High Crimes (2002, 115 min, PG13) ** - Directed by Carl Franklin, starring Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, James Caviezel, and Amanda Peet. Throw another Judd-Freeman trash novel thriller on the pile, in which she plays an headstrong, capable woman in over her head, while he pours forth bits of pith and wisdom in his wonderful voice. This time she’s a lawyer whose husband (“Jesus” Caviezel) turns out to be someone else and is arrested by the Marines for war crimes committed in El Salvador. Call me a cynic, but I was impressed that that was even happening. “High Crimes” alternates between Judd finding something out, arguing in court, and being ominously threatened by shadowy figures. It’s unsatisfying as a mystery (either he did or he didn’t), superficial as a critique on the military mindset, and feels like it follows the book’s thrills too closely to work as a good thriller (it’s revealing to compare the simpler thrills that work on the page with the more complex acrobatics needed for the screen). The acting is all perfectly reasonable, but the movie is dull and never convinces me of its need to exist.
Snakes on a Plane (2006, 105 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by David R. Ellis, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Nathan Phillips, and Juliana Marguiles.. No movie could live up to the camp “good-bad” build-up of “Snakes on a Plane.” The movie’s wind-up is pretty bad; not “good-bad,” “so-bad-it’s-funny,” or even offensively bad, but simply the blandest, least interesting way to establish what needs to be established. There are a few howlers along the way, to be sure, but for the most part, the set-up of the witness being escorted on a plane full of types is slow and wooden. Then a funny thing happens in the second half—once we know the rules of the game and how these phony snakes work, the movie works decently as an adventure in which the passengers do battle with their slithering intruders. From here on out, the movie is a good crowded-theater movie, and probably powerless on home video. As the FBI agent, Samuel L. Jackson does well by playing everything straight and often loud, getting in some great swear words and hitting it off with the ladies by smiling and saying nothing. He got my biggest laugh, inexplicably, by answering “Is it hot in here?” with “I haven’t noticed, but I’m from Tennessee.” Although many critics claim “SoaP” would be critic-proof, the final movie proves to be anything but: not only is a “reversed engineered” movie not very good (the studio gave in to various and sundry internet demands on how the movie should go), it also hasn’t done more than a couple good weeks at the box office.
For October 2006
Along Came a Spider (2001, 104 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Lee Tamahori, starring Morgan Freeman, Monica Potter, Michael Wincott, and Dylan Baker. Not exactly a good movie, but at least a moderately engaging thriller with some good twists. A madman (Michael Wincott of “The Crow”) kidnaps a senator’s daughter; things go from standard to intriguing when the madman stops being a genius and his plan actually begins to come apart. The great and steady Morgan Freeman is a police detective who isn’t sure why he’s on the case and Monica Potter plays the Ashley Judd role (poorly, I might add) of tagging along with Freeman so he has someone to talk to. Sequel to “Kiss the Girls,” which my wife watched on DVD while recovering from her wisdom teeth; I only caught about the last half of it.
Clockwatchers (1997, 96 min, PG13) *** - Directed & co-written by Jill Sprecher, starring Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, and Bob Balaban. Such a 1990s independent movie: dialogue-driven; voiceover narration; stark, simple direction; very comfortable with a small canvas. And Toni Collette, the amazing, wonderful, unconventionally beautiful Toni Collette, as one of four temp secretaries who become friends at the same company, then are slowly driven apart by the dehumanizing, thoughtless cruelty of Kafkaesque office work. Released within a couple years of Mike Judge’s “Office Space,” the tone is completely different but, as it moves along, no less abstract. Office theft and envy of the privileged permanent secretary slowly drive the temps crazy, one becoming a loudmouth revolutionary, another making up a whole new, better life, one becoming hopelessly uptight, and Toni closing in on herself, always on the verge of tears. Like “Office Space,” “Clockwatchers” understands that most of our waking hours are not spent in romances or blowing away Communists, but at a job we don’t care about, and that’s what shapes us. Bob Balaban shows up to play, well, Bob Balaban, because no one does it as well as he does. And at the end I wanted to put my arms around Toni, give her a kitten, and say “there, there, it’ll be okay.” From the Sprecher sisters, who brought us “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing.”