Reliable Bet: WILD CARD

Jason Statham’s screen presence – the stubbled head of a bruiser on a body with the aerodynamic grace of an Olympic diver – is perfect action movie charisma. No wonder he’s often used for his physicality, making tightly choreographed fights look like improvised excellence. Confident and comfortable on screen, he makes every gesture seem effortless. Whether in an electric jolt like the wild and vulgar Crank or a thundering throwback men-on-a-mission picture like The Expendables or an energetic star vehicle like The Transporters, he’s a distinct star. He can execute martial arts with total professionalism, but delivers straight-faced action thrills with the faintest smirking enjoyment. His is a brutal joy, every punch (or kick, or shot, or vroom-slam-pow-kablooey) lands hard, but is fun to watch. Even (too often) when he’s in subpar material, you’ll never catch him phoning it in.

His latest effort is the essentially direct-to-VOD/DVD Wild Card, a remake of the William Goldman-scripted/Burt Reynolds-starring 1987 film Heat. With a screenplay credited to Goldman, this new picture gives Statham an opportunity to show off his underrated way with dialogue. Sure, there are flashes of action that call for bruising hand-to-hand combat. He’s great there. But he also has a sturdy, believable way of working with tangled threads of lengthy dialogue. There’s world-weariness to his wittiness, as he here stumbles through a series of episodic encounters with a variety of stellar supporting character actors.

Statham plays a freelance tough guy in the lower levels of Las Vegas crime, doing a bit of bodyguarding here, some gumshoeing there to pay for his gambling addiction. The film meanders a few days with him as he babysits a meek young techie millionaire (Michael Angarano) while helping a friend (Dominik García-Lorido) find and get revenge on a mob sicko (Milo Ventimiglia) who brutally assaulted her. Along the way, he runs into recognizable actors who turn up for a scene or two each. Anne Heche, Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci, Sofía Vergara, Max Casella, Jason Alexander, and others turn up to color in the margins of Statham’s shady world. They trade crackling, half-charming B-movie dialogue. Every scene proves again Statham can jab just as well verbally as he can with his fists. Get him in a Mamet or a Tarantino picture and he’d steal scenes with the best of them.

Wild Card isn’t up to the standards of a Jackie Brown or Glengarry Glen Ross. Nor should it be held to those standards. It simply putters along, stuck in a low gear, with minor entertainment value from familiar crime movie scenarios strung together. Director Simon West, usually found blowing out bigger budget guilty pleasure blockbusters like Con Air, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and The Expendables 2, shoots cleanly and crisply, finding some dexterity in the small spaces and small budget to keep things slick and suspenseful amid the winding shaggy plot. But Statham’s great, and the film gives him opportunity to stretch some acting muscles he’s not always asked to utilize. There’s not much here, but it has its low-key charm.

Bad Boys: THAT'S MY BOY

That’s My Boy, a new R-rated Adam Sandler vehicle, is an awful movie. But, when I sat there and watched it, I laughed. Sometimes I cringed, sure, and other times I gaped with something approaching admiration at the gleeful way the bar is consistently lowered, but I left the theater feeling something like satisfied. I can’t recommend this movie. I’m not even sure I want to defend it in any way. But I laughed and it is my duty to report that reaction. After all, as Roger Ebert once said, “If I laugh, I have to tell you it’s funny. I went to see Jackass, a shameful movie. I laughed all the way through it. I mean, I have to tell you that.”

I found That’s My Boy to be a movie so exuberantly vulgar, so excessively coarse and gross-out goofy that I could almost imagine the Farrelly brothers finding it a bit over the top. (It probably has more on-screen uses for bodily fluids than any comedy since their own There’s Something About Mary.) It’s all predicated on an off-putting inciting incident and then goes on to include a couple of twists that are just about as bad. And all through it, Sandler is doing one of his patented (and usually grating) braying-accent arrested-adolescent shticks. I usually don’t like Adam Sandler movies, but after such career nadirs as Grown Ups and Jack and Jill, truly awful movies following nearly two decades of awful movies, even a mild improvement feels pretty good. What can I say? This time around I found it funny, although not at first.

The whole thing starts in the mid-80’s when a teacher (Eva Amurri Martino) has an affair with a student (Justin Weaver) – a teenager named Donny who grows up to be Adam Sandler. It’s not every day a comedy starts off with some casually presented statutory rape, but there you have it. I wasn’t laughing yet, that’s for sure. It’s uncomfortable to say the least, especially when the teacher is shipped off to prison pregnant and the eventual baby is left in the custody of the kid and his deadbeat dad. Luckily we cut ahead over twenty-five years later so we don’t have deal with the whole immediate implications of this scenario, skipping through an opening credits montage that spoofs the culture’s gendered double standard about this sort of scandal. Donny gains immediate fame through the talk show circuit – Arsenio and Letterman – as well as selling the rights to his life story for a TV movie, but soon enough his fame has dried up and he’s no better off than his fellow has-been pal Vanilla Ice (as an exaggerated buffoonish version of himself).

When the movie proper picks up, Donny, a drunken mess of perpetual boorishness, has just learned that he owes $40,000 to the IRS since he hasn’t paid taxes since 1994. He’ll go to prison unless he pays off the debt by Tuesday. Stewing at his usual table at his favorite (but dilapidated) strip club, he notices the wedding section of the New York Times where who should he see but his estranged son (Andy Samberg). He’s now a rising hedge fund manager marrying a pretty young woman (Leighton Meester) from a wealthy family. In fact, the whole wedding party – the bride’s parents (Blake Clark and Meagen Fay), grandmother (Peggy Stewart) and soldier brother (Milo Ventimiglia), the groom’s boss (Tony Orlando), and some straight-laced co-workers (Will Forte, Rachel Dratch) – is staying in a mansion on the coast of Massachusetts for the ceremony this very weekend. Donny, in a desperate attempt to raise the necessary funds, convinces a tabloid TV show to meet him at the prison and stage a reunion between teacher, student, and son and sets off to trick his son into this plan, but soon finds he’s having a pretty good time just being reunited.

So Donny bumbles his way into the wedding party and throws everybody for a loop. It’s like The Hangover crash-landed into the middle of Meet the Parents. Director Sean Anders (writer of the so-so Hot Tub Time Machine) and writer David Caspe (who works for the sit-com Happy Endings) haven’t exactly made a comedy of errors. This is a comedy of sexual dysfunction, of non-stop profanity and raunchiness, of panicked social anxiety and endlessly protracted embarrassment. But rather than mere juvenile tittering and strange squeamishness of usual Sandler fare, this is an enthusiastically rude embrace of base instincts and bad behavior. The straight-arrow son running from his irresponsible father is drawn back into his web of debauchery and is shocked to find how much fun it can be, especially when so many of the wedding guests seem so charmed by his coarseness and party-animal antics. And, sure, father and son have a lot of learning to do from each other, learning to live a full life and yada yada (it’s basically an inverted Big Daddy without the moral), but the level of manic depravity on display here is truly staggering. And I laughed a lot.

This is no typical Sandler movie, which are usually somewhere between a PG and a PG-13, lightly vulgar, cheap, sentimental efforts with plenty of saccharine uplift and a safer-than-not gross-out sensibility. This movie puts the hard-R in hard-R comedy, leaning against boundaries cheerfully and with such unashamed commitment. And the cast is so game, tearing into this material with surprisingly appealing energy and timing. This is a shameful movie that starts so tasteless it can only go up, but it still finds plenty of ways to shock, through some appalling (and funny) revelations and sheer volume of vulgarity. But surprise of surprises, Sandler and Samberg have nice chemistry and the supporting cast is so willing to go along with the surprisingly amusing material which grows more complicated and picks up speed as the narrative hurtles towards the ceremony. (And, of course, we have to see teacher and student meet again, and she’s now played by an Academy Award winning actress about whom I wouldn’t have guessed we’d now be able to say is making a habit of this sort of thing.)

Where does that leave us? It’s a movie in which sometimes-funny people have a good time in material a smidge rougher than you’d expect, finding jaw-dropping lines to cross and combining what would be all the raunchiest bits of marginally cleaner movies into one long parade of impropriety. And it’s handled with such slickness and even good-natured nastiness at times. Other times there are jokes that don’t go over so well and are just plain nastiness. The movie’s based on a premise so cringingly awful that I wish the filmmakers could have found a premise that was somewhat easier to take but that still got us to the same destination. So we’re right back where we started. I completely understand where people who will hate this movie will be coming from. It’s awful. But I did laugh.

Quick Look: Armored (2009)

Armored flew under the radar last December, quickly and unsurprisingly pushed there by the annual collection of high-profile holiday releases, which is unfortunate since it’s well worth discovering. It’s essentially a heist movie, following a team of armored truck drivers who plan to fake a hijacking and robbery, hide the money, and then double back later to pick it up and share the wealth. These are blue-collar workers struggling to make ends meet, a demographic often not the center of a Hollywood production, even one as low-profile as this. It’s a great, macho ensemble, starting with our central character, played by Columbus Short. His character is a young bundle of anxiety due to the recent deaths of his parents leaving him with custody of his teenage brother. We follow him, learn to care about him, meet the rest of the ensemble through him. There’s Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, Amaury Noalsco, and Milo Ventimiglia. They’re all tough, all determined, and yet they have distinct personalities that develop and grow throughout the film. They’re defined as much, if not more, by what they do as what they say.  When the heist doesn’t go according to plan, it turns into a sort of morality play via a ticking-clock thriller. The bulk of the movie takes place in a grim abandoned factory, a setting of inherent danger enhanced by the men’s fear of being caught at any minute. Think of it as 12 Angry Men with the jurors’ lives at stake. The characters are well-drawn; the goals of the plot are clear with a plan that must be executed within certain time constraints. This is a tightly constructed, purely solid suspenseful movie, wasting almost no time at all before plunging the audience into well-staged and bluntly-effective sequences. Directed with considerable skill by Nimród Antal, from a tight script by James V. Simpson, this is a pleasingly slick, and wholly unpretentious, example of a modern day B-movie aesthetic, with perfectly grimy set design and exciting intensity in the performances. It’s nothing more and nothing less than a fun time at the movies.

Renter's Adventures, Part Two

Pathology (2008, Marc Schölermann)

In Pathology, a young doctor (a bland Milo Ventimiglia) slowly discovers that the autopsy staff is playing a strange game. They’re competing to see who can pull off the perfect murder. The bodies come through their morgue, giving the other players in the game the chance to puzzle through the cause of death. Is our protagonist shocked by such behavior? A little bit, I suppose. But soon enough, he’s partaking in the games. This is a good concept, ripe for luridness and, sure enough, the filmmakers indulge in grisly autopsies and brutal murders, throwing in plenty of drugs and abuse as well. This should be a schlocky good time, but the whole thing falls flat.

First-time director Marc Schölermann has a serviceable style that neither dazzles nor distracts but the script by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor brings the real disappointment. The two of them wrote and directed Crank a hyperactive, and ridiculously lurid, action movie that barrels forward with such a crazed energy that those with strong enough sensibilities can find themselves swept up in the ride. I found Crank a little exhausting by the end. I was overwhelmed by the sheer excess but admired the style. Neveldine and Taylor have guts and talent and I still hold out hope that they’ll turn out some great genre work. With Pathology, though, they pull back the pace which only serves to make the plotting seem sleepy.

There’s a sense of matter-of-fact movement in the dialogue and plotting that makes even the most shocking hard-R content seem boring, routine, or just plain silly. The deeper and deeper Ventimiglia is pulled into the dark game, the more I felt my attention slipping away. It’s frightfully uninvolving, even for a third-rate knockoff and mash-up of Se7en and Coma. This is one seriously undercooked B-movie. Where’s the urgency? Why don’t the stakes seem life-and-death? All thrillers need a sense of danger and forward momentum. I never felt that here. Pathology is just well-shot nonsense, dull and grimy, lingering in the mind just long enough to feel uncomfortably sleazy.

Tokyo! (2009, Michel Gondry/Leos Carax/Bong Joon-Ho)

Tokyo!, an underwhelming triptych ode to Tokyo, presents three short films from directors who are not natives to the city: two Frenchmen and a Korean. Each film presents a distinct vision, has a few enjoyable sequences, but none of them truly satisfy. There is certainly none of the great sense of rambling unevenness married to a sense of relentless artistry that came with Paris, Je Taime, an anthology film featuring mostly great Paris-set shorts from nearly twenty different directors.

The first film, Interior Design, comes to us from Michel Gondry, of Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film follows a filmmaker and his girlfriend as they move to Tokyo. The banter between the two is charming, as are the scenarios in which they find themselves, such as finding a dead cat or competing for the same gift-wrapping job. This being a Gondry film, though, I was constantly anticipating a shift into whimsy and dreading the prospects since the short unfolds with such unforced heightened, but not much, reality. When the shift arrives with the girlfriend finding a new purpose in life, I was disappointed.

The second film is Merde from Leos Carax (who hasn’t directed a feature since Pola X in 1999), about a strange creature who emerges from the sewer and storms down a city sidewalk snatching bouquets and sandwich, pausing occasionally to frighten a baby or lick an innocent bystanders armpit, all in a mesmerizing sequence that plays out in nearly one continuous shot. When the creature’s antics turn more dangerous, it is captured and put on trial. The whole short is entertaining but it can’t match the high of its opening moments.

The third, and final, film is Shaking Tokyo, about a recluse who makes eye-contact with another human being for the first time in some time. That’s all I shall say about this one, plot-wise as it both the simplest and my favorite of the three. Director Bong Joon-Ho, who also directed the fun monster movie The Host, from a few years ago, shoots his short gorgeously with great pacing and patience in its warm human comedy and poignancy.

I’m not sure Tokyo! would have been worth seeking out in theaters, but now that it’s available for renting, it might be worth a look. After all, with anthologies, if you don’t like one contribution, you can skip ahead and hope you like the next one.