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The textbook definition of a “B” movie didn’t begin with balls, brawn, breasts and, well, bravura, but Justin Lin’s bold, onrushing “Fast Five” includes those elements and much more, as honorable (and entertaining) a studio production as odds would have you expect. Lin’s third go at the $1-billion-grossing series is a street race-meets-heist “Ocean’s 11,” as if directed by a Michael Bay who had more of an interest in tempo, topography and the timing of human expressions. Lin’s turned out to be a very, very good action director, a superb machinist, a crafter and wielder of tools. Sundance 2002′s “Better Luck Tomorrow” was a terrific debut for Lin, but didn’t forecast where his career has taken him. When you see a superlatively rotten movie at which tens of millions of dollars has been thrown, the idle thought usually pops up, couldn’t they have at least done something professional with all that money? “Fast Five” rebukes that quibble in almost every scene in its unapologetic pop professionalism. There’s a key perspective as well in Wesley Morris’ keen and necessary Boston Globe piece about the Utopian yet everyday world shown in the four previous installments and brought to casual nonpareil here. “It was a place the movies had never precisely seen before: gangs of young people of different races unified by automotive exhilaration. There were blacks, Asians of all kinds, Mexicans, Michelle Rodriguez, and whatever Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster are. Friction exists among the factions, but it’s… the organic sort you expect from a bunch of marginal kids engaged in… illegal hobbies… [F]or the young and youngish people who’ve bought tickets (and rented and downloaded it), this is just how the world looks.” Or, as he told NPR after the article ran last Sunday, “Basically it promotes race as this very normal thing. [There] are these very different types of people, but it’s not the subject of the movie like it is in most Hollywood movies. Race is just a matter of fact.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“How long have you been in the forest?”

A small, tight fistful of blunt lines like that in Joe Wright’s outlandish, determined art-house action thriller, “Hanna,” quickly set the heart of the casual admirer of Bruno Bettelheim’s fairytale study “The Uses of Enchantment” to racing. Wright is also bolder than ever with visual flourish.

A motherless child grows up in a rude cabin in far snowy reaches, taught by her father (Eric Bana) to be a ruthless mind, a calculating creature. She’s not amnesiac, she just knows no experience of the larger world: it’s “The Newbourne identity.” “Where do you come from?” “The forest.” The swamp, the primordial ooze, the soup, the shadows: from which all life and fear emerge. Outside the forest, a spy agency in the person of a Texas-twanging Cate Blanchett beckons, threatens.

There aren’t many high-functioning Asperger’s, tongue-in-cheek, Jesus-girl, killer-child thrillers in the market, which makes even the wooziest and blowziest moments of “Hanna” startling. A jarring mix of tones prevails, at one moment in settings that suggest Fassbinder making a “Modesty Blaise” and others, the Euro-oddness of the more gregarious films by Fatih Akin, like “Im Juli” or “Soul Kitchen.” As shot by the gifted Alwin Küchler (“Ratcatcher,” “Sunshine,” “Morvern Callar”) and tethered to the serene, slightly sinister percolation of a score by the Chemical Brothers, the world outside is otherworldly, as if we, the audience, were pitched into as much strangeness as bright young Hanna. Read the rest of this entry »

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“It took over 200 years to create the symbol of the presidency,” notes the president in “The Sentinel,” a political thriller with an illicit romance that George Nolfi scripted in 2006. Now he writes and directs a superior “romantic thriller” that spells out what it will take to make David Norris (Matt Damon) president in a foreseeable future. Tinkering with this Brooklyn pol’s itinerary to higher office are strange men-in-hats carrying proto-iPads: their screens map the existential GPS of Norris and all the rest of us. Micromanaging fate is necessary to maintain the exact timetable of human history. Except hat-wearing Harry (Anthony Mackie) is a minute late for a preset spilling of coffee on Norris’ shirt. Norris steps into a venture-capital meeting a bit earlier than expected and sees Harry’s coworkers, some uniformed in long black leather coats like those worn by the firemen in “Fahrenheit 451,” in the act of adjusting the mind of one of his immobilized coworkers. As in “Inception,” subconscious recalibrations alter one’s later “decision trees.” Minimizing “ripples” in the space-time continuum is like maintaining film continuity. “The Adjustment Bureau” posits God not as the Ur-auteur, but as an executive producer with script doctors doing rewrites to steer history since the hunter-gatherers. Read the rest of this entry »

Director Wilson Yip and screenwriter Edmond Wong continue the martial arts saga of “Ip Man” (2008). “Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster” shows the title athlete (Donnie Yen) relocating from the Chinese mainland to establish a rooftop academy in Hong Kong. A child is on the way and rent is due. An opening title indicates 1950. (A forward-moving timeline then starts at “Day 8″ for some reason and clicks ahead.) Flashbacks show Japanese troops shooting an unarmed Chinese colleague in the back of the head. That former master, introduced in the first film, is now homeless and brain-damaged. The polished fight scenes progress from Ip Man thrashing local toughs, to besting local martial arts teachers, and ultimately taking on the “foreign devil” known as Twister (Darren Shahlavi), a smirking lunk who fights wearing red boxing gloves and no shirt. Ip Man assumes the mantle of defender of Chinese tradition against vulgar Brits. Racial solidarity blossoms. The cultural politics are blunt. Fisticuffs meet flying kicks. Fight aficionados may already know the answer, but shouldn’t there be a little dialogue here about the mechanics of mismatch between Chinese fighters and the Caucasian colonizer? The story’s historical inspiration is footnoted at the very end, when a very young Bruce Lee comes for his lessons. With Sammo Hung (also credited as Action Director), Fan Siu-Wong. 108m. (Bill Stamets)

“Ip Man 2″ opens Friday at the Music Box.

“You’re a goddamn machine,” is warm praise for a “mechanic,” the term-of-art for pro killers like Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham, “The Expendables,” three “Transporters” and the upcoming “The Killer Elite”). This is a lively and deadly remake of the 1972 film of the same name scripted by Lewis John Carlino (“Seconds”). At first titled “Killer of Killers,” that Charles Bronson vehicle had the exasperated host of a psychedelic house party yelling at a long-distance operator: “No, I didn’t call Afghanistan!” The updated screenplay by Richard Wenk (“16 Blocks”) adds more dimension to this story of a killer commissioned to kill one of his own. Assassin-on-assassin twists are go-to plots for ironic payback. Read the rest of this entry »

Director Michel Gondry hardly displays the visual play that levitated his “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Science of Sleep.” Here he is tasked with a jokey screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who earlier co-wrote “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express.” Rich brat Britt Reid (Rogen) is the dissolute son of the late publisher of the The Daily Sentinel in Los Angeles. He plays vigilante on a lark with Kato (Jay Chou), his barista, mechanic and chauffeur. There’s a drug kingpin and a dirty D.A. Lots of cars, guns, fireballs and shattered glass. Cameron Diaz has a cameo role as a temp secretary who knows her crime news. Based on “The Green Hornet” radio series created by George W. Trendle in the thirties, this is thin action comedy that makes little of the superhero and sidekick dynamic. Sad to report, the best line may be Britt’s anticipation of Kato’s unwritten autobiography: “When they adapted it to a movie, I’d watch the shit out of that movie.” In this 3D conversion, there’s this bit of visual business to look for: the very same bad guy who wields a double-barrelled handgun gets two halves of a broken chair leg poked into his eye sockets. That’s the best industry insider joke about 3D to date. With Christoph Waltz, Edward James Olmos, David Harbour, Tom Wilkinson. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

Back in 1235 A.D. three witches are hung off a stone bridge and then lowered into a river. In the dead of night, one came back. A century or so later, “The Girl” (Claire Foy) is called a witch, blamed for the plague and extradited to an abbey for trial. “Season of the Witch” is the plodding tale of that six-day trek that ends with a supernatural CGI smackdown. The key smackdowners are the unbeliever-slayers Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman). These lusty, smelly Crusaders killed for Christ throughout the 1330s and after. Until that day in Smyrna in 1344 (probably October 28, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia) when Behmen felt bad about impaling an unarmed woman, so he deserted the church. Captured by priests, the duo is forced to escort The Girl in a horse-drawn cage for 400 leagues across a rotting rope bridge and through the Wormwood Forest where demonic wolves lurk. At the abbey there’s a book of spells. The souls of the monks are hijacked by something terribly evil. “We’re going to need more holy water,” reports a cleric. The winged woman here beats the feathers off the one in “Black Swan.” Cage is a seasoned evil-killer, if you’ve seen him in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (2010) and “Ghost Rider” (2007). But the Middle Ages delimits the motor-vehicle mayhem that director Dominic Sena displayed in his “Swordfish” (2001) and “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2000). Writer Bragi F. Schut continues the end-of-the-world stakes seen in his 2005 CBS series “Threshold.” Shot in Austria, Croatia and Louisiana, “Season of the Witch” is an unoriginal apologia for Catholic action-adventure. Reading scripture aloud in Latin may not smite heathens or halt the plague, but it always kicks satanic ass at the multiplex. With Stephen Campbell Moore, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, Robert Sheehan, Christopher Lee. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

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That fake look of a lot of 3D fits the cyberterrain of the totalitarian realm in this sequel to “TRON.” The exceptional computer graphics do not eclipse the quantum up-bump seen in the 2D original from 1982, although its visual adventurism is upheld here, coded with traces of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. Except for framing scenes shot  in overcast British Columbia, “TRON: Legacy” is set in an endless nightscape as dark as “Dark City” and “Blade Runner.” All that’s insubstantial  melts into something or nothing with 3D seamlessness. Check out the sparkly detritus marking every death. Read the rest of this entry »

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“I’m going to kill you all,” vows the driver for a crew of bank robbers, after another crew of badasses comes for the loot and slit the throat of his half-brother. One headshot, one metal plate under the skull and ten years of hard time later, Driver (Dwayne Johnson, “Walking Tall,” “The Scorpion King”), as he is identified onscreen, llves up to his lethal word. Five days, numbered onscreen, count down “Faster,” a solid B-movie written by brothers Tony Gayton and Joe Gayton and directed by Chicagoan George Tillman Jr. (“Men of Honor,” “Soul Food”). Genre touches include a bickering duo of detectives, one of whom is ten days from retirement; a hitman in therapy who wants to complete one last contract before settling down to raise a family; and flashbacks to a crime scene via an incriminating video. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ever-perverse and inventive writer Warren Ellis’ satirical graphic novel is transferred to the screen as a romp of wry hams: give Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman and Dame Helen Mirren a big gun and watch them go. It’s Ellis’ “Expendables.” This genial comic thriller posits the quartet as “RED”—”Retired and Extremely Dangerous”—C.I.A. pensioners who reunite to find out who’s assassinating their kind and why. “This useta be a gentleman’s game!” is the kind of line that sounds ehh, but works in performance. Aside from its actors, “RED”‘s saving grace is its willingness to find different notes of farce for each character, such as Malkovich being fully invested in one of his looniest incarnations (which is saying something). But smaller roles—including Mary-Louise Parker as the pension clerk that Willis knows only over the phone and Ernest Borgnine as a vault-keeper of secret intelligence files—ping with enjoyable comedy notes, sultry, grown-up comic-romantic banter. And, as directed by Robert Schwentke (“Flightplan”) and shot by Florian Ballhaus, the cartoonish palette doesn’t go too far in flattering the eye. The complications of Willis and Parker’s meet-cute, which involve repeated knock-out injections, is discomfiting enough that the characters address the subject repeatedly, but when the pair banter, there’s lovely splutter instead of splatter, her superlatively sexy voice and delivery deployed to gleeful result. The action scenes, shootouts and explosion of non-sclerotic proportion, are mostly fun; the location work is indifferent, with a Toronto-shot “Chicago” likely to prompt snickers in local showings. With Brian Cox as a randy Russian agent, Rebecca Pidgeon as a mumbly superior and Richard Dreyfuss, once again incarnating a Dick Cheney-style deus ex machina. 111m. (Ray Pride)