'Naked Gun' loads up on jokes

  Liam Neesen and Pamela Anderson deliver a serviceable -- if remarkably belated -- entry into The Naked Gun dumb-comedy sweepstakes.  

 Because the series, which began in 1988, hasn't spawned a sequel since 1994, it's tempting to think a new edition might be pointless. Not quite. 

  If nothing else, Naked Gun’s 2025 version reminds us of the kind of comedy that swept through theaters, beginning when Airplane! took flight in 1980. Credit creators David Zucker, Jim Abrahams (now deceased), and Jerry Zucker, the team that started the ball rolling and which had nothing to do with this imitative successor.

   Working from a screenplay by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, director Akiva Schaffer adopts the joke-laden approach the material demands, piling on enough dumb gags to stock several comedies. If one joke doesn't make you laugh, hang on; another quickly will be nipping at its heels.

     Neeson winks at his intensely focused action roles with his portrayal of Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., son of the original detective Drebin, who was played by the late (and irreplaceable) Leslie Nielsen. Neeson continues in the spirit of the original, which is to say he happily surrenders to the screenplay’s foolishness, layering his performance with faux gravitas.

   For her part, Anderson strikes jokey femme fatale poses that peak with a funny impromptu nightclub performance of a ridiculously extended jazz vocal.

   The rest of cast is used to meager effect. Paul Walter Hauser, as Frank's sidekick, and CCH Pounder, as the chief of Los Angeles' generically named Police Squad, don't have much to do. Danny Huston plays the villain, a tech mogul who provides an excuse to add jokes about highly automated electric cars.

    Unfortunately, the trailer spoils the boldly absurd joke that opens the movie, but it can be fun listening to the characters take words at their most literal.

     "Take a seat,'' says Drebin to Anderson's Beth. She does, dragging one out of the police station.

      As if to squeeze every last drop out of the movie's nonstop jokiness, a stream of mostly clever gags are sprinkled throughout the end credits.

      Bad comedies can be painful. I didn't feel that way about Naked Gun, but a question arises. Why did the movie's accumulation of gags leave me feeling less than blown away? My answer: Its irreverence needed better targets.

      Unlike the earlier movies, which bit the hand that fed them by lampooning Hollywood's addiction to multiplex-filling formula, this one relies on fan service, nostalgia, and the hope that in era of smart devices, dumb humor can offer dopey relief. 

       No matter how audiences react to Naked Gun, few will accuse the movie of overstaying its welcome. The movie clocks in at a refreshing 85 minutes, almost a short by today's bloated standards.

  

Another day, another Neeson movie

 

It's difficult not to wonder whether even Liam Neeson isn't getting bored with the characters he plays. Neeson's latest tough-guy variation arrives in Blacklight, a story about an undercover agent named Travis Block. Block gets caught up in an FBI plot run by Bureau head Gabriel Robinson (Aidan Quinn). Years in the FBI have caused Travis to neglect his now-grown daughter (Claire van Der Boom). He'd like to make amends by spending more time with his granddaughter (Gabrielle Sengos). The story begins when Block is ordered to corral an agent (Taylor John Smith) who has gone off the tracks. Block soon learns there's more to the story than he initially suspected. Eventually, he teams with a young journalist (Emmy Raver-Lampman) who's trying to expose a power-grabbing scheme within the FBI. Director Mark Williams, who directed Neeson in Honest Thief, includes the requisite elements (chases, etc.) but attempts at complication fall flat. Instead of an expose about unbridled ambition we get another movie that feels as if it has rolled off the Neeson assembly line. Neeson finds suggestions of vulnerability and idiosyncrasy in his character (Travis suffers from OCD) but Blacklight remains negligible.

Liam Neeson plays a good-guy thief

 

   Predictable, preposterous, and typically dour, Honest Thief features Liam Neeson as a bank robber whose efforts at reform are thwarted by duplicitous FBI agents.

    These days, Neeson's presence often signals what's in store, and Honest Thief offers little by way of exception to the rule that casts Neeson as the individual who fights his own battles, sometimes to rescue a snatched loved one or, in this case, to save himself from evil FBI agents.

    Neeson plays Tom, a successful bank robber who, after eight years and 12 successful jobs, begins to crave normalcy. Tom's transformation begins when he meets this edition's stereotypical good woman. Annie (Kate Walsh) operates the storage facility in which Tom stashes his loot, some $9 million. 

    Tom, you see, is an unusual thief. He doesn't spend the money he steals. Moreover, he offers to give it all back in return for a light sentence, a couple of years in a Boston minimum security prison that’s close enough for Annie to visit.

    Of course, surrender isn't easy. A couple of devious FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) learn that Tom really is the so-called "In and Out Bandit" and decide to keep the money he has stolen.

  Courtney portrays Agent Nivens, the mastermind of the scheme to steal Tom's stash. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Nivens will do anything to keep the money. He's more of an amoral nut job than his partner in crime. Married with a family, Ramos' Agent Hall suffers pangs of conscience.

    Director Mark Williams leaves few genre bases untouched. Tom not only knows how to crack safes; he also knows something about bombs, knowledge he picked up as a Marine and which allows Tom to fulfill another genre requirement, setting off at least one major explosion.

    "Wow," says Annie as she watches Tom blow a house to smithereens.

    You'd think the writers could have come up with a line that at least employed a word with two syllables. 

   Even Neeson can't sell some of the dialogue, stuff about how the robberies weren't about the money but served as a means to make Tom feel alive. 

   Tom ultimately has to settle matters his way. How else? "I'm coming for you,'' he tells agent Nivens, a line that sounds as if it has been said a thousand times before.

    The actors give it their best and, at 98 minutes, Honest Thief doesn't overstay its welcome but action, violence and the always serious Neeson can't rescue this unremarkable and sometimes ludicrously plotted thriller.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 8/7/20 -- 'Made in Italy' and 'The Secret: Dare to Dream'

Made in Italy

        The last thing I want from a film is to have my heart warmed. 

     So, I was put off by the generic description I read of

Made in Italy, a movie starring Liam Neeson and his son, Micheal Richardson. But then I thought, "Hey, give it a chance. Neeson never has been an actor whose work is driven by sentiment.”

     In Made in Italy, Neeson delivers a respectable performance but even he can’t save the film from becoming a predictable exercise in "feel-goodism" -- supposedly tempered by the emotional undertow of a man who lost his wife in an automobile accident and a grown son who’s estranged from his father.

       Director James D’Arcy, who also wrote the screenplay, makes his feature debut with a story that’s smart enough to leave London, where Richardson's Jake runs an art gallery and where Neeson’s Robert has been stewing for a couple of decades. Destination: Tuscany. 

        As it turns out, Robert owns a run-down house in the Tuscan hills. Jack wants to sell the house so that he can buy the gallery he loves from his estranged wife. Her family wants to sell it out from under her soon-to-be ex-husband.

        Once in Italy, the movie turns into a variant of Under the Tuscan Sun, a story of a renovation that’s fated to bring about a father-and-son reconciliation and which proceeds with considerably less difficulty than Diane Lane faced in the 2003 version of Frances Mayes' bestselling book,  more engaging than either movie.

         While in Tuscany, Robert must rediscover the talent he’s abandoned, although the artwork shown in the movie suggests he might have done well to stay away from an easel. 
          You don’t need to have seen many movies to know that Jack eventually will fall under Tuscany’s charms.

          Valeria Biello appears so that she can put an exclamation point on Jack’s transformation. She portrays Natalia, a beautiful woman who runs the restaurant in the small town near Robert’s property. A local realtor (Lindsay Duncan) helps look for buyers.

          D’Arcy tries to put weight into the proceedings in a scene in which Robert and Jack finally have the confrontation we've know is coming all along.

          Tuscan scenery can cover many sins when it comes to movies, but Made in Italy didn’t warm my heart. A couple of times, it made it sink, though.

The Secret: Dare to Dream

          

When it comes to movies that want to make you feel better about the world, The Secret: Dare to Dream makes Made in Italy look like something Eugene O’Neill might have written.

          Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas star in a movie based on a self-help book, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Holmes plays a single mom who’s struggling to make ends meet. Lucas shows up as the kind of super dude who in most movies would turn out to be a serial killer.

          But in The Secret, Lucas’ Bray really is a nice guy and Holmes’ Miranda is more than ready to break down her emotional resistance after being widowed. 

        Predictable and seldom credible, you’d expect to be able to watch a movie such as The Secret without working up too much animosity, but director Andy Tenant (Sweet Home Alabama) lets the movie dribble on for a patience-taxing 107 minutes, sticking so close to the surface you wonder whether someone should have suggested looking up the word “subtext.”

      The inevitable romance between Bray and Miranda is punctuated by Bray’s tendency to offer bromides that amount to various restatements of one idea: even terrible things are fraught with opportunity. He talks about the law of attraction, meaning that we attract the world we live in with our thoughts: Think positive and the outcome will be positive.

    Set around New Orleans, The Secret centers on Bray’s attempts to help Katie recover when a storm sends a tree through the roof of her home. 

     Miranda has three children (Sarah Hoffmeister, Aidan Pierce Brennan, and Chloe Lee) and a mother-in-law (Celia Weston) with whom she seems to get along.

     Aside from the fact that the tree that falls into the house looks real, nothing about The Secret can overcome the fact that the movie aims to spark a romance that’s as tepid as nearly everything else that precedes it.

          

The Coens sing a weird ballad

Six short films make for a mixed bag in the Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) tackle the West in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part anthology of short films in which breathtaking visual acuity couples with a morbid sense of humor and western mythology gives way to chilly existential horror. The six films -- united because they're presented as part of a book in which they're bound -- suggest crossbreeding between lurid western pulp and tales told around a campfire.

Not all of the episodes are successful and, sorry to say, stretches of the movie are duller than you might expect from the Coens. But this is a Coen brothers film and, as such, demands some attention from those who've been following the Coens since the days of Blood Simple, some 24 years ago.

In the first episode, Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a singing cowboy with an aggressively cheerful manner. Nelson's Buster Scruggs is also a killer who guns people down between songs. One of the movie's best episodes, this one also serves as an announcement that the Coens are hell-bent on replacing the Wild, Wild West with the Weird, Weird West.

Other chapters in the Ceon's rueful book include a story about hanging starring James Franco and a bizarre riff on wagon-train movies that focuses on a woman (Zoe Kazan) traveling west to start a new life but meeting with a sorry fate.

Then there's Meal Ticket, the story of a traveling showman (Liam Neeson) who goes from town to town with a legless, armless man called Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling). Neeson's character sets Hamilton on the stage where he recites Shelley, Shakespeare and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to increasingly sparse audiences. Hamilton's career soon will be undermined by an unlikely new entertainer.

Tom Waits portrays a lone prospector who strikes gold but must fend off trouble.

The final chapter of this blood-stained book takes place on a stagecoach where Saul Rubinek (as a Frenchman), Tyne Daly (as a rigidly upright woman), Chelcie Ross (as the always-necessary bearded old trapper), and Brendan Gleeson (as a passenger who sings a sad song) take their weird ride toward ... well ... you'll have to see the movie to discover where they all wind up.

The Coens have fun with the movie's language, which is florid and overdone, the formal-sounding speech of characters aspiring to -- but not always attaining -- eloquence.

For all the Coens wit and wiliness, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs sometimes feels caught in the pages of the book that serves as its framing device, a dusty volume that may be a sorrowful lament for a world that has been mortally wounded and has nothing left to do but stagger toward the grave.

Creative as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs can be, I'm looking forward to seeing the Coens turn the page.

The woes of a beleaguered commuter

Liam Neeson wields his considerable gravitas in another collaboration with Jaume Collet-Serra, who has directed Neeson in movies such as Run All Night, Non-Stop, and Unknown. Throw in the Taken movies — not part of the Collet-Serra/Neeson collection — and you have an entire genre based on Neeson’s ability to summon mega-helpings of determination. In the new and decidedly preposterous The Commuter, Neeson portrays a downtrodden suburbanite who makes the daily commute from his home in the New York burbs to Grand Central Station. Oh, and Neeson's Michael MacCauley also happens to be a former member of the NYPD who gave up police work to become an insurance agent. In what amounts to a super-contrivance, the screenplay loads the deck against Neeson's Michael. He and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) lost most of their savings in the market debacle of 2008. Michael needs money to send his son to college but meets with another obstacle when he’s fired from the job he’s held for a decade. On the commute home, a dejected Michael encounters a stranger on a train (Vera Farmiga) who makes him an offer: $100,000 if he’ll find a person who’s not supposed to be on the train and relieve that person of a bag that contains something that someone desperately wants. Even in his frazzled state, it's difficult to believe Michael would agree, but he does and things get more complicated. The story becomes increasingly ridiculous as the movie, moving like the northbound on which its set, keeps running over its own credibility. Collet-Serra eventually stages some action and Neeson must employ some brawn as the movie builds toward a runaway train finale. Patrick Wilson signs on as Neeson’s former partner on the police force and Jonathan Banks plays one of Michael’s long-suffering fellow commuters, but Neeson holds center stage in a movie that whips up some decent action as Collet-Serra plies his skills in a confined location. But even Neeson’s seriousness can’t make sense out of a non-character in a movie that's derailed by a screenplay that feels generic and implausible.

The man who was Deep Throat

Mark Felt takes us inside the world of the FBI during the days of Watergate.

Although an FBI investigation into matters involving White House personnel can be related to today's headlines, Mark Felt: the Man Who Brought Down the White House feels a bit dated and remote. In telling the story of Mark Felt, the man better known as Watergate's Deep Throat, the movie attempts to take us inside the FBI during the time when Felt began talking to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

Working from Felt's 2006 memoir, director Peter Landesman wraps his story in so much seriousness he might as well be preparing to enshrine it in a museum. For all its portent and heaviness, Landesman's movie about the messy work of saving the republic feels more like a weighty footnote than a main event.

As the title suggests, Felt -- whose identity was kept secret until 2005 -- occupies the movie's center. Felt, we learn, was passed over for the top FBI job when Herbert Hoover died. Despite the slight, associate director Felt insisted that he remained loyal to the agency.

As the movie tells it, he became a whistleblower because he refused to see the FBI compromised as investigations into the Watergate burglary began to heat up. He wanted to defend the integrity of an agency that wasn't supposed to be tarnished by political considerations. And maybe he was also furious and hurt about not getting the job for which he spent much of his adult life preparing.

Looking gaunt and severe, Liam Neeson plays Felt as a lawman accustomed to maintaining a stony front. A father estranged from a daughter who has been won over by the counterculture, Felt quietly endures his wife's (an underused Diane Lane) drinking and dissatisfactions, and he soon finds himself at odds with interim FBI director L. Patrick Gray (Martin Csokas).

An outsider to the ranks of law enforcement, Gray is put in the job to be a Nixon ally in the FBI after Hoover's death. Felt also finds himself at odds with FBI agent Bill Sullivan (Tom Sizemore), a guy who doesn't mind bending the rules and who becomes Gray's top assistant.

Scenes in which Felt interacts with fellow agents -- some of whom respected and feared him -- make us feel as if we're piercing FBI walls of secrecy, but that's not enough to elevate the movie to the level of importance to which it must have aspired.

Michael C. Hall has a nice turn as White House counsel John Dean, and Bruce Greenwood turns up as a journalist with whom Felt confided before he established a secret relationship with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

For the most part, Landesman places the film squarely on Neeson's shoulders, using the actor's statuesque presence as a key to setting a somber tone. Nothing wrong with that, but this gloomy earnestness seems to be Mark Felt's only tone. The movie sticks to it as doggedly as Felt adheres to his desire to protect the FBI from concerns that he insists are irrelevant to law enforcement.

Mark Felt leans heavily toward portraying Felt as an American hero -- perhaps with the mud of accommodation on his shoes, but a hero nonetheless.

The movie tells us that in addition to his Watergate efforts, Felt was involved in dubious FBI efforts to find members of the Weather Underground. Felt was found guilty, but eventually was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. This part of Felt's story plays like an afterthought. Besides, Felt remains noble to the end, refusing to pass any blame to subordinates.

There's no question that Felt was at the heart of events that shook the nation -- but Mark Felt wears its solemnity of purpose like a straight jacket, something that can't be said about All the President's Men, still the best Watergate movie of all.

Two priests suffer in 17th century Japan

Martin Scorsese takes his long-awaited crack at a novel by Japanese author Shusaku Endo..

If director Martin Scorsese chooses to grapple with questions of doubt and faith, he should at minimum be commended for the singularity and intensity of an interest that seems to have marked much of his cinematic career, perhaps his entire life.

So it's no surprise that after 30 years of trying, Scorsese finally has taken a crack at the Japanese novel Silence in what some are calling the third in his trilogy of overtly "religious" films. The first two being The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun.

Written by Jay Cocks and Scorsese, the movie takes place in 17th century Japan at time when the country is being purged of its burgeoning Catholic population. The Japanese authorities are intent on staving off this first salvo of encroachment from the West.

Working from a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, Cocks and Scorsese create a grim world of suffering. The Japanese use a mixture of rigorously polite cajoling and brutal torture to persuade Christians to renounce their faith.

The most common form of renunciation involves stepping on a bronze tile or fumie that has been engraved with a religious image, thus marking an outward and incontrovertible sign of rejection of an abhorred western theology.

Silence weaves a story around its many torture sequences. Two Portuguese Jesuits (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) sneak into Japan to find their mentor Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson). They can't believe what they've been told: Ferreira has renounced his faith and taken a Japanese wife. He lives contentedly in Nagasaki.

Before they leave for Japan, their superior (Ciaran Hinds) warns the two priests that Catholics are being tortured and killed in Japan. He cautions them against what surely will be a life-threatening journey, but they insist on proving that their mentor didn't betray his faith, a task that's doubly important for them because they took their faith cues from Ferreira.

Visually, Garfield and Driver couldn't be more different. Looking increasingly Christ-like or at least like a movie version of Christ, Garfield's Rodriguez has doubts, expressed by his inner voice and prayers. His experiences in Japan test his faith, and he posses the questions that are supposed to drive the movie.

These questions are stated -- often whispered by Garfield as queries about why God doesn't seem to hear the cries of the suffering faithful -- but they don't animate the movie or give it a sense of urgent, necessary life. Some of that may result from Garfield's inability to penetrate the depths of Rodriguez's tortured soul.

Driver, who's less seen because the two priests eventually split up, is an unusual looking actor, but here, he's been given the face of a gargoyle, otherworldly and strange.

Now, when it comes to torture, the Japanese are portrayed as adept and serious. They drip boiling water on bare flesh; they tie people to ocean-side posts and let them drown as the tide crashes in; they behead people; and they wrap people in straw and set them on fire. As a kind of piece de resistance, Christians are hanged upside down, their heads stuffed into holes in the dirt. Small incisions are made on their necks so that their blood slowly drains out of them.

The Japanese characters are strangely problematic, sometimes cartoonish. The Inquisitor who engineers all this torture (Issey Ogata) has a caricatured look. I've seen Ogata's performance described as comic. It's certainly weird and unexpected.

At one point, he hears disconcerting news and his body nearly deflates, something in the manner of air released from a balloon. Very strange.

Yosuke Kubozuka plays Kitchijiro, a self-confessed sinner who sometimes guides the priests and who has become something of an expert on what it means to renounce one's faith. He's a repeat offender.

Oddly, the movie lacks an exalting climax. I can't say more about this without revealing what should be discovered in a theater, but I'll also say that the issues Scorsese takes from Endo aren't general issues of faith in the face of terrible suffering, but issues pertinent to Catholic ideas about faith, martyrdom and apostasy as Endo (and subsequently Scorsese) interpret them.

Torture, of course, is an obviously condemnable form of coercion and watching it is appropriately appalling, but I don't know why we should be more interested in this particular part of Japanese history than we are, say, in the Spanish Inquisition that preceded it by several centuries.

Still, this is where Scorsese has landed to make a film that has been bracingly shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Preieto, whose images have staying power and depth.

It's not easy to reach a solid conclusion about Silence. As intellectually fraught as the movie can be, it also can be boring and stilted. At 161 minutes, it may seem nearly interminable to those who aren't caught in its sway.

For a movie that seems to want to explore questions about the nature and obligations of faith, Silence feels as if it has veered off into an exotic and foreign territory from which it has excavated a story full of gruesome sights and narrowly focused preoccupations.

Like the character Garfield plays, Silence too often feels like it's living in a world of its own and talking mostly to itself.

A monster calls, a boy listens

A 12-year-old struggles with the looming death of his mother.

Few movies deal with what happens when a child must confront the death of a loved one. Fair to say, then, that A Monster Calls musters considerable courage in taking on a difficult subject by telling the story of Conor (Lewis MacDougall), a 12-year-old boy who's losing his mother (Felicity Jones) to cancer.

Adapted from a YA novel by Patrick Ness, who based his story on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, another YA novelist who really did die of cancer, A Monster Calls plumbs young Conor's imagination by introducing him to a tree monster (voiced by Liam Neeson) who guides the boy through what may turn out to be the worst period of his life.

The monster follows a tough love approach, reinforced by Neeson's fine voice performance. The monster doesn't coddle Conor, but informs him that he'll be told three stories (beautifully animated set pieces within the movie) before learning the most important truth pertaining to his situation.

Conor isn't entirely captivated by the stories, which the monster concludes with some observations that probably are too directly expressed: People occupy various places on the moral spectrum at various times; few are entirely good or irredeemably bad; sometimes bad deeds have positive outcomes.

Aside from his mother's condition, Conor has other worries. He's bullied at school, and he dreads the prospect of living with his stern grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) after his mother dies. Conor's dad (Toby Kebbell) has moved to America, and has started a new family.

Director J.A. Bayona does a fine job mixing the movie's live action, animation and effects-driven scenes, so much so that the movie's somber mood may remind you of something that another Spanish director (Guillermo del Toro) might have rendered -- albeit in even more ominous fashion.

The performances are all good; it's particularly refreshing that MacDougall isn't a generically cute movie kid.

It's also touching that Conor and his mom are soulmates in the world of the imagination. Both have artistic inclinations. Perhaps that's how Conor learned to use his imagination both to cope with and escape from a situation he doesn't want to face.

I could go on, but let me say the most important thing: The movie put a lump in my throat, even as I wondered whether adults will want to see what can be construed as a kids' movie -- even if it really isn't a kids' movie of standard-issue variety. It's possible that A Monster Calls is more a movie about a kid than a movie for kids, particularly younger ones.

And some of the scenes may challenge parents to do some explaining, notably one in which a furious Conor destroys his grandmother's living room, an instance in which Conor vents his darker impulses.

Despite such cautions, Bayona and company have managed to make a movie that doesn't shrink from a difficult subject. Good for them -- and good for those viewers willing to give it a try.

After all, it's worth remembering that not everything that happens in childhood qualifies as kid stuff.

'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.

An exercise in diminishing returns

Pieces of puzzle don't fit together well in Paul Haggis's latest.

Director Paul Haggis's new movie, Third Person falters, but boasts an unusually watchable cast led by Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Adrien Brody and Israeli actress Moran Atias.

Perhaps best known for the over-rated Oscar-winner Crash (2004), Haggis tells three related stories that don't cohere until the movie's unsatisfying conclusion.

Third Person has not been particularly well reviewed, but as flawed as I believe the movie to be, I was happy to see a film that, at least, attempted to deal with adult concerns.

In the film's best performance, Neeson plays a stalled novelist who's living in a Paris hotel, where he's trying to finish a book. He's left his wife (Kim Basinger) at home in the U.S., perhaps so that he can carry on an affair with his mistress (Wilde), a journalist who's also trying her hand at fiction.

Brody plays a businessman who steals other people's fashion designs and sells them to manufacturers of knock-offs. On a trip to Rome, where it's practically impossible to eat badly, he becomes an ugly American in search of a hamburger.

Dubious taste aside, Brody's character finds himself involved with a Romanian immigrant (Atias) who pulls him into a web of possible deceit.

In the third story, Mila Kunis plays a New York actress who's working as a maid while trying to win visiting rights with her young son, who lives with his artist father (James Franco). Kunis's character has been accused of abusing the child.

The actors give the enterprise their best shot. I especially enjoyed seeing Neeson in a role which didn't require him to wield a gun. Wilde's performance as a woman of mercurial moods proves alternately alluring and alarming, and Kunis pushes her character far out on an emotional ledge.

Third Person -- which deals with issues of trust and betrayal and also with the loss of children -- is too transparently tricky and, at times, too willing to push matters toward strained extremes. As a result, many of its twists tend to take us out of the picture's flow.

By trying so hard to describe a world of unrecognized connections, Haggis -- who also wrote the screenplay -- loses the battle between life's real complexities and those dreamed up by a writer who's capable of intriguing us one minute and making our eyes roll with disbelief, the next.

A comic western gets thrown from its horse

A Million Ways to Die in the West floods the screen with gags. Most of them don't work.

Watching A Million Ways to Die in the West, a new comedy from Seth MacFarlane, I wondered about Hollywood. Why has an obviously clever comic with good looks and a gameshow smile been given the opportunity to over-indulge what seem like fantasies created by watching too many Westerns?

Maybe it's because MacFarlane tries (boy, does he try) to make us laugh with intentionally placed anachronisms, a surfeit of fart jokes and many other crude expressions that make it seem as if he's testing puerile limits by focusing on all manner of bodily excretions.

When I first saw the trailer for A Million Ways to Die in the West, it struck me that MacFarlane might have hitched his horse to a wagon that long ago left the stable. The Western has been parodied before, most prominently in Mel Brooks' classic Blazing Saddles (1974).

Alas, I was right -- or at least I think I was. From its opening credits -- presented in the style of big-scenery westerns popular in the 1950s -- it seemed that MacFarlane's trip west would be marked by a mixture of dubious taste and comic irrelevance.

The movie's major insight goes something like this: Life on the frontier was miserable in nearly every regard, offering many opportunities for those who braved the western wilds to meet with doom, degradation and wounded pride.

To make his point, MacFarlane plays Albert, a sheep farmer who lives with his parents.

During the course of the movie, Albert complains about the West and is rejected by the local schoolmarm (Amanda Seyfried).

Albert eventually finds true love with the wife (Charlize Theron) of a brutally cruel outlaw (Liam Neeson).

Suffice it to say that each of the aforementioned actors seems to be working in a different movie. Seyfried can't seem to find a handle on a character who abandons the hapless Albert for a man who runs the local mustache shop (Neil Patrick Harris), an emporium that seems to specialize in a Snidely Whiplash look.

As a woman who knows how to wield a six-shooter, Theron seems committed to acting as an audience for MacFarlane, reacting as if her paycheck depended on turning herself into his personal laugh track.

Neeson mostly plays things straight, adding to the tonal confusion that prevails throughout most of this lengthy comic ride. The movie lasts for 116 minutes, many of them marked by inertness at their core.

It might be of some help to catalog the various jokes. The most repetitive of them involves the local brothel where a hooker (Sarah Silverman) plies her trade.

Silverman's Ruth talks freely about her work to her fiancee (Giovanni Ribisi), an avowed Christian who agrees that he shouldn't sleep with Silverman's character until they're properly married.

Repetition is also evident in the movie's several gunfights, which breed little tension and lots of fretting about when MacFarlane plans to bring the proceedings to a close.

The movie even includes a lengthy fantasy sequence, which is supposed to depict a drug-induced trip that MacFarlane's character experiences when he meets Cochise (Wes Studi).

Some of the jokes undermine themselves. MacFarlane probably was trying to make a comment about western racial attitudes with a bit that takes place at a shooting gallery at a county fare. The shooting gallery theme: Shoot a runaway slave.

It's a misfire: The offensiveness of the conceit trumps any satirical point MacFarlane migth have had in mind.

Say this: MacFarlane isn't shy about turning his humor on himself, most notably when a sheep urinates on his face. Yes, it's disgusting.

Some of MacFarlane's one liners have a sharpness about them. At one point he says that tending sheep is like trying to walk 150 really stupid dogs at the same time.

But MacFarlane's comic vision seems mired in conflict. He tries to pay homage to the grand scenery of Westerns while at the same time trashing the romanticism that has enriched the genre.

A Million Ways to Die in the West probably will attract some interest, primarily because MacFarlane scored big with Ted, a comedy about a foul-mouthed teddy bear. MacFarlane directed Ted, and also provided the bear's voice, which meant he remained off screen. He proved that he could garner laughs from a one-joke movie.

In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane founders with a comedy that bombards us with one-liners, sight gags, gross-outs, and a cornucopia of jokes, most of them unbuoyed by anything resembling comic exuberance.

'Non-stop' trades action for sense

Liam Neeson reunites with director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Unknown) for Non-Stop, a thriller set almost entirely on a jetliner that's facing a terrorist threat.

In addition to exploiting current fears about flying, Non-Stop proves laughably improbable and only moderately suspenseful.

With action-oriented movies such as Taken and to a lesser extent The Grey, Neeson seems to be on the verge of turning himself into a cliche.

Here, he's playing another depressed hero: He's Bill Marks, a Federal Air Marshal who's mired in guilt and prone to heavy drinking. We can guess from the outset that Marks is stricken by a terrible event from his past, probably something involving a daughter.

Despite his personal baggage, Bill gets a better deal than the audience. He's riding comfortably in business class on a flight to London. Once on board, he finds himself seated next to a friendly passenger (Julianne Moore) who also likes to tipple.

The plot arrives almost before the passengers can fasten their seat belts: Bill begins receiving text messages over a secure network. It seems that one of the passengers is a terrorist who plans to kill one passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is deposited in an off-shore bank account.

To add a further level of complication, TSA folks on the ground believe that Bill is the hijacker, a rogue agent out for a big pay day.

Bill must find the real hijacker even as he argues with authorities about his right to do so. Like most heroes, he's on his own.

Joining Moore in supporting roles are Michelle Dockery and best supporting actress nominee Lupita Nyong'o (as flight attendants).

Nyong'o is entirely wasted, which may be just as well because this rising star hasn't much to gain from a mediocre thriller that throws around red herrings before we learn what's motivating the hidden terrorist.

Let's just say the explanation left me groaning in disbelief. It's brazen, contrived and about as likely as finding an empty middle seat in the center aisle of a trans-Atlantic flight.

Collet-Serra stages an explosive finale which I won't reveal here, but which probably should be avoided by travelers who tend toward white-knuckle flying.

Look, Neeson has plenty of presence, and he's become particularly adept at adding gravitas to these kinds of roles, but I look forward to the day when he finds a bigger challenge -- for him and for us.

Another careless action movie

Taken 2 spreads incoherent action around a plot full of ludicrous improbabilities. And, yes, it probably will make a few buck.

Consider a Mills family outing. A picnic? No. A holiday celebration in which everyone gives thanks for his or her blessings? No, not that, either.

As seen in the new action movie Taken 2, a Mills family outing involves enough bullets to stock the invasion of several small countries.

It all begins innocently enough. Dad (Liam Neeson) invites his former wife (Framke Jansen) and his 19-year-old daughter (Maggie Grace) to join him in Istanbul for a restful getaway. This purported vacation quickly devolves into a wild adventure involving vengeful Albanian kidnappers, bruising car chases, ferocious gun play, exploding grenades, terrible torture and severe beatings.

And you thought the Mills family didn't know how to have a good time.

All of this mayhem transpires in a sequel to the 2008 hit in which Neeson portrayed Bryan Mills, an ex-CIA agent who rescued his daughter from brutal kidnappers who threatened to sell her into sex slavery.

Taken 2 reprises the first installment, adding a few variations on kidnapping twists. This time, Bryan and his former wife are kidnapped. After his daughter helps him escape, Bryan must return to save his former wife, who may be interested in re-establishing a relationship with him.

Neeson usually receives praise for bringing a sense of bulky gravitas to any film in which he chooses to act. He does that here, but you have to wonder when Neeson is going to apply his considerable talents to something more substantial than a blurry action film.

I say "blurry" because director Oliver Megaton -- like many before him -- seems to specialize in over-edited, incoherent action sequences that are supposed to make the pulse pound, but, at least for me, failed to gin up the requisite excitement.

Worse than that, the screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen revolves around a series of preposterous improbabilities.

So how is that different from dozens of other movies, you ask? Well, we may be willing to accept this kind of plotting in a Bond movie, but Taken 2 presents itself as a serious thriller, laying on as much faux urgency as possible. Given that, it becomes difficult not to giggle when a captured Bryan uses a mini-cell phone to give his daughter Kim complicated instructions on where to find him.

Rade Serbedzija shows up as the chief villain, an Albanian who wants to avenge the death of a son that Bryan killed in the last installment. Serbedzija is surrounded by as many swarthy looking men as possible, the movie's way of signaling danger.

At the picture's opening, Serbedzila's Murad stands over the graves of Albanians sent to their deaths by Mills, who we know is a finely honed killing machine.

"The dead cry out to us for justice," he says.

Maybe, but the living cry out for a movie that's more than a collection of action set pieces strung around a lamely conceived plot that raises two unequally weighted questions: Will all members of the Mills clan survive and will Kim ever pass the driver's test she failed back in Los Angeles before things went so terribly wrong?

Missteps sink this 'Battleship'

It looks like a video game. Too bad you have to watch it instead of playing.

Terrible dialogue, ear-splitting noise, an uninspired premise, patriotic pandering, booming close-ups and an ocean full of cornball sentiment help sink the action movie Battleship not long after it leaves port. Derived from a Hasbro board game, Battleship is one of those lamentable movies that seem to have been assembled from spare parts taken from other movies. You'll find the cacophonous metal-on-metal abrasions of the Transformer movies, the fist-pumping bravado of movies such as Top Gun and a sic-fi premise that could have been lifted from any number of aggressively commercial entertainments from director Michael Bay. You know the drill: An alien force is about to invade the Earth. It falls to a slacker hero (Taylor Kitsch) to save humanity by finding his emerging manhood and leading the charge against the aliens. A large cast features several highlighted performances: Alexander Skarsgard of True Blood fame == plays Kitsch's older brother, and Brooklyn Decker portrays Kitsch's love interest. She's the daughter of an admiral (a little seen Liam Neeson). Director Peter Berg piles on the heavy action, much of it built around chaotic camera movements and frenzied editing. The aliens, once revealed, are disappointing creatures. Maybe it doesn't matter because most of the time, we can't' see them anyway: They're hidden by armored suits that make them look as if they were conceived as action figures long before there were jammed into this orgy of destruction. Berg takes a bow toward The Greatest Generation in an effort to blend contemporary war heroes with those from our more glorious World War II past, but the whole business comes off as rigid salute to the kind of courage found only in movies, bolstered, of course, by a megaton barrage of CGI. Did I say the movie is loud? Think of it this way: Experiencing Battleship is like listening to a symphony composed entirely of cymbal crashes.

Liam Neeson vs. wilderness and wolves

The Grey takes us deep into the Alaskan wild for a mixture of action and horror.

In the new movie The Grey, Liam Neeson dances with wolves that, for the most part, get the best of a band of grizzled oil rig workers who are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a harrowing plane crash.

I don’t know if Neeson is having trouble finding quality scripts or whether he enjoys making these kinds of movies, but he certainly gives action directors their money's worth by bringing instant gravitas to a genre that’s not always taken seriously.

In this case, Neeson – who also starred in Taken and Unknown -- has signed on for a movie that sets action and horror against an inhospitable and frozen landscape.

Once the surviving workers get their bearings, it becomes clear that they’ve quickly made the transition from gritty hard guys to potential wolf food. And it doesn’t take long for director Joe Carnahan, who directed Neeson in the A-Team, to show us the wolves, large, ferocious howlers that are naturally cunning and lacking in mercy, sort of like film critics.

Neeson’s John Ottway, an emotionally wounded man who’s charged with shooting wolves that threaten the oil workers, begins the movie at a forbidding-looking Alaskan drilling site. He's in such a distraught state that he even contemplates suicide.

Ottway obviously has known some other kind of life. He seems to have gone to Alaska in the same way that an earlier generation of movie characters joined the French Foreign Legion. I guess we’re meant to think that the plane crash forces Ottway into a last-ditch attempt at engagement.

The crew that tries to escape the crash scene with Ottway is appropriately motley. The men are differentiated from one another in mostly expected ways. Frank Grillo, for example, portrays an ex-con whose belligerence becomes his defining trait. He’s quick to challenge Ottway’s leadership, even though it’s clear that Ottway has plenty of wilderness savvy.

Obviously, many in this small band will die, and, as is often the case with such movies, you can amuse yourself by speculating about the order in which the unlucky will be picked apart by wolves. You also can brace for the film’s more “philosophical” moments, which play like so much dorm-discussion baloney.

Much is made of a poem (“Once More Into the Fray”) that Ottway says his father wrote. It’s the kind of poetry that could be appreciated only by someone who’s never read a good poem; sort of Jack London meets a Boy Scout handbook.

But if the movie has a message, you’ll find it in the poem: Grit your teeth and do battle with hostile nature.

Carnahan uses gauzy but obvious flashbacks to fill in a blank that doesn’t need filling; they explain why Ottway tends to be so damn morose.

Hey, I’m as frightened by an assortment (or so I've read) of real wolves, puppets and animatronics as the next guy. Some of the scenes in The Grey are rich with apprehension, and a few of the movie's twists even go against the grain of formula

Still, it would have taken a better-written movie to get me to leap whole-heartedly into this glum and frozen fray.

Another thriller with tension and plot holes

The build-up beats the resolution in a sometimes tense thriller.

Walking out of a preview screening of Unknown – a new thriller starring Liam Neeson – I turned to my wife and said, “If that hadn’t been based on a true story, I don’t think I would have believed a minute of it.”

I was being facetious, of course. Unknown is not based on a true story, and it’s not particularly believable, although much of the time I’m not sure its credibility really matters.

More to the point: If Unknown had had half a brain, it might have been an exceptional thriller. But wait. It does have half a brain – the half that can concoct an intriguing premise, create real tension and spice things up with decently mounted action sequences.

The other half? The half that knows how to bring a thriller to a satisfying conclusion? That half never seems to have developed.

Still, Unknown keeps you involved, in no small part because its story takes place Berlin during a chilly November weekend; the movie has enough frosty atmosphere to slide past some of its rough spots.

Neeson plays Martin Harris, a botanist who flies to Berlin with his wife (January Jones) for a biotech convention. When he arrives at his hotel, Harris realizes that he’s left his briefcase at the airport. He grabs a cab, and races back to the airport. En route, the cab gets into a horrific accident. Harris winds up in a four-day coma.

When he awakens and tries to resume his life, he’s greeted with alarming news. His wife no longer recognizes him. Worse yet, another man is claiming to be Martin Harris. This impostor seems to be living Harris’ life.

This leads to the obvious questions: Has Harris gone crazy? Is there a scandalous plot afoot? For reasons neither Harris nor we know, is someone trying to push the real Harris aside? It’s either the world’s greatest case of identity theft or Harris has fallen prey to paranoid delusions, a distinct possibility because he hit his head during the vividly presented crash.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) has skills. He knows how to create suspense, put an action sequence in motion and keep us wondering just when Unknown’s going to get around to making sense of a plot that’s better in the build-up than in its resolution.

Neeson (Clash of the Titans and Taken) seems to be making a habit of finding scripts that emphasize action, although this one does on occasion flirt with intelligence. Look, I like Neeson's work, but worry that his most interesting recent role took the form of a near-cameo in Paul Haggis’ forgettable The Next Three Days. He played an expert on jailbreaks.

The rest of the cast proves variable. Jones, best known for her work in Mad Men, seems a one-dimensional actress in a role that required at least two. Veteran German actor Bruno Ganz may be looking a bit decrepit, but still can steal a scene. Ganz plays a private investigator and former Stasi officer who tries to help Martin figure out what’s happening to him.

And Diane Kruger (of Inglourious Basterds) does a decent enough job as an illegal Bosnian immigrant who drives the cab that plunges Martin into a river. Kruger’s Gina may be able to help Martin straighten out the mess in which he finds himself.

The movie never really untangles all of its own messes, but it has some thrills and tension. In the end, you don’t need to believe its story to get something out of it. I hate to keep repeating this February mantra, but: Lower your expectations and proceed accordingly.

Staging a jailbreak for love

A husband wants to help his wife escape from prison, but director Paul Haggis can't quite give the movie the credibility and obsessive drive it needs.

An air of unbelievability hangs over The Next Three Days, a thriller that focuses on a community-college professor who attempts to free his wife from prison, where she's serving a life sentence for murder. Having exhausted all legal remedies, Russell Crowe’s John Brennan does what red-blooded American men are expected to do, at least in movies: He takes matters into his own hands. John tries to devise an escape plan for his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks).

Written and directed by Paul Haggis (Crash and Valley of Elah), The Next Three Days is a loose remake of the 2008 French thriller Anything For Her. The story's origins may explain why so much of this Pittsburgh-based drama feels slightly off, as if something has been lost in translation.

The Next Three Days charts John’s progression from amateur to professional. As an English teacher, he knows virtually nothing about jailbreaks or the criminal world. Much of the movie’s 133-minute running time must, therefore, be devoted to John’s education. He slowly learns how to conduct himself in a seamy new world, no easy task for a teacher who also must take care of his six-year-old son.

An all-too-brief encounter between John and a savvy ex-con (Liam Neeson)adds zest. I found myself wishing that Neeson’s appearance, as an expert on escapes, had amounted to more than a cameo. Extending his role might have given Crowe someone to play off, liberating him from having to carry the picture by himself.

The script makes some effort to test John’s commitment to his wife. At one point, he meets an attractive young mother (Olivia Wilde) at a local playground. Will John yield to temptation and develop a relationship with her?

Haggis tries to maintain a mild air of uncertainty about Lara’s guilt, but John never wavers in his belief. He insists that he knows his wife well enough to be sure that she’s incapable of murder. Sure she’s prone to sudden flashes of anger, but who isn’t?

When the movie's third act rolls around, Haggis generates tension and excitement, and he makes us wonder about the propriety of rooting for someone who's breaking lots of laws -- albeit in an effort to right what he perceives as a monstrous wrong.

But the combination of Crowe and Haggis creates expectations for something more than old-pro efficiency and gloomy drive. Like Crowe's character, the movie feels entirely too dutiful in its execution.