Weighty war tale honours SEALS

Speciality Theatre

Lone Survivor

****

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch. Director: Peter Berg.

Rated: R

Showing: Fri 2:30pm, 6:15pm, 9:15pm; Sat 2:45pm,  6:15pm, 9:15pm; Sun 2:15pm; 5pm; 7:45pm; Mon-Wed 2:30pm, 7pm; Thurs 2:30pm, 6:15pm, 9pm.

Runtime: 121 minutes

Action, biography, drama.

In Lone Survivor, director and writer Peter Berg takes on the same elements of the American Spirit that made his Friday Night Lights so powerful: loyalty, commitment, trust, brotherhood, love and devotion.

And, just as he did with his examination of high school football in Texas, Berg looks at these elements through a human filter, this time using a story about war and remembrance.

That combination gives Lone Survivor much more emotional weight than other films in the action-drama genre.

In the production based on a true story, Mark Wahlberg plays Marcus Luttrell, one of four Navy SEALs sent on what becomes an ill-fated covert mission to deal with a high-level member of the Taliban. The four SEALs must depend on each other to survive a battle — the likes of which hasn’t been staged with such honest brutality since the opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan”. What makes the movie so brutal are the central players. Berg doesn’t get bogged down with history lessons on each of the SEALs, but he does give just enough insight to each to make them come across as honourable warriors and not just faceless pawns being used to create the action.

Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster turn in top-notch performances as the other members of the team. The best example of how Lone Survivor is more than just a typical action movie comes in the discussion the four men have when they face some deep moral questions regarding their mission. A lesser film would have taken a more gung-ho approach. But Berg continues to show a great skill in making the characters in his movies as three-dimensional as possible.

In the middle of all the carnage, Berg never lets the movie waiver off its main objective — to honour and respect the brave men and women who face such scenarios for real. It’s a difficult task to make a military movie where there’s plenty of flag waving while not going so far as to glamorize war. Lone Survivor does this by showing deep respect for humanity while pulling no punches on the battlefield.

Berg also doesn’t let the film sink into the standard good vs. evil. He shows that the difference between a person who wants to kill you or save you is a thin spiritual line.

Just like Friday Night Lights couldn’t be easily passed off as a typical sports film, Lone Survivor doesn’t fit the standard military movie mold. 

That’s because Berg takes the story past the superficial to the personal. 

Ride Along

**

Stars: Ice Cube, Kevin Hart, Tika Sumpter

Directors: Tim Story. 

Rated: PG-13

Showing: Wed-Thurs 2:15pm, 6pm, 8:30pm.

Runtime: 100 minutes

Action, comedy.

A little Kevin Hart goes a long way in Ride Along, a dull buddy picture engineered as a vehicle for the mini-motor mouth Hart and the perma-sneering Ice Cube. It’s mismatched cops on patrol in Atlanta in this 48 Hours / Bad Boys / Showtime / The Hard Way action comedy where four screenwriters tried to find funny bug-eyed rants for the normally amusing Hart to deliver in between shootouts and chases. 

Cube’s pursuit of a mysterious villain named Omar is interrupted by his sister’s fiance. That would be Ben (Hart), a video game-addicted school security guard who longs to bring his wise-cracking / voice-cracking banter to the Atlanta P.D. James drags Ben on a ride-along just to convince the dude he isn’t cut out for police work and that he isn’t good enough for James’ supermodel sister Angela. 

Liberty Theatre

I, Frankenstein

No preview screenings for critics

Stars: Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Miranda Otto.  

Director: Stuart Beattie.

Rated: PG-13

Showing: Fri-Sat 2:30pm, 6pm, 8:30pm; Sun 6pm, 8:30pm; Sun 2:30pm, 5:30pm; Mon-Thurs 2:30pm, 6:30pm.

Runtime: 93 minutes

Action, fantasy, sci-fi.

Frankenstein’s monster Adam (Aaron Eckhart) gets swept up in a long-running battle between powerful gargoyles and infernal demons seeking the key to his immortality as director Stuart Beattie brings Kevin Grevioux’s acclaimed graphic novel to the screen in this sweeping horror fantasy adventure. 

Neptune Theatre

American Hustle

****

Stars: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Louis C.K., Jack Huston, Shea Whigham. 

Director: David O Russell.

Rated: R

Showing: Fri 7:30pm, Sat 6:30pm; Sun 5:30pm; Mon-Thurs 7pm.

Runtime: 138 minutes

Crime, drama.

It was time of wide ties and velvet suits, jangly jewellery, open shirts, big hair and boat-sized cars. 

After Watergate, cynicism was everybody’s default mode. The economy was in the toilet, disco was on the radio and everybody was corrupt.

American Hustle reminds us that as jaded as we’ve got about crime and a rigged economy and government and politics, none of this is new. 

And if you’re looking for a place where right and wrong dissolved from black and white to shades of grey, David O. Russell’s caper comedy is built around the 1970s ABSCAM scandal, a wide-ranging FBI sting operation from the golden age of such stings. 

Christian Bale is Irving Rosenfeld, a New York low-life who runs loan scams, art forgery scams and a chain of dry cleaners and glass repair shops all over the Five Boroughs.

He’s got a soul-mate, a paramour and partner in crime — Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams). 

Like Irving, Sydney’s a dreamer. When she buys into his profession, a fake English accent becomes her calling card and Lady Edith Greensly becomes her name. She has “connections to London banking”.

Irving is fat, with an epic comb-over not quite covering his bald pate. But sexy Sydney, who never met a bra she liked, shrugs that off. She can see through people, size them up. And she’s good at rationalizing their scams, aimed mainly at desperate small-business people. 

And then they con the wrong guy. Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) is a fanatical F.B.I. agent living the Saturday Night Fever dream. Russell has plenty of fun with the garish era that was the setting — “This new thing — a microwave... It’s scientific! Don’t put metal in it” — and he never lets himself get too caught up in the actual facts of this sting. Jeremy Renner is terrific as a hard-charging, idealistic mayor; Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) is a willing, sleazy “victim”; Louis C.K. is the embattled, common-sense peddling F.B.I. boss Richie crosses, and Jack Huston is a mob lieutenant. 

And Jennifer Lawrence is Rosalyn Rosenfeld, Irving’s wife. That’s right. He’s got an unstable child bride who was a single mom when she married him. Rosalyn is the juiciest character of the lot. 

ALL REVIEWS BY MCT