eye see you: one more sorry dance between a cop and a serial killer

(2002. dir: Jim Gillespie) I've had it up to here with serial killers. Seriously, I'm so done with the whole genre that I haven't watched more than a single ep of "Hannibal", this although I feel a passion for Mads Mikkelsen akin to the heat of a thousand suns.

This particular bad hombre is a cop-killer. He drills into eyeballs and hangs his victims, sometimes in humiliating ways, sometimes just deadly. He drives FBI agent Jake Malloy (Sly Stallone) into breakdown and a suicide attempt, after which Malloy is conveniently transported to a concrete prison facility in Wyoming in the dead of winter with a roomful of other disturbed cops for some detox and rehabilitation. The facility is entirely cut off from the rest of society, at least in the dead of winter.

Don't get me wrong. This movie has a great cast. Polly Walker is the resident medic, Stephen Lang has cultivated a truly creepy look to pull off the red-herring role, Charles Dutton is the steadfast buddy, Robert Prosky gets a decent turn around the dance-floor, and Sean Patrick Flanery has a nice moment as a broken young cop. Jeffrey Wright is, as always, amazing. In an era of movie stars winning Oscars for not doing very much at all (I'm looking at you, aging Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Christoph Waltz on your second trip to the podium), Jeffrey Wright transforms himself for every role. Could this damaged punk be the same cat who turned himself into Muddy Waters in front of my eyes in Cadillac Records, and pulled off the only truly effective moment in W., when an increasingly anxious Colin Powell asks a War Room full of asswipes and clowns what the Iraq exit strategy will be and is met with creepy silence and knowing smiles?

So I'm not saying don't watch it. It's an Old Dark House film: you've got a group of humans, most of them pretty messed up, locked away from the world in a place with no escape and a killer in their midst. The cast is full enough of stars and good character actors that the killer could be anyone. The trouble with using a snowstorm as your barrier is that climactic (or, in this case, semi-climactic) scenes shot in blizzards are unsatisfying. It's hard to tell what's going on, everyone looks like the same person in a shapeless, furry parka, and nobody can move very fast or effectively.

And Robert Patrick is great! He gets to play the hardened tough guy (the tough guy! in a Stallone film!), but then we get to watch him melt around the edges until by the end he's weeping like a child, and Patrick is the rare actor who can pull that transition off beautifully.

I give it two stars. The stars are for the acting. The story is pretty hackneyed, and, I swear to God, somebody needs to think of something to write about other than a damn serial killer playing cat-and-mouse with his investigating detective, or I'm going to lose it and start breaking some screenwriter kneecaps. Y'all stand warned.

valentino: shiny, but no insight

(1977. dir: Ken Russell) You know what you're getting into with a Ken Russell biopic: not literal truth, but stabs, some of them quite playful, at metaphorical truths. Nureyev is, in retrospect, a brilliant choice to embody Valentino. Both men are primarily dancers, own powerfully androgynous sex appeals, and are palpably "other", sporting the thick accents of those just off the boat from distant lands.

Although it is one of Russell's tamer ventures, without the extreme oddity of, say, Lisztomania or Gothic, it bears the Russell hallmarks. The grotesquerie of the jail scene brings to mind Tchaikovsky's wedding night on the train in the Music Lovers, or Sister Jeanne's twisted visions from the Devils. The pace is good, and the costumes and sets are suitably gorgeous and baroque. What we don't come away with, and what we want most from a biopic, is psychological insight. Even just one "oh, I get it" moment would suffice, and Russell never gives us one.

A framing device involving the various women in his life coming forward, one by one, at his funeral to tell a piece of his story, is dangerously pat but Russell has the skills to pull it off, just barely. All the women come off badly, not only Nazimova (Leslie Caron) played up to full tilt diva, but Rambova (Michelle Phillips) portrayed as a talentless, heartless user, a representation which is unfair at least inasmuchas she did obviously own enormous talent in her own right. Even June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), the powerfully successful screenwriter who launched Valentino's career and stood staunchly by him until the end (and beyond, burying him in her own family vault and following him within a year), becomes, within Russell's purview, ineffective and merely lovesick.

This got horribly panned when it came out, but it's a great wonder that any of Russell's strange, visionary films ever avoided that fate. This is not his best, but certainly not his worst. One of the problems is the controversy over Valentino himself, which I think still rumbles: he is now accepted as gay, but how gay was his lifestyle? He obviously genuinely loved women. Did he have a sex life with women? Was it successful? Did he and Rambova enjoy a thriving dom/sub relationship, as suggested by the "slave bracelet"? How much sex did he have with men? What was his attitude towards it? I think that Valentino himself would approve of Russell's perspective, focusing on the women in his life, because that's where he himself placed the emphasis. If you'd asked him what the lynchpin of his story was, he'd have been the first to say it was Rambova.

robert patrick in minor roles: a tepid double feature

Mexico City: (2000. dir: Richard Shepard) Not much of a role here for Patrick, although he gets to wear some more excellent suits. He works at the U.S. embassy in the titular city, and looks first like a bad guy, then like a good guy, and finally like a dead guy, without much of anything interesting to do.

This movie is good for one thing: showing you Mexico City. Someone who cares about the place and its history and legacy photographed this, and did it with beauty and grace.

The plot is interesting only because the heroine isn't forced to find a love interest. Her comrade-at-arms in the search to find her desaparecido brother is a friendly cab-driver, married with five kids, and they develop a nice friendship but nothing more. (The only other kind of nice thing is that the priest is a good guy, which would never have happened had it been made in Hollywood with the focus north of the border.)

The script is fatuous and predictable, the exposition hamfisted, the acting decent, the story just interesting enough that you keep watching for the lovely visuals. But just barely.

Firewall: (2006. dir: Richard Loncraine) One of those "cyber-heist" thrillers which are becoming so ridiculously popular these days. This one is actually not terrible. You've got Harrison Ford, Virginia Madsen (as the wife who is an accomplished architect, and yet her career is so laissez-faire that when she and her family are taken hostage for several days, nobody notices. Why? Because she's not really an architect, she's just a wife and mother, apparently with no friends or relations outside her nuclear family. They just wrote the architect thing into the script, I guess to justify the truly gorgeous house right on the Sound in Seattle). There's also Chloe from "24" (who's the best part of that show, am I right?), and Paul Bettany, keeping his usual cool as the Big Bad Pale Brit (and he has a great death moment. Not because it's set up particularly well, totally because of what he does with his face and body. He MAKES that moment out of whole cloth. Well done, sir).

Off to the sides and in the background you have Alan Arkin, Robert Patrick and Robert Forster. Ford's character works as a computer security guy for a bank, and these other fellows are all co-workers, bosses, etc. There's an interesting dynamic in play simply because, when Forster showed up onscreen as Ford's friend and peer, I subconsciously assumed that he would play a role in fixing the bad and creating the inevitable happy ending, just because he's Robert Forster, and it was a kind of shock when he didn't.

robert patrick badassed action double feature

Zero Tolerance: (1994. dir: Joseph Merhi) Evil drug traffickers (including Mick Fleetwood and aging Tarzan Miles O'Keeffe) wipe out an FBI agent's family, but they are harshing entirely the wrong dude's mellow. It's vigilante time, compadres, and due process be damned. So Robert Patrick goes after these five drug-lords, one after another, but is he in danger of losing his own soul in the process?

Who cares? Because back then they knew how to shoot an action flick. No CGI. No shaky cam. The gunfights don't go on too long, they incorporate dynamic shifts, and the collateral damage stays minimal. They keep us engrossed through interesting shots and moves and choices, all filmed and edited with old-fashioned clarity. One Destructo Set-Piece that was particularly satisfying was the decimation of a warehouse on Algiers, along with its evil-drug-trafficking inhabitants. Another, beautifully lit, has Patrick taking down a German drug-lord's crystalline fortress on an island off Seattle. In another, he steals a cop car and drives it straight through a helicopter, leaving a mass of fiery wake behind him.

In between, he spends some time looking all beatific in his sorrow, like a medieval painting of a saint. He parries the arguments of the woman trying to save his humanity and goes about his Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood business, figuring he can worry about his soul when the business is done.

Because this is an action film, not some damn tree-hugging wuss-fest.

the Marine: (2006. dir: John Bonito) Patrick has a good time playing a sociopath with a sense of humor in this awkward John Cena hagiology. (If, like me, you've never heard of him, Wikipedia calls Cena a "professional wrestler, rapper and actor," the reigning pro wrestling superstud champion of the known universe, I'm paraphrasing here, and "the public face of WWE since 2005." Personally, I was expecting Michael Cera and thought what interesting casting that was.)

The movie, as you might guess, is a mush of Ted Nugent patriotism (as in "I love my country because I can own my own rocket-launcher, but I hate my government because I get violent when folks tell me what to do"), throwback sentimentalism (a wistful nostalgia for a lost era that never really was, and family values, as long as you've got a really hot wife), and a Robert E. Howard-esque uber-romanticization of masculine musculature and bellicosity to the point that it epitomizes godhood.

It's also a jewel heist, masterminded by Rome (Patrick). The getaway goes badly awry (partly thanks to our Herculean hero), and the nattily-dressed bank-robbers are forced to walk several miles through treacherous swampland in entirely inappropriate footwear, carping at each other all the way, with the hero's hot wife in tow. (Since one of the robbers is also a hot babe, you can see the hot catfight coming from a mile away, right?) Our Hero the ex-Marine (he was too good, too perfect, and altogether too tough for the Marine Corps, since that bunch of pusses actually follow rules) manages to separate the bad guys and pick them off, one by one. They had a good time with explosives in this movie. Not one, but two buildings are double-exploded. As in, the biggest explosion you've ever seen destroys the back half of the place, then somehow there's enough ridiculously combustible material in the front half (which was unaccountably untouched by the original explosion) that when it goes (always, always, with Cena's stunt-double leaping to safety just in the nick) it is THE EVEN BIGGER BIGGEST explosion you've ever seen.

Alright. The kids have fun with their bombs and stuff. The bad guys (and girl) get theirs, the MacGuffin-diamonds are (ironically! get it?) lost in the violence they've inspired, and Our Hero rescues his hot wife after she's been trapped and unconscious in a car underwater for at least ten minutes. Does he miraculously revive her with the Prince Charming kiss of life? How can you ask me that? I wouldn't dream of spoiling the end of the movie for you.

The main point is that Robert Patrick has fun, and when he has fun with a character, it's always worth watching. I wouldn't spend actual money on it, though.