Review: "Unlocked"

“Unlocked” wears the clothes of a B-movie spy flick but has A-list talent both in front of and behind the camera. The result is a taut, well-paced thriller high in both entertainment value and uncomfortable musings about how international intelligence agencies have reacted to radical Islamic terrorism.

Noomi Rapace stars as CIA agent Alice Racine -- foreign-born, to explain the accent -- who’s taken a low-level assignment in London. Her cover is an advocate for immigrants, passing along any suspicious cases to her British MI6 counterpart, Emily Knowles (Toni Collette). It’s tedious, unrewarding work, but Alice failed to stop a terrorist attack in Paris two years earlier, and her confidence has eroded.

Her specialty is “unlocking” hostile witnesses, aka getting them to spill the beans on imminent activity. Alice is not an “enhanced interrogation” sort, tending to use her wiles and relationship-building with suspects who are usually not the bombers and shooters, but (relatively) docile bagmen and such who make the connections between terrorist cells.

She’s brought in by the European CIA chief, Bob Hunter, played by expert-in-squirrelly John Malkovich. It seems their current “unlocker” has died of a heart attack, and there’s word of a mass chemical attack being financed by a “trust fund jihadist” of English birth (Raffaello Degruttola).

They’ve caught a young courier carrying a message from an imam (Makram Khoury) suspected of radical affiliations, so it’s up to Alice to save the day. Michael Douglas pops up as Eric Lasch, a retired spook and mentor to Alice who’s ready to lend a hand.

The screenplay is by Peter O’Brien, a promising rookie who blends high-octane action scenes with plenty of plot twists and paranoia in between. Without giving away too much, Alice finds herself caught in a no man’s land between the American and British spy services, whose integrity has been compromised, and the jihadis.

Popping up to help, sort of, is Orlando Bloom as Jack, a scruffy thief who’s unlucky enough to pick Alice’s safe house to rob. They throw in together out of grudging happenstance. Tosin Cole impresses as a (legit) client of Alice’s day job who also gets recruited out of pressing needs, and is appropriately awed by all the spycraft and gadgets.

The film is directed by British filmmaking legend Michael Apted, who has to go down as one of the most important director never to receive an Academy Award nomination. (Though he has plenty of recognition from the U.K. equivalent BAFTAs, not to mention the Director’s Guild of America.) He’s perhaps best known for his “Up” documentary series documenting the lives of ordinary Brits from childhood to middle age.

But Apted also directed a Bond movie back in the day, and clearly hasn’t lost his touch for action sequences. Despite her small frame, Rapace is entirely convincing as a hand-to-hand badass. There aren’t any big-money antics, highway crashes and boat chases and such. But these constraints actually make the film feel lower to the ground and ruggedly authentic.

“Unlocked” shows you don’t need Bourne and Bond budgets to craft a top-notch spy movie.

Review: "The Drop"

"The Drop" is an intriguing, atypical movie. It starts out with a lot of disparate characters and story elements, some of them related, much of it not. Over time they gradually float towards each other, each piece locking into place in a way that might not have seemed obvious at first.

The experience of watching it is like stumbling upon a disassembled pocket watch, and then witnessing the little gears and springs drag themselves, with almost gravitational pull, into a cohesive whole again. The actual process of putting itself back together can be a bit tedious at times, but at some point everything clicks together.

This is another film based on the writings of Dennis Lehane, who also penned the screenplay. Movies based on his work have been up ("Gone Baby Gone"), down ("Shutter Island") and vastly overhyped ("Mystic River"). Here is a film that seems to contain the Lehane mythos boiled down to its inky essence. The story happens almost entirely inside one seedy bar, and the few frozen city blocks around it.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saganowsky, who sloshes drinks at Cousin Marv's Bar. Bob speaks in a clinched little croak, almost whiny; he isn't terribly bright and is passive almost to the point of transparency. There are rough types who come into the bar, and some try to get a rise out of Bob, but they leave unsatisfied, because it's like kicking a sweet puppy who only comes back for more.
He is, in short, a mook.

Cousin Marv is mostly a figurehead these days, an aging hulk who barely moves from his corner table. His name's on the bar, and he used to run a little action on the side -- he was, he says, somebody who made people sit up when he walked in. But he got pushed by some tougher Chechen mobsters, and flinched, and now it's their bar and he just runs it.

James Gandolfini could play controlled rage better than just about anybody, so Marv is a fitting final screen role for him.

The title comes from the process of picking one bar at random to be the place where all the gambling and other dirty money winds up for the night -- "the safe for the entire city." It soon becomes clear that somebody's looking to hit Marv's the night it's the drop, and Bob gets caught up in the tide of events.

One night Bob is walking home from work and comes across a bloodied puppy dumped in a trash can. The woman who lives there, a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), helps him patch the dog up, but insists Bob adopt him as his own. He blanches at first, but finally takes on the little pitbull, whom he dubs Rocco. This is, for him, a major addition to his tiny universe, which essentially consists of just the bar and keeping up his dead parents' tidy brownstone.

Accepting the responsibility of the dog changes something in Bob ... or does it? Hardy's performance is one poker face behind another, so we're never quite sure what's going on the other side of that lunkhead mien. Dribs and drabs of information leak out to suggest there's more there. He and Nadia start seeing more of each other, hesitatingly -- it's like two wounded animals sniffing the other's wounds.

Other characters' orbits intersect with that of the bar. There's a perpetually smiling police detective (John Ortiz) who sees Bob at the same church every morning, and wonders why he never takes communion. He starts investigating a stick-up at the bar, and then noses into old crimes that have become part of the neighborhood lore.

There's Eric Deeds (an imposing Matthias Schoenaerts), a hustler with a past connected to Nadia. He casts a baleful eye at Bob for seemingly mysterious reasons, stopping by the bar or his house, claiming Rocco is actually his dog, and dropping idle threats. (Somehow, he makes an umbrella seem weapon-like.)

And then we have the Chechen boss, Chovka, chillingly played by Michael Aronov. He expects Marv and Bob to recover the money stolen during the robbery. You can see the wheels turn in Bob's head, slowly, and in Marv's head, slightly less slowly -- if they could find the money, wouldn't that imply they were in on the job?

Director Michaël R. Roskam takes his time -- too much, really -- building up the suspense, but the plot of "The Drop" eventually gets there.

Video review: "Prometheus"

Narratively speaking "Prometheus," director Ridley Scott's long-awaited prequel to his seminal 1979 space/horror film "Alien," is one big mess. But it's still a worthy cinematic experience, a potpourri of Scott's flair for sumptuous visuals and sly, creepy mood-building.

Set some decades before Ripley and her gang encountered the black and spidery beasties, Scott and his screenwriters take us back to those same dangerous locales and unnerving themes. The protagonist is again a female, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), who thinks she's found an invitation from the creators of all life. It turns out to be more of a deathtrap, as the crew is slowly dwindled one by one.

Along for the ride is Charlize Theron as a hardcase representative of the profit-minded company financing the mission, the usual collection of disposable crewmates, and an android assistant named David (Michael Fassbender) who, like all of his ilk, turns out to be less helpful than his cheery nature might suggest.

Things really get strange when they discover a massive alien ship filled with vials of black goo, video records of an accident killing most of the crew, and a 10-foot-tall bald humanoid with a seriously bad attitude. At one point Elizabeth finds herself with an alien creature growing inside her, though in a different method than we've seen in the other movies, and has to submit herself to a horrifically invasive medical procedure to get it out.

The experience of watching this film is akin to wandering in a daze, as you find yourself constantly asking questions, and receiving responses that only provoke more questions. But even if the movie is on some levels unsatisfying, that's because it leaves you wanting more.

"Prometheus" is a real head-scratcher, a riddle of a movie that doesn't really care about finding any answers. The odd, discomfiting journey is its own reward.

Ridley Scott is (in)famous for releasing director's cuts of his movies, but if you want one you'll likely have to wait a few years. Although the video packages being released now contain about 15 minutes worth of deleted/extended scenes, including a new opening and ending, the theatrical version of "Prometheus" is all you'll get.

Interestingly, the film is only being released as a Blu-ray/DVD combination -- there isn't an option for a solo DVD.

The two-disc version comes nicely loaded with features, including two separate commentary tracks by the filmmakers and access (via tablet computer) to a database on the alien culture.

Spring for the four-disc collection, and you'll also receive all sorts of making-of goodies, including pre-visualization drawings and videos, behind-the-scenes peeks and more.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars

Review: "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest"

The Swedish trilogy about Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but disturbed woman striking back at a system that abused her, trundles to a wobbly finish with "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest." The final installment is heavy on plot and cheap theatrics, but light on the dark, mesmerizing energy that made the first film so watchable.

Noomi Rapace is back again as Lisbeth, now in custody for the attempted murder of her father (Georgi Staykov), a former Soviet agent who defected to the West and became a shadowy merchant of arms and information.

The main thrust of the story builds to her trial, and Rapace is given very little to do over the film's overlong 2½-hour run other than stay in her hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, or fidget in a prison cell.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is back at the center of the action after being somewhat sidelined in the last movie. Lisbeth previously saved his bacon, and now he's out to return the favor, digging into the sordid past of shadowy government figures and their lackeys who want to see her declared criminally insane.

Mikael wants to publish the whole grimy tale in his magazine Millennium -- which is also the name of the trilogy of books by late author Stieg Larsson upon which these films are based -- but his partner/lover Erika (Lena Endre) gets cold feet when the government thugs ratchet up the threats.

The film tries unsuccessfully to balance a burgeoning array of characters and plot lines, ladling on complexity without adding clarity.

There's Ronald Niederman (Mikael Spreitz), a hulking blond giant who is literally impervious to pain. He's also Lisbeth's half-brother, and is out to make her pay for what she did to daddy. He doesn't say a word the entire movie, but shows up every 20 minutes or so to randomly kill somebody so we'll remember how scary he is.

A group of ex-government spies in their 70s return to active duty to cover up their administration's nefarious dealings with Lisbeth's father. Of course, it's not long before they decide she's too much of a liability to let live.

Blomkvist gets unexpected help from a shadowy organization calling themselves Constitutional Defense, who are supposedly investigating the first shadowy group on behalf of the current government.

Blomkvist's sister Annika (Annika Hallin) is tapped to be Lisbeth's attorney, which she does adeptly, though she's perturbed at her client's unwillingness to show Blomkvist any appreciation for sticking his neck out so far for her.

Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom), the nefarious psychiatrist who committed Lisbeth to an institution when she was 12, returns as the prosecution's star witness.

The film's ending is strange and truncated, as Lisbeth and Blomkvist reach what is obviously the end of their journey together. While I grant that a big mushy Hollywood finale wouldn't work in the more restrained Swedish mode, the conclusion goes beyond minimalist to emotionally vacant.

If this pair can't even think of anything notable to say to each other by way of farewell, it makes us wonder why we bothered watching them for three movies.

2 stars out of four

Review: "The Girl Who Played with Fire"

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was a vibrant, mesmerizing Swedish thriller about a brilliant and damaged woman who hit back at the men who had tormented her. The sequel is gawky and forced, a rambling narrative that is more interested in perpetuating the tale of Lisbeth Salander for its own sake rather than because it has a compelling story to tell.

"The Girl Who Played with Fire" -- the second in a cinematic trilogy based on the late Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" novels -- does gather itself together for a smashing finale that, if predictable, still packs plenty of visceral punch.

Director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg take over from, respectively, Niels Arden Oplev and the team of Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg. Why the filmmaker switcheroo I cannot guess -- only observe that the change was not for the better.

"Fire" picks up one year after the events of "Dragon." Having assisted investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in uncovering a morass of secrets belonging to a rich family, Lisbeth has absconded with an embezzled fortune to find some measure of peace on a sunny beach.

With a long criminal history and incarceration in a mental institution, she eschews emotional relationships, but left a chink in her armor big enough for Mikael to slip through.

Lisbeth returns to Stockholm when she hacks the computer of her probation officer, Bjurman (Peter Andersson), to see what he's up to. After being violently raped by Bjurman in the last film, Lisbeth exacted a horrifying revenge that included his coerced agreement to falsify glowing monthly reports about her.

(Why she needs this, when she's successfully disappeared off the grid with her millions, is never made clear.)

Meanwhile, Mikael and his magazine staff are preparing an explosive expose about men in positions of power trafficking in sex slaves. Soon, the young journalist writing the piece and his girlfriend are shot execution-style. When Bjurman also turns up dead, Lisbeth becomes the prime suspect.

The trail leads to a mysterious figure known only as Zala, who somehow is tied in with Lisbeth's childhood troubles.

A handful of new characters turn up. There's Miriam Wu (Yasmine Garbi), an old friend/lover of Lisbeth's who watches over her old apartment. The two share a roll on the hardwood floor that's very steamy, but which also has an obligatory feel to it, as if the filmmakers felt the movie needed to have a sex scene, and figured making it a lesbian one would amp up the heat.

(Hollywood is frantically working on a much-anticipated -- and totally unnecessary -- American remake of "Dragon Tattoo," which I'm sure will dramatically tone down the frank European approach to nudity.)

There's also a famous professional boxer who somehow gets entangled in the web, then disappears as quickly as he popped up.

The most forbidding figure is a blond giant (Micke Spreitz) who seems impervious to pain, and badly wants Lisbeth in his fearsome clutches.

The story arc wobbles all over the place. As in the last movie, Mikael and Lisbeth spend most of the film apart, pursuing the mystery from different angles.

At some point the investigation into the sex scandal fades from attention, and the inquiry turns to Lisbeth's dark past. It's a strange shift, especially since people have died to bring this story to light, and yet we never even know if it was published.

Noomi Rapace still has a hefty, steely presence as Lisbeth, though she seems strangely unfocused. It's as if Lisbeth is continuing to burrow into computer networks and turn up secrets because that's all she knows how to do, not out of any burning need for vengeance.

As far as I can tell, the entire plot machinery of murders, investigations, etc. is set off only when Lisbeth leaves her Caribbean hideaway to return to Sweden for reasons that remain murky at best. For a girl who plays with fire, this disappointing sequel doesn't generate any.

2 stars out of four

Review: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" could have been a standard international potboiler. It’s about a disgraced journalist hired to investigate the mysterious death of the daughter of a wealthy dynasty decades ago, with every clue taking him deeper into a maze of intrigue and dark family secrets.

What makes this Swedish thriller exceptional is, well, the girl of the title.

It might interest you to know that its original title is "Men Who Hate Women," and it was only given its new, somewhat clunky moniker for international release.

Lisbeth Salander does indeed have a dragon tattoo. It’s so large it doesn’t so much decorate her body as entwine her in its coils. She dresses like a punk rocker, glares at the world from beneath a mane of haphazardly sawed-off tresses, and works as a professional hacker, burrowing into the lives of people targeted by her clients.

Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), an elderly tycoon, hires Lisbeth look into Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a famous investigative reporter who has just been convicted of libeling a rich businessman. He checks out clean, so Vanger brings Mikael to his remote island and relates the sad tale of his niece, Harriet.

Harriet disappeared mysteriously nearly 40 years ago during an annual meeting of the Vangers. Henrik freely admits that his clan is a nest of vipers, greedy and suspicious of one another. He suspects one of his relatives might be involved in her death, but the police inquiry turned up nothing.

For awhile, Mikael and Lisbeth’s stories run parallel. Unbeknownst to him, she’s been hacking into his computer, keeping up to date on his investigation. She gives him a tip that breaks the case wide open, and soon they’ve joined forces as they elbow through the morass of the Vangers’ twisted legacy.

Played by Noomi Rapace in a mesmerizing performance that vacillates between inner turmoil and outward explosion, Lisbeth has her own history of disturbing secrets.

In a horrifying sequence early on, she is assigned a new probation officer who uses his power to send her back to jail to perform unspeakable acts of degradation. Rather than wallowing in victimhood, though, Lisbeth acts out, displaying both her keen intelligence and a ruthlessness that allows her to give as well as she gets.

Even as Lisbeth and Mikael work the conventional end of the murder-mystery plot, it takes the back stage to their relationship – if one can call it that. The brooding, brilliant girl quickly becomes the dominant personality, despite being half Mikael’s age. She calls the shots and decides what level of intimacy they will, or will not, share.

At 2.5 hours, "Girl" is longer than it needs to be; director Niels Arden Oplev dithers on montages of characters typing furiously on the computer or poring through printed archives, searching for clues. But since the interplay between the two main characters is the far more compelling mystery, the occasionally languid pace doesn’t detract too much.

The Swedes have been on a roll lately with darkly atmospheric movies that seem inspired by American films, and in turn spawn imitations. "Let the Right One In," the chilling vampire film, is getting a U.S. remake. So is "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

While I lament the perceived necessity of an English version for audiences who won’t venture into subtitled films, I am warmed in knowing that Hollywood recognizes excellent material to rip off.

3.5 stars out of four