The Resident

I don't often watch Hilary Swank movies.  It's not that I dislike her --- although two Oscars seems a bit much, in my opinion --- it's just that she stars in a lot of crap.  I have similar feelings about Jeffrey Dean Morgan; I like the guy just fine, but he's not in many things I want to watch.  No, what drew me into The Resident was the fact that this was a Hammer Films production featuring Christopher Lee.  Plus, I just reviewed The Apartment, and I found the pairing amusing.  I haven't seen many classic Hammer movies, but I was completely unaware that they had resurrected the brand recently and made a few noteworthy pics (that I haven't seen yet).  Christopher Lee, a two-time Best Actress, a solid character actor, and a classic movie brand --- what could go wrong?

"That depends...how much do you love rape?"

Juliet (Hilary Swank) is a New York City emergency room doctor in need of a new home.  She receives a call from someone, telling her that there is an apartment for rent.  When she arrives, she finds an enormous place in an older building that is nearly perfect: great wood floors, about three acres of floorspace, and a ridiculous view of the city.  The downside is that the train passes pretty close to the building and things have a tendency to vibrate off of shelves.  The price is shockingly cheap (by NYC standards), so Juliet takes the place.

"I like the plastic on the walls.  It makes it easier to clean blood off!"

Her landlord is Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose only job appears to be renovating the building; Max and his grandfather, August (Christopher Lee), are the building's only other tenants.  Juliet loves her new place, but the creaks and moans of the building play tricks on her, making her think that she is not alone.  Nevertheless, things appear to be getting better for her.  She even randomly encounters Max socially and the two hit it off; in other words, the pair quickly start getting naked together.

Now stop.  Rewind.  The film backs up to give the viewer an alternate point of view on the story thus far.  It turns out that the friendly Max has been stalking Juliet for some time and she played right into his hands.  Remember those moments Juliet thought she wasn't alone?  That's because she wasn't.  Two-way mirrors, peepholes and secret passages abound in her apartment, and you can be sure that behind every creepy noise in the place, Max is hiding and breathing heavily.

Aww!  Look at that puppy dog face!  You are forgiven for everything, Max!

At this point, the film can take a few directions.  The first would be for the pair to start dating and either become a lovely couple, or his creepy nature would turn this into a taut thriller, where Juliet only gradually realizes how dangerous Max is --- and he's sleeping right next to her!  Alternately, Juliet could put a stop to their naked time before the grinding starts and Max could go into full-on horror movie villain mode.  The Resident opts for the second, easier, route.

How's the acting in The Resident?  I suppose that depends on how forgiving you are.  I wouldn't say that Hilary Swank was good, but she played her role capably.  Is it her fault that her character is almost fatally stupid?  I don't think so, but it would have been nice for her paranoid character to call the police, even once.  I will say, however, that I was surprised that she had some brief getting-out-of-the-tub nudity; that's just about the cheapest excuse for nudity you will come across in a film, and I wasn't expecting it from her in a horror flick.  I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan was certainly creepy for a good portion of this film, so I guess he was somewhat successful.  Toward the end of the movie, he exchanged creepiness for sub-par horror slasher villainy, and he wasn't very good at that.  I would say that he was solid for the first half of the film, but when the plot returned from its flashback, his performance went downhill quickly.  Christopher Lee felt out of place in this movie, somehow; I like seeing him act, but hearing his strong voice coming out of his frail body made me a little sad.

Little known fact: Christopher Lee is Noah

Lee Pace didn't have much do do.  He played Juliet's unfaithful ex, and his part was fairly unremarkable.  He got beat up like a chump twice and went grocery shopping.

Not necessarily in that order

Aunjanue Ellis is the only supporting character that isn't terribly important in the overall plot.  She urges Juliet to date Max and talks trash about Lee Pace.  On the one hand, I guess her character can be seen as someone encouraging Juliet, but everything she supports (take the apartment, date Max, etc.) is really, really bad advice.

The Resident was Antti Jokinen's first (and so far, only) feature film director credit.  That's probably for the best.  I will give Jokinen some credit; I thought the first thirty minutes were surprisingly solid, although the story felt familiar.  I also like that the "surprise" of Max being a creep was not held back as a major plot twist, because...well, it was pretty damn obvious.  His fancier camera work was handled clumsily, making scenes that should have been ambiguous (is she alone, or isn't she?) pretty cut-and-dried.  I didn't like the choice to rewind the plot to show us how awful Max is, but I suppose it was better than him having a shrine to Juliet in his closet.  My main problem with how Jokinen directed this movie was that he was inconsistent.  I would have been fine with this film if he had maintained the suspense from the first act.  The second act, during the rewind, took all the mystery from the story.  The third act just sucked, as Max went from creepy to evil with less buildup than the 12th kill in a Jason movie.  I don't think Jokinen did a terrible job directing this film, but he certainly didn't make this story better with his direction.

Example: he frequently told his actors to look perturbed, not scared

Unfortunately, Jokinen was also responsible for the major weakness of The Resident: the writing.  He co-wrote this screenplay with a guy who was involved in the third Underworld movie, so the talent pool for this screenplay was not particularly deep.  Still, this story is pure crap.  Ignoring the cliche of the nice guy who is secretly disturbed, there really isn't any other logical suspect when Juliet gets paranoid that she is being watched.  So, that means Juliet is either paranoid or her landlord is spying on her; given the title, that seems like a poorly constructed mystery.  What really pushed this movie over the edge from drudgery to utter crap was how the writers showed that Max was disturbed.  Max's primary way to get close to Juliet was by drugging her and touching her while she was asleep.  Licking her hands was creepy enough, but raping her while she was unconscious was more gross than shocking.

That's so...erotic?

If you're going to make rape a plot point, that should not be the effect.  I also did not need to see multiple scenes where Max masturbated while in Juliet's apartment.  They throw in some stuff where Christopher Lee implies that Max's parents were disturbed, too, but it doesn't go anywhere.  I think they overplayed their hand with Max, making his transition from peeper to murderer/rapist too abrupt.

It's surprisingly well-lit when Max chooses to creep

I would have been much happier if Max was just creepy and maybe building up toward rape, when he panics and kills someone and, from there, we see him get more desperate and his actions more drastic.  There's just no build to this plot whatsoever.  Instead of being suspenseful or scary, it is boring, over-familiar and uncomfortable.  I should be rooting for either the killer or the heroine here, but neither is particularly likable.  I had difficulty understanding why I wasn't sympathetic toward Juliet for a little while.  Then, I realized that she was an idiot.  She oversleeps after her evening wine bottle was drugged; instead of drinking less, she blames it on her apartment.  Yes, that makes perfect sense.  On the bright side, the movie did end with a nail gun-related death, so there's that.

Jonah Hex

I never had high expectations for Jonah Hex.  While I usually enjoy comic book movies, this one looked really, really bad.   When it absolutely failed with critics and viewers alike, I was not surprised at all.  I was, however, shocked when the star of the film, Josh Brolin, repeatedly trashed (but also defended) Hex while promoting his next movie.

Tags: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

That kind of honesty and optimism did two things for me.  First, it made me wish I liked Josh Brolin more.  He's okay, I guess, but his presence in a movie is never what makes me want to watch it.  Second, it made me curious as to how entertaining Jonah Hex could be if I approached it like Brolin suggested, with similar expectations as I had for Piranha.  Hell, it couldn't be worse than I expected, even with Megan Fox acting in it.  Right...?

Hey, uh...you got something on your face.  No, the other side.

In the Civil War, Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) fought for the Confederacy, but he was not a zealot.  When his commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), ordered for a Union hospital to be burned down, Hex refused.  This led to a confrontation  with the other men in his unit, which eventually led to Hex gunning down Turnbull's adult son (and Hex's best friend), Jeb (an uncredited Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  After the war, Quentin tracked down Hex, tied him up and forced him to watch as his men murdered Hex's wife and child.  Before he left, Turnbull branded Hex on the face and left him to die of exposure.  Hex was found, mostly dead, by an Indian tribe, who nursed him back to health.  However, his brush with death left him with an ability to speak to the dead.  So...that's something.  Turnbull was allegedly killed in a house fire a short while later, so Hex became a bounty hunter and took out his rage on some of the worst men in the Wild West.

Oh, and he had a horse-mounted Gatling gun.

One day, Hex is approached by representatives from the U.S. Government to come and meet President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn) about a job.  Hex, being an ornery type, isn't impressed by Mr. President until he states that Quentin Turnbull is not only alive, but actively planning to destroy the country within the next few days.  I wonder if the revenge-fueled antihero will seek out his most hated enemy?

After typing that summary, I realized that this movie doesn't really sound so bad on paper.  No, it doesn't sound great, but not as bad as people made it out to be during its theatrical release (13% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a Metacritic score of 33). Sure, the whole talking-to-the-dead thing is weird, but it's not a deal breaker by any means.

Maybe the acting is what sinks this ship?  Well, Josh Brolin is surprisingly good as Jonah Hex.  He would have been even better if his facial makeup didn't cause him to slur some of his lines.  John Malkovich was surprisingly mediocre as the hate-filled Turnbull; Malkovich usually has fun with evil characters, but he didn't really come across as very interested in this movie.  Michael Fassbender played the main henchman to Turnbull and did what I presume is his best impression of Jim Carrey's Riddler.  He was certainly goofy, but even the ridiculous goatee-tattoos never made him scary.

This is why you don't pass out at tattoo parties.

That leaves us with Megan Fox.  Yeah...she's not a very good actress and she takes lines that are supposed to be sassy or cool and she sucks the personality out of them.  On the bright side, she plays a shockingly clean and fit Wild West prostitute (who, of course, loves the disfigured hero), so at least she's flaunting what has made her career thus far.

The rest of the supporting cast is a collection of bit parts, played by recognizable actors.  Will Arnett plays a soldier, and his presence implies that the filmmakers were aware of the funny-bad possibilities in the script.  Michael Shannon, the third Oscar nominee in this cast, had a tiny role, as did Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and they were both fine.  Wes Bentley, who I thought (after seeing American Beauty) had a bright career ahead of him, gives one of the least impressive performances in the movie.  No wonder I haven't seen him in anything in over a decade.  I wasn't impressed by Aidan Quinn's President Grant, but that might have been because I wanted him to be drunk and make really poor decisions.  I was happy to see television actor Lance Reddick playing something other than a lawyer or police officer for a change.  He wasn't great, but I appreciated the atypical casting.

I'm not going to blame this movie on the director, Jimmy Hayward, even though this is his first live-action feature film --- he's worked as an animator on a few Pixar movies and directed Horton Hears a Who, which naturally makes him the best director for a comic book-based Western.  He didn't do a good job directing, mind you.  The acting was limited and the cinematography was mediocre, and that's if I'm being generous to both.  His editing was awful and there is some sort of recurring waking dream sequence that was pretty incomprehensible, but I will give him credit where it's due: the movie is short.  It's 81 minutes with credits.  Not just anyone would choose to put most of a character's back story into an animated form, but it cut out an awful lot of acting time from the movie, and for that, I thank him.

Nothing clever is said in this scene.

 The biggest problem with Jonah Hex is the ridiculous story.  That shouldn't come as a surprise, since this movie was written by Neveldine/Taylor, the writing team that brought us such think pieces as Gamer and the Crank movies.  Man, this is a dumb script.  Fox and Brolin have at least half of their lines devoted to quips, and they're all pretty bad.  Brolin gets away with some because he's devoted to his character's intended bad-assness, but Fox...she couldn't deliver a smart line if it came with paid postage.  Aww, snap!  Mail carrier humor!  **ahem**  Even without the dialogue problems, this is a bizarrely written movie.  Why does any Western bad-ass need gadgets?  The horse-mounted Gatling gun was ridiculous, the automatic dynamite crossbows were just silly, and the villainous "nation killer" weapon was simply bizarre.  And what was with all the explosions?  This is the 1870s --- I can buy gunfire starting a fire, but huge explosions every time?  That's just dumb.  Oh, and that weird Jonah-Hex-talks-to-the-dead thing?  And the weird crow spirit stuff?  Yeah, not in the comics at all.  Hex could have just been a smart bad-ass, but instead, he was given supernatural crow/death powers by the writers.  That may not have been the best choice.

And while this movie is very bad, it is stupid enough to enjoy.  That's not terribly shocking, given the writing team.  If you're looking for a good action movie, a fun comic book adaptation, or a cool Western, this is not the movie for you.

 If, on the other hand, you feel like laughing at something ridiculous and ridiculing a movie, this is a decent choice --- but by no means a great one.  If nothing else, this is the stupidest Western I have seen in ages, but at least it's short.  I give it a Lefty Gold rating of

The Losers

I came of age in the greatest time in film ever: the golden age of body count movies.  In those days (the late 80s-early 90s), the bad guys had evil oozing out of their pores, the good guys could kill hundreds of baddies with nary a scratch (Rambo II and III, I'm looking at you), and there always seemed to be a smart-ass remark after the good guys did something extra cool.  For about five years, these films reigned supreme, from (roughly) Die Hard to The Last Boy Scout (there are outliers to this statistical survey, but let's ignore them for the sake of argument right now).  These movies were always mostly awesome, and always (at least a little) stupid.  After a while, though, people wanted to see more realistic violence on the big screen, and these tributes to testosterone became quite rare in popular film.  That's why The Losers is such a breath of fresh (and familiar) air.  This is a movie that would have felt right at home in 1990.  The bad guy is pure evil, the good guys quip all day long, and there are a lot of dead bad guy underlings by the time this movie ends.

The Losers is a film about five elite Special Forces troops; Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is the man with the plan, Roque (Idris Elba)  is his knife-wielding right hand, Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) is the marksman, Pooch (Columbus Short) is the driver, and Jensen (Chris Evans) is the tech/communications guy.  The movie begins with the team on a relatively easy mission: they need to "paint" a target area for an air strike, basically giving the coordinates to the bombers.  After they give the order to strike, though, a group of children is brought in to the target area for the purpose of being drug mules.  The team tries and fails to cancel the air strike, so they rush in, kill a bunch of bad guys, and rescue the kids, narrowly avoiding the air strike.  When they reach their extraction point, the helicopter waiting for them has only room for the kids or the Losers (which is not a name I heard them referred to in the film, but whatever).  Clay lets the kids take the chopper.  Moments later, the helicopter is blown out of the sky.  Somebody wanted the Losers dead and twenty-five children died instead.  Oops.

After the bombing, the group lies low in Bolivia, trying to figure things out.  Eventually, Aisha (Zoe Saldana) finds them and offers Clay a shot at revenge.  Apparently, the man responsible for the helicopter attack was Max (Jason Patric), an omega-level CIA spook, the kind of guy that topples governments.  Obviously, going to the police won't do any good against such a foe.  The only solution is to kill Max.  For freedom.

No, it's not much of a plot.  That's okay, though.  This movie keeps the action coming early and often, and it's done very well.  There are explosions, sniper shots, car chases, shootouts, and you name it.  You want a body falling to its death from a building?  Puh-leaze.  Give me a real challenge.  Oh, you want a hand-to-hand fight between a man and woman in a fire that doubles as foreplay?  Your wish is granted!

The action would not be so entertaining if not for the cast.  Jason Patric steals the show as the ultra-evil Max.  I normally don't like Patric, but he's mwa-ha-ha evil here and knows it; he's a mass murdering bastard that never justifies himself and clearly likes what he does.  Most bad guys are just bad, but I always welcome the villains that you love to hate, and that is what Patric brings to the table as Max.   Chris Evans is the sarcastic guy he is in most of his movies, but he throws in a lot of uncomfortable comic awkwardness whenever women are involved.  It doesn't quite click, since he's kind of studly and it's hard to believe that his lack of game would prevent him from romantic success, but he still has his moments.  Oscar Jaenada doesn't say much, but his role is to be the quiet bad ass and he does his work well.  Holt McCallany is decent as Max's underling and their conversations make up some of the highlights of the film.  Jeffery Dean Morgan is a likable alpha male, but he's nothing special as Clay.  I like the guy and liked the character, but it's true.  Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, and Columbus Short don't do anything special, but none of them are bad, either.

Director Sylvain White does a good job keeping this movie moving, whether it be with action sequences or well-executed dialogue scenes.  This is the first movie of his I've seen, but I appreciate the music video quality of his cinematography.  This movie is based on a comic book series of the same name, with one of the primary writers of the TV show Friday Night Lights (Peter Berg) and the writer of The Rundown (James Vanderbilt) handling the adaptation.  I'm not familiar with the comic, so I don't know how well it was written, but this screenplay is pretty dumb.  That's not a problem for me, but consider yourself warned.  Yeah, there are the typical tough guy one-liners sprinkled throughout, but that's not the problem.  The problem is that I'm pretty sure that there are entire pages in the script that call for characters to watch explosions, smile, take a few beats, and then kill some underlings.  Again, I'm okay with that.  It's dumb, not necessarily bad.  What is bad is the basis for this film's conflict; so Max wanted to kill the Losers because...they saved children from an air raid, killing the bad guys he wanted to blow up only moments before their corpses blew up?  That seems silly, at best.

Ultimately, The Losers is a likable action movie that is a lot like ones you've seen before.  The action is good and served often, the characters are shallow but are equipped with sarcasm, and there is a genuinely amusing evildoer.  Yes, the script is a little dumb, the characters are one-dimensional, and you never care what happens to any particular character.  This is a movie that knows what it is and never apologizes.  The only thing that keeps it from joining the elite action movies on Mt. Stupid Bloodfest is the lack of originality.  Since these characters are so shallow, there's really nothing about this movie that makes it memorable.  It's a good time, but not much more.