Family Ties: Uncle Pablo & The Canadian Surfer

Nick Brady: Paradise Lost does not have the ring of Escobar: Paradise Lost, but then again Nick Brady does not have the charisma of Pablo Escobar. 

But Nick Brady serves a purpose in movies like Andrea Di Stefano’s Escobar. He’s our everyman. Our stranger in a strange land. Our innocent guide into the foreign and deadly world of the most notorious cocaine kingpin the world has ever seen. He’s also a foreigner to Colombia, the people and the movie’s plot.

Nick (Josh Hutcherson) is a Canadian surfer who ends up Colombia in 1983. He falls in love with Maria (Claudia Traisac), a confident young woman who points to a billboard with a picture of a menacing face and says that’s her uncle. Uncle Pablo seems nice enough, and he’s some kind of politician. When Nick and Maria attend a lavish party, Nick asks how Uncle Pablo made his fortunes. Maria doesn’t miss a beat, and her smile never fades: “Cocaine.” 

What transpires next is mostly predictable, but altogether fascinating. Nick is so smitten by Maria that he barely notices himself sinking deeper into Pablo’s clutches of money and extravagance. The hacienda where the Escobar keeps his family is paradise: pools, elephants and other exotics animals, life-size fiberglass statues of dinosaurs in the pastures. At one point we see Pablo dusting his prize keepsake: the car that Bonnie and Clyde were killed in. 

The real draw here is Pablo Escobar, played with psychotic finesse by Benecio del Toro. He’s a lovable kind of kingpin. Oafish, domineering, dispensing sage advice in ways that disarm his intimidating 1,000-yard stare. He’s made even more terrifying as he struts around with his wireless briefcase phone, Cosby sweaters and, hilariously, a green corduroy Boston Celtics cap. If you admired Steven Soderbergh’s Che and the great lengths del Toro went to craft that complex character than you will likely be disappointed that this film doesn’t quite reach that level of storytelling. His Pablo is marvelous to watch, but he doesn’t have much arc. He begins the film as Uncle Pablo, and then one day, on the eve of a prison term, he decides to kill everyone, including two infants—two infants too many for this kind of movie. There is no nuance in his monstrosity. And the fact the he would spend so much time doting on and then ultimately trying to kill Nick, seems laughably pointless. A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

That is the peril of these types of movies, these pictures about famous people and their sidekicks, assistants or secretaries: the film can’t sustain itself on the Nick Brady’s of the world, and there’s never enough time to develop the Pablos. It happened in The Last King of Scotland, in which a doctor found himself in the inner circle of Idi Amin, and in The Devil’s Double, in which a body double is roped into Uday Hussein’s twisted universe, and it happens here in Escobar. Hutcherson does what he can, and del Toro hits it out of the park, but they don’t have much to work with because their characters are on different trajectories. 

Di Stefano does do a commendable job holding these trajectories as best he can, and the film has a unique look and feel to it, although I found the drifting focus and handheld shots to be frequently annoying. He structures the movie out of sequence, and it works really well, especially since the flashbacks and flash forwards don’t tip off the plot points any more than they should. The first half of the film is largely a romance and psychological drama, but it quickly becomes a terrifying narco-thriller as Nick is sent on a mission to bury Pablo’s treasure. It’s a jarring acceleration, and doesn’t altogether work, but the scenes are well executed and appropriately nailbiting.

I did find it very hard to believe, though, that Pablo Escobar would ask his niece’s Canadian surfer boyfriend to drive his loot up into the mountains and then have to commit murder to hide it all. And Nick, apparently out of inexhaustible fear, goes along with it to a point. Let me repeat an earlier sentence here: A country full of Colombians and we spend the whole movie with the lone gringo. 

Listen, I’m fond of what this movie does, and what it attempts to do, with Pablo Escobar, who might be one of the greatest villains of the late 20th century. But Paradise Lost doesn’t go far enough. Pablo needs to run, as fast as he can, away from Nick until he finds himself in his own movie.

Enigma to Ultra: Turing versus the Nazis

In 1952, the man who shaved two years and millions of deaths off of World War II was prosecuted for a crime so frivolous and embarrassing that the Queen would have to pardon him decades later. But by then the damage had been done in this shameful piece of history.

Alan Turing, the subject of The Imitation Game, was instrumental in the events of World War II, he synthesized a number of modern ideas about artificial intelligence, and he pioneered this great big box that would one day become the computer. But Turing was also gay, something he was punished for with reprehensible cruelty after the war. I wanted Imitation Game to be as outraged as I was, but it takes a different approach entirely: it presents Turing not as a victim, but a hero. 

Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) was plucked from the ranks of a very talented batch of science geeks at Cambridge during the onset of World War II. He was assigned to Bletchley Park, the secret British codebreaking campus that was just starting to wrap its collective brain around the Nazi’s elusive Enigma machine.

Morten Tyldum’s careful direction and Graham Moore’s determined script present Enigma as a character in the film. The German code machine looks like a typewriter, but with a lampboard, a set of rotors, and a plugboard behind a wood panel at the base. The permutations of possible codes was almost incalculable — “millions of millions” one codebreaker says. Making matters worse, the Germans changed the machine’s codes daily, which gives the codebreakers roughly 18 hours of tinkering once the coded messages were gathered from the battlefield. While the others workers tried different combinations of plugs and rotors, Turing was looking for a shortcut.

The Imitation Game plays like an espionage thriller, because it is. In fact, historically speaking, it is the ultimate spy thriller. Turing, who was an awkward loner, spends much of the movie hunched over electronic components, dodging double-agent accusations, smuggling documents out of Bletchley Park to study at home, and fighting with his co-workers who didn’t share his ideas about his computing box that he called Christopher. Turing slogged through them, his subordinates (including Charles Dance and Mark Strong) and even Winston Churchill to get Christopher up and working with astounding results.

In one of the film’s strongest segments, Turing needs to hire more codebreakers so he plants a difficult crossword puzzle in the newspaper and watches as bewildered readers show up saying they can solve it. He ends up hiring the only woman, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), who falls for Turing even amid her suspicions of his orientation. They make a great pair. 

I’m skeptical of historical movies like this, because I know they condense facts, eliminate characters, make composites of others and in the end the history is lost. That is certainly true here, especially once you start diving into the details of Turing’s machine and Enigma’s follow-up project, Ultra. But the core here is Turing, and he’s just fascinating. As is Cumberbatch, who is delightful in everything he’s in.

I left Imitation Game fuming at Turing’s treatment after the war, but also immensely proud of his work during the war. If only he would have been allowed to continue working — the world might look a little different today.

 

Wicked Wick: Sad Keanu shoots people

Keanu Reeves has turned into his own meme. Sad Keanu. Google it, it’s very sad. 

John Wick is a movie version of Sad Keanu, but with guns. And more point-blank headshots than the photo booth at the DMV. Enough that they start to have a numbing sensation, a side effect that comes in handy for John Wick’s plodding second half. 

The film starts very dark: former hitman John Wick is burying his wife, who died suddenly from an illness, as opposed to a bullet like everyone else in this story. Before she keeled over, the sweet wife arranged to have a dog delivered to John on the day of her funeral. The puppy — with his droopy little eyes and puppy-dog tail and his scurrying paws — arrives and immediately alters John’s mood for the better. Things are looking up after all.

But we’ve already established that bad things (and Sad Keanu) happen in this movie, things that end with point-blank gunshots to the face. These things transpire because the puppy has to die. It just has to go. And go the puppy does at the hands of Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen, aka Theon Freakin’ Greyjoy), the dim-witted son of a Russian mobster who is too cocky and arrogant to even know that he just blew up the world of the wrong guy.

So all that is just setup. Here is the plot: John Wick murders an entire mob family as payback for the death of his puppy. Now, that sounds monotonous and dull, and it mostly is, especially in John Wick’s darker later episodes. But for large swaths of the first half this violent and gritty action thriller is a rather amusing comic adventure. I especially enjoyed the kingpin’s answer to why a low-level car thief would punch the kingpin’s son. He killed John Wick’s dog, the grunt says. “Oh,” the kingpin mumbles. Never before has “oh” meant so much. In those two letters he’s summed up his entire fate.

Other scenes are just absurdly dark, so much that you can’t help but laugh. After a particularly violent shoot-out, John calls for a hitman cleaning crew. The team arrives with all sorts of cleaning devices, including one big burly guy who only carries a squeegee. The crew Saran wraps the bodies into neat little take-out packages. And off they go as if wanton murder never took place. I also appreciated how everyone in the film knew who John Wick was, because he was just that legendary of a hitman. At one point a local cop shows up to a shootout and John barely has to explain himself before the cop tips his hat and whistles away as if he never saw anything. 

Murder machine John eventually gets stuck in a gory loop of violent head-exploding gunfights. At first his cruelty is oddly humorous, like when he wounds a bad guy, lets him cringe and bleed on the floor as he reloads his own gun to only blast him in the head. The joke here is that the threat was already isolated, but John takes his time to pop the guy in his dome because he’s some kind of obsessive completionist. This macabre brand of humor fades quickly as the headshots start stacking up and up and up. How many is too many? John Wick seems to be grasping for an answer.

David Leitch and Chad Stahelski’s film employs a wide variety of top-tier talent, especially if you watch HBO’s programming. The Wire’s Clarke Peters and Lance Reddick play two pros in a hotel, Deadwood’s Ian McShane is a club owner with information to sell, Newsroom’s Thomas Sadoski plays the befuddled cop, and Allen, Game of Throne’s organ-less imp Theon Greyjoy, plays the puppy killer. Other larger performances include Willem Dafoe, John Leguizamo, Michael Nyqvist and Dean Winters, whose work on TV is also goofily entertaining — he is the Mayhem insurance salesman and 30 Rock’s Beeper King. Altogether, this is a nice cast and the way the film is structured, I was never quite sure who was going to turn up next.

I just wish the film could hold my attention longer. As the body count rose, my attention drifted. The film looks snazzy, and Reeves plays Sad Keanu quite well, I just couldn’t punch through all the arbitrary killing, which was novel in small little dashes, just not something I could watch uninterrupted for a whole movie.

 

More than one way to crack a nut

Stonehearst Asylum reveals its wicked sense of humor early: A doctor is given a tour of an insane asylum, and during the tour he’s introduced to a patient who’s allowed to pretend he’s a horse. Why not cure him, the doctor asks. “What, and make a miserable man out of a happy horse.”

Here is a movie that does not excel, but it has heart and pluck and charisma. Oh, and making matters more interesting, Stonehearst is a gothic thriller set in chilly castle for the criminally insane. Yeah, it’s creepy charmer. 

The doctor here is Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) and he’s come to Stonehearst in the English countryside to learn about curing mental patients, who are still at this point in modern medicine called “lunatics,” which is one better than what another character calls them — “inebriates and chronic masturbators.” Newgate is quickly taken under the wing of Dr. Silas Lamb (Ben Kingsley), who runs the facility under some curious rules, including one that allows patients to come to staff dinners to socialize in their bare feet. 

As Newgate learns about the facility and its many dark corners, he realizes the film’s first big joke: the lunatics are running the asylum. Now, I say joke, but this is no comedy, yet I couldn’t help but laugh as events unfolded to reveal one absurdity after another. Patients are injected with heroin, given drought-causing waterboarding exercises, thrown in this ridiculous dizzy-chair contraption, and allowed to determine their own treatment, even if that treatment is none at all. When one character is threatened with something called a “pelvic massage” I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or not. (I did.) the whole movie is like this — vaguely hilarious, if also menacing and shrouded in doom. 

Newgate takes a special interest in Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), a beautiful ear-biter and eye-gouger whose husband has put a price on her head if she’s discovered. Behind Newgate as he attempts to rescue Graves is Dr. Lamb, an even more mysterious Dr. Salt (Michael Caine) and a groundskeeper named Mickey Finn (David Thewlis at his most vile). And if you caught those names — Newgate, Graves, Lamb, Salt — you’ll be forgiven for thinking this is a psychological allegory. 

The movie is drawn from an Edgar Allen Poe story, though I suspect loosely. It does have Poe’s devilish sense for humor. In an early scene, we’re told the asylum is home to the finest lunatics in all of Europe. “Here look at this man,” Lamb says, “he comes from a wealthy family that owns a vast train empire.” But why is he in the asylum? “Because he suffers no interest in trains.” Yeah, that sounds like Poe or maybe even Alfred Hitchcock. 

Stonehearst, directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist) from a script by Joe Gangemi, taps on all the predictable story beats, and some that aren’t so predictable. You know you’re in for a whopper of a finale when they trot the horses through the asylum kitchen. I will admit I expected a bigger twist at the end, something perhaps on par with Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor or even One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Instead, it fizzles. 

It’s all absurdly silly and at the same time deathly serious. That makes for a strange dynamic, for sure, but I was never bored, which is high praise for this genre. 

Gone Girl and the downward spiral

Gone Girl starts at the beginning and ends where it started. It's construction — and ultimately it's vast manipulation — is circular and dizzying. When it was over I wasn't sure if I wanted take a deep breath and stagger out of the theater, or go for another ride.

Here is a film that knows what it is and where it's going and does not for even a single nanosecond waver from its course. It's complete and fulfilled — cinematic zen. Not a frame of it is out of place. It is a capable picture, one executed with precision and skill by, who else, David Fincher. He's been making movies like this his entire career, and yet this one demonstrates his absolute mastery of the medium of motion pictures.

The film stars two characters on similar trajectories, but in different locations. Picture two satellites circling a planet but on opposite sides of the same orbit: their views are different, but their journey is the same. One of the characters is Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a washed up Missouri writer with mountains of debt, a dive bar and a wife who might hate his guts. His wife is Amy (Rosamund Pike), and in the opening scenes she turns up missing. Nick seems concerned, but not overwhelmingly so.

As the police launch their investigation, the town first comes to Nick's side to help him search, and grieve, until they realize that he may have killed her. He has no alibi, the crime scene looks staged, evidence has been tampered with, and there are some concerning journal entries, some of them told in flashbacks by Amy herself. There's also the issue of Nick smiling at press conferences, seemingly unconcerned about Amy's whereabouts, and he's hiding secrets that threaten to destroy his wholesome public image. As the case drags on, people in town start staring and sizing him up: "Yeah, he could be a murderer. Definitely," their eyes suggest. A TV news anchor in the style of Nancy Grace, the self-appointed public executioner on daytime television, all but indicts Nick for a murder that still has no body or murder weapon. A downward spiral shifts him out of orbit.

That's the first act of Gone Girl and I don't dare tell you further plot points since the film is built around its tightly packed secrets, and saying any more would be like walking through a minefield wearing Ronald McDonald's sneakers — very dangerous. The cast is large and complicated, and every performance is marvelous, especially Pike, who plays a narrator so unreliable that I was silently wondering if she even existed at all. Her performance is transcendent and terrifying. Affleck, with some of his Batman muscle already showing, holds his own as the knot Nick tied for himself is pulled tighter and tighter.

The rest of the cast is glorious: Neil Patrick Harris plays a scorned ex-lover, Kim Dickens is a whip-smart detective, a grown-up Patrick Fugit is her partner, Tyler Perry plays a high-profile defense attorney, and Carrie Coon, the glue of HBO's Leftovers, is Nick's supportive sister. Coon takes a disposable supporting role and elevates it into the stratosphere. 

Stepping away from the story and cast, though, Gone Girl is an exploration in technical subtlety. The nuts and bolts of the film, often overlooked in movies, are profoundly focused here, so much so that you might not even notice them, which is the way it should be. The cinematography is dark and moody, with lots of saturated colors and shadowy accents, and it perfectly suits the growing tension in Nick Dunne's collapsing world. I loved a scene during a candlelight vigil; lights above Nick's head cast long menacing shadows over his eyes and face. The editing is often slow and simple, yet also astute and nimble when required. The editing is punctuated by the mesmerizing and meditative score, which fades in and out as the film jumps around in time with Amy's deceptive journal entries. Gone Girl doesn't have the editing of a Scorsese film, the music of a Quentin Tarantino, or the cinematography of a David Lean, but even without all the flash it feels competent, balanced and efficient. 

The film comes from the blockbuster novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. I have not read the book, although it's on my reading list, even now that I know how it ends. And speaking of endings, of course this one packs a wallop. I wouldn't expect anything less from the guy who killed Ellen Ripley, murdered Tyler Durden, solved the Zodiac case, saved Facebook and had one of his most popular picture end with a FedEx delivery. Fincher knows how to cap off movies, and he's an expert on guiding characters to their destinies, no matter how pathetic, violent or rewarding they may be.

What's so remarkable about the way Fincher and Flynn tie up Gone Girl is how circular its journey is. It's a film about manipulation and control and deception. While Nick might be a victim in this spiraling whirligig, he's also the perpetrator. And we are his subjects.

Night Moves is a taut eco-thriller

The opening moments of Kelly Reichardt’s hauntingly bleak Night Moves re-establish the director’s brand of proto-realism: characters wander, stare, skulk, sit, stand, lean, ponder, mumble and drive, though no two at the same time. To find comparably one-tracked, and terminally silent, characters we have to reach back to 1968, when men in monkey suits did a 20-minute cold-open for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This is an excruciatingly nuanced method. Slow and agonizing, and yet also perceptive and whisper-soft. This methodical pace and volume is the hallmark of Reichardt, whose work was first widely seen in Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams camped around a Northwestern town with a dog. Williams returned for Reichardt’s next film, Meek’s Cutoff, a period piece about settlers and their clueless prairie guide. The film’s tone and half-muffled dialogue baffled audiences and critics alike. 

In Reichardt’s Night Moves, which she co-wrote with frequent collaborator and Mildred Pierce writer Jonathan Raymond, the director doesn’t stray too far from those flat, realistic performances that have marked her previous pictures. The film opens on Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) as they bop through an Oregon town running some errands, including one at a nude day spa, a suburban home to buy a boat, and to an organic vegetable farm. As things start getting pieced together, a shocking plot develops: Josh and Dena are eco-terrorists and are planning to blow up a dam that, in their minds, represents America’s endless energy dependence. 

As they piece their operation together they are helped in their endeavor by Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a fellow True Believer, who seems to have hyped up his own intelligence by simply saying it out loud over and over again. The three eco-terrorists have their target, their delivery device and their window of opportunity, but not the bomb, which requires a visit to a nearby fertilizer plant. Dena, her innocent face and blond locks hardly threatening, is elected to go make the purchase even though the sale of 500 pounds of ammonia nitrate — the primary compound used in the Oklahoma City bomb — would likely send up some red flags. It’s this scene, as well as several others, that reveal a secondary motive for Night Moves: it’s a suspense thriller. An effective one, too. 

Reichardt’s pacing does wonders to the thrills. Even scenes of Josh towing the boat, it’s hull overloaded with explosives, through a recreation area left me jittery and ready for pretty much anything. Later, after the bomb’s timer has been started, as the trio are paddling away from the dam, a car blows a tire on a dam overlook, forcing the driver to get out and change the tire with the bomb-boat in clear view over his shoulder. The rules of suspense require this scene, which allows the three leads to tremble in their boat while the tire-changer struggles with his lugnuts. And remember what Hitchcock said about suspense: bombs exploding are less suspenseful than bombs not exploding. 

Later in the film, as Josh, Dena and Harmon separate, the film becomes a meditation on trust, guilt and the adage “honor among thieves.” Night Moves is seen entirely from the perspective of the Eisenberg’s Josh character, who seems to have no personality whatsoever. He does have ideas, though he’s a victim to their results. Josh lives on a family farm run by some hippy types who have more balanced principles. “I’m not interested in statements. I’m interested in results,” the main farmer says after the terrorist act. Someone asks: You don’t call the destruction of a dam results? “No, I call that theater.” Later, this same farmer learns of Josh’s involvement in the dam explosion and the single human death it caused. He kicks him off the farm, which provides one of the subtle visual wonders of Night Moves: Josh, a profoundly confused hypocrite, driving a gas-guzzling truck past a bank of electrical boxes. Another razor-sharp image can be seen from inside an RV, its passengers watching The Price is Right while supposedly “camping.” 

The movie isn’t really interested in the environment, sustainable water usage, marine biodiversity, organic farming, or other ideas from the granola belt. It’s an examination on the choices people make and the repercussions from those choices. The performances are slow and tedious, but that’s no slam on Eisenberg and Fanning, both of whom do what all actors in Reichardt movies do — they underplay everything. A looser, more ambivalent film might unravel under those conditions, but Night Moves is wound as tight as its characters. That allows for an interesting experiment in acting, story and suspense. 

Celebrate July early with crime stunner

Modern crime movies don’t get much pulpier than Jim Mickle’s wickedly sinister Cold in July.

This rapturous and sweaty thriller, about a man’s journey into his own fear and obsession, crept up on me in an ambush of filmmaking and storytelling. It’s an electric film, one of my favorites of the summer. 

It opens on big boxy cars, plastic coffeemakers, acid-washed jeans, floral-printed couches and rotary phones. “East Texas, 1989,” the screen says, and it feels it. Little time is wasted: Richard (Michael C. Hall) is asleep in bed when he hears a noise in the living room. He loads a revolver and creeps out in his pajamas. An intruder stands at the coffee table. A shot rings out. The intruder drops.

The police arrive and determine the killing was in self defense, but that doesn’t settle well with Russel (Sam Shepard), the intruder’s madman of a father, who was just released from prison. Soon, Richard and his wife and son are being terrorized by Russel — telephone hang-ups, bullets sprinkled in their house, break-ins. The police can’t do anything because there is little proof. An overnight stakeout reveals a terrible surprise, but it doesn’t end Russel’s campaign of terror.

Now, at this point I thought I knew what Cold in July was all about. But this is no Cape Fear, a point that is made abundantly clear after a huge twist remaps the landscape of Mickle’s crime universe. The twist is so delicious that I won’t be spoiling it here, but know that it is one of two major plot twists the film whips you through in its fiendish tale.

Drenched in delicate nuance and so tightly woven I thought it would pop, Cold in July is based on a book by Joe Lansdale, and adapted to the screen by Mickle and Nick Damici, who plays a police officer. The script might be the genetic offspring — or from within the same psychosphere — of HBO’s True Detective and a movie like Winter’s Bone, or even David Gordon Green’s Undertow. It’s about men of low moral character, and how their actions bleed into the rest of the world.

The movie asks its audience to bite into some implausible plot developments that are almost too big to swallow, but the many payoffs more than make up for it. One payoff late in the movie has Richard, the suburban picture framer, shooting up at a man from the floor. Blood sprays upward coating a lightbulb and bathing the scene in a deep crimson. Rarely is a man’s descent into violence more explicitly shown then here in this scene, as the blood literally changes the color of the world.

Blood is a frequent motif. Early in the film, at a point I knew Cold in July was something very special, Richard and his wife clear out the bloody couch from their run-in with the intruder. After moving the heavy load outside, they drop to the floor in exhaustion and look up at the blood splatter on their once-clean wall. The act of killing a man has drained them, and left them a twisted new piece of artwork. 

Hall, so often wasted on Dexter’s repetitive plotlines and predictable meanderings, is given more to chew on here as the curious husband and father. Against his better judgment, Richard is propelled forward into the darkness; Hall plays it believably and effectively. Shepard is appropriately vile, even as his character grows more sympathetic as secrets are revealed. Don Johnson, so great now in his later years, turns up as a private detective that steals every scene he’s in.

This is a legitimate thriller with a sophisticated presentation and powerful characters. The summer’s tend to produce a lot of big-budget dreck; Cold in July is not part of that heap.

Cusack's got a dud old bag

The Bag Man is propelled forward on the strength of one lingering question: What’s in that damn bag? Spoiler alert — nothing.

Not literally nothing. Something’s in there, but by the time the movie ends you’ll wish it contained stacks of cash, "nogotiable bearer bonds" or Walter Sobchak’s dirty undies, just not what actually was in there. Making matters worse, the contents of the bag have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in The Bag Man; if anything, the bag’s contents relate more to some never-to-be-made prequel that answers questions about the bag’s origins, implications and all the other tedium that can fit into a leather carry-on.

The movie stars John Cusack as an unnamed mafia go-to guy, who has the bag from almost the very beginning. In the first scene, he’s given instructions about the bag by crime underlord Dragna (Robert De Niro). Dragna, spitting and sputtering over dinner, illustrates the importance of the bag using his steak and potatoes. "This is you. This is the bag. This is me," he says partitioning off his meal, "so get me the bag." This scene made me realize that I would have preferred the entirety of The Bag Man to be performed by actual steak and potatoes over Cusack and De Niro.

Anyway, cut to the very next scene and Cusack’s Bag Man has the bag. Poof, like that. There’s also a dead man in the backseat, a bullet through his hand and a phone booth clearly rented from some third-rate Hollywood prop vendor — when was the last time you saw a payphone, let alone a full-on glass-walled phone booth? Bag Man is given specific instructions to go to a hotel and wait until Dragna can board a plane, fly to Bag Man’s location and retrieve the bag. Here’s a thought, Dragna: maybe don’t leave the state when someone is retrieving your goods.

This is an idiotic movie, one that seems to have been inspired by better films, ones made by much better directors. It has Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, Guy Ritchie’s criminal oddballs and Michael Mann’s unnerving obsession with the night. But director David Grovic, who also co-wrote the screenplay, can’t turn any this hackneyed drivel into anything other than crumpled love letter to better movies.

It’s a shame because the movie had a brief window, about a third of the way through, that had potential. As Bag Man arrives at the hotel, he slowly spirals into a dream-like world of wacky characters, each more surreal than the one before them. For starters, the hotel is stuck in some kind of time warp, with a wheelchair-riding Crispin Glover serving as its de-facto Norman Bates. Other characters include two good ol’ boy cops, some trigger-happy federal agents and two pimps, one them a little person with a bladder that he empties on Bag Man’s head. I also liked how every guy Bag Man killed had an 8-by-10 glossy picture of the bag on them, revealing a wider bag conspiracy. All of this nuttiness threatens to spin the film into a unique, albeit odd, place, but then it settles on being a by-the-numbers crime thriller, and a dopey one at that.

Most of Bag Man is just downright cruel, especially to women. In an early scene, Dragna wallops a woman in the nose so hard she requires plastic surgery. Dragna, ever the gentleman, gives her a referral to a surgeon. In another scene, someone says flatly and with no irony whatsoever, "All women are whores." He was talking about women in general, and also prostitute Rivka (Rebecca Da Costa), a Fifth Element extra with blue hair, red leather miniskirt and theeck Russian accent. Not much on Da Costa looks real, which gives Grovic plenty of excuses to longingly slobber over her curvy frame.

This is not a good movie, nor is it even a commendable bad one. It just hurtles forward with its joyless action and grinding momentum. And that bag, its contents do not make anything better. If you must know what's in it, give it a week or two and the synopsis will be up on Wikipedia — spoil away.

Phone-heavy thriller has lots of turbulence

I liked Non-Stop better when it was called Liam Neeson Texting.

And boy does he text a lot. In the terminal, at the gate, in his seat, in the bathroom, standing in the aisle while other people are trying to get by … he’s like a teenage girl, except that instead of spam-tweeting “follow me” messages to Justin Beiber he’s negotiating with the world’s most overworked terrorist.

In this dopey air-thriller, Neeson plays Bill Marks, a federal air marshal who’s fallen on hard times and off the wagon. But ask yourself: wouldn’t you need a steady stream of scotch, and smokes in the airplane bathroom (violation!), to get you through a job that requires you to ride airplanes for a living? I was once seated next to the bathroom on a flight and by the time wheels were down I was ready to start shooting heroin between my toes.

Bill gets on a plane headed over the Pacific and almost immediately starts getting threatening texts, including this one: “A passenger will die every 20 minutes until I get what I want.” What he wants is $150 million transferred into a bank account set up in Bill’s name, which does not please Bill or the emergency responders on the ground who actually think Bill’s dumb enough to set up a criminal enterprise in his own name. Bill’s not that stupid, although the other people on this plane certainly are. 

There’s a hot-headed New York cop, a British flight attendant, Lupita Nyong’o in her first post-12 Years a Slave role, a computer programmer who looks like a discount Jamie Foxx, and a spazzy airplane woman with hipster glasses (Julianne Moore) because every flight needs at least one, usually in the seat right next to you, where the blab about their cats and things they horde, like cats. The people on this flight are the worst. They step on Bill’s toes, they act all pouty and wounded when he makes them sit down, and they seem to ignore evidence right in front of them so they can jump to all the wrong conclusions. At one point, the passengers are watching CNN footage that suggests Bill is the terrorist of the hijacked flight and all they can do is … wait for it … continue to watch TV on their hijacked plane. Nevermind that they can watch it happen live! And when they do finally rise up to stop Bill, it’s at the exact moment he needs the most help to apprehend the real terrorist. And later in the movie, Bill offers everyone free air travel, because that’s much better than dying in a hijacking. You’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane; let me present you Flakes on a Plane. 

Poor Neeson, he’s doing too many of these thrillers. He’s great in almost everything, even in mediocre dreck like this. But really, how many times can he do Taken? This movie makes him do some idiotic stuff, like test the purity of cocaine by breaking out a chemistry set and examining the powder’s atomic structure. No, I’m kidding — he pokes a knife in the bag, dabs at some coke and rubs in on his tongue because that worked in every movie from the ’80s. Let me not forget the most erotic bathroom fight that has ever been attempted at 30,000 feet. Neeson also has an awful yawn. He’s just sitting there and — boom! — his head tilts back, his eyes squint and his mouth opens and seems to suck in the entire Eastern seaboard. Why would director Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) allow such an ugly moment from his star? The camera even zooms in a little like it’s trying to get a close-up of his tonsils. 

Another ugly moment involves a Muslim doctor on the plane. When it’s revealed there might be a hijacker on board, everyone looks at this air traveler wearing a traditional headcovering and beard. Because, LOL, apparently racism is funny. Now, maybe this was a cultural critique of stereotypes and air travel. But I don’t think Non-Stop is that smart, a point that’s validated later again and again as the Muslim character is made the butt of several jokes, including one after a “random” carry-on search. “What?! You didn’t find anything in his bag?” one of the other passengers screeches.

There is a market for these types of frustratingly dumb thrillers, so it’s unlikely I’ll dissuade anyone from seeing it. If you’ve seen any of the Taken movies, then you’ll likely find Non-Stop acceptable, if only because Neeson has perfected this character. Although, judging by that yawn, I would say he might be getting a little bored with it.

3 Days to Kill crosses the bad-good threshold

3 Days to Kill might be 2014’s first guilty pleasure. It begins as an impossibly mundane action thriller, but somewhere along the way it blossoms into a film with an absurd amount of charm and quirky likability. 

The turn happens about 15 minutes in: CIA super-spy Ethan (Kevin Costner) returns to his Paris flat to find that a rather large family of squatters, all of them impeccably polite, have remodeled his house and appropriated his space as their own. He goes to the French police, but they tell him to wait until April to file a formal complaint — “Wait for spring like birds and bees and boys and girls.” Ethan calls them “turds,” which is a confusing word for French police. “I think he’s calling us shit,” one cop says. Ethan, defeated, returns home, where his squatters try to comfort him in his new bedroom.

At this point, I’m realizing I have no idea what this movie is anymore. This is re-confirmed several minutes later when Ethan, post-shootout, argues with another CIA agent about the difference between a mustache and a goatee. The prop in the scene is an injured, bullet-riddled bad guy with a goatee, who’s kicked and rolled over again and again to prove a point about the merits of facial hair. These comedic bursts are far departures from the high-octane spy thrills of the movie’s first 10 minutes, thrills that only make cameo appearances through the remainder of 3 Days to Kill.

Later, Ethan is forced to retire from the CIA after they find out he has inoperable brain cancer. In Paris, while he tries to regain lost trust with his ex-wife (Connie Nielsen) and his teen daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld), the CIA needs him for one more mission: to hunt down and kill a man known only as The Wolf, whose henchmen include The Albino and The Accountant. His government handler, a sexy vixen with a limitless budget, offers him money and an experimental cancer drug that comes in couture leather pouches. Ethan agrees, which means he spends the rest of the movie alternating between father-daughter dates to CIA-sanctioned murder.

The movie reminds me a great deal of last year’s mafia-comedy The Family, in which Robert De Niro, playing a mob boss, goes to a film club to critique Goodfellas. I wasn’t sure then, and am less sure now, whether The Family was a comedy, crime caper or something else entirely — in any case, I loved the movie's spazzy attitude. 3 Days to Kill bops around with generally the same swagger, like when Ethan puts his Italian hostage on the phone with his daughter to explain how to make a perfect batch of spaghetti sauce. Or when he barges into another suspect’s house to talk to his teen daughters about what makes teens tick. (This poor limo driver, he's kidnapped so many times that whenever Ethan shows up he instinctively takes off his coat and rolls it up — a pillow for the trunk.) The two movies, besides sharing their bizarre comedy timing, share writers — French filmmaker Luc Besson. Now, Besson’s movies have always had quirky streaks in them; think of the lighter moments in Léon, the fantasy-comedy of the Fifth Element, or the utter battiness of the Transporter movies. 3 Days to Kill taps into similar veins and you can sense the film smiling at you from behind the screen.

The movie has several comedic themes that return again and again, including a recurring gag about a purple bike, Ethan’s daughter-approved ringtone featuring Swedish electro-punk, and one of the squatter kids who insists Ethan give him high fives, even as the CIA spy escorts criminals to his bathroom for torture sessions. The McG-directed movie simply marches to the beat of its own drum. Yes, I just said McG, whose work I've panned for many years; this movie smacks more of Besson than McG, which is definitely a selling point.

Now, I did say this was a guilty pleasure so don’t go in expecting all the pieces to fit. They don’t. The movie is uneven and awkwardly paced, but it’s consistently entertaining and genuinely funny. And Kevin Costner seems to be having a lot of fun, proving that he might not be the most bankable star, but he’s still a dependable and likable one.