Case 39

"Some cases should never be opened"?  Consider that a warning from this film to not open the DVD case.  That might just be the most accurate movie tagline I have ever seen.  What's so bad about it?  It has star power and makes use of the "creepy kid" plot device.  What makes Case 39 so different from decent horror movies, like The Ring or The Others?  Aside from the lack of an article in the title, I would say quality and silliness.  Let me explain.

Emily (Renée Zellweger) is a social worker.  This tells us two things, right off the bat, given that this is a horror movie.  First, Emily has a good heart and wants to protect the innocent.  Second, she has an underwhelming social life because she is wrapped up in her work.  I'm not making any judgment calls on social workers as a whole, but that is the stereotype in movies for social working main characters.

The crooked smile means she cares for a living

She is overwhelmed with work, but she is making a difference in her thirty-eight cases.  When her boss drops case thirty-nine on her desk (oh...I see what they did there!  Clever!  Boring!), Emily is exasperated, but when she meets with the family of ten year-old Lilith (Jodelle Ferland), she forgets her annoyance.  Lilith's family is weird; the first time she visits their home, the father (noted Cylon Callum Keith Rennie) will only speak to Emily through the mother (Kerry O'Malley), and little Lilith shows the timidness of an abused child.  Playing a hunch, Emily decides to pay an unexpected visit to Lilith's home with her police buddy, Detective Mike Barron (Ian McShane), and times it perfectly; Lilith's parents had duct taped Lilith inside their oven, but Emily and Mike broke in just in time to save her.

"Seven hours at 275.  Baste frequently.  What's so hard to understand?"

The good news is that Emily gets the parents thrown in the crazy house.  They would go to jail, but...well, something about "I tried to bake my child" just sounds less than sane.  Emily takes Lilith to a foster home, but Lilith is clearly uncomfortable.  She wants to live with Emily.  And you know what?  Emily pulls some strings and makes it happen.  Finally, a family for big-hearted Emily!  Life is good!  Well, it's good until bad stuff starts happening all around her.  For whatever reason, everyone Emily cares about seems to either die or kill someone else.  What's that about?  And what does it have to do with little Lilith?  Hint: everything.

That doesn't sound like an awful movie, does it?  Sure, maybe it's a little predictable in general terms, but Case 39 spices things up a bit with demonic possession and hallucinations.

Hallucination, or one too many Jägermeister-'n'-wasp shots?

Technically, this isn't a bad movie.  I wouldn't call Christian Alvart's direction inspired or nuanced, but he does decently well with the special effects.  He doesn't handle actors well, as evidenced by how awful that cast played "scared," but he shoots a pretty competent film.  Like his other 2009 effort, Pandorum, Alvart tries to induce scares without building much of an atmosphere, so the end result is destined to feel hollow.  Thankfully, Alvart doesn't resort to much CGI and does not use darkness to obscure the movie this time.  He still appears to be incapable of conveying genuine human emotion, but at least his movie looks decent enough.

Well, it looks good most of the time

While I wasn't crazy for the acting in Case 39, I don't think that any of the cast did a particularly bad job.  Ian McShane played a good cop and gave a solid (if uninteresting) performance.  Bradley Cooper wasn't exactly charmless as Emily's child psychiatrist colleague/flirtatious friend, but his performance felt a little forced.  When he was shown trying to analyze little Lilith, he came across as someone who talks down to kids, which strikes me as incredibly unlikely in that occupation.  I'm not sure how good Jodelle Ferland was; creepy kids in horror movies usually just have dead eyes or look tortured, and she manages both. 

Despite hitting those standard marks, I thought she was just okay.  That leaves Renée Zellweger with the most interesting character, theoretically.  She is the lead, after all, right?  I'm not a fan of Zellweger usually --- something about her stupid face just irritates me --- but I have seen her do pretty good work in the past.  This movie just doesn't play to her strengths.  The role forces her to appear haggard, stressed, and frightened to a childish degree, none of which flatter her skill set.  It's not that she does a terrible job, so much as she is horribly miscast.  Surprisingly, that's not even the worst casting choice the filmmakers made.  After all, they took one of the more magnetic villains in Hollywood today (McShane) and cast him as a boring good cop.

"Are you sure I'm not supposed to kill her?"

The problems with Case 39 go a lot deeper than the casting, though.  This is just a tepid melodrama, trying to convince audiences that it is really a supernatural thriller.  The first problem is that the creepy kid doesn't do much that is creepy.  Instead of being a normal kid that bad things happen to (The Sixth Sense) or an evil kid doing unexplainable things (The Ring, The Grudge), Lilith appears to be a little bitch who is corteous to adults and does bad things behind their backs (kind of like The Bad Seed).  And what does she do?  She calls people and talks to them on the phone.  Scary.  The similarities in the setup of this premise to any number of other "bad kid" horror flicks makes the payoff particularly underwhelming.  I was hoping that we would see something cool or twisted happen, but Lilith doesn't physically do much of anything.  In fact, Lilith might just be the least frightening child antagonist since Problem Child.  That was a horror movie, right?

And what about that title?  "Case 39?"  Couldn't they have just given this any arbitrary title then, like "Case File 2172011-B: The Movie"?  Hell, even "The Social Worker" would be a better title than "Case 39."  They might as well have called it "Bland Bland Blandblandbland." 

Perhaps what makes Case 39 so bad is the inevitable climax.  I realize that you probably aren't going to watch this movie --- who the hell else would make the same mistake I made? --- but I feel obligated to say SPOILER ALERT: The way that the story progresses, it is apparent that Emily is not going to have a supernatural fix to Lilith's demon possession.  In fact, the most reasonable solution to the Lilith problem seems to have been her parents taping her inside the oven, which made me laugh when I realized it.  That means that Emily will have to either kill Lilith or be killed by her, and since this movie sucks, you know that evil won't win out.  I'm not saying that killing Renée Zellweger would have salvaged the film, but it would have made it watchable.  Instead, we have Emily pulling a Susan Smith to kill her child-demon.  And that's it.  Emily climbs out of the water, where her car (and Lilith locked inside) have sunk to the bottom.  Roll credits.  Is that supposed to be a happy ending?  This woman is going to get arrested and spend the rest of her life in a psych ward, but the film seems to be saying "...and that's the end of that chapter."  Star wipe aaaand...roll credits.  It's not that the ending is surprising, it is just cheap and lazy --- the two worst ways to end a boring and unimaginative supernatural horror movie. 

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

I don't know your feelings about the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but I enjoyed the first film and found the second and third ones to be nigh-unwatchable.  The prospects of this, the fourth film in the series, being good are obviously slim, but I have a soft spot for Johnny Depp and I don't usually hold summer blockbusters to terribly high standards; all I ask for is that this be a fun watch.

For those familiar with the other movies, your knowledge will do you no good in this movie --- it requires absolutely no previous knowledge of these characters.  And that's a good thing.  There are only three returning characters (Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, and Gibbs), as the writers wisely decided to leave Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy and the rest bobbing somewhere else for a change.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that Jack Sparrow --- who worked extremely well as a supporting character, but lost his appeal as he got more and more screen time --- is the main character in this movie.

Two characters, one wardrobe.

Here's the nuts and bolts of the plot.  A man, who by all rights should be dead, is caught in the fishing net of some Spaniards.  He apparently has information as to the whereabouts of the Fountain of Youth.  And the race is on!  I hope you didn't grow attached to that informative sailor, because he never shows up again.  The Spanish immediately set sail and, somehow, the British happen to be preparing an expedition as well.  And, as coincidence would have it, so is Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and his daughter, Angela (Penelope Cruz).  AND Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has been searching for the Fountain in his free time, too.  Since he has a map to the Fountain (which has apparently done him no good so far), Jack is targeted by the British and the other pirates.  The Spanish apparently either don't know about Jack, or saw At World's End and want nothing to do with him.  Since this is a pirate movie, Jack ends up with the pirate team, although his allegiances are nothing if not fluid.  There are a few things that have to be collected to reach the Fountain (it's over two hours long, you know), like a mermaid's tear and some cups, but that's the gist of the plot.

While the plot is somewhat less convoluted this time out, the acting hasn't noticeably improved since Part Three.  Johnny Depp still has all his fey mannerisms, but the character of Jack Sparrow loses his novelty in the spotlight.  The dialogue isn't great, so Depp doesn't have a whole lot to make his character seem fresh, likable or particularly funny.  Penelope Cruz is about as good as you might expect her to be in an English-speaking role; she's very pretty, but her acting is wooden.  There is a romantic subplot between her character and Depp's, but it never actually implies much passion and, therefore, is not very convincing. 

Sparrow and Blackbeard trading beard-braiding tips.

I thought Ian McShane did a pretty decent job as the evil Blackbeard, but his dialogue was also lacking punch.  Sure, McShane seemed evil, but that's not a stretch for him --- he could do that while riding a unicorn that craps rainbows and candy.  And, yes, I get that this series has always had a bit of the supernatural in it, but I didn't really need Blackbeard to be scary because he has super-pirate-ship powers.  That's just kind of lame and completely (although thankfully and hilariously) unexplained.  Geoffrey Rush returns as Captain Barbossa, for reasons I am not entirely clear on. 

"I feel pretty and witty and wise...!"

He does have a peg leg (filled with booze!) in this movie, which is a first (I think) for this series.  As good as Rush was in the first film, he is nowhere near as sinister this time around.  I like the idea of a pirate being accepted by the British Navy (it makes historical sense, too), but that wasn't enough to justify his inclusion in a fourth movie in the series.  Stephen Graham (Snatch, Gangs of New York) takes up the semi-moronic pirate role that was vacated by...well, many cast members from the last movie.  I liked him just fine, but he bounced between being idiotic and surprisingly swashbuckling at the drop of a (pirate) hat.  Kevin McNally returns as Sparrow's buddy, Gibbs, and was as likable in his small part as he usually is.  This film also introduces a boring (but thankfully shirtless, am I right, ladies?) Bible-thumper (Sam Claflin, in his feature film debut), a possibly not man-eating mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), a definitely man-eating mermaid (Gemma Ward), and a dashing but underused Oscar Jaenada (from The Losers).  Keith Richards makes a cameo appearance, as does Harry Potter's mean uncle, Richard Griffiths.  The acting's not bad, but the new additions aren't enough to balance out the predictable hijinks of the returning characters.

Director Rob Marshall is more famous for musicals than he is action/adventure movies, but I thought that his music video-esque editing made sense for a good portion of this film.  Of course, since I wasn't a fan of the acting, I can't be a huge fan of Marshall's direction.  Directors need to direct their talent, you know.  The film looked pretty good, though, with a lot of sweeping vistas and gorgeous scenes.  Marshall opted for more subtle use of CGI in this film (no octopus-faced villains here), which I appreciated.  While there is an awful lot of swashbuckling going on in this film, I wasn't too impressed by it.  Marshall didn't do a great job putting those fight scenes on camera in an exciting way.  He did do a good job with Jack Sparrow's predictably elaborate and goofy escape attempts, though.  These scenes were sometimes eye-roll-worthy, but I think they still looked pretty good.

I definitely appreciated some of the choices made in this movie, even if they didn't lead to cinematic greatness.  I like that the plot was taken from the book On Stranger Tides, instead of completely manufactured; I hated the plot of the last two films and thought that there were some good ideas in this story, even if they weren't executed very well.  I thought the mermaids were an interesting concept that was almost done well; they were all sexy and deadly, but I hated that every pirate and sailor knew about them and none dismissed mermaids as fiction.  I liked that the relationship between the captured mermaid and the Bible guy was kept as a very supporting plot; I didn't care about them at all, so having their story progress quickly was a blessing.  And how about the use of voodoo zombies?  That was a pretty cool idea.

Sadly, those quasi-compliments can't save this movie.  Jack Sparrow is getting tiresome, despite the best efforts of Disney's writers --- what makes him work in the first film is how dangerous and evil the audience thinks he can be, and the humor comes from him undercutting that malice.  By now, Sparrow is seen as a pretty nice guy and is just a clever/silly Keith Richards impersonator here.  The movie felt long, largely because the fist half was pretty boring.  The second half picked up quite a bit by shifting its focus frequently between the many subplots, but the first half just dragged as everything was set up.  I hated hated hated the use of the Spanish in this movie; they play a very important part (theoretically) and are barely used.  I don't understand how Penelope Cruz's character could be a passionate pirate-lover, a wannabe nun, and a swashbuckling sailor, and yet have none of that manifest itself onscreen.  And why on the hell is Juan Ponce de Leon's ship stuck in the side of a mountain?  And wasn't he looking for the Fountain of Youth in Florida?  Where exactly are the mountains of Florida?  Those last two issues could have been nipped in the bud with any explanation whatsoever, but this movie doesn't like to bother with details like that.

I don't mind that this movie is trying to be a brain-dead romp, but I do mind that I wasn't entertained by it.  It came close on many occasions, but ultimately fell short.  Still, shockingly, it is clearly the second-best Pirates of the Caribbean.

44 Inch Chest

I don't know why, but the buzz I heard about 44 Inch Chest was that it was a risque exploration of misogyny.  That's not something that I always enjoy, but I do like British crime stories, and I generally like Ray Winstone, John Hurt, and Ian McShane; I've also heard that the writers, who wrote Sexy Beast, have a talent for over-the-top characters.  All of that combined with the tagline ("The Measure of Revenge") to make me think that this could be a decently cool movie.

The story begins with Colin (Ray Winstone) on the floor of his home, which appears to have been recently ransacked.  At first, I thought he was dead, but it turns out he was just in shock.  You see, his wife of over a decade, Liz (Joanne Whalley) just left him.  One of Colin's buddies calls him on the phone, gets a mumbled reply, and hurries over because something is obviously wrong.  Once Archie (Tom Wilkinson) is able to comprehend what has happened --- Colin is doing a lot of sobbing and playing Nilsson's "Without You" over and over again, which would be more than enough for me to slap him silly --- he decides to do what any good friend would in a similar situation.  Archie calls together Colin's closest friends --- Mal (Stephen Dillane), Peanut (John Hurt), and Meredith (Ian McShane) --- and they all agree that the one way for Colin to get over this emotionally devastating moment is for him to spend time with his friends (obviously), drink a lot of liquor (makes sense) and then torture and murder Liz and her lover (natura --- wait, what?).  Colin had dragged loverboy's name out of Liz before she left, so the friends find his work, kidnap him, and throw him in a cupboard until Colin can work up the desire to kill the bastard.  What are friends for?

I'm going to go ahead and say that the general premise of this movie is awesome.  It takes a classic idea, that of a cuckolded man reacting to his situation with violence, and twists it around; instead of Colin being the bloodthirsty and revenge-obsessed monster, his friends are.  In fact, they heckle Colin for not immediately killing loverboy.  If I were in Colin's place, I have no doubt that my friends would choose to cheer me up with friendship and booze (and, let's face it, movies), but murder seems like an unusual remedy for soul-crushing depression; I doubt more than one of my friends would suggest that route to happiness. 

This was the first full-length motion picture directed by Malcolm Venville, and I like his style.  There are large chunks of this movie that take place within the mind of Colin, with his friends personifying his conflicting thoughts.  This could have been very confusing, since the friends are physically present as well, but Venville finds a way to differentiate between the imaginary characters and the actual ones.  I thought that all the actors were directed well, even if I hate seeing Ray Winstone as anything less than a scary mofo.  But even that worked out well; when Winstone switched from sobbing self-pity to helpless rage, the contrast made his anger seem all the more dangerous.

The acting was good all around.  As I mentioned, Ray Winstone plays outside of his comfort zone as the heartbroken Colin, but his intensity is still obvious.  I would have preferred more of his anger and less of his crying, but that's because I get a little uncomfortable watching frightening men cry.  Tom Wilkinson did a good job as the most reasonable and understanding friend of the bunch, although I was never clear on why his character (who seems nice) would be a party to murder.  Stephen Dillane, sure, I can buy that.  Ian McShane?  Definitely.  But Wilkinson's character felt a little out of place.  I definitely enjoyed McShane's homosexual gambler character; I usually don't include sexual orientation in character descriptions, but it's a significant part of his character.  Normally, British crime movies spend a decent amount of time ridiculing gay characters, but McShane's strong and charismatic jerk was a refreshing take.  John Hurt was amusing as the hate-spewing Peanut, although his bit about Samson and Delilah was a strange detour in the story.  It's hard to judge Joanne Whalley's performance, since it takes place primarily within Colin's tortured mind; she assumes whatever personality suits the plot at that moment, so it's not your typical film performance.

Now, you might assume that I really enjoyed this movie.  Well, I didn't.

Despite some clever direction, solid acting, and a good premise, 44 Inch Chest has one major weakness: the story.  The premise is established within the first seven minutes of the film; Colin is heartbroken and loverboy is kidnapped.  The rest of the movie (about a hour and a half) is Colin deciding whether or not to kill the guy.  Let me tell you, that time drags.  Nothing happens in this movie after the kidnapping.  Each of the friends tells a story about something that loosely relates the their current situation, Colin acts wounded and lame, and then it cycles again.  And what is the deal with these friends?  None of them appear to be criminals, so their quick and confident kidnapping and their pestering of Colin to kill loverboy is damned odd.  They act like professionals, but at least two of them (McShane and Winstone) are explicitly not hoodlums.  Leaving that unexplained in a dialogue-heavy movie is very unusual.  The dialogue is okay, but it's not fantastic, and it absolutely needs to be when the audience is waiting 90 minutes for one character to make one decision.  And that's what this movie boils down to: a lot of good work wasted by a story that could have been told in ten minutes.