An FBI agent and his informant

 

     Drugs. Impoverished living. A rundown town where the coal mine has gone dead. FBI corruption. Infidelity. And, of course, murder.

     These days chances are good that we're talking about a movie set in the American South.

    Above Suspicion, from director Phillip Noyce, tells the real-life story of how, in 1989, a rising FBI star formed a relationship with the seductive informant who helped him build an ascending career. 

     A spoiler? Not entirely. The movie's ending is revealed in the opening scene, a nod to William Holden's narration in Sunset Boulevard. The narrator of the story, it seems, already is dead.

    "You know what's the worst thing about being dead?''the late  Susan Smith asks. "You get too much time to think."

     Starting the movie at the end leaves us with one major question: How did Susan wind up dead?

     Emilia Clarke, familiar from Game of Thrones, portrays the movie's narrator, Susan, a woman living in Pikeville, Ky. Susan has the profile you’d expect in a movie such as this. She lives with but is estranged from her drug-dealing husband (Johnny Knoxville). She's also in the midst of a welfare scam.

    Desperate for a change, Susan reads a lot into the sudden arrival in town of FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston). Susan spots the agent getting out of a car looking sharp and healthy. She's overpowered by a desire to connect, seeing Putnam as a way out of town.

    From the start, Susan knows that Putnam is married. Putnam's wife (Sophie Lowe) supports her husband and, for much of the movie, has no idea that he might have a dark side.

   Stuck in a town that's portrayed as dirtbag hell,  the ambitious Putnam thinks he might impress his superiors by solving a string of bank robberies. En route, he leads a drug bust at Susan's home, opening the door for him to enlist her as a snitch. 

   Susan has more on her mind than helping Putnam advance his career. She tries to seduce him. After some half-hearted  resistance, Putnam takes the bait.

   Clarke mostly brings Susan to life, allowing her looks to be defaced to depict Susan's slide into terrible drug abuse.

   Huston, who played a man who had half his face blown off in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, can't quite locate a core for a character who perhaps doesn't have one. Putnam is self-absorbed and ultimately dangerous.

   Thora Birch doesn't get a chance to do much as Susan's sister, a hairdresser. Among the supporting cast, Knoxville lands the hardest hit.

    Noyce's varied resume includes movies such as Patriot Games, The Bone Collector, and Rabbit Proof Fence. He's a good director but he’s working with a story that follows a downbeat arc based on a real-crime book written by Joe Sharkey.

    Sharkey’s observant, detailed prose did more to create involvement than Susan's forlorn narration. 

    On screen, Above Suspicion has its moments, but it never feels as if we're discovering anything revelatory as we follow these characters on their predictably doomed journeys.

A president meets 'the king'

Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey make a fine Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. I know . I wouldn't have believed it, either.

Talk about a stretch. If you were making up a list of actors who could convincingly play Elvis Presley, I doubt whether Michael Shannon's name would make your short list. And Kevin Spacey may play President Frances Underwood on House of Cards, but Nixon? Well, Spacey's a terrific mimmic, so maybe.

I don't know who decided to team Shannon and Spacey in a comedy called Elvis & Nixon, but whoever it was deserves credit for a masterstroke.

Although Shannon looks nothing like Elvis -- even with deep sideburns and generous helpings of Memphis bling -- he manages to capture the spirit of "The King."

And Spacey, who can be a great comic actor, makes a more than credible Nixon, hunched over, dyspeptic and willing to warm to anyone who happens to agree with him.

What we wind up with is a rousing snapshot of two paranoid men -- one a president, the other a "king" -- both of whom display cagey smarts.

The screenplay -- credited to Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal and Cary Elwes -- takes a real incident and tries to determine what might have happened the day Elvis showed up at the White House requesting a meeting with Nixon.

Nixon didn't install his infamous taping system until a few years later, so it's open season for anyone who wants to speculate about a meeting between such unlikely companions.

Director Liza Johnson (Hateship Loveship) evidently thinks the meeting, which resulted in the most requested photo in the National Archives, couldn't help but be funny. In her imagination, Elvis didn't kowtow to Nixon, who initially was reluctant to meet with a rock n' roller.

Isolated and accustomed to being the center of attention, Elvis digs into Nixon's M&Ms, which had been forbidden to him, and asks to drink the Dr. Pepper Nixon's aides also asked him not to touch.

Elvis had no interest in protocol; he wanted Nixon to give him a badge that would make him a "federal agent at large," a lawman with undercover responsibilities.

Elvis liked badges, and had been awarded many by various local police departments. He carried firearms (licensed) and, in this telling, even brought them to the White House.

Johnson wisely delays the fated meeting until about an hour into the movie. Until then, Elvis gathers his support system, which includes Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), a friend who had known Elvis since childhood and whom Elvis trusted, and Sonny (Johnny Knoxville) another -- albeit goofier -- member of the Elvis entourage.

We also see some of the familiar White House figures of the day: H.R. Haldeman (Tate Donovan); Egil Keogh (Colin Hanks); and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters).

Elvis' team is busy catering to "The King;" Nixon's team tries to convince him that it will be good for the president to meet with Elvis because everyone loves Elvis and some of that love could translate into votes.

There's a bit of a subplot: Elvis persuades Schilling, who lives in LA, to accompany him to Washington. Schilling promises the woman he loves he'll be home in time to meet her parents the next day. I can't say we worry too much about whether he'll make it.

Shannon and Spacey come awfully close to parody with their portrayals, but they're far too skilled to let the movie degenerate into impersonations of two famous men, both of whom had little use for the Black Panthers, hippies and the counterculture.

Shannon convincingly finds the loneliness of a man who long ago got lost in his own image, but who also knows how to use that image to his advantage. And Spacey conveys all of Nixon's pettiness, as well as his deal-making instincts.

I'm not sure that Elvis & Nixon, which doesn't use any of Elvis' music but adds a lot of R&B to its soundtrack, is more than an amplified sketch, but why quibble: In Shannon and Spacey's hands, it produces a hunk, a hunk of pointed laughs.

Bullets, blood -- and Arnold

Schwarzenegger's older, but still ready for action. Are we?

Arnold Schwarzenegger continues his big-screen comeback with The Last Stand, a zealously violent and gleefully preposterous explosion of dramatic cliches and gun violence.

Korean director Kim Jee-woon certainly does his best to bring super-charged kick to a tired story about a small-town sheriff (Schwarzenegger) who faces off against an escaped Mexican drug czar (Eduardo Noriega). After out-foxing his FBI captors, Noriega's Gabriel Cortez heads for the border. Along the way, he's helped by a small army of brutal loyalists.

Where FBI agents -- led by Forest Whitaker -- fail, Schwarzenegger's Ray Owens is bound to succeed, hardly a spoiler in a movie that appropriates key plot points from every Western in which lawmen face impossible odds. What? You thought Arnold would come off as a chump?

Arnold's Sheriff Owens receives support from his deputies (Luis Guzman, Jamie Alexander and Zach Gilford). Johnny Knoxville provides what passes for comic relief as an oddball collector of exotic weapons, some of which figure in the movie's final showdown.

We know from the start that Cortez and Sheriff Ray will cross paths in a last-ditch effort to keep Cortez from crossing the border.

The movie's purposefully far-fetched approach finds Schwarzenegger playing things straight in a part that occasionally requires him to refer to the fact that he's growing older. Not to worry. At 65, Arnold's still capable of turning himself into a human assault weapon.

When someone is blown away in this cartoonish bloodbath of a movie, they're really blown away, blasted into oblivion amid flashing sprays of blood. Witness what happens to poor Harry Dean Stanton, who spends a hot minute on screen as a farmer who's murdered by one of the drug czar's henchmen (Peter Stormare).

To up the ante, Cortez takes a female FBI agent (Genesis Rodriguez) hostage as he barrels toward the border in a sleek black sports car that's capable of hitting speeds of 197 miles-per-hour. He thinks he's invincible.

Kim (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) doesn't skimp on action or allow much time for soul searching. On at least one occasion, he's able to strut his stuff. A set-piece built around a car chase in a cornfield qualifies as the movie's imaginative high point.

Although The Last Stand certainly isn't meant to be taken seriously, it sometimes made me uneasy. How many more movies do we need in which artillery speaks a lot louder than any of the dialog? Fair to say, The Last Stand does its share of cheer-leading for weaponry and blood.

Perhaps to make sure that we know Arnold still has what it takes, Last Stand also offers a number of "Schwarzen-liners," the kind of one-liners that have defined Arnold's career. "I'm the sheriff,'' says Ray, as if his job title contained a Ulysses-sized biography. "My honor is not for sale."

Ray creaks a little after a fight -- and so does The Last Stand, which (either wisely or foolishly (depending on how you look at it) tries to cover its paucity with Kim's visual pyrotechnics.

Oh well, you can't say that the former governor of California isn't trying to restore his box-office primacy. Early in the movie, we learn that Ray deserted Los Angeles crime-fighting for a quieter life in small-town Arizona. He's had his fill of the big time. Unlike Ray, I don't think that's the direction Schwarzenegger wants to head.