Lots of commotion, too few thrills

   

   Dwayne Johnson finds a superpower showcase in Black Adam, the latest entry into the DC Comics Universe. Johnson plays a character with superpowers but his Adam also has a vengeful side, which is supposed to make him more interesting — at least on paper.

   A noise machine built around a flood of unimpressive action, the movie features many battles in which bolts of lightning shoot from the fingertips of heroes and villains. There's enough zapping here to run a zillion microwaves but none of it has much real charge.

   A prologue explains how Adam acquired his superpowers by taking us back the ancient kingdom of Kahndaq where an enslaved Adam loses his wife and young son and finds himself in a state of suspended animation (or something like it) for 5,000 years. 

   Thanks to Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) Adam is revived in present-day Kahndaq,  a Middle Eastern-style country that is being invaded by militaristic thugs. The people of Kahndaq are not free.

   Adrianna comes into possession of a crown (well, it had to be something) that everyone else in the movie seems to want. Why not? It's made of Eternium. Ah, you say, that explains everything.

  Later, Adrianna’s son Amon (Bohdi Sabongui) will be kidnapped and Adrianna will implore Adam to help rescue the kid.

   Another story intersects with Adam’s. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) wants to combat Adam by assembling a special team dubbed The Justice Society. Calling this four-member group a "society" stretches the term, but I guess Justice Quartet would impose too severe a limit on future growth.

   Society members include Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). An idiosyncratic array of powers, none of them especially intriguing, is distributed throughout the group.

    Toward the end, the movie goes sentimental over the friendship between Hawkman and the self-sacrificing Doctor Fate. My heart strings remained unplucked.  

    Adam, who flies but more often seems to float like a balloon in a Thanksgiving day parade, wants revenge for the murder of his wife and son five millennia ago.  Say this: The man knows how to hold a grudge.

   The only looming question: Will Adam unite with the Justice Society to help save Amon, presumably so that the kid can continue skate boarding through Kahndaq’s deteriorating streets?

   The future of a free Khandaq may also hang in the bargain.

   Not enough? Eventually, a character called Sabbac  (Marwan Kenzari) emerges to lead the legions of hell against …well … just about everyone. 

    Oh well, I liked the name. Sabbac has ring to it, don’t you think? 

    The movie makes attempts at humor but they are, for the most part, just that: attempts.

     To make the already obvious even clearer, the movie uses the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black to underline some of the clangorous action. 

      Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s best bit arrives in a postscript that involves a surprise appearance. Talk about too little too late.

    Will there be more Black Adam movies? I don't know but it might be best to say Shazam and hope for the best.

    And if you don’t know about Shazam, don’t worry. You’ll probably be doing something else this weekend anyway.

Jackie Chan hits a somber note

The Foreigner pits Chan's character against a former IRA man played by Pierce Brosnan.

No one has made martial arts feel more joyous than Jackie Chan. Throughout his long movie career, Chan has been involved in some of the most intricately brilliant fight scenes ever filmed, many of them choreographed in ways that tip over into physical comedy.

One assumes that the always likable Chan, now 63 and perhaps past the point where he wants to risk more injuries, may not be able to continue at the bruising pace he once set. So it's hardly surprising to see Chan taking another tack in director Martin Campbell's The Foreigner, an adaptation of an insensitively named 1995 Stephen Leather novel called The Chinaman.

In The Foreigner, Chan's work takes a somber, determined turn as he plays a London father whose daughter is killed during a bombing by a group that identifies itself as a new incarnation of the IRA. Having given up his career as a hitman, Chan's Quan Ngoc Minh resumes action, setting out to avenge his daughter. Quan's mission of revenge brings him into the orbit of a former IRA man now serving in the government, Pierce Brosnan's Liam Hennessy.

Quan believes that Brosnan's character knows who's responsible for the London bombing. Having gotten nowhere with British counterintelligence agents, Quan insists that Hennessy name names. If the law won't provide justice, Quan will get it for himself.

It takes time for Chan to reveal his character's lethal side. Quan bows when he meets people and generally presents himself as an obscure restaurateur who runs a London takeaway joint. Few know that Quan was raised in Vietnam, where he was trained by US special forces. As a result, Quan knows how to build bombs and kick butt. He can commit to a mission with unrelenting persistence.

Quan heads to Belfast, following Hennessy to his country estate. There, Quan steadily raises the ante by setting off a series of increasingly powerful explosions. Meanwhile, Hennessy must deal with his angry wife (Orla Brady), the British government bureaucracy and a variety of other problems, including the ire of an IRA man who believes Hennessy has sold out men who once were his bothers in arms.

Chan vanishes for long stretches as Hennessy's intrigue-laden story moves toward center stage.

Campbell treats the material more as a political thriller than a martial arts display, and the whole package winds up as a hard-boiled entertainment that's not afraid to strike at point-blank range even if it doesn't quite manage to earn credit as more than another darkly hued movie shot through with the customary bitter undercurrents.

Senseless, relentless and cruel

Owen Wilson and Lake Bell play a mom and dad fleeing Asian rebels who are portrayed as savages.

No Escape, a rank helping of violence, makes the fate of one American family the focal point of attention in an unnamed Asian country that's consumed by rebellious street violence. Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, actors who usually work in comedies, are miscast as a Mom and Dad who wind up on the run with their two daughters (Sterling Jerins and Claire Geare). Pierce Brosnan turns up as a disheveled bum who's more than he seems. Brosnan's character sounds the movie's excuse for a theme (western money interests have screwed the Third World) and performs a couple of last-minute rescues. Guess it helps to have played Bond. Absent any significant thematic thrust, the movie comes off as another example of fear-mongering in which decent Americans are threatened by hostile, uncivilized thugs. Director John Erick Dowdle, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Drew, serves up lots of punishing violence and one vertiginous sequence in which Wilson's character tosses his daughters over a chasm between two tall buildings in order to save them. Dowdle works the movie's family over, but No Escape increasingly feels like an exercise in purposeless cruelty. Early in the movie, Owen's Jack Dwyer, who has come to the country as a mid-level businessman, leaves his wife and kids at the hotel where they're being housed. He wanders the city's market in search of a newspaper. Judging by how little Jack seems to know about the country he's in, you may wonder whether he's ever bothered to read one.

It's spy vs. spy in 'November Man'

Pierce Brosnan returns to espionage in a low-grade thriller.

Pierce Brosnan is beginning to look a bit long in the tooth for action-oriented spy antics. After all, it's been 12 years since Die Another Day, Brosnan's last run as the fabled 007.

Undeterred by passing time, Brosnan dives into a pit full of Eastern Europen mayhem to play CIA agent Peter Devereaux in The November Man, a loose adaptation of a 1986 novel by Bill Granger.

After a short prologue set in Montenegro in 2008, the movie leaps forward to a time when a retired Devereaux is called back into service by a tough-talking CIA boss (Bill Smitrovich), a guy who prides himself on his grasp of the world's brutal realities.

Devereaux's assignment: To travel to Moscow to help with the escape of a Russian woman (Mediha Musliovic) who supposedly has the goods on a Putin-like Russian (Lazar Ristovski') who's about to take over the country.

In the process, Devereaux gets crosswise with the agency, and finds himself burdened by a far-fetched plot and overly busy plot.

During the next 108 minutes, Devereaux must battle treachery within the CIA, take down an aspiring Russian baddie, save the life of a younger woman (Olga Kurylenko) and remind his former protege (Luke Bracey) that the old man still has it.

That's a big agenda, and director Roger Donaldson (The World's Fastest Indian (2005), Dante's Peak (1997) and No Way Out (1987) shuffles through it without making us care about much of the resultant intrigues.

Donaldson whips up tension here and there, but doesn't have much going for him other than the icy gravitas and sudden angry outbursts Brosnan brings to a role that strands him somewhere between hard-core action and worldly savvy -- with a trace of sadism thrown in for seasoning.

We've seen so many of these kinds of movies that just about everything in Novembmer Man feels second-hand.

The movie does accomplish one thing, though: It makes us long for the end of summer, and the start of a new movie season.

Repeat after me: We're almost there. We're almost there.

Polanski lowers his voice in 'Ghost Writer'

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor, nose-to-nose.

In Shutter Island, director Martin Scorsese decided to bring his considerable technique front-and-center. Scorsese pushed his ingredients into a hyper chamber of thrills where extravagant visual gestures become the norm. In his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski -- another top-ranked director -- follows a different route.

Although there are terrific images in The Ghost Writer – beginning with the opening shot of a ferry docking at a Massachusetts beach town – Polanski doesn't call attention to his cinematic virtuosity. He's telling a story, and if the story eventually bogs down in its own intricacies perhaps Polanski should be forgiven. The Ghost Writer is quietly involving, a thriller that doesn't aim for the usual adrenalin-fueled shocks.

Adapted by Robert Harris from his own novel, The Ghost Writer tells the story of a writer (Ewan McGregor) who's hired to ghost write the memoirs of a British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan). Brosnan's Adam Lang was forced to resign as the result of torture-related disclosures. Lang evidently turned suspected terrorists over to the CIA, an action that caused a furor in Britain.

After leaving office, Lang (an attractive Tony Blair-like figure) moved to the U.S., becoming a Massachusetts residentin exile. McGregor's character – referred to only as The Ghost – is hired after another ghost writer dies, an apparent suicide.

Just about everyone in the movie knows more than The Ghost, who gradually begins to understand that he may be in danger. The Ghost must weave his way through a web of intrigue and deception as he tries to uncover the truth about a former Prime Minister who can be charming but who also indulges a volatile temper.

McGregor, whose recent work in movies such as Amelia and Angels and Demons has been disappointing, pulls off a neat trick: He's playing a writer whose career has been subordinated to the lives of others. The Ghost may be well paid, but there's no public recognition of his existence. He's an authorial invisible man.

Brosnan ably portrays a beleaguered public man living in enforced privacy with his wife, the terrific Olivia Williams, and an assistant (Kim Cattrell) who may be more than a workmate. Timothy Hutton has a nice small turn as Lang's cagey lawyer, and Tom Wilkinson proves especially sturdy as a Harvard professor encountered by The Ghost toward the end of the movie's second act.

There are some great touches here. Polanski, who shot the film in Germany, gives the Langs an ultra-contemporary house that looks like a seaside bunker on the outside and yields to modern sterility on the inside. Williams makes intelligence look sexy, and we feel as if we -- like the title character -- have gained access to the private world of a once-important man who has resurfaced in disgrace. Lang is about to be charged by the World Court with crimes against humanity.

Polanski seems drawn to characters who are in over their heads, and the movie – particularly in its final scenes – does an admirable job of showing the disconnect between the earnest sobriety of public displays and the sloppy realities of private life.

During a long-ago film course, I watched scenes from Polanski's breakthrough Knife in the Water over and over again. The professor discussed the ways in which Polanski created tension and he certainly hasn't lost his touch. He has a great capacity for inwardness and concealment -- if not for selecting the best material.

Still, The Ghost Writer pulls us into its orbit, a whirlwind of intrigue and corruption that destroys anything caught in its wake, and there are bits and pieces that any director would envy: the tension that accompanies a set piece in which The Ghost tries to elude men who follow him onto a ferry or the intentionally obvious way Polanski plays a waiting game with the audience, following the progress of a note as it's passed from hand-to-hand in one of the movie's final scenes. At its best, Ghost Writer's makes us feel as if we're eavesdropping on conversations that we're not supposed to hear.

Whether Polanski's endlessly publicized, on-going legal troubles limit the movie's appeal remains to be seen, but The Ghost Writer shouldn't be dismissed. Here's a movie in which it's not the characters who are seductive, but the movie itself. Polanski's gift is one of insinuation and guile. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, then, that The Ghost Writer becomes less persuasive as its secrets are revealed.