Some amusing bits in a 'Marvels' mess

 

 Watching The Marvels, I occasionally felt as if I'd walked into a movie in the middle. Maybe the folks who had been there from the start understood why a battle in a Jersey City home featured characters who had passed through what the movie called "jump points" and were now swapping locations with one another.

    OK, I did see it from the beginning and I'm exaggerating, but The Marvels isn't likely to show up in many screenwriting classes that place a premium on coherence.

     A sequel to 2019's Captain Marvel, The Marvels mostly explains its mysteries as it plasters the screen with abundant fights (not thrilling), attempts at humor (a gag involving the musical Cats proves amusing), and a story in which Carol Danvers, a.k.a., Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) must atone for inadvertently wrought consequences inflicted on Hala, home planet of the Kree.

     Sporting a snarl and hefting a hammer-like weapon, the vengeful Dar Benn (Zawe Ashton) leads the battle against Captain Marvel.

    In this outing, Captain Marvel doesn't fly solo. She teams with two young women, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), an energetic Jersey teen who idolizes Captain Marvel.

     Rambeau, by the way, is the now-grown daughter of Maria Rambeau, a friend of Captain Marvel in past episodes.

     Captain Marvel, Kamala, and Monica Rambeau race through a stream of unimpressive effects and a screenplay that, to me, never seems to find its footing.

     Director Nia DaCosta (Candyman) adds feminist and youth spin, but seems less interested in narrative cohesion than cinematic play, much of it silly, notably a scene in which Captain Marvel becomes a princess in a world in which all the characters sing their dialogue, a misplaced but weirdly welcome Bollywood intrusion.

     At that point, I wondered what glories DaCosta might have achieved had she approached the entire movie in a spirit of parody. The movie's cute but nasty alien cats, though overplayed, could have helped in that  regard. 

     A merciful one hour and 45 minutes long, The Marvels made me think that the MCU universe has become so splintered generalists need not apply. The Marvels is a fans-only endeavor -- and it remains to be seen whether all of them will be eager to sign on.

     

Men in cars blowing things up

 

    First off, Roman Numeral fans: It's Fast Ten, not Fast "X," which sounds like the name of a quick-acting laxative. 

    Fast X, the latest in the Fast & Furious series, goes all in on preposterous over-stated action while acknowledging a trio of virtues: family, honor and faith.

    These virtues, and just about everything else, play second fiddle to blasts of fiery action. Let's be real, though. When a round, Volkswagen-sized bomb rolls through the streets of Rome, it's unlikely anyone will be pondering the qualities that define moral excellence.

   Fast X, by the way, is the first of two movies. It's no spoiler to report that director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) concludes his two-hour and 21-minute collection of explosions, gunfire, and insanely reckless driving with a cliffhanger. 

   Less fun than the best efforts of the franchise (take your pick), Fast X includes familiar characters, pays homage to past favorites (even offering a glimpse of Paul Walker) and drops cameos like breadcrumbs along its destructive path.

   Early on, Dom and Letty (Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez) are happily raising their son Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) in Los Angeles. Grandma Toretto (Rita Moreno) presides while the Fast family (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Nathalie Emmanuel) gather to hoist a few brews.

    It doesn't take long for the team to encounter this edition's villain. Dante (Jason Momoa), a Brazilian maniac, wants to avenge his father's death at the hands of the Fast team more than a decade ago.

    Credit Momoa with upping the movie's silliness quotient. Dante displays a mincing quality when it suits him. The most eye-catching scene occurs when Dante, his hair tied in schoolgirlish top knots, paints the toes of a corpse. 

    Other characters elbow their way into a fragmented plot, some with larger roles than others. Charlize Theron gets significant screen time as Cipher, a brilliant hacker and martial arts maven of variable loyalties.

    Michael Cena reprises his role as Jakob Toretto. In this outing, Jakob tales flight with Little Brian, who becomes a prime target in Dante's revenge plot.

    Blink and you'll miss Helen Mirren, who shows up as Queenie Shaw. Her son Deckard (Jason Staham) has a bigger presence in the movie, which adds Brie Larson as Tess, a rogue agent who works with Dom against the Agency's chief (Alan Ritchson).

    Ah yes, The Agency. Having once enlisted the Fast team's help, The Agency wants to corral Dom and his cohorts, giving them double trouble. Both Dante and the Agency are out for blood.

     Leterrier takes the action global, offering set pieces in Rome, Turin, London, Brazil, and at Hoover Dam. Cars drop from planes, fly off cliffs, and rumble up stairways. Downshifting earns a supporting role.

       Is any of this believable? Of course not. 

       But we've stopped expecting credibility from a franchise that has grown increasingly massive, including more paraphernalia, and turning itself into a mixture of demolition derby and Mission Impossible.

       Your job, should you choose to accept it. Sit through a movie that batters as much as at buoys and which has gotten so stuffed, it barely has room to accommodate the characters that once gave it a bit of humanity.

        

    

When bigotry makes a mockery of truth

Just Mercy tells the real-life story of an Alabama black man who's wrongly sentenced to death.

If Just Mercy, director Destin Daniel Cretton>'s big-screen adaptation of Bryan Stevenson's book of the same name, doesn't move you, I'm not sure what could.

Just Mercy qualifies as the straightforward story about a persistent, Harvard educated attorney (Michael B. Jordan) who moves to Alabama in the 1980s to head a project devoted to representing inmates on death row, as well as others who can't afford legal help.

One of the attorney's clients (Jamie Foxx) has been sentenced to death despite a jury's determination that he deserved life in prison. A shoddy defense completed the frame-up. Foxx's Walter McMillan - a.k.a. Johnny D -- was accused of killing a teenage white girl and the white community in Monroeville — the town where Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird -- hungered for someone to punish.

Just Mercy may not brim with groundbreaking insights about racism but it makes us feel the sting of injustice with performances that embody so much determination, pain and emotional truth that the movie rises above anything that might be deemed routine.

Cretton (Short Term 12) charts a course that explores the deep humanity of black Americans who have been wronged by a system that's rigged against them. As Foxx's character says at one point, he was born into a society that regarded him as guilty at birth.

Jordan (of Creed and Black Panther fame) can dominate a scene if he chooses. Here, he avoids any pyrotechnics in playing a young Harvard Law grad who isn't entirely sure of himself but who has decided that there's little point in being a lawyer if the fight for justice isn't at the heart of his practice.

Jordan's Bryan Stevenson can't always approach his work dispassionately. As a young black man, he not only wants to fight injustice; he feels the weight of it. He arrives in Monroe County where Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) has been working as operations director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Although she's not a lawyer, Ansley devotes herself to doing everything in her power to facilitate Stevenson's work.

The movie's themes are embodied in a cast that revolves around Jordan. As a death-row inmate, Foxx can be imposing in his mistrust of the system and tender in the way he helps to calm a fellow inmate (a terrific Rob Morgan) on the eve of his execution.

In some ways, Richardson's story resonates more powerfully than Johnny D's. A Vietnam veteran, Richardson was responsible for a woman's death. He can't escape the burden of his guilt. At the same time, it's clear that this victim of war-related post-traumatic stress doesn't belong on death row. As one inmate puts it, he should be hospitalized.

It's heartbreaking to hear Richardson say that the way people treat him on the day of his execution -- asking if there's anything they can do to help -- is the nicest anyone's been to him in his entire life. When the guards lead him out of his cell, he politely asks permission to say goodbye to his friends, fellow inmates on death row.

It's difficult to imagine a more convincing portrait of a man who has been battered and beaten by the world and by the torment of knowing that he veered out of control.

For his part, Foxx completely inhabits the role of a man who knows he's innocent but who also understands that no one cares. When truth doesn’t matter, cynicism is the inevitable result. Tough and guarded, Walter has adjusted to death row in the only way possible: He expects nothing from anyone.

It falls to Tim Blake Nelson to give a key performance as the convict whose false testimony condemned Johnny D. His face contorted from burns experienced as a kid in foster care, Nelson's account of how he was coerced into lying in court proves chilling.

Cretton chronicles the legal maneuvering required to try to win a new trial for Johnny D. But it's the clearly expressed human toll taken by a corrupted system that creates the movie’s emotional engagement. Cretton allows the movie's ending to go on too long, but even that can't dull the heartbreak of a story about bonds formed by people -- who in a more just world -- never would have met.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/20/19 -- Fantastic Fungi and Running with the Devil

If you watch a lot of movies, your consciousness often inevitably fragments to the breaking point. It’s possible, in the span of two films, to go from the generally overlooked world of fungi (yes, you read that right) to the massively over-observed (at least in movies) world of cocaine smuggling. I’m talking about Louie Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi and director Jason Cabell’s Running With The Devil, films that have no business being mentioned in the same breath, which is why I couldn't resist putting them together.

Let’s start with the healthy side of the ledger and a confession. What I know about mushrooms (magic or otherwise) is precisely nothing -- and, at the moment, I'm not especially fond of them. Mushrooms have mounted a late-summer invasion of my lawn, and some of them are not pleasing to the eye, protruding from the earth in a form that resembles a rotting phallus.

Of course, I’m not giving mushrooms their due -- as those who spend their time studying them, appreciating them and sometimes eating them would attest.

Narrated by Brie Larson (who occasionally speaks for the usually silent mushrooms), Fantastic Fungi includes commentary from authors such as Michael Pollan and Andrew Weil. It also focuses on the work of Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has made mushrooms his life and who runs a business cultivating, finding and selling all manner of mushrooms, which evidently come in an astonishing variety, 1.5 million species worth. Judging by the movie, it might be wise to think of Stamets as a human ambassador to the fungi world.

The movie is designed to provide information about the essential role that mycelium, part of a fungus, plays in keeping the planet balanced. Mycelium helps the earth digest decaying, carbon-based matter, keeping the earth’s life cycle — birth/decay/death/more birth —- humming.

Schwartzberg offers time-lapse views of mushroom growth and introduces us to the staggering array of mushrooms that grow in the earth’s forests. He also includes commentary from psychologists who suggest that ingesting certain kinds of mushrooms in controlled dosages can play an important role in coping with depression and dealing with other psychiatric issues.

In short, we may not be paying enough attention to the psilocybin mushroom, which can take us on a trip without having to go through airport security. The documentary shows psilocybin being taken in pill form under supervised conditions.

A bit of a commercial for mushrooms, Fantastic Fungi nonetheless should please those who ascribe to the idea, as the film does, that nature is intelligent.

Now, for a different drug:

In the age of opioids, a movie about the cocaine trade immediately and perhaps inevitably feels passe.

Running With the Devil functions as a kind of primer about how cocaine moves from Columbia to the US market, increasing in price with each step of its illicit journey. A strong cast — led by Nicolas Cage and Laurence Fishburne — can’t do much to elevate a by-the-numbers movie steeped in the violence and debauchery surrounding the drug trade.

The characters who populate Running With the Devil all have generic names. Cage, for example, portrays The Cook, a pizza chef who supplements his income in the cocaine trade -- or maybe it's the other way around. Fishburne portrays a character called The Man, an ambitious participant in the trade who’s gotten too deeply involved in sampling the merchandise and cavorting with hookers. Barry Pepper plays The Boss, a character who needs no further explanation. Cole Hauser appears as The Executioner. Can you guess his occupation? I thought you might.

The movie eventually finds Cage and Fishburne hiking through the North American wilderness en route to their final destination.

A mostly male production, Running With the Devil does include one major female character. Leslie Bibb portrays the DEA agent who’s trying to stop the drug trade.

With big money involved betrayals can’t be far behind and the screenplay, also by Cabell, has them.

Hints of Tarantino blow through a story which includes a surprise ending that you should see coming. Looking bookish and scholarly, Cage puts on an all-business front, with traces of madness, of course. His performance contrasts to Fishburne’s display of wanton carelessness.

I can't recall seeing Fishburne play a character such as this, but Running With the Devil stumbles as it laboriously works its way through the familiar piles of white-powder crime.

A less-than-marvelous ‘Captain Marvel’

Marvel's female superhero tries to work her way out of a frenzied movie.

Brie Larson is up to the task of playing Captain Marvel, a welcome female entry into Marvel Comics’ galaxy of superheroes. But -- and this is a major "but" -- the rest of Captain Marvel is a scattered, frenetic effort that jams action and backstory together without a great deal of finesse.

Even the movie's attempts at humor -- which arrive in the form of retro flashes from the 1990s -- tally only mixed results when it comes to brightening the proceedings.

One never entirely knows the reasons a movie goes wrong, but judging from a preview screening of Captain Marvel, I'd speculate that this effects-laden helping of Marvel mania was co-directed by a couple of filmmakers (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) whose indie cred from movies such as Half Nelson and Sugar didn't easily transfer to a major studio production.

Summarizing the plot poses a challenge for reviewers because any such attempt must be extracted from the bric-a-brac that sometimes feels tossed at the screen. Larson portrays a former US fighter pilot who will -- over the course of this origins story -- emerge as Captain Marvel, a hybrid of human and Kree (i.e., alien) biochemistry.

Jude Law portrays Yon-Rogg, a Kree who tries to teach Larson's character how to harness energy that she fires in undisciplined bursts from her fists.

There's conflict, of course. The Kree, it seems, are battling the Skrull, a rubber-faced collection of aliens who travel to Earth under the guidance of Talos, a heavily disguised Ben Mendelsohn who brings a bit of winking humor and happily jaded line readings to his role. I say "winking," although I'm not sure the heavy make-up allows much by way of facial movement.

As the plot leaps from battle-to-battle, Larson's character also lands in the U.S. where she picks up an ally, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, a familiar figure from the Avengers movies. Larson's Carol Danvers also reunites with her former best friend, another fighter pilot played by Lashana Lynch. A single mom, Lynch's Maria Rambeau has a daughter (Akira Akbar) who, at a crucial point in the plot, cheers Carol on.

Carol, who reaches Earth during the mid-90s, has lost any memory of having spent time on beleaguered earthly soil before awakening on the planet where the Kree hang out. Eventually, we'll learn how she got from to the good old USA to the home of the Kree, but the question doesn't exactly compel intrigue.

Minor pleasures arise. It’s of some interest to discover more about Jackson's Nick Fury, who in this edition displays a tight cap of hair. Annette Bening turns up as a character called Supreme Intelligence. I'll pass on any attempt at a joke. Too easy.

One of the movie's problems involves the abrupt way it handles its back story, introducing Carol's past in intermittent flashbacks that can prove as disorienting as they are revealing.

As is the case with many comic book extravaganzas, the movie leans heavily on effects -- albeit, in this instance, with the approximate elegance of a drunk seeking support from a lamp post. Many of the effects seem to involve flashing bolts of energy. At various times, the characters chase a device known as the "energy core,'' which is hidden in a lunchbox boasting a picture of the Fonz from the Happy Days era.

This energy core emits great power; perhaps it's responsible for discombobulating the story and keeping the movie's action sequences from cohering in any way that might be called thrilling.

Captain Marvel tries to zip and zap its way into the pop-cultural canon dropping jokey references to such bygone stalwarts as Blockbuster stores along the way. Some, I suppose, will enjoy the frenzy, but for me, the point turns out to be inadvertent: Incessant movement doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.

For Kong, it's tough being king

Kong: Skull Island introduces many monstrous sights. It's fun, even if the movie ultimately exhausts itself.

Some movies live in a world beyond ordinary standards, so much so that they liberate us from the need to parse or pick at what we were watching. Kong: Skull Island ought to have such a free-wheeling feel -- and much of the time, it does.

Deriving from the 1933 classic, Kong: Skull Island offers a new take on Hollywood's greatest ape, the thrust of which I'll leave you to discover in a theater, but know that Skull Island bursts with giddily presented carnage, much of it presented against a jukebox full of throwback rock by groups ranging from the Jefferson Airplane to Creedence Clearwater Survival.

For at least half of its 118-minute running time, Kong has some real hop to it, and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts isn't shy about putting his cards on the table. A Japanese and American solider square off in a mano-a-mano World War II prologue that dispenses with any suspense about when we'll see the towering ape. We meet Kong before the opening credits are done.

The movie turns the rest of those credits into a flickering newsreel, leaping through successive decades before landing in 1973.

Quickly, and without much time for reflection (a mercy, I think), the story swings into action. John Goodman plays a man who obtains government funding so that he can map an uncharted island.

From Washington, we're off the Vietnam to round up a crew. A disaffected Lt. Col. Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) takes charge; he's looking for a mission that offers compensation for a war that he believes should have been won. Packard and his subordinate (Toby Kebbell) gather other disaffected troopers, and join the trip to Skull Island.

Tom Hiddleston plays a tracker who's also recruited for the mission, along with a war-hardened photographer (Brie Larson).

With echoes of Apocalypse Now ringing in our ears, we're headed for Skull Island, which happens to be surrounded by a ferocious and possibly impenetrable storm system. If the movie's adventurers were even mildly sane, they would have abandoned any effort to penetrate the storm with helicopters. But sanity isn't the point here. Instead, unbridled mania prevails, which perhaps explains the presence of a jiggling Nixon bobblehead on one of the helicopters.

After the screening, someone pointed out to me that the number of helicopters inexplicably increased once the choppers took off from the ship that's carrying them to Skull Island.

Continuity aside, the helicopters make it through the storm only to be confronted by Kong, who has little interest in allowing them into his kingdom. He begins swatting choppers out of the sky as if they were pesky mosquitos.

If you're looking for proof that we live in an age of overload, you'll find ample evidence in the rest of the movie. As it turns out, Kong isn't the only dangerous creature on the island. The worst foes are reptilian monsters with forked tongues, hearty appetites and the ability to reawaken any tremors still lingering in audiences from Jurassic Park.

In IMAX 3D, Kong oozes the tropical density of an island where just about every living thing is over-sized and predatory, and the human characters, if these stick figures can be called that, are simply prey.

Did I mention that our adventurers have three days to accomplish their mission and reach the rendezvous point at which they'll be rescued? Yes, the proverbial clock ticks as loudly as the gunfire on the soundtrack.

To further spice the proceedings, the story introduces us to a World War II vet (John C. Reilly) from the movie's prologue. Reilly's character has been stranded on the island for almost 30 years. He's gone a bit whacky after living among a group of locals with a preference for heavily applied mud make-up.

In addition to battling the beasts -- a task that produces enough gore to slime the entire state of Maine -- the adventurers must decide whether to follow the vengeance-hungry approach of Jackson's character or just get the hell off the island.

For his part, Jackson glowers with so much furious conviction you half expect he might be reading one of Skull Island's more negative reviews.

Burdened by bloat, Kong: Skull Island can't help but generate some battle fatigue -- not only for its human and creature combatants, but for an audience. That's another way of saying that if you over-inflate a B-movie, it just might blow up in your face.

And in a digitally enhanced world, you'll notice that the actors are asked to spend a lot of time gaping at sights that had to be filled in long after they'd left the scene, not many dinosaurs being available via calls to central casting.

Minimal acting opportunities not withstanding, it might have been nice to care a little about whether any of these characters were destined to become something more than monster food.

Oh well, perhaps there's justice after all. At one point, a beast throws up the head of a man it has devoured. These creatures may be difficult to kill, but take heart: It's evidently easy to give them indigestion.

Best picture 'Spotlight,' a welcome upset

Host Chris Rock scored big in the opening as Oscar lumbered its way through a controversial year.

In the end -- and the end was a long time coming -- the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did the right thing: It awarded the best picture Oscar to the best picture. Spotlight, which did not have a stellar night otherwise, walked away with the evening's biggest prize.

I have to admit that I was surprised. Most prognosticators thought The Revenant would win best picture: I expected The Big Short to pull off an upset because it was both entertaining and meaningful. The Academy went me one better, and recognized Spotlight. I've never been happier to be wrong about an Oscar prediction.

As for the rest ...

It was an OK but typically labored evening that was guided by a mostly sharp Chris Rock, whose opening monologue lived up to just about everyone's expectations. I could spend time quoting lines from it, but I don't need to. I'll refer you instead to a link at which you can read his entire opening.

Suffice it to say that Rock was trenchant when he needed to be, immediately addressing the elephant in Oscar's room, the diversity issue that has dominated this year's awards season.

Once it got rolling, the program pretty much conformed to the standard model, receiving an energy boost from the lone upset that broke the tedium of watching Mad Max: Fury Road clean up in the costume, make-up, editing, sound and production design categories. As a fan of Ex Machina, I was particularly glad to see that movie win an Oscar for visual effects.

Mark Rylance's win in the best supporting actor category counts as another of the evening's surprises. Sylvester Stallone, who reprised his role as Rocky Balboa in Creed, had been the sentimental favorite.

Could voters have been reluctant to acknowledge Stallone in a year when there was much complaining about the fact that Creed's star -- Michael B. Jordan -- was ignored by the Academy?

That's not to say that Rylance wasn't deserving. He gave a fine performance as a Russian spy in Bridge of Spies.

If you're of a cynical bent, you might think the evening's many black presenters were on hand to counter the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that's been raging since the nominations were announced.

Some recipients -- notably Alejandro G. Inarritu, who won best director for The Revenant -- called for more opportunity for people of color.

In some ways, though, Oscars are only the tip of Hollywood's institutionally white iceberg.

A real increase in inclusion depends on diversifying the ranks of those who make key decisions at studios, as well as on breaking down stereotypical casting habits.

As is customary, there were bits that didn't work, notably the production number that accompanied Earned It, the nominated song from 50 Shades of Grey. As he sang, The Weekend was encircled by dancers who looked as if they were auditioning for 50 Shades of Victoria's Secret.

It's nearly impossible this time of year to go to the supermarket without being asked to buy Girl Scout cookies. Now, the Girl Scouts have invaded the Oscars. About midway through the proceedings, Rock brought out a troop of Los Angeles Girl Scouts who sold cookies to the audience, raising more than $65,000.

In what surely was a lapse in judgment, Rock neglected to say whether Tagalongs outsold Samoas.

What else? Showing lists of those who were being thanked at the bottom of our screens was a dumb idea. Without people to thank, most recipients had little to say.

An exception: Brie Larson, who won best actress for her performance as a kidnapped young woman in Room. Larson thanked both the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals, which served as launch pads for her movie. In an additional display of Oscar graciousness, she also thanked those who went to see her movie.

I suppose it's important to mention Joe Biden. The vice president introduced his "friend" Lady Gaga who sang 'Til It Happens to You, the emotional song from The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape on college campuses. That song lost to Writing's On the Wall, the theme from Spectre, a tune I hope never to hear again.

And, of course, there was Leo. Leonardo DiCaprio finally won his Oscar for his physically challenging performance in The Revenant.

That, and a considerable amount of Oscar fatigue, leads me to the real moral of last night's Oscars: One never should underestimate the power of crawling inside a dead horse. You never know what good will come of it.

For a complete list of winners, try ABC News.

There's no leaving this 'Room' behind

The harrowing story of a mother and son under extreme duress.

Sometimes to appreciate what a movie is, it helps to consider what it isn't.

Room, the story of a young woman who's held prisoner in a backyard shed along with her five-year-old son, could have been the sensationalized story of a deranged psychopath who kidnapped a woman when she was 17, sexually assaulted her, got her pregnant and continued to terrorize her.

But Room smartly takes us into a world where the abnormal has begun to normalize. Born in the shed, the woman's son knows no other life than the one he's experienced in this ratty space. He's seen nothing of the outside world except for the vacant sky that's visible through a skylight in the roof. Otherwise, there are no windows, and the door has been rigged so that only the psychopathic jailer has the combination that can open it.

Captured when she was 17, the boy's mother sometimes negotiates with her captor, who shows up whenever he wants to sleep with her. He's the boy's father, but he barely acknowledges the child's existence, and he obviously has no concern for the boy's welfare.

In their horrible situation, mother and son develop an unbreakable but sometimes difficult bond. Mom -- known as Ma and played with great dexterity and determination by Brie Larson -- tries to create a stable environment within an obviously perverse situation. She does her best to cope. She teaches the boy as best she can.

For his part, Jack (an amazing Jacob Tremblay) is as normal as any child could be under such circumstances. He's never had a haircut. He's made to hide in a small wardrobe when the man -- called Old Nick by Ma -- makes his nocturnal visits. He's always alone with Ma.

Jack hears Old Nick and his mother talking, but can't really understand what's being said, a condition made frightening and confusing by director Lenny Abrahamsson, who makes Jack's point of view frighteningly real, a child in a world he can't comprehend.

You're not wrong to think all of this sounds like the basis for a horror movie. But the brilliance of Abrahamson's adaptation of a novel by Emma Donoghue, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, is that Ma has made adjustments, even though she can't ignore the terrible frustrations of living in a confined space (10 feet by 10 feet) that never was meant for human habitation.

You get the impression, Ma never would have been able to survive without Jack, who has given purpose to her life. She's intent on doing her best to protect him, and also to begin telling him about the world beyond the shed. Her motherhood can be both tender and fierce.

I won't describe the plot machinations any further because, if you haven't read Donoghue's novel, it's best not to know much more.

There are other characters in the movie. Eventually, we meet Ma's mother (Joan Allen), the husband she's acquired since Ma's kidnapping (Tom McCamus) and Ma's father (Bill Macy).

Wisely, Irish-born Abrahamson, who directed the oddball movie Frank, offers only glimpses of Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). He focuses on Ma and Jack in ways that begin to illuminate both the love and claustrophobia of a mother/son bond, as well as the nature of a reality Jack is only beginning to comprehend. What he knows of the world beyond the shed comes from Ma and from the small TV left by their captor.

Old Nick, at one point, buys the boy a toy, and he's obviously left a few books and other things for Jack, but the movie never suggests that Old Nick has any capacity for empathy nor does it exploit his monstrousness for genre thrills: It stays within its mother-and-son frame.

Ultimately, Room is a story about what happens when love is put to the severest of tests.

Abrahamson credits us with enough intelligence to know that Ma has had no preparation for motherhood. Commendably, he doesn't turn Jack into a poster boy for adorableness; the kid can get on your nerves.

Unexpected and troubling, Room looks at what it takes not only to survive under horrific circumstances, but to love, as well.

Room followed me out of the theater: I couldn't entirely shake the uneasiness of the movie's first half, and I don't believe the characters ever will either. Room unbalances our world and makes it feel strange.

Yes, there's love and restoration -- but there's also lingering disquiet, the feeling that things can go so wrong that they never can be made right again. That's what haunts you about this absorbing, plain-spoken and carefully calibrated movie.

A romcom that tries to be trendy

Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie star in Sleeping With Other People.

Predictability in romantic comedy isn't necessarily a bad thing. We've all experienced the pleasures that result from knowing that two characters are destined to be together -- even if they don't yet realize it.

But the success of such movies depends a lot on how we react to the characters who are working their way toward a shared destiny.

In the case of Sleeping With Other People, I was less-than-charmed by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, who are cast as a couple of sex addicts dedicated to protecting themselves from emotional involvement.

Reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally -- a signature contemporary rom-com -- Sleeping With Other People tries (strains?) not to get too starry-eyed about love.

Sudeikis' Jake sleeps with just about any woman who crosses his path. Larson's Lainey clings to her "love" for a gynecologist played by Adam Scott.

The sex in doc's office is great, but he's engaged to someone else.

When Jake and Lainey, who had a brief fling in college, become friends as adults, they listen to each other's sexual tales while insisting that their relationship remain platonic.

At one point, Jake becomes involved with his boss, a woman of preternatural understanding played by Amanda Peet.

Jason Mantzoukas and Andrea Savage turn up as the family folks in Jake's bachelor life.

Sudeikis and Brie aren't helped by glib dialogue that sounds so written, you can almost hear the clatter of typewriter keys.

When Harry Met Sally probably remains best known for its feigned orgasm scene. Perhaps by way of competition, Sleeping With Other People features a scene in which Jake offers Lainey advice about how she can more effectively masturbate.

He conducts a demonstration with a bottle that I won't describe in any detail, but know that, at minimum, it's indicative of a movie that feels as if it wants to be both shockingly frank and romantic.

As in life, those may not be complementary ambitions.

Two from the indie side of things

Digging for Fire shouldn't work, but it does

An unusual mixture of obsession and informality give Digging for Fire, a new movie from director Joe Swanberg, its feeling of freshness. Tim and Lee (Jake Johnson and Rosemarie DeWitt) are house sitting for one of Lee's wealthy clients. She teaches yoga; he's a public school teacher. Along with their young son, Tim and Lee are set to enjoy a week of unaccustomed luxury. Signs of possible tension emerge. Lee wants to accept money from her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light) to send their son to an expensive pre-school. A mixture of pride and a commitment to public education keep Tim from agreeing. When Lee leaves to spend a weekend with her parents, Tim is joined by friends (Mike Birbiglia, Sam Rockwell and Chris Messina), as well as by a couple of women who tag along. Tim already has been consumed by a strange task: Having found a revolver and a human bone in the backyard of this expensive home, he decides to dig for more. Eventually, he's joined in this effort by Max (Brie Larson), one of the women who attended the impromptu party and returned the next day to find her purse. Swanberg quietly introduces the real issue: the state of Tim and Lee's marriage. While Tim's flirting with Max, Lee has her own tempting encounter with a ruggedly handsome man (Orlando Bloom) she meets in a bar. I won't say more, but I will advise you to view Tim's digging more as a metaphor than plot point. By the end you'll realize that Swanberg has taken an unusual and sometimes comic look at the fragility of marriage -- and also the feeling of safety it can provide.

Z for Zachariah: quiet tension in a post-apocalyptic world

The actors in Z for Zachariah (Chris Pine, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Margot Robbie) are all capable of keeping the movie's sexual tension close to the surface. Good thing, too, because Z for Zachariah throws them into a post-apocalyptic world in which they play the only survivors. Robbie's Ann Burden lives in an idyllic valley that has survived the nuclear holocaust that ravaged the rest of the world. Once Ejiofor's character, an engineer by trade, finds his way into the valley, director Craig Zoebel sets up a dynamic in which two characters who probably never would have met under any other circumstance are forced to work out the dynamics of their relationship. This process is disrupted when another man, Pine's Caleb turns up. Like Ann, Caleb professes to be a man of faith. Ejiofor's John focuses on practical matters with an eye on the possibly of re-starting the human race with Ann. The symbolism gets heavy when John proposes tearing down a chapel that Tracy's father built so that he can use the wood to build a waterwheel for harnessing electricity. Zoebel's naturalism keeps the proceedings from feeling overly allegorical, but the deliberately paced Z For Zachariah never quite attains the primal force the material demands.

Amy Schumer's semi-nasty rom-com

In Trainwreck, the spotlight is on a sexually aggressive woman.

Is there anything Tilda Swinton can't do?

In the new Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck, a nearly unrecognizable Swinton plays the crisply aggressive British editor of S'nuff, a trendy New York-based magazine that explores such ludicrous topics as the best ways for men to masturbate at work.

"Pitch me. Pitch Me,'' she goads her staff, looking for topics to satisfy her perverse journalistic appetites.

Swinton's role is parodic, but it leaves you wondering whether she might have added even more sharpness to a movie such as The Devil Wears Prada.

But wait. I already hear the groaning. Why am I talking about an actress who has a tasty supporting role in a comedy starring Schumer, the off-color, feminist-oriented comic who's garnering big-time attention at the moment.

The best answer, I suppose, is that I'm easing into what's going to be a review that resists falling too far on either side of the Schumer fence.

In Trainwreck, Schumer earns a center-stage spot on the big screen, but her movie hits flat spots even as it finds major comic flourishes. Besides, Trainwreck isn't nearly as creative as Schumer's Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer.

In Trainwreck, Schumer plays Amy Townsend, a talented magazine writer who defends herself against emotional involvement by sleeping with just about every man who crosses her path.

Amy has rules about her profligacy. She never spends the night with one of her bedmates. She consumes lovers, and quickly moves on.

That's an interesting (and novel) enough premise for a comedy, and it probably should have carried Trainwreck further than it does.

After all, movies seldom portray women as aggressors in the sexual arena. Amy doesn't make love: She notches conquests.

This approach allows Schumer, who wrote the screenplay, to play to her strengths. In the war-of-the-sexes, her character takes no prisoners.

The movie, which was directed by Judd Apatow, has fun putting Amy in charge of its sometimes scalding narrative.

The most notable of Schumer's early picture assaults revolves around Amy's relationship with a muscle-bound hunk (John Cena) who's too dim to acknowledge his homoerotic impulses. He also can't believe that Amy's interest in him doesn't extend beyond the sack, where his idea of erotic talk has to do with filling her with protein. He makes love to her as if she were an exercise machine.

Amy's life, which also includes excessive alcohol consumption, makes room for encounters with her sister Kim (Brie Larson), a younger woman who's married and who has a stepson, a brainy child who rubs Amy the wrong way. Kim qualifies as the anti-Amy, but the sisters are close.

If there's any psychology here, it revolves around Amy's father (Colin Quinn): He's a bigoted Mets fan who left his wife because he couldn't stand the bondage of monogamy.

A demonstrably rotten father and a worse husband, Quinn's Gordon presumably served as Amy's role model when it comes to men. His philandering evidently paved the way for Amy's lack of trust.

Still, Dad's the person to whom Amy feels closest. When illness forces him to move into an assisted living facility, Amy dotes on him.

So where's all this going? The train wreck that passes for Amy's life eventually takes a predictable turn. In the course of researching a story, she meets a well-regarded sports doctor (Bill Hader).

A bit awkward around women, Hader's character falls for Amy. She falls for him, too, but to make the relationship work, Amy must lower her guard and overcome her indifference to all matters concerning sports.

The movie's love story accomplishes two things: It allows Trainwreck to spend too much of its indulgent 125-minute length chugging into conventional rom-com territory (girl meets boy, girl screws up relationship, girl learns lesson), and it introduces cameos from two basketball players LeBron James (funny) and Amar'e Stoudemire (not so much).

The movie, by the way, is set in New York during a time when Stoudemire was still a Knick. Last I checked, he plays for the Miami Heat.

Much of the humor revolves around sex and reflects Schumer's non-stop attack on feminine cliches and the male ego. And, yes, her humor can be laced with acid.

For the most part, Hader's playing straight man as the movie's romantic lead, a good guy whose patience qualifies as preternatural.

Here's the pivotal point, though. You may find yourself wondering why Hader's Aaron doesn't give up on a woman who seems intent on destroying relationships. Amy can be amusing, but she's not always likable. She's often a pain in the butt.

Apatow (This Is 40, Funny People, Knocked up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin) doesn't always strike the right balance between the movie's comedy and its occasional serious moments, but directorial style doesn't much matter here. This is Schumer's showcase.

A footnote: It's refreshing to see James poke fun at the grim-faced intensity he shows on the basketball court. Those of us who follow the NBA seldom see LeBron James exercise his smile the way he does here.

Maybe in her next film, Schumer and James can go one-on-one. The result might make for good, competitive fun.

This gamble doesn't pay off

Mark Wahlberg stars in a lame remake of 1974's The Gambler.

The 2014 edition of The Gambler is less a remake of the 1974 Karel Reisz-directed drama than a highly stylized imitation.

In trying to evoke the spirit of 1970s cinema -- if that was the intention -- director Rupert Wyatt has made a movie that seems to include as much posturing as probing.

Working from a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed), Wyatt tells the story of Jim Bennett (Mark Wahlberg), a college professor and desperate gambler who's trying to pay off a major debt by (what else?) gambling more.

Bennett owes $240,000 to the kind of people who aren't big on forgiveness.

The gambler in the original -- the grandson of a powerful Jewish businessman who built a life from nothing -- tried to prove that he had the nerve to walk on the dark side, that, he too, could be a jungle cat on the prowl. James Caan's Axel Freed courted risk even when he knew he was being stupid about it, and Caan nailed the role.

Wahlberg isn't an actor you'd automatically cast as a college professor, but then -- in 1974 -- neither was Caan, who was still best known for playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather.

Wahlberg works at conveying a sense of brilliance, defeat and arrogance, but he appears to be fighting an uphill battle, working a little too hard, and you may find yourself wondering whether he isn't sometimes straining to play against type.

Moving the story from New York to California and updating James Toback's original screenplay, The Gambler can't quite make its grit credible, either.

This self-conscious sense of toughness mixed with smarts is nowhere more apparent than in the portrayal of John Goodman's Frank, a bald, decidedly overweight mobster whom Bennett approaches for money.

Goodman stands out as a shirtless Jabba-the-Gangster, but his character is treated as if he were an effect, a big rock dropped into the story solely to make a splash.

The New York gambling milieu gives way to a West Coast environment in which a group of Koreans run an illegal gambling establishment. Bennett loses big money to the Koreans, and the boss of the casino (Alvin Ing) wants it back.

Indifferent to personal safety, Bennett borrows $50,000 from a loan shark (Michael Kenneth Williams) who makes it clear that he'll play rough if he's not repaid.

Bennett also has no qualms about asking his wealthy mother (Jessica Lange) for money, which she reluctantly gives him, prompting a scene at a bank that mimics a similar scene in the original.

Of course, Mom should know better. Will Bennett use the money to pay his debts and walk away? Nah, he'll gamble more.

Bennett isn't exactly Mr. Chipps in the classroom. He berates his students, finding only one of them worthy of literary study, a blonde coed played by Brie Larson. She tries to establish a relationship with Bennett. He resists -- until he doesn't.

Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Escapist) certainly knows how to give a movie visual polish. Overall though, The Gambler seems soulless and synthetic, unlike what felt twisted and real in the 1970s.

I won't give anything away, but if you have the time and interest, compare the way the 1974 and 2014 movies end. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Three from the indie side

Three independent films arrive in Denver this week, each operating in a sphere that might be difficult to inhabit in the mainstream.* Two of the films (Adore and Afternoon Delight) were directed by women, and attempt to explore subtle and not-so-subtle aspects of the female psyche. None of this trio of films qualifies as stylistically groundbreaking, but Short Term 12 -- a clear-eyed drama about life in a foster-care facility -- stands out because of its heartfelt power. So a look at all three:

A tough look at a home for teens

Short Term 12 debuted at last March's South By Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), and stars Brie Larson as Grace, a young woman who works at a group home for troubled teens.

As the movie unfolds, we discover that Grace -- now in her 20s -- may be especially qualified for her job: As a teen-ager, she got slammed around plenty, experiencing her own version of a troubled life.

When we meet Grace, she's living with co-worker Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), a sensitive young man who's attuned to the needs of his charges and to those of the woman he clearly loves.

Loving Grace isn't always easy. Grace knows how to mix discipline with kindness at work, but tends to keep her inner life walled-off from Mason.

Something has to happen to move the story forward, and it does when the particularly difficult Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever) arrives at the group home carrying a carload's worth of adolescent attitude and hostility.

It may not be immediately apparent, but Jayden's presence will have a profound effect on Grace, who gradually begins confront the demons that haunt her own past.

Writer/Director Destin Cretton, who once worked in a group home, also introduces us to Marcus (Keith Stanfield). A young man who's about to turn 18, Marcus soon will outgrow the group home that has provided him with shelter from the stormy life that drove him there in the first place. Marcus knows a lot about rejection.

Cretton probably rounds off his screenplay a little too neatly, but by setting his story in a world where emotions never are far from the surface, he takes a big risk. His movie easily could have become sloppy and overly demonstrative, the dramatic equivalent of an oil spill. It doesn't.

The relationship between Grace and Mason adds additional richness. Early on, Grace learns that she's pregnant: She battles with herself about the wisdom of keeping a baby in a world that can deeply scar young people who receive the worst of things.

Larson's tough but vulnerable performance anchors the film, and Gallagher (familiar to those who've been watching HBO's Newsroom) grounds Mason in the kind of bedrock decency we don't often see on screen.

Cretton understands the difficulties of trying to provide a safe and reasonably stable environment for kids who live in unsafe and uncertain worlds. That understanding -- obviously shared by all involved -- makes Short Term 12 truly special.

Too annoying for redemption?

Short Term 12 has no shortage of heart-felt urgency. It's difficult to say the same about Afternoon Delight, a movie mired in the off-putting boredom and cynicism of its main character, a Los Angeles woman named Rachel (Kathryn Hahn).

Director Jill Soloway's movie makes the perilous journey from comedy to drama as it tries to digest a whopping contrivance. In the dramatic equivalent of bomb-throwing, Rachel invites a wildly uninhibited stripper, lap-dancer and prostitute (Juno Temple) into her home. Rachel's disenchanted husband (Josh Radnor) wonders whether this is the best arrangement for the couple's five-year-old son, but doesn't put up much of a fight.

So why would Rachel invite a prostitute into her home? The screenplay flirts with a lesbian attraction and with the possibility that Rachel really wants to help Temple's McKenna get her life on track. Of course, McKenna shows little or no interest in personal reformation. She doesn't consider herself to be a victim of exploitation, and she's more in control of her life than Rachel.

As a young woman who lives way beyond the judgment of others, Temple shines, and Hahn ably handles both the movie's comic and serious moments, including an emotionally challenging scene that casts a harsh light on Rachel's anger.

Still, it's difficult for Soloway and Hahn to overcome resistance developed in the movie's first half, and Afternoon Delight doesn't dig deeply enough to get past a feeling that Rachel might just be battling with her own superficiality.

It's no day at the beach

I would have thought that a movie starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright and stemming from a novella by Doris Lessing would have ranked among the year's better works.

But Adore -- a French/Australian co-production directed by Anne Fontaine (Coco Before Chanel) -- revolves a conceit that's proves provocative but hollow: Two lifelong friends may be sublimating sexual feelings for each other when they start affairs with each other's sons.

The movie opens when Watts' Lil and her young son attend Lil's husband's funeral. Penn's Roz offers support during her friend's time of grief.

The story then leaps ahead to a time when Lil and her grown son (Xavier Samuel) and Roz and her grown son (James Frecheville) are living what appears to be an idyllic life in a secluded Australian coastal town.

The young men -- described by Roz as "young gods" -- surf, swim, languish on a raft and enjoy what looks like a convivial familial relationship with each other and with their mothers.

Only Roz's husband (Ben Mendelsohn) seems like an intruder, and the screenplay -- credited to Christopher Hampton -- quickly disposes of him, leaving the movie's mothers and sons to deal with sex, love, jealousy and everything else arises as these near-incestuous, sexual relationships take hold.

Originally titled Two Mothers, Adore ends with all four characters sprawled on a raft, looking a bit like squashed bugs. They're wrung out, and so are we.

Oh well, crossing psychological and sexual boundaries can be exhausting, if not especially illuminating.

*I somehow failed to pay attention to an e-mail revising the opening date for Short Term 12. The movie doesn't open in Denver until next Friday. Consider the above review an early heads-up.

Finally, a worthy teen movie

Before The Spectacular Now, I wondered whether I'd ever want to see another film about adolescence, but director James Ponsoldt's addition to the genre qualifies as a remarkable achievement, a movie full of real feelings and real problems -- in short, a film about young people that refuses to pander.

Adapted from a novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now reflects Ponsoldt's desire to find a bit of truth in a genre that doesn't always value honesty.

Ponsoldt’s cast earns some of the credit. Miles Teller) plays Sutter, an underachieving kid who's flirting with alcoholism. Sutter lives with his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh), works part-time at a men's clothing store, parties hard and seems committed to a philosophy he calls "living in the moment."

Immersion in the present is well and good, but it's pretty clear that Sutter might be on the verge of throwing his life away. College? No. A future? Why bother? We know that Sutter’s spectacular present eventually will give way to the mediocrity that often results from squandered potential. How long will it take before the flask Sutter carries ceases to be a sign of rebellion and becomes a badge of dishonor?

Sutter is smart, amusing and glib in ways that can seem off-putting at first, as if Teller has been instructed to do a Vince Vaughn imitation. Don't give up on the kid, though; as the story progresses, he reveals depths that go beyond the surface of his clever retorts. He begins to question his views, in part because he forms relationship with Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a classmate who's not at the center of high-school party life and who’s a bit more substantial than the girl (Brie Larson) who dumps Sutter in the movie's early going, although she's no ditz, either.

Aimee and Sutter meet in an early morning scene in which Sutter awakens on Aimee's lawn. Drunk as usual, he forgot where he left his car. An exchange develops: Sutter asks Aimee to help him learn geometry; he basically schools her in how to have a better time in high school.

Lurking in the background is Sutter's father (Kyle Chandler), a heavy drinker who Sutter hasn't seen in years. His mother won't even tell Sutter where his dad lives. When he learns his father's whereabouts from his sister (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Sutter decides to visit. Dad, we soon learn, is a preview of coming attractions for what Sutter easily could become, an irresponsible jerk.

Spectacular Now provides Teller with a breakthrough role. Woodley -- familiar as George Clooney's teen-age daughter in The Descendants -- continues to impress.

Shot in Athens, Georgia -- where Ponsoldt grew up, The Spectacular Now is more than a good teen movie; it's a good movie, a look at characters we come to care about right up until the film's mildly ambiguous conclusion.

An unlikely (but funny) return to high school

I can't imagine that the world's population has been trembling with anticipation at thought of a 21 Jump Street movie. Who among us spends significant time yearning to revisit '80s television, even with a series that spawned Johnny Depp's mega-career? Beyond that, the idea of undercover cops re-enrolling in high school to smash a drug ring doesn't pulsate with originality. And who wants to return to high school under any circumstances?

All this by way of saying that the big-screen rendition of 21 Jump Street should have been a notable dud rather than an amusing (if intentionally silly) attempt to cast a parodic spell over a TV show that took itself fairly seriously.

21 Jump Street teams Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as screw-up police officers who are assigned to a unit that investigates youth crime and which is run by a scowling police captain played by Ice Cube .

You can tell that the movie is more interested in comedy than credibility because Hill and Tatum -- in defiance of the imperatives of any known gene pool -- try to pass themselves off as brothers once they're assigned to a school.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) have one exceptionally smart trick up their sleeves. The script, based on a story by Hill and screenwriter Michael Bacall, flips the script on Hill and Tatum. Hill's Schmidt, a scorned nerd in high school, discovers that he actually fits into the the politically sensitive school environment of the 21st century. Suddenly, he's cool. Tatum's Jenko, a much-admired jock when he attended the high school, seems like a dumb oaf when seen through an updated contemporary lens. He gets roped into going to band practice, and is forced to figure out a way to fake his way through advanced chemistry.

Hill has plenty of comic experience, but Tatum -- usually cast as a gooey-eyed hunk in movies such as The Vow -- handles his comic assignment with surprising aplomb, playing a character who can be dumb and dumber all by himself.

Beyond that, Hill and Tatum work well enough together to keep the movie from tumbling into the usual garbage heap of crude, intentionally stupid humor. Their growing bromance seems heartfelt, encouragement that it's possible to outgrow high school prejudices.

The supporting cast includes Brie Larson, as a high school drama student who thinks Schmidt's cool, and Dave Franco, brother of James Franco, as a high-school wheeler-dealer, who traffics in a drug that's supposed to break new ground in hallucinogenic experience.

I could have done without the movie's noisy attempts at action, which include a mind-numbing car chase, and not all of the jokes connect, but 21 Jump Street is the kind of movie that's best summed up by the collective sigh of relief it seems to have engendered from the critical community. And in fairness, it should be noted that the primary audience for a movie such as this probably will be ready and willing to forgive a few wrong turns.

Another bad cop on the road to ruin

I don’t know if it's possible for an actor to give more to a role than Woody Harrelson gives in Rampart, another story about a massively corrupt cop whose life is mired in a multiplicity of betrayals -- not the least of which is the betrayal of responsibility as an officer of the law. It may help to think of Rampart as The Bad Lieutenant west, a movie that recalls director Abel Ferrara's sensational (as in tabloid “sensational”) 1992 look at a corrupt New York City detective played by Harvey Keitel

Rampart takes place in 1999, and is named for a real-life LAPD scandal involving police ties to gangs. But Rampart, which was directed by the gifted Owen Moverman (The Messenger), takes place after that scandal and presumably acquires its name because of the poisonous atmosphere of mistrust it generated around the already tarnished LAPD. Rampart is less an indictment of the LAPD than a roiling, agitated look at a uniformed cop who has been bad so long, he doesn’t even remember what good looks like.

Harrelson plays David Douglas Brown, a cop who has been given the nickname of “Date Rape” by his fellow officers: He's suspected of having killed a serial rapist, doling out his own brand of justice without the encumbrance of a trial. He’s a swaggering, cocky member of the LAPD who may actually think of himself as a good cop; i.e., one who prizes results over procedural niceties.

It's easy to see how a cop might fall into this trap: If you cross the line to achieve what you regard as a good end, how long before you cross it just because you can?

As this edgy -- even jagged -- movie progresses, Brown reveals himself as a lost soul who’s estranged from his current wife (Anne Heche), and who happens to be the sister of his former wife (Cynthia Nixon), a needless domestic complication in a script credited to James Ellroy and Moverman.

Brown’s also a father; he shares tender moments with his youngest daughter (Stella Schnabel), but his teen-age daughter (Brie Larson) treats him with rueful disregard. Because Brown's such a well-known louse, Larson's Helen evidently views her sullenness as a kind of entitlement.

After Messenger, a terrific little movie about two Army officers (Harrelson and Ben Foster) assigned to informing next of kins about loved ones who have been killed in battle, a lot of actors probably wanted to work with Moverman. His strong supporting cast includes Messenger vet Foster, as a wheelchair bound bum; Ice Cube, as an internal affairs investigator; Ned Beatty, as a retried cop who seems to have schooled Brown in corruption; and Robin Wright, as a lawyer and extracurricular love interest for Brown.

They’re all good, but the movie is caught in Brown’s corrupt swirl. Somewhere near the mid-picture mark, he's caught on camera beating a fleeing suspect, an incident that creates a Rodney King-style furor. He tries to rob a poker game to generate cash for himself, and winds up being investigated for an unlawful shooting. He smokes too much and drinks excessively. He's a dangerous wreck of a man, who offers arrogant rationalizations to the police psychologist (Sigourney Weaver) who questions him. He did time in Vietnam and has been on the crime front lines for decades. That's his rap.

Rampart aims for gritty truth, but may be too caught up in Brown's delirium to find any. You’ll find some overwrought scenes and lots of pulp-flavored cinematography as Rampart follows Brown’s descent into a private hell that, in the end, seems all too familiar -- not necessarily from reality, but from other movies that have tried to plumb the souls of other cops gone bad.

Harrelson deserves credit for pulling out all the stops, but Rampart is so hell bent on pushing his character beyond the moral pale, that it ultimately lets him down. Rampart is well-performed, but it often feels as tarnished as its main character.


Footnotes: I don't know what it means (probably nothing) but for those who collect coincidences: Brei Larson, who out-sullens just about every known teen-ager in Rampart, has a much lighter turn in 21 Jump Street, which also opens this week. Ice Cube, who plays an internal investigator for the LAPD in Rampart, portrays another cop in 21 Jump Street. Of Ice Cube's two performances, I prefer his work in Rampart, which allows him to break out of his one-note, scowling mode.