A cop who has lost his memory

I can watch Russell Crowe in almost anything and not feel cheated. And, yes, I've seen The Pope's Exorcist. Crowe has traveled a long way from his Gladiator days; he now seems immersed in pure character work with little emphasis on heroism. In Sleeping Dogs, a jumbled noir thriller, Crowe plays a retired homicide detective who's suffering from Alzheimer's. Crowe's Roy Freeman has been given an experimental treatment to help jar his memory back to life. The story kicks in when a death row inmate (Pacharo Mzembe) asks Roy to revisit a case in which he helped get a conviction. The former detective struggles to rebuild long-ago events involving the murder of an academic (Marton Csokas) who had a sexy femme fatale research assistant (Karen Gillan). Roy asks his one-time partner and drinking buddy (Tommy Flanagan) to help. Some of the story is told in flashbacks that introduce us to an aspiring author (Harry Greenwood) who falls for Gillan's character.  Crowe gives the movie a solid center but it's not enough to keep incredulity at bay. A surprise twist of an ending fails to shock (you probably will see it coming) and Sleeping Dogs winds up squandering Crowe's efforts. 

Bob's Cinema Diary: Feb. 24 -- 'Linoleum' and 'Juniper'

 Linoleum

Few of us are lucky enough to live up to our own expectations. Those who have difficulty accepting this harsh truth often wind up bitter as they sift through the shards of crushed dreams. That's a tough way of talking about Linoleum, a mostly gentle comic movie that explores the life of Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan), a once aspiring physicist who uses his garage to host a makeshift science show for kids. When the remnants of a wayward satellite fall into Edwin's backyard, he decides to redeem his life by building a rocket that will take him to the moon. Director Colin West offers some startling sights -- notably, a red car falling from the sky -- to kick off his story. Somehow the driver of the car (also played by Gaffigan) survives and reveals that he's a former astronaut. Not only that, Edwin's show has been picked up for syndication with the former astronaut taking over Edwin's spot. To make matters worse, Edwin's wife (Rhea Seehorn) wants a divorce. His daughter (Katelyn Nacon) forms a relationship with the astronaut's son (Gabriel Rush).  By the end of the movie, West clears up the movie's mysteries and we realize that he has taken an unconventional approach to a story about recognizable themes. Brace for a scene of abuse that are tougher than the film's oddball tone might suggest. But credit West with imbuing his quirky (in the best sense of the word) movie with something more than novelty: the source and torment of unrealized potential. 

Juniper

In Juniper, Charlotte Rampling plays an alcoholic who spent her professional life as a war photographer, a career that presumably led  her to consume massive quantities of a mixture composed of gin and water. Debilitated by a broken leg, Rampling's Ruth travels from England to New Zealand to visit her widowed son (Marton Csokas)  and her rebellious teenage grandson (George Ferrier). Csokas's character promptly leaves to settle business in Britain, asking his son Sam to help with Ruth's care, a prospect that Sam greets with unsurprising resentment. The presence of a traveling nurse (Edith Poor) helps ease Sam's torment. Rampling has no trouble conveying  Ruth's bitterness and her demanding sense of superiority. Still, it's too easy to see where Juniper is heading. What could have been a hard-edged look at an alcoholic and her troubled grandson softens into the story of a redeeming relationship between grandmother and grandson. Director Matthew J. Saville's efforts benefit from Rampling and the rest of the cast but I couldn’t buy a story in which grandma proves she can be one of the boys -- for the good of her grandson, of course. Rampling's astringent performance deserved a movie to match it.

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.

A store clerk who' s really an avenger

Denzel Washington gets serious about taking out Russian mobsters.

Hardware store salesman by day. Avenger by night.

He's The Equalizer, the title character of a new thriller that reunites Denzel Washington with Antoine Fuqua, the director who guided Washington toward his best-actor Oscar in 2001's Training Day.

In The Equalizer, which is based on a 1980s TV show, Washington plays Robert McCall, a loner who works at a Boston big-box store called Home Mart. A believer in healthy eating and physical fitness, Robert helps an overweight co-worker prepare for a fitness test he must pass in order to become a security guard at Home Mart.

Health-oriented as he is, McCall is also an insomniac. He stays up all night, drinking tea in a 24-hour Boston diner and reading number 91 of the 100 great books he's set out to conquer.

Robert's monkish existence (as well as his reading of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea) is disrupted when he meets a young prostitute (Chloe Grace Moretz) who's been badly beaten by her pimp. Thus stirred, McCall's desire to protect the weak sets him on a course in which he tries to free the young woman from the tyranny of her vicious Russian mobster pimps.

In his battle with the Russians, McCall displays so much physical prowess we immediately know that he's no ordinary guy: After all, ordinary guys don't usually know how to push a corkscrew through an opponent's chin.

Later, we learn (as if we hadn't already guessed) that McCall's a former secret agent who's trying to live an anonymous life.

Washington wastes his gravitas and star power on a thriller that takes itself more seriously than it should and which culminates in an over-the-top battle in the Home Mart store, a series of deaths by hardware that's as gruesome as it is preposterous. Watch out for nail guns and power drills.

It's probably best not to think much about the social dynamics at work here. McCall is one of those disconnected characters who's trying to move through life without leaving traces.

The supporting cast tries to match Washington's intensity. Marton Csokas plays a sadistic Russian who has been sent to Boston to slow McCall's vengeful roll. Melissa Leo turns up in a small role as one of McCall's former associates, and, in what surely qualifies as the most thankless acting job of the year, Bill Pullman portrays Leo's husband, a true afterthought of a character.

The Equalizer probably will score big at the box office, but for my money, the movie traffics in the kind of revenge that works best when not presented in A-list, IMAX super-productions.

Washington's substntial presence pushes The Equalizer into the center ring, but the movie never really establishes itself as anything more than another over-amplified butt-kicker. And Fuqua's attempt to create a near-superhero -- while simultaneously maintaining an atmosphere of gritty urban realism -- hardly encourages plausibility.

Impressive as it is, McCall's vengeful spree doesn't prove emotionally satisfying. By the end, McCall's violence no longer express our collective outrage or our desire for moral balance: It's just what the man does.