THE ROOKIE (1990) - *1/2I just get a giggle thinking that Clint Eastwood, a man who has TWO Best Director Oscars and viewed by many as one of the best filmmakers alive, shot this piece of shit. Better yet, his next movie was UNFORGIVEN. The Chicago Cubs for Hollywood in the early 90s!
Really, talk about an example of where a project like THE ROOKIE, that seem to be a sure-fire, easy money maker for Warner Bros. ends up being a little turd that just sits there, and stinks up the joint.
Of course back in the day, Charlie Sheen was seen as this "hot" movie star that was on the rise, and Clint The Squint wanted a piece of him. So Eastwood drags out his Dirty Harry persona from under the bed, and Sheen becomes the well-abused uncertain greenhorn cop in what became (so far) Eastwood's only buddy cop picture.
A fact that surprised me, until I realized that Dirty Harry's partners all got whacked, and that he was an asshole through & through even if said partner lived, thus they are not "buddy cop" pictures.
Anyway, I should have assumed that THE ROOKIE was doomed to suck when it opens on what apparently was a childhood tragedy where Sheen kills his brother. A flashback of course, or else the world wouldn't have had MIGHTY DUCKS or MEN AT WORK. Really, I was laughing at this melodramatic and very unintentional goofyness until the movie tells me that it was meant to be serious.
That made me laugh even more. But sadly, not as much as when this movie spouted off some nonsense about Charlie Sheen being a rich kid who's in turmoil with his old man because he chose to be a street cop. Whatever.
But there is so much more sillyness. There's the very latin Raul Julia playing a German crime baddie. There's the 3rd act when Sheen has to go all "badass" and is as convincing at that part as Freddie Prince Jr. There's that whole silly shot of Eastwood telling Sheen, as their car plummets from a warehouse exploding to go buckle his seat belt, and the buddy cop cliche criminals like the heroes' superiors taking them off the case.
Or how about when both are being chased by a gulf carrier airplane, and both decide to split up in opposite directions, yet in the confusing editing, both seem to have the plane ready to run each over....despite physically being rather damn impossible.
No no, forget it. Nothing beats the most goofy/insane scene in this movie, and it could have worked, but it just doesn't in THE ROOKIE. That of course is when Clint Eastwood is held hostage by the baddies, and the woman accomplice of the baddie ties him to a chair and does the only thing expected: She rapes him, and tapes it.
I mean, take the opening of THE LAST BOY SCOUT where that football player takes a pistol and sprays bullets at the linebackers. It's goofy, its stupid, and its absolutely silly, but it worked! Why? Because that movie had this punkish vibe to it, and that scene worked in regards to that movie's attitude.
Instead, Eastwood getting taken advantage of just comes across as the most bizarre sequence in an ultra-lame action movie.
SMOKIN' ACES (2007) - ***1/2 There is a scene where the Tremors (triplet homicidal, hard-rockin Neo-Nazi assassins) assassinate one of the billed actor-characters. The mouth (and apparent brains) of the trio looks down at the corpse, uses his fingers to move the corpse's mouth to re-enate one of those melodramatic deaths of old westerns.
The thoughts that came to my mind were:
(1) You don't see this sort of thing in every crime movie.
(2) Used to hate the actor in question, but he's earned my respect.
(3) This is my sort of movie.
I mean, SMOKIN' ACES is....no, Odd isn't the right word. David Lynch having singing & dancing aborted Elephant fetuses and making us guess the meaning of it all, that is Odd.
On one hand, its very serious with itself with the junk crime tale with a cokehead Las Vegas entertainer-turned-witness Jeremy Piven being the center of a $1 million contract-kill, and every hitman and hitwomen want to cash it in. Really effective in how damn pathetic Piven gets (and I give him credit, because its the best portrayal of a snorter I've seen in some years. We get eyes as red as the Red Sea, we get the white-filled nostril, and we get a guy so wasted, he can't even kill himself right).
I guess Arie Gold went to hell after losing Vincent Chase as his client.
But yet the movie has these whacky as hell moments that, to be honest, SHOULD have derailed the movie, but somehow writer/director Joe Carnahan (who previously helmed the highly-praised cop drama NARC) makes it all work. We get the Loony Toons cartoonish moments where we laugh in how awesomely absurd* they are, and then we get the serious action-moments, and we eat them up.
What with the urinated-on-technicolor cinematography, Carnahan has shot a better Tony Scott movie than Tony Scott has made since MAN ON FIRE. Maybe it helps that while Scott abuses his Avid editing machine to give people migraines, Carnahan uses the camera-filters and editing for a point. I know Scott and his 60+ year old Limey ass with FIRE and DOMINO and DEJA VUE is trying to prove that he can hang out with the younger MTV-inspired directors.
Joe Carnahan just told the old man to quit it. Hell, SMOKIN' ACES is basically TRUE ROMANCE, but without the romance or Tarantino's random-ass movie citations.
One thing I don't get regarding SMOKIN' ACES is why it got so much damn critical hate back in its January release.
Why? Did Carnahan refuse to handjob AICN or kissass CHUD or refused to offer exclusives to some media-hack critic just to get a good write-up? Why it is too that the same people that kiss Tony Scott's ass spit on Joe Carnahan for using Scott's recent schtick and making it BETTER? Maybe because the sites hated the movie, the geeks and their shallow freeminds followed suit.
Then SMOKIN' ACES comes to DVD and is gangbusters, now the geeks are kissing its ass. I could feel righteous, but considering the movie is apparently getting a Straight-to-DVD prequel already....I'll forgive.
CHAIN REACTION (1996) - **1/2In Chicago, an innocent man is framed by a deadly conspiracy for a murder. While all the cops are after him, the hero must prove his innocence, while the conspirators want him to stay dead silent...
I was going to write about how CHAIN REACTION virtually is a stylized THE FUGITIVE knock-off down to the same basic plot concept, the same chase-thrills, the same action dynamic beats, hell even the same director, the once damn good Andrew Davis.
But then I realized, that isn't the problem necessarily. Hell, Alfred Hitchcock made a career of reusing his own narrative blueprints for years and years, and he still produced quality work.
The problem with CHAIN REACTION is that we as an audience never are really engaged in this popcorn thriller. We never give a s*** about the story (or what there is of it), we don't care at all about the anti-free energy government conspiracy that are after the heroes, and when the movie's well-shot hovercraft chase occurs, we aren't concentrating on the heroes trying to flee, our minds wonder off about other things.
When I'm worried about doing my laundry later tonight or on who the baseball game last night during a film's pinnacle big-budget action sequence, I do think that is a serious problem for any movie.
Of course, there is also another serious problem when you have great actors that are absolutely wasted with nothing to work with.
Despite his massive amount of screen-time, Morgan Freeman is a glorified loiterer. Brian Cox is the evil bad guy because, well, the script says so. The awesomeness that is Fred Ward is left for dead as a watered-down clone of Tommy Lee Jones' character from THE FUGITIVE who seems much more of an after-thought than an actual character, and ends up as a poor jobber. As for a much younger Rachel Weisz, well...she had better things to work in the horizon of the future.
Then there is the environmental angle. In the 1990s, numerous action movies had some sort of environmental angle, where the heroes fight to protect the environment like the Steven Seagal vehicles ON DEADLY GROUND and FIRE DOWN BELOW, or for free clean energy like Val Kilmer's THE SAINT and this movie. Yet none of them are good, or well good enough for me to want to watch it again. Why?
Now don't get me wrong. I care about saving the trees and the damn polar bears, I really do, but mixing action cinema with a green Earth message just NEVER ever works. Its just not enough of a motivator for people to care about the story or the narrative itself.
You know what the difference is between a good thriller and one that isn't? The good ones make you feel like you're riding a roller coaster, feeling the twist and turns, the slow boiling suspense that builds up to a climax with an exhilarating pay-off.
The bad thrillers are like those same roller coasters, except you're not riding it. You're watching it from the ground. You can see the same action and excitement, but there is just a massive disconnection you have with what's happening.
Well, thats what CHAIN REACTION ultimately felt like to me. I felt like I was too short, and got left off the ride.