The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Rating: ***1/2

Every culture has their own popular figure of the noble outlaw. The British, of course, have Robin Hood, while the Croatians have Andrijica Šimić. Meanwhile, the Lithuanians look up to Tadas Blinda and the Japanese tell stories about Nezumi Kozō. In the United States though, the western badit named Jesse James is frequently treated with a kind of reverence not normally given to a man that killed 19 people then robbed them of their valuables. When he was killed on April 3rd, 1882 by Robert Ford, James’ status as a legendary figure in America’s Wild West was secured, while that man that eventually killed him would became vilified as a coward.

This is the story of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a deliberate and exacting semi-historical account of the events that led to that fateful April day in Missouri. The story picks up in 1880, when Ford (Oscar-nominated Casey Affleck) and his brother Charles (Sam Rockwell) hook up with the infamous James-Young gang led by the renowned criminal Jesse James (Brad Pitt).

Both Ford Brothers become members of the gang, helping loot a train full of passengers of their wallets and jewellery. Over time though, Bob Ford develops a love/hate relationship with James and the brothers eventually find themselves in the position to arrest James on behalf of the government. Things don’t turn out that way, however.

The story of Assassination, more or less fits the traditional and iconic portrayal of the James legend as well as how Bob Ford fit into that storyline: The Ford Brothers were overeager volunteers for the James-Young gang, Bob idolized James but has difficulty reconciling the hero of his youth with the villain he’s fell in with.

But these men are neither one thing nor the other; there is goodness in James and there is a streak of morality in Ford. It’s the grey areas in which these men live that make the movie itself so compelling. All the hesitations, the last minute decisions and the catastrophic collision of perception versus reality are what drive this narrative forward.

The trouble is it doesn’t drive forward very fast. There innumerable long pauses in the film between developments and while I have the patience to sit through them, I hate to feel I’m just sitting there waiting for stuff to happen. But at these moments, it’s the performances that win you back over. Pitt as James is far from archetypal, he’s old, he’s tired and maybe he’s just a little bit insane. Pitt sort of reminded me here as a dialled back version of his character from 12 Monkeys – the frightening genius displaced by madness.

But frankly, playing troubled and disturbed are character traits I know Pitt was capable of portraying. The real story here is the Oscar-nominated Affleck, who combined with his role in big brother’s Gone Baby Gone, has carved out quite a year in acting for himself.

Affleck’s Ford is sympathetic and conflicted; a man in over his head who’s reasons for killing James were as complicated as the man himself. When the fateful moment comes there’s sense of hesitation and fear on the part of Ford; meanwhile, Pitt plays James like he’s almost expecting a shot in the back from Ford, taking off his gun in a purposeful manner while turning to straighten the picture as if saying to Ford, “I’m giving you an opening.” It’s a fascinating scene to watch on many levels and Affleck exploits it for all the dramatic juice he muster, even mirroring the emotion of James when Ford faces his own bitter end at that movie’s conclusion.

The film is a demanding venture in terms of attention and patience, but it is so well-crafted I have a hard time begrudging it. As bleak as the Missouri landscape (which, incidentally, was really Alberta), then combined with a minimalist score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of the Bad Seed, Assassination is good, but some prodigious editing would have made it a masterpiece.

Eastern Promises

Rating: ****

With Eastern Promises, Director David Cronenberg takes his show on the road, from the comforts of home here in Canada to the seedy streets of London England. New location to be sure as the noted filmmaker is taken far outside his territorial bubble. But on the plus side, all the Cronenberg touches are still there: the moral ambiguity, the shady dealings, the flawed humanity are all on display just relocated across The Pond.

When an injured pregnant woman shows up at the ER, she’s cared for by Ana (Naomi Watts), a mid-wife. The woman gives birth to the baby, but dies in the delivery. Amongst her personal effects is a journal written in Russian, which implicates the local head of the Russian organized crime family (Armin Mueller-Stahl) in her rape and murder. Out of Ana’s desire to do good, finding a home for the baby girl and giving the dead woman closure, she crosses paths with some of the most dangerous people in London, including a mysterious valet named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

Cronenberg is known for his incredibly stylish approach to storytelling, but Eastern Promises is raw and a little rough around the edges. This is not the typically touristy streets of London, but the down and dirty back alleys of England’s capital, places that dead end at the Thames making them an excellent place to dump a body. The city is always nearly drenched in rain, as if the weather itself were reacting to the characters’ state of mind. These are not happy people, or happy circumstances, and the mood that Cronenberg creates reflects that perfectly.

Mortensen proves once again why he’s one of the best actors working out there. He brings mystery and danger to the character of Nikolai, but at the same time he’s got a little something that only makes you wonder if he’s really as bad as he looks. Mortensen and Cronenberg mercilessly execute a twist which has actually nothing to do with the main story but at the same time it’s all serving for the way it answers key questions about Nikolai’s motivation, without losing any of that ambiguity. Helping the makeover is Mortensen’s convincing accent and even more convincing (and intricate) tattoo make-up.

On the other hand is Naomi Watts’ Ana, who is both a saving grace and a bit of a conundrum. She brings a lot of light into an otherwise dreary story, but she’s also saddled with the most contrived element of the screenplay: Ana lost her baby, so now she feels that she’s the abandoned baby’s surrogate mother and protector. In a film that skewers towards the unexpected and unplotable, this development was a real let down. To her credit though, Watts really throws herself into the part and makes it her own.

Eastern Promises is a guaranteed emotional wallop that is unexpected at nearly every turn and enjoyable in a brooding way even without a truly healthy dose of Cronenberg`s signature violence. It’s violent sure, but the point the direct is trying to make is what’s the more scary: a confrontation with a man with a knife or the threat of confrontation from a man who can summon the ability to frighten you into submission with a glare.

Mr Woodcock

Rating: **

I remember when Billy Bob Thornton used to be a character actor, now he just plays A character. It’s the same character, more or less, that he played in Bad Santa, then Bad News Bears and then this time last year in School For Scoundrels. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, so long as you like repetition and seeing the same jokes over and over again. It’s true for Thornton and its true in general for his new film Mr. Woodcock, where he plays an unloveable jerk that you can’t help but love.

Mr. Woodcock (Thornton) is the name of a sadistic gym teacher who’s a pox on all junior high boys with limited athletic means. One such kid is a porker named John Farley, who grows up to be a successful self-help author (Seann William Scott). John goes home to visit his Mom and get the key to the city, only to be horrified by his Mom’s new squeeze… Mr Woodcock! Oh snap! No she didn’t! But, yes she did, and now John’s mission in life is to ensure the break-up of his Mom and Woodcock.

Frankly, I could think of worse ways to spend 90 minutes, but the thing of it is, I can also think of better ways. Mr Woodcock is one of those movies that feels like you’ve seen it before. Shoot, even the people making the movie are acting like that they’ve seen this movie before. It’s not so bad, there are a couple of good one-liners and set-ups, unfortunately though, you’ve probably already seen them all in the trailers.

Basically, at this point, Thornton could play Woodcock in his sleep and in a couple of scenes, I think he was. Scott also appeared to be doing a little sleepwalking in the film John is so unengaging and so not inspiring you wonder how he was able to form a coherent sentence, let alone write a book. And that’s besides the fact that he’s totally vanilla, now Woodcock Vs Stifler, that’s a movie worth paying to see. Normally funny people like Ethan Suplee and Amy Poehler do there best, but there’s only so much you can do to turn the tide during intervals of 30 seconds to a minute.

So to put this as bluntly as I can, if the review so far has not be overly obvious as to the way I’m leaning on this, Mr Woodcock: sort of funny, but not if you’ve seen other movies where Billy Bob Thornton acts like a jerk. Which, granted, are numerous.

The Brave One

Rating: **

The problem with The Brave One is that it’s not sure if it’s The Punisher as Jodie Foster or if it’s Jodie Foster as The Punisher. It’s troublesome because while director Neil Jordan thinks he’s doing one thing, it’s actually coming out as the other; a revenge fantasy the like’s of which has not been seen since Charles Bronson in Death Wish or a few weeks ago in Death Sentence. I’ve got to admit: it kind of scares me a little to think that there are this many angry people out there, but hey, it’s just the movies. Right?

Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio talk show host, who’s show discusses the wonders of New York City. She’s engaged to David (Naveen Andrews from Lost), a respectable doctor if ever there was one. One night while walking their dog in the park, they’re viciously attacked by a gang of hoodlums. Erica survives; David does not. Erica attempts to return to her regular routine, but finds it difficult to deal with post-traumatic stress – so she buys a gun, illegally. At first it’s for protection, to make her feel safer, but when her life is actually threatened, again, she takes action.

It’s just one of several indifferent inconsistencies in the film: be horribly beaten, lose your partner, struggle to regain a sense of normalcy, only to walk in on a pistol-packed domestic dispute. You could probably walk around Manhattan all night, every night, your whole life and never even find one tenth the trouble that Erica seems to. Of course, it’s just accidental, or rather incidental, slayings to begin with, then her vigilantism becomes for focused and planned out.

Unfortunately the filmmakers have conned themselves into thinking that their doing this great, insightful story about PTS, the whole thing seems to carry a weight of pretension it isn’t owed. If we actually got inside of the head of this character it’d be one thing, but we really don’t. The film is preoccupied with getting her gun in hand and shooting blatantly and obviously bad people. If there was room to think, it’d be different. If they let it build, the anger and the injustice, if we saw the psychological processes working themselves out. But actually, Erica starts shooting about five minutes after she gets the gun, and she also gets pretty proficient at it pretty quick.

I like Foster, but she is utterly zombie like in a lot of her scenes, you get no sense of any kind of internal monologue as to whether she’s wrestling with her moral and ethical concerns. Only when it serves the story does the acting or self-serving narration reflect this. Terrance Howard is good as a sympathetic cop, and I’m judging this solely for the fact that he was almost able to sell the audience on the preposterous ending. This utterly ridiculous and outrageous ending makes any small gains in the previous hour and fifty minutes moot.

If by Brave One they meant boldly being typical so far as revenge dramas go, then mission accomplished. Congratulations Neil Jordon, you’ve proven that women in movies can be driven by the same type of bloodlust that males are. Way to go.

Shoot ‘Em Up

Rating: ***

Some movies don’t care about plot or character or important messages, some movies just want to see $#!T blow up really good. Such is the case with Shoot ‘Em Up, a film that spends more time firing big guns than firing off big ideas. The question then becomes: do the filmmakers deliver the hardcore action or do they waffle and only meet us halfway? Fortunately for action junkies, Shoot ‘Em Up is a highly kinetic rush with guns blazin’; like drinking your daily recommended amount of Red Bull in one go.

The set-up is simple: Clive Owen plays “Smith”, a homeless nobody (seemingly), but highly trained in the fine art of combat. Paul Giamatti plays Hertz, a “clean-up” man, really just glamorized assassin wearing a business suit. Hertz and his men are out to kill a baby and its mother when Smith intervenes, protecting the baby after the mother is killed. Monica Bellucci is DQ, the hooker with a heart of gold that becomes the baby’s surrogate mother. This bizarre family unit is forced to dodge every hitman within the city limits as the filmgoer is taken through a bullet-ridden 85 minutes with no pause.

Fairly straightforward, no? Frankly, if you’re in that kind of mood, you really don’t. And that’s okay because some times a movie can just entertain and Shoot ‘Em Up surely leaves one entertained. I think that this was the kind of movie that Joe Carnahan wanted Smokin’ Aces to be, but couldn’t quite get it there because of the numerous characters that need elaborate set-ups and back stories for explanation.

Is this purely about the cartoon violence factor? You better believe it! In the very first scene, we see Owen’s Smith munching on a carrot at a bus stop. Do you really need any other kind of visual cue than that? Smith is Bugs Bunny and Hertz is Elmer Fudd. When Hertz remarks, “Is this guy really that good or do we really suck?” it’s the post-modern spin on “Of course you realize that this means war.” From the use of a carousel to create a moving target to the climactic mid-air, freefall gunfight, Shoot ‘Em Up is a series of improbable situations that make Roger Rabbit look like Robert De Niro.

And just because the movie isn’t about acting doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the actors, and I certainly think that Shoot ‘Em Up has helped me to understand why Clive Owen turned down James Bond, and perhaps why he might not have made such a great Bond that people think that he would have. The man’s too funny. Not ‘ha ha’ funny, but he’s definitely not straight man enough to play the tightly buttoned 007. Sharp tongued anti-heroes, possibly always remarking “You know what I hate…” before, say, stealing the car of guy illegally parked in a handicap space, are better suited for Mr. Owen’s talents.

As for Shoot ‘Em Up, its enjoyable if not terribly original or redeeming in terms of lessons learned or moral guidance. Always presuming of course that you don’t life your life as a former Black Ops sharp shooter looking for trouble on the streets of a major metropolis, but if that were the case your life is already a movie.

3:10 to Yuma

Rating: ****

We’ve been privileged lately with the renaissance of the western. Though certainly not as pervasive as they once were, back in a time when every Hollywood studio had a standing set of a western town on their back lot, if not two or three. 3:10 to Yuma is throwback to those, more than last year’s The Proposition or TV’s Deadwood and not just because it is a remake of the 1957 original starring Glen Ford, also from the Elmore Leonard short story.

Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is a rancher in Arizona, a Civil War vet who lost a leg for reasons he purposeful avoids discussing. On the cusp of losing his ranch to the incoming railroad, Dan accepts a job to be part of convoy leading the criminal Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to Bisbee where they’ll put Wade on the train to Yuma prison. It’s a perilous mission as the posse will be passing through Apache land, be subject to vigilantes also wanting Wade’s head, while possibly being pursued by Wade’s own gang looking to free their boss.

Overall, Bale and Crowe are well matched, not so much adversaries as they are representative of the two Old West stereotypes: the gunslinging criminal and the diligent blue collar family man, eking out a living on the frontier. Bale’s slow burn frustration is easy to read in his face, but then there’s grim determination there as well, as he fights tooth and nail to provide some hope for his family. Crowe, on the other hand, does smarmy easy and presents himself as inherently dangerous without ever looking “evil” or talking with a growl.

But there are several other standout actors in the cast as well. Peter Fonda does grisly well as a bounty hunter on Wade’s trail, Alan Tudyk is good the unsure Doc Potter and Gretchen Mol provides able support in the thankless role of Evans’ wife. There are two really great standouts though and one is young Logan Lerman as Evans’ eldest son William, who magnificently plays combative against Bale as a young man who’s lost all faith in his father only to gradually understand his father better.

The other must-mention is Ben Foster as Wade’s second Charlie Pace and all I have to say is that whatever this kid is doing he should keep do it. You may recognize Foster from his role as Angel in last summer’s X-Men the Last Stand or from an ongoing stint on Six Feet Under and if you do, you’ll never recognize him as Pace, a cold as ice gunman that never betrays his calm or misses the target. You’ll be sitting there like probably, thinking where have I seen that guy before. And then when you go home and look it up, you’re shocked by the answer. Somebody give Foster an award, now!

3:10 to Yuma is a solidly made western from start to finish, full of moral ambiguity in a place where you live and die by the gun. But after the one-two punch of The Proposition and Deadwood, I afraid I just didn’t find it gritty enough. The filth-ridden world of Proposition and the cuss filled diatribes of Deadwood have acquainted us with a more “hardcore” vision of the West, a probably more accurate reflection of the way life really was. Having said that though, I think 3:10 at least meets us halfway – the grim and gritty West as presented by Hollywood and director James Mangold expertly balances character, tension and action into a tightly woven narrative that keeps attention paid till the credits role.

What you get is a highly satisfying Western that is appropriately grim in the end, featuring two very fine actors who each expertly execute a great performance. What more can you ask for on an autumn evening?

Death Sentence

Rating: **

Revenge fantasies always make up a healthy percentage of film plots, for the cinema is the only place we’ll ever know what its like, though vicariously, to beat someone’s brains in with a baseball bat. Or knife them in an alleyway while they put out the garbage. Or stalk them through an abandoned hospital and blow them away with a long range hunting rifle. All this and more can be yours to consider for the price of admission to the new film Death Sentence.

Based loosely on novelist Brian Garfield’s original sequel to Death Wish, which was turned into the 1974 Charles Bronson film, the set-up is rather simple. A wrong place, wrong time stop for gas by Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon), ends up in the murder of his beloved elder son Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) in a gang initiation kill. The banger is caught, but with only Nick’s eyewitness testimony to build a case on, the DA’s pushing for a plea. At this point Nick decides to take the law into his own hands, but one kill compounds another.

Confucius once wrote, "Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Naturally, of course, this thought is lost in all the nonsensical gore and death. On this count, they have a master at the helm in the form of James Wan, originator of Saw and the man that made “torture porn” part of the common vernacular. He knows how to ratchet up the tension and execute suspenseful sequences that get your heart-pumping good, but unfortunately for Wan, the film is horribly deficient in the basics, the part that happens at script level.

The villainous gangbangers are so cliché ridden and badly drawn that they are easy confusable and interchangeable. They’re like the Turnballs without any style, but certainly nobodies going to confuse them with the Baseball Furies, or any of the other colourful gangs in The Warriors. They’re skinheads without any ideology. Heroin freaks without any seeming lasting consequence. Any Law & Order episode offers the same kind of background character; a smart-mouthed, internally weak and cowardly dope fiend that helps the detectives find the next biggest fish.

Bacon is always winning and he does great work with what he’s given, his turn in personality is certainly more believable here than it was in Hollow Man. But the main banger played by Garrett Hedlund is so not scary that you can’t understand why a pencil pusher like Bacon’s character couldn’t kick his ass with one brief case clad hand tied behind his back. Aisha Taylor joins in the fun to put her stamp on the thankless, ineffectual cop role, while John Goodman slums as a sweaty, beef-eating local arms merchant.

I think it would have been more interesting to explore the psychology of the surviving family members rather than just getting them out of the way so that Bacon can do his business. The film does occasionally dips into the family’s feelings of loss and the recriminations that come with survivor’s guilt. Did I say psychological thriller? Yeah right! I must thinking about some other brutal revenge picture.

Ultimately though, I think that this film satisfies in a way intended and any one that wants to see Bacon not gonna take it anymore will undoubtedly leave the theatre in a most satisfied state of mind. And remember, the next time a gang member savagely takes your golden son, you take the law into your own hands and don’t take them to court.