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thedullwoodexperiment

~ Viewing movies in a different light

thedullwoodexperiment

Tag Archives: Sean Bean

Happy Birthday – Sean Bean

17 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Actor, Anna Karenina (1997), Birthday, Far North, Movies, North Country, Sean Bean, The Field, Tom & Thomas

Sean Bean (17 April 1959 -)

"Legends" Series Premiere

An actor with a wider range than most people give him credit for, Sean Bean is also one of the most consistently reliable actors working today. He may be well known for his more villainous roles – which, admittedly, he’s very good at playing – but since playing Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), his career has become more varied and (no doubt for him as well as us) more rewarding. His tough, uncompromising demeanour belies a man who listens to classical music when he’s preparing for a scene, and who is still a fervent supporter of Sheffield United football club. He made his feature debut in Winter Flight (1984), and since then has amassed over a hundred credits in both the movies and on TV, including appearances in Lady Chatterley (1993), the Sharpe series of TV movies, and more recently, season one of Game of Thrones (2011). On the big screen he’s a familiar face who brings a certain degree of gravelly sincerity to his roles. Here then are five Sean Bean movies that feature some of his more under-appreciated portrayals… and where his character doesn’t get killed.

Tom & Thomas (2002) – Character: Paul Sheppard

SB - T&T

A rarely seen children’s movie, Tom & Thomas sees Bean play the adoptive father of one of a set of twin boys (both played by Aaron Johnson, now better known as Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Once they meet, the other twin’s involvement with a group of child smugglers sets the pair off on a great adventure. It’s an enjoyable, unassuming movie, and it’s good to see Bean making the most of such a different role from the ones he’d been used to up until then.

Anna Karenina (1997) – Character: Count Alexei Kirillovitch Vronsky

02-00233935 - 1210501

Unfairly dismissed by critics upon release, Bernard Rose’s Russian-shot (and badly cut by the studio) version of Anna Karenina certainly has its problems in the script department, but remains a beautifully realised production of Tolstoy’s classic novel, with superb use of music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Bean is a convincing, dashing Vronsky, and his scenes with Sophie Marceau are impeccable for the way in which both actors portray the overwhelming passion their characters feel for each other.

North Country (2005) – Character: Kyle Dodge

SB - NC

Bean takes a supporting role in another movie that broadens his career CV, playing the good friend of Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) who brings a class action suit for sexual harassment against the owners of an iron mine. Based on a true story, Niki Caro’s movie is eloquent, passionate, and inspiring, and Bean fits in well as one of the few men in Josey’s life who aren’t either sexist scumbags or manipulative, uncaring “primitives”.

Far North (2007) – Character: Loki

SB - FN

In this strange and haunting tale set in the arctic tundra, Bean plays a man whose sudden interjection into the lives of a mother and daughter leads to both unexpected passion and forecasted tragedy. Kapadia’s last feature until this year’s Ali and Nino, Far North is a tough, uncompromising movie made against some stunning backdrops and giving Bean the chance to reveal a less macho side to his acting.

The Field (1990) – Character: Tadgh McCabe

SB - TF

Although it was a commercial failure, The Field still has a good reputation amongst movie lovers, thanks in the main to Richard Harris’s performance as Bull McCabe, but there are other positives as well, such as Bean’s stalwart turn as Bull’s son. It’s a powerful portrayal of a son unwilling (or unable) to meet his father’s expectations of him. It’s a movie where tragedy is just waiting to happen, and where pride is the instigator of that tragedy, and in the hands of writer/director Jim Sheridan, packs such an emotional punch you’ll be bruised for days after seeing it.

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Flightplan (2005)

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Berlin, Disappearance, Drama, Flight, Hijack, Jodie Foster, Missing daughter, Peter Sarsgaard, Propulsion engineer, Review, Robert Schwentke, Sean Bean, Thriller, Widow

Flightplan

D: Robert Schwentke / 98m

Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Kate Beahan, Erika Christensen, Michael Irby, Assaf Cohen, Marlene Lawston, Greta Scacchi

Every once in a while a movie comes along that is one part absurd, one part stupid, and two parts ridiculous. Back in 2005 that movie was Flightplan, a modest thriller starring Jodie Foster as super-anxious widow Kyle Pratt who’s travelling with her six-year-old daughter Julia (Lawston), from Berlin to New York by plane after the unexpected death of her husband (whose body is travelling with them in the hold). Hours into the flight, Kyle awakes from a nap to find that Julia has disappeared. Panicked, she accosts passengers and cabin crew alike in her efforts to find her daughter, but everyone tells Kyle the same thing: no one has seen her, not even the flight attendant, Fiona (Christensen) who saw them on board.

The plot thickens when Kyle tries to enlist the aid of the captain, Marcus Rich (Bean), who is initially sympathetic, even though a check of the plane’s manifest reveals the seat Julia was sitting in is officially empty. A search of the plane is conducted, and as expected, Julia isn’t found. When Kyle insists she and the crew search the cargo hold and the avionics section, Rich finds her abrupt, pushy attitude hard to handle. He finds things even harder when he receives notification from the morgue that has shipped her husband’s body, that Julia is also dead, killed at the same time as her father. Kyle vigorously denies this to be true, but now everyone sees her as the deluded, grieving widow. With the aid of the flight’s air marshal, Carson (Sarsgaard), Rich does his best to contain the situation from getting any worse.

Flightplan - scene1

And then it gets worse. Kyle accuses two Arab passengers (Irby, Cohen) of being complicit in Julia’s disappearance and attacks one of them. Carson intervenes but in the ensuing scuffle, she gets free. Carson chases after her but one of the Arabs intercepts her and throws her to the floor and she is knocked unconscious. When Kyle comes to she finds herself talking to a therapist (Scacchi) who nearly convinces her that her grief over her husband and daughters’ deaths have caused her to imagine that Julia is still alive (as this is easier to deal with). Kyle is almost convinced but sees evidence that Julia is alive, and she redoubles her efforts to find her. She eludes Carson and gets up into the roof of the plane where she causes the emergency oxygen masks to drop down and the loss of lighting throughout the plane.

Her efforts at sabotage allow her to go below decks to the cargo hold. She opens her husband’s coffin just as Carson catches up with her. In handcuffs and with the captain diverting the plane to land in Newfoundland, Kyle doesn’t have long to find her daughter and work out why she’s been abducted in the first place. Can she find out who’s behind it all, stop them, and get her daughter back? Are you kidding? Of course she can, she’s Jodie Foster.

Watching Flightplan again so long after seeing it for the first time is a strangely unrewarding experience. Memory – that elusive mistress – has covered the movie in a soft rosy blanket and if pressed, offers up a 7/10 rating, confident that it won’t be questioned too closely. But isn’t that the nature sometimes of first-time viewings, that with the passage of time some movies take on a brighter, shinier hue than was actually the case? Flightplan is definitely one of those movies, its high altitude hysterics and gaping plot holes you could fly a 747 through – oh, wait, they actually did – seemingly impervious to criticism eleven years ago because the movie was a whole lot of fun. But now with the dubious benefit of a second viewing, it’s a movie that’s revealed in all its lacklustre glory (oxymoron intended).

FLIGHTPLAN, Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, 2005, (c) Touchstone

Now it’s true we don’t always expect air-tight screenplays that follow every logical line when it comes to thrillers, especially so-called “high concept” ones. And sometimes, the ones that only come close to credibility by accident are often the thrillers we can enjoy the most, but Flightplan misses out on even this by virtue of two very grave errors made right from the start. The first is that it casts Jodie Foster as a grieving widow who may be hallucinating the existence of her daughter. Right away, the idea that Foster could be hallucinating anything, no matter how sad or grieving her character may be is patently absurd (that’s the first part, remember?). She’s Jodie Foster; she only ever plays strong women. And secondly, her daughter disappears on a plane, which in itself is a variation on the hoary old locked-room mystery, so of course she’s been abducted. Any other explanation would be just plain stupid (and that’s the second part).

The movie battles against these issues valiantly, but soon resorts to running Foster around in circles in her efforts to discover her daughter’s whereabouts. All the while she looks like she’s about to have a coronary, so prominent is the vein in her forehead.  But she perseveres, and is helped/hindered/helped by Sarsgaard’s dopey-looking air marshal (he really does look like he’s going to nod off right in the middle of a scene). With so few of the cast as plausible suspects for the villain role, Sarsgaard becomes the obvious choice, and despite the presence of Bean. But then he’s ruled out of the competition, then he’s back in again – oh wait, now he’s just been nice again. Yes it’s designed to add tension to a plot that lacks any kind of edge, but it only succeeds in being annoying and ridiculous (part three), though not quite as ridiculous as the reason for Julia’s abduction in the first place, which makes no sense at all and is patently ridiculous (and there we have it, part four).

Flightplan - scene3

Still, Foster is good value, even when she’s running down aisles like a champion sprinter, or punching out stewardesses, and she’s as watchable as always, imbuing Kyle with that patented inner strength that Foster, as an actress at least, possesses in abundance. Sarsgaard limps along behind her in comparison, trying to find a way in to a character who appears to have no inner life at all and exists purely for the script’s lazy benefit. Bean gets to play exasperated at various points, but is compensated by being handed the movie’s best line: “I am responsible for the safety of every passenger on this plane – even the delusional ones!” Sadly, everyone else is forgettable, but that’s because their roles are.

Schwentke directs in a bland, perfunctory style that does nothing to elevate the material (not that much could), and signals his desire early on to focus exclusively on Foster, and to the detriment of everyone else. Florian Ballhaus’s cinematography shows Berlin in the bleakest light possible before trying to make us go “Wow!” at the glamorous interior of the plane, and there’s a turgid, ineffective score from James Horner. All of which goes to prove that high concept thrillers need a whole lot more than a committed lead and a hokey script to be successful.

Rating: 5/10 – Flightplan plays like a toned-down Die Hard of the skies, but with its central plot and storyline proving too uninspired for comfort, it’s left to Foster to keep things moving and the audience from straying; if you want to see an imperilled Foster trapped in a confined space, see Panic Room (2002) instead.

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Jupiter Ascending (2015)

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abrasax Family, Action, Andy Wachowski, Caine Wise, Channing Tatum, Douglas Booth, Drama, Eddie Redmayne, Genetic reincarnation, Jupiter, Jupiter Jones, Lana Wachowski, Mila Kunis, Review, Sci-fi, Sean Bean, The Aegis, Thriller, Youth serum

Jupiter Ascending

D: Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski / 127m

Cast: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, Tuppence Middleton, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Christina Cole, Nicholas A. Newman, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jeremy Swift, Kick Gurry, James D’Arcy

Jupiter Jones (Kunis) works as a cleaner with her mother, Aleksa (Kennedy), and her aunt. She has no prospects, no will to succeed, and no man in her life. Shackled to her mother’s Russian family, she is unaware that she is the genetic reincarnation of the matriarch of the Abrasax family. The Abrasax family are part of an alien race whose business is that of seeding planets and harvesting the inhabitants once they reach a certain physical maturity. The Abrasax matriarch had Earth as part of her portfolio, and its importance as a source of youth-giving serum is not lost on her offspring, Balem (Redmayne), Kalique (Middleton) and Titus (Booth). Each of them is trying to acquire Earth for themselves, and when they learn of Jupiter’s existence, they initiate plans to either manipulate her or kill her (or both).

Jupiter can claim her genetic forebear’s titles and properties but if she does it will freeze out Balem and his siblings. His response is to send agents to Earth to kill her, but Titus sends a genetically engineered hunter called Caine Wise (Tatum) to protect her and bring her to him. Wise enlists aid of fellow hunter Stinger Apini (Bean) but a group of mercenaries manage to capture Jupiter and take her to a planet owned by Kalique. Kalique informs Jupiter that the conditions of her mother’s will were such that Earth would belong to her genetic reincarnation should one come forward. All Jupiter has to do is to claim her inheritance and her brothers’ plans will be thwarted.

Aided by Stinger and the Aegis, an intergalactic police force, Caine rescues Jupiter from Kalique and takes her to the planet where she can begin to claim her inheritance. Titus appears on the scene and tells Jupiter he plans to uphold his mother’s wish that Earth not be harvested, and that if she marries him it will ensure both Earth’s safety and an end to Balem and Kalique’s scheming. Titus isolates Caine from Jupiter and reveals his real plan which is to marry her and then have her killed, thus inheriting Earth by default. He has Caine expelled from an air lock, while Jupiter agrees to marry Titus…

Jupiter Ascending - scene

Originally set for release on 25 July 2014, Jupiter Ascending finally arrives on our screens and… is… well… just… terrible. It’s not quite as bad as, say, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) – that would be difficult – but it is shockingly, depressingly bad in ways that are completely surprising given the calibre of the directors, the cast and the crew. Already a box office bomb, with very little chance of its $176,000,000 budget being recouped any time soon, Jupiter Ascending is a classic example of what happens when you ask two feted filmmakers to come up with “an original intellectual property and franchise” – take a bow, Jeff Robinov (Warner Bros. president). The result? A movie that makes no sense at any point during its entire running time.

It’s a spectacular movie, true, but this is yet another sci-fi movie that is a triumph of style over substance. If there had been half as much effort put into the script as there has been into the special effects and the design of the movie then we might be talking about the movie in terms of it being a modern classic. But so successfully have the Wachowskis sabotaged their own script – sorry, “intellectual property” – that instead we have to talk about the movie in terms of it being an (almost) unmitigated disaster. Take the notion that only the human race can produce the serum that keeps the Abrasax family so youthful. So far, so good. But if this is the case, and the Abrasax family have “seeded” Earth in order to produce this serum, why haven’t they done it on other planets? Surely that would make sound business sense (not to mention keep them eternally young)? (It seems not.)

There are plenty of other elements within the script that don’t make sense, such as the whole idea that Jupiter is the genetic reincarnation of the Abrasax’ matriarch. How or why this should even happen in the first place is skipped over by the Wachowski’s, and it hovers over the movie like a particularly stinky McGuffin. And the speed with which Bean’s character changes sides (and is forgiven) has all the dramatic intensity of someone changing their washing powder instead of their allegiance. It’s all in service of a script that careens from one unlikely scene to another while ramping up the visual spectacle to such a pitch that the characters appear incidental to the vast spaceships and the vast sets inside them (though the Wachowskis have seen fit to ensure that no room is too small that Caine can’t pitch and hover around it with ease).

The cast look uncomfortable throughout, with Tatum doing his best not to appear confused (or wishing he was making another movie entirely), and Kunis unable to make Jupiter less irritating than she’s written. Bean appears to be apologising for each line he has to utter – his rhapsodising about bees is a highlight – while Booth mistakes petulance for silky menace, and Middleton is saddled with the weight of too much exposition (and wrinkles). And then there’s Redmayne, soft-spoken for most of the movie and evidencing Balem’s more psychotic tendencies by shouting loudly whenever he’s annoyed. By the end it’s become the movie’s most flamboyant performance, but it would have been better utilised in a pantomime than a science fiction movie trying to take itself seriously.

The action scenes are suitably large-scale and ambitious but still rely heavily on the bad guys being terrible shots, and Wise being able to get off a kill shot from any angle. The Renaissance feel to many of the sets and the overall design is, however, impressive, but the production facility on Jupiter is too overblown, and seems designed more to be destroyed (as it eventually is) than anything else. And therein lies another problem, the Zack Snyder Equation™, which posits that if there is a chance to provide mass destruction on a monumental level then it should be grasped with every gigabyte possible. It seems movie makers still haven’t caught on to the fact that while this may make for an arresting visual sequence, we’ve still seen it way too often now for it to have any meaningful effect.

Rating: 4/10 – with stumbling, forlorn attempts at comedy thrown in here and there – “I love dogs”, Jupiter’s Russian family, any time Famulus (Mbatha-Raw) makes an appearance – Jupiter Ascending succeeds in undermining its own credibility at nearly every turn; a space opera masquerading as something more (though exactly what is hard to determine), this sees the Wachowskis reprising themes from The Matrix to less than impressive effect.

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Wicked Blood (2014)

28 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Abigail Breslin, Alexa Vega, Chess, Crime, Delivering drugs, Down South, Drama, Drugs, Jake Busey, James Purefoy, Lew Temple, Mark H. Young, Review, Sean Bean

Wicked Blood

aka Bad Blood

D: Mark H. Young / 92m

Cast: Abigail Breslin, Sean Bean, James Purefoy, Alexa Vega, Lew Temple, Jake Busey, Jody Quigley

Hannah Lee Baker (Breslin) and her sister Amber (Vega) live in a small Southern town. Both their parents are dead and they live with their uncle Donny (Temple). Hannah is something of a chess prodigy and views the world around her in terms of a tournament match, with the pieces on the board representing the people she interacts with. The king is her uncle Frank (Bean), the local crime boss. After receiving a threatening visit from the FBI about Frank, she hatches a plan to leave town and take her sister and Donny with her. She approaches Frank and asks for a job making drug deliveries at $20 a time. He agrees to the job but gives her only $10 a time. Picking up the drugs from the trailer where Donny cooks it, her first delivery is to biker Bill Owens (Purefoy), a meth dealer who acts as Frank’s distributor; unknown to Hannah, Bill has begun seeing Amber.

When some of the drugs Bill has been distributing prove to be cut with vitamins, he tells Frank about it and asks for compensation. When Frank refuses to pay, an argument breaks out between Bill’s buddy Jackson (Quigley) and Frank’s brother Bobby (Busey). Bobby is keen to hit back at Bill and Jackson for their being disrespectful but Frank needs Bill to continue distributing his meth. Nevertheless, Bobby kills Jackson and another of Bill’s associates, but Bill doesn’t retaliate. He tells Hannah (who he’s now befriended) that he doesn’t want a war. He’s also fallen in love with Amber and doesn’t want to jeopardise his relationship with her. Meanwhile, Hannah is trying to convince Donny to leave with her and Amber but he’s too afraid of what Frank will do if he does; he’s also addicted to the product he makes.

Things are brought to a head when Bobby, who has a crush on Amber, sees her with Bill. One night he goes to collect her at Frank’s request but she refuses to go. When he grabs her she fights back but Bobby overpowers her and beats her half to death before dumping her body outside town. When she wakes up in the hospital, Bobby pays her a visit and threatens to hurt Hannah if Amber says anything. But Hannah guesses the truth and seeks Bill’s help. He refuses though, leaving Hannah to seek revenge on her own, and set in motion a series of events that will either see her plan come to fruition, or find her dead at the hands of her uncle Frank.

Wicked Blood - scene

From its low-key opening, with Hannah playing chess against a little boy, to its downbeat ending at the trailer, Wicked Blood is a crime drama that aspires to be something more than just another tale of one person’s determination to break free from hometown ties. Hannah’s need to escape is highlighted by her serious demeanour: she finds it difficult to find any amusement in life, brushing off the attentions of a skateboarder with undisguised disdain, and being told by Donny that she doesn’t smile anymore. She relies on her plan, adapting it when necessary, refusing to let go of it, or come up with another one. The allusion to chess, that it’s not just a game, the same as Life, is firmly made, and Hannah’s focus is unwavering. It all adds up to a character who is entirely believable, despite her teenage years, and Hannah is ably brought to life by Breslin. It’s a strong performance, utterly credible and a clear indication that Breslin isn’t going to be one of those child actors that doesn’t make the transition to adult roles.

With such a strong central character it would be natural to expect a slight drop-off in the quality of the remaining individuals the movie is concerned with. But thanks to the quality of the script, courtesy of director Young, this isn’t the case. Frank is presented more as a businessman than a crime boss (though these days the two roles aren’t so dissimilar); for most of the movie he sits in a darkened office poring over balance sheets. It’s a given that he’s a hard man, but it’s a subtler performance from Bean than might be expected, and even when the expected outburst of violence occurs towards the movie’s end, it’s a tribute to Young’s script – and Bean as well – that Frank doesn’t just become a psycho with a gun. Equally memorable is Temple’s performance as drug-addled Donny, a man who recognises the dead end his life has become, and who clings to Hannah’s offer of a new life with a mixture of childish hope and diminished longing.

In comparison, Purefoy has the harder task of making Owens’ passivity credible, and it’s not until he makes an unexpected confession to Hannah that his reluctance to engage with Frank is fully understood. It’s a difficult role, and one of the few areas where the script doesn’t entirely convince, but Purefoy is such a good actor that he never quite loses the credibility the character needs. Amber is a secondary character, a little naive but with a good heart even if she and Hannah are at loggerheads like most sisters, and Vega brings a confidence to the role that makes Amber both level-headed and hopelessly romantic at the same time. As Bobby, Busey has the most generic role, that of slow-thinking muscle to Frank’s brains, but imbues the character with a kind of nervous puppy energy that makes Bobby scarily unpredictable.

The small-town milieu is well represented by a handful of recurring locations, and there’s an emotive score courtesy of Elia Cmiral. Young shows a liking for low-level camerawork which allows for several shots to stand out in terms of space and composition, and the violence, when it comes, is almost casually brutal yet effective. All in all, Wicked Blood is a well-paced drama whose only drawbacks are its predictability and its repeated use of chess as a metaphor for life, but thanks to Young’s assured handling of the material as a whole, it remains absorbing and potent throughout.

Rating: 7/10 – a well-worn idea given a spirited interpretation by Young, and bolstered by strong turns from its cast, Wicked Blood has a quiet, slow burn intensity that works well; easy to overlook considering how many other low-key crime dramas are out there, but definitely worth a look, and a rewarding one at that.

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Soldiers of Fortune (2012)

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Christian Slater, Colm Meaney, Dominic Monaghan, Freedom fighters, James Cromwell, Maxim Korostyshevsky, Mercenaries, Reality TV, Review, Sean Bean, Televised war games, Ving Rhames

Soldiers of Fortune

D: Maxim Korostyshevsky / 93m

Cast: Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell, Charlie Bewley, Oxana Korostyshevsky, Colm Meaney, Freddy Rodriguez, Ryan Donowho

Soldiers of Fortune, even with its impressive cast (who must still be paying off their mortgages), is still the epitome of a silly, war-related action movie. Playing fast and loose with both logic and credibility, Soldiers of Fortune begins with McCenzie (Slater) and Reed (Rodriguez) on a mission in Helmand province in 2008. Reed is disguised as a woman, and wears a full-length blue burqha in order to infiltrate a village hiding a weapons cache. He’s quickly rumbled and it’s up to “never-leave-a-man-behind” McCenzie to invade the village single-handedly and rescue Reed from both the Taliban and ultra-nasty CIA operative Mason (Meaney), and this despite clear orders to the contrary. Fast forward two dishonourable discharges and four years later, and McCenzie and Reed are in need of a big payday. Enter Oxana (Korostyshevsky) and Ernesto (Donowho), freedom fighters from an island off the coast of Eastern Europe. They want McCenzie and Reed to help them overthrow corrupt Colonel Lupo (Gennadi Vengerov), and reclaim their island. (Oh, and ultra-nasty CIA operative Mason who is now Lupo’s chief of security.)

At this point, so far, so predictable. But then the movie throws its one one and only curve ball… and it’s a doozy. The freedom fighters have gained financial backing for their intended coup from five multi-millionaires: metals magnate Dimitov (Bean); video games designer Tommy Sin (Monaghan); arms dealer Grimaud (Rhames); financial whizkid Vanderbeer (Bewley); and ageing tycoon Haussman (Cromwell). As well as providing financing for the intended coup, all five find themselves going along for the ride under the pretence of taking part in a televised war game. It’s down to McCenzie and Reed to keep them safe when the real bullets start flying.

Soldiers of Fortune - scene

It’s this aspect of the script – multi-millionaires in fatigues take on a well-trained guerrilla army – that heightens the absurdity of it all and takes it to new levels. And there is the added bonus of Tommy Sin having a broken leg from the mission’s beginning: initially it’s an obstacle to his getting about but it’s rarely of any consequence or cause of any impedance once the mission is fully under way. In fact, Sin walks and runs just as well as any of the others, even after he’s shot in the same leg later on in the movie.

Of the cast, Rhames and Cromwell fare best, while Slater is required to do little more than scowl a lot and show off his forward rolls. The action sequences are perfunctory, and the direction by first-timer Korostyshevsky is adequate for this kind of thing, although he often clutters the frame in his efforts to cram in all the cast. The locations, however, are beautiful, and if nothing else the cast must have had a wonderful time being there. There are the inevitable personal “showdowns” for each member of the team, and there is one completely WTF? moment when Grimaud produces a rocket launcher from – literally – out of nowhere.

Watching Soldiers of Fortune is akin to viewing the worst bits of a “boys with toys” wish-fulfillment video. The bad guys are always killed by one bullet when one of the team takes three hits before going out in a blaze of glory; Slater’s reputation for never losing anyone on a mission is overturned within minutes of the mission starting; one of the multi-millionaires turns out to be a traitor (gasp!); at boot camp, all five unfit multi-millionaires – even Monaghan – tackle the obstacle course with ease; and all the while the audience is left wondering if the script has been translated into a foreign language and then translated back again… by someone unversed in either language.

Rating: 4/10 – as bad as it looks but in a perverse way, fun too to see so many stars prepared to dumb down for the money; loud, stupid, and awful in equal measure.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.

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