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“Non-Stop” is not a
comedy. I laughed my ass off. Not a good sign for a thriller that stars Liam
Neeson in Angry Action Figure Mode and plays on 9/11 fears of hijackings and
police state surveillance. Neeson is Bill Marks, suicidal fuck-up air cop with a
booze problem and a tragic life who should never hold a gun, much less be issued
one by Uncle Sam for work at 30,000 feet. But here Bill is anyway, sweating
buckets as he texts back and forth with a psycho who threatens to down the plane
unless $1.5M is delivered to a Swiss bank account. One in Bill’s name. Cue
drama! Cue the scenes where Neeson’s hero types. And types. And types. And
calls his boss. Bill also kills a man, beats random passengers, screams, and waves
and fires his gun like a madman. Why? This is “Taken” in the air. A cell phone
and a gun, if those are in a script does Neeson just sign on? As stewardesses,
Michelle Dockery of “Downton Abbey” and Lupito Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave” do
just about nothing. I’d watch a movie with them as the heroes. C-
“After Earth” must be
mocked. How else to react to a sci-fi survivalist tale from once-great director/writer M.
Night Shyamalan that is set on a desolated/abandoned future Earth, but one that
looks like a commercial for a tropical adventure? (Cities? There are none.) This is absolute unintended comedy, a wonder of miscalculation.
Despite MNS’s name, Will Smith is the man in charge as producer and story
creator, and it isn’t even his vehicle. The star is Smith’s teenage son Jaden, who
had better luck and better support in pop’s “Pursuit of Happyness” and the recent
“Karate Kid” remake. The syrupy story has a “Great Santini” father (Will) and
his green horn son (Jaden) all angry dinner scowls and then later crashing
their space shuttle on said Earth. Naturally, the duo must bond as son serves
as the “avatar” hero of his father, whose legs are shattered. Also in the shuttle
and now loose on Earth because no space cliché can go untouched: A slimy monster that eats people. I can take hodge-podge films that wink at their theft,
but “Earth” is blindly, awkwardly convinced of its own “inspirational” Hallmark gruel. It's just gruel. Younger Smith looks miserable. C-
“Time
Lock” is the kind of awful where you laugh not at what’s on screen –- OK, I did
a bit of that -– but at yourself for foolishly waiting for something good to
occur, a hint of brains from the folks in the credits. No doing.
First: There
is no time lock in “Time Lock.” Rather, we’re in the “‘Die Hard’ on a …” genre,
where the unlikely hero (comedian Arye Gross) is a computer hacker sent to a
space asteroid prison that’s taken over by a ninja-type (Jeffrey Meek) out to free
his criminal mentor (Jeff Speakman). Robert Munic directs with a sledgehammer,
every scene garishly louder than it needs to be, and every actor off his leash
to just go nuts and make it look good because no one wants to waste film. Gross
cracks jokes, flails arms, and does tricks. Magic, I mean. Not sex acts.
A WTF scene: Our hero sets ninja guy on fire -- fully engulfed -–
and in the next scene the dude has not a hair out of place. I thought
of “Highlander.” Even for 1990s low-brow sci-fi fluff, “Time
Lock” is a time killer. D
There’s
gotta be a porn film with this title, “Red Lights.” But this isn’t that kind of
film. We’re talking psychics here, supernatural, reality, and con jobs. Sigourney
Weaver plays a brilliant but (naturally) under-funded university researcher of
the paranormal who has spent her career unmasking psychics as frauds. Her assistant
researcher and driver is a brilliant geek named Tom (Cillian Murphy, taking a
break from “Batman” movies). The duo gets antsy when a blind psychic (Robert De
Niro) turns up after a 30-year absence, ready to go public again. When Weaver’s
character suddenly dies, Tom goes off the deep end of obsession to crush De
Niro’s charmer. Writer/director Rodrigo Cortes (“Buried”) spins a creepy and interesting
tale for a while, but as the thriller lurches on, it becomes a comedy soup. Tom
getting into a shoving match with another professor (Toby Jones) had me
giggling hard. I fell for red herrings I created entirely in my own mind. Score
for Cortes. The final scenes, though, are so bug-fuck crazy stupid (I won’t
spoil) that I tuned out, again laughing myself silly. I wonder if Cortes saw that
coming? C+
Conan
the Barbarian has it rough in “Conan the Barbarian,” the new remake of the 1982 blockbuster. Toward the end of this sword-and-sandals tale, Conan sneaks into a
castle, crawls through rancid water, and fights several large goons and a giant
octopus thingy. All to rescue a Damsel In Distress. When Conan finally arrives
at the castle’s keep, he realizes the bad guys have left with the DID. Oops. Poor guy never has it easy: The first
scene has Conan as a fetus (!) dodging a sword. Really. This is fodder for
hilarious, self-aware kitsch a la “Flash Gordon,” but it’s just loud and dumb, with
a murky climax that must have been unwatchable in 3D. TV actor Jason Momoa takes
over the lead from Arnold Schwarzenegger, a harsh task, and he can’t sell lines
like, “I live, I love, I slay, and I am content.” Maybe no one outside of Monty Python could spin that junk. Rose McGowan plays a witch, maybe bonking evil daddy,
and well knows she’s in an unintended satire. No one else does. Morgan Freeman narrates for no clear reason. Hope he got paid well. C-
