Fast Five

First Hit: Some fun car chases but mostly an unrealistic ill-advised script attempting to masquerade as an interesting film.

Vin Diesel has screen presence as does Dwayne Johnson. In this film they are adversaries and in a country, Brazil, where they are out of their element.

Dom (Diesel), Brian (played by Paul Walker), and Mia (played by Jordana Brewster) have to leave the US because both her brother Dom and her boyfriend Brain are fugitive escaped prisoners from the United States.

The US Government sends Hobbs (Johnson) to bring back these most wanted men but in Brazil the problems are more complex. Dom, Brian, Mia and a crew of misfits want to do one last job where they each will get 11 million dollars.

Their idea is to rob a local mob leader named Reyes (played by Joaquim de Almeida) who illegally runs Rio de Janeiro through drugs, prostitution and other graft. He owns the police and neighborhoods by bribes and giving people the minimum to survive. He wants a car which has been seized by the U.S. DEA. The car has an electronic chip in it that tracks where his money is collected and when all of it is transferred to banks. Dom and Brian find the chip and plan a robbery.

Reyes, worried about a theft, puts all his money (over $100 million) in a safe which is in the basement of the main police station. However Dom and Brian take two cars and some cable and are able to drag a multi-ton safe filled with money all around Rio (Yeah, sure). Hobbs is simply trying to catch Dom and Brian but runs into problems because he tries to strong arm Reyes thugs with his American arrogance. This gets everyone to be shooting everyone. 

Granted some of the car scenes are fun to watch and I would have like to seen a list of the cars used in the credits but, it just didn’t happen that way even though after a majority of the credits rolled there was a clip of more film. (Yes folks, I sit through the credits.)

Diesel was, as he usually is, gruff with a soft heart and plays a good outlaw. Walker is a pretty face but his role is marginalized and minimized by stronger actors. Brewster is attractive. Johnson is always a dynamic person on the screen and here he is thuggish and righteous. Almeida is very good in his role as tough master criminal. Chris Morgan and Gary Scott Thompson wrote this unrealistic script. Justin Lin spent a lot of money blowing things up, car chases, wrecking cars and creating long complex foot chases. The difference between amazing foot chases and long and uninteresting foot chases is to watch Daniel Craig in Casino Royale and this one. Craig’s chase is amazing.

Overall: This “Fast” series needs to end as the stories and execution are getting worse and worse.

Hanna

First Hit: Saoirse Ronan was beautifully believable as Hanna, which made this film work.

The opening scene has Hanna, in deep snow and obviously in the far northern reaches of the planet, stalking a deer; her piercing grownup eyes watching the cautious deer foraging.

She releases an arrow which finds the deer in its chest. The deer runs and Hanna runs after it in the deep snow, by now the audience is aware that she has some extraordinary skills. The deer is dying, she apologies for not hitting the deer in the heart, pulls a gun and shoots the deer.

She guts the dear, collecting rib bones when a man appears behind her and says, “You’d be dead.” It is her dad Erik (played by Eric Bana) and they begin to fight. He is teaching her how to survive. They live in a minimal cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Hanna tells her dad that she is ready to leave. He digs up a box that has a switch on the top and tells her that her enemy will come after her the moment she flips this switch. She flips it; Erik packs a small bag, puts on a suit and heads out into the snow.

A US covert unit led by Marissa (played by Cate Blanchett), comes after Hanna. Capturing her they place her an a round observations cell. The agency sends in a woman pretending to be Marissa and Hanna kills her and then escapes the inescapable building.

The race now is on to capture Hanna and Erik. There are shots of Hanna that are amazingly haunting. Her look, lack of fear and her capability to learn quickly is amazing and all this from a young teenage girl.

Although there are some faults with the film, including the way Blanchett played Marissa, I enjoyed the whole film and the music by The Chemical Brothers fit the way it was shot and directed.

Ronan was amazingly cool, complex, and interesting to watch as Hanna. I could not think of another young teenage actress that could have pulled it off the way she did. Just some of her facial looks were powerful and haunting. Bana was very good as Hanna’s father. Blanchett or the way she was asked to play this role was the weak link in this film. Seth Lochhead and David Farr wrote an interesting script. Joe Wright didn’t quite have a handle on Blanchett’s role but all else was wonderful. I really liked the pacing, the use of different types of sets and buildings, and most of all how he made Ronan this perfectly normal/abnormal girl who also killed people.

Overall: This wasn’t a great film but it was good and very interesting to watch. I think it could have been a great film, but I’m not sure how.

Source Code

First Hit: I liked it because it required me to think and made me wonder if it was possible.

What the film lacked was a strong, clear, and viable explanation for the ability to program one person into another person’s body to replay events that have already happened.

In a 1993 film called “Brainstorm” scientists were able to record someone’s experiences onto a form of video tape. Then a completely different person could put on a specifically designed headset, play back this recorded experience and the wearer would have the same experience that was recorded.

This bit of new technology seemed plausible because the film took some time to explain how it worked to the audience. In "Source Code" the ball is dropped here by either the actor playing Dr. Rutledge (played by Jeffrey Wright), the scientist who invents this “Source Code” phenomenon, or by poor scripting. What I think I heard was; that when a human dies there is a 8 minute segment of experiences still active in the brain (like RAM) and if tapped into (through the use of electrodes and “Source Code”) within a short period of time after their death, another person, who is compatible in physical characteristics, can experience the dead person’s last 8 minutes.

The interesting thing is that they are only renting the body, because the person who is being sent in is the conscious one. OK, I tried and I’ll think about it some more but I think it goes something like that. In this film Captain Colter Stevens (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), a helicopter pilot only being brain alive, wakes up on a train.

Christina Warren (played by Michelle Monaghan) is sitting across from him and talking to him. He is perplexed about what she is saying. He's thinking; who are you? Why am I on this train? He's asking these questions because his last memory is being a helicopter pilot on a mission in Afghanistan. He’s feeling nauseous goes to the bathroom and looks in the mirror only to find the body and face he's looking at isn’t his; it's somebody else’s.

Confused he makes his way back to the train car with Christina and then a bomb goes off and he is blown up with everyone else on the train. He wakes up in a small metal capsule, which I took as being the helicopter wreckage he died in (this is his last known living experience).

Captain Colleen Goodwin (played by Vera Farmiga) appears on a small video screen in front of him asking him what he learned. “Did you find the bomb?” “Did you find the bomber?” Stevens answers negatively and starts asking about what is going on. Who is in charge? What happened? Coldly Goodwin tells him he’s got to find the bomb and bomber quickly so that other lives will be saved. She turns to an assistant and tells him to recharge and bingo, Stevens is back on the same train at the same time with the same sequence of events. He sets his timer on his watch for 8 minutes and begins to try to do the job Goodwin told him to do.

He gets blown up again and again until he finds the bomb and then starts to make caring connections with Christina (who calls him by Sean Fentress - the name of the guy whose body he’s replacing). Each time the train blows up he goes back to his capsule as Stevens. He questions Goodwin and Dr. Rutledge attempting to find out more about how he is able to be in another place and time than what he knows was his last memory as Stevens. Goodwin tries to tell him more and Wright, who comes off as arrogant and self-serving, tries to explain his invention.

In the end, Stevens does complete the mission, Goodwin gives Stevens his wish, and people are saved.

Gyllenhaal is very good at giving us both an intelligent dutiful officer doing his duty as well as having compassion for Warren and others on the train and wanting to resolve an issue with his father. Monaghan is beautifully engaging and provides just the right amount of willingness and openness to understand what is going on. Farmiga is really good as the duty constrained officer who is working for an arrogant but bright boss. Wright played an either poorly written character or he poorly acted the character and I don’t know which. But this was the weakest part of the film. Ben Ripley wrote the script and I’m not sure if he did a good job and the explanation was poorly acted or if it was just one part of the script that was poorly written. However, the rest of the script was great. Duncan Jones did a great job of engaging the audience, getting Gyllenhaal to slowly realize what was going on and to make this film compelling about the possibility of being yourself in someone else’s body.

Overall: I enjoyed this film and although I’m not sure the logic hung together well with the given explanations; overall it was well done and interesting.

Battle: Los Angeles

First Hit: A poorly constructed commercial for the Marines.

In 2009 “District 9” gave us an outstanding film about an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth.

In “Battle: Los Angeles” we get an aggressive alien which wants our water but, besides landing in the Pacific Ocean, there is nothing associated with water during the rest of the film.

What we have here is a story of an aging, near retired Marine named SSgt. Michael Nantz (played by Aaron Eckhart) who, on the brink of retiring, gets pulled into duty to assist in finding some civilians who are holed up in an abandoned police station. They must pull them out within a few hours because the US Government is going to carpet bomb everything in Santa Monica as a way to stop the aliens.

As you might guess, they find the civilians; a young boy named Hector (played by Bryce Cass), his father Joe (played by Michael Pena) along with others. The Marines are tentative under Nantz because it is rumored he left a group of men in Afghanistan to die with him being the only survivor.

The film is supposed to be about survival, intelligence, and redemption of character but what I found was a film which was a continuous commercial about the prowess of the U.S. Marines. Quite frankly this was the worst intention and path the film could have taken.

The screenplay was mixed and when the veterinarian and Nantz dissect an alien to figure out the weak point and the way to kill an alien's body this film dove into the ridiculous. Then of course there is even the worse sub-plot of TSgt. Elena Santos (played by Michelle Rodriguez) and Nantz figuring out how to destroy the drones by destroying the alien command centers.

Eckhart is a good actor and here he gives his best shot but his talent is wasted. Cass is alright as the hero struck child who loses his father. Pena is mediocre as the father who tries to make lessons for his son during the time of crisis. He spends his time having his son honor Marines. Rodriguez is in her standard role as tough girl carrying a gun. I would like to see if she can act as a different character in some other type of film. Christopher Bertolini wrote this story and did a poor job of combining the intent of the Aliens (our water) with the story (how great the Marines are). Jonathan Liebesman directed this and I can’t help but think he was outside his skill set as this film is too loose and needed a lot of tightening up and focus. His first mistake, letting us see the invasion; then backing up the start of the film to before the invasion. For some films this works, for this it destroyed the point of the film, the invasion.

Overall: This film was one long ineffective, boring, and lousy commercial for the U.S. Marines.

I Am Number Four

First Hit: The beginning was mediocre but it picked up quickly and became a very entertaining film.

In the first 10 minutes I thought this was going to be a waste of my time. I’m not sure about the initial sequences but they weren’t a good setup for the rest of the film.

However, the rest of this story worked out and only because the actors were good and they wanted the characters to be as real as possible. John (played by Alex Pettyfer), who is Number Four, is one of 9 aliens sent to earth by his planet to save their planet’s species.

His home planet was invaded by Mogodorians who destroyed his planet’s inhabitants. They are out to find and destroy the 9 who were sent to earth. Each of the 9 has a guardian who assists them from being found by the Mogodorians. Numbers One, Two, and Three are dead and now they are after Number Four.

He is discovered to be an alien by a couple of kids his own age as the Mogodorians are closing in to kill him. At the same time Number 6 (played by Teresa Palmer) comes on to the scene to assist in killing the Mogodorians who have found Number Four.

The ending leaves it possible for there to be multiple follow-up films.

Pettyfer made this film work for me because he came across as thoughtful and made his character as honest as he could. Palmer was fun. Dianna Agron played Sarah an earthling John falls in love with. She was very good and held her own in keeping this film as solid as possible. Callan McAuliffe was wonderful as the odd earthling boy who figured out something was odd about John. Timothy Olyphant was good as John’s protector. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar wrote a really good screen play except for the initial 10 – 15 minutes. D.J. Caruso directed this sci-fi fantasy in a clear story like way.

Overall: I was surprised by how this film grew on me.