The Debt
A remake of a 2007 Israeli film, The Debt kicks things off with an out of sequence narrative that had me a little frustrated at first. As the film jumps back and forth between two different time periods (1966 and 1997), we find ourselves intrigued, but also a little bit lost. It doesn't take long for the pieces to start to fall into place, and we begin to realize what director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) is doing with his story. He's giving us vital pieces of info of the film's two storylines (which run in the separate years), and preparing us for what's to come. The film itself is a study in the idea of the "unreliable narrator", where we're told one thing, but then the truth is revealed, and we find out some key details were left out. The movie's an intriguing little puzzle, and fortunately, it doesn't fall flat in its major revelations, nor does it fall apart too much when you think back on it.
Describing the plot can be tricky, as it's hard not to delve into spoiler territory, but I will try my best. The opening moments of the film introduce us to our three main characters, who back in 1966, were young Mossad agents on a dangerous mission in East Berlin. They are Stephen (Marton Csokas), David (Sam Worthington), and Rachel (Jessica Chastain from The Help). Their mission is to capture a Nazi war criminal named Bernhardt (Jesper Christensen), who once went by the name of "the Butcher of Birkenau", and killed many innocent people in horrific medical experiments. They must capture him, and bring him to Israel, so that he can have a public trial. Bernhardt now has a respectable medical practice in Berlin, and Rachel must pose as a regular patient seeking help with getting pregnant in order to gather information on him, as well as check his identity. These are some of the more nerve-wracking moments of the film, and it's easy to see why, if you were trusting your body to someone who once used to be called the "Butcher of Birkenau".
His identity is confirmed, and the three agents manage to capture him, and sneak him out of his office. From this point on, the plan starts to go wrong. But, it had to end okay, right? Because the movie keeps on flashing forward to some 30 years later, where the elder Rachel (Helen Mirren) is helping to promote a book that her adult daughter has written about her mother's successful mission back then. However, something's obviously not right. Stephen (now played by Tom Wilkinson) has started following Rachel around, even though they haven't spoken in years, and David (now played by Ciaran Hinds) seems to be troubled by the past. I really don't want to go much further. A lot of the fun for me was figuring out where the plot was going, and the revelations. I suggest walking into The Debt knowing as little as possible.
Of the two main plots, the one set in '66 is easily the more interesting, as it holds the most tension, and has a claustrophobic vibe of paranoia that builds with remarkable and precise intensity. The scenes set in the more recent years are certainly good, and have actors like Mirren, Wilkinson, and Hinds at the top of their games. It just doesn't have the same feeling of excitement that the flashbacks do. I was never bothered by it, though, as both stories complement each other well enough. The plot with the younger agents also holds the more memorable performances. Jessica Chastain, in particular, is wonderful as the younger Rachel. It's yet another stand-out performance from Chastain, in what is proving to be a banner year for the actress. In The Help, she stood out as being the most interesting and well-rounded character in a movie full of stereotypes. Here, she gets to be strong, yet vulnerable, and has moments of fear and sadness where we really sympathize with her.
I enjoyed the movie greatly as a thriller, especially when the mindgames come into play, and relationships are tested. But, the movie also works as a claustrophobic drama, where the three young agents find themselves in a situation they had not planned for, and are trapped with their enemy in a place where they cannot leave. It creates some tense moments, sure, but we also start to feel for the characters as they break apart emotionally right before our eyes. Sure, we've seen this stuff done before, but that doesn't make it any less riveting. What's amazing is that for almost the entire length of the film, it never sells out, or takes a cheap way out. We get plenty of opportunities to care about these characters, or know what they're thinking. It's not until the film's final moments that we get a quick and dirty resolution that smacks of the screenwriters wanting to wrap things up in a hurry. But, this isn't until the final moments, and it doesn't hurt what's come before too much.
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The movie stars Paul Rudd as Ned, the "Idiot Brother" of the title. He's nice to a fault, extremely naive and trusting, good natured, prone to blurting out peoples' embarrassing secrets at the wrong time, and the one true love in his life is his pet dog named Willy Nelson. As the film opens, he's thrown in prison for a short while after he tries to sell a bag of weed to a uniformed cop. He's released early ("I was named 'model prisoner' four months in a row", he boasts), and heads back to the farm where his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) lives, only to find that she has moved on, and refuses to let him move back in. What's worse, she has his precious dog, and won't let it go. With nowhere else to go, he must move in with his three individual sisters - Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), Natalie (Zooey Deschanel), and Liz (Emily Mortimer). One by one, he destroys his sisters' lives and relationships with his blunt honesty, and inability to keep his mouth closed about things like infidelity and a hidden pregnancy. Of course, he means well, and does his best to fix what he destroys. But his main goal is to get his beloved Willy Nelson back, and live happily on his own.
Despite the film's R-rating, this is a gentle and a little too lazy comedy that, much like the character of Ned, is a bit too nice to a fault. We keep on waiting for some kind of edge or for a big laugh, but it never comes. We laugh politely from time to time at some of Ned's misunderstandings, but for the most part, this is an overly safe and lethargic comedy that just constantly seems to be stuck in the slow lane, like it's afraid to really fly with its premise and cast. Maybe the joke is that Ned is such a nice guy, and he's surrounded by such terrible people. His sisters are all more than a little bitter toward him, even before he starts destroying their lives. But, much like a sitcom, 
There are moments where the movie seems to want to be taken seriously, and these work just about as well as the comic moments, because we don't care about the characters. When one of the sisters discovers from Ned that her husband (Steve Coogan) has been having an affair on his job, there is absolutely no tension created, not even when she confronts her husband in the bedroom. There's no sense of betrayal, no sense of love lost, and no sense of pain. The actors are just reciting a scene, and we're just waiting for the film to move on to the next scene. This is a muted movie in just about every way. The laughs are near non-existent, the drama is thin and unconvincing, and the pace is so glacial, it seems to be at a stand-still at times.
What's frustrating is that I have no doubt that with a different screenplay or approach, this cast could have really made this material into something to watch. But, much like the film itself, the actors seem muted, and are never allowed to be as funny as we know they can be. Oh, there are certainly laughs to be had, but they are sparse and not big, full ones. We watch the actors up on the screen, and remember how funny they can be, and have been in other films. That leads us to wonder what they saw in this project. I have no doubt that the actors will get a chance to be funny again, but here, they're listless in a particularly lifeless little movie.
We flash forward to the present, with Saldana now playing the role of the adult Cataleya, and using her skills her uncle taught her in a convoluted and loopy sequence where she manages to kill a prisoner who's being held in a jail overnight. Her trademark with her killings is to leave the image of a flower that shares her name drawn in lipstick on the bodies of her victims, as that was her father's mark, and she is hoping the drug dealer who killed her parents will one day see it, and reveal his location to her. Outside of her hired killing jobs, she's trying to have a romantic relationship with a nice young man (Michael Vartan), which is hard, since she can't really tell him anything about herself for his own safety. There's also a grizzled old FBI agent (Lennie James), who is trying to track Cataleya down, and for reasons the movie fails to go into, refuses to believe that a woman could be responsible for these hit jobs, and that it has to be a man behind them.
The whole movie works like clockwork, with all the expected character types, plot points, and action sequences that we would expect in a movie like this. This could still be fun if 
As if the movie wasn't easy enough to predict already, it has a nasty and not-very-subtle way of foreshadowing certain events. When we see a random scene of Cataleya feeding some vicious dogs that belong to a friend, we just know that those dogs will be chowing down on a bad guy later on in the movie. They do not disappoint, though I must say I am impressed that those dogs were able to hear her command to attack while the bad guy is talking to her on the phone. At the very least, the movie does venture into guilty pleasure territory at certain times, and comes close to working on some level. But then, the plot and the film itself go back on autopilot, and we're left waiting for the next insane moment Besson threw into his script in order to grab our attention.
The movie opens with a sequence that does a great job of building dread. Some time in the past (it looks to be the late 1800s or early 1900s), the master of a dark, brooding mansion calls for his housekeeper to join him in the basement. It turns out that the whole thing is a trap, so that the master can knock out the teeth of the housekeeper with a blunt object (we notice he's missing more than a few of his own teeth), and sacrifice them to some unseen creatures that are lurking in the dark shadows of the room, and feast upon the bones and teeth of humans (especially children). They refuse his offering, and choose to drag him into the shadows instead. Cut to some time in the present, and we meet a sad and withdrawn young girl named Sally (played by the talented young Bailee Madison) who is being sent to live in the creepy old house we saw earlier, where her dad Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) have been restoring the mansion in order to make a profit, and hope to start a new life with Sally - an idea Sally's clearly not thrilled about, and wastes no opportunity to show to her future stepmother.
The family arrives at the house, and even though it's been spruced up a little, it still looks like it was built to be the setting for a horror movie. It even comes equipped with all the usual trappings of a haunted house, including a sealed off room, lots of dark corners for the characters to unwisely poke around in, and an old groundskeeper (Jack Thompson) who seems to know the history of the house, and knows that something bad is locked within it, but doesn't do a very good job of warning the family living there until it is much too late. Little Sally comes across the long-sealed up room (which just happens to be the basement room from the opening scene), and begins exploring, when she suddenly starts to hear ominous and raspy whispers speaking to her from within a dusty old vent leading to an ash pit. She unwisely breaks off the seal blocking the vent, and unknowingly unleashes the shadowy little creatures who have been trapped within the walls of the house for decades, and are now determined to stalk and threaten Sally.
Naturally, Alex and Kim do not believe Sally when she starts talking about tiny ten inch monsters that seem to be repelled by the light, and drawn to dark places. Alex has the role of being the character who constantly makes bad decisions and refuses to listen to reason, so that little Sally can be in danger for as long as possible. As for Kim, she begins to soften up and believe Sally eventually, especially when she does her own private investigation on the house itself, with the help of a local and friendly "exposition librarian", who knows a lot about the old man who lived in the house decades ago. It's also right around this time that we finally get a good look at the monsters tormenting Sally, and naturally, the big reveal can't hold a candle to the mystery that the movie so expertly sets up. No matter how advanced the CG, it can't stand up to the terror of the unknown.
I am recommending the movie because, despite the fact that the material is well-worn, it's executed well enough here. Still, certain things bugged me while I was watching the film. I did not like the way that the characters were forced to suffer a sudden drop in I.Q. in order to make the plot keep moving on at certain times. The plot is motivated entirely by the actions of the characters, but a lot of those actions sometimes make absolutely no sense. These are characters who know they're in a horror film, and fill the required roles of poking around in places they don't belong in an artificial way. They're doing it because the script tells them to, not for any logical purpose. All of the actors in the cast are giving the material their all, but the material doesn't always return the favor.
Of course, this was the intention of writer-director Robert Rodriguez. He's made all of the 
The film kicks off with a fun little action sequence where a super spy named Marissa (Jessica Alba) who, despite the fact she's nine months pregnant and due any day, is still active in duty, and hunting down her arch nemesis, a helium-voiced villain named Tick Tock (Jeremy Piven, in one of three roles he plays in the film), who has weapons that can stop time. Marissa is able to fight off and capture Tick Tock and his minions, even though her water breaks in the middle of the fight, and she begins to go into contractions. The fact that I saw this movie immediately after 
Marissa gives birth to a new baby girl (who provides the required number of fart and poo jokes that kids movies need), and drops out of the spy game in order to spend more time with her new family. She's desperate to strike up a relationship with Rebecca and Cecil, as they still haven't accepted her as their new mom, and are upset with their dad for remarrying after their mom passed away years ago. Other family issues includes father and husband Wilbur never having enough time for his kids and new wife, as he's busy developing a new reality TV show about tracking down and finding spies. (The gag being he doesn't realize his wife was a spy, as Marissa has always told the family she's an interior designer.) As the problems in the house build, an even bigger problem hits the world. Time begins to speed up, screwing up all time in the world. A masked supervillain who calls himself the Time Keeper makes a televised threat that he plans to hold the world hostage by manipulating and speeding up time unless his demands are met. Marissa is called back into action to track down Time Keeper, as he has teamed up with her old nemesis Tick Tock.
This is also right about the point when kids Rebecca and Cecil find out the truth about their stepmom being a spy. They find this out with the help of their pet dog Argonaut (voice by Ricky Gervais), who is actually a one-liner spewing robot sidekick who was designed by Marissa to watch over the kids if they were ever in danger, and she wasn't around. He's programmed not only to talk, but also to shoot tiny metal balls out of his rear end to slip up pursuing bad guys, which brought no end of amusement to the kids at my screening. When Tick Tock's men invade the home, Argonaut the robo-dog has no choice but to take the kids to OSS spy headquarters, where they not only learn the truth about Marissa, but also learn about the now-defunct Spy Kids division from former and original-Spy Kid, Carmen (Alexa Vega), who even though she is an adult, she's still carrying on her sibling rivalry with her brother and other former-Spy Kid, Juni (Daryl Sabara).
If you're guessing that Rebecca and Cecil will eventually become Spy Kids themselves, and learn to use a lot of fun and inventive gadgets to fight the bad guys and help their stepmother in her battle against evil, you'd be right. This is the studio's way of rebooting the franchise, and in all honesty, I could easily see them rebooting it every few years or so with a new pair of kids. 
Despite the almost total lack of plot, we do get some backstory at the beginning, which is narrated by Morgan Freeman, of all people. Mr. Freeman has lent his voice to a lot of narration in film, and I have a feeling he'll be wiping this from his credits as quickly as possible. We then cut to a savage and brutal battlefield, where a female Barbarian is in labor as she lies dying right there in the middle of battle. Her husband, Corin (Ron Perlman), helps his dying wife deliver the child, slaughtering a few enemy soldiers as he helps her deliver it. Giving birth to the baby, her last words are "His name will be Conan!". Corin holds the bloody child up to the sky triumphantly. The main thing I took from this scene is the fact that Perlman is wearing so much shaggy hair and heavy make up, he looks more like he's trying out for the role of Bigfoot in a remake of 
Cut ahead to Conan as a young boy (Leo Howard), who is learning from his father how to be a proper Barbarian, as well as a swordsmith. Conan's boyhood days of slaughtering random invaders in the forest and forging swords are cut short, when his village is burned down, and his father killed by the evil Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang). Khalar attacked the village, because he wanted a piece of an ancient mask that apparently holds the power to resurrect his dead sorceress wife, and become a god. I guess that's as good of an evil plan as any, but that's pretty much all there is to the character, other than the fact he has an evil daughter named Marique (Rose McGowan), who likes to make monsters out of sand, and slice people open with her talon-like fingernails. Conan grows up to be an adult (Jason Momoa), obsessed with tracking down Khalar Zym. That's Conan's motivation through the whole movie, right there. Oh, and there's a "pure blood" named Tamara (Rachel Nichols), who is needed in Khalar's evil ritual to become a god, as both a human sacrifice, and as a vessel for his dead wife's return.
Here's another amazing fact about this movie - There are three different writers credited. What's so amazing about that? Well, considering that 60% of the dialogue consists mainly of grunts, cries, screams, and wails of rage, I have to wonder what the screenplay itself looked like. At least when the characters do actually talk, they get to say intelligent lines like, "I don't like you, Barbarian!". I'd comment on the performances about this point, but what would be the use? The entire cast is forced to act like characters in a video game, hacking and slashing anyone in their path, with the minimalist of dialogue to move things forward to the next scene, where they hack and slash anyone in their path once again. I know, this is 
The film's biggest mistake is the handling of one of the lead characters, Peter Vincent. In the '85 original, he was a likable and sympathetic character, as well as just a great idea all around. In that film, Peter Vincent was a washed up B-movie horror actor who was facing hard times both personally and professionally. He was the host of a cheesy late night monster movie program, and no one took him seriously anymore, or seemed to notice him. The heart of the film came from the relationship he began to develop with Charlie, a teenaged boy who was convinced that his next door neighbor was a vampire, and needed Vincent's help, because hey, who better to turn to for help than a guy who spent most of his life fighting vampires in countless movies? The late, great Roddy McDowall played Vincent as a broken down man with nothing to believe in, who gains some confidence and some purpose back in his life when he finds himself fighting for something he believes in. It was a great character, and could easily have worked in the modern version, but that's not what we get.
This time around, Peter Vincent (played here by 
At least the other updates and changes are nowhere near as jarring and hurtful to the film. The setting has been changed to an isolated suburb in the middle of a desert on the outskirts of the Las Vegas strip, which when you think about it, really is a perfect setting for a modern day vampire film. With such a strong night life scene, and the relative isolation of the neighborhood, it makes sense why the vampire Jerry (played by Colin Farrell) would make the area his personal feeding ground. Too bad the movie doesn't exploit the idea as much as it should. As in the original, Charlie suspects that his new neighbor Jerry is up to no good, when he notices young women entering Jerry's house, but never coming out, and blood-curdling screams from next door waking him in the middle of the night. His suspicions are further aroused when he watches a videotape of Jerry, and finds out he doesn't show up on camera. Charlie knows that he's dealing with a supernatural evil, and what's worse, he knows that Jerry is watching him.
This is where the remake goes further astray, as since Peter Vincent has been reduced to a comic sidekick with no real bearing on the story, the movie turns into an extended cat and mouse game between Charlie and Jerry, with no real human emotion at the center of it all. Don't get me wrong, it's all done very well, and the cast fills their parts well. But this modern day 
At the very least, 
I don't want to stress only the negatives, for as far as horror remakes go, this one's pretty good. It's well made, well acted, well shot, has some laugh out loud comic moments, and has some good special effects to its credit. Oh, and it's in 3D, which for the most part is pretty pointless, except for one very cool effect. When a vampire dies in the movie, their bodies burn up in ashes and cinders, and the 3D effect of having the cinders seemingly fly out of the screen is very well done. But, that alone is not worth the inflated ticket price, especially since this movie naturally takes place mostly at night or in dark places. Best to see the 2D version if you can, as aside from the cinder effect, you're not missing a whole lot.
The film has been generating some controversy the past week, due to the similarities between the film's plot, and a real life crime situation that happened back in 2003, when a pizza delivery man named Brian Wells tried to hold up a bank with what he thought was a fake bomb, only to discover it was very real with tragic results. First-time screenwriter Michael Diliberti claims that the incident was not an inspiration for his screenplay, but I'm not really buying it. Regardless, I'm here to review the film itself, not to debate its inspiration. The pizza delivery guy in this movie is Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), a slacker man-child with a passion for action movies and video games, but little else in life. About the only thing going right in his life is that he somehow managed to get a very cute and faithful girlfriend named Kate (Dilshad Vadsaria), who also happens to be the twin sister of his best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari). Unfortunately, Nick has never told Chet that he's been dating his sister, and when Chet finds out, he doesn't take it well. The two break off their friendship, but are forced to rekindle it when Nick ends up with a bomb strapped to his chest, and Chet is the only guy he knows that he can turn to for help.
Enter our antagonists, dim-witted friends Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson). They're hapless pool cleaners who are tired of being under the thumb of Dwayne's verbally abusive retired Marine father (Fred Ward). They decide they want to murder the old coot, but don't want to get their hands dirty, so they plan to hire a hitman named Chango (Michael Pena). His fee is $100,000. In order to get the money to pay for the hit, they place a phony pizza delivery order, and when Nick shows up to deliver it, they kidnap him and strap a bomb to his chest, telling him he has 10 hours to rob $100,000 from a local bank, or they'll detonate the bomb. That gives Nick plenty of time to hire Chet's help, tell off his boss, say some words to his girlfriend, pull off the bank heist, and get involved in a number of high speed car chases that are pretty well shot, but get kind of tiresome after a while.
This is a movie that walks a fine line between comedy and cruelty, and it at least manages to stay afloat, unlike last weekend's abysmal and hateful 
