FILM REVIEW OF ''HOMEFRONT" (2013)

Don’t let the title of the latest Jason Statham thriller “Homefront” (*** OUT OF ****) deceive you.  This is no soap opera about life in the boondocks.  “Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead” director Gary Fleder and “Cobra” scenarist Sylvester Stallone should have entitled it “Hell On A Bayou.”  This exciting but formulaic revenge saga pits a retired DEA Agent against a murderous bunch of bikers and rednecks who resemble the hellions in the “Sons of Anarchy” television series.  Naturally, Statham plays the conscientious DEA Agent who witnessed a gross miscarriage of justice that his superior defends as ‘protocol.’  After an explosive drug bust at a New Orleans’ nightclub, our undercover hero’s brothers-in-blue mow down a clueless biker in a fusillade of gunfire.  Apparently, they suspected that the poor slob was reaching for a concealed weapon during a stand-off.  The blood-splattered experience sickened our protagonist enough that he resigned from the agency and settled down in a two-bit Louisiana town to raise his young daughter.  While he wants to put as much distance between his past as he can, our hero doesn’t realize that escaping his bullet-riddled past is easier said than done.  Basically, “Homefront” shares a lot in common with a witness relocation thriller, except the hero here is a cop rather than an eye-witness.  Stallone adapted Chuck Logan’s novel, but the filmmakers have altered the setting from Minnesota to Louisiana.  A former Vietnam veteran, Logan has published eight novels about his protagonist Phil Broker, and “Homefront” appeared in print back in 2009.  As it turns out, “Homefront” provides Statham with an ideal vehicle, and its rural setting and dastardly villains have the flavor of an Elmore Leonard novel.  Co-stars James Franco, Winona Ryder, Clancy Brown, Kate Bosworth, and Frank Grillo constitute a first-class cast for this gritty, hard-boiled, methamphetamine melodrama.

Everything goes wrong for our hero when his nine-year old daughter Maddy (newcomer Izabela Vidovic) picks on the wrong bully at her elementary school.  Fat Teddy Klum (Austin Craig) not only steals Maddy’s baseball cap, but he also terrorizes the willowy little darling on the playground.  Maddy warns Teddy twice to hand her cap back, but Teddy chuckles contemptuously at the defiant little waif.  Imagine Teddy’s surprise when Maddy socks him in the snout and knocks him on his obese butt!  Phil Broker (Jason Statham of “Safe”) is remodeling a house with his African-American partner Teedo (Omar Benson Miller of “8 Mile”) when he receives a call from the Rayville Elementary School.  School psychologist Susan Hetch (Rachelle Lefevre of “Twilight”) briefs Broker about the incident, and Sheriff Keith Rodrigue (Clancy Brown of “Highlander”) struggles to keep Teddy’s mom Cassie Bodine Klum (Kate Bosworth of “Straw Dogs”) off Broker’s back.  When she cannot slap Broker around, Cassie incites her husband Jimmy (Marcus Hester of “Lawless”) to rough him up.  Broker puts Jimmy out of action with the ease of a kung fu master, and the sheriff wonders where our hero got his training.  Later, Cassie resorts to her scumbag brother, Gator (James Franco of “Spring Breakers”), to take care of Broker.  Teedo warns Broker that Gator operates a local meth factory and discourages any competitors by informing on them to Sheriff Rodrigue.  Gator burglarizes Broker’s remote house in the middle of the woods and stumbles upon Broker’s files from his DEA days.  Furthermore, he discovers Broker was the anonymous snitch that sent Outcast motorcycle gang member Danny T Turrie (Chuck Zito of “Carlito’s Way”) to prison and put the first of the 47 bullets into Danny’s worthless son Jojo (Linds Edwards) on the street in New Orleans.  Gator concocts a hare-brained scheme with low-life waitress Sheryl Marie Mott (Winona Ryder of “Heathers”) to alert the Outcasts about Broker’s whereabouts.  Gator dreams in his naive mind that the Outcasts will repay him for his friendly little tip by helping him distribute his meth.  Outcast motorcycle chieftain Cyrus Hanks (Frank Grillo of “Disconnect”) and his best bangers roll into Rayville with payback on their brains. Meanwhile, our hero realizes that he is living in a land where feuding is a way of life.  At the last minute, after Gator has stolen Maddy’s pet kitten, Broker smells the stench of murder in the air and tries to clear out.  Unfortunately, our hero doesn’t get far before he discovers that there is too much lead in the air for him to hightail it without jeopardizing his daughter’s life.  

Mind you, “Homefront” would be just another entertaining but predictable shoot’em up, but director Gary Fleder has assembled a knock-out cast of celebrity talent and orchestrated some crowd pleasing action scenes.  James Franco plays Statham’s grinning redneck adversary with gusto galore.  At one point, he chides Phil Broker because our hero doesn’t “smell the wood burning” and “cannot connect the dots.”  Winona Ryder gives an electrifying performance as Gator’s scummy ex-convict accomplice who served time for smuggling narcotics into Angola Prison.  Topping both Franco and Ryder is sexy Kate Bosworth of “Straw Dogs” and “Blue Crush” as a housewife hooked on meth who ridicules her husband into doing what she cannot.  Seasoned character actor Clancy Brown emerges from the background a corrupt local sheriff who behaves with more discretion than the usual paid-off politician.  Essentially, nobody gives a bad performance in “Homefront,” and the children are incredibly convincing, too.  Of course, Fleder and Stallone shoot the works, and Statham displays his usual physical prowess.  Basically, if you enjoy watching the “Transporter” kick the crap out of his antagonists after they threaten his daughter, you’ll enjoy “Homefront.”  The close encounter combat sequence between our hero and two thugs at a local gas station is hilariously violent.  Statham is quickly turning into the new Steven Segal with the effortless aplomb with which he dispatches his opponents.  Dutch lenser Theo van de Sande’s cinematography of the swampy Louisiana locations is simply gorgeous; Sande shot the Wesley Snipes vampire opus “Blade.”  Clocking in at a nimble 100 minutes, “Homefront” never wears out its welcome.

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.