the Perfect Score: (2004. dir: Brian Robbins) Evans is miscast. It ought to have been someone a shade geekier, maybe a Chris Marquette. He ought to have played instead the love-wounded Matty, opposite Scarlett Johansson, with whom he's proved in six films to have an easy but palpable chemistry. This is an MTV revamp of the Breakfast Club, brainless, witless, and without merit, excepting the few moments of truth the young actors can coax from the piece. Erika Christensen, for example, is the smart girl who learns to tap into her inner slut. She gets the awkward, stuck-inside-her-head part right, but does nothing else particularly well, and the bit on the rooftop where she's finding her passion is forced and uncomfortable.
It doesn't matter. Nothing would have saved it. It's narrated by the Asian stoner dude who's a secret maths genius, and you can imagine how badly that plays: shamelessly for laughs, laughs which never come manifest. The token black guy is a basketball star whom the script treats as ridiculously asexual. It's embarrassing: in the end, the white kids pair off, while the Asian and the black guy don't even enter into the game, although it's obvious that Desmond (Darius Miles) is the character who has the chemistry with Christensen's smart girl. There's something grotesquely 1950s about it.
The other revelation is that Chris Evans doesn't play the straight man well. In his defense, his "comic" foil this time is Matthew Lillard as his older brother, again embarked upon his tired (you can tell even he's tired of it) "hyperactive party 'tard" routine, and that can't be easy to be around. And, to be fair, Cellular came out this same year, in which Evans does very well as straight man in his scenes opposite his scuz-buddy (Eric Christian Olsen), so it may well be a matter of script quality. And, come to think of it, direction, as well: in Cellular, Evans is allowed to be quicker on the draw, which he seems to enjoy, whereas Perfect Score is edited with long reaction shots before and after lines, which does nothing but protract the stupid thing.
If there's a reason to watch it, I can't think of what it is.
London: (2005. dir: Hunter Richards) This guy Richards raided the set of Cellular (Evans, Biel, Statham) and wound up with a much better cast than he deserved for what seems to be a very personal indie projet-du-coeur about the agony of being rich and gorgeous and just wanting to be loved on your own terms, goddamnit, and I'm going to stand in this bathroom doing cocaine until she loves me for the reasons I want her to.
The fact that Richards got Statham, with his super-virile presence, to play the impotent guy was an enormous coup, and Evans and Biel do everything they can, he playing an asshole who just can't quite stop himself being an asshole, she playing a homely gal, -- just kidding!-- the embodiment of All Which Men Desire, and they BOTH JUST WANT TO BE LOVED ON THEIR OWN TERMS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Like I say, both actors do what they can.
We spend most of the movie in a luxury bathroom about the size of a Tokyo apartment, half mirrors and half balustrade overlooking the city, doing coke off a Van Gogh casually pulled down off the wall. Mostly the Evans character is avoiding having to confront the woman he obsesses over and wants to dominate (calling his yearning by the name of "love"), the woman who is leaving him for a guy with a 10-1/2 inch cock (seriously, it seems that if the guy had a smaller dick, the loss wouldn't be so traumatic. But this is True Love, mind you).
Sometimes the conversating is more interesting than others. Sometimes we're stuck in an infernal round of flashbacks in which fucking, fighting, and whining are an endless ring in some Sartrean hell.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Puncture: (2011. dir: Adam and Mark Kassen) This is the bleakest lawyer movie you will ever see. It's like the Verdict only without those brilliant, icy spaces, and, significantly, without that miracle pitch in the ninth, the one that sends James Mason's unflappably smooth and malevolent lawyer into a much-cheered moment of stammering. This is Erin Brockovich with six-pack abs instead of cleavage, but instead of a plucky, foul-mouthed gal who won't give up, this guy is a drug-addicted sleazebag who lives his life on the edge of surrender, snorting coke in public johns and getting handjobs from his students. He obsesses over this one unwinnable case for the wrong reasons, possibly because he knows his body is about to give out and this is his last chance for salvation, and in the end, it is suggested, gets himself Silkwooded instead: suicide by waving a red flag in front of Big Business. The trouble is that his last, noble speech is one we don't really buy, because by this time we're familiar with this guy's brand of bullshit, and it seems ridiculous that anyone in power would go to the trouble to take him out because he's such a powerless, sadsack freakshow. After his death, almost as an afterthought, his ex-partner and the client, remotivated by his untimely demise, find their moment of victory, but the way it's presented seems hollow and a little glib.
Evans is good. He has that Paul Newman thing going, that rare, extreme level of likability that allows him to play an utter douchebag and get away with it. After watching this and London side by side, though, I never want to have to watch Chris Evans snort cocaine, ever again. Maybe a nice pot-smoking surfer next time, just to mix it up a little, OK?
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