Heroism on a bad day in Boston

Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg reunite for a look at the Boston Marathon bombing.

Patriots Day reunites director Peter Berg with actor Mark Wahlberg for a look at the horrible April day during which the 2013 Boston Marathon was disrupted by terrorist bombings.

Berg, who directed Wahlberg in Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon, approaches the story from two mostly compatible directions: On one hand, he's writing an ode to the city of Boston. He's celebrating the strength and good will of the city's ordinary residents. He supplements that ode to Boston with a police procedural about the frantic search to find the two bombers, who fled the scene of their foul handiwork.

Tense and well-edited, Patriots Day focuses mainly on a slightly disaffected Boston sergeant (Wahlberg) who, at the picture's opening, receives a kind of punishment assignment: He must serve in uniform at the finish line of the marathon, a job he regards as the equivalent of penance. He refers to his uniform -- not usually part of his detective's garb -- as a "clown suit."

Naturally, Wahlberg's Tommy Saunders gets more than he bargained for when a couple of bombs, planted in pressure cookers, turn a day of celebration into a day of bloodshed and grief.

In this case, Wahlberg portrays a character whose personal struggles really don't amount to much; Tommy grumbles about drawing uniformed duty, but he's basically a good-natured policeman who loves his city and his wife (Michelle Monaghan). Wahlberg certainly knows this character, and inhabits him with ease.

We also meet a variety of other characters. Kevin Bacon plays the FBI agent heading the hunt for the bombers from a Boston warehouse; John Goodman portrays the city's police commissioner.

We also meet a young couple (Rachel Brosnahan and Christopher O'Shea) who become victims of the bombers, as does an MIT security guard (Jake Picking) and a young Chinese app designer (Jimmy O. Yang), whose car is hijacked by the bombers while they're on the run.

Khandi Alexander has a brief, but entirely compelling, scene as the woman who interrogates the wife of one of the bombers (Melissa Benoist). Why Alexander doesn't find work in more movies remains a mystery to me. She's terrific here.

Meanwhile, J.K. Simmons suffers from no such shortage of exposure; here, he portrays a Watertown police sergeant who winds up with one of the bombers hiding in a boat in a Watertown driveway.

Themo Melikidze and Alex Wolff portray the two brothers who carried out this monstrous act, setting off a tidal wave of heartbreak in what should have been a day of pure excitement.

Berg focuses on the chaos and impromptu heroism that arose along with the professionalism that it took to keep the situation under control.

If you're looking for nuance, it's probably best to look elsewhere. Patriots Day offers straightforward storytelling with an emphasis on down-to-earth patriotism.

But the real point here, I think, is to salute the working people of Boston as the heart and soul of a badly wounded city. Put another way, you might summarize the whole of Patriots Day by noting that Berg seems to be bringing us one simple message: "This is what we mean by Boston Strong."

A sad-sack loses his soul mate

Steve Carell joined by a talented cast in Crazy, Stupid, Love

Steve Carell looks like a guy many of us might have gone to school with at some point or other. Carell, who made his big-screen breakthrough in 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, is neither impossibly handsome nor off-puttingly strange? His movie characters sometimes have a sad-sack quality, but can seem entirely normal -- in a middle-of-the-road sort of way. Not a comic who likes to poke a finger in anyone's eye, Carell wouldn't seem out of place on line at a Home Depot store.

An improbable leading man, Carell's comic skills nonetheless have made him a headliner, and his latest comedy -- Crazy, Stupid, Love -- surrounds him with a moderately successful mixture of relationship issues, rom-com cliches and better-than-average farce.

In Crazy, Stupid, Love Carell plays Cal, a married man whose wife (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce. After a 25-year-marriage that began with a middle-school romance, Cal and Moore's Emily probably are together more out of habit than love. To seal the divorce deal, Emily confesses to an affair with one of her office mates, an accountant played by Kevin Bacon.

Once rejected, Cal slips into full-blown depression. He also becomes an unlikely regular at an upscale singles bar, where he's the proverbial fish out of bottled water. At the bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a slick womanizer who decides to give Cal a makeover. Jacob wants to turn Cal into a mirror image of himself, a smooth operator and certified play-ah. This is what's known in the trade as a necessary contrivance, a development that allows the movie to continue and gets Hal off his bar stool.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a movie composed of meanwhiles, perhaps too many of them. Cal emerges as a love machine, and his eighth-grade son (Jonah Bobo) falls for his baby sitter (Analeigh Tipton), a girl who's four years ahead of him in school. Bobo's Robbie embodies the movie's major theme, which has to do with finding one's soul mate and pursuing him or her without fear of appearing either crazy or stupid.

In yet another "meanwhile," a young woman (Emma Stone)* rebuffs Jacob's advances; she's busy studying for her bar exam. But when Stone's Hannah is slighted by an attorney (Josh Groban) she assumes has fallen for her, she seeks out Jacob in what amounts to an expression of defiance and anger. Of course, Stone's Hannah falls for Jacob, and, of course, he suddenly realizes that there's more to life than sexual conquest. He's in love, too.

Jacob and Hannah close their love deal in a very amusing comic scene that pokes well-deserved ridicule at the final dance sequence of Dirty Dancing with its Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes rendition of Time of My Life. Last seen in the gritty Blue Valentine, the talented Gosling avoids turning Jacob into a caricature. Moore seems a little worn out in an underdeveloped role. An outgoing Stone, with her "I'll-try-anything" attitude, plays well against Gosling's cool.

I laughed at Marisa Tomei's increasingly broad portrayal of the teacher who becomes Cal's first conquest, and who lives to regret it.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris) work their way (not always successfully) through the variety of tones in Dan Fogelman's hit-and-miss screenplay. Still, a first-rate cast and a couple of well-staged comic high points push Crazy, Stupid, Love into the plus category. You'll have to make up your own mind about a sentimental, end-of-movie speech that threatens to turn Carell into the Jimmy Stewart of love.

Did it warm my heart? Not really. Carell and Moore never convinced me that they were soul mates. Still, when Crazy, Stupid, Love magnifies a comedy of misunderstanding into moments of giddy farce, it comes awfully close to fulfilling the whacky mandate of its title.

*When initially published,I incorrectly called Emma Stone, Emily Stone. My bad.

Cheers for a new edition of 'X-Men'

This prequel offers a good deal of fun.

It trivializes history, beckons to our inner mutant, and, oh yeah, offers a fair measure of summer fun. We're talking X-Men: First Class, a prequel that shows how the series' mutants split into opposing groups -- those with a "can't-we-all-get-along" credo and those who mistrust humankind, and, therefore, seek to destroy it.

First Class mostly hits the spot with an origins story that explains how Magneto and Professor Charles Xavier came to occupy their respective positions in a Marvel Comics universe occupied by mutants who are leaving humans in the dust as they move up on the evolutionary scale.

Magneto, you'll recall from previous X-Men movies, is the evil mutant; Professor Xavier helps train mutants to aid humankind.

In the hands of British director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass), X-Men: First Class advances the franchise by moving backward in time, specifically to the Cuban missile crisis which pitted the U.S. against a mighty Soviet foe, a looming nuclear showdown that feels almost quaint by today's standards.

This foray into history yields a surprisingly entertaining prequel that survives a few brushes with effects that border on the cheesy.

Credit a strong cast led by Michael Fassbender, who plays Erik, the young Holocaust survivor who will grow up to be Magneto. Erik has difficulty balancing his desire for revenge -- a Nazi killed his mother -- and his willingness to help others.

Played with conviction and charisma by Fassbender, Erik eclipses a youthful Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). Charles, also a mutant, tries to persuade Erik to join him in a quest that not only will help settle Erik's Auschwitz score, but also will benefit the rest of humanity.

The preternaturally good-natured Charles has grown up in the company of Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), a red-haired, blue-skinned mutant who can change appearances, often morphing into a lovely young blonde who wants to fit into human society.

In pivotal early action, we meet a Nazi doctor (Kevin Bacon) who's trying to force young Erik to use his psychic powers to advance evil causes. As it turns out, this Nazi doctor is Sebastian Shaw, a mutant who wants to rule the world and who re-emerges in the 1960s with a beautiful but chilly assistant, January Jones' Emma Frost.

Once the movie arrives in the 1960s, The X-Men crew gathers and begins its training, first under the guidance of a CIA official (Oliver Platt) and then on its own. Rose Byrne, last seen in "Bridesmaids," portrays a more sympathetic CIA operative.

This time around, the mutant crew includes Hank (Nicholas Hoult), Alex (Lucas Till), Sean, (Caleb Landry), Armando (Edi Gathegi) and Angel (Zoe Kravitz). Before the movie's finished, all the mutants will acquire comic-book names related to their powers: Beast, Havoc, Banshee and Darwin, for example.

The climax involves a ferocious battle of wills between mutants who are forced to take sides. Forgive me for thinking that Erik's arguments for the dark side can be more persuasive than the opposition's plea for understanding, a conclusion that may have more to do with the power of Fassbender's performance than with the strength of Magneto's powers of reason.

You get the idea: This is an enjoyable comic-book view of history as a bubbling cauldron of oppositional forces locked in a tug of war that never can be fully resolved -- at least not without jeopardizing a franchise.