FILM REVIEW OF ''THE RELENTLESS FOUR"

When Texas Ranger Sam Garrett (Adam West of "Batman") thwarts a quartet of greedy bounty hunters from collecting the loot on recently cleared outlaw Rex Calhoun, these maniacal manhunters frame him for the death of a cattle baron. The title of this medium-budget spaghetti western, “The Relentless Four” (**1/2 out of ****)refers to these trigger-happy, homicidal hombres. They are such low-down skunks that after the shoot Calhoun, one of them shoots Garrett’s horse out from under him so that the Texas Ranger cannot get to town quick enough to inform the sheriff about Calhoun’s innocence. Nevertheless, the resourceful Garrett obtains a horse from an Indian in exchange for tobacco and manages to make it to town before the bounty hunters walk out the door with their ill-gotten gains. “Our paths will cross again,” vows an angry bounty hunter to Garrett before he tromps out the door with his compadres.

The biggest cattle baron in the territory, Jeffrey Anders (Roberto Camardiel of “For A Few Dollars More”), and his cowpokes show up in town, jubilantly firing their guns skyward because they have just concluded a 90 day drive. Anders promises to buy the first round of drinks for them. Anders received $20-thousand for his steers and plans to pay off his drovers. They all pile into the saloon, start drinking whiskey and dancing with the saloon gals. The cattle baron gets into a game of friendly poker with Garrett and loses money steadily until his headstrong wife and daughter arrive in town to take him back to the ranch. She allows him to continue his game in the buckboard with Sam and him using both the table and the chairs from the saloon. At the ranch, Garrett and the cattle baron keep on playing after everybody else has gone to bed.

Meanwhile, outside the ranch, the four scheming bounty hunters create a distraction that lures the cattle baron away from the game. The villains sneak into the house, clobber Sam unconscious, steal his six-gun, and use it to murder the cattle baron in cold blood. The wife and daughter as well as several cow hands awaken in time to see the leader of the bounty hunters storm off on Sam's white horse wearing Sam's Stetson and vest, so that they assume that Sam is the killer. The villains drench Sam with liquor, return his clothes and six-gun, and send him back to town unconscious and slumped over his horse. The next morning poor, ignorant Sam awakens with a sore head to find a hostile crowd massed outside of his hotel room hurling stones through his window. The sheriff arrests Sam, and a trial ensues where the court convicts Sam for the cattle baron's murder and sentences him to be hanged the following day.

Later that night, Sam escapes from jail using soap to make the floorboard slippery and a bluffing his way out of the cell with his finger jabbed in a deputy's back. The sheriff shows up in time to pull a gun on Sam, but somebody outside the jail uses a rifle to shoot the pistol out of the lawman's fist. Sam asks no questions and then hightails it. As it turns out, the man who wounded the sheriff is none other than the leader of the titular quartet. He persuades the cattle baron's widow to pay his three amigos and he a thousand dollars a piece to bring Sam back. The widow agrees to his terms, but she stipulates without qualification that Sam must be returned alive, so that she can watch him hang. The action swings back and forth as the villains capture Sam and he evades them, only to be recaptured and finally brought back to town. Eventually, Sam winds up having to face his date with the hangman's noose. Everybody watches in tense suspense as Sam swings and his body is trundled away in a wagon.

"The Relentless Four" resembles American westerns from the 1930s and 1940s when the hero tangled with villains who wanted to exact revenge on him for doing his duty either as a lawman, ranch foreman, or stagecoach driver. The elaborate plans that these villains concoct to pay Sam Garrett back are far-fetched. Breaking into a ranch house to stage a shooting, then incriminating the hero for the murder is like something that would have happened to John Wayne in one of his old Lone Star westerns. It is rather surprising that the head bounty hunter didn't kill the sheriff instead of just wound him. Our hero lives up to the standard western tradition because he wears a white Stetson. Furthermore, he doesn’t consume alcohol, a characteristic that the writers weave into the dialogue on two occasions.

Nevertheless, the five "Relentless Four" scenarists pull a fast one at the end that will have you scratching your heads in befuddlement, especially the concluding scene where they let us in on the fake hanging. One-time only writer Manuel Marcello De Caso, Federico De Urrutia of "A Bullet for Sandoval," Marcello Fondato of "Blood & Black Lace," Manuel Sebares of "Hell's Brigade," and director Primo Zeglio of the Perry Rhodan sci-fi thriller "Mission Stardust" keep things twisting like a cyclone. In one scene, Sam holes up with a family when the bounty hunters ride in and demand to be fed. The ranch owner sends Sam out the back door with his gun, then re-enters his house where his wife and daughter are setting the table for the hungry bounty hunters. The leader spots the rancher's empty holster and notices a ring left over from a glass on the table and storms out of the house with his compadres firing their guns off as Sam tries to escape. Complicated as all get-out best describes this entertaining, often unconvincing oater where the greedy leader of the bounty hunters ultimately turns on his own men to get more cash. Clearly, "The Relentless Four" lives up to its title, because the bounty hunters are no slouches.

Unfortunately, the producers—probably as a cost-saving measure—hired somebody else dub Adam West's dialogue, so the future "Batman" TV star performs only the physical stuff. If you enjoy Italian westerns, "The Relentless Four" has a superb musical score from veteran composers Marcello Giombini & Franco Pisano. This gritty looking western appears to have been lensed on the same set that Sergio Leone used for "A Fistful of Dollars.” Miguel Fernandez Mila's wide-screen cinematography is pretty good, but you'll have to get a letter-boxed copy to appreciate it. The Encore Western Channel aired the version that I saw and presented it in full frame on with only the opening credits letter-boxed. Helmer Primo Zeglio was clearly no Sergio Leone, and it is not surprising that this dust raiser didn't do for Adam West what the Leone epics did for both Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef. Meanwhile, Adam West plays the role in a straightforward manner with no self-depreciating gestures.

FILM REVIEW OF ''GANG RELATED'' (1997)

Everything that can go wrong does go wrong for a couple of corrupt homicide cops in “Disorganized Crime” director Jim Kouf’s “Gang Related,” (*** out of ****) an ensemble police procedural thriller that springs one startling surprise after another on its unsuspecting audience. This above-average but unsavory chronicle of a crime coming unraveled boasts a talented cast in a heavyweight tragicomedy of errors. What elevates “Gang Related” several notches above the ordinary gangsta epic is the film’s old-fashioned portrayal of good and evil in a morally ordered universe where everybody must atone for their sins. The filmmakers have borrowed elements as diverse as O’Henry’s classic comeuppance storytelling style and combined it with bits and pieces from big-budgeted movies such as William Friedkin’s “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985) and Joseph Ruben’s “Money Train” (1995). Indeed, Kouf’s accomplished piece of filmmaking looks like the flip side of Peter Hyams’ buddy cop movie “Running Scared” with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines, although the cops that Crystal and Hines played were good guys to the core.

The characters in “Gang Related” serve as the pawns of a serpentine plot. None of them exert control over what transpires and the irony of this isn’t lost on audiences. Few ensemble movies reach the big screen anymore, so this proves both surprising and gratifying to see such a polished effort like this one. Writer & director Jim Kouf produced a similar saga with his 1989 crime spoof “Disorganized Crime.” Everything went awry for a gang of thieves in “Disorganized Crime.” In “Gang Related,” everything goes awry, too, but for the police. The chief difference is that Kouf plays it straight right down the line. Although the parable teeters at times on travesty, Kouf never shifts the accent to buffoonery. You know something is different, too, when a couple marquee stars shows up in minor of crucial roles. You can barely recognize Dennis Quaid at first as a remorseful derelict and James Earl Jones’s arrival occurs straight out of the blue.

As Detective Frank DaVinci and Rodriguez, James Belushi and Tupac Shakur create a credibly chummy chemistry. Arguing that drug dealers constitute the scum of society, they set them up for buys, knock them off, and then attribute the murders to gangs. According to DaVinci, "Drug dealers don't qualify as people. Never did, never will." DaVinci and Rodriguez have iced nine drug dealers with this reliable method of operation, using narcotics secretly liberated then later returned to the police evidence room. DaVinci and Rodriguez get the shock of their lives when they learn that their latest victim, Lionel Hudd (Kool Moe Dee of “Panther”), was an undercover D.E.A. agent. Moreover, Hudd’s superior, Agent Richard Simms (Gary Cole), is determined to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of Hudd’s murder and applies a lot of heat on the L.A.P.D. to find a suspect. Neither detective wants to confess to the crime so they search for a patsy. Several patsies don’t pan out because they have iron-clad alibis, but this doesn’t stop our unscrupulous protagonists from trying to set them up. They bring them into an interrogation room and slide the murder weapon across the desk at them and these poor fools catch the gun and wind up handling. One examines the revolver in detail and then cleverly wipes it clean and sends it sliding back at the cops. Eventually, DaVinci settles on a street bum. No sooner has Joe Doe (Dennis Quaid of “The Rookie”) been arrested than it turns out that he is a rich man thought dead for seven years. It seems that William Daine McCall, son of the founder of a major telecommunication corporation, was a celebrated surgeon who stepped out on his wife with a nurse. An argument between McCall and his wife prompted her to fly into hysterics, enough so to take their two kids and leave their home. Tragically, about a mile from home, the wife and children died in a car accident and McCall goes on a bender. Meanwhile, things keep getting worse for our protagonists. They enlist the aid of a stripper named Cynthia Webb (Lela Rochon of “Waiting to Exhale”) as an eyewitness. It seems that DaVinci is banging her on the side when he is sleeping with his wife. Cynthia buckles in court, however, when defense attorney Arthur Baylor (James Earl Jones of “Clean Slate”) tears up her contrived story under careful cross-examination, and she admits to perjury. Pretty soon the relationship between DaVinci and Rodriguez begins to deteriorate because Rodriguez lacks DaVinci’s cold, calculating nerve to kill people without a qualm.

James Belushi of “Mr. Destiny” plays an out-and-out villain here in a change-of-pace casting. He invests his character with more depth than you would normally associate with him. At times, his performance is so charismatic that you want evil to triumph. In his final screen appearance, the late rapper Tupac Shakur shows that his artistry will be missed as much by music enthusiasts as moviegoers.

Writer & director Jim Kouf has breathed new life into a routine plot by standing it on its head. Half of the fun of “Gang Related” is watching DaVinci and Rodriguez dig themselves deeper the more that they try to dig themselves out of disaster. Usually, in a movie like “Gang Related,” the heroes are the guys who are in trouble, but neither DaVinci nor Rodriguez qualify as heroes. They only character with any shred of integrity here is Cynthia. When she commits perjury, she refuses to divulge the identities of her cohorts. That’s what makes Kouf’s police thriller different and that difference might alienate orthodox crime movie junkies who need a hero to cheer. The ending is absolutely terrific!

FILM REVIEW OF ''X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE" (2009)

Seldom does Hollywood produce a comic book prequel as potent and perfect as “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (**** out of ****), a no-holds-barred barrage of CGI visual effects, and brawny brain-dead, derring-do that will overwhelm you with its sheer extravagance in less than 120 minutes—actually a trim 107 minutes. “Tsotsi” director Gavin Hood and savvy scenarists David Benioff of “Troy” and Skip Woods of “Swordfish” shove enough testosterone into this larger-than-life spectacle to fuel an entire franchise. After the anemic as well as dismal closure that Brett Ratner’s “X-Men: Last Stand” provided the “X-Men” trilogy, “X-Men: Wolverine” brings you back to life like a shot of adrenalin to the heart. Reprising the role that make him a household name, a mutton-chopped Hugh Jackman wields the razor-sharp knuckle knives that he deploys like a Cuisinart in the original “X-Men” to slash and gash anybody and anything that gets in his way. Like any really good prequel, “Wolverine” brings the action full-circle so that we learn how Professor Charles Xavier wound up with many of the wards that he supervises in director Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” (2000). Mind you, “Wolverine” lacks the subtlety that distinguished the first two “X-Men” movies, but this prequel makes up for it with high-octane, slam-bang, edge-of-your-seat, action sequences that make your blood pump.

Essentially, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” is a melodrama about two mutants that traces their origins back to Canada's Northwest Territory in the year 1845. As the two half brothers, James Logan (Hugh Jackman of “Australia”) and his older, more unstable semi-sibling Victor Creed (Live Schreiber of “Scream”) flee from their family in Canada and seek refuge south in America after Logan kills the man that he believes is his father. Hood and his scribes spend more time probing the back story of the highly conflicted Logan from his turbulent childhood to his tragic romance with a school teacher. Nevertheless, every episode of Logan’s life entwines with that of his unruly brother who suffers from anger management issues. Yes, eventually, Victor will become known as ‘Sabretooth,’ but for now he is just Victor. The credit sequence depicts our pugnacious pair--Logan and Victor--displaying their extraordinary strength, nimble dexterity and protean ability to regenerate no matter how devastating their wounds as they wade through the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam. Logan exerts more control over his bestial nature, while Victor wallows in his blood lust for death and violence, even when it prompts him to turn on his own men.

In Vietnam, Victor plunges off the deep end. He murders innocent Vietnamese civilians as well as American G.I.s. The Army slaps both Logan and him in front of a firing squad. Of course, these indestructible killing machines cannot die from ordinary bullets. They survive the firing squad’s fusillade but find themselves chained up again until General William Stryker (a nefarious Danny Huston of “The Aviator” at his oiliest) persuades them to be "part of a special team with special privileges.” (Incidentally, Brian Cox played an older Stryker in “X-Men 2.”) This black-bag, covert operations unit called Team X consists of fellow mutants, including Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds of “Blade: Trinity”), Agent Zero (Eurasian newcomer Daniel Henney), Wraith (novice Will.i.Am), Fred J. Dukes/The Blob (Kevin Durand of “Smokin’ Aces”) and Bradley (Dominic Monaghan of TV’s “Lost”) and resembles a mutant “Magnificent Seven.” For the record, Wade Wilson is a wizard with a sword. Agent Zero handles pistols like a gunman from a John Woo shoot-up with Chow Yun-Fat. For example, after he empties both magazines in his automatic pistols, he drops the clips, sends his sidearms somersaulting into the air like Wild Bill Hickok, snatches two fresh clips from his belt, and jams them into the grips as the guns fall spinning into his fists. Wraith specializes in teleporting. He’s somewhere one second and another place a second later. Bradley handles electricity like a conjurer.

During a bloodbath of a massacre in Nigeria, Logan quits Team X and masquerades back home in Canada as a ordinary, everyday lumberjack who has settled down with a luscious schoolteacher Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins) with has a knack for getting people to do what she wants, including muscle-bound Logan. Meanwhile, Logan wants nothing to do with his angry half-brother, but the bond between Logan and Victor proves to be stronger than even they imagined. Moreover, Victor isn’t content to let Logan skip out on him and he sets out to track him down with predictable results that forces Logan to confront his bestial nature on grounds that he cannot control. The treacherous Stryker lures Logan back to his laboratory and convinces him to participate in his highly hush-hush program Weapon X and Logan is reborn as Wolverine with an impenetrable alloy known as adamantium that makes him indestructible. Raving like the usual mad scientist, Stryker informs everybody about how he is going to create an army of these killers, but he forgets that Logan can hear him. Logan succumbs to his beastly nature, transforms into Wolverine, bursts out of the tank, and takes off.

Director Gavin Hood attracted praise for his first effort “Tsotsi,” a formidable drama set in South Africa about a teenage hoodlum who discovered an infant and shielded it from the elements. Hood’s second movie “Rendition” with Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal withered, but “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” finds Hood back in top form. Hood stages several incredible as well as outrageous combat sequences between not only Wolverine and Victor but also Wolverine and other antagonists. The violence is the stuff of far-out fantasy with no relation to anything realistic. Hood manages to juggle multiple characters with ease so that we’re never confused about who is trying to smackdown whom. Marvel Comic’s purists may quibble about the liberties that Hood and his writers take with the source material, but “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” qualifies as a first-rate, old-fashioned smackdown that will keep you rooting for the hero through thick and thin.

Film Review of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" (1997)

A quartet of teenagers in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (*** out of ****) go for a joyride after dark on July fourth, accidentally hit a pedestrian, and then try to cover up their crime. This refreshingly well-written but grisly thriller about a sadistic slayer, the hapless teen victims, and a bloody fishhook has more going for it than you might expect. The success of “Scream” has whetted the appetites of both moviemakers and audiences for more entries in the teen slasher genre. Happily, “I Know” provides all the usual thrills and chills of “Scream,” but bristles with better plot twists, more calculating characters, a dynamic villain, and a slam-bang finale in the tradition of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.” Unhappily, first-time feature film director Jim Gillespie suppresses the more literate points in Kevin Williamson’s inventive, psychological script to promote the more commercial elements of guts, gore, and gruesomeness.

Set in a cozy North Carolina fishing hamlet, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” chronicles the exploits of Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry William Cox (Ryan Phillippe) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) on a final summer fling before they either leave for college or get real jobs. Leggy, good-looking Helen wins a local beauty pageant, and the teens party hardy on a lonely stretch of beach with the surf crashing in the background. When they aren’t concocting campfire tales about a crafty killer, they’re doing dirty deeds in the dunes. Binge-drinking Barry gets too sloshed to drive his shiny new BMW so tee-totalling Ray takes the wheel. On the way home, Barry’s berserk drinking antics distract Ray. Suddenly, before Ray can swerve, a man steps in front of the headlights. Smashing into the guy, the car careens to a halt, and the teens find his bloody body in a ditch. Too freaked out to verify his death or alert the authorities, our protagonists argue briefly before they deposit the body in the briny deep. They hope for the best, but their efforts only yield the worst.

Julie, Helen, Barry, and Ray make a pact: they will carry their secret to the grave. Little do they realize how appropriately deadly such a vow turns out for them. Gradually, these best friends grow apart. A year after the incident, Julie suffers the most trauma from the collision. Reluctantly, she comes home for the summer and receives the shock of her life. An anonymous letter addressed to her contains the simple but devastating message: “I know what you did last summer.” Guilt grips her like an icy cold fist. Julie wants to call the police despite the consequences. Instead, she allows herself to be argued down, and she fears now that her life may be the price of her silence. Scary things start to happen. Helen, who treasured her long blonde hair, awakens one morning to find her golden tresses shorn and a threat scrawled in lipstick on her bedroom mirror. The cocksure Barry loses his football letter jacket, and the killer runs Barry’s automobile down into the jock’s own house. Finally, Julie discovers a body packed in the trunk of her car. Barry suspects that Ray is the villain.

Meanwhile, the clear-minded Julie tries to identify the guy they hit. Helen and Julie take a trip into the sticks. They visit Melissa Egan (Anne Heche of “Donny Brasco”) who lives alone and spends most of her day carving up dead farm animals. According to newspaper reports, the body of Melissa’s brother washed up not long after the hit and run, but the police attribute the boy’s death to drowning. Our heroines want to find out if Melissa’s brother might have had a vigilante for a friend. Once again the incriminating finger points at Ray. If “I Know” appears to imitate “Scream,” scenarist Kevin Williamson receives both the blame and the credit. After all, he wrote both movies. He has as much fun here bashing those eerie old campfire tales as he had busting slasher movies in “Scream.” The film opens with a legitimate, real-life predicament before it degenerates into an adrenalin gouge-and-gut thriller. These teens worry more about contacting the authorities than they do about disposing of a body. Not only has Williamson penned a tense, entertaining script, he has also pressed a few politically correct buttons. The movie suggests that only the worst things can happen when teens drink and drive. The peer pressure that teenagers endure is rampant, and they must take responsibility for their actions. Director Gillespie pushes most of these worthwhile didactic themes into the shadows.

The “I Know Who You Killed Last Summer” villain dresses in high sinister fashion as a fisherman. Attired in an oilskin slicker, rubber boots, and a southwester, he looks like a duster-clad cowboy from a spaghetti western crossed with “Star War” villain Darth Vader. The chilling quality of the masquerade is that we never see whose face lurks behind the disguise, and we never hear his voice. The huge diabolical fishhook that our fiend brandishes makes lugging corpses around on its curved, wicked point look relatively easy. Williamson has created an original killer with a theatrical sense of style. Many slasher movie villains have their own musical theme that announces their presence. The “I Know” villain fiddles with one of his villain’s trinkets. The distinctive sound that it produces not only serves as the killer’s leitmotif, but also apprises us of the fiend’s presence.

Little can be said about the rest of the story without blowing its impact. Gillespie and Williamson save the big revelation near the end, and it’s something that you’ll never guess. Meanwhile, Gillespie deploys all those staple slasher movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than movie subterfuges to distract audiences from figuring out the story ahead of time. Although the murders show moderate amounts of blood, the filmmakers want to shock rather than sicken. Gillespie stages each death with dramatic emphasis as well as a little irony. Disemboweled body parts are for the most part left off-screen to enliven the imagination. One character nearly reaches safety before the fisherman eviscerates her in an alley not more than ten feet from a marching band parading down the street.

A cast of unknowns credibly acquits itself. Hewitt brings a richly textured vulnerability to Julie. Caught between doing what is right and what her teenage friends think is right creates a painful dilemma for her that everybody has confronted. As much as Julie wants to believe that going to the police was the appropriate thing to do, she realizes that the smart thing now is to kill their killer before they die. As Helen, Gellar (looking a lot like Mira Sorvino) plays a wiser-than-average bimbo. The rivalry between Helen and her sister Elsa is one of the film’s neater nuances. Phillippe vividly captures the snobbish attitude of his star football character Barry who refuses to let anybody intimidate him, while Prinze as Ray is the least interesting but more heroic of the foursome. As Benjamin Willis, Muse Watson of “Sommersby” never needs worry about being cast as a hard-bitten character in future movies.

“I Know What You Did Last Summer’ generates more than enough action, suspense and horror. Credit goes to British lenser Denis Crossman. His dark, haunting photography, and the placement of his cameras enhance the horror. John Debney’s electrifying music score whips up just the right amount of frenzy to put you on the edge of your seat for the jolt and volts that Gillespie conjures up. This is the kind of movie where the women in the audience will scream because things jump out from nowhere to frighten them.

Minor problems afflict the film. Some dialogue gets drowned out by the music and the sound effects. The red herring subplot involving a pathetic looking backwoods girl seems incredibly preposterous. The fisherman villain may be the cleanest stalker in film history. Nobody can ever tell where he has struck, and the victims are literally kept on ice.

If you enjoy good scary movies, “I Know What You Did Last Summer” surpasses even the classic slashes, so you should not be disappointed. Enough surprises occur in the story to keep you guessing when you aren’t feeling paranoid. The evil fisherman is destined to take a place in the pantheon of movie murderers. Expect fisherman costumes to appear in the next year’s Halloween sales. Homicide has acquired a fresh look! In the tradition of “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” and the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, “I Know What You Did Last summer” unleashes a shocker ending that paves the way for an inevitable sequel.

FILM REVIEW OF ''TOPKAPI'' (1964)

Connecticut-born, HUAC blacklisted, director-in-exile Jules Dassin of “Brute Force” fame pokes fun at his earlier crime caper movie “Rififi” (French-1955) with “Topkapi,” a leisurely, light-hearted lark about an elaborate crime set in Constantinople in the early 1960s loosely based on an Eric Ambler’s novel “Light of Day.” “Topkapi” (**** out of ****) qualifies as one of the top ten heist capers of all time. Mind you, the filmmakers had to abide by the censorship rules of the day which dictated that crime could not pay. Adroitly, they skirt the issue so that realism never intrudes too serious on their amoral shenanigans. The actual heist itself is a breath-taking. Naturally, later filmmakers would imitate it.

Larcenous Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri of “Never On Sunday”) must steal a priceless sultan’s jewel-encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul. She induces a former lover, Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell of “Avalanche Express”), to plot the operation. A Swiss native who’s the epitome of efficiency and urbanity, Walter lays down several ground rules that he forces Elizabeth to accept. He demands that their accomplices all be amateurs without criminal records. Since they have no criminal records, they should be able to elude the world’s best policemen. He stipulates the three cardinal rules of thief. First, plot meticulously. Second, execute cleanly. Third, don’t get caught before, during, or afterward. Indeed, Walter doesn’t want anybody with a criminal record as a participant.

The first conspirator that Walter recruits is portly Cedric Page (Robert Morley of “Beat the Devil”) who is a genius with all things mechanical. He creates all sorts of toys in his studio, including a cute, little mechanical dog that walks and barks. He has a facsimile of a parrot that records voices and plays them back. He explains to Elizabeth and Walter that the museum boasts a complex alarm system. If you so much as bounce a ping-pong ball on the museum floor, it will trigger their sophisticated alarm system. Clearly, stealing the dagger cannot be accomplished with the usual smash and grab tactics of conventional crime thriller.

Instead, Walter concocts an intricate plan for entering the museum without touching off the alarms and he brings in a strong man, Hans Fisher (Jess Hahn of “Bad Man’s River”), and an aerial artist Giulio the Human Fly (Gilles Ségal of “Without Apparent Motive”), who work together in tandem. Rather than enter the museum in the obvious, ordinary way, the thieves plan to ascend from the roof. Next, Walter pulls in a con artist, Arthur Simon Simpson (Peter Ustinov), a small potatoes thief who takes advantage of tourists and looks for schmucks. Elizabeth and Walter hire him to take a Lincoln convertible across the border to Istanbul and leave the keys for a Mrs. Plimpton. Arthur is likeable enough because he is a bumbling thief. He is so cretinous that he doesn’t even realize that his Egyptian passport has expired so that when he tries to pass through customs, the Turks detain him, point out his expired passport, and then thoroughly search his automobile and discover a dismantled rifle and several grenades.

Initially, they accuse Arthur of being a terrorist, but he convinces them that he hasn’t a terrorist bone in his ample torso. The authorities accept his explanation that he is just ferrying the car across the border, but they still insist that he is part of a terrorist plot to kill their leaders in an important day not far off called Army Day. The Turkish authorities agree to release Arthur as long as he serves as their informant. They instruct him in how to pass messages to them without his bosses knowing about his perfidy. They tell him to hide his messages in a cigarette package that is empty and throw it away as litter and their agents shadowing him in a Volkswagen will retrieve them. Reluctantly, in over his head more than he could have imagined, Arthur has to go along with their plan.

The beauty of Danischewsky’s screenplay is the way she creates obstacles that not only the thieves but also the authorities encounter. Once Arthur delivers the car, he has no reason to continue as part of Walter’s well-thought out scenario. The authorities refuse to let Cedric drive the car because he is neither the owner nor does he have a driver’s license. Only the owner or a qualified driver, the police explain, can drive the car in Turkey. Cedric calls on Arthur and Walter has a new knot in his plan that he doesn’t like but must unravel for the success of the heist. The authorities are constantly on the tails of our thieves. Plans go further awry when Jess tries to get tough with Arthur and Arthur slams Jess’s hands in an iron grate, ruining them. Originally, the heist called for Jess to use his enormous strength to hold the ropes that they planned to use to suspend Giulio from the roof of the museum. The suspense escalates when Arthur accidentally reveals that the Turks suspect them of being terrorists, not thieves. Furthermore, the Turks—who keep them under constant surveillance—have taken many photos of them, only to learn that none of these people have a criminal dossier!

Dassin’s wife Melina Mercouri toplines a top-drawer cast, including a hilarious Peter Ustinov who received not only the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but also copped the Golden Laurel award, along with similar Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe nomination. Scenic and suspenseful and shot on actual locations, this spine-tingling tale about several intrepid thieves is a delight to watch, unless you are afflicted with attention-deficit-syndrome. Like its intricate crime, “Topkapi” spins out a lot of plot in “Battle of the Sexes” scenarist Monja Danischewsky’s screenplay that adds one character to Ambler’s original story and shuffles the others in order of priority. Nevertheless, you’ll quickly understand why Peter Ustinov walks off with top acting honors. He ushers in hilarity and bolsters the suspense with is dizzy antics.

Director Jules Dassin paces “Topkapi” for maximum suspense right up to the last five minutes when you still aren’t sure what’s going to transpire. Masterful entertainment with a delightful score by Manos Hadjidakis.

FILM REVIEW OF ''FIGHTING'' (2009)

The running joke about most movies made in New York City is that penny-pinching producers usually shoot spectacular aerial long vistas of the Big Apple and then lens everything else either in Canada or on a Hollywood back lot. If you're ever visited N.Y.C., you can spot the difference between the actual locale, usually unkempt and teeming with humanity, and the comparative tidiness of Toronto or an immaculate Hollywood soundstage. Award winning Sundance film director Dito Montiel of "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," shot his new movie "Fighting" (** out of ****) with Channing Tatum on the mean streets of ‘the city that never sleeps’ where Montiel grew up. The terrific authenticity of Gotham, however, cannot compensate for "Fighting's" punch-drunk plot about illegal street fighting.

If you've seen any of the dozens of movies since "Hard Times" (1975) with Charles Bronson," "Every Which Way But Loose" (1978) with Clint Eastwood, "Lionheart" (1990) with Jean Claude Van Damme," "Fight Club" (1999) with Edward Norton and “Snatch” with Brad Pit, about underground bare knuckles boxing, you've caught the cream of the crop. Generic from the get-go, "Fighting" amounts to little more than a sluggish knuckle-sandwich saga that telegraphs its every surprise far in advance.

Shawn MacArthur (Cullman, Alabama, native Channing Tatum of "Step Up") hasn't been in the Big Apple long. He earns his keep selling books on the sidewalk. The first time Shawn tries to pedal his product with other vendors on Broadway, several street hoods attack him and steal his money. He swaps blows with one of them and puts the guy down for the count. Watching this fracas from the periphery, eagle-eyed Harvey Boarden (Terence Howard of "Iron Man") admires the way that Shawn defends himself from multiple attackers. Not surprisingly, Shawn's assailants work for Harvey who earns his money by hustling the streets when he isn't selling fake Broadway tickets.

Eventually, Shawn and Harvey cross each other's paths. Initially, Shawn just wants the dough back that Harvey’s henchmen stole from him. Harvey convinces Shawn that he can earn $5-thousand and more by participating in illegal street fights. Gradually, Shawn and Harvey grow to trust each other, but beneath the surface simmers an unstated tension between them. Basically, Harvey sees Shawn as his ticket to prosperity. Harvey hails from Chicago. He came to N.Y.C. with the dream of opening an IHOP, while Shawn is fresh out of Birmingham, Alabama, after he parted company with his wrestling coach father following a family dispute. Shawn's past catches up with him in the character of arrogant Evan Hailey (Brian J. White of "12 Rounds") who was a member of Shawn's father's wrestling team. When Shawn and Evan tangled in a fight, Shawn's father tried to intervene and Shawn put the smack down on dad. Indeed, trouble with fathers is a theme that Montiel explored in depth in his first feature “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.”

Montiel choreographs each of Shawn's brawls with a sloppy, improvised realism so you see these goons grapple with each other more than swap old-fashion, John Wayne type right crosses. Unfortunately, these slugfests lack the ferocious intensity of last year's bare knuckled high school drama "Never Back Down." Instead, Tatum and his opponents engage in free-for-all bouts that resemble the fistfights from the second-rate survivalist saga "The Condemned" (2007) where the combatants pounded on each other, but we never saw fists smash flesh. What stands out about these fights is the locales. Montiel stages this fights in Gotham’s ethnic neighborhoods, such as the Russian enclaves in Brooklyn and the Hispanic hang0uts in the Bronx.

The villains are an anemic. Martinez (Luis Guzman of "Carlito's Way") and Jack Dancing (Roger Guenveur Smith of "American Gangster") are Harvey's old friends, but they show him no respect. They want to eliminate Harvey and take on Shawn as their own boxer. Meanwhile, Shawn and Evan talk tough to each other about old times in Dixie. Evan openly antagonizes Shawn. Nevertheless, these villains prove too lightweight to be intimidating. They never do anything really heinous to get our collective goat, so we have no reason to savor their demise.

Good fight movies make you want to shadow box, but the fights in "Fighting" lack any energy. Sadly, too, we are deprived of the inevitable training sequence that is part and parcel of any good Palookaville potboiler. Here, our protagonist engages in a quick workout on a subway. Later, in one of his bouts, Shawn takes on an opponent versed in martial arts with predictable results. As charismatic as our hero is, he never earns our admiration, because he never gets truly beaten to a pulp. He is just too lucky.

Montiel penned the script with Robert Munic of TV's "The Cleaner." "Fighting" qualifies as little more than an anthology of cauliflowered clichés and stereotypes from boxing movies. The relationship between Harvey and Shawn grows complicated when Harvey arranges a $100-thousand winner take-all-purse and struggles to persuade Shawn to throw the fight. This is one of those boxing plots as old as either "Golden Boy" (1939) with William Holden or "The Set-Up" (1949) with Robert Ryan and more recently Bruce Willis in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" (1994). Naturally, Montiel and Munic provide our hero with some time out for romance. He meets cute, sexy Zulay Valdez (Zulay Heano of "Grizzly Park") who makes ends meet in a private club as an underpaid, overworked, single-mom waitress with a young daughter and a stern, drill sergeant of a mother (scene stealing 78 year old Altagracia Guzman)who never gives Shawn a break.

Tatum channels Marlon Brando, mumbling his dialogue and behaving so casually that he doesn't appear to be acting. Clearly, Tatum is an up and coming cinematic contender, a handsome but hard-bitten hero in the Vin Diesel mode. Terence Howard, who is usually very good, looks miscast. He doesn't look as desperate for success as his character complains about being, while Zulay Henao doesn't garner enough on-screen to time to make much of an impression despite her high wattage smile.

"Fighting" isn't a tenth as good as Montiel's first film "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints." "Fighting" spends too much time pulling its punches to deliver any clout.

FILM REVIEW OF ''CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE" (2009)

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the duo who wrote and directed the original "Crank" (2006), are up to more audacious antics in "Crank: High Voltage" (**** out of ****) with agile Jason Statham and sexy Amy Smart reprising their roles as Chev Chelios and Eve Lyndon in the new supercharged sequel that surpasses its pulverizing predecessor. Neveldine and Taylor never received enough kudos for the first "Crank." Although its premise had been done before in "D.O.A."(1950) with Edmund O'Brien and the 1988 "D.O.A." remake starring Dennis Quaid, the difference is that the dying man in "Crank" can survive if he doesn't slow long enough for the toxin to destroy his system. The artistry of Neveldine and Taylor lies in their hopped up depiction of these frenzied, far-fetched events. A sense of vertigo seems to overwhelm you because they present everything either from the hero's perspective or what it would feel like if you were nearby him. Reportedly, these guys lensed much of the action on rollerblades while they clung to a variety of vehicles that our hero commandeered.

Shunning the suspension of disbelief in blatant fashion, Neveldine and Taylor allowed their "Crank" hero to perform feats no ordinary mortal could survive. Similarly, in virtually every scene of "Crank: High Voltage," they thumb their noses at credibility. Nobody, except Superman or Wile E. Coyote, could walk away from some of the stuff that happens to Chev Chelios. Like any superior sequel, "Crank: High Voltage" amps up the action. This time around the villains don't poison the hero. Instead, they harvest his heart and leave him with a battery-powered artificial ticker. The hero's doctor advises him to relax, but headstrong Chev Chelios refuses to relax until he recovers his heart. This outlandish, hyperkinetic thriller plunges our indestructible protagonist into one dangerous predicament after another as he searches for the dastards who pilfered his heart. Meanwhile, he manages to keep himself alive with periodic jolts to the battery attached to his artificial heart.

"Crank: High Voltage" opens where "Crank" closed. You don't have to know anything about the original, because Neveldine and Taylor refer visually back to it when they link the two movies. "Crank" concluded when our intrepid hero caught up with the adversary who had injected him with a fatal poison. The hero and villain are swapping blows aboard a helicopter while it flies over Los Angeles. During their ferocious fracas, both combatants topple out of the chopper. Chev plummets like Wile E. Coyote, crashes into an automobile, bounces off it, and then slams into the street apparently dead. Chev created such a media sensation while he ran amok that an elderly Asian gangster, Poon Dong (David Carradine of "Kill Bill"), has designs on his heart because it is so resilient. No sooner has Chev smacked the asphalt in "Crank: High Voltage" than a Triad crew of Chinese medics scrape him off the pavement with a snow shovel and haul his hulk off to a hidden hospital to harvest his heart.

During his post-operation, recovery stage, with the new heart thumping away in his chest, Chev learns to his horror that these scoundrels are scheming to remove his abundant genitalia. Erupting into action, our hero steals some clothes and calls his dependable but unethical medical genius, Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakam of "Sling Blade"), who assures Chev that he can re-implant his heart. Doc Miles explains that the battery charging the replacement heart will last only an hour or so. Meaning, Chev must electrocute himself periodically to keep the gizmo ticking. For example, he winds up wielding a stun gun on himself, attaching himself to a car battery, poking his finger into a car cigarette lighter, and buckling an electronic dog collar around his neck. Aside from electrocuting himself, Chev's falls back occasionally on static electricity generated by friction, primarily by rubbing up against people. Thus begins our hero's new rampage, every bit as frantic as the original "Crank," to track down the villains. Everywhere Chev Chelios goes, he has to zap himself to maintain his maniac energy levels.

Neveldine and Taylor are basically rehashing "Crank," but our hero has a different motivation. Chev's new deadline is based on the battery that powers the artificial heart along with his desperation to reclaim his old heart. Just as he collided with an oddball collection of characters in "Crank," he encounters some even bigger oddballs in "Crank: High Voltage." The brother of Chev's friend Kaylo, Venus (Efren Ramirez), has a grudge to settle with the Triad villains because they murdered his brother. Yes, Ramirez played Kaylo in "Crank," but Venus is even weirder. Venus suffers from full body Tourette's disease so no matter what he is doing, he may start dancing around hysterically without warning as if he were an elliptic. Another character that helps our hero is a lunatic hooker, Ria (Bai Ling of "Southland Tales"), who Chev discovers while chasing Triad gunman Johnny Vang. Vang (Art Hsu) is the goon that Chev saw leaving the clinic with his heart in a locked cooler. Chev also runs into just about everybody that he tangled with in "Crank," including his savior, Dom Kim, the high-ranking criminal whose life he spared. The surprises really culminate when he comes face to face with Ricky Verona, the thug that he fell out of the helicopter with him in the beginning!

Make no mistake, "Crank: High Voltage" isn't for everybody. This rude, crude, lewd, R-rated, adrenalin-laced exercise in gratuitous cartoon sex and violence with bizarre characters is bound to offend anybody who embraces political correctness and non-sexist thinking. Nevertheless, Neveldine and Taylor's inspired, roller-coaster depiction of these preposterous events will keep you laughing with every careening twist and turn that this B-movie plot takes. The homage to "Godzilla" movies during a body kicking showdown at a power plant is the high point of "Crank: High Voltage."