Zero Dark Thirty

This is going to make a great video game someday.

Grade: A - 
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt and James Gandolfini
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.


Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, is a cinematic Rorschach test that any given viewer is bound to come away from with their own interpretation. Some will see the amoral exploitation of the torture inflicted by the CIA upon dark-skinned detainees inside concrete bunkers at clandestine black sites. Others may see a chronicle of the tenacious, even courageous personnel who brought justice upon the world's most wanted terrorist, Some will see a paean to feminism, while others will decry a movie—named for half past the witching hour—whose notion of strong, successful women are those most adaptable to man’s genetic bloodlust.

Controversy has swirled around Zero Dark Thirty, from the level of access to sensitive intelligence allegedly given to director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (allegations that both deny) to its depiction of torture (and its investigative value). There are brutal depictions of sleep deprivation by means of loud music, chaining a detainee in stress positions so long that he soils himself, and stuffing a prisoner into a small wooden box.

But the fact is, torture was deployed repeatedly, and depicting its graphic nature is not only essential to an accurate telling of this history but is itself a form of condemnation for right-thinking viewers. The screenplay hints that vital evidence was occasionally obtained from the Bush-era torture program while recognizing the wholesale unreliability of intelligence extracted solely by such duress. Indeed, the film posits that it wasn't until the torture program was shelved and the intelligence community forced to shift focus and resources toward old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground detective work that they finally achieved success.

As a CIA operative newly deployed to one black site, Maya (Jessica Chastain) recoils at the sight of waterboarding during the film's opening scene. Although "Washington says she's a killer," Maya's killer instinct is that of an analytical assassin recruited by the CIA straight out of high school. Like many in Maya's generation, her age of innocence ended with 9/11, which set into motion a career motivated by the overarching aim of finding bin Laden.

Maya is patterned after a real-life counterpart whose degree of contribution to the war on al-Qaeda is a matter of debate. Perhaps because of legal and ethical purposes, all the film's characters are fictionalized, even down to someone meant to be Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini) credited only as "C.I.A. Director." Bigelow's clinical approach creates a compelling procedural, but there's also a conspicuous lack of character development and emotional depth, unlike Bigelow's last film, The Hurt Locker, for which she won the Oscar for best director.

The branch tasked with tracking bin Laden is depicted as understaffed and underfunded, but that doesn't mean its staff members aren't subjected to the weight of great expectations. Still, the geopolitical context of their mission is merely hinted at. The presidential transition from Bush to Obama only comes in the form of a TV interview in which Obama denounces the use of torture, a broadcast that plays in the background as intelligence operatives pay little attention to it. Otherwise, the tumult over the torture program only arises during a key conversation between Maya and her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke), a frequent purveyor of "enhanced interrogation techniques" who eventually accepts a transfer back to Langley to avoid being "the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes."

Reportedly, Bigelow and Boal planned to film a far more open-ended version of Zero Dark Thirty that concluded with bin Laden's apparent disappearance into the mountains of Tora Bora. Then bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011, and the filmmakers had to adjust their finale. The result is a taut 30-minute final act chronicling the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one of the most gripping, compelling movie sequences of the year and where Bigelow should have nailed down another Oscar nomination. It's also noticeably distinct from the film's previous two hours, a more more detailed and deliberate recounting than the broader, comparatively disjointed perusal that precedes it.

Nonetheless, Boal's screenplay opens and closes with acts of cold-blooded violence whose righteousness is left to the viewpoint and conscience of the beholder. The refusal of Zero Dark Thirty to take a moral stand mustn't be confused for immorality. And while this narrative about the search for Osama bin Laden is sometimes as muddled as the mission itself, its clarity of purpose is as steadfast as SEAL Team 6.

Killing Them Softly

What, were you expecting Brad Pitt or something?

Grade: C
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins, Ray Liotta and Vincent Curatola
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

“America’s not a country, it’s just a business.” While uttered in the closing moments of writer-director Andrew Dominik’s gangster pastiche Killing Them Softly, this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer motif smacks you in the head beginning with the film’s disorienting open shot. In it, Dominik shoots a two-bit hustler emerging from a New Orleans culvert—as if exiting through the dull end of a kaleidoscope—with a disembodied 2008 speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama acting as narrator.

While George V. Higgins’ 1974 crime novel Cogan’s Trade was set in the seamy seventies Boston underworld, Dominik updates the tableau to post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2008 U.S. Presidential race and the Wall Street bailout. Billboards, speeches and television news clips are omnipresent, as candidates bloviate about America as the land of promise and President George W. Bush explains the supposedly dire need for why $700 billion of no-strings-attached cash must be immediately earmarked to purchase failing bank assets.

Of course, analogizing mob syndicates as a subset of American capitalism has long been a pop culture staple. It’s no small wonder, then, that Dominik populates his cast with actors meant to evoke memories of previous cinematic touchstones, including Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) and no fewer than three regulars from The Sopranos, including James Gandolfini. Richard Jenkins plays the consigliere for a group of faceless mob minders—I guess Robert Duvall wasn’t available.

Dominik also reteams with Brad Pitt, who collaborated on Dominik’s previous film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a masterful examination of America’s affinity for celebrating its criminal heritage. In spite its shopworn premise, Killing Them Softly could have also served as a spiritual sequel, an ironic take on how American cinema has exploited and even furthered that very mythologizing. Unfortunately, the film proves ill-equipped for such heavy-handed allegory. Dominik adopts Higgins’ affinity for using pages of dialogue to illustrate events rather than chronicling them as they occur. While that might be an intriguing literary conceit, it proves infuriating on the screen when what’s being said (and said and said...) isn’t all that interesting.

Pitt is mesmerizing as gang enforcer Jackie Cogan, who is brought in to “manage” the fallout after three swindlers conspire to rob a Mob-sponsored card game run by local lackey Markie Trattman (Liotta). The film comes alive whenever Jackie is brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, interrogating a poor dolt (Scoot McNairy) involved in the heist or just jousting with Jenkins’ middle man about the complexities of mob bureaucracy. Unfortunately, those moments are subsumed by elongated conversations that do little to contribute to the storyline. One scene designed to advance a single plot point is extended to excruciating length by repeatedly cross cutting to the drug-addled point-of-view of one participant (Ben Mendelsohn). Gandolfini plays a washed-up hitman with a disintegrating home life and an unhealthy hankering for drink and degrading hookers, but his only two appearances comprise overlong, profane ramblings in which Jackie is relegated to passive listener.

What’s left is a film with high-minded posturing but little style or substance. Heck, it’s not really a gangster flick. It’s a portrait of an America ruled by avarice, where the have-nots are racked by vice and the haves are left to jockey for an even bigger piece of the pie. Lars von Trier would be proud.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Rail Rage

Grade: C

Director: Tony Scott

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Luis Guzman, and John Turturro

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Tony Scott is like the Rafael Palmeiro of filmmaking. Both were mid-to-upper standouts in their respective fields until avarice and self-indulgence persuaded them to artificially – and detrimentally – enhance their innate abilities. For Palmeiro, it was taking steroids for more hits and homers. For Scott, it is the audio-visual gimcracks he has allowed to infect his films the past decade: The jump-cuts, the slow motion, the freeze frames, the oversaturated color schemes, the time-lapse photography, the clanging, hip-hop-lite soundtracks by Harry Gregson-Williams. Its false bravado masquerading as cocksure preening, with little but car crashes and actors yelling at the camera to approximate the illusion of narrative drive.

You will quickly realize it is business as usual in Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 when you hear the openings strains of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” a six-year-old rap song with no apparent contextual connection to the film. In between herky-jerky images of the New York City skyline and subway system, we glimpse the blurry apparition of Ryder (John Travolta), a tattooed, racist ex-commodities trader making his way underground where he will lead the hijacking of the 6 train from Pelham Bay Park.

Denzel Washington (appearing in his fourth collaboration with Scott) plays MTA dispatcher Walter Garber, presumably named in part after Walter Matthau, who played then-Lt. Zachery Garber in director Joseph Sargent’s fondly held 1974 film adaptation of John Godey’s source novel. Garber finds himself in the unfortunate position of ad hoc negotiator with Ryder, who demands $10 million in an hour or he will execute one hostage for every tardy minute.

The miscast Travolta never firmly establishes Ryder’s persona: One minute he is a shrewd, diabolical nemesis, the next a ranting, raving lunatic unraveling under the pressure of his hair-brained scheme. Every time the high-pitched Travolta shrieks one of his many MF-bombs, he sounds as if he’s reading them off cue cards.

The stolid screenwriting combo of David Koepp and Brian Helgeland meekly attempt to introduce some moral ambiguity into Garber’s character, a device that worked well when applied to Nick Nolte’s protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake. But, Garber’s “confession” that he once accepted a work-related bribe comes only under Ryder’s threat to shoot a hostage if Garber doesn’t come clean. If that’s not sanitized enough for you, he also reveals that he spent the bribe money on his kids’ college tuition.

Initial police suspicion that Garber might be working in cahoots with Ryder is an intriguing angle that would have added another dimension to the procedural plotline, but it dissipates without comment as quickly as it materializes. So, too, with the discovery that Ryder’s true financial target is not cash but rather stock market manipulation: The last time we hear anything about that is when the city’s mayor (James Gandolfini) announces he is marching down to the SEC to look into any of Ryder’s recent, suspicious transactions. Just a suggestion, I’d say all of them.

The film’s banality reaches its nadir when Scott rolls out the most anticlimactic ending this side of brother Ridley’s American Gangster. Let’s just say a crime rooted in intricate planning and cunning execution comes down to one guy walking across an overpass getting caught by another guy running across an overpass. If that sounds exciting, then boy, do I have a bridge to sell you.

Neil Morris