Cynical Cinema

Hero Wanted is a rather painful experience.  I like Ray Liotta, who is a pretty solid, you-get-what-you-expect B-Movie actor.  Unfortunately, with Cuba Gooding Jr. you also get what you expect.  And, from him, I expect absolute crap.  Every movie this guy’s been in since Boyz N The Hood, he’s been just awful.  He seems to be that rare actor that gets worse with every passing year and project.  His finest acting performance may well have been in one of those MacGyver episodes when he was a teenager.  (Ironically, that chick who played Blossom - Mayim Bialik - also did her best work on MacGyver.)  And in Hero Wanted, Gooding is predictably putrid and unconvincing as a man on a quest for vengeance.  This is basically the same role that has been played by some very good actors in recent years -Jodie Foster, Kevin Bacon, and of course Charles Bronson.

 Speaking of Charles Bronson, there was a movie made about eight years ago called Boondock Saints (a far better movie), in which the two main characters, played by Sean Patrick Flannery and Norman Reedus, make reference a few times to Charles Bronson.  It’s the way Boondock Saints tipped it’s hat to the Bronson revenge fantasy flicks that preceded it, movies that clearly had an influence on the film.  Now here comes Hero Wanted, and where is the tip of the hat to Bronson?  Or for that matter, to Boondock Saints?  As it turns out, this movie is, throughout it’s hour-and-a-half running time, completely ripping off Boondock Saints.  Here’s how.

The guy starring with Gooding?  Norman Reedus from Boondock Saints.  Maybe the film makers thought that his involvement was in itself a big enough hat-tip.  It isn’t.  Ray Liotta plays an unusually smart and literate cop who makes amazing leaps in logic to close in on the real killer, all the while talking down to his subordinates and sending them out to get him coffee when they say something stupid.  Just like Willem Dafoe does in Boondock Saints.  He begins to feel empathy for, and identify with, the vigilante, just like Dafoe.  Cuba Gooding becomes, through some strange circumstances, a vigilante out for vengeance, just like Reedus and Flannery in Boondock Saints.  The director (first-timer Brian Smrz) loves the camera shot that goes around the characters in a sweeping circle, the kind of shot made popular by…Boondock Saints.  The big finale features a surprise appearance by an ex-marine badass killing machine, and every character has two guns, just like the big finale in Boondock Saints.  The killing scenes are shown piece by piece, where the scene begins, then they cut away, then the cops show up to piece it together, then we see how the scene plays out.  Just like in Boondock Saints.  The list goes on.

The movie starts with Cuba Gooding at a bar, playing an unconvincing drunk.  His drinking problem is easily explained away with the old quick, trite explanation.  Dead wife and unborn child, nothing to live for, and so on and so forth.  Then we see him working as a garbage man with Norman Reedus as a partner, when out of nowhere a car crash happens right in front of them.  Gooding jumps into the car and saves the little girl trapped inside, while the car burns.  He becomes an instant hero.  It’s the only good thing he’s done with his life…and so forth.  But he’s still a messed up weirdo, and he becomes obsessed with a girl who works as a bank teller.  When he approaches her, and the bank is robbed, she gets shot in the head.  He goes a little nuts, and tracks down the robbers one by one, in a quest for vengeance.  The fact that he knows who the robbers are and the police don’t gives away the ending right away, but I’ll leave out the quirky little details in case someone actually wants to see Gooding struggle his way through this painful movie.

Not only is Cuba Gooding Jr. unconvincing as a vigilante, he is also pretty bad at it.  He seems to need to deliver that one, last, tough-guy line before he kills someone, which gives them a chance to avoid death and fight him before he (obviously) eventually comes out on top.  As Eli Wallach said in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, “if you’re going to shoot, shoot!  Don’t talk!”  And the ending is ridiculous and implausible in virtually every way.  The more emotional and heartwrenching the ending tries to be, the more I laughed.  By the time Gooding inexplicably gets the girl, I was in stitches, pausing the movie several times because my sides hurt.  It’s almost worth watching just for that kind of hilarity.  But it isn’t.  Stay far away from this garbage.

There is a bit of controversy over the shutout of American Gangster at the Oscars. It was not nominated for best picture, and both Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington were shut out of the nominations for best actor. I understand the snub of Crowe. (Frankly, he deserves it more for 3:10 to Yuma than he does for this movie.) But the only reason I can think of for snubbing Washington is that he is too tailor-made for this part. You forget that he is an actor, because you’re watching Denzel Washington. As though it were a reality show about his life. If Denzel killed people and ran a drug empire and married Miss Puerto Rico, this would be exactly what his life would look like. The one role he has played to which I could compare this one was in Training Day, and he won the Oscar for that one. And here, he is better. That really is the strength of American Gangster, the performances.

Not just Washington, but Russell Crowe is reliably terrific as the cop tracking him down, and the supporting cast is remarkably good. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang clan, appears here, and as soon as I saw him I thought “oh, no! A rapper in a major role means this movie will start to hit Seagal territory in parts”. But the RZA is good. So is Armand Assante, who I love, and Josh Brolin as a crooked cop. Cuba Gooding Jr. is in the film also, and I absolutely hate Cuba Gooding Jr. However, he has maybe five lines, total, and wasn’t around long enough to irritate me. I also really like the inclusion of Clarence Williams III as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson. Johnson was a real-life legendary gangster figure in New York, and he was the subject of the under-rated 1997 movie “Hoodlum”, where he was played by Lawrence Fishburne in one of the best roles of his career.

In American Gangster, Bumpy dies near the beginning, and his right-hand-man, chauffeur and gopher, Frank Lucas, is left a little adrift. Frank is played by Denzel Washington, and he has few choices. Now that his mentor is gone, he can either leave town and go back to his family, or work for someone else, or take matters into his own hands. Of course, he chooses the third option and rises to power as the number one dealer, importer and gangster in New York. He manages to exist on the periphery, away from the other gangsters, the corrupt cops, and the good cops. One of those good cops is Russell Crowe, who has been blackballed by his police department for being a good cop. In a few scenes very reminiscent of Serpico, he is left hanging because the other cops in the department feel that if a cop won’t take money, then he of course would turn in cops who do. But of course, it isn’t black-and-white. Washington is not all bad, Crowe is not all good, which of course happens in any great movie. And a lot of bad ones.

What really sets American Gangster apart, aside from the fantastic actors doing fantastic acting, is the style. Ridley Scott has managed to make some of the most visually appealing movies in history. (Check out his early work, like The Duellists, or Alien). Sometimes that goes off the rails and the movie suffers for the stylish makeup - think Hannibal, or Black Hawk Down. But in American Gangster, Scott seems to treat the whole movie almost like a period piece. Of all his movies, this one feels the most like The Duellists, both in it’s theme and it’s style. It moves along at a crackling pace on the backs of Washington and Crowe, and although it runs more than two and a half hours, you never have a sense of the time passing. Tremendously engaging and fantastically done.