Cynical Cinema

“…stories from the dark side of the force” 

For a while now, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino have been mailing in their performances in movies such as 88 Minutes, Hide And Seek, and  Stardust.  And Gigli.  Let’s not forget Gigli.  If you want to see them mail it in together, then rent Righteous Kill, out on Blu-Ray and DVD Tuesday January 6th from Alliance Films.  Simply having these two acting titans on the same screen at the same time seems to be enough for the makers of this movie.  (Yes, they were both in The Godfather, Part II, and they actually appeared together for one terrific scene in Heat, but never have they spent this much time on the screen together.)

So think about this - the first movie where these two monsters of cinema share the screen throughout the movie, and they are playing the…same character.  Cops Turk (DeNiro) and Rooster (Pacino) are virtually the same guy.  They talk the same, they act the same, they do the same things and make the same analogies.  (One Ted Williams analogy they make is terrific - one of my favourite baseball stories, with a real-life application.)  Why bother hiring both of them?  Unless it is a marketing ploy - DeNiro and Pacino together!  And…that’s exactly what it is.  A marketing ploy.  And nothing more.

Also, think about this - you have Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino playing the main characters in a dark, “gritty” corrupt-cop movie.  And as co-stars you select…Brian Dennehy and 50 Cent.  Curtis Jackson, or “50 Cent” as he is better known in the rap world, is a terrible rapper.  And possibly an even worse actor.  Again, what reason could director Jon Avnet possibly have for putting 50 Cent in this movie?  Shouldn’t he be off playing the wisecracking sidekick in the next Steven Seagal direct-to-DVD vehicle?  What’s he doing here?  Unless it’s a marketing thing, and you want to attract the 500 rabid 50 Cent fans who will come just because he’s in it?  And…that’s exactly what it is.  A marketing ploy.  And nothing more.

That’s a phrase that really fits this movie.  “Nothing more”.  This is a corrupt-cop movie.  And nothing more.  It’s a vigilante killer movie.  And nothing more.  This is Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro walking around together.  And nothing more.  Remember all that stuff in the trailers about the Badge and the Gun?  This movie has all that stuff in it.  And nothing more.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the Al Pacino of the corrupt-cop classic Serpico might want to kick the Al Pacino of Righteous Kill right in the balls.  And that the Robert DeNiro of the vigilante killer movie Taxi Driver might question, upon watching this film, “are you looking at…ME?”  And then he would kick the Robert DeNiro of Righteous Kill right in the balls.  And nothing more.

You know those movies where the killer reveals himself as the killer right at the beginning?  The ones where the rest of the movie shows those murders without ever showing that killer’s face?  And you think right away - oh, this isn’t what it seems, and the guy who we think is the killer is not really the killer, and that’s terribly obvious?  Yeah, this is one of those movies.  And because of the silly set-up of the thing, I knew, four minutes into the movie, who the real killer was, how we were being misdirected, and what would take place throughout the rest of the movie. 

I am looking at my notes right now.  The first thing I wrote down is “Curtis Jackson?  DeNiro & Pacino together and they star w/ 50 Cent?”  The second thing I wrote down was the identity of the real killer and the end of the movie.  This was, quite literally, four minutes into the movie.  The third thing I wrote down was “Carla Gugino.  Yes.”  Because Carla Gugino is ridiculously hot.  I stopped writing notes after a while, but I could later have written “Carla Gugino.  Oh, no.”  Because her character in this film is painful.  She’s supposed to be the sexy, vampish police chick who gets off on bad boys and violence and killers and pain and so forth.  In a movie like this, she is just silly, and tawdry, and pointless.  (But still, of course, smoking hot.  I still love Carla Gugino.)

And frankly, I still love Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.  Even a half-assed effort from either of them is better than the output of 90 percent of other actors who star in other movies.  I would rather watch Pacino and DeNiro play a seven hour-long game of shuffleboard than six minutes of a Matthew McConnaughey romantic comedy.  Yes, they’re phoning it in, but they are the Larry Bird and Magic Johnson of the movie world.  And we all know that Bird and Magic at 50% were still better than most of the other players in basketball at 100%.  Right?

And seeing them together for an entire movie IS cool.  I’m not going to lie here, and I’m going to try to avoid being overly cynical.  There really is something very cool about watching this, and I will admit to a certain amount of childlike giddiness and awe when I first saw them together.  Like seeing Lemieux and Gretzky playing together for Team Canada in 1987.  But with this supporting cast, it’s kind of like seeing a Dream Team consisting of Lemieux, Gretzky, and twenty-eight clones of Aki Berg.  That team would still beat many others, but it wouldn’t be a world-beater. 

And that’s exactly what Righteous Kill is.  A movie that beats many others (like…Snake Eyes) but it is certainly no world-beater.

Oh - the special features.  There is one called The Thin Blue Line:  An Exploration of Cops And Criminals, and I flipped to it after the movie.  There are a few quick-cut camera shots of DeNiro and Pacino walking together, and the narrator says something about cops and corruption.  There are more Pacino shots, more DeNiro shots, then the announcer comes on and says, without a trace of irony at all, and I am not making this up - “we present to you true stories about the dark side of the force.“  He is not being funny, or winking.  The narrator does not get this joke.  He really means the POLICE force.  I turned it off seventeen seconds in.  I almost wish I had done the same with the movie.

“A lot of people go to college for seven years.”
“Yeah.  They’re called doctors.” 

Tommy Boy remains as funny today as it did when it was released in 1995.  Which is, most of the time, a good thing.  It came out on Blu-Ray December 16th from Paramount Home Entertainment, which is why I’m reviewing it.  Newly available in a different and better format, is this movie still worth buying?  Or renting?  Well, yes.  It is.  Although Blu-Ray is not exactly the format that cries out for movies like this one, the film is still pretty good, and pretty funny, and worth a viewing or two.  Or, like many of my friends seventeen years ago, a viewing or thirty.  Mainly, Tommy Boy remains a classic simply for being the best example of Chris Farley’s comedic genius available on DVD anywhere.

Chris Farley and David Spade were a magnificent comedic team, back in the days where “Saturday Night Live Alumni” was not a title that meant a box-office kiss of death.  This is clearly the better of their two movies together, Black Sheep being the other one, and a relic best left abaondoned on the shelves of stores that still sell used VHS tapes.  The rest of the cast is pretty good in Tommy Boy, including Bo Derek as a gorgeous older woman who schemes against Farley’s father, the perfectly-cast Brian Dennehy.  And Rob Lowe makes a terrific entrance as the deliciously evil cartoon bad guy.

But then there are still some problems.  Chris Farley was one of the greatest physical comedians of his era, and his pratfalls are fantastic.  And yet, for some reason, this movie wants Rob Lowe to be the guy who continues to get maimed and mauled.  Dogs attack him, he ends up on a crash-test car, he electrocutes himself through urine…and none of it is funny.  Lowe is a skilled actor, but this is not his bailywick.  Leave that stuff to Farley, who was fantastic.  And Farley was fantastic.  Tommy Boy is the best reminder of his comedic genius, and for that reason alone it’s worth picking up.  The Blu-Ray is, of course, unnecessary if you can find a regular DVD at a third of the price, but revisit this one.

I picked up The 4400, The Complete Series, out Tuesday the 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  And I started watching it.  And then I kept watching.  I stopped taking notes because it was interfering with my viewing of this show.  And I started to pay really, really close attention.  I got through Season One, and went to bed.  The next morning, as soon as I got up, I started Season Two.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun Season Three.  I woke up early the following day to complete Season Three.  And then, a couple of days later, I had watched the Fourth and Final season.  This was actually the second time I had watched Season Four of The 4400.  I watched it alone in May, when that season came out on DVD, and I gave it four stars out of ten.  I stand by that review.  As a stand-alone DVD set, Season Four merits four stars.

But now I was addicted.  I was desperate to find out what happened.  I had to know how this series ended.  And I watched all four seasons of this show.  I should have known.  After all, I had already watched the fourth season.  The fourth, and final, season.  And I remember how that one ended.  In that, it didn’t.  It didn’t end at all.  It didn’t answer any questions at all.  It just got cancelled and taken off the air.  I just watched thirty-three hours of this show.  Thirty-three.  Hours.  And at the end…nothing.  I was a little peeved.  But that was nothing compared to the fury of my girlfriend, who had watched all thirty-three hours with me.  She was incensed.  She had just wasted an entire weekend, and 33 hours of her life.

Here’s the basic premise:  Over the past 50 years, people have been abducted from all over the world.  All of a sudden, 4400 people are returned to Earth, all at once, all in one place, without having aged a day.  Each of the 4400 has a special ability - telekinesis, the ability to heal others, pre-cognition, and so forth.  The government gets involved, and tries to suppress these abilities.  We find out pretty quickly that these are not alien abductions, but rather these people are being taken by humans in the future, who are sending them back to hopefully change the course of history and save all of humanity.  And after a while, it looks like a war is brewing.

Then it ends.  It’s over.  If you’re the creator of The 4400, and you want to sell your “complete series” DVD, it seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do to film maybe five or six more episodes in order to wrap it up and give the viewers some closure.  The people who had invested in this series and who would purchase a 15-disc set to find out how it actually ends.  In fact, you could well market it to people who had never seen this show before as well.  Because this show was good.  It was VERY good.  Incredibly compelling, like the beginning of Lost.  And watching the first season made me absolutely rabid to find out the secrets and the stories and the result of the whole process.  In fact, you could maybe have created a satisfactory conclusion by filming TWO more episodes.  So why not?

Instead, this is what we get - a fifteenth disc that is full of special features, once the fourth season ends.  One of those special features is an introduction by Scott Peters, the creator of the show.  He talks about creating the show, and how pleased he is with the ardent fans who posted on the internet message boards and discussed the show and so forth.  Which is fine.  By all means, thank the fans!  But…then what?  You must have had some idea how the series was going to end - just tell us what the plan was!  It’s too late to do it now, just tell us the end.  It is no longer a spoiler, it is now the only catharsis available to us, the audience.  Help us out here.

The fact is, I felt incredibly ripped off after 33 hours of watching this with no resolution whatsoever.  Why bother with this, I thought.  In fact, thanks to the wrath of my girlfriend, I was ready to give this show a one-star rating.  After all, I was sour too because she woke me up in the middle of the night to express her anger - she had stayed up four hours later than normal to get to the end, because she too was addicted.  But I reconsidered, because if this show was compelling enough to make us that passionate about seeing an ending, it must have been doing something right.  And the show itself deserves at least nine stars.  But I will not give it nine, because it is false advertising.  The 4400 Complete Series is some great television, but there is nothing “complete” about this series.