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: Collateral

Collateral (2004) 

Directed by Michael Mann 

Written by Stuart Beattie 

Starring Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Mark Ruffalo 

Release Date August 6th, 2004 

Published August 5th, 2004 

Tom Cruise has been at the top of his acting game the past few years with terrific performances in Vanilla Sky, Minority Report and The Last Samurai. Not only were these terrific films, they were also winners at the box office each grossing over 100 million dollars. At some point, the Law of Averages say that Cruise has to have a misstep, a failure. With his new film Collateral, Cruise once again is beating the odds with another terrific film and likely box office winner.

As the films poster says, it started like any other night. Los Angeles cab driver Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) picked up his cab, cleaned it thoroughly and was on his way into another random L.A night. He picked up his typical rude, obnoxious, LAX going customers, that is, until he picked up a beautiful young lawyer named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) who bets him he can't get her to her destination faster by his route than her own. On the way the two flirt and Max even gets her number, this may not be all that typical a night after all.

Then the night takes it's most important turn as Max picks up Vincent (Cruise) a middle aged guy, gray hair, snappy but indiscreet suit, clinging to a high priced attaché case. Vincent is a little annoying, asks a lot of personal questions, he's seemingly one of those annoying glad handers who you just know has ulterior motives. Vincent's agenda is to have Max drive him to five different locations in a row for a price of six hundred dollars, more than Max would likely make the whole night. Even though Vincent makes him uneasy and it's against the rules, Max agrees and this life changing night is underway.

It doesn't take long for the night to get away from Max. On the first stop as Max waits in the cab, Vincent enters a rundown apartment building. Moments later a body falls from a window landing on Max's cab, Vincent exits the building soon after and Max puts two and two together. In an excellent dialogue exchange, Max says "You killed him" and the ever elusive Vincent replies "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him". Now it's on, and though Vincent had wanted this night to be incognito he now must take Max hostage and force him to help him finish his rounds which are tied to a drug dealer’s court case and the material witnesses that could put that drug dealer behind bars.

The plot is reminiscent of a smaller plot from the movie From Hell in which a carriage driver is employed to drive Jack The Ripper to and from each of his connected murders. Cruise's Vincent is quite similar to From Hell's version of The Ripper as an efficient, hired killer with a mysteriously meticulous purpose to his killing. However whereas the carriage driver allows poverty to overcome his conscience and becomes a co-conspirator, Foxx's cab driver chooses to follow his conscience and becomes a protagonist.

This is not your usual Hollywood-style hitman movie. The Hollywood hitman is more often than not portrayed as the anti-hero, not the villain. In Collateral, there is no question that Cruise is the villain of the piece and any attempt to humanize him in one scene will be undone by the next bit of violence. In this sense, Collateral shows more in common with Asian cinema's take on the hitman. He can be played as a straight villain or as the anti-hero that becomes more human through the plot and supporting characters. For some reason, Americans prefer their hitmen become heroic. If that is your idea of a hitman movie, then Collateral is not for you.

Another big difference between Collateral and most other Hollywood hitman movies is the style and rhythm of director Michael Mann and the script by newcomer Stuart Beattie. After 2001's disappointing Ali, Mann fell in love with the latest in digital technology and handheld camera work. In Collateral, he brings that love full circle using a combination of high definition digital and celluloid to establish the kind of dark noir-ish look that is unusually achieved through black and white photography.

Mann's direction is visual poetry that turns the city of Los Angeles into the third lead character of the film. The dialogue and the film’s soundtrack of Rock, Salsa, Techno and Jazz combine to give the film it's hum of life. This movie breathes and flows with the ease of a well oiled machine. The performances by both Jaime Foxx and Tom Cruise seem perfectly attuned to Mann's rhythm. Their dialogue and manner calibrated to fit into the scenery and stand out from it.

Tom Cruise continues on a streak of performances unparalleled by any other actor. For my money the man just keeps getting better and eventually the haters, and especially the Oscar voters, are going to have to recognize. Interestingly enough before Cruise gets his due, his Collateral co-star Jaime Foxx is likely to get noticed by Oscar. Not for this film but for his role in the upcoming Ray Charles biopic Ray. Foxx's role in Collateral shows his continuing evolution from mediocre comedian to real actor. It's been a good year so far for Jaime Foxx.

The supporting cast is filled out by Mark Ruffalo as an LAPD detective. Ruffalo seems a little too big for this rather small role but he is as effective as always. The film also features a terrific cameo by Oscar nominee Javier Bardem as Vincent's employer. Bardem's only scene, played opposite Foxx, is remarkable for how much the dialogue is so very Christopher Walken-esque in it's use of unusual metaphor and overall oddity.

Collateral is conventional only on the surface. In the good vs. evil sense, it is a conventional Hollywood movie. However in the numerous ways that Mann, his cast, and screenwriter Stuart Beattie tweak the Hollywood norms and what is expected of an action movie or a hitman movie, they make Collateral transcend anything that might be perceived as similar. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Movie Review G.I Joe The Rise of Cobra

G.I Joe The Rise of Cobra 

Directed by Stephen Sommers 

Written by Stuart Beattie, David Elliott, Paul Lovett 

Starring Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayans, Dennis Quaid, Ray Park, Joseph Gordon Levitt 

Release Date August 7th, 2009 

Published August 6th, 2009 

It is very, very, bad form to reference the great French auteur Jean Luc Godard in a review of something as ludicrous as G.I the movie but, the great director's quote that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie an apt and ironic way to discuss Paramount Pictures persnickety reaction to bad reviews of their other toy based movie Transformer Revenge of the Fallen (Again many apologies for dragging you into this Monsieur Godard). 

G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra acts as a near perfect commentary on the Transformers sequel. The parallels are almost endless. You have properties based on toy lines. You have stunningly awful dialogue shouted by utterly moronic characters and stories so incomprehensible that they leave almost no logical basis whatsoever for their very existence. Oh, and don't forget the girls in the super tight clothes. The only difference between these movies is that G.I Joe knows it's ridiculous and runs with it while Michael Bay thinks he's making Lawrence of Arabia with giant talking robots. 

Stephen Summers, the good natured hack behind The Mummy, keeps things light and goofy and allows a good time to be had by all and not just those most forgiving. The plot of G.I Joe The Rise of Cobra is of absolutely no consequence. Ok, fine, here's a capsule: G.I Joe is a secret NATO organization with elite soldiers from around the world who keep bad guys at bay. The latest bad guy to step out of line is an arms dealer named McCullen (Christopher McCullen) who is grinding a 400 year old ax over the way his arms dealing fore-fathers were treated. 

McCullen has developed a weapon that is sentient and can eat all metal structures. The unwanted logical question is: Why, if he built the weapon does he then hire thugs to steal the weapon? We never knew the weapon was stolen or taken from him so it is weird to see him send people to steal it. Who knows why but McCullen indeed does hire The Baroness (Sienna Miller, every nerd's dream in librarian glasses and tight black leather) and Storm Shadow (Byung Hun Lee) a ninja.  I mention that Storm Shadow is a ninja because, like all fanboys, just the word 'Ninja' makes me giddy. 

The attempt to steal the weapon draws the ire of G.I Joe and all out war ensues in both the Joe's buried in the desert bunker and the arms dealer's underwater fortress beneath the ice caps of the north pole. I imagine director Summers and Screenwriter Stuart Beattie laughing like school children as they chose these locations, I certainly did when each was revealed. There is a definite kitsch at work here but not so much that G.I Joe becomes all out camp. It's a little too aware of its own out-there-ness to allow for camp. 

Ah, but kitsch without a doubt, this is kitsch. Just check the buck wild goofy cameo by Mummy star Brendan Fraser who appears for one scene and seems more like a reject from a Rushmore production of Apocalypse Now than the star of G.I Joe sequels to come. Fraser is the only actor truly aware of the goofiness. The rest of the cast mixes dedicated professionalism with a healthy amount of incredulity. 

That is except poor Channing Tatum whose deathly seriousness as the newest Joe, Duke, becomes the film's biggest unintentional joke. Tatum is a handsome kid but his mumbled lines and wooden face turn even his attempts at humor into the most forceful of kitsch. Tatum has a following among young girls who have only recently discovered how to properly apply the new school slang 'hottie'. New school, in that it has only been a part of our low culture for maybe a decade. 

The rest of the cast of G.I Joe seems about as in on the joke as director Sommers. The key is, their awareness never becomes irritating in that winking fashion, again save for Fraser. Dennis Quaid is among many who, I am sure, stifled giggles over his dialogue that is almost entirely exposition. Rachel Blanchard is quite the trooper selling an attraction to the mugging comic relief that is Marlon Wayans. She, naturally, has a 'catfight' with the Baroness that is pure cheesecake but also brief. Sienna Miller has the most backstory of any character and plays it to good effect, as good as can be expected of such a limited and witless script. 

And then there is Ray Park as Snake Eyes. This is the character most fanboys were waiting for and we are not disappointed. Park is already a fanboy legend as the gone too soon Darth Maul in Phantom Menace (There is a stunningly large amount of fan fiction solely dedicated to Darth Maul murdering Jar Jar Binks, not related to this review really but interesting). Snake Eyes is the brother of Storm Shadow and they battle with swords, guns, fists and feet in well choreographed battles that culminate in unexpected fashion. Ray Park has more range behind Snakeyes's leather mask than co-star Channing Tatum has shown in several movies. 

G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra shames Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen not just in its better attitude and knowingness but also in special effects, editing and sound design, the alleged specialties of Mr. Michael Bay. The effects in G.I Joe work because of the clarity and uncluttered direction of Steven Sommers who managed this same economical trick in realizing The Mummy. Where Transformers 2 is a mess of robot carcasses battering one another at an ear splitting volume, G.I Joe is fleet and nimble, keeping the ludicrous action in focus where we can actually make out who is doing what to whom. 

G.I Joe The Rise of Cobra alsi unfolds quicker and lingers on noise far less than Transformers 2. Indeed, as Godard said, if you want to criticize a movie, make another movie. G.I is the other to Transformers 2 and Stephen Summers shows Michael Bay almost every mistake he made and then proceeds to make most of them again, only with a little more style and a whole lot more fun.