Winter’s Tale (2014)

“Winter’s Tale” is brain-killing romantic tripe with late-30s Colin Farrell as a 20-year-old (!!) street crook who falls for a young rich girl played by “Downton Abbey”’s Jessica Brown Findlay, the latter who dies of consumption in 1915. Add in time travel, a flying white horse, Russell Crowe -- awful, just awful -- as a demon with a gang of union thugs, Will Smith -- career worst awful -- as the most awkward hip-hop Satan ever, stars (as in suns, not actors) that are really souls of people, a magical princess bed that cures –- I shit you not -– little girl cancer, and none of that fuck-all mind-blow high-on-crack shit is as unbelievable as a 115-year-old NYC metro paper publisher paling around with a world famous food critic, both employed at newspapers in 2014. Shit. Really. Akavia Goldsman writes and directs, with all the talent of his “Batman and Robin” and “Avengers,” the 1998 Brit version. The ever-growing, Oscar-winning mediocre “Beautiful Mind,” making mental illness into spy game fun, seems his high point. D-

Broken City (2013)

An ex-cop PI with a dirty past gets marooned in a FUBAR infidelity case among city elites that results in murder and corrupted land deals. Forget it, Jake, this isn’t sharp dagger classic “Chinatown.” It’s dull spoon thriller “Broken City” with Mark Wahlberg as the dick working for a NYC mayor (Russell Crowe) who’s up for reelection. Mayor’s demand: “Find my wife’s lover,” but he has more in play. Money. The plot is threadbare. Jake Gittes worked for his info. Suffered. Wahlberg’s hero *finds* the bad guy’s plans printed on giant poster board with bold font at a Dumpster. Good actors have saved worse, right? Not this. Crowe plays the mayor in a cartoon mashup of 1970s’ Lex Luther and Donald Trump, with spray-on can orange skin and a dippy toupee. Wahlberg? Autopilot. Director Albert Hughes smart, too a tone for Wahlberg, too brave for the sorry studio? C

Noah (2014)

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” is mesmerizing, dredging in despair before shining in the power of hope, and yet it’s also -– not shocking, considering the people to please -– bat-crazy frustrating. Aronofsky has long focused on obsessives determined to feed an hunger even if it kills them, be it for love (“Fountain”) or art (“Black Swan”), but here he looks to the top, to God. Noah -- played by Russell Crowe -– goes far beyond sanity, terrorizing his family to -– he thinks –- please God, whom he only communicates with in dreams. You know the story. Ark. Flood. Animals two by two. Bird with twig. It’s here, but Aronofsky adds more. Welcome: Fallen giant angels covered in stone build the arc for Noah. Dumb move: Adding a villainous warlord (Ray Winstone) who stows away for months before he goes all knives and fists. Really? A knife fight is what this story -– told worldwide in many faiths -- needs? Why not scenes of the banality of life in that ship, the claustrophobia? Why add drama to one of the greatest drama stories ever told? That said, there’s no other director I can think of who could tell this story, whether you believe it fact or fantasy. B

The Man with the Iron Fists (2012)

When hip-hop guru RZA (aka Robert Diggs) scored Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” he apparently liked what he saw on set so much he opted to star, write, and direct his own martial arts entry, “The Man with the Iron Fists.” 

Akin to “Bill,” this entry is soaked in 1970s cinema with yellow-splatter-font credits and lots of blood and wonky theatrics to make it all retro. RZA is the titular hero, a runaway U.S. slave in late 1800s China, working as a blacksmith who gets mixed up in a gold theft involving a clan leader (Byron Mann), a whorehouse madam (Lucy Liu), and a Brit knife/gunslinger (Russell Crowe), plus 99 other characters I dare not list. Hence the title, our hero loses his hands but comes back punching. 

RZA is high on an admirable labor-of-love vibe, but “Fists” is fugly and scattershot, with blitzed editing that ruins every fight scene. There’s no majesty or cool factor to the choreographed violence, just chopped-up limbs and blood, and almost all CGI on the latter. 

Worse, as an actor, RZA confuses lifeless with stoic, and that leaves a massive hero hole in a 95-minute film that feels kitchen-sink garbled and amateurish. D+

Les Miserables (2012)

The big-screen adaptation of the tragedy/musical “Les Miserables” is everything every N.Y. film critic has said: Bombastic, sentimental, and manipulative; it tosses out tragedies like candy at a parade and has a story arc that could rival the Bible, but -- so what? Have they read Victor Hugo’s novel? The contrivances that drive its plot are halved here, and still may produce viewer whiplash. Hugh Jackman plays the Job-like French peasant Jean Valjean who finds faith and wealth after serving a grueling 19-year prison sentence for stealing bread, and sees raising the child of a doomed street woman named Fantine (Anne Hathaway) as his God-ordered duty. Meanwhile, he dodges an obsessive police inspector (Russell Crowe) hell-bent on law and order. Directed by Tom Hooper (“King’s Speech”), “Mes” proudly defies cynicism, and my cynical-self fell for it, especially the actors who sing on and to the camera with none of the lip-syncing shit that makes most musicals a chore. Crowe may be a blank, but Hathaway gives a performance that left me rattled. Jackman, too. Yes, it oozes excess at every turn, but Hugo would happily hum along. I did. B+

Romper Stomper (1993)

“Romper Stomper” put Russell Crowe on the world stage. He plays Hando, a fireball of unending menace, a neo-Nazi skinhead with a devastating temper and raw sexual power. He is the leader of a ragtag pack of Melbourne racists -- all jobless, essentially homeless, stealing all that they own, and coming and going in a beat-up old clunker car, packed in like sardines. They blast hate music celebrating the glory of their white European heritage all the while. It’s a dark, uneasy satire: These thugs are not even self-aware. (Hando is fully in the know, he just doesn’t care.) Director/writer Geoffrey Wright doesn’t get all preachy on us, he doesn’t have to. Hando’s best mate is Davey (Daniel Pollock), a young man tiring of his thug life, and the arrival of a fiery, lost red head (Jacqueline McKenzie) is just the right push for the men to break apart. This is a violent and unflinching drama that loses its punch only once -- a scene where a young boy is shot. (The scene is handled badly, and feels overly faked.) Crowe, eyes ablaze, cuts through every other actor and set piece like a molten sword of hate. A

Robin Hood (2010)

Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” is a serious, boldly filmed drama, historically accurate as far as any film with the words “Robin” and “Hood” in the title can be, which isn’t much, and stocked with some of the finest modern actors to grace recent cinema. Russell Crowe is our bow-and-arrow titular hero, and Cate Blanchett is Maid Marian, with Danny Houston as King Richard. The film is gorgeous, bursting with detail, and must have cost a fortune. It’s also an utter fucking bore.

Painfully plotted and paced, this “Robin Hood” sucks every ounce of adventure, fun and daring out of the classic tale that pretty much created the whole idea of adventurous, fun and daring tales. This is no story of Sherwood Forrest or Merry Men, or of robbing the rich to feed the poor. No. This is a bloody war film about the evil Crusades and colonialism, fanatical religion gone nuts, and what made Robin Hood into Robin Hood, and a war-burdened superpower levying sinfully high taxes against its own people to pay the bill of sword and horse. Yeah, U.S. Bush-era politics! I can’t get enough of that. And this is a summer major box office film, too.

Crowe doesn’t resemble a starved, war-haunted rebel in the making. Dude looks glum and pissy, and a bit beefy. His Robin hit a lot of bars while killing Muslims, although he’s sure sorry for it. The killing. Not the drinking. Blanchett is at least having fun poking fingers at past Marians who became damsels in distress, yelling for “Robin!!” to save their victim ass. Wait, sorry, Robin again has to save Marian's victim ass, and during a slow-motion battle that copies “Saving Private Ryan” down to the soldiers drowning on a blood-soaked beach. Violent for a PG-13.

When did Ridley Scott become a dull film artist? Where is the guy who made “Alien” and “Blade Runner” and “Gladiator” -- films I could watch endlessly? The action here has been splintered to smithereens, and this whole ultra-serious moodiness and mud and blood, this religious devotion to detail and making 1199 look like hell on earth … it made me wonder what Michael Bay could do with a faster, louder, livelier, more vulgar screenplay. I can’t believe I just wrote that. (See, or don’t, Scott’s equally dull “Body of Lies.”)

It’s sad when I can say Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood” is a better adaptation, but it is true. That Robin at least had a personality. Even if the ha-ha British accent in that 1991 summer flick was shit. Crowe's sourpuss is as flat as the perfectly decorated sword he welds, ceaselessly without end. His hunger from “Gladiator” is not here. Alan Rickman’s hilariously evil Sheriff of Nottingham could wipe the floor with the half-dozen villains employed in this footless reboot, especially Matthew Macfadyen’s snooze-vile Sheriff. Mark Strong is the lead villain, and William Hurt appears, but I can’t recall who he played. There’s just so little to remember anything.

Seek out Warner Bros. classic “The Adventures of Robin Hood” from 1938 –- you know the one, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Technicolor, green tights, and more fun than any movie made then or since. This new “Robin Hood” -– which ends with a shout out for a sequel -– should be outlawed. Attempted murder of a legend. D+

Body of Lies (2008)

“Body of Lies” is a horrible title. But it sure beats “Generic, Unconvincing Middle Easy Spy Movie.” The name it deserves.

Ridley Scott’s thriller starts off with a bang – a busted group of Islamic Jihadists blow themselves up inside a block of English row houses without so much as a shrug. The scene shocks. Then we jump to hot, dangerous Iraq where super CIA spy Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is digging and running to nail a second cell of Jihadists. The mission goes to hell, and Roger is wounded. That’s the first half hour. I liked it.

Then the show falls apart. Roger is sent to Jordan by his boss (Russell Crowe) to bust another cell. The job goes to shit and injured again, Roger starts digging on a local nurse. Because that’s what white-as-rice American spies do in the hostile Middle East, date Muslim women in public and play grab hands, as to not get noticed. Everyone notices. Dogs even perk their ears. DiCaprio, sporting a beard that looks like arm pit hair, can’t push this slop to credibility. He’s too eager to please, and why is a war-scarred spy all gaga over a woman? And why does she believe his flimsy cover story? Because the script demands that the hero be compromised. No other reason.

Roger isn’t even actually a character, a person to root for. He’s an ideal – the young, pragmatic, justice-seeking American who wants to vanquish evil, but with utmost care for the innocent. Crowe also plays a symbol – the fat, pretentions, know-it-all American who doesn’t care if he’s right or wrong, and can’t tell the difference because he’s busy driving the minivan. Crowe is good, but his character is white noise. Debates about war far flat: Good guys want the war to end, but the bad guys don’t. Deep.

Scott’s best playing card is the might of tech-savvy U.S. surveillance, and the way terrorists stay out of sight by staying off the grid, all hand-written messages, bicycles and 1,000-B.C. hideouts. This is perfect entertainment for 2000. An unlikely dud from Scott. Bag this “Body.” C

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind” is another good, but not great, film that somehow landed a bookcase full of Academy Awards. I can see it: It’s a harsh, but feel-good movie about a genius math professor (Russell Crowe) married to a stunning beauty (Jennifer Connelly), but thrown under the train of life by a horrific disease (Schizophrenia). Fictionalizing the complicated, not-romantic biography, “Mind” follows socially inept John Nash, the guy under the train who becomes lost to paranoia, visions and delusions of grandeur – that he, Nash, is a top secret Cold War spy. The cast is perfect, especially Crowe, who preens with striking intelligence in one scene and drowns in utter confusion and despondency during the next. Yet, the screenplay (by Akiva Goldsman) gets lost in sentimentality (a climatic speech, a heart-to-heart talk with open palms). As well, it drags out the delusion scenes long past credibility, and makes them too literal. Yet, it’s rarely dull, always looking deep into the eyes of its actors. It’s not high art. It was made as Oscar bait and succeeded. B

State of Play (2009)

"State of Play" may be the last of its genre: The newsroom thriller. As recent headlines tell us, the days of the nose-to-the-gravel newsroom reporter and morning ink on fingers are gone. Replaced by gossips who'd rather dish opinion than fact. The reporter here is Cal (Russell Crowe), a fat, long-haired slob who is covering a double murder in D.C. Meanwhile, his best pal (Ben Affleck) from college is in trouble on Capitol Hill -- he's in Congress and in a pickle after his lover/assistant dies mysteriously. Cal soon finds himself covering the story and trying to protect his friend, and not just out of loyalty. He's banging the man's wife. This ain't Bernstein or Woodward. Amid a sea of nifty plot twists and double crosses, "Play" debates the demise of hard-hitting journalism as it falls under the steamroller that is the Internet. But it gets a lot of things wrong -- from reporters playing CIA to the lack of technology such as smart phones and digital recorders. The climax settles on Cal getting the full story out in print, with no need to break it online. Fast. Is this film set in 1996? B

American Gangster (2007)

"American Gangster," the second film to pit Denzel Washington against Russell Crowe, improves with each viewing, although this crime drama never reaches the pinnacle level of "The French Connection" or even "Heat."

In the utterly bad 1995 thriller "Virtuosity," Crowe played a villain against Washington's unorthodox cop hero. Here, Crowe is unorthodox cop Richie Roberts, a Boy Scout on the job but a miserable louse at home, tasked with bringing down Harlem crime lord Frank Lucas (Washington). My first viewing left me under-whelmed as I expected and wanted a gritty, clockwork crime thriller. But this film, directed by Ridley Scott ("Gladiator") and written by Steven Zailian ("Schindler's List"), is more interested in the character and inner-workings of these opposing forces, not just the crime beat.

Crowe once more disappears into a role as the tough but fair police officer so honest he once turned in $1 million after a bust. He's also a bit of nerd, fumbling into a sweaty heap at the thought of speaking before an audience. Ironically, Lucas is a family man who remains loyal to his mother (Ruby Dee) and wife (Lymari Nadal). You marvel at the great heights Lucas could have reached had he been on the right side of the law. But in late 60s/early 70s, such hands were not dealt to American blacks.

I didn't like Washington's performance the first time I saw this, but was instantly won over this time. What I took for lazy arrogance in Washington's acting has turned into admiration for a fine performance of a man completely at ease with murder, selling of drugs and going to church on Sunday. Lucas' eyes, though, open as an army of corrupt NYC cops lays waste to his mansion, looking for money, and his momma slaps him in the face for the vengeance he'll seek. It's telling of Dee's power as an actress in her 80s that she can take a film from the hands of Washington and Crowe, but she does so.

Scott, as with Michael Mann, here becomes a master of detail, and his dramatization of the inner-workings of police and criminals is fascinating although the film wastes too much time on family court sideshows and making Lucas' family out to be Southern hillbillies gawking at big ol' New York. Best shocker: Cuba Gooding Jr. finally lands a meaty part in a highbrow film after years of miserable features so bad they now line the discount DVD bins at Wal-Mart. Let's hope he keeps up this path. A-