THE GOOD

The world has gone coo-coo for comic book stories. Attempting to capitalize on this market is the newest superhero installment: Captain America. With 9/11 fast approaching its 10th anniversary, patriotism is an easy win, and Captain America provides a large dose of feel-good American sentiment along with a moderately entertaining plot. The parts are mostly well cast, and Tommy Lee Jones turns in the standout performance of the movie. A compelling design for the titular character’s costume rounds out what this movie does well. In summary: America, Tommy Lee, and a cool costume.

THE BAD

Unfortunately, this movie does a lot of things very badly, and it actually comes across as if it was made hastily, to be blunt: from rather cheap CGI to a smattering of half-hearted action sequences (read “montages”), not to mention the rather lackluster writing, directing, and acting (even from Stanley Tucci, who phones this one in) . The dialogue is flat, leaving the characters quite one-dimensional, and the director does absolutely nothing to help (what can we expect from the director of such films as Hidalgo?). In all honesty, though there are some enjoyable elements, this one feels too much like a B-movie to me to have a $140 million budget.

THE CONCLUSION

While not a great movie (or even a very good one), Captain America fills the superhero-shaped hole in our hearts until the next one is released. It’s fun when it isn’t inducing sighs, and it provides a night of world-saving and girl-getting that we need time and time again. If you must see a hero movie tonight, this one wouldn’t be a horrible choice. But caveat emptor: it’s no Chris Nolan.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Alice Sebold wrote a gripping, affecting novel about a young girl whose life is ended far too soon by a man with a devastating and interminable itch: he rapes and murders young girls. Peter Jackson, whose extensive resume includes the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, is an adept director, a man with visions of legendary proportions, a film artist who pulls out all the stops. This is why it’s so difficult to fathom how and why The Lovely Bones is such a poor, disappointing film.

A young girl, Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan),”like the fish,” is on her way home from school when George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) cunningly intercepts her and proceeds to both rape and murder her. Her parents, Abigal and Jack (played respectively by Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg), begin the grueling process of both looking for her and grieving her loss. Susie, meanwhile, is discovering her own new place in the world. Or, rather, in another world altogether: the place in between heaven and earth. Jack and Abigail deal with her death very differently; Abigail eventually leaves the family, while Jack tirelessly searches out her killer. The emotional trauma devastates the family, which would be entirely dismal if it weren’t for the comic relief of Abigail’s mother (Susan Sarandon).

Jackson attempts to tell the story by creating different worlds for each of the major players. A worthy goal that is very poorly executed. The world of Jack is by far the most well told, as we are thrust into the world of a father whose undying love (played actually quite well by Wahlberg) won’t let his daughter’s memory go gently away into that good night. The mother’s story is essentially given the montage treatment, and, concomitantly, she is all but forgotten. Harvey’s story is fashioned fairly well, but it has the distinct feel of a low-budget crime scene reenactment at times, devolving, for a second here and there, into an almost comical presentation of the wretched and plagued man that he is. However, that being said, the rape scene is actually very well done, tasteful and minimalistic.

Lastly, the heaven (or the “in-between place”) scenes are horrendous. One would expect nothing but the most incredible, dazzling CG and special effects from the director of the Lord of the Rings films, but these scenes are nothing but laughable. We want to care strongly for Susie, as she deals with the constant thought of her family, of their attempt to come to grips with her loss in their personal ways, and of her own journey to the other side. Unfortunately, we cannot. Some of the special effects seem to come straight out of an earlier era, reminiscent of a time when we forgave much of what we saw in terms of verisimilitude, because we knew that they were trying their hardest, and the technology just wasn’t quite there yet. In all honesty, the computer graphics from Ghostbusters looks better than this film. At times, much better.

Fortunately, the acting is pretty good all across the board; Tucci, in particular, is extremely good. He seems like any man we might meet next door, though he’s struggling with a wretched urge. Ronan is actually pretty good despite the absurd green screen treatment. And Sarandon is quite possibly one of the film’s better halves (if you will) – in fact, if it weren’t for the acting, this film would be utterly abysmal. All in all, the writing isn’t horrible, but it’s overshadowed so strongly by the poor directing and graphics choices that it’s barely noticeable (surprising when you consider that Fran Walsh and Jackson worked together on all three Lord of the Rings).

Ultimately, this is yet another poignant, moving story poorly told. The tragic reality of the story, of course, is that this happens all the time – girls are abducted and abused, sometimes never to be seen again by their families or the light of day, and the lives of all involved are forever altered. This comes through despite the film’s gross incompetence (a testament to Sebold, in my opinion). In the end, this film is, sadly, not worth watching. There are some very suspenseful moments and a few touching scenes, but, overall, this film fails in so many ways that it becomes an effort not to walk out of the theatre, get your money back, walk to the nearest book store, and buy the novel, in an effort to hear the story told well. Save your time and money. Or, rather, spend it on the book.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Stories are told and retold for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their ability to move and inspire.  True stories have a resonance which is somewhat different than their fictional counterparts.  These stories are historically based in a way that fictional stories may not be, and we tune into the characters and their trials and tribulations for, perhaps, different reasons. However, a true story, like any story, must be told well.

Recently, several “Based on a True Story” films have fallen far short of the mark, leaving us feeling that we have been duped. Where is the emotion, the raw intensity of a human being’s life circumstances forcing them to rise above the plain of mere mortals and into the realm of the hero?  If it’s in the story, it’s in the story.  If it isn’t, it isn’t.  Infusing emotion where it doesn’t need it accomplishes little more than the forceful extraction of emotions from viewers and the subverting of any notion of sincerity, often in scenes whose truth is evident without overhauled emotionalism.

Like The Blind Side before it (though Invictus is better in many ways), this film attempts to tell a very good story, of historical and political import, revealing the truths of patriotic unity and the tribalism that can result in soul-stirring nationalism.  It succeeds in part due to the performances from Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the captain of South Africa’s rugby team.  Damon, while still quite good, chose to play this character with his mouth shut.  He rarely opened his mouth enough to be audible, and his accent changed frequently throughout the film, as though he couldn’t quite find the placement in his mouth for the South African dialect.  Rarely does one criticize the smallest parts in a film, but here, they were dreadful.  The rugby players with only a few speaking lines were about as good as a 15-year-old making his high school debut in Oklahoma! It appears that they found people who looked the part, but couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.

Emoting is not only a writing/acting dilemma; it can be held ransom by a director.  Clint Eastwood knows what he’s doing. He’s been around the block more times than most people ever imagine in one lifetime.  With Invictus, he comes up so short it almost doesn’t make sense, as if he had a ghost-director, much like a politician writing a memoir.  With as much experience and skill as Eastwood has, it’s a pity he produced such a self-ingratiating look at an already politically charged story of one nation’s rallying cry under the banner of athletics.  The movement of the camera was sporadic at times when it didn’t seem to make sense and methodically emotional at times that certainly didn’t seem to require it.  The only camera work that is worthy of honorable mention is during the rugby matches themselves, though even that was often ruined by sentimental music, which, throughout the film, was more along the lines of a sappy trailer than anything else.  This story is not a tear-jerker, but Eastwood does his absolute best to see to it that you shed a few ersatz tears.  (He doesn’t succeed, by the way.)

If the attempts to jerk tears from your eyes aren’t enough, the film also breaches the unspoken pact of historicity.  Minor differences are expected and trivial, but the title of the film, and the eponymous poem, plays a largely fabricated role. Mandela, while in prison, had a slip of paper with the poem “Invictus” on it (written by William Henley).  While this poem was personally inspirational in his life, the selection that he gave to Pienaar before the critical match was actually an excerpt of Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”  Historically speaking, the film takes its strongest thematic element (not to mention its name, for God’s sake) from something that isn’t quite right.

Fortunately, one can come away from this film learning two very important maxims.  First, any story, fictional or not, may be very poignant as it is, but the telling of that story is equally as important, if not more so.  Second, one can walk away from this film having witnessed the power of sport.  Athletics, like politics and religion, can drive people apart or pull them together.  The purpose of athletics, as in politics and religion, is the ascent of the human spirit, the pursuit of perfection through competition, and international competition does this on a grand stage.  The story itself is inspiring and rings true, but the film, as divorced as possible from the story, is lackluster and emotionally overwrought.  I would say rent it for the historical aspect, but even that isn’t entirely worth the effort. Watch a scene or two for Freeman’s Mandela, then find the book on which Invictus is based.  It’s bound to better than the film.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

No time is wasted.  In a way.  We are hurled right into the middle of the dilemma of Henry (the time traveler) and Clare (his wife).  An explanation is given, but not at first.  We’re left to deal with the confusion in much the same way Henry and Clare are, that is to say, holding on for dear life.  Much darker than expected, drenching with sentimentality and nostalgia, The Time Traveler’s Wife is a misnomer of a title, but also a fairly heartbreaking story of unconditional love.

Henry has struggled his entire life with what we are told is called ‘chronoimpairment,’ involuntary time travel.  He meets Clare, falls in love, and the story begins.  They deal with his traveling in much the same way that couples deal with spouses in the armed forces or international business.  Theirs is a wholly different struggle, of course, given that Henry’s ‘trips’ are against his will and not only in space, but in time.

The story itself is not a bad one.  Having not read the novel, one still notices the effort by Audrey Niffenegger, the author of the novel, to create a very realistic world, where his time travelling is a genetic impairment, a disease, not a fairytale.  In fact, at no point is magic qua magic involved or mentioned in any way.  That being said, the film itself was written by Bruce Joel Rubin, the pen behind Deep Impact and Stuart Little 2.  As such, nearly every scene reeks of sentimentality.  Kitsch is the foundation of this film.  Rubin has taken what appears to be a pretty good story and infused so much nostalgia and emotionalism that we aren’t left to respond to the story itself, but the emotions that Rubin and director Robert Schwentke have so thickly laid on.  If you have ever seen an otherwise beautiful girl covered in layers of makeup, you can relate to the tawdry cheesiness that this film displays on so many occasions.

The acting is actually split right down the middle.  Rachel McAdams is fantastic, as per usual, revealing the struggles of a girl in love with a man she has little control over.  Ron Livingston, the best friend, and Arliss Howard, Henry’s father, contribute honest and adequate performances to this film, though Livingston is the better half in this case.  Eric Bana, the Time Traveler himself, is a glorified Keanu Reeves in much of the film, showing little emotion, rarely reacting, giving so very little to McAdams that she should be considered for an award simply for how well she was able to perform with him.  He’s a hit-or-miss actor, and here, he’s a miss.  He offers a certain desirable appearance, but he is just barely adequate as Henry.  Nothing more.

It puts a new spin on the love story.  Their story begins in mideas res, and we follow their struggling relationship as they deal with his frustrating and enervating condition.  This is a fantasy/sci-fi love story, and it pulls at your heartstrings.  Buy into the convention, and you just might find yourself invested in the characters and their attempt to hold on to the one thing they want more than anything else.  Something we can all relate to, in our own ways.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Yes, I saw it in 3D.  Or, rather, I saw it in Real-D 3D.  All the better for it.  This film is visually stunning, and having spent half a billion dollars, I would certainly hope it would at least be that.  Unfortunately, that’s about all this one has going for it: lots of money and spectacular graphics.

One would hope that half a billion bucks could pay for some good acting.  Do they really expect us to believe that the absolute best they could buy with that kind of money was Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang?  I refuse to believe that.  Nonetheless, that’s what we get.  Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang.  They aren’t the worst, but they certainly aren’t good.  Worthington’s character, an ex-Marine who is bound to his wheelchair (one of the only good ideas the writers had), is shoved into his brother’s shoes (should I say body?) early on, and his first encounter with Lang’s character, Colonel Miles Quaritch, sets the tone for the rest of the film: overused and ineffectual.  The acting could probably only have been worse if they had been replaced by Paul Walker and Vin Diesel.  Zoe Saldana tries to play the love-interest, another character with mostly amusing dialogue (not in a good way), but doesn’t really get a chance, due in large part to the preposterous script.  Additionally, this film supports my theory that Michelle Rodriguez is actually requesting to be cast as the characters with the most poorly written dialogue in the film.  Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver were fine, but even they couldn’t rise above one of the laziest scripts of the year.

Had the script been given the kind of attention that WETA gave the graphics or that the producers gave the advertising campaign, it probably would have been vastly improved from the jejune one which made it onto the screen.  Instead, clichés follow on one another’s heels throughout the film, tripping themselves up in a laughable pile of bruised simplistic banalities.  I actually had to stifle laughter through some of the dialogue, much like I did in The Blind Side, save for one difference: I expected it in The Blind Side.  In Avatar, I expected a script that had been worked over until the writers bled, then worked over some more.  Half a billion dollars?

This movie aims to be epic, a film of sweeping proportions, soaring above all others in a meteoric rise to ineffably great heights.  It does no such thing.  Instead, it induces laughter.  If nothing else, I expected Cameron to have made sure that it was well-paced, especially given nearly three hours of screen-time.  Nope.  Characters have relationships that seem to be a creatio ex nihilo, a “creation out of nothing.”  Jack Sulley and Neytiri’s romantic relationship is a series of trite montages, expecting us to accept that their love develops naturally, which, of course, it does not.

If this wasn’t already bad enough, we are confused to find ourselves thrust into a story which can’t decide if it’s a love story, an epic, or an action film.  We might assume, for the benefit of the doubt, that it tries to be all three.  Fine.  Unfortunately, it can’t be all things to all people.  The love story is incoherent, the epic is poorly drawn and badly paced, and the action film lacks Bruce Willis.  (Although the score is about as epic as it gets.)  All jokes aside, the “epic” battle, the action-packed part of the movie, is no less believable than many others of this variety, but there are some aspects which are simply beyond comprehension.  For the sake of those who haven’t seen this film yet (which you should, by the way, despite its ability to ruin what could have been a fairly enjoyable story), I won’t divulge any spoilers.

The thematic elements are obvious enough.  The natives are being attacked by the new settlers.  We’ve seen this many times.  It has truth to it.  But we’re hit over the head with it so many times that it actually might give you a headache.  These humanoid natives are actually reminiscent of the Native Americans of Disney’s Pocahontas. I guess all “natives” on all planets are identical.  How imaginative.

Another prominent theme is that of the scientist v. layman conflict.  Weaver’s character, Dr. Grace Augustine, is the ideal Scientist, capital S, reminiscent of the story of Antoine Lavoisier, the French chemist who supposedly requested that his friends count how many seconds he remained alive after his beheading, in a final scientific experiment (15 seconds apparently, if you’re curious).  Dr. Augustine battles the corporate powers that be in what I found to be the more affecting thematic reference point, drawing on the struggle between scientists’ desire to unravel the mysteries of the natural world and corporate giants’ desire to exploit the resources of the same.  As Ribisi’s character says: “This is why we’re here, because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo.”  Along this same scientific vein, they make a fascinating discovery on the planet, Pandora, regarding the Na’vi’s great Mother Spirit, Eywa (one of the brighter moments of the film is when they let the audience in on this secret, in my opinion).  Again, though, no spoilers from me.

So, where are we now?  We seem to have witnessed what money can buy.  And what it cannot.  At least in this particular case.  It can buy marketing and a marvelous visual display of digital graphics (even though the people still don’t move like actual human beings – there’s a calculated quality which actual people typically don’t have).  It was unable, however, to buy honest writing or mostly decent acting.  In the end, then, this film needs to be considered along two very distinct lines of aesthetic thought: that of the magician, and that of the raconteur.

Perhaps most importantly, however, this movie is a telling example of one thing that money apparently can’t buy: a sense of truth – that knowledge that is both intellectual and emotional that the story being told is honest and, above all, human.  This film is rarely honest, and the moments of humanity are few and far between.  Films might ultimately be divided along this line, those with a sense of truth and those that lack it.  This is not to say that all films will be either entirely honest or entirely dishonest, only that the balance must fall one way or the other.  In my opinion, for this film, the balance falls the wrong way.  No amount of theatricality, however unprecedented or spectacular, can genuinely make up for the lack of a sense of truth.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Bruce Willis is cast in a movie for two reasons: it’s an action-packed film, and he’s got star-quality.  This one is no different.  Willis is the virtual hero in a film about virtual reality.  There’s little new here.  However, the film points out some of the ethical issues with such a world, built as it is on the proxy-society.  It reveals some harsh truths about the reality of living our lives online, namely, the potential for deception and outright mendacity.  It’s a movie to rent if you’re jonesing for a Willis flick.  If you’re not, the sociological and moral implications might be just enough to keep you awake.  Enjoyable, but certainly not Willis’s best.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

X-Men.  You know them.  I know them.  We all know them.  But do we know them?  That seems to be the point of the individual characters’ movies, beginning here with the saga of Wolverine, from childhood  to adulthood, to a kind of maturation which shows his strengths, his flaws, his background and history, his desires.  As with many of the recent big screen comics, this one is an exciting thrill-ride.  But with a purpose: to tell Wolverine’s story.

It’s directed by Gavin Hood, who hadn’t done any superhero or comics movies prior to the making of this film, and I think it helps.  He doesn’t try to force it to be a comic; instead, he lets the story unfold on the screen as a film, not a book.  Like any book-turned-movie or book-turned-play or vice versa, there are elements which are sacrificed on either end so that it will work better in the medium in which it is being created.  Comic book films, like the first Hulk movie, can sometimes err on the side of colorful kitsch, with a lot of display and comic book airs.  Thankfully, many of them do not do that.  Wolverine is one of the latter.

Let’s be straight with one another: the cast is pretty impressive: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan, Danny Huston.  Jackman and Schreiber have great chemistry, playing off one another, even in the midst of fighting (perhaps especially when fighting), and allowing the give-and-take of actor-to-actor to happen mostly naturally.  So, the acting: pretty good all around.  The plot: mostly good with a few very kitschy moments, and a deus-ex-machina here and there that seemed to me evidence of a lack of foresight on behalf of the writers.  Maybe it happens that way in the comics: I don’t know.  But suffice it to say that the writing was up and down.  Exciting, kitschy, and on the whole very watchable.  It isn’t a great script, but it is a lot of fun.

If you were a fan of the original X-Men movies, then you’ll probably love this one.  If you didn’t like them, then maybe this isn’t for you.  I, for one, am excited to watch the whole Marvel world unfold, kitsch or no kitsch.  If you think I used kitsch more than I should have, you’re probably right.  If you think you won’t like this movie because it’s kitschy in parts, I think you’re definitely wrong.  Go on.  You know you want to know what happens in the Marvel Universe.  I know I do.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Quick review: a film is the telling of a story, a work of art, and hopefully, a compelling and inspiring adventure, of which the words artistic, aesthetic, and ambitious, among others, would not be out of the question.  A movie, however, is chiefly entertainment, spectacle, “fun,” and is typically lacking in depth, substance, and subtlety, to say the least.  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a great movie, but it is a horrid, horrible, dreadful film.

Michael Bay is known for a few things, among them are explosions, loud noises, and slow-motion girls running in the style of Pamela Anderson on Baywatch.  These are stereotypical of box office blockbusters, especially during the summer.  But this is not new knowledge, and it certainly is not surprising.  With this in mind, one can expect only a handful of things from this movie, and they have already been mentioned, but I will reiterate: big, bang, boob.

Shia LeBeouf is doing his best.  I think.  As David Mamet has said, there’s really nothing an actor can do with a bad script.  It’s a bad script, and it will come off that way, no matter what the actor tries to do to enhance or improve it.  Unless that person is John Turturro, in which case a bad script becomes hilarious and the exact amount of comic relief needed in between gigantic eruptions of fire and bombs and Megan Fox.  Who is eye candy.  And only eye candy.

There is much that can be said against this film.  It’s shallow, hollow, and inconsistent, lacks any real emotion, and is perpetually hoping that the audience will like it because it spent $200 million on CGI.  And let’s admit it: the CGI is very, very good.  But besides John Turturro and the CGI, there is nothing that even approximates “good.”  It is very entertaining.  Not much more can be said.  It’s a fun summer blockbuster.  Don’t expect anything more from it.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

I was right.  Clive Owen has been pigeonholed.  Typecast.  Whatever you want to call it.  When Jason Statham gets typecast, the world keeps on spinning none the wiser.  But Clive Owen is a very good, talented, subtle actor, whose abilities lend themselves to movies with meat on their bones.  He’s a businessperson who needs money, as everyone understands, but picking another movie with a wildly absurd plot, a thousand and one plot twists, and Julia Roberts?  C’mon, Clive.  You can do better than this.  And so can Tom Wilkinson.  Not to mention Paul “Yale” Giamatti.

Duplicity is, if nothing else, a movie whose title is even more apropos than expected.  Two companies who essentially have nearly all the marketshare are cutthroats, willing to do whatever it takes to take the other guy down.  The CEO’s, presumably, are played by Wilkinson and Giamatti, two ruthless and idiosyncratic dictators whose companies are their very raison d’être.  The movie centers around these two companies and the one product that each thinks will destroy the other.  Roberts and Owen play ex-undercover agents with shady pasts and a sense of skepticism that is appropriate for a movie called Duplicity.  Each thinks the other is out to get the…well…other.  And the movie rolls on for two hours and a bit, and the characters don’t really change much, and the plot doesn’t really get interesting until the aforementioned “bit.”  The twists are as implausible as they are well acted.  Which is to say highly implausible because very well acted.

Julia Roberts is, for all else she may be, a very one dimensional actress.  Her performance here is not much different.  She comes in, shows little to no emotion, says a few lines unconvincingly, and leaves.  Then she repeats the process like a prosaic shampoo label.  Clive Owen, on the other much more dexterous hand, is a great actor.  He does his best in his movies, but sometimes his role leaves something to be desired.  The seasoned veteran Wilkinson never disappoints, in my opinion, and this movie is absolutely no different.  He commands each scene, however poorly constructed or simply written.  His presence is a force to be reckoned with, and each scene he is in is a treat that this movie gives to its oft-beleaguered audience members.

The direction takes a lot of its “inspiration” from the Oceans trilogy, from its use of montage to its music choices.  The problem is that it isn’t nearly as good as any of the Oceans movies, and not nearly as clever.  It has a big bucks cast, but not even they can drag this movie out of mediocrity and convolution.

Clive Owen has not made me happy so far in 2009.  He needs to step up his game, or at least pick movies where he actually has half a chance to shine.  Maybe it’s the economy, stupid.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that this movie is too long, too uninteresting, and too implausible to be enjoyable.  Skip it, and wait for Owen to do something worth your time and money.

Rating: 2/4 Stars

Clive Owen is beginning to get typecast.  If that doesn’t tell you what this movie is going to be like, then you haven’t been paying attention.  He’s got a gun, a mission, and a bad attitude.  I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I’m only saying I wish he would take more movies like Children of Men.  That’s a real mission.  This one is trying to take down an assailant, which happens to be a bank.  In this economy, this movie should work.  It does work on a few levels (to be generous).  The rest is predictable or unjustifiably unpredictable.  Both are pretty frustrating, and both are repellents for getting butts in seats.  Good thing it’s got Clive Owen, I guess.

The International is an odd movie.  For one thing, the title makes no real sense.  Who is the international?  Owen’s character?  The bank he is against, the IBBC?  The film crew, for all the SkyMiles they got?  I’m not sure, and I think director Tom Tykwer wasn’t sure either.  The movie is confused in lot of ways.  Besides the title’s identity crisis, we’ve got at least one character (Naomi Watts) whose role in the story is questionable filler at best.  These two are supposed to be a tag team, it appears, but Owen’s character, Louis Salinger, has other plans…mostly involving trying to keep Watts out of the script.  It didn’t work, and so we’re stuck with her awkward character seeking importance and her struggling performance in it.  This isn’t really her fault.  But none-the-less, it’s unappealing and mildly distracting from the plot.

The plot.  Well, Salinger is trying to take down the IBBC, a bank involved in international (there’s that word again) affairs of giant proportions.  What are they doing?  Well, no one knows, but it probably has to do with arms dealing and at one point, someone with soi-disant importance says it has to do with “power.”  Thanks for that.  As if we, the unsuspecting audience, had no clue.

Ludicrous plot aside, we are given at least a few select moments of interest or, at the very least, fun.  There’s a shoot-out scene on just about every floor of the Guggenheim, with lots of guns, lots of destruction of very expensive museum architecture, and no meaning.  Well, very little, anyway.  But all that meaning stuff aside, it’s a pretty good dose of fun.  That scene, I mean.  Not the movie.  And while the movie is full of very suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat tension, I never really knew what I was tense about, except for the safety of our one-dimensional  protagonist.

Owen’s performance is extremely one-note, but I think that’s a result of the ridiculous script and incongrous directing.  Watts is, as mentioned earlier, completely unnecessary.  And the plot is based in reality only to the extent that no one flies or shoots lasers from their eyes.  If the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, the audience is left confused and frustrated.  And the ending just eggs it on.  This one gets a star for effort and another one for keeping me in the theater.  Skip it.  Unless you’re a Clive Owen enthusiast.  But even then, this just might upset you.  

Rating: 2/4 Stars