FILM REVIEW OF ''AMERICAN ASSASSIN" (2017)

You’d think with gifted writers like Stephen Schiff, who wrote “True Crime” and “Lolita,” Michael Finch who penned “Hitman: Agent 47” and “The November Man,” and Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz who teamed up for “Defiance” and “The Last Samurai,” that “American Assassin,” (**1/2 OUT OF ****) with “Maze Runner” star Dylan O’Brien, would have rivaled the James Bond movies and the Jason Bourne franchise as an international terrorist thriller.  Indeed, a sturdy cast gives their best, particularly Michael Keaton who radiates throughout, while the youthful O’Brien has grown up sufficiently so he appears credible as a vengeful adult.  Nevertheless, mediocre scripting sabotages “American Assassin.”  The chief problem lies with its bland hero.  Cinematic heroes should stand out.  As the gung-ho, ‘go-out-and-kill-all-terrorists-and-come-back-alive,’ O’Brien is given little with which to forge a charismatic character. Basically, Mitch Rapp qualifies as an adequate but nondescript hero.  The only reason we feel sympathetic toward him is the tragedy involving his fiancée’s death; this now fuels his every waking moment.  Conversely, as CIA survivalist specialist Stan Hurley who trains black ops agents, Michael Keaton energizes every scene with his brazen bravado.  You have fun watching Keaton soak up every second whether he is shooting at an enemy or withstanding the villain as the latter tortures him.  Similarly, as the evil villain, Taylor Kitsch is almost as captivating as Keaton.  Furthermore, he is the best kind of villain who manages to stay one step ahead of the heroes and keeps surprising us and them.  Adversaries like Keaton’s trainer and Kitsch’s terrorist make O’Brien’s Mitch Rapp look like crap.  Happily, “12 and Holding” director Michael Cuesta keeps things moving so swiftly that it is possible to overlook the colorless but driven hero.  Little of this ambitious plot, however, is original.  “American Assassin” appropriates characters and predicaments from earlier movies, specifically like “Black Sunday” (1977) “The Amateur” (1981), “The Peacemaker” (1997), and “Munich” (2005) about villains with nuclear warheads.

Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) is vacationing in sunny Ibiza, Spain, with his beautiful, blonde, bikini-clad girlfriend Katrina (newcomer Charlotte Vega) when he surprises her with a marriage proposal.  Suddenly, murderous Islamist jihadists shatter their happiness and shoot everybody in sight.  The terrorists wound Mitch twice, and by the time that he reaches his fiancée, she is dead.  Over a year later, Mitch has learned to defend himself with his bare hands, practiced enough with firearms until he can obliterate bullseyes, and learned enough about his Middle-East adversaries so he can infiltrate their cells.  Little does our hero know CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan of “Love & Basketball”) has had him under surveillance.  Eventually, Mitch tracks down the monster who orchestrated the bloody Ibiza beach massacre, Adnan Al-Mansur (Shahid Ahmed of “Syriana”), to Tripoli, Libya.  Mitch has just gotten to meet Al-Mansur when CIA agents charge into the room and blast the terrorists.  Mitch watches in horror as Mansur dies from a shot in the head. This doesn’t keep Mitch from stabbing Al-Mansur’s corpse from repeatedly until the Americans drag him off the body.  The CIA keeps Mitch on ice for 30 days until Kennedy convinces CIA Director Thomas Stansfield (David Suchet of “Agatha Christie's Poirot”) to allow Mitch to join the Agency.  Initially, former Navy Seal veteran Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton of “The Founder”) abhors the prospect of training a civilian.  Nevertheless, Mitch emerges at the top of his class, despite all of Hurley’s dirty tricks to run him off.  The action comes to boil when the Agency learns about the theft of weapons grade plutonium from an off-line Russian nuclear facility.  Worse, Hurley recognizes the thief as an ex-CIA agent, referred to as Ghost (Taylor Kitsch of “John Carter of Mars”), left behind to die on a mission.  Miraculously, Ghost survived and plans to use the plutonium as payback to construct an atomic bomb.  Ghost double-crosses everybody along the way who helped build the bomb, and CIA don’t discover his plan until it is almost too late to thwart him.

If you’ve read Vince Flynn’s bestseller, you’ll know director Michael Cuesta and his writers have scrapped the novel’s plot.  Indeed, they have preserved certain scenes, primarily the boot camp and the torture scenes.  The plot about Stan’s former student Ghost is a figment entirely of the screenwriters’ imagination.  Ghost doesn’t exist in the novel.  Instead of a saboteur like Ghost in the film, our heroes contend with Middle Eastern regimes clashing with each other in bombed-out Beirut.  While an entirely different character tortured Stan in the novel, the villain suffers the same fate as Ghost does in the movie.  Letting down his guard momentarily, the torturer gives Stan the chance to chew off a piece of his ear.  Comparably, Flynn dispatched Rapp and Hurley to Europe to kill an amoral banker who had been managing millions of dollars for the terrorists as well as Russian espionage agents in Moscow.  Further, Mitch’s girlfriend didn’t die on the beach in Flynn’s novel.  Instead, she died aboard the doomed Pan Am flight 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.  Mind you, sticking Mitch and his fiancée together on the same beach gives our protagonist greater incentive to embark on a “Death Wish” style revenge spree since he saw her die.  Obviously, staging the beach massacre was easier than generating a CGI model of the Pan Am jetliner exploding.  The Mitch in Flynn’s novel didn’t experience his girlfriend’s death first-hand as his cinematic counterpart.  Most of the last part of the novel occurred in Beirut where terrorists abduct Stan, and Mitch launches a rescue mission.  The grand finale in the film occurs in the Atlantic, and Ghost is playing for far higher stakes than his counterparts in the novel.  Altogether, Schiff, Finch, Zwick, and Herskovitz have done an exemplary job of ramping up more larger-than-life derring-do, and Mitch takes greater initiative in his efforts to carry out his mission.  Although competently-made and fast-paced, the rated-R “American Assassin” is still far too derivative to rank as memorable.

FILM REVIEW OF ''KIDNAP'' (2017)

Halle Berry lets nothing stop her in “Pusher” director Luis Prieto’s “Kidnap” (*** OUT OF ****) when two predatory rednecks target her six-year old son for abduction in contemporary Louisiana.  This white-knuckled, adrenaline-laced, highway thriller about a mad mom in hot pursuit who refuses to quit is reminiscent of an earlier Halle Berry movie “The Call” (2013) where she portrayed a veteran 911 operator troubled about the welfare of an abducted teenage girl. “The Call” heroine ultimately teamed up with the victim to wreak vengeance on the murderous dastard who had abducted her.  Similarly, Berry is just as driven to catch up with her son’s kidnappers, no matter what the police advise her.  At one point, a policewoman urges her to wait for the authorities to intervene.  Our protagonist relents momentarily until she notices the glut of child abduction posters on a nearby bulletin board and the years that those children have been missing. Mind you, “Kidnap” is one of those contrived, but entertaining Hollywood thrillers where the police are either off elsewhere when needed or useless when involved.  Ultimately, they show up, but they are too late to make a difference.  Nevertheless, in dramatic terms, their last-minute arrival puts the burden on the waitress mom, facing her own child custody battle with her ex-husband and his girlfriend.  When we see Berry for the first time, she is calm and collected. Before “Kidnap” concludes, she is both disheveled and desperate in her efforts to rescue her son.

In a shrewd but calculated effort to endear Karla Dyson’s son Frankie (newcomer Sage Correa) to audiences, director Luis Prieto has appropriated real-life video of the adorable toddler from Correa’s parents.  The prologue in “Kidnap” shows Frankie as a lovable little fellow.  When the story unfolds, he is six-years old, but still lovable.  Frankie is coloring pictures in the restaurant where Karla (Halle Berry of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”) works as a waitress, serving up dishes to diners who aren’t happy.  Sadly, Karla isn’t happy either because she was supposed to have gotten off her shift so she could take Frankie to the city park.  No sooner does she have Frankie at the park than her attorney phones her about her ex-husband’s plans to take her son away from her.  All the racket going on around Karla at the park interferes with her concentration.  She steps away briefly from Frankie to tell her attorney that nobody is going to take her son away from her.  During these short-lived moments, she loses sight of Frankie, and then spots an obese, white woman, Margo (newcomer Chris McGinn), dragging him into her late 1980s’ Green Ford Mustang with a bra over the grille.  Karla scrambles after them, seizes the luggage rack bars atop the car-roof, and is dragged along until the accelerating vehicle jars her hands loose.  Charging off to her red minivan, she drops her cell phone in the street and careens out of the park on the bumper of the Mustang.  As she closes on after them, these fiends hurl everything in the trunk of the Mustang at her.  Happily, Karla swerves out of the path of the debris, but some motorists aren’t so fortunate.  One vehicle tumbles sideways after a spare tire slams into it.  Eventually, the kidnappers hang Frankie’s head out of the passenger’s side door and hold a knife to this throat.  Reluctantly, Karla backs off, but she doesn’t give up her pursuit as easily as the abductors reckoned.

Things complicate quickly when Karla attracts the attention of a motorcycle police officer.  Initially, the cop orders Karla to pull over, but Karla keeps pointing at the Mustang.  Eventually, the cop gets the message, but he finds himself crushed between the recklessly driven Mustang and Karla’s red minivan.  The two cars plow off the highway and onto a grass median where the injured cop crashes his bike.  Karla comes face to face with the kidnappers and tries to bargain with them.  She tosses them her wallet with her credit cards and gives them her pin number in exchange for her son’s life. The tall, lanky, male redneck driver, Terry (Lew Temple of “Lawless”), takes her wallet.  Moments later Karla freaks out when Terry’s mother emerges from the Mustang with the wallet and suggests that Karla take her to the bank to withdraw $10-grand for Frankie.  Naturally, you would never let such a repugnant woman share the same car with you.  Margo slides into the back seat so she can control Karla.  While cruising through an underground, one-lane tunnel, Karla realizes her mistake, and the two women tangle like tigers.  Twisting Karla’s side belt around her neck, Margo strangles her.  Karla ditches Margo, but this isn’t the last that she’ll see of this despicable dame.

Basically, “Kidnap” puts us in the passenger’s seat with Karla as she chases the villains.  Initially, she has little luck catching up with them.  The filmmakers refrain from showing us what little Frankie is enduring until the end when the tension really comes to a boil.  Director Luis Prieto doesn’t pull too many punches because you know our heroine is going to rescue her son.  Nevertheless, our heroine must deal with one infuriating setback after another.  Chiefly, the villains are hopelessly unsavory and have no qualms about endangering innocent bystanders.  Indeed, one pedestrian gets in Terry’s way, and he smashes into her, somersaulting her off the windshield of his stolen car.  Not even the sight of a woman crumpled up on the asphalt in dire need of medical help distracts our brave heroine from letting her adversary escape from her!  Prieto keeps his camera focused tightly on Karla so she is up in our face for the duration of the harrowing chase.  You’ll be pulling your hair out by the roots at the unbearably suspenseful grand finale of “Kidnap” when our heroine finally tracks down Frankie! Clocking in at 95-minutes, “Kidnap” will keep you poised on the edge of your seat.

FILM REVIEW OF ''IDENTITY THIEF" (2013)

 

Jason Bateman contended with social media as a concerned father in the dramatic movie “Disconnect” where he discovered that his misfit son tried to commit suicide as a result of pictures that his teenaged son had posted on the Internet.  Now, Bateman plays another father in “Horrible Bosses” director Seth Gordon’s improbably but entertaining fish-out-of-water comedy “Identity Thief” with Melissa McCarthy.  Bateman is cast as father who loses his identity to a clever con artist over the telephone.  McCarthy plays the eponymous character with gusto.  “Scary Movie 3” scenarist Craig Mazin and Gordon have a field day pitting straight-laced Bateman against the comical McCarthy and humiliating him at every turn.  Eventually, these two emerge as an odd couple.  The ways they change during the course of the movie make “Identity Thief” (*** OUT OF ****) an engaging laffer.  You’ve got to love comedy, tolerate profanity, and resign yourself to sexually offensive situations to be able to laugh off what transpires.  While McCarthy hams it up as the cunning Diana, Bateman delivers a flawless, deadpan performance as a well-meaning milquetoast.  Morris Chestnut, Jon Favreau, John Cho, Robert Patrick, Eric Stonestreet, and Jonathan Banks contribute strong supporting performances.
 

This madcap comedy of errors finds our clueless, chumpster hero leaving his pregnant wife (Amanda Peet of "Sax and Violins") and two daughters in comfortable Denver, Colorado, to cruise south to Winter Park, Florida, where he hopes to persuade a gluttonous identity thief, Diana (Melissa McCarthy), to accompany him back to the City of the Plains.  Early in "Identity Thief," Sandy Bigelow Patterson (Jason Bateman of “Smokin' Aces") answers the phone at work and makes the fatal mistake of divulging his full name, birthday, and social security number to the eponymous villainess who is posing as a computer security associate.  She embarks on a spending rampage and gets so plastered at a bar that the police take her to jail on a DUI. Naturally, she misses her court date.  Not surprisingly, the Winter Park police contact the Denver Police and they pull Sandy over and take him into custody.  Eventually, Sandy convinces Detective Reilly of the Denver Police that he is not the same person as the scam artist in Winter Park.  Reilly points that it may take between six months and a year for him to clear up his identity thief crisis.  Now, Sandy is in trouble with his boss, Daniel Casey (John Cho of "Star Trek") because of his huge credit card debt.  No sooner does our upright family guy protagonist track down his identity thief than he winds up helping her flee from two, gun-toting, Hispanic narcotics dealers.  Diana conspired with Marisol (Genesis Rodriguez of "Man on a Ledge") and Julian (Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. of “The Hangover”) to forge credit cards for them and their crime boss.  During their escape, Patterson claps handcuffs on her a la “The 39 Steps,” but Diana extracts herself without difficulty from the cuffs.  These two wind up helping each other while the villains head off in hot pursuit.  

Gordon and Mazin raise the ante with various plot complications during the road trip.  A notorious, big-time mobster behind bars, Paul (Jonathan Banks of “Beverly Hills Cop”) who is linked to Diana dispatches a hell-bent-for-leather hit man, Skiptracer (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2”), to eliminate Diana.  After Skiptracer abducts Diana, Sandy manages to run them off the road and Skiptracer’s van overturns during the collision.  Moments after Sandy gets Diana out of the van, a semi-truck demolishes Sandy’s car so they appropriate Skiptracer’s van.  The van overheats on them, and Sandy and Diana find themselves on foot.  They wind up lost in the woods and camp out until first light.  While Sandy tries to sleep, a snake slithers up one pants-leg.  The snake scene in the woods will keep you laughing, even if the snake is CGI.  Watching Diana trying to drive the serpent off with a flame stick is amusing, too.  However, things turn truly zany when the snake bites Sandy on the neck! Diana’s favorite move is to smash her adversary’s throat with her fist.

The chief problem with “Identity Thief” is its messy morality. Our protagonist tells his daughter at the outset of the action that bad behavior is punished, but he engages in such antics.  Meanwhile, as much as our heroine tries to change her stripes, Diana never entirely renounces her amoral ways.  At least one plot line involving Jonathan Banks’ incarnated criminal is never taken advantage of and the fates of three villains sent to kill McCarthy are left unraveled. McCarthy’s riotous shenanigans and Bateman’s straight-arrow businessman and the charisma that they generate salvage this otherwise formulaic saga.