Two fine actors, one muddled mess

Some movies just don't work -- nearly from start to finish.

Director April Mullen's Wander, a thriller starring Aaron Eckhart and Tommy Lee Jones, fits the description. Muddled to the max, Wander tells the story of Arthur Bretnik (Eckhart), a former cop who spends his time investigating conspiracy theories. Bretnik is the quintessential emotionally wounded man: An automobile accident resulted in the death of his daughter. As a further result of the crash, his now hospitalized wife (Nicole Steinwedell) has withdrawn into a catatonic state. Did all this havoc result from a crash or was the crash representative of something more sinister? Arthur occupies himself with an assignment: A woman asks him to look into the death of her daughter. A major question arises: Is Bretnik a nut or is he really onto something -- with help, of course, from his pal Jimmy Cleats (Jones)? Arthur and Jimmy host an amateur radio show in which conspiracy-minded folks call in to vent and air their thoughts. Not worth belaboring, Wander is one of those WTF movies that drowns inside its endless convolutions, dodges, and cuts.  The overall confusion breeds wide-eye disbelief and offers the viewer little choice but to give up caring.

A middleweight's amazing comeback

Bleed for This tells a powerful story -- but doesn't always do it with distinction.

Boxing movies long have been a staple in Hollywood's repertoire with Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull still topping most lists of big-screen punch-outs.

Bleed for This, the story of Vinny Pazienza's amazing career in and out of the ring, stands as a medium grade, often dreary look at a man who sustained what should have been a career-ending, spinal-cord injury.

Instead of going down for the count after a devastating car wreck, Pazienza returned to win the middleweight title. His feat has been dubbed the greatest comeback in boxing history.

The minute you sit down to watch Bleed for This, which stars Miles Teller as the Rhode Island-bred "PazManian Devil," you know that the movie will end with videos showing the real man. Fair to say, surprise isn't the movie's strong suit.

In the hands of director Ben Younger (Boiler Room), Bleed for This revels in the working-class atmosphere that spawned Pazienza. The film takes place in a rough-and-tumble Italian American milieu with numerous scenes of Pazienza's family gathered around the dining room table, their Rhode Island accents thick enough to float in Narragansett Bay.

Younger offers a straightforward -- if condensed -- account of Pazienza's career, which certainly qualifies as a wonder of sorts.

After his injury, Pazienza was told he'd never fight again. Ignoring the diagnosis, he began training soon after his release from the hospital, an activity made more difficult by the halo that had been screwed into Pazienza's skull to hold his neck in place.

Two relationships bolster the story; one involves Pazienza's trainer Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart with a dramatically receding hairline); the other centers on Vinny's father (Ciaran Hinds).

Hinds's performance has a kind of scowling rigidity that never entirely convinced me, but the movie tries to make its dramatic weight with a scene in which Hinds's Angelo Pazienza wonders whether he hasn't pushed his son too hard, and is, therefore, partly responsible for Vinny's plight.

Pazienza's relationship with Rooney doesn't have much by way of psychological subtext. The alcoholic Rooney helped Pazienza establish his career by encouraging him to move up two weight classes. Later, Rooney helped prepare Pazienza for a comeback that seemed impossible to everyone but the fallen fighter.

Teller doesn't have the physical bulk of the real fighter, but he gives the movie his all and the fight scenes are mostly convincing -- if cinematically routine.

Younger does a better job showing the physical pain involved in Pazienza's retraining. The most difficult scene to watch is one in which a doctor removes four screws from Pazienza's skull and drops them into a waiting receptacle. After three months, the halo was replaced by a neck brace.

Because the movie mostly celebrates Pazienza's determination, it doesn't waste much time counterpunching; i.e., considering the idea that a man who can't see any other role in life but that of a fighter might be tragically limited.

Pazienza's story obviously makes a strong subject for a movie, but Younger and company can't bring the movie to total victory -- either as a Rockyesque source of inspiration or as a Raging Bull-influenced hunk of tormented realism.

In fight-movie terms, I'd call it a draw.

Eastwood and Hanks team for 'Sully'

A real-life drama with stunning highlights.

In a society riven with division, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger qualifies as a hero nearly everyone can get behind. You remember Sully, I'm sure. In January of 2009, he made an emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. The feat was hailed as a heroic act of competence and daring in the face of potential disaster.

It all happened in a matter of minutes. Shortly after leaving Laguardia Airport, Sullenberger's jet was struck by a flock of geese. The plane's engines were disabled.

Sullenberger quickly calculated his chances of returning to Laguardia or making an unscheduled landing at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport. After determining that he couldn't reach either airport, Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles landed their plane in the Hudson.

Miraculously -- there's really no other word for it -- all 155 passengers survived. No one was even seriously injured.

We all saw pictures of the shaken passengers standing on the plane's wings in the middle of the Hudson on a day when temperatures dipped into the 20s. We saw rescue boats scurrying to bring the passengers to safety. It was a national "Holy shit" moment, and -- for once -- it ended in a good way.

Director Clint Eastwood's Sully, which stars Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, offers stunning recreations of those events on the Hudson, but rather than move steadily toward the fateful moment, screenwriter Todd Komarnicki places them toward the middle of a film that focuses on the National Transportation Safety Board investigation that followed the landing.

According to the movie, an NTSB committee left an already shaken Sullenberger wondering whether he'd made the right decision.

Hanks' low-key performance underscores Eastwood's celebration of Sullenberger's competence and modesty, even as Hanks conveys Sullenberger's continuing bouts with doubt. Sully dreams of what might have happened had he miscalculated. He experiences post-traumatic stress, and his life is made more difficult by a relentless flood of media attention.

As co-pilot Skiles, Aaron Eckhart shows a bit more flare. He's a staunch defender of Sullenberger, and believes that the highly experienced captain had no choice but to gamble on a river landing.

Although the tension of the landing can be felt throughout Sully's entire 95-minute running time, Eastwood makes a public NTSB hearing the movie's climax, hinging its outcome on questions about the validity of NTSB computer simulations used to evaluate Sullenberger's decisions.

In a battle between human judgment and computers, there's little doubt which side Eastwood will take. I suppose the NTSB is vilified a bit -- albeit not in excoriating fashion. The NTSB investigators -- Anna Gunn plays one -- are portrayed as a panel of not-always-friendly inquisitors.

A compelling story helps Sully survive some of the problems that keep the film from total takeoff. Flashbacks to Sully's past (his start as a crop-dusting youngster and an episode from his stint in the Air Force) are inserted without great finesse, and there's little attempt to flesh-out the drama.

Despite Sully's statement that the landing and rescue reflected a team effort of which he was only a part, the movie remains a solo flight built around Sully's experiences, which include brief, troubled phone conversations with his wife (Laura Linney).

Eastwood, who has been praised by those who work with him as a no-nonsense director who knows what he wants, must have warmed to Sully, who never regards himself as a hero and who talks about what he accomplished in mundane terms: He was just doing his job.

The film compacts (justifiably, I think) the NTSB investigation, which took place over the course of 18 months -- not in the few days following the emergency landing. Besides, can you imagine the outcry that might be heard if the NTSB didn't investigate emergency water landings?

A few nuances might have given us a better feeling for such complexities, but Sully seems interested mostly in keeping faith with the unquestionable trustworthiness of its main character.

The movie also leaves you with an indelible sense of the terror and panic that would rattle you to the core if you were on a plane that was heading for water, and you were hearing fight attendants straining to overcome the sounds of a falling aircraft. "Brace. Brace. Brace," they shout in drum-beat fashion.

It's a moment you won't soon forget.

London (and taste) under siege

This lame sequel to 2013's Olympus Has Fallen involves little more than sustained violence built around the need for Gerard Butler, who again plays a Secret Service agent, to squelch swarthy looking foes who have blown up much of London and who threaten the life of the US president (Aaron Eckhart). The plot kicks in when Britain's prime minister passes away, and Eckart's Benjamin Asher travels to London for the state funeral. The picture quickly reduces itself to following Eckhart and Butler as they race around London in an effort to save the president from being beheaded by the Barkawi family. The Barkawis are arms dealers seeking vengeance for being victimized by a US drone strike. As vice president Trumbull, a concerned looking Morgan Freeman presides over a table of US government types who fret about the situation. One might rattle on about the movie's unashamed bombast and exploitative violence (See Westminster Abby topple! Watch London Bridge blown apart!), but that would be a waste of my time and yours. London isn't the only thing that has fallen with the release of this noisy mess of a movie; so have my hopes of seeing Butler, an appealing enough actor, in something that didn't leave me rolling my eyes in dismay.

'Olympus' falls into a dumb, violent heap

The White House is under attack, along with all credibility
At one point during a preview screening of the woeful Olympus Has Fallen, I wrote these two words in my notebook: "Ridiculous tripe."

That may not represent the deepest analysis, but then depth isn't exactly at issue when it comes to a thriller that's more interested in carnage than commentary. Olympus Has Fallen probably has the late and often great John Frankenheimer spinning in his grave. Frankenheimer put Washington under threat in movies as intelligent and varied as The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. Olympus Has Fallen puts Washington under threat with a barrage of CGI-created rubble, rampant gunfire and laughable turns of plot.

Director Antoine Fuqua, working from preposterous script by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, creates a film that slams its way toward a simple-minded mano-e-mano finale between a lone Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler) and a rogue terrorist from North Korea (Rick Yune).

Fuqua (Training Day) is not without talent, but a movie about a terrorist attack on the White House either needs to stake a claim in the world of fantasy or pass a rudimentary test of realism: Olympus Has Fallen does neither.

And rather than lending the movie an air of topicality, recent bellicosity on the part of North Korea struck me as little more than an unfortunate coincidence.

If Olympus attracts a crowd, it may be because audiences are willing to regard it as an example of enhanced mayhem, an accepted form of entertainment these days. I'd blame our endless capacity to find joy in watching things and people destroyed, as well as the presence of a strong but ill-used cast that includes Aaron Eckhart (as the president), Morgan Freeman (as Speaker of the House and eventually acting president), Melissa Leo (as Secretary of Defense), Angela Bassett (as the head of the Secret Service) and Radha Mitchell (as the wife of Butler's character, one Mike Banning by name).

That's an impressive line-up, but acting hardly matters as Fuqua pours on enough mind-numbing action to swamp the movie's opening scenes, which at least are novel, if not entirely believable.

In the middle of a blinding snowstorm, the president is being driven from Camp David to the home of one his major donors for a Christmas party. The president's limo veers off the road, resulting in the death of the First Lady (Ashley Judd).

Judd's character dies despite Banning's efforts to save her. The grieving president, who also has a young son, decides that Banning should be shelved. Stuck in an office job at the Treasury Department, Banning doesn't reactivate until a visit from the Prime Minster of South Korea goes terribly awry.

As part of the attack, Yune's Kang -- a terrorist who leads a small army against the White House -- works his way into the underground fortress where the president and his team are hidden once the attack begins.

An even bigger (and, of course, world threatening) plan lies beneath all the surface pyrotechnics, but that scheme proves as dumb as everything else about a movie that relies on lame dialogue, rote performances and the willingness of audiences to make gargantuan suspensions of disbelief.

Olympus Has Fallen isn't the first movie to litter the screen with violence, but this one makes an apologetic attempt at self-justification by wrapping itself in the America flag.

In so doing, the filmmakers suggest that the old adage had it all wrong: Patriotism isn't the last refuge of scoundrels. It's the last refuge of hack work. I don''t know how you'll feel, but I'm not saluting.

A stale helping of gonzo weirdness

By now, debauchery modeled on Hunter S. Thompson has begun to feel old hat.

Johnny Depp seems to have taken responsibility for honing Hunter S. Thompson's legacy. Depp, who played the gonzo journalist in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), also helped draw attention to The Rum Diary, an autobiographical novel Thompson wrote in 1959, but which wasn't published until 1998.

Depp now stars in and serves as one of the producers of the big-screen adaptation of The Rum Diary, which tells the story of a dissolute young journalist (the Thompson surrogate) who learns to devote his life to fighting "the bastards," an all-purpose description for anyone who stands against truth, justice and the gonzo way.

Because Depp has played Thompson before, his portrayal of Paul Kemp seems like a muted preview of coming attractions for a character that would later blossom into a richer mode of bat-shit craziness. Still, the roots of big-time debauchery can be seen in Kemp, an apparently shiftless young man who lands a job on an English-language Puerto Rican newspaper called the San Juan Star.

True to Thompson's form, we meet Kemp in the midst of a ferocious hangover. We eventually learn that the aspiring journalist has prepared for his job interview at the Star by consuming large quantities of alcohol. The Star's editor (Richard Jenkins) hires Kemp to write horoscopes, and later complains about the way Kemp has abused his hotel privileges, downing something like 161 miniatures from the mini-bar in his room.

In the early going, director Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I) introduces the movie's eccentric cast of characters, which includes Sala (an excellent Michael Rispoli), the paper's photographer, and Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi), the paper's resident drunk, a surly fellow who refuses either to work or be fired and who sometimes listens to the recorded speeches of Adolf Hitler.

Much of this comes across as strained weirdness, which doesn't exactly serve Thompson or the movie well.

The screenplay - also by Robinson - throws Kemp into a plot involving commercial treachery. An American businessman (Aaron Eckhart) tries to arrange a land development deal that's bound to inflame the already simmering resentments of anti-U.S. locals.

Robinson puts Sanderson and Kemp into competition for a beautiful young woman (Amber Heard), who happens to be engaged to Sanderson. Heard's character - Chenault by name -- provides the movie with its seductive allure.

By now, Thompsonesque reprobation seems entirely too familiar to be more than mildly amusing. On top of that, Robinson keeps tossing off bits and pieces of movie: a crusade against greed, an early LSD trip, the seductive balm of an island away from the U.S. mainland and some broadly conceived comedy. A sight gag involving bizarre car ride in which Kemp winds up sitting on Sala's lap earned the biggest laughs at a preview screening.

So call Rum Diary an act of off-kilter devotion on Depp's part: Thompson devotees may enjoy it, but - to me - Rum Diary felt like a movie suffering from a hangover of its own. This may be an attempt to bring an early Thompson work to the screen, but instead of feeling fresh, Rum Diary has the dispiriting taste of residue.

Much to admire about 'Rabbit Hole'

Rabbit Hole has some great moments, but never springs to full heartbreaking life.

Rabbit Hole, director John Cameron Mitchell’s big-screen adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-wining 2007 play, is tasteful, unsentimental and often beautifully written.

That’s saying something because the screenplay – also by Lindsay-Abaire -- deals with a subject that easily could have devolved into hand-wringing melodrama: a New York couple attempts to cope with the death of their 4-year-old son.

We meet Howie and Becca – played by Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman -- eight months after their son Danny’s death. I won’t say what happened to Danny because Mitchell plays the movie’s emotional cards slowly and wisely, which should come as a relief to anyone who fears that Rabbit Hole will deliver an emotional clobbering.

Tension arises from the different ways in which Howie and Becca attempt to deal with their son's death. Howie watches a cherished video of his son on his smart phone. It helps him remember happier times. Howie’s untroubled by physical reminders of his son’s existence – drawings pasted to the refrigerator, for example. He seems to treasure them.

Becca, on the other hand, hardly can abide the residual paraphernalia of her son’s lost life. She’s carrying the departed Danny in her head, and it’s all she can do to move on.

Of course, both Howie and Becca attempt to maintain a normal facade in the face of unspeakable tragedy. They put up a brave middle-class front. Their house is neat. Howie seems to be functioning well enough at work. He’s liable to return home in the evening and find Becca puttering over dinner.

Kidman, nearly unrecognizable in the movie’s early scenes, steers clear of any suggestion of glamour, but her portrayal of the sometimes icy Becca not only holds her character’s emotions in check, but also keeps us at bay, and, I think, limits Rabbit Hole’s ability to crack open our hearts. It’s almost as if Mitchell and Lindsay-Abaire have studied the mathematics of grief and allowed their calculations to inform the movie’s structure and all of its various subplots.

Becca’s younger sister (Tammy Blanchard) is involved in a relationship and recently has become pregnant. Both Becca and Howie attend a support group where Howie meets Gaby (Sandra Oh), a woman whose grieving style may be closer to his than Becca’s. Becca’s mother (Dianne Wiest) takes comfort in religion. She also has dealt with the death of a child, an adult son who succumbed to drugs.

In what may be the movie’s best scene, Wiest and Kidman talk about the way grief never ends, but morphs into something easily recalled and somehow bearable: The awful weight of it lessens with the passage of time.

The relationship between Becca and a high school student (no, it’s not at all kinky or sexual) begins in mystery, but eventually assumes an unsatisfying air of contrivance.

Rabbit Hole certainly has its moments. We’re watching a couple of decent people who must learn how to continue living in the face of the unthinkable, but I couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that I was witness to a very good rehearsal of material that had yet to spring fully to life and which generally left me on the outside looking in.

Put another way: I don’t believe that Mitchell has found a way to bring Rabbit Hole from the stage to the screen with all its power intact.