Ill-Informed Gadfly

Michael Mann is a great American moviemaker who may never make another great movie. It’s a depressing notion, but as “Public Enemies” makes clear, Mann has gone over to the dark side. He used digital video judiciously and expressively in his previous two movies, “Collateral” and “Miami Vice.” But “Public Enemies” is 100 percent video, and while it allows Mann to wield his camera with unprecedented dexterity, the final product nonetheless looks like it was shot on a cell phone. So Mann doesn’t live up to his usual aesthetic standards. But if anyone else had directed “Public Enemies,” I’d be hailing it as an impressive piece of cinema, a rare movie for adults released at the height of the silly season. The final months of legendary criminal John Dillinger’s life are packed with blazing Tommy guns and electrifying escapes, yet Mann summons a feeling of quiet melancholy. As Dillinger, Johnny Depp embraces the outlaw life while also showing how it saps his vitality. And Marion Cotillard brings beauty, intelligence and astonishing depth of feeling to Dillinger’s girlfriend, Billie Frechette. When the movie hits a lull, Cotillard is there to perk it up. This 2-hour, 20-minute saga has its fallow stretches, as Dillinger’s life can’t easily be wrangled into a three-act narrative. It might have been more lucid if it were longer: Several characters and subplots feel stunted. Maybe “Public Enemies” doesn’t have the raw material to be a masterpiece, despite the seemingly ideal pairing of Dillinger and Mann.

Sam Mendes began his career as a theater director, and he returns frequently to the stage. You can tell from the staginess of his movies. “Away We Go” is his fifth film and his breeziest to date, a trifling road picture about expectant parents searching for a suitable place to raise their unborn daughter. The material demands a light touch, but zest and spontaneity continue to elude Mendes. You can almost hear him clearing his throat before an actor delivers an important speech. He favors declamatory line readings, and he struggles to capture naturalistic behavior. And while his movies are superficially pretty to look at, he still doesn’t know how to use images to tell a story. “Away We Go” couples Mendes’s theatrical bent with the literary sensibilities of screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, who structure their debut film like a series of short-story parables. That’s a lot for a movie to overcome, and it succeeds fitfully at best. Eggers and Vida capture the anxieties that accompany pregnancy, and lead actors Maya Rudolph and Jon Krasinski play them with humor and grace. Yet the central couple is too vague to stir anything more than fleeting empathy. Vignettes with Rudolph’s sister and Krasinski’s brother radiate with warmth and relative understatement. But the movie also offers loud caricatures of bad parents, and it overreaches in a bid to show the sorrows of a seemingly idyllic family. On the whole, “Away We Go” is amiably dull, a tolerable waste of time.

You hear it all the time as a movie critic. You recommend something dark and challenging and incisive, only to be told, “I don’t want to see that. It sounds depressing.” My stock response, inadequate but true, is that great art can never be depressing. Now “The Brothers Bloom” — that’s depressing. Never have I felt so despondent during a movie or so miserable afterward. You can’t forget it as soon as it’s over, like a lame Hollywood rom-com. Its vacuousness is epic, and it sticks with you. It repels your interest from the opening shots. Ricky Jay narrates. Two prepubescent brothers wear dark suits and bowler hats. The camera does cloying pinwheels. The soundtrack mimics a hipster’s Ipod on shuffle. It is arch, fey, precious, ersatz, empty. It begins as a witless parody of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson. Then it settles in for a grueling two hours of forced whimsy. Writer-director Rian Johnson, who also made an ultra-stylized noir called “Brick,” is a dangerous sort of hack: clever, schooled in cinema, with absolutely nothing to say. He takes gorgeous locations and first-rate actors and reduces them to nonsense. Typically I try to find delicate ways to suggest that maybe you should see one movie and avoid another. With “The Brothers Bloom,” I’m going to resort to direct orders. If it’s in a theater, walk out. If it’s on TV, change the channel. If the DVD arrives, send it back. If it downloads, reboot. I see movies so you don’t have to, and you don’t have to see “The Brothers Bloom.” Thank me whenever.

In “Wedding Crashers,” Bradley Cooper played a sadistic psychopath who cloaks his terrifying personality in praiseworthy activism and achievement. It was an oddly unfunny, discordant note in an otherwise good-natured crowd-pleaser. Nonetheless, the role was a good fit for Cooper, with his beady eyes, hawkish nose and coldblooded intensity. These characteristics haven’t abandoned Cooper now that he’s graduated to leading roles. In “The Hangover” he plays a sociopath — unintentionally. He’s supposed to be a laid-back guy’s guy, but he’s singularly unlikable, even frightening. There’s no bonhomie in his persona. He regards his co-stars with grudging acquiescence or naked loathing. If he’s a frat guy — and “The Hangover” aspires to frat-approved comedy — he’s the guy who lurks in his room before emerging to haze the pledges with dead-eyed glee. Cooper’s Phil Wenneck makes a toxic first impression: A prep-school teacher, Phil steals cash from his students and blows them off when he leaves the building with “It’s the weekend — I don’t know you.” In Las Vegas, he suits up in a black-on-black ensemble, unironically. He oozes vanity and contempt. Cooper is easily the most appalling leading man to be foisted upon the moviegoing public since Matthew McConaughey.

Why do people like this movie?

I know why: marketing. The trailers package bad-boy hijinks like an ingenious Sin City tourism commercial. But the movie forgets the good times, the gags, the camaraderie. Instead, it spews venom, misfiring badly every time it tries to push the envelope. “The Hangover” is misogynistic, racist and homophobic. It doesn’t satirize these prejudices — it assumes them. In the trailer, Cooper and Justin Bartha pull up in a convertible outside Ed Helms’s house and yell, “Paging Dr. Douchebag!” But the movie wants to remind you it’s R-rated, so they call out “Paging Dr. Faggot!” instead. Forget the fact that the actual line doesn’t sound as funny as the cleaned-up version. It’s also needlessly offensive. Who says “faggot” anymore? Who wants to hang out with guys who insult each other with “faggot” — with no hint of self-awareness?

It’s shocking to me that this nasty, bilious movie was directed by Todd Phillips, who helmed “Old School,” the riotous and good-hearted gem of the Frat Pack era. An abyss separates Cooper, Helms and Zach Galifianakis from the charismatic trio of Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson. Galifianakis, a respected avant-garde comedian, sells out utterly, playing a series of types in a desperate bid for laughs. He’s the nerdy guy, the dumb guy, the awkward guy, the naive guy, the fat guy, the unkempt guy, the volatile guy, the creepy guy, the diabolical guy — an inconsistent and incomprehensible stew. Helms generates a smidgen of goodwill as he lies hysterically to his impossibly shrewish soon-to-be fiancee, but the movie’s contempt for women sours the enterprise. Heather Graham is the only tolerable female, in a too-brief appearance as a platinum-hearted hooker, and when Heather Graham delivers the most engaging performance in a movie and leaves you wishing for more, you’ve got problems.

“The Hangover” revs up the audience with its promise of Vegas mayhem. The high points from the trailer come at the right times, with people laughing at the punch lines they already know. Meanwhile, I lamented the incredibly dull and predictable chain of events — a series of un-twists — that follows the clever setup. I was ready to leave long before the perfunctory, craven denouement.

And I LOVE Las Vegas.

Director Tony Scott is a merciless exploiter of contemporary miseries. In “Man on Fire” it was kidnappings in Mexico. In “Deja Vu” it was Hurricane Katrina, with domestic terrorism on the side. There’s more homegrown terror in “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” but Scott’s real subject is the foundering economy, as embodied by a disgraced Wall Street big shot and a municipal employee who suffers the trickle-down effect of the misdeeds downtown. Despite his distinguished career with the transit authority, Walter Garber feels compelled to take a bribe to pay the college tuition for his daughters, and he’s about to get canned for it. But first he has to deal with the hijacking of a subway train. That’s what the movie is supposed to be about, but Scott hijacks a solid thriller premise with his weird and ineffectual zeitgeist-mongering. The original “Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” was released in 1974, and it’s a fascinating New York City time capsule – but it doesn’t insist on its own significance. It just tells an entertaining crime story. Scott feels obligated to goose up the action with showy roles for aging movie stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta. Washington’s Garber enacts a predictable tale of redemption. Travolta’s bad guy speaks the language of high finance. He’s also a Catholic who feels a bit guilty about his evil deeds. These mostly irrelevant details somehow take precedence over the plight of the people he kills. The 1974 “Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” will endure for decades to come. The remake wants so much to be “of the moment” that it will be forgotten this time next week.

“Sin Nombre” is a compelling and appropriately brutal border-crossing odyssey. It’s not likely to change any minds about undocumented immigration, but at the very least it shows that the decision to enter the United States illegally is a grave one, with profound risks. The debut film from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga follows a Honduran teenager named Sayra who agrees to travel with her father to the States, where his wife and younger children live. Meanwhile, Willy, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in the south of Mexico, rightly grows disillusioned when his girlfriend is raped and murdered as punishment for his disobedience. Sayra and Willy converge in a grimy railyard that could be a gateway to heaven or hell. “Sin Nombre” translates as “nameless,” and the two young travelers embrace the opportunity to reinvent themselves on the journey north. Fukunaga is a first-rate visual storyteller whose work brings to mind both Michael Mann and Terrence Malick. His images are forceful and muscular, but he also conjures moments of extraordinary, rough-hewn beauty. He finds poetry in faces that carry the promise of youth or the death sentence of gang tattoos — or both. The inked teardrops that fall from Willy’s right eye are particularly evocative. Fukunaga has more difficulty clarifying the psychology of his characters — when Sayra makes a bold and crucial decision, her mind remains inscrutable. Nonetheless, “Sin Nombre” is fresh, vital, inspired moviemaking.

“Drag Me to Hell” is the shiny toy in this dry cereal box of a summer, a movie that radiates the joy of cinema. You can feel director Sam Raimi exhaling with satisfaction as he returns to the tropes that he cut his teeth on, like eyeballs and bodily fluids used as projectiles. Raimi atones for the mechanized excesses of his dreadful “Spider-Man 3,” rediscovering the exuberant camerawork and cocktail of humor and fright that won a devoted cult following for his “Evil Dead” trilogy. Raimi, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother, Ivan, also finds the ideal subject matter for our troubled times. “Drag Me to Hell” takes gleeful revenge on the mortgage industry, punishing an ambitious young loan officer named Christine Brown who refuses to extend credit to a decrepit gypsy woman. First Raimi stages the most inventively inappropriate girlfight I’ve ever seen. Then the old crone curses Christine with a demon who won’t quit until he possesses her soul. The punishment far exceeds the crime, but “Drag Me to Hell” is more than a sadistic horror movie. It’s an outrageous satire of cutthroat young professionals, and Raimi encourages us both to empathize with Christine and to delight in her suffering. Pulling off that two-step requires a brilliant actress, and Alison Lohman delivers, using her cherubic face to summon innocence or malice on command. Justin Long, too, is perfectly cast as Christine’s callow psychology-professor boyfriend, who’s both supportive and cluelessly self-absorbed. Movies with the energy and wit of “Drag Me to Hell” are unusual in any season.

Dementia is not cute. Nor does it lend itself to profundity or poetic justice. But if you prefer being lied to about such a serious subject — if you’d like to believe that people with Alzheimer’s get an opportunity to wrap a bow around their lives — then perhaps you will enjoy Michael Caine’s new movie, a piece of high-class drivel called “Is Anybody There?” Caine plays a retired magician who grudgingly moves into an old-folks home in an English seaside town in the mid-1980s. There he befriends the introverted, 10-year-old son of the home’s proprietors, setting up vignette after cloying vignette with the crotchety old guy and the simpering kid. The dementia doesn’t come in right away: Caine is seen executing complicated ruses, empathizing with the boy and grieving the death of his wife in ways that only someone who has his faculties can pull off. But if he were to live for another decade, there would be no movie, so screenwriter Peter Harness has him lose his mind. Caine remains vigorous in his mid-70s, able to balance swagger and vulnerability. But in “Is Anybody There?” his work is shrill and unfocused; he gives in to cliché. The sad thing is, there’s some good stuff going on around the margins of the movie. Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey bring humor and genuine pathos to the boy’s overworked parents, whose marriage is crumbling. Filmmakers with an interest in subtlety would tell their story, but “Is Anybody There?” wants to be adorable and easy to digest. To me, it brings to mind the end of the digestive process. It ought to be flushed away.

Now I know what Christian Bale was so pissed off about. The recording of Bale’s profane rant on the set of “Terminator Salvation” is more entertaining, more passionate and funnier than anything in the movie. I doubt Bale would have snapped at the cinematographer if he knew they were doing first-rate work together. Bale must have suspected that “Terminator Salvation” was hopeless. It has nothing you want in a movie: There’s no emotion, no suspense, no humor. Worse, it organizes the plot entirely around stuff that has yet to happen, or has already happened, depending on your point of view. The “Terminator” series depends on paradoxes involving time travel, and in this installment, Bale’s John Connor is on a mission to make sure that his father, Kyle Reese, has a chance to grow up and go back in time and impregnate John’s mother. But didn’t Kyle already do that? It’s hard to imagine that John could possibly fail. The key to his success is a new variety of cyborg with a human brain and heart, played by a hunky but dull newcomer named Sam Worthington. At times, he sounds American. Often he slips into his native Australian. And on occasion, he sounds like his mouth is full of peanut butter. The director who calls himself McG has little skill with actors. And he can’t grasp the simple concept that made the first two “Terminators” so fantastic: an unstoppable killing machine pursuing characters you care about. “Terminator Salvation” is franchise filmmaking at its perfunctory, soulless worst.

Dan Brown spent six years writing the follow-up to his mega-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code,” which will hit bookshelves in September. Brown’s pace undoubtedly tests the patience of his devoted readers, but his meager output to date may prove a tonic to moviegoers who dread sitting through the mind-numbing screen adaptations of his work. His plots are both mechanical and preposterous, terms that can also be applied with ease to the cinema of Ron Howard, who directed both “The Da Vinci Code” and the new prequel-turned-sequel “Angels & Demons.” Howard signals early on that he’ll be working hard to create the illusion of tension, whooshing the camera around a particle accelerator in a frenzied bid to make subatomic physics appear exciting. Most of the action in “Angels & Demons” takes place over a six-hour stretch, and Howard constantly reminds the audience with text on the screen indicating the exact time. Like most of his choices, it’s clunky and literal-minded and has the opposite of the desired effect — time seems to slow down. Speaking of slow, the movie stars a narcoleptic Tom Hanks, who can’t be bothered to bring a soupcon of academic eccentricity to his Harvard symbologist hero. Once again he’s paired with a fetching brunette who speaks her lines as if she learned them phonetically — this time it’s Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer playing an Italian physicist. Together, they have the chemistry of a wet blanket on top of another wet blanket. “Angels & Demons” pits science against religion, and it’s as dull as a warmed-over sermon or biology lecture.