Review: "False Positive"

 

The filmmakers of "False Positive" would very much like you to know that "mommy brain," a state of confusion and mental frailty endemic to new mothers, is a real thing, as this phrase is repeated a number of times throughout the psychological thriller. It's about a woman who desperately wants to get pregnant who begins to suspect that her famous fertility doctor and seemingly perfect husband are conspiring to drive her mad.

Come to think of it, "Mommy Brain" would've been a better title for this middling picture.

Are they really lined up against her, or is she just cracking under the strain of hormones and seismic shifts in her life? I'll leave it to you to find out, though the recent cinematic fixation on women undergoing gaslighting ("The Invisible Man") by meanie men should lend a clue.

Ilana Glazer stars, produced and co-wrote the screenplay with director John Lee, so this is a fairly rare example of a horror film -- or at least horror-adjacent -- with a strong female sensibility to it. She plays Lucy, a thirtysomething marketing whiz who has spent the last few years trying to get pregnant with her husband, Adrian (Justin Theroux), a reconstructive surgeon who's supportive and dreamy to boot.

Dr. John Hindle is the best fertility innovator in the biz, and usually women have to wait 18 months or more to get an appointment. Luckily, Adrian studied under Hindle in med school and they're able to get in right away, where Lucy is assured that his cutting-edge techniques can get her preggers lickety-split. This is exactly what comes to pass.

Hindle is played by Pierce Brosnan, who is so good-looking he might as well belong to another species. Perfectly polite and attentive, with silver hair and beard, Dr. Hindle may have airs of being an egomaniac, but he's the kind who can back it up with results. 

His clinic has a Stepford Wives feel, all white and sterile, with nurses (Gretchen Mol is the lead) who seem like they stepped off a supermodel runway rather than nursing school. Everyone talks in calming, pleasant tones and you just feel like everything's going to be peachy.

Lucy is very joyful to become pregnant, and it even looks like she's in line for a big promotion at work. She makes friends through a pregnancy support group with other expecting 1-percenters (Sophia Bush plays one), and they do ladies' luncheons and cute baby showers and so on.

Things start to go awry when Lucy finds out she is pregnant with not one, but three babies -- twin boys and a girl. She really had her heart set on a girl, planning to name her Wendy in honor of her lifelong love of "Peter Pan." But Dr. Hindle and Adrian say she's likely to lose all three unless she agrees to "selective reduction" -- aka abortion -- and they are strongly pushing to keep the boys.

Soon Lucy begins to experience hallucinations, becomes paranoid, starts snooping around on Adrian and find out he's been snooping around on her, etc. She seeks out a feminist midwife (Zainab Jah) who teaches that the medical profession is a male-dominated conspiracy that wants to wrest the natural process of childbirth away from women and control their bodies.

Things go on from there, wandering into familiar horror-movie power dynamics and moist outcomes. Let's just say the doctor's insemination tool gets employed in a way that can't be recommended in the user manual.

Oddly, I found the movie pretty compelling during the first couple of acts, but the last half-hour feels stale and predictable. Lucy will emerge from her confusion cocoon and take up the righteous mantle of wronged mothers everywhere. It's stronger when she, and we, are kept more in the dark.

When it comes to scary movies, it's usually best to expect the expected.

 

Review: "The Foreigner"

“The Foreigner” is a novel concept: a Jackie Chan movie in which Jackie Chan is completely unnecessary to the plot.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. This joint Chinese/British production has all the hallmarks of a Chan film: chop-socky action, Westerners underestimating an undersized Asian man, and cool/quirky stunts in which the 63-year-old action star demonstrates he’s still got plenty of spring in his step.

But really, with a little rewriting you could completely eliminate his character, Ngoc Minh Quan, from the movie without missing much of a beat. The real heart of the story is about an internal struggle within the IRA, with Pierce Brosnan playing the smooth political operator trying to keep the peace, attempting to stave off young upstarts blowing things up and threatening the détente with the Brits.

The set-up is that Quan’s teen daughter (Katie Leung), is killed during a gruesome bombing, and vows revenge. Everyone dismisses the timid little restaurant owner, who keeps persistently calling and showing up in people’s offices. His chief target soon becomes Liam Hennessy, an Irish deputy minister who used to be part of the IRA brigade but these days plays both sides.

Brosnan, as Hennessy, brings smarmy charm and a buried volcano of rage, trying to find a solution that serves both his IRA allies and the British authorities. Meanwhile, this nettlesome “Chinaman” keeps getting in the way.

Needless to say, Quan turns out to be a whole lot more capable than anyone imagines. His part of the story is sort of a mix of Sylvester Stallone in “First Blood” and Liam Neeson in “Taken,” content to leave others alone but ready to whip out a mondo-sized can of whup-tushie when confounded. He has a very specific set of skills…

Charlie Murphy plays Maggie, Hennessy’s mistress who has a little more to her story; Ray Fearon is the chief police inspector on the case, looking to cut a deal with Hennessy; Orla Brady is Hennessy’s wife, who has her own old resentments stirred up; Dermot Crowley is one of Hennessy’s old running buddies; and Rory Fleck Byrne plays Hennessy’s nephew, who has a military background that’ll come in handy later.

In case you didn’t notice from that summary, all the main supporting players are all defined by their relationship to Hennessy, not Quan. It’s a pretty standard-issue procedural thriller, as various forces converge to stop a terrorist plot. But then this odd little man shows up and throws everyone’s plan into kerflooey.

Chan seethes as the determined father who harbors a lot of secrets and past pain. But let’s face it, he’s a star in the Schwarzeneggerian mold, featured for his physicality rather than his emoting. His mask of rage looks more like a peptic ulcer.

Directed by Martin Campbell, who helmed a few James Bond films and the execrable “Green Lantern,” from a screenplay by David Marconi based on a novel by Stephen Leather, “The Foreigner” works reasonably well as a martial arts action flick, and as political thriller. Only trouble is, those parts don’t go well together, like mismatched suit pieces that clash rather than complement.

Review: "No Escape"

A rather clumsy but also rather effective thriller, "No Escape" is a dark night's ride through a landscape of xenophobia and primal instincts. It's the sort of movie that accomplishes its mission but makes you feel a little slimy after watching it.

It's about an American family who land in some unnamed Southeast Asian country to start a new life with dad working for a benevolent U.S. company building a plant to provide drinking water for the spectacularly ungrateful natives, who launch a coup almost the minute they get to their hotel and start hunting foreigners for summary execution.

There's more to it, of course. Director John Erick Dowdle ("Quarantine"), who co-write the script with brother Drew, throws in suggestions that the Western spooks and suits have been here for some time, ripening up the ground for economic enslavement. Hey, somebody says, maybe all those leering marauders shooting American tourists in the back of the head are just freedom fighters standing up for their own children!

I'm guessing this is supposed to make us feel better about cheering when the yanks smash in the face of some anonymous bandana-wearing thug. Today's globally-themed disposable entertainment comes conveniently embedded with its own white guilt.

Owen Wilson and Lake Bell play the parents, and they're the best things about the movie. They're likeable and emotionally identifiable figures, and both have faces that are fascinating to watch in the way their beauty seems to transgress every supposed rule of how attractive people are supposed to look. I'm guessing a bunch of people told them they were ugly as teenagers, and look at 'em now.

Like Gerard Depardieu's, Wilson's nose boasts more interesting topography than most mountain ranges, with clefts, ravines and humpback rises. Thank God the plastic surgeons never got ahold of him.

Sterling Jerins and Claire Geare play the daughters, and they're good eggs, adorable when needed and whiny just when the story needs them to make noise when the bad guys are trolling nearby. Pierce Brosnan plays a scarred, debauched Irishman who offers a little help at the airport, and then a little more down the line. These days when Brosnan turns up in a movie, we just assume he's got a Walther PPK or a wristwatch laser stashed somewhere.

The bulk of the movie is essentially just one big long chase, as mom and dad try to get the kids to safety while avoiding the roving, random bands of bad guys. They end up making for the border with Vietnam to seek asylum ... Vietnam! You can practically feel the filmmakers poking us with the irony stick.

Look, I understand the rules better than most about how movies manipulate us, and the ways we are driven to root for the protagonists by having the villains do nasty things to them. But I'm uncomfortable with the way this picture uses Asian heavies as faceless boogums barely indistinguishable from each other.

The Americans wander around, stupidly trying to speak English to everybody, while the natives chatter away like inscrutable monkeys. Since the movie never even bothers to give the country a made-up name or language, they're literally generic hostile "foreigners."

(It was shot in Thailand, for what that's worth.)

The Americans are the naive innocents, of course, caught up in some overseas intrigue that interests them only so much as it threatens them. You get the sense that the dad's first call after the tragedy will be not to relatives to assure their safety but to his company to see if his relocation bonus check will still clear.

"No Escape" is visceral, nail-biting and sure to entertain. Your instructions are to shriek at the scary Orientals, and try not to think too much about it afterward.

Video review: "The November Man"

When he was a younger man, Pierce Brosnan played James Bond and was quite good at, to my mind. Now he’s around 60 and too old to play a run-of-the-mill spy, but of just the right vintage to segue into the burgeoning Geezer Spy genre --  now dominated by Liam Neeson (“Taken”) but also populated by the likes of Kevin Costner (“3 Days to Kill”) and Denzel Washington (“The Equalizer.”)

These movies all tend to resemble each other, to wit: our hero is an efficient, ruthless killer who has now retired from the game/faked his death, but is recruited/forced to take on One Last Job which, of course, goes horribly awry and thus he must wade through a veritable army of bad guys who mock him for his decrepitude, until he shows them what a supreme badass he still is.

The whole thing is an exercise in aging Baby Boomer fantasy, which doesn't necessarily mean the movie won't be very good, though that is in fact the case with "The November Man."

The plot is a nigh-incomprehensible mish-mash of gunfights, car chases and distressed damsels, with Brosnan as an ex-CIA man who finds himself facing off with some of his old crew, plus some new whippersnappers.

He's brought in to sneak out a high-level source, who is then assassinated in the middle of the operation. Soon he's laying waste to Russian mafia, various assorted goons and his own CIA handlers/turncoats.

The action scenes are crisp and engaging, but any time people start talking the movie slows to a crawl.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the ideas of geriatrics pulverizing their younger competition. Until they can come up with some fresher stories, though, best to leave the oldsters in retirement.

Extra features are pretty good, though you'll have to spring for the Blu-ray edition to get them -- the DVD version comes with zilch.

There's a making-of documentary, featurettes on shooting in Belgrade and Brosnan's comeback, plus a feature-length commentary with Brosnan, director Roger Donaldson and producer Beau ST. Clair.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "The November Man"

"You can be a human being or a killer of human beings, but not both. Sooner or later, one of those will extinguish the other."

So says Peter Devereaux, and he should know. After more than three decades as a top CIA operative, he left a trail of bodies so long it earned him his unofficial codename, from which the movie "The November Man" takes its title. That's because after he comes through a place, one of his grizzled old handlers relates, nothing is left alive.

That analogy doesn't really make any sense -- of course plenty of things are still alive after November; that's how we get spring -- but then neither does much of the rest of the movie. It's a frenetic mish-mash of shootouts and bombastic dialogue, with some damsels in distress and vague geopolitical outcomes in the balance.

Pierce Brosnan optioned the rights to the book series by Bill Granger right around the time he was given the boot as James Bond in 2005. It's too bad they didn't actually make this movie back then, because it would've seemed a lot fresher.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: a past-his-prime spy is forced into taking One Last Job, but things go bad and he is forced to wade through a quagmire of thugs and bosses of uncertain loyalties, all the while sternly lecturing the whippersnappers about what a badass he is, before providing them a demonstration.

Liam Neeson, Kevin Costner and other have already taken their stab at this premise, with varying degrees of success. (Up next: Denzel Washington with this fall's "The Equalizer.") Now it's Brosnan's turn, and while he makes for a nicely creased, convincing geezer spy, the story never becomes coherent enough to land any real emotional punches.

The setup is that someone has a very big secret about Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), a Russian pol in line to take over the presidency. It seems he was a bad boy during the Chechnyan uprising, executing people and even taking a young girl named Mira as his personal sex slave. So Federov wants to take out anyone who knows anything about it, while the Americans (Will Patton and Bill Smitrovich are the senior spooks on the scene) want to leverage Mira against him.

Trouble is, no one can find her. So they settle for the next best thing, Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko), an advocate against sex trafficking who counseled Mira. Devereaux gets brought in to do a simple "exfil" -- that's "sneak somebody out" in spy talk -- of Federov's assistant, who has the goods on him. Alas, nasty things happen, setting off a chain reaction in which everybody is after Alice, and Devereaux becomes the only one she can trust.

There are a couple of X factors, both in the forms of younger, lean and hungry assassins. Alexa (Amila Terzimehić) works for Federov, has the body of a ballet dancer, the beak of a hawk and the stare of a killer. David Mason (Luke Bracey) is a CIA stooge who used to be Devereaux's protégé, until an op went bad and they became antagonists.

Much of the screenplay by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek -- too much, really -- is concerned with a chess match of wits between Devereaux and Mason, with the young guy better at rough-and-tumble skills while the older chap plays the superior long game. It's the old "teacher still has a few lessons to impart to the student" shtick.

But then the movie morphs into a relationship story between Devereaux and Alice, with her bearing a terrible secret (which I figured out around the 45-minute mark). Neither dynamic gets enough air to survive on its own, and both end up suffocating.

Director Roger Donaldson has made some terrific thrillers, including "No Way Out," which ratcheted up the tension inch by inch. But "The November Man" ends up as a lot of gunfights interspersed with confusing dialogue.

Or to put it another way: "You can have a revenge saga or a May/November romance, but not both."

Review: "Remember Me"

"Remember Me" is a mess of a movie, but its flaws are those of a cast and crew trying to do too much, rather than taking the easy way out with cliches and familiar plot devices.

The romantic drama has a twist ending that feels cheap and exploitative. And some of the actors -- notably Chris Cooper -- get lost in the ambitious but undisciplined storytelling.

Still, I would rather sit through a dozen noble failures like this than the latest idiot comedy or sentimental pap.

Robert Pattinson, in his first role since the "Twilight" movies made him a phenom, plays Tyler Hawkins, the scion of a well-to-do family who's slumming it in the poorer boroughs of New York City. He's seriously estranged from his business magnate father (Pierce Brosnan, proving once again that one of the few things he can't do is a convincing American accent).

He attends college, but not officially, only auditing some classes, and spends most of his time working part time at a book store, or hanging out in a coffee shop writing in a journal that he shows to no one. He's coasting through life, undecided about just about everything.

It's the sort of role that seems designed to promote Pattinson's mojo as a heartthrob rather than build a discernible, believable character. He twitches a lot and clenches his jaw and doesn't look people in the eye, except for the one person in the world he truly cares about, his little sister, Caroline. Tyler is the classic sensitive/broken soul who needs a romance to assemble the disparate pieces of his lackadaisical life.

That would be a role for Ally, played by Emilie de Ravin (an Aussie whose American accent is also strained). She's the daughter of a tough cop (Cooper) and a mother who was gunned down when she was 11. (Mom is played by Martha Plimpton, who I can't even remember the last time I saw her onscreen, and it makes me happy seeing her.)

Ally's dad compensates for his wife's murder by keeping a sharp eye on his daughter. Needless to say, he doesn't much care for the unambitious Tyler or his horndog roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington). In fact, the two meet the cop before Ally, when they try to break up a street fight. Tyler mouths off to him and so he throws them in jail. Aidan spots Ally with her father, and suggests as a joke that Tyler flirt with Ally using his gift with "that freaky poetic crap" that the gals love.

So he does, but then they fall for each other for real. Friction with the two fathers exacerbates their relationship on either end, which is further strained by other family problems for Tyler.

The screenplay by rookie Will Fetters meanders and loses its way, more interested in individual scenes than any kind of narrative arc. Some of its eddies are interesting enough in their own right, while other times we wish the film would hurry up. I kept waiting for things to happen -- such as the two a-hole fathers meeting -- that never did, and some of the places the story did go were baffling and boring.

For instance, there's a whole long sequence about Tyler sister Caroline getting hazed by some school mates at a sleepover party. Kids can be nasty to each other, and I don't want to minimize the effects of bullying. But the way the entire Hawkins clan goes into crisis mode over some pretty mild behavior seemed way overblown. Tyler's super-busy father, who doesn't even bother to acknowledge his son's 22nd birthday, stops everything he's doing to rush over. It just felt contrived and wrong to me.

The title comes from Tyler's brother Michael, who killed himself six years earlier. Tyler has Michael's name tattooed over his heart, and gets all cold and moody whenever anyone brings the subject up. The movie doesn't really do anything with this information other than use it whenever an angsty moment is required.

The Ally/Tyler romance didn't really do anything for me. We believe that they're a couple because the movie tells us so, not because they seem fated to be together. I also didn't like how they treated the character of Ally's father. He's all rage without any paternal warmth. We never spend any time with him, so we don't understand what makes him tick. All we see is him doing bad things, so eventually we just figure he's a bad guy.

(I will say that if I were Tyler, after the same police detective beat me up twice, I'd be thinking about a conversation with his lieutenant.)

Director Allen Coulter is a TV veteran who made the excellent "Holllywoodland" a few years back, and he seems to have a nice touch with actors but not with the mechanics of storytelling. I really liked the performance he got out of Ruby Jerins as little Caroline -- she seemed to hold all the hope and fears of a lonely, gifted child in her every glance.

I won't say anything about the strange, shameful ending, other than the film's timeline should have tipped me off.

It doesn't work, other than as a purely manipulative trick. For some reason, I want to believe the people behind this movie are better than that, so I'll write it off as a profoundly misguided mistake rather than a cynical ploy.

2.5 stars

Review: "The Ghost Writer"

"The Ghost Writer" starts off at a slow boil, and for a long time the plot simmers without gaining momentum. It bubbles away and doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. But then the last 30 minutes or so kick into high gear, with big reveals and satisfying twists.

It's based on the novel "The Ghost" by Robert Harris, who adapted it for the screen along with director Roman Polanski.

(Polanski was still working on the film when he was incarcerated as a fugitive from justice after raping a 13-year-old girl back in the 1970s. I won't linger on the debate about whether the Polish director is a great artist or a sexual deviant, other than to say I've never understood why people insist the two are mutually exclusive.)

"The Ghost Writer" isn't among Polanski's finest works ("The Pianist," "Chinatown") but it's certainly a worthy mystery/thriller.

Ewan McGregor plays the (unnamed) ghost, or ghost writer, for former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, clearly enjoying himself.) Lang -- who bears a not-at-all accidental similarity to Tony Blair -- was popular but drew criticism near the end of his term for playing poodle to American interests.

Just as the ghost arrives at Lang's secluded beach mansion to fix up the dry memoirs, one of his former ministers (Jon Bernthal) steps forward with allegations that his boss aided in the kidnapping of British citizens to be waterboarded by the CIA.

After Lang decamps to deal with the charges, the ghost starts digging into the mystery. His predecessor, a longtime Lang aide, drowned mysteriously on the same island, and the ghost finds photographs and documents among the deceased's effects that don't jibe with the autobiographical history Lang provided.

Lang's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) gave up her own political ambitions to foster her husband's, and resents how his life overshadows and restricts hers. She certainly has charismatic skills of manipulation, which she's soon exercising on the writer.

The ghost's investigation eventually leads to the secluded house of a Harvard professor (a great Tom Wilkinson) whose connections to Lang may be more than meets the eye.

Mysterious men start following the writer around, as the cat-and-mouse game gains intensity and energy.

Nowadays most movies of this sort start out strong and peter out with an illogical or unnecessary ending. "The Ghost Writer" moves in the opposite direction, dithering early on and growing stronger and more purposeful as it goes.

The biggest weakness of the film is the ghost, who never gains any substance as a character. We don't know anything about who he is, so it's peculiar that a professed political agnostic would become so obsessed in ferreting out the truth.

I won't reveal anything about the big twist at the end, other than to say it will probably bolster the mood of those contemptuous of the Bush/Blair anti-terror strategy. For Polanski, the horrors of history are an ample springboard for his distinctive, neurotic style of filmmaking.

3 stars

Review: "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief"

The studio would not screen "Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief" for critics here in Indianapolis. It's something that's been happening more and more lately. Once, it was only tiny little indie films. Now, mainstream movies like this are skipped.

In this case, it was especially curious because several weeks ago they contacted several local critics and offered interviews with the cast. We took them up on it -- you can read the Q&A here -- but still no screening. Exasperating.

Usually when a film is not screened, it's because the studio knows it has a dog on its hands. "Percy" is not a dog of a movie; it's actually a pretty good one. It's a pleasant enough action/adventure story for the preteen crowd -- sort of a Greek mythology version of "Harry Potter."

Instead of spells, Percy Jackson (a winning Logan Lerman -- one to watch) and his cohorts have gods for parents: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, Hermes, etc. This makes them demi-gods -- humans with magical powers.

Percy thinks he's a regular kid with dyslexia and ADHD, a loser whose mother (Catherine Keener) is married to a slob of a step-father. His only friend is Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), a cripple on crutches.

But when minotaurs and furies start materializing out of thin air to attack him, it's a clue that his daddy is actually Poseidon (Kevin McKidd). It seems some miscreant has stolen Zeus' lightning bolt, and he thinks it's Percy. Unless the lightning is returned, the gods of Olympus are going to war.

The movie is based on a popular series of books by Rick Riordan. Screenwriter Craig Titley and kid-centric director Chris Columbus -- who directed the first two "Harry Potter" movies -- aim for a slapdash of PG-rated mayhem mixed in with some Greek Mythology 101.

In their reckoning, the Earth is populated by hundreds of offspring of the gods, who have a tendency to visit and "hook up" with mortals and then skedaddle. Percy and his ilk think they've been abandoned by their parents -- a none-too-subtle metaphor for the divorce epidemic.

Percy is taken to Camp Half-Blood -- think Hogwarts as a summer retreat -- to train and learn about his destiny.

Grover is revealed as a satyr, half-man, half-goat and all girl-loving horndog. The headmaster is a centaur who had been posing as a wheelchair-bound professor at his school, played by Pierce Brosnan. Luke (Jake Abel) is the friendly son of Hermes who takes Percy into his confidence. Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), daughter of Athena, is the baddest warrior in camp.

(No hint as to why all the demigod students happen to be between 16 and 18 years of age -- was the early 1990s the Summer of Love for gods coming to Earth to knock boots?)

The plot is fairly simplistic and silly, something involving finding their way into Hell to confront Hades, who's taken Percy's mother hostage. First they have to find three magical pearls that will allow them to return from the fiery depths.

This, of course, involves fighting increasingly dangerous critters pulled from the pages of Greek and Roman lore. Uma Thurman has a nice cameo as a sunglasses-wearing medusa. Other star turns include Sean Bean as Zeus, Rosario Dawson as the spouse of Hades, and Steve Coogan as the original man in black himself.

"Percy Jackson" is certainly not a great film, but it's well-executed family entertainment that will keep even parents reasonably entertained.

The only supernatural mystery is why the studio didn't want critics to see it.

3 stars