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Parker (2013)
This offering from director Taylor Hackford had so much going for it: A great cast led by Statham, who's tailor-made for this role. A gritty crime story full of intriguing twists and wonderful low-lifes. Punchy dialogue and action handed to screenwriter John J. McLaughlin on a silver platter. With all of that, Parker should be an intensely riveting flick for big screen action-lovers. Unfortunately, it's not. The movie is adapted from prolific American crime author Donald E. Westlake's 2000 novel Flashfire, the 19th in his 24-book Parker series begun in 1962 with The Hunter. Several Hollywood films have either been based on or inspired by Westlake's Parker books over the years. Point Blank (1967) starring Lee Marvin, and Payback (1999) starring Mel Gibson were both based on The Hunter, for instance. However, this 2013 adaptation of Flashfire is the first where the main character is actually named Parker. And, according to Westlake's youngest son Paul who blogs about his father's lit legacy at donaldwestlake.com, this movie is "mostly true to the book." I guess that's code for all the book's good bits were left out. Parker, the film, drops the ball at virtually every instance of potential greatness. Continuity gaffs abound. The editing is hackneyed, completely botching key scenes that should feel intense but instead are laboriously boring. You have characters shooting guns mere inches from each other yet repeatedly missing their targets, making those scenes laughably nonsensical. McLaughlin's script merely has Statham spit out the same tired lines heard from his past few features, to the point where it's easy to forget this is a new release. On-screen moments with a deathly ill-looking Nick Nolte as Parker's trusted mentor Hurley, and Emma Booth as Parker's clothing challenged girlfriend Clare don't much help this forgettable stinker. Frankly, the only notable highlight is Jennifer Lopez' obvious efforts in actively fleshing out her character throughout as being more than a contrived and vapid one-dimensional role. It has little to do with the main story, but the subplot between her and Bobby Cannavale as lovesick local Sherriff Jake Fernandez is a refreshing treat. Sure, fans have seen better performances from Lopez, but it's clear what you see here is her natural talent shining through despite the lazy screenplay and lame editing. You'll find the usual info, photo gallery and video sections at the nicely designed official website (parkermovie.com), as well as a series of free games that include Safe Cracker Cash Grab, Parker's Escape Driving Game, and Parker's Revenge shooter game. The games are definitely a highlight of the site, well worth checking out. Statham fanatics will likely keep this boring, poorly cobbled actioner in theatres much longer than it deserves. However, apart from Lopez' comparably impressive performance, you won't see anything you haven't seen before or really need to pay the price of admission to sit through. Yawn. Reviewed 01/13, © Stephen Bourne. Parker is rated 14A by the Ontario
Film Review Board for occasional gory/grotesque images, coarse
language, sexual references, nudity in a non-sexual context,
occasional upsetting or disturbing scenes, embracing and kissing,
tobacco use, violent acts shown in clear, unequivocal and realistic
detail with blood and tissue damage, and is rated 13+ by la Régie
du Cinéma in Québec. REFERENCE:
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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips © Stephen Bourne. Moviequips.ca and moviequips.com are the property of Stephen Bourne. All content of this website is owned by Stephen Bourne, unless obviously not (such as possible reference links, movie synopsis and/or posters featured under the terms of fair use) or attributed otherwise. This website is based in Ottawa, Canada. |
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Pain & Gain (2013) Pain & Gain is inspired by the three-part, Dec. 1999 - Jan. 2000 Miami New Times newspaper feature of the same name by crime reporter Pete Collins. In it, Collins detailed the unbelievably bizarre and horrifying local kidnapping/torture-for-profit crimes committed by bumbling ex-con New Yorker Daniel Lugo, his Trinidadian cousin-in-law Noel "Adrian" Doorbal, and a handful of peripheral criminals from Nov. 1994 until June 1995. They were called the Sun Gym Gang, named after the seedy Miami Lakes fitness club where amateur bodybuilders Lugo and Doorbal worked. Certified public accountant and franchise deli owner Marcello Schiller was their first victim, held captive and brutally robbed until he escaped the gang's murderous attempts to collect on his life insurance policy. The gang then killed rich Hungarian phone sex entrepreneur Frank Griga and his wife Krisztina Furton during a botched Ponzi scheme and kidnapping plot. Lugo and Doorbal have remained on death row since 1998. Whether or not you decide to plug that tragic and gruesome reality into the context of the movie Pain & Gain, there's absolutely nothing funny about the crimes committed by the real Sun Gym Gang. In a follow-up item by Miami New Times reporter Francisco Alvarado, Griga's surviving sister Szuszanna was quoted as saying, "The movie is going to glorify what they did." However, Pete Collins' original newsprint series bubbled throughout with wryly cited examples of just how absurdly inept the key gang members were. That's what Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's (McFeely? McReally? Okely dokely) wildly over-the-top screenplay embellishes, fabricates and delivers on. It glorifies nothing. Pain & Gain, the film, relentlessly victimizes the Sun Gym Gang with sardonic humour. Rightly, its starring antagonists are presented as hatefully self-aggrandizing stupid people taking immorally grim short-cuts in their pursuit of the American Dream. It's Fargo (1996) meets Dumb & Dumber (1994), juiced up on 'roid rage, pumping irony with every wonderfully ridiculous scene. Even the soundtrack choices are funny. This big screen feature is an incredibly entertaining, often rude and raunchy side-splitting romp. The movie's official poster showcasing Mackie, Johnson and Wahlberg oozing gangsta attitude in front of the American flag doesn't do this film justice, even with the chuckler tagline, "Their American Dream is bigger than yours." Huge kudos to the entire cast that includes the excellent Shalhoub, Ed Harris as jaded P.I. Ed DuBois III, and Bar Paly as starry-eyed stripper Sorina Luminita, for bringing their A-game to this irreverent show. Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie are effortlessly exceptional deadpan comedic powerhouses here. Their characters are so unwittingly dumb that a paying audience can't help but continually burst out laughing at them. Some of the character-defining internal monologues are sheer genius, too. It's as though they're all living in an egomaniacal, Hollywood-fuelled dream world that's clearly unsubstantiated by their individual realities. Spurred in the wrong direction after hearing charlatan motivational speaker Johnny Wu's (Ken Jeong) "Three Finger" Get Rich mantra: Get a Goal, Get a Plan, Get up off your Ass, Wahlberg's Lugo later convinces himself that his obviously flawed yet curiously failing schemes just need another finger. Hilarious. You'll find more of these funny quips superimposed on several scene captures highlighted on the official website at painandgainmovie.com, along with the usual synopsis and cast bios. Additionally enjoyable for movie buffs is how Pain & Gain mercilessly parodies the needlessly superficial, cliché-saturated spectacle of 1990s films notoriously cranked out by director Michael Bay and Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer. For instance, after several miraculously futile attempts at eliminating Kershaw lead to his BMW exploding, cinematographer Ben Seresin's acerbic lens cuts to Lugo, Doorbal and Doyle swaggering towards you in larger-than-life slow motion, heroically backlit by that blossoming fireball rising into the Miami night. It's in the trailer. The punch line is, nothing heroic has happened. They're just idiots. Yes, the fact Pain & Gain is based on a news article that covered true and recent atrocities does bring controversy before screening it. However, this 130-minute comedy isn't a faithful re-enactment or glorification of those crimes. The poster reads this is a true story. As presented, it's not. What you'll discover is an immensely entertaining, hilariously macabre mature flick brimming with memorably surprising comedic talent that's definitely well worth checking out on the big screen. Incredible. Reviewed 04/13, © Stephen Bourne. Pain & Gain is rated 18A
by the Ontario Film Review Board, citing occasional gory/grotesque
images, very intense/aggressive coarse language, slurs, sexual
references, nudity in a non-sexual context, illustrated or verbal
references to drugs, alcohol or tobacco, crude content, occasional
upsetting or disturbing scenes, detailed/graphic portrayals of
substance abuse, embracing and kissing, sexual innuendo, implied
sexual activity, frequent and/or prolonged portrayals of graphic
violence, and graphic portrayals of torture/brutality, and is
rated 13+ by la Régie du Cinéma in Québec. REFERENCE:
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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips © Stephen Bourne. Moviequips.ca and moviequips.com are the property of Stephen Bourne. All content of this website is owned by Stephen Bourne, unless obviously not (such as possible reference links, movie synopsis and/or posters featured under the terms of fair use) or attributed otherwise. This website is based in Ottawa, Canada. |
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Pacific Rim (2013) Striker Eureka, Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, and Gipsy Danger are hokey names. Even for giant robot names. Even for giant robots that arguably, litigiously resemble the giant robot-like heroes in the Transformers movies. Even if humanity decided that seeing giant reptilian aliens popping up from the sea to eat our bridges and buildings and all us tiny fleshy, fleeing amuse-bouches instead meant building equally giant robots that evacuated everyone to the South Pole, or colonize Mars, or take over another movie set, giving these enormous robots names like Striker Eureka, Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, and Gipsy Danger would be hokey. While time is of the essence as civilization crumbles around our ears on-screen, the powers-that-be naming these big giant robots Dingo Trousers, Octane Bagpipe, or something just as inane holds as much importance to a movie theatre audience not made up of tie-in merchandise manufacturers and action figure collectors. Granted, Pacific Rim does take a few moments in the opener to self-parody the distracting hero worship cash-in fueled by the robots vs. aliens war presented here. Kudos for that. Also, the CG animation of the robots and aliens throughout this 131-minute romp is absolutely gob-smacking. Truly incredible. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this feature offers up little more than relentlessly exasperating goofiness. In a bad way. Xylophone Platypus. Jelly Mullet. Nietzsche Bling. Naming big giant robots with unrelated random words is kinda fun, but probably far too thinky for a Pacific Rim movie review. Pacific Rim stars Charlie Hunnam as Raleigh Becket, haunted young co-pilot of America's last remaining giant robot, Dweezil Zappa - uh, I mean Gipsy Danger - and co-stars Rinko Kikuchi as Becket's feisty eventual love interest and co-pilot Mako Mori, and Idris Elba as their grizzled Pan Pacific Defense Corps commander Stacker Pentecost. There are other characters in the flick. They're predominantly a cavalcade of tired stereotypes cursed with the expressive talent of solid concrete. They all may as well have had big giant robot names. Too few from the supporting cast particularly serve to move the paper-thin story along, and those who do - such as quirky scientists Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb - merely act as forgettable slap stick filler in sideline scenes that don't go anywhere. Why? Because the people don't matter. Pacific Rim isn't about telling a great story, it's about showcasing big honkin' robots called Jaegers rasslin' big nasty Godzilla monsters called Kaiju. Buckle up. Dumb down. Booyah. Fun facts: The Japanese word Kaiju simply means giant creature. Toho Ltd. is the Tokyo-based film company known worldwide for originally spawning such notoriously cheesy but fun Kaiju monster movies as Godzilla (1954), Rodan (1956) and Mothra (1961), among others over the decades. Calling the robots Jaegers is a mispronunciation of the German word for hunter, Jäger. It's also short for Jägerbomb, a potent alcoholic cocktail possibly ordered in mass quantities around the napkin co-writers Travis Beacham and Guillermo del Toro seemingly wrote this screenplay on. Not only do they create a world crippled by attacking monsters slamming through city after city worldwide like drunk Punks in a mosh pit full of piñatas, where those enormous fighting robots built armed to the neck bolts and ready to kick some mega-lizard butt have hokey names, but this is a world where how those robots are piloted is made utterly nonsensical in the most impractically complicated way imaginable under these dire circumstances: Two onboard pilots curiously dressed in armour plated Power Ranger suits, each strapped into a motion capture treadmill contraption cocooned in the robot's head operate it. In reality, modern fighter jet pilots are patched into highly sophisticated onboard computers that enable them to launch missiles by blinking their eye while engaged in mid-air dogfights at Mach speeds, but nothing so arcane exists in the universe of Pacific Rim. Nope. The pilot on the left operates the entire left side of the robot, in-sync with the robot's limbs, and the other pilot similarly operates the right side of the same robot. They're two puppet masters inside a big marionette that works like it's been swiped from engineering plans designed by Leonardo da Vinci on a bad day. Just to add an exotic twist to this nuttiness, the pilots are also technologically mind-melded via a neural bridge, moving together in fluid Zen-like harmony while brutally reaping oozy monster death, because the robot's advanced system of flashy-blinky buttons is too complex for one human brain to handle. Wait. What? Dear Hollywood, stop making stupid movies. Please. Just shake it off or hug it out or something, dude. If you feel the need to keep making people in the future dumb, let the aliens win. No, really. Thanks. You'll find the usual synopsis, cast and crew bios, photo and video galleries, and social media links, plus sections for poster downloads, and tie-in sweepstakes at the movie's impressively illustrated website. Further down the menu is the Kaiju Survival Guide you can download as a fairly big, two-page PDF. More notable is the features section that includes links to the Jaeger Combat Simulator game, a poster creation app called Jaeger Designer, and the Pan Pacific Defense Corps site where you can join up, enroll in the Jaeger Training Academy or take a tour of the Shatterdome: PPDC headquarters. The Jaeger vs. Kaiju Battle game versions for IOS and Android, and the Pacific Rim Shop are a couple of additional main menu goodies. It's a great-looking, cleverly realized movie site over-all that wonderfully highlights the amazing CG animation seen on-screen, only stumbling slightly at usability with its ridiculously tiny content text throughout. While featuring an amazing close-up illustration of the giant Gipsy Danger Jaeger behind its tiny pilots and the tagline: To Fight Monsters, We Created Monsters, the international poster for Pacific Rim is a boring tease. It's a dull composition for such a visually stunning sci-fi actioner. The tagline rightly suggests Jaegers fight Kaijus, so it seems like a no-brainer that this one-sheet should dramatically display a Jaeger facing off against a Kaiju. Unfortunately, it doesn't. The visually stunning CG animation is worth checking out on the big screen, but it soon becomes a hollow guilty pleasure barely worth the price of admission. The lousy storytelling, cliché-riddled dialogue and cheesy, boring human characters pretty well demand movie fans leave all expectations at the door and see Pacific Rim at the cheapest matinee possible. It's pretty, but pretty bad. Reviewed 07/13, © Stephen Bourne. Pacific Rim is rated PG by the
Ontario Film Review Board, citing scenes containing some grotesque
images in a fantasy, comedic or historic context, use of expletives,
mild sexual references, limited use of slurs, scenes that may
cause a child brief anxiety, or fear, limited embracing and kissing,
and restrained portrayals of non-graphic violence, and is rated
G by la Régie du Cinéma in Québec. REFERENCE:
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Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips © Stephen Bourne. Moviequips.ca and moviequips.com are the property of Stephen Bourne. All content of this website is owned by Stephen Bourne, unless obviously not (such as possible reference links, movie synopsis and/or posters featured under the terms of fair use) or attributed otherwise. This website is based in Ottawa, Canada. |
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