A grim helping of John Woo action

 

Director John Woo returns to Hollywood action with Silent Night, a movie that evokes memories of Woo's work during his bullet-riddled days of Hong Kong action, not to mention Hollywood efforts such as 1997's Face/Off.  Memories, however, aren't enough to carry Silent Night across the finish line.

   Woo is an undisputed master of action, but in a year when John Wick: Chapter 4 set a high bar for inventive over-the-top  gunplay and fighting, outrageously violent movies have their work cut out for them, Silent Night included.

   The story: Joel Kinnaman plays a father who sinks into despair. How could he not? Kinnaman's Brian lost his young son when rival gangs raced through his neighborhood firing at each other. Brain gave chase and was shot in the throat by a gang leader who left him for dead.

    Brian survives, but a bullet that lodged in his throat damaged his vocal cords, preventing him from speaking and leaving Kinnaman to squeeze all the gloom and despair he can muster   into Brian's expressions.

    Not surprisingly, living with a man who's deeply embittered about his son's murder exhausts Brian's wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno). When she leaves, Brian is free to do what the main characters in such movies do: seek revenge or, if you're more high-minded, a crude form of justice.

  Brian's quest for vengeance, preceded by vigorous training, leads to a major body count and several displays of the violent ingenuity that made Woo famous during his Hong Kong heyday, which is when I became a fan. 

    A sketchy screenplay sets up the movie's vengeful rampage. But after its explosive opening, Silent Night takes too long to reclaim the only reason for its existence: exaggerated action and wild violence that employs a battered red Mustang, knives, and several varieties of firearms. 

     That's Woo, I guess, but a relentlessly grim tone tamps down the movie's kick. Silent Night struck me as more morose than exciting, a genre exercise that lights a fuse, but, unlike Woo's best work, doesn't blow us away.

Nicolas Cage uncaged again

 

Nicolas Cage takes another turn as a nut job of uncommon intensity in Sympathy for the Devil, a movie that, for much of its 90-minute running time, finds Cage’s character in a car with Joel Kinnaman’s David. Listed as The Passenger, Cage's character holds David hostage as they drive to a purported reunion between The Passenger and his fatally ill mother. As it turns out, The Passenger knows about David’s suburban life and threatens his family, including the pregnant wife David was on his way to join when the movie opens. She's in the hospital, having gone into labor. The Passenger force David to take a road trip, all the while bullying and badgering the poor guy. Suggestions that David may not be an unlucky rando percolate throughout. A violent scene at a roadside diner takes the comic edge off director Yuval Adler’s rendition of Luke Paradise’s screenplay and squanders some of its credibility, as well. Cage’s performance feels familiar and so does much of the movie, which seems to have been form fitted for Cage. At one point, The Passenger struts his way through a rendition of I Love the Nightlife, but Cage and Kinnaman  can’t “boogie” their way out of a movie that doesn’t always emerge from the shadow of earlier efforts. Strange, no? When it comes to movies,  the weird seems well on its way to becoming commonplace.

Super villains invade the summer

Lots of action, no real traction in Suicide Squad.

Into the endless flow of comic-book movies comes Suicide Squad, the latest entry from DC Comics to hit the nation's multiplexes. Cluttered and chaotic, the movie tells an inconsequential story about a group of super baddies who are recruited to fight evil.

There may not be 12 of them, but Suicide Squad functions as a kind of Dirty Dozen of the comic-book world, taking on a supposedly desperate moment when Superman isn't around, and Batman operates on the crime-fighting fringe; i.e., Ben Affleck has a cameo.

Heavily promoted and cast for cash, Suicide Squad does a reasonably good job of introducing its characters -- with featured work from Will Smith, Margot Robbie, and Viola Davis.

Too bad the movie eventually turns into a muddle that pits our heroic villains against a powerfully angry witch who wants to ... er .... well ... wreak havoc.

Suicide Squad advances an idea that isn't exactly novel, something about fighting fire with fire. Adopting a strictly business attitude, Davis plays the government official who decides that there's only one way to combat a villain that has invaded the subways of an American metropolis called Midway City. She assembles a task force of equally malicious combatants.

The movie's much seen trailer and its strong opening scenes ignite hope for an adventure in which Col. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) will try to control the unruly misfits who must be released from imprisonment to form Task Force X; a.k.a., the Suicide Squad.

There's Headshot, a crack marksman played by Smith; the beautiful, crazy and scantily clad Harley Quinn (Robbie); and Diablo (Jay Hernandez), a tattooed character who shoots flames from his fingertips.

Diablo's uncontrollable temper has led him to commit a monstrous act. He attacked his wife and kids, a foul deed that seems too malignant even for a comic-book movie that wants to take its evil seriously.

About that evil: Let's just say that The Enchantress, the witch played by Cara Delevingne, fails to work her way into the ranks of indelible comic-book antagonists.

Other members of the Suicide Squad include Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a reptilian creature who's at home in sewers; Boomerang (Jai Courtney), an Aussie assassin who takes out his opponents with (what else?) a boomerang; Slipknot (Adam Beach), a man with climbing skills; and Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro), who's skilled with a sword and pretty much an afterthought in the overall proceedings.

And while we're on the subject of afterthoughts: The movie also features an appearance by The Joker (Jared Leto). Metal teeth and maniacal laughter don't make The Joker as wild as the movie might have hoped.

The Joker's around mostly to work his evil ways on Harley. Once a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, Harley has been turned into a bat-wielding maniac and sex toy by the Joker.

Lots of blurry and over-extended action alternates with scenes that give members of the Suicide Squad a chance to deliver snide dialogue, but audiences that compare Suicide Squad to Deadpool (a far more successful take on good/bad guys), likely will be disappointed.

Director David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch) may have the chops for a comic book movie, but he has written a darkly hued script with little capacity to wink at its well-worn genre and a story that builds toward a second-rate display of pyrotechnics. Get the point? Suicide Squad just isn't much good.

'Run All Night:' Another vengeance saga

Liam Neeson and Ed Harris can't salvage this genre exercise.

Liam Neeson and Ed Harris play characters who share a deep history in Run All Night, the latest in what seems the endless series of kick-ass movies that have come to define Neeson's career.

In this current blast of violence and revenge, Neeson and Harris play a couple of Irish guys from Brooklyn who have known each other for a very long time, long enough for Harris's Shawn Maguire to be tolerant about the sorry state into which Neeson's Jimmy Conlon has fallen.

Time and guilt have turned Jimmy, a one-time hitman, into a pathetic neighborhood souse. For his part, Shawn is trying to live in semi-respectable, middle-class fashion.

Watching Neeson and Harris together makes you wonder what sort of movie might have developed if director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also directed Neeson in 2014's Non-Stop, hadn't stepped into a bucket full of genre junk, doubling down on violence, jumbled action and contrived plot twists.

The trouble starts because Shawn's obnoxious son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) gets into trouble for setting up a heroin deal that his father rejects. This leads to a variety of plot contortions that culminate when Jimmy is forced to shoot Shawn's son in an act of self-defense.

Uninterested in how much of a bastard Danny might have been, Shawn vows vengeance. He pledges to kill Jimmy's son (Joel Kinnaman), a family man who works as a limo driver and who long ago broke off contact with his father.

Brad Ingelsby's screenplay establishes a situation in which a wayward father must try to save his son's life, a process that takes place over the course of one cold Christmas Eve.

Kinnaman, an unusual talent who starred in the RoboCop remake and in the TV series The Killing, strikes me as a difficult actor to cast. If you've seen him in The Killing, you know he can be compelling in an offbeat way. But he never quite finds his groove here, which means the movie's father/son dynamic tends to feel perfunctory.

The supporting cast features Vincent D'Onofrio as a Brooklyn cop who has spent the better part of his career trying to put Jimmy behind bars. Last seen as one of Martin Luther King's cohorts in Selma, Common turns his back on non-violence to portray a hitman who does Shawn's bidding.

Of course, Jimmy sobers up long enough to spring back into grueling action, which is really what the movie's about.

I wish I could say that Collet-Serra brought a clever spin to the action set pieces, but he pretty much hits every note straight on as the movie goes through its predictable paces.

Run All Night fails to fulfill the promise of its grittiest scenes. That's all the sadder because Harris makes Shawn's conflicted affection for Jimmy seem real, and because Neeson carries the weight of Jimmy's misdeeds with palpable sadness.

But all this to what avail? Despite flourishes that suggest real dramatic ambition, Run All Night goes nowhere we haven't been before.

'RoboCop' stomps into theaters

It's nothing special, but at least it avoids the junk heap.

Topical issues -- drones, the use of high-tech killing machines and the role of private enterprise in ensuring public safety -- waft through the 2014 remake of RoboCop, although they don't necessarily have much sticking power. Retooled for a new century, this remake of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 blockbuster also works in a reliable old standard: amoral corporate greed.

Not content with creating robots for heavy duty law enforcement in such dangerous places as Tehran, an evil corporation -- the unimaginatively named OmniCorp -- decides that the best route to conquering the U.S. domestic market is to put a man inside a machine.

The argument goes something like this: A human touch would help convince people that a sophisticated killing machine could experience pangs of conscience or -- in a worst case scenario -- be moved toward regret upon inflicting collateral damage.

Like the original, the screenplay contrives to make Detroit detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) the man in the machine. After assassins attempt to kill Murphy with a car bomb, his ragged remains are carted off to OmniCorp, where they are fitted into an imposing black suit of armor that's programmed to put him in uber-cop mode.

In one of the film's more inventive touches, we see that all that remains of Alex are his head, lungs, heart and one hand. So much for biology: The rest is metal.

Not surprisingly, Alex isn't happy to discover that he's been turned into a robot and that he henceforth will be deprived of fleshy contact with his wife (Abbie Cornish) and his young son (John Paul Ruttan).

As RoboCop, Murphy also has been deprived of the personality that he displays in the movie's early scenes, thanks in part to Kinnaman's ability to humanize cops, a skill he mastered in TV's The Killing. More about that later.

Brazilian director Jose Padilha, who created the pulsating Elite Squad movies, takes the reins, working with a screenplay that manages a bit of wit. Padilha makes amusing use of the Tin Man's refrain from The Wizard of Oz ("If I only had a heart") and of a throbbing rendition of "I Fought the Law."

But Padilha doesn't spend much time trying for tongue-in-cheek winks at the audience, aside from a recurring segment featuring Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak, host of a television show that pimps patriotism, OmniCorp-style.

A strong supporting cast adds some of the color that has been drained from Murphy's personality when he becomes RoboCop: Michael Keaton portrays Raymond Sellars, the villain who runs OmniCorp; Gary Oldman signs on as an OmniCorp scientist who hasn't entirely lost his moral bearings; Jackie Earle Haley has a nice turn as an OmniCorp enforcer, and Michael K. Williams appears as Murphy's human partner.

Not surprisingly, Padilha sometimes subordinates story to action, which he films in the typically chaotic style of today's movies. This means that aside from blasts and flying bullets, it's not always possible to tell what's actually happening.

If you've seen The Killing, you know that Kinnaman plays one of the more unusual cops ever to appear on TV, a hip Seattle detective with drug problems in his past. It would have been a stroke of real genius to allow Kennaman to retain a similar personality inside his black RoboCop suit.

To be fair, Kennaman does what he can to embody Robo's inner battle: Does Murphy retain enough of his humanity to counter the programming that guides his actions? Does anything of Alex Murphy remain or is he all RoboCop?

The screenplay tries build emotion by having RoboCop pine for his wife and son. Can he go from being a lethal weapon to a credible RoboDad.

RoboCop isn't as strapped for ideas as real-life Detroit is strapped for cash, but it can feel messy and noisy, which -- come to think about it -- may be just what folks are looking for with a remake that's willing to try lots of things, perhaps in hopes that some of them actually will work.

Amazingly, some do. RoboCop may lack the high-impact clobber of the original, but it manages to avoid the junk heap. I guess that's something.