Warner Brothers got the right vibes from Tommy Lee Jones and his character in the bigscreen version of The Fugitive and the suits clearly thought they might have a new franchise in the making. Unfortunately they thought wrong, at least from a financial perspective since this movie only seems to have a box office gross roughly equivalent to their cost. Or possibly Jones changed his mind after the success of the first Men in Black, released months before and still making the cash register sing.

I liked U.S. Marshals and would have been glad to see another featuring this crew; I bet Jones would rather have made another than the pathetic Space Cowboys and just sad Man of the House. Though Wesley Snipes wouldn’t have featured again, Joe Pantoliano, Kate Nelligan, Daniel Roebuck and LaTanya Richardson made a good assortment around the typically gruff, hard-ass Jones. Oh well.

Written by John Pogue (his first produced script, though he went on to write all three Skulls flicks) and directed by Stuart Baird (who next directed the criminally underrated Star Trek: Nemesis), the marshals are tasked with transporting a (wrongly accused, of course) Snipes and other assorted alleged felons to New York City when one of the bad men, using a gun assembled form parts hidden in the toilet paper holder, tries to kill Snipes and instead blows a hole in the plane cabin wall. He and a couple of others are promptly sucked out but most survive the crash.

Snipes had already picked the handcuff lock and escapes in the confusion, leading Jones et al on a fugitive hunt. Wesley knows who set him up, or who can lead him to the right man, and stays clear of the marshals long enough to get there. The villains are corrupt, money hungry US government officials in collusion with some nasty Chinese intelligence agents.

The important thing in a movie like U.S. Marshals is pacing. Accelerating tension with shorter and shorter breathing spaces until the climax, when the Right Thing must happen. In this instance, as in the first movie, the marshals’ target has to prove his innocence and put the real bad guy in the frame instead, and Jones and the unjustly accused hero must grudgingly acknowledge respect for the other.

Baird, who mainly works as an editor, does this very well. Speeding SUVs run into Manhattan traffic jams, footraces down alleys where the only exit is a padlocked backdoor, even the opening, accidental crash of Snipes’ towtruck. There’s no mystery for us in Snipes’ innocence because, of course, even if the movie didn’t make that plain early on the trailers telegraph this spoiler; not that viewers like me care or would have doubted it since that’s the franchise’s key differentiator ;).

recommended

This collaboration between George Clooney and writer/director Stephen Gaghan is a close cousin of Fernando Meilles’ Constant Gardener with focus shifted from pharmaceuticals to the more obvious petroleum. Cementing the relationship is that neither fits the Hollywood mold (which, despite their shared anti-corporate message, predecessors like Silkwood and Erin Brockovich very much do).

Syriana follows veteran CIA Middle East operative Bob Barnes (Clooney) and financial wizard Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) as they follow perpendicular roads to the opening of a massive new facility in a corrupt Persian Gulf emirate. Mirroring the American pair are a poor Pakistani teen (Mazhar Munir) attempting to work in the Emirate and Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig, in his first big post-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine role), heir apparent and determined to reshape his country as more than just free-spending oil barrons.

Christopher Plummer plays the master chef, happy to cut and stir behind the scenes, with Jeffrey Wright (very different from his performance in Angels in America) excellent as his sous chef; both are partners at a powerful DC law firm, working to smooth approval of a merger between Chris Cooper’s up and coming family business with the traditional Big Oil corporation run by Peter Gerety (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Wire).

Other noteworthy performers are a very subdued Amanda Peet as Damon’s wife; the visibly aging David Clennon, an Assistant US Attorney General investigating the merger, and William Hurt, ex-CIA, still connected pal of Barnes; Jane Atkinson, the ruthless head of Barnes’ CIA division; and, Akbar Kurta as Nasir’s slothful brother and rival in succession.

Syriana is based on the allegedly autobiographical book by Robert Baer though Gaghan and Cooney steer clear of that controversy by making the plot unquestionably fiction albeit inspired and informed by the source material. Making his directorial debut after writing the terrific Traffic, Gaghan has clearly learned from Steven Soderberg’s film of his script as we float from perspective to perspective, a bit of plot here and character development there, misdirection and suggestion as prevalent as clear going.

recommeded

The movie that killed BradJen, or whatever stupid nickname the tabloids had for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, and hatched Brangelina was on HBO last night so me and the sweetie watched to see if there were any clues.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which continues the up and down nature of director Doug Liman’s career1, gives us the darkly comic tale of husband and wife John and Jane Smith. Unbeknownst to the other, each works as a top assassin but for different, enemy organizations. Precisely who employs the no longer so in love spouses is never mentioned though I got the idea that we’re talking about rivals within the US intelligence bureaucracy and not, say USA v. China.

John and Jane are sent, separately, to kill some fearsome young desperado during a transfer of custody and, after failing due to the unexpected presense of the other, realize who was there. Learning their true natures incites the Joneses to go to war, like the camel’s final straw, since neither thinks they want to be in the marriage anyway.

Hundreds of knives and bullets fly, a few explosions are set off and the couple finally learn the whole assignment was a setup by their bosses, who just found out their killer was married to an enemy killer. Still no longer in love, they’re pissed off enough to team up and fight their way past the platoon of blacked out soldiers assigned to finish them. In an incredibly predictable conclusion they fall back in love in the process of killing every one of the soldiers. Fade to black.

There are two things wrong here: the wanton violence and the fact that the whole movie feels like a warmed over remake of the much better Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas film The War of the Roses. That 1989 film, still the best directorial effort from Danny DeVito, mined the same terrain using brains instead of rocket launchers.

moderately recommended, especially if you want to see Jolie in a leather outfit taking care of a ‘naughty boy’ terrorist leader and dancing in a thin shift in a tropical rainstorm.

1: Swingers - great, Go - a big miss, Bourne Identity - a personal all-time favorite, Mr. & Mrs. Smith - a solid single.

Made a dozen years ago, the comic–though not any more cliched than many characters here–Arab terrorists are no longer that amusing to American audiences. Few of us consider the possibility of smuggled nuclear weapons as farfetched as we did in 1994.

Still, I rank the James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger action comedy blockbuster True Lies as one of the best of the genre, up there with both Pirates of the Caribbean movies and possibly the first Men in Black, and certainly neither of them has produced anything nearly as good since. Also, the Jamie Lee Curtis striptease.. well, I can’t verbalize my reaction better than a Wayne Campbell “Schwing!”

Tom Arnold, as Arnie’s sidekick, has the best role of his career trying to hang on as the future Governator rides everything from a horse and a classic ‘Vette to a Harrier jet as they try to stop Art Malik’s crew from detonating the warheads. Tia Carrere, who earned Schwings of her own in Wayne’s World 2, is not quite ruthlessly seductive enough to get away with her filthy loot, going down in a classic back of the limo cat fight against Curtis. Even Eliza Dushku has a choice part, one of her first high profile gigs, as Arnie and Jamie Lee’s teen daughter who takes the key action to stop the terrorists before being rescued by her dad. While she’s hanging by one hand from a construction crane 22 stories over Miami and she has to let go and fall a couple of feet onto the Harrier.

definitely recommended

Sequels, especially ones which are the middle chapter in a trilogy, often let down fans of the first movie. The Empire Strikes Back was a notable exception, often cited as the best of the six by fans, but The Two Towers (despite being a terrific movie IMO) is generally considered a letdown. The reason, even in the best of cases seems fairly straightforward: the first film opens the big can of worms and the main characters surprise and seduce us while the second still doesn’t resolve the conflict and we already know the characters.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is fighting welterwight compared to these heavyweight classics, and is an enjoyable two and a half hours, but still falls into the middle movie canyon. I suspect only the most ardent of Johnny Depp fans were expecting anything like what his Captain Jack Sparrow character turned out to be in Curse of the Black Pearl and others were wondering why the excellent, if eccentric, actor signed on for a movie based on a theme park ride; Eddie Murphy’s The Haunted Mansion, released around the same time, certainly turned out to be the weak effort most were projecting for Pirates.

Curse, though, was a revelation and showed that a little imagination, a bit of discipline and a smidge of over the top acting go a long way. The problem is that this time the audience expects much more, the big surprises have been shot out of the cannons. So to speak.

Yet Dead Man’s Chest still succeeds. Reviewers were not particularly kind but the fairly full theater we saw it in laughed a lot and left talking and smiling. The barebones plot perhaps tracked a thousand previous pirate/romantic comedies but director Gore Verbinski, writers Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio (not involved in the first PotC but they did co-write Shrek) and the special effects crew did a really good job giving us new material.

The character of Will Turner’s father was terrific, both in dialog and Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd’s performance. The sequence with Sparrow, Turner, Norrington and the cannibal tribesmen, particularly the sword fight between the three men inside a dislodged waterwheel as it careens down a mountain–I’d buy the DVD just to see the making of this! Bill Nighy’s Davey Jones was another treat, but Nighy’s done so many good roles lately I wonder why he wasn’t a bigger star when younger. Keira Knightly, well, she’s smart and aggressive and as cute as ever.

Of course now the crew has got a really huge hill to climb with next year’s conclusion. All the major characters return, including Jonathon Pryce, Geoffrey Rush, Naomie Harris (the voodoo priestess) and Nighy plus Yun Fat Chow as a Chinese pirate captain and possibly even walking dead rocker Keith Richards as Depp’s daddy, so the Magic 8 Ball says: “Outlook Sunny!”

definitely recommended