Cinemas - starting this week - 26/9/08

Sep 26 2008 by Michael Green, Chester Chronicle

It was never likely to happen that a picture which finally got the chance to team up 70s icons Robert De Niro and Al Pacino for an entire movie was going to live up to the weight of expectation.

Maybe if Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann (who put them on screen together for the first time – but only for about six minutes – in Heat) or perhaps Quentin Tarantino was at the helm, the impossible could have been achieved.

But the director here is journeyman Jon Avnet who has the likes of Fried Green Tomatoes and Red Corner in his back catalogue which hardly qualifies him to referee the Hollywood heavyweight acting contest of the decade.

Strangely enough, though, the biggest disappointment is the script provided by Russell Gewirtz who did such fantastic work on Spike Lee’s Inside Man which managed the Heat trick of taking two fine actors – Denzel Washington and Clive Owen – and building a memorable relationship between them without getting them to share screen time.

Here, though, Gewirtz provides a by the numbers plot about a serial killer who is murdering scumbags, with a trail that leads back to the police department itself – surprise, surprise.

Actually, there are no surprises whatsoever, no tension either, not even when the ‘shocking’ twist is revealed about an hour after everyone had figured it out anyway.

The best you can say is that, even when working with sub-standard material, watching these two Tinseltown icons working their own magic alongside one another is special indeed.

And while there is a sense of disappointment they they could not engineer a project together that was more worthy of their talents, one must not overlook the fact that collectively, they have turned up and taken the cheques for the likes of Analyze This and Gigli so they hardly have spotless records.

STAR RATING: **

TAKEN (15) (All major cinemas)

LIAM Neeson combines the action hero skills of Bruce Willis with the everyman qualities of Harrison Ford in this rip-roaring thriller set in the streets of Paris with a tantalising premise.

Neeson plays a former CIA agent who has retired to spend more time doting on his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace). But his deadly skills have to be revived when she is abducted by sex slave traffickers and he only has 98 hours to track her down before she disappears into the sleazy system for good.

The methods he employs are far from pretty and this turns out to be a picture that uses torture in almost as gratuitous a way as the Hostel or Saw movies which may alienate some elements of the audience drawn to the film by its cast and story.

STAR RATING: **

DEATH RACE (15) (All major cinemas)

IT MAY have Roger Corman as a producer and have borrowed part of the title, but this is a lame, safe, neutered version of the classic 70s exploitation movie Death Race 2000.

That film had the witty if callous premise of a cross country race where outrageous cars with drivers to match scored maximum points by killing people in wheelchairs, OAPs and kids.

That whole notion is removed here in favour of something more akin to The Running Man as Jason Statham’s wrongly convicted killer is forced to take part in a prison race which is screened on pay-per-view Internet.

It’s fast, it’s violent and it’s brain dead while the most shocking sight of all is the presence of an actress of the stature of Joan Allen as the icy, foul-mouthed prison warden.

STAR RATING: **

APPALOOSA (15) (All major cinemas)

ED HARRIS directs this minor gem of a Western in which he and Viggo Mortenson (reteamed after A History of Violence) play two lawmen for hire who specialise in heading for lawless towns, cleaning them up and moving on.

Their latest project is a place terrorised by Jeremy Irons’ callous git of a rancher but our two heroes end up fighting each other when Renee Zellweger’s distracting widow arrives in town.

STAR RATING: ***