Avengers: Age of Ultron

Earth's Mightiest Millennials

Grade: B –

Director: Joss Whedon

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Don Cheadle

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 21 min.

The true conflict driving Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereinafter Avengers 2) isn’t the titular troupe of titans versus the titular James Spader-voiced, Tony Stark-conceived humanoid answer to a global SDI. No, it’s the battle between the insatiable craving for summer whiz-bang BOOM and the distinctive character development that once distinguished the Marvel Cinematic Universe but now seems to only hurtle its serial storylines toward a climactic who-knows-what. To borrow a phrase from another comic book movie milieu, “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Something similar can be said for superhero sequels.

Amid the incessant drumbeat of quips and clobbering, Stark / Ironman (Robert Downey Jr.) embraces his full-fledged inner Dr. Frankenstein, crafting an A.I. named Ultron that decodes its directive to protect the planet as ridding it of puny humans. Suffice it to say when it comes to artificial intelligence, Avengers 2 is to Alex Garland’s recently released Ex Machina what Transformers is to Selma on race relations.

Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) is now the Hulk whisperer, an Ann Darrow to the not-so-jolly green Kong (Mark Ruffalo). Clint Barton / Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) gets a bucolic backstory, a farmstead full of younguns and firewood that needs choppin’. The new Maximoff twins, quicksilver Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and telekinetic Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), need re-education after their harsh Eastern European upbringing and Hydra-experimentation. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is homesick or something.

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) also shows up, as does War Machine (Don Cheadle), and Idris Elba, and Stellan Skarsgård, and Anthony Mackie. Even Paul Bettany, the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S., finally gets a body.

Once again, this assembly must overcome their internal insecurities. Once again, the alpha Avengers must stave off mankind’s annihilation along with the destruction of entire city, while finger-wagging Captain America (Chris Evans) and the others busy themselves with cannon fodder and needing “to get these people to safety.” Indeed, as the powerful Ultron yearns to evolve into an omnipotent cyborg named Vision, his army of mechanical clones are somehow susceptible to a single strike from an arrow or handgun.

Great action movies balance heft with heart. But here our heroes, coursing with spirits and testosterone, close down a party by seeing who can lift Thor’s hammer—metaphor alert!—and only mention CEO Pepper Potts and Nobel Prize-winner Jane Foster to compare significant others. And as for the women who do make the cut, Natasha is both barren and branded an aggressive flirt, an Asian scientist (Claudia Kim) only has goo-goo eyes for Thor, and Wanda cowers in fear until a pep talk from Hawkeye unleashes her latent Scarlet Witch.

“They’re a mess,” says Barton’s pregnant wife (Linda Cardellini), referring to the avenging heroes and not their conflated yet cursory narratives. As summer flicks go, Avengers 2 isn’t a bad movie, just a confounding one. I giddily enjoyed the Hulk tangling with Stark’s colossus Hulk Buster armor as much as the next fanboy. But the film elucidates why this Marvel collective was and is best built on its sturdy standalones, where the principals and plotlines have room to develop. It was fun to see Earth's Mightiest Heroes band together in the first Avengers. This time around, they’re just getting in each other’s way.

RoboCop

RoboTron

Grade: B –

Director: José Padilha

Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jay Baruchel and Samuel L. Jackson

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 48 min.

In our present-day of drone technology, governmental surveillance and cyber ubiquity, the reality of RoboCop seems more immediate and ominous than it did upon the original film’s release 27 years ago. That’s the strength of director José Padilha’s slickly produced remake. The chink in the armor, however, is that apart from teasing a few tantalizing themes, the film doesn’t do enough to shed its air of stuffy sameness. Indeed, if 2014 reinvention is your aim, you don’t make a lot of progress by casting Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, (let’s be honest…) Samuel L. Jackson, and someone who rose to popularity as part of the original The Bad News Bears.

Prohibited by law from expanding their lucrative drone robotics program to U.S. city streets, OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Keaton) teams with scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Oldman) to develop a human/machine hybrid to circumvent legal strictures and stir up public outcry to repeal the ban. Their PR guinea pig is Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), a Detroit policeman critically injured while investigating crooked cops and a local crime boss. Norton encases Murphy’s surviving brain stem, heart and lungs inside a detachable, weaponized metal suit, whereupon Murphy is tasked to clean up the Motor City’s mean streets.

The crux of RoboCop’s problems is Kinnaman, who exudes a mechanical affect even before his character is pumped full of antipsychotics. There’s little emotional connection, even when he’s mourning a wounded partner (Michael K. Williams), interacting with his wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) and hockey-loving moppet, or essentially being controlled as a literal corporate slave.

Although Padilha scrubs much of the original’s dark humor, there are sardonic flourishes, like the resident paramilitary meathead (Jackie Earle Haley) piping in “If I Only Had a Heart” from The Wizard of Oz during “the Tin Man’s” combat simulation exercise, and Jackson acting as the film’s Shakespearean chorus in the form of a right-wing, corporately-compromised TV show host. Amongst the rest of the supporting cast, Oldman acquits himself best as an earnest but conflicted man of science pushed to compromise his ethics.

Comeuppance for the transgressors comes quickly and with relative ease, such that there’s plenty of opportunity left for Padilha to flesh out the wider, thought-provoking ideas suggested as early as the film’s opening sequence, when OmniCorp robots employed by the U.S. military patrol the streets of Tehran, pacifying the populace at the point of laser cannons while suicide bombers position to strike their metallic occupiers.

However, the film’s intriguing, even affecting first half ultimately surrenders to a harried final third, as the narrative wholly embraces its otherwise tragic Frankenstein’s monster subtext at the expense of still-unexplored social and political conundrums. RoboCop has a heart, but it could have been much more … if it only had a brain.

Django Unchained

Hey, some of my best fashion model girlfriends are black

Grade: B
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Don Johnson
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hr. 35 min.

By the end of the mostly heady, sometimes punishing experience of watching Django Unchained, you’ll have a strong inkling why both Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner dropped out after agreeing to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-set revenge flick. Apparently, the potential benefit of allowing the director to work his renowned career-resuscitating magic wasn’t enough to stomach having to repeatedly refer to actors playing slaves as “n**gers” in the middle of a plantation revival setting.

Tarantino has always reveled in being a cinematic iconoclast, but his latest B-movie pastiche promises to polarize casual fans and fanboys alike. Tarantino applies his raw, increasingly garrulous voice to a mashup that notably includes the Western black bounty hunter tableau of the 1975 blaxploitation film Boss N**ger, the bloody violence of Sam Peckinpah and the original Django, a 1966 spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero (who has a bit part in this iteration), and the grotesque depiction of slavery in the American South captured in the 1971 Italian pseudo-documentary Goodbye Uncle Tom, including a version of the film’s butcherous finale.

Set in 1858, “two years before the Civil War,” Django (Jamie Foxx) is a shackled slave rescued from his chain gang by Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German, Doc Holliday-esque former dentist turned bounty hunter who needs Django to collect the bounty for a trio of ruthless brothers Django can identify. In exchange, Schultz agrees to free Django from “this slavery malarky” and help rescue his wife, the German-fluent Broomhilda (Kerry Washington, who shrieks and quivers a lot). Django takes a liking to bounty hunting—another “flesh-for-cash business,” as Schultz compares it to slavery—and the new partners soon track Broomhilda to the clutches of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the debonair but barbarous proprietor of Candyland, a plantation where Candie breeds male slaves for sport fighting.

While Foxx is able, earnest but surprisingly unmemorable, Waltz sinks his teeth into Tarantino’s verbose dialogue, like he did as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds. DiCaprio goes with gusto where Russell and Costner dared not tread, but the supporting cast is highlighted by Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of Candyland’s house Negro, whose ceremonial unctuousness masks a malevolence toward anyone would might threaten his master’s house.

Admirers of Tarantino’s audacity, his dexterity with a camera (along with cinematographer Robert Richardson) and his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema will find satisfaction despite a 165-minute running time that could have stood being sheared down a half-hour or so. Structurally, this is one of Tarantino’s most straightforward films. Still, there are a number of glaring plot holes and historical inaccuracies—e.g., the use of dynamite and other weaponry years before they were invented. They’re the sort that routinely crop up in Tarantino’s work and should no longer be waved away as artistic flourish, particularly considering his recent criticism that the 1977 miniseries Roots “oversimplified” slavery and didn’t “ring true.”

Tarantino deserves credit for committing many of slavery’s horrors to film, including bracing scenes of slaves being beaten, eaten by dogs, stripped, smeared with blood, face-branded and pitted in so-called “Mandingo fights.” However, the awful reality of the antebellum South was far, far worse, and Tarantino particularly pulls his historical punches in the depiction of women, limiting himself to allusions of coerced prostitution without the rape and rank sexual abuse that ran rampant in the plantation culture. Apparently even Tarantino knows that unmasking facts must be balanced against public appetites and the MPAA ratings board.

The biggest trouble with Django Unchained isn’t hearing the n-word over 110 times, by some counts. Indeed, such overuse almost acts to neuter the term of its inflammatory function. Instead, while Tarantino claims he wants the film to start a conversation, the real problem is that it doesn’t have very much to say. Setting entertainment amid trying times is nothing new to cinema, but cloaking it with the shroud of truth is Tarantino wanting to have his layer cake and eat it too. It also opens Tarantino up to criticism that he is exploiting slavery’s scourge for pop consumption and self-aggrandizement.

A scene like the metaphorical undressing of the hoods worn by a group of Klansmen is not only overlong, but it’s indicative of the easy, banal chuckles Tarantino deploys throughout Django Unchained under the guise of social satire. It’s small compensation for audiences asked to surrender their racial sensibilities at the theater door.

Marvel's The Avengers

Team America: World Police 2

Grade: B +
Director: Joss Whedon
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth and Jeremy Renner
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 35 min.

The long-gestating Marvel superhero showcase The Avengers comes saddled with hulking expectations, an ironfisted fan base, and hawkish backers hoping the latest entry in this banner franchise can captain the American movie scene back from recently stark box office tallies.

The looming quandary—beyond the fact that it’s impossible to fashion a pun using Thor—is how to cobble together a satisfying and sensible ensemble film spawned from a quintet of cinematic table setters ranging from good (Iron Man) to middling (Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk) to woeful (Iron Man 2).

Helmed by writer/director and part-time comic book author Joss Whedon, The Avengers manages, against formidable odds, to hit all the right notes. Based on the premise of the very first Avengers comic in 1963, Earth’s mightiest heroes, chaperoned by the cyclopean Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), must join forces to thwart the aims of revenge and world domination by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the estranged brother of Asgardian demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth).

Long before a climactic Transformers-style battle royale in which the Avengers must repel an invasion by the Orc-like Chitauri, the true tension is between the superheroes themselves. As a roiling brew of ids and alpha males, these crusaders bicker and bloviate, each of them representative slices of American masculinity: God (Thor), Country (Captain America, again Chris Evans), wealth (Tony Stark/ Iron Man, still Robert Downey Jr.), sex (Natasha Romanoff/ Black Widow, filled by Scarlett Johansson’s pouty lips and skintight pants) and testosterone-driven rage (Bruce Banner/ Hulk, now played by Mark Ruffalo and a 20TB server, respectively). Whether the group could defeat Loki isn’t really in doubt; the question is whether they can ever co-exist, much less collaborate in the first place.

Whedon manages to successfully juggle screen time to afford each character their moment in the spotlight. There’s even a nod to the villainous comic book origins of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) when Loki hijacks the ace archer’s mind for nefarious purposes. Shrewder still is that the script doesn’t take itself so serious, often allowing humor to drive the narrative even more than action. Spearheading that effort, of course, is the indomitable Downey, who is wisely given space to wisecrack—e.g., he calls the full-maned Thor “Point Break” refers to Hawkeye as “Legolas” at one point—and recapture the devil-may-care daredevil from the first Iron Man. Even Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) pops up to rekindle her Nick and Nora-esque repartee with Her Boy Stark.

Action lovers needn’t fret, however, as the film has more than its fair share of computer-generated F/X eye candy to spackle its plot holes and utter lack of depth (passing allusions to forcible interrogation and clean energy feel like they belong in another movie). Titanic tussles between Iron Man and Thor and, later, Thor and The Hulk are the stuff of fanboy dreams. The Dark Knight this isn’t—instead, The Avengers is a superhuman three-ring circus filled acrobatics, wild beasts, clowns and all the popcorn you can munch. Oh, and a Hulk.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

The Other Guys

Either jump or don't jump...my chocolate mint is melting

Grade: B

Director: Adam McKay

Starring: Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, and Steve Googan

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

If nothing else, The Other Guys demonstrates how Will Ferrell can perpetuate his comedic film career. His character, NYPD desk-jockey Allen Gamble, is a milquetoast variant of Ferrell’s typical buffoonish man-child, sans the conflated pomposity and loutishness that fueled roles in Anchorman and (the overrated) Talladega Nights but had grown increasingly irksome in the lackluster Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Step Brothers.

To wit, Allen is a schmo who takes a job as a police forensic accountant and wiles away his days filing paperwork because it is the farthest thing from his previous job as a college campus pimp named “Gator.” He takes illogical pains to downplay the patent, stunning beauty of his physician wife (Eva Mendes). He drives a red Prius and cranks Little River Band to get his adventurous juices flowing.

Indeed, riffing on tropes is the overarching theme of The Other Guys, which opens with the Wile E. Coyote, pseudo-heroics of two shades-and-leather-coat-wearing, muscle car-driving bad boy supercops, portrayed terrifically by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson (prequel, please?). On the other side of the squad room are Allen and his partner Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), a hothead who was busted down to desk-duty after an unfortunate incident that earned him the nickname “Yankee Clipper.”

Allen and Terry soon set out to earn their piece of precinct cred by cracking an elaborate white-collar caper hatched by Wall St. jillionaire David Ershon (Steve Googan). Hamstringing them throughout is crippling social ineptitude, Terry’s active distain for his partner, and the stock irascible police captain (Michael Keaton), albeit one who moonlights as a manager at Ben Bath & Beyond and harbors an unwitting penchant for quoting lyrics from TLC songs.

Yes, this is the buddy-cop spoof that Cop Out wanted to be. Director and longtime Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay knows how to strike just the right absurdist chord, blending a panoply of explosions and car crashes – and a gunfight that is a sly homage to John Woo – with scenes like an extended monologue in which Allen explains why tuna would win a war against lions (it’s as funny as it sounds). If Ferrell is playing partly against type, then Wahlberg falls headlong into it, riffing on his Oscar-nominated role from The Departed. And, there’s subtle satire in casting corporate villains instead of the stereotypical drugs-and-thugs sort, although the film unsuccessfully strains for import when it litters the closing credits with sundry real-life statistics about corporate greed and the widening wealth gap.

The laffs wane towards the end of The Other Guys, devolving into a series of callbacks to earlier gags – the film could have easily been trimmed by about 15 minutes – that keep it from reaching rarified Naked Gun air. Ferrell and Co. work best when they leave the arena of parody and embrace the bizarre, like Ferrell and Mendes’s dinner-table crooning of a ballad named “Pimps Don’t Cry” or Allen plowing through crime scene cadavers, coating his Prius in a sheet of cocaine in the process. Mindless comedy is rarely this knowing.

Neil Morris

Iron Man 2

Iron Man says 'Practice safe sex'

Grade: B –

Director: Jon Favreau

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Mickey Rourke, and Samuel L. Jackson

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes

If Iron Man was a phallic embodiment of the United States' single-minded crusade to impose a Pax Americana at the point of a spear, then the Tony Stark in Iron Man 2 is most aptly viewed as a metaphor of his own. The bajillionaire protector we meet in the sequel has fully assumed the qualities of the proverbial Ugly American, exuding the arrogance and entitlement of Uncle Sam as the world's unaccountable enforcer.

Here, Stark dons sunglasses and blows dismissive kisses at a Congressional committee bent on bullying him into relinquishing his ferrous-plated super suit. "I am Iron Man; Iron Man is me," he declares to the Senate subcommittee. It may as well be Robert Downey Jr. making that claim, for while multiple actors have capably portrayed Superman and Batman on the screen over the years, it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone other than Downey as Tony Stark.

Congress questions Stark out of concern for the country's increasing dependence on him to the exclusion of an increasingly irrelevant military industrial complex; not coincidentally, the politicos are also sniffing around for ways to exploit him before external enemies do. These are provocative issues, even if the notion of escalation in the face of an omnipotent superhero was explored to much greater effect in Christopher Nolan's Batman films. Problem is, they are all brought to bear inside the first 15 minutes of Iron Man 2. The remainder of its clunky, two-hour-plus running time is spent sidewinding through a series of bullets, bombs, babes and disjointed plot points.

Escalation begins before the opening credits in the form of tattooed, vodka-swilling Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian stereotype who speaks in three-word sentences and whose unexplained rage against the Stark family leads him to construct a plasmatic lash he intends to lay to Iron Man. Rourke's two battle scenes bookend a performance that mostly features him furiously tapping on computer keyboards. More significantly, he is one of two barely realized baddies whose narrative impotence emphasizes Iron Man 2's violation of rule No. 1 for successful action films: the presence of a compelling, imposing villain.

Vanko's partner in evil is Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a rival weapons contractor with aims on developing and outfitting the military with its own high-tech wardrobe. Rockwell, normally a durable actor, misplays Hammer with an exaggerated cartoonish affect that wears out its welcome after two scenes. Add to that mix Stark's encroaching mortality, daddy issues and Stark's increasingly erratic behavior and heavy drinking that prompts his military buddy, Rhoadey (Dan Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard without the audience batting an eye), to commandeer one of Iron Man's suits, a precursor to his eventual transformation into the sidekick War Machine. Oh, and don't forget Scarlett Johansson's role as shapely Natasha, Stark's newest personal assistant and acrobatic woman of mystery. Even still, the series' backbone remains Downey's wiseacre high wire act, particularly his banter with his Girl Friday, Pepper Potts (a fine Gwyneth Paltrow).

The worst moment in Iron Man 2 finds a drunken, costumed Stark rampaging through his own birthday party. It's a scene worthy of a bad comic book-movie parody, and it underscores the film's fundamental problem—its excessive jokiness. The first Iron Man's levity rested with Downey's bravura performance and director Jon Favreau's fanboy sensibilities. What's different this time out is the screenwriting is handled by seemingly kindred spirit Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder) rather than Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (best known for Children of Men), a decision that enabled the sequel's flaws. Iron Man was a popcorn movie that dared to succeed during an era of brooding movie heroism. Its sequel suffers not only by comparison but also due to its strained efforts to please an audience now hip to its hipness.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/iron-man-ramps-up-the-camp-but-falls-flat/Content?oid=1411907

Soul Men

Soul Men

Grade: B –

Director: Malcolm B. Lee

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Bernie Mac, Sharon Leal, Adam Herschman, Sean Hayes, and Affion Crockett

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

Grade: C

Director: Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath

Starring the voices of: Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen, Bernie Mac, and Alec Baldwin

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes

There are few coincidences when it comes to Hollywood marketing. What are the chances that two of the late comedian Bernie Mac’s final film projects would be released into theaters on the same day merely 3 months since his untimely death? Still, in the doldrums of this pre-awards season, it is worth taking time to pay tribute to an underrated talent cut down while his acting abilities were still evolving.

The problem with Samuel L. Jackson’s outsized onscreen persona is that it usually dwarfs his costars, leaving little room for them to coexist in a film to which Jackson is either unwilling or incapable to modulate. Such is not an issue in the buddy road comedy Soul Men when Jackson meets his physical and spiritual match in the loquacious, brash Mac. The two play Louis Hinds (Jackson) and Floyd Henderson (Mac), former backup singers in a 1960s R&B trio who became estranged after their lead singer left for a successful solo career. After their ex-partner dies, Hinds and Henderson call an uneasy truce and embark on a cross-country road trip to a tribute concert in Harlem’s Apollo Theater.

The middling storyline hinges on a Blues Brothers framework that includes visiting Arizona dives and Texas saloons, coping with familial strife, and a final performance with the police waiting offstage to arrest the duo for sundry misdeeds. The musical numbers, for which the actors supply their own vocals, are pedestrian and derivative at best. But, Mac and Jackson paint in profanity with the same virtuosity some artists work in water colors, and together they form an irreverent chemistry. The result is a satisfying mix of hilarity and melancholy, the latter fueled by the reality that Mac and Isaac Hayes, who makes a cameo, did not live to see this film’s release.

While Mac voices a lion king in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, he is not the reason anyone will or will not see this PG-rated kids’ film. The best thing that can be said about this sequel to the popular 2005 animated original is that it will entertain youngsters under the age of 10. Of course, the same can be said about an animatronic jug band at Chuck E. Cheese’s, which might, come to think of it, rival the second Madagascar in plot depth and originality.

An ill-fated attempt to finally return home to New York City by the franchise’s quartet of zoo escapees – Alex and dancing Lion (Ben Stiller), Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the Giraffe (David Schwimmer, emerging from exile) and Gloria the Hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) – literally crash lands in the African plains. There, Gloria and Melman discover love, Marty discovers he is part of a like-minded herd, and Alex discovers his long-lost parents (Mac and Sherri Shepard). From there, it is onto a pale takeoff of “The Lion King,” as Simba…er, Alex competes to succeed his father against the dastardly Scar…er, Makunga (Alec Baldwin).

For kids, all the plotting merely passes time between “moving it” with Sacha Baron Cohen’s hyperactive, self-assured lemur Julien. For every one else, only the return of those sardonic penguins provides any genuine chuckles.

Neil Morris

Lakeview Terrace

Time for Lasik and a diet

Grade: C –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, and Ron Glass

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

For fun, squint hard and trying seeing Lakeview Terrace as an examination of the disparate viewpoints on Obamamania. In one corner, we have the GOP bogeyman: an intelligent, upper-middle class African-American wielding authority. Across the ring is a lefty, Prius-driving, multi-culti archetype besieged by society’s prejudices and governmental intrusion into their private lives.

Trust me, that correlation not nearly as silly as this ugly, unpleasant thriller about a widowed LAPD cop, Abel Turner, (Samuel L. Jackson), who unleashes his anti-miscegenation demons onto an interracial couple – Chris (Patrick Wilson) and Lisa (Kerry Washington – who moves next-door. A devoted yet domineering dad, Abel demands his children use proper diction and sport a Shaq jersey instead of Kobe’s (presumably because of the race of their women). Never mind that Abel’s knuckle-dragging bigotry somehow exempts his extrageneous coworkers or other neighbors. Or, despite the offense to his puritan values when his kids witness the new neighbors canoodling in their pool, he still hosts a bachelor party littered with booze and strippers.

Chris courts Abel’s wrath by merely moving into his cul-de-sac, magnified by Abel’s annoyance at Chris’ penchant for rap music and his nasty habit of flicking cigarette butts onto Abel’s lawn. The standard neighbor-terror genre melds with a Training Day knockoff that grows more cartoonish by the minute, partly thanks to Jackson’s pauchy, menacing-stare slide into self-parody.

The true sin of Lakeview Terrace, directed by the filmmaker formerly known as Neil LaBute (a long, long way from In The Company of Men) is that it is neither insightful social commentary nor an entertaining, sensible thriller. Frankly, it plays more like a bastard vignette from Crash left on the cutting room floor because even Paul Haggis thought it was too heavy-handed.

There is a far more provocative, intelligent movie to be made out of Lisa’s affluent father (Ron Glass) and his disapproval of her choice of husband. Unfortunately, that subplot is subsumed by Abel’s increasingly irrational antics and LaBute’s half-hearted attempts to rationalize them. Through it all is the metaphor of an encroaching wildfire that, like this mistake of a movie, ultimately produces lots of smoke but few visible flames.

Neil Morris