BEFORE: The original plan was to link to a film on Netflix titled "The Kissing Booth", via Molly Ringwald, but that plan's out the window now, I've decided to get back to action films, ones that should take me to the Nicolas Cage chain, and that in turn should set me straight toward my choice for an Easter-based film. Things could still go wrong, of course, but I like the way this new plan is headed, and honestly, I just couldn't watch one more romance-based film at this point. Can you blame me?
So, instead, now both Chris Evans AND Eric Christian Olsen carry over from "Not Another Teen Movie". Two actors in common? Now I feel like I'm on the right track to...well, somewhere.
Tomorrow, TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up goes back to the 1920's and 1930's, for the next to last time:
5:15 am "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937)
7:45 am "The Circus" (1928)
9:15 am "The Music Box" (1932)
10:00 am "Sweethearts" (1938)
12:00 pm "Naughty Marietta" (1935)
2:00 pm "The Cowboy and the Lady" (1938)
4:00 pm "The Awful Truth" (1937)
5:45 pm "You Can't Take It With You" (1938)
8:00 pm "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939)
10:15 pm "Boys Town" (1938)
12:15 am "The Gay Divorcee" (1934)
2:15 am "The Merry Widow" (1934)
4:00 am "The Broadway Melody" (1929)
I've seen only three of these: "The Awful Truth", "You Can't Take It With You" and "The Gay Divorcee". I've seen the OTHER version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", the 1969 remake, but I suppose that doesn't count here. Anyway, another 3 out of 13 takes me to 96 seen out of 233, which is just 41.2%
THE PLOT: A young man receives an emergency phone call on his cell phone from an older woman, who claims to have been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are targeting her husband and child next.
AFTER: This thriller came out in 2004, back in the before-times - that's before the iPhone and other smart phones - so way back then, filmmakers saw the future and predicted we'd all be on Nokia phones in the days to come. Or, perhaps that's what Nokia paid them to depict, which sounds a little more likely. People had little idea how the phones of the future would take over our lives, to say nothing of the effect they would have on action movies. Can a kidnapped woman hot-wire a broken landline phone the same way that people in action movies tend to start cars, just by crossing two wires together? Honestly, I have no idea - but my point here is that SHE would probably have no idea how to do that either, she probably would have looked at the phone smashed to pieces and just thought, "Well, I'm screwed now."
Of all the ways to get herself out of the predicament of being locked in the attic of a house, I think I'd only try to hot-wire the phone line if I'd exhausted every other method of escape or getting a message out. There were glass windows - how hard did she try to break that glass? Couldn't she use her shoe or something to break a window, and then if she did that, wasn't the car like RIGHT THERE under the window, just a one-story jump away. I'm just saying. I wouldn't expect her to break down the door or deck the guard on the other side of the door, but the house also seemed a little broken down, it might not have taken much to break a hole in the wall or just get out onto the roof somehow. Other actions were possible, other than the ones she took, that's all.
So OK, I have to work with what the movie gives me, this kidnapped woman hot-wires the phone and gets a message out to the most unlikely of heroes, Ryan, just a regular guy who wants to get his girlfriend back by pretending to work a charity event at the Santa Monica pier (a location carrying over from "Not Another Teen Movie", I think...). Suddenly he's got to drop everything, and abandon his friend and ex-girlfriend at the pier and like, totally rescue this kidnapped woman. Which is not cool, because his friend ends up in a whale costume to promote the "Heal the Bay" initiative - and you just can't get laid if you're wearing a whale costume and handing out flyers.
Ryan does go straight to the police, but there's a crazy mix-up there because the cop working the front desk is about to retire to run a day-spa, so he's not very focused on his job - plus there's a bunch of rowdy guys who have JUST been arrested who start mixing it up in the police station lobby, so he sends Ryan up to major crimes on the fourth floor, and for some strange reason, Ryan can't find any detectives there, which really never gets explained very well. And up until that point, the plot details were SO specific about everything that I was willing to believe that all this really happened to somebody - the whale costume, the day-spa, the hold-up at the cell phone store JUST to buy a phone charger. Because, come on, who would write this stuff out of nowhere?
Things get more complicated when the kidnappers also abduct the woman's son, and then set their sights on her husband, too - because SOMEBODY in this family simply must know where the thing that they're looking for is. (And what, exactly, is that MacGuffin of a thing?). Hey, if you can't find something, just keep kidnapping people until you get lucky, I guess. Things get even MORE complicated when it seems that the kidnappers are also cops - so are they good cops kidnapping bad people, or bad cops kidnapping good people? I really need to know who to root for here...
The cop from the police station eventually does get back in on the action, because something keeps bugging him about the case - it takes him quite a while to put two and two together, but he finally gets there, and then it just becomes a question about how deep the corruption goes in the department, but other than that, this sort of turns into a by-the-numbers thriller, once we've sorted out who the bad guys are. Ryan, meanwhile, is zipping back and forth from here to there in a stolen car - and then he gets stuck in traffic maybe a few too many times. Sure, there's traffic in L.A., I GET IT, but from a narrative point of view maybe you don't want to rely on that plot point again and again.
Screenwriters tend to be just a bit behind when it comes to technology, but this film might be an exception - this is 2004 cell phone technology, in a nutshell, that drives nearly all of the action. The same screenwriter, Larry Cohen, had been working in Hollywood since the early 1960's, and he wrote "Phone Booth" a couple years before this one, I swear that's true, but then it looks like he retired before he could write another action movie titled "Potential Spam". This concept would never work today, because people with smart phones now don't even answer their phones if they don't recognize the number of the person calling them. So we'll never know how many kidnappings weren't solved last year because the victim couldn't get any help from random strangers. (NITPICK POINT: She could call a rando but she couldn't call 911 from the hot-wired phone?)
Also starring Kim Basinger (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Jason Statham (last seen in "The Pink Panther" (2006)), William H. Macy (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Noah Emmerich (last seen in "Warrior"), Richard Burgi (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Valerie Cruz, Jessica Biel (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Adam Taylor Gordon (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Caroline Aaron (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Matt McColm, Eric Etebari (last seen in "Boss Level"), John Cenatiempo (ditto), Brendan Kelly (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Rick Hoffman, Lin Shaye (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lauren Sanchez (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Sherri Shepherd (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Dat Phan, Esther Mercado, Al Sapienza (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Sean Smith (also carrying over from "Not Another Teen Movie").
RATING: 5 out of 10 seaweed face-masks
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