Wicker Park

Year 18, Day 89 - 3/30/26 - Movie #5,288

BEFORE: Christopher Cousins carries over from "Draft Day". And Josh Hartnett is back in the countdown, after three action films earlier this month. Sometimes it just makes sense to split one film off from a mini-chain of films with the same actor, because I need to spread things out - look, if I'd come here right after "Fight or Flight" or "Wrath of Man" I would have missed out on a bunch of films, and I'd be too close to Easter way too soon. Easter is coming up this weekend, I better load up on some Reese's eggs or something. 

THE PLOT: A young advertising executive searches obsessively for his ex-lover Lisa who disappeared two years earlier. 

AFTER: Well, this film is a complete mess, I don't know how else to describe it. It looked like it was going to fit in with last week's theme about people being kidnapped or otherwise disappearing, only this one doesn't really go with that because here the missing woman just sort of moved unexpectedly. She got a job offer in London and just left, which is a thing that somebody might do, and it's not her fault if she just forgot to inform the man who was running around town trying to randomly bump into her. 

Let me back up a bit, because the movie does that frequently, it's way too flashback-y and it presents us with something of a split timeline, some events are in the present and others are in the past, and the film skips between the two without much warning. I had to re-watch the first half hour just so I could determine which scenes were the flashbacks, and I'm on a tight timeline, I can't be watching a movie one and a half times just because it's hard to understand. But we meet Matthew when he's moved back to Chicago, he's dating his co-worker and things seem to be going OK, and his boss has gifted him a new account, but the next meeting is in China because these people have never heard of Zoom meetings. Maybe in 2004 that wasn't a thing, but still, to fly to China for one meeting, when the clients are right THERE in Chicago seems pretty stupid. But, you know, business. 

Matthew seems like he has it all, great job, beautiful girlfriend, he even bumps into his old friend Luke on the street, and they look forward to getting into some trouble together. Yep, everything's coming together, so it's time for Matthew to shoot himself in the foot and tear it all down. The problem comes after the meeting in the restaurant when he overhears a phone call in the back and he goes into the apartment-sized phone booth (it must be a fancy restaurant, if the phone call room is bigger than the restroom, but you know, it was a different time, before everyone had cell phones) and he swears he can smell his ex-girlfriend's perfume. He rushes out only to see her from the back as she breaks a heel and almost falls down. But he can't catch up with her, it's maddeningly going to take the rest of the movie for that to happen. 

He then misses his plane to China on purpose (the first of many times) so that he can search Chicago for Lisa, who he has determined is back in town, only, how to find her? It's not like there's a thing called directory assistance or the internet, so instead he has to follow clues like a detective would, back at the restaurant she somehow left a folder with her hotel key, so OK, that might be a good place to start. He goes to her room at the Drake and searches her room, he even falls asleep there, which triggers another round of flashbacks or dreams. So this is a good chance for us to learn how he first met Lisa, which has something to do with a camcorder that won't record audio, him seeing her on video and then in person across the street while he's watching that video, then following her to a dance studio so he can watch her rehearse. This leads to her coming into Luke's shoe store so Matthew can pretend to work there and tell her that those red heels she wants aren't available in her size, but they can be ordered. But she knows he's been following her, and somehow that's not creepy at all to her, so they agree to meet the next day and kind of fall into a relationship.  

But you know, life happens and one day she disappeared, later we learn that Matthew had asked her to move in with him (after knowing her for what, three days?) and that's too fast, man. Who can blame her for running away from the guy who basically stalked her and then jumped the gun on living together? You know, sometimes we make choices and we have to live with them, but I guess maybe that erratic woman you slept with two years ago is always going to evoke that powerful fantasy even though you've got a beautiful girlfriend right next to you who will even drive you to the airport, and isn't that what love is all about? No, by all means, ditch the flight and go roam around Chicago's underworld trying to get lucky. 

When Matthew finally finds Lisa, she looks completely different - probably because she's not Lisa, she's a different Lisa who was also at the restaurant and seems a little sketchy, but what the hell, Matthew will sleep with her anyway. Wait, WHAT? Is she pretending to be Lisa, or was Lisa pretending to be her, what exactly is going on here? We see a lot of the same events again from a different P.O.V., but still nothing is starting to make sense. Meanwhile things seem to be going great for Luke, who's been dating this actress named Alex, she even forgives him when he doesn't show up for their date because Matthew borrowed Luke's car and didn't bring it back on time. Matthew also books another flight to China but fails to go to the airport again. 

The third time we jump back in time and go through this crazy exercise again, we learn that Alex and second Lisa look a lot alike, Luke and Matthew go to her play performance (she's terrible, at acting, BTW, and I'm not sure if this actress that I think is a good actress was a bad actress back then, or if she was acting like a bad actress would - I suppose it doesn't matter) and she's wearing a lot of make-up, so the two guys don't put it together that they've slept with the same woman. Matthew has to leave the play to NOT take the next flight to China, and you would think there would be some repercussions at his job that he's missed the meeting completely, but the explanation is somehow that an Italian businessman's wife died in a car crash. No, I don't understand that either. 

The "explanation" for all this is that Lisa and Alex were friends, except the "guy from the newspaper" (who I think was the Italian businessman) was stalking Alex, so she switched apartments with Lisa for a while. And Alex fell in love with Matthew, but he only had eyes for Lisa, the mystery woman he saw across the street. Or maybe Alex was in love with Lisa, that's all a bit unclear. Anyway, Alex was masquerading as Lisa so she could get Matthew's attention or something like that, but that seems very unhealthy, too, like why didn't she just keep dating Luke? It feels like everyone here wants what they can't have and nobody wants to be in the job or relationship that they do have. Alex was also deliberately keeping Matthew and Lisa from getting together, by not delivering hand-written notes and deleting voicemail messages. 

This feels a bit like bargain-basement David Lynch, like I'm thinking about "Lost Highway" where one character became a completely different person somehow and "Mulholland Drive" where two characters got so close to each other that they switched places, and the audience is just supposed to accept these things as if they could really happen. Like if you're going to go for it, really go for it, but "Wicker Park" has nothing but terrible reasons to explain why one person would impersonate another, and then there are also no repercussions for that. I've tried my best to make heads or tails out of "Wicker Park", but I think I've failed - or perhaps there's nothing there that does make any sense, in which case I'm exonerated. 

I think there are also maybe some translation errors, since this is based on a French film titled "L'Appartement", which in turn is loosely based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and all of that play's star-crossed lovers. I think maybe Billy Shakes invented "reductio ad absurdum" with regards to love stories, when you have fairies pouring love potions (ruffies) into people's eyes and giving people donkey heads, you're really exploring all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong in relationships. But here in "Wicker Park" they changed the play-within-a-play to "Twelfth Night", which makes a bit of sense, because that play also has someone falling in love with someone in disguise. Still I stand by my initial ruling, that this is all one giant mess. 

Directed by Paul McGuigan (director of "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Reckoning")

Also starring Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Ezra"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Marlowe"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Another Kind of Wedding"), Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "French Exit"), Amy Sobol, Ted Whittall (last seen in "The Calling"), Joanna Noyes, Mark Camacho (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Marcel Jeannin (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Stefanie Buxton, Stanley Hilaire, Zhenhu Han, Lu Ye, Christian Paul (last seen in "Death Race"), Gillian Ferrabee (last seen in "Secret Window"), Miranda Handford, Benjamin Hatcher, Richard Jutras (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Mary Morter, Erika Rosenbaum (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Jessica Schulte (last heard in "Megamind"), Paul Doucet, Jamieson Boulanger, Carrie Colak, Gordon Masten (last seen in "Stanley & Iris")

RATING: 3 out of 10 sleeping pills (maybe the whole film is just one long fever dream...)

Draft Day

Year 18, Day 88 - 3/29/26 - Movie #5,287

BEFORE: It's another film today that I just don't know what to do with - I mean, it's somehow an entire film about the NFL draft, which apparently is a big deal every year, it's televised and everything. Again, I'm not a sports guy, and I think big league sports might be a bit out of control, a film about the drafting process which is tangential to the sport itself only kind of proves my point. I get that there are movies about football, sure - "Any Given Sunday", "The Longest Yard", "Rudy" and so on. But did we need a movie about the NFL draft? Probably not, which is the main reason I've avoided it for so long. But the chain is the chain and I kept a little spot on the watchlist where I piled up three Kevin Costner movies, so while the clearance sale is still going on, I want to get rid of them all, they're just taking up space in the warehouse. 

This year's NFL Draft is longer than a day, it will take place April 23-25 in Pittsburgh - sorry that I couldn't arrange to watch this film any closer to this year's event. For someone who runs a calendar-based movie blog this might be the equivalent of watching a Christmas movie in August, I don't know. But I did what I could - the whole process is still a bit of a mystery to me, and by that I mean my own scheduling process, not the NFL draft process. But we live in a world now where everyone the ability to record videos and a place to post them, since joining Instagram I can't tell you how many people are making video lists of the best pastrami sandwiches sold in NYC or where to find the greasiest cheesesteaks or the most secret speakeasies, judging restaurants on the weirdest scales you can imagine. Like there's a guy who's a cab driver who reviews restaurants on his lunch breaks, popping in to get a table for one at some of the most exclusive restaurants you can imagine, and everyone can't wait to serve him because they know he overtips.  

But I'm sure there's someone out there who, for example, judges restaurants only on their decor, or their names or reputations. We've got Michelin-star ratings, celebrity chefs, and then there's being internet famous as opposed to being known for making good food. I have to wonder what's being lost in the process, because sometimes you just want to have a decent meal in a place that isn't too crowded. But judging a restaurant on anything other than the food seems a bit like making a movie about the NFL draft and not the sport itself. But let's find out. 

Kevin Costner carries over from "Let Him Go". 

THE PLOT: Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one draft pick. He must decide what he's willing to sacrifice on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with NFL dreams. 

AFTER: Well, I was kind of right, this is a film that started at 8 on the ridiculous scale and then took it up to 11. Partly society is to blame, because we can't really do anything "small" here in America, everything that starts out small eventually gets overhyped to the point of madness, the Super Bowl is just one example, if you feel like spending six or eight hours watching a tribute to excess, to the point where there's so many food traditions or tailgating "rules" that there's a whole subculture just for THAT, then you've got the exorbitant amount of TV commercials and just the money spent on making and booking ONE of those ads is larger than the GDP of most countries, I'd say that things have gotten pretty far out of hand and they're not going back. There's a sponsor just for the COIN FLIP, and people are also betting on the coin flip (one of hundreds of things you can bet on). 

Another example is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, like I imagine 100 years ago somebody just thought it might be a nice idea to inflate a couple balloons, book a marching band and entertain a few dozen people in the streets, and now look where it all is. It's a three hour mythic mash-up of product placements, musical numbers from Broadway shows, marching bands from all over the country, dance troupes and celebrities who drop by and comment for five minutes because they've also got something to promote. Whatever entertainment value a parade might have once had is now buried under a giant merchandising pile, but God help your Broadway show if you DON'T do a performance on 34th St. during the parade, you might as well just close down the theater because everyone will be going to the other show down the block that did perform. They have plenty of marching bands in the NYC area, I'm just saying, and they all pretty much look and sound the same, why do they have to fly an entire band plus parents and support staff in from Flagstaff, Arizona - it all seems very wasteful to me, but I guess then those teens get to say they were on TV and also they got to visit the big city. At the end of the day, does NBC get to air three hours of programming that means something, that they're proud of? Or is it just a tradition now, muscle memory and we keep doing what we're doing without thinking about why we're doing it? 

To be fair, sports movies only took things so far, because at one point somebody wrote the book "Moneyball" and regular people started to realize that there might be more to the game than what you see on the field, and every team has staffers who are even more obsessed with stats than the fans are, and they've also got researchers who dig into each player's personal history to try to determine not just what kind of player they're going to be, but what kind of person, what kind of teammate they're going to be, and for the team owners who are spending millions on THIS guy over THAT guy, maybe that all adds up to something, or maybe it doesn't, because nobody has a crystal ball that works 100% of the time. The best you can do maybe is spend your money wisely, make the best picks you can, cross your fingers and hope for the best - and STILL 100% of the people are going to get fired over time based on the decisions they made or didn't make. 

But still, I went in to this knowing almost NOTHING about the NFL Draft, and after I really don't know much more. I know that the team with the worst record each year gets the best (first) pick the next, so it's a bit like my father's family's old Christmas gift distribution. (We did the white elephant thing, where everybody got a number and then picked wrapped gifts in order, but you couldn't pick the gift you brought, and you had options to trade what you just opened for anything that had been unwrapped before. Other trades were negotiated afterwards, privately.) But then every team gets a pick in every round, unless they've traded away that pick to another team for something else in return. Is that about it? I have a feeling this system was designed to make things equitable among all of the NFL teams, but then the teams with the smaller budgets are free to negotiate with the teams with the bigger budgets, and that's not equitable at all. The teams in the larger markets might have more power and assets to negotiate with, so again, something about this very fair system doesn't seem very fair. 

We follow Sonny Weaver Jr., the GM of the Cleveland Browns, who receives directions from the team's owner to at least TRY to get the most coveted player in the draft, a QB named Bo Callahan, because he's going to put asses in the seats. After speaking with the also-struggling Seattle Seahawks, Sonny is able to trade for their #1 pick in the first round, but only by giving up the Browns' 1st-round pick for the next THREE years. This puts the Browns in the best position to secure Callahan, only it raises questions, why were the Seahawks so eager to give up their pick? I mean, they got something in return, but perhaps that was just a cover-up tactic, do they know something about Bo Callahan that the other teams don't? Sonny would rather draft a running back named Vontae Mack, or even a legacy player like Ray Jennings - but the owner wants the flashy new quarterback to replace Brian Drew, their sophomore QB who might have a bad knee, and who also seems to be demanding a trade IF the Browns take Callahan, because that town ain't big enough for the both of them. 

Meanwhile, everyone assumes that the Browns will take Callahan with their new first pick, so the head coach starts to revolt because he didn't plan for this, he likes Drew, the old QB just fine and he's got all his plays for the season centered around what Drew can do. Ali, the team's accountant, is called in to see if the team can even afford to draft Callahan, because of the salary cap (another thing that I believe is supposed to level the playing field, but I bet there are plenty of ways around it). Sonny starts re-reviewing all the footage of Callahan, too, to see if he's got a weakness they haven't discovered yet, and he has the team's security officer do another deep dive into Callahan's background to find any hint of scandal, other than the fact that there was an incident at his birthday party in college, and it seems none of his teammates were involved, but that also means they weren't THERE, and why weren't they? Did Callahan not have any friends on the team, or did he have bad B.O., or were the local cops inclined to hide the fact that team members were there? Anyway you try to explain it, it doesn't make much sense. 

Also meanwhile, the film needs to pile on all this other personal drama, to hide the fact that this is a football movie where nobody plays any football - sure, it's the off-season and Draft Day, but maybe you came here for a football movie and not a negotiation movie. So for some reason that accountant, Ali, is in a situationship with Sonny, and they have to keep it quiet because that's probably an H.R. violation. But, Ali is pregnant so they're going to have to disclose sometime soon. And on top of THAT, Sonny's father died like a week ago and he was the GM before Sonny was, and in his will he had a request that his ashes be scattered on the team's practice field, and Sonny's mother wants to do this TODAY, right now, while she's there, and Sonny for some other reason doesn't have the stones to say, "Mom, today's just not a good day for this, I'm very busy, how about tomorrow?"

I mean, it's really like "What could POSSIBLY go wrong on Draft Day", only heightened beyond the absurd. There are 365 days in a year, but every problem in Sonny's life seems to have come to a head on Draft Day, of course. How is a man supposed to conduct trading business, research a player again at the last minute, keep the coach from quitting, keep the team owner from firing him, and try to figure out who the other teams are going to pick while also trying to figure out who HE is going to pick? It's a lot. Also it's worth considering that you may draft a player you really want, or you may draft a player to keep him from another team that needs him, or you may just draft a player for the hell of it so you can trade him later to another team. This is worse than 3-D chess, this is like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark when you can't even feel the shapes of the pieces. 

It's also possible that all of the team's research isn't worth a damn.  People always point out that Tom Brady, one of the greatest if not THE greatest, was picked like 140th in his year. Some stats will tell you a player is really great, and then you still have to cross your fingers and hope he lives up to the hype, while other players you may draft just to round out the team, and one of those guys can really surprise you one day. Or so I've heard. Anyway, I don't know what all the fuss is about, because at the end of the day, this is still drafting for the Cleveland Browns, one of the worst teams in the NFL on a perennial basis. I've spent time in Cleveland, and I can tell you their fans are some of the most loyal there could be to a team that has just never delivered for them, not even a bit. Yet we're supposed to believe here that there are players somewhere who are ECSTATIC to be drafted by the Browns. I refuse to believe it, except that playing for Cleveland might be slightly better than digging ditches in Kuala Lumpur. 

It's just my feeling here, but I speak as someone who's gotten a behind-the-scenes look at hypefests like San Diego Comic-Con, and now I've peeked behind the curtains of NBA games, while I'm selling beer at Nets games. My strong suspicion is that simply everyone is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Certainly nobody knows for sure what movies are going to be successful, what children's TV shows are going to catch on, and which players are going to coalesce into a successful team of contenders in any sport. Everyone's running around trying to get maximum eyeballs on their product, whether that's at live events, on TV screens or on social media. But I think mostly the thing to remember is that nobody has a clue, not at all, not from what I've seen. Creative people just keep putting stuff out there and hope that other people find it and enjoy it, but sports is really its own thing, teams just have to keep practicing and playing the games and trying to win, but then there's this whole ridiculous culture (or cult) built up around each team and each sport. 

Directed by Ivan Reitman (producer of "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" and producer of "Space Jam: A New Legacy")

Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Family Switch"), Denis Leary (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Frank Langella (last seen in "Sweet November"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Sean "Diddy" Combs (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "The Tale"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Rosanna Arquette (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "King Richard"), Arian Foster (last seen in "Baywatch"), Brad William Henke (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Chi McBride (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Griffin Newman (last heard in "Disenchanted"), Josh Pence (last seen in "La La Land"), David Ramsey (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Tom Welling (last seen in "The Fog"), Wade Williams (last seen in "Message from the King"), 

Dave Donaldson, Jordan Harris, Zachary Littlejohn, Enre Laney, Laura Steinel (last seen in "Babylon"), Wallace Langham (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Christopher Cousins (last seen in "Untraceable"), Erin Darke (last seen in "The Drop"), Quincy Dunn-Baker (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Gregory D. Rush, Tom Headlee, Patrick Breen (last seen in "The Assistant"), David Dunn, Stephen Hill (last seen in "Widows"), Jim Brewer, Margot Danis, Leanora Haselrig, Jennifer McMahan, Brenda Adrine, Edwina Hadley, Pat Healy (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Andre Bello, Jacob Bertrand, John Dannug, Shannon Edwards, Mike Karban, Annette Lawless, Gil O'Brien, Nathan Andrew Read,

with cameos from Chris Berman (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Russ Brandon, Jim Brown (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Monique Brown, Joel Bussert, Sammy Choi, Jeff Darlington, Rich Eisen (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Ken Fiore, Mike Florio, Aaron Goldhammer, Roger Goodell, Jon Gruden, Rebecca Haarlow, John Heffernan, Marc Honan, D'Qwell Jackson, Mel Kiper, Bernie Kosar, Ray Lewis, Alex Mack, Alex Marvez, Mike Mayock, Tony Rizzo, Deion Sanders, Frank Supovitz, Phil Taylor, TJ Ward, Seth Wickersham, 

and archive footage of John Candy (last seen in "Once Upon a Crime...")

RATING: 5 out of 10 retired jersey numbers

Let Him Go

Year 18, Day 87 - 3/28/26 - Movie #5,286

BEFORE: Out working last night, an animation event and thanks to my previous life, I'm pretty good at identifying animation VIP's, who tend to show up late for events and often they can't find their QR codes, which are on their tickets, which are somewhere in their e-mail, only they can't find the e-mail or the paper ticket their assistant printed out. Yes, I know the type, I spent 30 years working for somebody just like that. At some point it's easier if they just tell me their name, because I've watched SO many animated films and read SO many credits that I'm probably going to know exactly who they are, or I may have dealt with them at some point via e-mail in that previous life. So yeah, this guy told me his name, I knew who he was, and I let him in the event, 99% sure he was probably on the VIP list, which I didn't have access to at that point, because the screening had begun. After the event, I told the host who I let in without a ticket, and he told me that I made the right call. Yep, I figured that. I had Googled the guy, essentially confirming he was who he said he was, and his producing credits let me know he belonged there. The event host was once my counterpart at the animation studio across the street (literally) and so we had a lot to talk about, for two people who had never met before. 

Kevin Costner carries over from "The Upside of Anger". 

THE PLOT: A retired sheriff and his wife, grieving over the death of their son, set out to find their only grandson. 

AFTER: Well, we've really got a running theme this week, and it's got a lot to do with kidnapping - I mean, that's kind of a no-brainer for a Jason Statham film, but I thought the theme would kind of end there. In "Homefront" his character's daughter was held by drug dealers, and then in "A Working Man" he rescued his boss' daughter who had been kidnapped by the Russian mob to become a sex slave. Then in "Killer Elite" his mentor, played by De Niro, was being held hostage by an Omani sheik. In "Death Race" he went to prison, that's not exactly the same thing, and "The Upside of Anger" had a husband who disappeared, that's sort of its own thing too. But now we're back on kidnapping of an actual kid - OK, again sort of. But you see how the whole week has been about people vanishing or being made to vanish, right? 

The situation with this one is that the Blackledge family is going well, their son James has married Lorna and they have an infant son, Jimmy. Maybe Margaret is just a bit too into the grandmothering thing, we see her push Lorna out of the way so she can give Jimmy a proper bath in the kitchen sink. Not long after that, James apparently falls off his horse while out doing chores on the Montana ranch, and breaks his neck. When his horse returns to the stable without him, George has to ride out and bring his son's body home. Well, as a former sheriff he's probably seen his share of dead people, but still, the loss is devastating to the family. 

The film fast-forwards a couple years, and Lorna marries Donnie Weboy, but the Blackledges are still looking forward to being doting grandparents to little Jimmy - but Margaret sees Lorna out walking with Jimmy and her husband, and when Jimmy drops his ice cream cone, Donnie grabs the kid to make him stop crying, then he hits Lorna. (NOTE: this part of the film is set in 1963, and it was a different time, but this behavior is NOT OK by modern standards, nor was it OK to Margaret back then.) Margaret decides to drop in and talk to them, only to find they've left town with no forwarding address.

But since it's 1963, there's no way to look somebody up on the internet or call directory assistance even, and phone books were only published like once a year so there really was no quick way to track somebody down, it's easy to forget that we live in the information age now and back then, things didn't get updated often, except at a snail's pace. Margaret wants to pack her bags, load up the truck and drive around until she learns where her grandson is, whether George joins her on her quest is really up to him. But as a former sheriff, he's got some contacts in law enforcement, so the police station is their first stop, not a terrible way to go because maybe Donnie Weboy has some outstanding warrants or something, they can also maybe issue an APB or something. But again, no computers to trace his credit cards, no street cameras to tie into, no nationwide database of traffic tickets or anything like that. They spend the night in an empty jail cell (umm, how is that better than a hotel room?) and the sheriff gets them a lead on a shop in Forsyth that might be owned by the Weboy family. 

The Weboy cousin in the Forsyth shop tells them the family is mostly based in Gladstone, North Dakota, so that's where they head next. Along the way they meet Peter, a young Native American who lives out in the middle of nowhere, away from society for some reason. It's noted that much like the times it's set in, the film also tends to move at a snail's pace. You can really feel the time that it probably takes to drive across the big state of Montana... Peter does know the name Weboy, at least, and suggests they look for Bill Weboy when they reach town. 

Bill Weboy seems helpful, but also a little shady at the same time. He'll drive them out to the main Weboy farm, but only if they come back at 4 pm and they agree to stay out there for dinner. Also he wants one of the Blackledges to ride in his truck, why exactly is a bit unclear - but it seems he doesn't trust the Blackledges, and if he can't trust them, how can they trust him? Donnie's mother does make pork chops for dinner, but she's also rather forward and rude and when Lorna, Donnie and little Jimmy arrive, something still seems a bit off, and the Blackledges don't really care for how they talk to little Jimmy and send him to bed without dinner just because he wouldn't eat a hamburger with mustard for lunch. 

The next day, the Blackledges visit Lorna at work and ask her to return to Montana with their grandson, she agrees to do so, but she's also concerned what this family will do to her if she leaves, probably track her down. So instead of Lorna showing up at their hotel, the Blackledges are visited by Blanche, Donnie and Bill, plus a couple other tough-looking family members, and things don't go well. George pulls his gun, but come on, he's getting on in years, so he ends up in the hospital, and the local sheriff who investigates the incident sides with the Weboys, pointing out that these out-of-towners came to Gladstone to try to get their grandson back, then they pulled a gun on the Weboys while in their hotel room, but the good news is that the Weboys have agreed to not press charges, provided George and Margaret leave town and forget about their grandson. 

Well, that probably would be the smart thing to do, only Margaret can't seem to give up. George sneaks out to return to the Weboy ranch with a shotgun, and he tries to either take the boy or go all one-man-army on the Weboys. Well, he's not exactly Jason Statham so there are some disastrous consquences, to say the least. I guess at some point you have to cut your losses and accept that even family members are going to come and go. At that point, even if they could get little Jimmy back, would it be worth the cost? 

Sure, the Jason Statham films are mindless, feel-good action films where the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, and the good guy with a gun usually beats a biker gang with guns because he's got the moral high ground, also he exercises and knows MMA stuff. But if a normal person went up against a whole family full of tough guys, this film's result is at least a bit more believable, even if it's not exactly the outcome the audience wants. Even when Margaret gets more help from Peter, by the time she arrives at the Weboy house, well, no spoilers here. 

But these actors played Superman's earth parents in the previous round of DC superhero films, maybe that's why it feels like they're the moral people with justice on their side. Why couldn't they have tried to go about things the legal way, instead of playing vigilante, maybe file some lawsuit to get visitation rights so they could see their grandson? That might have taken a bit longer, especially if they didn't know where he was, but ultimately that could have been more successful. Just saying. 

Directed by Thomas Bezucha (director of "The Family Stone")

Also starring Diane Lane (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Kayli Carter (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Ryan Bruce, Lesley Manville (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Will Brittain (last seen in "The Forever Purge"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Connor Mackay, Adam Stafford, Booboo Stewart (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Greg Lawson, Bradley Stryker (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Will Hochman, John Treleaven, Heather Lea MacCallum, Ryan Northcott, Otto Hornung, Bram Hornung, Ravonna Dow, Judith Buchan, Marilyn Potts, Vanessa Holmes, Bryn Roy, Finn Lee-Epp

RATING: 6 out of 10 slices of coffee cake

The Upside of Anger

Year 18, Day 86 - 3/27/26 - Movie #5,285

BEFORE: Joan Allen carries over from "Death Race", to a film that I'm not quite sure how to handle, because it seems rather relationshippy, if not outright romance-y. That usually would reserve a film for February, however I tried other outros from the Jason Statham block, and this was really the only one that worked, in that it gets me to Easter in the proper time frame. If I read the signals correctly, this film does NOT connect to anything else on the romance list, so it's OK to split this one off from the herd, otherwise it's just going to sit on the watchlist for a few more years maybe, or never get watched at all. 

I've also just realized it's a prime candidate for a Mother's Day film, perhaps similar to "Because I Said So" or "Lovely and Amazing", which were both about families with several teen/twenty-something females and their relationships to their mother. So this film is arriving either two weeks too late for the romance chain or two months early for Mother's Day, I can't really tell before I watch it, but I really need it for the linking so I'm going to just watch it and hope the chain knows what it's doing. 

THE PLOT: When her husband unexpectedly disappears, a sharp-witted suburban wife and her daughters juggle their mom's romantic dilemmas and family dynamics. 

AFTER: Yeah, it's kind of what I figured, I don't know what to do with this film, like forget putting it in the right category, I want to know where the heck this story came from, like is this based on a book or a true story, did all of this really happen to a Detroit family with four teen daughters, or is it all just a made-up story meant to make some kind of point about life, and if so, what is that? Apparently this all comes from the mind of writer/director Mike Binder, but Kevin Costner's ex-baseball player is believed to be based on retired Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, who had a radio talk show but maybe didn't like to talk about his baseball career all that much. Think of that as maybe an early example of a podcast, then, one where the host can talk about whatever he wants, because it's not like the audience has any say in the matter. Any way you slice it, though, this definitely feels like a mortar-type film, there's no way this is a brick, even if I'd scheduled it on Mother's Day, that might have made it a little more relevant and topical, but I'm guessing still it's more valuable to me as a film that links other films together and keeps the chain going. 

The poster finishes the title "The Upside of Anger" with "is the person you can become." And I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Anger is a good thing because it turns you into a different person? Certainly not a happier person, but I guess an angrier person is technically the same person, just angrier. Right? Like I can have a lot of emotions, angry or sad or ecstatic or regretful, but I'm STILL ME. The upside of anger is the person you can become - it feels like one of those phrases that you might overhear and it will bounce around your brain for a couple hours before you scream, "No, it's fucking NOT, that doesn't make any sense." Lewis Black once said this after overhearing someone say, "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college..." and you can probably go crazy thinking about what that sentence might mean. 

The movie starts off with a funeral, but it fails to mention who is being buried - we can eliminate a couple of the characters because they're seen AT the funeral, but the identity of the corpse is going to remain secret for most of the movie. Then the movie flashes back three years to Terry Wolfmeyer telling her four daughters that their father has left the family, most likely to live with his younger secretary in Sweden. Terry starts to drink heavily to cope with her anger and pain, and when she confides in her husband's friend and their neighbor Denny, they start to drink together. Spending time together, though, even if they're mismatched, well, we all know where this can lead - but Terry is still going through the stages of grief. 

The meat of the film is about Terry's relationship with her four daughters - Hadley, Emily, Andy and Popeye - and how that relationship is affected by their father's absence, their mother dealing with that absence, and also her budding relationship with Denny. Denny's never been a father figure before, but is willing to take a stab at it - as a former baseball player maybe he's dated a bunch of MLB groupies and might finally be ready for a real relationship, later in life. Stranger things have happened. 

Hadley graduates from college and then introduces her mother to her boyfriend of three years, only to reveal that she is pregnant, and they are engaged. Terry reacts with anger because all of this is being sprung on her kind of after the fact, and she embarrasses herself at a luncheon with her future in-laws because she is having trouble dealing with the influx of all this news and change. Emily, the second daughter, wants to pursue a career as a ballet dancer, only her mother makes her go to U. Michigan in Ann Arbor and pursue something more traditional. But when she is hospitalized for some kind of eating disorder, caused by stress, she comes home to recover and (eventually) Terry accepts her decision to pursue dance as a career. She had to get there the hard way, though, nearly everything in the film seems to move in that direction. 

Andy, another daughter, accepts a job from Denny at the radio station where he has his talk show, his producer, Shep, is reluctant to hire her at first, but then is attracted to her, so he has her producing radio shows while he's also sleeping with her, that's probably an H.R. violation, even back in 2005, but people became more aware about such things later on. Meanwhile, Popeye pursues a relationship with her high-school classmate while she makes documentary films, but after she kisses him, he tells her that he's gay, and she doesn't want to believe it. It happens, sure, and what high-school girl couldn't use a gay male best friend? Gorden's dad likes bungee jumping and he claims to like it too, but I think this was just a big fad back in 2005, anyway I don't think anybody LIKES it, so I really don't understand why this was ever a thing. 

Also meanwhile, Terry and Denny have kind of an on-again, off-again thing going on, they have sex but then they don't know where to take things next, like marriage is probably off the table, but why not just try to enjoy it for whatever it is?  Terry wants to micro-manage the relationship just like she does with her daughter's lives, and that's probably very annoying. Terry gets mad at him over the whole thing with her daughter dating his older radio producer, but then when she and Denny separate for a while, she finds that she misses him, and they get back together. Denny just likes being some part of this big family, coming over for very delicious dinners, and giving advice to the daughters when he can. Sure this life's not perfect, but then nothing is. 

There's a final twist to the story, and it's got a lot to do with that funeral from the opening, but I'm not going to spoil it here. Whether the twist is believable or not, well I suppose that's up to you. I guess maybe this is all about how our anger and frustration over things not happening the way we would like them to is probably the simplest reaction we could have, but is being angry really the best way to spend our time, or is it a lot of misplaced and sometimes unnecessary emotion? Sorry, that's really all I have tonight, the film doesn't even connect the dots that well in trying to have some meaningful words of advice for all the folks at home. Would that really be so much to ask for here?

Directed by Mike Binder (director of "Reign Over Me")

Also starring Kevin Costner (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Erika Christensen (last seen in "Swimfan"), Keri Russell (last seen in "Austenland"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Mike Binder (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Tom Harper, Dane Christensen, Danny Webb (last seen in "The Dig"), Magdalena Manville (last seen in "Monster' (2003)), Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "The Wife"), David Firth, Rod Woodruff, Stephen Greif (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Arthur Penhallow, Richard Mylan, Robert Perkins, William Tapley (last heard in "V for Vendetta"), Owen Oakeshott, Bella Sabbagh, Gavin Munn

RATING: 5 out of 10 wedding band songs 

Death Race

 Year 18, Day 85 - 3/26/26 - Movie #5,284

BEFORE: Back to work tonight, I've had a few days off to catch up on TV, and I pulled out the DVDs that will get me to Easter - now on my next break I'm going to have to figure out the path to Mother's Day, which will be a little over a month long, that's a bit tougher to do. Why does Easter have to move around so much? It's coming really early this year, April 5, which is why I really have to hustle right now.

Jason Statham carries over from "Killer Elite" and this is going to bring my third (?) annual Statham-Fest to a close. I sort of thought by now that I'd be left with the scraps, that these leftover Statham action films would have decreased in quality, but some of these were pretty darn good - of course, I'm kind of grading on a curve when it comes to action movies. I mean, three of them had almost the exact same plot, where he had to come out of retirement and go all one-man-army on a criminal organization because somebody close to him had been kidnapped. A couple films stood out, though, by being so over-the-top, that's not always a good thing though.  

THE PLOT: Ex-con Jensen Ames is forced by the warden of a notorious prison to compete in our post-industrial world's most popular sport: a car race in which inmates must brutalize and kill one another on the road to victory.  

AFTER: Well, it's something a bit different tonight, the last THREE Statham films all involved some form of kidnapping, and this one, well, HE's the one essentially kidnapped, he's framed for murder and then sent to prison, which feels a bit like a form of kidnapping. Since he's got racing experience, his special skills are needed on the inside - not justifying it, just explaining it. Nothing like a life sentence to clear the mind when your wife has been killed and your infant daughter is being raised by foster parents. 

Ames is about the same build as Frankenstein, or at least a racer that goes by that name who's survived a few racetrack accidents and wears a mask as a result, which is pretty convenient if you're a warden trying to replace him after he finally couldn't be put back together again. Darn, and he was just ONE win away from gaining his freedom, too... This is the kind of race that's being simulcast via pay-per-view all over the world, so crossing the finish line with your car upside-down and on fire, it's kind of encouraged, but not a great method for keeping your drivers healthy. 

So this film lands somewhere between "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Running Man", with a little bit of "Rollerball" and a lot of "Mad Max" thrown in for good measure. I'm trying to record the new version of "Running Man", but other films on cable are due to expire sooner, so I'm trying to prioritize - can't add everything at once. But I'll try to circle back to Glen Powell in that remake as soon as I can. 

Tonight's film is also a remake, I never watched the film "Death Race 2000" which came out in 1975, but it also had a character named "Frankenstein" (I almost put this film in the horror chain because of that...) and some say this film could work as a prequel OR a sequel to that film, but I'm thinking loose sequel because David Carradine played that character then and also supplied the voice of the same (?) character here. I worked on an animated film that David Carradine recorded a voice for, that was back in 2004 and I think we all got the feeling he wasn't going to be alive for much longer, but he lived until 2009.

There are also three SEQUELS to this film, all of which went to video stores and not theaters, and the only actor who carries over is Frederick Koehler, who plays Lists, the guy on the racing team who, umm, knows stuff. Damn, if I'd known there was connective tissue I could have scheduled all four films in a row, but I don't know, that might have left me in a place too far from home, and I wouldn't then get back in time for Easter. So perhaps I should just stick with the one film and not worry about the others. 

Things get worse for Ames when he figures out that not only did the warden recruit him by having his wife killed, but the killer was also an inmate at Terminal Island, released to do the hit, and wouldn't you know, he's also one of the other racecar drivers. You can practically hear Ames making that mental note to kill this guy at the earliest opportunity, and no, it doesn't take that long - like Day 1 of the race. 

The racers don't get to use their car's weapons until the second lap on each day, and then they have to drive over sword icons to activate the weapons and shield icons to activate the defense systems (smoke, oil, napalm). It's an interesting conundrum because if the cars only had weapons, then it would make no sense to be the car in the lead, because one solid way to win the race would be to drive in last place, and just blow up all the other cars ahead of yours. Ah hah, strategy - but with the defense systems then there is more motivation to be in the lead, and use the oil slick or the spike strips to neutralize the car shooting at you from behind. 

Then there's the secret weapon that the warden has built for this race, which is the Dreadnaught, a giant truck with guns, missiles and flamethrowers. However, this leads me to a NITPICK POINT: First they say that the warden is trying to make this "sport" more popular, to do what she needs to do to have drivers with fan followings, ones that might get four wins (but never five) and have loyal followers who sign up for the PPV events. But then she authorizes the release of the super-dangerous Dreadnaught truck, which is actively trying to kill ALL of the players. Aren't these actions in contradiction with each other? How can the drivers develop fan bases if they're all dead? 

Anyway, this would seem to be a vision of the future made in 2008 that was set in 2020 and, well, OK maybe things didn't really turn out the way this film predicted - we've got plenty of terrible things, but we aren't streaming prisoners killing each other, not just yet. We've got bodycam cop videos, and we've had videos of cops killing people in the streets, just not specifically murderers racing cars and simultaneously shooting at each other. So, umm, yay? This movie is just a big loud explode-y ball of nonsense and/or fun, so also, umm, yay?

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (director of "Monster Hunter" and "Pompeii")

Joan Allen (last seen in "Room"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Deep Cover"), Tyrese Gibson (last seen in "Ride Along 2"), Natalie Martinez (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Max Ryan, Jason Clarke (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Frederick Koehler (last seen in "Babylon"), Jacob Vargas (last seen in "Devil"), Justin Mader (also last seen in "Room"), Robert LaSardo (last seen in "The Mule"), Robin Shou, Benz Antoine (last seen in "Heist"), Danny Blanco Hall (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Christian Paul (last seen in "Warm Bodies"), Janaya Stephens (last seen in "The Lookout"), John Fallon, Bruce McFee (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Cory Fantie, Russell Ferrier, AnnaMarie Lea, Dan Jeannotte (last seen in "RED 2"), Abdul Ayoola (last seen in "Arrival"), Ruth Chiang (ditto), Melantha Blackthorne (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Shane Cardwell, Pilar Cazares, Carolyn Day, Jim Dunn, Nathalie Girard, Sharlene Royer and the voices of David Carradine (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Dick Ervasti, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 members of the Aryan Brotherhood

Killer Elite

Year 18, Day 84 - 3/25/26 - Movie #5,283

BEFORE: Jason Statham carries over from "A Working Man" and is now tied for first, with five films watched this year - you know what comes after that...

And the fill-in nouns for tonight's "Merc Madness" mad-libs are former special ops agent, old/new girlfriend, mentor, and British SAS paratroopers. Just insert those into last night's plotline blanks and we'll all be on the same page. 

THE PLOT: A special-ops agent returns from self-imposed exile to rescue his kidnapped mentor. 

AFTER: I hadn't heard of this film at all, not until it started streaming and it turned up on one of my monthly add-in sessions. But it seemed like maybe a minor Jason Statham film if I hadn't ever heard of it before, so it made some sense to wait until I had like 5 or 6 Statham films lined up, you know, just in case I needed to bury it in between two good ones and burn it off. The advantage of having six Statham films connected in a block is that, in addition to filling nearly a week on the calendar and getting me closer to the next holiday, I can move them around in almost any order, as long as I can find a proper entry into the block, I've then got at least a dozen good exits, everyone from James Franco to Winona Ryder to, well, now Clive Owen and/or Robert De Niro. I do have a couple De Niro films on the list in a much smaller block - just "The Comeback Trail" and "The Alto Knights" and a couple documentaries, but I'm going to follow a different link out of this mini-chain because that gets me to Easter on time. Knowing that De Niro links to docs could be helpful, but I'm not ready to cut to the Doc Block just yet, it's more of a summer thing. 

The danger in putting De Niro AND Clive Owen in a Jason Statham film is that it's then something less, and also more, than a Jason Statham film. It's not uncommon for him to get most of the screen time in an action film these days, they probably build the whole film around what stunts he wants to do or what vehicles they want him to blow up. But I think that just like Franco and Ryder in "Homefront", they worked the other two mega-stars in pretty well here. De Niro plays the lead character's ex-partner and mentor, while Clive Owen plays the enforcer for the Feather Men, a secret society of former U.K. military operatives who look out for each other, just in case somebody tries to track them down and gain revenge for what they did during wartime in the Middle East. Funny you should mention that, because...

Danny Bryce is an ex-mercenary who retired after a job where he had to kill a man right in front of that man's child. He moved to Australia and lives a quiet life, camping mostly. But one day he gets a package with photos of Hunter, his mentor, who is being held captive in Oman, so he returns to meet with "The Agent" who tells him that Hunter was unable to complete a merc job and is now being held by a sheik who won't release him until someone completes the mission for him. For the sake of Hunter's kids, Danny travels to Oman and agrees to complete the job. Well, first he tries to break Hunter out, but when that doesn't work, he takes the gig. The job is to kill three U.K. SAS troopers who killed three of the sheik's sons during the Dhofar Rebellion.  The sheik is getting older and his health is going, he feels he needs to get vengeance for his sons before he dies, otherwise he won't have a great afterlife - no virgins waiting for him there.

Danny not only has to figure out who and where these men are, but also get them to confess on videotape to war crimes, and then make their deaths look like accidents, and also return to Oman with proof that the job was done right. Danny hooks up with two of his merc buddies, Davies and Meier, promising them each half of the $6 million cut, leaving nothing for himself. Well, at least his heart's in the right place. The first guy goes down pretty easy, after they record his confession the plan was to make it look like he slipped on a loose tile and struck his head in the bathroom - which might have worked if the police just ignored the big bullet hole in his brain. 

When the team starts asking questions in a pub frequented by SAS veterans, somebody tips off the Feather Men, who (eventually) become aware that somebody is killing off these retired soldiers, but they're not sure who's doing this and why. Meanwhile Danny learns that their second target is going to participate in a veteran's march on a mountain range - you know, just for fun. So he slips in and puts drugs in the guy's coffee thermos which put him into shock and hypothermia during the march. (There's another guy that the team tries to kill here, named Martin and played by Ben Mendelsohn - I'll admit I was very confused by this part, because he's not on the list, and also he gets away, and I wasn't sure if this was a flashback scene, or if not, how it fit into the larger story...it takes place in the desert, and I don't think there are many deserts in the U.K.)

The team tries to take out the third guy with a job scam, they phone him and tell him about a job interview, to lure him from his house, so they can figure out how he's going to drive there and get him in a head-on collision with a remote-controlled truck, er, lorry. This part of the plan works, but a suspicious member of the Feather Men witnessed the crash, and spotted Danny's men while they were trying to confirm the kill. Now the Feather Men know for sure that someone is targeting ex-soldiers and taking them out, meanwhile Danny thinks his job is done, however some soldier has written an expose about the military operation and it comes to light that there is a FOURTH soldier who needs to be killed - those damn sheiks, always moving the goalposts...

(It's a bit clunky here, but the fourth man they need to kill is Ranulph Fiennes, whose expose on the military operation is apparently also the book titled "The Feather Men", which is the book this film is based on. This was a little bit too meta, even for me, it reminds me too much of the film "Adaptation", which was adapted from a book of the same name, which isn't possible, it just goes around and around like a chicken-egg thing. You can't have a film based on a book and then within the film's universe, there is also that same book.)

By now the Feather Men realize they have to protect the fourth soldier - if he doesn't finish his book, then they can't make a movie out of it, and all of them will then cease to exist. So they put him in a safe house and protect him with like 100 undercover guards, but Danny just sends in someone else dressed like him, only wearing a motorcycle helmet, and while everyone is trying to catch that guy, he sneaks in the back way and shoots the soldier. Only he doesn't kill him, he only incapitates him so he can take photos of his body lying on the ground, to fool the sheik.  NITPICK POINT: If he could take a photo of his target pretending to be dead, basically create a fake photo and deliver that to the sheik without killing anyone, why didn't he just do that in the first place? The sheik was pretty old school, if you show him a fake photo and a phony newspaper, he'd probably believe that the job was done. 

Anyway, after making sure that his girlfriend is safe in Paris, where Hunter's been keeping an eye on her, Danny and Hunter head back to Oman with the fake pictures, not just to get the money, but to have the job declared done so they can live out their lives without looking over their shoulders. But Logan, the enforcer for the Feather Men, gets there first and has other ideas about how to end things. The three men then part ways and they're all unofficially retired, unless somebody decides to make a sequel to this, which wouldn't be the worst idea. 

Directed by Gary McKendry

Also starring Clive Owen (last seen in "Ophelia"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Dominic Purcell (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Aden Young, Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "Manhattan Night"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Cyrano"), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "The Union"), David Whiteley (last seen in "Knowing"), Tony Porter (ditto), Matt Nable (last seen in "Son of a Gun"), Lachy Hulme (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Firass Dirani (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Nick Tate (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Bille Brown (last seen in "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"), Stewart Morritt, Grant Bowler, Michael Dorman (last seen in "The Invisible Man"), Daniel Roberts (last seen in "Mission: Impossible II"), Rodney Afif (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jamie McDowell, Dion Mills, Andrew Stehlin (last seen in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Simon Armstrong, Richard Elfyn (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Chris Anderson, Brendan Charleson, Sandy Greenwood, Boris Brkic (last seen in "The Proposition"), Riley Evans, Sofia Nikitina, Tim Hughes (last seen in "Quigley Down Under"), Michael Carman, Salim Fayad, Kristy Barnes-Cullen, Kate Neilson, Zane Dirani, Mohamed Dirani, Michael Dirani, Emily Jordan (last seen in "The Master")

RATING: 5 out of 10 sideburns (well, it WAS set in the early 1980's)

A Working Man

Year 18, Day 83 - 3/24/26 - Movie #5,282

BEFORE: I'm so mad at myself for not coming up with some kind of "Merc Madness" tournament, what with the college basketball thing going on and all. CBS shows are pre-empted this week, and on a few other channels too because of college sports, which I never really understand. Like who is a fan of NCAA hoops AND "Law & Order", like at the same time? Anyone? No, I didn't think so. And Colbert doesn't have too many weeks left in his show, and you're just going to run repeats? Not cool. 

Jason Statham carries over again and can I do two more with him? Yeah, I probably can but the last one might be the most ridiculous of all, from what I've heard. 

THE PLOT: Levon Cade left his profession behind to work construction and be a good dad to his daughter. But when a local girl vanishes, he's asked to return to the skills that made him a mythic figure in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism. 

AFTER: OK, we're going to fill in the Jason Statham plot Mad-Libs tonight, as you know, the framework is: "A man with a shadowy past as a _______ has retired to raise his _______ in seclusion, but when __________ is kidnapped, he's forced to take down _________ in order to bring them back."  Yesterday's answers, of course, were DEA agent, daughter, her cat and the local drug-lord, but today's answers are Marine Commando, daughter (again), the daughter of his construction boss and the Russian mob. Gee, I can't help but think these films are following some kind of formula.  I'd be really surprised if tomorrow's answers were circus clown, llama farm, Jack Black and ISIS, but it could happen.

As a bonus, Levon has to take down a biker gang, in addition to the entire Russian mob - that takes a lot of time, so that's why this one is almost two hours long. Thankfully the mob never gets around to killing Jenny, his boss's daughter, like they want to use her as a sex slave but she defends herself and nearly bites this guy's face off. Since she's so much trouble, they want to just kill her and dump her body, but then comic (?) circumstances keep arising so they kind of never really get around to it. Two of the mob's main operatives drive her away from the farmhouse and they're about to shoot her and dump her body in a swamp, but since she knows karate she manages to get away from them and escape. She gets rescued by a police car, only the police are ALSO in the pocket of the Russian mob, so instead of a police station, they drop her off back at the remote "farmhouse". Then a few hours later they try to kill her again, but then they get a call from their "client" who wants her delivered alive to him, so he can kill her. You know it only takes a few minutes to kill someone, here it takes a few days, which seems very hard to believe. 

But that does give Levon time to visit his old war buddy, get his permission (for some reason) to go look for the missing girl, and then start working his way up the crime family chain, starting with the bartender at the nightclub where she was made to disappear.  He ends up killing the bartender and his two buddies, so that would seem to be a dead end, except that he then follows home the Russian gangster who shows up to clean up the dead bodies. THAT guy he holds over a pool in a poorly balanced chair, but then the gangster won't stop screaming so he has to kill him too. I think if Levon could only have waited until he got a name or something from these gangsters before killing them, the process could have gone a lot faster. Just saying. 

That drowned gangster's brother finds him dead, and sends his own two sons to track down Levon, who is in the middle of trying another way in, looking for the son of the drowned guy, who is named Dimi. Dimi runs the human trafficking part of the Russian mob, and also has a biker gang making some kind of blue club drug. Levon uses a fake ID to masquerade as a drug buyer, somebody who wants to distribute the blue drug to the Chicago club scene, and both times he buys the drugs he just throws them in the river, which is probably bad news for the fish. But then the dumb and dumber sons of the drowned guy catch up with him (with the help of those corrupt cops) and throw him in a van, only cue the fight scene inside the van where Levon frees himself, shoots the driver in the head and crashes the van into a river, giving him the upper hand, and two more dead gangsters. 

Meanwhile, the upper members of the Russian mob wonder who this "devil" is that's killing all their enforcers, so they figure out his identity and send a crew to set fire to his father-in-law's house, which is where Levon's daughter lives. For safety's sake he brings his daughter to stay with his blind war buddy, then he's free to do whatever, which means finally getting close to Dimi and shooting him in the hand, so he'll reveal where this secret farmhouse/whorehouse is. Levon, the one-man army, then heads there for the final showdown against all of the biker gang, followed by the weirdest members of the Russian mob. Well, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out, then moving on to that client who got his face bit off, and then Viper and Artemis, who are the enforcers who were too stupid to kill Jenny, time after time. 

I really don't know how seriously to take this one, because it's SO over-the-top and flat-out ridiculous, like I'm used to seeing Statham being the one-man army, and using the enemies as his shield, then getting into close hand-to-hand combat and killing people with his opponent's gun, that sort of thing. Then you know there's usually a moment in these Statham films where he's tied-up, or seemingly unconscious, or otherwise down for the count, and really, he's not even waiting for his second wind, he's just waiting for his opponents to let their guard down. Then those ten or fifty guys are in some SERIOUS trouble. They're also further hampered by those "villain bullets" that never hit the hero no matter how many they fire at him, while the hero's got perfect aim and all his shots land because his intentions are good. 

Of course, he's going to prevail, and if he says he's going to rescue the girl, he's going to rescue the girl, no matter how many bikers he has to kill or how long that takes. In most cases when someone's missing more than three days, that usually means they're dead - but of course there are going to be exceptions to that rule every once in a while, or if it's a movie. 

Directed by David Ayer (director of "The Beekeeper" and "Street Kings")

Also starring Jason Flemyng (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Merab Ninidze (last seen in "Conclave"), Maximilian Osinski (last seen in "People Like Us"), Cokey Falkow (last seen in "The Expendables 4"), Michael Peña (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), David Harbour (last seen in "Violent Night"), Noemi Gonzalez, Arianna Rivas, Isla Gie, Emmett J. Scanlan, Eve Mauro (last seen in "Land of the Lost"), Kristina Poli, Andrej Kaminsky (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 4"), Greg Kolpakchi (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Neil Bishop (ditto), Piotr Witkowski, Chidi Ajufo (last seen in "Get a Job"), Ricky Champ (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), Max Croes, Kenneth Collard (last seen in "6 Days"), Richard Heap, Joanna DeLane, Muki Zubis, Alexander Bracq, David Witts (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Wayne Gordon, Daniel Lundh (last seen in "Midnight in Paris"), Jose Conejo Martin, Eddie J. Fernandez (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Jade Coatsworth, Alana Boden, Leah Walker, Priyasasha Kumari, Jonathan Nyati, Kya Brame, C.C. DeNeira, Sophie Craig, Tom Vaughan, Andrea Vasiliou, Benjamin Schnau (last seen in "The Current War"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 bags of cement