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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Las Vegas

Mini-Review: Sleepless (2017)

11 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Baran bo Odar, Corruption, Crime, Dermot Mulroney, Drama, Drugs, Internal Affairs, Jamie Foxx, Las Vegas, Michelle Monaghan, Review, Scoot McNairy, Thriller

D: Baran bo Odar / 95m

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, David Harbour, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Gabrielle Union, Octavius J. Johnson, Tim Connolly

Vincent Downs (Foxx) is a crooked Las Vegas cop. Sean Cass (Harris) is his equally crooked partner. Together they steal twenty-five bundles of cocaine (though why they do this is a little fuzzy). Their use of department issue weapons gains the attention of Internal Affairs officer, Jennifer Bryant (Monaghan), who immediately suspects Downs of the theft. Convinced by her own intuition that he’s dirty, she brings her suspicions to her partner, Doug Dennison (Harbour), but he’s not convinced. Meanwhile, Downs – who has an ex-wife, Dena (Union) and teenage son Thomas (Johnson) – is trying to maintain a semblance of post-divorce family life when Thomas is abducted by local casino-cum-crime boss Stanley Rubino (Mulroney). The reason for this? Simple: the cocaine is his and he wants it back, or Thomas will pay for Downs’ actions.

Downs takes the cocaine to Rubino’s casino, but in one of those plot “twists” that never make sense, he hides twenty-three of the bundles in the casino, gives Rubino the other two and bargains for his son’s life, stating that he’ll hand over the rest when he knows his son is safe. Rubino agrees, but when Downs tries to retrieve the rest of the cocaine from its hiding place, he discovers that Bryant (who has been following him) has taken it, and in a move that would have her investigated by Internal Affairs as well, has hidden it elsewhere in the casino. But there’s a further wrinkle: the cocaine is owed to gangster Bobby Novak (McNairy), and he’s there to collect…

Nuit blanche. That’s the title of the French/Belgian/Luxembourgian co-production, released in 2011 that, in its English language guise, has become Sleepless. If it matters to you, Nuit blanche (aka Sleepless Night) has a score of 75 on Metacritic, while Sleepless has a score of 33. Which version would you rather see? (Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question.) Inevitably, Sleepless – a title that makes no sense without the word “night” attached to it – is professionally made, glamorous to look at, has Foxx and Monaghan working really hard to overcome the preposterousness of Andrea Berloff’s urgent-but-empty screenplay, and never once makes you care about Downs or his son’s predicament. It tries to, on several occasions, but thanks to a combination of Berloff’s writing and director Odar’s reliance on style over substance, it has a shallow, seen-it-all-before vibe that harms the movie more than it helps it, and which stops it from letting the audience in on the – sadly – warmed over intrigue.

Remakes of foreign language movies often suffer in comparison because there are more things that can be lost in translation than just the dialogue. Tone, the original movie’s rhythm, its location, its visual aesthetic, any subtexts – all these and more can be either abandoned or discarded in the process of “re-imagining” a movie for audiences who speak another language (though surely that’s what subtitles are for?). There may be an element of “we can do better” about these remakes, and though that certainly isn’t the case with Sleepless (and despite any intentions its makers may have had), this is still a bad idea that lets down audiences at every turn. Even its fight scenes, which see Foxx get pummelled regularly but to minimal effect even though he has a stab wound to deal with, don’t elicit enough reaction to be successful in themselves. And if an action thriller can’t get those scenes right…

Rating: 4/10 – lacklustre, and padded out with way too many establishing shots of Las Vegas itself (we know where we are, for Foxx’ sake), Sleepless is a run-of-the-mill effort that tries hard but doesn’t know how to deliver; an over-complicated script proves too much for the cast to deal with, and despite its relatively compact running time, you’ll be wishing for a quicker resolution than is actually on offer.

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Jason Bourne (2016)

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Alicia Vikander, Asset, Athens, Berlin, Black ops, CIA, Drama, Iron Hand, Las Vegas, London, Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, Review, Sequel, Thriller, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel

Jason Bourne

D: Paul Greengrass / 123m

Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Ato Essandoh, Scott Shepherd, Bill Camp, Vinzenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken, Gregg Henry

The original Bourne movie trilogy was smart, inventive, thrilling, and a massive boost for the ailing spy genre. It made an action hero of Matt Damon, featured action sequences that were fresh and exciting, and had an emotionally complex through-line that bolstered the already intense plotting. At the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, David Webb had gained the answers to questions that had plagued him ever since he’d been saved from a watery grave by the crew of a fishing boat.

Except… he hasn’t, not really. The closing lines from The Bourne Ultimatum – “I remember. I remember everything.” – are repeated here at the movie’s beginning, and are followed by a montage of scenes from the original trilogy (as far as this movie is concerned, The Bourne Legacy (2012) never happened). But in amongst these memories are flashes of scenes we haven’t seen before. And when Jason Bourne snaps out of his reverie, we find him in the back of a truck and heading for an illegal fight ground in Greece. Clearly the years since he took down Treadstone and Blackbriar haven’t been good to him: despite his fighting prowess he still looks lost. And the bad dreams, or reveries, he’s experiencing aren’t helping. For someone who “remembers everything”, he’s having some of the most spectacularly disturbing and disorienting dreams ever. And he can’t make sense of them, especially the ones that involve his father, Richard Webb (Henry).

Jason Bourne - scene1

Help comes in the familiar but unexpected form of ex-CIA analyst Nicky Parsons (Stiles). Having hacked into the CIA mainframe, she’s done so with the aim of helping Bourne learn more about his past, and has discovered that his father had a greater role in the Treadstone programme than Bourne has been led to believe. But in hacking the CIA, Nicky has become a target and her contacting Bourne in Athens leads to his getting “back in the game”. With CIA operatives on their trail, as well as an Asset (Cassel), Bourne gains access to the information Nicky hacked, and once he becomes aware of his father’s involvement, he finds his enrolment in the Treadstone program wasn’t as clear cut as he thought. But as before, his reappearance has senior members of the CIA, including Director Robert Dewey (Jones), unwilling to let Bourne expose their Black Ops programs. Using a combination of the Asset and the head of the Cyber Crimes Division, Heather Lee (Vikander), to track down Bourne and eliminate him once and for all, Dewey plots to keep the CIA’s secrets as hidden as ever.

Fans of the Bourne Trilogy are generally dismissive of The Bourne Legacy, the Jeremy Renner starring addition to the series that failed to add anything new to the mix, and which felt like an uninspired retread of everything that had gone before. Matt Damon famously turned down the chance to cameo in Legacy, and made it clear that he wouldn’t return to the franchise unless Paul Greengrass was back on board as well. Well, Damon got his wish, and Greengrass is back as the movie’s director. But perhaps Damon should have made another stipulation: that Greengrass didn’t write the script.

Jason Bourne has many of the same attributes that The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum share. There’s the generous use of “shaky cam”, Christopher Rouse’s exemplary editing, excellent location work, and a series of intense and very well-staged action sequences (one of the series major strengths). But there’s one aspect that’s missing this time round, and aside from Greengrass’s muscular directorial style, it’s perhaps the series’ most important component: the contribution of Tony Gilroy. As screenwriter of the first two movies, and co-screenwriter of the third (though his input was drastically reduced), as well as Legacy‘s writer/director, Gilroy helped guide the series from its inauspicious beginnings to a position of critical and commercial success worldwide. His scripts had intelligence, depth and subtlety, and his villains were drawn with a vividness and care that made them worthy adversaries.

Jason Bourne - scene3

But without Gilroy (no doubt a casualty of The Bourne Legacy‘s poor reception), Jason Bourne proves just as disappointing as its unacknowledged predecessor. Nearly ten years on from the events of Ultimatum, Bourne is still an emotional mess, haunted by memory fragments that cause him pain and regret. He looks awful, and Damon plays him like a man besieged. For a man who found all the answers he needed, Bourne looks even more tormented than when he was in the dark. The movie never really attempts to explain why this is the case, preferring instead to give audiences a tortured Bourne without expanding on his back story. As a result, his decision to jump back in, prompted by some spurious nonsense involving his father, seems perfunctory instead of necessary.

With Bourne himself treated in such a cavalier fashion – he’s really just a one-man wrecking crew here – the other characters fare just as badly. Dewey is a stock villain, one step removed from twirling an invisible moustache and muttering “mwah-ha-ha!” whenever the script has him do something nefarious. Jones has no chance with the role, and there are times when his awareness of this comes through loud and clear; just watch his scenes with Vikander, and ask yourself if he looks committed. Cassel’s Asset is fuelled by revenge for the torture he suffered through Bourne’s exposure of the Blackbriar program, but as the character spends an inordinate amount of time running around chasing Bourne without actually catching him, his anger (and his back story) gets shoved to the side. And then there’s Heather Lee, the Cyber Crimes head who acts as this movie’s Pamela Landy. There’s supposed to be some mystery as to which side she’s on (she helps Bourne in various ways while pushing a separate CIA agenda), but thanks to Greengrass’s less than subtle direction, Vikander never looks anything other than extremely distrustful.

Film Title: Jason Bourne

And then there’s the small but important matter of how Bourne gets about. From Greece he travels to Berlin, then to London. He does so on his own, without any help from anyone, and manages to elude detection at every turn (a facet of the series that was usually, and very cleverly explained away – but not here). And yet when he travels from London to Las Vegas he does so by commercial aircraft, and though he receives assistance from Lee in getting through US Customs, it still begs the question how UK Customs didn’t flag him up in the first place. (Also, it seems that outside of Athens and Las Vegas there’s not the CCTV infrastructure to allow the CIA to track Bourne efficiently anywhere else.) And stop and think about this: in Las Vegas, at an expo for a communications platform that Dewey wants to appropriate – don’t ask – Bourne picks up various conveniently placed bugging devices that he uses to get to Dewey, all of which begs the question, what plan did he have originally (as he couldn’t have known they were there beforehand)?

Gaping plot holes like these only add to the realisation that Jason Bourne is a less than rewarding, less than necessary sequel to four previous movies (three of which had already told the story effectively and with impressive style), that throws in a handful of rousing action sequences, makes Bourne indestructible, has a subplot involving a communications platform – actually, still don’t ask – and features some of the blandest characters in the whole series. Greengrass is a mercurial director, with a great visual style, but he’s not as good a screenwriter as he might think, and along with Rouse, he makes things too simplistic for the movie’s own good. The end result? A movie that only takes off when it’s throwing punches or chasing SWAT vehicles.

Rating: 5/10 – a missed opportunity to enhance and expand on the series, Jason Bourne trades on nostalgia instead of bringing something new to the franchise; Bourne looks tired throughout, as does Jones, and by the movie’s end the viewer will feel exactly the same way.

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The Trust (2016)

22 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Alex Brewer, Benjamin Brewer, Crime, Drama, Drug dealers, Drugs, Elijah Wood, Hidden vault, Jerry Lewis, Las Vegas, LVPD, Nicolas Cage, Review, Robbery, Sky Ferreira, Thriller

The Trust

D: Alex Brewer, Benjamin Brewer / 93m

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Elijah Wood, Sky Ferreira, Ethan Suplee, Eric Heister, Kenna James, Keston John, Steven Williams, Jerry Lewis

When you’re watching The Trust, the latest no-brainer, substance-lite thriller starring Nicolas Cage, spare a thought for Jerry Lewis (yes, the Jerry Lewis). Urged by Cage to appear as his on-screen dad, Lewis appears in three scenes and amasses roughly a minute of screen time. What, you may be asking, was the point? In fairness, Lewis is ninety, so he may have worked to his potential, but it’s the kind of unkind cameo that will either have audiences, a) wondering if it’s really him, or b) asking themselves, isn’t he dead? The answers (already established) are yes it is, and no he’s not. The better question is, was he so bored that he didn’t have something, anything, better to do?

As it turns out, Lewis gets off lightly, sharing his scenes with Cage and Wood, while the two lead actors get to spar with each other for almost the rest of the movie. Cage is Jim Stone, an evidence technician for the Las Vegas Police Department, stifled by his bosses lack of vision when it comes to his ideas for gathering evidence more efficiently, and treated like a nuisance caller who makes the mistake of giving his name every time. Also working as an evidence technician for the LVPD is Wood’s character, David Waters. Waters is good at his job but he’s too fond of a joke, and smoking weed, to be as uptight as Stone; he’s coasting along, none too ambitious but clearly lacking the wherewithal to make his life better.

The Trust - scene2

At an auction of property seized by the LVPD, Stone is shown one clever way that drugs have been transported. Looking through the paperwork that went with the bust, Stone spots an anomaly: the guy who was caught was a low-level criminal and yet his $200,000 bail was paid quickly and without fuss. Wondering why someone so inconsequential would have that kind of support, Stone begins to follow him to see who he’s affiliated with. What Stone discovers is a hidden vault located in back of a laundry. But what is actually in the vault? Stone, along with Waters’ help, determines to find out.

Viewers of The Trust – should anyone take such an ill-advised step – will find themselves unsurprised at the dearth of reasonable ideas, the lack of credibility, and the complete absence of tension or drama. They’ll be equally unsurprised at the way in which the narrative unfolds with all the urgency of someone with crippling arthritis trying to navigate a particularly steep set of stairs. In the hands of its directors, the movie stumbles around looking for reasons to keep Stone and Waters together, while ignoring the plain and simple fact that despite the “best” efforts of Cage and Wood, the movie can’t come up with any reason they would ever team up in the first place. It’s the elephant in the room: why would Waters go along with Stone’s plan when there’s so much they don’t know, and so much that could go wrong?

The Trust - scene3

But hey, this is the movies, and people do the funniest things in the movies, like purchase expensive drilling equipment from a German manufacturer because it’ll be harder to trace (really?), or let a hostage make a phone call during the middle of a heist (that won’t come back to haunt anyone, surely?). It’s a truism that the cleverer the concept the sillier the execution, and The Trust is no different in its attention to making things look and sound absurd. From the now traditional discussion where one person outlines their criminal plan to another in a public place (a Vegas casino bar on this occasion), to Stone and Waters being able to just drop their day job and concentrate on breaking into the vault, the script by co-director Benjamin Brewer and Adam Hirsch cuts narrative corners as if it’s de rigeuer for this sort of movie, and never once gives the viewer the sense that this is all happening in a world anyone could recognise.

And it’s yet another movie that features a performance from Nicolas Cage that has little to offer other than the actor’s trademark tics and quirky line deliveries. It seems incredible that you have to go back to 2013 to find a Cage performance worthy of his talent, but that’s how long it’s been (it was a banner year for Cage, with roles in Joe, The Frozen Ground, and The Croods all reminding us of just how good he can be). Here he looks tired, not quite going through the motions but perilously close to it, his mannerisms and reactions just a touch off from what they would be if he were fully engaged with the material. It’s a shame to see Cage at such a remove from what he can achieve as an actor; perhaps his upcoming turn in Oliver Stone’s Snowden will help turn things around.

The Trust - scene1

Playing opposite him, Wood does his best but may now be wishing that original choice Jack Huston had been able to play Waters. It’s the “anxious partner” role, the doubting Thomas who sees the potential for disaster at every turn, and who’s proved right (and suffers for it). Since playing a certain Hobbit back at the turn of the century, Wood’s career has been a varied one, but mostly played out in shorts and TV shows. Here he’s competent enough, but like Cage he can’t wrestle anything from the script that will allow him to improve on what he’s been given to work with. As a result, it’s to Wood’s chagrin perhaps that, on occasion, he looks like he’s lost.

Rating: 4/10 – with the narrative proving only occasionally interesting or absorbing, and with the actual vault break-in taking up far too much of the running time, The Trust is more laborious than it needs to be; tedious then, and a waste of both Cage and Wood, and punctuated by unnecessary bursts of violence, it’s a movie that never settles for, or decides on, a consistent tone to help tell its story.

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Monthly Roundup – October 2015

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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AnnaLynne McCord, Blackmail, Charlie Chan, Crime, Detective, Donald Sutherland, Drama, Gambling, George Eads, Gold bullion, Gutshot Straight, Justin Steele, Las Vegas, Lesley-Anne Down, Literary adaptation, Mantan Moreland, Michael Crichton, Murder, Radio station, Reviews, Robbery, Sean Connery, Sidney Toler, Stephen Lang, Steven Seagal, The First Great Train Robbery, The Scarlet Clue, Thriller, Victorian England, Vinnie Jones

It’s been a pretty quiet month, so only a few movies make the roundup.

The First Great Train Robbery (1979) / D: Michael Crichton / 110m

Cast: Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, Lesley-Anne Down, Alan Webb, Malcolm Terris, Robert Lang, Michael Elphick, Wayne Sleep, Pamela Salem, Gabrielle Lloyd

Rating: 7/10 – in Victorian England, master criminal Pierce (Connery) recruits a motley gang of criminals (including Sutherland’s dandy pickpocket) to pull off an audacious heist: the robbery of gold bullion from a moving train; Crichton adapts his own novel with wit and style, and even though he finds himself hampered by budgetary restrictions, still manages to make The First Great Train Robbery an enjoyable, if predictable, diversion.

First Great Train Robbery, The

The Scarlet Clue (1945) / D: Phil Rosen / 65m

Cast: Sidney Toler, Mantan Moreland, Ben Carter, Benson Fong, Virginia Brissac, Robert Homans, Jack Norton, I. Stanford Jolley, Janet Shaw

Rating: 5/10 – murder and espionage are the order of the day for Charlie Chan (Toler) as he investigates criminal goings-on in a building that houses both a radio station and a science laboratory (which are, of course, connected); not one of the Oriental detective’s better outings but still possessed of an admirable energy, The Scarlet Clue has a meandering script but it’s offset by good performances (though Toler does look tired) and better-than-average injections of humour.

Scarlet Clue, The

Gutshot Straight (2014) / D: Justin Steele / 89m

aka: Gutshot

Cast: George Eads, AnnaLynne McCord, Stephen Lang, Ted Levine, Steven Seagal, Vinnie Jones, Tia Carrere, Fiona Dourif

Rating: 4/10 – when Las Vegas-based gambler Jack (Eads) meets fellow gambler Duffy (Lang) he finds himself entangled in a web of murder and deceit centred around Duffy’s wife, May (McCord); boasting a half-decent performance by Seagal, this vanity project for Eads signposts its clunky plot developments with all the finesse of a punch to the face, and never finds a way of overcoming its star’s shortcomings as an actor.

Gutshot Straight

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Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015)

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Andy Fickman, Comedy, Convention, Father/daughter relationship, Kevin James, Las Vegas, Neal McDonough, Raini Rodriguez, Review, Robbery, Sequel

Paul Blart Mall Cop 2

D: Andy Fickman / 94m

Cast: Kevin James, Raini Rodriguez, Neal McDonough, Eduardo Verástegui, Daniella Alonso, David Henrie, D.B. Woodside, Nicholas Turturro, Gary Valentine, Ana Gasteyer, Loni Love, Shelley Desai, Shirley Knight

INTERIOR. DAY. THE OFFICE OF MICHAEL LYNTON, CHAIRMAN & CEO OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT. THE OFFICE DOOR OPENS. HIS SECRETARY COMES IN.

LYNTON: Yes?

SECRETARY: You’ve just had a call from Kevin James.

LYNTON: Okay. What was it about?

SECRETARY: He said he had a great idea for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 3.

LYNTON: Have you seen Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2?

SECRETARY: No, I haven’t.

LYNTON: Well, pray you never have to. And after we pass on number three, pray no other studio picks it up instead.

SECRETARY: Is 2 that bad?

LYNTON: Bad? It makes Zookeeper look like it should have won Best Film at the Oscars.

SECRETARY: Okay, that is bad. What shall I say if he calls back?

LYNTON: (thinks for a moment) Tell him I’ve died – No, that won’t stop him. No, tell him we’re only making horror movies from now on. And pray he doesn’t come up with an idea for one of those instead.

SECRETARY: Got it. Will do.

LYNTON: Hell, I wish he would.

THE SECRETARY LEAVES. LYNTON GETS UP FROM HIS DESK AND WALKS TO THE WINDOW. HE LOOKS OUT AND SHAKES HIS HEAD REPEATEDLY IN A WEARY, RESIGNED MANNER.

FADE OUT.

Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 - scene

Rating: 3/10 – so bad you wish you could forget it the moment you see it, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 is an appalling, unfunny mess that mistakes pratfalls for the height of humour, and makes continually desperate attempts to inject real mirth into proceedings; an early front runner for Worst Sequel of 2015.

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Wild Card (2015)

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Action, Casino, Domink Garcia-Lorido, Gambling, Jason Statham, Las Vegas, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Review, Security consultant, Simon West, Stanley Tucci, The Golden Nugget, Thriller

Wild Card

D: Simon West / 92m

Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci, Max Casella, Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander, Anne Heche

Nick Wild (Statham) is a security consultant living and working in Las Vegas. He’s also a gambler with a dream: win $500,000 and spend five years living the life he’s always wanted, starting with a year sailing around the Mediterranean. He takes a job protecting a young man named Cyrus Kinnick (Angarano) while he plays at the casinos. At the same time he receives a message from a friend called Holly (Garcia-Lorido), asking him to visit her. When he does he finds she’s been raped and beaten up by three men she met at the Golden Nugget. She tells Nick she wants to find out who they are so she can sue them.

Nick soon discovers the three men were local gangster Danny DeMarco (Ventimiglia) and two of his men. He’s warned not to go anywhere near them, but when he tries to tell Holly he couldn’t find out who the men were, she realises he’s lying and reminds him of a debt he owes her. Knowing it will cause trouble for him, Nick pays a visit to DeMarco at his suite. He disables DeMarco and his men, giving Holly – who’s never intended to sue them – a chance to exact her revenge on the gangster. She threatens to cut off his penis, and even nicks the side of it; he cries and pleads for forgiveness. Relenting, Holly takes $50,000 from him and splits it with Nick before leaving town.

Nick takes Cyrus to a casino, and while Cyrus plays at a craps table, Nick takes his half of DeMarco’s money and begins to gamble. He’s soon on a winning streak that culminates in his winning $506,000, enough for him to leave Las Vegas. He’s about to cash in his chips when he’s struck by an anxiety attack. He tells Cyrus that he’s been fooling himself: the money isn’t enough for him to avoid having to come back to Vegas after his five years are up. Telling himself he needs a bigger pot of money he stakes all his winnings on a single bet… and loses it all. Afterwards, he’s attacked by DeMarco’s men but manages to defeat them. But this leads to Nick being summoned to see Baby (Tucci), the boss of organised crime in Las Vegas. DeMarco has come to him with a story that Nick came to his suite, beat him up and shot his men, and stole the money to gamble with. Now Nick has to prove to Baby that DeMarco is lying, or his life will be forfeit…

Wild Card - scene

A remake of the Burt Reynolds’ movie Heat (1986), Wild Card is a project that Statham has been trying to get made for around five years. It’s also an adaptation by William Goldman of his own novel and a reworking of his script for Heat. A crime drama that features another of Statham’s occasional forays into character acting, the movie doesn’t offer anything new (hardly possible given the material’s history), but it does make for an entertaining, if occasionally risible, trip through the underbelly of life in Las Vegas.

It’s a milieu that’s been explored many, many times before, but here there’s a sense of  ennui that drifts alongside the narrative, making the characters’ desperation and need for self-improvement all the more affecting. Cyrus is a twenty-three year old self-made multi-millionaire who wants to know what it’s like not to be afraid, and to have the self-confidence to “be a man”. Holly is an escort who, like Nick, wants a better life where she’s not always at the mercy of others. And Nick himself is afraid that he’ll spend the rest of his life in Vegas, scratching a living and ending up alone. A lot of this is underplayed, a smart move by Goldman, and it gives the movie an edge that comes as a bit of a surprise.

With Las Vegas providing a more than suitable backdrop, Wild Card keeps its themes of redemption and avarice well to the fore. Nick’s return to the table after winning the money he’s always dreamed about is both inevitable and startling, and gives Statham the chance to show that he can be a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for. Sure he can pull off an action scene without breaking sweat or getting out of breath, but here he’s stretched on more than a few occasions – lying to Holly, appearing to kowtow to DeMarco, going back to the tables, looking bereft after he’s lost – and while he still maintains an aloof, taciturn presence, it’s a more rounded performance than usual.

But this being a Jason Statham movie, and one directed by Simon West – they also collaborated on The Mechanic (2011) – there’s room for a clutch of exhilarating, superbly choreographed fight scenes. Fans won’t be disappointed by the brutally inventive ways in which Nick dispatches various henchmen – one close up of a nose being broken is particularly impressive – and if these sequences still prove to be the main highlights of a movie that does its best not to be “just” an action movie, then it’s unfortunate but not entirely surprising.

The rest of the cast provide adequate support, though some are reduced almost to cameos or appear to have done only a day’s filming. Angarano and Ventimiglia have more than most to do but have a job with characters who remain cyphers throughout, with Ventimiglia in particular struggling to make more of DeMarco than the preening, psychotic gangster he appears. Garcia-Lorido brings an emotional intensity to her role that bodes well for her future, while Tucci phones in one of his patented “man with excess mannerisms” performances as Las Vegas’s capo di tutti capi. But with the likes of Davis, Heche and Vergara reduced almost to walk-on roles, the movie ends up feeling a little misogynistic.

All in all, West directs with his usual visual flair and helps Statham give one of his best performances. Goldman’s script is peppered with some less than quotable lines of dialogue – “He goes crazy and he shoots maybe my best two friends in the whole world” – but the structure is solid and Nick’s love/hate relationship with Sin City is woven into the storyline in a way that is meaningful and instructive of Nick’s personality. There’s a pleasingly claustrophobic feel to the casino scenes, and Shelly Johnson’s cinematography captures the glitz and the glamour of Las Vegas alongside its less attractive features.

Rating: 7/10 – worth seeing as a movie where Statham stretches his abilities as an actor, and for a couple of outstanding fight sequences, Wild Card is the kind of action movie that starts slow and builds to a (vicious) climax; unpretentious, and occasionally solemn, one can only hope that Statham and West get a chance to team up again soon.

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Last Vegas (2013)

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ageism, Comedy, Jon Turteltaub, Kevin Kline, Las Vegas, Mary Steenburgen, May-December relationship, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Relationships, Review, Robert De Niro, Romance, Stag party

Last Vegas

D: Jon Turteltaub / 105m

Cast: Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline, Mary Steenburgen, Jerry Ferrara, Romany Malco, Roger Bart, Joanna Gleason, Michael Ealy, Bre Blair, April Billingsley

Four friends – Billy (Douglas), Paddy (De Niro), Archie (Freeman), and Sam (Kline) – are reunited when Billy is set to get married in Las Vegas.  For three of them it’s a chance to escape from the mundanity of their lives and live a little.  Paddy is still mourning the death of his wife after a year; Archie is living with his son, yet being treated as if he’s too fragile to be trusted even to look after his granddaughter; and Sam is dying a slow death from boredom in a retirement community in Florida.  Meanwhile, Billy is marrying 32-year-old Lisa (Blair), and while he’s outwardly happy, it becomes clear he’s not as committed to the idea as his friends might have expected.  Friends since childhood, the four come together despite Paddy’s animosity towards Billy for not attending his wife’s funeral, and declare they’r going to party “like it’s 1959”.  With a burgeoning romance developing between Billy and lounge singer Diana (Steenburgen) that threatens to undermine his marriage plans, as well as his friendship with equally smitten Paddy, it’s up to Archie and Sam to keep things on track, and ensure everything goes as smoothly as possible…if they can.

As close to a vanity project as you’re likely to get these days, Last Vegas plays like a fever dream for the geriatric community.  With none of its star quartet below the age of sixty-five, seeing them behave as if they were still teenagers is alternately disquieting and off-putting.  Douglas is the lonely Lothario, afraid of getting old and losing out on love and companionship altogether.  De Niro is the devoted husband bereft at losing his wife and retreating from life.  Freeman is the supposedly frail grandfather who whose life is governed by his ill health (not that he displays any of this in the movie).  And Kline is the bored retirement dweller who feels his life and any excitement is behind him.  Frankly, if I was the same age as these guys and I felt they were supposed to represent my age group, I’d want to punch their lights out.

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There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel young again when you reach a certain age and the things you took for granted have become the things you have to think about before you do them.  But here, all the initial complaints about getting old are soon left behind once everyone’s in Las Vegas, and they can start to “party like it’s 1959”.  Archie busts some serious moves on the dance floor, Sam nearly gets to use the condom his wife has given him (so he can get over his “depression”), Paddy realises his wife wouldn’t want him to hole up in their apartment for the rest of his life, and Billy finds true love with Diana having come to terms – quickly – with his loneliness.  Tonally, Last Vegas is one of those “have your cake and eat it” movies where it’ll all come right if you remain true to yourself, and don’t lose sight of who you are.  It’s a wish fulfilment movie with no sense of irony or its own absurd premise.

It’s a good job then that the movie delivers on the laughter front.  There are some belly laughs to be had, mostly related to Freeman, and the movie has a good time making its characters look foolish before it makes them out to be super-cool.  The script by Dan Fogelman does its best to wring laughs out of the situations the four friends find themselves in, rather than completely at their expense, while most of the supporting characters are there mainly to show how ageist we are as a society, and to be humiliated (see Dean, played by Ferrara).

Of the four leads, it’s Freeman and Kline who come off best but that’s because they’ve got slightly more to work with (and Kline can do this sort of thing in his sleep).  Douglas looks uncomfortable, as if he really would like to be marrying a 32-year-old, while De Niro is just uncomfortable to watch.  Despite the number of comedies he’s made in the last twenty years, De Niro still fumbles the ball when it comes to humour. Here he looks like the guy who not only doesn’t get the joke, but isn’t even aware that a joke’s been told (it doesn’t help that Paddy has to remain angry with Billy for most of the movie).  Steenburgen does well as the singer with a heart of gold, but isn’t given much to do other than listen to the travails of the four friends, or warble a couple of songs.  Of the rest of the cast, only Malco stands out, as the organiser of Billy’s stag party.

The movie is adequately directed by Turteltaub, and there’s fun to be had from seeing a slightly different side of Las Vegas than the one normally seen, but without the committed performances of its leads, and the better-than-expected humour in the script, Last Vegas would be a waste of time and effort.  That it partially succeeds is therefore a surprise, and a pleasant one at that.

Rating: 7/10 – worth seeing for Freeman and Kline alone, and the rare sight of De Niro having a DJ’s crotch thrust at his face repeatedly, Last Vegas works a lot better than you’d think; no awards winner, it’s true, but a pleasing diversion nevertheless.

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