Glass - Movie Review

Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark and Charlayne Woodard.
Written & Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

★★½

I loved Unbreakable. I liked Split. After the hit of Split and the buzz afterwards, the studio would have happily financed Glass, but Shyamalan wanted to do it himself so he could have 100% control. This is a movie that really could have used a producer to reign him in and give script notes. The last time Shyamalan got too full of himself and refused to accept what the studio was telling him was when he ended his Disney deal and took his next film elsewhere under condition he could make it the way he wanted. That movie was Lady in the Water.

This movie isn't as bad as that one, but I really wanted to like this movie and it had too many issues to ignore. I am glad I saw the reviews were bad so I went in with low expectations.

I really liked this movie for a good while. Past the hour-mark, it was still a solid thumbs-up for me. We get reintroduced to the unbreakable David Dunn (Bruce Willis), still fighting bad guys in his poncho. We see what he and his grown son (Spencer Treat Clark) are up to. We also see that split-personalitied Kevin (James McAvoy) is free, and that the more malevolent ones in the Horde (what all the personalities who aren't Kevin are called) are running the show, as he's holding four teenage girls hostage in some abandoned brick factory. (I love abandoned brick factories as a movie setting. Almost as much as catwalk-and-steam factories for Act 3 action showdowns.)

David brushes up against Kevin and sees where the girls are. They have a showdown, but both wind up getting arrested and tranquilized and taken to a mental health facility. Enter Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specializes in patients with delusions of being superheroes. It's a very narrow field of research. Oh, and also at this facility? Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).

Now if you haven't seen Split, like my wife, this movie is very confusing and terrible. I have, so I understood everything about the lights switching personalities in Kevin, or why former kidnap victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) has sympathy for a couple of the personalities inside there. But there are other ways the movie goes wrong.

First of all, Shyamalan is very fond of characters looking right in the camera to give their dialogue, giving the audience the POV of the character he/she is talking to. This is done quite a bit with Paulson, and we are unable to look away when her dialogue starts getting really clunky and repetitive. "Stop making Paulson look at us and explain everything!" The more she's forced to give over-expository dialogue, the worse it gets. Which is exactly how I felt when watching Lady in the Water. This makes the middle of the movie lose a lot of its pacing, but I was still okay with that.

Act 3 comes, and Shyamalan builds up to this twist that isn't really that great, or at least if he hadn't hung SUCH a lantern on it. But even as we get there, the climax is start-stop-start-stop, like a car that starts but dies as soon as you hit the gas. We also lose track of what everyone's doing during the final showdown. The last half-hour could have been done in fifteen minutes just as effectively, and it wouldn't have felt so clumsy. It also would have been nice if he'd had a couple more million in the budget to make the special effects look better.

Now I really enjoyed the three main guys in their roles. McAvoy bounces around all of the personalities with precision. One line and I have no doubt which of the dozen or so from the Horde is currently in charge. Willis looks more engaged here that he has in at least a decade, and Jackson really buries himself nicely into the role of Mr. Glass. It's one of my favorite characters of his.

Glass is a movie easy to pick apart. I could really rip on a lot more elements in this movie, but after I've slept on it, I'm still glad I saw it, as it mostly lived up to my low expectations. It's an entertainingly bad movie. But man, the potential it had... It could have been so much better.

A Good Day to Die Hard - DVD Review

Starring Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney, Sebastian Koch, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Cole Hauser.
Directed by John Moore.

★

The script is so bad, I'm surprised no one ever yells, "Look's like today's a good day to die hard!" before chomping a cigar and giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

The directing is so bad, there isn't a single interesting action sequence. It's all buried in this dark-blue sheen that John Moore (Max Payne) seems to relish.

There is no chemistry between Bruce Willis and Jai Courtney as father and son.

I could go on. Don't mind if I do.

John McClane is going on vacation to visit his estranged son. Turns out his son is a spy and is in the middle of staging a prison-break with a high-profile political prisoner. McClane takes it in stride, stealing a truck and crashing through traffic, trying to talk to his kid. "Hey! What's going on!"

This isn't a Die Hard movie.  This is a generic, brainless, action superhero movie where the bad guys can't shoot but the good guys can. This might as well have starred Dolph Lundgren.

Red 2 - DVD Review

Starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Mary-Louise Parker, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Byung Hung-Lee, David Thewlis, Neal McDonough and Brian Cox.  Directed by Dean Parisot.

★★½

There's a certain breezy silliness to the whole affair, aging hitmen brought out of retirement.  Morgan Freeman's presence is missed, but Malkovich and Mirren still seem to be having a grand old time, and the script is clever enough that we don't feel bogged down by overdoing what made the first one work. Bruce Willis phones it in, to the point that I'm trying to remember the last time he didn't phone it in.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation - DVD Review

Starring Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, Bruce Willis, Byung Hoo-Lee, Jonathan Pryce, Ray Park, Ray Stevenson, Adrianne Palecki, Elodie Yung, D.J. Cotrona, Walton Goggins, Luke Bracey and Arnold Vosloo.
Directed by Jon M. Chu.

★½

The first movie was not good.  You had director Stephen Sommers' Mummy-sequel sensibilities, Marlon Wayans, those CGI suits the Joes wore, phoned-in performances from the likes of Dennis Quaid and Rachel Nichols, and a movie that felt like the entire purpose was to set up Part 2.

Chu takes over directing duties, and he kills off most of the Joes, thereby nullifying a lot of the events from Part 1.  Gone are Hawk, Baroness, Scarlet, Ripcord, Heavy Duty, etc.  Destro's left in his Minority-Report-type prison, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt has left Cobra Commander duties to an actor named Luke Bracey.  GI Joe 2 had a smaller budget, and I see where some significant cuts were made.

Master-of-disguise Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) has assumed the disguise of the President (Jonathan Pryce), which means this time around, Pryce gets to be the villain.  (I don't think Vosloo himself worked more than a day on this film.)  Storm Shadow (Byung Hoo-Lee), whom I swore died in the first one, is back, but his allegiances aren't as obvious.

New Joes include Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Lady Jaye (the bland Adrianne Palecki) and Flint, played by D.J. Cotrona, who makes Palecki look like an Academy Award winning actress. Maybe his part was underwritten, or maybe they cut a lot of his stuff out after they saw what a dead weight he was, but he was sore-thumb bad for me.

For those who grew up on the 1980's cartoon and toy line, I can't say it's any better than the first one. But if you liked the first one, you'll probably like the second one. I didn't care for the first one, and I was hoping the significant changes might result in a better movie.  Didn't happen.

Bright spot of the movie: Walton Goggins (Justified) as the supermax prison warden who loves his job.

Since GI Joe 3 is happening, and Chu will again direct, I hope they kill Flint quickly and bring back Destro. I can't imagine Christopher Eccleston couldn't use the money.

My Top Ten Films of 2012

I have not yet seen Amour, Holy Motors, Anna Karenina, Rust & Bone, and some of these other movies making top ten lists, but of the 99 titles from 2012 I have seen, these were the best.

Best of the Miscellaneous

BEST PERFORMANCE IN A BAD MOVIE - Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages.  Whenever he wasn't on screen, the movie was terrible, but whenever he was, we knew we were basking in the light of one of the coolest guys on the planet.

BEST COMEBACK - Channing Tatum.  We should have seen this coming, since he was the funniest part of The Dilemma.  He was so good in 21 Jump Street that the producers of GI Joe 2 ordered reshoots to not kill his character off in the opening scene.  He managed to star in a movie about male strippers and carry over $100 million domestic, and he kept his chick-flick card in "premium" by starring opposite Rachel McAdams in The Vow.  He'll also co-star in his third Soderbergh collaboration (Side Effects) next year.

SECOND BEST COMEBACK - Matthew McConaughey.  Bernie, Magic Mike, Killer Joe.  Three different characters, save that each wears a cowboy hat at some point.  (Yeah, he was good in The Paperboy too, but the less said about that, the better.)

MOVIES I LIKED BUT WITH SERIOUS PROBLEMS:
The Master - If PTA had just given this movie an ending, showed some progression, then I would have loved this.
Prometheus - I rewatched Alien and Aliens after this movie. (I was surprised how closely their rhythms matched).  But they both gave answers.  Basic. Brief.  That's all we ask.  This movie leaves things too ambiguous.  It also casts Guy Pearce as a 90-year-old man.  Why not get an actually old actor who isn't buried under Pruneface make-up?  And So-and-So's death at the end is one of the dumbest I've ever seen.  Other than that, I look forward to the sequel.

MOVIES I LIKED BUT NOT ENOUGH TO LIST THEM HIGHER THAN THE OTHERS:
The Amazing Spider-Man
Bernie
Dredd
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Hope Springs
Jeff Who Lives at Home
Premium Rush
Rise of the Guardians
Snow White & the Huntsman
The Three Stooges

Honorable Mentions (my 21-26, alphabetically):

5 BROKEN CAMERAS - This documentary is filmed almost solely by a Palestinian farmer who became a world-known activist as he documented Israelis taking over their nearby land, then setting up walls and fences and tear-gassing the residents anytime they came too close. It's definitely one-sided but it's not common that we see the Palestinian point of view.

21 JUMP STREET - This movie is one of those surprises. When the trailer debuted I thought it looked awful, but it was arguably the funniest movie of the year.

THE HUNGER GAMES - I recognize its flaws but I don't mind them. Didn't mind the shaky-cam; didn't mind the fact that these people don't look that hungry; didn't mind that Katniss only kills people in self-defense.  I've seen it three times now and hope the sequel can fix the problems of Book 2.

PITCH PERFECT - This does for a cappella what Bring It On did for cheerleading.

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN - Strange journey of a documentary that made me think it was going one place and went somewhere else entirely, to the point I checked Wikipedia while watching the DVD to see if this really happened and isn't some Bansky-style hoax doc.  It's mainly about a couple South Africans who are trying to find out how their favorite musician Rodriguez died.  Rodriguez was a musician in the early 1970's who flopped in his native US, but he was as big as Elvis in South Africa.

THE SESSIONS - John Hawkes is one of those actors who elevates any film he's in, and he gives another tremendous performance here as a man left virtually quadriplegic by polio who sets out to lose his virginity. It's filled with humor and heart.

More Honorable Mentions (my 11-20, alphabetically):

ARBITRAGE - Richard Gere's best work since Chicago, this movie accomplishes exactly what Bonfire of the Vanities could not.  Gere's a millionaire hedge-fund manager cheating on his wife, but somehow we still root for him as he tries to keep his house of cards from falling.

THE AVENGERS - About as good a movie as it possibly could have been, finally Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk and Thor are in the same movie.  Good job by Joss Whedon in keeping the action moving, the dialogue crackling and giving everyone their moment.  Didn't really see why this movie needed Hawkeye, but...

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS - Joss Whedon's puzzle pic is a terrific send-up of pretty much every horror film ever made.

CLOUD ATLAS - This deeply ambitious project may not achieve all its goals, but I found it breathtaking on the big-screen.  It follows six stories across the centuries, with each one loosely - very loosely - connected to the next, and it weaves through each story so that once you get the rhythm, you never get lost.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES - The conclusion to the best superhero trilogy ever made might not be as good as the first two installments, but it's still pretty darn good.  Anne Hathaway was able to mine sexuality I didn't know she had as Catwoman, and all the regulars (Bale, Caine, Oldman, Freeman) get their moments.

END OF WATCH - Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena have great chemistry, the kind where I actually hope the next MTV Movie Awards mentions them.  Probably would have made my top ten if it didn't have 400 F-words.

LES MISERABLES - I liked it.  It definitely had its problems but it also hit some emotional buttons and had some of the best raw acting captured on film this year.  I view it as a companion piece to the stage play.

LIFE OF PI - Visually arresting, narratively challenging work from Ang Lee.  Just one of the most gorgeous movies of the year.

MAGIC MIKE - Steven Soderbergh has abandoned high-minded fare, but he hasn't slipped in quality. This is like Flashdance for male strippers, but with substance and a story.  Tatum's a charming lead, and McConaughey shows up again in a role that would get him a Best Supporting Actor nod in a weaker year. And hey, Alex Pettyfer has finally been made a credible actor.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK - Loved this little gem.  Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence give career-best performances, and Robert DeNiro is the best he's been in a long time.  Casting is the heavy lifting for a film like this, but the chemistry generated afterwards needs to be there, and they have it.

And now...

    ... My Top Ten

10. DJANGO UNCHAINED - Quentin Tarantino is an artist because he makes movies that he would want to see, and he invites audiences to join him on this ride.  Jamie Foxx is fine as Django, a slave seeking to rescue his wife, but it's the supporting cast that chew all the scenery and have all the fun: Christoph Waltz as a good-guy German bounty hunter, Leonardo DiCaprio as a sadistic plantation owner, and especially Samuel L. Jackson as the devious house negro Stephen. QT brings his 1970's exploitation mentality to slavery, but once again, adds more levels than the casual viewer might expect, or might miss due to the cartoonish gore.

9. SKYFALL - It's the best Daniel Craig Bond yet, and easily makes the top five of best Bond films ever.  A large part of that is Javier Bardem as a former agent seeking revenge on M, and it makes it a more personal mission.  We see more of what's behind the aunt-nephew-like relationship of M and 007.  Love the theme song!

8. WRECK-IT-RALPH - Even 8-bit characters can have heart.  This is another home-run for Disney, and it's very Pixarian in the way it weaves together multiple strands to a plot and populates with funny supporting characters and clever throwaway gags.

7. LOOPER - Rian Johnson's futuristic thriller plays with the problems of time travel and keeps twisting the story down paths we don't expect.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt does an amusing impression of young Bruce Willis.

6. LINCOLN - Good ol' Abe finally gets a movie, not counting all the others. One smart decision this movie makes is to not try to tell his life story but focus on one aspect of his presidency and let it illuminate all others.  We see him as president, husband, father, commander-in-chief, cajoler, taskmaster, politician and friend.

5. CHRONICLE - Breathes new life into the found-footage genre, and the superhero genre. Three teens find "something" in the woods and shortly thereafter they develop super powers, one stronger than the others.

4. THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER - The best John Hughes movie since Hughes was making them himself.  The three leads are all great, but Emma Watson announces herself here as a true star.

3. ZERO DARK THIRTY - This straight-forward account goes through the ten years between 9/11 and Usama bin Laden getting killed. We see it through the eyes of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a focussed analyst who makes capturing or killing UBL her life's mission.  We get no backstory on her, and so we're like the characters on screen, knowing only what is presented to us (that, and what we remember from the news the past few years).  Pretty sad Kathryn Bigelow wasn't nominated for this.

2. MOONRISE KINGDOM - The most magical tale of the year, and unjustly ignored by most during this awards season, but awards are about publicity and campaigning, and well, that's fine.  This probably surpasses The Royal Tenenbaums as my favorite Wes Anderson movie. (I'll have to see how I feel in a few years).  While it has famous adults (Edward Norton, Bill Murray, etc.), the film's two young star-crossed puppy-lovers are the central reason it works so well.  And hey, Bruce Willis made it into two movies in my top ten!  Didn't see that coming.

1. ARGO - Despite its historical - shall we call it "playfulness" - for dramatic effect, Ben Affleck has delivered a milestone as his third directorial effort. It's no accident that he won the Golden Globe for Best Director and had he been nominated, I'm confident he would've brought the Oscar home for this too.  He stars too, but he always seems generous with his on-screen co-stars.  Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Victor Garber, Clea Duvall, Tate Donovan, Chris Messina, etc., etc., all come together for one great whole, with a story that's suspenseful even though we know how it ends.

So there it is. Did you see any of them?

My worst ten of 2012 are here.

UPDATE: I rented The Perks of Being A Wallflower, and it deserves to be in my top ten. Somewhere.

Looper - DVD Review

Starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano and Piper Perabo. Directed by Rian Johnson.

★★★★

JGL does an amusing Bruce Willis impression, and that's just one of the smaller pleasures of this movie.  JGL plays Joe, an assassin in 2044 who kills people for the mob in the future.  But when his 2074 self is his next target, he hesitates, and Old Joe gets away.  Joe needs to catch and kill his old self, or he may not be allowed to live to see 2045.

The movie has several twists and turns, and it's another home-run for Rian Johnson (Brick), who's quickly becoming one of my favorite directors.

The Expendables 2 - DVD Review

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, Terry Crews, Liam Hemsworth, Randy Couture, Nan Yu and Chuck Norris.
Directed by Simon West.

★½

I don't remember much about the "plot" of the first one, but the second one has less of it.  Stallone and company are hired mercenaries who go in to fortified headquarters in whatever country, shoot down a hundred henchmen, blow stuff up, then leave.

Then they get a job that is supposed to be easy, but "one of their own" is killed, which makes it personal.

It's inspired that they bring in Jean-Claude Van Damme to play the main villain.  Most of the rest of it is tired rehash.  They fire a lot of guns, they exchange one-liners, they fire more guns, they make in-jokes (Arnold and Bruce say each other's catchphrases at one point), and nothing else about it justifies its existence.  Chuck Norris shows up? Huh. Does he do anything cool?  Not really.

So maybe when they make Expendables 3, they'll get Carl Weathers, Gerard Butler and Dwayne Johnson, and they'll invade North Korea and overthrow Kim Jong-Un.  Might as well.

Expendables 2 is #1 again

For the weekend of August 24-26.


1.  The Expendables 2 - $13.5 million ($52.31) - 2 wks (LG) -52.8%
 . . . 3355 screens / $4024 per screen
2.  The Bourne Legacy - $9.3 ($85.5) - 3 wks (U) -45.5%
 . . . 3654 / $2545
3.  ParaNorman - $8.55 ($28.27) - 2 wks (Foc) -39.3%
 . . . 3455 / $2474
4.  The Campaign - $7.44 ($64.54) - 3 wks (WB) -43.3%
 . . . 3302 / $2253
5.  The Dark Knight Rises - $7.15 ($422.19) - 6 wks (WB) -35.1%
 . . . 2606 / $2744
6.  The Odd Life of Timothy Green - $7.13 ($27.08) - 2 wks (BV) -34.2%
 . . . 2598 / $2742
7.  Premium Rush - $6.3 - 1 wk (Sony)
 . . . 2255 / $2794
8.  2016 Obama's America - $6.24 ($9.08) - 7 wks (RM) +401.2%
 . . . 1091 / $5718
9.  Hope Springs - $6 ($45) - 3 wks (Sony) -34.1%
 . . . 2402 / $2498
10. Hit & Run - $4.68 ($5.87) - 1 wk (OR)
 . . . 2870 / $1629
11. Sparkle - $4.2 ($18.9) - 2 wks (Tri) -63.9%
 . . . 2244 / $1872
12. The Apparition - $2.96 - 1 wk (WB)
 . . . 810 / $3648

The end-of-August slump has kicked into full gear.  Premium Rush, Hit & Run and The Apparition were the three big releases, and they'll all disappear quickly.  The best per-screen average of the Top 12 goes to the conservative documentary 2016 Obama's America, which expanded this week.  As far as political documentaries go, it's on pace to be the most successful non-Michael Moore doc in history.  Well, it'll be close to see if it passed An Inconvenient PowerPoint.

The Bourne Legacy is going to be the last summer movie to cross the $100 million mark.  The Expendables 2 won't quite pull off what the first one did, despite Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis having bigger roles, and Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris being added to the cast. (I picture Mickey Rourke and Steve Austin saying, "It's because we're not in it!")  If the overseas haul is big enough, I guess Expendables 3 is justified, with word floating around they want to add The Rock and Wesley Snipes. (Dang, it sucks that Patrick Swayze is dead.)

Moonrise Kingdom - Movie Review

Introducing Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward.
Starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban. Directed by Wes Anderson.

★★★★

Wes Anderson, God bless him, is a quirky director with a distinct style that puts his stories on a tightrope.  His movies can suffer from an overload of whimsy.  As long as human emotion can still break through, that's when he succeeds best.  I loved The Royal Tenenbaums, partly because the three genius kids still felt the pain of having such an unbearably dysfunctional dad.  I felt like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou didn't quite work because the quirky overwhelmed the humanity.

Moonrise Kingdom succeeds largely because the emotions are real.  Granted, he still has that puppet-show style where most frames are set up like you're in the front row watching something unfold on stage, but the offbeat delivery doesn't hide or blur the humanity.  It centers on Sam, a resourceful khaki scout, and Suzy, an angry girl with binoculars.  They are 12 years old in 1965, and if Stephen King's taught me anything, it's that being 12 is a magical time, when girls aren't just those creatures with cooties who stand on the other side of class.  Sam and Suzy both feel like outcasts and are therefore drawn to each other.  They've hatched a plan, you see.

Edward Norton is Scout Master Ward, in charge of his troop and alarmed when he sees Sam has run away. He notifies Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), the law enforcement in these parts.  They come to learn Suzy's gone too and must notify her parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand).  We go back and forth watching the adults frantically, fruitlessly try to find the two lovebirds, and we watch Sam and Suzy survive in the wilderness, for Sam has been training for this.

Jared Gilman (Sam) and Kara Hayward (Suzy) have made their film debuts here, and they simply are their characters. The relationship and chemistry between them is sweet, unforced and natural.  Even in stylized Anderson-ville, everything works.  We want these two crazy kids to be together, even though there's no possible way they can just live in the woods forever.  Gilman has this straightforward nerdiness, and Hayward is like a rebellious Emma Watson.

We caught this at the $3 theater, so I imagine it'll be on DVD in a couple months. It's worth hunting down. Wouldn't surprise me if it gets a couple Academy Award nominations when the time comes.

Elijah as Maniac, RIP Andy Rooney, etc.

- Elijah Wood (Sin City) and Nora Arnezeder (Safe House) will star in a remake of the 1980 slasher film Maniac, to be directed by Franck Khalfoun (P2). Wood will play Frank, a serial killer who feels like he get a little bit of revenge on his abusive mother every time he kills a woman.

- Casting rumors: Kit Harington and Richard Madden, both of HBO's Game of Thrones, are reading for Arthur in Arthur & Lancelot. Joel Kinnamen (AMC's The Killing) is up for Lancelot. Meanwhile Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games), Aaron Paul (AMC's Breaking Bad), and Ben Foster (The Mechanic) are up for the role of Bruce Willis's son in Die Hard 5.

- Longtime 60 Minutes contributor Andy Rooney has died at age 92, just five weeks after his retirement.

Die Hard 5, Sin City 2, Megan Fox, etc.

- Don't cry for Megan Fox. She may have been fired from Transformers 3, but she has plenty of projects lined up. She just finished filming Friends with Kids with Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm, then she has The Dictator with Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat), and then she'll be in Judd Apatow's next film This Is Forty, with Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Leslie Mann and Albert Brooks.

- John Moore (Max Payne) will direct Die Hard 5, to be set in Russia. Bruce Willis will indeed reprise his role as John McClane. Willis will then do the sequel to Red.

- William Monahan (The Departed) has been hired to polish the script for Sin City 2, to be co-directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

- The Coen brothers' next directorial effort will be Inside Llewyn Davis, about a folk singer in the 1960's. They wrote but did not direct the remake of Gambit, opening next year. Gambit stars Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman and Stanley Tucci and is directed by Michael Hoffman (Soapdish, The Emperor's Club, The Last Station).