SYNOPSIS: Set against the backdrop of the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict, the action thriller “1992,” sees a factory worker, played by Tyrese Gibson, caught up in a dangerous heist to steal catalytic converters, which contain valuable platinum, from the factory where he works.
CAST: Tyrese Gibson, Scott Eastwood, Ray Liotta, Michael Beasley, Christopher Ammanuel, Dylan Arnold, Ori Pfeffer, Oleg Taktarov. Directed by Ariel Vromen.
REVIEW: A heist movie wrapped around a family drama, the generic action of “1992” is given some added oomph by its historical backdrop.
Gritty and dark, “1992” recounts the events following the Rodney King verdict, which saw four LAPD officers acquitted of charges of excessive force in the arrest of King, despite videotaped evidence. In the days that followed anarchy erupted in Los Angeles, resulting in 63 deaths, more than 12,000 arrests and over $1 billion in property damages.
Thrown into the middle of the chaos, former gang-member-turned-factory-worker Mercer (Gibson), wants to get his son to the relative safety of the factory. Another father and son, played by Ray Liotta and Scott Eastwood, see the riots as a convenient distraction, and plan to rob the factory while the police are busy trying to bring order to the streets.
The resulting clash and family dynamics provide an easy metaphor for the good vs. evil that drives the plot.
Gibson plays Mercer as a man who has had a reckoning with his past and wants to set a good example for his son. Gibson pulls off the action—when pushed, he occasionally uses his special set of skills to solve problems—but it is in the relationship with his son that the character is at his most interesting. He’s been-there-done-that and uses his life experience like a sword to cut through the tough guy nonsense his son spouts.
Liotta on the other hand is far more one dimensional. It’s fun to see Liotta go full-on mad dog, and he is effective, but his character is less nuanced and supplies far fewer surprises than Gibson.
As a crime drama “1992” doesn’t plough much new ground. The robbery, and resulting complications, are straight out of the Heist 101 Handbook for Screenwriters, but the family drama and contrasting parenting skills freshen up what otherwise may have been a standard b-movie.
Everything about “Fast X,” the latest entry in the “Fast and Furious” franchise, is big. Really big.
The a-lister cast list is a laundry list, including returning stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson and Charlize Theron along with the addition of Marvel superheroes Jason Momoa and Brie Larson. The villain is faster and more furious than ever before and the action can only be described as bigly. There’s even a surprise cameo from one of the world’s biggest movie stars.
But is bigger always better?
A jumble of the usual mix of family, friends, fast cars and flashbacks, “Fast X” begins with relative calm in the world of former criminal and professional street racer Dominic Toretto (Diesel). The patriarch of the “F&F” gang, he has left the fast life behind, and retired with wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and his son Brian. “We used to live our lives a quarter mile at a time,” he says. “But things change.”
Not so fast, there Dom.
Dom’s past comes back to haunt him in the form of flamboyant villain Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa), the sadistic, revenge fueled son of drug lord Hernan Reyes. “I’m Dante,” he says by way of introduction. “Enchanté.”
Way back in “Fast Five” Dom and Co. were responsible for the loss of the Reyes family fortune. “The great Dominic Toretto,” Dante snarls. “If you never would’ve gotten behind that wheel, I’d never be the man I am today. And now, I’m the man who’s going to break your family, piece by piece.”
Cue the set-up to the second part of the franchise’s three-part finale. It is, as they say on the movie poster, just the beginning of the end.
In the “Fast & Furious” world the word “ludicrous” is not just the name of prominent cast member Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, it’s also the name of the game. Since the franchise’s humble 2001 debut, the movies have grown bigger and sillier with each entry. “If it can violate the laws of God and gravity,” says Agent Aimes (Alan Ritchson) in “FX,” “they do it twice.”
The latest one redefines ridiculousness.
The out-of-control car stunts that crowd the screen have no touchstone in reality, other than the cars have four wheels and drive along streets when they aren’t bursting into flames or flying through the air. It’s as if the wild car chases were dreamed up by fourteen-year-olds playing with their Hot Wheels sets as images of canon cars danced in their heads. Anything goes, and no idea is too big or too ludicrous.
When the tires aren’t squealing, Dom is whinging on about the importance of family with a straight face and a serious tone that makes Leslie Nielsen’s “Naked Gun” deadpan look positively flamboyant. Only Momoa seems to understand how colossally silly the whole thing is, and has fun pulling faces, doing a Grand Jeté or two and peacocking around as he rolls a neutron bomb through the streets of Rome. It’s a ludicrous performance in a completely ludicrous movie and it fits.
The bombastic “Fast X” is overstuffed with characters—it seems like every actor in Hollywood has a cameo—plot and, if this is possible, it is overstuffed with excess. The very definition of “go big or go home,” it is for “F&F” fans who have been along for the ride for more than two decades everyone else may want to take a detour.
This week on the Richard Crouse Show Podcast we meet Haley McGee, a Canadian living in London, England, who has written a book called “The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale,” a memoir about her attempt to pay off credit card debt by selling gifts from her exes. In the book she tries to calculate exactly how much romantic relationships cost in time, money and effort.
Then we’ll get to know Celeste Bell, co-director of a great new music documentary called “Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché.” It’s the story of Bell’s mother, legendary punk rock singer Poly Styrene, whose band X-Ray Specs were one of the first punk rock bands to find commercial success with their album “Germfree Adolescents.” The documentary is a rarity, a movie about punk rock that casts its eyes beyond the musical anarchy to portray the real person behind the music.
Finally, we chat to Clark Backo. You know her as Wayne’s love interest Rosie, on the television series “Letterkenny.” You can now see her in “I Want You Back,” a very funny rom com now playing on Amazon Prime.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
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“I Want You Back,” a new rom com starring Jenny Slate and Charlie Day and now streaming on Amazon, begins with dueling break-ups.
Noah (Scott Eastwood) and Emma (Slate) have been together for 18 months. She’s comfortable and content. He’s an A-Type on the hunt for the next thing in life, who happens to appear in the form of Ginny (Clark Backo), the statuesque owner of a local pie shop.
Peter (Day) and Anne (Gina Rodriguez) are six years in when she blindsides him. He’s too complacent, she says as she dumps him. She wants a bigger life, one filled with excitement and she thinks she’ll find that with local theatre director Logan (Manny Jacinto).
Emma and Peter are dumped and devastated.
This is a rom com, so it is inevitable that the grieving Emma and Peter will meet cute. Turns out, they work in the same office tower and spend time in the same stairwell, crying and longing for their exes. When they finally meet, she is smeared with mascara, he has the toilet paper he used to wipe away his tears stuck to his face. They respond to each other’s pain and begin a platonic friendship.
They sing “You Oughta Know” at karaoke, get drunk and attempt to make one another feel better. “Dying alone is not so bad,” Emma says. “Having someone to watch you die is embarrassing.” They go to the movies, have lunch, lurk on their exes’ Instagram and hatch a plan. Emma will infiltrate Anne and Logan’s relationship as Peter makes friends with Noah and Ginny, both trying to drive a wedge in the new relationships. “They might not know they should be with us,” Emma says, “with all these new shiny people around.”
“It’s like ‘Cruel Intentions,” Peter says, “but sexier.”
“How is it sexier?”
“It isn’t.”
The chemistry Slate and Day share, as actors and characters, (NOT A SPOILER, JUST THE WAY ROM COMS WORK) make it clear who should be partnered with who by the time the end credits roll. This is, after all, a rom com so the outcome isn’t a secret. It’s all about the journey, how the two most likeable characters in the movie will finally find their happily ever after. “I Want You Back” offers up a fun journey that travels ground most rom coms have voyaged before, but does so with laughs and heart.
There are hijinks and farce—a proposed three-way tryst, a very uncomfortable hiding spot and unrequited love—but the clichés of Katherine Heigl-style rom coms are blunted with edgy humor topped off with a helping of romance. The movie allows Slate and Day to bring their unique comic gifts to the material while keeping it on the rom com straight and narrow.
“I Want You Back” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but the eager cast keeps the predictable parts of the story interesting and very funny.
Richard joins Ryan Doyle and Jay Michaels of the NewsTalk 1010 afternoon show to talk the murky origins of the Mai Tai, a drink that became so popular in the 1960s it caused a worldwide rum shortage! We also talk about what to watch on the weekend!
A remake of Nicolas Boukhrief’s 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur,” “Wrath of Man,” now playing in theatres and coming soon to VOD, is a revenge/heist flick that sees director Guy Ritchie reunited with his trademarked tricky storytelling style, Jason Statham and the ruthless violence that made his early movies such eye poppers.
Statham plays “’H’, like in bomb,” a man of few words with a mysterious past. Big surprise there. They should call him Gazpacho because he is the coolest of cool cucumbers. No matter what, this guy’s pulse rate never rises above 50 beats per minute.
When we first meet him, he takes a job as a security guard for Fortico, a Los Angeles armored car company. A recent robbery left three people dead and made the surviving guards edgy and uneasy. “Do you have any idea how dangerous this job can be?” a coworker named Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett) asks him. “We ain’t the predator, we’re the prey.”
When some very bad people attempt to rob one of the company’s cash trucks “H” reveals a special set of skills to the shock and awe of his co-workers. “It doesn’t feel right,” says security guard Bullet (Holt McCallany). “It’s like he wants the trucks to get hit.”
As the bodies pile up “H’s” lethal past is exposed and it becomes clear that he didn’t take the gig at the armored car company simply because he needed a week to week pay cheque. “I can do in two weeks,” “H” says to the shadowy Agent King (Andy Garcia), “what you wish you could do in twenty years.”
Told on a broken timeline and sectioned-off into chapters with names like “Bad, Animals, Bad” and “Scorched Earth,” the movie’s plot can be boiled down to one line. “I do bear a grudge,” “H” says, summing up the film’s raison d’etre as bullets fly and bodies pile up. A nihilistic story about revenge decorated with a tense heist subplot, it’s a riff on Statham’s earlier work in which he usually played either Character #1, a “loner with a past who must protect a loved one,” or Character #2, the “loner with a past who must protect a youthful innocent.”
Here he shakes things up by showing a disregard for the lives of some while avenging the loss of a loved one. Gone is the jokey Statham of “Spy” and his over-the-top “Fast and Furious” work. This is a back-to-basics performance that sees him settle on one facial expression, as though his chiseled face is encased in amber, to convey the character’s one deadly motive. The taciturn thing has worked for him before and it works well here. “H” is no laughing matter. Danger follows him around, and Statham’s coiled spring performance, no matter how basic, suggests that ultra-violence could erupt at any moment. It gives the movie much of its edge as Ritchie navigates the grim but stylish goings-on.
Are there plot holes? Yes. I can’t go into them without giving the story away but let’s just say “H’s” resilience is impressive.
Somewhere buried deep in the gunplay there is an elegance to “Wrath of Man.” Ritchie’s tough-talking film is tautly crafted, and, for those expecting “Snatch” style editing tricks, quite restrained.
The editing, not the violence.
Shot through a hail of bullets, the movie builds to a tense “Heat” style climax that doesn’t waste time or ammo. The jittery atmosphere is amped up by an angrily effective score from composer Chris Benstead.
On the downside, Ritchie’s taste for macho posturing doesn’t add much to the film’s early scenes. There are barely any female characters, save for Niamh Algar’s security guard Dana and assorted wife characters, and the hard-boiled dialogue between the often men borders on parody.
“Wrath of Man” is bleak and the characters are all, at best, anti-heroes, but for those with a taste for adrenaline pumping action set pieces, “Wrath of Man” delivers.
The Battle of Kamdesh was a bloody 2009 confrontation that saw 400 Taliban fighters attack Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, a station manned by 53 American soldiers and just days before it was to be shut down. “The Outpost,” a new film starring Scott Eastwood and Orlando Bloom and new to VOD, recreates the attack in gut-wrenching detail.
Based on the bestselling “The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor” by CNN’s chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper, the movie focusses on Bravo Troop 3-61 CAV, soldiers working from a base camp situated at the bottom of three mountains. Nestled in a deep valley, the camp’s location is difficult to defend, allowing the Taliban to position themselves as to pick off the soldiers below.
The film’s first hour hints at what is to come. Like many war movies before it, “The Outpost” uses this time to get to know the men, Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha (Eastwood, ironically playing a character named Clint), Captain Ben Keating (Orlando), Specialist Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones), CPT Robert Yllescas, (Milo Gibson), and Daniel Rodriguez, a veteran of the battle who plays himself in the film. Between bouts of enemy fire we learn of their hopes, ambitions and thoughts of home. Its brotherhood building that, in terms of the drama, really pays off in the last hour when we see how the bond between the soldiers comes into play during battle.
Director Rod Lurie, a West Point alum, class of 1984, with four years of military service, has made a you-are-there film. He immerses the viewer in the details, the lives, sacrifices and, ultimately the skill under pressure of these men as bullets and bombs fly. The battle scene is ferocious, tour de force filmmaking, creating an atmosphere of bombast while never losing the connection between the men that will make the difference between life and death. But it is still a study in the importance of working as a unit as Lurie emphasizes the camaraderie as much as the action during the twelve-hour, close contact gun fight.
The performances are uniformly effective but it is Jones who stands apart as Specialist Ty Carter, a Medal of Honor winner, who fights through his fear to do his job.
“The Outpost” has all the earmarks of a war film, the action, the brotherhood, but it isn’t a recruitment film. It is respectful of the soldiers, their duty and courage but critical of a government who knew Combat Outpost Keating was a sitting duck and did nothing to remedy the situation. As a stark comment on the cost of war it is a powerful and award worthy effort.
Check out episode twenty-four of Richard’s web series, “In Isolation With…” It’s the talk show where we make a connection without actually making contact! Today, broadcasting directly from Isolation Studios (a.k.a. my home office), we meet Rod Lurie, a West Point graduate who became a film critic and was once banned from screenings for referring to Danny DeVito as “a testicle with arms.” He is a journalist and author and, since 1999, a filmmaker. In this interview we talk about West Point, why he stood at attention at a screening of “Poltergeist” and, of course, his latest film, “The Outpost.” It’s an intense recreation of the Battle of Kamdesh, a bloody 2009 confrontation that saw 400 Taliban fighters attack Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan, a station manned by 53 American soldiers and just days before it was to be disbanded.
Critics are raving about the film. “IndieWire” said that Rod shot “much of the 45-minute long ambush in hectic, agile long-takes that allows him to capture the Battle of Kamdesh for all of its terror, and with a clarity that allows us to feel that terror in our bones.” The film is also being praised by veterans, including those who fought in the battle, for its realistic depiction of warfare and the life of a soldier.
“The Outpost” is available now on VOD, wherever you legally rent or buy movies.
“I think that my most memorable was in 1982,” he says in the interview. “I was a cadet at West Point. I had leave for the weekend. I went to New York City, and went to see two movies. One was The Road Warrior, George Miller’s film. Oh my god, I was so absolutely excited by that movie. I thought it was so thrilling and I left on such a high. I always knew I want to be a filmmaker and I said to myself, ‘That’s the kind of movie that I want to make. I want to have that sort of effect on an audience.’ I left that theatre, and I went to see another movie, and that movie was ET. And I remember at the end of that movie I was in tears like a baby. I’m this tough military guy and I’m crying because he went home and his heart is beating. ‘I’ll be right here.’ I leave that movie and I say, ‘Oh my god, this is the kind of movie I want to make.’”
Now let’s get to know Rod Lurie…
Watch the whole thing HERE on YouTube or HERE on ctvnews.ca!
A movie star is someone who can carry a movie, a person audiences will line up to see no matter what the film. There’s no formula, just equal parts talent, charisma and staying power.
For years Tom Cruise and Will Smith ruled the Hollywood roost, but Cruise’s couch jumping tarnished his star (unless he’s headlining a movie with the words Mission Impossible in the title) and Smith has hit a box office rough patch.
These days Hollywood’s biggest movie star—both physically and metaphysically—is a former wrestler who made his acting debut playing his own father on an episode of That ’70s Show. Since then Dwayne Johnson’s paycheques have blossomed along with his popularity and in 2016 he was the world’s highest-paid actor, in part due to his reputation as “franchise Viagra.”
It’s a simple formula. Take a flagging franchise; add Johnson and flaccid box office numbers suddenly grow. Case in point, the Fast and Furious series. Johnson signed on for the fifth instalment, playing Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, helping that movie make north of six-hundred million dollars. His over-the-top presence—who else could remove a cast from his broken arm simply by flexing his oversized biceps?—drove the grosses of the next two F&F movies to the stratosphere. This weekend’s The Fate of the Furious is poised to shatter even more records.
His is a varied filmography—a resume containing everything from the hi brow, abstract sci fi of Southland Tales and the bloody b-movie Walking Tall to the family friendly Tooth Fairy and the pedal-to-the-metal Fast & Furious flicks—bound together by one thing, his innate star power.
Haters, like a recent commenter at Variety.com, who complained that Johnson, “has never done a compelling complex character, only mindless good vs evil roles,” miss his populist appeal. Despite his Greek God physique, he’s an everyman, a charismatic crowd-pleaser with a cocked eyebrow.
His appeal continues off screen as well. He’s a big deal now but that wasn’t always the case and he’s positioned himself as an inspirational figure, a muscle bound Tony Robbins. “I started w/ $7 bucks. If I can overcome, so can you,” he tweeted when he was crowned the World’s Highest-Paid Actor.
“I have enjoyed a good amount of success and I’m very grateful for everything I have,” the bulky actor told me a few years ago.
“I’m very grateful for being who I am. I make sure to approach every project and everything I do as if it is going to be my last.
“There was a time when I was in Canada, playing for the CFL and sleeping on a mattress that I got from the garbage of a sex motel. I’ll never forget it. True story. So, for me, those times are kind of in the forefront of my mind. The wolf is always scratching at the door. It’s good to remember that. It’s important.”
Johnson is Hollywood’s biggest earner but a recent viral video shows his core connection to his fans. Dressed as mascots of themselves Jimmy Fallon and the artist formerly known as The Rock photobombed folks at Universal Studios in Orlando. One man, with a tattoo of Johnson on his leg, was brought to tears when meeting the hulking actor. “Stuff like this will always be the best part of fame,” said Johnson.
