Movie Review: Stretch

Stretch
Directed by: Joe Carnahan.
Written by: Joe Carnahan.
Starring: Patrick Wilson (Stretch), Ed Helms (Karl), James Badge Dale (Laurent), Brooklyn Decker (Candace), Jessica Alba (Charlie), Ray Liotta (Ray Liotta), David Hasselhoff (David Hasselhoff), Ben Bray (Ignacio), Randy Couture (The Jovi), Shaun Toub (Nasseem), Chris Pine (Roger Karos).

Joe Carnahan is a somewhat frustrating filmmaker. He is capable of making excellent films – likes the corrupt cop drama Narc (2002) or the much better than it sounds wolves vs. man movie The Grey (2011), but more often than not he directs crap like Smokin' Aces, The A-Team or now, Stretch. At his best, he reminds me of Sam Peckinpah – making movies about wounded masculinity – at his worst, his films feel like cheap, uninspired misogynist Tarantino clones. I hoped he had turned some sort of corner after The Grey – far and away his best film to date – but his follow-up Stretch is one of his worst. It was unceremoniously dropped by its distributer earlier this year, and instead of heading to theaters ended up going direct to DVD and Netflix. There is a reason for that.

The movie stars Patrick Wilson, as a would-be actor and limo driver work in Los Angeles. He was once a gambling and drug addict – but when he fell in love with Candace (Brooklyn Decker) he cleaned up his act – and kept clean even after she left him. But he is about to embark on the worst night of his life. His job is in jeopardy, his old gambling debt that he has been steadily paying down, has now been called in in full. His only hope is that his latest client – a crazed billionaire named Roger Karos (Chris Pine) gives him a $6,000 tip at the end of the night. Karos has agreed to that – he needs Wilson to drive him around that night, and run some errands for him, before he heads to a private plane and gets out of the country before he can be arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. But can Karos be trusted?

Stretch is Carnahan is Smokin Aces mode – fast moving, lots of swearing and violence, and women who are used as sex objects if at all. Model Brooklyn Decker is fairly high billed – but she’s barely in the movie. In it somewhat more is Jessica Alba – but the movie does nothing with her, and almost insultingly tries to make the audience believe that she’s the nerdy, awkward girl in glasses who suddenly becomes hot (Alba is always hot). The movie works better than it probably should – mainly because of some background touches. Chris Pine goes completely off the wall insane as Karos – and he steals every scene he is in. It must be fun to be an actor like Pine, who is often stuck being stoic in blockbusters, to completely let loose in a role like this. I wanted him in every scene – but sadly he disappears for long stretches at a time.

Wilson is less convincing in the lead role. He is an actor who has often had to play fairly dull characters – so like Pine, he may well have seen this as an opportunity to let loose – unfortunately for him, he clearly isn’t very comfortable doing so. His character approaches several of his big moments as an acting scene – and in those scenes, he is supposed to be somewhat awkward. Unfortunately, most of his scenes are like that. Ed Helms has some fun playing a fellow limo driver, who recently killed himself, who comes back to haunt the lead character with insane, profane rantings and ravings.

Stretch isn’t exactly horrible – it moves so quickly, introduces so many characters, has a lot of action sequences, and enough of Pine to make it somewhat tolerable for much of its running time. But it just seems like a massive step back for Carnahan – and like everyone else in the movie is simply going through the motions. There is a reason the distributer abandoned this movie just weeks before it was to be released – now we all know what that reason is.

Movie Review: The Grey

The Grey *** ½
Directed by: Joe Carnahan.
Written by:  Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers based on Jeffers short story.
Starring: Liam Neeson (Ottway), Dallas Roberts (Hendrick), Frank Grillo (Diaz), Dermot Mulroney (Talget), Nonso Anozie (Burke), Joe Anderson (Flannery), Ben Bray (Hernandez), James Badge Dale (Lewenden).

The Grey is a thrilling man vs. nature movie, where the line between the men and the wolves who are hunting them is dangerously thin. When we first meet Ottway (Liam Neeson), and learn that he works as a marksman for an oil company drilling way up North – his jump is essentially to shoot wolves before they can attack the other workers, he describes himself, and his co-workers, as men unfit for mankind. That`s a fairly good description – at least at first. The men we meet are hard, seemingly emotionless, who spend a good deal of time making sure all the other men know just how tough they are. When their plane crashes on their way home, only a few of them survive. They gather what they can at the crash site, but know that the chances of being found are slim to none, so they`ll need to make the trek South on foot. Their journey is hastened by the fact that wolves seem to be circling. Ottway tells them not to worry – the wolves are most likely just passing through, smelt the dead bodies, and decided to have a free meal. Unless they are close to their den, they probably won`t attack them. But as first one and then a second are attacked and killed by the wolves, it becomes clear that this wolf pack will not rest until they`ve killed the survivors of the plane crash.

The Grey is one of the only movies I can recall where the people become more human instead of less, as they are pushed to their limits. Most of the time, the logic of the movies is that people are civilized because of civilization and societal demands on them. Once those barriers are gone, they fall into a primal, animalistic frenzy. Think of Lord of the Flies for the most famous example of this type of story. But The Grey works the opposite way. At first, these men seem hard and emotionless – one of them, Diaz (Frank Grillo) seems to be a particular hard ass, who pretty much goes insane for a while. When, after two of their numbers have been killed by a wolf, and the group finally kills one of the wolves own, Grillo goes further than the rest, deliberately trying to antagonize the wolves. We get the feeling that this group of men really are barely above the level of the wolves.

Yet, over the course of the movie, these men become more human to the audience, and each other. These men do not even know each other`s first name, and do not much care. But as the wolves get closer, and more and more of their numbers fall, either to the wolves or other hazards in the wild, they let their barriers down, and become closer to each – by opening up. The wolves remain wild animals – merciless, vicious, cruel and violent, because that is their nature. But while the men try to come across that way, when pushed to the limit, they find their humanity, instead of losing it.

 
I realize now that I have spent most of this review making The Grey sound like a pretentious film, and it is far from that. This is a movie with a primal power to it; one that haunts you long after the movie is over. It is a movie that leaves no real hope for the audience – it doesn`t leave you feeling good, but instead emotionally drained. Directed by Joe Carnahan, who has specialized in machismo so far in his career (from good in Narc, to awful in The A-Team), The Grey is his best film so far, because it`s not just all about posturing. Instead, these characters, which seem so much like caricatures at the beginning of the movie, get to you because they open up. Had these characters not been as three dimensional as they are, then The Grey would have just been an exercise in terror – a great, stylish one sure, but little else. But because the characters – especially Liam Neeson, who delivers his best performance in years here – become real to us, we share their sense of dread, their sense of inevitable death. They fight hard against these wolves, but they know the odds are against them – and so do we. The movie ends at exactly the right place. Any longer, and the film would just be too depressing, too dark, too hopeless. While this looks like just a movie about men vs. wolves, it becomes so much more than that.

Movie Review: The A-Team

The A-Team **
Directed by: Joe Carnahan.
Written By: Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom and Skip Woods based on the TV series created by Frank Lupo & Stephen J. Cannell.
Starring: Liam Neeson (Hannibal), Bradley Cooper (Lt. Templeton 'Faceman' Peck), Jessica Biel (Charisa Sosa), Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson (B.A. Baracus), Sharlto Copley (Murdock), Patrick Wilson (Lynch), Gerald McRaney (General Morrison), Henry Czerny (Director McCready), Yul Vazquez (General Javier Tuco), Brian Bloom (Pike).

The A-Team is a big, loud, stupid, lazy action movie. Most of those adjectives would probably apply to the original TV show from the 1980s, but I can’t really say. Although I know I watched it as a kid – and that’s why we had the A-Team van and some action figures for the show – other than the iconic opening song, I cannot recall anything about the original show. This unnecessary update will likely appeal to fans of the show, and undiscerning action movie fans of any strip – the ones who don’t really care about anything other than seeing stuff blow up really good. And the movie does that – a lot. At times, when I was able to completely turn off my brain, I actually kind of enjoyed the film – but you can only turn off your brain for so long before it starts telling you the movie you’re watching is just plain dumb.

Co-written and directed by Joe Carnhan, The A-Team is yet another movie about a ragtag group of military men, set up for a crime they didn’t commit and have to go on the run to try and prove their innocence. The team is led by Hannibal (Liam Neesom), a charming, grey haired man constantly chomping on his cigar. His team includes Face (Bradley Cooper), the ladies man of the group, B.A. (Quinton Jackson), an angry African American with a Mohawk and Murdock (Sharlto Copley), an insane pilot. Those bare character descriptions are about as deep as the movie gets on any of its characters.

This time, they are in Iraq just as American forces are about to pull out (making this some sort of futuristic fantasy movie) when they learn that the Iraqis are moving a series of currency plates for American money that will allow them to print billions of dollars of unsupported American currency. CIA agent Lynch (Patrick Wilson) goes to Hannibal with the assignment, and his commanding officer (Gerard “Major Dad” McCraney) agrees, even though Captain Sosa (Jessica Biel) thinks the assignment is hers. Of course, things get screwed up, McCraney is killed, the plates go missing and Hannibal and his team are court marshaled, dishonorably discharged and sent to separate maximum security prisons for 10 years each. And of course, they aren’t going to be in those prisons for very long.

The plot of The A-Team is barely worth mentioning, because it is so thin that its barely there. It doesn’t really matter what the team is chasing, just that there are chasing it, and there are people who have a vested interest in seeing that they fail. I understand that most action movies, even the good ones, get away with similar thin plots because they are not about their plots – they are about action, and the relationship between the stars. The problem with this movie is that you don’t care about the team. Neesom smirks his way through his role as Hannibal – you never really feel how committed he says he is to the rest of his team, and you never understand why his team is so willing to follow him anywhere on his insane plans. Cooper is capable of being a charming actor, and he really does try here as Face, but I had trouble believing him as an army man though – it’s like his character from The Hangover simply picked up a gun. The series most iconic character was undoubtedly Mr. T’s B.A. Baracus, but you know they didn’t know who to cast when they cast UFC fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in the role. Jackson isn’t much of an actor, but then he isn’t given much to do either. Too many “I pity to the fool” lines, and he would look ridiculous, and so the movie kind of skimps of him completely. The only one of the four I really liked was Sharlto Copley, from last year’s District 9, who has all the best lines as the insane Murdoch. No, the movie doesn’t explore his character any more than the others, but he at least seems to be having fun. The rest of the cast – from Jessica Biel to Patrick Wilson to Gerard McCraney to Brian Bloom – seem to be sleepwalking through their underwritten roles.

Joe Carnahan was at one point a promising filmmaker. After making what I thought was a horrible debut with Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane for almost no money, we went on to make the great cop drama Narc, with Jason Patric and Ray Liotta’s best roles in years, and the tremendous guilty pleasure Smokin’ Aces – which was just as big and loud as The A-Team, but was also incredibly entertaining. But with The A-Team, he has struck out. Starting a little bit in Smokin’ Aces, it seemed like Carnahan wanted to become the next Michael Bay – with the same rapid fire, yet incoherent editing style. His writing, which was clever in Smokin’ Aces compensated for that. But in The A-Team, it doesn’t simply because he doesn’t give us a single character who is interesting. The film is never boring – it is far too loud and moves way too quickly for that – but it never comes together into anything that you would actually enjoy sitting through. Carnahan needs to slow down.