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ReviewsPreviews: XXX: State of the Union
The United States faces a brand new threat in XXX: State of the Union, one which could prove to be the deadliest yet. August Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), a senior member of the National Security Agency, discovers that the Secretary of Defence, George Deckert (Willem Dafoe) has been training a secret military faction to overthrow the US government by kidnapping and assassinating the President (Peter Strauss).
Unable to find agents capable of countering this threat, Gibbons turns to Darius Stone (Ice Cube) an ex-army lieutenant currently serving time for failure to comply with orders from a senior officer, and assault. Having worked with Stone before, Gibbons is convinced that he is the man who can tackle Deckert and his men. On the run from the law, Stone must now find Deckert and prove his involvement in the conspiracy before he runs out of time.
The fact that the main attraction from the first movie (XXX) Vin Diesel is a no-show certainly proves to be fatal for a movie already suffering from an average story-line and mediocre performances by the main cast, notwithstanding the role played by Ice Cube. The rapper-cum-action hero proves to be the one redeeming feature of this otherwise average movie. Overall, Lee Tamahori’s latest production fails to live up to the hype surrounding its release. A six out of ten at best.—Amyn Bhamani
Be Cool
Be Cool, the sequel to Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1995 hit Get Shorty, is anything but cool. Directed by F. Gary Gray (the new Italian Job), the flick suffers from a severe bout of directional drift, although both movies are adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novels.
The film takes off from where the predecessor concluded with Chili Palmer — the loan shark debt collector — making it big in Hollywood as a producer. Now fed up with the movie business, he decides to call the shots in the music industry when he stumbles upon a struggling young singer.
John Travolta returns as Chili along with Danny DeVito, who could have raised the movie to a decent level if his role not been shrunk to a cameo. Travolta just goes through the movie with a glazed look in his eyes and a quirky expression plastered over his face trying to ooze coolness but getting nowhere.
Then there’s the plethora of stars including Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Cedric the Entertainer, Andre Benjamin (AKA Andre 3000 from OutKast) and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith to name a few. James Woods puts in a comic cameo as well in the opening scene, but nowhere as good as the one he pulled off in Scary Movie 2. But Dwayne Johnson, better known as the Rock, is a real scene-stealer with his severe doses of self-mockery. He plays a gay bodyguard to the dolt manager played by Vince Vaughn who’s able to deliver a few zany zingers.
In fact almost everyone is able to do justice to their parts at some point, but it’s the lack of cohesion and relevancy that just doesn’t help the movie’s cause.—Saqib Khan
Unleashed
Danny is a dog. Well … not literally. You see Jet Li in Unleashed, whose weary eyed infantile looks help mandate a familiar slugfest story, where a child is yanked in his formative years to be trained into a rabid martial artist, tamed only by a collar, is a compound of both the good and the bad. The good, being the performance of both Li and Bob Hoskins. The bad being the implausible simplicity of the script.
Danny (Li) is nurtured in captivity in a caged basement by Bart (Hoskins), a gangster from Glasgow, who routinely takes him out to hammer his opponents in illegal slugfests. Danny, like a docile animal, wilfully sits in the backseat of the car.
He is salvaged to normalcy when a fateful assassination attempt on Bart leads him to Morgan Freeman, a blind piano player. Incidentally the piano holds an affecting bond to the boy as his mother, herself a piano player, was bumped off by Bart.
Freeman’s character resides in a peaceful seclusion of his music, while his teenaged step-daughter is a picture of a typical British teenager, complete with short bobbed hair and braces which come off somewhere in the second half. What is hard to judge here is the thin line between logic and absurdity. For example, just how a character like Freeman enters the script requires some thought. And the way another accident in the film’s latter half returns Danny back to his somewhat estranged family is explained away as déjà vu.
Written and produced by French film-maker Luc Besson, better known for The Fifth Element, his proverbial character developments aren’t given much space to impact the viewer. Mostly this is because no one has the right to be an assessor for a de-saturated cinema-lift dubbed in Mandarin or Cantonese.—Mohammad Kamran Jawaid
1. Batman Begins
2. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
3. Madagascar
4. Star Wars: Episode III
5. The Longest Yard
6. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D
7. The Perfect Man
8. Cinderella Man
9. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
10. The Honeymooners
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