Taken 3

Year 8, Day 147 - 5/26/16 - Movie #2,346

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over for the last time, and as you see, I had no shortage of options for Father's Day films - "Boyhood" would have been another acceptable choice, and the whole impetus in the "Taken" films is a man protecting his daughter, so this would have qualified also.  And I'm planning to watch another film this weekend that's all about a father - so, it's kind of a month-long build-up to Father's Day this year.  I should probably make plans to go up to Massachusetts and visit my own dad, sometime between his birthday and June 19.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Taken 2" (Movie #1,913)

THE PLOT:  Ex-government operative Bryan Mills is accused of a ruthless murder he never committed or witnessed. As he is tracked and pursued, Mills brings out his particular set of skills to find the true killer and clear his name.

AFTER: I'm tying a lot of recent themes together with this one - we've got the ex-special agent (as in "The Equalizer") who gets framed for murder ("American Gigolo", "Lost Highway") so he has to go on the run ("Run All Night") while trying to figure who the real murderer is ("A Walk Among the Tombstones") and this puts him in conflict with Russian mobsters ("The Equalizer" again) who were once part of the Russian military ("Enemy at the Gates" and "K-19: The Widowmaker").  Plus there's a lot of that close-contact fighting that I've seen in so many movies lately, like "Batman v Superman" and "John Wick" and "Kingsman: The Secret Service".  Definitely a trend. 

But all that is not why the film feels familiar - it's probably because the plot is cribbed straight from "The Fugitive", right down to the professional lawman (police in this case, not U.S. marshal) who has to track him down, even though he believes that he's probably innocent.  The only difference seems to be that in that Harrison Ford movie, Dr. Kimble was a relative novice at living on the lam, but here we can just count it as another one of Bryan Mills' "special skills" - hey, it rhymes, Bryan Mills with the particular set of skills.  

Watching a "Taken" film is like waiting for the other shoe to drop, there can be moments where our hero's life seem to be going well, maybe his ex-wife wants to reconcile, or maybe his daughter has some good news to share with him, but you just know this is a temporary respite in his life, and there's a whole bunch of bad news just around the corner.  Surprisingly, the situation here does not seem to be a reprisal for his actions in "Taken 2", which were a direct result of him punishing the men who kidnapped his daughter in "Taken".  The filmmakers realized that if they kept the cycle going, it was never going to end - each villain would always have a brother or a cousin that would want revenge. 

They went a different way with it this time, which is about the only thing that feels original here.  Still, nothing explains why a man who knows that he is innocent doesn't surrender to the police and answer their questions.  If he were guilty, there would be plenty of physical evidence to support that, and likewise since he's innocent, there should be little or none.  So why not let the police do their job, and stand on his otherwise spotless record, and not run away from the cops.  Newsflash, if you run, you look guilty!  

But I get it, he believes in his own special skills more than he believes in the police, and in fact he gets halfway into his investigation before the cops even catch up with him.  But then there's about a half-hour break in the film where he has to go through a lot of trouble just to get a message to his daughter, and this feels like killing time.  Hello, there's a killer on the loose, and he's wasting precious time - and this also makes him look more guilty, because an innocent man would get right on the hunt, because the ONE thing he knows is that he didn't do it.  
Also starring Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Body Snatchers"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "Don't Say a Word"), Maggie Grace (last seen in "Taken 2"), Leland Orser (ditto), Dougray Scott (last seen in "My Week With Marilyn"), Sam Spruell (also carrying over from "K-19: The Widowmaker"), David Warshofsky (also last seen in "Don't Say a Word"), Don Harvey (last seen in "Noah"), Dylan Bruno, Andrew Howard.

RATING: 5 out of 10 camera angles (of the SAME explosion!)

K-19: The Widowmaker

Year 8, Day 146 - 5/25/16 - Movie #2,345

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over again from "Ruby Cairo", and I'm back on the Russian front.  Not literally, I just mean that I'm covering the topic of Russian war again, this time in the early 1960's, when people on both sides of the Cold War somehow thought it would be a good idea to take a bunch of nuclear missiles and put them on submarines.  No, I never understood it either.

THE PLOT:  When Russia's first nuclear submarine malfunctions on its maiden voyage, the crew must race to save the ship and prevent a nuclear disaster.

AFTER: Well, the good news is that, unlike "Enemy at the Gates", the actors here at least made an attempt to sound like Russians - but the bad news is that not all of them were successful.  By all means, hire an American and an Irishman to headline your film about Russian navy men...    And yes, for any of you "Star Wars" fans out there, like myself, this is the film where Han Solo takes control of a nuclear submarine away from Qui-Gon Jinn.  Well, duh, Han Solo's automatically a better pilot, over a Jedi who never even fought in the Clone Wars, it's no wonder he was given command of the sub.  

But as with "Enemy at the Gates", Hollywood saw the need to focus on Russians, possibly to counter all of the negative propaganda that the U.S. was responsible for during the Cold War.  It just seems to be in our nature to try and de-humanize our enemies, we did it with Germans and Japanese during World War II and we're doing it now with Muslims and Mexicans.  They're evil, godless Socialists who are incapable of human emotion and forming lasting relationships.  No wait, that's the propaganda targeted against hipsters and gay people, my mistake.  

The truth is that Russians were just regular people, just people with dour expressions who were apparently incapable of finding joy, unless it came in the form of drinking vodka and listening to balalaika music.  Or is that just one big Hollywood stereotype?   

And, naturally, something goes wrong on the submarine's first voyage - the crew had considered the ship cursed ever since the champagne bottle refused to break across its bow, but really, you should expect things to go wrong in a movie.  How interesting would the movie be if the ship left its dock, went out on its first patrol, and everything went according to plan?  Bo-ring!  So, make sure that no one ever makes a movie about your life, that would be one way to prevent disasters from happening to you.  

The irony of a reactor leak on a submarine is that the crew frantically needed a way to cool down the reactor, and found that the back-up cooling systems weren't working - meanwhile, the submarine was surrounded by millions of gallons of cold water, with no way to get that water to the reactor, at least not without sinking the sub.  And it might have come to that, if a few brave souls hadn't done what they did.  And going to sea in a nuclear submarine without proper radiation suits?   That seems like the case where the can opener was invented wasn't invented until 1858, at a time where people had been storing food in tin cans for nearly 50 years - you'd think that the two inventions would go hand-in-hand, and if so, you would be wrong. 

Also starring Harrison Ford (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Jarhead"), Joss Ackland (last seen in Flawless"), John Shrapnel (last seen in "Notting Hill"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), Tim Woodward (last seen in "The Scarlet Letter"), Steve Nicolson, Ravil Isyanov, Christian Camargo (last seen in "The Hurt Locker"), George Anton, James Francis Ginty (last seen in "Surrogates"), Lex Shrapnel, Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson, Sam Spruell (last seen in "The Counselor"), Sam Redford (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), Peter Stebbings, Shaun Benson, Kristen Holden-Ried, Dmitry Chpeovetsky, Tygh Runyan, Jacob Pitts, Michael Gladis, JJ Feild, Peter Oldring, Joshua Close, Jeremy Akerman, Christopher Redman, Peter Graham,

RATING: 5 out of 10 torpedo drills 

Ruby Cairo (Deception)

Year 8, Day 145 - 5/24/16 - Movie #2,344

BEFORE: Halfway through the 5-film Liam Neeson chain, and I'm not even sure what to call this film - it's listed on the IMDB as "Ruby Cairo", but the poster says "Deception", and I think it aired on cable under the latter name.  But, there's another film titled "Deception", with Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor, maybe they changed the title of this film after the fact to avoid confusion?  Or maybe it's a deception of its own, who knows?  

Some people in show business say you can't have two films with the same title, but doesn't it happen all the time?  There was a movie titled "Bad Boys" with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and another "Bad Boys" that starred Sean Penn.  There was a comedy titled "Black Sheep" with David Spade and Chris Farley, and also a horror film with the same title about bloodthirsty sheep.  "Kicking and Screaming" was the title of a Will Ferrell comedy and also an indie drama, there were even two crime thrillers titled "Bad Company", released just 7 years apart.  And let's not forget the two films titled "The Illusionist", both about magicians, one animated and one live-action.  "Wanted", "Glory", "Betrayed", "Delirious", and other one-word titles have been repeated over the years as well.  I've even got two different films named "Flawless" as part of the countdown.  

The simple fact is, you can't copyright the title of a work.  If I wanted to make a documentary about people chasing tornados and title it "Gone With the Wind", I'd be within my rights.  I just probably couldn't make a Civil War drama with that name.  So why do movie companies spend so much money on title searches, or make them mandatory for contracts, when they don't matter? 

THE PLOT: After her businessman husband dies suspiciously in a Mexican plane crash, his widow begins to investigate his labyrinthine financial dealings, not all of which are legal.

AFTER: May's been a tough month for movie spouses - there was that guy's wife in "American Gigolo", the dead wife in "The Equalizer", and the man who killed his wife (umm, I think?) in "Lost Highway".  Tonight I'm presented with a dead husband, so that's at least a bit of a change-up.  And the baseball pun is intended, because this movie is somehow about baseball cards leading to a fortune, but not in the usual way.  

After her husband is declared dead in Mexico, and someone mails her a body part, Elizabeth Faro (whose husband called her "Ruby Cairo" for some unexplained reason...) travels to Mexico and immediately seeks out her husbands missing baseball cards (after selling most of the collection at a yard sale, very disrepectful to a collector.  Hasn't she heard about eBay?).  The baseball cards are a clue to where he kept his money in banks around the world, though I'm a bit suspicious of her interpreting his "secret" code.  

For that matter, the whole plot doesn't really add up - she decides to build a better life for her kids, by leaving them alone while she jets around the world?  OK, to get the money, sure, but wouldn't her kids' lives be better with her in them?  And then when she has found and withdrawn more than enough money for one lifetime, she gets upset when the last few secret accounts are empty?  Jeez, how much money that she didn't earn does she need?  

In her travels, she meets a former oil executive who now works tirelessly to bring grain from the U.S. to poor countries - and she stumbles on what might be a smuggling ring inside his operation, but might also be tied to her husband's strange missing money?  It's all very unclear, and nothing really gets explained properly.  How shady is the food relief organization?  Is it OK to smuggle other things with the food, if starving people are being fed, or is that not morally correct?  There don't seem to be any consequences from exposing it, so it's somehow legit?

Since the husband owned a "successful" air transport company that was somehow also deeply in debt, I'm sort of reminded of a story that broke in the news last week, which was about the chef/owner of NYC's first upscale Vegan restaurant, which, in these trendy times, seems like a good gig, like having a license to print money.  (Google "Sarma Melngailis" for the whole story, I'm just going to sum it up here.)  After splitting with her boyfriend/co-owner, she got married to this shady guy, and started to come up short with the payroll at the restaurant, which led to an employee walkout.  Seems that the new husband had a lot of gambling debts, and they were using restaurant money to cover them.  After giving the employees a number of lame excuses, like "we're switching banks, the money needs to clear" some staff came back and the restaurant re-opened, but a few months later, they were short on the payroll again.  This time the couple was living high on the hog at a number of casinos in Las Vegas and Connecticut, blowing six figures at a time.  Another employee walkout, and this time the restaurant closed for good, and the missing owners were found hiding in Tennessee, tracked down by a wayward order from Domino's pizza (which is not vegan, last time I checked).  

A much better (and more legal) scam would seem to be to get a movie studio to finance your film, so you can travel the world on someone else's dime.  Which is my way of saying that nothing really adds up to anything in this plot, it just seems like some director wanted to take trips to a lot of different countries, with the movie studio paying for it.  Mexico, Germany, Greece, Egypt - there's no rhyme or reason to it, unless the actors also wanted to see those parts of the world. 

Wikipedia says that this film was titled "Ruby Cairo" first, then re-edited and re-released as "Deception" with an additional 21 minutes - I wonder if those 21 minutes explained anything from the original film...

Also starring Andie MacDowell (last seen in "St. Elmo's Fire"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Jack Thompson (last seen in "Original Sin"), Luis Cortes, Alberto Estrella, Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez, Lucy Rodriguez, with a cameo from Jeff Corey (last seen in "Bird on a Wire")

RATING: 3 out of 10 cashier's checks