“Target Number One” is a Canadian true crime story, but no, it’s not a retelling of Bill Miner’s railway robbery or the great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist of 2012. It’s a gritty look at investigative reporter Victor Malarek’s fight to uncover the truth behind a heroin bust orchestrated the Canadian Security Intelligence Service put an innocent man in jail.
A the-names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-innocent retelling of the case of Alain Olivier, called Daniel Léger (Antoine Olivier Pilon) in the film, the movie stars Josh Hartnett as Malarek, a Globe and Mail reporter whose dogged determination reveals how the CSIS framed Léger, sending him to a Thai jail for eight years. “I’d be very careful before you print anything about this case,” a high-level cop tells Malarek.
Telling the tale on a broken timeline, director Daniel Roby skip through the details, building both sides of the story simultaneously until the two threads meld, but “Target Number One” isn’t an action movie. There is tension as Léger‘s situation worsens but the compelling part is Malarek’s search for the truth. It’s a procedural the takes its time putting the puzzle pieces in place.
Hartnett does a good impression of the driven reporter and Steven McHattie turns in another of his trademark edgy roles as Frank Cooper, a crooked RCMP officer, but it’s the work of Jim Gaffigan and Pilon that are memorable.
Gaffigan ditches his affable stand-up comic persona to create a medicine portrayal of Glen Picker, a drug dealer and police confidant.
As Léger, Pilon as an arc. From lowlife criminal, whose big score is ripping off a gas station for a full tank, to someone who can navigate survival in a squalid Thai prison, he’s simultaneously vulnerable and edgy and that makes him the film’s most memorable character.
“Target Number One” is a low-key thriller, short on action but long on intrigue.
In theatres now:
Now playing in Vancouver, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
Ron Shelton has made some very good movies. His crowning achievement may be 1988’s Bull Durham, a film he wrote and directed. That movie was a wholly realised piece of work, a baseball movie woven together with a great love story and topped off with three great performances from Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner. Bull Durham has the kind of focus that Shelton’s latest film Hollywood Homicide lacks. Is this a buddy picture? An action flick? A comedy? I don’t know, and I don’t think Shelton knows either. Harrison Ford plays a surly blowtop cop named Joe Gavilan partnered with a younger, gentler detective (Josh Hartnett) who teaches yoga on the side and aspires to be an actor. They are investigating the multiple murders of a rap group. It’s typical stuff, Shelton isn’t breaking any new ground here, but it might have worked had there been any chemistry between the two actors. Hollywood Homicide might have been a much better picture if had they been able to replicate the spark that Mel Gibson and Danny Glover shared in the Lethal Weapon series. The bottom line on Hollywood Homicide is that it is neither fish nor fowl. At best it’s a half baked attempt at blurring genre lines that ends up out of focus.
The Slevin of the title is an unfortunate guy played by Josh Hartnett who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up involved with some very bad men. With the help of a curious neighbor, a world-weary hit man and two warring crime bosses he tries to extricate himself from this messy situation.
This is a hard-boiled crime drama in the vein of The Usual Suspects and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which means that it is bloody, darkly funny and will keep you guessing. The film is a bit of a roller coaster ride of mistaken identities and convoluted plotlines, but near the end when the labyrinthine story starts to fall into place, revealing surprising connections and unlikely alliances the movie pays off.
The script sometimes veers off in Tarantino land with too many clever pop culture references to comic books and old movies, and over-written unusually articulate gangsters, but the actors here rise above the script. Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman both play mafia kingpins with gusto, chewing the scenery so much I feared that Kingsley might actually bite through the screen. Bruce Willis makes the best of his usual cool-guy persona, this time as a hit man, and Josh Hartnett, an actor who seems to have been teetering on the edge of stardom for a while now, gives the most likeable and best performance of his career so far.
Lucky Number Slevin isn’t destined to become a classic genre picture in the way that The Usual Suspects of Memento have, but it is a cool movie with really fun performances.
Josh Hartnett should be ashamed of himself. If he weren’t so damn cute this stupid story about a young man who gives up sex for lent would stop his career dead in its tracks. 40 Days and 40 Nights is puerile, insulting and at 96 minutes about 93 minutes too long – I liked the music in the first three minutes of the opening credit sequence.
It’s amazing that more bad stuff hasn’t happened in the isolated town of Barrow. Located literally at the Top of the World, this fictional Alaskan town is desolate, freezing cold and has one month a year with absolutely no sunshine whatsoever. It’s the stuff that Hollywood nightmares are made of.
When this sleepy little town is invaded by blood sucking freaks who move fast, howl for no reason and are in desperate need of a visit to the dentist, the townsfolk are terrified yet spend most of the movie running through the snow yelling, “What the hell is going on?” to anyone still left alive.
Why they are surprised is a bit of a mystery to me. Anyplace that dark and out-of-the-way is just asking for a supernatural invasion of some kind. They should just be thankful it didn’t happen a long time ago.
It’s a good set up for a horror film. 30 Days of Night mixes the isolationism of The Thing with the conventions of a zombie film—the survivors hole up in a “safe house” while chaos reigns outside—to create an effectively creepy story with enough gore to keep the hard core fans happy.
With a setting this perfectly creepy the cast doesn’t have to do much other than swing the odd axe and grimace appropriately through blood smeared lips. Josh Hartnett is the love-sick sheriff who one ups George A. Romero’s classic “shoot them in the head” defense by getting up close and personal with these creatures of the night and using an axe to decapitate them. Former Australian roller skating national champion Melissa George is his gun toting ex-wife, while Danny Huston, son of Hollywood legend John, brother to Angelica, is Marlow, the head vampire with a mouth full of rotten fangs and a wardrobe that looks borrowed from Marilyn Manson. Mark Boone Junior is great as a Grizzly Adams type who meets a particularly… grizzly end.
Based on a graphic novel of the same name, 30 Days of Night is packed solid with thrills and is the best horror film of the year.
