Nicholas Cage has starred in many big action movies over the years but given his physical and emotional natures has been a poor choice for the roles (e.g., Gone in 60 Seconds, Face/Off, Con Air). Characters that are a bit on the quirky, self-conscious side are better fits (Matchstick Men, City of Angels, The Rock). This film, which does not require him to be strong or fast or even all that smart, turns out to be a good choice.

In Next Cage plays Chris Johnson, a man made nearly miserable by having been born with the strange talent to see about two minutes into his own future. He uses this skill to be a modestly successful Las Vegas magician and win just enough money to stay under the radar of the various casino bosses.

One night, though, he catches the eye of a security manager and needs his ability to barely escape (the unstated) unpleasantness that would surely follow being caught. On his way out, however, he bumps into a man who plans to rob the casino’s cash cage and shoot two people dead; his nature won’t allow him to skate by without stopping it from happening.

Somehow–the movie never explains this important fact–Johnson has also already come to the attention of FBI counterterrorist agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) and a polyglot terrorist band who’ve smuggled a nuclear device into Los Angeles. Both are tracking him, though the baddies just want him out of the way and Ferris wants his help stopping them.

The last complication is Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel). For the first time in his life Johnson has seen one thing more than two minutes in the future: he sees Liz walking into a Vegas diner. And he sees it over an over again, to the point where he goes to said diner every morning at the time of his vision, since he doesn’t know the day. Finally she shows up and he uses his ability to ensure the perfect approach. They leave together.

Just ahead of the Feds and bad guys, as it happens. He’s already fallen for her and sure enough she falls for him (he cheats, of course). Then the downside of his emotional attachment becomes clear as the bad guys take Cooper hostage to get to Johnson.

This movie doesn’t require Cage to be a fighter or a genius, just to be overly aware and able to portray a man weary beyond his years, something he can do quite well. Think about how ‘old’ Chris Johnson’s brain must be, reliving so many moments in time until they come out just as he desires; two minutes over and over again.

Lee Tamahori, a Bond veteran (Die Another Day), has a good touch with the mix of special effects and action, not always showing all his down cards. The script, by Gary Goldman (Total Recall) and Jonathon Hensleigh (Die Hard With a Vengeance, Armageddon, The Punisher), muddles a bit more than one would like but decent overall. Honestly I’m a bit surprised that Next wasn’t a bigger hit since I think it’s a better movie than a number of Cage’s which were.

recommended

This 1960 movie is one of those classics I’m willing to bet most people under the age of 60 have never watched but still feel they know all about. I admit I was one of them until the other day. Let me say upfront, I don’t really see the whole Spartacus as Christ thing, any more than I do for Neo in The Matrix trilogy; if this were so than the same would be true of the hero of nearly any straightforward epic story. But some people want to see such things anywhere they can.

Spartacus is a slave born a few decades before the aforementioned Christian savior in a north African Roman colony, where he’s spotted by gladiator trainer (Peter Ustinov, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and taken to Italy. Life is easier in Capua than in a Libyan mine but he still chafes under the rules and constraints imposed by his masters.

Then one day two leading Roman senators (Lawrence Oliver as the patrician Crassus and John Gavin as a young Juius Caesar) and their lady friends turn up at the school unexpectedly and want a show. The sniveling master is happy to oblige until the women insist the gladiators fight to the death, as is custom in Rome; he tries to convince them that doing so in the school would be a really bad idea but the arrogant women want what they want.

One shortcoming of Dalton Trumbo’s script for me is that Crassus never really understands that what he and his friends did that afternoon was the inciting incident of everything that came after, including his own downfall, the death of tens of thousands and the rise of Caesar. Even at the very end, when Crassus realizes who Spartacus is (since all the men captured with him famously stand up and say “I am Spartacus”), there’s no light of recognition.

Still, this is one of the best performances Kirk Douglas gave, Olivier is as terrific as ever, Ustinov is a very good shifty, sniveling, out for his own good Roman plebe, Jean Simmons is wonderful as Varinia, the Brittanic slave who immediately falls for Spartacus (and vice versa, to be sure), Charles Laughton punches his weight as Crassus’s populist political opponent and John Ireland a strong right arm to Douglas.

The movie was also a triumph for writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nearly destroyed by the McCarthy blacklist, the most prominent member of the Hollywood 10, and Spartacus was the first credit he got after that dark era ended. He worked for another decade after this, giving us the scripts for Exodus and Papillon before passing away in 1976.

This film was also the first really big hit directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose next four pictures were the phenomal Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick realized the epic scope of his story required grandiose outdoor settings but he skillfully navigated the line between tasteful and the campiness embraced by contemporaries like Cecille DeMille. He didn’t shy away from visuals that studio execs probably objected to, such as the crucifixions of the captured rebels which lined the army’s road back to Rome.

recommended

After a career mostly spent writing children’s animated dinosaur movies and writing and directing fluffy romantic pics, Michael Davis steps up and, in my book, scores a near bullseye with a misunderstood satire of the recent Jason Stathem/Vin Diesel ultra-violent anti-hero thrillers.

Clive Owen is Smith, the anti-hero at the core of Shoot ‘Em Up, and, as he did in Children of Men, shows why he was most everyone’s first choice to be the current Bond (even though Daniel Craig was fine too). He faces off against henpecked hitman Hertz (Paul Giamatti, taking his cues off Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Mission: Impossible III global bad guy) attempting to protect a beautiful whore (the beyond gorgeous Monica Belluci) and an infant whose mother died in Smith’s arms.

How does Davis turn the cartoon-level violence on its head? For starters, Smith’s signature killing move is driving a carrot through an opponent’s eye–and having Smith, a real invisible man further off the radar than Gene Hackman’s character in Enemy of the State, actually grow his own carrots in the vacant building in which he squats. That’s what I call a whole ‘nother level.

In the current batch of one man going up against an army of killers movies, the protagonist somehow evades multiple fusillades of bullets but Owen and Belluci take this to ridiculous heights in Shoot ‘Em Up, with two confrontations towards the end, one in Smith’s squat and the other where Owen tracks Giamatti to his client and attacks their lair. The idea that his aim–and luck–is so much better than every single one of the baddies’, well, I just have to laugh.

Warning: Though this is decidedly a satire, and a high-grade one, I want to be clear that bullets and blood are onscreen in massive quantities.

recommended

Paul McGuigan takes an American spin on the gangster revenge flick he did so well a half decade earlier in Gangster No. 1. The result here is good but while it is no doubt funnier lacks the vicious edge that put the 2001 movie over the top. You will want to pay close attention, though, as almost nothing is as it seems.

Lucky Number Slevin has quite the cast. Josh Hartnett is the title character, Bruce Willis is a veteran mob hitman called Goodkat(?), Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley are partners turned rival gangsters called The Boss and The Rabbi (yes, Kingsley’s character really is a rabbi), Stanley Tucci is an NYPD detective, Mykelti Williamson is a dimwitted henchman, Danny Aiello has a cameo as a bookie, Robert Forster a cameo as one of Tucci’s colleagues and Lucy Liu is her usual sexy, gregarious self as Slevin’s accidental love.

The plot is a black humor twist of Hitchcock’s mistaken identity classic, North by Northwest, with Slevin standing in for Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill and Liu for Eva Marie Saint. Writer Jason Smilovic doesn’t leave the comparison to chance and has Kingsley’s character talk about taking his immigrant father to see it. But while we viewers know from the start that Slevin Kelevra is not the Nick Fisher the others seem to think, well, like I said at the top nothing is as it seems; Lucky Number has onion-like layers, an Outback Steakhouse Bloomin’ Onion, fried and big and greasy and still so tasty.

recommended

Writer/director Joe Carnahan (the less than stellar Narc) was apparently going for a parody of an early ’70s, semi-blaxsploitation type of movie, with plenty of carnage and characters so stereotyped they could have come from Ralph Bakshi’s animation studio in a setup more cliched than the Spy Kids trilogy. He almost made it work, too, until a jarring turn to the serious at the climax nearly ruined all his good work.

Jeremy Piven is Vegas entertainer and friend of the mob Buddy “Aces” Israel and the title refers to a rumor that dying mafia chieftain Primo Sparazza wants his last act to be rubbing out Israel, with a $1 million bounty. See Buddy’s gotten a little too close to his criminal pals and crossed over into active participation, and when he gets caught decides to trade his inside knowledge for a free pass.

From the large cast, a few performances stand out. Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta are FBI agents, partners sent to get Aces from his Reno penthouse hideout as soon as the ink is dry on his deal. Alicia Keys and Davenia McFadden are a beautiful pair of hitters (and lovers); McFadden gets the biggest gun of all, a .50 caliber she sets up in a room in a hotel across the street facing Aces’ suite. Joel Edgerton is an assassin whose stock in trade is a mastery of disguise and mimicry, his Hugo about as different from his lead role in Kinky Boots (which is another one I missed writing up!) as I can imagine.

A 2.5 for the humor and confident action of the first 90 minutes. Points off for the last 15 minutes as well as driving home Buddy Israel’s sleaziness well beyond the necessary.

modestly recommended, if you like this kind of thing.

Garret recommended this 2004 French action flick months ago but it just turned up on On Demand. If you saw the Daniel Craig Casino Royale last year, remember the opening sequence where Bond chases a man through an African city and that action style, known as Parkour, came from this movie and specifically from David Belle. When I saw that Luc Besson co-wrote the script there was no question but to watch it right away.

Belle co-stars in Banlieue 13 with Cyrill Rafaelli, Bibi Naceri and Dany Verissimo; Naceri co-wrote the script with Besson and Pierre Morel directed. Honestly, though the movie was subtitled, I could have enjoyed the movie nearly as much with no dialog since the plot was ridiculous, anti-government paranoia mashed up with a drugs gang, and only serves as a minimal framework from which the action sequences were hung.

In Paris three years from now (six after the picture was released) the government has erected walls around the worst crime districts of the city and cut off all services to those left within. Taha (Naceri), a crime boss, is turned over the police on the last day before they pull out completely by Leito (Belle) but the cops arrest Leito and turn his hot younger sister Lola (Verissimo) to Taha’s tender care. Somehow Taha’s crew captures a neutron bomb in transit, so the Feds send in Police Captain Tomaso (Rafaelli) with Leito, liberated from prison, as his guide. Taha has turned little sis into his drug-addled slave, so that’s his motivation.

Anyway, the real treat from this movie is, as I said, the action and so visual I’m not sure I can describe it well with a few words. Parkour is a stunning combination of gymnastics, running and a sort of boxing-oriented martial arts fighting style; you can watch this movie and easily be thinking that a lot of the more acrobatic moves are done with wires. But you’d be thinking wrong as everything was done by the performers.

Imagine a track meet, a bunch of sprinters who hate each other and instead of running around a gravel circle they race through and across buildings and alleys. They jump over bannisters to go up and down stairwells, barely break stride as they leap from rooftop to rooftop, run right onto and over cars coming straight at them. Throwing nasty punches and kicks, dodging trucks and scaling fences along the way. At full speed!

recommended

Star Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg reteam for this alternative musing on the same thoughts behind their 2005 film A History of Violence (which I saw but apparently forget to write up here). Maybe it’s the improvement from having done this before, changing the setting from rural America to London’s urban core, that the sympathetic innocent is Naomi Watts rather than Mortensen, or that the capacity for violence of Mortensen’s character is not ever concealed, but I prefer Eastern Promises to the first movie. Maybe Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) is just a better writer than Josh Olson.

A teenage girl, who speaks no English, dies giving birth to a daughter and a hospital midwife called Anna Khitrova (Watts) takes home the girl’s diary looking for clues to her identity. The writing seems to be Russian and Anna’s uncle Stepan is a Russian emigre, but he and her mother give her grief about it so she goes to the restaurant whose card was inside the diary.

There Anna meets Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl), the owner, who agrees to take a look at the photocopy of the diary. He’s also, it turns out, patriarch of a family which belongs to the Vory V Zakone, a Russian mafia variant, and the girl was a prostitute who belonged to him. Nikolai Luhzin (Mortensen) is one of his soldiers, working for Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassell, familiar to US audiences as Clooney’s rival thief The Fox in the Ocean’s 11 movies), though he introuces himself to the pretty Anna as “just a driver.”

Just as in History of Violence, family is the fulcrum on which all else balances. Semyon and Kirill bring Nikolai into theirs–during the scene where he becomes a ‘made’ man the Vory V Zakon leaders insult Nikolai’s real parents and require that he renounce them–and Anna risks not only her own safety but her family’s as well.

The plot is dense, much of it delivered through the emotional tones of the actors’ performances and Knight supplies a number of twists that elevate Promises above the philosophical trap into which Cronenberg might have easily been snared. Plus, you need to remember this is a David Cronenberg movie and that means you won’t walk out without a shuddering over a few gruesome scenes; here he uses throat cuttings, perhaps attempting through repetition to push through the instinctive disgust to find a deeper meaning.

recommended

I never saw the ’80s TV show and wasn’t even that excited to see this big movie of the summer during its original run. The Big Guy popped up with a suggestion to see Transformers in IMAX, though, and that seemed like just the right idea, even if it was only playing up in the City.

The storyline is nothing exciting or surprising and, to be honest, there were a few bits I’d have left out to make it better. The truth is that Transformers is incredibly well-suited to the huge screen and massive sound system because of its scale, color and movement. Michael Bay knows how to make this kind of movie, though not all his efforts are as good: Bad Boys (I & II), The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor. Surely having a screenplay by the team of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Mission Impossible: III, The Legend of Zorro, Alias and the upcoming Star Trek film) is responsible for a bit of the quality as well.

Among the cast I liked Shia LeBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, Anthony Anderson, Jon Voight and Rachel Taylor. The actors voicing Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Megatron (Peter Cullen, Mark Ryan and the omnipresent Hugo Weaving!) were really entertaining too.

The big deal, of course, are the special effects. The way the transformations occur is stunning and fun. Fast too, thank goodness for the really cool computers and software we have these days, eh?

recommended

Denzel Washington and Tony Scott do not generally make for a thrilling combination (e.g., Man on Fire) despite the quality of their work otherwise. So I skipped this 2006 release until the other day when the supply was really low and it was available in HD on demand. Deja Vu exceeded my expectations but that’s only because they were so very, very low.

Washington plays Doug Carlin, an ATF agent in the New Orleans office, when one weekday morning someone blows up a ferry full of kids and soldiers and their families, killing over 500 of them. Carlin catches the eye of FBI agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer, who gives a paycheck-oriented performance) after he points out that one body was actually found dead five minutes before the explosion and Pryzwarra adds him to his very special investigatory team.

Special because the team is using, for the first time in the field, what they explain to Carlin as a very high power satellite surveillance system that allows them to show in ultrahigh def exactly what happened anywhere within the target area from any angle, with high fidelity sound as well. The catch is that the system can only show what happened four days and six hours in the past, because it takes that long to process the input, and the data flow is so large that it cannot be recorded.

Pryzwarra and the system’s slacker savant developer, played by Adam Goldberg, try to hide the true nature of the device from Carlin but he’s too slick and figures out that it’s actually a camera which sees directly into the past. Or rather, creates a sort of tunnel into the past, through which they can send a signal. Probably a piece of paper, with a warning of the impending explosion, and maybe even a person. A person?! That’s so whack they never had the nerve to test the idea.

The biggest problem is that everything in the movie rests on this magic camera and, despite the explanation that Goldberg’s scientist character eventually provides, is something even this inveterate science fiction fan won’t accept. It’s a combination of a bad take on string theory and inconsistent technology, and the script by Bill Marsilli (whose previous credits are for a couple of kid’s TV cartoons) and Terry Rossio (a better track record but presumably brought in to fix Marsilli’s work) can’t overcome this basic failing.

not recommended

After 20 years, his producers seemed to be having trouble coming up with new big action thrillers for Arnold Schwarzenegger; this 2000 release was the next to last one he made except for the third Terminator, which I don’t count because it was a sequel. At least the producers gave us a villain who was neither a terrorist nor a machine this time, eh?

In The 6th Day, set a few years in our future, the Governator plays Adam Gibson, partners with Hank Morgan (Michael Rappaport) in a leading edge helicopter taxi service. One beautiful day the two are hired to fly multi-billionaire Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) up to a nearby mountain for some skiing. Actually Gibson is hired but he and Morgan switch without telling Drucker’s people as Adam needs to run an errand.

There’s a big surprise when he gets home to his lovely wife (Wendy Crewson) and daughter and it isn’t just the surprise birthday party for him: he’s already inside celebrating. Then, after four hard cases come along and try to kill him, Ah-nold is off and running. We already know who’s chasing him: Drucker is sponsoring cloning research by superscientist Griffin Weir (Robert Duvall), and while the research has pretty much succeeded cloning humans is still against the law. No one outside Drucker’s inner circle can be allowed to know about the active program.

6th Day was written by the husband and wife team of Carmac and Marianne Wibberly and directed by veteran Roger Spottiswoode; it’s the first big production for the writers, who went on to write the I Spy movie, the Charlie’s Angels and Bad Boys sequels, Tim Allen’s Shaggy Dog remake and Nic Cage’s National Treasure, while Spottiswoode previously gave us the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, the Robin Williams/Kurt Russell The Best of Times and Sly Stallone Stop! Or My Mother Will Shoot comedies and the AIDs docudrama And the Band Played On.

Here the first half is entertaining because we know what’s happening but Schwarzenegger’s character is struggling to figure it out for himself and then the movie kicks into top gear after the two Adams connect and work together to take down Drucker. Dr. Weir gives a major assist after finally growing himself a conscience.

Of the big guys post-True Lies action flicks, The 6th Day is my favorite though it doesn’t really reach the same heights as that one, Last Action Hero or the first Terminator.

recommended