Classic Movie Review Fire in the Sky

Fire in the Sky (1993) 

Directed by Robert Lieberman 

Written by Tracy Torme 

Starring Robert Patrick, D.B Sweeney, Craig Sheffer 

Release Date March 12th, 2023 

Published June, 2023  

A group of friends worked together on a scam to convince the world that one of them was abducted by aliens. For me, this is a much more interesting story than treating the lie these men told as if it actually happened. Unfortunately, that's the approach director Robert Lieberman and writer Tracy Torme went with in making Fire in the Sky, pretending the lie was the truth. By pretending that this man was actually abducted by aliens, the filmmakers cosigned the lie and colluded to provide credence to the grift of these men that, for at least of them, continues to to this day. 

Fire in the Sky asks you to believe that in 1975 a man named Travis Walton was abducted by aliens while his friends watched in shock and horror. The 'friends' ran away, leaving Travis seemingly for dead. Several days later, a naked and traumatized Travis was found a full town away shivering inside of a shed. In Fire in the Sky, D.B Sweeney provides a reasonably shaken and angst ridden performance as Travis Walton. And, because he's an actor whose been given direction on how to portray this trauma, he makes it look as if this is what really happened to Travis Walton, perhaps better than Walton himself ever could. 

The story of Travis's disappearance is told in a dimwitted flashback. Apparently the filmmakers half-watched Rashomon and took a minor inspiration that pretends to art but falls squarely into melodrama. Familiar faces Robert Patrick, Peter Berg, Craig Scheffer and Henry Thomas play Travis friends who, for a time, were suspected of having killed Travis, at least according to the movie. The real story of what happened to Travis Walton is that he and his friends perpetrated a hoax that Walton has exploited for financial gain for years. 

They sold the story to The Enquirer, a disreputable tabloid that claimed that Walton and his friends passed a lie detector test. The reality is, The Enquirer had just as much to gain from Travis Walton's made up abduction story as he did. Skeptical investigators who performed tests on Walton found that he was trying to beat the lie detector through various means that had been shared in books out around that time. One lie detector test that Walton ended with the administrator calling Walton's story a 'gross deception.' 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review Hancock

Hancock (2008) 

Directed by Peter Berg 

Written by Vince Gilligan 

Starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, Eddie Marsan

Release Date July 2nd, 2008 

Published July 1st, 2008 

It's the fourth of July weekend and that means Will Smith is back in theaters. This time the world's biggest box office draw is playing a drunken superhero with a major image problem in Hancock. Directed by Peter Berg, Hancock is not your typical Will Smith movie. Playing against type as a charisma free jerk, Will Smith is still funny and fun to watch but also slightly off.

Laying on a bus bench in Los Angeles, with liquor bottles laying at his feet, Hancock (Smith) looks like a homeless guy. However, he happens to be a superhero who makes it his business to get the bad guys and protect the innocent, regardless of the damage he does along the way. Hancock causes as much or more destruction saving lives and protecting property as the bad guys do committing their crimes.

No wonder then that the people of LA despise their superhero savior. Media savvy image consultant Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) decides he will try and change that negative image. Hancock rescued Ray when his car became trapped on railroad tracks with a train bearing down. Naturally, Hancock stopping the train may have saved Ray's life but derailing the train damaged hundreds of other cars and will no doubt cost millions in clean up and other such costs.

At Least Ray is grateful, he even invites Hancock home for dinner with his family, wife Mary (Charlize Theron) and son Aaron (Jae Head). Mary is exceptionally uncomfortable around Hancock while Aaron is the rare kid who sees Hancock as a hero. Ray makes it his goal to turn Hancock from a pariah into a hero by making people miss him. The plan involves Hancock actually going to jail for all of his destructive behavior before being sprung by the very people who put him away after they realize how much they need his help. 

Meanwhile, Mary is holding back something she knows about Hancock; a revelation that eventually becomes an important bit of plot. But the less said about that the better.   

Anyone who has read the Watchmen comics or saw Pixar's The Incredibles will recognize elements of each that combine to create Hancock. Alan Moore's Watchmen series with its jaundiced view of flawed, failing heroes no doubt informs Hancock's flawed alcoholic act. Fans of the Incredibles on the other hand will recognize a major plot point of that film where heroes were forced to give up saving the world from evil after being sued too often and blamed for the damage caused in their effort to serve and protect.

Hancock is nowhere near as special as its influences but with a terrific cast it manages to be consistently entertaining. Smith, playing against type as a charisma free jerk, manages a star performance unlike any he has delivered before. I particularly enjoyed the way Hancock dealt with his anger in ways only a superhero could.

When it comes to bringing the funny in Hancock Jason Bateman is the comic relief. Bateman's nonplussed facial reactions and wry comments on Hancock's brutish behavior are terrifically timed and quite reminiscent of his wonderfully sly Arrested Development character Michael Bluth whose constant astonishment at the depths of his family's ruthlessness was one of the great running gags in TV history.

In an interesting coincidence it was during Arrested Development that Bateman first met and sparked great chemistry with Charlize Theron. Now Theron and Bateman are together again and the chemistry remains strong. Theron's Mary is unfortunately underwritten and suffers from a mid-movie twist that seems to exist only to justify hiring an Oscar winning actress such as Ms. Theron. 

Still, despite the way Theron's Mary is treated by the plot, Theron sparks with Bateman and in a different way with Will Smith. Though you will find the plot hard to believe, Theron's penetrating gaze aimed in Smith's direction communicates a great deal of emotion without words because Ms. Theron is such a terrific actress. Unfortunately, by the fifth time she stands and stares Hancock down, you will want to scream at the screen for her to just say what she is thinking already.

Hancock is entertaining and involving if more than a little uneven and lacking in depth. There are a wealth of possibilities for a story such as this but with little care for creating believable back stories, or as the comics call'em, origin stories for the hero and his various nemeses, Hancock becomes merely a series of well planned effects and stunts and not much more.

Those effects and stunts are fun but not entirely satisfying and thus Hancock is only good and not quite great.

Movie Review Mile 22

Mile 22 (2018) 

Directed by Peter Berg 

Written by Lea Carpenter 

Starring Mark Wahlberg. Iko Uwais, Ronda Rousey, John Malkovich

Release Date August 17th, 2018 

Published August 16th, 2018 

Mile 22 is some hot, flaming, garbage as a movie. I’m shocked that such a mess could feature the talent of Peter Berg behind the camera and Mark Wahlberg in front of it. Not that they are no stranger to nonsense, they did make Lone Survivor together, a film that amounted to the Black Knight from Monty Python written as a soldier in Afghanistan, but that film is Die Hard compared to the ludicrous, chaotic, rubbish that is Mile 22.

Mark Wahlberg, sort of stars in Mile 22 as James Silva, a CIA operative. I say 'sort of' because the performance is so unhinged and disconnected that it is hard to say if he is fully aware of what is happening in the movie. Wahlberg seems far more invested in the idea that his character is a troubled super-genius than in the plot which has him leading a team that broke up a Russian spy ring in an American suburb and is now in some foreign locale following up on what they found.

The plot kicks in when Li Noor (Iko Uwais from The Raid franchise), drives right up to the American Embassy and presents evidence that could lead to the discovery of a cache of some deadly poison. However, he won’t give up the evidence, one of those Hollywood encrypted computer disks that even the world’s great hackers can’t hack, (Gah!), until Wahlberg agrees to take him to America and away from the people trying to kill him.

Uwais is a tremendous physical performer and he gets one truly spectacular fight scene that demonstrates that but his casting appears to be little more than a marketing attempt to evoke the worldwide success of The Raid and The Raid 2. Uwais is supposed to be desperate yet duplicitous and yet his blank-eyed stare only ever looks tired when he’s supposed to seem menacing or slightly untrustworthy. He’s checked out in only a slightly different way than Wahlberg it would appear.

Poor Ronda Rousey makes her film debut in Mile 22 and it’s rather embarrassing. Rousey plays Sam, one of Wahlberg’s lieutenants, and while she’s believably a badass, she is cringe inducing when attempting dialogue. Saddled with an expository scene with co-star Lauren Cohan, Rousey mumbles her way through a wince inducing exchange where she seemed about as natural as a mixed martial artist in a mud wrestling competition.

Mile 22 appears to have been edited with an eye toward satisfying absolutely no one. The film is hard to watch at times as Berg and his team slash cut from perspective shots to security camera footage in the most jarring fashion possible. Berg favors odd angles as well and thus the editing combined with the cantilevered angles and too loud soundtrack obscure the action and assault the senses all at once.

I have always disliked Berg’s fantasy approach to supposedly realistic action. His Lone Survivor with Wahlberg a few years ago had a real life story to tell but the violence was so cartoonish it obliterated the real life story. The stars of Lone Survivor may have been real life heroes but Berg’s cartoonish exploitation of their real life struggle rendered those men like animated caricatures, bulletproof and apparently made of rubber and steel rather than flesh and bone.

That same cartoonish violence and amping of the stakes beyond the point of believability is present in Mile 22 as well. Each character in Mile 22 suffers through a scene where they are injured to a degree that would be unsurvivable by an actual human being. And then, when they aren’t defying the ability of the human body, the odds are so heavily stacked against the survival  of our heroes that that we can’t help but laugh and wonder just how dumb or bad at their job the bad guys must be for the heroes to survive.

I don't understand how Mile 22 came to be. Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg are a good team of director and actor. The last two Berg-Wahlberg movies, Patriot's Day and Deepwater Horizon, are legitimately good movies. Patriot's Day was one of the better movies of 2016, a legitimately emotionally involving action movie about the real life Boston Marathon bombing that felt visceral and alive. Here however, both director and leading man appear to be paycheck players who do not care a lick about the movie they're making or how remarkably bad that movie is. 

So, why is this movie called Mile 22? I am legitimately wondering why this movie is called Mile 22? I watched all of Mile 22, or what my mind could take before I had to look away to shake off the latest assault on my senses, and I still have no idea what the title is about. Perhaps it was a production title and they simply didn’t bother to change it? That would fit with how little anyone appears to care about the quality of Mile 22, one of the worst movies of 2018.

Movie Review The Kingdom

The Kingdom (2007) 

Directed by Peter Berg 

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan 

Starring Jennifer Garner, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman, Jeremy Piven, Richard Jenkins

Release Date September 28th, 2007

Published September 27th, 2007 

The trailer for Peter Berg's The Kingdom promises much more than the film delivers. Watching the trailer you expect big action, political intrigue and some mystery. What you really get in The Kingdom is CSI: Saudi Arabia. The first two acts of The Kingdom play out with the precision of your average episode of Jerry Bruckheimer's cop science show. The last third of The Kingdom however becomes something close to what was promised. The third act of this foreign set thriller becomes such a rousing action piece that I can forgive much of the dull imitation of a TV cop show that is the first two acts.

In Riyadh Saudi Arabia there is a strip of land where hundreds of American oil workers have recreated America on Saudi soil. It is here that that the terrorsts of the new thriller The Kingdom strike and kill more than 100 Americans and several of their Saudi protectors. Also killed in this attack are a pair of American FBI agents.

After some political maneuvering the FBI's Evidence Response Team leader Ronald Fleury gets his team, including Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner), Adam Leavitt (Jason Bateman) and Grant Sykes (Chris Cooper), on the ground in the kingdom, as Saudi Arabia is called in private. They are not welcome as their Saudi Arabian police bodyguard Col. Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) explains and American diplomat Jim Schmidt (Jeremy Piven) underlnes.

The teams goal is to find the weapons used in the attack, link them to a specific terrorist and kill him. That it plays out quite that simply is both a virtue and a curse for this interesting but not entirely satisfying thriller. Directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Rundown), The Kingdom attempts to be a mystery, a forensic thriller and an action movie and only succeeds at one, and then only in the final act of the movie.

The last third of the film is an extended action sequence involving the capture and near beheading of one of our heroes and his friends' desperate, violent attempts to rescue him. These scenes are expertly captured by Berg's handheld, whip pan camera and in Matthew Michael Carnahan's hard boiled, tight lipped dialogue.

The striking moment, and the films most true, comes as Foxx's Fleury and his Saudi counterpart kick down the door of a potential terrorist. Just before the action kicks in, Foxx asks casually but with some urgent good humor, which side of the door Allah was on. The Saudi's matter of fact response "We'll see" feels real, it sounds like a part of a story that someone might tell over beers after surviving it. It's the most authentic moment in the movie.

Solemn with bursts of awkward wit, the script by Matthew Michael Carnahan fails to give weight to the picture beyond the obvious dangers of the mission. Attempts at politics are fumbled miserably as scenes involving Richard Jenkins as the head of the FBI and Danny Huston as the Attorney General happen without context or consequence. Two fine actors are wasted in a subplot that never develops, in an attempt to bring political weight where none exists.

So just what is the political perspective of The Kingdom? There really isnt any. The film makes passing references to 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, and the war in Iraq. However, the politicians of The Kingdom are fictional as is the films terrorist attack which is loosely based on the 1997 Khobar Towers bombing and the struggles of the FBI in conflict with the Saudis and our own government, but it takes place in a modern context.

The films allusions of depth come not from politics or a subtext of war criticism or the futility of terrorism but rather more facile references to how Americans and Saudis and even terrorists are all just people with families to protect and care for. Thus why we have a few uncomfortable scenes where Jamie Foxx is established as a loving doting dad, scenes where his Saudi counterpart Col. Al Ghazi is seen caring for his two sons and even a scene of a terrorist comforting and teaching his young son about Jihad and American imperialism.

The family scenes feel like a fratboy's attempt at being deep and meaningful and Berg has always carried that fratboy air about him. Writer Matthew Michael Carnahan too has that air of fratboy toughness without thought, sensitivity only in the broadest strokes. In the end it is that fratboy sensibility that makes them terrific with crafting visceral action scenes but at a loss to tell us what it all means or give us anything deeper than 'everyone has a daddy'.

The Kingdom is a deeply flawed action picture that succeeds because its creators are skilled in the art of action and at holding a surface of professionalism. The film always looks good, keeps a good pace, even at 2 hours plus, and it certainly feels like it should be important. Unfortunately, there isn't much beneath the surface of The Kingdom.

A kickass third act is what recommends The Kingdom. If you go in with lowered expectations, lower than the Oscar nominatable expectations I had from that killer trailer, and you may find yourself enjoying The Kingdom.

Movie Review: The Rundown

The Rundown (2003) 

Directed by Peter Berg 

Written by R.J Stewart, James Vanderbilt 

Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson

Release Date September 26th, 2003 

Published September 25th, 2003 

After The Scorpion King made Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson a viable action superstar, many were quick to anoint him as the heir apparent to the Schwarzenegger-Stallone action star crown. The Rock need only prove himself in a film that wasn't connected to a previously successful vehicle (Scorpion King being a continuation of a character from The Mummy franchise).That proof of The Rock's star-power comes with his star turn in The Rundown, an action comedy that pairs the Rock's muscles with the motor mouth comedy of Seann William Scott for a fun action spectacle.

In The Rundown The Rock takes on the role of Beck, a henchman for some kind of mob figure. After failing to retrieve a debt for his boss, Beck is given the option of one more job. This job that will get Beck the money he needs to get out of the thug business and into his dream gig, owning a restaurant. However, this not your everyday gig for a thug. Instead, this job involves going into the dangerous jungles of Brazil to capture the mobster’s erstwhile son and return him to Los Angeles. 

On the surface, that might sounds simple enough but when Beck gets to the city of El Dorado, or as the locals have dubbed it, Helldorado, it's hot, it's dangerous and it's run by a whacked-out nut job played by Christopher Walken. Beck is quick to find the kid, Travis (Seann William Scott), but Walken's weirdo dictator and his wacky henchmen have plans of their own for Travis. Seems the kid has happened upon the whereabouts of a valuable artifact that could be worth millions.

Walken isn't the only one with designs on Travis either. Jungle rebels lead by the lovely Marianna (Rosario Dawson) also want to get their hands on the artifact so that they can get their people out from under Walken's tyrannous reign. This leaves Beck stuck in the middle of all of the fighting between Walken's thugs, the rebel’s, and in one scene some various amorous monkeys. And Beck is also fighting with Travis who's motor mouth is far more brutal than his fighting.

The Rundown is predictable, certainly not high minded or idealistic. What the movie does have going for it however, is some fun action scenes, some truly brutal looking stunt work, and a strong enough amount of wit provided by The Rock's put upon performance. Johnson's incredulous reactions to the numerous indignities visited upon his character is the film’s strongest source of comedy. That and it's physical humor which has the Rock hanging upside down, fighting monkeys and getting beat up by a group of Brazilian Little People. 

The films stunt work does press the boundaries of believability, such as an early scene where Rock and Scott roll down a hill and take a brutal amount of punishment. It's nothing a little suspension of disbelief can't get you past but it does feel a bit excessive. As directed by Peter Berg, The Rundown combines the kind of 80's style action movie where no one runs out of bullets with the 90's style action movie where you shoot and pause for an ironic aside before shooting again. It's clichéd but the actors make it tolerable with fun, witty, and knowing performances.

And then, Christopher Walken delivers yet another of his iconic weirdo performances. Be sure to watch out for a particularly peculiar rant from Walken's would be dictator about the tooth fairy. It's a bizarrely long monologue that is delivered in a way that only Christopher Walken could deliver it. Walken gives this monologue with his entire being, his fully physicality embodies this moment. It's completely outside of the movie and stops the whole story dead in its tracks but, it's worth it because Walken is incredibly entertaining. 

Even with a show stealer like Christopher Walken however, The Rundown belongs to The Rock, who I realize wants to be known as Dwayne Johnson but as a wrestling fan he will always be The Rock to me. Top lining his first stand-alone action vehicle, The Rock oozes the kind of star quality that you just can't teach. It's a great star making performance in a film that I hope will make him a star for good. The action genre needs The Rock's cool and charisma to carry it over clichéd plots and endless violence of stock action movies like The Ruindown.