A FILM REVIEW OF "BULLET TO THE HEAD" (2013)

Watching the Sylvester Stallone shoot’em up “Bullet to the Head” (**** OUT OF ****) felt like a blast from the past.  This polished but predictable anthology of action movie clichés contains several R-rated, close-quarters, combat scenes with sufficient amounts of blood splatter and gore; some high-octane, fireball explosions; lots of snappy tough guy banter; and surprising displays of frontal female nudity.  Half the scenes reminded me of producer Joel Silver’s explosive, slam-bang, white-knuckled, testosterone-laden tales, such as “Conspiracy Theory,” “Exit Wounds, “Swordfish,” and his “Lethal Weapon” franchise.  Indeed, Silver serves as one of the producers, and “Bullet to the Head” adheres to his formula.  Meanwhile, action auteur Walter Hill drew the other half from his hardboiled melodramas.  For the record, Hill helmed the two “48 Hrs” flicks with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy, “Extreme Prejudice” with Nick Nolte, “Last Man Standing” with Bruce Willis, and “Red Heat” co-starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Belushi.  Although “The Messenger” scenarist Alessandro Camon adapted the Alexis Nolent graphic novel "Du plomb dans la tête,” “Bullet to the Head” looks like “48 Hrs” and/or “Red Heat” clone.  Mind you, “Bullet to the Head” is Hill’s first theatrical release since his gritty 2002 prison melodrama “Undisputed” with Ving Rhames and Wesley Snipes.  During his absence from the big screen, Hill helmed the premiere episode of HBO’s “Deadwood,” and then the television mini-series western “Broken Trail” (2006) costarring Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church.”  In many respects, this action-packed, largely straightforward, odd couple buddy picture compares favorably with earlier, exceptional Stallone sagas like “Assassins,” “The Specialist,” and “Demolition Man.”  Most definitely, it surpasses “Tango and Cash” and “Stop, Or My Mom Will Shoot.”

Cast as a seasoned hit-man in the Crescent City, Sylvester Stallone tangles with a mysterious cabal of Big Easy investors who have the New Orleans Police Department on their payroll.  Director Walter Hill has juggled the occupations of the protagonists from his earlier buddy picture epics.  The cop was always the lead in the combo in the “48 Hrs” movies and “Red Heat.”  This time around, world-weary, career criminal James “Bobo” Bonomo (Sylvester Stallone of “Rocky”) is the lead, while saintly, Washington, D.C. Detective Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang of “Fast & Furious”) behaves rather naively and relies too much on his cell phone.  Ironically, the two men want to exact vengeance for the deaths of their former partners.  They agree to form an uneasy alliance, but Kwon’s conscience prompts him to constrain Bonomo. These two don’t immediately run into each other. When the plot unfolds, Bonomo and his partner Louis Blanchard (Jon Seda of “Bad Boys 2”) masquerade as cops to snuff a cocaine-snorting thug, Hank Greely (Holt McCallany of “Fight Club”), in a motel room.  Bonomo spots a tattooed prostitute cowering in the shower, but he lets her live.  This amoral murderer draws the line at shooting women.  When he is behind the wheel on the road, he swerves to avoid stray cats in front of him.  “It’s bad luck,” he assures Louis.  These two show up at a crowded bar where they are supposed to pick up the balance of their loot for the shooting.  Before either realizes they have been double-crossed, another assassin, Keegan (Jason Momoa of “Conan”), stabs poor Louis repeatedly to death in front of everybody.  He wields a small blade to hack both of Louis’ lungs so nobody in the noisy bar knows a murder has occurred.  Keegan isn’t quite as lucky with Bonomo.  Now, Bonomo wants payback.  Our hero crosses paths with a hard-nosed, Washington, D.C. police detective who is visiting New Orleans.  As it turns out, Hank Greely was his former partner in Washington.  Kwon wants the people who ordered Hank’s demise.  Sure, neither Bonomo nor Kwon have much use for each other initially, but they kind of grow on one other as they survive back-to-back fracases. 

Hill stages some gripping shoot-out scenes that genre fans will savor, and you get to see Silver's trademark Ka-Boom explosions!  Hill never lets the narrative bog down in aimless chatter or an over elaborate plot.  Stallone’s character provides deadpan narration throughout the pyrotechnics so you never take anything seriously in “Bullet to the Head.”  “Bullet to the Head” is not unlike a Tarantino thriller.  Camon and Hill wrap up everything, but leave room for a sequel since the hero’s daughter and the D.C. cop are dating.  At 66 years of age, Sylvester Stallone appears as fit as a fiddle.  This is the kind of movie where guys shed shirts and clash muscles.  He channels a little bit of “Rocky” in his tongue-in-cheek performance.  The ax fight between beefy, muscle-bound Jason Momoa and Stallone has been carefully edited to present both to maximum advantage.  You know Stallone is going to triumph, but Momoa doesn’t make it look easy.  Momoa makes a lusty villain.  No less villainous is Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as a crippled, African investor has no qualms about murder.  Christian Slater appears briefly as a smarmy swindler with a flash drive around his neck that boasts the goods of everybody.  The interrogation scene is pretty amusing.  Clocking in at a lean, mean, 97 minutes, “Bullet to the Head” doesn’t wear out its welcome.  You don’t even have to wait around to see what’s after the end credits so you can clear out early.  Were it not for the pedigree talent involved, “Bullet to the Head” would qualify at best as a three-star rather than a four-star movie.  If you still like Stallone, you'll love "Bullet to the Head" because it is worth shelling out the bucks to watch this Spartan saga.

FILM REVIEW OF ''KILLING THEM SOFTLY" (2012)

Connoisseurs of hard-boiled criminal melodramas should line-up for writer and director Andrew Dominik’s latest outing “Killing Them Softly,” (**** OUT OF ****) starring Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini, Sam Shepard, and Richard Jenkins.  Mind you, this isn’t a high-octane heist caper with edge-of-the-seat suspense, careening car chases, and scantily clad beauty queens.  If anything, “Killing Them Softly” qualifies as just the opposite.  Had I not read the page-turner Dominik adapted for this third feature film, I would have thought he was imitating Quentin Tarantino without the torture scenes.  Indeed, the first time I saw this atmospheric, but strictly small potatoes ‘disorganized crime’ thriller with its loquacious low-lifers, dismal urban locales, and ultra-violent, artsy-smartsy, shoot’em ups, I walked away with a low opinion of it.  Dominik adapted “Killing Them Softly” from the 216-page novel “Cogan’s Trade,” published back in 1974, long before Tarantino arrived in Hollywood.  Anybody who remembers the vintage Robert Mitchum movie “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973), will savor this 97-minute epic.  The characters are unsavory hoodlums with foul mouths and itchy trigger fingers who love to talk about their individual peccadilloes.  A liquor-swilling James Gandolfini appears for three scenes and vanishes, while Pitt looks like a pirate, smokes like chimney, and sports a genuinely cynical attitude.  Unfortunately, this Brad Pitt movie doesn’t look like it was designed for mainstream, PG-13 audiences, any more than Dominik’s last picture, the obscure western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”  Nevertheless, although it looks like a hundred other forgettable, straight-to-video crime movies, “Killing Them Softly” is one of the coolest, all-male, crime movies you will enjoy.

“Killing Them Softly” draws its title from the protagonist’s method of killing people.  Chiefly, he doesn’t want to kill anybody who he knows.  The victim’s outburst of emotion and their pleas for mercy horrify him.  Basically, rather than killing somebody you know, you only rub out those you don’t know.  Ostensibly, this riveting crime thriller amounts to a series of long-winded conversations between hoodlums punctuated with gunplay.  While the novel took place in the 1970s, Dominik has updated it to 2008 during the Obama Vs. McCain presidential election.  Wall Street has just plunged America into the depths of a recession, and nobody is happy.  The economy is stalling out.  An unlucky ex-con Johnny Amato (Vincent Curatola of HBO’s “The Sopranos”) owns a dry-cleaning business.  He hatches a scheme with an accomplice, Frankie (Scoot McNairy of “Argo”), that involves knocking over a mob-protected poker game.  Everybody knowsif you try to steal from the mob, you can expect to die a hideous death.  Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta of “Goodfellas”) masterminded such a heist; he robbed his own game and then convinced the mob enforcers sent to sweat a confession out of him that he didn’t do it.  After Dillon (Sam Shepard of “Safe House”) and Kenny Gill (Slaine of “The Town”) rough Markie up, Markie goes back to business as usual.  One evening, with a different group of poker players, Markie lets it drop that he robbed his own poker game.  Nobody retaliates, but Johnny Amato decides if he doesn’t rob Markie’s new set-up that somebody will beat him to it.  Frankie isn’t so sure about the wisdom of Amato’s strategy.  Amato assures Frankie that everybody will remember Markie’s early treachery and the real hoodlums will get away scot-free with about $50-thousand.  Frankie and his wisecracking, heroin-shooting, Australian pal, Russell (Ben Mendelsohn of “Knowing”), burst in on Markie’s poker game and rob not only Markie but also his players.  Frankie wields an incredible, double-barreled, sawed off shotgun with the barrels cut so far back that you can see the shells with their green crimping sticking out.  No sooner than they hold up the game and escape, the mob in the anonymous city where the action unfolds imports a thug, Cogan (Brad Pitt of “Fight Club”), to straighten the situation out.  It seems that this second robbery has hurt the mob.  Nobody wants to gamble for fear they will be held up.  Cogan and a mob attorney, Driver (Richard Jenkins of “The Cabin in the Woods”), arrange the details and the pay-offs.  Of course, nothing goes according to plan for Cogan.  He hires an out-of-town torpedo, Mickey (James Gandolfini of “True Romance”), to whack Johnny Amato because Amato knows Cogan.  Again, Cogan has neither the patience nor the desire to watch Amato plead for his life before he blows his head to smithereens.

The late George V. Higgins captured the grimy underbelly of the criminal world in his 26 or so novels.  He shocked critics with his use of profanity.  Like Tarantino, Higgins possessed a droll sense of humor.  Higgins’ characters uttered the F-word as often as Al Pacino’s Cuban gangster did in “Scarface.”  Dominik has transferred “Cogan’s Trade” to the big-screen with enviable fidelity to the source material.  “Killing Them Softly” is one of the rare exceptions to the rule where the movie isn’t as good as the novel.  Sure, some things must have bit the editing room floor, but the film never wears out its welcome. When he isn’t faithfully duplicating Higgins’ irreverent dialogue, Dominik proves that he is a genuinely gifted director.  He shows what it is like for a heroin addict to carry on a conversation.  Furthermore, the little touches distinguish “Killing Them Softly;” you’ve never see a car door shut the way that Dominik depicts it.  Using television news clips from politicians during the 2008 Wall Street debacle, Dominik compares the criminal tendencies of Wall Street with hoodlums.  Nothing about “Killing Them Softly” is delicate, but its sense of irony will have you rolling in the aisles.

FILM REVIEW OF ''THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET" (2012)

What was “Hunger Games” actress Jennifer Lawrence thinking when she signed on to star in the lightweight but bizarre chick flick horror chiller “House at the End of the Street?”  Perhaps Jennifer’s agent convinced her to make it to keep her busy while the producers of both “The Hunger Games” and “The X-Men” were preparing their next sequels.  Indeed, anybody could have played the character of Elissa.  A year or two ago this would have been a plum role for Amanda Seyfried.  Although she brings her good looks and charisma to the character of Elissa, Lawrence looks like she is biding time with this above-average, atmospheric potboiler. Meantime, Elizabeth Shue, cast as her mom, and Max Thieriot, cast as a troubled young man, look like they were born to play their roles.  The rest of the cast is believable, especially Gil Bellows as a small-town cop, Nolan Gerald Funk as a despicable high school playboy, and Allie MacDonald as our heroine’s closest high school friend.  Incidentally, “House at the End of the Street” (**1/2 OUT OF ****) has nothing to do with either the Jodie Foster epic “The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane” or director Ruggero Deodato’s grisly Italian-made movie “The House on the Edge of the Park.”

“Hush” director Mark Tonderai must have been channeling Alfred Hitchcock as well as Wes Craven when “Dream House” scripter David Loucka and he made this movie about suspicious characters in a rustic setting.  Indeed, a little bit of Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho” creeps into this edgy offering.  Similarly, the choices made the heroine evokes memories of the Wes Craven movie “The People Under the Stairs.”  Like most horror movies, the filmmakers play head games with the audience during the first hour before they shoot the works.  You never really know what is occurring in this surprising, often disorienting saga, even when you think you know what is happening.  Happily, “House at the End of the Street” isn’t the kind of scary movie that will curse you with nightmares, much less throttle your throat with icy fingers of tension while you’re watching it.  Tonderai’s film won’t have you either chewing your nails or squirming in your seat until Ms. Lawrence is tied down to a chair in the last half hour of the action.  Everything that occurs before those scenes is basically warm-up material.  You won’t find a scene-stealing, sadistic, maniac like a Freddie, Jason, or Michael Myers here because the killer doesn't don a disguise and mutated into a full-blown killer.

An ugly divorce prompts Dr. Sarah Cassidy (Elizabeth Shue of “Adventures in Babysitting”) and teenage daughter Elissa (Jennifer Lawrence) to move into a house that they might not otherwise have been able to afford had a murder not occurred at a nearby residence.  It seems that an insane child slaughtered her parents one stormy night.  The authorities searched for the murderous girl afterward but never found her.  Word spread that the daughter had drowned in a nearby dam.  Naturally, this unsettling murder lowered property values, and Sarah discovers that she can afford the house.  Sarah had a history as a slut when she was a teen so she is ever vigilant where Elissa is concerned.  Initially, neither Sarah nor Elissa knew that anybody was living in the house where the murders occurred.  As it turns out, their backdoor neighbor is a quiet, well-mannered, but reclusive young fellow named Ryan.  You see, Ryan was the son of the parents who died at the hands of their daughter. Ryan wasn’t living with them at the time of the murder.  Since his parents left him the house as well as enough money for him to attend a community college, Ryan has been living there and trying to avoid the neighbors.

Meantime, Elissa attends a party at another neighbor’s house.  A popular high school jock, Tyler (Nolan Gerard Funk of “Bereavement”), is the son of these neighbors, and they tout his civil-minded exploits at school.  In reality, Tyler is a loathsome reprobate.  During the party, Tyler tries to persuade a reluctant Elissa to have sex with him.  Elissa storms out of the party and walks home.  A storm erupts while she is walking, and Ryan pulls up in his car.  He offers Elissa a ride, but she refuses to accept his offer.  Moments later, the bottom drops out, and Elissa changes her mind.  Afterward, they become close friends, much to the chagrin of Elissa’s mother.  An uneasy Sarah establishes ground rules for them during dinner one evening.  Ryan and Elissa cannot be together alone.  Ryan is willing to abide by these strict rules, but Elissa hates her mom for embarrassing her in front of Ryan.  Elissa reminds Sarah that she is not a slut.  Shrewdly, Elissa programs the family telephone so when mom calls, the call is forwarded to Elissa’s cell phone.  Sarah often has to work late shifts at the hospital. This way Elissa can visit Ryan without Sarah’s interference.

Discretion prevents me from divulging some suspicious things that are happening at Ryan’s house.  Suffice to say, despite his sympathetic demeanor, Ryan is not entirely who he appears to be.  Nevertheless, Elissa likes him, and her mom warns her that she—Elissa—is the kind of girl who tries to mend other people.  In other words, she tries to make them better.  Nobody in the town trusts Ryan, except an affable policeman, Bill Weaver (Gil Bellows), who stands up for the misunderstood youth.  By this time, Tonderai and his writer start making the characters behave idiotically, and “House at the End of the Street” turns into a video rental.  When the revelations come, the source of all the evil turns out to be the parents.  Interestingly enough, our heroine finds herself up to her neck in trouble when she allows her curiosity to get the best of her.  While the villain isn’t as homicidal as Norman Bates was in “Psycho,” he turns out to be a far more interesting character than our valiant heroine.