BEFORE: Plans are underway for another real vacation - not a Comic-Con vacation, but a real one where my wife and I fly to another city, drive to yet another city, and have a lot of good food and fun times along the way. Since I'm not going to San Diego CC this year (for the first time in maybe 15 years) I was able to put all of my airline miles toward a flight to Dallas and another that returns from New Orleans, so our plan is to rent a car and drive between those cities, with stops in Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. Now we just have to find fun things to do and great things to eat in those cities, it shouldn't be too hard. We know what we like, we just have to find things that fit in with that. Stay tuned in October for a full report, and I'll still get to watch about 20 horror films before we leave.
I got this one to fill up a DVD when some channel finally ran "Into the Wild", and I think I'd passed on it several times before. Finally, it fills a need and provides a link as Bruce Willis carries over from "Rock the Kasbah".
THE PLOT: Johnny, a drug dealer and a couple pals kidnap rival Jake's younger brother Zach, then assigns his buddy Frankie to be Zach's minder. They develop a brotherly friendship. Zach parties with his captors as things begin to spin out of control.
AFTER: Well, maybe things happen for a reason, but the silver lining about losing my ability to dub films to DVD is that I'll never again have to put a movie on my list JUST because it will help fill up a half-full DVD. I think avoiding this movie for so long was the right call - now I wish I had avoided it altogether, but I can't go back and unwatch it, what's done is done. This movie has way too many characters, and just seems to be filled with awful people doing awful things to each other, and there's no real rhyme nor reason to it all, except perhaps as a cautionary tale. (Which would be what, exactly - don't kidnap people? Don't be a drug dealer? Don't do the crime if you can't do the time?)
I got the feeling after a while that this was based on real events, the tip-off was constantly putting informative sub-titles whenever new characters were introduced (and there were a LOT of them...) that referred to people as "Witness #47" or such, which implies that there would ultimately be a court trial, and then of course that tips the story's hand. We then know that something bad's going to go down, and there will be no stopping that, and the only question then becomes who does what to whom. Things are going to get much worse before they get better, and many of these characters are essentially circling the drain.
The best scenario after a kidnapping charge becomes the victim gets returned, the kidnappers are caught or turn themselves in, and then they face life in prison. Think about that for a second, and you may realize why so many kidnappings don't go down that way, as kidnappers opt for a more gruesome alternative that they think will give them a chance to escape. Yeah, this is not going to end well, that's for sure. And then even in a ransom-type situation, what's the point in paying the kidnappers, what's their motivation at that point to release the victim?
But I digress - this film feels like Richard Linklater went and directed a story written by Quentin Tarantino. The criminal elements are there, but mostly everyone just seems to want to hang out and party and not really accomplish anything. Don't even criminals have some kind of work ethic? Not any more, I guess, not when weed is legal and there's so much tail to chase and anyway, Fiesta is going on, whatever that is. If the goal was to make crime feel pointless and stupid, then mission accomplished.
Also starring Emile Hirsch (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Warcraft"), Shawn Hatosy (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "Dying of the Light"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "Lovelace"), Chris Marquette (last seen in "Fanboys"), Dominique Swain (last seen in "Face/Off"), Alex Solowitz (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Fernando Vargas, Olivia Wilde (last seen in "Butter"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Vincent Kartheiser (last heard in "Rango"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "The Revenant"), Heather Wahlquist, Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "The Straight Story"), David Thornton (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Charity Shea, Holt McCallany (last seen in "Sully"), Amber Heard (last seen in "North Country"), Janet Jones, Alan Thicke.
RATING: 3 out of 10 rolls of duct tape
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