Boarding Gate
dir. Olivier Assayas
A baffling movie that aspires to the condition of “sexy thriller,”
Boarding Gate, by French director Olivier Assayas, is all
about chicks and guns and a bleak, Michel Houellebecqian eroticism that
looks like fluorescent lights and smells like the recycled, slightly
mildewed air of an anonymous hotel room. Its sole keyword entry on
imdb.com is “Italian woman.”
Asia Argento stars as Sandra, a chick-avec-gun whose
hobbies include fucking some guy or getting ready to fuck some guy or
fleeing the fuckers she’s just fucked (Sandra is all about toxic
relationships). One of her lovers, an American businessman, pimps her
out to visiting competitors, hoping she’ll hump corporate secrets out
of them. Another lover, a Hong Kong businessman named Lester Wang,
agrees to help her murder the first lover, then split the money (what
money, exactly, is never clear) and meet in Hong Kong.
Things go wrong, as they must. Upon her arrival in Hong Kong, Sandra
discovers a dead friend, is kidnapped, escapes, runs across rooftops,
is roofied, and does a little more running (breasts always flopping,
thong always riding high) for good measure.
The film lurches between low-level action sequences and bleak
eroticism, all for the sake of admiring, and pitying, Argento’s sad
beauty. Argento is sad and beautiful, even if she chews
through her lines like she’s just come out of her dentist’s office and
the Novocain hasn’t worn off yet. But her character doesn’t make any
sense: Does she want these men or simply use them? Why does she kill so
casually but suffer such remorse? Can’t she—a seductress and
veteran of the drug trade—think of a better way to raise money
than killing the man she used to love? Boarding Gate doesn’t
fuss with reasons. Sandra is a cipher, struggling through an ominous
web of her own devising, programmed to arouse everything except our
curiosity.
BRENDAN KILEY
Flawless
dir. Michael Radford
When it comes to managing expectations, it’s obviously a stupid idea
to title your movie Flawless, even if it is about a diamond
heist. (Whoever chose the title could learn a little something from
The Bank Job, released a few weeks ago.) Flawless is,
unsurprisingly, not without its flaws. It still functions, but it’s
nothing to brag about.
Demi Moore plays Laura Quinn, a negotiator at the London Diamond
Corporation in the early 1960s. (She’s also an American, educated at
Oxford—one gets the feeling this detail was inserted after she
failed to approximate a British accent, since it serves no other
purpose.) Miss Quinn is talented: She speaks Russian well enough to
charm visiting Soviet emissaries; she grasps the social turmoil in
places where diamonds are mined. But she is a woman, and so her bosses
(including the delightful Joss Ackland) resent the very skills that
make her valuable. She’s passed over for a promotion she clearly
deserves. Conveniently, a brilliant idea of hers becomes a pretext for
her firing (no one who is not upper-level management must know what
LonDi is up to!) and also conveniently, a janitor named Hobbs (Michael
Caine) learns of her fate. Expertly manipulating her outrage, Hobbs
confides that he knows how to swipe a thermosful of diamonds. But he
needs Miss Quinn’s assistance.
The heist itself is sufficiently entertaining, if overly dependent
on a security guard with a penchant for hardboiled eggs. But Moore
comes off as dulled by the injustices visited upon her character, not
inflamed by them. Caine, for his part, seems bored playing a role he’s
played so many times before, and the motivations assigned his character
are downright ornate. And the buildup and subsequent investigation
are as dry as they are meticulous. The central flaw in
Flawless isn’t in failing to provide its characters with
backstories. Plenty of heist films have gotten away with much flimsier
motives. But giving the thieves social grievances serves only to
undermine their greed—the one motive we can all understand. ANNIE
WAGNER
Run Fatboy Run
dir. David Schwimmer
Five years ago, Dennis (Simon Pegg) jilted his very pregnant
girlfriend Libby (Thandie Newton) in a fit of panic. Now he works as a
lowly security guard at a London boutique, spending his days chasing
down panty pilferers and his nights pining for the woman he left
behind. Owing back rent on his bleak basement apartment and constantly
late for scheduled visits with his son, Dennis needs a major jolt to
get his life together—a jolt Libby’s new marathon-running
boyfriend (Hank Azaria) handily provides.
With pedestrian direction by David Schwimmer (yes, that David Schwimmer), Run Fatboy Run works best when all focus is
on Pegg, whose inspired twitchings and dashes of exasperated mania are
responsible for the bulk of the movie’s highs. But the script (which
Pegg cowrote with Michael Ian Black) is an unfortunate mess, veering
wildly between slapstick and grating sentimentality. Subplots are
introduced and then left to drift; character arcs are far too rushed
and convenient—it’s cinema schizophrenia, with every moment of
lunacy diluted by a yank at the heartstrings. And while the
performances are fine (though Newton’s freaky lack of facial pores is
distracting; next to her, everyone looks like Manuel Noriega), most of
the characters are nothing more than setup men for the predictably
schmaltzy climax. There’s a decent comedy somewhere inside Run
Fatboy Run, but you have to wade through overwhelming saccharine
to find it.
BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Stop-Loss
dir. Kimberly Peirce
After nearly a decade of nothing, Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t
Cry) returns with Stop-Loss, a film about the endless war
in Iraq. At the center of the mediocre movie is soldier Brandon King
(Ryan Phillippe), who returns home a decorated war hero. Brandon not
only returns home, he returns to a small town in Texas. In short,
Brandon, as an American citizen in the age of W., has done everything
right. He is from Texas; he joined the army to fight terrorism; and he
risked his life to protect his country. Now he wants to relax, deal
with a few emotional problems, and adjust to a life that is quiet and
normal. But the government will have none of that. He’s a good soldier
and they want him back in Baghdad fighting the endless war against
terror.
To make him return, the army authorizes a “stop loss” injunction.
Brandon knows this injunction is wrong, refuses to return to Iraq, and
becomes a fugitive. While underground, he discovers that there’s no
support for those who want to challenge the state, its determinations,
its wars, or its injunctions. The entire infrastructure for leftist
resistance has been decimated. In the postliberal age, the age of W.,
black Americans, once at the frontline of the fight for human rights,
are a broken people; cosmopolitan Jewish lawyers are morally bankrupt;
and life in Canada presents nothing but a hornet’s nest of
uncertainties. Even the American family is powerless. Antigone (the
family) can only offer Creon (the state) a dumb look, a yelp, and a
groan. With nothing to back him, Brandon is trapped in a situation that
has only one solution. Stop-Loss is an obituary of America’s
leftist spirit. CHARLES MUDEDE
21
dir. Robert Luketic
Based on Ben Mezrich’s decent nonfiction book Bringing Down the
House—wherein a group of MIT students turn their math skills
to counting cards in Vegas—21 is a headache of a movie
where every camera movement is overbaked and every turn of a card is
accompanied by an unnecessary sound edit.
Blank-faced Jim Sturgess stars as Ben Campbell, a big brain on
campus whose path to Harvard Medical School is blocked by the obscene
amount of cash needed to make tuition. Nerdy even by MIT’s standards,
Ben falls in with a group of math whizzes led by one of his professors
(Kevin Spacey). Promises of easy cash are made, Ben’s longtime crush
Jill (Kate Bosworth) sweetens the pot, and soon Ben is winging to Vegas
on weekends, where the group’s secret signals and ability to crunch
numbers prove a windfall—until a near-obsolete security expert
(Laurence Fishburne) lands on their trail.
With its army of vacant pretty faces (Bosworth may as well have been
replaced by a cardboard cutout), 21 begins as a celebration of
intelligence and ends as an impressive display of cinematic stupidity.
Director Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law) shows little
restraint, pummeling the audience with a barrage of film-school weapons
in service of a story that has been completely rinsed of nuance. The
gambling scenes are unbelievable, the third-act twist entirely
predictable, and if not for a whacked threat made by Fishburne (“First
I’m going to break your cheekbone with a small hammer… and then I
will kill you”) there would be nothing at all to recommend. BRADLEY
STEINBACHER
