Mini-Review: Bad Country (2014)

11 Friday Apr 2014

Tags

Amy Smart, Baton Rouge, Chris Brinker, Crime, Crime drama, Drama, Hit list, Louisiana, Matt Dillon, Review, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe

D: Chris Brinker / 95m

Cast: Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Neal McDonough, Amy Smart, Tom Berenger, Chris Marquette, Don Yesso, John Edward Lee, Alex Solowitz, Christopher Denham, Bill Duke

At times, Bad Country seems like an Eighties throwback, a Walking Tall-type movie that swaps Tennessee for Louisiana, and Buford Pusser for Willem Dafoe’s detective Bud Carter. Its production design and filming style is reminiscent of other movies from that era, and while that’s no bad thing by itself, this grounding doesn’t add anything to the movie, or make it stand out.

With an opening statement that gives the impression the movie is based on a true story (but it’s not), Bad Country sees Carter bust a small-time gang of thieves. Their arrest leads him to Jesse Weiland (Dillon). Weiland is a safecracker-cum-enforcer for local syndicate kingpin Lutin Adams (Berenger); he also has a wife, Lynn (Smart) and baby son. Adams is in Carter’s sights and he turns Jesse, aided by Jesse’s animosity towards Adams for having his brother killed, and his need to provide for Lynn and the baby (which will be difficult if he ends up in jail). With the Feds, represented by rookie Fitch (Marquette), muscling in on Carter’s operation, the original plan is hijacked and things quickly go sour, with further loss of life on both sides. When an attempt is made on Weiland’s life, he goes after Adams himself.

There’s little that’s fresh or new here, and the movie trundles along in fits and starts and never really springs to life. The plot is perfunctory and often banal, while Chris Brinker’s direction is drab and uninvolving. The cast do their best – Dafoe gives his usual impassioned performance, despite the material – but Smart and McDonough are given short shrift, while Dillon often seems on auto-pilot. The Baton Rouge locations are well-used but not enough to make them a feature, and there’s one too many scenes that fade to black, as if those scenes should have continued a bit longer but the script didn’t know how to manage it. There’s plenty of gunfire, and a final shootout that lacks energy and focus when it should be thrilling.

Rating: 5/10 – more ho-hum than humdinger, Bad Country plods along without ever really getting going; set against other, more recent crime thrillers, it lacks more than most, and the Eighties setting ends up being of no benefit at all.

Runner Runner (2013)

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ben Affleck, Costa Rica, Crime drama, FBI, Gambling, Gemma Arterton, Justin Timberlake, Online gaming, Review, Thriller

D: Brad Furman / 91m

Cast: Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck, Gemma Arterton, Anthony Mackie, Michael Esper, Oliver Cooper, Christian George, Yul Vazquez, John Heard, Bob Gunton

Supporting his financial outlay at university by acting as a facilitator for an online gambling organisation, Richie Furst (Timberlake) is ratted on to the Dean (Gunton) who gives him an ultimatum: either quit or be expelled. Richie’s response is to bet all his remaining money on an online gaming site; when he loses it all he suspects the game was rigged. When he finds proof, he determines to travel to Costa Rica – where the site is based – and show the site’s owner, Ivan Block (Affleck), what he’s found. Grateful for Richie’s information, he offers him a job which Richie accepts. Now living the high life, Richie begins to woo Ivan’s personal assistant (and ex-lover) Rebecca (Arterton). While Richie enjoys his new lifestyle, things begin to crumble around him. He is targeted by FBI agent Shavers (Mackie) who tells him Block is a scam artist. Two of his friends who came to work for Block on Richie’s recommendation begin to find strange anomalies in the way Block’s site is run. When one of them ends up beaten to death, Richie finally begins to realise the enormity of the situation he’s got himself into.

Advertised as a thriller, Runner Runner certainly has thriller elements, but largely this is a crime drama that keeps the actual crime so far off screen that it might as well not be there. That Block is running a scam seems of little consequence against the effect it has on Richie; the movie concentrates almost exclusively on how Richie is betrayed time after time, and then how he retaliates. There’s a larger story here with the possibility of a much wider drama being explored, but the script by Brian Koppelman and David Levien keeps things restricted to Block’s empire, with occasional side trips to island enforcer Herrera (Vazquez), the man Block has to pay in order to keep his business running.

What doesn’t help is the incredible naïveté that Timberlake is forced to adopt due to the laziness of the script. For someone attending Princeton, Richie is possibly the dumbest student you’re ever likely to meet. He falls for Block’s spiel hook, line and sinker, and even when he’s tricked time and time again, he still carries on as if Block’s assertions are just “part of the job”. Even when he realises how much trouble he’s in he tries to escape back to America, something agent Shavers has already told him would not be permitted. And then, when he agrees to help the FBI and the Costa Rican police bring down Block, he’s suddenly able to turn the tables just…like…that.

Making online gambling interesting is something the movie also fails to achieve, and a few over-the-top parties that Block hosts aside, there is little glamour here. Costa Rica is a beautiful country but you wouldn’t know it from the glimpses you get of it, and Arterton, who has a pouting attractiveness, is relegated to the sidelines for most of the movie. So what you end up with is a movie that looks and feels bland and uninteresting, and as a result, ends up disappointing its audience in almost every scene.

Furman directs with an indifference to the material that makes you wonder if he saw the problems ahead of time and decided just to take the pay. Timberlake sleepwalks through most of his scenes, while Affleck looks embarrassed by some of the dialogue he has to (try to) give credibility to. Arterton is wasted, Mackie tries too hard and gives a one-note performance, and Heard is saddled with a character so similar to his role in Sharknado (2013) it’s almost embarrassing. With no one trying very hard either in front or behind the camera, Runner Runner is doomed to fail from the very first frame.

Rating: 4/10 – a silly, shabby drama with pretensions toward being a thriller, Runner Runner is the cinematic equivalent of roadkill; a low point for all concerned that will be hard to beat.

The Shadow of Silk Lennox (1935)

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bank robbery, Creighton Chaney, Crime drama, FBI, Gangster, Lon Chaney Jr, Murder, Nightclub, Ray Kirkwood, Review

D: Ray Kirkwood / 60m

Cast: Lon Chaney Jr, Dean Benton, Marie Burton, Jack Mulhall, Eddie Gribbon, Larry McGrath, Allen Greer, Theodore Lorch

After four years of being billed as Creighton Chaney in an effort to make his own way in movies, Lon Chaney Jr finally landed his first lead role in this below average potboiler. As nightclub owner cum gangster John Arthur “Silk” Lennox, Chaney does his best to appear urbane and charming, and there are moments when he almost pulls it off, but mostly he looks uncomfortable; when he’s being an out and out villain, Chaney appears more relaxed. It was inevitable perhaps that Chaney’s career – outside of Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Wolf Man (1941) – would be given over to playing villains. He wasn’t blessed with matinee idol looks, and often his delivery was a little off, but he was a formidable screen presence, and it’s interesting to see him here finding his feet.

Lennox and his gang rob banks. He tricks the police into giving him a cast-iron alibi for his latest robbery, and when they fail to make any headway, it’s down to the FBI to lend a hand. Fortuitously, one of Lennox’s gang, the Deacon (Budd Buster), tries to leave town with the money from the robbery. Lennox tracks him down and has him killed; this provides the FBI with the opportunity they need to bring Lennox to justice.

The short running time reflects the slightness of the plot, and the by-the-numbers filmmaking. The script, adapted by Norman Springer from his story The Riot Squad, is too weak to make much of an impact, and Kirkwood directs without attempting to make any of it appear interesting. There’s a sub-plot involving an act at the nightclub – played by Benton and Burton – that plays as unconvincingly as Lennox’s trademark saying “It’s all going as smooth as silk”. The sets are functional and look entirely too flimsy, and the photography, by the usually reliable Robert F. Cline, is flat and uninspired, leaving the movie a chore to look at. There’s a chirpy performance from Mulhall that raises the stakes when he’s onscreen but this isn’t until the last twenty minutes or so; before then, everyone else fails to ignite the soggy material.

From here, Chaney would go on to a succession of uncredited roles in movies such as Slave Ship (1937) and Love and Hisses (also 1937). He had other, credited, roles but it wasn’t until Of Mice and Men that he finally broke out as a leading man, even if it was largely in low budget horror movies. Chaney was capable of giving strong performances when needed, but all too often his personal demons got in the way of his career. Seeing Chaney in The Shadow of Silk Lennox is like watching a fighter early on in his career who’ll maybe only get that one chance at a title shot. It’s reassuring to know that, even with his eventual decline as an actor – Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964) anyone? – Chaney had his time in the sun. He was sometimes an unpredictable actor, and that often makes watching some of his movies more rewarding than they should be (although that can’t be said here).

Rating: 3/10 – low budget doesn’t have to mean low quality but it does here; ponderous and underwhelming, The Shadow of Silk Lennox fails to rise above its mediocre origins.