Movie Review: Vantage Point

Vantage Point (2008) 

Directed by Pete Travis 

Written by Barry L. Levy 

Starring Dennis Quaid, Sigourney Weaver, Forest Whitaker, Edgar Ramirez, William Hurt

Release Date February 22nd, 2008

Published February 21st, 2008 

Dennis Quaid is one of those fatherly actors who's craggy visage and heroes stare makes you root for him unconsciously. Like Harrison Ford, Quaid's often been called Ford light by this writer, Quaid looks old enough to be a more handsome version of your dad. In that 'my dad could beat up your dad' contest of childrens egos, Dennis Quaid is who you wish were on your side. Thus Quaid is perfect for the kind of earnest, trustworthy, tough guy, good guy roles that he played in The Day After Tomorrow and that he plays in the new actioner Vantage Point.

As secret service agent Thomas Barnes, Quaid embodies the flawed hero of the American character. Noble, loyal, self sacrificing but not above fear or failing. My rhetoric is lofty but I promise, justified. Even in a movie as terrifically bad as Vantage Point Quaid is worthy of such grandiose musings.

Directed by English television veteran Pete Travis, Vantage Point plays out the same terrorist attack on an American President (William Hurt) from 8 different perspectives. First it's the media where Sigourney Weaver, as a producer for the Global News Network, has several cameras and endless angles to cover all the while dealing with a diva reporter (Zoe Saldana) with an agenda beyond just covering a speech by the President on terrorism. The speech, taking place at an ancient villa square in Spain, is soon rocked by the shooting of the President and then several explosions, all caught on camera, all with different pieces of the puzzle.

Next we rewind to get the 'Vantage Point' of secret service agent Thomas Barnes. Returning to active duty, at the behest of his partner Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox), several months after getting shot protecting the President. Suffering from post traumatic stress, there are fair questions as to whether he can handle active duty again. Once the shooting begins and the plot unfolds it quickly falls to Barnes to put the pieces together and tie the whole of this goofball plot together in some kind of believable or modestly plausible fashion.

Next we see events from the miscast perspective of Forrest Whitaker as an American tourist lashed to a handheld videocamera that captures important evidence of the shooter and the subsequent bombing. Whitaker is a fine actor who gives his all but a younger actor, with less integrity and more grit would have fit the role better. We need to believe that this guy would not put down his camera for anything and while Whitaker plays the noble hero seeking justice, the truer perspective is the modern fame seeker who see's dollar signs with his video of the President being shot is more believable and holds more dramatic possibilities. Consider, the venal anti-hero becomes noble hero is far more dramatically satisfying than the heroic guy becomes more heroic. But there I go, reviewing the movie that Vantage Point is not.

We then get the perspectives of the president himself, a Spanish police officer (Edgar Ramirez) wrongly accused in the wake of the shooting and the terrorists themselves whose goofball plot has every Bond villain cliché one can imagine wrapped in one goofball twist after another. Of course, that isn't the biggest problem for Vantage Point. Rather, the films biggest struggle is with structure. The film rewinds over the same terrorist attack 8 times all the while trying to conceal and reveal little tidbits of plot that maybe they plan to reveal later in the film or maybe they don't. By the 4th or 5th rewind you are not likely to care. Worn out by the constant ripping back and forth in the space time continuum of this event a headache is a far more likely result than intrigue or interest.

And yet, even as you are rubbing your eyes and ruing the thought of another flashback, when Dennis Quaid returns to center stage late in the third act you are momentarily drawn back in. Dominating a pretty terrific car chase through the narrow, brick and mortar streets of old town Spain, Quaid ever so briefly distracts from the flashbacks and goofball twists to deliver a rousing action sequence that in any other film could have been a game changer, a scene so cool it makes the movie better. Nothing, unfortunately, not a car chase or even the resurrection of Steve McQueen driving Bullitt directly over one of the terrorists, could save the goofball mess that is Vantage Point.

Movie Review Our Family Wedding

Our Family Wedding (2010) 

Directed by Rick Famuyiwa 

Written by Malcolm Spellman 

Starring Forest Whitaker, America Ferrara, Carlos Mencia, Regina King, Lance Gross 

Release Date March 12th, 2010 

Published March 14th, 2010 

Oscar winner Forest Whitaker is not known for his sense of humor. It's not that the actor best known as the embodiment of the evil dictator Idi Amin in Last King of Scotland cannot be funny but rather that he is better known for self serious drama and outright frightening evil. The comedy Our Family Wedding is an absolute out of the box move for Whitaker and a testament to his talent that he melts right into a comedic role despite how truly lame all around him is.

Our Family Wedding is a comedy of interracial manners starring Forrest Whitaker as the single dad to Lance Gross as Marcus a kid about to graduate from college and become a doctor. Marcus has a surprise for his dad though, he's getting married to Lucia who he has been living with for two years and plans on taking her with him on a Doctors without Borders mission in Southeast Asia for the next two years.

Whitaker's Brad is not the only one who will be shocked by these revelations, Lucia's Father Miguel (Carlos Mencia) is certain to be surprised by his daughter choosing to marry an African American, non-Catholic who wants to take her to Asia for two years. Oh, and Lucia is dropping out of law school to be with Marcus and her mother (Diana Maria Riva) knew about this but did not tell her husband.

The set up is not bad actually, it has a lot of built in conflict to build on. Unfortunately, director Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, The Wood) doesn't believe in his material and prefers relying on lame coincidence and goofball slapstick moments to pad the film out to feature length.

Because he couldn't think of anything less original or interesting, Famuyiwa has Whitaker and Mencia meet cute in a most convenient and unfunny fashion. The two push the racist stereotype button repeatedly until the joke becomes unfunny and by the time of the reveal that they are going to be family the joke is worn out.

Race issues are addressed only briefly and with no honest insight. The script by director Famuyiwa, Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman injects racial stereotypes as a punchline but fails on all accounts to take race seriously as an obstacle to Lucia and Marcus's romance.

The only really good part of Our Family Wedding is Forest Whitaker who slips comfortably into this comedic role and is the only actor who brings anything of depth to his character. Whitaker indulges the whims of his director, he does chase a goat in the movie (Ugh) but in the non goat chasing scenes he crafts a real character from the minor pieces given to him.

Our Family Wedding is dopey and second rate with a dearth of comedic interest. Forest Whitaker is solid but the film built around him is a rickety mess of lame stereotypes and dopey slapstick. Rick Famuyiwa is a much better director than this film demonstrates. Check out his smooth, smart romance Brown Sugar and skip Our Family Wedding.

Movie Review The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters (2007) 

Directed by Denzel Washington 

Written by Robert Eisele 

Starring Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Parker, John Heard 

Release Date December 25th, 2007

Published December 24th, 2007 

Melvin B. Tolson is a renowned orator and poet. To find that he was also a champion debater and a teacher of the spoken word is no surprise. Nor is it all that surprising that the students of Mr. Tolson would go on to be champions of civil rights, leaders of men and women and fighters for social justice. Removing this surprise, a film about Mr. Tolson and his students is an admirable yet redundant act.

Fair to admit that Mr. Tolson's acts were more than 70 years ago and thus could use a proper reminding of. However, couldn't we get a more fitting reminder than a conventional Hollywood melodrama? We are talking about some very important history here. Glossing it over with superstar actors and facile, sports movie cliches seems inappropriate at best, blasphemous at worst.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of good here. Denzel Washington is the perfect actor to capture the innate intelligence and extraordinary eloquence of Melvin Tolson. Forest Whitaker as the President of Wiley College and the father of one of the debaters, Denzel Whitaker (no relation), is typically Forest Whitaker, a powerful, calming presence.

And yet, I am troubled by much of this well meaning, adequately crafted film. The whole is far too simplistic, playing out serious, historic instances with a typically Hollywood sheen. The typical three act structure with a third act featuring a false crisis/false dawn; real crisis/real dawn scenario seems too prosaic for something as important as what Tolson and his team accomplished.

Tacking on a love story between two of the debaters, Jurnee Smollett and Nate Parker, only makes this already false movie feel less authentic. Both young actors acquit themselves well in the debate scenes, with Smollett shining with a powerful speech on social justice that will have many dabbing away tears, but the love story makes fools of both. It was simply false and unnecessary, a nod to what is expected of modern Hollywood and not what was best for telling this story.

Worse yet is the sports movie aspects of The Great Debaters. As the Wiley College team begins a series of scheduled debates the focus on what is being argued is lost in the cliché of who wins and loses and tracking the wins and losses as if this were a sporting event. It may be true that Tolson and the tiny African American enclave of Marshall Texas took the tact of keeping score, but in the film the device cheapens and distracts.

If removing the conventional inclusion of the love story and the sports movie clichés would render the material un-filmable, then so be it. Maybe this story just wasn't meant to be told in a typically Hollywood fashion. A better form would be the documentary, one where Mr. Washington and Mr. Whitaker could tell the story of the Wiley College debaters without the distraction of melodrama and sports movie score keeping.

The Great Debaters fails for being unoriginal about a wholly original group of characters. It fails to assume the gravitas of its subject and as such, demeans it.

Movie Review Repo Men

Repo Men (2010) 

Directed by Miguel Sapochnik

Written by Eric Garcia, Garrett Lerner

Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber, Alice Braga, RZA, Yvette Nicole Brown

Release Date March 19th, 2010 

Published March 20th, 2010 

Warning: The movie Repo Men has been sitting on a studio shelf for nearly three years. The film starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker never developed a reputation as a troubled project but for some reason the studio never saw fit to put it on the screen until now. This is, generally, a bad sign. Films that sit on studio shelves for a while have an almost literal stench of failure attached to them.

Repo Men stars Jude Law as Remy, a man with a very unique and disturbing profession. It is Remy's job to retrieve property but not just any property, Remy retrieves internal organs. A company known as The Union has developed mechanical organs to replace failing human organs of all types, lungs, heart, kidney et cetera.

The catch is that  these mechanical organs are unbelievably expensive, so expensive that the company offers an exorbitant payment plan. If you default on your payments for more than three months the Union sends Remy and or his pal Jake (Forest Whitaker) to retrieve the organ by any means necessary. Bloody gutting and death are the usual result.

As you may have learned from the trailers and commercials, Remy has an accident and ends up with a mechanical heart courtesy of The Union. Becoming a transplant patient changes Remy and he can no longer be a repo man. Also helping change Remy's perspective is another former patient (Alice Braga) who Remy falls in love with and eventually goes on the run with in order to escape the repo of both of their important parts.

Repo Men has an interesting idea, one that could be played to capitalize on the current debate over health care reform in America. What better way to parody the heartless insurance and HMO conglomerates than with the mass, bloody retrieval of organs that patients fail to pay for. The satire practically writes itself. 

That, however, is for another movie, as noted above Repo Men was made nearly three years ago before the battle over health care reform became a daily lead story on the national news. What Repo Men is really about is hardcore bloody violence reminiscent of the recent blood and guts epics coming out of Japan and South Korea. Repo Men apes a number of Asian action and horror conceits, especially the bloody violence of Chan Wook Park's Oldboy.

A scene late in Repo Men seems entirely lifted from Oldboy. In it Jude Law takes on several bad guys in a narrow hallway with a knife, a saw, and some sweet Kung Fu. It's a terrific scene but also derivative and in the end pointless. I won't spoil the ending but trained film watchers will be disappointed at how Repo Men tips its hand early on and cheats to the finish in a most irritating way.

I don't know exactly why Repo Men was left on the shelf for three years. There is little that could have been done in that time to improve it. My guess has less to do with production trouble than with marketing challenges. The studio (Universal) was likely holding the film until Jude Law regained his status as a marketable leading man.

In 2007 Jude Law was coming off of a series of box office disappointments and indie movies that barely made it beyond the art house. He was also a rising tabloid star having had a troubled marriage and well publicized affair that kept him from making many movies from 2004 to 2007.  In 2009 Jude Law came back to the top of the marquee starring opposite Robert Downey Jr in Sherlock Holmes. With Law's name recognition once again on the rise, and his tabloid troubles seemingly behind him, Universal likely felt they finally had a marketing hook and Repo Men arrived.

None of this means much to the quality of Repo Men. It's merely one of those notable Hollywood stories; a peculiarity of the Hollywood system where stars are coveted for their ability to sell a movie with their name and persona but shunned at the mere mention of potential scandal or perceived lack of appeal..

Repo Men is the result of that bizarre Hollywood system where marketing means as much or more than the quality of the movie. No one seemed to care whether Repo Men was any good, it's not great but not terrible. The more pertinent concerns for executives were whether the movie could be sold. In 2007 it wasn't an easy sell. In 2010 it became an easier sell.

Putting aside the Hollywood junk, if you are a fan of hardcore, blood and guts violence or a fan of Jude Law you will find a lot to like about Repo Men. If you prefer movies with strong story, characters and motivations skip Repo Men which pushes aside an interesting cast and story in favor of more blood and more guts and more spectacular ways of displaying them on screen

Movie Review Street Kings

Street Kings (2008)

Directed by David Ayer

Written by James Ellroy, Kurt Wimmer, Jamie Moss

Starring Keanu Reeves, Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, Chris Evans, Common, The Game 

Release Date April 11th, 2008 

Published April 10th, 2008 

In her review of Street Kings Manohla Dhargis calls the film 'accidentally entertaining'.  What the hell does that mean? Were you entertained or not? It seems she was but she was embarrassed about it. No such shame for this reviewer. Street Kings is a violent, not so bright thriller that succeeds because it is so competently compelling.

Keanu Reeves, at his monotone blank slate best, stars in Street Kings as corrupt cop Tom Ludlow. As he drinks himself into stupor, Ludlow takes comfort in the fact that his corrupt behavior gets the bad guy when the system can't or won't. Thus, when we meet Tom he is busting up a group of Korean gang members, shooting and killing four and making it look like a legit bust. In the process of his crime he saved the life of a pair of missing, kidnapped twins.

The ends however do not justify the means for his ex-partner (Terry Crews) who suspects immediately the real story of Tom's 'heroism'. Thankfully for Tom he has a powerful commander (Forest Whitaker) on his side along with a cew of fellow corrupt Vice Cops willing to falsify evidence and cover his backside.

When Tom's former partner goes to internal affairs, headed up by House star Hugh Laurie, Tom is ready to punch his ticket but he gets beaten to the punch when the two are ambushed in a shady convenience store robbery. Tom survives, his partner takes 18 bullets in what is obviously more than a wrong place, wrong time incident.

The death of his partner sparks a new conscience for Tom the rogue gunfighter cop and searching for the killers brings about an awakening that is as dangerous as any case he's ever busted with his dirty cop schtick.

Street Kings was directed by David Ayer who debuted last year with the highly overrated vigilante actioner Harsh Times. That film featured an over the top performance by Christian Bale that contributed to the film's troubled tone and lack of any semblance of realism. In Street Kings, Ayer is plagued by the opposite kind of performance from Reeves, a monotone, relatively colorless performance that fails the film's emotional connectivity.

Not that Reeves' performance is not effective. In fact, this is one of the more engaged and active performances of Reeves' career. However, he simply isn't well suited to this role. Reeves' brand of earnest seriousness combined with a limited emotional range is not well suited to such a broadly emotional role.

Tom Ludlow is a vaguely racist, angry, drunken mess who kills criminals to deal with his pain and begins to feel guilty about his place in the world. The role calls for an actor who doesn't overplay the emotional extremes but unlike Reeves is not stoney eyed and inscrutable. A slightly younger Denzel Washington could have knocked this one out of the park.

That said, I don't mean to trash Reeves who I think is more talented than he is often given credit for. Yes, his limitations are well demonstrated but what he lacks in emotional demonstration he makes up for in many roles with his body language. He is a tremendous physical actor who uses his wiry frame to great effect.

In Street Kings Reeves' physicality gives him a presence that he's never had before. Adding a few pounds of muscle and a couple pounds around the midsection, Reeves communicates both his toughness and his destructive nature with his body.

The film remains hamstrung by Reeves lack of emotion but Director David Ayer still manages to make something of what he has. Using Reeves' man of action physical presence, Street Kings plays loose with the emotional stuff and becomes more of a straight action movie, heavy on bloodletting violence and light on the aftermath.

The content of Street Kings could have been something special with a more rangey actor in the lead but Reeves doesn't kill the movie. With Reeves in the lead we get a solidly crafted action flick that nails you to your seat with suspense and raises you from it with stunning acts of action movie violence. Nothing to be embarrassed about, Street Kings is a flawed, messy, yet highly entertaining old school action flick.