Movie Review Shooter

Shooter (2007) 

Directed by Antoine Fuqua 

Written by Jonathan Lemkin 

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Michael Pena, Danny Glover, Kate Mara, Rhona Mitra

Release Date March 23rd, 2007 

Published March 23rd, 2007 

Mark Wahlberg is on the verge of major superstardom. Coming off his Oscar nominated performance in The Departed, Wahlberg is one major starring role away from that rarefied air of a 20 million dollar man. Unfortunately, his latest starring role, Shooter, is not the career transforming movie he was looking for. An abysmal mess of action movie cliches, Shooter is a step backward, in fact, for Wahlberg who delivers one of the least appealing performances of his career.

Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) is one of the best snipers in the world. As demonstrated early in the movie, he can take out a can of beef stew from a mile away. That is why security contractors led by Colonel Johnson (Danny Glover) turn to him to find out how an assassin might kill the President with a near impossible shot from more than a mile away.

Though not exactly keen on helping a President he has deep philosophical differences with, Bob casually reads the 9/11 report and talks of disdain for wars over oil; just to give you an idea of his political bent, Swagger agrees to help out. It turns out to be a fateful decision. The asassination happens despite Bob's help and in fact because of it, the men he is working for are the actual assassins and Bob it seems is their patsy.

Now he must team up with a rookie FBI agent, babyfaced Michael Pena, to take down the shady conspiracy. To do so, they will have to kill a whole heck of alot of people.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua, a master of style over substance filmmaking, Shooter has no real plot but rather plot hangers on which scenes of extreme violence are hung. On the bright side, much of that extreme violence is pretty cool looking. A siege on a farmhouse where Wahlberg and Pena kill some 20 or more nameless henchmen brings back fond goofball memories of Schwarzeneger's Commando and Stallone's Rambo.

Naturally, this being a throwback to action movies past there is eye candy in Shooter. Hot redhead Kate Mara, last seen in the underappreciated We Are Marshall, plays Wahlberg's love interest who by chance happens to spend much time in bondage wearing only a bra and jeans. And then there is smokin' babe Rhona Mitra, best known from TV's Nip/Tuck, who plays Pena's FBI partner who, though she keeps her clothes, models some lovely short skirts that I doubt are standard issue for an FBI agent.

Allegedly, when it comes to the action/thriller genre, we are supposed to accept plot holes and dumb luck that allow the lead character to escape certain capture or death. Shooter abuses the dumb luck in scenes so appallingly contrived that Jean Claude Van Damme would scoff. What luck that Swagger manages to steal a car that happens to have medical supplies in the truck right after he had been shot twice.

What luck that the one guy in the world without a television happens to be an expert in weapons who can help Swagger figure out who set him up. To ask for suspension of disbelief once or twice is cool, to keep asking over and over until all logic is abandoned in favor of utter contrivance is just too much.

Shooter compounds its goofball plot with a political perspective as ludicrous as any of the outsized action scenes in the film. Wahlberg's Bob Lee Swagger presents a pseudo-liberal political perspective that he defends with a gun. In a more self aware movie that could be played for ironic laughs, but Shooter is not a satire. The film wears a simplistic anti-war, anti-conservative perspective on its sleeve right down to showing Swagger casually reading the 9/11 report and chiding his enemies for their wars for oil.

Kudos to Mark Wahlberg and director Antoine Fuqua for wanting their film to be relevant but if they really want to get their point across; they need to do it in a smarter, more self aware movie. Shooter is a blood and guts, old school action picture. Attempting to shoehorn political commentary into the film only serves to make the politics seem as irrelevant as the film itself.

The most disappointing thing about Shooter is the thing that should have been its biggest strength. Star Mark Wahlberg. In one of the most unappealing performances of his career, Wahlberg mumbles his way through a charisma free performance. Handicapped by a script that gives him little more to do than shoot and grunt, Wahlberg brings very little life to this performance.

Mark Wahlberg is far too good an actor for such dopey material as Shooter. Brainless action crossed with mindless political cliche, Shooter feigns depth by appealing to a left wing mindset but insults that same left wing with its goofball liberalism defended with a big gun. It's true that Shooter has its heart in the right place; but when its purpose is so poorly expressed, the point is desperately missed.

Wahlberg will bounce back from this. Shooter may not launch him into the star territory of Tom Cruise, Will Smith or even Mel Gibson, but he's too talented not to make it there eventually. That is, if he can bypass idiot movies like Shooter.

Movie Review: World Trade Center

World Trade Center (2006) 

Directed by Oliver Stone 

Written by Andrea Berloff 

Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Pena, Michael Shannon, Stephen Dorff, Jon Bernthal 

Release Date August 9th, 2006

Published August 9th, 2006 

When United 93 was released back in March of this year I was floored by that films documentary realism and emotional punch. However, I was unable to recommend the film. To whom do you recommend a film that gives the feel of actually reliving the greatest tragedy you have ever witnessed. Standing in the theater the following day watching audiences cue up with pop and popcorn in hand I was struck with how vulgar it seemed to munch popcorn while reliving 9/11.

World Trade Center, director Oliver Stone's flag waving, rah rah, patriotic remembrance of that day feels like a film you could munch popcorn to. Classically Hollywood, World Trade Center is about bravery, self sacrifice and the kind of heroism rarely ever seen. It's also saccharine, remote and rather simpleminded. Though skillful and respectful World Trade Center fails to grasp the gravity of it's subject and thus never feels important enough to justify having been made at all.

On September 11th John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) rolled out of bed at 3:30 am without waking his wife Donna (Maria Bello), it was going to be just another tuesday morning at the port authority police precinct. Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) rose a few hours after Mcloughlin and kissed his wife Allison goodbye before joining McLoughlin at PAPD headquarters.

This of course was to be no ordinary Tuesday for anyone in the country. After receiving assignments for the day, McLaughlin in charge of everything and Jimenez sent to Port Authority bus terminal, things turn horrifying quickly. As Jimenez is shooing away homeless people the shadow of the first plane passes over him headed for it's deathly collision.

Returning to the station, Jimenez will join McLaughlin, his pal Dom Pezullo (Jay Hernandez) and several other officers in heading off to the trade center towers to evacuate the people inside. Arriving at the towers, after commandeering a city bus, the officers find a horror show of the injured and the dead. Some are victims who leapt to their death rather than burn alive in the towers.

McLoughlin, Jimenez, Pezullo and another officer, Antonio Rodrigues (Armando Riesco), are the guys who chose to run into the towers and get people out. The cops are in the concourse between the towers when they began to collapse. Rodrigues was killed, Jimenez and McLoghlin were buried by the first tower  collapse while Pezullo managed to be unharmed and attempted to free Jimenez. Sadly Pezullo died when the second tower fell.

One of the most striking elements of these scenes in which the actors are trapped in the rubble is the complete loss of time. Unless you methodically researched and kept time on your watch you don't remember and cannot keep track of the time between when the planes hit, when the first tower fell and when the second tower fell. We have the benefit of hindsight but the characters do not, so every scene in which they wander the trade center gathering materials, in which they are first nearly crushed by debris of the first tower to the second tower falling, is filled with dreadful tension.

As filmed by Oliver Stone these scenes are the best in the film. Harrowing, nail biting moments that have a real emotional kick even as we already know what is about to happen. The actors approach to these moments is stellar without any pretense or knowingness, each actor plowed ahead acting on their assigned duties, working through fears of the unknown, fears of a world on edge that they cannot comprehend.

Nicholas Cage is especially good in the early scenes of World Trade Center before his portrayal devolves into a series of mushy  flashbacks. Early in World Trade Center Cage thrives as the efficient, matter of fact police sergeant who also happens to be the officer behind the disaster scenarios at trade towers. When McLoughlin tells a superior officer that we prepared for any number of occurances after the attack in 1994 but we did not plan for this, the lines hit hard.

The most fascinating moments of World Trade Center focus on a supporting character, Staff Sgt. Dave Karnes. Working on 9/11 as an insurance salesman in Connecticutt, Karnes left work soon after seeing the attacks on television. He visited his pastor and told him that god was calling him to the towers to save people. He went to a barbershop and got a military buzzcut and pulled his marine corp uniform out of mothballs and made his way to New York.

Arriving at the site, passing security thanks to the uniform, Karnes was the first person to jump onto the fallen towers and begin searching for survivors. Joined by a fellow  marine, Thomas played ever so briefly by William Mapother, Karnes searched the rubble and found Jimenez in McLoughlin some 20 feet below, trapped in the rubble. Karnes determination and heroism are stunning, so stunning that many have found his story unbelievable. Dave Karnes is for real and his story was real, one of many extraordinary stories that fateful day.

Karnes' story could warrant his own movie, he went on to fight in Iraq for 18 months at the age of 45, the attacks having inspired him to re-enlist. Unfortunately there are only so many stories that Oliver Stone and writer Andrea Berloff could work into a reasonable runtime. Another great story was that of former paramedic Chuck Sereika, played by Frank Whaley, who also gets only a gloss in World trade Center. When Chuck arrived at the site he was no longer a medic, having spent the most recent months in rehab. He intended only to tie a few tourniquets and help where needed. He ended up the first man inside the rubble when McLoughlin and Jimenez were found.

All of these stories are dramatic and compelling but they are the periphery of what is a real Hollywood-ization of 9/11. Most of World Trade Center is dedicated to the heightened melodrama of McLoughlin and Jimenez trying to keep each other alive and there families at home trying not to fall apart. The heightened emotion in these scenes is portrayed with a belt it to the back of the room, broadway musical like theatricality. To much of World Trade Center rings with a tinsel town phoniness that is anathema to a movie based on 9/11.

Most obvious of these egregiously inflated scenes comes at the end of the film. As Nicholas Cage as John McLoughlin is lifted from the rubble of the World Trade Center his stretcher passes through the hands of hundreds of rescue workers who shake Cage's hand and he gives the thumbs up to. With a star the size of Nick Cage laying in the stretcher the scene plays like a Hollywood homage to the heroic saviors of 9/11.

If any group are worthy of a big Hollywood thank you it's the fire fighters, policeman and rescue workers who saved what few lives could be saved that day but the justification does not make the scene feel any less false and cloying.

I find it bizarre and a little disgusting to try and examine the entertaining aspects of World Trade Center. By comparison I rated United 93 a zero in my popcorn rating. That film was just too much like watching 9/11 happen again for me to treat it like a typical movie. World Trade Center , because of it's star power and melodrama is more of a movie movie. I was able to seperate from World Trade Center far more than I could the more visceral and real United 93.

That seperation comes twofold. I was able to find aspects of World Trade Center that I could judge from a movie making standpoint, things such as the performances of Cage, Pena, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello all of which are solid with just a hint of falsehood. Also Andrea Berloff's often overwrought and at times gut wrenching script that never fails to hit a melodramatic note but also misses few chances to really touch you with sincerity.

However, this is still a 9/11 movie and it is rubbing a wound that is still raw. Oliver Stone is very careful to be respectful with his storytelling. There is no shock factor, no forced conspiracy theory, really no controversy about Stone's interpretation whatsoever. The film is an earnest examination of character and heroism that uses the greatest attack on American soil as a framing device. That is both respectable and repugnant. It is both a great piece of storytelling and an impossible rendering of a painful memory.

Because the film is directed by Oliver Stone parsing the films political aspects should become quite a sport. However, these efforts are futile. Stone honestly avoids any overt political message in favor of a simple tale of heroism. If you want to find politics in World Trade Center they will likely be your own. I have read reviews that claim Stone's use of a Brooks and Dunn song on the soundtrack is an example of his red state bent. On the other hand I personally read a minor political statement into Stone's montage of citizens around the globe reacting to the attack and rallying around America. The Bush administration went on to squander this international goodwill almost completely. That however, is my own parsing of the scene not Oliver Stone's.

In searching the film for political viewpoints you cannot ignore the most fascinating and complicated character in the film, Staff Sgt. Dave Karnes played by Michael Shannon. There is no question that Shannon was a hero that day selflessly risking his life to locate McLoughlin and Jimenez in the rubble. On the other hand, the creepy intensity that Michael Shannon brings to the role allows a political interpretation.

Karnes is a neo-con wet dream of god and country patriotism who re-enlisted in the military twice to join the war on terror. Karnes is undoubtedly brave and heroic but, the creepy intensity with which he is portrayed could be read, if one were so inclined, as a metaphor for the right wing's frighteningly single minded pursuit of the war in Iraq. That again though, is me bringing my personal politics to a chapter of the movie that may not have politics at all.

Oliver Stone's reputation simply invites this sort of speculation.

World Trade Center is a film that fills me with conflict. There is nothing horribly offensive about the film. It is relatively well crafted with some very powerful moments. But, I cannot escape my own horror at watching 9/11 dramatized. It's still too raw and too fresh in my memory for a movie to portray in a way I feel will show respect and deference for what happened.

That is not Oliver Stone's fault. He made what I'm sure he feels is the best movie he could make given the materials he had to work with. Much of what he delivers is Hollywood hokum that is out of place in a movie about 9/11. However, there is far too much solid work for me to write the film off completely. Michael Shannon for one deserves a serious Oscar push as does Stone's set design team whose attention to detail may be the films most emotional experience.

To whom do you recommend a film about 9/11? I cannot think of anyone to whom I would say this film is a must see. Maybe the academy for what I mentioned before but with great reservation. I cannot fathom who would want to watch a dramatization of this horrifying event in history when so much of it is still so fresh in our collective memories.

Movie Review Lions for Lambs

Lions for Lambs (2007)

Directed by Robert Redford 

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan 

Starring Robert Redford, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield 

Release Date November 9th, 2007

Published November 8th, 2007 

A valuable dialogue on the most important topics of our times is well engaged in Robert Redford's Lions For Lambs. Inter-cutting three different stories, unfolding simultaneously, and one important flashback, Lions For Lambs fails in structure but succeeds for its intentions. The inescapable issue is how tremendously un-cinematic Lions For Lambs is. Maybe I'm grasping, but a movie needs to be more than the sum of its windy pretenses. Even as someone who agrees wholeheartedly with the message, the message fails in the milieu and good intentions bog down for lack of a more compelling cinematic arc.

Robert Redford directs and stars in Lions For Lambs as a political science professor, everyone just calls him doc. This morning Doc is early to chat with Todd (Andrew Garfield) , a student with a sharp mind who refuses to apply himself and often just doesn't show up. The war and the government has so disillusioned young Todd that apathy has set in. For the next hour Doc attempts to awaken the engaged mind of this student with so much potential.

As that is happening in California, a journalist (Meryl Streep) has arrived in the office of a young Senator (Tom Cruise) who, years earlier, she had proclaimed the 'future of the Republican party.' The senator took the hyperbolic headline to heart and now wishes to repay her unintentional compliment with a real important scoop. As the two chat, a military operation that the senator helped plan is getting underway. He hopes that telling the journalist this story will help him with another front page headline to add to his presidential resume.

Meanwhile, the soldiers assigned to carry out the new strategy have left the comfort of the American base in Bagram on their way to a remote, hilly region of Afghanistan, dangerously close to the Iran border and covered in snow. A gun battle causes PFC's Finch (Derek Luke) and Rodriguez (Michael Pena) to fall out of a transport copter into an enemy nest. Surrounded, they must conserve their ammo, nurse their wounds, and deal with the cold as they await a rescue.

Each of these three storylines, written by the very talented Matthew Michael Carnahan, dovetails off of the other with modest detail. Using Mark Isham's quietly compelling score to link one scene to the next, Redford makes no pretense about what his point is. Lions For Lambs is about excoriating cowards who make decisions in Washington while our lions are sent off to die to protect these lambs. It's a heavy handed point but a well made one, especially if it already speaks to your beliefs as this film does mine.

I've opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning and listening to Robert Redford and Meryl Streep make the points that I have already made myself, in various arguments over Iraq, is quite affecting for me. However, it may mean nothing to you. If you are for the war, a supporter of the President and his policies, you won't like much of Lions For Lamb. The film is unabashedly, unashamedly liberal and that, at the very least, is bold especially just a mere three years after the Dixie Chicks were threatened with death and the end of their careers for speaking out.

Times change quickly and now a spate of Hollywood heavyweights have taken on the war to varying results. In The Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Redacted, Rendition and a number of documentaries have taken on the war to varying degrees of success. Robert Redford delivers, arguably, the most thoughtful film of the bunch but also the least cinematic. Sorry, but we need more than just actors speechifying for over an hour. The film lacks dynamism and feels stultifying by being limited to a one speech after another structure. 

There is little to no visual accomplishment to Lions For Lambs. Don't get me wrong, it is professionally shot, but only a few scenes, those set in the mountains of Afghanistan, manage to be visually compelling. The rest is just a series of conversations shot almost statically in two shots broken up by the occasional showy camera move or tight close up.

Tom Cruise has the most difficult role in the film, that of the conservative voice, a strawman for the liberal messaging of the movie. His ambitious Senator may look like John Edwards but he talks like Dick Cheney. Jousting with Streep's skeptical journalist, Cruise more than holds his own. His character being a natural villain, a congressman and snake oil salesman, he is doomed to be outwitted but he doesn't go down without a fight.

Watch how Cruise regulates that star charm, holding back on that natural glint in his eye. It's an extraordinary effort because the man is effortlessly charismatic. He literally has to dial it down to play a charismatic congressman. In Lions For Lambs Cruise brings just the perfect mixture of political savvy, ugly ambition and earnest passion. He's the kind of villain who doesn't see himself as the villain and those are the best kinds of villains. 

Lions For Lambs ends with a poignant offering of why Redford chose this title. I won't spoil it for you but I will say that anyone who questions Redford's patriotism and commitment to our troops will have not seen these final gut wrenching scenes. In the end, Lions For Lambs should be far better than it is. The subject matter deserves a more compelling direction. It needs more than just a series of soapbox declarations and condemnations. Valuable subject matter is rendered inert due to a lack of style that keeps Lions for Lambs from transcending its polemical intentions.

Movie review: The Mule

The Mule (2018) 

Directed by Clint Eastwood 

Written by Nick Schenk 

Starring Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Pena, Dianne Wiest, Andy Garcia 

Release Date December 14th, 2018 

Published December 13th, 2018 

Clint Eastwood’s career has been thought dead before but never by this critic. Never, until now. After suffering through his ‘experimental’ 15:17 to Paris earlier this year and now the misbegotten, The Mule, it feels as if Eastwood’s career as an auteur director is unquestionably over. Gone are the days of Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, deliberate and painstaking mood pieces that mixed character and drama brilliantly. 

Now we have movies like The Mule where the diminishing returns of Eastwood’s cranky old racist character have finally reached their ugly nadir. The Mule is Eastwood at his most tone deaf, and I’m not talking about his political incorrectness, this is a full fledged failure and not some political screed. The Mule isn’t merely proudly un-PC, it’s downright anti-intelligent. Where Eastwood used to be able to make up for story flaws with strong film-making, his ear for dialogue has gone deaf and his eye for visual flair is nearly blind. 

The Mule stars Eastwood as Earl Stone, a famed grower of Day-lilies. There is no need to remember this detail, it will play no role whatsoever in the movie. It’s an extraneous detail that plays like a failed rough draft that was never corrected in rewrites. That explanation may also work to answer Eastwood’s embarrassing early scenes in which he attends a flower show and delivers non-sequitur dialogue that would make Tommy Wiseau wince in recognition.

Earl chose flowers over his family, choosing the flower show over attending his daughter’s wedding The movie is so clumsy in detail that it makes it seem as if Earl has shown up at the wedding, he’s at a bar where there is a wedding party, before cutting to his having missed it and not speaking to his daughter (Alison Eastwood) again for more than a decade. He somehow manages to have a close relationship with his granddaughter, Ginny (Taissa Farmiga), though how he managed that without speaking to his daughter for most of the girl’s life is another clumsy detail in a series of dropped plot threads. 

Again, none of this matters to the central plot of The Mule. Yes, Earl’s strained relationship with his family, including his openly antagonistic relationship with his ex-wife, Mary (Dianne Wiest), is supposed to inform his character’s decisions in the main plot but the story is so muddled that he could have jettisoned the family story and it would not have altered the main narrative one iota. The Mule is shockingly lazy that way. 

The main plot of The Mule finds Earl down on his luck with his flower farm in foreclosure. Desperate for money, Earl accepts a shady job from a lowlife friend of his granddaughter. The job involves getting paid big money to drive drug shipments from Texas to Earl’s home city of Peoria, Illinois. Earl is perfect for the job because as an old white man driving a pickup truck, he is the single least likely person on the planet to get pulled over. That's not intended as trenchant observation of Police corruption however, that's more this writers observation than anything the movie characters have considered. 

No joke, he drives without a seat belt on for most of the movie and is never in danger of being stopped by police This could be a great opportunity to examine privilege and stereotypes but Eastwood shows no interest in exploring why an old white guy seemingly never has to worry about being questioned by authorities. Instead, the film appears to be a comic drama about Eastwood singing country songs in the cab of his truck while delivering load after load of illicit drugs. 

There is, I guess, some danger in the plot. The drug dealers threaten Earl’s life a lot and wave guns around a lot but he doesn’t react to any of it, as if age means that you don’t fear death or being beaten by drug dealers anymore. As much as money is his motivation, boredom could also play a role in Earl’s choice to become a mule. There appear to be no stakes on the line for Earl who uses his advanced age as an excuse to do whatever he wants. 

Perhaps that’s meant to be funny, Earl’s give no you know what attitude. Indeed, Eastwood could have been playing for laughs but there is nothing in Eastwood’s direction that indicates he’s being anything less than serious about this story. Just because it is terribly clumsy doesn’t mean it isn’t also dour in that way that bad melodramas are always dour as a way of seeming more dramatic than they really are. 

The Mule is downright dreary as it trudges to a finish that is unpredictable only because it is so messy it’s impossible to predict where we are headed. The film has no narrative momentum, it has no forward motion at times, scenes start, linger and peter out before being replaced by another. The scenes of Eastwood driving and singing along to old country and pop songs are endless and repeated to a torturous degree. 

Eastwood’s decline as a director is stunning. I won’t attribute it to his age because I still believe him capable of delivering a good movie. I think the issue is that he no longer cares for making movies. It’s my feeling that he likes keeping busy and collecting paychecks. 15:17 to Paris and The Mule are movies from a filmmaker who has nothing better to do and decided that making a movie with his buddies is a good way to pass the time.  Here’s hoping Mr. Eastwood had a better time making The Mule than we did watching it.