The Whole Truth

Year 13, Day 345 - 12/11/21 - Movie #3,994

BEFORE: OK, I got all (?) my Christmas cards addressed Thursday night, then I got them mailed out on Friday.  It's SO much easier to just send links to download my music, instead of a CD, and I saved on postage this way, too!  If this works, I'll just do this every year, whoever wants the music can still get it, and those who don't can just ignore the link.  What a load off of my mind.  Got my COVID vaccine booster shot AND a flu shot on Friday, too, with no bad reactions except for a sore left arm.  So now I just need to think about finishing the movie year and maybe buying some Christmas gifts. 

Keanu Reeves carries over again from "The Watcher". First he was a cheating husband, then he was a serial killer, now tonight he's a lawyer.  I know, it's tough to say which is worse.  Boy, it sure seems like I'm going to close the year with that new "Matrix" movie, right?  Sorry, if you're expecting that, please prepare yourself for disappointment. But I do want to send a rare Birthday SHOUT-out today to Gabriel Basso, born December 11, 1994.

THE PLOT: A defense attorney works to get his teenage client acquitted of murdering his wealthy father. 

AFTER: Boy, it's been a while since I've watched a good legal drama - probably the last one was "The Trial of the Chicago 7" back in April.  For a murder trial, I guess I'd have to think back even further than that. "The Lincoln Lawyer"?  What was that case about, I barely remember?  I guess that particular plot didn't stick with me, but that's what can happen when you watch 300 movies in a year, and then another 300 the year after that.  The memory is almost full, as they say.  

I think there's a similarity between the two films, in that part of the plots hinges on attorney-client privilege, in both cases the defense attorneys have inside information that could affect the case, only they're withholding it, because they can (or have to).  It's not the defense attorney's job to bring these things up, it's the prosecuting attorney's job to prove guilt, the defense only has to poke holes in the prosecution's case, or bring up enough doubt to keep the charge from sticking.  It's doubly difficult for Richard Ramsay here because his client, the son of the deceased, hasn't spoken since his father's murder, which some witnesses say he took responsibility for.  Without his testimony, though, Ramsay's hands are somewhat tied, he's limited in what he can introduce in his client's defense if he doesn't know his story.  

There are plenty of other suspects, since the deceased was an abusive sort, and since Ramsay's a friend of the family (the deceased was his legal mentor at one point) he knows that's he's the kind of man likely to beat his wife and/or bully his kids. We see him in one flashback teaching his son to swim - the hard way, by throwing him in the pool - and then later when his son is applying for colleges, berating him until he agrees to go to Stanford and not that "other" more liberal, non Ivy-league school.  It's his way or the highway.  So naturally the wife is a prime suspect here, so's the teen boy who lived next door and spied on Mrs. Ramsay in the shower, who also witnessed spousal abuse and may have tried to put an end to it.  

The only evidence Ramsay is able to introduce are photos of bruises on the wife's body, taken the day after the murder.  However, just proving spousal abuse is legally not enough to justify murder, unless the killing was done in self-defense.  But it's not the wife on trial here, it's the son.  I wonder, since the deceased man is played in flashback by Jim Belushi, why Ramsay didn't try an unusual defense, namely that haven't we all wanted to kill Jim Belushi at some point?  Really, a few episodes of "According to Jim" would constitute justifiable homicide, right? Just me? 

Ramsay believes that "everyone" lies on the witness stand in court, which I have to admit is a unique point that I haven't seen mentioned before in legal thrillers.  We're so used to people being sworn in to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth that it's almost hard to then shift gears and think that everyone really lies, to some degree.  But that's perjury, and it's also illegal, but I guess then you have to prove it before you can charge somebody with it. 

I'm not sure how I feel about the younger lawyer character that Ramsay takes on as an associate, I'm not sure her character is all that necessary, except to act as a sounding board, someone for Ramsay to bounce ideas off of when trying to come up with legal strategies.  Also he mansplains his thoughts to her about everyone lying on the stand, this is a method of getting those ideas in the heads of the audience, but the character doesn't serve much of any other real function, which seems like a bit of a waste. 

But, finally, the whole truth is seen in flashback at the end of the film - and it's not something I've seen before, so for that reason alone I think I'll be lenient in my scoring today.  But beyond that, the trial stuff is really basic, cookie-cutter, "Law & Order" season three type stuff.  I'm not going to get involved in the speculation over why Renée Zellweger started looking very different when she came back from a long acting hiatus in 2016, that's her business. I get that nobody ever really looks the same over a period of, say, 15 years, but most people do continue to look like themselves, and she decided she was going to look like somebody else.  Whatever. 

Also starring Renée Zellweger (last seen in "Judy"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Gabriel Basso (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), James Belushi (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "Contraband"), Christopher Berry (last seen in "The Hunt"), Jim Klock (ditto), Jason Kirkpatrick (last seen in "Mudbound"), Nicole Barré (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Sean Bridgers (last seen in "Dark Places"), Jackie Tuttle, Mattie Liptak (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Thomas Francis Murphy (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Dana Gourrier (last seen in "Broken CIty")

RATING: 6 out of 10 crime scene photos back at the hotel

The Watcher

Year 13, Day 343 - 12/9/21 - Movie #3,993

BEFORE: It's the day of palindromes, as three elements of my tracking system can be read the same backwards and forwards.  Day 343 of the year, and it's 12/9/21 - and it's movie #3,993 overall, which means I'm just four films from Big Movie 4,000 - I kind of wish I had more control over how a year's going to end, because that should be some kind of super blockbuster to commemorate the occasion, but I'm afraid it's not going to be, just an average sort of Christmas-ish movie.  I hope it's not a letdown for me or for you. But hey, it'll be Christmas, so good cheer and all that, and hitting a milestone like 4,000 movies should be its own reward, at least from an OCD standpoint. I'll feel some sense of accomplishment, hopefully - but that will probably be tempered by the fact that then I'll have to abstain from movies for the next two weeks, waiting for January 1 to start the cycle over again.  Guess I'll catch up on "Hawkeye" or season 2 of "Tiger King" or something. 

Keanu Reeves carries over from "Knock Knock", and it's sort of a last-minute addition to Keanu's stats for the year - he was already in three romance-themed movies in February, and then the new "Bill & Ted" movie later in the year, and now three more films in December.  He can't possibly win the year at this point, it's too little, too late - but he could still make the Top 20, that's not too bad. Actors who focus on romances and/or horror films seem to have an inside track according to my organizational system - but they can't beat U.S. Presidents and talk-show hosts, who appear in so many documentaries, via archive footage. 

THE PLOT: An FBI agent tracking a serial killer gives up all hope of solving the crimes and moves to another city. After he's settled in, the old acquaintance makes himself known and resumes sending him pictures of his next victim.  

AFTER: I'll admit it, I'm in a bit of a movie funk, here at the end of the year.  Maybe it's because I programmed a bunch of action films about criminals, bank robbers and serial killers, also the men who track them down. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, people who stalk lonely horny architects or the doctor who couldn't save their father after the accident, then torture them. Really, why are we making films about these characters, do they even deserve it?  Elsewhere, people are robbing banks and pulling diamond heists, and thinking that's OK if they just give 1/3 of the money to charity.  Or they're obsessing over Instagram celebrities, spying on people in hotel rooms or thinking that they're clones of their own grandmother, and I just feel like I can't make sense of it all, it's much too big and way too weird. 

(I'm supposed to be addressing my Christmas cards, buying gifts and planning a holiday trip, but I'm up late at night watching films about sociopaths, it just doesn't feel right.  I know this chain of films leads to Christmas stuff, I can't wait to get there and have that pull me out of this funk, I hope. Maybe I should watch that Beatles docu-series just to feel something good and positive in the world again.)

That poster above for "The Watcher" really says it all - the villain is depicted as a shadowy hooded figure.  A blank, essentially.  Why does he kill women?  Who knows, but it hardly matters, that would count as character motivation, and we really don't have the time or the budget to worry about that.  Let's just take it as a fact that he DOES kill women, and move on from there.  What's the connection between him and the stressed-out FBI agent?  Well, there is one, but we don't learn about it until MUCH later in the game, almost too late. All that matters is that the bad man sends the good man a photo of the woman he's stalking, and that gives the good man 24 hours to prevent the crime.  No, of course it doesn't make much sense, neither does the Joker or the Riddler sending Batman cryptic information about their next heists, to see if the Dark Knight can stop it in time.  It's a foible, a weakness, and it's the stuff of fiction, because the real bad people in this world just go out and DO the thing, they don't send information to the cops or the FBI or the press until afterwards.  Yeah, we had the Zodiac killer and the Unabomber, and they wrote their manifestos, but eventually they got caught through other methods.  (Wait, I forget, did they catch the Zodiac killer? I guess not.  They got the Golden State Killer and the BTK Killer, though.)

FBI Agent Campbell is hardly perfect, he takes too many substances like sleeping pills, tranquilizers and I think maybe peanut m&m's just to relax at night, and keep the nightmares of past cases away.  He also sees a therapist twice a week, and on the casting alone, you can bet that's probably going to be important later in the film. For whatever reason, he walked away from the FBI and started his life over in Chicago, only to have serial killer David Griffin follow him there and keep their game of cat and mouse going. Griffin is very outgoing and dynamic, which is maybe why you cast Keanu Reeves in that role, but do we really want to see surfer dude Ted "Theodore" Logan as a murderer?  No, we really do not.  There are reports that Keanu Reeves was "tricked" into starring in this movie, I guess maybe back then it wasn't that hard to rope him in?  He'd just been in "The Matrix" and was maybe trying to transition from comic roles to more serious action-oriented ones.  Hey, it was the turn of the millennium, it was a confusing time for all of us.

But this is all so very BASIC - this was back before FBI profilers were doing genetic profiling to find serial killers not in the system based on the DNA of their relatives, or other complex things like that.  This was boots-on-the-ground, canvassing witnesses for information, trying to identify where this photo was taken sort of detective work.  Sitting in unmarked cars for long periods of time with a telephoto lens, tapping phone lines and knocking on all the doors in a neighborhood, hoping to get lucky.  Hey, let's put the photo of that woman on the evening news and hope that one of her friends or family members will call the hotline, it sounds crazy, I know, but it just might work.  These days an AMBER alert goes out to millions of smartphones at once, so chances of spotting that blue Toyota Celica are pretty darn good.  

It's too bad that following a serial killer for ten (?) years and trying to learn everything about him only gets you so far, because then even though they've spoken on the phone many times, Agent Campbell doesn't even recognize Griffin when they share an elevator together.  Jeez, the guy's not stupid, don't you imagine that he'd recognize his VOICE when they share pleasantries in that elevator?  COME ON!  And then the many chases and almost captures throughout Chicagoland mean NOTHING when the two agree to meet face-to-face at the grave of one of his victims.  ("Hey, aren't you the guy from that elevator?").  This doesn't even make a bit of sense, because we were told that the killer operated out of Los Angeles for many years, why is one of his victims buried in a Chicago cemetery?  

Like "Marauders", this film seems to have all the required elements in place, like some writer just went down a checklist or something, but it's all so poorly ORGANIZED.  Like we've got the pieces of a good movie, potentially, but they just don't fit together right, or at all. Shouldn't there be somebody like a script supervisor or a studio executive that can say to a director, "Hey, this bit here where the adversaries meet in the cemetery, does this, you know, WORK?" when it just doesn't. 

Another example - Campbell calls the phone number of a possible victim, and after many rings, Griffin answers the phone.  This proves Campbell is too late, and probably dead, but Campbell instructs the police to "Trace this call!"  Why?  You dialed the number yourself, you know the address of the victim, what's the point of tracing the call?  I'm scratching my head, here - doesn't the screenwriter know that you only trace a phone call when you don't know the location of the party on the other end of the line?  

Also starring James Spader (last seen in "Shorts"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Ernie Hudson (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Chris Ellis (last seen in "The Oath"), Robert Cicchini, Yvonne Niami, Jenny McShane, Rebekah Louise Smith. Gina Alexander, Joseph Sikora, Jillian Peterson, Michele DiMaso, Andrew Rothenberg, David Pasquesi (last seen in "Return to Me"), Marilyn Dodds Frank, Shela Coleman, Michael Guido, Mindy Bell

RATING: 3 out of 10 visits to that terrible Vietnamese restaurant

Knock Knock

Year 13, Day 342 - 12/8/21 - Movie #3,992

BEFORE: Well, this one was on Tubi the last time I checked - but now I find that's it's no longer there.  Why can't movies just stay where I left them, how am I supposed to find them when I need them?  It's an extra step that shouldn't be necessary.  Anyway, now it's on Peacock so I guess Peacock is the new Tubi, which is bad news for Tubi. Tubi now feels like that little take-out restaurant that popped up in the space of a bigger chain restaurant which closed that particular location, they're only there because the space has a working grill, but they haven't changed most of the signage so essentially it feels like they're squatters. You want to place an order with them and help them out, but you're afraid that the restaurant's not really open, even though Yelp says it is. So you go there in person, and thankfully they're still open, but now they're wrapping all the food in paper because it's cheaper than using those foil containers with the clear plastic lids, so really, it's only a matter of time before they shut down.  

Ana de Armas carries over from "The Night Clerk". 

THE PLOT: A devoted father helps two stranded young women who knock on his door, but his kind gesture turns into a dangerous seduction and a deadly game of cat and mouse. 

AFTER: Well, I suppose in the end this is the most significant cautionary tale against cheating one's spouse since "Fatal Attraction", only imagine that film with TWO Glenn Closes, only they're both young and hot, and also complete psychopaths.  At least Glenn Close's character was able to PASS for normal, even if she wasn't - but these girls are complete CRAZY pants. 

Keanu Reeves plays Evan, a California architect who spends most of Father's Day alone so he can complete a project, while his wife and kids head to a beach house.  He smokes some weed to get creative and keeps tackling his latest design, but then a huge rainstorm rolls in, and two young, attractive girls knock on his door, soaking wet, looking for a party somewhere in the neighborhood. Their cab has stranded them, they're lost AND their phones are wet, so they don't work. Well, of COURSE the charitable thing would be to let these girls come in and dry off, maybe offer them a cup of hot tea, put their wet clothes in the dryer - what could POSSIBLY go wrong, having two nearly naked girls in the house while his wife is away?  

Yep, you guessed it, it looks like that Uber our hero called for the girls isn't going to be making a pick-up - the girls use the time to strike up a conversation with the very lonely, very horny man, and before you can say 1, 2, threesome, they're banging the night away, in the bed, in the shower, in the kitchen even, I think.  Look, we all like to think that we'll be faithful to our partners, that we can stare temptation right in the eye and not succumb to it, but is it always true?  Doesn't every man (or woman) have their breaking point?  Some situation that's just too amazing to NOT take advantage of?  There's a little wine, some weed, our defenses are down, and maybe just once in our life, we want to live in the moment without fear of repercussions. 

Here's the thing, though, there are ALWAYS repercussions - even if this man had a fling with two hot women and they left the next morning, and they never called, never visited again, he'd still KNOW, deep down in his memories, and perhaps in time that guilt would eat him alive, or it would ruin his relationship from the inside, he'd be mad and disappointed with himself, and maybe even lash out at his wife.  Logically, it's her fault, isn't it?  She started fooling around with him that morning and then just stopped, because the kids were up, then she took off on that long drive to the beach with the kids.  (Yes, obviously this was written by a male screenwriter, who found a way to blame the wife for her husbands' infidelity. Umm, congratulations?)

But here's the problem - these women don't leave.  They make themselves "brekkies" and make a total mess in the kitchen, then when Evan tries to throw them out of the house, they threaten to call the police and report him as a sex offender.  Suddenly the girls claim to be 15 years old, when they're clearly, well, older than that - but how can you be sure?  Suddenly Evan sees his life spiraling out of control when he realizes what he's done. Now he's willing them anything they want, money, a ride out of town, hell, give them the family car if they want it.  Anything to avoid doing hard time.  But what the girls WANT, apparently, is to teach Evan a lesson and/or destroy his life. So they set about doing exactly that.  

I've had a running joke on Twitter over the last week, after describing each film's plot I've said, "This can't end well..." and it's true, a lot of my movies this month have been downers, what with gangsters and Nazis and a global pandemic, bank robberies and hotel murders and the destructive power of social media - and people wonder why I find it hard to get out of bed in the morning!  But this is the first film in a long while to cause me physical PAIN while watching it, I was all twisted up in my desk chair watching Evan's predicament get worse and worse.  Last week there were TWO films where Ben Kingsley was captured and tied to a chair, and today it's Keanu's turn.  

The girls end up destroying Evan's record collection, family photos, most of the furniture, and a good deal of his wife's art.  Oh, yeah, they've probably destroyed his marriage, his reputation and his relationship with his kids, too.  I don't know how somebody bounces back from something like this - the screenwriter apparently doesn't either, because the film stops before there's any chance at repair or redemption in Evan's life, assuming that's even possible.  What was Evan supposed to do, slam the door in the girls' faces when they knocked on his door?  Yes, that is exactly what he should have done, only he didn't know that at the time.  

We get so used to "it's darkest before the dawn" scenarios in movies, situations that keep getting worse and worse until there's some kind of miraculous salvation at the end.  But what feeling am I supposed to have if that answer, that resolution, never comes?  Well, sure, it sucks to be Evan.  And I have to remind myself to never, never, put myself in any similar situation.  But never is a long time, and many things can happen over time. Without that "savior" moment in the plot, things tend to end up very dark indeed.  The audience, however, can walk away thinking that this could never happen to them, if that helps. 

(I work part-time in a movie theater that shows a bunch of premieres, and I'm occasionally celebrity-adjacent.  It's a bit weird that sometimes I see a famous person in real life, doing a Q&A after a film and I think, "Hmm, didn't I see her naked in that movie?" but you can blame Thomas Edison for that, not me.  I don't think we all realize the ways in which movies and the internet have changed our lives, and I mean every aspect of our lives, even sexually. Without nudie films and internet porn, our lives might be very different - boring perhaps, though there was definitely drawn porn in Victorian times and maybe even in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's just that the technology has gotten a thousand times better.  But I would never, never get involved with somebody on a whim, for a fling, at least I tell myself that I'm stronger than that.)

This was directed by Eli Roth, director of horror movies like "Hostel" and "Cabin Fever", also action movies like the "Death Wish" remake. You can take this as a horror movie of sorts, if that helps you remember to not let any strange, stranded nubile women inside your house. 

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Lorenza Izzo (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ignacia Allamand, Dan Baily, Megan Baily, Aaron Burns, Colleen Camp (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 reasons to keep it in your pants

The Night Clerk

Year 13, Day 340 - 12/6/21 - Movie #3,991

BEFORE: OK, final ten films, now we're really getting down to the end of the year.  And 19 days until Christmas, I'm pretty darn sure I can make it. Plus I'm riding high, I know that none of my December films are needed for January, and vice versa.  All I've got to do now is stick to the plan, not make any sudden moves, and this year will be over before you know it. If I can get to my two Christmas movies, and the chain remains unbroken, then every decision made during the year regarding which movies to watch is thus proven to be a good one.  Umm, except maybe the decision to watch "Cats". 

Johnathon Schaech carries over from "Marauders". 

THE PLOT: A voyeuristic hotel clerk becomes the subject of a murder investigation. 

AFTER: This morning, on my way to work, after switching subway trains I was standing on the platform at 14th Street in Manhattan, waiting for the F or M train to take me two more stops, when I saw a man walking on the tracks, yelling about the CIA and the FBI (New York is BACK, baby!).  My first thought is, this guy's a goner, he's so close to where the train's going to enter the station that even if the conductor sees him, there's no way he can stop the train in time.  Then my second thought is, "I've GOT to get out of here..." because if the train hits this guy, and I'm a witness, because I'll have to give a statement or fill out a form and that will make me super late for work, for sure. So instead of calling 911, I started to leave the station. Another person on the platform was already using the emergency phone on the platform to contact subway police, so I don't feel too bad about my decision to beat it out of there.  But then that sick part of me deep inside was kind of curious, what would it look like if this guy got hit by the train, going super fast?  He'd be splattered into bits, right?  Yeah, sure, visually interesting, but I don't really like the dark part of brain that would find that interesting, plus what if seeing that happen gives me nightmares, and they don't go away?  What if my brain enjoys it just a little too much, and starts seeking out other accidents to witness, chasing that unattainable high again and again?  There were just no good things that could result from me watching a man get killed by a train. 

As it turned out, the message that there was someone on the tracks did reach the conductor in time, because the train stopped in time.  Good people on the platform were also waving their arms to get the train to stop, but I'd like to think that Good Samaritan who placed the phone call made the difference, and I congratulated him for doing a good thing, just in case nobody else today would give him any credit for this.  I bring this up in relation to "The Night Clerk" because it also features a character who does a bad, bad thing - he's got cameras set up in a hotel room where he works so he can record people's private affairs (often literally) and conversations.  He may be doing this for a valid (?) reason, but that just doesn't make it right.  And ultimately, no good can come of this, I guarantee it.  

The reason, if you can believe it, is that this young(ish) man, Bart, has autism, or Asperger's, and he studies the way that people interact with each other and have conversations, so that he can practice at home and get better at conversations himself.  Nope, not good enough, recording people in hotel rooms is still wrong, even if you think this is OK. Recording ANYONE without their consent is over the line, probably illegal, and you just can't get around this.  Why can't he record people having public conversations, people who already know they're being taped - it's the whole secretive nature of this that makes it wrong.  Sure, people probably get away with a lot of illegal stuff in hotel rooms, but that doesn't make all that stuff right, either.  When I check in to my suite I want to know that nobody's got eyes on me - even if I'm not doing anything wrong.  

This is all the movie's set-up, of course, to present an updated version of "Rear Window".  The person who's watching is going to see something illegal, and then of course nobody's going to believe him, or he'll become a suspect himself. Even the guy who's not all there upstairs somehow seems to know that what he's been doing is wrong, though, because if the police find his tiny hidden cameras in an active crime scene, then he's going to be in a lot of trouble.  He's got the wherewithal to get into the room and collect his tech, but now he's also tampered with an active crime scene, so that's another infraction.  Plus on top of THAT, he's got video evidence connected to a murder but he's not turning it in to the authorities, so that's withholding evidence, another crime.  Boy, the hits just keep on coming here, don't they?  

And come on, which is it, does this guy have diminished capacity, the inability to tell right from wrong, or doesn't he?  He knows he's got to get his cameras out before they're found, because he's been spying on hotel guests, and that's a very bad thing, even if he's not a pervert or doing this to see naked people.  (Another NITPICK POINT: He just wants their conversations? There's a hot chick in a bathrobe walking around, and he's only interested in what she's got to say?  OK, clearly there IS something wrong with him.)

All Bart knows is that a woman is dead, but wouldn't you know it, the cameras caught nearly everything BUT the killer's face. NITPICK POINT #2: with THAT many cameras?  I find that hard to believe.  How come he's got six different angles of HER face, but no clear image of his?  This is just to prevent the audience from knowing the killer's identity, obvi.  But come on, there are only like 6 main characters, so it's not hard to figure out at all.  

Thankfully, Bart has an overprotective mother who points out to the police detective that Bart couldn't have done this, he doesn't own a gun, he doesn't know how to shoot a gun, and he'd never do anything wrong.  Umm, except for spying on people in hotel rooms, that is. (Again, WTF?).  If Bart were a bit more normal, you get the feeling that maybe the detective's covering for somebody, and he'd love to pin the murder on Bart, though he knows he'd never make it stick. Now, if this were a "Law & Order: SVU" episode, Bart would be in lock-up in the first act of the show, and you'd have to wait 47 more minutes for the real killer to be revealed. (It's the music teacher, right? It's always the music teacher...). 

But, for some unknown reason, Bart had blood on his hands (literally) and is still allowed to walk around and live his life - he's transferred to another hotel in the same chain, which thankfully has the same layout and the same policies and very similar looking rooms (probably so the film crew could just shoot in ONE hotel location and not have to pay for a second location fee...). Bart makes friends with a young woman staying at the new location, and since she's got a brother who's also on the spectrum, she's very sympathetic towards him.  Bart starts extra rehearsals on how to have a conversation with her, gets a haircut and a new suit, and mistakenly believes he's got a chance with her.  

I won't say any more except that the whole thing's a situation that can't POSSIBLY end well, so of course it doesn't. Everything's connected, of course, and you don't turn your life around just by moving to the next hotel in the chain.  Still, I wonder why the police detective isn't held just a bit more accountable for not showing any interest in solving the murder.  Isn't there some kind of check in the system for when a cop's not doing his job?  I'd like to think so, but honestly I don't know for sure. Still, let's consider that NITPICK POINT #3, just to be on the safe side. And I don't understand the causes and effects of autism any more than science does, but I know that kid's not going to get any more aware of the world as long as Mommy keeps fighting his battles for him. 

The big news story this week, of course, is this Ethan Crumbley kid who shot and killed four people at his school, and his parents are being held responsible.  I support this notion to some degree, because apparently they gave him the gun as a gift, and they knew he had mental problems.  So yeah, they can't charge the parents with murder, but reckless endangerment sounds about right.  I think they should also be held accountable for naming their kid "Ethan Crumbley", because you just KNOW that kid's going to get teased at school. He sounds like a damn Charles Dickens villain, and this is the 21st century!  If you give your kid a weird name like that, you're just setting him up for a teenhood of being teased and bullied, and then one day that kid's likely to explode in anger and take it out on others.  I guess you can't do anything about the last name "Crumbley", and that's part of the problem, but give him a normal first name, like Steve or Bob or Bill, help the kid out.  Like the main character here, his full name is Bartholomew Bromley, and that's nearly just as bad - you're just setting a kid up for failure if you name him like that.  You wonder why he's socially awkward?  THAT'S WHY!

Also starring Tye Sheridan (last seen in "The Tree of Life"), Helen Hunt (last seen in "A Good Woman"), Ana de Armas (last seen in "Yesterday"), John Lequizamo (last seen in "One for the Money"), Jacque Gray, Joey Miyashima (last seen in "Time Freak"), Austin Archer, D.L. Walker (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Ibraham Quraishi, Frantz Louizia, Pam Eichner, Walter Platz. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 pints of ice cream

Marauders

Year 13, Day 339 - 12/5/21 - Movie #3,990

BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over from "Lucky Number Slevin", and this presents me with something of a dilemma - I've realized how many films Bruce Willis has made in the last few years that have now found their way to the streaming platforms. After this one's gone, there are still SIX more on my list that I'm just not going to be able to get to, because I only have 10 slots left in 2021 after tonight, and I need all of those steps to reach my Christmas movies.  Mr. Willis is totally dominating Netflix right now, just like Nic Cage is the boss on Hulu, but time is running out, I can't get to either group of films so close to Dec. 25.  What to do?  Sure, table them for next year, but when?  

At the same time, I've been trying to put together my January line-up, and the chain has not presented itself yet, I've encountered resistance, as I mentioned a few days ago.  Once I get three steps past January 1, there are just too many choices.  I've got a potential starting point for January, and another potential starting point for February, but I have not been able to prove that there is a connection between those two points that is about 30 films long. I'll accept 29 or 31, or really, any number CLOSE to 30 at this point. (If the month runs short or long, I've got all next year to make up the difference...)

So my question then becomes, can I use one dilemma to help solve the other?  Can I drop in six films with Bruce Willis in them and get any closer to bridging the big gap?  I'll have to check this out after I watch "Marauders". With just ten films left to go this year, I'd be insane to change my line-up now, since I have a clear, solid, confirmed path to the end.  Maybe January is the best time to watch the movies that couldn't fit into December?  Is that what I usually do? 

THE PLOT: When a bank is hit by a brutal heist, all evidence points to the owner and his high-powered clients. But as a group of FBI agents dig deeper into the case - and the deadly heists continue - it becomes clear that a larger conspiracy is at play.  

AFTER: Another dilemma is that today's film shares FIVE actors with another Bruce Willis film, "Reprisal".  So you know that it's killing me to NOT follow up this film with that one.  But I think I have a very good reason.  More on that in a bit. 

This film starts off SO WELL - we the audience are thrown right into an exciting bank robbery, performed by a practiced team that's wearing masks and using advanced technology, crowd-control tactics and good old shotgun blasts very precisely, to do the maximum amount of financial damage to a bank in Cincinnati, and leave before the cops show up.  It's impressive, but something's just a bit...OFF.  Maybe it's in the way that their recorded message keeps repeating, "Follow our instructions, and you won't be harmed" just before they blow a security guard away, and they just didn't have to. So are they liars as well as thieves, or did something not go according to plan?  We'll have to put in a pin in this little disconnect for now...

Cut to the CEO of the Cincinnati-based banking chain, played by Bruce Willis, and he seems very concerned about something. Is that stress, guilt or something else?  He draws a very odd metaphor about a spider that's climbed the outside of his headquarters, all the way up to his floor. Either he's just an odd duck, or there's something going on under the surface.  Once again, we'll have to put another pin here - but when the film returns to him later on, unfortunately we won't get any answers for a very long time.  

The lead role here is played by Christopher Meloni, who's recently returned to the franchise that made him famous, "Law & Order" after like a 20-year absence, to play Detective Stabler once again. "Law & Order: Organized Crime" is great, and I approve of the change from one-episode plots to season-long overarching stories, it just works better, and allows him to really re-develop Stabler as a professional cop, an undercover agent, and a newly widowed father trying to balance everything while still taking down the bad guys.  He often seems like he's in over his head, only he's really not, because he's smart and thorough and experienced - look, I don't know if this drama bears any resemblance to how real policemen work, but hey, I'm along for the ride. Meloni's been good in everything from "Oz" to "Happy" to "Wet Hot American Summer" and his role here as the lead FBI agent on the case suits him very well.  

He's really the only non-suspect here, when it comes to answering "Who's dressing up like super-villains and robbing banks?"  We know it's got to be SOMEBODY, because why else would the movie have masked characters?  That means there's got to be an unmasking at some point, there's got to be a payoff, and my mind started working on that little problem right away. I'm not going to get there the same way, by following forensic evidence or criminal records of suspects or interrogating witnesses, I'm going to get there by knowing how movies work, because that's how I work a case.  

Now, here's where I slipped up - the masked bank robbers made me think of Marvel villains like Taskmaster and Crossbones, they've got a sort of similar body armor-with-helmet look to them, and isn't that the guy who played Crossbones, Frank Grillo, playing Detective Mims?  So he's the prime suspect, it makes sense to cast the guy who played Crossbones in this role - plus, he's never around when the bank robberies take place, so it could totally be him.  He's got a wife with a cancer diagnosis, so maybe he needs money for her treatments, and this is how he supplements his police salary to pay for that.  But then I thought, "No, wait, that's too obvious, maybe the movie WANTS me to think it's him, then the story's going to pull a fast one on me, it must be somebody else."  There's only one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's the fact that Frank Grillo is NOT in this movie - Det. Mims is played by Johnathon Schaech.  In my defense, if you Google photos of the two actors, you'll see they do look a lot alike.  Still, mea culpa. 

(ASIDE: Frank Grillo IS in two other action movies on my list, co-starring with Bruce Willis both times - "Cosmic Sin" and "Reprisal", the latter of which also features Johnathon Schaech in a role.  So that's probably why I got them confused, beyond the fact that they resemble each other.  If you look up the cast lists for action films like "First Kill", "Reprisal", "Escape Plan 2" and "Escape Plan 3", you'll see a ton of overlap. This usually makes my programming easier, but occasionally also harder.)

The FBI digs deeper into the case, but evidence starts leading them to a Gulf War soldier who's supposed to be dead, how could HE have a hand in the robbery?  Other evidence, supplied by the robbers, seems to suggest that the bank's CEO is dirty somehow, and is storing blackmail material in his bank's safety deposit boxes, also possibly treating the bank's money as his own.  Now, there are a few things wrong with this, so perhaps this is where the movie starts to run off the rails. I'm guessing that the chief executive of a whole banking CHAIN probably makes a decent annual salary.  Maybe a few million a year? (I'm not an expert on these things, I'll admit.). And I'm guessing the job isn't all that difficult, once you reach that level in the business world you're probably set for life, you're fine as long as the entire U.S. economy doesn't collapse, which, to be fair, has been known to happen. Still, why would a well-paid CEO need to resort to blackmail or theft to make ends meet?  And then even if his blackmail schemes are paying off, why would he need to skim money from his banks on top of that?  Plus, don't we have some kind of federal monitoring of the banking system that would prevent exactly this sort of thing?  Why isn't that system working?  Are the auditors at the FDIC all asleep at the switch?  

The bank-robbing crew donates some of their haul to a local charity, apparently they view themselves as a high-tech crew of "Robin Hoods", so this is really the same question that I saw posed a few nights ago by "Locked Down". If you steal a lot of money, and you donate, say, 1/3 of it (as that seems to be the standard movie rate) to charity, does that make the overall theft OK?  I don't think so, but I think at least we're talking about sums of money that a screenwriter THINKS will present a dilemma here. But it just doesn't. Does it?  About this time in the story, I turned to my BFF Andy (my houseguest for the weekend) and asked him whether he thought a charity would report unusual large cash donations to the detective at the local precinct.  I very much doubted it, but Andy thought it might be possible.  Either way, wouldn't there be some other method of bookkeeping that a charity would need to follow to report this donation?  Again, I'd like to believe our society has a proper way of maintaining some order, but now I guess I have to concede that the head of the mission MIGHT have found a large cash donation a bit suspect, what with all the recent bank robberies in the Cincinnati area.  

Andy and I then debated whether "Marauders" is a good movie, which is a lot tougher to determine.  Like "Lucky Number Slevin" there are more questions than answers, and most of those answers aren't provided until the very end of the film.  In the meantime they seem to have all the elements needed for a killer action movie - they've got Bruce Willis, Chris Meloni, Dave Bautista, plus the great (?) Cincinnati skyline, hi-tech gadgets, and somebody definitely rented a killer rain machine, which was used in as many scenes as possible.  Thankfully, this also coincided with the two or three days that Bruce Willis was also available to play his role.  (Come on, to be fair, the guy clearly had 6 other action movies to appear in that year, based on how many are currently available on Netflix...).  There's also very obvious product placement, courtesy of a kick-ass GMC SUV that seats 6 comfortably and barely stands out AT ALL when the FBI is using it as a base of operations for surveillance during a funeral.  Two of the characters also very prominently drink Bushmill's Black Bush whiskey, in different scenes, which either implies a connection between those two characters, or else it meant that the production's budget could only afford one bottle, and had to re-use it. (Any remainder was no doubt consumed at the wrap party...)

But the larger question is, do those pieces all come together, to create something that's more than the sum of its parts?  Nah, not really.  So much of this is very confusing, and then when the answers DO finally come, there's no explanation for why the FBI didn't have these answers sooner.  That's what they DO, they look at the case files ("jackets") of all the people involved and they look for any possible connections, but here those connections all come either at the last minute or even later, commonly known as "too late" or "after the fact".  Was everyone in the FBI just plain incompetent, or (more likely) did the screenwriter just not know how an FBI investigation works - in addition, of course, to not really knowing how banking or charitable donations work?  I'm sort of spotting a recurring theme here.

The third item in the Trivia section on this film's IMDB page points out that this was writer Michael Cody's first film.  Ah, yes, that explains a lot.  Like how a movie with a budget of about $15 million only made $1.6 million at the box office. 

Ah, but here's my bit of good news - and it hearkens back to Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis. Realizing that I can't fit the other Bruce Willis films into 2021, my next thought is, might I find room for them in January?  And I'd only programmed January as far as "Spider-Man" and "Shang-Chi", maybe only through the first 8 days of 2022.  From "Shang-Chi" I can see a path to a film called "Boss Level" with Frank Grillo in it, and as I said before, he's in two movies with Bruce Willis, so getting all those films in gets me to day 17, then I can link to seven films with Nicolas Cage, four with 50 Cent and six more with Dave Bautista.  (As I mentioned before, there's a TON of overlap if I stay within the action-film genre...). Dave Bautista's also in the new "Dune" film, which happens to link to the first film in my romance chain!  So I turned my regret over not being able to watch more Bruce Willis movies into a possible solution for January!  And if I can get from January 1 to February 1, then I've really got like the first quarter of 2022 programmed, or at least until about March 15.  What a relief!  Of course, it's not set in stone, I could change it, but it's great to know there's at least one path that will get me through the first couple of months - and my choice for the first film of the year is now confirmed as a solid one. 

Also starring Christopher Meloni (last seen in "Almost Friends"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Stuber"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Cecil B. Demented"), Texas Battle, Johnathon Schaech (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Lydia Hull (last seen in "Broken City"), Tyler Jon Olson (last seen in "Heist"), Christopher Rob Bowen (ditto), Danny A. Abeckaser (last seen in "The Irishman"), Richie Chance, Tara Holt (last seen in "The Prince"), Carolyn Alise, Chris Hill, Jesse Pruett (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), David Gordon (ditto), Cameron Brexler (ditto), Alyshia Ochse (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Ryan O'Nan (last seen in "Eat Pray Love"), Rico Simonini (last seen in "A Good Day to Die Hard"), Michael Urriquia, Torrie Wilson, Shea Buckner, Kristen Rae Myers, Joe Gelchion, John Dauer, Alora Catherine Smith, Derek DuChesne, Chick Bernhard (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of wine (undrunk)