One for the Money
The film is based on the first in a series of books by author Janet Evanovich, that chronicle the adventures of female bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum. I have not read the books, but I am giving them the benefit of the doubt, as they have to be more interesting than the movie, which has this bland and overly sanitized feel of a failed TV show. If this were on television, it would be one of those shows that would be canceled in less than a month, and no one would notice it was gone. Katherine Heigl plays Stephanie in the movie. She's a divorced, down on her luck woman who got fired from her job at Macy's six months ago, and hasn't been able to find work since. She has no money for food, so she has to eat dinner at her parent's house every night, which includes her nagging mother (Debra Monk), her long-suffering father (Louis Mustillo), and her feisty granny who likes to fire off guns at the dinner table (Debbie Reynolds). The scenes with the family are obviously supposed to be comic highlights in the film, but there's no energy to the humor. Let me tell you, when you have Debbie Reynolds as a crazy grandma, and you can't think of anything to do with her, you're not trying hard enough.
Desperate for work, Stephanie blackmails her cousin Vinnie (Patrick Fischler) to give her a job at his bail bonds business. The first case she's given as a bounty hunter is to track down a rogue cop named Joe Morelli (Jason O'Mara), who is wanted for his suspected connection in a murder. This works out nicely for Stephanie in two ways, as catching Joe not only means a $50,000 pay day for her, but it just so happens that Morelli is an ex-boyfriend of hers that she's still sore about him dumping her after a one night stand back in high school. (When she finally tracks Joe down, it turns out he's still sore too, but about the fact that after he broke things off with her, she hit him with her car, which she claims was an accident.) Stephanie's not on Joe's trail for long until she starts to discover that he just may be innocent, and that there may be a bigger crime syndicate involved in a heroin ring behind it all.
One for the Money tries to combine a gritty crime thriller, with goofy female-centered humor, and the two elements just don't mix. The jokes aren't funny enough, and the mystery at the middle of it all just isn't engaging enough to grab our attention. The movie just doesn't do enough to get us involved with the characters - Not Stephanie herself, not Joe, and certainly not the two comic relief prostitutes who act as Stephanie's main informants, and just seem to be tossing about various sassy urban slang in their dialogue, and hoping to get a laugh. It also doesn't help that the movie's energy is just completely off. This should have been a fast-paced, exciting, and funny movie. Instead, everybody seems to be slogging through this movie as if they're wearing concrete shoes. First-time feature director, Julie Anne Robinson, just can't get her cast to sell this material.
Equally off is the romantic chemistry between Heigl and O'Mara. We don't believe that they still have feelings for each other after all this time. Come to think of it, they're not that convincing when they're supposed to hate each other, either. Their banter has no life to it. It's stilted, sounds scripted, and the two act like they're total strangers in some scenes. These characters require lightning-quick dialogue and wit, and a building passion. We don't get that from the stars here. This sense of weariness carries through to the entire cast. The villains aren't evil enough, nor are their identities surprising in the least. This is yet another case of if you want to know who the real villain is, look for the semi-recognizable actor in a tiny role who seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with anything throughout the entire movie.
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What I mean by that is this should simply be viewed as a very sweet and charming experimental film, not as a life-changing experience. With all the awards hype and critical praise that has been heaped upon the film, I'm already beginning to sense a bit of a public backlash. I don't know what some people were expecting out of this movie. They complain that it is formulaic, predictable, and steals from old movies. To those people, I can only say congratulations on pointing out the obvious. I'm sure that Hazanavicius intended that all along. He's not trying to reinvent the silent movie, or make some kind of daring comment on it. He's simply replicating the kind of simplistic and melodramatic storytelling that was common in the era. I've also heard people complain that the plot wouldn't hold up if the movie was in color or in sound. Of course it wouldn't, that's the whole point. There's not a single modern element to this movie's presentation, acting, or storytelling. And in a way, 
I apologize if I sound somewhat bitter, but I have spent part of this weekend listening to certain people criticize this movie for the very things it was striving to do, which makes little sense to me. In the case of this movie, the cliches and the melodramatic storytelling are not faults, but part of the experience. Maybe these people had inflated expectations due to the award hype it's been getting. For me, I was just happy to be watching a movie I felt was worthy of the awards it was getting, after recently being disappointed by 
I realize I've gone pretty far into this review without talking about the plot. In the case of 
But before sparks can fly too much, both of their fortunes change. The Hollywood landscape is changing with the introduction of talking films, and while Peppy's career advances, getting larger roles to the point that she is getting top billing in her films and being seen as "America's Sweetheart", George remains stuck in the past, believing that talking pictures are simply a novelty. When the studio lets him go from his contract, George puts all of his money into an expensive and independently made silent movie, which is a massive bomb at the box office, and all but sinks the last bit of his career. With the Depression hitting America and George's fortunes all but gone, he is forced to sell everything he owns, and move into and share the tiny apartment owned by his former chauffeur (James Cromwell). The remainder of the film switches back and forth between Peppy's increasing fortune, and George's descent into alcoholism and depression. And yet, there is a somewhat playful tone throughout the movie that all but assures us everything will be all right in the end. Here, a happy ending is not just anticipated, it's etched in stone, as the two actors find each other once again, and Peppy attempts to get George back on his feet.
If 
It would also be a crime not to mention the music score by Ludovic Bource, as it is the only thing we hear for almost the entire film. His score is often playful, sometimes ominous and somber, but always sweeping as it underscores every scene and emotion up on the screen. This is a rare treat for fans of film music, as it's one of the few times in a theater that you get to solely concentrate on the music, and just how it brings out the emotions of a scene as much as the actors. His score should be studied by both film and music enthusiasts, and I'm sure will become an important and valuable lesson in film scoring in the near future.
Those of you who have seen the ad campaign know that the film has a great hook, with Sam Worthington playing a man staging a publicity stunt on the ledge of a building, threatening to kill himself, all the while distracting everybody from a heist going on at a nearby building. But this is not a crime movie. Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, a former cop who is in prison for a crime he claims he had nothing to do with. When he is let out of jail briefly to attend his father's funeral, Nick decides to stage a daring escape by getting in a fight with his brother (Jamie Bell) and the two cops who are escorting him. He winds up stealing one of the cops' gun, and swipes the brother's car in the process. A chase ensues, in which Nick is able to lose the pursuing cops by driving in the path of an oncoming train. Did he know the train was going to be crossing the tracks at that precise moment? Was it part of his plan? This is not the first time we'll find ourselves questioning Nick's plan to supposedly clear his name.
Flash forward one month later, and Nick is still on the lam, and checking into the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City under a fake name. He takes a room on the 21st floor facing a certain side of the city, treats himself to some room service, writes what looks like a brief suicide note, and then climbs out onto the ledge of the window, where he is quickly spotted by some bystanders on the street below. The police and news media instantly swarm to the scene, and we're introduced to our other key characters, including a sarcastic cop named Jack Dougherty (Edward Burns), and a NYPD crisis negotiator named Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), whom Nick asks for specifically by name. While all this is going on, Nick's brother from the funeral, Joey (who it turns out was in on the escape play the entire time) and Joey's girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) are breaking into a building across from the hotel. They're climbing through air vents, rigging security cameras, and disabling heat sensors. If we didn't see this kind of stuff done a lot better in the last 
It's about this time we are introduced to one of the film's central villains, a cold millionaire named David Englander (Ed Harris). Harris plays the role as an almost cartoonish villain to the point that he starts to resemble a live action version of C. Montgomery Burns from 
Okay, I can sort of believe that Nick could stage an incident where he almost falls off the ledge, so that he can distract everyone, so they won't notice his brother and his girlfriend setting off a small bomb on the building across the street. But the way everything just falls into place completely baffled me. The funeral, the publicity stunt at the hotel, the heist...Everything would have to be planned out to a ridiculous degree in order to work successfully. And when the movie tries to explain how these people were able to pull it off, it becomes even more implausible. We can only go along with this plot so far. By the time people are jumping off of the roofs of 20+ story buildings, and landing on the street with hardly a scratch or a limp (even if they did land on a giant inflatable air cushion used to catch jumpers), my brain was saying no more.
Too bad the movie the performance inhabits is almost a total mess. As a bio-picture of Thatcher, you probably couldn't even get any sloppier or historically disjointed, and you would probably end up learning more about her by reading the Wikipedia page about her. The screenplay by Abi Morgan is completely disorganized, jumping from one crucial moment to the next, with nothing in between. Also annoying is the film's narrative. A majority of the film is set two decades after her time in power, with Thatcher as a doddering old recluse, senile and suffering from constant hallucinations of her long-departed husband, Denis (Jim Broadbent). The movie will then flash back to an important moment in Thatcher's life or political career, which naturally grabs our attention, only to have the movie pretty much skim over all the major details, and just give us a bare bones recreation of her career. We don't learn about the people in Thatcher's life or career, nor do we discover anything about why she made the decisions she did. The movie's too preoccupied with having Thatcher hanging out with the ghost of her dead husband.
Such important events that 
The flashback narrative that the filmmakers have used also gives the movie an annoying "stop and go" quality. Just when we're getting involved in the story, such as when it depicts a young Thatcher (played by Alexandra Roach) forcing her way into a male-dominated political system, it goes right back to the modern day scenes with Thatcher as an elderly recluse, and the entire momentum of the film simply just stops dead. The movie is constantly teasing us with intriguing details of her life, only to just give us either the bare essentials, or nothing at all. At one point, the movie talks about political relationship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, but all we get to see of this is a brief glimpse of the two dancing together at some kind of political ball. The movie's disjointed narrative ensures that nobody gets developed, sometimes not even Thatcher herself. We are watching some great performances up on the screen (everyone here is great, but lack the transformative quality of Streep's performance), but the acting has no role to inhabit.
Based on the short story "Ghost Walker" by Ian Mackenzie Jeffries (who co-wrote the script along with director Joe Carnahan), the movie takes us to a frigid Alaskan wasteland, where some of the worst people society has to offer ("men not fit to live among men", they're described in a melodramatic voice over by the main character) have found work as oil pipeline workers at the very end of the world. Our focus is John Ottway who, as played by Neeson, is a rugged man with a painful past concerning a woman (more on that later), and a skill for sharpshooting. His job on the oil field is to kill any wolves that may try to attack any of the workers out on the vast frozen land. We don't know much about John, other than he is haunted by the memories of a woman he once loved. The movie is sort of intentionally vague, but I got the impression that the woman had died somehow. Whatever happened in John's past, it's painful enough that in one of his early scenes, he's sticking the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth, and contemplating pulling the trigger. Only the sound of wolves howling in the distance bring him back to reality, and help him realize he still has more to do in this life.
The wolves are somewhat invisible predators, always lurking just out of sight, sometimes seen only as glowing yellow eyes in the night. When they are off in the distance and stalking the human characters, they are effectively chilling. It's when they come up close that the movie falters a little. Whenever the wolves attack, they turn into CG or animatronic creations, losing much of their mystery. It doesn't help that whenever this movie depicts a wolf attack, it does so in such a way as to suggest a slasher movie, with the wolf or wolves suddenly leaping out of nowhere, and then a bunch of tight cuts while the camera violently shakes and sputters to represent a struggle. At times, it almost looks like a wolf skin rug is being shaken about in front of the camera, while an actor rolls around and screams incoherently. It's disappointing to say the least, especially since the movie does such a good job of creating mounting tension with the wolves, only to give us the same old thing when they get up close to their victims.
Despite his skill and expertise in dealing with these predators, John finds himself helpless, along with a small handful of survivors, when a plane carrying them home crashes in the middle of the frozen wasteland. With very little chance of them being discovered, John immediately sets about taking charge of the frightened and wounded men, barking out orders to create shelter, and trying to keep them alive from the elements, and the wolves that seem to constantly be watching the party from the distance. 
Some of the survival stuff is interesting, and there are some pretty tense moments, such as when the men have to cross over a wide chasm to the other side. My problem is that a predictable pattern eventually settles in. The men fight and argue amongst themselves, the wolves attack, the men band together, one of the men inevitably gets picked off, and the survivors carry on. The movie repeats this simple formula with little alteration. Eventually, we begin to anticipate the wolf attacks, even the "surprise" ones that seem like they were lifted out of a bad horror movie. I found that I was constantly at war with myself while I was watching the movie. The stuff that was good about the movie was so good, I wanted to forgive the flaws. But, I just couldn't get over the predictable pattern, nor the fact that many of the characters seemed to exist simply so they could be killed off in the first place.
And yet, I found a lot to like here, as well. I enjoyed Neeson's performance as John, and I liked the way the character finds himself facing mounting odds and guilt over not being able to protect certain people, yet still finds different ways to carry on. The movie also has a very harsh and grim quality that I think worked very well for this particular story. John and the other survivors of the crash know that they are facing a doomed situation, and so they sometimes turn to dark humor or acts of violence in order to keep themselves strong. (One of the men cuts the head off of a dead wolf, and throws it off into the surrounding woods, hoping the other wolves will find it.) The movie is filled with a lot of good individual moments that are surrounded by stretches that are either repetitive, or don't work as well as they should, such as the wolf attacks.
Maybe that's no surprise, knowing Lucas' past works, but I was hoping that his interpretation of a more factual story would be a bit more grounded in reality than his usual Sci-Fi fantasies. No such luck. Ham-fisted dialogue, stock characters, and underdeveloped melodrama is the name of the game here. I will admit, I was sort of entertained by a lot of the film's corniness. The movie has the feel of a B-1940s war movie spruced up with modern day effects. This is not the first time the story of the Tuskegee Airmen has been set to film, as there was a very fine HBO movie made about their exploits back in 1995. That was a more factual account of the story. This is a much simpler affair, emphasizing the big effects and the easy to read character types that come right out of a screenwriting handbook. If you accept that this is the style over substance version of the story, you'll probably enjoy 
The four main characters that the screenplay focuses on are the sort you'd expect to see in a movie like this. There's Marty "Easy" Julian (Nate Parker), who is the team leader struggling with alcohol, and a low self image in himself that sometimes leads him to question his own decisions in battle. His best friend is Joe "Lightning" Little (David Oyelowo), the resident "maverick" of the squadron who likes to take big risks in battle and doesn't follow orders. Next up is Ray "Junior" Gannon (Tristan Wilds), the youngest member of the Airmen who wants to prove himself, and not be seen as a "kid". Finally, there's Samuel "Joker" George (Elijah Kelley), who as his nickname hints, provides much of the comic relief. To the credit of the actors playing these characters, they are all fine in their roles, especially Parker and Oyelowo, whose friendship creates probably the closest thing to real emotion that this movie gets. The problem lies in the screenplay by John Ridley and Aaron McGruder, which gives the characters half-baked personalities and motivations.
A romantic subplot that sparks between "Lightning" and a woman he meets in Italy is a fine example of just how thin the dramatic material is. The movie keeps on constantly cutting back to this plot, which is supposed to show the relationship building between the two. But the thing is, the movie forgets to give the two lovers anything in common. They barely speak each other's language to begin with, so it's kind of hard to swallow when he gets down on one knee and asks to marry her after only being with her two times, and even harder to swallow when she agrees. We're supposed to get behind these characters and feel for them, but the movie completely forgets to give them any real chemistry or personality when they're together. Whenever the movie cuts back to the love story, you can almost feel the film's energy deflating right up there on the screen.
Fortunately, 
I would define 
Instead, we get a movie that is far too nice and pat, and doesn't dig strongly enough into its own material. If features two big names above the title (Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, specifically), but they are given so little to do in the movie, this must have been like a paid holiday for them. The movie's not really about them, anyway. It's about young Oskar (Thomas Horn, a child 
Thomas dies on September 11th, which Oskar refers to constantly as "the dark day". Since then, he has become emotionally distant to his grieving mother (Sandra Bullock), and spends most of his time locked away in a secret shrine he has built devoted to his father, the centerpiece of which is an answering machine containing six different messages Thomas left before he died. One day, Oskar works up the courage to go into his dad's closet to look through the belongings he left behind. Amongst those belongings is a small key in an envelope labeled simply "Black". Thinking that the label must refer to someone's name, and that this person must have known his father and knows what the key is for, Oskar begins an exhaustive search across New York City, tracking down every person he can find in the phone book with the last name of Black. This leads to a number of encounters, where young Oskar meets various people who are either grieving in some way (either through September 11th, or other means), or spark a special relationship with the boy.
These sequences where Oskar tracks these people down seem forced, and don't have the slightest bit of realism to them. First of all, there's the obvious issue of building your entire story around the idea of a small boy going out on his own into the city, and encountering numerous strangers, seemingly without his mother knowing. Yes, the movie does address this issue at the end, by throwing in a last minute revelation about how the boy was really in no danger whatsoever the entire time he was going off on his own, meeting these people. But it feels so completely shoehorned in, it didn't calm my nerves about just how wrong the concept sounds. It simply seemed like a manipulative way to explain a logical hole in the story. And then there's the fact that the people little Oskar encounters don't seem like real people, nor do their conversations sound honest. Take the very first person the boy meets on his quest, a woman (Viola Davis) whose husband is in the process of leaving her when Oskar shows up to ask her about his father and the key he found. Their conversation about elephant tears sounds scripted, and doesn't have the slightest bit of plausibility behind it.
The one person Oskar does encounter during his journey that does work in the movie's favor is a mysterious old man who is renting a room in the apartment where Oskar's grandmother lives. He's referred to simply as "the Renter", and is a broken down man who hasn't spoken ever since a tragic event in his past, and communicates simply through hand signals (he has the words "yes" and "no" written on the palms of his hands), or writing down messages on a set of index cards that he always carries with him. The Renter, as portrayed by Max Von Sydow (giving the film's best performance) is portrayed as an unlikely friend and guardian to Oskar, teaching him how to conquer his fears concerning other people, and public transportation. I liked the relationship that he builds with the boy, and how the child slowly warms to him, to the point that he almost becomes a father figure.
But as soon as the Renter character and Sydow's performance leaves the movie, we're back to where we started, with an emotionally distant story anchored and narrated by a young boy who just sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I understand that the character of Oskar is supposed to be isolated and socially awkward, but the way the character is written and portrayed (I have nothing against young Thomas Horn's performance) just alienated me. I never warmed up to him, not even when he is supposed to be finally bonding with his mother. It doesn't help that Bullock hardly shows up in the movie, and that her fading relationship with her son is barely addressed. Yes, the movie once again addresses this issue at the end, but much like its explanation on how Oskar was in no real danger going off on his own and meeting strangers, it doesn't ring true. The movie is supposed to be about emotional healing, and how this boy's journey touches the lives of the people around him. But since the people keep on disappearing before we get a chance to really know them in the first place, the whole movie ends up feeling pointless. Well meaning, but ultimately pointless.
Kate Beckinsale returns as the vampire warrior, Selene, after sitting out on the third movie, which forced the filmmakers to make that one a prequel. This movie picks up where 2006's 
Flash forward 12 years later, and Selene is freed from her cryogenically frozen prison by an unseen person. She's been the prisoner of mad scientist, Dr. Lane (Stephen Rea) for the past few years, but as soon as she's thawed out, she slips on her skin-tight black outfit, and picks up where she left off, slaughtering countless humans who seem to think running at her mindlessly will somehow stop her, or prevent her from ripping their heads off. She eventually meets up with some fellow vampires, who have been hiding underground ever since the humans declared war on their kind. The Lycans are still around too, and they're apparently not afraid to run about out in the open, and hunt down the hiding vampires. The fact that we see so much of the Lycans is unfortunate, due to the low budget and unconvincing CG used to create them. The movie tries to hide this fact by having the monsters stand in dark corners or shadows as much as possible, but it doesn't do a good enough job of hiding the fact that you've probably seen more convincing monsters while playing your Xbox 360.
There's a little girl thrown into the plot as well. She's Eve (India Eisley), and much like Selene's lost love, Michael, she seems to be a hybrid of both monster races. For the sake of what little plot this movie has, I won't reveal her connection or her significance, but you'll probably figure out just who she's supposed to be and the part she plays much quicker than it takes Selene to put it together. The remainder of the movie is devoted to non-stop action sequences, which are of the particularly mindless and gory variety, and a silly conspiracy plot involving the Lycans trying to use technology to make themselves stronger. All we get for our troubles of trying to follow this goofy thing is an ending that acts as a set up for the next movie, which I'm certain has already been grenlighted, due to the fact that this movie had a strong opening weekend. Oh goody.
