Video review: "Richard Jewell"

Richard Jewell was a man who was treated very unfairly by the media, and “Richard Jewell” is the movie that returns the favor. Despite being a very solid film, it was buried underneath a mountain of bad press and died a quick death at the box office. As the old saying does, don’t pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.

(Or whatever the modern equivalent of that would be -- “people who leverage digital impressions by the terabyte?”)

The beef has to do with the way the movie suggests that Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) obtained information in an unethical way. Her reporting (and those of many other outlets) indisputably was wrong and terrible, jumping to the conclusion that security guard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) planted the bomb at the Olympics rather being a hero who saved countless lives.

I hate that director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray felt compelled to portray Scruggs as sleeping with an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) to obtain the dirt that led to her big scoop. There is no evidence to suggest such a thing happened, and she (like Jewell) died young.

You can’t libel the dead, but you can try to resurrect their reputation. And this “Richard Jewell” does very well, despite the glaring flaw.

Hauser is very solid as Jewell, a simple man who yearned to be seen as a protector of others. But because he was an overweight guy with a slow Southern drawl, people were ready to jump to conclusions about him because he didn’t fit the image of the stereotypical hero.

Kathy Bates got an Oscar nomination for playing Jewell’s mom, Bobi, and she delivers a head-wallop of a speech in defense of her boy.

Also wonderful is Sam Rockwell playing Jewell’s attorney, Watson Bryant, a peevish loner who finds his best self defending an innocent man who has literally the entire country’s law enforcement and media establishment lined up against him.

Give “Richard Jewell” a chance on video. I hate that they maligned a journalist, even if she was the one who opened up a spigot of false information that nearly claimed a man’s freedom and very life. One bad turn does not deserve another, and it’s a really good movie despite this bad take.

Clint’s movies tend not to have a whole lot of bonus features on video release -- he’s an old-school guy who doesn’t believe in filmmaker commentaries and such. So all you get are two featurettes: “The Making of Richard Jewell” and “The Real Story of Making Jewell.”

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Review: "Richard Jewell"

Everybody undervalued Richard Jewell, starting with himself.

By all accounts he was a decent, hardworking man who embraced his role as protector at times too fervently -- particularly during those periods when he worked as a security guard at a college or entertainment venue. Jewell started and ended his career wearing a badge, and knew firsthand that people respect someone with a uniform and gun more than some sweaty dude in a white polo shirt.

So when Jewell discovered a backpack at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and alerted the authorities before it exploded, saving countless lives, what happened next was perhaps not so surprising. People saw an obese, slow-talking man with a Southern accent and decided he could not be a hero as initially thought.

“Richard Jewell” is director Clint Eastwood’s ambitious and successful attempt to rescue the reputation of Jewell, he was accused of being the bomber without a scintilla of actual evidence. It also tries to cast the FBI and especially the media as the villains, and here it’s less skillful and certainly heavy-handed.

Paul Walter Hauser plays Jewell in a performance that is spot-on both physically and spiritually. He does not try to portray Jewell as a saint or a smart man -- things he surely was not. Rather, Hauser shows us a simple, authentic soul who persevered despite that fact that many people saw him as a pathetic loser.

He knew this, and trudged on.

Take the scene right before Jewell sounds the alert on the backpack. He goes over to confront a group of underage teens drinking and breaking bottles against the media tower at Centennial Park. The boys completely laugh him off, call him a bunch of insulting names tied to his weight, and continue their revelry.

The look on Hauser’s face as he walks away from this scene is telling. He does not react to the insults, because Jewell has heard them a million times before, but simply goes about doing his job. He fetches the cops, who chase off the drunks, and insists they check out the pack nearby, even though most think it’s just full of beer.

The film, written by Billy Ray based on a book by Marie Brenner, takes us through the initial harrowing events of the explosion and aftermath. It’s tense stuff. But it really kicks into high gear when Sam Rockwell rides in as his lawyer, Watson Bryant, after it becomes clear the feds, lacking any substantial clues, have focused on Jewell using the “lone bomber” profile, which had been much in the news back then.

Jewell calls Bryant because he’s the only lawyer he knows, having briefly worked together years before. Bryant (based on actual lawyer Lin Wood) is cantankerous and foul-mouthed, and barely ekes by on personal injury cases. But the way the FBI leans on Jewell, he needs someone ornery in his corner.

They share a great scene where Watson blows up at the way Jewell is deferential to the authorities, calling everyone “sir” and even offering to help while they search the apartment he shares with his mother, Bobi (Kathy Bates, terrific as always). Why aren’t you as mad as I am, Watson demands. Jewell finally gets mad enough to insist that anger just isn’t his way.

Jon Hamm plays the FBI agent leading the investigation, and Olivia Wilde is Kathy Scruggs, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who first broke the story that Jewell was a suspect. In an odd choice, they kept Scruggs’ name the same as the actual person while changing that of most everyone else.

You may have heard the movie suggests -- without evidence -- that Scruggs traded sexual favors in exchange for scoops, one of the vilest and cheapest charges leveled at female reporters. Both she and Jewell died at a young age, so she’s not around to defend herself.

The movie doesn’t touch on the fact that Jewell and his attorney ended up suing many media outlets for their inept handling of the case, winning settlements from nearly all of them. “Richard Jewell” works spectacularly as a condemnation of a mass media that went from Point A to Point Z on a story without bothering to do any of the legwork in between to connect them.

It’s too bad Eastwood and his team did the exact same thing in portraying the journalist on the case. One poor turn deserves another, apparently.

Review: "Gemini Man"

It’s one thing for a character to say they’re haunted by ghosts; it’s quite another to show the ghosts. “Gemini Man” does the former while scrimping on the latter.

I’ll be straight: I was prepared to duck the screening for “Gemini Man.” It’s a busy time of year and there’s a lot of movies to pay attention to. The trailers, in which Will Smith, playing a world-class assassin who encounters a younger CGI’d double of himself, looked pretty goofy.

Digital alteration of reality continues to advance, and we’ve all seen those freaky-deaky “deep fake” videos of Bill Hader transforming into Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatnot. But the truth is it still hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s totally convincing. So I was prepared to give “Gemini” a skip.

Then I saw the creative team: Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) directing? Two of the screenwriters are David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”) and Billy Ray (an Oscar nominee for “Captain Phillips”)? The credentials are there, maybe the film’s better than advertised?

Nope.

It’s not a bad movie by any means. It’s got lots of vigorous action scenes, including a killer one where the two warriors battle on motorcycles, with the younger one using the bike itself as a weapon. There are also exotic international locales, a sniveling villain, and other hallmarks of the spy thriller genre. In terms of action set pieces, it’s basically a low-rent Bond film.

But that’s all it is. Lee and the screenwriters (Darren Lemke is the third) make aspirations toward something deeper and more meaningful, but keep falling back on stunts and shootouts instead of exploring the main characters’ inner psyches.

Smith plays Henry Brogan, a legendary sniper for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’s spent 30 years making impossible kill shots, dubbed AMFs -- “Adios, Mother Flipper,” or thereabouts -- such as the one that opens the picture of a terrorist getting it through the window of a speeding European bullet train. Now after 72 confirmed kills he’s ready to hang it up, citing age, fading skills and the aforementioned ghosts.

Turns out the last kill wasn’t a clean one, but cooked up by old nemesis Clay Verris, played by Clive Owen in full jowls-and-scowls mode. He runs the titular Gemini program, a quasi-military force used by governments to clean up their messes. And they’ve concluded that Henry is the loose tie that needs to be snipped.

We’ve seen this before in every spy franchise, from Bond to Bourne to Jack Reacher. Someone in the government decides the veteran killer needs to be killed, racking up tremendous deaths and expenditure of resources in the process, necessitating even more stuff to throw at the guy.

At some point I’d like to see a movie where an armchair spymaster says, “You know what? Better just leave him be.”

Gemini’s secret weapon is Junior (also Smith), who was cloned from Henry’s DNA. The young man has spent his entire life being trained by Verris to be the ultimate killer. He’s got all of Henry’s moves plus a few parkour-style bits where he bounces off walls and such. But does he have the same hidden conscious eating away at him, suggesting all his jobs may not be on the up-and-up?

As I said, the likeness is not terrible, akin to Smith during his “Fresh Prince” days. He acted out the role normally and then a younger version of his face was digitally stitched on. It works OK in fleeting shots or darkness, but when the camera has to hold in bright light, it has a very video game feel.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Danny, a DIA agent sent to tail Henry who ends up becoming his capable ally. She and Henry flirt in between the firefights, while pretending not to. Douglas Hodge and Benedict Wong are old friends brought in to help out.

The dialogue is truly cringe-worthy at times, with lines such as “It’s like watching the Hindenburg crash into the Titanic.” My personal (dis)favorite is Henry waking up Danny in bed and she pulls a pistol on him. “It’s not gun time, it’s coffee time,” he purrs, handing her a brimming mug. What the…?

I was expecting “Gemini Man” to be more a psychological thriller interspersed with action scenes about two hardcases with intertwined identities, a la “Face/Off.” But it’s just a straight-up action movie featuring Old Will Smith and digitally de-aged Will Smith.

It’s garden-variety gunplay, with a Benjamin Button twist.

Video review: "Captain Phillips"

Director Paul Greengrass is not a man who deals in moral absolutes. In “Captain Phillips” he, along with screenwriter Billy Ray and star Tom Hanks, relate the true story of an American cargo ship captain who was kidnapped at sea by Somali pirates. Rather than making the bad guys faceless, soulless villains, he portrays them as real, thinking individuals who feel pressured to commit acts of piracy.

This is not to say that the film attempts to paint a flattering portrait of the pirates in favor of the American. But by making the guys behind the guns seem full-blooded and human themselves, it only serves to underscore the peril of the title character.

Barkhad Abdi is just terrific as Muse, the head of the pirates. Desperate, but also clever and empathetic, he engages in a war of wills with Phillips, who spends the second half of the movie as his prisoner, crammed into a dingy lifeboat.

The fact that Abdi, an acting novice, manages to hold his own with a powerhouse like Hanks speaks well not only of his own screen presence, but Greengrass’ expert direction.

The scene where Phillips is finally rescued from his ordeal and brought aboard a Navy ship for medical treatment is some of the best acting you will ever see, with Hanks shining as a man who's been through hell and is trying to keep it all together, and failing.

A live-wire act coupled with a deep character study, “Captain Phillips” is the rare drama that doesn’t settle for simple black-and-white answers.

Video extras are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions, and have a certain amount of heft without being particularly ambitious. There are three behind-the-scenes featurettes about various aspects of production, and a feature-length commentary track supplied by Greengrass.

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Review: "Captain Phillips"

“Captain Phillips” is in some ways two separate movies tied together by the same event: the first capture of an American ship by pirates since the 1800s. Both are equally effective at evoking a harrowing sense of tension – even though, since the film is a chronicle of real events, we know the title character makes it out alive.

Based on a book co-written by the actual Captain Richard Phillips, the story starts out as the tale of a group of cargo ship crewmen resisting armed intruders, a classic us-versus-them saga. The audience is encouraged to look upon the Somali pirates as bloodthirsty killers and thieves, while the resolute captain (Tom Hanks) is the noble hero beset by them.

Then a curious thing happens, and the second half of the film shifts to the confines of a stuffy, tiny motorized lifeboat where the four pirates have escaped with Phillips as their abductee.

Screenwriter Billy Ray swings to an intimate character study, where we learn the Somalis are thinking, feeling individuals who capture ships not out of pure greed, but to appease the tyrannical warlord who rules them. They come from a society where men are valued by how much ransom money they bring in. Their desperation in many ways mirrors that of Phillips.

Director Paul Greengrass is a seasoned expert at portraying real, violent events with a clear eye and a steady hand (“United 93,” “Bloody Sunday”). By not overdramatizing the proceedings but letting them play out with organic emotions, Greengrass manages to underline the humanity of the peril without becoming maudlin or manipulative.

And, of course, the movie is a showcase for yet another one of Hanks’ brilliant performances. He’s been so good for so long that we’ve come to expect nothing less than excellence out of his acting roles. In a perverse sort of homage, we tend to under-praise his efforts because of the high standard he has maintained for a quarter-century. I certainly hope the Academy Award voters do not do so.

I was pleased to find Greengrass employed authentic African actors to play the Somalis rather than relying on performers from the U.S. or England or wherever. They all acquit themselves well, especially Barkhad Abdi as Muse, the scrappy, cagey pirate leader, and Faysal Ahmed as Najee, the excitable enforcer who often butts heads with him.

Really, Phillips and Muse are the main characters of the piece, and Greengrass and Ray give us pivotal scenes of each man before, during and after their confrontation. We discover the two “captains” aren’t so very different than we’d imagined – including facing larger pressures from their superiors to carry out policies that won’t endear them to their underlings.

As Phillips himself puts it: “We’ve all got bosses.”

Things build to a fever pitch when a U.S. destroyer arrives on the scene, followed by a team of Navy sharpshooters. You may have already read the astounding account of how SEAL Team Six managed to put an end to the kidnapping, but seeing it rendered in sight and sound is a spellbinding experience.

The film’s version of events does omit some key facts, such as the fact the pirates’ comrades were trying to bring in other captured vessels carrying more than 50 hostages to act as human shields. From a storytelling standpoint it’s a wise move, but it leaves the film open to charges of focusing on the plight of an American to the detriment of foreign-born victims.

The movie does not engage in so much equivocation as to make the Somali pirates seem blameless, or the Americans appear as unflawed. But in treating both the captors and captives as full-blooded human beings, “Captain Phillips” plumbs depths a lesser film would’ve skimmed over.