Unknown

Unknown - Dir. Dir. Jaume Collet-Serra (2011)

Most actors tend to take less physical roles by the time they hit 60. Not Liam Neeson, who has reinvented himself as a badass action hero following the success of Taken. He's certainly believable as an unstoppable killing machine with his deep voice and imposing 6'4 frame. Unknown certainly feels like it came from the same Luc Besson machine that churned out Taken with Neeson cutting a swath through menacing Euro-trash villains. On the contrary, Unknown comes from the Joel Silver action factory. It was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who also helmed the horror film Orphan, and based on the novel Out of My Head by French novelist Didier Van Cauwelaert.

Neeson stars as Dr. Martin Harris, a biologist who has just arrived in Berlin for a biotechnology conference with his wife Liz (January Jones). A terrible accident in a taxicab leaves Martin in a coma for several days. When he awakens, he is shocked to discover another man (Aidan Quinn) is now claiming to be Dr. Martin Harris and Liz has no idea who he is. Or Martin's memories a delusion or has he fallen into an elaborate conspiracy? The only clue to uncovering Martin's true identity is the cab driver, Gina (Diane Kruger), who is reluctant to come forward because she is an illegal immigrant from Bosnia.

Unknown is the type of standard fare we've come to expect from a post-Bourne world. The film boils down the Hitchcockian wrong man formula to its barest essentials while trying to plug in various plot holes with fist fights and car chases. Luckily, the one taxi Martin gets into happens to belong to the hottest cab driver in all of Germany. And, of course, Neeson will regain his memories just in the nick of time to dish out some serious beatings.

Neeson is a capable enough actor to make all this silliness credible. He's backed up by some good European talent like Sebastian Koch from The Lives of Others and Rainer Bock from Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Frank Langella also turns in a creepy performance as one of Martin's colleagues. The most intriguing character belongs to Bruno Ganz as a former Stasi officer turned private investigator. Ganz is best known as playing Hitler in Downfall, also known as the Hitler from all those YouTube videos where he laments about Burning Man, X-Box Live, and becoming a meme. Too bad you cannot say the same for January Jones. The Mad Men actress turns in another blank-eyed robotic performance as Martin's cold fish wife.

Unknown is best described as Taken meets The Bourne Identity. It's a ridiculous and pedestrian action thriller that may provide some diverting pleasure for about two hours.

Rating: ** (*****)

Sarah's Key

Sarah's Key - Dir. Gilles Paquet-Brenner (2010)

Sarah's Key revolves around a little known atrocity committed during World War II known as the Vel d'Hiv Roundup. On July 16 and 17 of 1942, French police and officials of the Vichy government, under orders from the Nazi regime, enacted a mass arrest of over 13,000 Jews living in Paris. Most of them were women and children. These Jews were initially interred at the Vel d'Hiv stadium without the use of bathrooms and under tremendous heat as all windows were blocked to prevent escape. Nearly two-thirds of the prisoners were eventually sent to Auschwitz. Sarah's Key, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, serves as a reminder of these tragic events and their lasting effects on the France of today. Much like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it looks at the Holocaust through a child's point-of-view.

Kristin Scott Thomas stars as Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris with her French husband, Bertrand Tezac (Frederic Pierrot). She learns that the apartment her in-laws have owned for decades came into their possession soon after the Vel d'Hiv Roundup. She sets out to discover how the Tezacs got the place and who the tenants were before them. Julia's investigations uncover the harrowing story of a young girl named Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance).

In 1942, the police take Sarah and her family into custody. In a panic, Sarah locks her little brother, Michele (Paul Mercier), in a hidden closet and tells him to stay there until she comes back. Sarah and her parents are sent first to Vel d'Hiv then to a deportation camp in Beaune-la-Rolande where the adults and children are separated. Sarah manages to escape thanks to a sympathetic police officer and seeks refuge with an elderly couple in the countryside. All the while she is desperate to return to Paris to rescue Michele.

The two stories of Sarah and Julia run parallel to each other, but neither meshes with the other. Sarah's portion of the film stands as its most effective thanks to the heartbreaking performances by Mélusine Mayance and Charlotte Poutrel, who plays the adult Sarah. While Kristin Scott Thomas gives a strong performance, her segments come off as preachy and hollow. Julia's search for the truth about Sarah is meant to symbolize the impact of the Roundup. Many are unaware of the events, others warn her not to stir things up, and a few react with angry denial. One coworker is quick to condemn those that stood by to which Julia refutes with "What would you have done?"

In addition, Julia discovers she is pregnant and must decide if she should to keep the baby when her husband staunchly declares he doesn't want it. To really drive the point him, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner dissolves from an overhead shot of Sarah lying in a fetal position to a newly pregnant Julia. Brenner also tries too hard with the score as ominous music blares to the hilt as detainees are herded off a bus.

The two time periods of Sarah's Key don't always gel together and Julia's world of trendy magazine offices and iPhones feels trivial next to the plight of Sarah. Still, it's a fine film that tugs at the heart strings, despite mistakenly tackling its subject matter with a clinical and didactic approach.

Rating: ** (*****)

Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex - Dir. Jimmy Hayward (2010)


Comic book movies are now a staple of the summer blockbuster season. This modern age of the comic book film can be traced back to an unlikely source in Blade. For decades, Marvel had attempted to turn their characters into successful feature films. Yet, all they had to show for it are a pair of awful direct-to-video movies based on Captain America and the Punisher and a Roger Corman-directed Fantastic Four that was never even released. With top properties like Spider-Man and the X-Men languishing in development hell, it was an unknown vampire slayer that broke through for Marvel and set the stage for Iron Man and others.

In recent years, Marvel’s main competitor, DC Comics, has had massive success with its rebooted Batman franchise. However, Superman Returns was a failure and they’ve struggled to get other A-list characters like Wonder Woman and the Flash off the ground while Green Lantern finally hits screens next year. It only makes sense for DC to exploit its lesser known characters or creator-owned properties to fill the void. And along rides Jonah Hex.

Hex was created by John Albano and Tony DeZuniga and first appeared in 1971 in All-Star Western #10. Set in the Old West, Hex was a bounty hunter with half his face hideously scarred. He was sold into slavery to the Apache as a child and fought for the Confederacy in adulthood. Later, he was revamped with a supernatural bent as part of DC’s Vertigo imprint. The movie version combines a little bit of both, but is a very loose adaptation of the character.

Josh Brolin stars as Jonah Hex; a Civil War veteran who surrendered to the Union inadvertantly resulting in the death of his best friend Jeb Turnbull (an uncredited Jeffrey Dean Morgan). In revenge, Jeb’s father, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) forces Hex to watch helplessly while his wife and son are murdered. Left for dead with his face branded, Hex is saved by Indians and the ordeal leaves him the power to temporarily speak with the dead.

Since then, the disfigured anti-hero has made his mark as a renowned bounty hunter and gunfighter of exceptional skill. Meanwhile, Turnbull has become a terrorist striking out against the American government. He steals a massive supergun, dubbed the ‘Nation Killer,’ in order to destroy Washington during the country’s centennial celebration.

Jonah Hex endured a problematic journey into the theaters. The script was originally written by Neveldine & Taylor, the team behind the Crank films and Gamer, who were also attached to direct. Brolin signed onto the project supposedly because he loved its atrociousness. The pair left the project and was eventually replaced by the oddball choice of Jimmy Hayward whose only previous experience was the animated Horton Hears a Who. The project saw last minute reshoots under the supervision of Francis Lawrence (Constantine, I Am Legend) and a massive retooling of the plot.

What’s left is a complete mess that is barely 80 minutes long, not counting the credits. Jonah Hex is like two fractured films hastily duct taped together. There is a strange battle on a metaphysical plain between Hex and Turnbull that was once set to be the climax of the movie. Instead, it’s clumsily and confusingly intercut with two major sequences of the final product. The mystical elements are excised and in their place we find ludicrous weaponry like saddle-mounted Gatling guns, dynamite launching crossbows, and a monstrous cannon powered by glowing orange orbs invented by Eli Whitney, the creator of the cotton gin. No, really.

Some of the cast seem to realize what a colossal turd they’re in and play along. Brolin tries to rise above it all as the gravelly voiced Hex while Michael Fassbender goes over-the-top as a knife-wielding Irish henchman. Megan Fox also appears as a tough hooker with a lilting Southern accent and an impossibly thin hourglass waist. She seriously looks like she’ll snap in half at any second. For some reason, Fox almost always appears in close-ups with soft lighting no matter what the situation. Will Arnett is woefully miscast as a straight-laced Union officer while Michael Shannon pops in for one and only one scene as the ringleader of an underground fight club. Both actors are victims of the reshoots and slapdash editing.

Jonah Hex never purports to be anything more than a low-grade B-movie. Some might be able to enjoy it on a ‘so bad, it’s good’ level, but not me. Jonah Hex makes no attempt to remain faithful to the source material. It’s a shame really as the character had the potential to star in a Leone-style Spaghetti Western. The movie isn’t so much A Fistful of Dollars as it is Wild Wild West. In the pantheon of DC adaptations, it ranks at the bottom of the pile alongside Catwoman and Steel.

Rating: * ½