dir. F. Gary GrayEdward Norton is a pompous jackass. Mark Wahlberg is an inflection-handicapped pretty boy. The two team up in The Italian Job, a remake of the 1969 heist comedy starring Michael Caine and Noel Coward, and somehow, shockingly, the result is not completely fucked.
How did it happen? I suspect the answer is to be found in director F. Gary Gray, helmer of two decent flicks (Friday, The Negotiator), one minor disaster (Set It Off), and one complete disaster (A Man Apart). Here, working with a clean script, he's built a sturdy--if unsurprising--summer fluff piece.
The gig: A group of polished thieves (led by Wahlberg and Donald Sutherland) pull off a gold heist in Venice, Italy. Backstabbing ensues, however, when mustachioed Norton snuffs Sutherland and makes off with the loot. Rightfully pissed, Wahlberg and his gang regroup, this time with Sutherland's daughter (Charlize Theron) as their crack safe... er, cracker, and concoct a scheme to get back what's been stolen. Crisscrosses, shenanigans, and a fairly thrilling Mini chase/race/blatant car commercial ensue. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Owning Mahowny
dir. Richard KwietniowskiAt last, a film dares to ask the question, "What is the sound of one actor slumming?" Few men of the screen are as compulsively watchable as Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has made a career out of lending gravitas, pathos, and humor to the bleak end of the human spectrum. Sadly, he is often the best or only good thing about the films in which he appears (here I cite the collected works of Paul Thomas Anderson, whom history will remember as a phony auteur). Owning Mahowny is another such poo pile, in which Hoffman's knack for the sad sack is prostituted in the service of a film concerned solely with cheap drama and boilerplate psychology.
This overwhelmingly Canadian portrait of one sweaty bank manager's gambling addiction, and the enormous fraud he perpetrates to sustain it, places Hoffman at the center of a story that grows less plausible with each frame; that it's supposed to be true doesn't help--the film is portentous and humorless, and neither John Hurt as a greedy small-time casino manager, nor Minnie Driver as the frumpy, bewigged girlfriend, can elevate the proceedings. Hoffman is a great actor, but the more he appears in ugly garbage like this, the closer he comes to phoning it in. The only crucial difference between this performance and other recent ones (e.g., Love Liza) seems to be the mustache on his lip. SEAN NELSON
