Video review: "Destroyer"

Nicole Kidman has de-glammed for roles before, mostly notably putting on a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” for which she won an Oscar. That’s a pretty standard M.O. in Hollywood: get grizzled, get Oscar gold.

The boys do it too: see Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

But Kidman goes beyond unadorned to downright fugly in “Destroyer,” a hard-edged drama in which she plays a police detective who’s been spiraling toward the bottom for years. With her face mottled, eyes like two dim lamps peering out of dark holes, Erin Bell looks like she’s stared into the face of the devil and slowly gotten crispy.

She’s a boozer, a user, a cop who seems to spend very little time actually investigating crime. Seemingly sleeping out of her police car, she’s following up on an old case that involves an undercover operation she was in years ago.

It centers around Silas (Toby Kebbell), a drug dealer who inspires fear and loyalty in his crew. And there was Chris (Sebastian Stan), the fellow cop who posed as half of a couple with her and led to a real-life romance.

Other players include Erin’s estranged teen daughter, Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), who’s about to make some bad choices with her scuzzy boyfriend, and Bradley Whitford as a wealthy lawyer involved with the drug trade.

Directed by Karyn Kasuma from a screenplay by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, “Destroyer” is a tough watch but a rewarding one. Kidman deserved the Oscar nomination she didn’t get, not for just taking off her makeup but for putting on the face of self-destructive character who worms her way under your skin.

Bonus features are sparse in quantity but long in quality.

There are two separate feature-length commentary tracks, one by Kasuma -- pity Kidman did not join her -- and another with the script men. Plus there’s a making-of documentary, “Breakdown of an “Anti-Hero: The Making of Destroyer.”

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Reeling Backward: "Destroyer"

"Destroyer" is a pretty conventional bit of World War II propaganda. It's amazing to think now about how the movie industry was turned to promoting the war effort. I'm not sure if people even stopped and thought about it -- back then, everybody assumed we were all in it together.

Can you imagine our modern-day entertainment industry cranking out films supporting the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, one after another, almost from the day our troops set foot in the Middle East? The very idea is ludicrous.

Back then, movie stars also joined the military in droves, or at least flew around selling war bonds and other such things. After making "Destroyer," Glenn Ford enlisted with the Marines, where he spent the war working as a motion picture technician and hosting a radio program.

Up until then, Ford's film career was nothing to shake a stick at. After the war he came back with "Gilda," his big breakthrough role. (On a side note, I've had "Gilda" DVR'd for awhile now, and keep meaning to get to it. But for whatever reason, I've had a hankering for war pictures recently.)

It's interesting to think of Glenn Ford as a young man, and playing a character who's cocky and headstrong. The star persona of Ford is of a man who's middle-aged but still physically capable, with deep convictions and sense of honor, who believes in thinking before acting -- basically, he was Dad. But perhaps I'm conditioned to think of him that way, since like most people of my generation my first experience with Glenn Ford was playing the father in "Superman."

Here he plays Mickey Donohue, a naval chief who butts head with Steve "Boley" Boleslvaski (Edward G. Robinson), a tough old sailor who's just come out of retirement to fight in the war. Boley served aboard the first destroyer John Paul Jones during WWI, and became a shipbuilder who helped oversee the construction of her replacement. When he learns that the ship will be commanded by an officer he used to serve with, he agrees to re-enlist.

Things don't go smoothly for Boley. He has the right ideas about how to keep a crew tight and orderly, but he's simply so far behind the times that he keeps lousing things up. He orders the gun crews to keep their sights right on target aircraft, rather than leading them, because he never had to fight against airplanes in the first World War. He doesn't even know that the new artillery guns are loaded from the breech, not from the muzzle.

Eventually Boley gets busted down in rank, and now must report to Donohue, his arch-enemy. Little does he know that the much younger Donohue has been wooing his daughter (Marguerite Chapman) during shore leave.

At one point it appears that the new John Paul Jones is a cursed ship, and gets reassigned to mail-carrying duty. A bunch of the crewman request to transfer off, and Robinson gives a rousing speech where he invokes the story of the ship's namesake. Of course, they decide to stay on. Because that's the way things were back then -- or at least, how Hollywood would like us to think it was.

3 stars