Shane Black’s new film ‘Nice Guys’ Doesn’t Finish Last: Just Somewhere in the Forgettable Middle

In The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe play private eyes who are forced to join together in their pursuit of a missing porn star named Amelia, whose mom (Kim Basinger) works for the Department of Justice. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1977, which proves to be a fascinating milieu. Writer-director Shane Black immerses us in some of the social crises of the day: gas shortages, the alarming rate of air pollution in L.A., the post-sexual revolution rise of access to pornography (and the way this access affects various groups of people). But The Nice Guys fundamentally doesn’t work. Like so many other neo-noirs of late, it forsakes the thrill of a crackling good mystery for the allure of irony. The result is a disappointing movie full of interesting details and performances.

Shane Black clearly has an affection for the mystery/film noir genre. After making his reputation as a screenwriter for the Lethal Weapon movies, Black wrote and directed the indie favorite Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), itself an ironic ode to the trashy delights we experience in consuming pulpy mystery thrillers. That film starred Robert Downey, Jr. and Val Kilmer, playing an actor and a detective, respectively, who get embroiled in a crime in modern-day Los Angeles. If your experience was anything like mine, that movie worked on you, once. Watching it a second and third time, I felt that all its charm had somehow been drained out, and all that was left was a chatty, too-clever-for-its-own good plot that was so ironic, so hip, that it wasn’t willing to let us truly enjoy the actual mystery.

The Nice Guys feels like the fourth or fifth viewing of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It's tolerable, at times funny, often meandering and jumbled. Once we figure out the mystery, which is confusing and aimless for half of the movie, the film’s quirky, self-conscious sensibility becomes increasingly tired. It’s as though Shane Black deliberately muddled the story for as long as possible because he knew there wasn’t much to it. But there is one encouraging note about Black’s directing: He has a sharp eye for genuinely comic situations.

Perhaps the funniest scene involves Russell Crowe’s character, Jackson Healy, confronting Ryan Gosling’s character, Holland March, in a public restroom. March must maneuver all of the following while sitting on the toilet: a handgun, the door of the bathroom stall, the magazine he’s using to cover his privates, and the cigarette in his mouth, which he tries to hold on to while speaking to Healy. It’s a terrific set-up, and Gosling plays it perfectly. He’s utterly sincere, and that works for his character.

Has Ryan Gosling ever gotten to do this much physical comedy in a movie before? His performance is the one pleasant surprise of the movie. Gosling is such a stoic actor, like a modern-day James Dean without the allure or the facial ticks, that his performances often get lost amid other more interesting and compelling actors. Here, Gosling uses his habitual brooding for comic effect, perhaps because Shane Black casts him as a relentless, bumbling screw-up, a single father whose thirteen-year-old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) often aids him in his investigations, much like the character Penny in that old cartoon series Inspector Gadget. (Rice, incidentally, gives a fine performance: her character is the epitome of the 1970s latchkey kid, raising herself, and practically raising her dad: she even drives when he’s had too much to drink.)

While it’s delightful to watch Gosling play a fool and a failure, it’s disheartening to see a puffy Russell Crowe, dressed in baggy clothes, playing a sad version of his character, Bud White, in L.A. Confidential. Bud White was fit and competent and driven by a sense of duty. Jackson Healy feels utterly useless. He’s like a sad puppy. And Crowe seems utterly lost in this movie. He only comes through when he’s attacked by bad guys and gets to do some fighting. There are some movie stars who can do sad really well; but Russell Crowe has been branded the hero, and that is where his talent lies.

Fallen knights like Holland March and Jackson Healy, who are really just the latest iterations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, are all too familiar in this genre. Filmmakers cannot seem to get enough of the idea of the loser private eye sinking amidst all the rot and decay of Los Angeles. These themes do seem appropriate in L.A., but it’s hard for Shane Black to improve on Chinatown or The Long Goodbye. Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential, understood how to explore that decay with tongue in cheek (with the help of the sickly brilliant mind of writer James Ellroy). All of these movies suggest that politics, not Hollywood, is the real source of corruption. It’s a compelling argument, and a canny defense of the arts (because they so often need defending against people who treat them as suspect), but even that defense gets mucked up in The Nice Guys, because we’ve stopped caring by then. (Although there’s a great joke at the end about a porn film that’s been made to raise consciousness about the government’s dubious relationship with the auto industry.)

There’s also a really unsettling thread in The Nice Guys: the movie keeps putting young teenagers in weird sexual situations. At the beginning, a young boy sneaks into his parents’ room in the middle of the night and pries a dirty magazine from under the bed. While he’s pouring over the pages in the kitchen, a car crashes into his house. (In one of the best shots in the movie, we see the headlights through a window, and suddenly the car loses control and tumbles down the canyon.) When the boy investigates, he finds that the driver is Misty Mountains, one of the centerfolds in the very magazine he was reading! And not only is Misty Mountains right there in the flesh, but her flesh is prominently displayed as she breathes her last in front of this very confused boy. (It’s an amusing jab at puritanical self-guilt: Did his actions induce this dramatic form of punishment?) Later, Holland’s own daughter winds up at a party of porn stars, and she wanders around asking questions about the missing girl in her dad’s case, somehow blasé about all the things going on around her.

Black is obviously making a point here about how ineffective these men are at their jobs that they wind up relying on the observations of children. He both mocks and affirms the old cliche that children are growing up too fast, seeing too much. “These are the kids my daughter has to grow up with,” Holland moans after encountering a disturbingly frank 13-year-old boy. After all, Los Angeles, which has always been branded as a city of sin, is home not just to celebrities and pornographers, but regular families with kids, just like any other place. It’s the convergence of these worlds—the glamorous, the seedy, and the ordinary—that Shane Black seems most interested in.

With Matt Bomer (who gives a memorable performance as a hitman named Jon Boy), Margaret Qualley, Keith David, Beau Knapp, Yaya DaCosta, Ty Simpkins, and Murielle Telio.

The Water Diviner

There is scenic beauty to spare in Russell Crowe’s flawed but touching The Water Diviner. The film—apparently based on fact, however loosely—traces the journey of an Australian farmer named Joshua Connor in 1919 to Gallipoli. Connor is trying to recover the bodies of his three sons, all of whom were part of ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and were (to the best of his knowledge) killed together in battle (during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign which left thousands of troops dead on both sides). Crowe also directed the film, with a surprisingly subtle hand, particularly in crafting battle scenes and in showcasing the landscape that situates his story, be it the austere terrain of the Australian desert or the sumptuous blues and greens of the Mediterranean and Turkey. Crowe’s light touch doesn’t always work for the film: there are moments when it feels lacking in emotional weight, despite the compelling elements of the story which would seem to defer such weight almost as a matter of course.

My knowledge of World War I is fairly limited, and my knowledge of the skirmish at Gallipoli and its aftermath even more so. But even I felt more than a little skeptical about some of the cultural and political aspects of The Water Diviner. Somehow, Crowe’s film feels too blissfully easy in its understanding of cultural divides. Crowe’s good-natured, politically neutral farmer, Joshua Connor, begins his search in Istanbul, and when he arrives, an eager young boy nabs his luggage and lures him to the out-of-the-way hotel run by his widowed mother Ayshe (played by Olga Kurylenko). Naturally, she’s put off by Joshua Connor, since he represents the Anglo enemies who slaughtered so many of her own people (including her husband, although she refuses to admit his death because it might obligate her to marry his brother, a calculating, somewhat sleazy man). Nevertheless, a fragile kinship—and romance—is obviously in the works. And even though the film ultimately leaves this development open to interpretation, its inclusion feels more than a bit precious, like a Hallmark movie found its way into an otherwise tough-minded film about the tragedy of war.

I appreciate that The Water Diviner is ultimately proclaiming a message of togetherness. The characters in this film have felt the torrent of war in the most direct and painful ways imaginable. But a movie that so conveniently unites two warring cultures by contriving a romance between two people from those cultures, feels a bit calculated, like finely processed treacly Hollywood goo. It goes down so easy. But there’s also a romanticized portrait of the Turks which left me feeling skeptical about the film’s historical insight.

And yet, this movie is likable and effective and refreshingly subtle in so many ways. Crowe’s depiction of conflict is one of the most understated we’ve seen in Western movies of the last decade. We see flashes of the battle Connor’s sons fought in Gallipoli, all of them technically pretty dazzling and viewer-friendly. We can tell what is happening in the action, and the sounds of the guns feel loud in that antiquated way, not like computerized modern recreations. The battles are also not drawn out: they’re more like flecks of memory, only Connor doesn’t remember them; he’s imagining them, or we’re getting them as a kind of dreamlike retroactive vision. They are well-staged, efficient, powerful, and haunting.

And to his credit, Russell Crowe doesn’t try to milk the audience or give himself blustering actor-y moments. His character—obviously grief-stricken not just by the loss of all three of his sons but the recent suicide of his wife—is broken. He’s been stripped of the things that we’ve been told are being protected by aggressive military force. The Great War for him isn’t a roar of victory; it’s a wail of personal loss. In one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film, we see Joshua Connor’s sons, all of them apparently mortally wounded, one in particular issuing a guttural moan that goes on for hours; his brother, the least wounded of the three (the third is already dead) cries out, knowing he can do nothing to save his brothers or himself, and feeling the weight of this great tragedy in a very literal sense as he lies under the broken bodies of his brothers.

That’s a powerful image. There are many of them in The Water Diviner. And yet, these images are marred somewhat by the film’s cheap satisfaction. Perhaps this is a result of what feels like rushed storytelling. I’ve never been one to complain about a movie being too short, but are moments in The Water Diviner that feel clumsily staged as though the filmmakers were in a hurry and didn’t have the finesse to dramatize what they wanted in the right way. This is surely—at least in part—the mark of a first-time director. Crowe makes up for these oversights by his willingness to soak in the surroundings of the many places Connor travels.

And even though the film feels at times like a cultural field trip conducted by an overly optimistic and more than slightly misinformed guide, its intentions are admirable. To his credit, Crowe does make an effort to depict the complexities at work between the two cultures at the heart of the film: the Anglos and the Ottomans. Connor is aided more than once by a Turkish military officer (Yilmaz Erdogan)—who’s been enlisted by Australian military officials to help them recover their dead soldiers, because he’s familiar with the landscape and the trajectory of the battles. But this is part of the problem: the film feels naïve in its forced togetherness. The actors lend some credibility to problematically noble intentions. And I can’t overstate my gratitude for a movie about war that makes an effort to be subtle and thoughtful and relatively light on explosions (for a summer movie).

With Jai Courtney, Ryan Corr, Dylan Georgiades, Jacqueline McKenzie, James Fraser, and Ben O’Toole. 

Man of Steel

After about twenty minutes of listening to several children squirming in their seats near me (as well as talking intermittently and running up and down the aisles of the theater), it occurred to me that it was possible that children were not getting more disruptive in public. This may have been normal, accepted behavior from them, only I hadn't been to a movie that kids would see in years, with a few exceptions. (I did go with my students--for a field trip--to see The Hunger Games and Oz.) The movie was Man of Steel, and the children were apparently bored out of their minds during all the parts when I was riveted by what was happening on screen. (In other words, all the "non-action" parts.)

Of course, one would expect director Zach Snyder's take on Superman to have a lot of inane action sequences. And it does. These scenes, for me, hampered my enjoyment of the film. The human story of Man of Steel remains as enchanting as it was in the 1978 version: Kal-El (played by Henry Cavill, who seems perfectly cast) leaves the doomed planet of Krypton (sent by his parents, played by Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer) and finds a new home on earth, with new parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). And what's more, David S. Goyer, who wrote the script, manages to rehash this story in a fresh way. Much of it is scene in flashback at important points during the present, and the story of how Kal-El/Clark Kent travels North to his fortress of solitude feels more vibrant here: he basically works his way North, taking whatever jobs he can find, and of course finds it difficult to avoid stepping in to save the day when catastrophes strike (such as a burning oil rig that traps its crew).

But the action scenes are intense and it's hard to get your bearings during them. This is a continuing problem in these kinds of movies. I often just check out during those moments. It's hard to be emotionally invested when you can't even tell what's going on. The glimpses I do get reveal to me that the computer effects, while useful for creating impressive vistas and many other designs that would be astronomically expensive to do for real, aren't all that hot. I kept getting the feeling I was watching someone play Halo. (This may be just a reverential nod to the 1978 Superman, which did have pretty crummy effects.) The plot thickens when General Zod (Michael Shannon), a Krypton rebel who managed to survive when Krypton imploded and now wants revenge against Jor-El's son, threatens to destroy the earth if Kal-El is not handed over to him. (This way, Man of Steel jumbles together the plots of Superman I and II.) 

One of the movie's biggest assets is Amy Adams, who plays a different kind of Lois Lane than Margot Kidder did. Kidder's Lane always had a quip to dish out. She was also written at a time when the world seemed to idolize the single career woman. Lois Lane, hot-shot reporter for the Daily Planet, had it all. Except Superman stole her heart and she was reduced to a gushy, sentimental girl at times (performing a corny mind poem in that scene when Superman takes her out flying one evening). In the latest Superman film, Lois isn't bearing the feminist cross. So she can be vulnerable without losing her humanity. And she's also more involved in the action of the plot, which may not be totally believable, but certainly succeeds in making her character more vital. (To be fair, I always enjoyed Margot Kidder's performance as LL.) Amy Adams is a fine actress, and she's thoroughly enjoyable in Man of Steel.

Goyer has really laid on the Jesus-imagery thick, right down to having Clark Kent be 33 years old. (Comic book fans: was that how it was originally?) It may be that the studio executives have noticed what a large market there is for "Christian" entertainment, so now they're pandering to yet another demographic. Perhaps they're hoping ministers will show clips from Man of Steel during sermons. I sincerely hope nobody confuses Jesus of Nazareth with a super-hero. 

With Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet; Christopher Meloni, Antje Traue, Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, and Dylan Sprayberry (as teenage Clark Kent). 143 min. ★★

Broken City

In Broken City (2013) Mark Wahlberg plays an ex-cop named Billy Taggart, who became a private investigator after being let go from the force. He shot and killed a young man, allegedly in self-defense, and the incident aroused a considerable amount of media attention and public indignation. Seven years later, Billy is hired by Nick Hostetler, the mayor of New York (Russell Crowe), to spy on the mayor's philandering wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). But Billy soon discovers that he's embroiled in something much deeper and more dangerous than mere adultery.

The elements of Broken City could almost have been fashioned into a film noir thriller from the 1940s. It has all kinds of bad, corrupt people and some light scandalous touches. But that's where the similarities between that genre and this crime mishmash end. The film never comes together, never becomes exciting, must-see-this-to-the-end movie-watching. Mark Wahlberg is a capable actor, but in Broken City his Billy Taggart has very little credibility. He's not compelling enough to be the kind of character who's inexplicably driven, the way Philip Marlowe was in The Long Goodbye, to figure out the mystery, despite his increasing irrelevance to the investigation.

Billy Taggart keeps showing up where he seems totally out of place: at crime scene investigations in which he shouldn't be allowed, at expensive political cocktail parties where his presence gives him away. The movie doesn't make much use of these incredulous moments. Billy's just there, conveniently invited into important scenes for the sake of the plot. There's also a scene where Billy discovers some important documents--freshly hurled into a dumpster--that help reveal the mayor's political maneuverings. Why, you ask, wasn't this shredded? Especially when, seconds later, Billy peers into a window only to see more compromising documents being destroyed the way you'd expect them to.

The supporting cast is a good cast, but is given very little to do, with the exception of Russell Crowe. He's always been very good at being very bad, and in Broken City he captures the essence of the charming, corrupt political animal, talking his way out of trouble and into the people's hearts. As his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones looks like a strong, civically involved first lady of NYC, but the script doesn't give her much to do. It's a problem I keep noticing for actresses. They seem to exist in movies to serve a function, rather than to interpret and illuminate a character or entertain us with their own considerable acting talents. It's the men who get to have all the fun. Zeta-Jones has a few little quips here and there, but she's really just eye candy for the sympathetic observer. And Kyle Chandler, as the man she's supposedly sleeping with, who just happens to be the campaign adviser to the mayor's opponent, doesn't have much chance to shine either.

The subplot, involving Billy's actress-wife Natalie (Natalie Martinez), nearly sinks the movie. She's premiering in an "indie film" (the phrase is uttered with such limited understanding that it's difficult to believe she's an actor, or that the screenwriter knows much about movies), and the tacit tension between Billy and Natalie becomes palpable at the premiere, during the movie's explicit love scene, between Natalie and her male co-star. Billy's rage turns to boozing, and their relationship goes on the rocks with the drinks. It's bad. Natalie's movie is called Kiss of Life, and the opening credits are featured over an ocean shore on a hazy day. The conversation leading up to the sex scene is laughable: shallow twaddle about the meaning of life, or something pseudo-deep, as I remember it. It's such a preposterous and uninteresting subplot that even the writer abandons it after a while. Natalie leaves and she isn't mentioned again.

One redeeming quality: the chummy relationship between Billy and his assistant, Katy (Alona Tal), is amusing and the only fun aspect of this movie. (Except, their comic banter starts to remind you of crime shows like NCIS, which is never a good sign for a movie.) With Jeffrey Wright, Barry Pepper (playing the mayor's opponent), Michael Beach, and James Ransone. Directed by Allan Hughes. 109 min. Watch The Big Sleep instead. Or The Long Goodbye. ★½

3:10 to Yuma

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale head the cast in the 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma. Crowe plays an infamous cutthroat train robber who's supposed to be evil incarnate, and Bale is the stubborn rancher, struggling to feed his family, who agrees to help transport him to a train station bound for the Yuma, Arizona prison. I haven't seen the 1957 original, which starred the always forthright Glenn Ford, and Van Heflin, but this re-imagining is a first-rate Western. It's trashy good fun, sustained by Crowe's inability to be unlikable. He's the kind of dream villain who's tough enough to be intimidating but not dastardly enough to kill a kid or anything like that.

The director, James Mangold, maintains a sort of controlled brutality that works because there's an ironic side to all this: the archly drawn characters poke fun at the old model of good guys vs. bad guys. Granted, there's nothing new in this, but the movie doesn't make a point of being too clever or self-impressed about it. We're allowed to enjoy the play-acting. This is probably the best sham Western I've seen.

This movie offers itself up as some kind of hero-worshiping wish fulfillment. Bale's character wants to be a hero to his sons again. After losing a foot in the Civil War, he feels reduced to something less than a man, and he sees this moment as an opportunity to improve his image. You find yourself laughing at this delusional reasoning. It fuels all the drama of the movie. Westerns have always contained an element of wish fulfillment. They have so often encapsulated an obsession with masculine power and domination. The outlaws, the Indians, and the elements become the Western hero's three obvious antagonists.

The actors are mostly well-cast. Ben Foster, as Crowe's right hand man, achieves a kind of creepy comic book style performance. He's disturbingly devoted to Crowe, and the moment he comes on screen he's commanding your attention. As a performer he restrains himself for the most part, and lets the creepiness really sink in and populate all of his scenes in the film. Peter Fonda does good work as a determined old codger working for the Pinkerton guards Crowe and his gang attacks in the beginning. He's go the vibe of a John Carradine: he's done this before. Vinessa Shaw seems anachronistic as a saloon keeper Crowe beds early in the film. She just looks too modern, even with authentic-looking costumery. She doesn't look, for instance, as convincing as Katharine Ross did in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With Logan Lerman, Peter Fonda, Dallas Roberts, Alan Tudyk, Gretchen Mol, and Luke Wilson.

L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential (1997) is the definitive modern pulp noir. Set in 1950s Los Angeles, it's about the decaying power of corruption in the police department. This is the kind of movie you experience with sheer glee, because it taps into the very base, gritty, sensual pleasures and fascinations that make movies such fun: murder, sex, blackmail, corruption, and ambiguous characters who simultaneously defy and embody the good guys vs. bad guys theme. In fact, L.A. Confidential is so gritty and seedy, that by the end you feel dazed. The movie punches you in the gut. But what elevates the material, transcending the whole genre of pulpy thrillers of which it is very much an homage, is the humanizing of the main characters.

Russell Crowe, as the brute force member of the LAPD, Bud White, is astonishingly good. He seems to be all macho energy--an invaluable asset when it comes to intimidating suspects--but he's vulnerable too. Crowe looks like someone who would throw people through windows and take a girl out to the movies in the same day, and he's well cast in the role. It was one of the movies that made him a star. He thrives in parts like these.

Kevin Spacey seems to be having a wonderful time as the cop who courts Hollywood. He's a creative consultant for a hokey TV cop show, and it's where he lives. Spacey is so effortlessly good that he's probably overlooked amidst the more dramatic roles. When he and Guy Pearce are having a heart to heart and Pearce asks him why he became a cop, he doesn't give a long speech about some traumatic childhood experience that imparted within him a lifelong desire to see justice served. Instead, all he says is, "I can't remember." It's delightfully antithetical to the cliched soliloquys so many movies (even this one at times) resort to, the kind that generally end up in little blurbs for the Oscars, to showcase a performance. It's impossible to characterize an entire performance in one 30-second clip, and Spacey is living proof of this.

What strikes me about L.A. Confidential is how creepy it is. The corruption is so believable, and flies so squarely in the face of the mythology about Hollywood and the 1950s, that you find yourself feeling genuinely at uneasy. The movie taps into our underlying fear and distrust of authority figures. It asks: How do we know that they have our best interests at heart? More frightening--what if they do, but are willing to break the law to carry out their own brand of justice? Like the corrupt police chief played by Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, playing God with a badge becomes an intoxicating drug. Sooner or later it's uncontrollable, and it never remains untainted by corruption, greed, and vanity.

L.A. Confidential recalls real murder cases that have fascinated us for decades. It's based on the book by James Ellroy, who in part became a mystery writer because he was so affected by the gruesome, still-unsolved, murder of his own mother. The story inadvertently conjures up images of the Black Dahlia case of 1947, which of course happened in L.A. only a few years before the events of this movie. Most closely connected to that story of a would-be actresses' brutal murder is the thread in L.A. Confidential about a call-girl agency, run by a sleazy millionaire (David Strathairn). He fixes up girls to look like movie stars. He has a 'Rita Hayworth' and a 'Lana Turner' and a 'Veronica Lake' (played by Kim Basinger, the only actor in the movie to win an Oscar, and probably the least deserving person in the movie of all, even though she's not bad). Veronica Lake, it should be noted, is best remembered for playing dames in grimy B movies. It's pure enjoyable trash, and one of the great films of the 1990s.

With Danny DeVito as a smut-peddling journalist who writes for a Hollywood gossip magazine called Hush Hush, Simon Baker, and James Cromwell as the police chief, Dudley Smith, an almost mythological creature. He seems to see through a person's soul, and he's a sly, dark mastermind with a hacky Irish accent. He's absolutely terrifying. ★★★★

Body of Lies

This twaddle about terrorism and the CIA is mixed-up and convoluted. It's the kind of massive, dull, film that makes you think the occasional explosion or torture scene is climactic, when really it's just a minor interruption to the plodding rhythm of a movie that's too high-minded and pseudo-intellectual for its own good. It's proof that two respected actors and a well-known director (Ridley Scott). can pick a bummer.

I've never been completely sold on DiCaprio anyway. He's certainly got talent (and he shines in the right part, such as in Catch Me If You Can), but he often fails to be convincing in the roles in which he's cast. Did anyone really forget it was Leonardo DiCaprio they were watching rather than Howard Hawks in The Aviator? Blame it on the youngish face that has kept him looking 25 even at 35 (and older). You're always aware that he's acting.

On the other hand, Russell Crowe looks and sounds better than he acts in this movie. He becomes immersed in the character at the surface level, but he never gets the delicious breakout scene we're expecting. There's no meltdown. Even when DiCaprio's character pushes him out of his chair (a funny scene that gets underplayed, even dismissed, because this movie is too serious to really care about humor), Crowe's character reacts with phony finesse, and lifts higher our anticipation that he'll blow a gasket sooner or later. It doesn't pay off. Crowe puffed himself up to play DiCaprio's sleazy and slick good-ole-boy boss, a doughy Southern scoundrel who's too much of a coward to do anything but pull the strings and push the buttons. He's placed with the obvious intention of conjuring up the image of any number of politicians in recent history. but his character has nothing likeable.

This is a movie that's bungled by its own high-falutin aspirations, not to mention its relentlessly sluggish pacing. It's trying to be hip and complex, and as a result, its true intentions are too cloudy to be clear. The movie fails to resonate with the viewer. Actress Golshifteh Farahani breathes some life into the muddle for a while, as DiCaprio's Jordanian love interest, and Oscar Isaac registers well as one of DiCaprio's partners. (He played the scummy Prince John in another, better, Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe movie, Robin Hood).

Based on a 2007 novel by David Ignatius.

The Next Three Days

In The Next Three Days, which was filmed on location in Pittsburgh, Russell Crowe looks puffy and inept as a high school English teacher who devises a plan to bust his wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of jail. She was convicted of murdering her boss three years earlier, but Crowe's character isn't interested in whether or not she did it: he just wants his wife back. Crowe is the movie, because Banks spends most of it stuck in the slammer awaiting his visitations, and while she gives a successful performance, it's Crowe's task to make this movie believable.

The improbabilities that bog this movie down are manifold. It's hard enough to believe that Crowe's character could successfully break anyone out of jail, but the movie covers that problem by letting him fail, frequently. He tries to find people in Pittsburgh's ghettos to get him fake I.D.'s and winds up getting his face smashed (and his pocket picked). In fact, you get the feeling that his own lack of street-smarts will dissuade him from undertaking the operation altogether, but he persists, even when it seems impossible to prove his wife's guilt.

The movie is suspenseful and keeps your stomach in knots, but it's the moral ambiguity that makes The Next Three Days a little more interesting. You start to think that Crowe's character has gone bonkers just like Don Quixote, who comes up during a discussion in his class, and provides a clumsy impetus for our understanding of Crowe's transformation. He simply refuses to accept the reality of his wife being in prison for murder, so he opts for an alternate reality. Quite interesting, but the movie doesn't have the strength of its convictions. [SPOILER] We're let off the hook at the end because Bonnie and Clyde turn out to be nice and innocent, not mean and cold-blooded. Crowe makes it work, but the movie is just a heartbeat away from being an absolutely inconceivable mess. With lesser talents it would have been just that, but as it is, I liked it for the most part.

Adapted from the French film Pour Elle (Anything For Her) (2007). Directed by Paul Haggis. With Liam Neeson, Brian Dennehy, Jason Beghe, Olivia Wilde. 125 min. ★★½

Robin Hood

Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott reunite for a rousing update of ROBIN HOOD. Your trusty reviewer doesn't usually go for epic movies, but is willing to put a little trust in the hands of the director of ALIEN and the star of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Cate Blanchett makes for a strong but soft Maid Marian, who agrees to give aid to the illusion that Robin Longstride (Crowe) is her dead husband Robin of Loxley returning from 10 years battle (in order to keep her land and ensure the livelihood of the many subjects who work it). But trouble is afoot, within and without England, as the sleazy King John (Oscar Isaac) sees little value in the liberty of his subjects, but must depend upon their fighting skills to save England from being overtaken by the French, led by his backstabbing chum Godfrey (Mark Strong). William Hurt as a British chancellor and Max von Sydow as Marian's ailing but noble father-in-law lend just the right amount of British upper-custiness to this swirling epic, a tale that proves it is worth retelling, particularly in light of 1991's ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES and its notoriously appalling casting choice of Kevin Costner in the lead. Audiences may determine if a sequel is in order (there's certainly room for more, provided they do as good as this one). With Mark Addy (as Friar Tuck), Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Matthew MacFadyen, Kevin Durand, and Scott Grimes. ★★★½

State of Play

State of Play didn't seem to get much notice back in April, but it ought to have. It's an absorbing political thriller in the vein of director Alan J. Pakula's films (All the President's Men, Klute, and The Pelican Brief), based on a 2003 British TV mini-series. Russell Crowe heads an impressive cast as a reporter for the Washington Globe whose old buddy, a U.S. Congressman (Ben Affleck) becomes the center of a scandal when his aide and mistress dies suspiciously in a subway station.
The congressman's investigation of a large and insidious corporation which has its financial fingers in the cookie jar of the War on Terror seems unrelated to this apparent accident, at first. Crowe and a newbie reporter (Rachel McAdams) whose job as a blogger for the Globe he resents, must band together in their search for the truth, fighting reticent political figures, creepy mercenaries, and the ticking of the media clock.
Well-timed and appropriately suspenseful fun with more than a few pertinent plot points (such as political scandals, the War, and the current transitory nature of newspaper media and its relationship to the blogosphere). Helen Mirren gives a wonderfully bitchy performance as Crowe's editor, and also starring Robin Wright Penn as Affleck's disgraced wife, also a long-time friend with Crowe.

So far, I would certainly add this to my favorites of the year. ★★★