Reviews

Total groaner.

As noted in subject line, full of empty, easy characters. Dialogue was rarely better than stilted, and often not even that. Acting was mostly atrocious. A wan, sickly, etiolated cousin of Unforgiven, which was a fantastic, fantastic, fantastic movie, and which, I don't know, Eastwood must have wanted to remake with some kind of Catholic and/or redemptive (ethnically speaking) theme. (Is this what happens when you get old? You start to wrap things up and think about redemptive things? God, Clint, just write a memoir.)

Eesh; stay away if you care about Clint Eastwood's legacy.

Not gonna get too much into it, will just say that it was pretty good, though with a little work to the script (dialogue, yes, but also how it evoked Crockett's and Tubbs's lives and identities outside of their lives/identities undercover), it could have neared excellent.

Visually, it was beautiful, though this should come as no surprise given who directed it. I was also satisfied stylistically; an updated remake, yes, but for the most part it held true (to the original series) in terms of pattern and theme (i.e., cars, boats, guns, clothes, clubs).

The acting was, given the limitations of a script that didn't really demand all too much of players, pretty good.

The script was, as I wrote above, adequate, but not something I would lavish with any significant praise. There were two scenes where the dialogue ventured well into the territory of trite, but only two scenes, and, more problematically, I wanted to be made more aware of the lines that were being blurred (by their going deep, deep undercover).

On the whole, though, this was good entertainment. The music was good, the action sequences were well-wrought, the tension was kept in-line with a narrative arc that did basically had no missteps. And like I said, it's a beautiful movie.

The movie is basically a 6, maybe even a 5, but the acting really helps. Don Cheadle does a striking job, but of course we don't expect much less from him at this point. Also measuring up to expectations were Matt Dillon, Keith David and Tony Danza, though his part was small. Surprisingly good were Michael Pena, Ryan Philippe, and Ludicrous, who, looking back on all of this, might even be the sleeper of the cast.

Unfortunately, outside of the acting this was just an obvious, unimaginative, clunky movie. It's late, I don't really feel like getting into it, so I'll let it suffice to say that if you're the kind of person who likes ambiguous fiction, if you prefer art that asks you questions, leaves you with frayed and stringy ends for you to decide what to do with, then this movie is not for you. It gives you all the answers loud and clear, sometimes in the form of a cell phone ringer and the text that accompanies it.

But like I said, the acting is pretty great at times. Certainly it's worth a video rental just to see Cheadle, and if you combine Ludicrous and Matt Dillon, you might even find it worthwhile to see a matinée.

this movie was horrible. Or *is* horrible, I should say, as I'm sure it is still playing at a theatre near you.

Basically--and yes I need a new paragraph for this--I simply can't stand it when a movie is not a movie, but instead a stock car race of plot vehicles vrooming around a track, racing to get to the great, meaningful, dramatic, thematic finish. To wit: the mother of the poetess, whom we see only rarely in the first thirty-five minutes, comes off as a mostly absent entity whose only purpose is to arrive home waaay late every night and give our long-suffering hero a hard time for not taking proper care of her little sister (read: yet another obstacle for our poet hero to overcome on her way to heartfelt expository writing). Vroom. And as for that little sister, let me tell you what *she* does: she looks forlorn, cuts herself, starves herself, looks forlorn and hungry, acts like an angel on the altar in the middle of church, passes out during said performance, dot dot dot, and finally jumps out her psych ward window to her death (and if you think I'm being callous then that's because you didn't see the film's eleven second treatment of her death). Vroom, as we race on towards the making of a real teen poet.

And then the teacher.... Okay, at one point he puts a gold star on her forehead. Which is all I'll say, except for: vroom goes the confusing adult world car.

And the poetry? And the excerpts from the brave teacher's leather bound novel? Hai ram--if you appreciate literature or poetry, if you have any respect for the craft of writing, then you will most likely wince at the trickling treacle that is served to us as (presumably) exemplary writing.

Is it too much to ask for real characters? Too much to ask for characters that do more than emotively mope, but tell us *why* they are so sullen? Is it really so bothersome to spend the extra fifty hours writing good dialogue, to actually reach down within yourself--as this movie, by the way, pedantically tells us to do--to come up with real feelings and real people and not just their sit-com approximations? Because please, all I'm asking for are two true hours, a darkened interstice of theatrical time when I don't for once have to slap my knee with a rolled up paper, clap my palm to my forehead in an exclamatory wince because I've just been suckered again.