Bovie Movie

Despite returning to Las Vegas where the series began, Steven Soderbergh’s second sequel to 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven fails to rediscover the sheer insouciance of the original. George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and the rest of the cast reprise their roles as the charming conmen, who this time target the hi-tech casino of ruthless Vegas businessman Willy Bank (Al Pacino). The strength of the series was always its breezy enthusiasm, but here there’s a chronic lack of fun: Pacino barely gets out of first gear, while Clooney seems to have his mind on other things. Only Ellen Barkin appears to be enjoying herself, shining in a comic role that sees her dosed with potent pheromones and seduced by a heavily disguised Matt Damon. Apparently there won’t be an “Ocean’s Fourteen”; clearly, Soderbergh’s under no illusions that Ocean’s winning streak has dried up at last. 

Directed by Michael Mann, this crime thriller about a cop (Al Pacino) and a robber (Robert De Niro) is epic in both scale and length, clocking in at just under three hours. Though punctuated by bursts of virtuoso action, including a running battle in downtown LA that ranks as one of the best action scenes ever filmed, it is the unusual emphasis on character that impresses most. De Niro is in fine form as the calm, methodical loner whose life is arranged so that he can abandon everything in 30 seconds when the heat is on, including his sidekick, Val Kilmer. Pacino, by contrast, is more of a cliché, angst-ridden and on his third marriage. We’ve seen it before and catch Pacino acting all the time, especially in his set-piece meeting with De Niro. It’s also a pity that after so much brilliance Mann should succumb to a derivative ending — an airport chase, à la The Killing and Bullitt, and a tidy if bloody resolution in which the wrong man gets killed. 

This lengthy melodrama is kept vibrantly alive and out of the clutches of sickly sentimentality by a towering Oscar-winning performance from Al Pacino. He plays playing the blind ex-soldier who heads for New York to sample life’s luxuries over the Thanksgiving weekend. As his unworldly teenage escort, Chris O’Donnell is quietly impressive, but it’s Pacino’s picture, whether tangoing with Gabrielle Anwar, berating O’Donnell’s cowardly schoolmates or barking out his famous “hoo-ha” cough. It’s loosely based on Dino Risi’s 1974 Italian film of the same name. 

This scorching update of Howard Hawks’s 1932 classic by director Brian De Palma relocates events to Miami and follows the rapid rise and violent fall of a Cuban refugee turned cocaine-smuggling kingpin. Al Pacino produces one of his finest scenery-chewing performances as the ruthless criminal pursuing the American dream, and he gets top support from Michelle Pfeiffer as his wife, Steven Bauer as his partner in crime and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as his sister. The accurate, if four-letter-word heavy, dialogue and sharp wit in Oliver Stone’s script and the vivid cinematography of John A Alonzo help make De Palma’s urban shocker a modern-day classic and one of the best movies ever made about the subject. However, some may find its excess in all areas — especially the final massacre that outdoes The Wild Bunch — more off-putting than entertaining. 

Oliver Stone offers his multi-camera perspective on American football in this bruising “us and them” drama. Essentially it’s North Dallas Forty with a racial subtext, coated in Jerry Maguire feel-good sentimentality. But this ensemble masterclass is also a hybrid of Platoon and Wall Street, with Al Pacino even delivering a teamwork variation on Michael Douglas’s “Greed Is Good” speech. It’s no accident that the tin-helmeted players thunder into encounters resembling the beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, for Stone considers them the cannon fodder in a militaristic stratagem, to be patched up and returned to the front by generals stationed safely away from the conflict. It’s overlong, but has moments of explosive inspiration. 

“Nothing is what it seems”, says Al Pacino, giving another gruff, seen-it-all performance, this time as veteran CIA agent Walter Burke, who recruits cocksure computer whizzkid James Clayton (Colin Farrell). The same could be said about the plot of this thriller, an escapist diversion from No Way Out director Roger Donaldson. Most of the action takes place in “The Farm”, a CIA training facility where would-be agents are taught hi-tech espionage and survival skills, and where Clayton meets and falls for enigmatic rival Layla (Bridget Moynahan). Clayton’s relationship with his grizzled mentor is then put to the test when Burke tells him that Layla is a mole and orders him — by any means necessary — to find out who she’s working for. 

You can see how the writer pitched this project: The Exorcist meets John Grisham. Keanu Reeves plays a hotshot lawyer from Florida who’s lured to a New York law firm run by Al Pacino. Pacino’s character name, John Milton, is an unsubtle signpost to the diabolical turn of events in a movie that sways unsteadily between a debate over good and evil and a half-successful attempt at black comedy. It’s the heavy-handed dropping of clues, including supernatural visions from Reeves’s ignored wife, Charlize Theron, that makes the eventual revelation a very tardy one as far as the viewer is concerned. There isn’t a single scene that’s remotely believable, but the whole concoction, right down to the Ghost Busters finale, is mindlessly enjoyable and directed by Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, Ray) with po-faced urgency. 

Al Pacino proffers yet another variant on his patented crazy-but-charismatic mentor routine (see Scent of a Woman, The Devil’s Advocate, The Recruit) in this morality tale set in the world of high-stakes betting. After an injury ends his football career, former college quarterback Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) gets a job dishing out sporting tips on a dial-up advice line. He’s recruited into the big time by shady entrepreneur and TV personality Walter Abrams (Pacino), a recovering addict who develops an almost unhealthy interest in his protégé’s personal life (shades of Wall Street). It’s business as usual for a shouty Pacino and the rest of the competent but unstretched cast — McConaughey seems to have been contractually obliged to take his shirt off every 20 minutes, while Rene Russo struggles to add dimension to her underwritten role as Pacino’s wife. Only Jeremy Piven, in a supporting role as McConaughey’s sleazy rival, seems to be having fun. 

In Seattle, the successful forensic psychiatrist and college professor Jack Gramm is in evidence since he was responsible for the condemnation of the serial killer Jon Forster, influencing the jury to sentence him to the death row. Jon accuses Jack of manipulation, inducing one witness and sister of one of his victims to testify against him. On the eve of Jon’s execution, Jack receives a phone call telling him that he has only eighty-eight minutes of life, while a killer is copycatting Jon, killing women with the same “modus-operandi” and is investigated by Seattle Slayer Task Force. With the support of his former wife and associated Shelly Barnes, the FBI agent and his friend Frank Parks and his assistant Kim Cummings, Jack investigate some weird and problematic students, a security guard of the campus and the woman with whom he had one night stand.

The Godfather was a masterpiece and so, too, was its sequel. Yet this third picture is merely a distant relative and was made for purely mercenary reasons (director Francis Ford Coppola reportedly needed the money for a personal project). Thanks to the badly bungled corkscrew plot — no one has a clue what’s going on, apart from some vague corruption in the Vatican — one is left with the basic theme of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), unable to renounce crime and being slowly transformed into a martyr. Pacino has some fine moments and Andy Garcia is frequently electrifying as Sonny Corleone’s bastard son, Vincent Mancini, the new don on the block. However, Coppola’s own daughter, Sofia, who took over at the last minute from Winona Ryder, is embarrassing as Michael’s daughter Mary, the film’s symbol of innocence.