Big Miracle Release Date: February 3, 2012 Director: Ken Kwapis Writers: Jack Amiel & Michael Begler (screenplay), Thomas Rose (book Freeing the Whales) Stars: Drew Barrymore, John Krasinski and John Pingayak MPAA Rating: PG HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

On the surface, Big Miracle appears to simply be a feel good film about saving a family of gray whales trapped underneath the ice in Alaska. But it’s actually about something deeper and far more fascinating. It’s a film about why we care about these types of stories and how they have the ability to unite the entire country (and the world at large).

The film is based on the book Freeing the Whales, which tells the story of the 1988 “Operation Breakthrough” mission to free three whales caught underneath the ice in Point Barrow, Alaska. Adam Carlson (John Krasinski) is an Alaskan reporter in Point Barrow doing local color stories. He films a piece on the whales, which runs on the local NBC news.

The story ends up going national when NBC needs a minute and a half of filler at the end of Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News. (The producers decide to go with it because Brokaw loves animal stories.) It captures the nation’s attention, which sends a swarm of national media to Point Barrow to cover the story. Since the town only has one restaurant of note and one hotel, the locals begin price gouging the out-of-towners because of the limited resources.

With the media getting the entire country invested in the story, an eclectic group of people with different agendas all have to band together to save the whales. There’s Rachel Kramer (Drew Barrymore), the militant Greenpeace spokeswoman who is trying to save the world. She is forced to work alongside J.W. McGraw, the oil tycoon in possession of equipment that everyone believes is the best chance to break up the ice, who is clearly only helping out for PR reasons. Then there’s the native Alaskans, who are also at odds with Rachel because they hunt the whales for food, which she is morally opposed to. But the locals clearly still care deeply about these animals. President Ronald Reagan’s administration also gets involved in a calculated PR move, hoping to help Vice President George H.W. Bush’s Presidential election campaign. Reagan’s administration must also decide whether or not to enlist the help of the Russians, who have a ship in the area that could be of assistance. They must decide if they can stomach the idea of the Russians coming to the rescue.

Being a PG-rated family film, the movie is careful to never paint anyone as too much of a villain. While McGraw primarily cares about his own self-interests, he does get invested in the rescue effort and comes to genuinely care about the whales. There is also a scene where he and Kramer come to a mutual understanding, realizing that it’s much harder to hate one another now that they’ve gotten to know each other. The Russians as well are shown to care very much about the whales, even if they are still in the midst of the Cold War with the Americans leading the rescue effort. The only people who come out looking bad are the reporters who, with the exception of Carlson, all seem concerned primarily with scooping their colleagues and making a name for themselves.

The film does a good job balancing footage of its actors with news footage from 1988. You see the real footage of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather delivering their newscasts. You also see real footage of Reagan giving a press conference. (Unfortunately, the film also chose to get a Reagan impersonator for one scene, which was incredibly distracting and unnecessary.) During the credits, there is a montage that shows you some of the actual people the actors were portraying. Early in the film, there is a scene where Rachel Kramer has a megaphone and is dragged out of the meeting where McGraw is awarded exclusive rights to drill for oil in Alaska. Originally, I figured this was Hollywood looking for a flashy way to introduce her character, but at the end of the film you see the footage of the real Kramer doing the exact same thing. That was a nice touch.

The performances are all solid. John Krasinski is an effective leading man and he injects some great comedic moments into the film, including a hysterically funny scene inside a helicopter. Ten Danson gives a really fun, hammy performance as McGraw, making him a blustering ass, but still somehow likable. Kathy Baker is really charming as well in her role as Ruth McGraw, J.W.’s wife who manipulates her husband into helping out without him even realizing what she’s doing.

Big Miracle is a fun, lighthearted film, but it’s also a fascinating look into our society. It examines the way TV news work and what we as a nation get invested in. There are also moments when people question how much effort and resources as worth putting into saving these animals and if human lives should be put at risk to save three whales. (Being a light family movie, it never delves too deep into any of these ideas, but the fact that it touches on them at all was refreshing.) If none of that interests you, it’s also a fun, funny film about saving three whales. Big Miracle has broad appeal and is a surprisingly charming little film. I recommend giving it a shot.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

Man on a Ledge Release Date: January 27, 2012 Director: Asger Leth Writer: Pablo F. Fenjves Stars: Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks and Jamie Bell MPAA Rating: PG-13 HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

Man on a Ledge is by no means a good movie. It is, however, a fairly entertaining one.

Borrowing heavily from the 1998 Samuel L. Jackson movie The Negotiator, the film stars Sam Worthington as Nick Cassidy, a police officer facing a 25-year jail sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. However, instead of taking a room full of people hostage, Cassidy climbs out onto the ledge of the 21st floor of a hotel and threatens to jump off. Playing the Kevin Spacey role of the police negotiator who believes the wronged cop’s story and decides to help him is Elizabeth Banks as Lydia Mercer. Cassidy requests Mercer by name, knowing that she is haunted by a case one month earlier in which she failed to talk a police officer down from a bridge.

Cassidy was convicted of stealing a $40 million diamond from ruthless businessman David Englander (Ed Harris). Nick uses his ledge stunt as a distraction to draw attention to himself while his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) break into Englander’s vault to find the diamond, which Cassidy believes never actually left the premises.

By adding the diamond heist element and by giving us a flashback to Nick’s prison escape, the film finds ways to keep the action moving while Nick is perched up on the ledge. Not that the scenes on the ledge are boring. Director Asger Leth chose to put Worthington and Banks on the actual 21st story ledge of a New York City hotel, which undoubtedly added an extra level of realism to the performance and gave Leth the ability to get some really captivating shots. Any of you with a fear of heights will definitely get that queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach several times throughout the film.

The performances are mostly solid too, which helps sell the film. Worthington and Banks have a good chemistry and their scenes together work well. Harris unfortunately isn’t asked to do very much, but he makes the most of the scenes he’s in by chewing just the right amount of scenery. Titus Welliver, Anthony Mackie and Edward Burns are all really enjoyable in their supporting roles. The only two weak links are Bell and Rodriguez, who give underwhelming performances. (Leth does his best to distract you from this by having Rodriguez show off as much cleavage as humanly possible in all of their scenes together.)

The story is fairly formulaic and every “surprise” twist is easy to spot a mile away. Still, it all works well enough until the end. The climax of the film, however, is a complete mess. The story falls apart and no matter how much suspension of disbelief you are willing to apply, the films gives you an ending that is in no way believable. Even overlooking the completely unrealistic action movie hijinks that ensue in the end, the resolution itself makes little sense when you stop for even one second to think about it.

The film also has two flaws in its design that it struggles to overcome. First, since Cassidy is an escaped convict and has no hostages, the police don’t really have a compelling reason to let him stay out on the ledge threatening to jump off and creating a huge spectacle. The film is fairly successful in handling this problem in two ways. Number one, Cassidy checks into the hotel under a fake name and wipes down his room for prints, so it takes a while to positively ID him. And two, once the police know who he is, Nick has Mercer on his side keeping the tactical unit from swarming in and forcibly removing him from the ledge.

Unfortunately, the film never really finds a way to address the second problem, which is Nick’s overall plan. Cassidy has his brother break into Englander’s vault to find the diamond, proving Englander had possession of it all along. But why would anyone be convinced that Cassidy and his brother didn’t simply plant the diamond in Englander’s vault in order to clear Nick’s name? A jury didn’t believe his story once, so why would anyone believe him now? The film never really addresses this. The most frustrating thing is that there are actually several outs they could have used to overcome this problem, but writer Pablo F. Fenjves failed to utilize any of them.

Problematic writing aside, the film is paced well enough that it never really overstays its welcome. While the story ends up being quite ridiculous, it is never boring. If you are looking for a mindless January action film, you probably won’t be disappointed. Though with a few added tweaks to the story, this one could have been a lot better.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

Real Steel Release Date: January 24, 2012 Director: Shawn Levy Writers: John Gatins (screenplay), Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven (story) Stars: Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly and Dakota Goyo MPAA Rating: PG-13 HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

If you’ve ever wanted to see a robot square off against a bull at a county fair, then Real Steel is the movie for you.

It’s a lightweight movie featuring a ridiculous premise (real life Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots) and every sports movie cliché you can imagine and yet somehow it works. If you are looking for a cinematic masterpiece, then you should probably avoid this one. But if you are just looking for some mindless, fun robot boxing goodness, then Real Steel may be the film for you.

At the start of the film, Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a broken down boxer with nothing going for him. He’s washed up, broke and in debt to a few unsavory characters. He makes his money driving around the country with his robot Ambush, fighting it against bulls or whatever he can to make a quick buck. But Charlie is impulsive and likes to go for big money instead of an easy payday, which has a tendency not to work out for him.

Kenton finds out that his ex-girlfriend has died, leaving the 11-year-old son they had together an orphan. Charlie isn’t interested in being a father, but when he finds out his girlfriend’s sister is married to a rich man (who wears an ascot just so you know how rich and uptight he is), Kenton decides to use the kid to leverage $100,000 from the couple. He decides to take his son Max (Dakota Goyo) for the summer with the intention of signing him over and collecting his money once they get back from their European vacation.

Scrounging for spare parts in a junk yard, Max discovers a generation two sparring bot that he decides to keep. Charlie tries to explain that the robot is too small and outdated to make it in the fight game, but Max is just too precocious and optimistic to listen. He cleans the robot up and gets it ready to fight and – lo and behold – the thing can hold its own in the ring. Thanks to it’s “shadow function” (which allows it to mimic the motions of any human), Charlie is able to use his boxing skills to train Atom the robot to be a fierce competitor. Underdog, rags to riches, father-son bonding shenanigans ensue.

The film borrows heavily from other boxing films and sports movies, most unapologetically from Rocky and Over the Top. Finding a way to make an emotionless robot an underdog is no easy feat, but making Atom a training bot and giving him a cute face helps considerably. There’s something charming and quirky and Atom, which helps sell the ridiculous premise. And, of course, there’s an evil, unstoppable champion robot named Zeus out there who is unbeaten in the ring, giving little Atom a Goliath to his David.

It’s ridiculous, but the reason the film works is because of Hugh Jackman. Jackman is so charismatic and fun to watch and he plays the role of Charlie so earnestly that he sells you on everything else. Even when Charlie is being a complete bastard – trying to sell his son for quick cash or stealing parts from a junkyard – he does it in a way that gets you smiling. Like he did so effortlessly in the role of Wolverine, Jackman has once again created a lovable anti-hero in Kenton.

The supporting cast is also solid. Goyo does a fine job as Max and is quite entertaining in several scenes where he gets the robot to mimic his dance moves. Kevin Durand, who excels at playing completely unlikable villains, plays Ricky, a promoter who wants the money back that Charlie owes him and will do what he has to to get it. Anthony Mackie is great as Finn, another promoter who provides Charlie’s robots with fights. And Evangeline Lilly holds her own as Bailey Tallet, the surprisingly “not a wet blanket” love interest for Charlie. (Lost fans will be shocked to discover that even with robots on the loose and Durand playing a villain, Lilly is never once captured and held hostage in the film.)

The film never takes itself too seriously and though it’s overly formulaic, it’s a formula that works. The fight scenes are a lot of fun to watch as well. The CGI for the robots is great and the scenes are shot and paced quite well. The locales that these fights take place, particularly for the underground fights Charlie and Max first enter Atom into, are aesthetically interesting as well. There’s a fight outdoors in a place called The Zoo and a really cool night-time fight that takes place in an empty field lit up by a circle of cars with their headlights turned on. These locales all looked impressive when I saw this film in the theater, but they look even better in Blu-ray, which really allows the colors to pop and the subtle nuances of the background to shine through.

So if you are in the mood for a cheesy, ridiculous film that features robots squaring off against each other, then this may be the film for you. If you are in the mood for a movie that actually features this line of dialogue: “Kenton must have hardwired this bot with a will to go on,” then check out Real Steel. It’s everything you want in an underdog, father-son bonding, robot boxing film.

Bonus Features

The makers of this two-disc Blu-ray have really gone above and beyond on the bonus features. In addition to the normal bloopers and deleted/extended scenes there is a special director’s commentary that syncs with your iPad and a number of fun featurettes.

The first, “Countdown to the Fight: The Charlie Kenton Story,” is a 13-minute faux documentary hyping up Atom’s fight with Zeus by giving you Kenton’s backstory. It gives a lot of background information about Charlie Kenton that isn’t given in the movie and Hugh Jackman and a number of other actors appear in it in character to give interviews. It’s a very well-made featurette that looks and feels like a real documentary that would air on ESPN to hype up the fight.

“Making of Metal Valley” breaks down the shooting of a single scene. It shows what went into shooting the “Metal Valley” sequence, which is the scrapyard where they find Atom. It was a four-day shoot with a number of tricky effects shots, so it’s cool to see how they put it all together. Plus, the stunt coordinator has an eye patch, which is worth watching the whole thing just to see.

There are two other fun featurettes – “Building the Bots” and “Sugar Ray Leonard: Cornerman’s Champ.” The first shows you the real working robots that were created for the film and used in combination with CGI robots. The second is all about Leonard, who served as a boxing consultant on the film and helped Jackman look convincing as a boxer. Both are worth checking out.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

Red Tails Release Date: January 20, 2012 Director: Anthony Hemingway Writers: John Ridley (story/screenplay) and Aaron McGruder (screenplay) Stars: Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Gerald McRaney and David Oyelowo MPAA Rating: PG-13 HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

Promoting Red Tails, George Lucas told the New York Times that he wanted to make a Patriotic World War II film like the John Wayne film Flying Leathernecks.

Lucas said, “We made movies like this during the war, and everybody just loved them. I said, ‘There’s no reason why that idealism, that kind of naïveté, can’t still exist.’”

For better or for worse, Lucas (who did not write or direct Red Tails, but served as the executive producer on the film) has accomplished that. Red Tails, which tells the story of the Tuskagee Airman, is an overly idealistic and naïve war film, one that lacks subtlety or any shades of gray. The black protagonists are are heroic, the white higher ups back in Washington who oppose them overly racist and narrow-minded and the Germans they are fighting against all racist and evil as well. (The lead German antagonist has a scar across his face and actually utters the line: “Die, you foolish African!” just so you have no doubts about how evil he is).

The film has the proper sense of grandeur. It is big and loud and the opening sequence features a massive and hectic firefight. All of the CGI dogfights are fairly well-rendered and well-constructed, if slightly underwhelming considering they have the Lucas name attached to them. Planes, trains and battleships are all destroyed and bombs are dropped over cities and all of it is depicted through giant CGI explosions. Like much in the film, these explosions and the dogfights are passable, but not spectacular.

The biggest problem with the fight scenes is the dialogue, which is cartoonishly bad. Every character speaks in generic war cliches and absolutely none of the dialogue feels authentic. Also, for some reason, a lot of the talking is used to overexplain things that are fairly obvious. (Like one scene in which two crew members aboard a bomber have a length discussion about the Red Tails deciding to continue guarding them after a relief crew of fight pilots fails to materialize, something which was establish one minute earlier when the Red Tails themselves had a lengthy discussion deciding whether or not to stay with the bombers.) There is way too much clunky and unnecessary exposition, which at some point makes you wonder just how much the creative forces behind this film are underestimating the intelligence of their audience.

In that same New York Times interview, Lucas claimed he was making this movie for black teenagers. However, I’m not sure how much they will actually get out of the experience. No context is given in the film – we learn nothing about the Tuskagee Airman before or after the time period depicted in the movie and there isn’t really any sense given of their impact on the war as a whole. We don’t know how they came to be or what their lives were like after the war when they went back to America. We see brief touches of the racism they continue to face during the war – both by enemy fighters and by their fellow soldiers, who refuse to let the black officers drink in the officers’ club with them. However, these problems are easily solved – the bad guys are all blown up and the racist officers end up inviting the Red Tails in for cocktails once the see how impressive they are in action.

The characters themselves are all paper thin as well. The two leads, Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker) and Joe ‘Lightning’ Little (David Oyelowo), are both given a single defining characteristic. Easy is the group leader who, though heroic and wise, has a drinking problem. And Lighting is a hothead who goes for glory over following orders. However, neither one of these character flaws affect their performances very much – Easy’s drinking never really compromises his ability to command and Lightning’s hotdogging usually results in added glory.

The rest of the characters are even less defined than that. Cuba Gooding Jr. is briefly in the film as their pipe-chewing commander. Terrence Howard is the guy arguing with the higher ups in Washington trying to get the Red Tails better assignments. Fans of The Wire will appreciate seeing Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan and Andre Royo in minor roles. (Of the three, Wilds has the meatiest and most interesting role.) Perhaps the most disappointing casting is Bryan Cranston as Colonel William Mortamus, the man trying to shut down the Tuskagee Airman experiment, a one-dimensional character with little screen time played by a man who has shown an incredible ability to add subtlety and nuance to a role.

One other incredibly grating thing about the film is the fact that all of the characters seem to have superhuman eyesight. Lightning spots an Italian woman on a rooftop while flying overhead in his plane and then tracks her down after the mission because he could tell she was cute after briefly glimpsing her from miles overhead. And both bomber pilots and enemy combatants all seem to be able to tell the Red Tails are black, even though you would think you wouldn’t have time to stare closely at the man in the cockpit during a chaotic dogfight.

Even with the unrealistic eyesight, leaden dialogue and generic plot, the film still has its moments. But at the end of the day, it is nothing more than an overly naïve, idealistic and utterly forgettable film. If you are looking for nothing more than a loud, dumb war movie, you may enjoy this one. But if you are actually looking for an accurate depiction of the the men who flew these red tailed airplanes and their role in history, you are better off watching the 1995 HBO film The Tuskagee Airmen.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

Contraband Release Date: January 13, 2012 Director: Baltasar Kormákur Writers:Aaron Guzikowski (screenplay), Arnaldur Indriðason (film Reykjavik-Rotterdam) and Óskar Jónasson (film Reykjavik-Rotterdam) Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Giovanni Ribisi and Kate Beckinsale MPAA Rating: R HoboTrashcan’s Rating:

January is the bleakest month for movies. The studios tend to launch their Oscar hopeful films and their big budget family fare in December, meaning that January gets the leftovers. So it’s no real surprise that Universal is giving us Contraband this week, an overly-formulaic, poorly-conceived and badly-shot heist film.

Contraband follows a well-worn formula. In it, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is a retired smuggler turned family man who is forced to do one last job to pay off a debt his brother-in-law racks up with a local gangster. Farraday assembles a crew and goes to Panama to steal millions of counterfeit dollars to set things right.

The film has many problems, but by far its biggest one is its unwillingness to let anyone get the upperhand on Farraday. In his first encounter with Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), the gangster who his brother-in-law owes the money to, Farraday wrestles a gun out of Briggs hands and tells him if he ever threatens his family again that he’ll kill him. In a later scene, Farraday savagely beats Briggs while two of his thugs basically just stand there and watch. There isn’t a single moment in the film where Briggs gets the better of Farraday. He comes across an an ineffectual weasel without any real power.

Because of this, it becomes unclear why Farraday takes on the job at all. If Briggs is such an ineffectual dope, why does Farraday have to pay him back? It seems like he could simply outmuscle him or find a way to outsmart him so that he’s in jail or otherwise out of the picture. Briggs needed to be intimidating so that we believed Farraday and his family were actually in some type of jeopardy. It needed to feel like there were actually high stakes. We needed to feel like Farraday was vulnerable in some way and not a superhuman figure who is stronger and more clever than everyone else around him. As it stands, his reasons for getting back into a life of crime seem flimsy at best.

The other major problem with the writing is a subplot involving Farraday’s wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and his friend Sebastian Abney (Ben Foster), who stays behind to watch over Farraday’s family while he is off smuggling the cash. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t get into too much detail about this plotline, but I will say that it takes a very odd and fairly ridiculous turn. The suspension of disbelief needed to accept anything that happens in this storyline is way too much to accept, even for an over-the-top heist movie like this. The twist is shocking for the sake of being shocking, completely comes out of left field and is just badly conceived and badly written.

Making matters worse is the way the film is shot. It is way too dark and grainy, which I imagine was meant to give it a gritty feel, but ends up just making it hard to see what’s happening in a lot of the scenes. Director Baltasar Kormákur needed to find a better way to give the film the feel he was looking for without making it hard to watch.

Still, Contraband does have a few well-executed moments. The way Farraday ultimately settles things with Briggs is a nicely done moment. Also, the way he is able to smuggle the cash into the country was clever and was set up well earlier in the film. Plus, there is an amusing and unexpected use of a Jackson Pollock painting.

The cast is also fairly solid. Wahlberg is good, though he could probably play this role in his sleep at this point in his career. I’m a big fan of Ben Foster and think he gives a solid performance in this film, he’s just hampered by a dumb storyline. The always entertaining J.K. Simmons is great as Captain Camp, the guy in charge of the ship Farrady smuggles the money aboard. William Lucking also has a nice cameo as Bud Farrady, Chris’ incarcerated father.

There are a handful of good moments in this film and solid performances by some talented actors. With January being a slow month for movies, I really wish I could recommend this film as an amusing, if not very ambitious, heist film. Unfortunately, I think the negatives in this one ultimately outweigh the positives and keep this from being an entertaining film.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

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