The story of welterweight champion Irish Mickey Ward may end with The Big Fight, but it doesn’t quite take the expected path to get there.
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Mark Wahlberg
It’s been a long tough year at the box office, lots of mediocre movies, nothing that stands out until this weekend when we get two completely different films Tron and The Fighter. Both stand out for different reasons, I’ll tackle Tron: Legacy in a different review. When I walked into the screening of The Fighter, I walked in cold, didn’t know anything about the movie beyond what I learned talking with Anthony Thomas – one of the boxers in the movie. I was there to see True Grit, but the movie was switched to The Fighter at the last minute.
This movie had all the elements that I generally like:
- Christian Bale – check
- Amy Adams – check
- Mark Wahlberg – check
- A story about an underdog – check (As Eddie Murphy said Elvis said – “We gotta win this race!”)
Yes, there was almost no way this movie should have failed, I’m a sucker for any one of these things and this movie has all four. It is time I come out of the closet and admit I, generally, love sports movies. Yes, I know they are usually “cliche’d” but things become cliché because they work. The Fighter is based on a true story but it includes all of the generic story points – a down on his luck local Boston boxer, Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) has a career that is hampered by his crack addicted brother Dicky (Christian Bale). Dicky was an up and coming Boxer who can’t get past his one moment in the limelight – knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard. Micky is caught between doing what’s right for his career and sticking by his family (family brings you down man!). Amy Adams sluts it up for her role as a bar girl who Micky falls for.
Grade: A
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Many folks may not know who he is, but be on the lookout for Anthony H. Thomas. He’s a long time friend and former assistant to Mark Wahlberg who has had numerous cameos in most of Wahlberg’s friends and from a personal standpoint he’s one of the inspirations behind the HBO Hit television show Entourage, which is loosely based on Wahlberg’s Hollywood life. He is best known as one of the original members of The Funky Bunch. During my recent conversation with him he gave off a good vibration (ok, I couldn’t resist). This Christmas he plays a boxer in Mark’s latest movie – The Fighter.
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It’s taken all of a week for Dinner for Schmucks to be replaced as the funniest movie of the summer, so far – especially because The Other Guys is the unlikeliest of movies – a funny parody of cop/buddy movies. Unlikely because there have been so many in the genre that more than a few have lapsed into self-parody, and the ones that have tried to be funny simply weren’t.
Why does The Other Guys work where others have failed? Will Ferrell’s best performance in years; Ferrell’s best material in years and, in Mark Wahlberg, an actor who is absolutely fearless in putting himself out there.
Grade: A-
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Take the basic Punisher plot [cop’s family killed by bad guys], add some designs by Constantine and top with a superficial gloss of Norse mythology, and you get the videogame-based Max Payne. Max Payne [Mark Wahlberg] is the cop whose wife and son are murdered; Alex Balder/Baldur [Donal Logue] is his ex-partner who discovers a link between the deaths of Payne’s family and the death of Natasha Sax [Olga Kurylenko], sister of assassin, Mona Sax [Mila Kunis].
Then there’s the blue fluid that is a failed super-soldier formula [so very Captain America] and the hallucinations it induces of Valkyries [the warrior women who bear Vikings who died in battle to Valhalla. The question is this: if everyone who uses this stuff sees the same hallucination, is it a hallucination or a glimpse into a supernatural realm – a question that is never answered [and could have made the movie something much better]. That fluid leads to the mighty Aesir [residents of Asgard – home of the Norse gods] Pharmaceutials. The company’s head of security [Beau Bridges] is Max’s dad’s former partner on the police force.
There’s more of this kind of thing throughout Max Payne – like the big blowout that occurs in a club called Ragnarok [the Norse end of the world myth]. Of course it’s a red herring. What else could it be? The biggest twist possible would have been if the club actually was where the movie ended.
Max Payne is beautifully shot, well-paced and so technically accomplished, overall, that it’s a shame it never attains any actual style. Most of the action choreography is an homage to John Woo [or blatant theft – you decide]. All it needs is a few doves…
Max Payne is a waste of some very talented actors – and of an hour and forty minutes in the life of anyone who sees it.
Final Grade: D
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Any great mystery, espionage or horror movie lives or dies on its writer and director combining to provide suspense – the ominous shadow here, the piercing music sting there – while creating characters we can relate to and placing them in situations that leave them more and more unable to cope, or adapt, until some revelation… some idea… gives them the wherewithal to overcome their plight.
For about two-thirds of The Happening, writer/producer/director M. Night Shyamalan does exactly that. Beginning with the first intimations of something wrong beginning to happen in New York city’s Central Park, Shyamalan provides an almost Hitchcockian build of suspense as people begin killing themselves in numbers that suggest, at first, a terrorist attack.
The film follows a troubled couple, Elliot [Mark Wahlberg] and Alma [Zooey Deschanel] and the young daughter of a friend, Jess [Ashlynn Sanchez] – giving us a chance to see her with her father [John Leguizamo] before bad things separate them. As the behavioural problem mounts, and theories about the problem evolve, it seems certain that humanity is about to be removed from the face of the planet.
Even allowing for Shyamalan’s tendency to write dialogue that no one would ever really say, The Happening builds nicely. Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography and James Newton Howard’s score do work well to keep the audience on the edge of its seat. The problem arises when the third act has absolutely no surprises and the development of the attacks evolves precisely as it seemed it would – until…
Normally, that would be a good thing, but here, Shyamalan telegraphs the way the film plays in a rather clunky manner, so that the impact of some events are nearly nullified. Also, as a direct result of information imparted earlier, the film’s brief tag is also telegraphed, leaving us saying, “So?” On the other hand, The Happening is a huge improvement over Lady in the Water, so maybe Shyamalan’s career isn’t over just yet.
Final Grade: C-
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