Review: “Iron Man”


One cool comic book superhero epic movie.

I didn’t (and still don’t) spend much time reading comics as a kid, but I watched all the cartoons--including the bad ones. Even though Iron Man doesn’t have the same iconic recognition as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, the X-Men, etc., I knew who he was.

From what I’m told, he started out in Marvel Comics in 1963 as an anti-communist hero, then moved on to fighting evil in general. Unlike most other heroes, he’s not from another planet nor did he get his powers from magic or genetic mutation. He’s self-made from American technological know-how.

His alter ego, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), is a playboy billionaire weapons manufacturer and genius inventor modeled after Howard Hughes. After watching this film, I wished I had an aptitude for pushing technological boundaries.

Downey, while not the prototypical actor for a comic book superhero (which usually goes to young heartthrobs) is an actor of intelligence who draws from his own checkered past to initially play Tony Stark as a boozing, womanizing genius. Stark runs Stark Industries, the company he inherited from his father and the world's leading weapons manufacturer. Life is good. He blithely glosses over the death and destruction in which his company plays a major role. “They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire,” he says before demonstrating his latest missile, the Jericho. “I prefer the weapon you only need to fire once.” Downey delivers a knockout performance that by itself is worth the price of admission to watch. Fortunately, I got in at $7.95 with a student ID--and saw it twice on opening day.

“Iron Man” starts in the present, or recent past. With superb direction from an unlikely Jon Favreau (“Made,” “Elf,” and “Zathura,” none of which I saw), the movie opens in Afghanistan. There, Tony Stark displays his Jericho missile system for top US military and allied Arab brass. The Jericho test firing demolishes half a mountain, insuring big orders on his latest product of mass destruction. Afghan guerrilla insurgents, using Stark-issue military spec, then capture Stark and wipe out his Air Force escort.

Seriously wounded with shrapnel in his chest, Stark is brought to a cave where the gun-toting insurgents have set up shop. A Gandhi-like Yinsen (Shaun Toub), saves Stark with beyond next generation heart surgical skills. Yinsen implants a cylindrical electromagnet into Stark’s chest that keeps the shrapnel in his from reaching his ticker and other vital organs, resulting in instant flatline. Once Stark is saved, the insurgent leader, a chrome-domed thug named Raza (Faran Tahir), wants Stark to build him another Jericho missile.

Or else.

Under closed circuit surveillance, Stark doesn’t build a missile, but a miniature Ark reactor (fusion?) to power his chest electromagnet and an armor suit with mechanical arms and legs, and a weapons system featuring Gatling guns, flamethrowers, and missile launchers that fire out of his arms. Topping it off is an iron mask that’s a cross between a welder’s helmet and a goalie mask. When the amazingly stupid insurgents do catch on, it’s too late. Yinsen sacrifices himself to buy Stark time to power up his MacGyvered suit, which he uses to blast their camp to smithereens and fly--sort of--out of harm’s way.

Stark returns from three months in captivity a changed man. He's seen the horrors he has helped perpetrate. No more weapons manufacturing for Stark Industries, he says. Against the wishes of his ambitious No. 2, Obadiah Stane (a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges), Stark sets a new agenda of redemption and keeping the world safe from his weapons, aided by his trusted assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow with red hair) with whom he shares a budding romance and his best friend, U.S. Air Force Col. Jim “Rhodey” Rhodes (Terrence Howard). Everyone thinks he’s lost his mind, though.

The pieces of the first Iron Man lie in the Afghanistan desert, soon to be reassembled by Raza’s insurgents. Meanwhile the suddenly pacifistic Stark rebuilds a new and improved Iron Man suit (amid several funny snafus in the trial stage) , sleek red and yellow and looking like a 1952 Buick Roadmaster. As he pushes ahead with his quest for redemption, Stark uncovers a diabolical plot against him set in motion by a hidden enemy and makes full use of his new gold titanium plated alter-ego.

Despite being worked over by four screenwriters, the story is smart (though the insurgents could use more development), the dialogue features witty lines mostly from Downey, and the CGI is first rate with viewers hard pressed to tell where the effects end and a real suit is brought in.

For all the effects, Favreau thankfully doesn’t forget the man in “Iron Man.” A mark of his indie roots. Though brilliant and rich, Stark is a man with “character defects,” as he himself puts it. His enemies are men, too, corporate raiders and militants living in caves in the Middle East. This might be the most relevant superhero tale we have yet seen.

"Iron Man" is by far the highest profile outing for both Favreau and Downey. Downey, who was once uninsurable, has led a career much like Johnny Depp's--acclaimed for quirky roles in interesting movies, but never breaking through as a draw at the box office. “Iron Man” could be his “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Compared to other recent superhero movies, I’d say “Iron Man” is a notch below “Batman Begins” (the reigning king of comic superhero movies), but on par with the second installments in the “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” franchises. With a few developments hinted at, like Iron Man’s partner, War Machine, and a big bad (he wears ten rings), the pieces have been set for a hopefully stellar sequel in, I believe April 2010.

Review: "Enchanted" a royal treat


An animated Disney girl becomes a flesh-and-blood sweetheart
in this tongue-in-cheek homage to Disney fairy tales by Disney.

The first two-thirds of "Enchanted" is sweet, charming, almost-perfect, can't-wipe-the-smile-from-your-face fun. Simply put, it's endearing and, well, enchanting.

The movie works on a second level by lovingly evoking Disney's classic canon. "Enchanted" references everything from "Snow White" to "Beauty and the Beast," with gentle satire and sly references (pay attention to little details and character names). Helmer Kevin Lima ("Tarzan," "Enchanted") working with the script by Bill Kelly ("Blast From The Past"), takes traditional Disney fairytale animation and combines it with live action that forms a unique romantic comedy.

Narrated by Julie Andrews ("Mary Poppins"), the fun begins in the classically animated land of Andalasia. There we meet a young woman named Giselle
(Amy Adams, "Junebug"), a sweet innocent who, like Snow White, befriends woodland creatures; shares Belle's taste in gowns, and has Ariel's flowing red hair. She dances about her tree house and sings of a prince who will come and give her "true love's kiss." Her animal friends represent a Who's Who of Disney cartoon creature history: a chipmunk, blue birds, a baby deer, a gray rabbit, an owl, a warthog and more.

This sweet, idealistic beginning is basically a condensed all-too-familiar Disney classic. Giselle falls into danger when a six-storey green troll, drawn by her song, comes around to eat her and is saved by the brave, charming, and somewhat dim Prince Edward (James Marsden, "X-Men").
Having found in each other the one who completes their “heart’s duet,” Giselle and Edward finish the song about the magic of "True Love's Kiss", instantly fall in love and ride off to be "married in the morning!"

But not all is well. Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon, "In the Valley of Elah"),
Edward's wicked stepmother, knows that if he marries, she will lose her throne forever. So Narissa, magically disguised as a crone in black hood and gown, dupes Giselle, on her wedding day, to make a wish at a magical fountain with a sparkling waterfall. As Giselle leans forward to make a wish -- of course, to live happily ever after with her prince -- the crone gives her a shove and the would be princess falls into the fountain and lands in a place "where there are no happily ever afters." Where else but real life midtown Manhattan?

Giselle lands, in of all places, underneath a manhole cover in Times Square.
In classic New Yorker fashion, passers-by give the hoop-skirted belle barely a glance. In no time flat, her tiara is stolen by a homeless man and she's doused by rain, but hope reigns supreme when Giselle spies the 'Palace' she's been searching for (actually the billboard fronting of a run down casino).
That's where she meets divorce attorney and single dad McDreamy -- er Robert (Patrick Dempsey, TV's "Grey's Anatomy") as his young daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey, "Duane Hopwood"), recently denied the fairy tale book she'd asked for, spies a real live Princess asking to be let into the palace.

When Giselle asks for directions to a nearby meadow or hollow tree, Robert reluctantly lets her spend the night on his couch in his SoHo apartment. He finds the act of a good Samaritan difficult to undo and before he knows it his curtains have been turned into frocks
and his singing houseguest is cleaning house. She leans out a window and puts out her signature call: "Aahhh. Aahhh. Aaa -- ahhh."

But rather than cuddly blue jays, squirrels, rabbits, and the like, NYC’s finest urban pests come a running: rats, pigeons, flies, and cockroaches. Though taken aback, Giselle pushes on to make "new friends," orchestrating the clean up of Robert’s apartment with her happy pest cohorts to the tune of a "Happy Working Song" (a spoof on Snow White’s "Whistle While You Work"). As the apartment is tidied, birds get injured and plates are dropped. In the film's most hilariously inspired scene -- helpful cockroaches clean the tub! And at the end, a pigeon eats one of the poor roaches.

Of course, this domesticity
is misinterpreted by Nancy, Robert's girlfriend of five years (Idina Menzel, "Rent"),
who is nonetheless wooed back by a disbelieving Robert with Giselle's advice. And if he's surprised that works, imagine his dilemma when her prince, Edward,
really does arrive, accompanied by Pip, a most 'animated' chipmunk, Giselle’s best animated friend.
Emerging in Times Square with his high boots, puffed shirt, and sharp sword,
he attacks a city bus and refers to everyone as “peasants.”

Giselle and Edward aren’t the only ones to have traveled through the manhole, though. The Queen’s lovestruck lackey, Nathaniel (Timothy Spall, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"),
comes along. Somehow, in an apparently thinly populated Andalasia, Nathaniel kept Edward busy for years with hunting trolls and other adventures, while steering the young prince away from likely maidens. Nathaniel seems surprisingly New York savvy from the start, slipping into disguises, complete with international accents, and Edward is too self-absorbed to notice or care. When the two buy food in a cafeteria and get a motel room, I find myself wondering how they pay for it all? Gold coins?

Unbeknownst to everyone but Pip (who can’t speak anymore, just pantomime) is the fact that Nathaniel is spying for the queen and has orders to give Giselle a poisoned apple. But when Nathaniel fails twice to off Giselle, Narissa herself makes an appearance
-- right in time for the upcoming "Kings and Queens ball."

There's one other thigh-slapper song and dance production: a mock ballad called "That's How You Know," deploying hundreds of performers,
including rollerbladers and a mariachi band, at locations all over Central Park.
During it, Giselle runs up a hill arms outstretched, a la famous shots in "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Sound of Music."

It's a show-stopper in more ways than one, unfortunately.

Director Kevin Lima and credited screenwriter Bill Kelly are hard pressed to maintain the momentum over the next hour or so, which plays out a lot like a clichéd, tune-free Disney Channel movie.

The film tries to recreate "Sleeping Beauty"'s epic confrontation with the evil witch in gloomy, Gothic Forbidden Mountain. Here, Narissa poisons Giselle at the King and Queen ball. But Robert revives Giselle with a kiss just before the clock strikes twelve. The Queen then turns into a fire-breathing, six-storey tall dragon and takes Robert outside with her and up the skyscraper they’re all in. Giselle heads after them -- once she tosses aside her shoes.

The special effect is disconcerting, and not particularly special. It's as if in the final reel, it was decided to give the men something to do. I feel the ball could’ve been another song-and-dance set piece for Giselle, but it was Robert who ended up muttering a few lyrics.
And what exactly was the point of casting Idina Menzel, one of Broadway's leading musical performers, and not giving her anything to sing? Still, until then, the story is a winner. I expect the songs by Alan Menken ("The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast") and Stephen Schwartz (Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame") will be new classics and they're perfectly placed within "Enchanted."

A singer and trained dancer, Amy Adams is pitch perfect as the beautiful Giselle, both animated and live, giving her wide eyed innocence and wonder.
James Marsden plays the self-absorbed and flawless Prince Edward with goofy charm.
Patrick Dempsey has the tough role as the comedy’s straight man but he gives it his best as McDreamy, er -- Robert, a NYC cynical divorce with a buried heart of gold.
If nothing else, it's worth seeing just for the cartoonish performances of Adams and Marsden as the real-life versions of a classic Disney princess and her Prince Charming. Adams owns her character down to the faintest gasp, twirl, and smile, captivating the audience and carrying the film on her shoulders.
I won’t be shocked if she gets an Oscar nomination for this role.

"Enchanted" is fun most of the way, thanks in part to updates of familiar Disney scenes: like poison fruit comes in the form of a vile apple martini and the magic mirror being a motel television. But the film sends mixed messages about love as Adams' princess falls in true love with Dempsey's skeptical modern bachelor.

As Giselle waits for Edward to come for her, she discovers how the real world has a different view of love from fairytale land. She's confused by ideas like "dating"
and how Robert and his girlfriend Nancy could be in love for years but not yet married. Giselle's outright shocked by the idea of divorce, a discovery that drives her to tears. Giselle says, "Separated forever and ever?" when she learns a client of Robert's is divorcing her husband.

Burned by a former love, Robert is a calloused realist in love and unaffected by the divorce he’s overseeing. He views love in a practical, business-like fashion. The polar opposite of Giselle. Over and over, he explains to Giselle that love can't happen in a day, is not magical, and is a commitment that takes work. Giselle's lovey-dovey version of love, he explains bitterly, is mere fantasy. "Many marriages are happy if they just don't end," he says. "Forget happily ever after."

Giselle and Robert's discussions about love are intriguing and well placed in a Disney family movie. After all, Disney is a chief perpetrator of the Hollywood myth of easy, instant and magical love. The kind where fireworks ring out, cartoon birds sing and couples are magically connected in happiness. It's a breath of fresh air to find a movie stressing that love only begins with magical feelings, but from there, it's about choice and commitment. By featuring characters with very different and very incomplete perspectives on love, "Enchanted" is in position to explore what love really means. Giselle and Robert have the opportunity to learn from each other and apply in their respective relationships the truth that successful love needs both real-world commitment and fairyland romance. And for a while, it seems that maybe that's where all the love talk is headed.

Until the two-thirds mark hits.

The climactic scene changes Giselle. She stops singing and loses some of her innocence and joy. And while the film applauds this change as a positive step in her personal growth, it feels sad to me. Giselle is a strong woman, dynamic character, and great role model, one who’ll be the next popular princess in Disney lore, but the real world changes her, and I'm not sure all the changes are actually positive. For her sake, I almost wish Giselle would've stayed in Andalasia. But I guess then I wouldn't have had so much fun seeing her bring a little bit of that world here.

Instead of using Giselle’s and Robert’s relationships to show a realistic and affirming view of love, "Enchanted" sends mixed messages about what love is. It talks a lot about commitment, but chucks commitment out the window. It talks about the need for couples to get to know each other, but instead affirms the idea that true love is something magically discovered nearly immediately. "Enchanted" didn’t define love incorrectly, but left it unclear and confusing. It feels to me like the filmmakers took the easy way out with a crowd-pleasing resolution at the expense of its values and message.

Why wouldn’t Robert warm to Giselle? She’s sunny, has control of woodland creatures through her voice, and can inspire a couple on the verge of divorce to stay together. But what does Robert offer Giselle? A relationship in the real world where more than half of marriages don’t last? What chemistry does Giselle really have with Robert other than the fact that the story mandated her to become a "real woman" who fell in love with a real guy?

Although "Enchanted" doesn't fully take advantage of its unique idea, it's still a hugely entertaining, clever comic fairy tale. But when it ended, I wondered, Is Giselle better off now? What happens two years down the road?

Review: “Lust, Caution”

Being a fan of Ang Lee, whose “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” masterpiece is one of my top 5 favorite films, I couldn’t resist tracking down the small art house theater in my area that was showing his latest work, which is out only in limited US release: "Lust, Caution."

The Eileen Chang short story that's the basis for Lee's adaptation is as economical as a wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without demystifying the complex relationship between a young Chinese spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous collaborator she has been assigned to seduce.

Reactions to Lee’s film range from fascinated to bored. I fall toward the latter to my disappointment. I can see that Lee admires Chang's story. But I would say Lee and his long-time screenwriting collaborators, Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, have stretched Chang's delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.

The life of "Lust, Caution" is poured into the last third; most of what comes before is a long expository flashback buildup, which I felt could’ve been told from the beginning and shortened--greatly.

The picture opens in Shanghai 1942, in the home of Mr. Yee (Tony Leung, one of Asia’s top leading men), security head of the Chinese government that’s collaborating with the occupying Japanese, where his talkative wife (Joan Chen) is entertaining a mahjong party of well-dressed friends. One of them is the beautiful Mrs. Mak Tai Tai (newcomer Tang Wei), the wife of a Hong Kong importer-exporter. When Mr. Yee stops by the table, he and Mrs. Mak share glances that indicate they’re somehow involved. But it’s later revealed that she’s also involved with young Kuang Yu Min (Chinese pop star Wang Leehom), who’s in the resistance.

Mak Tai Tai makes an excuse to leave the game. She goes to a downtown cafe in downtown, where she makes a phone call to Kuang and a group of other men, sits down at a table and begins to remember the past, specifically events in Hong Kong four years earlier.

Cut back to 1938 Hong Kong, where the supposed Mrs. Mak is revealed as college student Wang Chia Chi, an idealistic, naïve girl, who’s enticed into a rebellious, anti-Japanese theatre troupe by Kuang. She develops a crush on him and finds an unexpected calling as a natural actress, who inspires audience members to tearful cries of “China will not fall!” in her troupe’s first patriotic performance. When Kuang gets the idea to turn their group into an unaffiliated amateur resistance cell, she goes along and allows him to persuade her to take the Mak disguise so that she can get close enough to Yee to lure the traitor to his death. But the plot fails when Yee leaves abruptly for Shanghai to accept a promotion, escaping the group’s assassination attempt.

Flash ahead to 1941, when after some difficult years Kuang approaches Wang to resume her role as Mrs. Mak to attempt to seduce Yee again for the same purpose. Under the official auspices of the Communist resistance, Wang goes to Shanghai and this time entangles Yee in a stormy, passionate affair. The outwardly stoic Yee seems on the verge of abandoning his usual cautiousness to his desires, when Wang comes to a crossroad.

Not only are the mission and her life at stake, but so is her real identity. Her role as Mrs. Mak is not only a facade for Yee, but also a trap for herself. And soon she must choose whether it's more valuable to play a false person who is trusted and loved, or a real one whom she barely acknowledges herself.

Defining oneself is a favorite theme of Lee's. In this film, he makes some of his most devastating observations about human nature, finding in his main character a woman who has no identity until she creates one for others. In an early scene, Wang sits in a movie theater crying while watching “Intermezzo”; it's a telling moment because it immediately precedes her emergence as an actress and speaks to the connection between the fiction of a "character" and the emotion it generates within her.

She becomes consumed by playing Mrs. Mak, not only because she completely believes the truth of her role, but because the Yees believe as well. It makes her self-delusion that much more powerful, and when she eventually sleeps with Mr. Yee, their sex scenes are charged with deep emotional intensity because he expresses a need to reveal himself to another person and she feels the gratification of finally becoming someone. To her, convincing him she is Mrs. Mak is actually being Mrs. Mak, and it empowers her--both emotionally and physically--as a fully-formed person rather than the discarded daughter of an expatriate or some street urchin playing with patrician-class values.

At the same time, the real world frequently imposes its unflinching gaze on her gambit and reminds her that she isn't acting in some assassination play, but part of a real plot. In an early sequence that concludes her first "performance" as Mrs. Mak, Wang witnesses her fellow actors clumsily murder another collaborator--a sight too real and unglamorous for her to stay "in character." Later, she receives a precious stone ring that reveals Yee's love, in the process unleashing her own buried feelings. Both events reconnect Wang with her humanity, corrupted by playing her role of Mrs. Mak, ultimately showing her how she not only betrayed those closest to her, but herself as well

Punctuated by several skillfully photographed and intense, even sadomasochistic, love scenes, “Lust, Caution” presents complex characters. Yee, on the surface, appears to be a harsh, even hateful man. But his feelings for Wang bring out another side of him. The relationship between Mr. Yee and Wang with her divided identity is the central dynamic of "Lust, Caution." Both people play roles within roles, engaging in intricate double and triple games that get so complex they become ensnared in entanglements neither one anticipates or wants.

The one place the protagonists are naked, both literally and psychologically, is when they make love, and the sex scenes in "Lust, Caution" are both explicit and essential to illustrating the intensity of their relationship. The sex is graphic and rough. While they might not admit it, this appears to be the only place where the protagonists are honest with each other, where the complex, tortured, ever-changing relationship between them plays itself out.

Wei, Leung and Leehom are all brilliant in their roles. Lee manipulates their characters to evoke sad, beautiful and profound human truths. He pits the two halves of Wang’s character against each other and positions them against her two would-be suitors, Yee and Kuang, creating a dynamic where two men are fighting for two different women in the same frail frame.

Leung's Yee is a man full of secrets, and he finds in Mak a person in whom he can confide--if not the sordid details of his business, at the very least his tormented feelings. Meanwhile, Kuang vows to protect the shrinking-violet Wang from harm, but fails to recognize her real identity until it is too late, as she has already succumbed to the reassuring validation of the Yees' acceptance. (Her question to him--"Why didn't you do that before?"--after he kisses her is one of the movie's most heartbreaking moments.) Lee exercises control of these shifting emotional dynamics to not only maximize the drama in the last third of the film, but to show the desperate and destructive ways that Wang has sealed her own fate.

Thing is, these character subtleties weren’t obviously apparent to me on first, second, or third reflection--and not just because I spent almost half my time reading the English subtitles. I wonder how well the casual viewer will pick up on the character nuances that Lee wove into the film? Something I also didn’t understand was how Wang, after being clumsily initiated into the world of sex by a fellow actor in her troupe, found the seductiveness she needed to entice Yee, particularly in the moments before her first sex encounter with him in which he raped her. And I found it coincidental that she could sing a very touching song to Yee about how they were “needle and thread,” who would never part. I found myself wondering about Yee’s reasons for collaborating with the Japanese, whether he was in it for his own gain or he sincerely believed that working with the Japanese would benefit China? I found it interesting that Wang could speak English, but it didn’t seem relevant to her character and the story, so the few English scenes could have just as well been done in Mandarin. And Kuang’s competing interest in Wang gets a bit lost by the wayside as the story meanders along.

The bones for a great movie are in the film: The tormented femme fatale, the lethal but alluring man she must seduce, the exotic locales, the political intrigue--all punctuated by startling sex between lust-struck hunter and prey. But Lee doesn't zero in on them. He allows long gaps of silence to insinuate themselves unnecessarily between lines of dialogue. He also lavishes a great deal of attention on several shots of Wang sitting in a cafe, dabbing perfume on her wrists: The detail is straight out of Chang's story, but there, it's fleet and concise; Lee stretches it out, crushing it by attempting to load it with importance.

What Chang wrote about eloquently and succinctly--how easily the noblest intentions can be corrupted by love, or at least the promise of it--gets lost in the film. The film focuses so much on the details--like a mahjong game that lasts forever, but we Westerners still don’t understand--we lose sight of the lead actors, whose relationship is all but buried till the last 40 minutes or so of the film.

"Lust, Caution" (shot by Rodrigo Prieto) does have a polished retro-dreamy look. And Lee couldn't have chosen better actors for the cast. It's always a pleasure to watch Joan Chen. She doesn't have much to do here, but playing an aging, possessive beauty, she casts a quiet spell over the picture. Tang, with her fine features and always-questioning eyes, plays Wang with a deft balance of delicacy and toughness to stand up to Leung.

Leung's performance is less moodily romantic than any of those he has given in his work with director Wong Kar-Wai (including "Chunking Express" and "In the Mood for Love")--but here, he pushes beyond romanticism into unsettling territory. His Mr. Yee is at first unreadable, like a distant danger signal at sea that we can't quite make out through the fog. But later in the movie, as Yee's relationship with Wang deepens, he slips into focus. This may be the most unlikable character Leung has ever played--he's such an appealing presence that you can't imagine any director asking him to convey the ruthlessness that this role demands. But Leung pulls off the nearly impossible, making us feel sympathy for a man driven largely by selfish impulses, a man whose cruelty is almost dissolved by love, but not quite as he lets Wang meet her fate--with anguish.

Rated NC-17 for its intense sex scenes (which were cut in the Far East release for Chinese authorities), "Lust, Caution" shows flashes of craft and poignance, teasing people with what it could have been in my opinion.

Review: "American Gangster"

Inspired by an article profiling drug dealer Frank Lucas for “New York” magazine seven years ago, "American Gangster" really means business.

The film opens strong as Frank (Denzel Washington) pours gas on an unknown Puerto Rican man, sets him ablazing and then pumps a couple of shots into the guy as rough mercy. Things don't get any nicer from there.

Frank is the driver for Bumpy Jones (Clarence Williams III), the benevolent gangster-lord of Harlem. But Bumpy, incensed by a discount department store, mutters a final judgment before dying of a heart attack: "This is what's wrong with America -- it's gotten so big you can't find your way ... What right do they have cutting out the suppliers, pushing all the middlemen out, buying direct from the manufacturer?"

Bumpy's not long in the ground before Frank seizes on his dying mentor's words and spins them to his own benefit. He flies to war-torn Vietnam, making his way deep into the jungle and using his entire savings to buy a load of pure heroin from a Chinese warlord, which he then smuggles into the U.S. aboard military planes with the connivance of an army friend and sells in high grade at cut-rate prices on the street, branding his merchandise “Blue Magic” for quality and racking up sales. As he continues his unusual and brilliant import scheme, he brings his family up from Tar Heel country (The movie gets his roots wrong, saying he's from Greensboro, North Carolina: He grew up in tiny LaGrange, about 10 miles southeast of Goldsboro, which he left at 12 in the early 1940s.) to New York City, where he buys an estate for his gray-haired mother (Ruby Dee, just turned 83) and takes his brothers (including Huey, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) into the business; works out a distribution deal with his Harlem rival Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and Italian mafioso Dominic Cattano (Armand Assante); and weds a beauty contest winner (Lymari Nadal). Frank’s on top of the world, leaving no trace of evidence connecting him to his “Blue Magic” and underplaying the flashy gangland stereotype but ruling his empire when necessary with an iron -- and violent -- hand.

Of course, there’s the law to deal with, on the one hand the corrupt New York City special investigations squad led by chief narcotics detective Trupo (Josh Brolin), who menacingly demands his usual cut of the profits. But he proves less threatening to Frank’s business than Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), this film’s version of Eliot Ness, a detective whose squeaky-clean career is not mirrored by his messy personal life: a custody battle with his wife (Carla Gugino) over his son, womanizing, and financial troubles. But Richie gets appointed by his boss (Ted Levine) to lead a special narcotics federal task force, and he's determined bring down some major criminals, including Frank.

Richie faces his own challenges on the other side of the law. NYC police are, in general, so corrupt that an honest cop is a pariah. When Richie seizes and surrenders $970,000 to his superior officer, the cynical joke -- "Where's the rest of it?" is funny only because it's based in truth. Most of Richie's fellow cops would have taken the cash, and they can't trust someone so trustworthy. The first Ali-Frazier fight serves as a reference point for the film, which spans the years from 1968 to the mid 1970s.

Director Ridley Scott (whose “Gladiator” masterpiece is one of my ten favorite films) and screenwriter Steve Zaillian try to develop each character equally, though it's really Washington's charismatic crook who holds our interest. That's no knock on Crowe, who's solid. Zaillian's script works to portray Frank and Richie as mirror-image strivers -- Frank looking for new possibilities in dealing, Richie going to law school at night -- and shows us how innovations in crime are matched by innovations in crime fighting. Frank wants to work around the Italian mob’s established structure of heroin importing; Richie wants to work without the corrupt infrastructure of the local cops.

Eventually, Richie fastens on Frank and breaks up his brazen, all-or-nothing attempt to ship in one huge last load of heroin as the American effort in Vietnam is collapsing. Before long the two men are facing one another in jail, with Frank negotiating turn state’s evidence in return for special treatment, and Richie getting his opportunity to show off his legal chops in court.

As Frank’s and Richie’s stories gradually intersect, the film’s tone wavers between different themes. Is “American Gangster” a parable of American capitalism, where men like Frank sell narcotics because it's the most profitable work available? Is it a cautionary, rise-and-fall tale about a drug dealer's life and times? Is it the portrait of a dogged cop trying to crack a narcotics smuggling ring? Or of a cop fighting the more insidious evil of police corruption? Or is it just a riveting tale of cop-versus-crook, with two formidable foes circling each other warily, never meeting until their final showdown? The listed possibilities call to mind a host of other films, like “Traffic,” “Scarface,” “The French Connection,” “Prince of the City,” “Heat.”

There are many moments when Ridley Scott's epic feels like a patchwork made of other films, other images. One music cue recycles Bobby Womack's title song from “Across 110th Street.” Frank's twisted vision of the American dream ("This is where I'm from. This is where my family is. My business. My mother. This is my place. This is my country. This is America.") sounds like a paraphrase from “The Godfather.”

But there are also many strong moments where something unique flashes through “American Gangster,” which make you wish there were more of them. Frank's such a businessman that he considers how Nicky Barnes dilutes his dope to maximize street profit "trademark infringement." Richie only becomes aware of Frank's importance after spotting him seated many rows ahead of better-known criminals at the Frasier-Ali fight: "His seats were phenomenal. ..." In a devastating third act speech, Ruby Dee gives the movie its one resounding note of moral outrage. And in the film's most tense scene -- and the one that suggests what “American Gangster” might have been -- Richie's search of Frank's dope plane is derailed by a sneering U.S. Attorney (Roger Bart) because he simply can't believe the idea Frank's been able to get a direct connection, racism overriding police work.

Ridley Scott, who took over for Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day"), puts together a spectacular film on the production level. He and his crew get details right: the clothes, the look of a Harlem diner, the naked women assembling packets of "Blue Magic" heroin in an apartment in the projects, where a wild chase through the hallways caps the film. Scott treats us to many wide street shots and scenes in crowded clubs. Every element from the store fronts to the cars to the costumes look completely genuine. You believe what’s happening at every minute of “American Gangster” could be a very close recreation of what actually went down. There’s a legitimacy to the production that elevates it above what many other directors can do.

But the emotional fire burns only intermittently. We’re never given much of a reason to care about Frank or Richie and so the film becomes a vivid recreation without a dramatic purpose. Everyone involved got the "how" and the "what" of this story down great but forgot the "why." We never learn much about either Frank or Richie beyond their actions and it makes the whole piece shockingly cold and detached.

Except for one 30-second story about seeing a cousin killed by racist cops in North Carolina, we learn nothing about Frank’s past: He's just an empty-hearted killer with the shrewd instincts of a corporate head, and he's willing to get his fingers bloody when necessary. We learn more about Richie in comparison, who's portrayed as one of the few honest cops in North Jersey in the 1960s. But not how or why he turned out that way.

The last 40 minutes of "American Gangster" are as brilliantly directed, acted and action-packed as anything since, well, last year's Oscar-winning mob movie "The Departed," but the film runs long at 157 minutes. Washington and Crowe, two of today’s best leading men, have an easy chemistry when they collide. Still, there isn’t much to their characters. Scott is a great visual designer, but he has rarely brought full human dimension to his characters and I don't feel he does it here.

“American Gangster” is too well made not to enjoy, but it doesn’t get under one’s skin. It’s a good film that feels like it could have been great.

Film Review: “Eastern Promises”

Directed by David Cronenberg, “Eastern Promises” jumps out of the gate with the most realistic, horrific throat slashing with a dull knife you will ever see. (How do they fake that kind of thing?)

You the audience have been duly warned and every scene after that is charged with pure danger. You don’t know what will happen because a character’s glance might be judged wrong and out will come an ice pick.

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a part English midwife, who gets her last name from her Russian father, works at a North London hospital. We meet her as she struggles, but fails to save a young pregnant girl, Tatiana (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), who is brought to the hospital after hemorrhaging and collapsing at a pharmacy. The baby is saved, though.

Determined to find a relative with whom she can leave the baby, Anna takes the dead girl’s diary, which is written in Russian, to her Uncle Stepan (Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski). When he refuses to translate the diary, Anna takes a photocopy to a Russian restaurant owner, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose business card was in the diary. Seemingly inseparable from his kitchen, Semyon offers meals of czarist luxury to his customers in his posh Trans-Siberian restaurant.

Anna and the rest of us gradually catch on that Semyon is the patriarch of London’s local Russian mafia family, the Vory-V-Zakone (“Thieves In Law”), who’re involved in everything from selling teenage prostitutes to running weapons to murder. Tatiana, we discover by degrees, was forced into prostitution and drug addiction by Semyon. She was trying to escape when she hemorrhaged and ended up in Anna’s hospital.

Semyon’s heir apparent is his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) a vicious, out-of-control murderer. Kirill is the heir-apparent to the throne but his father doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that. Moderating between the two family members is Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), a chilly, impeccably dressed “chauffeur” whose carefully groomed exterior masks a ruthless brutality. Bullied and ordered around by Kirill, Nikolai is being prepped to graduate from driver and enforcer to a mob captain with the tattooed stars to prove it. Semyon barely hides his preference for Nikolai over his own son.

Skillfully written by Steve Knight, we learn that Russian criminals have their careers tattooed on their bodies. Nikolai is covered with tattoos, but he needs two eight-pointed stars on his chest and tattoos on his knees to complete his body book that will show that he belongs to the highest rank of the Russian underworld.

Anna wants to find the baby’s relatives and agrees to exchange the original diary for a family address in Russia. When Anna finds out what is in the diary and who it implicates, instead of minding her own business, she steps deeper into the dangerous world of the Russian mafia and becomes entangled with Nikolai.

Assigned to “dissuade” her, it's impossible to guess whether Nikolai will add Anna to the collection of corpses he has already dropped in the Thames. Not once, but twice he warns Anna to stay away, though. But her need to discover who Tatiana was combined with her growing attraction to Nikolai makes it impossible for Anna to keep to a safe distance. And Anna forms an instant bond with Tatiana’s infant.

This is Mortensen’s second film with David Cronenberg. He was dazzling in Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” and has found his Martin Scorsese in the director. Mortensen, who can seem a little rigid and withdrawn, uses that stillness to create an unnerving presence. Nikolai says very little and displays an economy of movement. So what little he does say and do has even greater impact. Watts is best in the scenes with the actors playing her family--her mom, Helen (Sinead Cusack) and her disagreeable uncle Stepan. Cassel has the most difficult task as Kirill because he has to navigate the stereotypes of playing a character who is a drunk Russian and a closeted gay. Both groups might be offended with the role but Cassel is a good actor and he makes the character work within the context of this film.

“Eastern Promises” is written by Steve Knight, who also wrote “Dirty Pretty Things.” Knight again contemplates immigrant dreams that turn into nightmares. This time young girls made into sex slaves. Tatiana’s diary provides a view into how twisted those dreams can become. Knight also conveys little details that comment on the assimilation process of other immigrants whether it’s a Russian youth’s desire to go to a Chelsea football (soccer) game or Kirill’s attempt to explain that the slang “the coast is clear” has nothing to do with the beach or the periodic monologues from Tatiana’s diary that vocalize her desire to see the world and find a better life before she was forced into prostitution and drug addiction.

A key to the film’s success is the contribution of cinematographer and longtime Cronenberg collaborator Peter Suschitzky. The careful and precise composition of each shot, combined with the use of sound, insinuate something dark lurking below the often calm and polished surface. Suschitzky’s poised, objective camera records some of the violence with a surprisingly calm eye that makes the violence all the more disturbing. Violence on screen tends to be one of two things: so over the top it severs all ties to reality or so brutal it shocks. Cronenberg’s violence leans toward the latter category. The film’s violence stirs unease at the very least.

The ads for the film state “Every sin leaves a mark.” This draws attention to the way the Russian gangsters use tattoos to tell the story of their lives--each tattoo records something they’ve done. The tattooed hides of these Russian mafiozy is the surface they proudly reveal to others in their secret world and it defines them. Cronenberg also shows the surfaces the characters present to the outside world. Nikolai has two skins--his tattooed body which in turn is covered by slick Armani suits. He uses the outer skin to try and fool the public, while the skin underneath defines his rank within the inner circle of the gangster world. As the film progresses, we find that there is even another layer to his character. It’s appropriate then that in two key scenes Nikolai strips down to expose more than just his flesh. In some ways, Nikolai has much in common with Mortensen’s character in “Violence,” who hides one persona beneath another.

Anna may not have such obvious layers, but she also wears an outer mask--a pretty British midwife--who hides both her Russian heritage and her own baby’s death. Everyone in this film has one surface they want people to see as well as another one underneath. Semyon is the doting grandfather who harbors a much darker soul. And his son Kirill seems forced by the rigid codes of his mob environment to do a lot of macho posturing to hide the fact that he’s gay and a softie for children. Even Stepan, the bigoted old school Russian who disapproved of Anna’s past relationship with a black doctor, turns out to be a decent sort, who once worked back in the day as a KGB auxiliary against the Vory-V-Zakone in the Rodina (Mother Russia).

But then Cronenberg has always been interested in human surfaces whether it’s a body with parasites squirming beneath the skin (“They Came From Within”) or a blood-sucking phallus under Marilyn Chambers’ arm (“Rabid”) or bodies mixed with technology (“eXiztenZ”). These earlier films fall in the horror genre but both “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” are more thrillers or violent dramas. Yet in a sense they too are dealing with horror, the horror of what people are capable of doing to each other. So although Cronenberg is not doing horror in a conventional sense, he’s still showing us horrors. The brilliantly staged fight in a Turkish bath house--where a naked Nikolai is assaulted by two knife wielding thugs--has all the horror and discomfort of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” shower scene. “Eastern Promises” is a horror film hiding beneath the more refined skin of a sleek Hollywood thriller.

Elegant in its ability to disturb, “Eastern Promises” demonstrates that Cronenberg is one of today’s top filmmakers. He serves up a twisted morality tale that flashes a fleeting and unexpected tenderness. His film gets better upon reflection and with repeated viewings. The more you consider the details, the more they add up to something smart and complex.

If there’s one quibble I have, the title brings to mind a mid-range perfume. This film is more a shot of blood with a vodka chaser.

Review: "3:10 TO YUMA"

The Western may be an endangered cinematic species nowadays, but every once in a while one comes along that’s good enough to make a body nostalgic for the days when they were churned out in droves. The ultimate American genre, a repository of frontier mythology with archetypal manly men who live by their own code of honor, James Mangold’s "3:10 to Yuma" shows that an Aussie and a Welshman can meet the requirements just fine. A remake of Delmer Daves' 1957 picture, the new version holds its own, operating on the border between chaos and civilization, law and abandon. The film is based on a story by Elmore Leonard, about a down-on-his-luck rancher who forges a curious bond with an outlaw as he takes the criminal to a railway line for transport to prison.

Mangold ("Walk the Line") has assembled a cast that has hardly a weak link and almost makes one not regret the absence of classic stalwarts like Ward Bond, Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Dan Duryea. Christian Bale plays Dale Evans, a sharpshooter and Union Army veteran who lost part of his leg in the Civil War. With the small pension awarded him by the government, he has moved his wife, Alice (Gretchen Mol, who somehow looks both luminous and careworn), and his sons, hot-under-the-spurs teen Will (Logan Lerman) and sickly Mark (Benjamin Petry), to a small Arizona ranch. A drought has nearly ruined Evans' livelihood, and the property's deed-holder, knowing the railroad is eyeing the land, hopes to drive him and his family off it.

Russell Crowe shines opposite Bale as outlaw leader Ben Wade. Crowe captures all the malevolent charisma of Wade, whose gang in a spectacular opening sequence, attacks a Southern Railway stagecoach defended by Pinkerton agents with a Gatling gun and a crusty bounty hunter Byron McElroy (Peter Fonda), an old rival whom he lets live despite the bloodlust of his right-hand man Charlie Prince (Ben Foster).

Evans and his sons observe the attack. They rescue McElroy and take him back to town, where Pinkerton man Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts) and Marshal Weathers (Luce Rains) are waiting for the stagecoach Wade and his boys just robbed. There Evans helps capture Wade, who tarried too long with barmaid Emmy Roberts (Vinessa Shaw) while his gang vamoosed to safety.

Butterfield and Weathers then decide to take Wade from Bisbee to a town called Contention, about three days’ ride, to board the 3:10 train to Yuma prison, where he’ll be hanged for twenty-two robberies of Southern Railway’s cash deliveries. Desperate to save his ranch, Evans agrees to be part of the posse in charge of getting Wade there for a land-saving paycheck. Coming along for the ride are Butterfield, McElroy, Doc Potter (Alan Tudyk of the lamented “Firefly” and “Serenity”), who must care for McElroy’s wounds, and Tucker (Kevin Durand), henchman to the town despot who’s dispossessing Evans. But Will, who’s been left behind, shows up just in time to keep Wade from escaping in the first of several instances in which he outwits his captors. And hovering over the entire journey is the knowledge that Prince and his comrades are hot on their trail. They want their boss and won’t spare bullets to get him back.

In Daves' version of the movie, Evans was played by a drawn, weatherbeaten Van Heflin; Glenn Ford's Wade was a gentlemanly, sinister operator. They're both terrific performances, but Bale and Crowe match them, reinventing the characters in ways that honor, without imitating, the men who first played them.

Crowe's Wade is the type of roguish romancer we've seen him play before--his manly-man demeanor charms barmaid Emmy in something under two minutes. But he doesn't downplay Wade's ruthlessness either. Actually, his Wade doesn't seem to see ruthlessness and charm as contradictions. His eyes can be gently mocking or icily appraising, but even then you can't tell exactly what he wants: He's a man who's simultaneously looking for ways to connect and betray, as if he can't tell the difference anymore.

Bale, looking gaunt and haunted, is Crowe's match in every way, playing the quintessential broken man who's responded to life's hardships by doggedly insisting on doing what's right. Bale pushes his role out without ever appearing to push it at all. He takes moments that could be corny or overbearing and scales them down instead of blowing them up. The effect is something both casual and meticulous, a way of paying homage to the genre's past and nudging it toward the future.

Crowe’s and Bale’s scenes together are like acting master classes. Wade knows he's a bad man, and he tells his decent captor so. But he's a smiling villain, and Evans senses there's something more than bloodlust beneath his body count.

Mangold and his screenwriters, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, have taken Halsted Welles' earlier screenplay and fleshed it out, adding some interesting details (Wade's battle scars, both emotional and physical, are their invention, and they were probably added to lend some present day topical relevance to the picture) and some superfluous ones (the posse runs into a group of railroad baddies, led by Luke Wilson, that feels like padding the movie doesn't need). And Wade has an artistic bent, sketching out people, birds, and other things that catch his fancy and we learn he’d read the bible cover to cover once as a boy as his mother vanished while buying railroad tickets back East.

The supporting roles also help elevate the new version and play with the cliches of the genre. There’s Fonda’s laconic bounty hunter, Tudyk’s soft but nervously heroic vet-turned-doctor, Roberts’ haughty eastern detective, Rains’ leathery lawman and Tucker’s thuggish deputy. Not least of which is Wade's psychotic right-hand man, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), who has an unbridled, fury and dedication to his leader. Resplendent in a double-breasted Confederate gray leather jacket with brass buttons, his presence alone suggests bad things ahead. Meanwhile, the craggy rock faces and orange dust of New Mexico become characters in their own right.

Most important, though, is the expansion of the role of Will Evans, little more than a cameo in the original, who here becomes an important figure as the boy at war with himself--disappointed in his father, who he sees as weak, and seduced by Wade’s easy charm. His presence deepens the conflict at the center of the story by making the young man’s soul the prize that Wade and Evans are fighting for.

Mangold works throughout with finesse, paying homage to the old conventions without allowing them to seem stale and getting strong performances down the line. (The only exceptions are the women. Gretchen Mol barely registers as Dan’s wife, nor does Shaw make much of an impression, except on the eye. But this is a man-centered tale.) Technical contributions are top-notch, from Phedon Papamichael’s cinematography (showing us dusty, underpopulated towns and landscapes that hover uncertainly between bleakness and beauty, and even give us a stagecoach driver's eye view over the backs of a team of galloping horses) and Michael McCusker’s editing, which together mix energy and control, to Marco Beltrami’s score, supportive in both the action scenes and the quieter moments.

"3:10 to Yuma" hits a rough patch in the last reel, though, when the shift in Wade’s motivations remain as opaque as it was in the original, and the decision to go for a denouement both downbeat and uplifting doesn’t quite play. But those problems don’t take the movie off the rails. This is a great old-fashioned western that works in contemporary terms, a rousing demonstration that some people can make the kinds of pictures they supposedly don’t make anymore.

Film Review: “The Bourne Ultimatum”

If Alfred Hitchcock were alive and directing action films today, they'd probably look a whole lot like Paul Greengrass’ masterful spy thriller “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Those who enjoyed the first two chapters (Doug Liman’s “The Bourne Identity” and Greengrass' “The Bourne Supremacy”) will have a ball with this third and final entry. Forget that it's a sequel to a sequel and ignore the fact that the film has next to no connection to its Robert Ludlum source material -- “The Bourne Ultimatum” still stands as one of the most rousing action movies in years.

Need proof that $100 million dollars worth of digital and CGI trickery isn’t needed to create an action spectacle that will have moviegoers cheering? Here it is. How novel to find an action film that delivers thrills and intensity through character and story instead of eye-candy and explosions. Simple to follow but just twisted enough to sink your teeth into.

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is in constant motion, racing down streets and along corridors, leaping across rooftops. Intimate with many cities -- Moscow, Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid -- and, incapable of hesitation, he runs without a stumble though their mazelike neighborhoods, markets, and railroad stations. No office or hotel-room door remains impenetrable; no safe remains locked. Robert Ludlum created the character -- in his 1980 novel, “The Bourne Identity” -- as a black-ops assassin whose brain had been wiped clean before he was programmed to kill. The writers who adapted Bourne for the screen (Tony Gilroy has been a regular, along with various collaborators) took over Ludlum’s notion for the character; they enhanced Bourne’s locomotive skills, and gave him a soul. This Jason Bourne is so anguished by his crimes that he develops amnesia, but he gradually remembers the bad things he has done, and is haunted by them.

Because the viewer actually cares about Jason Bourne's plight -- and, like him, craves some big answers -- the action moments feel like natural extensions of the story, rather than a collection of stand-alone set-pieces that were wedged into the plot wherever they'd fit. It feels good to breeze along with an extended action scene and actually not know where it's headed. The Bourne series has already shown that it doesn't always play by the rules (recall the fate of Franka Potente's character in “Supremacy”), and that adds another layer of flavor to the mayhem: some of the characters you like actually could die.

Hats off to producer Frank Marshall for keeping this trilogy moving ahead in confident fashion. Along with Liman, Greengrass, Damon, Gilroy, and hundreds of other contributors, the producer has done the near-impossible: He has delivered a trilogy that has no weak entry.

The film’s plot goes something like this: London journalist Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) stumbles onto a hyper-secret CIA black op code named Blackbriar.

It's so sensitive the whisper of it on Ross' cell phone sets sinister surveillance technology abuzz an ocean away in midtown Manhattan.

There the Blackbriar leak sparks the attention of a Bush-league spook, Noah Vosen (David Strathairn), and Pam Landry (Joan Allen), the honorable but tough-as-nails CIA bureaucrat from 2004's “Supremacy” who, in the last moments of that film, told Bourne his birth name.

Thing is, that still hasn't happened yet -- “Ultimatum” actually kicks off in Moscow following Bourne's confession to a young Russian girl whose parents he murdered and his putting paid to Franka’s killer. Still racked by flashbacks to his vicious past -- filled with more post-9/11 imagery than ever before -- Bourne's search for his identity leads him to Ross and, consequently, to Vosen.

From here, Greengrass piggybacks jaw-dropping set piece on jaw-dropping set piece. When the ever-resourceful Bourne sets up a meet with Ross at London's Waterloo Station, he puppeteers the reporter through corridors and crowds to evade a rapidly-tightening network of operatives and video surveillance cameras linked via satellite to Vosen's hi-tech hub.

Yet the man unerringly pulling all the strings here is Greengrass, whose faculty for electrifying -- yet never disorienting -- chases and clashes is staggering. A mind-blowing mid-point chase over the rooftops of Tangier and an intimate hand-to-hand fight to the end that ends in stunned silence are among the film’s highlights.

Yet throughout, the director of “United 93” never loses his focus, or the emotionalism hard-wired into Bourne's search for both self and redemption.

By the time he locates his objective -- found amid the skyscrapers of New York -- we're as invested in finding the truth as he is.

And just as exhausted.

Bourne’s primary foe, Noah Vosen, who has a whittled honest voice, makes a devastating no-nonsense villain: he seems efficient, capable, a man born to lead people -- right off an ethical cliff. Landry has been involved with this Bourne caper long enough to know that Bourne isn’t a monster, just a ruthless assassin. She wants to hear his side of the story. True, he has a damaging tape that could blow the cover of a sensitive program. But, she reasons, “if he really wanted to hurt us he could have sent the tape to CNN.”

Vosen is forever urging and barking -- “He’s on the move, gimmee eyeballs on the street, let’s go”-- while his analyst Geek Squad storms their computers following Bourne around the world via surveillance cameras and intercepted phone signals.

In chasing the British reporter, Vosen orders, “I want his phones, his BlackBerry…I want to know what he’s gonna think before he does.” Half a second later, the thing is done.

A big pleasure is the fantasy that the CIA is a swooping, roaring, unstoppable force able to summon the darkest magic out of a clear blue sky -- when they need an “asset,” or assassin, at Waterloo Station in London, he’s there instantly, in just the right place, perfectly hidden, with his trusty sniper gear. Back in the real world, we have 50 years worth of reasons to suspect that the CIA is a place where bored nine-to-fivers in poly-blend shirts sit at crumb-covered desks silently calculating their pensions. Find Bin Laden? Track Al-Qaida activity Stateside? When?

The greatest of pleasures, though, is in watching Bourne work -- you can see him observing, thinking, planning, reacting, as CIA baddies swarm in from every direction. The script never cheats its way out by giving him a fancy gadget -- buying a prepaid cellphone is one of the smartest things he does -- and it doesn’t stop for jokey one-liners or cooing romance. Chasing the source who gave the reporter the story about him brings Boune to Madrid, where he again runs into the young CIA field support officer, Nicky Parsons, (Julia Stiles) who started to believe in him in the last movie. Emotions underlie the looks she gives Bourne, but shooting her a glance is as close as Bourne gets to undressing her. This budding romance may be saved for later if Marshall comes out with more Bourne films. I’ll watch ‘em if they’re all this good.

Bourne is no James Bond. Even though last year’s “Casino Royale” was a tremendously satisfying entry, 007’s films don’t stand up to the Bourne series’ brute velocity. As Greengrass thrusts his trademark shaky camera into his spies’ faces, stages gripping fistfights without music or unnecessary cuts, hurls you across the rooftops of Tangier or demonstrates the art of crunchily driving a stolen police car backwards off the roof of the Port Authority, he always makes you feel the temperature, and it’s boiling hot. A whiff of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo makes the film feel current, but Greengrass doesn’t quite dump us back in reality by overselling the parallel.

There isn’t a syllable of excess dialogue -- Damon seems to have about 10 lines in the whole movie -- and Bourne’s real-time scheming makes you smile with its brilliance, if not its plausibility. When a bomb exploded half an SUV length away, one wonders how Bourne bounds away without so much as a chapped lip? When he finally comes back to New York with score-settling on his mind and is trapped in a building overflowing with adversaries, Greengrass glosses over the escape plan and shows Bourne trotting out of the place.

Greengrass shoots the film’s scenes in tiny fragments, leading to an extraordinary gain in speed and power most other directors would have trouble matching. The camera trembles and shakes and hurtles in “Ultimatum,” as if we were trapped inside the moving Bourne, and yet, on the fly, we see what we need to see. Gathering the fragments, Greengrass keeps some of the chase scenes going for ten minutes at a time.

Summing up the first two films: the drama of “Identity” was existential (Who am I?), and the drama of “Supremacy” was moral (What did I do?). The drama of “Ultimatum” is redemptive: How can I escape what I am? This is illustrated when Bourne has a shot on a CIA assassin in New York who failed to kill him, but he passes it up. The same operative later comes back to hold Borne at gunpoint as he’s poised to dive into the Hudson River and escape. After asking why Bourne passed up the shot, the operative lets him jump.

The creators of the black-ops program that created Bourne are shown to have used such techniques as hooding and waterboarding to break down and remake his personality, and he wants to find them. Commenting acidly on current interrogation techniques, the filmmakers suggest that such games were played with Americans as well as with outsiders. This may be a fiction, but it’s a sinister thought.

Boasting more smarts, slickness, subtlety and character than all of this summer's action offerings combined, “The Bourne Ultimatum” (like its predecessors) is an anomaly in today's multiplex world. (The whole series has the “old-school” feel of John Frankenheimer's work around 1972 -- which is a good thing.) The flick builds on the foundation of its excellent predecessors and then ups the ante at every turn. “Ultimatum” may be the best of the lot. Probably the best Hollywood movie of the whole year. Greengrass has crafted a template for all future spy films and moved into the penthouse of top directors. If this is indeed the finale to the series, as Damon has suggested, the filmmakers have gotten out while the getting’s good.

Review: Spiderman 3

More is less.

Speaking for myself, I thought the first Spiderman was OK. The second installment hit it out of the park. No question.

I feel that Spiderman 2 raised the bar so high that director Sam Raimi overreached himself and tried to tell a grand story by mixing in too many subplots and characters competing with each other for screen time. He substituted scope and scale for the warmth and wit that made those two previous pictures so memorable. This lumbering third installment finds a trio of villains jockeying for screen time amid several half-developed storylines and a darker, self-serious tone that veers into the overwrought.

The opening credit sequence does a beautiful job of showing highlights from the previous two movies and gets you ready for this one, which is set an indeterminate amount of time after the 2nd one. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is living his dream life - he and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) are going strong, he's at the top of his college classes, and much to the consternation of the Daily Bugle’s J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), Spidey’s become New York’s favorite celebrity. What could go wrong?

For starters all of this success starts to go to our favorite webslinger’s head. He becomes self-involved and doesn’t notice MJ's problems whose life is starting to go downhill after she gets fired from her Broadway show. To be fair, she doesn’t tell Peter anything. (One must ask why the critics hate her in the third film when she was loved in the second and was good enough to get hired in the first place?) Anywho, MJ gets jealous of Peter's platonic relationship with his colorless lab partner Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) when she gives Spidey the key to the city and gives him "their" kiss while he’s hanging upside down.

It’s a bad time to grow an ego, as there’s trouble brewing on several fronts. First, Peter’s former best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco) has discovered his late father’s stash of Green Goblin super-soldier serum, and he’s suiting up for second-generation supervillian-hood with a personal vendetta against Spider-Man.

And speaking of personal vendettas, it turns out the man who murdered Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben wasn’t actually the guy we saw Spidey take out in the first film. In a strange little chunk of revisionist history, we see a bunch of reshot scenes illustrating that Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) was the trigger man. As if all this weren’t awkward enough, James Cromwell’s police captain calls Parker and Aunt May down to the station and explains it to them for no obvious reason.

The punchline isn’t only that Church just escaped from prison, but he also accidentally tripped and fell into a top secret science experiment out of Star Trek that, for some reason, was being carried out in the middle of the night—so suddenly he’s the Sandman.

Still not enough story points for you? Well there’s also the matter of this strange alien goo coming from a meteorite that lands conveniently close to the spot where Peter and MJ are stargazing in New York’s Central Park. The goo then attaches itself to Peter’s moped and hangs around inertly in his room for the first 2/3 of the film before attaching itself to Peter and spontaneously transforming into a shiny black costume. It’s a parasitic organism that makes Spidey a lot more aggressive, and causes Pete to grow his bangs out like he’s in an ’80s New Wave band and sway like he’s on Saturday Night Fever.

Then there’s Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a competitive freelance photographer, who’s trying to muscle his way into Parker’s gig at the Daily Bugle by Photoshopping forgeries of Spider-Man committing robberies so the people of New York will turn on their hero. And that’s before Brock gets up close and personal with the alien goo.

Whew! Raimi—who co-wrote the script with his brother Ivan as well as two-time Oscar winner Alvin Sargent ("Julia," "Ordinary People")-figures out a way to line up these events (sort of). For example, during the early fight between Spidey and Harry (the best action set piece of the film), Harry hits his head and comes down with short-term amnesia, so that he spends most of the movie being an amnesiac pussycat who’s nothing but sunshine and light. MJ hangs out with him for a bit to find some comfort from all her problems. Then Spidey figures out a way to stop the Sandman, but only for a little while. During these rest periods, Peter/Spidey can then deal with other problems.

On the bad side, the problems seem more artificial in Spider-Man 3 than they did in Spiderman 2. Each problem has less breathing room, less time to become organic with gray areas in the middle. The film eventually gets so tangled and top-heavy with its 20 million different plot threads, Raimi has to resort to Peter Parker watching television so news crews can helpfully recap at least an hour’s worth of off-screen events that set the final battle in motion. (Note to aspiring screenwriters: If your superhero needs to watch CNN in order to figure out what’s going on in his own movie, take it as a sign you’ve written yourself into a corner.)

There's the Raimi touch of having (Bruce Campbell) make another appearance, this time as a pseudo French Maître d' and the expected Stan Lee cameo (I'm not against him getting his due, but his cameos don’t seem to be adding anything). Then there's the typical moment where Spiderman does something in front of the cheering NYC crowd. Rather than get out of the way, the New Yorkers stand there and watch the battles when buildings and debris are falling around them. What would it be like to have Spidey fight ONE villain WITHOUT removing his mask in the middle of the brawl? It's amazing everyone in NYC doesn't know who he is by now.

McGuire seems to be a bit bored this go around. There's no spark or excitement in his performance except when he gets taken over by the alien goo and goes dark side—for Peter. He struts down the street dressed in black, accompanied by cheesy music, and women either give him the eye or look at him like he's a creep, goes to jazz clubs, and says "babe" a lot. Hilarious sequence.

Then there's the idea of bringing in the iconic Gwen Stacy, who many fans of the Spiderman comic book knows has a major impact on our hero's life. The problem is, Stacy's impact is felt early on in his career and introducing her into the film world this way and at this time makes absolutely no sense. If they wanted to introduce a woman to make MJ jealous then this character would have been fine, as long as she was called something other than Gwen Stacy.

I liked the Sandman character and the resolution at the end better than I thought I would, but I also hated the revisionist way they turned Sandman into the killer of Uncle Ben. The storyline was handled well, but it felt too much like the Batman origin story where they had to make the hero invested by saying "Hey, I killed your Uncle."

The stuff with Harry was actually very good. Here James Franco really gets to display a real emotional range. The new Goblin designs were real cool (in an edgy bad guy sort of way), everything from the black leather suit, to the mask, to the redesigned Goblin glider were fantastic. I had the feeling this was a guy who could kick Spidey's butt (and should have been the main baddie for the film). The main reason the 3rd film works is because of him.

As good as everything with the Goblin and the Sandman were, much about Venom was terrible. The way he moved in his liquid form, conveniently sat around inert in Peter’s room, to how he looked once it bonded with Brock. I like the cartoon Venom, but the film version got shortchanged and deserved its own movie. Why couldn’t Venom have been brought in for Spiderman 4? The studio will produce it after all, whether or not the original team stays on board. He's one bad guy too many. His introduction into the story causes everything to be crowded, rushed, and overlong. Spider-Man 3 feels like it should end around the 1:40 mark, but like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps going...

The CGI in this takes a step back to the cartoony animation that was in the first film, Spiderman swinging around town looked like a tiny animated spec. The stuff with the Sandman was about as good as it could be. Focusing on the grains of sand and then expanding to see him reassemble after the experiment—very lyrical.

Considering how overloaded the film is, Raimi does juggle the characters and storylines fairly well. People will line up to watch the film and set new opening weekend box office records. But everything is just a little off, or takes a step back. The ending was touching, but I’m stumped on where Peter and MJ are headed now. People love trilogies because it's said that good things come in threes, but this series would have looked better and felt more satisfying had the filmmakers stopped at two.

Retro Review: "BATMAN BEGINS"

Hey all,

I recently rented the "Batman Begins" DVD from my local Blockbuster since I'd been meaning to and I don't care for the current theater offerings.

I liked "Batman Begins" when it first came out and it's only deepened since, which is nice because it's more common for me to not like something on DVD/VHS after seeing it in theatres.

IMHO, Director Christopher Nolan has hit it out of the park. Being a genius of mystery and intrigue (MEMENTO, FOLLOWING, INSOMNIA), it shouldn't be that surprising. For those who haven't seen MEMENTO, a unique, yet brain-straining feature; suffice to say that Nolan is great with thought and suspense -- but action? What an exciting risk to employ. Personally, I think these risks pay off in spades. This is a film that cares a great deal for what is going on inside the Bat-Man's head; the action is more of an accent.

Director Nolan did a fantastic job of directing this, all of the performances are top notch, the pacing is smooth as silk, and the atmosphere is right on target. If I had one complaint it would be that he plays it almost too safe, there isn't a single memorable shot in this film or a moment where you go "WOW!!!" or "COOL!" and the
action sequences were too pedestrian.

The fight scenes are shot close in; Nolan seems to have made a conscious decision not to compete with other more "martial arts" hand-to-hand action flicks. His action scenes are dark, the sounds and movement jeer a chill or more accurately -- fear.

Co-written with David S. Goyer (scribe of the mostly dismal BLADE trilogy), "Batman Begins" is anything but cartoony, this new film is serious, real, and most of all BELIEVABLE.

Never once do you not believe that this world exists, that Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is not a real person, that the young Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman) isn't honest, that Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) isn't an idealistic, earnest Assistant District Attorney. The cast in this film all did an amazing job. They understood the material, and took it seriously -- the way it's meant to be.

Nolan's approach is born out in the title, taking Bruce Wayne back to his childhood before guiding him into the formation of his double identity. The film still resides in a nether world, one stuck in a comic book sensibility yet real enough to gain and hold viewer interest.

Nolan breaks the first part of his film into several story segments, as he relates Bruce Wayne's childhood, his eventual alienation and withdrawal from society, and his reclamation as a noble warrior and crime-fighting crusader. By using this framework, Nolan not only can draw an in-depth portrait of a troubled man confronting his fears, but he can also underline what the film is about, that is, Batman's origins and eventual transformation.

As a result, the film witnesses the evolution of Batman's costume, cape, car, cave, and more, all smoothly integrated into the story without calling undue attention. Nolan makes it fun, and darn interesting, to watch how everything comes together to make this new creature.

This early part also sets up Batman's eventual battles against Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), Wayne's early mentor who rescues him from an Asian jail and starts him on his warrior training in a league of shadowy ninjas, who fight evil-doers by being avenging angels.

Nesson, who has played the wise mentor figure several times in recent years, gives Wayne several great tips like: "Always be aware of your surroundings" and "To conquer your fear, you must become fear."

When Ducard and Batman end up enemies, it sets up the later, big battle scenes back in Gotham.

Everything shifts from Bruce Wayne's childhood and his eventual Asian travels to his return to Gotham, his exposure to the growing crime problem, and his integration into society as well as his father's corporate world. Nolan relies heavily on computer-generated effects for this second part, delivering a doomed vision of a dark city, populated by unemployment, corporate crime, corrupt police, crime
lords, and, of course, bats.

In the final part, doomsday arrives, as various forces conspire to overtake the city with only Batman and perky assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes to thwart them. This apocalypse befits the film's comic book origins, looking artificial but nevertheless harrowing.

Nolan's mood-setting with terminally ominous atmospherics are greatly aided by the often thunderous music score, supplied by two of Hollywood's most noted craftsmen, James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer. In listening to the highly complementary score, it's fun to try and pick out which composer did which scenes.

The nice thing about this film, is that it actually gives us a look at Bruce Wayne's parents. When they die we actually care, because we get to know these people. Bruce's relationship with Rachel is complicated, she was their maid's daughter and they were close friends as children, but grew apart after the death of his parents.
She becomes a crusading Assistant DA and doesn't like the fact that Bruce doesn't seem to care about the world around him.

Since he's not too well known to general movie audiences, Christian Bale works out passably well as the latest Batman, despite his near total lack of emotion and over-fondness for whispering for effect. The superb supporting cast adds strength to what could have been throwaway roles. Rutger Hauer, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe, Linus Roache and Morgan Freeman inject believability if not prestige into their parts. Michael Caine plays dedicated servant Alfred with just the right amount of whimsy but never indicates he's doing anything but taking it all seriously. Katie Holmes was passable, but she won't be missed in the upcoming DARK KNIGHT. I can hardly wait to see who'll be the new Rachel.

In my lights, Nolan has breathed new life into the Batman franchise, which the last couple of flicks did their best to beat down into campy mindlessness. Here's hoping Nolan keeps the magic with the DARK KNIGHT, which is due out on July 18, 2008.