BEFORE: All right, we're getting down to it - the road to Christmas leads right through Mel Gibson this year. Maybe you can guess what's coming up next week. But seven films remain for this Movie Year after tonight, but I'm making progress very slowly because I'm so damn busy with two jobs. I'm working both days this weekend, and then I don't get a day off until Thursday, and I just booked an eye exam for that day at a new eyeglass provider in Queens, because my vision just keeps getting worse, as does my hearing. What I really should be doing is watching as many films as I can before I can no longer hear or see them - really, it's no fun getting old.
Kevin Dillon carries over from "A Midnight Clear".
THE PLOT: A radio host takes a call, where an unknown person threatens to kill the showman's family on air. To save loved ones, the host will have to play a survival game and the only way to win is to find out the identity of the criminal.
AFTER: Speaking of old, Mel Gibson. And Clint Eastwood. Neither shows any sign of retiring, but really, both should consider it, I mean, if they don't have enough money to go the Gene Hackman route than I really don't know why anybody is an actor. If I got to be an actor and made a couple million for being in ONE movie then I'd be done, I'd probably take my ball and go home, find a small town upstate where that money would buy a house AND pay my living expenses for the next 20 years. But nobody really DOES that, instead they try to become top-tier actors who make five million per picture, and then ten, then twenty, meanwhile their lifestyles are getting more extravagant (I assume) and they have to pay agents, assistants, alimony, child support, where the hell does it all end? Honestly I'd love to hear about some a-level actor who puts all his money in the bank, lives in a simple one-room apartment in a small California town when he's not traveling to make movies, and then cashes in by buying up a few Starbucks franchises or something and never needs to work again. Sure, he can make a movie a year by choice, but not because he needs to, and therefore he's more relaxed and a better actor. But I'm betting that's just not how it works.
Forget it, we all know that life is a never-ending treadmill and that should go double for famous people, why should they get to relax if I can't? Screw you, Mel Gibson, I hope you never retire and have to keep on working forever. Remember when he essentially got cancelled, after launching a film directing career, and things seemed to be going well, but then he got arrested for driving drunk and called some female police officer "sugar tits" during his arrest? He also said some very racist things during that incident, and then a couple years later a recording of a phone call with his wife got leaked, where he said some more racist things. That phone call led to restraining orders and domestic violence charges, plus he was blacklisted (oh, the irony) from Hollywood for almost 10 years.
He kind of battled his way back, though, by starring in "The Beaver" and "Edge of Darkness" and by directing "Hacksaw Ridge", and since then he's made a bunch more movies, like "Daddy's Home 2" and "Boss Level", so I guess you have to wonder whether it was worth it or not. Just kidding, he made some respectable movies, too, like "Blood Father" and "Dragged Across Concrete", so really, it's not for me to say. But I wonder sometimes which Mel Gibson I'm going to get in any particular movie, if that makes sense. Hey, he's 68 and still working so I guess every day above ground is a good one, he's on his third major relationship and has nine kids in total, so that's a lot of incentive to keep working, I guess.
The movie's a tough one to review, though, because it starts out as one kind of movie and then turns into something completely different by the end, I don't want to spoil it other than to say what I just did, which is maybe too much. What seems to be happening may not be what is really happening, and with a lot of action taking place over phone calls and over a radio broadcast, well, we all know that things aren't always what they sound like, especially over non-visual mediums. Nobody likes a complete fake-out, and perhaps that's what we're dealing with here, you may take a lot of things for granted and then realize later on that you were way off-base, your brain helped fill in the gaps a bit because you've seen other action movies and you know how they tend to go.
Anyway, after the part that introduces us to Elvis, the shock-jock lead character, the guy who works the late-night shift at a call-in talk radio station, he gets a call from Gary, a guy who claims to be breaking into his house in Pasadena to possibly kidnap or kill his wife and daughter. This guy apparently has a grudge against the radio host over the way he treated a former employee, who was Gary's girlfriend and she later committed suicide, so naturally Gary blames Elvis for her death, and by the way, Gary's an ex-soldier who came back from Afghanistan with military training, which means he knows weapons and also bomb stuff. After the fake-out when it's revealed that Gary wasn't near Elvis' house at all, things get even worse, as he's rigged the whole radio station building to explode and he starts playing the kind of games that the Joker would think up.
Elvis, with the help of his switchboard operator and the new intern from the U.K., has to keep Gary on the line long enough to either figure out his identity or get the L.A. cops to show up and deal with him. Yeah, good luck on that last one, he's better off taking matters into his own hands, like "Die Hard" style. As mentioned above, there are more twists that follow so I'm going to stop describing the plot in case you want to review the film yourself.
But let me just say that there are a LOT of things that don't add up here, for example we're not exactly sure why Gary wants to stay on the air, basically broadcasting his name and the details of his sick games and potential crimes to any law enforcement officials listening. It's also not very clear whether the radio show has managed to stay broadcasting the entire time, or what exactly the listeners can hear from any of the parties. The microphones seem to work as if by magic, but then, isn't the whole medium of radio and TV a form of magic, one that nobody really understands how it works? Oh, no, wait, I'm thinking about vinyl records, nobody really knows how they work. But radio and TV operate invisibly via waves that nobody can prove exist, and that's kind of like magic, right? Hell, it's a movie so things work the way we need them to work, I guess.
Also starring Mel Gibson (last seen in "Father Stu"), William Moseley (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Alia Seror O'Neill (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Paul Spera (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Nadia Fares, Enrique Arce (last seen in "Murder Mystery 2"), Yoli Fuller (last seen in "Good Grief"), John Robinson (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Ravin J. Ganatra (last seen in "Greed"), Yann Bean (last seen in "Jackie"), Nancy Tate, Carole Weyers (last heard in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Romy Pointet, Robbie Nock (last seen in "The Pink Panther" (2006)), Agathe Bokja, and the voices of Hallie Paquin, Anna Maryan, Rebecca Leffler.
RATING: 4 out of 10 stolen computers
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