurman) throw themselves at him, but he has eyes for only one woman—his ex-wife.
The first half-hour is, maybe not promising, but on par for this kind of movie. There’s a glint in Butler’s eye, a few giggles and Dennis Quaid, as the soccer team’s pushy sponsor has the makings of a pretty good someone-you-love-to-hate character.
Then it takes a turn.
George has unresolved feelings for his ex-wife and the movie has unresolved plot points falling from the sky like the tears of the Movie Godz who weep when movies this bad get released. When there is a large sum of money meant to be used for soccer outfits and balls is given to a broke person in the first act, that money must become a plot point by act three, otherwise it becomes a loan and therefore dramatically uninteresting. Loose ends dangle, flapping in the wind and worst of all the female characters are treated as lingerie wearing narrative devices and little else.
Seriously, someone please tell Uma Thurman to saddle up and work with Quentin Tarantino again because this rom com detour she’s taken is leading her nowhere.
It’s not he worst rom com ever—that’s because Katherine Heigl doesn’t make an appearance—but it is a sloppily made movie that relis too heavily on Butler’s trademarked eye twinkle and rakish smile. This time around, however, they’re not enough to save “Playing for Keeps.”
