A new Captain America hits the screen

 

  I'd like to talk about the ending of Captain America: Brave New World. It's borderline crazy, gratuitously overblown, willfully preposterous, and, perhaps, the most enjoyable thing about this latest edition to the MCU canon. 

  I laughed a lot as the movie smashed its way toward a Washington D.C.-based conclusion. The late-picture bombast struck me as amusing, although I'm not sure that was the reaction the creators were hoping for.

   Only the fear of spoilers keeps me from saying more. So on with the review: 

    Captain America: Brave New World spends much of its 118-minute runtime watching Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) justify his ascendance to the role of Captain America, a job once filled by Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Although Mackie often appears in nicely tailored suits, he dons his uniform when it counts. Mackie earns his shield, which he tosses around like a lethal Frisbee.

   Director Julius Onah balances comic-book bravado and elements that sometimes resemble a conventional hunk of intrigue about how power should be wielded.

   In this outing, Harrison Ford takes over a role previously played by the late William Hurt. Ford portrays Thadeous Ross, a ruthless US president who wants to change his image from warrior to peacemaker. 

  To accomplish his lofty goal, Ross must arrange a treaty under which the world's powers will  agree to share adamantium, a much-desired substance that .... well ... who cares what it does?

   Looking older than he ever has on film, Ford appears throughout the movie; he seems committed to serving the story's serious side while not diminishing its comic-book clout.

    In the early going, President Ross invites Wilson to the White House in hopes that the new Captain America will bring the Avengers back to life. 

   Before an Avengers rebirth can occur, an aggrieved super soldier (Carl Lumbly) -- one of Wilson's warrior pals and a wrongly imprisoned victim of his own government -- takes a shot at the president. 

   The assassination attempt fails, but we're quickly assured that Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley is no revenge-seeking villain; mysteriously, he's being manipulated. Wilson pledges to clear his friend's name.

    Thematically, Brave New World touches on genetic engineering and mind control while making room for an aerial battle over the Indian Ocean when the US tries to prevent Japan from seizing control of the world's adamantium supply. 

    Plenty of well-played additional characters turn up. Shira Haas portrays a former Mossad agent who works as the president's top security aide. Giancarlo Esposito plays Sidewinder, a bad guy for hire. Danny Ramirez adds a welcome light touch as Falcon.

     Tim Blake Nelson does major bad-guy duty as Samuel Sterns, a biology genius with a grudge against the president and the need for a wig. Stern's hair has been replaced by the brain that grows outside his head. 

      The action sequences aren't exactly groundbreaking, and at times, the screenplay slows its roll so that various characters can deliver chunks of exposition.

      I have no idea how much of a splash Brave New World will make, but the movie flirts with topicality as it tries to keep the Marvel torch burning. Yes, the flame sometimes sputters, but like Mackie, Brave New World ultimately holds its own.

'Outside the Wire' -- but not far enough

    Consider it a tribute to Anthony Mackie's command as an actor that he can play an android and still create one of the more intriguing characters in Outside the Wire.  A mildly futuristic action thriller,  Outside the Wire explores (if that's not too deep a word) issues revolving around collateral damage resulting from combat. 

    Mackie portrays Leo, an android who teams with a fully human soldier (Damson Idris) for an assignment in an eastern European combat zone. Set in 2036, the story follows Leo and Idris's Lt. Harp as they attempt to find a vicious warlord, locate some planet-threatening nukes and diffuse a global catastrophe.

     Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom adds a few decent sci-fi flourishes throughout: robot soldiers called gumps and occasional glimpses of Leo's innards, for example. Overall, though, the movie doesn't seem to be breaking new ground.

   The story's ethical dimension stems from Lt. Harp's behavior during the film's prologue. As a drone pilot who's far removed from the field of combat, he disobeys orders and fires on a missile launcher. His action results in the death of two marines. 

    Harp justifies his decision by insisting that he might have sacrificed two lives, but he saved 37 others. To teach him a lesson, his commanding officers send Harp into the field.

    An underused supporting cast includes Emily Beecham as a resistance fighter and Pilou Asbaek as a brutal warlord.

     Despite a few unexpected twists, Outside the Wire comes across as a near-generic helping of action that tries to serve up something more than standard action, but it's strictly a genre affair -- and not a superior one at that.

Drugs, time travel and fatigued paramedics

 

    Time travel movies may not have dime-a-dozen familiarity, but they're not exactly novel either. That means that directors who venture into this territory must do so with an awareness that they need to come up with something that feels fresh. 

    Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who directed the tantalizing Endless, take an unusual approach in Synchronic, a movie with a time-travel twist. They tell a story that doesn't appear to be about time travel at all -- at last initially.

   Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan portray two New Orleans paramedics, best friends who are bombarded by constant drug-overdose calls, so much so that Synchronic looks like another foray into the world of drugs and despair but it's not quite that either.

   Synchronic, by the way, is a powerful pill that opens those who swallow it to seven minutes of time travel that takes place from the exact spot where the drug has been taken. Travelers play a game of time-travel roulette: They can't control the period in which they land.

  Synchronic puts plenty on its plate: friendship, the vanished daughter on Dornan's character, a crumbling marriage, a terminal disease from which Mackie's character suffers and travel to various moments in history -- the Ice Age to the time of the Conquistadors among them.

   As the movie's principal time-traveler, Mackie's Steve faces all manner of danger in his seven-minute forays into alternate realities, the idea being that past, present and future actually are concurrent. References to Einstein and physics are made, but the movie hardly qualifies as an intellectual exercise.

   The directors can't entirely fuse the movie's diverse elements and not everything about Synchronic works. For me, though, Mackie's complex character keeps the movie on track. Dornan holds his own, as well, and Synchronic nudges its way onto the plus side of the sci-fi ledger.

Two black men outsmart a racist system

Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson play men who learned how to play a rigged game and win -- at least for a while..

Toward the end of The Banker, Joe Morris — a streetwise nightclub owner played by Samuel L. Jackson — explains why he has joined forces with brainy Bernard Garrett, Jr. (Anthony Mackie) in a plan to circumvent race restrictions and get rich in real estate.

“The game is fun, even when it’s rigged,” says Joe.

When The Banker, which is based on a true story, sticks to Joe's idea, it’s both informative and entertaining. Both Jackson and Mackie are in fine form as very different men who become partners out of necessity. As a black man, Mackie’s Garrett can’t raise sufficient money to enter the real estate game in Los Angeles during the 1950s. Thwarted by the financial establishment, Garrett turns to Morris for financing.

Although he claims to trust no one, Morris becomes involved. He believes in Garrett’s confidence and in his demonstrated ability to master the mathematics required to succeed in real estate.

The movie acquires additional social meaning when Garrett devises a plan to break the color barrier. He’ll school a white laborer (Nicholas Hoult) in how to play the part of a wealthy entrepreneur. Hoult’s Matt Steiner becomes a student with two teachers. Garrett tries to bring him up to speed in math; Morris teaches him how to play golf so that he can associate with the country-club crowd.

Steiner will play a role similar to a ventriloquist's dummy while an unseen Garrett pulls the strings. Garrett and Morris will own everything; Steiner will be an employee.

As the story develops, Garrett also uses his success to engage his social conscience. He rents and sells homes to black buyers in formerly white neighborhoods. He knows that a burgeoning black market can make his plans work.

All goes well until Garrett decides to buy a bank in the highly segregated Texas town where he grew up. Again using Steiner as a front, Garrett purchases the Mainland Bank and begins loaning money to aspiring black businessmen — on the QT, of course. A wary Morris reluctantly goes along.

Every story needs an arc, so we’re pretty sure that Garrett and Morris will hit some major snags, most relating to Texas-style racism. The town's white population would be appalled if they learned that two black men owned the town's bank. How long can Garrett and Morris remain invisible?

Morris proves himself a master of wily pragmatism, posing as Steiner’s chauffeur so that he can keep on eye on his charge. At one point, Garrett’s devoted wife (Nia Long) poses as a cleaning woman so she can observe Steiner, who eventually begins to confuse his faux prowess with the real thing.

Without Garrett's genius, Steiner's bound to mess things up.

Strongest as a commentary on how entrenched racism kept blacks from accumulating wealth, The Banker, director George Nolfi eventually allows the story to bog down in the details of deals that led to Garrett and Morris's undermining. They eventually did jail time.

But Mackie and Jackson never are anything less than convincing as a savvy odd-couple that wouldn't take "no" for an answer. The key: If the front door is locked, look for another way in.

Of course, the overall point trumps the movie's slyer observations: The doors to success never should have been locked in the first place. Or as Joe might have put it: The game shouldn't have been rigged in ways that worked against the smart, well-prepared Garrett from achieving his goals.

'Miss Bala' is one big miss

Miss Bala may have been intended to boost Gina Rodriguez's profile and shift the actress into an action gear. The star of TV's Jane the Virgin has appeared in other movies (Deepwater Horizon and Annihilation) but this time finds herself in the middle of a drug smuggling/gun-running/gangsta thriller that also happens to be a remake Spanish-language movie from 2011. This misguided outing must have lost something in translation, turning into a by-the-numbers thriller about a Los Angeles make-up artist (Rodriguez) who's drawn into the cross-border drug underworld. Hey, she's got good reason: She wants to save her Tijuana based friend Suzu (Christina Rodlo). In the process, Rodriguez's Gloria becomes entangled with the DEA and also begins to establish a relationship with Lino (Ismael Cruz Cordova), a vicious, self-justifying and apparently aspiring cartel czar. Lino says he can help find Gloria's friend, who disappeared during an early picture shootout at a Tijuana nightclub. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen and Twilight) doesn't skimp on violence but much of it is more jittery than compelling. Anthony Mackie turns up in a too-small role as someone involved in the drug chain into which Gloria is coerced. The movie careens from betrayal to betrayal as Gloria tries to find her footing in this merciless world. Eventually, she must pick up an AR-17 and resolve matters in the way of such movies. Miss Bala, in which a beauty pageant plays a fringe role, can't replicate the corruption-heavy vibe of a movie such as Sicario. It's improbably plotted and predictable, yes. In sum, though, it's just Corruption Lite and, by the end, laughable.

A teenager faces a crisis of conscience

The Hate U Give highlights racial problems without sacrificing the humanity of its characters.

The two photos above make a key point about the new movie The Hate U Give, an adaptation of a young adult novel by Angee Thomas. One photo shows actress Amandla Stenberg as a character who attends a tony private school, has a white boyfriend and white girlfriends. The other photo shows the same teenager in her neighborhood after a traffic stop results in the shooting of one of her friends by a cop.

The same teenager, different circumstances. That's part of what drives this involving look at a high school student battling with social and personal issues and the powerful ways in which those issues can intersect.

There's enough material in The Hate U Give to create a mini-series -- and it's possible that Thomas's novel would have been better served in such an extended format. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't see a movie that deals convincingly with many real issues, mostly without subordinating the humanity of its characters to the art of scoring political points.

Stenberg's Starr Carter has a strong family life. Her mother (Regina Hall) believes in education and tries to shield her kids from the worst temptations of the neighborhood where the family lives. Her dad (Russell Hornsby) instills Starr with pride in her blackness. As a man who served a prison term, he understands the code of the streets. He also owns the neighborhood grocery store and has committed himself to the Garden Heights section of a city the movie never names.

Starr has two brothers, an older half-brother (Lamar Johnson) and a younger brother Sekani (TJ Wright), characters who expand the movie's already strong sense of family.

The pivotal action occurs when Starr meets an old friend Kahlil (Algee Smith) at a neighborhood house party. Later that night, she becomes a witness to Kahlil's killing by a policeman, a traumatic event that reverberates throughout the rest of the movie.

A neighborhood drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) has an interest in keeping Starr from telling her story in court. Unable to find employment elsewhere, Kahlil worked for the drug dealer at a very low level.

Working from a screenplay by Audrey Wells, director George Tillman, Jr. has made a movie that speaks to the complexities of racial issues in America. Starr's white boyfriend Chris (K.J. Apa) is well-meaning but not always attuned to Starr's existence as a black kid. And it's not all his fault, either. Starr has done a good job of keeping the two parts of her life separate.

Starr's best white girlfriend Kayleigh (Sabrina Carpenter) has appropriated black styles of speech, but her understanding of black life stays pretty much on the surface.

Starr herself sees the educational advantage of attending a private school. According to her own description, the public high school she would have attended is a place "you go to get drunk, high, pregnant or killed."

The movie also includes the presence of a black policeman (Common). Common's Carlos, who's also Starr's uncle, tries to make a reasonable case for why the white officer behaved as he did when he pulled Kahlil over.

Tillman obtains strong performances from a deeply committed cast led by Stenberg, who embodies the often contradictory poles of Starr's identity with intelligence, determination and appropriate amounts of consternation.

The Hate U Give maintains a terrific sense of what's at stake in every moment, even as it tries to corral every topical issue it can find. Perhaps that's the point. Young black people can't necessarily dodge any of these issues and The Hate U Give becomes a film that takes a powerful look at how one young woman tries to achieve her measure of success without abandoning her sense of self.

When the police become torturers

Detroit immerses us in a brutal racist incident that took place during the city's 1967 riot.

I found it impossible to watch Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit and not be flooded by a complex torrent of reactions to the movie's undeniable visceral power. Bigelow takes an unflinching look at a little known racist incident that took place during the Detroit riots of 1967. Police brutality and racism are awful, of course, but how much of it do we need to see before that point effectively has been made?

That's a question that every moviegoer will have to answer for his or herself, but -- I wondered, if in trying for unblinking honesty, Bigelow hadn't sometimes mistake intensity for insight.

Bigelow divides her movie into three unequal parts. She begins with an appropriately frenzied approach to the Detroit riots, settles into a disturbing and violent example of racist brutality, and then -- as if to temper the horror of what we've been watching -- spins out a courtroom finale in which the offending police officers are brought to trial.

Bigelow bases her movie on a true story, chronicled in a 1968 book by John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident. Events at the Algiers were a kind of adjunct to the Detroit riots that began when the police raided an after-hours bar frequented by black patrons.

No matter what side of the political divide on which you fall, it's nearly impossible to watch Detroit without making references to the climate between black communities and police forces that have been infected by institutional racism -- not only in 1967, but in 2017.

At the Algiers Motel, several young black men, two white women, several police officers and a black security guard are thrown together during the heat of the riot. The police officers -- led by a racist cop (Will Poulter) -- terrorize their captives in ways that result in psychological trauma and, ultimately, killing. By the end of the night, three young black men are dead.

From the outset, we've tagged Poulter's Krauss as an undisguised racist. Even before the incident at the Algiers, he goes unpunished for shooting an unarmed black man in the back.

The movie's segments in the Algiers Motel are on a par with the kind of sustained cruelty we sometimes see in horror films. Of course, torture is precisely what the police are doing to their innocent victims, perpetrating an invisible slice of horror during the intensely pressurized atmosphere of a violent outburst that made Detroit resemble a war zone.

During this portion of the film, the police line their victims against the wall, singling them out for humiliation, along with two white women (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever) who were partying at the Algiers. The cops accuse the women of being prostitutes, an opinion they seem to justify only because the women have been hanging around black men.

Three figures stand out among the black men, the lead singer of a group called The Dramatics (Algee Smith), a military veteran recently returned from Vietnam (Anthony Mackie) and a friend of Smith's character (Nathan Davis Jr.).

No one is more conflicted about what's happening at the Algiers than John Boyega's Dismukes, a security guard sent by his employer to protect a store from looting. Dismukes becomes caught up in the Algiers' drama. He's a law-and-order guy, but he's not blind to the racism that's being displayed by out-of-control cops.

All of this begins because the cops believe that someone in the motel fired a gun at them. As it turns out, the gun was a starter pistol fired by a young man (Jason Mitchell) who had been trying to frighten a small gathering at the Algiers by mimicking the way white policemen treat blacks. To make his act more convincing, Mitchell's character draws the fake gun, eventually firing it out a window.

I don't want to leave the impression that Detroit proceeds entirely without nuance. In the movie's later going, we meet cops who are appalled by what happened at the Algiers. We sometimes see the movie's brutal but self-serving cops trying to find a way out of the situation they've created. Not every black character is willing to stand up for truth when it comes to exposing the viciousness to which they've been subjected.

Bigelow may want us to understand that the cops have deluded themselves into believing that abuse is not only justifiable but a privilege of their positions of authority. Once the firebombs start flying, these policemen seem to think they've been granted license to do anything.

All of this unfolds after a prologue featuring paintings by Jacob Lawrence that try to provide some context for the riots: northward migration by blacks devolved into segregated housing projects and high unemployment. That's the gist.

Later, we'll see news clips of George W. Romney and President Lyndon Johnson, political leaders who remind us that what we're witnessing springs from a reality; the government apparatus geared up to meet what it saw as the challenge of unleashed fury and wanton destruction.

Written by Mark Boal, who also wrote Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit might have been even more daring had it taken some time to show us the pre-riot atmosphere in the Detroit police department, the conditions that presumably made Poulter's character possible.

As the movie unfolded, I found myself wondering how a director as meticulous as Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City) would have handled such a volatile story.

It's also worth remembering that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing already made a statement about the ways in which racial violence can be kindled.

So a confession: At various points during events at the Algiers Motel, I wondered what Bigelow was trying to accomplish by allowing them to drag on so long.

Other points are more economically made. Mackie portrays a Marine who recently returned from Vietnam. Having served his country offers him no protection from the wrath of the police.
That's a powerful observation.

It also helps to remember that many of the current and well-publicized incidents of questionable police conduct did not take place under violent duress; racism hardly needs riots as an excuse to express itself. Sometimes, all it takes is a traffic stop.

A racial drama misses the mark

A white grandfather fights for custody of his black granddaughter.

In Black or White, Kevin Costner plays Elliot Anderson, a successful Los Angeles attorney whose 17-year-old daughter died during childbirth. The child's father, a drug-addicted black man, took no responsibility for his daughter, so Elliot and his wife raised young Eloise.

But when Elliot's wife dies in a car crash, the girl's paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer) proposes that she share custody with Elliot. He rejects what seems like a perfectly reasonable offer.

Her son may be wayward, but Spencer's Rowena appears to be entirely responsible. She cares for her nieces and nephews, presides over a happy household and runs a successful real estate business.

Despite the fact that he's drinking too much and dealing with grief, Elliot finds himself in the middle of a custody fight that dominates what becomes an increasingly unconvincing look at the divide separating an affluent LA lawyer his scrappy opponent.

The problem: Black or White doesn't delve deeply enough into the characters who are upholding different sides of this custody fight.

The movie also stacks the deck against Eloise's father (Andre Holland), a troubled young man who turns up about half way through the movie, claiming that he's reformed.

Holland's Reggie is so obviously ill-prepared for fatherhood that the movie never gives him a chance. He tries to extort money from Elliot, and winds up in a late-picture confrontation that's neither believable nor fair.

Costner does a good job portraying alcoholic denial and the unexpressed anger Elliot harbors about his wife's death, but he's stuck in a scenario that goes where most second-rate dramas land, the courtroom.

There, writer/director Michael Binder cooks up a strategy in which Rowena's brother -- an attorney played by Anthony Mackie -- tries to convince the presiding judge that Elliot's a racist with a bad drinking problem.

Perhaps to keep us from losing sympathy for Elliot, he's portrayed as a somewhat responsible drunk. Elliot hires an unwaveringly earnest math tutor (Opho Koaho) for Eloise. Elliot also asks the young man to double as a driver when he's too inebriated to get behind the wheel himself, which is most of the time.

Black or White doesn't spend enough time with Rowena to make us understand what she wants for Eloise, and it never allows her to articulate a reasonable argument about why a black child needs to be exposed to other blacks.

Elliot seems to be living an all-white life.

The movie tilts that way, too. Black or White spends entirely too much time with Costner as it leads us toward a finale in which one side essentially gives up.

Too often, Black or White misses the opportunity to explore the gray areas that could have shed real and productive light on an interesting problem. The movie concludes as if it has resolved its issues. I'm not sure, though, that it ever really tackled them.

Another helping of 'Captain America'

The Winter Soldier adds a bit of grown-up flavor.

Let's start with the conclusion: Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a mostly welcome addition to the apparently endless stream of movies derived from Marvel Comics.

Winter Soldier, which follows 2011's The First Avenger, boasts abundant action, some amazingly vertiginous special-effects sequences and a conspiratorial plot that gives this massive comic-book movie a bit of an adult tilt.

Fans already know that a buffed Chris Evans makes a stalwart Captain America, the clean-cut World War II soldier transported into superhero status in the present.

As one-time KGB agent Natasha Romanoff -- a.k.a. Black Widow -- Scarlett Johansson breathes additional life into the proceedings. Same goes for Anthony Mackie, who plays Falcon, a veteran of recent wars who flies with pop-up metal wings. More importantly, Falcon recommends that Captain America familiarize himself with the music of Marvin Gaye.

More about that later.

Samuel Jackson does reliable duty as Nick Fury, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., the spy agency that uses its real-world savvy to keep America safe.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo -- known for TV's Arrested Development -- handle the major action set pieces well, giving them body-slam impact: The finale -- though typically protracted -- doesn't skimp on thrills.

Others have made this point, but it's worth reinforcing: Over-editing can ruin fight sequences by substituting frenzied cutting for a clear view of the combat, a sin Winter Soldier too often commits.

Some scenes, though, are more driven by dialogue than CGI, which brings us to Robert Redford, who appears as Alexander Price, a S.H.I.E.L.D. official so virtuous he once turned down the Nobel Peace Prize. Price also heads the World Security Council, a group devoted to maintaining global security.

Can we let Winter Soldier pass without at least wondering about Redford's presence? What exactly is the man behind the Sundance Film Festival, which each year supports the independent spirit in film, doing in a mega-budget, comic-book blockbuster?

I leave it to Redford to answer the question, which is provocation enough for the moment. Maybe he just wanted to play against his image as a liberal savior.

The screenplay tries for complexity by creating confusion about the motivations of Price and Nick Fury, but Winter Soldier isn't exactly over-flowing with edge-of-the-seat suspense.

And, of course, there's the Winter Soldier of the title, an unstoppable warrior played by Sebastian Stan. Not surprisingly, the Winter Soldier is employed by HYDRA, the organization that opposes S.H.I.E.LD. and which happily would sacrifice human lives to maintain order.

But back to Marvin Gaye.

I don't know if the late Gaye ever imagined that his music would find its way into a comic-book movie, but can there be any doubt that the world would be a better place if all comic-book heroes spent more time listening to Gaye and less time kicking butt?

A transformed Michael Bay? Hmm...

Violence sometimes trumps comedy in Pain & Gain.
As it happens, I'm writing this review in Krakow, while working on a film project. Poland, a land rich in both painful history and cultural gain, seems an odd place to be reviewing Michael Bay's dramatically hyperventilated Pain & Gain, but that's the situation in which I find myself.

I suppose it's not entirely inappropriate. If you follow a diagonal line from the National Museum in Krakow to an opposing street corner, you'll run smack into a colossus of a billboard advertising Tom Cruise's Oblivion. That billboard, I suppose, underscores the oft-made but still unsettling point: American movie culture is ubiquitous.

So, Pain & Gain ...

Basing his movie on an improbable but true story, Bay detours from the crash & smash style he brought to movies such as Transformers, forsaking massive explosions for a hyped-up look at low-level Florida thugs who cook up a kidnapping scheme.

In many ways, Pain & Gain is an odd, even bizarre hybrid -- part comedy, part display of shocking violence and part satire about the distorting powers of the American dream.

Despite its multiple ambitions, the movie works best as a comedy about dopey, violent hoodlums who are too dumb to achieve their felonious ambitions. Bay tries to give the violence as much twisted humor as possible, serving up jolts that cause us to wince even as we chuckle.

There's a fine line here, of course, and Bay sometimes crosses it. Too much vividly displayed violence can (and sometimes does) steamroll the movie's comic elements.

Muscularity, of course, is what Bay's after with this story about body builders gone terribly wrong. Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a weight lifter who works as a trainer at Miami's Sun Gym. The time: the 1990s.

Fearing that he's stuck in a dead-end life, Lugo attends a self-help seminar. He decides that he should be a doer. For Lugo, this means hatching a scheme to kidnap a successful businessman (Tony Shalhoub).

Lugo recruits two cohorts (Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson) to carry out his ill-conceived criminal plans. He decides to hold Shalhoub's Victor Kershaw as a prisoner, until Kershaw signs over all his property and wealth to Lugo.

This trio of IQ-deprived felons doesn't count on Kershaw's powers of resistance. The victim refuses to acquiesce. Lugo & company then proceed with a variety of crudely conceived tortures.

To say that these guys are ham-handed gives them more credit than they deserve. They're precisely the kind of bungling fools one used to find in old Ealing Studio comedies -- with one exception: They're in a Michael Bay movie that seems intent on channeling some of Quentin Tarantino's taste for irony-laced violence.

Each of the thugs represents a different brand of self-deception. Lugo comes off a flexed muscle of a man whose brawn and ambition exceed his brain power and skill. Since his release from prison, Johnson's Paul Doyle has been struggling to give up a life of sex, drugs and crime. Despite a new-found love for Jesus, Paul has trouble staying a straight and narrow course. Mackie portrays Adrian Doorbal, a young man whose steroid abuse has left him buffed but impotent.

The supporting cast adds additional noir flavor. Rebel Wilson, who scored big time as Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect, plays the woman who falls for Mackie's Adrian. Michael Rispoli has a nice turn as a porn king who's as sleazy as our trio of heroes, but smarter, and Ken Jeong makes a credible motivational guru, the man whose pseudo-philosophy encourages Wahlberg's Lugo to aspire to a future that doesn't involve wearing sweat pants.

Also look for Ed Harris, as a retired Miami detective who decides to help recover Shaloub's character's wealth.

You should take the movie's "R" rating seriously, but it's not always is easy to take the same attitude toward the rest of Pain & Gain, which can feel like drama gone berserk.

Look, Pain & Gain represents Bay's most interesting work in some time, even though its stylized agitation and dim-witted characters can feel increasingly mismatched.

And then there's this: Pain & Gain has some enjoyable kick, but to paraphrase a line from the late Pauline Kael, the movie may make you wonder why you're spending valuable time watching dumb people do a lot of dumb things.

Heavy gunfire, but 'Gangster Squad' misses

A great cast can't salvage and over-stylized look at LA crime in the late 1940s.

Sitting through Gangster Squad is a bit like watching a bad Brian DePalma movie, maybe a low-grade version of The Untouchables. I felt cheated. If I'm going to watch bad De Palma, I'd prefer that it be directed by De Palma rather than by Ruben Fleischer , best known for 30 Minutes or Less and Zombieland.

Perhaps because he's dealing with so many familiar elements, Fleischer relies heavily on style to spiff up the story of a small squad of LA cops who use rogue methods to take down famed gangster Mickey Cohen. Gangster Squad, we're told at the outset, was inspired by a true story, but the movie's shamelessly enhanced dramatic oomph made me wonder whether inspiration hadn't trumped accuracy.

According to the movie, Cohen attained so much power in post-war LA that he threatened to take control of the city, a feat he accomplished by showering the police and select judges with equal amounts of bribery and threat. In defiance of the Chicago mob, Cohen also attempted to corner the market on all West Coast bookmaking. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the Gangster Squad, a group of LA cops who worked deep undercover, never receiving credit for their efforts.

In telling what could have been a rewardingly sleazy LA tale, Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall put a lot of second-rate dialog in the mouths of many thinly drawn characters. The movie is so pulpy, the Tommy Gun blasts practically scream out for "blam! blam!" exclamation points.

If you've read anything about Gangster Squad, you already know that the movie was scheduled for earlier release, but was delayed because it once contained a shooting scene at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Not surprisingly, such a scene (now gone) seemed in poor taste after the Aurora multiplex shootings, although I wonder if it would have been in any better taste had that execrable bit of real-life violence never occurred.

Offensive levels of violence aside, Gangster Squad represents a significantly wasted opportunity, mostly because Fleischer has assembled an impressive cast.

A sneering Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin leads the Gangster Squad of the title. He's joined by Ryan Gosling, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick and Anthony Mackie, all of whom play cops recruited to put Cohen out of business.

That's a strong enough roster to make the movie's by-the-numbers script even more distressing. It's like asking a professional all-star team to play pick-up games in the park.

Emma Stone joins this heat-packing boys' club as Cohen's girlfriend, a woman who falls for Gosling's character, a jaded cop who doesn't sign up for the Gangster Squad until he sees an innocent shoe shine boy gunned down in the streets. Hey, even the most cynical cop has his standards.

The Gangster Squad is formed when the LA police chief (a bearish Nick Nolte) decides that the only way to topple Cohen is to fight fire with fire, an idea as unoriginal as the way I've just expressed it. Nolte's William Parker encourages his squad of renegades to step outside the law and wreak havoc on a Cohen empire built on profits from prostitution and gambling. Essentially, this means that they smash a lot of furniture, kick in doors and stuff like that. When they're about to shoot a bunch of bad guys, they say things such as "Light 'em up."

Fleischer seems to have encouraged over-the-top acting, particularly from Penn, who turns in one of his least interesting performances as the rapacious, sadistic Cohen. Fully embracing Cohen's darkest impulses, Penn makes the gangster seem so repulsive, you wonder why his own men don't bump him off.

There's no skimping on violence with the number of bullets almost matching the number of cliches in a script that scrambles film noir and western conceits while making a feeble attempt to raise an embarrassingly obvious moral question: Is it OK for cops to turn to savagery in pursuit of a good cause? Adjustment issues faced by World War II vets -- notably Brolin and Gosling's characters -- receive short, simplistic shrift.

Little about the dialog is subtle or nuanced, so the actors are forced to work awfully close to the surface. Brolin rages; Gosling does cool; Ribisi (as the 1940's-style techno geek) raises issues of conscience; Patrick acts as if he's just wandered in from the set of a B-western; Mackie remains calm under fire; and Pena is stuck in the tag-along role.

Fleischer may have wanted to make a movie in which everything comes across as pure and unadulterated -- a clash of boldly drawn big-screen archetypes. It mostly doesn't work, and Gangster Squad earns its stripes as the year's first disappointment. I suspect it won't be the last.

'Man on a Ledge' plunges into mediocrity

A convicted cop makes an unusual ... er ... totally improbable stab at proving his innocence.

If a movie puts a man who's threatening to take the big leap on a ledge some 200 feet above a New York City sidewalk, it’s reasonable to expect that some tension will follow.

In the prosaically titled thriller, Man on Ledge, director Asger Leth does create a bit of tension, but the movie that surrounds the title character is too painfully improbable to keep eyes from rolling.

Instead of the tightly focused picture its title suggests, Man on a Ledge turns out to be an unsatisfying mixture of vertiginous teases, heist-movie ploys and bad cop/good cop moralizing.

Sam Worthington, of Avatar fame, plays Nick Cassidy, the man on the ledge, a former New York City cop who was sent to prison for stealing a valuable diamond.

The screenplay by Pablo F. Fenjves quickly shows us how and why Cassidy wound up on the ledge, where he spends most of the picture.

I won’t burden you with a plot summary, except to say that Cassidy, his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are involved in a preposterous scheme that’s supposed to prove Cassidy’s innocence.

If you’ve seen even a couple of movies, you’ll quickly be able to separate the bad guys from the good guys, but I’ll give you a rapid rundown of the supporting cast, which includes Elizabeth Banks (as the detective called to talk Cassidy off the ledge); Edward Burns (as a skeptical cop who doesn’t think Banks’ character is up to the job); and Anthony Mackie (as Cassidy’s former partner and purported best friend).

Special mention needs to be made of Ed Harris, who plays David Englander, the real-estate tycoon who owns the building where Cassidy stages his ledge stunt. Englander’s greed and insensitivity are so blatant, they stand out like an overly wide and aggressively garish tie. Getting a bad – i.e., caricatured -- performance from an actor as gifted as Harris takes some doing, but Leth manages it.

Other annoyances crop up: Bell and Rodriguez banter in ways that are neither funny nor believable, and the standard crowd gathers to encourage Cassidy to jump, thus ensuring that a major cliche gets its unruly due.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kyra Sedgwick, who plays a hard-bitten New York TV reporter. Sedgwick’s Suzie Morales roots for the most lurid and gripping possible story. It didn’t take long for me to begin to share Suzie’s point of view.

So if I was at all tense by the end of this one, it was probably because I was waiting for someone to talk me down from the ledge disbelief.

Dealing with a radical past

Night Catches Us poses a difficult question: How to move on when the past hasn't been fully digested.

Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us tries to (and in some measure succeeds) show how powerful events in the past echo in the present. Most of what transpires in Hamilton's film -- set during the mid 1970s -- has its origins during the turbulent '60s when the Black Panthers were establishing themselves as a force in Philadelphia and in other cities. * The story begins when Marcus Washington (Anthony Mackie of Hurt Locker) returns to Philadelphia for his father's funeral. Marcus soon re-establishes a relationship with Patricia Wilson (Kerry Washington), a woman he knew when both belonged to the Black Panther party, an affiliation that led to Wilson's husband being killed by the police and that put Marcus in prison. * Patricia, who's raising her daughter, shares an obvious connection with Marcus, who is scorned by some of his former Panther colleagues. They think he's a snitch. * The supporting cast includes Wendell Pierce (familiar from HBO's Treme) as a bullying Philadelphia detective and Amari Cheatom, as Patricia's cousin, a young man who wants to emulate the radical actions of the '60s. * Both Mackie and Washington are memorable in roles that minimize pyrotechnics. * I thought Night Catches Us could have packed more of a wallop, but it goes a long way toward capturing the struggles of people who probably will spend the rest of their lives trying to deal with the secrets and contradictions of a volatile past -- and perhaps never entirely succeeding.