5/14
After last week's Iron Man high I was looking at the movie listings and it wasn’t long before I knew this week would be a low. Indiana Jones is still 2 weeks away and there just wasn’t much out there that I hadn't seen that was all that appealing. I even briefly considered seeing Iron Man again…instead I decided to try out the mixed martial arts (MMA) feature, Redbelt. Written and directed by David Mamet who did GlenGarry Glen Ross (which I loved) I hoped for more of the same interesting characters and good dialogue. I got neither.

Know this going in, I don’t like MMA. It does nothing for me. So needless to say I was worried that this would be lame. While I didn’t find it to be that exactly, if there was any ever doubt that I didn’t care for MMA this put that to rest. It does nothing for me. Its like wrestling with some punches to the face. Problem is, even if you are MMA guy I don’t think you would like this film.

The story follows Mike Terry (Chiwetal Ejiofor) a small time Ju-Jitsu trainer who is running his own training academy. Its clear from the beginning that he is a "purist" in every sense, honoring the sport and what it stands for over personal or financial gain. He runs into a big time movie star one night at a bar (Tim Allen) and saves him from getting his butt kicked. They form a friendship and all of a sudden things start happening for him and his wife. He is made an advisor on Tim Allen's latest movie, his wife is going to partner with Allen's wife's clothing line, etc. Once things start going well you know that it will eventually fall apart. It does. It starts with Allen's people and the MMA fight promoters stealing Mike's idea for a fight gimmick which results in Mike being put in a spot where he agrees to compromise his beliefs and the purity of the sport to fight on the under card of the major pay per view MMA event. The finale is Mike Terry struggling to uphold the purity of MMA and doing whats right vs. paying the bills. Not exactly big time drama.

Lets get to the grade sheet:

Acting:  C  Chiwetal Ejiofor is pretty good. Id like to see him in another role but I think hes got some stuff. Everyone else is fairly ho-hum. Nobody else really stands out. Some "that-guy" appearances here and there and Tim Allen is fine but overall the cast is fairly forgettable.

Comedy: N/A  Not trying to be funny. Wasn't.

Story:  D+   All over the place. Not really sure what point the movie was trying to hammer home. They kept introducing all these story lines and none of them really went anywhere. The end of the movie makes you think that they were focusing on the story line of Mike Terry upholding the honor of his Ju-Jitsu but looking back on the body of the movie they never really committed to that. Your left with a jumbled group of characters and story lines, none of which you really care about. Plus it’s a movie about Ju-Jitsu.

Hot Chicks: F  Nothing. Not a single hot chick moment. I cant even give this a N/A because this type of movie screams for a token hot chick appearance and we didn’t get one. I think they were trying with his wife but it wasn’t good enough. Even the ring girl at the fight was lacking. Weak effort.

Violence: D  Puzzling. I figured a movie about MMA would at least have some good fight scenes. Wrong. The fight scenes were just a lot of grappling and rolling around on the ground. I think this is why Im not a MMA guy. Call me crazy, but choke holds, arm bars and submission holds are not exciting. I didn’t like how the fight scenes were shot and they really never did much. I cant think of a single cool fight moment in the entire movie. I don’t mind some realism in a movie like this but you have to ramp up the action a little for a wider audience. Even the token "final dramatic fight" was lame. No real reason for them to fight, no real reaction to the fight, no action. Im not saying we need a lot of Jean Claude Van Damme in this movie but a little would have helped.

Best Part:  F  Really wasn’t one. If I had to pick one I would go with a cameo by Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini. Even then it was only cool because he was Boom Boom Mancini. His character, like most of the movie, was lacking. I was at least expecting a cool final fight scene but it sucked. Tell me this…if you’re the promoter of a major pay per view event that will make or break your immediate financial future and it starts to go wrong, what would you do? Something? Anything? Nope, just sit there and watch this random guy choke your star out in the hallway.

Overall: D  Driving home from the movie I was trying to talk myself into something in the C- range but the ending was just stupid. I cant flunk the movie overall because it wasn’t painful to sit through but it never really was any good. Too many characters that you never care about enough, too many story lines that arent seen through to the end. Not very interesting unless you like rolling around on the ground and choke holds.

Theater Count: 4

May cant get here fast enough. Take a look at the movie listings this week and you'll see what I mean. The bad part of my quest to see a movie every Tuesday night is that in a slow month you run out of stuff you want to see. Faced with this issue this week (again) I sort of decided to check out George Clooney's new movie Leatherheads, knowing full well that it was a chick movie and that it would most certainly suck.

Tuesday came and I received a phone call from Big Jimmy, who has been known to join me on my quest from time to time. We quickly decided that 2 dudes can not go see Leatherheads together because, as George Costanza would put it. "Just seeing that movie with another guy doesn’t make you gay but it doesn’t help either."

So, at Jimmy's request, we settled on "Street Kings" with Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker. Now its well know that I don’t like Keanu, in fact, I think he is a horrible actor. For a long time I refused to see The Matrix because of this fact. When I did finally see it last year I decided to create a new category of movie, EDKR. (Entertaining Despite Keanu Reeves). Currently this category is filled with Speed, The Matrix, Point Break and now Street Kings. (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is exempt from this category as Keanu wasn’t acting in that movie, Im convinced thats really how he is).

Street Kings almost certainly cast Keanu because he looks cool holding a gun and dressed as a cop. He plays a renegade cop who operates just outside the rules, doing what needs to be done to bring the bad guys to justice. Only we don’t mess around with arrest, trial and due process justice. Keanu dispenses healthy doses of .44 magnum justice. He is part of a special team of renegade cops, lead by Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, who do the dirty work that needs to be done but cant normally because things like the law and civil rights get in the way.

Certainly things start to unravel as Keanu's former partner is gunned down in a robbery/assassination attempt and its discovered that he had been talking to internal affairs about his former team's actions. The head of internal affairs, played by Hugh Laurie (the guy who plays the doctor from House) starts poking around which leads Keanu to start an off the books investigation of his own. Each turn uncovers more dirty laundry that in the end, points to…well, you can guess. If cop corruption movies have taught us anything its that it always leads to the guy at the top who you wouldn’t think would be involved. Street Kings is no exception, fairly EDKR but straightforward and predictable. No major surprises but some good action and legitimate drama. Good times for the most part, certainly more so that George Clooney and the guy from the Office trying to tackle each other.

Lets get to the grade sheet:

Acting:  C-  Given my anti Keanu disposition Im surprised that I graded this so high. He is as awful as usual. I really like Forest Whitaker but hes fairly over the top in this role. Im surprised that an Oscar winner would take this role but I guess you have to pay the bills. No one else really stands out, except Jay Mohr who plays one of the cops on the task force and works a really excellent cop/porn mustache. More on this later.

Comedy: N/A  All the comedy here is of the unintentional variety. Nothing was supposed to be funny but Keanu was right on the money in several cases, belting out such winners as:

"You may not want me, but you sure as hell need me."
And
"Not where Im from. Where Im from, bad breeds more bad."

Hot Chicks:  F  This movie is ripe for a random sex scene or a cop meeting at a strip club but we get none of that here. Even the token hot chick girlfriend role is filled by someone who looks like she is 12. In a movie like this, there is no excuse for not having a high hot chick count.

Violence: B-  Decent. Keanu and his team operate outside the law so we get some good gunfights and random beatings. I especially enjoyed Keanu beating an informant senseless with a phone book. A guy gets shot while on the toilet and Keanu gets smacked around a few times. Good Times.

Story:  C  Nothing new that we havent seen before.

Best Part: B+  Jay Mohr's cop/porn mustache. Awesome. You can tell right away hes a power player with a stache like that. Even if you don’t see the movie you should try and check out a photo of his mustache from this movie.

Overall:  C (EDKR)  Again, I can only assume its better than Leatherheads and given the slow month of April I may find out for sure next week…..May cant get here soon enough.

Theater Count:  20 (including Big Jimmy)

April is turning out to be a grind…not much out there that I really want to see but the journey here is bigger than the destination so I press onward. This week I decided to check out "In Bruges" staring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. I don’t really care for Farrell all that much but Gleeson is a great "that guy" actor and Ralph Fiennes is always a solid addition and I had heard good things so I was hopeful going in.

The story begins after Farrell & Gleeson (who are hit men) have killed someone in London and their boss (Fiennes) has sent them to a sleepy little town in Belgium (Bruges) to lay low while the heat dies down. Apparently there is nothing to do in Bruges except sight see and enjoy the buildings and canals in this scenic little town. This appeals to Gleeson but not to Farrell who is mad that they are being told to stay here where there is nothing to do. The story starts slow but once you learn what happened back in London it quickly escalates into a darker story line. There is some inner turmoil with Farrell's character and ultimately the boss orders Gleeson to kill Farrell for what he has done. Farrell's character (Ray) has meet a girl and is showing some signs of sincere remorse for what went wrong in London. Gleeson (Ken) decides that its not right to kill him for what he did and tells Fiennes (Harry) that he cant do it. Harry is upset by this decision and decides to head to Bruges himself and take care of both of them. As you can guess, things don’t necessarily go as planned.

From a sleepy start to the movie, it really gets going later on and takes on some dark undertones. Throw in a racist midget, some drug use and prostitutes and a whole ton of F-Bombs and you’ve got something here. Also as a side note, I believe this movie sets a record for the use of the "C-Word". You know, the four letter word that women seem to hate that rhymes with bunt. Yep, that word. They must use it 30 times in this movie at least….

Lets get to the grade sheet:

Acting  B   Not bad. I don’t really care for Colin Farrell in general but he did a decent job here. Brendan Gleeson is always solid and Fiennes does some good work here as well. There are also a couple of good secondary characters here including a nice performance by Jordan Prentice as a racist, drug using midget. Plus everyone has cool accents.

Comedy  C+  Some darker comedy at play here but a few funny scenes mixed in. Also a couple of times where I thought the director was trying to be funny but it didn’t really work.

Hot Chicks  D  Ill give them this, I doubt there are many hot chicks in Bruges, Belgium. They lose points though because the girl they cast as the token hot chick isnt that hot. Kind of weird looking actually.

Violence  B-   They are hit men, after all.

Story   B-   I would bet that the director (Martin McDonagh, who also wrote the film) is a fan of Quentin Tarantino. There is a lot of the seemingly meaningless dialogue throughout the movie where you get the feel that he is trying to write like Tarantino. Some of it works, some doesn’t. The story starts out slow but by the middle to the end there are some darker elements that play nicely together. It sneaks up on you but it’s a good story.

Best Part  A   After a night of drunken, drug induced partying with prostitutes and a midget, Ray (Farrell) gets mad at the midget's racist tirade about a race war between black midgets and white midgets and proceeds to karate chop him in the neck. Laugh out loud funny.

Overall  B-  The best way to describe this movie is "sneaky good". It doesn’t hit you in the face as a good movie but when your done, you have enjoyed yourself. If you don’t want to plunk down $9.50 its certainly worth a DVD rental when available.

Theater Count:  Zero