In short: McCanick (2013)

When he hears that his old acquaintance, a young man called Simon Weeks (Cory Monteith) has been released from prison early, policeman Eugene McCanick (David Morse) starts an increasingly irrational and dangerous attempt to find Weeks and most probably do something very violent to him. In a series of flashbacks, what at first seems like your classical movie revenge trip is revealed to be something more human and much sadder: the attempt of a coward to avoid having to look at himself in the mirror and be honest to himself for once in his life. As it goes with cases like this, other people will have to suffer so that McCanick won’t have to take responsibility for anything in his messed up life.

Even though Josh C. Waller’s direction is focused and clever, and the supporting actors are doing fine work, McCanick really is the David Morse show, a state of things that seems only fair towards an actor who has spent large parts of his career supporting others on screen. Not surprisingly, Morse makes the most out of the opportunity, providing McCanick with complexity and humanity even once the script has reached the point where the flashbacks disclose how petty the secret that drives McCanick actually is. That’s rather important in a film featuring a central character who is such a coward he’d rather see people dead than have someone walk around free who knows about his actual sexual preferences and who actually seems to think he could assuage his own feelings of guilt by just adding more and more to be guilty about.

Waller’s direction and Morse’s acting are good enough to keep McCanick interesting and human once this turning point in the film is reached, while Daniel Noah’s script takes great care to not forgot that the cop’s victims are human beings with all the good and bad that entails, too. It’s the kind of old-fashioned humanist approach films of this sub-genre have never been exactly full of, and thankfully in a version that does keep the hand-wringing down regardless.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,josh c. waller,david morse,cory monteith,crime,drama

The Rock (1996)

General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) has had enough of the guv’mint not acknowledging the service of his black ops soldiers and not even paying their dependents any money when they get killed! Clearly, the best and most obvious way to change this once all official recourse has failed is to get together a gang of other military idiots, steal a chemical agent and a bunch of rockets, take hostages from a tourist tour on Alcatraz, hole up there and threaten San Francisco with a chemical holocaust. What would you have done, gone to the press!? This is a perfectly sensible plan, really.

Fortunately, the powers that be have kept former SAS man John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) secretly locked up for stealing the microfilms that contain stuff like the truth about Roswell and who shot JFK (that is seriously in the script), and Mason is the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz. After a lot of farting around and the worst car chase ever, a team of soldiers accompanied by Mason and FBI biochemist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), who ain’t a slow man it seems, infiltrate Alcatraz only to be slaughtered by Hummel’s men. Well, you know who doesn’t get slaughtered, so now it’s on Mason and the not terribly excellent at violence Goodspeed to play Die Hard on Alcatraz.

Whenever a certain type of film fan wants to make a case for Michael Bay once having made non-horrible films, they dig up this Jerry Bruckheimer production, as well as Bad Boys II, which I’m not going to touch with a ten foot pole.

In The Rock’s case, I don’t believe these people are completely wrong. Sure, the film is dumb as a rock (tee-hee), and all attempts to try and sell me on Harris’s character as an action movie villain who isn’t an actual villain but more of a tragic figure really dies with me needing to believe in a character who actually expects this plan wouldn’t end with a lot of dead people and nothing else, his unwillingness to actually fire the rockets notwithstanding. Not that Harris doesn’t do his best (and that’s, him being the great Ed Harris, a lot) to sell this nonsense. There’s a lot of exciting tense staring, glowering and quoting Thomas Jefferson, and some really great dramatic shouting in Harris’s repertoire here, and while the script is just too dumb to actually pull this off, Harris is certainly providing a highly entertaining performance that is as close to a human being as anyone in the film.

Speaking of human beings or not, apart from an army of fine character actors (David Morse, William Forsythe, Tony Todd, and so on, and so forth), there’s a pretty embarrassing outing by Sean Connery on display who counteracts Harris’s acting by just barely bothering to show up and coasting on being Sean Connery. Which makes a hilarious contrast to the actor he’s interacting most, Nicolas Cage. Cage, as always when he’s in the hand of a director who doesn’t know how to direct actors that don’t do it themselves like Harris, goes completely insane, delivering line after line of the inane dialogue he’s cursed with with wild abandon, bizarre emphasis and all physical, bug-eyed tics he can come up with. It’s pretty awesome, actually, particularly in a film where an actor really needs to shout to be heard over all the explosions and what may very well be Hans Zimmer’s worst score, seeing as it consists exclusively of musical clichés. Though, come to think of it, that might actually be Zimmer making a comment on the rest of the film.

Fortunately for my poor beleaguered brain, the film’s explosions and stunts are mostly pretty great, and it’s here where we can indeed see a younger, more competent Michael Bay. Sure, he’s never heard of the concept of holding a shot, and he really rather cuts than moves the camera in any sensible direction, but most of the action is much more readable than is typical for later Bay. And when you can actually see the fast, loud, and slickly bombastic action, it becomes really rather entertaining. There is, however, a scene that already encapsulates everything that makes later Michael Bay films so unwatchable: the early car chase is a completely unparsable mess of shot-cut-shot-cut-shot-cut-cut where it’s never clear how the cars chasing each other are positioned, what obstacles they are actually facing, or why shit around them explodes. Actually, I’m convinced the car chase consists of random shots of cars, explosions, people in wheelchairs, the scrunched up faces of Cage and Connery just hacked together for no good reason.


All this adds up to a film that’s a complete mess, dumb as all hell but entertaining on that basic level that lets you waste your life in front of a TV drinking beer and belching rhythmically to the noises of explosions. I’m pretty happy contemporary blockbusters are actually made by thinking human beings now.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A couple of years ago, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) was found with amnesia. Today, she’s a mild-mannered school teacher, a suburban wife and mother, and seems very happy with her lot.

Alas, a couple of things happening at now put a stop to her happiness. Her old personality starts to surface after she gets a good hit on her head in an accident, and her old self clearly wasn’t a very nice person, trained in all the arts of the movie spy assassin. Which turns out to have been exactly what she was when her old associates start trying to kill her after having seen her on TV in a small town Christmas parade (as you know, all Shane Black films are bound by law to take place around Christmas). At the same time, the last private detective Samantha hired to find out who she was before her amnesia, the decidedly shady Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson), finds some actual clues to her past. After Samantha, who is in truth called Charly, has fought off a first assassination attempt, she and Mitch go on a road trip together that will culminate in a lot of violence but will make clear who Samantha really was.

Put two lovers of excess in cinema like director Renny Harlin and writer Shane Black together, and you do indeed get a pretty excessive film. There’s violence I was really surprised a mainstream action film in the mid-90s got away with, there are explosions, there are so many people killed by our protagonist it’s difficult to describe this aspect of the film as anything but cartoonish. However, all this excess is based on what is to my mind probably Black’s most interesting script. It does of course contain his usual shtick about how horrible life and people are, but he’s exploring these ideas through an at first and outside of the action scenes very noir-ish and clever set-up that also concerns not just Samantha’s search for identity but also asks questions about what “identity” might even mean, and how fluent what we call our personalities are even when amnesia doesn’t come into play. Where did “Samantha”’s ethics come from exactly when she was birthed from the brain of a ruthless killer? This intersection of identity and ethics is also of interest to the film when it comes to Henessey, a guy who is as much of a con-artist as he is a private eye now, but who finds himself drifting back towards the better man he once was at the same time Samantha is going back towards the worse woman she was.

That exploring this through a big loud American action movie with conspiracy elements actually works as well as it does is a little wonder. But then, it also happens to be a fun and highly accomplished big loud American action movie delivered with all the excessive panache Renny Harlin (at this time still the second-best Hollywood mainstream action movie director after John McTiernan) is best at. But, perhaps because Harlin happened to be married to Davis at the time and really wanted to let her show off her considerable abilities after their curious pirate movie flop together, and clearly respected Jackson’s perfect rendition of the struggling private dick, he’s also giving the actors ample space to shine even when they are not murdering anyone. Add the horde of well-known faces and character actors (honestly too many to count) and you have yourself quite a bit of substance beside the explosions.


Really, my only actual caveat when it comes to The Long Kiss Goodbye is the set-up of a couple of its final action scenes where the wheels of the plot mechanics become so visible, it’s impossible not use the word “lazy” to describe the construction there. Fortunately, you’re not going to be able to hear me complain over the sound of stuff exploding.