Movie Review

I Am Legend

2008-02-06T06:43:00.000-08:00

A film review by David Thomas - Copyright © 2007 Filmcritic.com

To the modern eye, the plot for the 1954 Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend might sound something like Cast Away with zombies. Truth be told, that's not a terrible premise, and Constantine director Francis Lawrence runs with it in this third film adaptation of the novel (and first to keep its title). Where he takes it may not always work, but he makes sure we enjoy the ride.

Will Smith plays Robert Neville, a virologist investigating a genetically engineered cure for cancer that has gone very, very wrong. With most of the world's population wiped out and a small remnant turned into ravenous, infected carriers, Neville ekes out a lonely existence with only a dog for company in the remains of New York City, hunting, foraging, and exploring by day and shutting himself in at night. The infected, as it turns out, are vulnerable to ultraviolet light.

Through flashbacks we see how Neville came to be in this predicament, and how he dedicated himself to finding a cure. Part of that involves capturing infected humans for testing. In doing so, he incurs the wrath of one of the local CHUDs and Neville soon finds out that these creatures are not as dumb as they look.

At first, the film wrings plenty of scares out of Neville's encounters and does a good job of revealing the monsters bit by bit, but once displayed, their CGI-ness is hard to ignore. By the time they're in full-on assault mode, they resemble nothing so much as zombified versions of the I, Robot androids, right down to their wall-scaling and coordinated attacks. This makes for exciting action sequences, but dials down the horror quotient considerably.

Smith, for his part, does a superb job of communicating the pathos and desperation of the last man on Earth. His slow disintegration into madness is subtly evoked, and in one particularly emotional scene he handles one of the most tired clichés of the zombie genre with genuine depth.

The script gives him plenty of help, at first. Screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman show plenty of restraint, teasing out the details of the virus and its outbreak over the course of the film while elegantly laying out how Neville interacts with this post-apocalyptic world in episodic vignettes.

Ultimately, the film seems to be on the verge of asking intriguing questions about faith and humanity. The final moments, however, try to answer those questions so quickly that it's like trying to cram all of Signs into about five minutes. The effect is underwhelming.

In spite of these shortcomings, I Am Legend maintains the power to awe. The production design by David Lazan and Naomi Shohan is nothing short of amazing, rendering a Big Apple reclaimed by nature with stark realism. And while the story played out against that backdrop becomes a little too pat in its conclusion, the journey it takes to get there is no less entertaining.

The Great Debaters

2008-02-06T06:30:00.001-08:00

The fine cast of The Great Debaters, this well-told, sane and safe drama directed by Denzel Washington includes Nate Parker as Henry Lowe, Denzel Whitaker as James Farmer Jr., and Jurnee Smollett as Samatha Booke. The screenplay written by Robert Eisele chronicles just one of the achievements of Melvin B. Tolson, debate coach extraordinaire, during his tenure at a small black college in 1930s Marshall, Texas. Wiley College was home to Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington) and the debaters he coached to an historical winning season culminating in a Harvard debate. This movie builds nicely to a final half hour that includes an anticipated face-off.

Like Medieval rivals lining up to joust, debaters regard their prey. Like hearing the first bars of familiar Beethoven, you know what comes next. Great debaters, like great composers, play with words; words as weapons, words as melodious strains of a winning strategy. Debaters must marry together pretty, powerful words that hit an intended target — the right ones transport, the left ones really strong sprinklings of verses from history, literature, mythology, and life after all. The best ones needed for bite. Thoreau made this movie, this drama about a great debate as gift, possible. While I am not crazy about the title The Great Debaters, I am crazy about this movie. It is a memorable, old-fashioned movie that does not cook up convoluted concepts to unravel or flimsy flashbacks that confuse. No, it is straightforwardly simple, nonfiction storytelling at its best.

While Denzel Washington both directs and stars in this drama, he also takes a huge step back and allows the young men and woman of the cast to shine. Tolson is a bizarre black man. We find him in the opening scene dressed as a sharecropper at midnight. He passes a nearby juke joint and saves student Henry Lowe from a bad beating at the hands of an almost-cuckolded husband. At this auspicious first meeting, neither man is aware that he will become part of the Wiley College winning debate team in the future. Lowe, played strongly by Nate Parker, is irresponsible and remains true to character throughout the movie.

Despite his shortcomings he is quick on his feet and immediately recognizes his disguised professor and asks why he is dressed that way. But Tolson is not a man to toy with. No one can question his private life or his politics. In reality, his life is a bifurcation that he would rather not share with anyone. Instead Tolson shares ideals and words with which he arms his debate soldiers to shoot at their nonexistent opponents. And the debate judge he teaches them to call "God."

Tolson gives one-word responses to personal questions and defeats all doubters with snappy comebacks. The theme of his political infidelities, in the form of union organizing activities, is more than dangerous in the Jim Crow South. His tactics are unorthodox, because he coaxes the mixing of both black and white men, deeply suspicious to the young debaters and to the father of his star debater, James Farmer, Jr. Minister Farmer, played by Forrest Whitaker, is both conservative and well-educated. He gets in Tolson's face after his unionizing activities come to light, resulting in a formidable confrontation.

These issues cause one debater to quit the team. Four become three and the audience is privy to the trails by fire that this trio will endure. They witness the burnt corpse of a black man freshly hung from a Klan-chosen tree. This is seared into their collective memories. It will become the fodder for their great debate with Harvard. They suffer their first and only defeat the next day at the hands of the Howard University debate team.

Their failure is clearly not due to Tolson's training. Here is a strict task master. The movie gives us some insight into how he trains his debate soldiers. By the river he imparts the strategies they will need to deliver the arguments they research — but he writes. Ah, there's the rub. And this is the basis of Harvard's subject switch for the debate.

Lowe's supporting role is substantial in the movie and so is his unrepentant ne'er-do-well attitude when it comes to the lady in this drama, Samantha. Their quiet affair and his wild ways threaten to snap the tenuous threads that bind this debate family together. Destiny steps in — but we knew that. There are however a few surprise twists and turns. Harvard springs a last-minute surprise on the young lions — they will be given a new subject to debate. Why? Because they must prove worthy by writing and delivering their own arguments in addition to doing the research, all within 48 hours.

Once again the team is at odds: how to best frame the arguments. This added pressure precipitates a violent disagreement in their tony suite between Farmer and Lowe over how to argue their resolve. Farmer wants to invoke Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent civil disobedience methods. Lowe thinks that is just too predictable. Their ongoing rivalry and this spat brings on more self-pity for Lowe. He gives in and seeks out Boston's black side of town for comfort. He comes to his senses and hurries back to deliver his decision: young Farmer and Booke will debate the white Harvard team! He will be watching from his seat.

What I love most about the last 30 minutes of this film is that it recreates most, or all, of the actual debate with Harvard. I love listening to the quotes and arguments that drip like liquid pearls from their, literally, trained lips. I could listen to an entire movie where only poetry is imparted. Then I would find myself in a Shakespearean play.

What's wrong with that? Nothing and there is nothing wrong with this movie except that the people who really need to see it might not care to be so educated by blackness about greatness? Park your fears. Go see it.

Written by Heloise
Published December 30, 2007

American Gangster

2008-02-06T06:14:00.000-08:00

Review By: PETER TRAVERS
Rate by NMR : ****

Call it the black "Scarface" or "the Harlem Godfather" or just one hell of an exciting movie, but the fact-based, 1970s-era American Gangster is already looking like a major awards contender. Denzel Washington looms like a colossus as notorious drug lord Frank Lucas, and in the still, watchful center of his volcanic performance you'll find the measure of a dangerous man. There's more good news: A combustible Russell Crowe channels Serpico as Richie Roberts, the honest Jersey cop who aches to take Frank down. Steven Zaillian, sourcing Mark Jacobson's 2000 New York magazine interview with Lucas ("The Return of Superfly"), brings scrappy life to a script that spans more than a decade. Camera legend Harris Savides shoots on the fly, as if he'd sneaked into a Seventies time capsule. And Ridley Scott, at the top of his game, directs like a man possessed. Jay-Z did a hip-hop concept album, unconnected to the soundtrack, to pay tribute.

So what's the downside? The movie is long (157 minutes), overstuffed (horn-dog Richie's court fight against his wife for child custody belongs on Lifetime), shadowed by innovators (Coppola, Scorsese, The Sopranos) and limited by giving equal time to Richie when -- don't kid yourself -- Frank is the flame that draws us in. We see Frank first torching a victim, then pumping him full of bullets. In business, Frank doesn't believe in a job half done. An uneducated force of nature from North Carolina who hits New York as a driver for black mobster Bumpy Johnson (a knockout Clarence Williams III), Frank is soon a star peddler of heroin. And he does it the hard way, by cutting out the middlemen, including the mob. He flies to Southeast Asia to buy the junk, smuggles it stateside in the coffins of Vietnam soldiers, bribes police and the military, hires his brothers and cousins to help run his operation, and sits back with his wife -- no less than Miss Puerto Rico (Lymari Nadal) -- as the millions roll in from the drug he calls "Blue Magic." He even buys his version of Graceland for his good mama (the superb Ruby Dee). No wonder Frank believes in America: The corporate lifestyle of lie-cheat-steal-kill works for him. Frank damn near flies under Richie's radar until he breaks conservative form and pimps out by wearing a chinchilla coat and hat (gifts from his wife) to an Ali-Frazier fight. That makes him a target. Who wants him dead most? A rival dealer (Cuba Gooding Jr., returned to form)? A bad cop (Josh Brolin is chillingly good)? A mob boss (Armand Assante doing low sleaze to a high turn) who will never see blacks as paisanos? It's the mobster who tells him, "It's success that took a shot at you." It's also race, class, and the absence of truth and justice that currently define the American way. American Gangster isn't all blistering action; it has bite and timely relevance. Frank and Richie are both outsiders playing by rules everyone else ignores. Even Richie's crew laughs at him for not pocketing a million bucks in found drug money. But as Richie's grip tightens around Frank, the movie closes in for the kill by crosscutting (shades of the Corleones) between a massacre and a church service. The climax also allows Washington and Crowe to finally occupy the screen together. As with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Heat, it all comes down to a few pointed words and banked fire in the eyes. Washington and Crowe clash like titans -- they're something to see.

Ditto the movie, which goes to the heart of America's obsession with success as a killer instinct. That's why the film's moral indignation with Frank can't match its fascination with his balls of steel. Superfly and Tony Montana are Hollywood fantasies. Frank is for real. As the real Frank said, "People like me. People like the fuck out of me." Maybe that's what's so scary.

Starring: Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Dania Ramirez, Josh Brolin, Carla Gugino

The 11th Hour

2007-10-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps. To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in. That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,” an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence. Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section and wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn’t want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven. No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a temporary salve for the audience’s guilt.

Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, “The 11th Hour” attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.

In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar. Every so often, Mr. DiCaprio pops up on screen to interrupt this show and tell, squinting into the camera and pushing the narrative to the next topic.

If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).

Effectively blunt, this sequence provoked a colleague to invoke the name of the avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, but the truer visual and structural model here is a film like “Koyaanisqatsi,” with its streaming global landscapes. The difference is that the images in “The 11th Hour” are pointedly horrifying, not reassuring, pacific or aestheticized.

That can make it tough to watch, which the directors clearly know. They whip through the pictures and the interviews fast — at times a little too fast — and keep the information flowing as quickly as the visuals. This swift, steady pace means that you receive a lot of bad news from a lot of different sources. The ecologist Brock Dolman explains, “When we started feeding off the fossil fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle.” From there the topic nimbly jumps to climate change, national security (courtesy the former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey), Katrina, asthma and the stunning news from the oceanographer and author Sylvia Earle that “we’ve lost 90 percent of most of the big fish in the sea.”

Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not over yet. Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight, to rise to the occasion, as Mr. Woolsey notes, invoking America’s rapid, albeit delayed jump into World War II, gives hope where none might seem possible.

It is our astonishing capacity for hope that distinguishes “The 11th Hour” and that speaks so powerfully, in part because it is this all-too-human quality that may finally force us to fight the good fight against the damage we have done and continue to do. As the saying goes, keep hope alive — and if you’re holding this review in your hands, don’t forget to recycle the paper.

“The 11th Hour” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has freakily scary environmental images.

THE 11TH HOUR

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners; narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directors of photography, Peter Youngblood Hills and Andrew Rowlands; edited by Pietro Scalia and Luis Alvarez y Alvarez; music by Jean-Pascal Beintus and Eric Avery; production designer, Ms. Conners; produced by Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Petersen, Chuck Castleberry and Brian Gerber; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 91 minutes.

We Own the Night

2007-10-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) runs a hot nightclub in go-go late '80s Brooklyn; Joseph Grusinsky (Mark Wahlberg) is with the NYPD, working hard to stop the Russian Mafia from flooding the streets with drugs. The two men have nothing in common -- aside from the fact that they're brothers. Writer-director James Gray's We Own the Night takes its title from a slogan the NYPD used in the late '80s to publicize and puff up their anti-drug efforts; the film's partially a family drama, as Bobby and Joseph and their dad, Deputy Chief Bert (Robert Duvall) come to terms with how they connect to each other; its also a run-and-gun action film, as the Russian Mob comes after the Grusinskys and Bobby has to step up to the fight.

James Gray's been working the mean streets since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa; after his prior film with Phoenix and Wahlberg, The Yards, in 2000, Gray hasn't made a movie in seven years. There was a mild bidding war surrounding We Own the Night prior to it's screening as part of the competition slate at Cannes -- Columbia picked it up -- and if anything made paying 11.5 million for the movie seem like a good bet, it has to be the marquee appeal of the big-name cast. And Phoenix and Wahlberg are very good in the film, portraying very different men going through very different transformations. Bobby has a hot girlfriend (Eva Mendes), a cool job and grown-up fun every weekend with booze and drugs and late nights and laughs; when the crooks come gunning for his family, though, fun time is over. Joseph is hard-bitten and full of swagger, but after he's ambushed and very nearly killed, his swaggering cockiness turns inward, darker, more complex.

Gray and cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay capture the gritty nights of '80s New York, and even the daytime scenes have a film of grime over them; there's some excellent camera work in the film, ranging from a hair's breadth escape Bobby makes in the desperate heat of the moment to a car chase action sequence set in a summertime downpour; the film looks coherent, cohesive, distinctive. The story doesn't feel that way, though -- We Own the Night seems a little torn: Is it a family drama or an action film, a showcase for performances or a knuckle-clenching exercise in tension?

If anything makes We Own the Night worth watching, it's Phoenix and Wahlberg. Both men have a knack for conveying the essential paradox of action - there are some things so brave you have to be terrified to do them -- and they also throw themselves wholeheartedly into the feuds and fights of their fractured family. Mendes is fine as Bobby's girlfriend Amada, and Duvall has the right kind of flinty solidity as Bert -- he may be a cop, but he's also a man. We Own the Night may feel curiously at odds with itself, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad movie; if Gray's movie excels at one thing, it's how it takes the title phrase and makes a boast into something like a curse. Bobby and Joseph both own the night in different ways at the start of Gray's story of good men in a bad world; as the film goes all the way to the gutter to the grave, we see exactly what that costs.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2007-09-28T01:33:00.000-07:00

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 21, 2007

Before a bullet shattered his skull in 1882, Jesse James cut a bloody swath through parts of the Midwest and the South, leaving a trail of corpses and favorable press notices in his wake. Bad man, poor man, bushwhacker, thief, James was as American as apple pie and the Confederate flag he wrapped himself in like an excuse. That bard of the great unwashed, Woody Guthrie, compared him to Robin Hood, and decades later Bruce Springsteen kept the fires burning, singing about a homespun legend as seductive as it is false.

The lachrymose new film “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” adds another gauzy chapter to the overtaxed James myth, if not much rhyme or reason, heart or soul. Topped by Brad Pitt wearing boot-black hair and a faraway stare, this is a portrait of the murderer as a middle-aged man as seen through the curious mirror of celebrity. At a well-seasoned 34, James lives in an ordinary house in an ordinary town, where he sits in his backyard smoking cigars and handling snakes, a devil playing at preacher. His days with Confederacy guerrillas are long gone, as are most of his crimes. Among his closest companions now is his greatest fan, Bob Ford, a gunslinger slyly played by Casey Affleck.

As its title announces, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is about a murder, the last violent chapter in a cruelly violent life. As such, it’s also about a celebrity stalker, a kind of Mark David Chapman in spurs who nurses an annihilating love for the object of his obsession. It’s an obsession fueled and fanned by the media, including the sympathetic newsmen who saw James as a heroic anti-Reconstructionist, and the fiction writers who memorialized and even exalted the brutal exploits of his gang. Like a schoolgirl with a crush, Bob Ford keeps his treasured Jesse James dime novels in a box under his bed. When he caresses the cover of one book, it’s as if he were tenderly stroking a lover’s cheek.

If there was more to Bob’s love, you won’t find it here, despite a coy bathtub scene that finds James luxuriating in milky water while the younger man hovers uncertainly nearby. “You want to be like me or do you want to be me?” asks James, casting his glance back at the man others would later brand Judas. In this nearly all-male world of camaraderie and gunsmoke, where little women bustle discreetly in the background (including Mary-Louise Parker as James’s wife, Zee), the ways of the flesh, of heaving, stinking, struggling humanity, have little place. For all their exploded bone and ravaged pulp, their trickles and rivulets of blood, the men in this film aren’t as much bodies as beautiful, empty signifiers.

In his last — and first — feature film, “Chopper” (2000), the New Zealand-born director Andrew Dominik seemed on the same wavelength as his raucous, at times queasy, entertaining subject, the ultrabrutal criminal reprobate of the title, played by Eric Bana. Neither overtly sympathetic nor disapproving, the filmmaker presented his villain as a larger-than-life but unequivocally human grotesque. Using color like an Expressionist, he bleached the screen a sizzling white that turned blood red nearly black and splashed on hues of bilious green and urine yellow as if to suggest that Chopper’s fluids had leaked from his body to contaminate his surroundings. The colors sicken and beguile, as does the human riddle at their center.

There’s a different riddle in “The Assassination of Jesse James,” staring into a florid sunset, slashes of red cutting across the sky. Dressed in near-all black, the question mark known as Jesse James stands away from the camera, knee-deep in a golden, grassy field stirred by the wind or perhaps just an off-screen mechanical fan.

It’s a striking, pleasing image, whatever the case, pretty as a picture postcard, a vision of man and nature that brings to mind Thoreau at Walden Pond or more precisely Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” James is also facing West, of course, toward the last frontier, home to cowboys and Indians and prospectors of all types, including, soon enough, those who will wield movie cameras, not six-shooters.

If he had lived, James might have saddled up for the movies, and, indeed, his own son played him in the 1921 film “Jesse James Under the Black Flag.” When “The Assassination” opens in September 1881, shortly before his final train robbery and seven months before his death, James was already a star of sorts, a living if fast-aging legend, a favorite newspaper subject, a government target and the featured attraction in hundreds of dime novels with titles like “The James Boys and the Vigilantes.” Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.

It’s a curious performance, at once central and indistinct, but then, so too is the character. Based on the novel of the same title by Ron Hansen, the film introduces James at the beginning of his end. Hunkered down in some woods, surrounded by darkly dressed men and leafless birch trees, and framed by Roger Deakins’s impeccable, stark, high-contrast cinematography, he looks a vision. This isn’t just Jesse James — it’s also Jim Morrison at the Whisky in 1966 with a dash of Laurence Olivier, a touch of Warren Beatty and more than a hint of Ralph Lauren. It’s the beautiful bad man, knowing and doomed, awaiting his fate like some Greco-Hollywood hero, rather than the psychotic racist of historical record.

The movies have their truths, which rarely align with those of history. Taken on its own narrow, heavily aestheticized and poetic-realist terms, then, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” works. The cinematography may speak to Mr. Dominik’s yearning for meaning and importance more than it does of his outlaw, but the visuals often dazzle and enthrall. (The images that approximate the blurred distortions characteristic of pinhole photography are especially striking.) They also distract and, after a while, help weigh down the film, which sinks under the heaviness of images so painstakingly art directed, so fetishistically lighted and adorned, that there isn’t a drop of life left in them. Instead of daguerreotype, Mr. Dominik works in stone.

The question of whether the world or cinema needs another monument to an American gangster, a thug who lived by the gun and repeatedly killed in cold blood, remains unanswered by the film and its makers. And perhaps that isn’t a question worth asking. This is, after all, meant to be an evening’s entertainment, and its burdens should remain modest even if its goals are not. Its revelations, aside from Mr. Affleck’s performance, which manages to make the character seem dumb and the actor wily and smart, are nonexistent. The true story of Jesse James, despite all the dime novels and B movies, remains untold, perhaps because in its savagery it really is as American as apple pie and, as such, unspeakably hard to tell.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, rude language.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.

Directed by Andrew Dominik; written by Mr. Dominik, based on the novel by Ron Hansen; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Dylan Tichenor and Curtiss Clayton; music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Ridley Scott, Jules Daly and David Valdes; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 150 minutes.

WITH: Brad Pitt (Jesse James), Casey Affleck (Robert Ford), Sam Shepard (Frank James), Mary-Louise Parker (Zee James), Paul Schneider (Dick Liddil), Jeremy Renner (Wood Hite), Zooey Deschanel (Dorothy) and Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford).

Feast of Love Movie Review

2007-09-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

Romance, lust, love, and loss propel an intriguing group of suburban neighbors through life in the touching romantic drama Feast of Love, based on the novel by Charles Baxter. Directed by Robert Benton (Billy Bathgate, The Human Stain), Feast of Love might be a little too schmaltzy for some cynical viewers, but it’s a refreshingly adult and twistedly optimistic take on relationships that should appeal to romantics and mature audiences willing to give in to its sentimental story.

The Story

Professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) has taken time off from his teaching duties to recover from the tragic death of his son. His teaching job put him in a position to assist those in need, but now he’s satisfied with quietly observing others going about their everyday lives, lending advice only when specifically asked for his opinion.

Sipping on his coffee in his friend Bradley’s little coffee house, Professor Stevenson has a front row seat to the emotional drama playing out all around him. Even before Bradley realizes he’s about to lose his wife to an unlikely suitor, Harry has it all figured out. Then there’s the handsome yet troubled barrista, Oscar (Toby Hemingway), who serves him his steaming cup of java on a daily basis. Harry knows the minute a beautiful stranger named Chloe (Alexa Davalos) walks into the shop the two are destined to fall deeply in love.

Harry sees everything and then returns home to his loving wife Esther (Jane Alexander) to report on the day’s events. But love is never easy and lives are too complicated to sum up in snippets. Each of the main players has a secret they’re harboring and each has to deal with their own demons - an abusive father, a prediction of an early death of a loved one, the inability to discontinue an affair – in order to move forward in life.

The Cast

There’s no better actor than Morgan Freeman to play narrator for a story such as this. Freeman’s just so charming and earnest that he's able to take a character like Professor Stevenson and make him instantly into someone we not only trust but also care about.

Freeman’s surrounded by a cast of recognizable faces in Feast of Love including Oscar nominee Greg Kinnear (As Good as It Gets) as the coffee shop owner who slowly opens his eyes to the world. Kinnear’s done a couple of these types of roles before, and he’s well cast as the optimist who keeps on believing in love even when it’s spitting his affection back in his face. Selma Blair and Radha Mitchell admirably play the cheating women who give Kinnear trouble.

But the film’s real shining stars are the youngest actors of the group. Alexa Davalos and Toby Hemingway steal the show from their more veteran co-stars. These two have real chemistry and their story, more so than any of the others, would have been interesting to follow in greater detail. As it is, because this is such an ensemble piece, not nearly enough time is devoted to the pair.

The Bottom Line

With Morgan Freeman playing the audience’s guide through all the intricate, intimate details of multiple relationships, Feast of Love is a delicious, meaty dish. Sure, it’ll appeal more to women than men, but there’s something (and not just nudity for the males) in this for anyone who’s in a relationship, recovering from a bad relationship, or ready to take on a new one.

Review: Eastern Promises

2007-09-28T01:18:00.000-07:00

One of the most satisfying things in all of filmdom is watching a great director find a signature muse. These pairings are marriages made in celluloid heaven. Von Sternberg discovered and claimed Marlene Dietrich. Johns, Ford and Wayne, made many movies together. Scorsese had DeNiro (and now he’s trying to recapture that with DiCaprio, bless him). For a brief and glorious time greedy Julianne Moore had both PT Anderson and Todd Haynes to sing her praises. Woody Allen had Diane and then Mia with a little Dianne on the side. Uma Thurman, rather famously, had Quentin Tarantino wrapped around her little finger big toe (If QT would stop dilly dallying between projects there’d probably be more filmic evidence).

I could go on but I should get to the point. After only two films together, David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen are making a strong bid for the director/muse pantheon. They clearly “get” each other. Let’s pray they never break up.

This simpatico director/actor pair first teamed for the astonishing A History of Violence (2005, my review) in which Cronenberg shed new light on Mortensen’s gift. The 48 year-old New Yorker had previously been known as a solid supporting actor with star potential just waiting to be tapped (and with only Peter Jackson’s truly tapping it for the Lord of the Rings trilogy). Violence revealed Viggo as not just a movie star but a chameleon, too. Better yet, it proved him to be an auteur’s dream –rare is the egoless actor with plenty to be egoistic about, who is there to serve the director’s vision completely.

Eastern Promises begins, like their first pairing, with a gruesome crime that doesn’t include the lead actors, leaving you curious and agitated --who are these people and what further terrible deeds will we witness? Soon afterwards we meet Anna (Naomi Watts) a midwife in London who rescues a baby from its dying mother’s belly in her hospital. The dead woman carries with her only a diary scribbled in Russian. Anna is eager to unveil the mystery of this orphaned baby. Her curiosity leads her straight into the lion’s den, which in this case is a restaurant run by London’s Russian mafia. Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a driver for the powerful crime family within, takes an immediate interest in the intrusive blonde.

Promises sinuously winds its way through hospitals, barbershops, riverfronts, ordinary flats, whorehouses, and expat favored restaurants, offering tantalizing glimpses of complex relationships and miserable trapped people. Its on its way to an outstanding climax but it’s snaking, sometimes unsteadily, towards that destination. Promises is often powerfully tense but Cronenberg keeps the actual action and violence to a minimum, saving most of it up for his big bang.

Just before that explosion he smartly hands the movie over to Viggo Mortensen. The actor lifts Eastern Promises way up to heights it could never reach without him. He’s 100% immersed in this hardened Russian criminal with secrets and ambitions of his own. Though most of the movie’s best twists and reveals involve the slow onion peeling of Nikolai, to get at what lies beneath his cold threatening exterior, there’s not a moment that feels false or cheap in retrospect. Just as in A History of Violence this is an actor who can withhold without lying, always staying true to the character while supporting directorial themes and narrative needs. Nikolai stands disrobed before powerful men who study the history of violence in his tattoos (they tell a story you see: his alliances, prison time, crimes…) Then, completely submitting to their dominion over him, he undergoes another tattoo ritual. The crime family is essentially marking their territory. It’s a haunting needle sharp scene, arguably the film's best, with only Nikolai’s enslaved body and the actors numbed lived-in line readings to focus on.

Shortly thereafter the movie reaches its already justifiably famous set piece. Nikolai is cornered, naked and weaponless, in a bathhouse by two men from a rival family who mean to gut him. After this relentless brutal brawl and its enormously creepy final shot, the movie has nowhere to go but down. But even as it winds down, escaping the bathhouse to return to hospitals, restaurants, and riverfronts again, there are smartly acted moments before its strangely tidy and somewhat unsatisfying resolution. These final scenes are odd fits for a movie that’s been memorably messy and easily sidetracked with subplots and character bits.

Eastern Promises is nowhere near as strong thematically or as tightly structured as A History of Violence, but it still delivers a cinematic jolt. Viewed as a mutual declaration of love between filmmaker and muse, though, it delivers fully. Consider A History of Violence Cronenberg’s gift to Mortensen, unlocking the greatness within a slowly ascending movie star. Eastern Promises then is the actor's return favor, elevating a minor auteur picture to a major event with his mesmerizing character creation.

1408

2007-09-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Starring: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Jasmine Jessica Anthony, Christopher Carey, Mary McCormack

John Cusack checks into Room 1408 at Manhattan's posh Dolphin Hotel and finds that the joint is jumpin' with ghosts who will do their damnedest to make sure the dude will not get out alive.

It's a hellish premise, just the wicked mastery you expect from Stephen King, whose short story gives this mindbender its spine. King's recent work has been royally botched onscreen (hello, Secret Window, Needful Things and Dreamcatcher). Not this time. For that all praise to Cusack, who brings his welcome smartass savvy to the role of Mike Enslin, the author of bestsellers that debunk the idea of things that go bump in the night. Mike has his own demons, notably the death of his daughter (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), a tragic event that shattered his marriage to Lily (Mary McCormack).

He makes Mike's cynicism palpable as he checks into Room 1408 despite the objections of hotel manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), who informs him that more than fifty people have died trying to spend the night there. Just to hear Jackson intone the line -- "it's an evil fucking room" -- is enough to shiver your timbers.

Swedish director Mikael Hafsrom, who scored with Evil in 2003 and fizzled badly with Derailed two years later, seems to have regained his footing. The mid-section of 1408 is saddled with tacky and needless special effects, but Hafstrom ratchets up the tension big time as Cusack pulls out all the stops in a performance way beyond frightfest duty.

The fact that 1408 is relatively free of gore has encouraged some critics to use it to attack what they call the torture porn of such directors as Hostel's Eli Roth. But Roth is a gifted filmmaker with his own goals and methods to achieve them. Hafstrom wisely takes the path King intended: to plumb the violence of the mind. Heebie-jeebies are guaranteed.

Review: Lust, Caution

2007-09-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

Lust, Caution is a great festival film; it's lush and long and loaded. It's also a bad festival film; I want to go back to it and think about it more, as if it were too delicate or intricate to be understood with the snap judgments and quick appraisals a festival can make you turn to at first resort. Like director Ang Lee's prior film, Brokeback Mountain, Lust, Caution takes a brisk, brief short story (Se, Jei by Eileen Chang) and makes it fill the screen, with plenty of room for visual rapture and strong performances -- and some space for doubts and questions to seep in, with a distant whisper of controversy about sex (for the R-rated Brokeback, over gay themes and characters; for the NC-17-rated Lust, over explicit straight sex) at the edge of hearing.

In wartime Shanghai, Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei) enters a parlor and travels to another world. She plays Mah-Jong with idle, wealthy women (who live in constant danger, in the middle of squalor) and slowly, carefully, carries out the steps in a plan to meet her lover, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) -- husband to Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen), collaborator in service to the occupying Japanese, torturer. But Mrs. Mak's actions don't speak in the warm close whispers of a lover, but rather in the brittle conspiratorial tones of a criminal. ...

Because she is not Mrs. Mak; she is Wong Chia Chi, and she has been on a four-year journey to meet with Mr. Yee and be his lover. Until some later point, when he can be killed. Lust, Caution revolves around a plot, like a thriller, and we try to read it like that; but it also revolves around character and nature, like a drama, and we see it through that perspective. The movie -- and the audience -- jumps from intimate drama to glossy thrills.

And the jolt of that jump can jar. Lust, Caution is nothing more -- and nothing less -- than Notorious, Hitchcock's 1946 classic about a woman (Ingrid Bergman) sent undercover by a man she may love (Cary Grant) to be a lover to a monster (Claude Rains) . (Those of you under 40 may instead have to think of Mission: Impossible II.) Here, Wei's handsome handler is Wang Leehom, who puts her on the trail of Leung. Leehom -- a popstar in his first role -- fades into the film, though; we see little of his character. Of Yee, we know even less; every part of the film seems to unfold for us through Wei's eyes.

Wei is also making her film debut here, but her character is, too, playing a dangerous masquerade born from the movies. Wong Chia Chia goes from activism to art to conspiracy -- and from innocence to corruption to something like repentance. Wei makes us feel that arc in Wong Chia Chi's life during wartime; or, rather, she and Lee and screenwriters Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus make us feel it. And that journey has glamour and horror in it. When 'Mrs. Mak' makes her move, every motion is from the '40s Hollywood playbook; Mr. Yee responds with casual brutality she -- and we -- do not expect.

The sex in Lust, Caution is complicated -- every ecstatic cry is more than matched by a choked sob. More bluntly, the NC-17 rating that comes with it takes Lust, Caution's box-office -- already, as a subtitled period piece, dim even in light of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's 128-million domestic total -- and completely extinguishes them. But Lee offers that he wasn't aware of that, and you're inclined to believe him: This is the film he wanted to make. Lust, Caution is a film worth seeing again, a film worth having your own opinion about, a challenging piece of cinema that also thrills, a complicated bold work that's bigger than its problems.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Review

2007-09-28T00:27:00.000-07:00

Resident Evil: Extinction is the third film in this zombie franchise, so let’s take a minute to figure out where we’re at. The first Resident Evil was a blast due in part to blind stupid luck, and in greater part an ensemble cast containing, in addition to Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez in her last good performance before becoming that alcoholic from TV’s Lost. The second one fell flat on its ass; Paul W.S. Anderson’s script was a mess and Alexander Witt, the guy they hired to direct it, managed to make it even worse. For Extinction, they’ve brought in helmer Russell Mulcahy who takes another terrible Paul W.S. Anderson screenplay and redeems the franchise by hitting it out of the park.

Like the others in this series, Resident Evil: Extinction is an action movie first, and a zombie movie second. Milla Jovovich’s Alice character could be fighting anything, it doesn’t have to be zombies, that just happens to be what they’ve settled on for this particular set of stories. And that’s fine, since zombies have been done to death and I for one am getting sick of watching them. Resident Evil: Extinction doesn’t need to be a good zombie movie, or even a good horror movie in order to work. It does however need to be fast-paced and fun; thankfully Mulcahy pulls that off admirably.

It’s five years since the last Resident Evil movie, and things have gone badly. The zombie-making virus unleashed in the first movie has since spread across the entire planet, turning the world into a wasteland desert inhabited by mindless, flesh-eating baddies. On the surface, only a few ragtag bands of humans survive. To live they must keep on the move, if they stop the undead flock to them and chow down. Underground, the evil Umbrella corporation still exists. You remember them, the all powerful capitalist monolith which created the zombie virus in the first place and in the past worried more about its profit margins than saving the human race. Now they’ve all retreated to underground bunkers where they create and kill clones of Alice in an attempt to find a cure for that which ails the world, or at least a way to make things better for themselves. After watching her beat the hell out of everything in the first and second movies, they believe Alice is the key, and so they’d love to get their hands on the original.

The original Alice we know and love is one of the few people left living on the surface, and like everyone else she’s on the move. She joins up with a convoy of survivors traveling Road Warrior style, and attempts to help their leader Claire take them to Alaska where rumor has it, the infection hasn’t spread. The movie works surprisingly well early on as a post-apocalyptic survival tale. I’m not kidding with that Road Warrior comparison, there are definitely moments when the film nearly has a sweet Mad Max vibe going for it, or at least a little bit of Thunderdome. Sadly, it doesn’t last and soon those Umbrellla Corporation bastards get in the way, ruining the survivor’s zombie smashing run to the Great White North.

What’s most surprising about Extinction is how tame the franchise has become. The film is rated-R, but only barely. I had to go home and look it up, because it plays like it’s PG-13. Gone is the now trademark Milla Jovovich full-frontal nudity which usually graces these movies. The film is also pretty light on zombie decapitations. Evidently you now only need to slash their throats in order to kill them, presumably because that’s less gruesome than chopping off heads. This would make sense if they were bucking for a PG-13, but the movie is R so you’ve got to wonder why they didn’t take it all the way.

Speaking of taking it all the way, it wouldn’t have hurt to make it longer either. It’s one thing to be fast paced, but it’s another to jump from scene to scene so fast that you’re left with silly coincidences and unbelievable logical gaps. The script is incredibly thin, and there really should be more to it. Pacing isn’t necessarily dictated by running time, and a few more minutes tacked on could have worked wonders for the film’s plot without sacrificing the quick beat Mulcahy sets for it. Extinction is good enough even as it is that I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with it.

Thin or not, Extinction is a fast, well staged action movie with giddy, creative sequences involving things like zombie birds and a genius moment in which Oded Fehr blows everything to hell while toking on a joint. More importantly, Milla still looks great doing her karate moves. Gone is some of the wildly over-the-top, annoying action prevalent in the second film. This time when Milla strikes her superhero pose, you’re cheering for her instead of wondering how the hell she managed to suddenly become Spider-Man. The script is undeniably shoddy, full of wild coincidences and it often seems more concerned with setting things up for yet another sequel than finishing the film at hand. The end in particular suffers from that, the movie’s finale seems like rush to get to the franchise’s next movie rather than a big finish to this one. Still Mulcahy and his cast overcome all of that to delivery an enjoyable experience, back in the twisting, zombie-infested levels of the Resident Evil world.

source: http://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Resident-Evil-Extinction-2609.html

Bobby

2007-09-25T01:56:00.000-07:00

By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer

The death of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 marked the end of a certain type of idealism in American politics. In trying to translate the power of what Kennedy meant to so many people into a compelling film, writer-director Emilio Estevez has exceeded his reach with the historical drama "Bobby." Set on the day leading up to the assassination of RFK at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the film weaves together the stories of 22 fictionalized characters tangentially linked to that event with archival footage of the late senator as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, Estevez draws some rather obvious parallels between the Vietnam era and present-day social and political conflicts.

It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way. It aspires for the Altmanesque interplay of "Nashville" or "Short Cuts" but instead feels like one of those '70s disaster epics such as "Earthquake" or "The Towering Inferno," in which a star-studded cast endures melodramatic story lines as the audience awaits the inevitable momentous event and tries to guess who will be around at the finish.

Estevez lined up Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Helen Hunt and nominees William H. Macy and Sharon Stone, as well as his father, Martin Sheen, ex-girlfriend Demi Moore, her husband Ashton Kutcher and a slew of hot young actors such as Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan and Shia LaBeouf for this upstairs/downstairs mélange of intersecting lives. The tales of the hotel staff are more diverting than those of the guests, primarily because many scenes ominously take place in the Ambassador's kitchen, where Kennedy was gunned down, and their circumstances speak more directly to the issues the candidate was addressing.

It's easy to become swept up in the palpable enthusiasm Estevez shows toward his subject, but the pedestrian and overly expositional dialogue of the film's characters proves to be as stifling as the excerpts from Kennedy's speeches are stirring. Even with dynamic performers such as Laurence Fishburne, as a chef, and Freddy Rodriguez as a busboy, the exchanges have the ring of platitudes rather than drama. Scenes of almost pure exposition and bald declarations of themes strip the film of any possibility of subtext.

The film opens with a crawl explaining its context accompanied by familiar footage of RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., César Chávez and the Vietnam War from which we are to take that it was a time not terribly different from our own. An unpopular war rages while ideological, class and race divisions threaten to tear the country apart. Throughout the film, Estevez repeatedly points out these parallels — as when a man explains the perils of a new method of voting and warns of hanging chads — but never moves beyond that observation.

Whereas Oliver Stone has had a career to examine the many gripping aspects and conflicts of the volatile 1960s, Estevez attempts to do it in less than two hours. The result is a Cliffs Notes movie skimming the decade's greatest hits of pop culture references and isms. When characters banally discuss movies such as "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate," it feels as though they're merely name-dropping.

The weakest of the micro-dramas — one featuring Sheen and Hunt as bored (and boring) Easterners suffering from psy-chological malaise; he's depressed, she's lost her identity in materialism — seems to exist strictly to mark the rise of pop psychology. Likewise, an overlong, indulgent sequence featuring naive campaign workers (LaBeouf, Brian Geraghty) drop-ping acid with the hotel's resident drug dealer (Kutcher) achieves little beyond reminding us that the '60s was the Age of Aquarius and that people did a lot of drugs, while also allowing the director to depict the requisite subjective acid trip.

Estevez, who also plays alcoholic lounge singer Moore's dutiful husband, acquits himself far better as a director than as a writer. Working in episodic television in recent years, he has moved beyond early efforts behind the camera such as "Wisdom" and "Men at Work," and he does a good job of moving between stories and establishing milieu. Aside from the LSD interlude and the trite use of Simon and Garfunkel over a key sequence, his directing choices such as using actual footage of Kennedy rather than an actor are sound and make the film more watchable than it might have been.

As a screenwriter, however, Estevez seems hamstrung by too much reverence for both the '60s and Kennedy. The approach limits him to dealing in archetypes rather than flesh-and-blood characters who would have elevated the drama to something more memorable. We've seen all these characters before, and other than Timmons, Christian Slater's racist kitchen supervisor, and Miguel, a kitchen worker played by Jacob Vargas, they threaten to recede into the hotel's wallpaper.

Even those two get the life squeezed out of them in one of the movie's many tidy endings that precede the assassination sequence. The script's earnestness prevents the film from delivering a true perspective on the time the way Warren Beatty and Robert Towne did with the 1975 satire "Shampoo," set a few months after "Bobby" at the time of the Nixon-Humphrey presidential election.

Finally, the film functions as something of an elegy to the Ambassador and the Cocoanut Grove, the late great Wilshire Boulevard hotel and nightclub which were demolished this year, a further blight on Los Angeles' reputation for failing to preserve its landmarks. Unfortunately, the fictionalized dramas that serve as a "Grand Hotel"-like homage to the place pale in comparison with the vitality of Kennedy. Simply seeing and hearing these words reminds us that even though the times have much in common, we're far removed from an age when politicians embraced issues and positions rather than middle-of-the- road centrism.

kevin.crust@latimes.com

Movie Review: The Brave One

2007-09-18T21:36:00.000-07:00

Packing Heat After a Coldhearted Crime

Erica Bain, the gunslinging heroine of “The Brave One,” is the host of a public radio talk show called “Street Walk” that takes a sentimental, nostalgic view of New York City. Also a rather purple one, since Erica is prone to come up with poeticisms on the order of “New buildings sprout like chromosomes from the city’s DNA,” a sentence that someone evidently thought so highly of that we get to hear it twice.

Until a senseless act of violence wrecks her affection, Erica looks back longingly at a vanished metropolis whose touchstones include Eloise at the Plaza and Sid Vicious at the Hotel Chelsea. She sighs about how that old Manhattan — Edgar Allan Poe and Andy Warhol are other names in her necrology — is “dying.”

For its part, “The Brave One,” though set in the present, tries to conjure a more specific moment in the history of New York, a time when its citizens, on screen and off, seemed to be in far greater danger of actually dying at one another’s hands. Around 30 years ago, in the depths of its civic and fiscal crises, the city served as a perfect setting for nasty, dark-hearted crime dramas — tales of vengeance that ranged from “Death Wish,” on the brutal, populist end of the spectrum, to the more self-aware and nuanced “Taxi Driver.”

In that movie Jodie Foster played Iris, the young prostitute who was the object of Travis Bickle’s white-knight fantasies. In this one Ms. Foster’s character, Erica, is, like Travis, a haunted survivor who supplies rueful voice-over narration. But her spirit is in many ways closer to that of Charles Bronson’s workaday vigilante in the “Death Wish” movies. The public radio gig, the references to Emily Dickinson and D. H. Lawrence, the directing credit for Neil Jordan (of “Crying Game” fame) — all of this produces a patina of refinement and seriousness.

But don’t be fooled. “The Brave One,” though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.

And that, the movie insists, is how, in your heart of hearts, you really do want it to be. Its none-too-subtle governing idea is that even the most effete, brownstone-dwelling public radio listener (or New York Times reader) might feel the occasional urge to blow someone’s head off.

Mr. Jordan and the screenwriters, the father-and-son team Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor, and Cynthia Mort, clearly relish the conceit of transforming a slightly built, overcivilized blonde into a killing machine. After allowing us a glimpse of the carefree life Erica shares with her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews) — scenes that remind you just how little the portrayal of happiness has figured in Ms. Foster’s recent performances — they plunge her into a modern urban horror story.

While walking their dog at dusk in Central Park, with joggers and park-bench sitters in sight, Erica and David are viciously beaten and robbed by three thugs, who also steal the dog. As if to emphasize the swift, brutal transition from before to after, Mr. Jordan tastelessly juxtaposes images of Erica’s bloody clothes being stripped off in the emergency room with flashbacks of David slowly undressing her for lovemaking. After three weeks in a coma, Erica awakens to find that David has died and that she is paralyzed by fear and grief.

The cure is an illegally purchased 9-millimeter pistol and a box of bullets (when told of the mandatory 30-day waiting period for a legal purchase at a downtown gun store, she replies, “I need something now,” perhaps unwittingly echoing one of Homer Simpson’s greatest lines.) At first accidentally and then deliberately, Erica becomes a vigilante, shooting down a murderous husband who is also a convenience-store robber, a pair of iPod thieves who are also potential rapists and a few other bad guys whose badness is similarly overdetermined.

Erica clearly feels some anguish, but little in the way of remorse. Ms. Foster handles her emotions efficiently, having made pain offset by steeliness something of a specialty of late. In “Panic Room” and “Flight Plan” her mix of desperation and ferocity was that of a mother in extremis. Here, looking smaller and more vulnerable but at the same time more ruthless, she is driven by grief, perhaps a less rational and more dangerous motivation.

Not that “The Brave One” is overly concerned with the finer points of her psychological state. Nor does it have much new or interesting to say about the morality of her actions or the urban context she inhabits. Erica’s foil and confidant is a homicide detective named Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), who seems to be the only member of the New York Police Department actually interested in doing his job. (His partner, played by Nick Katt, is the only person in the movie with a sense of humor).

Mercer befriends Erica and agrees to be interviewed for her radio show, even as he is investigating the shootings carried out by the mysterious, presumably male, vigilante.

They have a few desultory discussions about the rule of law and the ethics of extrajudicial killing, arguments that are resolved in a climax that manages to be at once preposterous, sentimental and appalling. That it may also be viscerally satisfying is a sign of just how cowardly “The Brave One” really is. It’s a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can love.

“The Brave One” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense violence, profanity and some nudity.

THE BRAVE ONE

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Neil Jordan; written by Roderick Taylor, Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort, based on a story by the Taylors; director of photography, Philippe Rousselot; edited by Tony Lawson; music by Dario Marianelli; production designer, Kristi Zea; produced by Joel Silver and Susan Downey; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 122 minutes.

WITH: Jodie Foster (Erica Bain), Terrence Howard (Detective Sean Mercer), Naveen Andrews (David Kirmani), Nicky Katt (Detective Vitale) and Mary Steenburgen (Carol).