In Manhattan, Nothing Beats a Bike: "Premium Rush"

Over the years, there’s certainly been a fair share of fine bike-related movies spanning numerous genres.  Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 classic of the Italian neorealist movement, is widely considered one of the best films ever made.  In 1985, Tim Burton made his directorial debut with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which features possibly the most pimped-out pedal-powered ride the world has ever seen.  But there’s one place that the bicycle has never gone: into the realm of the action picture.

That is, until now.  Premium Rush, the new film from director David Koepp, takes us into the high-speed world of urban bicycle messengers.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Wilee, a hotshot New York messenger who accepts one final job to close out a long day: the transport of an envelope from the Upper West Side to Chinatown.  He quickly regrets the decision when he finds himself pursued by Bobby Monday, (Michael Shannon) a crooked policeman who badly wants to get at the contents of the delivery.

Premium Rush conveys a truism about New York: riding a bicycle can be a bitch.  Cyclists are quite often considered as a nuisance, invading the sacred space that has supposedly been reserved for the automobile.  These messengers are outsiders, forced to squeeze their way through dense traffic to make their appointed rounds, sometimes bending the rules of the road.  The film makes no apologies for the sometimes harsh actions of Wilee and his colleagues, who blow red lights and smash the side-view mirrors off offending taxicabs.  It’s a war between cars and bikes, and the messengers take no prisoners.

For all their brazen antics the messengers aren’t portrayed as the menace to society that many New Yorkers see them as.  At several points in the film, Wilee finds himself at a densely packed intersection that he must cross swiftly without causing injury to himself or passers-by.  His lightning-quick thought process is visualized through CGI arrows that chart his options, each of which has various consequences that unfold before our eyes.  Wilee will put his own body on the line if it means keeping others out of harm’s way.

The cycling of Premium Rush is compelling and authentic; at no point do we roll our eyes or question what we see.  There’s nothing here that couldn’t conceivably be done in the real world, which keeps us engaged in the action.  Wilee uses the urban landscape to his advantage, slipping through narrow streets and alleyways on his bike that motorists would find intractable.  

Threading his way through the columns of an elevated rail line, Wilee is able to evade Monday and momentarily slip out of harm’s way, in a nod to William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971).  Paying homage to one of the greatest chases in cinema is a gutsy move, but Premium Rush has the goods to back it up.

This includes a crack performance by Gordon-Levitt, who is coming into his own as a legitimate and highly versatile leading man.   As the high-strung, emotionally unstable Monday, Shannon turns in a delightfully over the top portrayal that provides a perfect foil for the cool, devil-may-care attitude of Wilee.  

Dania Ramirez plays Vanessa, Wilee’s on-again, off-again messenger girlfriend, who disapproves of his risky riding style.  Wole´ Parks rounds out the cast as Manny, a rival messenger who aims to take advantage of the rift between Wilee and Vanessa.  The love triangle that ensues occurs on the fly, with heated phone conversations taking place between the characters as they zip through the city on separate missions.

Koepp’s film doesn’t rely on shootouts or explosions for its thrills, but rather the surge of adrenaline that comes with zipping inches away from rush hour traffic on nothing but a frame and two wheels.  Even though it may be a distant memory for many, the sense of freedom and possibility of riding a bike is something that we’ve all shared.  Premium Rush captures these sensations, and takes us on a ride we won’t soon forget.

Still Clunking Along: "The Expendables 2"

The past decade has seen a steady stream of intelligent action films.  Doug Liman started the movement with The Bourne Identity (2002), based on Robert Ludlum’s bestselling novels about an amnesiac black-ops assassin.  Martin Campbell reinvented James Bond with Casino Royale (2006), which did away with the excess that had plagued the franchise.  And Jon Favreau’s Iron Man (2008) proved that a major studio could produce a fun, loud superhero film without sacrificing quality.

Yet there is always room for excess.  In 2010, Sylvester Stallone bucked the trend of character-driven action pictures with The Expendables, a smash-mouth movie that paid homage to and featured many of the stars of the 1980s and early 1990s musclebound blockbusters.  Two things were clear: the film wouldn’t challenge the intellect in any way, and, if it was even mildly successful, would be the basis for a new franchise.  Its worldwide box office gross topped $274 million and, just like the film itself, the prospect of a sequel was a no-brainer.

For The Expendables 2, this time directed by Simon West, our friendly mercenaries have returned, led by Barney Ross (Stallone) and his right-hand man Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), this time going up against a new enemy: the dastardly Jean Vilain (yes, that’s really the bad guy’s name), played by Jean-Claude Van Damme.  With a small army at his command, Vilain steals a device from our guys that indicates the whereabouts of a cache of weapons-grade plutonium which he plans to recover and sell to the highest bidder.  

It may not be the densest or most clever of plots but, to be honest, how much are we really expecting here?  This movie is about two things: one-liners and violence.

Expendables 2 has the former in spades.  Terry Crews, as barrel-weapons expert Hale Caesar, provides a slew of boisterous, mostly monosyllabic outbursts that are almost as entertaining as those from the series of Old Spice commercials he has starred in.  One would think that a man continuously screaming “What!” and “Oh!” at the top of his lungs would wear on the nerves, but Crews’ antics are consistently delightful.

Perhaps the film’s best moment comes courtesy of Chuck Norris as Booker, a veritable one-man army who swoops in from out of nowhere to save our pinned-down team.  “I heard you got bitten by a King Cobra,” Ross tells him.  “Yeah,” Booker replies, “and after five long, painful days...the cobra died.”  The perfectly delivered line, a reference to the ‘Chuck Norris Facts’ that have been circulating around the web for years, elicited a huge reaction from the audience, whio erupted in raucous laughter.

Yet where it really counts, there has been no improvement.  The sequel still suffers the same problem as the first installment: a disappointingly minimal amount of violence.  The opening sequence is quite satisfying, with our team compiling an impressive body count during a rescue mission in Nepal.  But what follows is a whole lot of nothing, with combat sequences that are mediocre at best.  Everybody knows that most of these guys are well past their primes, but even so there’s far less action than advertised, which leaves us wondering what the point of it all was.

The Expendables franchise will eventually come to a point where people will become so tired of its empty promises that they’ll simply refuse to buy a ticket anymore.  Yet Stallone seems determined to continually produce these movies until he ticks every conceivable action star off his list.

As gaudy as the casts of the first two installments have been, there’s still a slew of superstars that we could see in the future.  There will be talk of Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes, and Nicolas Cage, all of whom would be solid additions, but I’m thinking bigger.  

If we are going to be submitted to more sequels, let’s at least see something different. What about bringing in more international talent, such as Hong Kong action veteran Chow Yun-fat, or Abhishek Bachchan (right), the leading man of Bollywood’s high-octane Dhoom series?  Going outside Hollywood would be a welcome departure, not to mention a potential boon for overseas box office receipts.  And, while they’re at it, the series could get more women involved, like Angelina Jolie, Milla Jovovich, or Kate Beckinsale, all of whom have proven their mettle as action superstars.

Though the film hardly delivers on the action front, it’s still a blast to watch these guys pal around with each other.  Thankfully, The Expendables 2 takes itself far less seriously than its predecessor, which makes it a hell of a lot more enjoyable to watch.  But just how much longer will we put up with these mostly hollow movies?  It all depends on who decides to show up next.     

The Monster in their Midst: "Jaws" and the Penn State Scandal

The belief in an institution can drive men towards unspeakable deeds.  Over the past several months, the world found out just how true this could be as it was revealed that top officials at Pennsylvania State University conspired to conceal, and in some cases enabled, the crimes of a child sexual predator.  Under their watch, they allowed evil to roam free on the campus, all in an effort to prevent damage to the university’s storied football program, which had been a financial juggernaut for decades.

Like the great white shark that was allowed to keep feeding on bathers in Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller, the danger was exponentially increased by the inaction on the part of those who could have confronted and vanquished the monster in their midst.  The scandal is the quintessential example of life imitating art, and the similarities between the fictional Amity Island of Jaws and the real life “Happy Valley” of State College, Pennsylvania are striking.   

The man that was being protected at Penn State was Jerry Sandusky, who served as an assistant football coach from 1969-99, with access to campus athletic facilities long after his retirement.  On June 22, 2012, Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of 48 counts of sexual abuse involving eight young victims. The crimes occurred from 1994-2009, including the anal rape of a ten-year-old boy in a locker room shower.  At age 68, Sandusky’s sixty-year sentence virtually guarantees that he will never again breathe free air.

Sandusky is a despicable man who got what he deserved.  But nearly as disturbing as his crimes were the results of an internal investigation led by former FBI director Louis Freeh.  Released less than a month after Sandusky’s verdict was handed down, the report found that head football coach Joe Paterno, university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and senior vice president Gary Schultz knew of the molestations as early as 1998.  These four men continuously suppressed the crimes from the school’s board of trustees, the university community, and local authorities.

“I feel betrayed,” laments Theo Drivas, a 2008 Penn State graduate.  During his time at the university, it was always stressed that the school’s football program played by the rules, engaged in fair recruiting practices, and maintained rigorous academic standards for its players.  This, Drivas says, was a fraud, as behind this sham of integrity they were harboring a man who posed far more danger to the community than a cheating athletic team.

Sandusky had exhibited a long-term pattern of abuse that was willfully ignored.  “You don’t suddenly wake up one morning,” Drivas says, “and decide, ‘I’m going to rape a boy today.’  They knew about him for years, and did nothing about it.”  At the very least, Sandusky could have been permanently banned from the university, but even this most basic responsibility was neglected.

The prime concerns of the leaders of both Amity Island and Penn State were twofold: the avoidance of bad press, and the need to keep money flowing.  Their greatest fear was not for the safety of potential victims, but for the potential despoiling of their institutions if they were to publicly acknowledge the existence of danger.  Both communities revolved around a single point that its inhabitants would do anything to protect.  

For Amity, this was the summer tourist season which brought in the cash that kept its businesses thriving.  At Penn State, it was the football program that raked in millions of dollars, and where Paterno had become the most powerful and revered figure at the university.  There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to run a successful motel, or coaching a team to a winning record, but when these desires begin to overrule logic and safety, there are bound to be catastrophic ramifications. 

In Jaws, when Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) moves to immediately shutter the island’s beaches following the first shark attack, he is overruled by Mayor Vaughn, (Murray Hamilton) who tells him that, “Amity is a summer town.  We need summer dollars...You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”  Like the four men who guarded the Penn State football program against bad publicity, Vaughn repeatedly has the chance to step up and do the right thing, trading momentary agitation for the long-term safety of the community.  But the preoccupation with the avoidance of fallout and the drop in business that may follow robs the men of the conviction to make the tough, though necessary, choice.

It wasn’t only the people in charge who behaved shamefully.  Marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) arrives on Amity Island and finds himself violently berated by a group of local fisherman for presenting evidence that a tiger shark they caught may not be the animal behind the two attacks.  This mirrors what happened in the aftermath of Paterno’s firing in November 2011, when thousands of Penn State students took to the streets to riot in protest, throwing rocks and, at one point, overturning a news van.

In the eyes of many at State College, Paterno was a god who could do no wrong, and this belief was the catalyst to such an aggressive and irrational outburst.  Their actions were not only disgraceful to themselves and the university but, more importantly, enormously insensitive to Sandusky’s victims.  The loss of a football coach, even one who had risen to such lofty heights, was nothing in comparison to what Sandusky took from those boys.

For both Amity Island and Penn State, an insular culture led to a skewing of priorities that made a dangerous situation much worse.  Jerry Sandusky was a real-life monster.  His superiors had the power to ensure that he wouldn’t have any more chances to cause harm to a single child.  But the danger wasn’t stopped when it could have been, and the lives of eight children were ruined.  

The scandal at Penn State is, unfortunately, not an isolated incident.  We are living in a society where, time after time, the allure of money and prestige outweighs the responsibility to do what is right.  From the financial crises of the last few years, to the doping by professional ballplayers, there are countless individuals who will protect their own interests above all else.  It is an unacceptable state of affairs that needs to change.  

The words of Mrs. Kintner, the mother of an attack victim in Jaws, poignantly reminds us of the price that has been paid by these repeated lapses in morality.  “You knew there was a shark out there.  You knew it was dangerous, but you let people go swimming anyway.  You knew all those things, but still my boy is dead now.  And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Does Renner Tarnish "The Bourne Legacy"?

“A Bourne film without Jason Bourne?”

This was the question on filmgoers’ lips when The Bourne Legacy, the fourth installment in the spy franchise, was announced.  For Universal, the hardest task wouldn’t be producing the film without Matt Damon, but rather clearing up the confusion of audiences when they learned that Jason Bourne himself would not appear in the film.  Was the part being recast?  Would the series be sent back to the drawing board as part of Hollywood’s recent reboot-obsessed culture?

A well-executed marketing campaign cleared up these matters quite nicely: Legacy would be a sequel to 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass), focusing on a new character who must deal with the consequences of Bourne’s actions.  For a critically and financially successful franchise that had been driven by Damon’s performance, it would be a huge gamble.

Rolling the dice here is Tony Gilroy, who takes over as director after writing or co-writing the screenplays of the three previous films.  Legacy posed a unique challenge as Gilroy, who along with his brother Dan served as screenwriter once again, had to take the series in a new direction while remaining mindful of the original story.

The film’s opening, occurring simultaneous to the events at the close of Ultimatum, introduces us to our new protagonist, Aaron Cross, (Jeremy Renner) as he takes part in a training assignment deep in the Alaska bush for Operation Outcome, a Department of Defense black-ops program whose agents are administered daily doses of experimental medication designed to enhance their mental and physical abilities.  Cross, like Bourne, is a freak of nature: he leaps from cliffs, dives deep into icy cold water, and possesses rifle skills that would make an Old West gunslinger’s jaw drop.

Spawned from Treadstone and Blackbriar, the illegal CIA assassination squads from which Bourne has leaked classified documentation in, Outcome is thrown into jeopardy of public exposure.  Rather than have this happen, program director Eric Byer (Edward Norton) gives the order to terminate all of its international field agents and medical scientists, including Dr. Marta Shearing, (Rachel Weisz) thus burying any evidence of its existence.  Able to dodge assassination but left sans medication, Cross seeks out Shearing, who has also narrowly avoided death, the only person who can help him get the fix that will avert a crash of his system.

Amidst the escapes of Cross and Shearing, the strategizing of the government officials looking to cover their backsides, and the transition from Bourne’s storyline, there is a lot going on here, as there should be.  But while the original trilogy handled the interweaving of their respectively dense plots and subplots with style and fluidity, the first half of Legacy comes across as muddled and scattershot, seemingly struggling under its own weight.  

The lean, crisp dialogue that had become a hallmark of the franchise is nearly gone, replaced by a screenplay rife with exposition.  Too much time is spent explaining things, and while this may in part be intended as a service to first-timers who are uninitiated in the Bourne universe, there are far too many moments that feel needlessly dragged out.

Fortunately, when the film finally does get on with it, the audience is treated to some riveting action sequences, including the series’ signature teeth-shattering, fast-paced, hand-to-hand combat.  Director of Photography Robert Elswit, who dazzled with his work on last year’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird), does not disappoint, as an extended chase scene barrels over the rooftops and through the dense streets of Manila, packed with ingenious shots from virtually every conceivable angle.

This is, without a doubt, the highest-profile role to date for Renner, who hasn’t had to carry a film since his superb portrayal of Sergeant First Class William James in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), which earned him a best actor Oscar nomination.  Since then, Renner has turned in a series of fantastic supporting performances, ranging from a bank robber in The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010), to the superhero Hawkeye in Joss Whedon’s mega-blockbuster, Marvel’s The Avengers, released earlier this year.  

There was certainly no question about Renner’s chops coming into such a demanding role, but Matt Damon is a tough act to follow, as he had created in Jason Bourne one of the most sympathetic and relatable cinematic action heroes.  While Bourne’s exploits provide the framework for this film, Gilroy makes the right decision in letting Cross’ story stand on its own.  Once the connection between the three top-secret programs is established, the focus shifts entirely towards Byer’s manhunt for Cross and Shearing, and the clunky first half gives way to a more free and easy conclusion.

Thankfully, Cross’ story never gets bogged down by Bourne’s.  This bodes well for Renner, as it allows him to create a distinctive character.  Cross is inquisitive and personable.  He tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to form relationships with others in the program, making small talk with another field agent who he bunks with during his training.  And while Bourne’s aim is to take down his superiors, Cross’ motivation is firmly rooted in self-preservation.    

Alongside Renner’s adept performance as Cross, it is ultimately Weisz’s Dr. Shearing who is the most compelling character.  Shocked into awareness by the attempt on her life, she comes to realize the full implications of her research, and is transformed by Weisz, who pulls off an utterly convincing American accent to boot, from a coolly detached professional to an emotionally invested fugitive from justice.  This is where production designer Kevin Thompson makes his mark, as the orderly, sterile, almost blindingly white environment of Shearing’s suburban laboratory is gradually traded for the dark disorder of the urban underworld to which she must accompany Cross.

As in all of the Bourne films, we are left with unfinished business, which begs the question of what lies in the future.  While Legacy never matches the lofty heights of its predecessors, the fall-off is much less than can be expected of the fourth film in a series that is without its star player, and the result is a capable, if innocuous, action picture that doesn’t sully a proud tradition.  This is a franchise that still has legs, and may yet see the return of Jason Bourne.