'The Paperboy', 'Side Effects' and 'Outrage Beyond': review round-up

'The Paperboy' - Dir. Lee Daniels (15)

Trashy, pulpy and a little kitsch, Lee Daniels' follow-up to 'Precious' would be much more fun if it weren't also a little po-faced. For a film that has clear arthouse pretensions, this is the movie in which Nicole Kidman's brash, convict-obsessed Charlotte wees on Zac Efron's besotted face. It's the movie which (in one of the most bizarre, awkward and misjudged scenes I've ever seen) sees Charlotte masturbating in front of the assembled cast during a visit to her incarcerated fiance, played by John Cusack - also feverishly masturbating, as hot-shot newspapermen Matthew McConaughey, David Oyelowo and their young driver (Efron) look on speechless: confused and a little aroused. It isn't like anything else you've seen and the there are some enjoyably extreme moments, like those highlighted, but this is funny-bad where the "bad" outweighs the "funny" by some margin.

It's replete with heavy-handed montage sequences and imagery that implies some sort of deep meaning but which under close analysis seems to yield very little. There's a Macy Grey narration that could be excised without harming the film in any way and which seems confused about who it's addressing. Why Grey's housemaid is even telling the story in the first place is never made clear by Pete Dexter's screenplay, based on his own novel. There's also the sort of over the top poverty porn that made parts of 'Precious' so baffling and slightly offensive, with every lower-class character a filthy degenerate with a funny accent. It's fun to see Cusack play against type, but it's an excessive performance - though Kidman is stand-out and the rest of the cast solid - but that's hardly enough to make up for the film's many shortcomings: an investigation storyline that goes nowhere; vague commentary on late-60s racial politics that goes nowhere; and a chase sequence in the third act that is quite possibly the least tense and exciting ever committed to film. It's a mess. Shambolic filmmaking.

'Side Effects' - Dir. Steven Soderbergh (15)

Not the film you expect it to be following a twist at the halfway point, 'Side Effects' - the supposed final film of director Steven Soderbergh - is a gripping thriller that takes many an unusual turn, stretching credibility all in the name of entertainment value. Partly a commentary on the power wielded by big US pharmaceutical companies over the medical profession - and on the power of doctors over patients - and the over-prescription of anti-depressants, the cold and methodical nature of the first half is reminiscent of the dry and earnest 'Contagion'. That section of the movie sees Jude Law's charismatic and plausible psychiatrist coming to the aid of a suicidal depressive played by Rooney Mara - a patient, seduced by advertising, into demanding a particular drug which also happens to be sponsoring several of her doctors.

The second half - which I can't really write about here - is tense, gripping and hugely entertaining, though it's undeniably quite contrived and a little silly. Never more so than whenever Catherine Zeta-Jones appears as a rival psychiatrist who looks more like someone's idea of a "sexy librarian" roleplay fantasy than a medical professional. There's something exploitative about some her scenes with Mara in particular, but it didn't hamper my enjoyment of Soderbergh's latest in a run of recent (and varied) successes - that include 'Magic Mike', 'Haywire', 'The Informant!' and the aforementioned 'Contagion'. Needless to say, I hope this isn't the final feature of a progressive 50 year-old director who appears to be going from strength to strength. Like most vintage Soderbergh, this isn't a film without flaws: but it's interesting, bold and dynamic cinema full of surprises.

'Outrage Beyond' - Dir. Takeshi Kitano (TBC)

Not his most cinematic, stylish or daring work to date - being a thoroughly enjoyable and polished, but otherwise fairly standard Yakuza gangster thriller - 'Outrage Beyond' (a sequel to his earlier 'Outrage') keeps Takeshi Kitano on solid and more commercially viable ground following a period of self-reflection and experimentation. In it he plays a former mob enforcer who just doesn't give a fuck - not about the police or his criminal overlords - making him the rogue element in a society built around deference and respect for authority. He's as enjoyable a screen presence as ever, though the film seems to lose momentum whenever he's not on-screen. Most interesting is the way the film portrays the complicity of the police in mob activity, through the schemes of Fumiyo Kohinata's cynical and manipulative Detective Kataoka - perhaps the real villain of the piece.

FilmQuest 2012 (8/30): 'Con Air':

"Beautiful? Sunsets are beautiful, newborn babies are beautiful. This... this is fucking spectacular!" If I hadn't seen Michael Bay's 'The Rock' the day before there's a good chance producer Jerry Bruckheimer's next film - 1997's Simon West directed 'Con Air' - would have seemed like the epitome of hi-octane. However, seen in the shadow of Bay's quote-a-second action flick it seemed comparatively sedate.

But this is odd because 'Con Air', the latest entry in my rapidly expanding "FilmQuest 2012" series, is arguably more extreme than Bay's film in terms of raw ingredients: this time Nicolas Cage has daft hair and a thick Cajun accent, he gets to run (and jump) away from explosions with far greater frequency, and the cartoonishly over the top villains are brilliantly cast (including Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo and Dave Chappelle) with the scenery-chewing John Malkovich in top form. It also has a suitably BIG premise: the world's most loathsome scumbags (notorious rapists, drug lords and mass murderers) hijack a prison transport plane, making it hell in the air. There is, of course, one good man aboard. Meanwhile the authorities on the ground (led by John Cusack) bicker over whether to shoot the plane out of the sky or trust the one good man to restore order.

These cops argue over whose jurisdiction the whole incident is whilst, over the next hour and a bit, pretty much everything explodes and people are battered, shot, stabbed, crushed, impaled and burned with regularity. There is a pitched gun battle between the cons and soldiers in a plane scrapyard, an attack helicopter chase through the Grand Canyon, a crash landing on the Las Vegas Strip (with landmarks destroyed), and a high-speed chase between police motorcycles (commandeered by the Cage and Cusack dream-team, no less) and a rampaging convict-carrying fire truck - complete with climactic good versus evil fistfight on the roof of the moving vehicle. This is a film where a plane tows a sports car into the air for chrissakes, prompting the line "on any other day that might seem strange". But the best line? "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."

As with 'The Rock' every aspect of the story is heightened to its greatest, most ludicrous possible level to ratchet up the drama and punctuate the stakes for all involved. For instance, Nicolas Cage's Cameron Poe isn't just a mild-mannered convict due to leave prison after an 8 year stretch, on the wrong plane at the wrong time (on a story level this might have been enough). No, he's a decorated former soldier who returned home from serving his country to find his pregnant wife (Monica Potter) being pestered by a despicable drunk, who he accidentally kills after being attacked.

He's then assured by a lawyer that he'll only serve a year if he pleads guilty, but the judge gives Poe no less than 7 years because he's a soldier - engendering a sense that he's a victim of rough justice. Yet he's never the slightest bit angry or twisted: a benevolent convict who shares his sweeties with the kindly diabetic man in his bunk (Mykelti Williamson) and writes regular letters home to his young daughter. Oh, and the hijacking of his flight home doesn't merely jeopardise his freedom - it also means he might miss his daughter's birthday party.

The ingredients are there but I think it's held by the fact that West, unlike Bay, is not any sort of visual stylist. Whilst 'The Rock' is rendered even more lovably ridiculous by all the American flags and fast-cutting of its uber-trashy auteur, 'Con Air' just isn't quite as intense. And if 'The Rock' was an inspired once in a lifetime mess of various jobbing writers (including Tarantino and Sorkin) then 'Con Air' is a much more coherent but infinitely less romantic piece from a single screenwriter: Scott Rosenberg. There are some quotable lines ("Put... the bunny... back... in the box"), but nothing on the level of 'The Rock'. Though I accept that this is an unfair and arbitrary standard of measure. Like I said, I saw both more or less back-to-back.

One aspect of 'Con Air' that genuinely elevates it above most of the action competition (puns definitely intended) are the interactions between Cusack's US Marshal Vince Larkin and Colm Meaney's DEA Agent Duncan Malloy. Whereas most movies would be comfortable with the idea that these convicts are an evil blight on society, Larkin makes constant references to the idea that they've been, to some extent, institutionalised by the prison system. Malloy angrily disagrees and often calls the prisoners "animals", but he is consistently shown as pig-headed and governed by reactionary anger rather than thought (see the sequence in which Cusack tries and fails to convince him that he's chasing the wrong plane). Conversely Larkin is shown as intelligent and rational. Perhaps their relationship is best defined by the following exchange:

Vince Larkin: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by observing its prisoners." Dostevsky said that... after doin' a little time.
Duncan Malloy: "Fuck you!" Cyrus Grissom said that after putting a bullet in my agent's head, okay?

Malloy is motivated by revenge which is opposite of justice. This philosophical feud is complicated by the scene in which Malloy wants to shoot the plane down over the desert, only for Larkin to ensure that he doesn't - directly leading to the crash landing in Las Vegas, potentially killing hundreds of people in a densely populated area. Is Malloy's pragmatism vindicated here? Maybe that's a valid way of seeing it, though it's probably not the view taken by the film: after all, we want Cage to survive to see his wife and daughter to the strains of "How Can I Live".