Run All Night

I think we missed the early bird special

Run All Night

Grade: C +

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Starring: Liam Neeson, Ed Harris, Joel Kinnaman, Common, Boyd Holbrook and Vincent D’Onofrio

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

In Run All Night, Liam Neeson plays a father thrust into protecting his child from harm threatened by a criminal syndicate. Novel concept, huh?

Yes, Neeson is another man with a particular set of skills, in this case Jimmy Conlan, an aging ex-mob hitman now subsisting off booze and the charity of Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris), head of an Irish crime boss in Queens and Jimmy’s old pal-cum-boss.

Taking place over a 16-hour period, Jimmy and Shawn’s pledge to one day “cross the finish line” together assumes a different meaning when Michael (Joel Kinnaman), Jimmy’s estranged son, spies Shawn’s bad-seed son Danny (Boyd Holbrook) rub out some Albanian drug traffickers. When Danny hastily tries to eliminate his witness, Jimmy is forced to protect Michael by putting a bullet through Danny’s neck.

Shawn vows vengeance against both father and son, so Jimmy must kill as many people as possible over a single night to buy Michael time to escape the city and Det. John Harding (Vincent D’Onofrio), the proverbial “last honest cop,” time to clear Michael’s name, even though Harding wants nothing more than to see Jimmy rot in prison for all the buttons he’s pushed over the years. Along the way, Jimmy must navigate an obstacle course of mob heavies, crooked cops and a professional assassin (Common) who would love to off Jimmy for free.

Run All Night falls squarely in the post-Taken period of Neeson’s film career. Director Jaume Collet-Serra has been a key collaborator, helming Neeson’s Unknown and last year’s Non-Stop before this film. There’s little new here, beginning with several obvious riffs from The Godfather and Michael Mann’s Heat. People hide out where any sensible foe would look, and Jimmy/Michael’s ability to elude all pursuers (and their bullets) strains even the most pliable bounds of credibility.

Stylistically, the overlong narrative is padded with a few too many firefights, chases and stare-downs. Cinematographer Martin Ruhe adopts an irksome Google Earth pan-and-zoom technique whenever the locale shifts between scenes, and composer Junkie XL bombards the audience with a cacophony of blaring brass.

Still, the pace is brisk and occasionally exhilarating, while the milieu is steeped in gritty pulp. But the undoubted high points are the recurring  tête–à–têtes between Neeson and Harris, old pros in life and art who relish their hardboiled byplay. Better use of Nick Nolte, who wanders through as Jimmy’s brother, and a virtually silent Bruce McGill, who plays Shawn’s leftenant, would have only heightened the film’s grizzled vet cachet.

As it stands, Run All Night is a serviceable B-movie, full of action, ammunition and family angst for flavor. While Neeson’s movie children are forever in peril, his film career remains safe and sound.

Pain & Gain

SPF 20K

Grade: B -

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris, Rebel Wilson, Tony Shalhoub and Ken Jeong

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min.

Was Michael Bay’s vision of American society actually its mirror image all along? Looking back, is it mere coincidence that in 1995 when Bay released Bad Boys, his first garish big-budget behemoth, about two Miami cowboy cops, the real-life Sun Gym Gang was in the throes of its brutal spree of kidnapping, torture, extortion and ultimately murder across South Florida? Is it coincidence that Pain & Gain, Bay’s latest feature 18 years hence, comes full circle geographically and, in some ways, thematically? [Between this and Spring Breakers, it hasn’t been a good month at the movies for The Florida Commission on Tourism.]

It is difficult to give Bay too much credit for seeing the story of Daniel Lugo and his band of muscle-bound murderers for what it is: an embodiment of the American dream on steroids. Based on a 1999 series of Miami New Times articles by writer Pete Collins, it’s set a modern-day milieu where everything is supersized, from abs to ambitions, from bodybuilding to Benjamins. Intent notwithstanding, Bay’s bombastic camerawork, slow-mo montages and oversaturated palette are the oddly apt canvas for a tale that even the director of Armageddon needs to continuously remind the audience is based on a true story.

In world divided between “doers” and “don’t-ers,” Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) fancies himself among the fittest former. A mix of moxie and make-believe, he ranks Rocky, Scarface and Michael Corleone among his personal heroes. And, his motivation is worthy of admiration, as when he exponentially increases membership at the Miami-based Sun Gym where he works as a take-no-prisoners fitness trainer.

One of his clients is Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), an unctuous businessman with an ego as massive as his bank account. Spotting an easy and deserving mark, Lugo enlists his hapless workout buddy Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson, ever-improving), a hulking ex-con and born-again-Christian. Together they hatch a plan to kidnap and coerce Kershaw into signing over his fortune—money, cars, residence, etc.—to the trio. Lugo dreams of a life of mansions, backyard barbeques and riding lawnmowers; Doorbal wants to purchase injections to reanimate his steroid-shriveled testicles; Doyle, well, is a timid Lenny who finds wealth far more problematic than poverty.

Bay’s impulse to portray the Gang as bumbling beefcakes rather than monstrous meatheads works—to a point. There’s merit to lampooning the inanity of Kershaw’s month-long captivity and would-be murder, followed by the need for Kershaw to enlist the services of private investigator Ed Du Bois (Ed Harris) after the Miami police refuses to assign credence to Kershaw’s unbelievable tale. But torture, dismemberment and homicide—both attempted and actual—merit far greater reproach than what’s typically reserved for the Keystone Cops. Pain & Gain’s comedy is pitch black, but it remains comedic nonetheless even at moments when a more agile director would recognize the need to modulate tone and deconstruct characters. Instead, Bay chooses odds ways to pull his punches, like couching any of the actual murders by the Gang as accidental.

But modulation is hardly Bay’s hallmark, and here is no exception. Dissatisfied with the satirical, Bay again indulges in the scatalogical, epitomized by an inexplicable scene in which a fat, incontinent patient leaves bile smeared all over the walls and floor of his hospital bathroom. In a story whose truth is already stranger than fiction, one character feeds his severed toe to a pet chiwawa. And in what universe does a gaggle of married male suburbanites, with their wives looking on, breathlessly volunteer to role-play a rapist attacking Doyle’s stripper girlfriend (Mindy Robinson) during an upscale Community Watch meeting? Misogyny? Check. Homophobia? Check.

In truth, Pain & Gain is a setting that cries out for Michael Bay’s filmmaking technique, but it’s a story that demands the satirical tone of the Coen brothers. Lugo may as well have been talking about Bay when he declares, “Some people don’t know a good thing when it’s staring them in the face.”

Man on a Ledge

A preferable alternative to seeing "Man on a Ledge"

Grade: C

Director: Asger Leth

Starring: Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, Jamie Bell, Genesis Rodriguez, Ed Burns, Anthony Mackie and Ed Harris

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 42 min.

Although it lifts the iconography of Wall Street calamity—a man perched atop a Manhattan high-rise, threatening to leap to his death—along with a New York financier-cum-bogeyman (Ed Harris), Man on a Ledge draws from the Occupy movement only in the same way X-Men: The Last Stand was informed by the struggle for gay rights. It’s a gimmick in search of a punch-line, much like Phone Booth, another New York-set lone man-in-peril piffle.

Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is an ex-cop convicted of stealing and destroying the world’s most priceless MacGuffin, a diamond belonging to Harris’ David Englander. After escaping from prison, Nick hatches a plan to threaten jumping from the highest floor of the Roosevelt Hotel, gathering the attention of literally dozens of onlookers and an equal number of media types and their choppers. It’s all a ruse, as the audience is too quickly told, since Nick is only the diversion for his brother (Jamie Bell) and girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez, the flash of her in lingerie the only reason to see this movie), who are across the street inside Englander’s vault pulling off an actual diamond heist in order to prove Nick’s innocence.

Got that? Everything else here is designed to soften the film’s fall as it slowly plummets to its death. There’s a fallow subplot about cop corruption involving Nick ex-partner (Anthony MacKie), and the inexplicable presence of Lydia Mercer, a disgraced police psychologist whose world-weary, hard-living persona is instantly discredited by the fact that she’s played by the inescapably gorgeous Elizabeth Banks.

As contrived as it is convoluted, screenwriter Pablo Fenjves’ tall tale relies on the absurd premise that the reappearance of a man famously convicted for stealing a precious gem will provide the perfect cover for the actual theft of that same jewel taking place literally across the street. It also relies on plot holes and other oddities—e.g., for reasons never explained, Nick wipes away his fingerprints from inside the hotel room before crawling out its window, yet later knowingly provides a print to Lydia that reveals his identity. And, the rushed, ridiculous climax is irrational on multiple levels, not the least of which is its slipshod, climactic concept of legal due process.

But beyond the illogical narrative and character motives is the fact that Man on a Ledge isn’t nearly as exhilarating as its title suggests. Instead of high-flying fun, it’d be better off taking a long walk off a short perch.

Neil Morris