Distraught after the brutal rape of his wife, English teacher Will Gerard (Nicolas Cage) accepts the offer of Simon (Guy Pearce), a mysterious man who tells him his organization will take care of the rapist in exchange for a simple favor at a later date. Will, clearly more familiar with Shakespeare than the movies, is shocked six months later to learn that Simon wants him to kill a man. Screenwriter Robert Tannen strings together one cliche after another (Simon’s organization turns out to be unbelievably high, wide, and deep; Will magically acquires superhuman resourcefulness; and so on), finally closing the loop with a predictable showdown in an abandoned mall. Cage makes it watchable, but can’t make it worth watching.
**
Distraught after the brutal rape of his wife, English teacher Will Gerard (Nicolas Cage) accepts the offer of Simon (Guy Pearce), a mysterious man who tells him his organization will take care of the rapist in exchange for a simple favor at a later date. Will, clearly more familiar with Shakespeare than the movies, is shocked six months later to learn that Simon wants him to kill a man. Screenwriter Robert Tannen strings together one cliche after another (Simon’s organization turns out to be unbelievably high, wide, and deep; Will magically acquires superhuman resourcefulness; and so on), finally closing the loop with a predictable showdown in an abandoned mall. Cage makes it watchable, but can’t make it worth watching.
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** Saved from complete ignominy by one good idea and a couple of chuckles, this embarrassing direct-to-video thriller is about a woman (Mia Sara) and her daughter held captive by an unlikely pair of wackos (Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson) and their cruel little girl. Dickinson thinks Sara is her dead sister, Reynolds thinks she's hot, and their young daughter doesn't seem to care so long as she gets to drag Sara's kid around on a leash. Can't seem to make up its mind whether to be frightening or funny or so over-the-top foolish as to resonate with the so-bad-it's-good crowd. Ends up just being dumb. Based on the book Playmates by Andrew Neiderman. *** Family of five is threatened when a psychopathic man who was sent to prison on the testimony of the father is set free. Unusual thriller in the sense that dad garners lots of sympathy but little real help from the authorities, and is ultimately forced to band together his own family for their protection, being (refreshingly) unable to handle it all himself. Suspenseful and exciting -- up to a point. MacDonald's more realistic approach also undercuts the drama as the villain can do only so much and remain plausibly at large. Filmed as Cape Fear in 1962 and 1991, and also published under that title even though it has no relevance to the book. *** Psychiatric patient kills the wrong woman (Angie Dickinson) at the wrong time, drawing the ire of her teenage techo-geek son (Keith Gordon) and the pretty hooker (Nancy Allen) who can ID the killer. Well-directed by De Palma (with a long bravura sequence without dialogue set in New York's Metropolitan Museum), and deeply indebted to Alfred Hitchcock, though unfortunately not in one important respect: Hitchcock didn't write his own scripts. This one flounders at the climax, and the foolish denoument is not only overlong but also out of character. With Michael Caine as a psychiatrist and Dennis Franz as a cop. The unrated version includes a few more seconds of somewhat more explicit sex, violence, and language, none of which adds anything of any real value to the film. *** Technicolor noir as cheating wife (Marilyn Monroe) plots the murder of her older jealous husband (Joseph Cotten) at Niagara Falls, unaware that a vacationer (Jean Peters) has seen her with her lover. Second half nicely set up by the first, but the first is where the real action is, as Monroe tortures Cotten with her wandering ways. Peters and Casey Adams (really Max Showalter) are appealing as the second honeymooners who get tangled in Monroe's web. **** Overlong but exciting Cold War thriller that gets off to a terrific start when a young tourist calls the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with a startling revelation. This leads Sam Hollis (military intelligence), Lisa Rhodes (press attache), and Seth Alevy (CIA bureau chief) on a mission to discover the secret behind a mysterious Soviet facility known as the Charm School. DeMille preserves the mystery as long as possible, then substitutes a certain moral ambiguity to keep things interesting. Peppered with the author's usual invigorating dialogue. And it's all set against a finely detailed and realistic portrait of the USSR. ** A couple of Harvard coeds (graduate students, actually) decide they want to find out if any progeny resulted from their donation of eggs at an infertility clinic. Of course, the only way to accomplish this goal is by breaking the law: assuming fake identities to find jobs at the clinic, stealing access cards, hacking into the computer system, and so on. Nothing illustrates the utter implausibility of this story more than the fact that the women not only allow just one day for this adventure, but actually succeed in that timeframe. Oh, and they uncover shocking secrets, too, from cloning to murder. **** Japan-bashing at a mile a minute. When a beautiful young woman is murdered at the Los Angeles headquarters of a powerful Japanese corporation, the L.A. cops send in super-sleuth John Connor, their resident, if semi-retired, expert on Japan. His Watson, a Special Liaison officer with only rudimentary knowledge of his suspects, tells the story, which hinges as much on the subtleties of Japanese culture as the dangerous naiveté of American government. Oh, yes, Crichton bashes America, too, often just by comparison. An exciting, thought-provoking, opinionated thriller, with plenty of plot twists and two of the author’s most engaging characters. Made into a film in 1993, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. ** The amusing irony of this film, which is about the search for non-existent WMD in Iraq just after America’s invasion in 2003 (the very same weapons of mass destruction that were the ostensible reason for the war in the first place), is that it tries very hard to convince us of its authenticity while, at its core, it’s just an excuse for another thriller that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In the field, where Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) spends most of his time, the movie looks good, it sounds good, and it is, for all we know, historically accurate. But after a promising beginning, during which Miller must contend with the chaos of looting Iraqis and a pesky sniper only to come up empty yet again, the soldier’s frustration and mounting sense of moral outrage propel him (and us) on a bizarre journey of insubordination and inexplicably lax military discipline. Miller seemingly can do whatever he wants (including abandoning his unit) and go wherever he wants (to prove his suspicion that the war was a fraud) without fear of interference from his superior officers (who conveniently disappear after the first half hour or so). Not that he doesn’t encounter resistance; he does. It comes in the form of a high-ranking politico who rates his own special hit squad yet somehow can’t muster the clout to get Miller tossed into the brig where he belongs. **** Taut thriller starring Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, ex-CIA operative, whose seventeen-year-old daughter is kidnapped while on a trip to Paris. He has 96 hours to find and rescue her before she disappears into the criminal underground forever. You’ve seen all this before, just generally flabbier and lazier. Here all the clichés and stereotypes of the genre are used to good purpose: to strip away the fat. What’s left is a lean, hard tale of a man with the skills to battle evil on its own turf and the uncompromising drive to do so. Neeson, who has to carry the plot, gives a terrific performance, imbuing Mills with an inner conviction to match his physical prowess. For all his cold-bloodedness, we never forget that Mills is exactly what he tells his daughter he was, when he worked for the CIA: a man who prevents bad things from happening. |
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