Bovie Movie

The car’s the star in this boys-and-their-toys action drama that, unfortunately, has too little action to cover for the absence of plot. Nicolas Cage plays a reformed car thief who agrees to pull off an impossible job — steal 50 top-of-the-range cars in four nights — for bad guy Christopher Eccleston, in return for his brother Giovanni Ribisi’s life. Cage ropes in his old crew — including ex-flame Angelina Jolie and silent-but-deadly Vinnie Jones — for the job, but it’s over an hour before we get any stealing or crashing of any description. There’s a nice chase at the end, but the deficiencies in the storyline drive it headfirst into a cul-de-sac of unrealised tension. 

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. 

Director Troy Miller follows up the little-seen Mr. Show movie Run Ronnie Run! with this prequel to Dumb and Dumber, the 1994 box-office smash that starred Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels and launched the careers of writer/directors Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly. For the follow-up, we’re taken back to 1986 when Lloyd Christmas (Eric Christian Olsen) and Harry Dunne (Derek Richardson) first met while in high school. Dissatisfied with their being stuck in remedial classes, the dense duo sets out to prove that they can attend classes with their peers of normal intelligence. Along the way, they encounter a greedy principal played by Eugene Levy and a friendly janitor played by Luis Guzman who takes Lloyd under his wing. Along with Mimi Rogers as Harry’s mom, Mrs. Dunne, Dumb and Dumberer also features performances by Rachel Nichols and Cheri Oteri.

In this slasher-influenced take on Ten Little Indians, a classy cast is stranded at a remote motel in the Nevada desert on the proverbial dark and stormy night (which of course means that the phone lines are down and contact with the outside world is impossible). Given that the place is suspiciously reminiscent of another roadside hostelry (proprietor: N Bates), it’s no surprise when they find themselves being picked off one by one in increasingly bloody ways. As the potential victims include indie favourites John Cusack and Ray Liotta, you hope that this is going to be more than a TV-movie-style murder mystery in which the guest turns are offed according to Hollywood rank, with the highest paid actor remaining. For the most part it is — the shocks are well staged, there are flashes of wit and the performances are sly without being too tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, director James Mangold can’t sustain the atmosphere in the face of increasingly outlandish plot twists and the final revelation is so wildly illogical it’s irritating. 

Before screenplay writer Andrew Niccol stood the science-fiction genre on its head with The Truman Show, he had already shaken it up with this engrossing futuristic thriller, which he also directs. Built around the controversial subject of genetic engineering and how it might lead to a socio-economic class divide, it follows Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), an imperfect human who attempts to join a space mission by illegally exchanging identities with Jerome (Jude Law), a paraplegic with perfect DNA. How he does this armed with blood and urine samples is ingeniously shown by Niccol, who mints a new genre vocabulary with his absorbing, intelligent and suspenseful story. In Niccol’s future society, a dustbuster is deadlier than a gun and wearing contact lenses means the choice between life or death. This thought-provoking cautionary tale is stunningly designed and has accomplished performances from Hawke, Law and Uma Thurman that do it full justice. 

Just Married and Dude, Where’s My Car? goofball Ashton Kutcher takes on a more serious role in this ambitious supernatural thriller. Written and directed by Final Destination 2 scribes J Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, it’s based on the idea of chaos theory, which speculates that the smallest of events can have the hugest of consequences. In a plot that feels lifted from The Twilight Zone, Kutcher plays a troubled college student who discovers he has the ability to go back in time and rewrite the past. Touching on provocative themes such as child abuse, disability and terminal illness, Gruber and Bress have created a powerful and disturbing tale. Despite being spoilt by a rushed and overly simplistic conclusion, it’s surprisingly dark and adult for a Hollywood project. In contrast to his joker reputation, Kutcher delivers a strong and believable performance, though his co-stars, with the exception of a stomach-churningly good Eric Stoltz, are largely unremarkable.