Review: The Call (2013)

Sometimes when you watch a movie, you just know that creative threw a bunch of stuff against the wall and went with whatever muddle mix of ideas happened to stick.  The Call starring Halle Berry is precisely this type of movie.  Forget that it’s almost a direct rip of Cellular (Chris Evans), because that alone would not have warranted someone opening his/her checkbook in order for this movie to be made.  No, this movie is more like five parts Cellular, and one part Silence of the Lambs and Kiss the Girls, with a little of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 sprinkled in.  The problem here is that none of these mismatched parts is done particularly well.

The plot of the movie focuses on Halle Berry’s Jordan Turner, a 9-1-1 operator who becomes embroiled in the machinations of a serial killer when she accepts a call from Casey Welson (Aibgail Breslin), a girl who is kidnapped from a mall parking lot.  The plot plays out like a game of cat and mouse as Berry and Breslin work together to try to stop the killer (Michael Eklund) before it is too late. 

Though this has been done before, the premise has a few things working for it – a clear objective, the feeling of time constraints, lots of enclosed spaces; all the tools one would need to build a taut suspenseful narrative.  And that’s what makes director Brad Anderson directing miscues all the more glaring.  To be fair, this movie is a low budget B-level film and thus should come with tempered expectations, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tell a compelling story.  Sadly, writer Richard D’Ovidio seems content to pick pocket elements from other films and does a shoddy job of sewing them into one meaningful plotline.  The story is so week that you could have watched the entire film with the mute button on and not have been any worse off.

Still, I am going to throw a ton of blame for this debacle at the cast.  When you are making a B-level movie, much of the onus to elevate the narrative falls to the acting talent.  Despite some of the acclaim that Halle Berry has received, I’ve never been high on her acting abilities.  Still, regardless of where you stand on this debate it is undeniable that her recent filmography leaves a lot to desire.  So to me, her work in The Call is the continuation of a steep decline.  I found her performance lazy and unconvincing and the delivery of some of her lines downright cringe inducing.

As for her co-star Abigail Breslin, her work was a pedestrian paint-by-numbers damsel in distress performance.  You could have gotten this (or more) from half the actresses at an open casting call, but my guess is that she was placed in this film for whatever bump at the box office her slight name recognition might contribute.  Still her performance probably could have graded better had Michael Eklund brought a bit of menace to the table.  It is not hyperbole when I tell you that he is probably one of the least intimidating villains I’ve ever seen in a film from the thriller genre.  His performance is total amateur hour.

So to recap, the plot is an amateurish amalgamation of a bunch of mismatched films; poorly written and directed; produced on the cheap; and features a cast that brings nothing to the table.  I don’t think this needs to be stated, but I am going to say it anyway.  Do not watch this movie.  Ever.  It is a supreme waste of time and/or money that can be spent on more interesting activities like mowing your lawn with nail clippers or…breathing.  In lieu of this, watch Cellular.  By no means is that a cinematic masterpiece, but Chris Evans and Kim Basinger are ten times better than the aforementioned cast of this film.  And as you move forward in your life, I highly recommend that you avoid all movies that feature Halle Berry as the lead.  Consider yourself warned.

Standout Performance: Morris Chestnut.  He wasn’t terrible.

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Review: Cloud Atlas

It’s time to pull the plug on Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski.  Fourteen years ago they put together a cleverly written and directed mega hit known to all as The Matrix. Since then, their careers have been on a steady descent into ineptitude.  How so?  They greatly devalued their one claim to fame with two disastrous sequels (Matrix Reloaded, and Matrix Revolutions); milked said franchise for every single penny with mediocre video games and other licensing ventures; and they turned a cult classic of a cartoon in Speed Racer into a cinematic assault on the senses.  The latter led to a four-year hiatus from the film game that officially came to an end with the release of Cloud Atlas.

Typically this is the point in the review where I give a synopsis of the plot, but with Cloud Atlas that is really difficult to do.  This difficulty is born from the film’s unbalanced detailing of a handful of plots ranging from the distant past to the distant future, all edited with neither rhyme nor reason and presented with no sense of order or sensibility.  This renders viewers disoriented and completely disconnected from the film and its characters, which is incredibly ironic because the movie fancies itself a highbrow attempt at showing how all life is interconnected, when in fact the film’s many plots are anything but that.

In the line of things that went horribly wrong with this film, first and foremost would be the aforementioned odd choices in editing.  However, right on its heels would have to be the casting and acting choices.  It is a slippery slope to ask one actor to play multiple roles in a film.  I am hard pressed to name two or three times where it has worked and can rattle off movies ad nauseum in which it didn’t (Norbit, The Nutty Professor, Jack and Jill, Last Action Hero, et al).  Besides the fact that none of those movies are in anyone’s pantheon of greats, another thing they have in common is that they all aspire to be somewhat comedic.  Why?  Because the same actor in multiple roles feels gimmicky and is distracting, hence it works best as a sight gag. 

In Cloud Atlas, not just one actor takes on multiple roles, but nearly the whole cast of principles including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant.  Let me not mince words here when I tell you that it just flat out does not work.  Forget that the costume changes border on the ridiculous, that the makeup jobs appear absolutely amateurish, and that for the duration of the film you will find yourself constantly struggling to discern the who, what, when, where, and why of any given moment, the fact of the matter is that none in the cast are up to the task of taking on this endeavor.  Never is this more glaring than with Tom Hanks.  This is a guy with some serious hardware in his trophy cabinet and he is made to look like an absolute fool in this flick.  The asinine appearances, over the top accents, and rudimentary logic render the cast inept and completely tear this film down. That I made it to the end of the movie is simply the result of disbelief - disbelief that the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer could a film together of this nature.  In my mind there had to be an “ah” moment at the end that would bring every all together.  But sadly that never happens. 

Even now in thinking about this film, I can’t tell you for sure if I watched five, six, or seven storyline in this movie, but I can tell you for sure that each one of them was bad.  I have heard the words ambitious, genius, and intelligent attached to this movie by the people who will spend forty minutes detailing the difference between a movie and a film, but that’s merely the “nothing musings” of a societal blowhard.  Cloud Atlas is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a bronze rendering of dog poop sitting on a pedestal in an art gallery.  And because someone somewhere calls it is art, people stand there and ponder it, all the while thinking that it is nothing more than dog poop.  That’s Cloud Atlas – dog poop.  Don’t see it.  Don’t rent it.  In fact, never watch another movie made by the Wachowskis again and hopefully their brand of pseudo intellectual cinema will just go away once and for all.

Standout Performance: If there was anyone who acquitted himself of the nonsense surrounding the entire production it would have to be Ben Whishaw who did a nice job as aspiring composer Robert Frobisher.

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Review: New Year's Eve

Let’s fast forward through the diatribe I typically express whenever I come across one of those ensemble cast movies that features half of Hollywood (Valentine’s Day, What to Expect When You Are Expecting).  Let’s just accept the fact that I think they are terrible, lack character development, and feature actors just mailing it in.  Having just seen the movie New Year’s Eve I can tell that I saw nothing in this movie that makes me feel otherwise. 

New Year’s Eve follows the lives of a bunch of people in New York City on New Year’s Eve battling the holidays, the elements, and the trite sentimentality that drives their respective matters of the heart.  Why director Garry Marshall – he of Pretty Woman, Beaches, and The Princess Diaries fame – keeps venturing into this genre is beyond me, but rather than completely dismiss the film as a complete write off, I am going to highlight the glorified vignettes and how they don’t work to varying degrees.

Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele star in the “love in the elevator” portion of the movie and their collective performance plays like two high school drama students acting out a series of romantic clichés.  Not much better than that, is the “mending the fences” storyline as brought to life by Jon Bon Jovi and Katherine Heigl, though there is a thin layer of authenticity to this plot line as Heigl is asked to play a bitter and domineering woman and Bon Jovi a selfish self-centered musician.  On the opposite end of the authenticity spectrum is the performance of Josh Duhamel who plays the role of a cad that has come to grips with his own sentimentality and hopes to find a special someone that he once shared a moment with.  As to who that is, well it is a mystery easily solved about ten minutes into the movie.

Not to be upstaged in the unbelievablity department is the competition between two couples to have the first baby born in the new year for a monetary prize.  Is it unbelievable that this might happen in real life?  No - crazier things have been done in the real world for the almighty dollar.  It is in fact the performances of Seth Myers and Jessica Biel that are hard to fathom.  Myers delivers every other line with his hand-caught-in-the-cookie-jar expression from SNL: Weekend Update, and Biel has yet to master the ability to convince anyone that she can actually act. 

Then there is the arc shared by Michelle Pfeiffer and Zac Efron.  I was sure I would hate this one the most.  I cannot stress how overly contrived, incredibly cliché, and so overused the paradigm for their story line is, however it is still represents the most entertaining parts of the movie.  Effron is believable as a douchebag (obviously) bike messenger, but it is Michelle Pfeiffer who carries their story.  Of the one million characters in the movie, hers is the most sympathetic and the only one that seems to have any real depth despite the limited screen time.

As for the rest of the cast, Hilary Swank is there and fairly dour as she is charged with shouldering the gravitas of the movie.  Likewise Robert DeNiro, Abigail Breslin and Sarah Jessica Parker negotiate the mother-daughter relationship in ways that are not compelling.  Also appearing in the movie are Halle Berry, Common, Cary Elwes, Alyssa Milano (yes, apparently she still acts), Sofia Vergara, Carla Gugino, and so on and so forth and none of them do anything of significance to impact the movie one way or another.  As glorified extras, their presence actually breaks what little reality exist in the film as you find yourself thinking more about actor recognition rather than investing in the characters they are attempting to portray.

So I could sit here and tell you not to watch it (which is what I would suggest) but for the most part it probably won’t make much of a difference.  This is one of those movies that from the moment people first see the trailer, they instantly decide whether or not they are willing to invest their time and/or money on this project.  But if I can save even one person from this disaster, I will say it again: this is not a good movie.  It’s an exercise in quantity over quality so in lieu of one really good plotline you get five terribly weak ones.  The best recommendation I can make is to not only skip this movie, but to quit the genre altogether.

Standout Performance:  Michael Bloomberg and Ryan Seacrest.  They were asked to pay themselves.  It’s about as easy as acting can get.

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