BEFORE: Worked a big red-carpet premiere last night, I can't really talk about what celebrities were there, but let's just say it was a film starring someone who was in the news yesterday for becoming a father again, for the seventh time, at the age of 79. Yep, that guy. Got to see him live and in person for about two seconds - but that counts, he's made it to my list of celeb encounters, which just keeps on growing.
I was outdoors most of the night, on duty to watch the tents, crowds, and the ADA ramps, which can be quite tricky for some people to navigate. I didn't mind being outside, because I was in prime position to watch the celebrities getting out of black SUV's and entering the press tent. But then I had to stay late to watch the tents being broken down and loaded on to trucks, because somebody's got to do that. I locked up at 1 am and was home by 2 am, and for all the trouble I've had sleeping lately, it turns out that getting home early and being exhausted is a pretty good cure for that.
Pierce Brosnan carries over from "The November Man".
THE PLOT: After being recruited by a group of unconventional thieves, renowned criminal Richard Pace finds himself caught up in an elaborate gold heist that promises to have far-reaching implications on his life and the lives of countless others.
AFTER: Yeah, there were a lot of reversals in this film, too, just like last night's, but when a heist is this much fun, who really cares? I'm not going to complain as long as I'm being entertained - so the problem with "The November Man" therefore is that it took itself WAY too seriously. C'mon, lighten up, have fun, let's steal some stuff, we can always commit acts of war later on.
Essentially, this one follows the "Mission: Impossible" format - not the Tom Cruise movie franchise, but the old TV show. The group's got to have a ringleader, an expert thief, a disguise guy, an explosives guy and a woman or two. Of course, to modernize things this cast is also gender- and ethnically diverse, plus the woman is an expert martial artist. So they just tweaked the roles a little bit, but it's clear that some screenwriter was following a trite-and-true formula.
So why wasn't this film a success, then? It got a horrible score on Rotten Tomatoes and only made about $1.5 million, against a budget of $15 million. OUCH. I'm not really sure why people didn't go to see this, I enjoyed it. Maybe most people don't think of Pierce Brosnan as someone able to headline a comedy, he's still got the reputation of an action hero. Hey, Arnold did comedy, and so did Stallone, what's the big deal? Maybe Nick Cannon doesn't draw a vast audience either, and nobody ever seems to say, "Hey, did you go see that new Tim Roth movie?" He's not really a headliner, either, in other words. And then a lot of the other actors were Arabic, and that's never really been a big draw for an American movie.
The hook here is that a prince of a small Arabic nation put the team together, with the purpose of stealing money from the rich (and evil) to give back to the poor that lost it in the first place. When possible, that is. If the Misfits can't figure out who to give the money back to, then they'll donate it to UNICEF, or wherever it will do the most good. Who gets to determine that, I'm not sure, but they certainly don't plan on keeping the stolen money for themselves, then they'd be just as bad as the bad people they took the money from, I get it.
Sure, there are some problems here, I'll admit - Nick Cannon is the disguise expert, and yet all of his characters end up looking a lot like Nick Cannon. How he fools the same person twice, I'm not really sure - I'm skeptical of his abilities, so maybe the mark wasn't fooled and was just being nice. Brosnan plays Richard Pace, the master thief who's also escaped out of several prisons owned by the villain of the piece, Schultz, played by Tim Roth. Schultz runs a multi-national conglomerate that makes its money by building prisons all over the world, because yeah, that sounds like a profitable business? And in one of those prisons, he stores all his money from Arab countries in the form of gold - because a prison vault and a bank vault are kind of the same thing? Just kidding, they're not, and keeping your gold close to a bunch of locked-up criminals has to be a new level of stupid, but yet that's where we find ourseives.
Pace also has a daughter, Hope, and she's supposed to be off doing charitable work somewhere, but instead she hooked up with this Misfits team, who is also doing charitable work, or a form of it, if you stop and think about it. Robin Hood was big on charity, in other words. So Hope turns up with the other recruits to try to convince Pace to put his many talents to use for a good cause, and that's getting the gold out of that Abu Dhabi prison in the absolute most complicated manner possible. First they have to do a reverse prison-break to get Pace and the explosives expert on the inside, then the disguise guy goes to work, and then the distraction of mass food poisoning to get half the inmates sent to a hospital, and if a few gold bars get sent on each of their gurneys to the ambulances, all the better. That's the original plan, anyway, but Schultz sees a gold bar drop off a gurney, and the jig is up.
Or is it? The original plan A seems to get replaced by plan B so quickly, it's almost like plan B was the plan all along, and plan A was just there to fake out the villain and the audience. Then it's on to Plan C, for the very same reason - and this goes on for a long while, and I'll be that by the time they're on plan J or K you will have at least forgotten all about Plan A. Tell me I'm wrong. NITPICK POINT: The plans were devised around the fact that gold bars are very heavy, thus necessitating the ambulances and such. But before long people are picking up gold bars very easily, which is a clear indication that they're not real - but I guess they're real in this fictional world, just not really heavy? Also I think the time needed to smelt gold was vastly underestimated here, just saying.
In the original script for this film, the team was going to steal Nazi gold from a prison in the Caribbean, but after a few rewrites, and Hurricane Maria devastating Puerto Rico, the prison was moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. But then problems came when a production company based in Abu Dhabi invested in the film, buying rights to the script as well, before realizing that the plot of the film had references to Middle East politics and terrorism. (So, umm, somebody invested in the film without reading the script first?). Eventually all the direct references to Qatar were removed, and they created the fictional country of "Jazeristan" to be the fictional home of terrorism. Why, was "Schmatar" not available?
I guess sometimes the general public and I don't see eye to eye on some movies - "The November Man" has a 6.6 rating on IMDB, and I gave it a 4. "The Misfits" has a 4.4 rating on IMDB, and I'm giving it a 6. Agree to disagree, I guess. Some people are just anti-fun. Well, either way it looks like we won't be getting a sequel to this one. Some people just view this as a knock-off films like "The Italian Job" or "Ocean's Eleven". Well, they're not wrong, but who's to say it can't also be fun and entertaining at the same time?
Also starring Tim Roth (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Nick Cannon (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Rami Jaber, Jamie Chung (last seen in "The Man with the Iron Fists"), Hermione Corfield (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Mike Angelo, Qais Qandil, Samer al-Masri, Gonzalo Menendez (last seen in "Savages"), Jerrod Weston, Firas Al Shakarchi, Walid Riachy, Feez, Mansoor Al-Fili, Ghassan Azab, Reda Abdelmagid, with a cameo from director Renny Harlin.
RATING: 6 out of 10 safe deposit boxes
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