“Snitch” – True events are boring without drug kingpins.

After watching the movie Snitch, I’ve learned two things.
1. Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock, is not a good actor. I know this is the least surprising statement of the year, but it’s never been so obvious as it is in this film. That’s not to say he wasn’t trying hard, because it was obvious that he was doing the best he could. It’s just that his best is slightly worse than Keanu Reeves reciting Shakespeare.
2. The United States’ war on drugs has been a monumental failure; this movie shining a spotlight on one of its worst components, that being those convicted for the first time of dealing drugs get a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in prison with the catch that they can get it reduced if they cooperate with law enforcement to help catch other drug dealers. Gee, what could possibly go wrong there?

Snitch is “inspired by true events” (the marketing tagline for this film), which means a little more than it usually does with movies. Back in 1999, PBS’s Frontline aired a story called “Snitch” in which they reported on the manipulation of defendants facing these harsh penalties. One of the cases they detailed was about an 18 year-old boy, Joey Settembrino, who was arrested for selling drugs, though it appears as if the whole thing was a setup by an earlier arrestee who was cooperating to reduce his sentence, and that Joey was not a drug dealer (read this for the details http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/cases/joeydad.html). When the cops tried to get Joey to work with them, he said that he didn’t know any drug dealers and didn’t want to set-up other people. The authorities then turned to his father, James, and said if he helped them they would reduce his son’s sentence. James agreed, but ultimately failed and it’s not clear if his son’s sentence was ever reduced. The film takes this story and, in true Hollywood fashion, changes a few things.

First, they have the father (Johnson) approach the cops, volunteering to help them take down drug dealers. Then, they embellish the task to be dad taking down a Mexican cartel leader. Finally, they change the ending because there’s no way this movie ends with dad simply failing and watching his son languish in prison. Obviously, the original story would have a been letdown, but the writer (Ric Roman Waugh, also director) just couldn’t help himself, adding an unrealistic story that actually distracts from the real story and allows for a loud, obnoxious, bullet-riddled climax that dumb moviegoers will think happened in real life. Because…you know, inspired by true events.

I’m not saying the changes are necessarily a bad thing, but it is really disingenuous to capitalize on the true events phrase and not even have the decency to put something at the end of the film talking about the case that was the inspiration. From a sheer entertainment value, the changes are good and the climax fits the build-up of the film quite well. However, there were a couple of plot holes that made no sense and made the plot even harder to accept as being real. For starters, the set-up of Jason seemed really weak and any decent attorney would have been able to prove entrapment and have the case dismissed. Maybe the actual event really was this simple, but it’s a really hard pill to swallow. But the bigger hole involves an employee of dad’s named Daniel (Jon Bernthal, a.k.a. Shane from The Walking Dead), a twice-convicted drug felon who is trying to clean up his act and provide for his family. For some reason, dad never tells the authorities about him (at least that we see), nor does he tell Daniel about the sting until he’s forced to. For a guy who cares so much about his son, he sure seems to give little thought to ruining someone else’s life and family. In fact, the movie comes dangerously close to forcing you to root for Daniel more than dad.

Compounding the trouble of accepting the realism is Johnson himself. We’re supposed to believe he’s the underdog, even being forced to watch him get beat up by a bunch of thugs early in his quest to locate a dealer. This scene was lifted straight out of The Next Three Days, but it was much easier to believe an out-of-shape Russell Crowe getting his ass kicked than The Rock being overpowered by a dude half his size. This scene would have much better (and closer to what the real father experienced) if the dudes had just denied him, or even pulled a gun on him telling him to get his yuppie-ass out of their neighborhood. Or something to that effect.

If the movie accomplishes anything, it brings to light how insane the war on drugs has gotten. As I mentioned earlier, the lawmakers have actually created a situation where the real and more dangerous drug dealers are incentivized to call anybody a drug dealer in order to have their sentences reduced. And in the cases described in that Frontline report, the police appear more concerned with making arrests than making sure they are arresting actual drug dealers. Although, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if it turned out that the Drug Enforcement Agency had a hand in this film’s making, turning a scathing indictment of a 40-year failed drug war and asinine punishments into a propaganda piece to convince people that we can win the war if people would just sacrifice their livelihoods, risk their lives and their families’ lives, in order to capture drug lords who are no more dangerous than Benjamin Bratt. Then, you too could be the inspiration for a movie in which there is a happy ending instead of you dying in an ill-conceived plot to place untrained civilians into violent and deadly situations.

Rating: Ask for three dollars back. Even with the embellishment, it provides some insight into an important topic while delivering a competent film.

“A Good Day to Die Hard” – And also to run head-first into walls.

When the best thing you can say about a movie is that the title is really stupid, you know you’re in for a turd of a movie. Especially when that movie is the fifth installment of a franchise that died years ago, but nobody wants to bury it. I remember having this same thought when the fourth one – and just as stupidly titled Live Free or Die Hard – came out in 2007, twelve years after Die Hard with a Vengeance. While Live Free or Die Hard was nowhere near as good as the first three, it wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be. At the very least, the script maintained a well-thought out bad-guy plot and the action escalated at a good pace, just like the movies before it. Not to mention that my wife and I love Timothy Olyphant. …But I’m not sure A Good Day to Die Hard even had a screenplay, let alone a well-thought out bad-guy plot, and the action threatens to make your head explode five minutes into the film.

If you’ve seen or heard the tag-line, you probably got a cramp from shaking your head in derision (or disbelief). If you haven’t seen it, it’s “Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia.” Really? Not only have the marketing fools bastardized one of the greatest catch phrases in action lore, but this movie is set in Russia? Is the writer (Skip Woods) purposely trying to pretend it’s still 1989 or does he really think the Cold War never ended? Either way, I’m betting that tagline was the bulk of the screenplay, surrounded by “ACTION! MORE ACTION! BODIES FLYING! CAR CHASES!”

Since we’re on the topic of screenplay, it would be really easy to believe that this one was written on the back of a cocktail napkin. I’m not kidding; based on the content of the film, it would fit with room to spare. Based on what I saw, it could not have been more than this:

John McClane’s son (Jack) gets arrested in Moscow – John flies to Moscow.
30-minute car chase (everyone improv’s lines)
McClanes escape with important Russian
Double-cross; McClanes captured
McClanes escape and kill a bunch of guys
Everyone goes to Chernobyl
“Yes, that Chernobyl”, says one McClane (doesn’t matter which one)
Another double-cross
McClanes kill everyone and scoff at radiation
The End

That would easily fit on a napkin, even a coaster with a little effort. However, effort is something Mr. Woods wasn’t interested in, and it showed in a nonsensical plot that was the opposite of coherent. There are political foes, CIA agents, an incriminating file, bad guys double-crossing each other, and weapons-grade uranium. None of this is given any time to breathe or develop, as most of the ninety-minute running time is devoted to carnage, so none of it makes any sense and least of all, what the hell John McClane is even doing there. He goes to Moscow after learning that Jack (Jai Courtney) has been arrested. But if Jack’s a CIA agent (he really is) working on a multi-year operation, why would the CIA let John get anywhere near Jack? Wouldn’t four movies worth of John thwarting terrorists be enough to ensure he would be kept an eye on?

But if the plot is nonsensical, the characters are flat out horrible and the dialogue they are given is worse. In fact, I’m not sure they were even given dialogue. John spends most of the movie yelling that he is on vacation – when he’s not punching people for speaking for Russian and stealing their cars (I’m not making this up) – or telling us how many more bad guys he’s going to kill. After the last two movies, are we sure he’s not a sociopath and actually worse than the bad guys he’s murdering? Of course, he’s trumped by the lead henchman, Alik, who also sounds like he’s just making up lines as he goes along. During one scene, he monologues like a cartoon villain, upping the cartoonishness by tap-dancing while eating a carrot. Yes, that actually happens.

By now, you might be thinking I’m being overly harsh about a movie that everyone expects to be nothing more than a series of gunshots, explosions, and one-liners. I promise you, I went into this movie expecting nothing more than that, but I did expect it to at least try to be a Die Hard movie, with some snarky humor and at least a little bit of smarts. That flew out the window at minute seventeen of the car chases scene, and it was pummeled to death when the bad guys were able to neutralize the radiation in the heart of Chernobyl with a little bit of Febreze. Maybe that’s good enough for people who don’t remember how good Die Hard was, but then those people have probably never met a wall they didn’t like.

Rating: Did I mention this movie’s release date was Valentine’s Day? Ask for all of your boyfriend/husband’s money back.

“Beautiful Creatures” – It’s good to see actors visibly having fun.

Sometimes, you have no idea what kind of food you’re hungry for. You might decide to eat a hamburger and think it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted or you might go for the last piece of pie and end up nauseous. The point is that your mood can drastically affect your reaction to the food you eat. For me, the same can happen with movies. In either case, you don’t realize what you want until after you’ve finished; good or bad. This is how it was for me with Beautiful Creatures and I came out realizing the hamburger is just what I wanted.

Beautiful Creatures is the latest young adult novel/series to get the silver-screen treatment. Considering I had never heard of the books (let alone read them) until I saw previews, I had no expectations for this movie and didn’t have to worry about how closely it followed the book. Though, I will soon be reading the book since I liked the movie and want to know what was different, as well as what happens next (there are four books in this series, called The Caster Chronicles). Based on what I saw in the previews, I was expecting something similar to Twilight, but with witches instead of vampires and a role reversal for the romantic couple (the girl is the supernatural one here). I’m happy to say that while the love story is a main focus in Beautiful Creatures, it’s not THE STORY like it is in Twilight.

Beautiful Creatures will appeal to more guys than Twilight simply because the romance isn’t so thick and fantastical. In Beautiful Creatures, Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert) is the new student in the small southern town of Gatlin, where books are banned, devout Christians are everywhere, and Civil War reenactments have mandatory participation for everyone, children included. Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) is a local who reads banned books, questions the Christians’ narrow-mindedness, and is the only one not immediately picking on the new girl. In fact, he’s quite taken with her for the very reason that she’s an outsider and niece of the reclusive Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons), descendant of the town’s founders and richest man in the area. At this point, the movie really does sound like Twilight, but it quickly divulges the real plot of the movie and that the love story is only a plot device. You can breathe that sigh of relief now.

As it turns out, female Casters (don’t call them witches; Lena says they don’t like it) become light or dark casters on their sixteenth birthday and have no choice in the matter. Additionally, Lena’s family accidentally cursed themselves during civil war times and all females in the family are doomed to become dark casters until the curse is broken. Macon is convinced that Lena will not become dark, but her mother, Sarafine (Emma Thompson) is bent on ensuring that she does. We’re not really sure why this is so important, other than Sarafine wanting more power by having her daughter on her side, but we’ll go along with it. After all, we’re talking about young adult literature, not Shakespeare.

Anyway, the movie moves back and forth between the family squabbles and the love story, maintaining a good mix throughout the film. It also has interesting secondary characters in Amma (Viola Davis) – Ethan’s family’s housekeeper who is some other kind of witch, and Ridley (Emmy Rossum) – Lena’s sister who is definitely not a good person. These two add depth to this world we’re experiencing, making it much more interesting than just a standard a love story.

Beyond the story, the acting is pretty good, aside from some really bad southern accents. Ehrenreich is charming and endearing, Englert is sympathetic, yet not too mopey (I’m talking to YOU, Kristen Stewart), and Irons, Thompson, and Rossum are all having as much fun as they possibly can, delivering characters that are both likeable and easy to despise (again, depending on your mood). Rossum stands out the most, as she has the smallest supporting role, but arguably the best scene – stepping out of a red BMW, wearing a skin tight, skin revealing dress, strutting her way toward Ethan and his friend. For you guys out there, you will have the same look on your face as the two boys do on theirs, as Rossum couldn’t be any more attractive than this.

When all was said and done, I found myself having enjoyed this film much more than I was expecting. While it does have some small flaws – most likely due to having to cut things from the book – it overcomes them with an interesting, multifaceted story, a strong cast delivering fun performances, and good pacing that will make you forget time passing at all. Mostly, I’m glad it wasn’t just a Twilight knockoff aimed at female tweens and women waiting for a vampire to ravish them.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back and enjoy your burger.

“Side Effects” – What’s the opposite of thriller?

Imagine that you are a passenger in a car and your friend is driving you to a surprise location. You come to a four-way intersection and you expect your friend to go left, right, or straight. Much to your surprise, your friend shifts the car into flying mode and you go up. After the initial shock that your friend owns a flying car, you spend the rest of the trip wondering why your friend never mentioned he had a flying car, or that there were cities in the sky of which he was a member. That’s how the movie Side Effects unfolds. It’s like watching two halves of two different movies that are vaguely related to each other. It’s a jolting experience that leads to one reaction: huh?

(Spoiler alert: If you like Steven Soderbergh films, you may want to quit reading now. In order to intelligently discuss this movie, there are a few major plot points I have to bring up.)

The film begins by showing us blood trails through a house, then jumps back three months to Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) picking up her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), at prison, who served four years for insider training. Shortly thereafter, Emily smashes her car into a wall in a failed suicide attempt and wakes up in the hospital, greeted by Dr. Banks (Jude Law). After persuading Dr. Banks to take her on as a patient (rather than be committed to a mental ward for a period of time), he tries various anti-depressants to treat her depression. After several of the drugs cause her to vomit, lose sleep, and hate sex, they settle on one called Ablixa after she tries to kill herself again (by stepping in front of a subway train). The Ablixa seems to cure all of those problems, but causes her to sleepwalk, leading her to kill Martin in her final sleepwalking episode and bringing us full circle to the opening scene of the movie.

Emily is arrested for murder and sent to a mental hospital for reasons of insanity, in addition to Dr. Banks arguing that the Ablixa made her do it. Throughout all of this, Dr. Banks periodically consults with Emily’s previous psychiatrist, Dr. Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a minor character with no real purpose up to this point, other than offering small suggestions to Dr. Banks to help Emily. So, if you are keeping score, this movie is about a woman’s battle with severe depression and a commentary on the dozens of anti-depressants and the side effects of anti-depressants and what it is doing to our society. It’s approximately at this point in the movie when Soderbergh shifts into flying car mode.

Due to the events concerning Emily, Dr. Banks loses his job and is removed from a trial dealing with another anti-depressant. Emily is also trying to fire him as her psychiatrist so she can go back to Dr. Siebert, even though he kept her from being convicted of murder, and we also find out that Dr. Banks had an incident with a student years in the past. Meanwhile, Dr. Banks is starting to suspect that something’s not right, even though he, nor the audience, has any reason to suspect that anything is amiss. By this point, the audience is being pointed in a direction that his past indiscretion has something do with all of the bad things happening to him. However, a meeting with the drug study representative leads us to believe that the drug companies are committing some kind of fraud. At the same time, Dr. Banks believes that Emily has been faking her condition in order to get away with murdering her husband, even though the first half of the movie was spent trying to convince us how much Emily loved her husband and how depressed she was. Not to mention, we are given no reason for her wanting to kill him, since she could have simply left him while he was in prison. Instead of creating a well-reasoned and thought-out thriller that keeps the audience on the edge of its seat, this convolution leads the audience to continually say “wait, what?” during the entire second half of the film.

Without getting into the final reveal of this tangled mess of a story, I can assure that there is no way the audience could guess the ending or the motivation behind the villains’ plot. That’s not because the audience isn’t capable; it’s because the movie gives zero indication or foreshadowing to that plot. It’s almost as if the entire first half of the film is one giant red herring, while the second half is trying to convince you how clever the whole plot was. It’s like a friend telling you to guess the number’s he thinking between one and ten, and then telling you the answer is pizza.

While the movie’s story leaves a lot to be desired, especially since it could have gone in so many better directions, Zeta-Jones turns in the worst performance in a cast that includes Channing Tatum. While the script is kind enough to remove Tatum fairly early on, Zeta-Jones’ part only increases as the film goes on. She over-dramatizes every line and scene she has, almost as if she thinks she’s in an episode of a soap opera, and hits an awkward crescendo in her final scene.

Reportedly, this is Soderbergh’s last film for a while, potentially forever. That’s kind of shame since the man is only fifty and is capable of great movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Going out on this movie is like a baseball player retiring after popping up in the infield. He just better hope this isn’t what people remember him for.

Rating: Ask for 8 dollars back and where Soderbergh got his flying car.

“Stand Up Guys” – Like a depraved bucket list.

Do you ever wonder if some movies are written specifically to feature certain actors? I’m not talking about movies where they had certain ideas of actors while writing the script; I’m talking about movies whose scripts already have names penciled in. On one hand, I really hope this isn’t true because it would mean auditions are just lip service and bullshit. On the other hand, it’s impossible not to think this happens more than we’d care to know after watching a movie like Stand Up Guys.

Stand Up Guys is about three old guys rekindling the good old days of when they were criminals together. Think about that for a second and try to guess which old actors would like to relive the days when they played hard-to-forget criminals or bad-asses. Wouldn’t your guesses have to be Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Robert De Niro? The only one you’d be wrong on (in this case, at least) is De Niro, as the guy making up the trio is Alan Arkin. However, even his character makes sense when you find out that he’s the driver of the group and doesn’t do guns. Heck, he even reminds Walken and Pacino of this fact when they offer him a gun.

Actually, I was being a little vague in describing the premise of the movie. It’s really about what Pacino wants to do his first night out of prison (after 28 years) and Walken funding the escapades while deciding whether or not to kill Pacino – his best friend. As we learn later in the film, Pacino takes the fall for a botched crime job in which their employer’s son dies and now that employer is forcing Walken to kill Pacino for revenge. This is easily the weakest part of the plot as we don’t get any more information than that about the botched job. No flashbacks, no narration, no story-telling to Arkin’s daughter (Julianna Margulies) or Walken’s granddaughter (Addison Timlin), nothing. If that’s not bad enough, their ex-employer is another old guy known as Claphands (Mark Margolis), which may be the dumbest crime boss name in history. But I digress.

As the film labors its way through the night, we’re treated to Pacino doing all the things he did as a young guy. Except, now he looks slightly better than a mall-Santa after a fourteen-hour shift and can’t get a boner. Seriously, he can’t. An entire sequence is spent on him going to a whore house, not pleasuring a Russian-accented hooker (Katheryn Winnick), breaking into a pharmacy with Walken to steal some Viagra (among other old guy drugs that Walken needs), eating a fistful of them, and going back to the whore house to complete the Viagra commercial. And that’s just the tip of the shenanigans.

After sex, food, and snorting crushed up hypertension pills while drinking hard liquor, Pacino is rushed to the hospital to drain the blood from his over-Viagra’d pecker. He recovers amazingly quickly for an old guy and decides they should go break Arkin out of the old-folks home. This leads to more shenanigans, including an ode to Office Space in which Arkin fulfills his lifelong wish of doing two girls at the same time. This actually happens, including the part where they ask him “what’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to do?” And yes, that same Russian hooker, in addition to her boss (Lucy Punch), oblige the old man. And in what has to be a direct insult to Pacino, does not need any medication to rock the two women.

This series of events is what passes for a plot, as the question of whether Walken will kill Pacino is rendered an afterthought. If this movie weren’t so much about indulging Pacino in a debauched kind of bucket list, we might have learned more about Walken and Arkin, or even the secondary characters, who are actually more interesting the main trio. At the very least it would have been nice to know more about the busted job that landed Pacino in prison. All we do know is that they are stand up guys for being loyal to each other, stealing a car for Arkin to relive his driving skills, rescuing a damsel in distress, and leaving an inheritance to a granddaughter.

Rating: Ask for seven dollars back. The film is supposed to be a comedy, and while there were some scattered chuckles, the film falls flat far too often while relying on tired old-guy jokes.