Bovie Movie

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. 

Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play serial killers turned into folk heroes by media excesses in this striking movie that was criticised by original story author Quentin Tarantino after it was largely rewritten by director Oliver Stone and others. Ambitious, unrelenting and inventive, Stone’s controversial landmark film excites the intellect while bludgeoning the senses. It blends naturalistic violence with stylised visuals and commandeers every available cinematic trick, plus the TV sitcom format, to put across its searing message. Stone utilises a dazzling range of technique to underscore the media’s obsession with violent crime, and delivers one of the most arrestingly provocative additions to the debate since A Clockwork Orange. Love it or hate it, this all-out image assault is a unique if disturbing experience. 

The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was a major event in US history (awakening the sleeping giant and all that), but this attempt to capture it on screen by the big-thinking producer/director team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) is a huge disappointment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual attack, which forms the middle act of the film’s bloated three hours, is an amazing spectacle — it’s almost worth the obscene $135-million budget. However, sheer cinematic power is undermined by our total lack of empathy for any of the cardboard cut-out characters who populate Bay’s advert-like world of slow-motion and colour filters (and baseball-playing kids to signify America — yes, we get it). Weaknesses of plot and characterisation are only amplified by the film’s unwieldy size and patriotic portent, and the script is toe-curlingly bad. Bruckheimer and Bay presumably think their love story and wartime heroics are charmingly old-fashioned. They have clearly not studied Casablanca or From Here to Eternity. 

Two kids from a small town accidentally stow away aboard an airplane owned by the mob.

When the grandmother of the publicist Karin (Gina Phillips) dies, she inherits her property in the fields. She travels with her boyfriend Jeff (Randall Batinkoff) for the weekend, but she decides to stay along the week cleaning up the place and packing the stuffs. Karin has horrible nightmares and visions of ghosts of her past, while she stays in the house with the creepy housekeeper Pierce (Tom Sizemore) and her younger sister Wendy (Jenny Mollen).

Following on swiftly from the release of Behind Enemy Lines, here’s another noisy, gung-ho modern war movie. However, the fact that this film is based on the disastrous 1993 “Battle of Mogadishu” in Somalia does not temper its flag-waving, pro-American militarism. The film’s poster tagline “Leave no man behind” disguises what was a strategic American mess as chest-beating melodrama — in reality, 18 Americans were killed, as were hundreds of Somalis during a 15-hour firefight. That it should come from a British director is the surprise, though to his credit Ridley Scott has cast many non-Americans in prominent roles — an underused Ewan McGregor, an impressive Jason Isaacs, comic turn Ewen Bremner and charismatic Eric Bana. It’s sensitive, cool-headed and intelligent for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, but for all of Scott’s incredible technical skill — you really do feel as if you are there — the battle scenes lack identifiable characters and there is scant insight into the Somalian conflict. In a post-11-September world, its call for “heroes” makes it little more than a recruitment film. 

Die Hard provided such a perfectly structured action-movie template that Hollywood has been reluctant to leave the idea alone; cue this silly but hugely enjoyable airborne thriller. Wesley Snipes plays the security expert who finds himself on the same aeroplane as obligatory British master criminal Bruce Payne, temporarily in police custody. Of course, Payne’s henchmen have hitched a lift as well and when they duly free him, it’s up to Snipes to save the day. Despite the hand-me-down plot and dialogue, director Kevin Hooks manages to wring the requisite suspense out of some expertly staged action set pieces. He is helped enormously by charismatic turns from Snipes and Payne, and a solid supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Bruce Greenwood and a then little-known Elizabeth Hurley. 

In contrast to the laddish heroics of her 1991 film Point Break, director Kathryn Bigelow came up with this intelligent, provocative thriller a year earlier. Jamie Lee Curtis is the rookie police officer who tries to prevent an armed robbery in a supermarket; Ron Silver is the businessman and firearms nut who picks up the robber’s gun and embarks on a chilling game of cat and mouse with her. Curtis is outstanding as the harassed officer and Silver is genuinely creepy, while there is strong support from a cast that includes Philip Bosco, Louise Fletcher and Tom Sizemore. Bigelow skilfully defines the almost fetishistic attraction of weaponry, but doesn’t forget her action roots and stages some exhilarating set pieces. 

One of Dreamcatcher’s few memorable moments concerns an extra-terrestrial life form erupting from the bottom of an unfortunate gentleman while he’s on the lavatory. It’s an entirely appropriate image, since down the toilet is exactly where this, the latest in a long line of poor quality Stephen King adaptations, is headed. The bizarre plot has four childhood friends on a hunting trip rescuing a deranged oddball who, it soon emerges, is host to some sort of alien parasite. While they attempt to evade the monster, the military — in the shape of Morgan Freeman — arrives, determined to eradicate all trace of the shape-shifting beastie. Despite a screenplay co-written by William Goldman (who brilliantly adapted King’s Misery), initially effective atmospherics from director/co-writer Lawrence Kasdan and creditable performances, this is soon hobbled by poor quality CGI and an abysmally incoherent final act. As usual, King fans are advised to stick to the book. 

This Mars-based science-fiction adventure makes Brian De Palma’s underrated Mission to Mars look like 2001: a Space Odyssey. It’s 2050, and a team that includes Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Carrie-Anne Moss and a hammier-than-ever Terence Stamp is sent to investigate when long-range efforts to make Mars habitable run into problems. Vital equipment is damaged in a crash-landing and the survivors are forced to depend on one another to fend off man-eating alien bugs and their own malfunctioning exploration robot while surviving the inhospitable terrain. Director Antony Hoffman’s feel-bad fantasy can’t be faulted technically: it looks great, and features some nifty space gadgets and nice special effects. But the plot lacks dramatic drive and the supposedly realistic depiction of interplanetary travel is markedly unengaging. The spectres of other, far better, sci-fi epics haunt the whole misbegotten patchwork: Alien, Starship Troopers, Short Circuit — you name it, it’s in here somewhere. Aside from the ever-cool Sizemore, none of the actors registers as anything more than easily expendable ciphers, and the whole damp squib ensures Mars won’t be a Hollywood travel destination for many moons to come.