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'EDGE OF DARKNESS'
CRAVEN HEART
By Sean Chavel

Dishonest advertising makes you believe that Edge of Darkness is just another vengeance with a bang thriller. Instead this paranoia thriller is far from the conventional assembly line, far from the routine and far from the mediocre. Protracted detours and an unnecessary extended length of two full hours keep this from being a complete success. But its aim to explore big issues of corporate illegal action and its interlocked political support, while achieving this with fairly original perspectives, grips your mental interest.

Up to this point, commercials have emphasized Mel Gibson pursuing his daughter's killer with a "Death Wish" rage in his eye. Warner Bros. advertisements have not given you the proper impression that this is a complicated, and complex, conspiracy investigation where corrupt government and corporate malfeasance is involved.

You've seen enough movies where you can sniff out hackneyed corrupt government plots, but somehow this movie is layered and multifaceted. While the movie paints a primary villain into focus it generally contains a varietal range of villains, some more intrinsic to the girl's death than others. Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is the girl, peculiarly sick but not necessarily contagious, who arrives home to visit her father Thomas Craven (Gibson, in his first lead role since "Signs"), a veteran Boston police detective. Not before long she is gunned down execution style.

Evidently poisoned and simultaneously targeted by contract killers, Emma seems to have been hiding disreputable secrets in regards to the fictional corporation she worked for called Northmoor. While only an intern at the research compound, it nevertheless is a high security clearance job that required absolute compliance. We gather that she was killed because she leaked information to activists. The media, and detective law enforcement, are already persuaded that Thomas was the supposed target in the shooting and that Emma's death was a mistake.

Drama surrounding Northmoor is intriguing as we become vaguely oriented as to what is produced - it is one of those fictional sinister corporations that masquerades nuclear and weapons development with green peace. But in a later series of clandestine meetings held between a Northmoor executive and government operatives, the film finds its niche in plausibility. The script is by William Monahan ("The Departed") and Andrew Bovell ("Lantana"), who collaboratively create intelligent layers of high crimes.

Yet at its most primal level, the movie just wants to see Craven break the rules so he can bust some heads. You might join in on some cruel applause when Craven pours poisoned milk down the throat of a bad guy. As this grey-haired lethal weapon, Gibson is really good in the movie constantly brewing with elevating intensity, and he's got the Boston accent down pat.

But it is one of those movies that is way too reverent with its Boston accents, and some of the supporting players get you lost. Caterina Scorsone, as one of Emma's former associates, lays on the accent in such a heavy-handed way that you can't wait till she stops acting. Ray Winstone, that British actor, isn't doing the Boston accent but his dialogue readings come off in a mumble - although he does have an interesting character to play as a guy who has in his longtime experience conducted both good and evil in his professional endeavors.

Other weaknesses slow down the momentum of the movie, none more evidently as the repetitive scenes of Gibson imagining Emma as a young girl again filling his presence. And it cannot but helped be mentioned that the script, in attempt to pipe up "mystery," comprises characters who withhold telephone contacts (i.e., information) from Craven in a way that makes the audience feel as if the movie simply must be longer than it has to be. Emma's surviving boyfriend (Shawn Roberts), who never leaves his flat despite being in danger, is signature as the stubborn paranoid and as a cloying irritant to the audience.

You might feel let down by such bumpy supporting characters carrying on with needlessly protracted anxiety fits. It's the smart dialogue, the high corruption stuff that keeps you riveted when "Edge of Darkness" is able to stick to its essentials.

It helps that Danny Huston ("The Constant Gardener," "Children of Men"), with his seething intellectual-snob persona, portrays a figure of white collar evil. Martin Campbell, the director of "Casino Royale," furnishes the Huston character with a magnificent office, with its glossy interiors and looming glass window view. Somehow Huston and that office stand out. Let's recap: Superb work by Gibson and Huston, a screenplay with ideas, and hmm, that office.

Eyes Wide Open
By Staff Writer

Aaron (Zohar Strauss) is the principal in Haim Tabakman's freshman picture about a fellow in his thirties who lives on one of the winding streets of Jerusalem's ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. The snoopy people of the area know everybody's business and they care enough to send the very worst packing if they don't like what he's doing. And what an "evil" person is doing, in their estimation, is to violate some aspect of the first Five Books of the Bible. Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan, and Daniel and Ashpenaz may have had more than casual friendships with each other, but Leviticus 18:22 states "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with women: it is abomination."

But lust overcomes restraint for Aaron and Ezri (Ran Danker), the latter a single man who from the town of Safed who appears to be homeless and the former, a Jerusalem butcher with a cute wife, Rivka (Tinkerbell) and four charming kids. "Eyes Wide Open" is a casually-paced, intense drama, with intimate close-ups and long gazes, especially by Aaron, who almost never smiles even when his true nature is being fulfilled. Yet after enjoying a forbidden relationship with the gay, younger man he takes in to be his apprentice in a successful butcher shop, he still looks forlorn but states that "I was dead: now I'm alive." He could have fooled me, but let's take him at his word.

As Axel Schneppat casts his lenses around the cobblestone streets of the holy city, one which has traffic jams with horns honking as well as scenes of men praying in small groups in the synagogue and attending lectures by the rabbi, Merav Doster's story unfolds.

Aaron, who has repressed the gay part of his bisexual leanings until handsome young Ezri learns how to cut meat, slowly, and after much restraint (he insists that this restraint is God's way of testing us), gives in. The two bed down from time to time in the back of the shop. Meanwhile the nosy neighbors find out about the young guy's reputation, even putting up posters in the neighborhood urging citizens to stay away from the sinner. Aaron is threatened with a boycott but some of the young, fanatical bullies, unless he parts with the helper, while his wife-whose gorgeous red locks are covered with the prescribed, ugly wig-catches on and in her own, low-key lays down the law. How things turn out ultimately may be predictable, but not only is the acting as authentic as performances can get, but we viewers also learn a lot about the customs of ultra-conformists, who like modified Taliban members will absolutely not put up with man-to-man hanky-panky.

I'm sure that these residents would be speaking Hebrew at all. Ultra-orthodox, including Hasidim (many of whom live in Brooklyn and upstate New York as well as Jerusalem), generally consider Hebrew a holy language to be spoken only in the synagogue. Yiddish is for ordinary conversation. But that cavil aside, "Eyes Wide Open" deserves to be seen by a broader audience than the presumed target: gays, Jewish interest, and festivals-haunting cinephiles.

'Dear John': No heat from Sparks
By Staff Writer

I've never actually read a book by Nicholas Sparks, nor do I have the desire to.

After all, his novels regularly find their way to the screen. So I feel as though I'm absorbing them by osmosis.

I don't think I'm giving much away - no spoiler alert required - to say that "Dear John" is the first of the cinematic adaptations of his books I've encountered in which one of the two lovers at the center of the story doesn't die. Not that true love runs smoothly - Sparks wouldn't have an oeuvre if it did.

Sparks is a big believer in people having a moment and capitalizing upon it, even if it doesn't last. The people in his stories always seem to be at a critical point in their lives - a decisive point - when they're questioning everything they've ever believed in. They're vulnerable, open to a connection they never had before, receptive when that one person suddenly walks into their life and changes everything.

Not that everything ever stays changed for long. Inevitably there's a conflict - there wouldn't be drama without conflict - often involving a misunderstanding of some sort. And then regret and, with luck, reconciliation - but not for long. Never for long, because otherwise how would Sparks make his audiences tear up at the cruel irony when true love refuses to resolve itself as happily ever after?

In "Dear John," the couple that has a moment consists of John and Savannah (which is confusing because the story is set in Charleston). John (Channing Tatum) is a soldier at home on leave; Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) is a college girl at the beach on spring break.

They meet (cute) on a pier where Savannah, with a group of friends, accidentally drops her purse in the water. While her male companion dithers and runs down the pier to get to the shore to get to the water, the valiant John simply jumps in, dives to the bottom and rescues the purse, winning the girl's heart.

They spend a rapturous two weeks together, though not without bumps. There are hints (and even brief evidence) that he has an anger-management problem (which apparently was solved when he joined the military). Autism is also an issue; she is one of the few who can reach the autistic son of a family friend (Henry Thomas). And she makes a not-unfounded suggestion that his socially retarded father (Richard Jenkins) may suffer from Asperger's syndrome.

John goes back to duty in Germany (where he's in Special Forces) and Savannah goes back to college. They write regularly, pouring out their hearts and longing for the day when his final year of service is up and he can come home to her.

Unfortunately, the story begins in the spring of 2001, so their epistolary romance is interrupted by 9/11. He comes home on a weekend leave - and tells her that, like everyone else in his unit, he's going to extend his enlistment. She is, to put it mildly, not enthusiastic.

Shortly afterward, he gets the kind of letter for which the film is named. Shortly after that, he is wounded in action. Shortly after that, he recovers and decides to become a lifer. Shortly after that …

Really, there's nothing short about this movie. It stalls out after an hour, then stumbles along for another 50 minutes of the usual Sparksian palate of life lessons and regrets and sadness.

Tatum possesses a gift for quiet that's surprisingly effective here. A longing look makes up for a lot of script deficiencies, though not nearly enough. Seyfried is a wide-eyed beauty who has some acting chops but is not up to the task of carrying an entire movie on her slim shoulders, even with help from the hunky Tatum. Richard Jenkins is a godsend in any film but, at times, it's hard to tell if he's in character, or merely shying away from the camera out of embarrassment at how little he has to do.

Once upon a time, Lasse Hallstrom was an interesting filmmaker, a Swedish import with an acute eye for American manners and mores. But then he got lost in sludgy literary adaptations such as "Chocolat" and "The Shipping News" - and now a Nicholas Sparks movie.

At one point in the film, John starts a fire by using a flint. There's more heat in that bit of action than in this entire soggy, dreary film.

Legion
By Scott Mendelson

There's not very much wrong with Legion, except that it chooses to tell the wrong story and barely has the resources to tell the narrative that it chooses. The idea of God finally becoming fed up with humanity and launching an extermination is an intriguing one, the kind of thing that brings to mind epic-scale apocalyptic carnage. Yet the world of Legion primarily exists in a single roadside diner and it tells the tale of but a handful of victims of God's initial wrath. This is certainly not the first film to tell of world-changing events from the point of view of a single group of isolated characters (Signs, Pontypool, Cloverfield, etc), but this is the first one of this sub-genre which seems to base its storytelling decisions on budgetary limitations.

A token amount of plot: God has decided to wipe out humanity, having grown tired of watching mankind squander their resources and their lives. The only hope for our world is a lone rogue angel (Paul Bettany), who still loves us and still has faith in the species that was created in God's image. He immediately ventures to a rundown greasy spoon, which contains a handful of locals, a few accidental tourists, and a young pregnant waitress (Adrianne Palicki) whose child inexplicably holds the key to humanity's survival. As the world is attacked by the very forces of God himself, a battle for the very survival of our species takes place in the most unlikely of places.

The film peaks in its moody and character-driven first act. While the occupants of the doomed restaurant are barely fleshed out, the casting is so spot-on that the actors fill in the blanks for us. Dennis Quaid is grizzled and beaten down by life, Charles S. Dutton is noble and optimistic, and Lucas Black is a simple young man clutching onto his friendship with Palicki as the sole reason to wake up in the morning. The rest of our main characters are given only a few token details, but the film lets them authentically live and breathe for the entire first third of the picture, so we at least have some emotional investment when the violence starts. Plus, owing to its mere $26 million budget, there is actually a greater focus on character interaction and narrative than slam-bang supernatural action.

Having said that, the relatively low-budget is a genuine problem for this ambitious picture. You can see the filmmakers struggling to achieve the bare-minimum visual quality for a theatrical supernatural horror picture, and the action beats are always shot in tight close-ups and edited in a way to best hide the lack of scale. There's certainly no fault in not wanting to spend $80 million on this honest-to-goodness B-movie, but I've seen cheaper genre pictures that looked better when it counted. Besides, the lack of funds detracts from the urgency of the picture. We are told once or twice that the entire world is being overrun by God's minions, but we never once see it or even hear the carnage that surely must be taking place elsewhere. Even as we are invested in the fates of our leads, we can't help but wonder about the story happening just off-frame.

Still, in the end, Legion is a cheap B-horror thriller with the requisite religious overtones. Whatever it lacks in production values, it makes up for with solid acting by a better than expected cast. The picture doesn't quite know when to end; climaxing a good fifteen-minutes after its natural finale, but the first two-thirds of the movie is pretty solid entertainment. Come what may, Legion may be a victim of its own successes. It desperately wants to be a real movie, and it's just good enough as an acting treat to make me genuinely mourn its lack of visual oomph.

Grade: C+

'FROM PARIS WITH LOVE'
LESS THAN TAKEN
By Sean Chavel

The people behind the making of From Paris with Love wanted to make a sensational CIA intrigue action-adventure without caring whether or not the CIA details were accurate or realistic. The filmmakers' intention is to create an entertainment that is a blast, a rip-roaring adventure that doesn't need to mirror anything going on in real life. The clichés are ripped off from clichés from other movies.

Pierre Morel ("Taken," which demonstrated concern with that thing called narrative) gets to play around with a couple of explosion scenes, meaning you get the sense that this is a director that loved putting together his sharp camera angles and smash-cut editing techniques. He gets two primary camera subjects: Jonathan Rhys Meyers (who we love from "Match Point") and John Travolta (who we love from "Face/Off"). Kasia Smutniak (who you might know only if you spend a lot of time with French cinema) is the secondary camera subject, also known as the pretty girl.

James Reese (Rhys Meyers) is established early as a personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in Paris. In addition to being an aide, he is also the Ambassador's chess partner which is important for setting up a howlingly bad exchange of dialogue at the end of the movie which I dare not give away. Anyway, Reese's dream is to become an operative for the CIA. He gets an on-the-field training day when he acts as escort to FBI agent Charlie Wax (Travolta) who transports firearms from the States and successfully gets them past French security.

For a whole half hour, I was uncertain what was going on plot-wise but off the track I was still amused by the male repartee. What I could gather was that Wax might be considered some kind of bad guy since he indulges in snorting drugs and cajoling with hookers. If there is a central mystery in the film - intended or unintended because I was never sure if the filmmakers had an agenda or not - it is whether or not Wax is a bad guy or simply a badass renegade. Like I said, I wonder if "mystery" was even intended within the screenplay.

What is apparent is that Reese is less an escort than a tag along, and the intensity of Wax's methods is scary for him - Reese is not sure if he should trust Wax. Within two hours, the two of them are already engaged in a couple of shoot-outs or brawls. Within twenty-four hours, well, it's bam-bam all over the place. The one-liners in-between the bullet frays can be described as either awful or priceless or maybe it is both at the same time. I think screenwriters of action movies in the 1980's tried harder to be witty. I do apologize for not having any dialogue examples for you, but perhaps just in case you see the movie; I wouldn't want to spoil the ridiculousness for you.

I am going to be Mr. Obvious here: This is not a respectable movie but it is not trying to be. I can't even begin to say how incoherent the plot is but I am amused by how unconcerned it was at being incoherent. The big whopper plot twist where the key woman of the plot turns out to have a double-crossing agenda isn't mind-bending, it's just contrived.

Oh, the action is preposterous, and laughable, but isn't it fun to laugh? Isn't ridiculous more fun than solemn? Sure, sometimes it is even if it is to a limited degree. I was shaking my head in disbelief, yet I wasn't exactly bored.

My memory was a little fuzzy just a couple of hours after seeing the movie, but I do have a couple of favorite moments. I like the scene at the end where the French diplomat is irritated by the inconvenience of how delayed she is - didn't she recall that just moments ago an oncoming car got hit by a rocket launcher that was intended for her? Then at the beginning, how about shoot-out at the Chinese restaurant scene with cocaine oozing through bullet holes from the ceiling. What was that about? I mean to say, What Was That About!!!

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