8 Mile
REVIEWED 11/02, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

This Detroit ghetto rich movie serves up seven days' worth of youthful angst and development as Jimmy Smith Jr, A.K.A. Buddy Rabbit (Marshall Mathers III, A.K.A. Eminem) struggles to regain his ad libbing confidence after choking on stage at a local Hiphop freestyling face-off. The cards are already stacked against him, being a young White man building a small reputation for busting ferocious rhymes in a world dominated by racially pompous and highly territorial Black men. They don't like him crossing the very real boundary - represented by a road named 8 Mile - that separates these Americans of different ethnic heritage. Buddy doesn't care. To him, Hiphop is his heritage. And, possibly his ticket to a better life.

Having just broken up with his girlfriend, and with no place to go, Buddy ends up moving back in with his Trailer Trash mother (played to the hilt by Kim Basinger) and Lily, a sweet little girl who could either be his kid sister or his daughter. We never know. What is certain is that trouble seems to follow Eminem's character where ever he goes. His mom's abusive boyfriend doesn't like him. His sweatshop supervisor at New Detroit Stamping is always hassling him to keep his nose clean cranking out car bumpers. And, his friends apparently only want to support his musical talent on their terms, as his manager or his student or his fan. He's aware of all this, and yet can't really get himself focussed enough to fully take control of his own destiny. Not until deep into this flick, when he finally has enough and gets serious about navigating his raw potential by his own rules.

You're given a pretty good movie here. Sure, it's fairly small in scope and doesn't clobber you over the head with a huge Hollywood pay-off at the end. However, I found that since the material was really about this guy's first grown-up psychological turningpoint, maturing from a dream-filled frustrated adolescent into a clear-eyed goal-oriented contender, it played itself out quite well. Even the blossoming (and slightly explicit) side story between Buddy and Brittany Murphy's alluringly jaded Alex was deceivingly elegant at it's core. Surprisingly, there's also a wealth of humour laced throughout, in the fairly gutteral lyrics as well as in the script's truthful dialogue. '8 Mile' does have it's minor flaws, and it won't be for everyone's tastes, but it's definitely a straightforward and gritty, satisfying drama worth checking out.

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2 Fast 2 Furious
REVIEWED 06/03, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Noisy wreck drives to distraction. When rogue LA ex-cop turned Florida street racer Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is given little choice by US Customs but to infiltrate the underworld dabblings of shady Miami importer Carter Verone (Cole Hauser), he enlists the help of his bad boy ex-con childhood buddy Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) to share running bags of dirty money from Point A - a trailer park - to Point B - a deserted airstrip - at breakneck speed. Unfortunately, both O'Conner and Pearce's motives seem suspicious. Brian has a bad reputation for betraying his former police brethren, making it tough for him to be taken seriously by the legit agents involved. And, Roman just rubs people the wrong way for kicks - including their cagey short-fused crime boss and those trigger-happy thugs.

Let's face it. This sequel to 'The Fast and The Furious' (2001) isn't about anything other than fast cars and furious drivers. Problem is, it fails miserably at delivering on either front. Sure, there are loads of ear-splitting Nitro-injected engines growling under dozens of tricked up roadsters thundering across the screen. The high-octane action scenes do initially grab you by the throat, as the pace builds towards each pay off. However, they each manage to anti-climactically run out of gas just shy of the mark. Leaving you hanging on little more than this picture's one-dimensional script and it's heaping servings of ridiculously trite dialogue chewed out by these cardboard cutout caricatures - who you're never really given a good enough reason to care about. Will these two guys patch up their underlying conflicts? Who cares? Get back to the cars. Will our heroes thwart the villain? Not important. Cars, gimme the cars. It's a vicious circle, because the lousy acting makes you want to sit through another unfinished high-speed race, which disappoints and makes you hope the following pit stop of acting won't be as bad as the last one. It is. Veer clear of this turkey, folks.

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28 Days Later...
REVIEWED 07/03, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Britain is quarantined. London is by most accounts a ghost town. Four weeks after a determined trio of well-meaning animal rights activists are brutally attacked by the troop of laboratory chimpanzees they break in to a high-security facility to release, the mass population of that good green island has been reduced to a handful of survivors uninfected by a horrible plague called 'Rage'. This germ is so powerful that one drop, transmitted by saliva or blood from anyone who has it, transforms its victim into a ruthless, red-eyed killer within seconds. Jim (Cillian Murphy), a timid bicycle courier who ended up in a car accident-induced coma before this brutal epidemic, awakens from his hospital room shroud of tubes and monitors after the worst has passed. He wanders this urban wasteland; alone, not knowing what's really happened. Selina (Naomie Harris), the feisty and headstrong, butcher knife-wielding former chemist who saves Jim from certain death at the hands of those shadowy scattered hoards of berserker-like walking dead stricken with this merciless contagion knows. So does a small band of heavily armed soldiers broadcasting a dubious message of hope from their broken down fortress - miles from our uncertain heroes - just beyond Manchester's blazing skyline. However, after these spunky Londoners risk their lives in finally making it through this cannibalistic gauntlet of terror with the help of father-daughter team Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and Hannah (Megan Burns), Jim soon wonders if they're really any safer under the Army's ragtag protection than they were just fending for themselves...

Well, this Brit gorefest certainly is a juicy one. It's tough avoiding easy comparisons to the likes of 'The Omega Man' (1971) and the 'Day of the Dead' (1985) trilogy, because there are glaring similarities in cinematography and the 'hungry zombies gonna git you' plot. However, '28 Days' successfully differs in that you're actually given reasons to care about the protagonists. You're given strongly developed characters faced with diverging mindsets, all trying to figure out how to stay alive while (in most cases) retain their humanity so an audience can see these souls are worth being spared. Shot on location using digital cameras, the realism of this surprisingly captivating tale of fearful isolation and blood-thirsty madness immediately pulls you in by the neck and drags you through its emotional meat grinder of wonderful interactions and clever twists. It raucously chucks gooey asylum escapees and truckloads of adrenaline-pumping shockers at you with malevolent abandon. Until this fairly tight script has had its way with your guts and your nerves, and spits you out of the theatre into our real world of SARS and West Nile, Mad Cow et cetera. And, I think that's about the only problem I might have had with this excruciatingly timely flick, if it had just cheaply played on the disease-obsessed hysteria of the moment. Sure, it's still a relentlessly disgusting horror show that's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. However, I found it to be a gritty great romp that had a lot of passion, that's definitely well worth checking out - if your stomach can handle it.

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21 grams
REVIEWED 01/04, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Small jagged silhouettes flutter and scatter in swirls, like ghosts of birds and fragile leaves, absorbed by a parched and heavy morning sky. University mathematics professor Paul Rivers (Sean Penn) sits smoking a cigarette on the edge of the rumpled bed while grieving widow Cristina Peck's (Naomi Watts) softly sleeping chalk-white body lays motionless in their dingy New Mexico motel room. The accident scene was gruesome. Long black scars scraped into the pavement. Jack's haunted eyes locked on hers for an eternity. No time, Jesus. Endless tears and tortured pain. Paul hires a private detective to find origins of the 2am donor for this post-surgery heart that beats inside of him. He lays wheezing behind an oxygen mask at home, his own heart failing; steadily weakening while desperately waiting; stealing a few puffs from a careful bathroom stash before his wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg) gets home from the doctor. Mary has left him. Mary wants to have his child. She has packed her things. The fourth bullet is his. Refreshed from her daily swim, Cristina returns to her comfortable two-storey suburban home, awaiting her cherished daughters and devoted husband Michael while unknowingly grinning at his minutes-old en route phone message to her. She plays it back, and plays it back, curled and sobbing. Lost retribution, lost redemption. Marianne Jordan scrubs the blood of unseen strangers from her husband Jack's religiously emblazoned truck, under the blanket of a long dark chilly night that was supposed to be his birthday party. Father and childish girls share a booth at the Arcade Restaurant, just a few blocks away. The earth moves, rotating slowly - seemingly directionless - so that they can be closer, like the poem says. A flood of adrenaline splits into their deafened skulls, as the two men wrestle over the loaded gun. She can hear her two giggling little ones playing, chasing a squirrel on the sidewalk, in the muffled din behind Michael's voice. Cristina sits in her empty house of phantoms, trembling in hard reflective shadows, as the sharply inhaled cocaine sears into her emotionally exhausted brain once more. Forget it. Forget it. Get out of my house. Imploding silence. Nerves flayed raw. Paul's pale scarred body is so warm against hers as they hungrily make love - Paul is Michael is Paul with her - thirteen weather-bleached doors from where Jack cuts into his tattooed flesh in an alcoholic haze. Self-made exile. Blood and sin. Bathed in a busy hospital's antiseptic fluorescent lighting, dulled by nausea and drugs, Paul internally ruminates about his mortality, enshrined once again in an unruly shroud of tubes and drips and the relentless electronic ping echoing his new yet temporary heartbeat. Death's waiting room. Cell block suicide. Jack Jordan (Benicio Del Toro), a brooding ex-con turned tenuous Bible thumping counselor, thunderously espouses The Word to a troubled youth, a few days before being fired from his caddying job at an exclusive golf course; before an horrific accident that will test Jordan's obsessive faith to his marrow. Grit in the bones pulverizes logic. She feels for the first time in months. Escaping from everything. God help them all...

Holy cripes, what an incredibly challenging and deeply rewarding movie this is. Already critically acclaimed in Europe and the States, '21 grams', whose title apparently refers to the dubious theoretical findings of an early 20th Century attempt to measure the soul, is easily the most intellectually demanding offering seen in mainstream theatres since the likes of 'Reservoir Dogs' (1992) or Full Frontal (2002). Not in the same thematic veins, but primarily because of the thoroughly intriguing and sometimes initially confusing - almost inaccessible at times - editing style of Stephen Mirrione here. It's like a shattered iconic pane from a church window, virtually unrecognizable and requiring an esoteric system of repair as we watch uninitiated from the sidelines. A scattered jumble of broken jigsaw pieces, revealing more and more of Guillermo Arriaga's beautifully shot yet personably morose script under the masterful iron hand of director/co-writer Alejandro González Iñárritu - if you trust them. The result is a seemingly haphazard presentation of immensely powerful performances from this main cast that truly does rely heavily on the audience's patience and involvement to arrange and lock the fragments together throughout this approximately two-hour screening. It doesn't care if you want to be immediately gratified or dutifully entertained. This picture plays by it's own rules, and you will either engage your brain cells and give yourself to what's simultaneously self-destructing and reconstructing itself onscreen, or leave quietly. Ballsy. Unsettling. Artfully lush. And, that's both the sheer genius and major weakness of this truly original cinematic experiment. If you stick with it from opening to closing credits and pay attention to what's happening, this overwhelmingly gritty and very human drama will probably stay under your skin long after you leave the theatre. However, Iñárritu and Mirrione do appear to become far too enraptured by the path they drag you through. To the point of it feeling as though those of us sitting in the dark scratching our heads and waiting for scenes to come together in an obvious way have been forgotten a third of the way through. '21 grams' is relentless in staying the course that in many ways seems to resemble a kind of chaos theory in mathematics gone insane. I almost want to hunt down the half dozen or so people I saw walk out early to get their money back, just to see if they regret not giving this one the time it needs to sink into your pores. Because it does. I've tried to give some semblance of how it plays out, in my somewhat Nostradamian synopsis above, but you really do have to experience this film firsthand. Full marks should go to Penn, Watts, and Del Toro for how absolutely wonderfully they transcend familiar acting clichés to become these altogether well intentioned but ultimately weak and pitiably tormented elegant failures grounded under the boot heel of their individual and converging reality. Better than awesome. Wow! And, without these capable star talents, it could easily be said that this film would have collapsed in a heap of worthless self-infatuated Art house junk. '21 grams' definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you're jaded by Hollywood fluff and flotsam and honestly hunger for something meaty to sink your teeth into as a moviegoer, this one was specifically made for you. Holy cripes, go see it if that's you.

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50 First Dates
REVIEWED 02/04, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Hawaii's Sealife Park veterinarian Henry Roth (Adam Sandler) has a bachelor's dream life come true, hanging out with his one-eyed island buddy Ula (Rob Schneider), romancing American tourists seeking short term love on that tropical paradise by night, while spending the past ten years getting his fifty-foot sailing boat ready for a long-planned expedition to Alaska where he wants to study walruses. However, at the moment, that aquatic attraction's four thousand pound resident Jocko is about the only walrus he's come close to. And, the one night stand dating scene has lost its lustre for Henry, ever since he met Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore) at the local Hakilua Café over waffles. He can't get her out of his mind. Replaying their first conversation in his head, and daydreaming about her all of the time. Problem is, Lucy doesn't know who he is. Because of a terrible accident that happened almost a year earlier - in which she and her father were returning from picking a pineapple on the beach for his birthday and they swerved out of control to avoid hitting a cow in the road, slamming his truck into a tree and putting her in intensive care for three months with irreparable damage to Lucy's right temporal lobe - she has no recollection of anything that happened after that crash. Her short term memory only lasts a few hours. And, is gone by the time she wakes up the next morning. Leading her dad Marlin (Blake Clark) and brother Doug (Sean Astin), and all of their close friends to pretend to live the same day over and over again. They just want to protect her from any more trauma. Henry doesn't get it, but continues to invent ways for her to notice him. Sometimes they work, often they fail miserably. That is, until Marlin points out that Lucy sings on the days when she and Roth have met. He makes her happy. So, despite the prevailing skepticism surrounding him, Henry decides to try something radical by telling her the truth, after seeing an album of photographs and notes her family has kept since her tragedy. Leaving a tape by her bedside for her to rediscover daily what had happened to her. Making her life much more than just a series of perfect moment instant replays repeated every twenty-four hours, by understanding what she needs and romancing Lucy each time they meet as though it was the first time, each time he sees her.

Well, it's been a while since moviegoers have seen these two stars together in one of my all-time favourite romantic comedies, 'The Wedding Singer' (1998), but the magic is still there. Sure, '50 First Dates' is a mushy and slightly contrived, warm fuzzy kind of movie at heart - being released in theatres on Valentine's Day, for cripesakes - but director Peter Segal, who helmed 'Anger Management' (2003) and 'Nutty Professor 2' (2000), sure knows how to squeeze the most out of George Wing's superbly personable screenplay here. Letting Sandler's and Schneider's similar brands of childishly goofy humour tinged with mature themes loose when necessary, while reining in the laughs to give a paying audience something more to hook in to and care about. Clark's performance is fabulous here, as the patiently doting foundation-like father who protects his little girl. You can't help but like these characters and want to cheer them on, as they all deal with Lucy's fairly serious affliction while she's initially oblivious to it, and then is subsequently made conscious of how it has affected everyone around her for such a relatively long time. That's where this wonderful movie gets you. It's not a dreary downer or an overtly disrespectful mockery about brain injury victims. 'Goldfield Syndrome' and other medical mumbo jumbo aside, this astounding picture is a thoroughly breathtaking love story at times. Where the bad is taken with the good, and is then mixed with a lot of great humour and soul, to give you an incredibly satisfying experience from the beginning to the, uh, next beginning... multiplied by fifty or so, to the happy surprise ending. Just the variety of ways that Roth comes up with to conspicuously interrupt this woman's life is worth the price of admission alone. However, there's so much more to enjoy. Ula's ridiculously clumsy shenanigans, for instance. The hilarious asides between Henry and bizarre Sealife Park co-worker Alexa (Lusia Strus), or with heavily tattooed short order cook Nick (Nephi Pomaikai Brown). And, of course, the ukulele-accompanied tune 'Forgetful Lucy' is pure gold alongside Robbie Hart's last ditch mile-high serenade to soon-to-be Julia Guglia a half dozen years ago. Over-all, this is an intelligently fun and hopelessly romantic keeper that's definitely worthy of attention. Check it out.

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The 40 Year-Old Virgin
REVIEWED 08/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

Frankly, I was a little surprised at the amount of positive critical acclaim for this fairly soft yet crass debuting comedy from former producer turned co-writer/director Judd Apatow. That is, until I remembered Van Halen front man David Lee Roth's legendary Rolling Stone magazine quip about rock critics liking Elvis Costello because most of them look like Elvis Costello. It's just my harmless theory about many movie critics, but... well, y'know.

In 'The 40 Year-Old Virgin', co-writer/actor Steve Carell ('Bruce Almighty' (2003), 'Bewitched' (2005)) does a decent enough job as abstaining middle aged electronics store inventory clerk Andy Stitzer being summarily outed and relentlessly cajoled by his co-workers into changing his frame of mind towards finally having sex with a woman for the first time. However, there's not much here. It's a sex farce that fails in its nervous conviction, mainly because Apatow's and Carell's screenplay doesn't really offer up any reason for a paying audience to care if slightly Pee-Wee Herman-like Andy has his day or not during the transformation that broken hearted David (Paul Rudd; 'The Shape of Things' (2003), 'P.S.' (2004)), philandering Jay (Romany Malco; 'The Tuxedo' (2002), 'Churchill: The Hollywood Years' (2004)) and kinky pot head Cal (Vancouver's Seth Rogen; 'Donnie Darko' (2001)) awkwardly and vicariously orchestrate throughout. It's a disjointed romantic comedy, co-starring Catherine Keener ('Being John Malkovich' (1999), 'The Ballad of Jack and Rose' (2005)) as single Mom entrepreneur Trish Piedmont, that basically exists as an ad hoc and wildly uninteresting landing strip for this hundred and sixteen-minute disappointment to make its emergency landing after quickly running out of fuel. Pretty well all of the characters are stereotypes, each given a sack of expletives to spice up their boring dialogue, in the hopes of maybe being funny. It's a hit and miss slog for the most part.

The only lasting redeeming aspect of this sporadically humourous feature is the vague character development that feels as though it was snuck in as an after thought, where the guys who start out trying to indoctrinate Stitzer as one of the boys end up realizing how pathetic their own lives are. Yes, the condom scene and the chest hair waxing scene are high points - that's apparently Carell's real chest hair painfully being yanked off in strips - but, a lot of what's captured on film feels too familiar. They're hardly enough to sustain the entire picture. Yes, there's nudity. Yes, there's an abundance of swearing and graphic sex talk. There should have been a lot more, though. 'The Wedding Crashers' (2005) is far superior, and I was disappointed with that romp as well.

This one might be fine as a second choice rental after 'American Pie' (1999) or 'Euro Trip' (2003), but be prepared to be left unsatisfied once it's highly reputed stamina prematurely falls short.

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2046
REVIEWED 09/05, © STEPHEN BOURNE
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REVIEW:

The strands of smoke that slowly exhaled in long, soft, swirling wisps from Jing Wen's (Faye Wong) sultry lips was like a vision of unresolved secrets escaping from the tortured soul of this young woman that Hong Kong journalist Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) barely knew except in passing. She was the eldest daughter of Chow's hotel landlord. Through the fogged glass of his tiny second floor room, he'd silently watch her practice the language of her lover beyond her father's unsympathetic eye. Her ballet of a broken heart. Each Japanese word accompanied but a carefully placed step of her slender foot. Chow was mesmerised. There, in room 2046, stuck in the political tumult of 1967, he'd had his abundance of women and had lived with their memories, and his feelings of unfulfilled longing. 2046 had been the room of one of them. Lulu (Carina Lau). The girl he'd fallen in love with many years earlier, in Singapore, who he had tried to find again. He thinks. He remembers her. But, she had changed her name to Mimi and had rebuffed his advances like a stranger begging for coins in the rain swept street. His feelings remained secrets. Long ago, when people had secrets they needed to confess, they'd climb a mountain and carve a hole in a tree, and then whisper them into it, before covering over the hole with mud. It had become the theme of his novel. Nobody had ever returned from 2046, but the train was carrying him back to his own time a broken man. He had gone there to find her. But, she had rebuffed his advances like a stranger. She had been the girl he'd loved many years ago. He remembers her. He thinks. All he had now were his memories of her. His life as painful secrets. His tortured mind mesmerised by his female robot attendant wjw1967. She had become his tree on the mountain. The book had become a success, but Chow seemed bored. Even his steadily intensifying romance with his drinking buddy and call girl neighbour Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang) had become monotonous and claustrophobic after a while. His pursuit of her had electrified him, but her love had become a problem. He rebuffed her need, as though she had been little more than a beggar on the street. His thoughts turned to his novel more and more. How he'd needed her to love him, even as a substitute for real love, as the years thundered backwards outside that futuristic train. Its - her - artificial features were so life-like, perhaps her heart could be too. She had playfully held up her hand for him, curling her finger and thumb into the shape of a hole for him to whisper into. She had become what he'd needed. But, the strands of smoke that slowly exhaled in long, soft, swirling wisps from wjw1987's sultry lips weren't like a vision of unresolved secrets escaping from a tortured soul. Were they?

There's something almost delightfully anti-utopian about walking up to a theatre's box office and saying, "One for twenty forty-six at eighteen forty-five, please" that might have made sitting through this otherwise aggravatingly boring, R-rated and subtitled 2004 flick from writer/director Kar Wai Wong ('Buenos Aires Affair' (1997), 'In the Mood for Love (2000)) worth the effort. Too bad I didn't think of it until after unwittingly slipping in and out of a coma while '2046' laboriously dragged on through its hundred and twenty-six minute run time. It has nothing in common with Lucas' 'THX-1138' (1971), except for vague references in name alone, though. The primary problem with this visually lush yet dreadfully meandering feature is that it's far too subtle for its own good, while heaping richly retro and futuristic scenes that feel clipped from ten year-old fashion magazines onto the eventually weary big screen. You end up hunting for cues instead of following what passes for a story here. It looks like the House of Chanel art directed it, without bothering to let Wong's screenplay really amount to much of anything - except to continually repeat its narratives and dialogue with the same actors in pseudo-1940's as late 1960's clothes and then in funky high tech wardrobe throughout. I guess that's supposed to be clever and artful, but this entire effort ends up playing out as a pointlessly superficial cinematic sleeping pill. It could have easily spent more time giving its protagonist, smug Hong Kong newspaper reporter Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai; 'Die xue jie tou' (1990), 'Hero' (2002)), something tangible to work with while he dallies with his seductive hotel room neighbour Bai Ling (Ziyi Zhang; 'Rush Hour 2' (2001), 'House of Flying Daggers' (2004)), is piqued by his landlord's daughter and Wong's eventual writing assistant Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong; 'Chong qing sen lin' (1994)), and recalls passages from his life-based popular romance novel about a heart broken Japanese man attempting to turn his android attendant wjw1967 (again, Faye Wong) into his surrogate lover on a time travelling train returning from the 21st Century. The premise sounds rife with über coolness, right? Well, there's nothing much here for a paying audience to be captivated by. Unless you love fashion shows set in vapid, moderately exploitative dramatic plots tinged by the likes of 'Alfie' (1966) or 'The Man Who Loved Women' (the dour 1983 US remake) or, well, 'Alfie' (2004). Sure, there are slight moments when Chow's sexually intense relationship with Bai is wonderfully captured here, but they really do feel as though these actors are revolting against the script by bringing more to those scenes than what was intended. As though a twinge of conscience jarred them into being more than the disinterested human finger puppets their characters are during the remainder. It's hardly enough for this length of a movie. Rent this one if you're a huge fan of Zhang and want to see her in something where she's not kicking butt, but that's pretty well the only serious reason hop aboard this disastrous snooze fest.

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16 Blocks
REVIEWED 03/06, © STEPHEN BOURNE
www.ofrb.gov.on.ca | www.rcq.gouv.qc.ca


REVIEW:

Given one hundred and eighteen minutes to deliver Manhattan Grand Jury witness Eddie Bunker (Dante Terrell "Mos Def" Smith; 'The Italian Job' (2003), 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (2005)) sixteen blocks from a precinct basement cell into the hands of a district prosecutor attempting to indict six police officers of various criminal activities, burned out and alcoholic Detective Jack Mosley (Bruce Willis; 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995), 'Sin City' (2005)) quickly discovers that he's up against more than a snarl of morning traffic when Mosley stops his malevolent ex-partner Frank Nugent and a gang of dirty cops from summarily executing Bunker before any damaging testimony can be entered into court records. Okay, the premise is a little weak and a lot of the eventually revealed underlying story does remain fairly enigmatic and left up to speculation, but this consistently suspenseful action flick from 'Die Hard' franchise director Richard Donner ('Superman' (1978), 'Timeline' (2003)) clips along at a reasonably effective pace while pulling some great tag team work out of Willis and Mos Def. '16 Blocks' is apparently an unofficial remake of the classic Clint Eastwood crime thriller 'The Gauntlet' (1977), and anyone who's seen that effort will immediately notice quite a few similarities here - right down to the use of a city bus in a somewhat different manner throughout this hundred and five-minute picture's final scenes. I actually hoped that more of the background stories of Mosley and Bunker could have been built into some of the dialogue in writer Richard Wenk's screenplay, so that a more captivating dynamic could have evolved during the moments when these characters stop to interact. However, the movie shorthand that's used instead still manages to bring enough interesting baggage for this odd couple to chew on and pull you into their increasingly doomed circumstance. It's certainly not the greatest Guy Flick ever made, relying more on subtle nuances than bold and bloody high points. The aspect of this story that does eventually feel slightly monotonous is in how Jack and Eddie end up tenuously evading Nugent's tightening, uh, gauntlet of trigger happy cohorts and easily manipulated SWAT squad members, by exhaustively running up and down and through and under an eternally endless maze of stairwells and alleys and crowded sidewalks without much of anything other than you watching them run away. This is where the script misses a perfect opportunity to have the desperate prey slowly become the stealthy hunters. I wanted to see some of the old Willis bare knuckled fight carefully breathed into the story arc, without taking away any of the established context of this decidedly greyer and self-destructively flawed man. That, for me, would have made '16 Blocks' an even more satisfying feature than what's delivered in the final cut. Maybe the powers that be simply wanted to steer clear of a well tried formula in favour of a far less violent solution, but the Wenk's pen swings a little too far to the left at times - inevitably cobbling together a rather pedantic ending rife with head tilting, lazy clichés. And yes, the voice that Mos Def chooses to use is annoying after a while, but there's a reason for that: Whiney chatterbox Eddie is supposed to be annoying. However, this one is still an over-all entertaining movie chock full of macho bravado and heavily spilled bullet shells that's deftly tinged with an intelligent sensitivity seldom seen in action pictures. Check out '16 Blocks' as an enjoyable escape worth renting if you're looking for a good, undemanding popcorn flick that won't blow up in your face.

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