Movie Review: Derailed

Derailed (2005) 

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom 

Written by Stuart Beattie 

Starring Clive Owen, Jennifer Aniston, Vincent Cassell, Melissa George, Xzibit 

Release Date November 11th, 2005

Published November 11th, 2005 

When Jennifer Aniston was on "Friends" she was undeniably a star. When she co-starred with Jim Carrey in her first blockbuster movie role in Bruce Almighty, again she looked like a star. Unfortunately, outside her hit TV show and without Jim Carrey to fall back on Jennifer Aniston looks anything but a star in the dreadful thriller Derailed, a misguided attempt to recast Jennifer Aniston as a femme fatale.

Alongside an equally miscast Clive Owen, Aniston struggles with a ridiculous plot, poor direction and a thriller concept that is entirely devoid of thrills.

Though Jennifer Aniston is clearly the draw of Derailed, Clive Owen is the star of the film as Charles, a bored husband and father who jumps at the chance to meet a sexy stranger on a train. That sexy stranger is Lucinda (Aniston), a banker, also married with a child but unhappily married as she is rather quick to confess. The two share a few moments on the train, then lunch the following day, drinks the next night and finally a seedy hotel.

It is in the hotel that a minor fling becomes a huge mess. Just as Charles and Lucinda are getting intimate, the door bursts open and in comes Laroche (Vincent Cassel), a petty thief who they assume just wants a few bucks. If only that was all he wanted.  Unfortunately, before he leaves he beats Charles severely and then rapes Lucinda.

Here is where the films logic becomes derailed, pun intended. So should Charles and Lucinda call the police and report what happened? If they do their spouses will find out what happened and they will lose everything. So it's understandable then that they just let it be. Charles tells his wife Deanna (Melissa George) that he was mugged.  She thankfully does not ask about going to the police, and both Charles and Lucinda go their separate ways.

Not long after, however, Charles gets a call from Laroche asking for twenty grand or else he will tell his wife Deanna that he cheated. Charles again has ample opportunity to come clean to his wife and call the cops but because the plot requires his stupidity, he pays the money. This, despite the fact that he needs the cash to pay for the care of his sick daughter Amy (Addison Timlin), who needs constant care for diabetes.

The money puts off Laroche only temporarily as he once again comes calling, even showing up at Charles' house, asking this time for one hundred grand. Can you guess that Charles still is not smart enough to call the cops? Of course he isn't, but to his luck the screenplay by Stuart Beattie provides a street smart African American ex-con named Winston (rapper RZA pronounced "riza") as a mail room worker at Charles office who offers to help him out for only ten grand.

By this point in the film I would not have cared if Charles enlisted the help of the entire Wu Tang Clan to get the bad guys off his back. Derailed is such a clueless mess of a movie that watching it is more frustrating than a game of Sudoku blindfolded. The lapses of logic are staggeringly stupid and though it's become old hat to call bad thrillers predictable I have to break out that old chestnut as well. Ads for the film ask that we don't give away the big twist and I won't, watch two minutes of the movie and you will guess the twist on your own.

Derailed has one of those idiotic plots that could be cleared up with one smart action by the main character or attention to one minor detail by one of the supporting characters. The players in Derailed must remain willfully ignorant in order for this plot to work and that is endlessly frustrating for the attentive movie goer.

Maybe the most frustrating thing about Derailed is the performance of Clive Owen. Sleepwalking his way through this ridiculous role, Owen's Charlie is passive even when threatened repeatedly and entirely manipulated by the plot at every turn. What may I ask was supposed to make Charlie an interesting thriller hero? He cheats on his wife while she is at home taking care of their sick daughter. He blows the savings meant to save his daughter's life to cover up his affair and when his family is threatened directly by the bad guys he does nothing but accept his third ass whipping in the movie. I hated Charlie as much as I hated the lowlife bad guys who took his money.

I feel very bad for Jennifer Aniston. After losing her husband Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie and watching those two strike box office gold with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, she finds her first gig since the breakup to be arguably the worst performance of her career. Worse even than that Leprechaun sequel she was in before "Friends". It's not entirely her fault.  I'm sure someone convinced her to forego her good judgement and believe that this insipid plot could actually work if they sexed it up a bit, but even the sex in Derailed is a letdown.

Clive Owen continues a baffling string of monotone dull performances. Someone in Hollywood desperately wants Clive Owen to be a big star but his performances in Beyond Borders, King Arthur and now Derailed show an actor bored with unchallenging material and allowing that boredom to seep into his performance. When challenged in movies like his breakthrough performance in Croupier, in the thriller I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and the scathing relationship drama Closer, Owen shows he has real acting chops. Stop trying to force Clive Owen to be a star, he clearly doesn't want it.

Derailed is an abysmal movie, a worst of the year list kind of movie. A forgettable, stupid unrelentingly bad B-movie dressed up with A-list actors slumming in idiot parts.

Movie Review: 1408

1408 (2007) 

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom

Written by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski 

Starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Tony Shalhoub

Release Date June 15th, 2007 

Published June 14th, 2007 

Adaptations of horror master Stephen King's many novels and short stories can't be called hit and miss because there are far more misses than hits. Hollywood has failed on numerous occasions to capture the nuances and intricacies of King's psychological approach to horror. Whether it's timidity, Hollywood producers unwilling to go the extremes of King's writing or if it were simply that King's work is unadaptable to the film medium, we really have yet to see one filmmaker find the right take on King's unbelievably popular work.

The latest attempt to bring King's work to the screen is arguably the most successful yet. 1408 is a short story about a disillusioned writer searching for ghosts in corporeal form and in his own psyche.

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a hack who writes fake creepy stuff about tourist trap hotels that purport to have ghosts. Mike is nearly burnt out on searching for the supernatural and never finding it when he stumbles across the legend of room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York City. It's a room where numerous murders and suicides are alleged to have taken place.

Unlike most of the tourist trap fleapits that claim a paranormal connection,  Mike discovers that the management at the Dolphin Hotel, lead by Mr. Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) aren't interested in promoting their haunted history. Olin does all he can to try and discourage Steve from staying in 1408. Explaining that murders and suicides weren't the only occurrances of death in 1408, Olin goes as far as to give Steve the entire gory history of 1408 if he will just not stay there.

Unfortunately, Steve comes to believe this is merely part of the spiel to sell the creepiness of the room. He insists on getting the keys and despite Olin's ominous warnings, he's prepared to spend the night in 1408 come hell or high water. Little did he know hell and high water are literal features of this room.

Mikael Hafstrom, whose last film was the overwrought thriller Derailed, directs 1408 with an eye for dream like detail. Watch the way the room is filmed, how things are always slightly off. Doorways, hallways, paintings all seem to shift uncontrollably and yet ever so subtely that you only notice if you  begin to really look for it.

That said, there is fair debate as to whether what happens in 1408 is meant as a sort of fever dream of depressed writer on the edge of sanity or if this is in fact the evil of the room working its mojo. It's that compelling mix that keeps you guessing throughout this endlessly clever, scary, entertaining film.

John Cusack's complicated performance in 1408 is one of the most fascinating of his underappreciated career. Considering that much of the film takes place with Cusack alone in a hotel room, acting by himself, you must be impressed with his technique and endless charisma. Using the device of a tape recorder to allow Cusack's writer to talk to us aloud, director Mikael Hafstrom trains his camera tightly on Cusack's upper body and head giving us that tight claustrophobic feel.

We are trapped with Cusack in this room and Hafstrom uses his camera to shrink the room around us. It's a remarkable piece of direction that will chill the spine and push you to the edge of your seat. Hafstrom is the rare director who gets the spirit of King's very internalized form of horror. Many other King adaptations have picked up on the more twisted or gory aspects, 1408 is the first to tap the mind of King and follow his disturbing psychic instructions.

A taut psychological horror flick, 1408 far surpasses the product that passes for horror in this day and age. 1408 proves that you don't need idiot teenage characters in tight clothes (or no clothes at all), sadistic directors, or pseudo porn to make a horror film. This is a movie that thrives and scares with smarts and technique.

1408 is also the very rare example of a Stephen King adaptation that actually looks and feels like a King work. Terrifyingly cerebral, 1408 is Stephen King brought to the big screen for the first time in his finest form.