Waco - TV Review

Starring Michael Shannon, Taylor Kitsch, Andrea Riseborough, Paul Sparks, Rory Culkin, Shea Whigham, Melissa Benoist, John Leguizamo, Julia Garner, Camryn Manheim, Glenn Fleshler and Eric Lange.
Created by Drew & John Erick Dowdle.

The Branch Davidian tragedy is one of the biggest black stains on the resume of the ATF and FBI. It's been ripe for a limited-series retelling, and I'm glad Paramount Network (formerly Spike TV) took it on.

For the most part they do a good job. It's an incredibly talented cast, and it's treated with the same prestige as American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson. Kitsch in particular has to play the balancing act of a believably charismatic leader for his followers while showing the meglomaniacal side that led him to believe he was another Messiah.

This six-episode series dedicates the first two episodes to before the siege. We see top negotiator Gary Noesner (Michael Shannon) trying to clean up the mess of the Ruby Ridge standoff that led to the ATF killing an unarmed mother and child. He butts head with FBI man "Mitch Decker" (Shea Whigham). He's based on someone else, but he's such a cartoon villain for most of this miniseries, I can understand them changing the name so they wouldn't get sued.

We also see David Koresh being a loving leader, albeit with polygamy and underage brides snuck in. They're telling this from the perspective of the Branch Davidian survivors, making it plausible why so many people would follow him.

I think the miniseries would have been stronger if the creators hadn't pressed their thumbs so heavily on the scale. The one-two punch of incompetence by the federal government leading to the deaths of innocent people didn't need the extra melodrama. In that respect, it reminded me of classic movies like Bonnie & Clyde and Dog Day Afternoon, where no matter what the criminals did, law enforcement was eeevil.

And yet, it's still highly effective in pushing those buttons. The tension builds and builds to the final showdown, where we see how tragedy could have been averted if Koresh and the FBI bosses had just been a little bit less stubborn.

Lone Survivor - Movie Review

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, Emile Hirsch, Eric Bana, Alexander Ludwig, Yousuf Azami, Ali Suliman and Jerry Ferrara.  Directed by Peter Berg.

★★★½

The advertising keeps quoting Bill Simmons calling it the best war movie since Saving Private Ryan. Simmons is a sports guy, so it just shows how insignificant movie critics have become, at least to the marketing department. I'd say it's just a notch below Kathryn Bigelow's efforts, but it's worthy to compare to Black Hawk Down.

It's based on Marcus Luttrell's best-seller about the failed Operation Red Wings that resulted in the deaths of 19 servicemen. It's a tribute to those men, and it finds a way to be pro-soldier without being pro-war. It's angering to see how hard it is to become a SEAL, and how weird the rules of engagement are in Afghanistan, and how so many more lives would have been saved if they just had better equipment.

The soldiers' bodies take quite a bit of abuse, and from what I've read, they were pretty accurate about it. The comraderie of the four soldiers (Wahlberg, Kitsch, Hirsch, Foster) is engaging, and when the bad stuff starts happening, we still hope somehow they'll escape their fate. Kitsch has shown he might have a future in movies after all.

My Worst Ten Films of 2012

For the record, I never saw such (alleged) stinkers as One for the Money, W.E., Project X, A Thousand Words, Damsels in Distress, The Raven, LOL, A Little Bit of Heaven, What to Expect When You're Expecting, Bel Ami, That's My Boy, People Like Us, The Watch, Cosmopolis, The Apparition, The Oogieloves Movie, The Words, The Cold Light of Day, Stolen, House at the End of the Street, Bringing Up Baby, Butter, Here Comes the Boom, Atlas Shrugged Part 2, The Man with the Iron Fists, Red Dawn, Playing for Keeps, Parental Guidance or anything with Tyler Perry.

But of what I have seen, these were the worst.

Dishonorable Mentions:

360 - I only watched the first forty minutes, and I'd seen enough.  Just a slow, slow slog meeting a bunch of boring or unpleasant people, and supposedly all their storylines tie together in the end, but even with a cast of Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, etc., I just didn't care.

AMERICAN REUNION - These kids are too old for this excrement.

LOCKOUT - Guy Pearce gives a great tough-guy performance in an "Escape from New York in Space" movie that might have been cool to me if I'd seen it in 1990.

MAN ON A LEDGE - Sam Worthington's star power's faded.  The whole thing felt predictable and cheap, and it really falls apart if you think about it. ("Please don't think about it!" pleads the studio.)

THE PAPERBOY - Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack all give great performances in a story not worth telling.  (Why am I watching Kidman pee on Zac Efron?)  This slice of Southern Gothic is not enough Lee "Precious" Daniels and too much Lee "Shadowboxer" Daniels.

RED LIGHTS - Starts off promising but gets progressively worse until we hit our twist ending that has no impact whatsoever.

ROCK OF AGES - Not counting any scene that had Tom Cruise.  It's worth seeing on DVD or cable to just watch Tom Cruise's scenes. Everything else about the movie is terrible.  Had it come out in the 1970's, it'd be the next cult midnight show where people yell at the screen.  Who on Earth thought having three Foreigner tracks on the soundtrack was a good idea?

TOTAL RECALL - Director Len Wiseman and wife Kate Beckinsale probably shouldn't make movies together anymore.

And now...

... My Worst Ten

10. Taylor Kitsch in JOHN CARTER and BATTLESHIP - Neither movie is as bad as you may have heard. I actually kinda liked John Carter, whereas Battleship only ceased being the worst movie of the year once the aliens showed up.  But Kitsch is the worst thing about both movies, and he was the lead.  His movie career will go the way of Josh Hartnett.

9. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER - This movie could have, should have been campy fun, but it's poorly lit and surprisingly uncreative.  I credit them for casting Benjamin Walker, who looks like a young Liam Neeson, but I thought it might have more creative weaving into history while Abe slaughters vampires on the side.

8. THE EXPENDABLES 2 - The first movie was a fun reunion of all these old muscle-headed action stars.  Now while it's cool that Jean-Claude Van Damme shows up, and he's a villain, this sequel wears out its welcome early.  Just empty-headed mindless gunfire at a bunch of faceless foreigners.

7. THE DEEP BLUE SEA - Poorly-paced melodrama about a woman who leaves her affluent husband for a younger man who doesn't love her back. But they have passion. On the days that he likes her.  There's a three-second pause after every line.

6. & 5. GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE and SEEKING JUSTICE - How far hath Nicolas Cage fallen. Dude won an Academy Award, you know.  Academy. Award.   First, he's starring in arguably the worst comic-book hero franchise, and then he's doing these VOD projects that make about $75,000 in theaters before disappearing.  We know he doesn't manage his money well, so maybe that's it.

4. THE DEVIL INSIDE - A low-budget horror movie where the characters don't behave rationally. I know, they make a hundred of these a year. But have you ever watched one that ends on a cliffhanger then directs you to its website to what happens next. Its website?!

3. UNDERWORLD AWAKENING - The fourth time is not the charm. Kate Beckinsale is back, but it doesn't matter. It's the future where vampires are known and the humans are trying to exterminate them.  The plot's the thinnest yet.

2. BENEATH THE DARKNESS - Dennis Quaid tries his hand at playing a psychopath in this trifle where the mystery is obvious from the beginning, but the participants on screen pretend that it isn't.

1. TAKEN 2 - The first movie had a visceral satisfaction to it. A great trailer, and a movie that lived up to it.  Even though it's the same director, the sequel is almost a parody of the first one. After the traumatic events of the first movie, the wife and daughter decide to surprise Dad by showing up... in Istanbul?  You'd think the daughter would never leave the mainland USA again.  Relatives of all the dead Eurotrach from the first movie seek revenge in the second, and several of them get dispatched with ease.  The whole thing has an unpleasant sheen to it.  It's a cynical cash-grab.

Savages - DVD Review

Starring Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Aaron Johnson, John Travolta, Benecio Del Toro, Salma Hayek, Emile Hirsch and Demian Bichir.
Directed by Oliver Stone.


★★


Stone, finally, has gone back to make a movie absent of political polemics.  He's just here to make some pulp fiction, a flashy, violent tale about a pair of small-time, successful marijuana dealers who find themselves at war with the Mexican cartel when they refuse to join them.

Even though the title makes me think of Pocahontas, it's fitting for this story, as this cartel is brutal in their punishments and scorched-Earth in their approach.  In a twist, the big mob boss is played by Salma Hayek, and she is where she is due to her willingness to kill people quicker than Scarface.

Kitsch (Battleship) and Johnson (Kick-Ass) are okay as the two "heroes." When their mutual girlfriend is kidnapped, they must hatch a plot to get her back, and it involves a shady federal agent (Travolta) who allows the drug war to flourish as long as he gets paid.

It's the kind of movie where there's little redeeming social value, and everyone deserves to die, but it loses the courage of its convictions in the last few minutes and offers a cop-out instead.

Battleship - Movie Review

Starring Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson, Tadanobu Asano, Hamish Linklater, Peter MacNicol, Jesse Plemons and Jerry Ferrara.
Directed by Peter Berg.

★★

When Paramount centered Top Gun around the star power of Tom Cruise, he'd already earned it. After supporting turns in Endless Love, Taps and The Outsiders, he made the most of his big break in Risky Business.

Taylor Kitsch has been given the same opportunity here, in a movie that wants to be Top Gun with Aliens. And he's not really up to the task.

For the first half-hour, this is one of the worst movies of the year. We go through the motions of establishing that Kitsch's Alex Hopper is impulsive, irresponsible, smart, cocky, a real maverick. Heh. His disapproving older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) is there to shout expository dialogue at him, but one too many stunts has led to Alex possibly getting kicked out of the Navy, right after these combat exercises the US is doing with Japan.

Then the aliens finally show up and it gets more interesting. They drop a dome over a few-miles radius, trapping some ships in there with them, and no one can get in or out. What's their motivation? Well, once they blow up the first ship, that's all they need to know.

It never goes off the Roland Emmerich rails, nor does it go into that "commercial for itself" Michael Bay mode. It really stays the whole time in Jerry Bruckheimer-wannabe land. Top Gun more than anything, but it reminded me of Pearl Harbor at one point too.  And, yeah, Transformers.  By the way, Transformers 1 & 3 were better movies than this.

I can't think of an actor though, that could have saved this movie. I mean, I liked Skarsgard and Rihanna and the others in their supporting roles fine, but no one is required to do much. Liam Neeson's part could have been played by anybody. Could have just as easily been Beau Bridges.

And no one ever says "You sank my battleship!"

P.S. I did like the one sequence with AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

P.P.S. I hated the obvious product placement. Coke Zero, I'm talking about you!

John Carter - Movie Review

Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Mark Strong, Dominic West, Samantha Morton, Willem Dafoe, Ciaran Hinds, James Purefoy, Thomas Haden Church, Bryan Cranston and Daryl Sabara.  Directed by Andrew Stanton.

★★★

"Of Mars! Say it!"

After Mars Needs Moms bombed, Disney changed the original title John Carter of Mars to the much blander John Carter.

If you forget all the surrounding noise about how expensive it was to make, and how much money it will lose, it's actually a pretty decent sci-fi adventure with one central flaw. Taylor Kitsch is not that interesting.

It's all about John Carter, a Confederate Civil War vet forced back into active service by the United States of We Yankees Kickedyerbutt. While Kitsch's line-reads rarely stray from the obvious choice, I enjoyed watching Bryan Cranston dig into his expository officer character. I wish his character had been zapped to Mars too.

So yeah, about 20 minutes in, John Carter's on what the natives call Barsoom. The ensuing plot goes through several familiar tropes of the genres. Star Wars, Avatar, Dune, etc. owe a debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This is the live-action directorial debut of Andrew Stanton (WALL-E), and all the money is up there on the screen. The cities and ships and landscapes are all great. I really felt transported to another place. There was an air-battle that got confusing and that made me think of how I appreciate George Lucas the choreographer.

And for me, Kitsch is a notch below Chris Hemsworth's Thor. Maybe after a couple more movies he'll figure it out.  I still would have enjoyed a sequel, as this is essentially an origin story, but we know that won't happen.