Movie review by Greg Carlson

The good news is that the weakest thing about “X2: X-Men United” is its limp title, another one of those shorthand sequel acronyms bestowed apparently for the benefit of the attention-span challenged or the near-illiterate (see: “T2,” “T3,” MiB 2,” MI:2,” etc.).  Marquee notwithstanding, director Bryan Singer proved the last time out that he was clearly the man for the job – a smart storyteller with an occasionally stunning sense of visual grandeur, and more importantly, deep and abiding affection for the source material.  The consensus among fans was that, for the most part, he got it right.

On the colorful page, one of the hallmarks of Marvel Comics is a preoccupation with brooding, depressed heroes plagued with problems not easily overcome by their awesome powers.  Singer lavished attention on this detail in the first “X-Men,” and healthy doses of the same themes attended both “Spider-Man” and “Daredevil” (the jury is still out on the yet-to-be-released Hulk movie – Ang Lee is a proven director, but that artificial-looking CG in the preview is drawing muffled snickers and shocked gasps).  With its recurring motifs of genocide, oppression, and estrangement, the “X-Men” series manages to strike a timely chord.

“X2” opens with a spectacular set-piece that introduces us to blue-skinned, fork-tailed teleporter Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) as he demonstrates how effortlessly he can endanger anyone, even the President of the United States of America.  The reasons for Nightcrawler’s attack on the Oval Office are revealed in time, but suffice it to say that influential people want plenty of ammunition for their initiative to marginalize mutants by drafting legislation that would erode equal rights and privileges (downright eerie how closely the Mutant Registration Act mirrors the real-life Patriot Act).  Fortunately, any semblance of plot is quickly relegated to the background, as Singer rotates the concerns of the movie toward its unique inhabitants.

In addition to the original line-up, “X2” adds Nightcrawler, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Pyro (Aaron Stanford), Deathstrike (Kelly Hu), and a handful of other characters who might figure more prominently in additional installments of the story.  Once the required presentations are made, the balance of the movie is spread out among old favorites like Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, very trenchant), who digs deeper into his past in order to piece together gaps in his memory.  Once again, some characters fade into the background: Halle Berry’s Storm isn’t given much more to do than the first time around, and Cyclops (James Marsden) is only trotted out when the plot absolutely demands his presence.

Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are as good as ever playing rivals Professor X and Magneto.  Villains always get to have more fun, though, and it is McKellen who relishes every droll bon mot in his re-teaming with sexy shapeshifter Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who makes the most of her more expanded role).  The inveterate Brian Cox is also greatly appreciated as a mysterious military man with ties to Wolverine.  While this sizable ensemble presents Singer with a formidable obstacle in the allotment of equal screen time, the director adroitly sketches in just enough for each participant to come alive.  It will be interesting to see where he takes us next time.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Cons and capers can make for terrific screen entertainment. From “The Sting” to “The Grifters,” “Paper Moon” to “Catch Me If You Can,” scam artists at work on the fringes of respectable society fire the imaginations of us regular folk who only dream about being clever enough to fix the ultimate haul. Even recent movies like “Heist,” “Ocean’s 11” and “The Score” demonstrate that high-stakes gamesmanship isn’t likely to disappear from the cinema any time soon. Director James Foley’s “Confidence” is another, lesser entry in the genre, but it is not without its beguilements.

“Confidence” stars the perpetually hoarse Edward Burns as master swindler Jake Vig, a career crook with a practically superhuman aptitude for separating suckers from their money. Working with a seasoned team of role-players, Vig accidentally cheats a major Los Angeles crimelord known as “The King” out of a rather substantial sum. Under the threat of unspeakable harm to his person, Vig agrees to restore the King’s cash by hatching a major con involving an elaborate series of perfectly-timed deceptions that promise to net him five million bucks. Better yet, the loot will be pilfered from one of the King’s most despised arch-rivals.

Foley, whose resume includes the film version of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” has both the necessary experience for this kind of material and the visual gusto to breathe colorful life into the blue neon signs and rain-slicked streets of the L.A. underworld. Foley’s vision is only compromised by the lackluster scripting of Doug Jung, who comes close, but never quite pushes the story into a place that would distinguish “Confidence” from movies with similar agendas. Despite its carefully orchestrated double and triple crosses, the movie exudes an air of familiarity along the lines of “been there, done that.”

Edward Burns’ poseur-cool and somnambulistic presence desperately necessitate a hearty supporting cast, and on this count “Confidence” delivers. The sensational, often overlooked Paul Giamatti sprinkles in enough comic relief to give the movie a pulse where it is most needed, and Rachel Weisz is so good it is a shame her smooth-operating pickpocket is lamentably underutilized (but then, what do you expect when testosterone levels are so high, women are literally called “skirts”?). Donal Logue, along with the indispensable Luis Guzman, turn up as a pair of cops on the take, and Andy Garcia is ideal as the mysterious fed pursuing Vig and his crew.

In the role of Winston “The King” King, however, Dustin Hoffman upstages leading man Burns in every scene in which he appears. Hoffman’s role is not much more than a glorified cameo, but the veteran puts on a clinic for his young co-stars. Affecting an amorphous, indeterminate sexuality (you’re never quite certain, but King seems to enjoy hitting on both genders in equal measure), Hoffman is a livewire, chewing gum with zeal and peering out at the world from behind a pair of librarian’s eyeglasses. Aside from Giamatti, Hoffman is the only actor in the movie who understands that this is the sort of stuff that is not meant to be taken seriously. By the time the trigger is pulled on the last hustle, you find yourself wishing you had seen less Vig, more King.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For a few years now, horror fans have eagerly awaited the release of rock-auteur Rob Zombie’s feature-filmmaking debut, the colorfully titled “House of 1000 Corpses.” Originally prepared for Universal Studios (a shrewd move considering the parade of references, visual and otherwise, to Zombie’s beloved, classic Universal horror film cycle), the movie was completed in 2000 and then dumped, apparently because its content was expected to earn it a rating of NC-17. Following a flirtation with MGM, the movie finally limps into theatres under the aegis of the less fearful Lion’s Gate. Unfortunately, “Corpses” was decidedly not worth the wait.

Zombie, who boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th century trash, horror, and exploitation culture as well as a keenly developed visual sensibility honed while making a series of clever music videos, seems at first an ideal candidate to resurrect the flagging fright genre. For the first half hour or so, “Corpses” even holds the promise of being able to deliver the kind of experience deserving of a “Famous Monsters of Filmland” cover story. Too soon, however, it becomes painfully apparent that Zombie is a much better visual stylist than he is a writer, as one tired cliché after another rears up to insult the audience. The only “shock” here is the realization that Zombie’s imagination has painful limitations.

If “Corpses” artfully explores Zombie’s predilection for drive-in movies, circus sideshows, 16mm bondage loops, and late night TV horror show hosts, its story borrows too heavily from Tobe Hooper’s landmark “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and its first sequel. A quartet of young adults runs out of gas (natch) during a rainstorm (ditto) on Halloween 1977. The travelers locate the service station of one Captain Spaulding (perfectly played by veteran freakshow Sid Haig), and while no explanation is given for the Marx Brothers reference, the crafty entrepreneur invites the two couples to partake in his Grand Guignol dark ride, a biographical homage to sadists and killers like Albert Fish, Lizzie Borden, Ed Gein, and the fictional Dr. Satan, a psychopath lynched for his unauthorized operations at a local hospital.

Surprisingly, the kids make it out of Spaulding’s roadside museum without a scratch, but unwisely pick up sexy hitchhiker Baby (Sheri Moon, very good in her feature debut), who invites everyone back to her neglected, decaying, ramshackle homestead. Greeted by the voluptuous horror of Karen Black as Mother Firefly, the waylaid innocents are soon introduced to the rest of the family, a gallery of revolting malefactors ready to systematically victimize the sitting targets with every conceivable excruciating torture and humiliation. At this point, “Corpses” immediately begins to rot, as one boring contrivance after another merely provides opportunity for unrelenting abuse and gore, devoid of anything resembling wit or skill.

“Corpses” expires with very little to recommend it to even the die-hard horror fanatic. While Zombie stages some intriguing and disturbing scenes (including an inspired lip-synch of Baby crooning “I Want to Be Loved By You” and the execution of a cop in a grisly, time-suspended tableau), his screenplay fails him at every turn. Zombie enthusiasts are likely to enjoy the music (composed by Zombie and Scott Humphrey), which includes the bizarre pairing of the director and Lionel Richie on a souped-up remake of “Brick House.” Those who find little to like in the necromancer’s tunes, however, will be equally hard-pressed to discover anything redeemable in the movie itself.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

As evidenced by the numbers of people turning out to see it, “Anger Management” is as close to a sure-fire success as you can get. The inspired teaming of the legendary Jack Nicholson and the, well, not legendary Adam Sandler covered a wide enough demographic for the honchos at Sony Pictures to start salivating even before the weekend totals started rolling in. The only problem with the movie is that it is not very funny. Or entertaining. “Anger Management” looks reasonably sharp and clever on paper, but on the big screen, the movie is clearly more “Big Daddy” than “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

A quick scan of the credits indicates that, sadly, “Anger Management” is just another clone from the well-oiled Sandler machine, a Happy-Madison production brought to you by the team behind “The Animal.” In the movie, Sandler plays human doormat Dave Buznik, a meek loser who toils away in cubicle hell as a designer of clothing for overweight housecats. Despite his intrinsic timidity, Dave inexplicably dates the dishy, sweet Linda (Marisa Tomei, treated like an afterthought), who doesn’t seem to mind that the rest of the world walks all over her man.

Following a series of misunderstandings on a plane during a business trip – one of the only marginally comical sequences in the movie – Dave is sentenced by a judge (the late, great Lynne Thigpen) to anger management class. Administrated by author and anger expert Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), Dave’s class is populated by an odd assortment of apoplectic lunatics that range from a pair of lesbian porn stars to a traumatized veteran of the Grenada invasion. Dave quickly figures out that Buddy is just as nuts as his patients, but, facing jail time as an alternative, he is forced to go along.

Once the cockamamie premise is firmly established, with Buddy literally moving in to Dave’s apartment and sharing his bed, the Sandler-Nicholson interplay takes over, and the two performers lay it on with relish, lurching through a contemptibly daffy string of unfunny bits, poorly staged by director Peter Segal, whose resume includes “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.” Screenwriter David Dorfman also earns his share of the blame, relying on pathetic clichés and ill-conceived confrontations that wouldn’t even draw a chuckle from most kindergartners.

One segment, for example, finds Dave and Buddy descending on a Buddhist monastery to settle a score with Dave’s childhood nemesis. Even with the considerable talents of John C. Reilly at the filmmakers’ disposal, the best they can do is a tired physical slapstick that ends with a head-butt and an orange-robed wedgie. In addition to Reilly, “Anger Management” enlists a parade of stars in cameo performances, to no avail. From Bobby Knight, John McEnroe, and Rudy Giuliani to Luis Guzman, John Turturro, Woody Harrelson, Heather Graham, and Harry Dean Stanton, the movie comes off as downright desperate to please. The supporting players do nothing, however, to enhance the movie’s minimal coherence, and “Anger Management” ends as it began: a irreparable, pointless goner.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer Larry Cohen and director Joel Schumacher are both known for peddling pulp fictions to audiences who may or may not want the wares, and now, following a decades-long gestation period, Cohen’s strident and nutty story has been realized on the big screen.  Schumacher, grasping the anachronism of a man trapped in a phone booth, justifies the break in logic by raining down a shower of opening images that bounce from the teeming masses on their cell phones to the satellites on high that provide the connections.  Kieslowski did the same thing much better in “Red,” but Schumacher understands that he has to hit the ground running if he is going to hook the audience.

Scruffy Colin Farrell is well-cast as PR hustler Stu Shepard, the devilish offspring of Sidney Falco from “Sweet Smell of Success.”  A wannabe kingmaker, Stu struts the pavement of Times Square, browbeating his fawning toady of an assistant while juggling an endless stream of calls from clients, magazine editors, and other pretenders.  Stu has a crush on one of his marks, adorable actress Pam (Katie Holmes), and calls her daily from the last working phone booth in his orbit, because he is married, and knows his wife checks the cell phone bills.

Even with its breakneck set-up, “Phone Booth” hits the wall as soon as Stu picks up the ringing phone following one of his many calls to Pam.  A voice on the other end of the line (Kiefer Sutherland, at his smarmiest) calmly explains that he has a high-powered rifle, and will kill Stu if he dares to hang up.  Stu’s incredulity evaporates along with his swagger when the sniper proves he is not joking around.  An innocent bystander is shot, and soon the entire street is swarming with cops, news vans, and curious onlookers rolling tape in their camcorders.  Fortunately for our protagonist, attending officer Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker) is able to figure out that Stu is the victim and not the killer.

What follows, is messy, ill-conceived, and woefully set-bound, as Stu and the sniper play a verbal game of cat and mouse.  Farrell, sporting an occasionally spotty Bronx accent, rips it up with reckless abandon: crying, sweating, screaming, and begging, his Stu is an actor’s dream role.  Ditto for the unseen Sutherland, who just sits back and pours it out like honey.  The relationship of the two men is problematic, however, as the sniper feels that Stu’s lack of compassion, honesty, and responsible moral behavior is enough to mark him for death.

What “Phone Booth” chooses to sidestep, to its detriment, is any reasonable explanation as to why the sniper knows so much (or even cares) about Stu in the first place.  Tantalizing details of Stu’s moral shortcomings are peppered throughout the phone conversation, and occasionally Stu takes a wild guess at the sniper’s connection to him, but the movie purposefully elects to leave the information a secret.  Maybe Cohen and Schumacher want to keep the movie’s themes in the realm of fable.  If so, the filmmakers left out one important ingredient: a reason why we should care about Stu Shepard in the first place.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A smelly, matted-down shaggy dog story with enough red herring to supply a cannery for a year, “Basic” limps into theatres with little prospect of success. On paper, the movie boasts a strong resume: “Die Hard” director John McTiernan, the first on-screen re-teaming of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson since “Pulp Fiction,” plot threads that allow room for pumped-up action sequences as well as steely interrogations, a supporting cast that includes talented performers like Connie Nielsen, Taye Diggs, and Brian Van Holt. The weak link, however, is the tortuous, labyrinthine screenplay by James Vanderbilt, which collapses under the weight of its migraine-inducing convolutions, diversions, and smoke-screens.

Jackson plays the boastful, strutting Army Ranger Sgt. Nathan West, a vicious martinet whose idea of a swell time is to send his trainees on exercises in the Panamanian jungle during a gale-force hurricane. A classic caricature of the military sadist, Jackson verbally abuses his soldiers with the kind of language that echoes R. Lee Ermey’s humiliating rhetoric in “Full Metal Jacket.” The training exercise goes horribly wrong, however, and confusion reigns as some of the soldiers are killed after turning against each other during the storm.

Col. Bill Styles (Tim Daly), with only a few hours to sort out the mess before it is turned over to higher-ranking authorities, calls on one of his best, head of base MP Julia Osborne (Nielsen) to question the two soldiers who survived the mysterious shootout. One of the survivors, however, refuses to speak to anyone other than a fellow Ranger, which cues the appearance of boozy DEA agent Tom Hardy (Travolta), a former Ranger with seemingly little love for West and his tactics. Before you can cry “re-write,” Osborne and Hardy are sparring like an old married couple as they clash over the best ways to extract info from the tight-lipped murder witnesses/suspects.

With a flair for pacing, McTiernan moves the action along at a brisk rate, but once the interrogation scenes begin (which operate as a back and forth, “Rashomon”-like tennis match between the two surviving soldiers), “Basic” breaks down, piling on conflicting details so quickly that the audience gives up on making any sense of the plot. Giovanni Ribisi, usually outstanding in small roles like the one he plays here, tries on a ridiculous accent and hammy affectation that derails any credibility his character might have had. The film is also not aided by the inclusion of several competing versions of what happened during the exercise – seeing them merely adds to our disorientation.

The plot twists are dispatched with such ferocity that the sexual tension between Osborne and Hardy elicits only laughter when the two finally get into a physical tangle. Like everything else in “Basic,” it seems to come out of nowhere. By the film’s final stages, Vanderbilt’s script has completely disintegrated, making suggestions about what is really going on that serve only to negate literally everything that has transpired thus far. Unlike other movies that play head games with their audience (think about classic film noir or “The Usual Suspects,”), “Basic” forgets the rule that if you are going to deceive your viewers, you still need to respect them in the final outcome.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like many cinematic translations of the work of Stephen King, “Dreamcatcher” dabbles in so many side-trips and diversions that the result is one rather large, rather sticky mess. Paring down an 800-plus page novel into reasonable feature film length is a challenge no matter how you slice it up, but even the legendary William Goldman (who has already done time on S.K. drive with scripts for “Misery” and “Hearts in Atlantis”) cannot wrap his formidable pen around the sprawl. Goldman, along with director Lawrence Kasdan, never figures out how to unpack King’s behemoth, and the result is alternately tedious and laughable.

With echoes of “Stand By Me,” “Dreamcatcher” begins with a quartet of childhood friends whose adult lives lack the warmth, magic, and wonder they shared as kids. Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Beaver (Jason Lee), Henry (Thomas Jane), and Pete (Timothy Olyphant) once rescued a mentally retarded boy from some sadistic bullies, and were rewarded with the supernatural ability to communicate with each other telepathically and see into the future. Douglas Cavell, the victim of the bullies, has difficulty pronouncing his name, and is affectionately called “Duddits” by his protectors (who begin to recognize that there is something extraordinary about their new friend).

The now grown men don’t have much contact with Duddits anymore, but the powers bestowed upon them all those years ago have not faded with age. The foursome retreats to a rustic getaway in the woods of Maine for an annual hunting trip, but things do not turn out as expected when a bloated, disoriented hunter with a wicked, blistering facial rash shows up. Before you can say “Dumb and Dumber,” the hunter is letting loose with some of the most extensive screen flatulence this side of “Blazing Saddles,” and the audience laughs in spite of itself.

The chuckles rapidly dissipate into disgust, however, when the hunter’s rectum explodes, absurdly shifting the tone of the movie into high sci-fi outer space beastie mode. With more than a nod to “Alien,” “Dreamcatcher” decides about halfway in that it is supposed to be a “bugs on the run” movie. Seems that hunter didn’t just have gas – he was playing intestinal host to a nasty, eel-like extraterrestrial with rows of jagged teeth. Pretty soon the U.S. military is involved, as a “black ops” unit led by veteran alien hunter Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman, slumming) descends to quarantine the area.

Most people will have given up on “Dreamcatcher” by this point (the movie jettisons the significance of its own title in favor of set pieces that show off the slimy CG effects shots), but Kasdan and Goldman are just getting warmed up. Inexplicably, Curtis goes completely insane just as the alien invasion problem begins to pick up steam. Kasdan never gets a handle on how to pace such a grab-bag of disparate elements, and the appearance of a grown-up version of Duddits (played by Donnie Wahlberg) in the eleventh hour is predictable down to the outcome of the final confrontation with the uber-alien.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Every now and again, highly respected, laurel-wreathed actors will indulge in some goofy antics that make little sense to paying customers. Even when these sorts of movies are directed by grand old veterans like William Friedkin, who made at least two of the best films of the 1970s in “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” the mystery remains: do actors read the script before they sign on to do the movie, or do they simply take their agent’s word for it?

Recently minted Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro, whose performance in “Traffic” was both electrifying and genuinely worthy of its accolades, has not been immune to appearing in questionable fare (see: “Excess Baggage”), but in “The Hunted” he cuts loose with some of the silliest dialogue he is likely to ever encounter, including a speech about the injustices suffered by poultry. Playing a battle-stressed soldier who saw vicious action in Kosovo, Del Toro is Aaron Hallam, a Rambo-esque survivalist who knows exactly how to kill a man with a few quick strokes of a knife, or if need be, his bare hands.

War does strange things to men, and Aaron passes his time tracking down deer and elk hunters who unfairly use huge scopes on high-powered rifles. Aaron sees this as supremely unfair, and pays the hunters back by gutting and dressing them just like their intended prey. Aaron’s bloody activities quickly draw the attention of the FBI, who discover that they are going to need the help of Aaron’s old teacher, L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), a former civilian employee of the U.S. military who is both a preternaturally gifted outdoor tracker and an expert in brutal hand to hand combat. A hilarious flashback featuring a handlebar-mustachioed Jones fills in some of the blanks: this is the kind of guy who makes his recruits literally forge their own knives on the way to becoming killing machines.

Friedkin does not shy away from dishing it out as heavily as possible (i.e. Jones portentously freeing a white wolf from a snare, Johnny Cash’s ominous cover of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” on the soundtrack, etc.) but if “The Hunted” has anything going for it, the taut pacing is the leading candidate. Like “The Fugitive,” “The Hunted” works best when it is locked into the relentless pursuit mode that allows for nimble editing and swift camera moves. Friedkin breathlessly moves the action between urban settings and dense forest locales with ease, greatly abetted by superb cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. And if you can see the faces of the stuntmen standing in for Del Toro and Jones now and then, well, at least the action isn’t computer generated.

In the end, though, there isn’t much movie there, and we never get close to understanding how Aaron strayed so far from rationality. Instead, a thoroughly predictable confrontation, featuring more grunts than a match at Wimbledon, pits the student and the master against one another. The screenplay, by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli, assumes it is making sound use of some tried and true representative anecdotes, but unfortunately the scribes forget to relate any insight into Aaron’s motivations other than the basic post-traumatic stress disorder that has fueled the plots of so many similar movies.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Aging action star Bruce Willis’ open support of the current Bush administration’s pro-military philosophy immediately indicates the underlying sensibilities of “Tears of the Sun,” a messy hybrid that attempts to fuse social consciousness with a glorification of gung-ho ass-kicking. Following in the footsteps of ex-wife Demi Moore, Willis plays Navy SEAL Lt. A.K. Waters, a tough, relentless warrior given to smearing camouflage greasepaint into every crag and cranny of his stony, square-jawed face. Short on words but long on muscle, Waters completes his missions with total commitment and zero emotion.

Sent by Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt, who must by now have his own personal set of officer uniforms) into civil war-torn Nigeria to extract a humanitarian physician, as well as two nuns and a priest, Waters suffers one of those end-of-the-first-act crises of conscience that stirs him to abandon orders and protocol and risk himself and his loyal team of comrades in order to “do the right thing.” The right thing is embodied in the stubborn platitudes of Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), the “critical personnel” Waters has been assigned to rescue. With injured patients in tow, Kendricks and Waters begin a treacherous hike through the jungle toward Cameroon.

Director Antoine Fuqua, whose “Training Day” really packed a punch, makes the most out of a dire script, alternating between suspenseful nighttime scenes and rain-soaked horrors made worse by the daylight. In fact, the most problematic aspect of “Tears of the Sun” is its bifurcated psychology: the atrocities that attend “ethnic cleansing” are superlatively vile and gruesome, but they only provide an excuse for Waters and his SEALs to rain down hell on the Nigerian baddies. One suspects that American audiences will take satisfaction in the SEAL squad’s superior training and firepower, but the propagandistic fantasia wears thin in short order.

Waters’ elite group of fighters, mostly indistinguishable from one another except for Atkins (Cole Hauser) and Pettigrew (Eamonn Walker), serve the traditional function of grunts in combat films – ripe for the picking off, the inevitability of several deaths is a foregone conclusion. Nobody pulls out a picture of his wife, but anyone who has seen a war movie will get the idea. Composer Hans Zimmer even cribs Barber’s Adagio when a shot eerily reminiscent of “Platoon” sweeps upwards to show hordes of enemies closing in on the outnumbered heroes.

“Tears of the Sun” lacks both depth and credibility when it comes to Kendricks and her throng of beleaguered followers. The Nigerians on both sides of the civil conflict are treated as two-dimensional, and a “surprise” twist that takes place well into the action borders on offensive stereotype. Bellucci, presumably cast as much for her beauty as for any acting ability, is saddled with dialogue in which she constantly barks about her “people” needing to rest, while Waters counters with his own orders to “keep moving.” Once you’ve heard the umpteenth variation on this dialogue, you’ll be as anxious to leave Nigeria as the surviving SEALs.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ron Shelton’s “Dark Blue” looked good on paper: screenwriter David (“Training Day”) Ayer adapting James Ellroy’story, Kurt Russell and Ving Rhames showing off their chops, the clever premise of setting the action against the 1992 verdict announcement in the trials of the cops who bludgeoned Rodney King. The premise, however, is much sweeter in theory and on paper than it is unspooling on the big screen. “Dark Blue” wallows in the formula it had hoped to transcend, laughably careening well-past plausibility inside its first five minutes. Filled to overflowing with convenience, coincidence, and cliché, “Dark Blue” is obvious, leaden and bordering on nonsensical.

Kurt Russell, as the vile, racist Sgt. Eldon Perry Jr., plays the top half of the tired veteran/rookie team-up endemic to the genre. Goofy Scott Speedman, never able to control his greasy golden mane with the same kind of skill Russell demonstrates with his outrageous conk, slack-jaws it as the wide-eyed innocent hard pressed to keep up with his elder partner and the kind of demented street justice favored by the honchos who run the LAPD’s Special Investigations Squad. At the shooting board hearing that kicks off the movie, Russell sums up the moral ambiguity that is his raison d’etre: “At the end of the day, the bullets are in the bad guys and not us.”

Previews for the film suggested that Ving Rhames would factor as a central figure in the narrative, but his by-the-book Assistant Chief Arthur Holland is such a straight arrow (you never see him out of uniform), the filmmakers seemed to have no idea what to do with the character, opting most of the time to simply ignore him. By the time a last-ditch effort to humanize the chief drops out of the sky in the form of a five-year old extramarital tryst, the Perry plotline has consumed the lion’s share of the movie’s attention, and the audience is impatient to return to Russell’s corrupt gun-slinging.

Director Shelton, who has shown a flair for vibrantly-sketched characters in the past, unfortunately doesn’t have the time to fully explore the relationships Russell and Speedman have with the women in their lives. Lolita Davidovich is excellent as Perry’s fed-up wife – she makes the most of her limited screen time and really delivers the goods in a solid scene where Perry makes her read aloud the letter she had intended him to find once she had already left. More problematically, Speedman’s character is sleeping with Holland’s assistant, Sgt. Beth Williamson (Michael Michele) primarily because it seems to serve the plot by linking the good cops and the bad cops.

Naturally, the movie’s climax corresponds to the rioting and looting that occurred in the wake of the verdicts in the King beating trial being read, and Perry is caught in the eye of the hurricane in South Central. Using his car like a battering ram, he navigates through a surreal tableau of smoke and fire, threatening to use his pistol any time the angry mob gets too close. It is a bravura set-piece, which makes it such a shame that the movie that led up to it amounts to nothing. As visually impressive as it is (a CG wide-shot of the city on fire notwithstanding), “Dark Blue” fails to convince us that it deserves even the kind of guarded praise afforded other recent cop movies like “Training Day” and “Narc.”