Stolen

One would be excused for assuming Nicolas Cage's "Stolen" (and Nicolas Cage's did-it-all-for-the-money movies really should include his name before the title in the manner of John Carpenter) would feature yet another crazy-eyes Cage performance. However, in Nicolas Cage's "Stolen", Nicolas Cage shockingly takes the role of the straight man. He is noted bank robber Will Montgomery and director Simon West and writer David Guggenheim go to extreme lengths in the action-packed prologue to prove that despite being on the wrong side of the law, Will is a "good guy."

He takes a phone call from his daughter pre-bank robbery and chats happily with her about a bedtime story. He refuses to allow one of his bank robbing accomplices, Vincent (Josh Lucas), to murder an innocent witness. "We're not killers," Will explains. And he refuses to name the names of Vincent or his other accomplices, security expert Hoyt (M.C. Gainey) and comely getaway driver Riley (comely Malin Akerman), when put behind bars by vengeful cop Harlend (Danny Huston, in a jaunty hat) after his refusal to murder the innocent witness lands him behind bars.

And once he is released eight years later he plans to go the route of comely Riley and lead the straight life, making up with his aged daughter (Sami Gayle). But problems, as they must, emerge. 1.) His daughter wants nothing to do with him. 2.) His daughter is kidnapped by re-christened cabbie Vincent who locks her in the trunk of his taxi and demands $10 million from Will to spare her life.

See, Will burned the $10 million from the previous bank job to lessen his jail sentence and Vincent has always held a grudge. The grudge, in fact, has caused Vincent to go to - in the words of comely Riley - "dark." So dark he has (gasp!) grown long, ratty hair and (egads!) acquired a prosthetic leg. In other words, Josh Lucas does the crazy-eyes acting here.

Crazy-Eyes Josh Lucas, or is that Chris Elliott?

Trouble is, Lucas basically looks like Chris Elliott in "Scary Movie 2" and is about as threatening. The timbre of his voice was just never meant to generate menace and when he goes off the deep end he is in water 12 feet less deep than when Nicolas Cage goes off the deep end.

Nicolas Cage's "Stolen" is set, for the most part, over a 24 hour period on Fat Tuesday in New Orleans. Theoretically this is to allow for a certain sense of atmosphere, but really this is to allow a great many crowds and/or floats which characters can use to conveniently escape either from the authorities or from other bad guys when the screenplay cannot quite figure out how to manufacture the escape on its own. It also allows for the obligatory shot of Nicolas Cage dramatically running up and over cabs while "the clock is ticking." And really that's what Nicolas Cage's "Stolen" is all about - Nicolas Cage running up and over cabs while "the clock is ticking."

Although it's also about the comely Malin Akerman helping Nicolas Cage thieve $10 million in gold bars in a sequence that makes robbing a bank look at least as easy as Gary Oldman hi-jacking "Air Force One"......while dressed in chic high heel boots. You could poke a lot of holes in the story of Nicolas Cage's "Stolen" but you cannot deny that the comely Malin Akerman could pull off a bank robbery while dressed in chic high heel boots.

That might have been the single most credible plot point of a movie in 2012. I mean, if the comely Malin Akerman can't pull off a bank robbery while dressed in chic high heel boots, cinema may as well just go ahead and retire as an artistic medium.  

The comely Malin Akerman, who pulls off a bank robbery while dressed in chic high heel boots.

Red

The afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday when I sit down to watch a movie prior to the later-in-the-day festivities there is a certain kind of movie for which I yearn. I yearn for the kind of movie where....

-A rocket launcher is concealed within a toy pig.

-Helen Mirren fires a gatling gun.

-John Malkovich plays a guy who was given a daily dose of LSD for 11 years.

-Locales change (by my tally) 11 times.

-A phone trace ACTUALLY works (for a specific reason)!

-Ernest Borgnine turns up as "The Records Keeper."

-Brian Cox has a Russian accent.

-Lines spoken consist of things like: "You can't just go around duct taping everybody" and "He made twenty-two calls to pension services and that didn't stand out to you?" and "The General has dropped his contact lens" and, of course, "I'm going to break into the C.I.A."

Let me be honest, 364 days a year I would not have enjoyed "Red" all that much but on Super Bowl Sunday......well, you know.

"Red", directed by someone who isn't important because of all the stars in the cast, except for Karl Urban as the mostly hapless guy in pursuit of all the stars who really should have been played by Justin Theroux instead, is the darndest movie. A lot of its reviews centered on how boring and slow it was when the topic - retired black ops agents reconvening when they are all targeted to expose the high reaching conspiracy - seemed to suggest such fireworks. "Red", though, comes across more like free jazz, an action film decidedly uninterested in the finer points of the plot and, well, the action scenes. It's actually less fun watching Helen Mirren fire a machine gun than watching how matter-of-factly John Malkovich goes about re-loading the machine gun for her.

(John Malkovich, by the way, is just an absolute master at doing something with nothing. His facial expressions throughout "Red" are magnificent. Watch him on the right edge of the frame after Morgan Freeman says, "Looks like we're getting the band back together." And as for Morgan Freeman, well, is there another actor alive who, when a guy enters the retirement home to plug him in the back, could so convincingly lend gravitas to the line, "So it's like that, huh?" )

Perhaps the movie's most serious mis-step is moving Mary Louise Parker's innocent Sarah Ross (i.e. Shaniqua Johnson), the pension call center rep from Kansas City with whom Bruce Willis's Frank Moses falls in love over the phone and whom he kidnaps when her life is put at risk, out of the picture in the third act as the obligatory pawn/hostage. She's a romantic who reads trashy novels like "Love's Savage Secret", dreams of a vacation to Chile, goes on endless bad dates, drinks Corona outta the can, and in the middle of the aforementioned C.I.A. break in pauses to smile, giggle and wonder "What do you suppose the punishment is for what we're doing?" "Death," Moses replies. "Maybe life in prison." "Yes!" Sarah exclaims.

She is where the spirit of "Red" lies which is why "Red" actually should have been more like a movie called "Love's Savage Secret."

Who's Harry Crumb?

Maybe it was because of the closing ceremonies at the Winter Olympics where they trotted out some famous Canadian comedians. Maybe it was because around this time each year my dad would depart for state speech contest in Council Bluffs, Iowa which meant a Saturday evening of my mom and my sister and I eating junk food and watching John Candy comedies. Either way, when I saw "Who's Harry Crumb?" one recent evening on AMC I knew I had no choice but to watch it.

Released in 1989 "Who's Harry Crumb?" strived to be Candy's answer to Peter Sellers' Inspector Jacques Closeau, the story of a bumbling private detective who outwits the bad guys in a kidnapping case despite the fact much of the outwitting is by pure chance and/or coincidence. Harry Crumb was the grandson of the great Augustus Crumb and the son of the even greater Lionel Crumb but Harry is not quite a chip off the old block, thus he's been demoted to a regional office in Tulsa where his desk is positioned directly beneath a diseased tree from which oranges "hilariously" fall in the midst of conversations. Oh, John....

But things are looking up for it seems the model daughter of millionaire P.J. Downing (Barry Corbin) has been kidnapped and when the family turns to friend Eliot Draisen (Jeffery Jones) for help it is Draisen who suggests Crumb. He suggests this because, in fact, he has masterminded the whole kidnapping! Yes, Draisen plans to abscond with the ransom and then abscond with Downing's trophy wife Helen (Annie Potts, the most sexless sexpot in cinematic history) except, of course, Helen is busy scheming with her lover and part-time tennis instructor Vince Barnes (Tim Thomerson) on how they can both abscond with the ransom money and kill her unsuspecting husband.

Into this mess wades Harry Crumb. "I'm so thoroughly trained I don't even have to think before I speak." The film's aim, unfortunately, is lowbrow. Mighty lowbrow, one might say. Any room, absolutely any room, however innocent it may appear, presents any number of potential pratfalls for the redoubtable Crumb. He gets his tie caught in a paper shredder (boo!) and he rides a stationary exercise bike through a wall (yah!) and when Draisen shows off his prized pterodactyl egg it is only a matter of time before the antics of Crumb cause it to be smashed to smithereens.

The one thing you can say definitively, though, is that Candy throws himself at all these typical hijinks with determined gusto. The gags are nowhere near the level of "The Pink Panther" or "A Shot In The Dark" but Candy, like Sellers, projects the same sort of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-talking-about-or-even-doing-but-I'm-going-to-furrow-my-brow-and-intone-dramatically-and-pray-to-high-heaven-you-don't-call-me-on-it vibe. "Bamboo is my business." He even develops a nice rapport with Downing's other daughter, the neglected Nikki (a young Shawnee Smith), who becomes Crumb's de-facto partner and, like Graham Stark in "A Shot In The Dark", seems to project much more brain power than the man in charge even as she is content to sit back and let him go at his own blundering pace.

And in fact it is Crumb and Nikki who allow for the two sequences that make "Who's Harry Crumb?", even for all its gags involving sprinklers making it appear our title character has wet his pants (LOL), entirely watchable.

I can remember watching the Tom Cruise remake of "Mission Impossible" with my dad and during that sequence where they are pulling off the impossible heist by, of course, crawling around the air ducts my dad commented, "People are always crawling around air ducts but there's never any air blowing through them." "On the contrary!" I declared. "In 'Who's Harry Crumb?' John Candy crawls around an air duct and air is blowing through them!" "All these movies," my dad bemused, "where crawling around air ducts is a major plot point and the only one that gets it right is the John Candy comedy." In truth, "The Brothers Bloom" actually has an even better crawling-around-the-air-ducts sequence with Rachel Weisz but still....

More than that, though, I'm a kid who grew up in the 80's and "Who's Harry Crumb?" is defiantly an 80's movie. No doubt about it. From the insipid and repetitive lite jazz score to the opening credits combining yellow and hot pink to Shawnee Smith's all-stonewashed outfit I guess it's a little bit nicely nostalgic to see a movie from the era when kids tight rolled their jeans and Samantha Fox was a sex symbol and Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For A Hero" ruled the charts.

I mention it because the big setpiece to close the film would still be worth the price of admission. Long before "Arrested Development" found plenty of brilliant fodder for comedy with an airport stair car ("You're going to have hop ons") "Who's Harry Crumb?" mined that same territory with a steady hand. As the villains set to make their escape aboard a jet bound for Buenos Aires it is Harry and Nikki who navigate the airport tarmac aboard the stair car in a heroic effort to foil their getaway with "Holding Out For A Hero" joining them for the ride.

No, John Candy, isn't exactly a white knight and the stair car might not be a fiery steed but, damn it, if this part didn't make me laugh with delight and wish it was 1989 all over again. I think it's a real shame John Candy didn't get the chance to join his compatriots in chuckling at his own country in Vancouver.

Whiteout

As human beings we often find ourselves making decisions that to the untrained eye would appear devoid of any reason. But to us, the person making it, these decisions are always completely within reason when looked at solely from our perspective, even when considering the potential disaster looming down the road as a result. For instance, if a cute, cool, very manipulative girl keeps telling me to do shots of tequila, I'm going to keep doing shots of tequila. If I want to have a celebratory glass of scotch because Kate Winslet has just won her first Oscar but I'm still hungover from having too many glasses of scotch the previous evening, I'm having a celebratory glass of scotch. If I want to go see the new thriller "Whiteout" even though my friend Brad has termed it as "look(ing) even worse than the second 'Underworld' movie" and all the previews I've seen it for have included the gaspingly awful line "This wasn't an accident" and three hours before the showtime I planned to attend my friend Dan advises me the film has received a paltry "17" on Metacritic, I'm still going to see "Whiteout". Why did I still go see it? Well, I think that's obvious. I have a crush on Kate Beckinsale (she is the heir to Sienna Miller's throne should Sienna - highly doubtful - ever to do anything to vanquish it). And you know what? I enjoyed "Whiteout".

Oh, don't misunderstand, "Whiteout" is an awful, awful movie, but that does not mean I can't have a good time at it and I did - for two reasons I will address momentarily. First, though, the movie opens with the requisite Scene From The Past in which a Soviet cargo plane at the height of the Cold War carrying something "mysterious" crash lands after everyone onboard gets in a brutal gunfight. In theory this scene exists to set up plot developments later but really it exists to give the movie a "pulse pounding" action sequence as its curtain raiser. Once it's outta the way we get rolling.

It is now present day and we are at a scientific research facility in Antarctica, which is established via one of the five greatest title cards in cinematic history. It says (I'm not making this up): Antarctica, the coldest, most isolated land mass on the planet. (Ah, so that's what Antarctica is! "Whiteout" is not just a "thriller" but an educational tool!) We then find ourselves in the midst of a steadicam shot following someone across the frozen tundra and into one of the facility's buildings and then into this person's room where once she removes her stylish Russian hat she is revealed to be....U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (i.e. Kate Beckinsale). She then proceeds to - mind you, she has not actually spoken a line of dialogue yet - strip down to her underwear and hop in the shower, allowing for a shot of Ms. Beckinsale's most fetching derriere. Talk about a movie knowing it's main selling point!

(A word here about this shot - while I have an enormous crush on Ms. Beckinsale I also happen to honestly think she's a pretty decent actress and it kind of saddens me to see her get saddled with this sort of gratuitous crap. She's better than this.)

Once she's done showering the movie launches into a 15 to 20 minute parade of telegraphed plot points, the likes of which you have never seen. It is an absolute joy! Included this expository avalanche are (and I apologize in advance as I'm certain I'm forgetting a few): a constant announcement blaring over the facility's loudspeakers about a gigantic storm moving in that means everyone has to be off the base in 72 hours or risk being stuck there for the whole winter (the Dramatic Timeline Device!), horrendously filmed flashbacks involving Something Bad That Happened In Carrie's Past which brought her here, the facility's grizzled doctor (Tom Skerrit) lecturing newbies for no discernible reason whatsoever on the effects of a whiteout, an Australian who we know is up to no good once he wryly asks Carrie for a "strip search", and Carrie advising that once she gets off the base for winter she is - wait for it...wait for it...wait for it! - turning in her badge! Oh yeah! How can you not want to see this?!

Now that everything has been telegraphed the movie moves into the meat of its story, a murdered geologist found in the middle of "no man's land", the "first" murder in Antarctica, which, of course, means a U.N. investigator (Gabriel Macht) will turn up so that one moment he can appear helpful and genuine and the next he can appear shifty and suspicious which works as a means to keep the audience guessing about who the dude in the parka and ski mask is running around killing everyone. Wait, did I not mention there was a dude in a parka and a ski mask running around killing everyone?! Of course, there is!

But then all the "thrilling" aspects of the movie are really the least interesting. The director is Dominic Sena and his action passages are so boring that during the climactic battle in a vicious whiteout blizzard (remember Tom Skerrit lecturing us about this?) I actually started pondering what I should have for dinner. Sena also chooses to shoot a great deal of this movie in moderate-to-extreme close-up, a decision which would be regrettable if not for the movie's finest feature - the celestial face of Kate Beckinsale. It does all the heavy lifting for him. Seriously, I could get lost in the fierce wild prairies of those English eyes until well after the cows returned to their homestead. (The greatest special effect in this movie has nothing to do with CGI, it's Ms. Beckinsale's elegant hair always staying in place, even when she's in the midst of winds vicious enough that you have to walk from place to place while attached to a thick rope.)

I have been lightly mocked in the past for proclaiming (as I'm wont to do) that various entities (like, say, The Arcade Fire) are better than the Aurora Borealis. But at the conclusion of "Whiteout", once the the Inital Reveal and then the Secondary Reveal have taken place, and the Talking Killer has finished blathering about no-one-cares-what, there comes a moment when the face of Kate Beckinsale and the Aurora Borealis literally have a showdown.

As far as I'm concerned, Kate Beckinsale's face wins.

(Note: I will be expecting that restraining order from Ms. Beckinsale's lawyer in the mail later this week.)

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Three consecutive weekends of extreme activity have left me feeling a bit under the weather this week and so last night I found myself searching the pay per view channels for something that best fit the following criteria: Movie To Watch While Sick And Laying On The Couch. It didn't take me long to find one.

"Paul Blart: Mall Cop."

Our hapless title character (Kevin James) lives at home with his mom and young daughter and his dreams of being a New Jersey State Trooper are continually dashed by a pesky hypoglycemia problem. He works at a West Orange, New Jersey mall as a security guard, a dead-end job he takes far more seriously than anyone else which leaves him the source of much ridicule. His trusty Segway is practically his security blanket. But hope springs eternal in the form of young, comely Amy (Jayma Mays), who runs a wig kiosk in the mall. Their romantic moment astride that Segway with a little 80's rock for effect is (I'm not ashamed to say it!) awesome - an over the top, ridiculous moment that is played entirely straight. Of course, Paul wastes nary a moment in blundering this romantic possibility, a development that allows James to revel in his customary physical comedy.

Redemption, though, is right around the corner. Black Friday, the worst shopping day of the year, turns even more ominous when a group of strangely under-armed thugs (who also put to use skateboards and bikes, though they seem rather useless when you see them bounding about in light speed like a cavalry of pre-pubescent gymnasts), headed up by a villain so bland he wouldn't have made the cut on the fifth season of "Alias", appear at closing time, wrangle a few mall employees hostage and threaten to....crap. I already forgot. But does it really even matter what they are doing so long as they are there at the mall doing it? The bad guys are merely a platform for Paul Blart to test his manhood! Thank goodness he was rocking out to Guitar Hero in the closed-up arcade when his precious mall was invaded so the crooks missed him!

The cops and SWAT Team inevitably appear outside and council Paul to give himself up but once our man Blart realizes Amy is among the kidnapped he has no choice but to stay inside and make like John McClain in "Die Hard", even if "scooby-dooby-do" is not quite as grand a catchphrase as "yippie-ki-ay".

I have to say, "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" was refreshing in that it was not quite exactly what I expected, which is to say it was not god-awful. It was really very....very....harmless. I expected fart jokes whipped at me incessantly but not so. A lot of the humor comes from the empathy generated for Paul Blart. By God, we want this security guard to succeed and, against all odds, he does! (Whoops! Did I give it away?!)

John McClain is a fine one-man-against-everyone-else hero and if I were trapped in a mall with terrorists he is probably the guy I would hope happened to be trapped in there with me. But there are times when maybe John McClain is just a little too much, a little too in your face. Sometimes you want a hero who doesn't know exactly how to woo the girl and who at the sight of an automatic weapon cries "Sweet mercy!" and books it in the opposite direction.

Sometimes you just want a little "peanut Blart and jelly."