The Whole Ten Yards (2004)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Gangster, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak
screenplay by George Gallo
directed by Howard Deutch

by Walter Chaw Oz (Matthew Perry, racing Ray Romano for title of television personality least suited for the big screen) is a dentist married to ex-moll Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge) and ex-hitman Jimmy (Bruce Willis) is married to ex-dental hygienist Jill (Amanda Peet). Oz is constantly mugging, falling down, running into things, and making funny faces, which leads me to believe that Oz might be afflicted by some toxic stew of epilepsy, Tourette’s Syndrome, and limited comic actor’s disease–the last of which the sort of thing that otherwise dull or homely children contract to get attention in class. Through a devastatingly disinteresting sequence of convoluted events, our whimsical quartet is menaced by Hungarian mobster Lazlo Gogolak (Kevin Pollak, in his fourth decade of needing a bullet to the head) and his dimwit son Strabo (Frank Collison)–resulting in a shootout and a desperate series of speeches that don’t do a thing to explain how Jimmy pretending to be a housewife in a David Lee Roth wig relates to stealing millions from the mob.

Black Sunday (1977) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Drama, DVD, Espionage, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound B
starring Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, Marthe Keller, Fritz Weaver
screenplay by Ernest Lehman, Kenneth Ross and Ivan Moffat
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw Before Thomas Harris created a genius shrink-turned-serial murderer, he wrote the everything-old-is-new-again terrorist saga Black Sunday, managing to incorporate the Super Bowl into its tale of good intelligence saving the day. How novel. What's constant between this and Harris's Hannibal Lecter trilogy is his interest in broken heroes: the inversion of the man of action archetype that germinated in the Fifties Western tradition and flowered in the voodoo ego-nomics of the Reagan-mad Eighties, locating Black Sunday firmly in the deep well of Seventies cinema–filthy with ineffectual champions and astringent endings. But where Harris's novel understood its place in the bittersweet, paranoid zeitgeist, Black Sunday, with its all-star cast (Robert Shaw two years after Jaws, Bruce Dern at his peak, Marthe Keller a year removed from Marathon Man), megalomaniacal producer Robert Evans, and blockbuster aspirations, proves to be another Star Wars-style harbinger of the impending end of what was possibly the most amazing period in film in history.

Wild Things 2 (2004) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Susan Ward, Leila Arcieri, Isaiah Washington, Tony Denison
screenplay by Ross Helford & Andy Hurst
directed by Jack Perez

by Walter Chaw Alligator swamps and high school, I get the comparison, but like the first film, Wild Things 2 is coy, smug, and not so much meta as a self-satisfied, misogynistic tease. Those looking for titillation will have to settle for a lot of slo-mo beach volleyball, multiple views of Susan Ward walking around slowly in such a way as to hide her alarming thighs, and a brief three-way featuring a body double for repulsive/hot (see also: Brittany Murphy) Leila Arcieri, who drops Arcieri down about two cup sizes while upping her pastiness by at least three Danes. Seriously here, how hard would it have been to find a couple of exhibitionistic starlets for a direct-to-video smut pic like Wild Things 2? The really disturbing thing about that is that Arcieri and Ward were apparently hired for their acting ability.

The Rundown (2003) [Widescreen] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Schwarzenegger, Thriller

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring The Rock, Seann William Scott, Christopher Walken, Rosario Dawson
screenplay by R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt
directed by Peter Berg

by Walter Chaw There’s an ebullient lustre to Peter Berg’s dedicatedly obnoxious The Rundown, an action film with so little pretension that it actually comes off as smart. It’s the same peculiar phenomenon that makes of Laurel & Hardy geniuses after the fact, banking on timing and carefully cultivated absurdity to at once define and rejuvenate the mismatched buddy-on-the-run genre. Consider a scene in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fights a tribe of pygmy Brazilian freedom fighters, edited and choreographed like a Yuen Brothers wu xia married to a Weissmuller Tarzan flick. Delirious and ridiculous, exciting in spite of itself, The Rundown is the kind of adrenalized filmmaking that is, in fact, more intelligent and misanthropic than it seems. More, it’s not a fluke: Actor Berg’s directorial debut Very Bad Things remains, along with Doug Liman’s Go, one of the great underestimated time-capsule pitch-black comedies of the late-Nineties. If not for a few glaring moments where Berg displays the first symptoms of obfuscating Danny Boyle disease (CGI pullouts, nauseating zooms, and meaningless hyper-edits), particularly in its prologue, The Rundown would be something of a cult all-timer.

demonlover (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, France, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image D+ Sound D+
starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, Gina Gershon
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Right now, I think I like Olivier Assayas's demonlover. I think. I don't always feel this way: after a couple of screenings and a lot of pondering, I have to say that this singularly dense and elliptical movie has a lot of things going against it. Like its lead, it's cold and austere to a fault, viewing its techno-financial milieu from a safe distance and attributing to it a number of traits that simply don't add up. But in the cold light of day, the film connects the dots about the business of cultural production that are normally hidden from view. Assayas may be grasping at straws in a number of instances, but his general framework is sound, and as he speaks of the disconnect of people from the industries that shape them, I'm inclined to look past demonlover's weaknesses. Right now, at least.

Wild Things (1998) [Unrated Edition] – DVD

Posted in1990s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Satire, Thriller

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards
screenplay by Stephen Peters
directed by John McNaughton

by Bill Chambers I shepherded myself through puberty on a steady diet of Cinemax, and I’ve apologized for worse than this movie’s sins on behalf of director John McNaughton, whose Mad Dog and Glory almost sires a new genre: misogyny uplift. So I’ve always considered my indifference towards Wild Things to be something of an anomaly. A continuation of a theme that ran subtly through McNaughton’s powerful Normal Life, i.e., some inextricable link between carnal desire and pecuniary greed, Wild Things (originally titled Sex Crimes) opens with an aerial view of the ‘Glades that cleverly juxtaposes alligator-infested swampland with the grounds of a nearby high school. The implication is clear, but then again it’s too clear, and you can shut the movie off then and there without missing a beat.

Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat (2003) [Widescreen] + Gothika (2003) [Widescreen Edition] – DVDs

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DVD, Family, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

The Cat in the Hat
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin, Kelly Preston, Dakota Fanning
screenplay by Alec Berg & David Mandel & Jeff Schaffer, based on the Dr. Seuss book
directed by Bo Welch

GOTHIKA
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton, John Carroll Lynch
screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez
directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Catinthegothikaby Walter Chaw The vaguely infernal Dr. Seuss classic is given an overtly infernal treatment in the most excruciating rape of a beloved childhood memory since The Grinch (another Brian Grazer abomination), the replacement of director Ron Howard for production designer Bo Welch a case of bad for worse. I’d love to be able to say that The Cat in the Hat is inexplicable because I’d love to be able to be naïve about why and how films like this are made, but I fear by now I’m all too familiar with ideas of populism, condescension, the supremacy of opening weekend box-office, and the toxic belief that entertainment for children needn’t hold up to the same kind of scrutiny as entertainment for non-children. Byzantine in the number of ways in which it declares its disdain for film and moviegoers, The Cat in the Hat is also crude, low, and proof at last (with Pieces of April) that Sean Hayes should stick to television, where it’s easier to change the channel. There’s a built-in audience for this picture (most of which will feel a little ill afterwards), it’s going to gross an obscene amount, and it’s proof positive that when large amounts of money are at stake, there are really no depths to which some people will sink to try to grow it.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, France, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

***/****
starring Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer
screenplay by James Gunn
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Heretical to even suggest it, I’m sure, Zack Snyder’s remake of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead surpasses the original in any number of ways. It gives the idea of consumerism run wild the short shrift that it deserves (and the cynicism that an intervening quarter-century demands), touching on the original’s explanation of the zombies’ affinity for the shopping mall and the human heroes’ delight at their newfound material wealth before becoming a bracing action film that, like Marcus Nispel’s reworking of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the source of which didn’t need updating as much as Dawn arguably did), is more firmly entrenched in the James Cameron Aliens tradition than the Seventies institution of disconcerting personal horror film. There’s nothing like fat on the bone of this picture (something the original can’t claim), providing a canny demonstration of how comedy and satire can work without descending into slapstick (no pies in zombie faces this time around), and of how great performances and smart direction can craft a piece that honours its origins while significantly upping the effectiveness of its themes and premise.

Taking Lives (2004) [Widescreen Edition – Unrated Director’s Cut] – DVD|[Extended Cut] – Blu-ray Disc + Gia (1998) [Unrated] – DVD

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Television, Thriller

TAKING LIVES
***/****
DVD – Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland, Gena Rowlands
screenplay by Jon Bokenkamp, based on the novel by Michael Pye
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw The more cynical among us would note that the title might also refer to the time that movies exactly like Taking Lives have stolen from hapless audiences, but the fact of it is that if not for our mortal curiosity, we might have missed genuinely good mad-dog killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, The Untold Story, and Se7en. On a reptile level, I think it behooves the herd to slow down at the scene of a gory end, the flock imprinting another’s messy mortal lesson as an explanation for our fascination with train wrecks and splatter flicks. But where a film like The Silence of the Lambs perversely reassures its captive audience that no matter the procreative ingenuity of a predator’s unslakeable bloodlust, there’s always a corn-fed, buttermilk-scrubbed farm girl there to put him away (and Taking Lives falls into this camp), there are films like granddaddy In Cold Blood (and great-grandpappy Psycho) that disdain the easy treatment of societal cancers. The one is appeasement and equivocation-bordering-on-exploitation, the other is always disquieting and sometimes even thought-provoking.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) [Divimax] – DVD

Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: George A. Romero, DVD, Horror, Italy, Thriller, Zombie

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross
written and directed by George A. Romero

Dawnofthedead1978cap

by Walter Chaw There's a shopping mall in Colorado called "Colorado Mills" that bubbles with the kind of nameless existential dread generally reserved for terrariums and introspective box turtles. Its architecture–a mountain womb of logs and waterfalls–seeks to replicate the feeling of a village, so that the impulsive consumerism it encourages is disguised as foraging in some fantasy of frontier life and the mob of co-capitalist pilgrims shuffling along appear as a murmuring throng of fellow villagers–wayfarers with whom you have a polite agreement to neither speak to nor make eye contact with. Human interaction is dangerous, for it dispels the illusion of comfort.

Cold Creek Manor (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Dennis Quaid, Sharon Stone, Stephen Dorff, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Richard Jefferies
directed by Mike Figgis

by Walter Chaw Conservatively speaking, I'm going to see something like four-hundred films this year and write reviews for about three-hundred of them. That's somewhere in the neighbourhood of "too many" and "much too many," and it's fair to wonder at some point along the way if my point-of-view is becoming coloured by fatigue, too many disappointments, too many deadlines, and the sort of imperious condescension to lacklustre product that begins to feel a little bit like hate. You get into this business because you love movies, you love talking about movies, and you love criticism wielded with responsibility–and then sets in the sobering realization that maybe the experience of going to movies might be permanently degraded by the experience of going to every movie and, worse, being forced to think about and contextualize all of them in a larger perspective.

The Girl from Rio (1969) + Sadomania (1981) – DVDs

Posted in1960s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, DVD, Spain, Thriller, UK, West Germany, ZERO STARS

Die sieben Männer der Sumuru
*½/**** Image  A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Shirley Eaton, Richard Wyler, George Sanders, Maria Rohm
screenplay by Peter Welbeck
directed by Jess Franco

Sadomania – Hölle der Lust
Hellhole Women
ZERO STARS/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ajita Wilson, Ursula Fellner, Robert Foster, Gina Jansen
screenplay by Jess Franco and Günter Ebert
directed by Jess Franco

by Walter Chaw Theoretically, I'm not opposed to the idea of the exploitation film. In the right hands, its disreputable ingredients of sex, violence, and "shocking" behaviour (the girl and the gun of Godardian legend) could be a thrilling camera subject and a springboard for lush stylistic excess. But for every Russ Meyer, Dario Argento, or Suzuki Seijun who knows his way around a camera, there are scores of Lucio Fulcis, Ruggero Deodatos, and Jess Francos who have no clue as to how to make a movie that hangs together. The latter of that unholy trio is a case in point: the current DVD release of two of his films is an occasion for seeing how far the exploitation formula can go wrong. Running the gamut from ridiculous (The Girl from Rio) to repellent (Sadomania), they lack any real stylistic brio to enliven their rote excesses and cheap perversions, succeeding only as possible subjects for Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style mockery.

Fight for Your Life (1977) – DVD

Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blue Underground, Crime, DVD, Thriller

*½/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring William Sanderson, Robert Judd, Reginald Bythewood, Lela Small
screenplay by Straw Weisman
directed by Robert A. Endelson

by Bill Chambers The package containing Fight for Your Life drew me towards it the way a pie cooling on the windowsill draws fugitives from chain gangs. Something I hate about myself is my susceptibility to ironic temptation: Here was this DVD with one third of "Newhart"'s Larry, Darryl, and Darryl having a barechested brawl with a Famous Amos look-alike on the cover, and like a not-so-metaphorical rat to cheese, I had to spin it immediately. Further patronizing me was a pull quote from All Movie Guide declaring Fight for Your Life "the least politically correct movie ever seen in American theaters." Coupled with my foreknowledge of the film's ongoing ban in the United Kingdom, why, that's "I gots ta know" territory. The film was now in the challenging position of having to meet a set of lopsided expectations: If it turned out to be anything less than transcendent schlock, I'd feel cheated.

Out of Time (2003) [Special Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Eva Mendes, Sanaa Lathan, Dean Cain
screenplay by Dave Collard
directed by Carl Franklin

by Walter Chaw If Carl Franklin were going to reunite with Denzel Washington, I wish he would've just made a follow-up to their exceptional adaptation of Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress–and while we're taking a stroll through fantasyland, I really wish that Franklin would make another film the equal of his astonishing One False Move. Not to say that Out of Time is a bad film (given the fatigue of the premise, it's a remarkably good film), just to say that it's only good enough to remind (unlike Franklin's excrescent High Crimes) of the kind of filmmaker that Franklin has been and, hope springing eternal, could be again. What translates well is a sense of breezy professionalism in a preposterous film put together so well that it gives the illusion of being entirely effortless and occasionally great. Out of Time reminds of the superior Confidence in the same way that Franklin reminds of James Foley: they're genuinely gifted neo-noir directors at the top of the game when they're at the top of their games, but too often given to undertaking projects of convenience. For Franklin, Out of Time is something like a return to form but more like a skilled director trying hard to find his way back to the true path.

The Order (2003) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras B
starring Heath Ledger, Shannyn Sossamon, Mark Addy, Benno Fürmann
written and directed by Brian Helgeland

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the good-bad of Lost Souls and the bad-bad of Bless the Child is the medium-bad of The Order (just north of the medium-bad of Stigmata), a Brian Helgeland film that, using much of the same cast from his A Knight's Tale, squanders a pretty interesting concept and a handful of powerful scenes on so much confused exposition that it's nigh impossible to get too invested in the thing. More of a shame is that the foundation for the piece is such a strong one, revolving as it does around the idea that the Catholic Church would be hateful towards a personage who could absolve sin outside the Church proper, allowing sinners a "backdoor" into salvation. Since it's a simple conceit and a thorny one, it's easy to see why Helgeland thought he had something here. It's only with the ponderous details the hyphenate loads onto this cart that The Order gets irretrievably bogged down.

They Drive by Night (1940) – DVD

Posted in1940s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart
screenplay by Jerry Wald & Richard Macaulay
directed by Raoul Walsh

by Bill Chambers At first an earnest but cheerful portrait of two brothers trying to make ends meet as Depression-era truckers, Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night does a complete about-face in terms of tone about halfway through that’s almost guaranteed to cause intellectual whiplash. It might therefore be an effective salve to think of this sea change as analogous to our road-bound heroes’ plight, but it’s business as usual for both distributor Warner Bros. (here combining two disparate pieces of source material–A.I. Bezzerides’s novel The Long Haul and the 1935 Bette Davis vehicle Bordertown–simply to get mileage out of pre-owned properties) and Walsh, since Walsh seemed to gravitate towards cross-pollinated screenplays. (I’m thinking of his Pursued, a western that flirts haphazardly (yet rewardingly) with noir conventions, or his gangsters-go-camping yarn High Sierra (written by John Huston).) Nevertheless, the film’s U-turn is so radical that it arguably transforms They Drive By Night into one of the U.S. cinema’s earliest experiments in portmanteau–adequate absolution, really, for this borderline social-conscience picture’s zany mutation into a gothic melodrama.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [Classic Double Feature] – DVD

Posted in****/****, 1930s, 1940s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
****/**** Image B Sound B Extras A+
starring Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart, Holmes Herbert
screenplay by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Rouben Mamoulian

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
**½/**** Image A Sound B Extras A+
starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Donald Crisp
screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
directed by Victor Fleming

by Walter Chaw Owing a tremendous debt to German Expressionism and the silent era that the cinema had only recently left behind, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a surprisingly disturbing and enduring take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark tale of the id. Opening with a point-of-view shot, something that the director referred to as a first in the American cinema, the prologue’s build to a medical amphitheatre reveals the connection between this film and Mel Brooks’s classic satire Young Frankenstein, illustrating that it’s as important a headwater of the horror genre as the Universal monster features. Mamoulian and veteran cinematographer Karl Struss (the DP on F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise) themselves owe a great debt to Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, indulging in claustrophobic, expressionistic sets, long wipes, slow dissolves (in one case, extremely slow), extended floating takes, and matching shots that use statuary and illness to offset love and ecstasy. This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is fever delirium; it’s stagy, no question, exhibiting a distinct discomfort with dialogue as well, but its images, including Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde (the first stage of which resembles Conrad Veidt from Caligari), remain powerful seven decades later.

Wonderland (2003) [Limited 2-Disc Edition] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Documentary, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

WONDERLAND
*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Val Kilmer, Lisa Kudrow, Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott
screenplay by James Cox & Captain Mauzner and Todd Samovitz & D. Loriston Scott
directed by James Cox

by Walter Chaw A collision of vérité with the sort of Requiem for a Dream grind-cut quick-edits that have produced some of the worst films of the last couple of years (case in point: Spun), Wonderland sets out to tell the true story of 1981's Wonderland Murders, which left four scumbags dead and porn king John Holmes–King Scumbag, as it were–implicated in the lead pipe nastiness. It's a regurgitation in so many ways of so many things: neo-Boogie Nights, neo-noir, neo-Val Kilmer's own strung-out performance in the superior The Salton Sea–and therein lies the problem, as Kilmer is altogether too likeable an anti-hero, typecast as the strung-out simpleton too good-looking to be at the bottom, too drunk on himself to be anywhere else. A section where the passage of time is represented by a montage of TV GUIDE listings provides the only spark in the midst of this spastic spectacle, demonstrating a knowledge of its cathode tube parentage as cannily as the use of Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" tune that defined the MTV-made hit, dancing on the edge of art and porn. It happens early, it raises hopes, and then Wonderland runs itself well past the point of caring.

Hell Up in Harlem (1973) [Soul Cinema] – DVD

Posted in1970s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Commentary A+
starring Fred Williamson, Julius W. Harris, Gloria Hendry, Margaret Avery
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bill Chambers There have been wiser marketing decisions: MGM leaves Black Caesar out of their "Best of Soul Cinema" DVD set while including the film's sequel, Hell Up in Harlem. Having not yet managed to see Black Caesar for myself, I wondered if that's why Hell Up in Harlem left me as confused as I was entertained. But according to writer-director Larry Cohen in his DVD commentary, one of the finest I've ever listened to (and worth a purchase by itself), that ain't the half of it. In their infinite wisdom, AIP cashed in on a follow-up to Black Caesar so soon after its release that Cohen and star Fred Williamson–whose title character had perished at the end of the original, not that anyone seemed to care–had to shoot it in tandem with It's Alive! and That Man Bolt, respectively. Since those productions were situated on opposite coasts, Williamson couldn't film his lead role in Hell Up in Harlem until one or the other wrapped, resulting in a shake-and-bake screenplay whose main dramatic consideration was how to get away with an abundance of over-the-shoulder shots of the star. This is also why Williamson's character inexplicably decides to move to L.A., and why he boards a flight to Los Angeles at L.A.X. International.

The Badge (2002) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image C+ Sound B+
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Patricia Arquette, William Devane, Tom Bower
written and directed by Robby Henson

by Walter Chaw Cornering the market on redneck hicks on the mend, Billy Bob Thornton stars in Robby Henson's direct-to-cable The Badge, a Louisiana cop erotica opera equal parts James Lee Burke and The Big Easy. Long on unmotivated slow-motion stretches and editing choices that are bizarre at best, the picture has ambition and atmosphere to burn but stumbles over its own pretension. A cop procedural, lovers-on-the-run intrigue, and ultra-liberal posturing share time in a lurid gumbo before a third-act reveal; the picture's rife with flashbacks and gravid pontificating that undermine the entire shooting match. Better than it should be for Thornton's remarkable ability to convey confusion and discomfort, The Badge is more an Issue movie than a whodunit–and like most movies erring on the liberal side, its strengths don't have a chance against the sloppiness of that bleeding heart on its sleeve.