FILM REVIEW OF ''12 YEARS A SLAVE" (2013)

A searing indictment of chattel slavery in the antebellum South, “12 Years a Slave” (**** OUT OF ****) depicts the tragic odyssey of a free-born African-American violinist shanghaied and sold into slavery by unscrupulous white chiselers.  Solomon Northup’s literary chronicle implicates himself as much for his own naivety as the avarice of the assailants who hoodwinked him for monetary gain.  Two smooth-talking con artists in top-hats persuade our hero to leave the safety of New York so he can play his fiddle at a concert in Washington, D.C.  They assure Northup that they will pay him handsomely for his services and reimburse him for any expenses incurred during the trip to and from the capitol.   The surprises and shocks that ensue as a consequence of their mendacity turn Northup’s life upside-down.  British-born, black director Steve McQueen and “Red Tails” screenwriter John Ridley pull few punches in their largely realistic portrayal of Northup’s exploits.  They adapted Northup’s eloquent autobiographical account of his captivity between 1841 and 1853.   Of course, nobody should be flabbergasted that Northup’s memoirs contain a far greater wealth of information than the film.  Naturally, McQueen and Ridley had to eliminate some Northup’s various adventures to make a movie under two-and-a-half-hours in length.  Northup’s hanging provides one clear example.  Three bitter whites resolve to string up Northup until an overseer intervenes.  In Northup’s memoir, he was never actually hanged.  In McQueen’s film, Northup is hanged, but he manages to balance himself on the tip-toes until somebody cuts down.   “

Mind you, this isn’t the first time that Northup’s horrific ordeal has been presented in the media.   “Shaft” director Gordon Parks produced “Solomon Northup's Odyssey” back in 1984 for PBS's “American Playhouse” anthology television series.   After its original telecast, the Parks’ teleplay came out on home video as “Half Slave, Half Free.”  Inexplicably, McQueen had never heard about Solomon Northup and his plight when he was searching for a story to shoot about slavery.  Unlike Parks and his “American Playhouse” production, Mc Queen and Ridley were not restrained by the straitlaced standards of television censorship.  As much as “12 Years a Slave” is a yarn about courage in the face of  wholly insurmountable odds, this Fox Searchlight release qualifies as a horror movie that provides little relief from our protagonist’s travails until the end credits roll.  Happily, McQueen doesn’t paint all whites as unrepentant dastards.  Indeed, our hero survives this adversity because compassionate whites stand up to unsavory whites. Nonetheless, for all but a quarter-hour of its running time, “12 Years a Slave” makes you abhor the individuals who abuse Solomon.  The worst plantation owner of the bunch rapes his most productive black female slave repeatedly on a regular basis while his jealous wife dreams up schemes to drive the object of her husband’s lust from their property.

Movies about Southern slavery, sometimes referred to as the “peculiar institution,” usually focus on slaves born into bondage.   McQueen sought to make a film that would appeal to broader audience.  Ridley and he found in Northup’s memoir the perfect vehicle for this perspective.  Since Northup had been born free, we can identify with him more than we might a poor soul who never possessed his freedom.  Similarly, the same is true of those 18^th century British sea-faring tales about helpless lads kidnapped by press gangs and forced into service by His Majesty’s Government because they happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.  In “12 Years a Slave,” two grifters posing as traveling entertainers appealed to Solomon’s vanity as a musician to earn some quick, easy cash.  When things seem too good to be true is when you should flee temptation.  Solomon trusts these gentlemen implicitly, and they escort him to the nation’s capitol.  Once they arrive, they wine and dine him at an elegant restaurant and then slip him a Mickey Finn, the equivalent of the date rape drug Rohypnol, in his libation.  When he entered Washington, Solomon was dressed as splendidly as any Caucasian gentleman.  When he awakens the following morning on the outskirts of the capitol, Solomon finds himself attired in a night gown with a web of chains on both his wrists and ankles.  When he protests his status as a free-born black, the slave traders whip him into submission with a wooden paddle.  At this point, our hero winds up far from home in Louisiana where he must pick cotton, cut sugar cane, and grovel before his bullwhip wielding masters.

“12 Years a Slave” lives up to its R-rating.  The film contains considerable violence and cruelty, with extreme profanity as well as some nudity and brief sexuality.  Various characters utter the politically incorrect N-word as many as 60 times in the company of other derogatory adjectives.  The violence is far more disturbing than the sexuality.  Nude scenes occur when the slaves must bathe before an auction. Similarly, when buyers inspect the slaves, they force them to strip naked.  According to Northup’s memoirs, slaves whose bodies bore the mark of the lash were not as easy to sell as slaves with unblemished bodies.  A slave with too many scars was regarded as rebellious and considered poor prospect for sale.  12 Years a Slave” makes the Hollywood classic “Gone with the Wind” look like a fairy tale.  Although nobody suffers the loss of body parts as in the television mini-series “Roots,” the torture scenes where a female slave is lashed so badly that her back resembles a chopping board and male slaves are hoisted atop tree branches to hang until dead equal any of the ghastly horrors in Steven Spielberg 1993 Holocaust epic “Schindler's List.” English actor Chiwetel Ejiofor of “American Gangster” gives an unforgettable performance as Solomon Northup who suffered untold terror at the hands of his sadistic captors.   Naturally, as formidable as McQueen’s film is, Solomon Northup’s memoir is ten times more fascinating.

FILM REVIEW OF ''OLYMPUS IS FALLEN" (2012)

You know an actor  has a stake in a movie when he is listed as one of the producers.  Indeed, Gerard Butler served as one of four producers on the slam-bang, high-octane, but derivative President-in-jeopardy thriller “Olympus Has Fallen” (**** OUT OF ****), featuring Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Aaron Eckhart, and Rick Yune.  “Training Day” director Antoine Fuqua and freshman scenarists Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt must have put their heads together and scrutinized the “Die Hard” movies, “Air Force One,” and “In the Line of Fire.”  They’ve reconstituted the conventions of those classics as efficiently as the corpses pile up in this edge-of-the- seat nail-biter where nary a second of its two-hour running time is squandered.  Furthermore, they’ve followed the lead of not only “Team America: World Police” but also the recent “Red Dawn” remake and cast the North Koreans as the villains.  The impressively orchestrated aerial attack on Washington, D.C., alone is worth the price of admission.  When he isn’t generating suspense and tension, Fuqua shows no qualms about depicting battlefield torture either by the villains or the hero.  Subsequently, squeamish moviegoers might find the subject matter challenging in this violent melodrama.  Our sympathetic but indestructible hero displays about as much compassion for the treacherous villains as they show for the scores of innocent bystanders that they kill with barrages of bullets and high explosives in this rambunctious R-rated actioneer.  This is the kind of movie where the audience talks back to the screen.  At least, several people were talking back to the screen where I saw it.  They were either advising the hero or warning the villains. Interestingly, Fuqua and cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (son of Oscar winner Conrad L. Hall) lensed most of the White House scenes on location in Louisiana rather than in the nation’s capital.  Mind you, we’ll have to bide our time until late June when “Independence Day” helmer Roland Emmerich’s similarly themed saga “White House Down,” co-starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, appears to know which of these white-knuckled, geopolitical, hostage epics will take top honors.  

“Olympus Has Fallen” opens at Camp David.  President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart of “The Dark Knight”), First Lady Margaret (Ashley Judd of “Heat”), and their young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen of “Marmaduke”) are cruising along slippery, snow-swept roads at night with a Secret Service escort when chaos occurs.  The President’s limo goes into a spin and crashes through the railing of a bridge over an icy river.  Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler of “300”) and his personnel struggle futilely to stabilize the limo as it teeters precipitously off the bridge.  Simultaneously, President Asher fumbles to help his wife who has been injured during the accident.  Banning slashes the President’s seatbelt and extracts him from the vehicle.  Unfortunately, the sudden weight shift plunges the car with an unconscious Margaret inside into the river.  The memory of the accident and Banning’s valiant efforts to save his life at the expense of his wife prompts President Asher to have Banning transferred to a desk job at the Treasury.  Banning cannot stand his new sedentary position despite assurances from his superiors that he did the right thing on the river bridge.

During a visit from the South Korean ambassador to the White House, terrorists strike from the air with a cargo plane equipped with mini-Vulcan machine guns that blow U.S. fighter jets out of the air.  The cargo plane strafes the White House and anybody in the surrounding area, killing tourists and law enforcement personnel.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, Asian gunmen with automatic weapons storm the White House, killing anybody who gets in their way, while the Secret Service herds Asher and his guests to a bomb-proof bunker beneath the White House.  No sooner has the Secret Service gotten the President to safety than traitors in the South Korean delegation start blasting away.  The terrorists take Asher, his Vice President, and other essential members of his cabinet as hostages and demand that the U.S. withdraw the Seventh Fleet as well as pull our troops from the DMZ between North and South Korea.  Nobody knows who the identity of the terrorists, but two minutes later when the American military arrive, they find themselves in a stand-off.  The leader of the villains, Kang (Rick Yung of “Die Another Day”), has some other tricks up his sleeve.  Worse, a treasonous Secret Service agent, Forbes (Dylan McDermott of “In the Line of Fire”), has helped orchestrate the takeover.

During this surprise attack, Banning manages to survive, but he is the only survivor.  He learns from the acting President,  Speaker Trumbull (Morgan Freeman of “Driving Miss Daisy”), that the terrorists haven’t taken Connor as a hostage.  Banning sets out to find Connor while avoiding detection from the terrorists who are busy fortifying the White House from intruders.  Banning is clearly modeled on Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard” hero John McClane, and he dispenses ruthlessly with the terrorists while he searches for Connor.  Meantime, Kang wants the codes to our nuclear arsenal and he doesn’t mind shedding a lot of blood to get want he wants.  When he isn’t trying to outfox the terrorists, Banning has to prove to Speaker Trumbull that he is America’s last line of defense.  Pentagon General Edward Clegg (Robert Forster of “Jackie Brown”) argues with our hero every step of the way and demands that he stand down so that the Navy Seals can chopper in and take out the terrorists.  What Clegg doesn’t know is that the wicked Kang has planned for virtually every contingency. 

“Olympus Has Fallen” qualifies as Gerard Butler’s best action-thriller since “Law Abiding Citizen” (2009), and Fuqua’s film takes full advantage of a talented, top-notch cast, particularly Morgan Freeman.  In a smaller role as an egotistical Pentagon general, Robert Forster stands out, while Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser, and Ashley Judd make the most of their peripheral roles.  You can bet that America’s worst enemies will enjoy the set-up in “Olympus Has Fallen” more than they will the payoff. 

FILM REVIEW OF ''RED DAWN' (2012)

Although I ranked the original “Red Dawn” (1984) as a vintage Reagan-era action opus, freshman director Don Bradley’s supercharged, high-octane, remake starring Chris Hemsworth, Josh Peck, and Josh Hutcherson surpasses its predecessor on several counts.  The first “Red Dawn” depicted a Soviet invasion of a small Colorado town and the scrappy squad of high school teens who eventually ousted them with their hit-and-run guerrilla warfare.  Patrick Swayze starred in the original, and Charlie Sheen made his cinematic debut.  Anti-Communist, Cold War movies enjoyed a brief renaissance when “Red Dawn” came out.  Clint Eastwood’s “Firefox” (1982) about a washed-up Vietnam pilot who stole a top-secret Soviet stealth jet fighter represented a standard example of these films.  Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky IV” (1985) appeared a year after “Red Dawn” with the Italian Stallion swapping blows with a gigantic Soviet pugilist.  Meanwhile, James Bond had tangled with cunning Soviets in both “For Your Eyes Only” (1981) and “Octopussy” (1983).  The Soviets qualified as despicable B-movie villains, but the Americans defeated them despite any handicaps.  The last gasp of this sub-genre occurred during the 1980s, particularly after the bottom dropped out of the Evil Empire in 1989.  Comparatively, while Milius’ “Red Dawn” unfolded largely in a rural setting, the agile remake occurs in the urban setting of Spokane, Washington.  Bradley and scenarists Carl Ellsworth of “Disturbia” and Jeremy Passmore of “Special” haven’t departed drastically from the original screenplay that Kevin Reynolds of “Waterworld” and John Milius of “Flight of the Intruder” penned.  Whereas the original concluded with the defeat of the enemy and the end of World War III, the “Red Dawn” (***1/2 OUT OF ****) remake leaves the outcome of the action up in the air.  This remake is not as enigmatic about the fate of its protagonist as its predecessor was.  

Chris Hemsworth of "Thor" plays battle seasoned Marine Jed Eckert who comes home to Spokane after his tour of duty.  It seems Jed ran out not only on his father, Spokane Police Sergeant Tom Eckert (Brent Cullen), but also his impressionable younger brother Matt (Josh Peck of “Drillbit Taylor”) and left no messages.  Not long after Jed arrives home, the unexpected happens.  Enemy cargo planes crowd the sky, and paratroopers appear like a blizzard of snowflakes.  Jed, Matt, and their friend Robert (Josh Hutcherson of “The Hunger Games”) scramble for the safety of the family cabin in the woods.  Along the way, they pick up several others as they flee from the besieged city during a harrowing auto chase with the North Koreans in furious pursuit.  Eventually, Jed trains these teens from the bootstraps up into a lethal band of guerrillas.  Soon they become the bane of the North Koreans.  Everywhere our heroes go and devastate the North Koreans, they spray-paint wolverines on the walls.  Wolverines are the name of their high school football team.  No matter how fiercely North Korean District Leader Captain Cho (Will Yun Lee of “Die Another Day”) pursues them, Jed and company elude him at every turn.  One day our heroes join forces with three Marines dispatched to contact them.  Helicopter pilot Colonel Andy Tanner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of “The Losers”) and his two men explain they have been ordered to retrieve a top-secret communications unit that the enemy uses to safeguard its chain of command.  Jed and Matt clash when Matt takes advantage of an opportunity to rescue his girlfriend, Erica Martin (Isabel Lucas of “Immortals”), from a prison bus during a major tactical exercise. One of them dies because Matt goes rogue on the Wolverines.  Before long the North Korean bring in an imposing Russian military adviser who devises a way to track the Wolverines back to their lair.  Jed and Matt square off against each other about Matt’s irresponsible attitude.  Eventually, the two reach reconciliation before the North Koreans descend on them without warning.

One of the biggest criticisms about “Red Dawn” (1984) was its far-fetched premise.  A Soviet airborne invasion seemed dubious initially, and it seems even more implausible in the remake.  The Soviet Union emerged as our chief nemesis from the end of World War II and remained so until 1989.  Pitting a faction of fresh-faced kids against the Soviets isn’t nearly as improbable as pitting them against the North Koreans.  Mind you, nobody considers the North Koreans a serious threat compared with either Russia or China.  One of the strengths of the “Red Dawn” remake, however, is the way it makes the events that precipitate World War III seem credible.  Nevertheless, casting the North Koreans as our adversary remains lamentable.  Originally, the filmmakers cast the Red Chinese as our adversary.  Afterward, the studio changed their minds because China imports Hollywood’s product.  Consequently, the studio kept “Red Dawn” on the shelf for three years while they digitally altered the uniforms, insignia, and identity of the invading army.  Bradley and his writers make us abhor the North Koreans and cheer for the underdog heroes.  Freshman director Don Bradley, who supervised the stunts on “The Bourne” movies as well as “Spider-man 2” and “Spider-man 3,”stages the combat sequences with vigorous aplomb.  The teens look credible enough wielding some impressive firepower. Bradley doesn’t waste time either.  This “Red Dawn” clocks in considerably shorter than the Milius original. Some of the dialogue sounds quotable, particularly the remark about Marines regrouping in Hell.  Altogether, “Red Dawn” qualifies as another of those few remakes that overshadows the original.