Movie Review The Bank Job

The Bank Job (2008) 

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais 

Starring Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Mick Jagger 

Release Date February 19th, 2008 

Published June 22nd, 2008 

The words 'based on a true story' are always a little sketchy in Hollywood. Take for instance the new to DVD movie "The Bank Job" starring Jason Statham. This London set crime thriller is based on a real 1970 bank heist where the culprits escaped without punishment and the crime remains unsolved. If you think I gave away too much there, trust me this Bank Job has more surprises than any spoiler I could give you.

London has been rife with conspiracy theories for years as to the how and the why of these criminals and their astonishing escape from justice. The most tantalizing theory goes all the way to Buckingham Palace and a safety deposit box with some very interesting royal blackmail material.

As for the movie itself.

Jason Statham, the intense, bullet-headed star of the Transporter movies, stars in The Bank Job as Terry Leathers. A former thief and thug, Terry has gone legit selling and repairing high end automobiles. Not making much money in his new profession he is quite receptive when an old flame approaches him with a money making opportunity. The old flame is Martine (Saffron Burrows) who, unknown to Terry, has just been busted by MI5 and needs Terry's help to get her out of trouble. He thinks she is offering the opportunity to rob a bank. In reality MI5 wants her to obtain the contents of a particular safe deposit box.

Who that box belongs to and what is inside it are just the kind of sexy details that make for one heck of a guilty pleasure movie. The Bank Job is exactly that. Clever, if not exactly brilliant, The Bank Job is what I like to call a mouse trap movie, quick, precise and deathly effective. Director Roger Donaldson directs The Bank Job with a swift, no frills style that focuses on the action and lets the plot do the talking. The seemingly extraneous are actually integral elements of the plot and no strand is left untied up until the very end.

Jason Statham is the perfect star for this kind of gritty, fast paced action. With his tough guy looks and badass accent, Statham is the kind of guy who looks like trouble follows him everywhere. The former supermodel Saffron Burrows matches Statham's grit with smoldering good looks and the combo is smokin 'hot.

The Bank Job is quick and to the point while telling a clever story with the kind of guilty pleasures and thriller elements that make for classic B-Movie excitement. That it's 'based on a true story' gives it another level of kinky thrill. Who cares how much is true and how much is Hollywood, it's all a whole lot of fun.

Movie Review Reign Over Me

Reign Over Me (2007) 

Directed by Mike Binder

Written by Mike Binder

Starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Liv Tyler, Saffron Burrows, Donald Sutherland

Release Date March 23rd, 2007

Published March 22nd, 2007

I've never been a fan of Adam Sandler's big screen work. If Will Ferrell's work sometimes feels like a series of SNL skits, Sandler's work is like Mad TV in comparison. Jokes so obvious that the audience chuckles before the punchline, dirty sight gags that only Sandler and his team hangers on find funny, and story's so blindingly dumb that you lose IQ points watching them unfold, Sandler is the ultimate in movie flotsam, for the most part.

However, after his turn in P.T Anderson's wonderfully quirky Punch Drunk Love, I was forced to admit that, when he is directed, Sandler has some real talent. Now with his turn as a 9/11 widowed husband in Reign Over Me; I am forced to once again reconsider Sandler and his talent. As the only good thing in an otherwise shallow wasteland of male midlife whining, Sandler manages to steal the show from none other than Oscar nominee Don Cheadle. Impressive, if you're also an award winning actor, mind blowing if you are Mr. Sandler.

Allen Johnson's (Don Cheadle) life has grown stagnant. Every night is spent at home with his loving wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith) and everyday spent in the office of his quiet dental practice which, though he started it, has begun to treat him as just another employee. Allen's boring life gets a charge of excitement from two very strange sources.

Driving down the street one day Allen sees his old college roommate Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler). Though Charlie is so scattered that he seems not to remember Allen the two decide to get some coffee and soon they are spending a lot of time together. Charlie was once just like Allen, only happier. He had a beautiful wife and 3 daughters. Sadly, Charlie's family died in one of the planes that hit the world trade center. Since then Charlie has receded into a childish fantasy world of rock music and video games.

The other source of chaos in Allen's life is a wacky dental patient named Donna (Saffron Burrows). She arrives in his office asking about a cosmetic procedure though there is nothing wrong with her teeth. Soon she is offering Allen no strings attached oral sex. When Allen rebuffs her advances, she sues him and yet still wants him as her dentist. If you guessed that she and Charlie will eventually cross paths, well you are not as psychic as you are a student of plot mechanics.

Reign Over Me is the latest aimless, masturbatory exercise in arrested development from writer-director Mike Binder whose scattershot resume includes the exceptional drama The Upside of Anger and the brutal TV series The Mind of the Married Man. Binder is funny and sometimes very insightful. He's also full of shit, navel-gazing, meathead who can't seem to grow up.

Reign Over Me falls somewhere in the middle of Binder's oeuvre. It's at times quite full of shit and at times; honest and insightful. The most truth comes in the pain etched in the performance of Adam Sandler who doesn't so much shed his well worn comic fratboy persona as temper that persona with deep sadness and desperation.

Sandler makes the material work and pulls the character of Charlie away from the grandstanding grief monster written by Binder and into truer, more thoughtful territory. Sandler's own history with arrested development, perpetual child types actually serves him well in giving depth to Charlie. When we see the ways in which Charlie has regressed, with video games and his obsession with the music of his youth, it's very easy to follow Sandler into this territory.

Where the full of shit aspects of Reign Over Me come into play are in any scenes featuring women. Binder does a poor job of writing realistic women and though Liv Tyler and Jada Pinkett Smith struggle to try and give depth to their poorly written characters, they are undone by Binder and his boys club mentality. That ludicrous Binder mentality is especially on display in the character of Donna played by model and actress Saffron Burrows.

Burrows plays a mentally unstable woman who expresses her insecurity and instability by offering oral sex to Cheadle's Allen. She then irrationally sues him but wishes to retain his dental services and again offers sex. Why does this character exist? What does she bring to Allen's journey in the film? These questions are unanswerable, though the explanation could be Binder's inability to avoid shoehorning sex jokes into a film that is lacking them.

What's good about Reign Over Me is Adam Sandler's nuanced and affecting performance. Sandler hasn't been this good since his quirky, oddball performance in Punch Drunk Love, a film that grows more maligned by every Sandler performance. Punch Drunk Sandler and Reign's Sandler have a great deal in common. They are socially inept, damaged souls seeking something bigger than themselves but emotionally stunted to their very soul.

Reign Over Me Sandler is edgy and daring, willing to risk audience sympathies with his rash, childish outbursts and more daringly by allowing the film to use this character to exploit the sadness of 9/11. This is where Sandler truly shines. In a lesser performance writer-director Mike Binder's grandstanding would seem shallow and callous. Sandler makes it work by establishing the grandiose, over the top sadness of this character that carries over the terrific scene where he breaks down.

The rest of Reign Over Me is just another full of shit episode of Binder's former TV show with Don Cheadle dulling his skills to play to Binder's level of myopic male arrested development. The way the character of Allen is written, it is as if he doesn't need a reason to be unhappy and seeking release, he's a dude and dudes need to get out of the house and away from their wives sometimes. That is; literally, the level of Binder's insight into this character.

Reign Over Me is two different movies. One is a shallow exercise in male pattern selfishness. The other is a dark tale of sadness and loss featuring a shockingly good performance from an unexpected actor. If I told you that Don Cheadles was starring alongside Adam Sandler and that Sandler was the one delivering the knockout performance, would you believe me? Well that is what I am telling you and, trust me; I'm more shocked than you are.

Movie Review Enigma

Enigma (2001) 

Directed by Michael Apted

Written by Tom Stoppard

Starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows, Tom Hollander

Release Date April 19th, 2002 

Published October 8th 2002 

A little more than two years ago, the film U-571 caused a small controversy when it portrayed an American sub crew as the first Allied soldiers to capture a German code-breaking machine. It was not the Americans but rather a British sub that captured the first Enigma machine. And Enigma shows that it was the British who first cracked (and then cracked again) the German’s supposedly unbreakable codes.

At Bletchley Park, a converted British farm, a group of Britain’s top mathematicians are holed up combing through jumbled numbers and letters, attempting to uncover German troop movements. As we join the story we meet Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott), possibly Britain’s top code breaker. Jericho was the first to break Germany’s Shark code—the code used by German U-boats. Jericho is returning to Bletchley Park after recovering from a nervous breakdown that his colleagues believed was work induced; however, we come to realize that it was caused by a failed romance with a mysterious blonde named Claire (Saffron Burrows).

It is Tom’s goal to return to Bletchley Park and win Claire back, but upon his arrival, he finds Claire has gone missing and the code he had spent so much time cracking is now useless. As Tom is distracted by his search for Claire he must also deal with once again cracking this uncrackable code. In his search for Claire, Tom enlists the help of Claire’s best friend,

Hestor (Kate Winslet). Tom and Hestor quickly discover that Claire’s disappearance and Jericho’s unbreakable code may be related. Jeremy Northam plays a lawman named Wigram who suspects that one of the Bletchley Park mathematicians may be a German spy and because of Jericho’s strange behavior he is at the top of Wigram’s list.

The code breaking in the film is quite complicated, to the point of being entirely confusing to anyone not well versed in mathematics. It was so confusing that a layman would not understand it; however, to dumb it down would be a disservice to the history of Bletchley Park.  

While the difficulty of that portion of the story makes Enigma difficult to follow at times, the actors, (notably Dougray Scott) do an excellent job ofkeeping the audience engaged. The scenes involving Scott and Northam are something out of classic Hitchcock as these two intelligent men match wits searching for a missing femme fatale and a spy who may or may not be the one in the same.

Had director Michael Apted indulged more of the Hitchcockian elements of Enigma, the film may have been far more entertaining. As it is, Enigma comes off more as a scholarly historical piece and less of an entertaining mystery. Still Enigma is a well-crafted piece worth a look for. It is shining a light on history that is too often colored by Hollywood.