Movie Review: Warrior

Warrior (2011) 

Directed by Gavin O'Connor

Written by Gavin O'Connor, Anthony Tambakis, Cliff Dorfman

Starring Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte 

Release Date September 9th, 2011

Published September 9th, 2011

I can imagine the pitch meeting for "Warrior;" it was likely the easiest sell in a long time. Producers likely walked up to a studio executive and promised two "Rocky" movies in one and walked away with a green light. Yes, "Warrior" is two "Rocky" movies in one as Tom Hardy's war hero and Joel Edgerton's physics teacher are both underdogs who overcome the odds for the chance to fight the big fight.

Tommy Riordon (Tom Hardy) is a former war hero attempting to stay out of the lime light. In returning home to Pittsburgh, Tommy seeks out his formerly alcoholic father, Nick Nolte, for a favor. Tommy wants a trainer for a major Mixed Martial Arts tournament and while his father was an abusive drunk who drove Tommy and his mother to run away, he was a great trainer.

Unknowingly on the same track is Tommy's brother Brendon (Joel Edgerton). A popular High School physics teacher, Brendon is facing the loss of his house if he can't come up with some extra cash. Against the wishes of his worried wife (Jennifer Morrison), Brendon returns to the world of Mixed Martial Arts to make some quick cash.

Lingering in the near future is a major Mixed Martial Arts tournament with a multi-million dollar prize. The trailer for "Warrior" has spoiled what happens in the tournament but trust me, you will still be compelled by the action captured by director Gavin O'Connor who makes the action of MMA both brutal and yet safe for all audiences; the film is rated PG-13.

There is a surprisingly soft middle to "Warrior." The family drama involving the brothers and their dad and Brendon and his wife is an easy, pushy kind of drama that states quite clearly how the audience is supposed to react to what is being presented. For me, this type of drama is irksome, others don't mind having movie think for them.

The difference between a good movie and a great movie often lies in the attention to detail. Great movies take care to avoid even the tiniest logical inconsistencies. Good movies allow a few things to slide in the hope that the big dramatic moments will make audiences forget about the flawed moments.

The flaws in "Warrior" prevent it from becoming a great movie. The problems are in the details such as the fate of Brendon's job and Tommy's leaving the military. There are others as well and each of the issues detracts from what could be a very good sports drama.

"Warrior" could have been a contender. A little more care to sure up the minor cracks in the film's logic and we could be talking about a serious Oscar contender.Tom Hardy is so phenomenal and his performance is so authentic that he nearly wills "Warrior" toward greatness. It's a shame that he is undercut by drama that doesn't trust his ability to compel us without needing to signal the audience how to feel.

Movie Review: Zookeeper

Zookeeper (2011) 

Directed by Frank Coraci

Written by Nick Bakay, Rock Reuben, Kevin James, Jay Sherick, David Ronn

Starring Kevin James, Sylvester Stallone, Rosario Dawson, Leslie Bibb, Nick Nolte, Cher

Release Date July 8th, 2011

Published July 7th, 2011

Kevin James is a big, lovable teddy bear of a guy who is hard not to root for. That appeal comes in handy in a movie like Zookeeper which indicates from its premise that critics should really hate it. The premise has James talking with zoo animals who give him advice about his love life. So... yeah, that's actually the premise. 

To be fair to my profession, the most recent examples of humans talking with animals include such dreadful films as Dr. Doolittle 1 & 2 with Eddie Murphy, a pair of Alvin & the Chipmunk debacles and Hop. History would seem to dictate that Zookeeper should be brutal. That it is far from brutal, indeed it's modestly enjoyable is quite something.

Hilarious Heartbreak

Griffin (James) is in love with Stephanie (Leslie Bibb) but unfortunately she can't love a modest zookeeper. Too bad she tells him this after he pops the question in an elaborate romantic gesture, a terrifically funny scene exceptionally well played by Kevin James who earns our sympathy right off the bat.

Cut to five years later and Griffin is thinking of leaving the zoo to work at his brother Dave's (Nat Faxon) exotic car shop. When the zoo animals get wind of their favorite zookeeper thinking of leaving the finally reveal that they can talk. The reveal on the animals talking is another great scene from James who reacts as someone likely should react when animals begin speaking to them only funnier.

Animals Can Talk

In order to convince Griffin to stay the zoo animals come up with a plan to teach him how to win Stephanie back. Again, you will be surprised how often you laugh during these scenes as James goes all out throwing himself into all sorts of physical gags as he works to make us laugh.

The animal voice cast includes Sylvester Stallone and Cher as Lions, Adam Sandler, doing one of his irritating voices as a monkey, Maya Rudolf as a giraffe and most surprisingly, Nick Nolte as TGIFriday's loving gorilla. Nolte is a wonderfully strange choice who infuses even the goofiest scene with unnecessary vocal gravitas.

If You Liked Paul Blart...

Zookeeper has no right to be as funny as it is but then again neither did Kevin James's last lead comic performance in Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Both films look dreadful on the surface but watching them, I was caught off guard by the number of times Kevin James made me laugh.

No other actor in Hollywood works harder to make an audience laugh. Most of the time when an actor desperately tries to make you laugh they fail, it's all too obvious and desperate. James however, brings sweetness to his desperation that makes him sympathetic.

Of course, Zookeeper is not going to win any Oscars and likely won't remember any of it in a couple days but while watching it I laughed a great deal more than I expected to. Kevin James is a funny, sweet and hard working guy that you just can't help but root for even as you wish he weren't in a talking animal movie.

Movie Review The Good Thief

The Good Thief (2003)

Directed by Neil Jordan 

Written by Neil Jordan 

Starring Nick Nolte, Ralph Fiennes

Release Date April 25th, 2003

Published November 11th, 2003 

You've seen heist movies. Heck, you've seen movies called The Heist. The genre is one of Hollywood's time honored sources of roguishly handsome con men and intricate storytelling. You know that old saying about how familiarity breeds contempt? Well a number of heist movies have bred a number of cliches and repetitious stories that have become shorthand for hack screenwriters. In this era, it takes a lot more than an intricately planned con to make an entertaining heist movie. The modern heist movie needs a little extra something to set itself apart from the genre pack.

In The Good Thief, that something is Nick Nolte in a career best performance. In The Good Thief, Nolte is Bob, a pathetic junkie gambler in some nameless French slum. Despite his weary, decrepit appearance, his reputation as a legendary thief persists in the mind of an obsessive French cop named Roger (Tcheky Karyo). After Bob saves Roger's life in a bar fight, the two share a drink and Roger senses something is up with the aging thief and begins tailing him.

Indeed Bob does have something going on, his drug addiction and gambling have emptied his bank account. A friend, Raoul (Gerard Darmon), has a line on a big score to get Bob back on his feet. In the meantime, Bob decides to help a young Russian girl who had come to France and was going to work as a prostitute until Bob saved her. The girl, Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze), is 17 and obviously attracted to Bob who needs all his will power not to take advantage. Bob also has to overcome his drug addiction in order to pull off the big score.

The heist is no more clever than most heists in similar films. It involves an overly complicated security system and the theft of some classic works of art from Picasso, Degas and others. There are typical scenes of gathering a crew, narrowly avoiding the cops while manipulating them into the right position to work around them. And let us not forget the girl, who like every other girl in the heist movie, complicates things.

Director Neil Jordan gives all of this the polish of professionalism and a real love of French landscape, architecture and an extra special appreciation of the French slums, which he paints with the right mix of menace and “Frenchness.”

The Good Thief is a remake of the Jean Paul Melville film Bob Le Flambeur, the title is referenced in August Le Breton's updated screenplay as one of Nolte's many aliases. It's the type of subtle nudging humor that edges in throughout the film. Having never seen Melville's original, I can't compare the two. However, Le Breton seems to have a good sense of how to update the script, to modernize it without losing what made them want to remake The Good Thief in the first place.

As good as Jordan's direction and Le Breton's script update, The Good Thief belongs to star Nick Nolte. Put aside the tabloid trash that has dominated his recent press clippings and take a close look at Nolte the actor. His weary eyes and weathered face tell us more about the character than pages of dialogue ever could. That classic Nolte growl is tempered and toned to the dialogue that rolls out like a hand of cards. Nolte's Bob is constantly telling stories about his parents, his exploits and his career. His favorite is a story about meeting Pablo Picasso at a bullfight, I could listen to him tell it for hours.

Combining Nolte's awesome performance with some terrific source material and Jordan's steady directorial hand, you get one of the rare heist flicks that skates over its atypical genre and becomes a fascinating exercise in acting and dialogue.

Nolte deserves award consideration for this role. Whether it's eligible for this coming Oscar ceremony is in question, it debuted last year at the Toronto International Film Festival but didn't make its American debut until April of this year. Eligible or not, your chance to pay homage to his performance is now on DVD.

Movie Review: Tropic Thunder

Tropic Thunder (2008) 

Directed by Ben Stiller 

Written by Ben Stiller Justin Theroux, Etan Cohen 

Starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Steve Coogan, Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Danny McBride

Release Date August 13th, 2008 

Published August 12th, 2008

Ben Stiller may seem all mild mannered and inoffensive but he has a rather pronounced dark side when he wants to. It came out when he played Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight. And that dark side was unfortunately on display in his ugly direction of The Cable Guy. But it is not until now, with the release of the savage Hollywood parody Tropic Thunder that we finally see Stiller at his darkest. Sending up full of themselves actors, greedy agents, and maniacal studio heads, Stiller pulls no punches and lands frequent, hilarious, body blows.

In Tropic Thunder Ben Stiller writes, directs and even stars as action movie legend Tugg Speedman. The star of the over-ripe action series Scorcher, Tugg's star is fading and he is craving the respect that only Oscar can bring. That is why he chose to star in Simple Jack, the story of a severely mentally challenged farm worker. The role was universally derided.

Speedman was lucky to land a role in Tropic Thunder a Vietnam book adaptation with an all star cast and Oscar written all over it. Sort of. The film has the gravitas of a Vietnam story but it also has a first time director (Steve Coogan), an inexperienced crew, and an out of control budget. And then there are his co-stars.

Jeff Portnoy is the star of the comedy franchise The Fatties in which he plays every character and every joke is a fart joke. Portnoy also happens to have a wicked heroin addiction to complete the package. Kirk Lazarus is a completely different kind of problem child. A multiple Oscar-Emmy-Golden Globe award winner, Lazarus is legendary for immersing himself so deeply in a role that he loses himself.

Once, after portraying astronaut Neil Armstrong, he was found in dumpster attempting to fly it to the moon. For Tropic Thunder Lazarus has undergone a medical procedure to dye his skin so he can play an African American Sgt. The cast is rounded out by a rapper named Alpa Chino (Brandon Jackson, read the name again if you didn't get it the first time), and a first time actor named Kevin (JayBaruchel).

Together the cast is such a pain in the ass that the director finally decides he has to change the whole production. At the urging of the writer of the book, a nutball vet nicknamed Four Leaf (Nick Nolte, in full Nick Nolte mode), the director is taking the cast into the real jungles of Vietnam where they will shoot the movie guerilla style with handheld and hidden cameras with real explosions, provided by an inexperienced tech guy (Danny  McBride) with an itchy trigger finger.

Unfortunately, not long after arriving in the jungle, the director goes missing and the cast is engaged by real life inhabitants of this jungle setting, drug smugglers who mistake them for DEA agents. Now the cast is involved in a real war only they don't know it.

Ben Stiller tapped out the script for Tropic Thunder with his pal Justin Theroux and they hold back nothing in demonstrating the self involved nature of most actors, directors and studio people. The studio head in Tropic Thunder is an especially delicious parody, of whom only Stiller and Theroux know for sure. Played by an unrecognizable Tom Cruise, the studio head is a maniac with a penchant for Diet Coke and hip hop dancing.

Cruise has never been this unrestrained and balls out hilarious. He bites into this role with the same verve and vitriol that he brought to his misogynists' guru in 1999's Magnolia and it's a contest to tell which character required more swearing.

Tropic Thunder is loud, violent, stupid and offensive. It's also, arguably, the funniest movie of 2008. If you can put aside the controversies, you are going to laugh a lot at this most deserving beatdown of Hollywood imagemakers. There are jokes in Tropic Thunder that are intended to make you uncomfortable or even angry and yet, you often can't help but laugh at just how outland and bold these jokes are. I don't want to here the R-word slur toward the mentally handicapped but it is hard to deny, in the context of Tropic Thunder, it's use apt and very, very funny. I'm deeply ashamed at laughing as hard as I did, but I did laugh. 

As for Robert Downey in blackface... well..... I was sure this would be the most controversial element of Tropic Thunder. Fortunately, Stiller and Theroux do try to defuse the situation with Brandon Jackson's Alpa Chino character calling out the blatant and disgusting racism at play. Meanwhile, Downey Jr himself does well to make sure Kurt Lazarus has few redeeming qualities, he's clearly a terrible person. The movie is hard on Hollywood by being hard on these characters who represent elements of the Hollywood in need of a serious punch in the gut. Downey's shots at the pretentious Method Actor, are terrifically, savagely funny.

Delivering unto the Hollywood elite the smackdown they so desperately deserve, Tropic Thunder is the rare Hollywood satire to throw punches and actually land a few. The public generally isn't interested in Hollywood talking about itself, even when it is being self critical, but with Tropic Thunder comes a Hollywood self examination that comes with big laughs that don't require you to have read obscure tomes about Hollywood legends and bastards.

Movie Review: The Hulk

The Hulk (2003) 

Directed by Ang Lee 

Written by James Schamus, Michael France, John Turman 

Starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Nick Nolte, Josh Lucas 

Release Date June 20th, 2003 

Published June 19th, 2003 

I don't know much about the comic book version of The Hulk. My only exposure to the big green guy is the goofy live action TV version in which Bill Bixby turned into a green-painted Lou Ferrigno. I'm not familiar with the comic book mythos, his origin story, his powers, and especially his heroic purpose. I'm sure the comic has a dramatic force to it, something that the Incredible Hulk seeks, a goal he hopes to achieve. It is that goal that is missing from Ang Lee's The Hulk, a listless superhero movie without a real hero.

The film version of Hulk's origin begins with Bruce Banner's father David (Nick Nolte, looking worse than his recent mugshot). David is a military scientist working on some potion that, according to the military, is too dangerous to test on humans. Undeterred, David Banner tests the potion on himself. We are not certain what was accomplished until David and his wife have their first child Bruce, who has inherited his father’s altered genetics. David soon realizes he made a terrible mistake, but before he can find a cure for his son, the military shuts him down. So David blows up the facility and returns home where something really bad happens. It's clear to the audience, but young Bruce blocks the memory.

Flash forward and Bruce, in the person of Black Hawk Down's Eric Bana, is working as a scientist on a military base. With his ex-girlfriend Betty Ross and another classmate, Bruce is unknowingly working on the same project his father had begun years earlier, an experiment that uses gamma rays to heal injuries without surgery. What Bruce doesn't know is that his father is back from prison. David Banner has taken a job as a janitor in the lab, not only to see his son but to take revenge on the man who shut down his lab, General Ross (Sam Elliot). Oh, and the General is also Betty's father.

When Bruce's experiment goes bad, he is accidentally sprayed with gamma rays unleashing his heretofore unknown alter ego. Seeing his son for the first time as the Hulk, David Banner sees an opportunity to get his revenge on General Ross. He will manipulate his son's alter ego into destroying everything. That is the basic plot as I understood it, though there is also a quick bit with a military contractor named Talbot (Josh Lucas) who wants to harvest the Hulk's DNA to create super soldiers. However, that is an ineffectual afterthought in a plot full of afterthoughts.

Initially, when I heard director Ang Lee was going to make a so-called art house super hero movie I was excited about the possibility. I was thinking Jekyll and Hyde, a little Frankenstein, maybe even Freud. Unfortunately, I got some of what I was hoping for and I didn't like it. Lee lost the real idea that drives super hero movies and that is escapism. Lee's Hulk is so tortured that I'd rather see him in counseling than a movie. There is this protracted plot point about Bruce's repressed memories of childhood. Specifically about the day his father blew up the army lab. Though we in the audience know exactly what happened, Bruce has blocked it out. The director drags it out so far that we are left screaming the memory at The Hulk. The frustration of waiting for Bruce to unclog his memory lasts almost to the very end of the film.

One of the many problems with The Hulk is its casting of Eric Bana as Bruce Banner and the CGI face of the Hulk. Bana, who was so charismatic and exciting in Black Hawk Down, appears to have had his personality removed. This is likely due to a script that rushes him along even while he sulks like a tortured artist. Bana never communicates anything other than painful exasperation throughout the entirety of The Hulk. Maybe he was attempting to mimic the audience.

My major problem with The Hulk is that there really isn't much of a plot. The Hulk isn't the least bit heroic, save for his fight to save Betty from some vicious genetically-enhanced dogs. For the most part, I was sympathizing with the film’s supposed bad guy, Sam Elliot's General Ross. The General does what any right thinking person would do when a giant superhuman begins going around smashing things and hurting people, he tries to kill it.

Then there is the CGI effects that bring the Hulk to life. Ugh! Sadly the concerns that fans had after the poor showing in the Super Bowl commercial back in January were confirmed. The Hulk never looks like anymore than a video game character. Bana's dull facial expressions on the CGI mug don't help much. It's impressive that a CGI character could be so well integrated into the real life backgrounds but I was far more impressed with the CGI realism in Shrek, where the technology really seemed to be at its peak. Would I have been happier with a big green painted professional wrestler as The Hulk? No, it was dopey looking on the 70's TV show and it would be even dopier now, but this CGI is only slightly more satisfying. 

What The Hulk truly lacks though is dramatic purpose. The film is so wrapped up in Bruce Banner's psychology and Hulk's CGI appearance that they seemingly forgot to give the character something to strive for. Is he looking to cure himself of the Hulk? Does he want to be a superhero? Does he strive to control his new self in order to become a hero? I never understood the reason why I should care about The Hulk. And thus I didn't.