A FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HIGHWAYMEN" (2019)

"Blind Side" director John Lee Hancock's authentic, Depression Era, road-trip, manhunt thriller "The Highwaymen," (*** OUT OF ****) co-starring Oscar-winning actor Kevin Costner and Oscar-nominated Woody Harrelson, serves as the flip side of the classic Warner Brothers' gangster epic "Bonnie & Clyde" (1967), with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Told from the perspective of the two seasoned manhunters who tracked down the bloodthirsty young Texas couple, "The Highwaymen" confines their quarry Bonnie & Clyde to the periphery of the mayhem, out-of-the-limelight, depicting them in either far-off shots or close-ups, so audiences cannot sympathize with these trigger-happy desperados who had gunned down policemen without a qualm. "Young Guns" scenarist John Fusco has provided far more history about this pugnacious pair in this Netflix movie than its celebrated theatrical predecessor. Often, when we see Bonnie, we are given only glimpses of her feet encased in ruby red shoes. She walks with a limp that she acquired after Clyde drove off a bridge under construction when he missed a detour. This mishap injured Bonnie so severely that she resorted to laudanum, a concoction of opium and alcohol, to relieve the agony until she died in May 1934 in a hail of gunfire from two former Texas Rangers--Frank Hamer and Manny Gault--along with a posse in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Throughout this chronicle of their pursuit, Hamer and Gault were amazed by the relative lack of height of the two criminals in comparison to the media attention that transformed them into titanic celebrities during what was termed 'the Public Enemy era' between 1931 and 1934. In the final scene, Hancock gives us a lingering glance of the two felons, looking like two clean-scrubbed, fashionably attired cherubs, with an arsenal of firearms at their fingertips.

As depicted in "The Highwaymen," the beginning of the end for the notorious duo started with a prison breakout that Bonnie & Clyde orchestrated to free accomplices from the Texas-based Eastham Prison Farm in 1934. Warden Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch of "Shutter Island") of the Texas Department of Corrections got the green light from Governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates of "Primary Colors") to hire Hamer to stop the crime spree of these two twentysomething renegades. Privately, Ferguson had nothing but contempt for the Texas Rangers, recently disbanded under a cloud of corruption, and warned her own duly appointed constabulary that they would face repercussions if the two former Rangers nabbed Bonnie & Clyde. Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner of "Dances with Wolves") comes out of retirement and accepts Simmons' offer despite the misgivings of his socialite wife. Hamer chooses an old friend and former Texas Ranger Benjamin Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson of "Natural Born Killers") to accompany him. Neither Hamer nor Gault is in good enough shape to chase a teenager around the block near Bonnie's mother's house. Hamer hasn't fired his revolver in such a long time that he cannot obliterate bottles with bullets. While immaculately dressed officers of the state of Texas as well as the FBI rely on the latest modern crime-fighting technology to pursue the elusive Bonnie & Clyde, Hamer counts on his frontier savvy about human nature and maps charting the couple's whereabouts to ferret them out. Comparatively, this evokes memories of the turn-of-the-century John Wayne western "Big Jake" (1971) where Wayne tracked down the dastards who kidnapped his grandson, while law enforcement handicapped by modern technology could do little despite their apparent advantages over him. Ultimately, Hamer and Gault put everybody, including FBI with their aerial searches, to shame. Essentially, our heroes qualify as underdogs who manage to triumph despite incredible odds to stop the Barrow gang.

Mind you, "The Highwaymen" certainly isn't the most exciting manhunt melodrama. At times, the going is mighty slow because Hamer and Gault painstakingly gather clues and develop leads based on their bloodhound instincts. Although most of the action involves Hamer and Gault, they have few encounters with Bonnie & Clyde until the finale. The scene that highlights best what our heroes must contend with occurs when they tail Bonnie & Clyde out of a town and then lose them in the middle of nowhere. Clyde careens off the highway into a barren field and swerves in circles around Hamer and Gault. Clyde churns up a blinding dust storm and loses the two Texas Rangers. Eventually, after he learns that the felons are cruising off for 'greener pastures,' Hamer decides to pursue them into Louisiana where the authorities have issued no warrants for their arrest. During the manhunt, Gault agonizes about his ability to shoot a woman. Later, they learn Bonnie Parker has been as just as cold-blooded and homicidal as Clyde. This is a far cry from the vintage Warner Brothers movie. Hamer follows a lead involving one of Clyde's accomplices in Louisiana. He cuts a deal with the father of one of Clyde's cronies that culminates in the inevitable ambush of the twosome. The posse catch Bonnie & Clyde as they approach their accomplice's father who is seeking roadside assistance. Reportedly, in real life, the posse poured so many volleys of gunfire into the couple that the barrage deafened them.

Clocking in at two hours and twelve minutes, "The Highwaymen" aims for the older demographic that loved "Unforgiven." Nevertheless, it ranks far above anything that Costner has made in many moons. Costner and Harrelson lend their considerable gravitas to Hancock's authentic looking film. The $49-million production does a commendable job of recreating the utter despair and destitution suffered by too many people during the Great Depression. Some critics and historians have accused Hamer of overstepping his authority after he shadowed Bonnie & Clyde into Louisiana, and he could have taken them alive. Hancock and Fusco show that Hamer was prepared to do whatever was necessary to kill the couple. Despite its impressive adherence to history, "The Highwaymen" will always lay in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Warner Brothers' classic, but it does provide greater insight into Bonnie & Clyde.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS" (2018)

The fiftysomething son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, Brian Henson may have thought everybody would laugh hysterically at the sight of his father’s “Sesame Street” Muppets wallowing in puppet sex, killing other puppets, and spewing R-rated “Scarface” obscenities.  Indeed, the production company behind “Sesame Street” sued STX Films for an early poster displaying the tagline: “No Sesame, All Street.” Mind you, none of the actual “Sesame Street” Muppet characters are ridiculed in Henson’s farce.  Nevertheless, The Sesame Workshop argued such advertising “deliberately confuses consumers into mistakenly believing that Sesame is associated with, has allowed, or has even endorsed or produced the movie and tarnishes Sesame’s brand.”  Judge Vernon Broderick threw the case out.  Although they lost the lawsuit, The Sesame Workshop must be elated that Henson’ abominable police procedural comedy “The Happytime Murders” (* OUT OF ****) bombed during its first week in release.  Forging a make-believe world where “meat sacks” and “felties” bump into each other, this lame laffer earned only a quarter of its $40-million budget. Puppets refer to humans as “meat sacks,” while humans call puppets “felties.” Comparisons between “The Happytime Murders” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), where cartoon characters co-existed with humans are inevitable.  Despite its top-notch CGI of Muppets ‘behaving badly’ and its celebrity cast, featuring Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, and Elizabeth Banks, this predictable, half-baked hokum should have been called “The Crappytime Murders.”  Basically, neither Henson nor scenarists Todd Berger and Dee Austin Robertson have conjured up enough sidesplitting jokes to weather its lowest-common-denominator 91 minutes.  Moreover, the jokes are neither shamelessly nor hilariously memorable.  If you’ve seen the trailer where puppets perform “Basic Instinct” sex and the guy squirts ‘silly-string’ semen, you’ve seen the most provocative scene.  Another scene with a Dominatrix Dalmatian whipping a semi-nude, tied-down fireman while yelping, “I'm gonna piss on you like a fire hydrant” is more idiotic than erotic. 

 

This whodunit takes place in the seedy underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles.  Mankind has marginalized puppets as second-class citizens, and the filmmakers cannot resist exposing the racism with which humans belittle puppets. The action concerns the puppets who starred in “The Happytime Gang,” a popular 1990’s kiddie show. Humans embraced this groundbreaking sit-com about puppets, and puppets attracted greater sympathy from humans.  Decades afterward, the lucrative syndication rights for the show are up for grabs.  Now, a serial slayer is stalking and knocking-off the seven puppet cast members one-by-one.  Lieutenant Banning of the LAPD (Leslie David Baker of “Elizabethtown”) assigns former police detective Phil Phillips (long-time Muppeteer vet Bill Barretta) to serve as a consultant for his former partner, Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy of “Identity Thief”), to solve these homicides.  Traces of bad blood linger between Phil and Connie.  For the record, Phil is a sky-blue Muppet with black hair who resembles former “Late Late Show” talk host Tom Synder, and he doesn’t mind kicking the crap out of anybody.  Phil was a rising star in the LAPD, until a pistol-packing puppet took Connie hostage in a stand-off.  Phil fired at the perpetrator, but his bullet ricocheted and killed an innocent bystander.  Connie caught a slug in the liver when she disarmed her truculent captor.  Desperately, Phil rushed her to the nearest medical facility, and it turned out to be a puppet hospital.  Although the puppet doctor refused to operate on a human, Phil waved the muzzle of his service revolver under his nose.  Since acquiring a felt liver, Connie contends with many of the afflictions puppets suffer on a daily basis. Puppets crave sugar as if it were cocaine, and Connie has dozens of Maple Syrup bottles chilling in her fridge.  

Now, Phil ekes out a living as a private investigator. One day, switch-hitting, nympho puppet Sandra White (Dorien Davies) slinks into his office.  She hires Phil to thwart blackmailers demanding $350-thousand from her.  The first place Phil heads is a smut shop.  He is trying to trace the cut-out letters in the blackmail note to a porno magazine.  Meantime, a masked gunman enters the store, kills the owner and his two employees, who were staging a porno about an octopus milking a slutty dairy cow with his tentacles.  The gunman blows their felt heads off with a shotgun.  BLAM!  BLAM!  During this blazing mayhem, Phil occupied himself in the smut owner’s office, scrutinizing a list of suspects who might have clipped letters from the porno magazine for Sandra’s blackmail message.  Nevertheless, the LAPD treat Phil as ‘a person of interest’ despite his story that he heard nothing in the owner’s office.  Now, Phil is on the lam, and Connie is struggling to protect him, while they ferret out clues to the identities of the killers.

Comparably, “The Happytime Murders” isn’t nearly as rude, crude, and offensive as Peter Jackson’s “Meet the Feebles” (1989), Trey Parker’s “Team America: World Police” (2004), and Seth MacFarlane’s two “Ted” comedies with Mark Walhberg.  Mind you, the prospect of a “Happytime Murders” sequel is probably as infinitesimal as “Ted 3.”  Sadly, Henson and his writers provide a far from adequate history about the origins of this strange new world where puppets talk.  Principally, when did the Muppets become sentient?  Sure, these questions may not bother you, but some explanation should have been offered.  We watch puppets play cards, orchestrate drive-by shootings, and generally act like criminals.  Puppet die violently in this murder-riddled melodrama. Bullets blow the stuffing out of these puppets when dogs aren’t mistaking them for chew toys. The puppet work is probably some of the best.  Publicity material for “The Happytime Murders” reveals that Henson and company fashioned about 125 Muppet-like puppets for it.  Indeed, the interaction between the actors and the puppets looks appropriately goofy.  While she is cast as the top-billed detective, Melissa McCarthy plays second banana to Phil. Maya Rudolph steals every scene as Phil’s radiant secretary ‘Bubbles’ who can pick locks. Neither trailblazing nor sharp-edged enough as a satire, “The Happytime Murders” scrapes the bottom of the barrel with little to show for it.

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 ''THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD" (2017)

As the summer doldrums descend upon us with the impending change of the seasons, it is reassuring Hollywood has produced a genuinely entertaining action comedy to tide us over until the major Thanksgiving and Christmas releases.   Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson make a charismatic combo with no love lost for each other in the fast-paced but formulaic thriller “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” (***1/2 out of ****) co-starring Gary Oldman and Salma Hayek.  “Expendables 3” director Patrick Hughes proves not only that he can orchestrate some extraordinary stunts involving vehicular mayhem on a modest $30-million budget, but he also gets inspired performances from his gifted cast.  Indeed, you’ve seen variations of “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” many times before in road pictures about mismatched heroes, such as the two “48 HRS” movies, “The Rundown,” “The Rookie,” the “Rush Hour” trilogy, the “Lethal Weapon” series, “The Nice Guys,” and “Midnight Run.”  This adrenalin-laced saga benefits from catchy dialogue courtesy of “Fire with Fire” scenarist Tim O’Connor who gives everybody quotable lines peppered with flavorful profanity as well as a plot sizzling with surprises galore.  Of course, you know Ryan Reynolds is going to deliver Samuel L. Jackson as a witness to testify against villainous Gary Oldman before the deadline when the latter can be cleared off all charges against his murderous Eastern European regime.  The destination isn’t as much a revelation as the rollercoaster ride that everybody takes to arrive there in the nick of time.  All too often movies like “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” lose steam somewhere in the middle, but Australian director Patrick Hughes maintains the momentum throughout its 118 minutes.  The gauntlet that our bickering heroic pair must negotiate keeps challenging them right up until to the last second. Happily, the gals in this slam-bang, grudge match aren’t destitute damsels-in-distress, but babes that can shoot straight, smash testicles with their feet, and rival the guys with their profanity.  Clearly, sensitive souls searching for philosophical insights about life’s mysteries should shun this implausible but entertaining nonsense.

Debonair Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds of “Deadpool”) is at the top of his game as an elite triple-A bodyguard who will shield any scoundrel who can afford his services.  Bryce knows all the tricks of the trade.  As “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” unfolds, our clean-shaven, well-dressed, suit and tie executive has escorted a notorious Japanese arms dealer, Kurosawa (Tsuwayuki Saotome of “London Has Fallen”), to the airport to bid him farewell when a random shot out of the blue obliterates the arms dealer as the latter is peering out the window of his jet at Bryce.  Our protagonist is stunned beyond expression and watches as his bodyguard service folds.  Initially, Bryce blames his girlfriend, Interpol Agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung of “Gods of Egypt”), for her lack of discretion. Michael believes Amelia leaked word about the Japanese arms dealer’s presence.  They separate over this breach.  Meantime, genocidal Belarusian dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman of “True Romance”), is on trial at The Hague in the Netherlands for international human rights violations.  As the trial winds down to its inevitable conclusion, the prosecution cannot seem to keep its’ witnesses alive long enough for them to testify.  The last man scheduled to take the stand against Dukhovich is the world’s deadliest hitman, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson of “Pulp Fiction”), who refused an offer from him.  Simply said, Kincaid doesn’t murder innocent women and children. He has irrefutable evidence which will seal Dukhovich’s fate.  Basically, Kincaid has cut a deal with the prosecutor to talk if she will release his wife, Sonia Kincaid (Salma Hayek of “Everly”), from an Amsterdam prison.  As Kincaid later tells Sonia, he doesn’t care if they send him to prison because there isn’t a prison secure enough to hold him.

Interpol sets out to haul Kincaid from Manchester, England, under a heavily armed guard to The Hague.  An informer within the ranks, however, tips off Dukhovich’s top assassin, Ivan (Yuri Kolokolnikov of “Game of Thrones”), about the route.  Ivan’s trigger-happy henchmen ambush the Interpol van and wipe out everybody but Amelia and Kincaid. Kincaid catches a slug in the leg before Amelia and he elude the killers.  She escorts Kincaid to a safehouse where he digs the bullet out of his calf as if he were Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo and bandages himself.  Afterward, Kincaid refuses flatly to cooperate with Interpol.  Reluctantly, Amelia swallows her pride and resorts to Michael for help.  At first, he wants nothing to do with this suicidal kiss of death exercise.  Nevertheless, he caves in to his desperate ex-girlfriend’s pleas.  No sooner have Michael and Kincaid met than they are shoving pistols in each other’s faces. “My job is to keep you out of harm’s way,” Michael reminds Kincaid. “I am harm’s way,” Jackson retorts defiantly.  Since his near miss with death during the ambush, Kincaid has gone to packing a pistol.  As it turns out, Michael and Kincaid discover they are old adversaries, and they spend the rest of “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” swapping insults when they aren’t whittling down the army of gunmen that outnumbers them. 

“The Hitman’s Bodyguard” indulges in everything action movie fans crave.  Director Patrick Hughes knows better than to let the expository dialogue scenes interfere with the plethora of shooting and killing.  The body count escalates into double-digits, and Kincaid himself knocks off almost thirty gunmen.  Although our heroes cannot perish, life is hardly a picnic as they dodge one barrage after another. Half of the time, Kincaid and Michael are working against each other. For example, Kincaid stomps the brakes during a careening car chase and a surprised Michael performs a header through the windshield but regains his footing without missing a stride.  Ironically, the relationship between them improves as the odds against their survival worsen.  Meanwhile, Gary Oldman arouses our wrath as an appropriately despicable villain who kills without a qualm.  Villains must be hard-boiled in thrillers.  Despite its familiarity, “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” delivers everything that makes an action movie unforgettable!