Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: American Hustle

 Somehow over the course of a month the Cap'n went from being in the majority to the minority with respect to American Hustle. At the time American Hustle was released, the critical consensus was high on the film, audiences were looking forward to seeing it, and things looked good for David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings)'s follow-up to Silver Linings Playbook. I saw it, really enjoyed it, and wanted to spread that enthusiasm, only to discover that friends of mine who I thought would also dig the movie... didn't. And then the internet backlash started.

 Now American Hustle is, from what I've been reading an watching, a mess; it's a case of actors doing whatever they want with no clear direction to corral them and a director who clearly doesn't care about the story being told and it's just meh. Totally overrated. Now, if it was just the internet, I could understand that, because if there's something you like, spend five minutes online and you'll find hundreds of people vociferously arguing why it's the "worst thing ever" in forums and comments or on blogs (like this one - I bet someone out there who loves Lockout can't understand why I thought it was the worst movie of 2012). The internet is a place where everybody gets a voice whether anyone wants to hear it or not (Blogorum - case in point), so that's fine, they hate American Hustle.

 My friends were a bit more puzzling, and it wasn't so much that they hated it, but that they were underwhelmed. Maybe it was expectations for a new David O. Russell film, which usually sets the bar pretty high, or for the cast (which is impressive), but it didn't do it for them. I understand that, because I felt like Silver Linings Playbook was a thoroughly average movie that was nice to watch and amusing but in no way deserving of all the attention it got during Awards Season. In fact, I'd mostly forgotten about Silver Linings Playbook until after I watched American Hustle.

 So American Hustle still makes the cut in the "Best Of" because while I was watching the film I enjoyed it tremendously, but it's an outlier. It's on the edges, although not because of anything in the first three paragraphs. No, American Hustle gets bumped a bit because of the director and type of movie Russell is paying homage to, and only because the director in question also made a movie this year and it's that much better. Still, I'm going to stick up for American Hustle, because I disagree with much of the criticism thrown its way, and I think the internet is willingly overlooking what a clever, amusing ride the film is.

 Unlike The Butler or Dallas Buyers Club or Saving Mr. Banks, American Hustle doesn't mess around with the "Inspired By a True Story" schtick we've been seeing a lot of in 2013. It is based on real events, although not strictly speaking, and the title card at the beginning makes it clear that some of the movie really happened. Not all of it, but mostly the catching a politician in a sting operation in New Jersey part. Although it would have been pretty cool if the person who caught him had the terrible comb-over / wig combo that Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is rocking.

 American Hustle opens with a long, dialogue-free section while Rosenfeld is putting on his wig and adjusting his hair to make it look real, which it doesn't. It never looks real, and while it's kind of pathetic, it's a visual indicator of the underlying theme of American Hustle: everybody is lying. Coming into the film, I was taking the "hustle" part seriously, and rightfully assuming it meant that the film was a "con artist" movie, so I'm watching it for the con. Everybody in this movie is lying (well, almost everybody, and I'll get to the exceptions shortly) and the fun, for me, was figuring out the angle: who was lying to who about what and when.

 Rosenfeld is preparing for a sting with Lady Edith Greensly (Amy Adams) and Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), and thanks to some undercover cameras, we know it's 1978. They're already bickering and Irving doesn't trust Richie and somebody's hairpiece gets messed up. I'll let you figure out who that might be. In Goodfellas fashion, we then jump back to Irving's life as a child, helping his father improve business as a window repairman by throwing rocks in strategic directions, if you catch my drift. Irving meets Edith, who isn't actually Lady Edith Greensly, or even British, but in fact is Sydney Prosser, a former burlesque dancer who moved to New York and got a clerical job at Cosmopolitan, but that's not really her calling either. Sydney and Irving bond over Duke Ellington at a party and he gives her free clothes from the laundromat he owns. Also, Irving suggests she joins him in scamming people out of money with fake loans, but Sydney leaves. Irving thinks he screwed up, but she comes back in with a British accent and introduces herself as Lady Edith. Con artists in love.

 So how does Richie fit into this? Well, he's an FBI agent that busts London Associates during one of their loan scams and decides to cut them both a deal: help him bust four bigger fish in the pond and he'll let them go. Richie immediately has eyes for who he thinks is Lady Edith, despite the fact that he has a fiance who lives with him at his mother's house. Also, he wears curlers at night to give him a perm, of sorts. Oh, did I mention that Irving is already married? Yep, he has a wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) and has adopted her son Danny (Danny and Sonny Corbo), and Sydney knows about this but doesn't really care. Rosalyn knows, and probably cares, but is also kind of crazy and hates it when people tell her what to do. She's a liability, as we'll see later in the film, but Irving loves Danny and doesn't want to lose him, so he sticks with her.

 So, I mentioned earlier that there are three genuine characters in American Hustle, and one of them is DiMaso's first target: Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner). Instead of being a corrupt politician willing to take a crooked deal from a Hispanic FBI Agent posing as an Arab Sheik (Michael Peña), Polito genuinely believes that this investment in Atlantic City casinos will help bring jobs back to the community. And the community already loves him. Moreover, in a moment that confuses Irving, Carmine becomes friends with Rosenfeld, takes him out to dinner with his wife, and gives him a microwave, not as some kickback but as a sincere gift for helping him help the community. Irving thinks it's an angle, but it's not, and the scene is rather touching, because in a world of con men, Rosenfeld never had a real friend.

 The other genuine characters are DiMaso's supervisor, Stoddard Thorsen (Louis C.K.), who is stuck between Richie asking for ridiculous things like two million dollars, the entire floor of a hotel, and a jet, and his boss Anthony Amado (Alessandro Nivola), a middle of the chain guy who wants to make a name for himself. Thorsen is just trying to do right by the agency and is repeatedly punished for it, while Richie tries to guess the moral of an ice fishing story that Stoddard never finished telling. The last character, I'll leave as a surprise, but it involves the mob and was really nice to see this actor as imposing again. It's been a long time and gives me hope that we might see more of it in the future.

 Things naturally spiral out of control because Richie overestimates his ability to con people, to Irving's annoyance, but Lady Edith is also working him over (or is she working over Rosenfeld?). Meanwhile, Rosalyn can't be bothered to follow the instructions not to put metal into the "science oven" and sets something else in the house on fire. It gets messier when Carmine insists that Irving bring Rosalyn, and not Edith, to dinner and then to a party with members of the mob in attendance, and before you know it everybody is in way over their heads.

 I think I can understand the "actors gone wild" position, even if I don't agree with it. The story isn't meant to be taken on its own terms, because movies about con artists are their own particular beast. Yes, everybody has crazy hair and Amy Adams is using a British accent and only Jeremy Renner and Louis C.K. seem the least bit reserved, but that's because they're playing roles. The three main characters in American Hustle are constantly shifting because they need to convince someone to trust them, so yes there's inconsistency in the performances. I don't think that's simply a case of David O. Russell letting the actors improvise and never reigning them in. Maybe the gaudy 70s clothes and disco music are also helping this argument persist? I'm not sure, but at any rate, I see the performances as part and parcel of the story, not existing in place of one.

 On the other side, while I enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence's train wreck that is Rosalyn Rosenfeld, she's much too young to be playing that character. It's never more evident than in scenes with Bale and Lawrence together, where he seems to be the right age and she seems even younger than she's playing. On the other hand, the microwave scene is pretty funny. Renner and Louis C.K. underplaying actually helps as a counterbalance to the outlandish Bale and Cooper, and Amy Adams is a force to be reckoned with in this movie. Even as people complain about American Hustle being overrated, the exception is always Adams' performance, with good reason. She's electric in every scene in the movie, and when Sydney comes clean to Richie that Edith doesn't exist, it's a powerful scene for both actors.

 Does the Goodfellas / Casino multiple-narration, doubling backwards and forwards on itself help American Hustle? Well, David O. Russell's take on a Martin Scorsese movie definitely isn't going to compare well to an actual Martin Scorsese movie (as we'll see in a little while), but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and taken on its own, American Hustle uses the structure well. I think it's probably right that it shouldn't get the kind of Awards Season attention that it's getting already, but considering the backlash directed at Jordan Belfort and The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle might be seen as a "safer" alternative for voters. I don't know. I enjoyed every moment of American Hustle while I was watching it, and in retrospect it's maybe slipped down the list a few tics, but that's only because I saw a few movies that I liked more. And we'll be getting to those very soon. Stay tuned.

Blogorium Review: The Avengers

 When I think of "Summer Blockbuster" movies, I tend to think of the 1999 remake of The Mummy. It's a big, loud, dumb, action packed movie with plenty of special effects and wafer thin characters. When I say "big," I mean the scale of just about everything: the fight scenes, the chases, even the jokes are elevated to a massive level. Rachel Weisz is introduced as he character knocks down every shelf in a library. It has a little something for everybody, including something for the horror fans: it's hard to argue that the scarabs who tunnel under your skin and eat your heart or the pre-Arnold Vosloo Imhotep are there for the kiddos or the romantics who came to see Fraser and Weisz trade barbs before falling in love. It's an entertaining, if inconsequential, film that does exactly what it sets out to do, throws in some (for then) state-of-the-art special effects, and sends audiences home happy.

 The Mummy is what I assume people mean when they say "it's not supposed to be Hamlet - it's just a movie!" Of course, I haven't seen the Transformers film*, which is where this argument comes up with every successive sequel. It's what I gather I'll be hearing from people who go to see Battleship, this year's Transformers surrogate. That's fine, I guess. Gone are the days when "summer" movies meant movies like Batman Returns or Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark were the norm, when John and Jane Q. Public would go to movies that didn't need to be as close to "lowest common denominator" studio concocted and market tested product as humanly possible. Where movies like The Dark Knight or Inception aren't a rarity. Okay, so Mission: Impossible: III and Star Trek and even Iron Man also qualify. Let's not be so myopic here, but my point is that playing it safe pays off and doing something a little risky (and Batman Returns or Alien 3's relative failure may have fed into this) was something you wouldn't need to wait a few years between.

 Which brings us to The Avengers, the culmination of Marvel Studios' four year project to make a film for Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and The Incredible Hulk (Eric Bana, no wait, Edward Norton... no, wait...) before bringing them together with Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) under the leadership of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to save the world. In The Avengers, the threat is Loki (Tom Hiddleston), introduced as "Loki! The brother of Thor!" by Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), in case you missed Thor last summer. That would, by the way, probably be a bad idea, but don't worry, Marvel isn't going to leave you in the dark at the beginning of the movie. That might make you leave.

 So I don't want anybody thinking that I didn't enjoy The Avengers. I did. I enjoyed it a LOT more than The Mummy, which is an unfair comparison but helps frame how I feel about how The Avengers functions as entertainment and the reaction to the film. I've seen it twice now, and I liked it more the second time than the first. It's a film that plays like gangbusters with an audience, so I totally understand why people are throwing around words like "amazing" while other reviewers are reacting in comparably hyperbolic ways to bring them back to Earth.

 The first time I saw The Avengers, I was caught off guard by just how "Whedon-esque" The Avengers is. I don't want to repeat too much of what I said last week, which covers what most of audiences know of Joss Whedon versus what his die hard fans have come to expect, but even I wasn't expecting The Avengers to be as "quippy" as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Serenity. Almost every character has a moment where they make a clever, scathing comment that undercuts tension or action or a speech made by someone else. Most of them have several, and I'm not just talking about Downey's perpetually snarky Tony Stark, who has a nickname for every member of the team. Even the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) gets a line in that is, apparently, often drowned out by the laughter from what happens right before he says it (the line, for anyone who didn't hear it, is "Puny god.")

 At first, I didn't know how I felt about it. Being a semi-dedicated Whedon-head**, once it happened a few times, I understood that this was going to be a film where stakes were maybe not as important as they could be. Then again, that's fine: if you've seen any of my other reviews for these films, Jon Favreau, Kenneth Branagh, and Joe Johnston also muted any serious sense of threat to their respective outings. The Avengers are "hopelessly outgunned" but not in such a way that Tony Stark doesn't continue to threaten Loki right before a Chitauri*** invasion of Manhattan. The film was enjoyable, but I had reservations about how I felt about the lack of "stakes," even when a supporting character died and another character turned "evil" early in the film. Rather than meaning much, it just made sense. That's a good way to address two characters we kind of know but who have to this point played minor roles in other films.

 See, the more I write about The Avengers, the more it seems like I didn't enjoy it. Nothing is further from the truth: I'll probably see it again, maybe even this weekend. I highly recommend it to people tired of insipid "summer entertainment" and I think it's great that parents are bringing their kids (or, more likely, vice versa) and that the whole family seems to be loving it. This is a movie that can comfortably show trailers for Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and Pixar's Brave beforehand and not one of them seems out of place. It's a movie for geeks, for families, for casual moviegoers, and people just looking to have fun at the movies. Clearly its box office receipts (which, as you know, is the only way you know a movie is any good****) support the idea of its universal appeal. It is a LOT of fun, and I really want to emphasize that.

  The more I think about it, the more appropriate it is to compare The Avengers to The Mummy AND to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. The Mummy I use as a sort of superficial concept of what "summer entertainment" means, in that it is successful in trying to reach all of the target demographics while also being vaguely enjoyable but also mostly forgettable once you're finished with it. It's why the film works so well on Saturday afternoons, when it seems to play on television. It doesn't require you to pay too much attention, but you'll have a good time and be able to get back to what you're doing without much trouble.

 Star Trek, similarly, is a more successful version of this. It's accessible both to Trekkies***** and people who know of Star Trek but haven't necessarily been following the series or films. The direction is assured, the film moves at a brisk pace, the cast is fun, and it delivers laughs and thrills in equal measure. I continue to argue that despite the fact that the Star Trek reboot is a very entertaining film, it doesn't have much - if any - of a plot. It does such a fine job of making you not notice this fact that nobody really seems to mind, and I'm cool with that.

 The Avengers is sort of like that, in that it gets by on such good will with what it does right (the levity, the excitement, the humor, the character interaction), that you don't really mind the first half dragging after Loki steals the Cosmic Cube (er, Tesseract******) until Thor shows up. We spend time catching up with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), we see Black Widow in a scene that should make fans of Buffy or Dollhouse very happy, we meet the new guy playing Bruce Banner and enjoy the fact that Marvel finally nailed the Hulk's alter ego, and as usual, Steve Rogers doesn't have much to contribute.

 I know. I was mean to Captain America in that review, but aside from one great line ("There's only one God, ma'am, and I don't think he dresses like that") he doesn't get to do much but shout orders. Well, there's the other nice moment when he finally gets a pop culture reference (at the expense of Thor) that's a good laugh during an exposition scene. Captain America doesn't play much of a role in his fight scene with Loki - Iron Man swoops in and saves the day, and I don't really understand why the whole "Thor's hammer vs. Cap's shield" manages to end a fight in the woods after the God of Thunder steals Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s jet.

 But look, I'm thinking about this too much. And I'm not saying that maybe I shouldn't, but like Star Trek, most people just don't care. And I'm okay with that, because if you're going to get behind "summer entertainment" in the way people are getting behind The Avengers, it's vastly preferable that it be something this well made. This much fun. Joss Whedon knows exactly how to put the right pieces together to make a movie that plays to as many people as possible without pandering or dumbing everything down, and now he has a massive platform with which to demonstrate it. I totally understand why people LOVE this movie, and I understand why some critics are so frustrated that people are willing to overlook so much of what isn't "perfect" that they see. Both sides have a point, even if they're reaching a little too hard to prove what the other is "missing."

 Where am I? Well, like I said, I'll be seeing it again. I enjoyed it that much and think a third time is worthwhile. I'm comfortable with the film's strengths and faults in equal measure and to be honest, the former outweigh the latter in all the ways that count. Since I can't fathom why I'd see Battleship, The Avengers is going to be my "summer entertainment," as Thor and Fast Five were last year. Things will get dark and moody with Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and (hopefully) Looper in the coming months, but I'll be happy to have some fun with Earth's Mightiest Heroes in the meantime. You should too.







* After The Island, Michael Bay and I got to a point where it made more sense for us to spend some time apart. Not being able to follow the incomprehensibly edited and shot robot action scenes in the trailers made the decision to sit out the last seven years of his output easier.
** That's what you call yourselves, right? I mean, you aren't all just Browncoats, right?
*** Interesting tidbit I missed during the credits - the Chitauri named "The Other" is played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel alumn Alexis Denisof.
*** On the off chance you have never read one of my reviews before or anything else from this blog, I would like to point out that this statement is intended sarcastically.
**** Sorry, Trekkers.
****** I must admit that I'm a little confused why The Cosmic Cube isn't called "The Cosmic Cube" in The Avengers, and is instead repeatedly referred to as "The Tesseract." At first I thought it was to avoid explaining what a "Cosmic Cube" would do, but when you introduce Thanos as the stinger for the sequel and don't say his name (the lady sitting next to me asked her boyfriend "who's he?" and he didn't know) then I think you could get away with just calling it The Cosmic Cube.

Blogorium Review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

 There's supposed to be such a thing as a "law of diminishing returns"; if a hit movie continues to produce sequels, they rarely if ever are as good as the first film. From the eleven-and-a-half Friday the 13ths to the Die Hard and Indiana Jones and Alien quadrilogies all the way back to the Thin Man films, it's a dicey proposition to keep going. Even in the rare cases where a Godfather Part II or Evil Dead 2 manage to match the original, the third film is imperfect. The James Bond films have lows that match their highs, and it tends to happen that the "diminishing returns" play out with each successive 007.

 I bring this up because this is the fourth Mission: Impossible film, and it's a toss up as to whether Ghost Protocol or M:I:III are the best entries yet. You could really argue either way, but it's strange to think that the third and fourth Mission: Impossible films are not only that much better than the first two films, but better than a lot of action cinema in the last decade. This comes from a fan of the Bourne films, the Jason Statham cycle (Transporter/Crank/Death Race/etc), the Sherlock Holmes buddy-cop reinvention, The Expendables, Rambo, Predators, and yes, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. While these are all fun in their own right, I'm still prepared to take Ghost Protocol over them right now.

 Call me a prisoner of the moment, but it's rare to see a film that doesn't mind being action packed and funny without one undermining the other. It's also nice to see that Brad Bird transferred the breathless action from The Incredibles to the real world, in what is (reported to be, anyway) as realistically as possible. Tom Cruise was dangling from the walls of the world's tallest building in Dubai, although how or why any insurance company would allow that is beyond me.

 Okay, we're four paragraphs in, so let's explain what happens in Ghost Protocol: Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has been cooling his heels in a Russian prison for a few years, following the death of his wife Julia (played by Michelle Monaghan in M:I:III), when he's released by IMF agents Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg, returning from M:I:III). The agency assigns the team the mission of breaking into the Kremlin in order to find some evidence of the mysterious "Cobalt," a terrorist who may have a nuclear device. "Cobalt" has successfully been erasing all evidence of his existence, and when Hunt is caught in an explosion while trying to escape from the Kremlin, IMF and the United States are implicated in an assault on Russia. Hunt is informed by the IMF Secretary (?) (Tom Wilkinson) that the President is issuing "Ghost Protocol," and that the team will now be considered "enemies of the State" unless they can covertly intercept "Cobalt," nuclear expert Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) before he begins a new world war. Hunt, Carter, and Dunn are joined by William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), an analyst who may be more than meets the eye, but their resources (and time) are limited. Oh, and the Russian police agent (Vladimir Mashkov) is hot on their tail.

 One of the things I enjoy so much about Ghost Protocol is the way that nothing goes according to plan: from the opening, where Lost's Josh Holloway is "Estevez'ed" because his face recognition software warns him an assassin (Léa Seydoux) is coming while she's pulling her gun out. He's distracted and killed, so Carter and Dunn's first mission is botched, necessitating Hunt's release. Ethan won't just leave the prison when Benji unlocks the cell doors by remote: he insists that the person releasing him (he doesn't know it's Benji, which is a nice conceit between what the audience knows and what the characters know) also open the door for Bogdan (Miraj Grbic), causing an otherwise smooth escape plan into a full fledged prison riot.

 And it just keeps going. Little things like the mission brief not self destructing to the mask maker jamming to accidentally killing a key informant to sticky gloves that don't stick keep compounding and making life harder and harder for the team. They can't do anything about it, so they have to improvise, grin, and bear it. So the building in Dubai they need to control the elevators in has a room you can only get into from the outside - Ethan can use the stick gloves to break in so Benji can hack it. They have 30 minutes before the assassin arrives to sell the launch codes to Winstrom (Samuli Edelmann), and one of the spider-man-like gloves stop working halfway up. It's a good thing Ethan was rock-climbing in M:I II.

 This works in Ghost Protocol because it adds serious tension to the film. They manage to be too late, make silly mistakes, and only sometimes manage to succeed by the skin of their teeth. It's less of the "oh shit, they have his wife" from M:I:III and more of "there's no back up coming if you screw this up" as is evident when Wilkinson's secretary is killed and Renner is forced to join the ragtag group. He doesn't have anywhere else to go now.

 While Pegg is a consistent source of laughs in the film, Renner also brings in some much needed levity as an IMF analyst befuddled by the half-baked desperation ploys during the film. His "secret" isn't actually all that important, especially when one considers the coda for the film (for which I do recommend you catch up with characters from M:I:III), but it does explain how Hunt knows he's more than just a number cruncher. Ethan pulls a gun on Brandt and isn't surprised at all when he's promptly disarmed.

 The rumor was that Renner was brought in to continue the series after Ghost Protocol, but then Cruise had so much fun making the film that they may continue with both of them. That's fine with me, because if we're not going with the Maggie Q / Johnathan Rhys Meyers iteration of the team (Ving Rhames' absence from Ghost Protocol is explained without suggesting he's out of the series), I could watch more Mission: Impossible films with this lineup. Cruise, Patton, Pegg, and Renner have great chemistry and work together as a (dysfunctional) team. Like the last film, each member serves more than one purpose and nobody feels superfluous, even if some of the set pieces sometimes do.

 Which brings me to the weaknesses of Ghost Protocol, and there are a few: Benji and Brandt are involved in an infiltration scheme reminiscent of the "sensor room" in the first film, but instead of suspenseful it's joke-y and ultimately proves to be another red herring. Hunt's showdown with Hendricks in an (admittedly cool looking) elevated car port is anticlimactic, but that may be due to the fact that Nyqvist is stuck playing a character that barely figures into the movie. He doesn't say much, he's mostly in the background, and the threat he poses is globally more dangerous but doesn't have the same emotional resonance as Philip Seymour Hoffman's Owen Davian. He doesn't register much at all, and certainly doesn't have the impact of Seydoux's Sabine Moreau, a much smaller character.

 In fact, it's entirely possible to play out Ghost Protocol without a "main" villain. The film is more or less the disavowed IMF team racing against the clock to stop a missile from launching, and while their attempts to stop "Cobalt" / Hendricks from getting to the point he can do that are entertaining, I don't know that his presence is even necessary. Like the Russian police who show up at inopportune times for Ethan, Hendricks is more effective as an abstract threat. There's one scene that really gives Nyqvist anything to do, and while it's a clever closer to a great chase scene, that's about all that the moment amounts to.

 Still, I highly recommend Ghost Protocol, which is consistently entertaining despite these flaws. To be honest, I didn't really notice them while I was watching the film - it was only in retrospect that it occurred to me that some elements of the film (including a character played by Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor introduced in the third act) were maybe superfluous. It never feels superfluous when you're watching the film: the script by André Nemec and Josh Applebaum and Brad Bird's direction keep you swept up in the race to stop nuclear war. Tom Cruise is again hard at work demonstrating why he's so essential to this series. He's a little bit older than he was last time and things are a little harder for Ethan Hunt to bounce back from, but he's still climbing up the side of buildings to entertain us.

 If this is any indicator of what J.J. Abrams and Tom Cruise (as producers) want to keep bringing to the Mission: Impossible series, it's entirely possible that "diminishing returns" aren't on the horizon as they push towards a fifth film. There's certainly enough that happens in the last five minutes of Ghost Protocol to imply there's more story to be told, so keep the quality level high and I'll be back for more.

Blogorium Review: The Town

editor's note: there will be no Video Daily Double today, as the Cap'n winds down his "year end reviews" leading up to this weekend's 2010 Year in Film recap.

Ben Affleck's The Town is a pretty by-the-books heist film saved by fine performances and Affleck's affinity for Boston, Massachusetts. It's not that the heist story is bad, per se, but that if you've seen any heist movie (Criss Cross, The Score, Heat, Inception, or even, well, Heist), then you can figure out the angles from the beginning of the film and pretty much map out where The Town is going. Admittedly, that's not a bad thing, because heist movies, like slasher films, are sort of like jazz or blues in that way - you know where major beats are, but the way the story gets there is what's interesting.

Affleck, who co-wrote the film with Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard (based on a Chuck Hogan novel), stars as Doug McRay, a former hockey prospect turned bank and armored car robber in Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston known for a tough life and criminal behavior. Doug's father, Stephen (Chris Cooper) has been in jail since he was young, so McRay was raised with James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner) and may or may not be the father of James' sister, Krista (Blake Lively)'s daughter. The other members of McRay and Coughlin's "crew" are Albert McGloan (Slaine), the driver, and Desmond Elden (Owen Burke), the electrical guy. The boys answer to "Fergie" Colm (Pete Postlethwaite), a drug pusher running a florist front.

When they rob a bank early in the film, James' short temper gets the best of him and he begins beating the bank manager, while Doug tries to coax co-manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) into opening the safe. As collateral, they take Claire hostage and let her go blindfolded, but when James discovers she lifes four blocks from their apartments, Doug decides to spy on her. They have a "meet cute" at a laundromat, and Doug's easygoing charm wins her over, much to James' chagrin. Their next heist(s) compound the desire of Detective Dino Ciampa (Titus Welliver) and FBI Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) to nail the crew before Coughlin's murderous impulses harm anyone else. Doug wants out, Colm and Coughlin won't let him, so he agrees to do "one last job" before leaving with Claire for better opportunities.

I really don't need to tell you anything else about the plot, because that setup is so familiar, so specific to the sub-genre (and nearly all film noir), that you can probably guess who lives, who dies, when it happens, and where things begin to fall apart for McRay and his crew. What's different, what largely works in The Town's favor, is twofold; the pacing, which is surprisingly languid for films known for their preference towards tension, and the Charlestown setting, which gives Affleck the ability to flesh his characters out in unexpected ways.

Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was a film I was tremendously fond of, partially because of its moral ambiguity but mostly as a result of making the location a character in the film. The Town isn't quite as successful, mostly due to the lack of urgency during every scene - including the robberies - but in taking it easy with the pacing, little flourishes emerge that separate this film from other heist movies. Typically, the hero is a bad guy with a good heart, tied to some maniac that's going to endanger them all (Heat) or double cross him at the end (The Score), but Doug McRay is only a nice guy in that he doesn't hurt people during robberies. He maintains the lie to Claire about who he is or why they "met" until well after Frawley tells her the truth, and while his passion for kids and renovating a local hockey arena is genuine, the act (semi-spoilers ahead) come from money stolen at Fenway Park after a Red Sox series.

Renner's Coughlin is the "loose cannon" character, but he also cares about Doug and depends on him like a brother. His rationale for why Doug "can't leave" comes not from a purely psychotic decision, but from something he did to protect McRay and never told him about. The boy-men solve their problems with violence, and when Doug finds out that Claire's car was vandalized by guys he knows, he brings James along for a little home invasion and aggravated assault without thinking twice about it. Whether or not Krista's daughter is his, Doug feels no compulsion to stay with her when the opportunity to be with Claire arises. The interpersonal relationships that usually are reduced to quick, identifiable archetypes have some room for fleshing out in Affleck's two hour cut (there's a nearly two and a half hour extended cut on the Blu-Ray I have not yet sampled, but apparently it contains more procedural footage with Welliver and Hamm).

The cast is uniformly great, and keep the leisurely pace worthwhile: Affleck and Renner have the lion's share of screen time, but Rebecca Hall is very good in the thankless role of girlfriend / police pawn. Jon Hamm motivated, clever, and ruthless Agent Frawley nearly steals the film away from Affleck (who is charming as ever, and finally manages to shake off the stench of years of bad movies), particularly with the line "you do realize this is a national agency, don't you?" near the end. Titus Welliver, who many Lost viewers will recognize immediately, gets a quick shot of nuance and backstory during an interrogation with Doug, and only Postlethwaite and Lively seem to be saddled with one-note characters: the crime boss who rules with an iron fist and the delinquent mother more interested in drugs than her child (a similar part to Amy Ryan's in Gone Baby Gone, but less developed in The Town).

The Town is a pleasant continuation of the shift in Ben Affleck towards writing, developing, and directing his own projects, and he has a fine eye behind the camera. It was nice to see him in front again, and while I'm curious to see if he ever plans to make a film set outside of Massachusetts, audiences are well served by putting aside memories of Gigli, Surviving Christmas, and Paycheck in order to give Ben Affleck a second go-round. Even if the song is one you've heard before, he makes it worth listening to.