The careers of Kim Basinger and Val Kilmer collided in this disastrous bank robbery thriller/comedy/drama/whatever. Basinger plays Karen McCoy a pro bank robber who looks awesome, but got busted because of bad blood with bad guy Jack Schmidt (Terrence Stamp). Kilmer is J.T. Barker, a foppish, wannabee robber.

McCoy has just served 6 years in the joint and wants nothing more to go straight and to get to know her son. Unfortunately, her past catches up with her. It doesn’t help that she can’t find work and that her crooked parole officer is trying to reconnect her with bad guy Schmidt. She doesn’t want to get back to her old ways, but Schmidt does something really bad and she just, like, has to, you know? Sorry, but it’s obvious from miles off.

“The Real McCoy” devolves into a massive heist which attempts to be really clever, but is just not all that entertaining. Sure, we see how difficult it is to get into said vault, but it seems like it takes director Russell Mulcahy half of the film to show us. All in all, a very average heist.

A few other bones to pick. Terrence Stamp with a southern accent? I mean, (in Southern accent) c’mon. Stamp is a good actor, but don’t make the guy fake a southern accent. Also, what a waste of Val Kilmer. He’s reduced to a skin-deep goofball, when we know he could do so much more. On a positive note, Basinger looks great, in spite of stupid looking outfits, but that really is no reason to see a movie.

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the blockbuster. By definition, it’s designed to reach the biggest movie-going audience possible, compromising any artistic credibility. It has to be violent without being too violent, sexy without being too sexy, serious, yet funny, non-offensive, and so on. Most importantly, a blockbuster has to be big, intimidating, larger than life.

Transformers is as formulaic as they come. It feels almost like a study in blockbusterism. First off, you have your paint by numbers launch: Out in the middle of nowhere (desert setting of course) something really weird and bad happens. Luckily, before the proverbial bad stuff hits the fan, we get a chance to meet a few chatty soldier dudes. We hear what they miss from back home, one of them even video conferences with his wife and their baby, who he’s not yet met in person. Even though an evil helicopter robot thing obliterates their entire base, our new friends somehow manage to be in the right place at the right time and escape.

Then we shift to a high school classroom where somehwat-geeky outsider Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is making a presentation about this great grandfather. Being the typical teenager, Sam’s biggest priority is buying a pair of wheels and getting the attention of fellow student Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox).

As luck would have it, Sam’s first car is actually a robot, but not one of those bad ones that did bad stuff in the desert. Even better, the car does get him the girl. I mean, brilliant. Life in a blockbuster is unfortunately not so easy. The bad robots are looking for a certain cube and the good robots want to stop them. The location of said cube leads them to Sam. I don’t want to give away any “exciting” details, but I’ll give you a hint: It all ties together.

What follows are a lot of loud action sequences and badness beating goodness, but goodness coming back, and so on and so forth. The robots look great, not doubt. Their infused hip personalities are what ruined it for me. I’ll take robots, no problem, but tone down the attitude. The music by Steve Jablonsky also proved immensely irritating. After literally every minute we are submitted to another sweeping, momentous theme that forces us to realize how important and earth shattering the sequence is. As in all blockbusters, we are also provided with moments of comic relief (painkiller-addicted dog named Mojo, president with cowboy accent wearing red socks, asking a stewardess for a Ding Dong). The music is there to hammer homoe that things are getting heavy again. I’ve never felt so manipulated. Director Michael Bay could really take a lesson from the Coen Brothers and their meisterwerk, No Country For Old Men. There is practically no music in the whole film. I love music, but watching that film was so incredibly refreshing. Watch it and bathe in the silence.

Once Transformers was over, after being pounded with over two hours of the blockbuster experience, I realized several things. One, I had a headache. Two, Shia LaBeouf, who I really liked in A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, was able to pull off a decent performance in a Michael Bay film; a worthy feat. Three, I’m looking forward to watching LaBeouf in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or just Indiana Jones 4, for those who favor brevity. Four, Megan Fox looks like a young Jennifer Connelly after a bath in self-tanning lotion and a serious bout of teeth whitening. (Unfortunately, she doesn’t have Connelly’s acting chops.) And five, blockbusters just ain’t my cup of tea. I’ll watch them, but, afterwards, I almost always feel like I was taken for a ride. Indeed, Transformers was no exception.

Buy Transformers from Amazon.

Yikes. Everyone already knows this movie is ridiculously awful. I thought Jim Carrey was pretty good in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and am willing to give him a chance when it comes to a non-comedy genre. This movie starts with Carrey’s character, Walter Sparrow, an animal control officer, trying to catch a dog. Displaying great ineptitude, Sparrow is sidetracked by the the name on the dog’s collar. The dog bites him and gets away, which is a shame, because had it not, the resulting baffling chain of events would have never taken place.

Sparrow’s wife Agatha, played by Virginia Madsen, gives him a crappy-looking used book by an unknown author for his birthday. It is called The Number 23. Ta da! All of a sudden, Sparrow starts seeing the number 23 everywhere, kind of like how boys start seeing boobies everywhere when they start puberty. (Speaking of which, Virginia Madsen does provide some nice cleav action in the film.)

Sparrow starts seeing all kinds of parallels to his life while reading the book. Strangely enough, though he finds the book completely engrossing, he takes frickin’ forever to finish it. This gives filmmaker Joel Schumacher plenty of time to show us stylish shots of Carrey playing the role of the book’s main character, Detective Fingerling. While he’s not stumbling into strangely lit rooms wearing tons of eyeliner, Fingerling is having copious amounts of sex with clothed females. It’s really strange and creepy watching Carrey pump into some lady friend of his. This is clearly a case of miscasting.

At some point in these noir-ish scenes, Fingerling picks up a saxophone and that’s sort of when this movie became a comedy for me. It just can longer be taken seriously. I couldn’t help but be reminded of another universally panned film, The Salton Sea with Val Kilmer. Kilmer actually looked cool in that movie and his narration was dead-on. His instrument to express his pain was the trumpet, and he looked ridiculous fake-playing it, but at least the other elements were there. Carrey’s narration stinks. His voice gets annoying very fast, and again, the movie star Carrey with all his silly antics gets in the way.

It is perhaps worth noting that Sparrow has a kid, played by Logan Lerman, sporting what looks like a toupee. Lerman, 15 when this movie came out (1+5=6+15=21 damn!), is actually quite good and went on to play another solid role in a much better movie, 3:10 to Yuma. (3+10=13+10=23!) The Number 23 is really one of the worst I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of awful movies.

Buy The Number 23 (Unrated Infinifilm Edition) from Amazon.

When you’ve got hind quarters like Jessica Alba, acting skills are optional. In Into the Blue, she plays Sam, a young woman living in the Bahamas with her diving instructor boyrfriend, Jared (Paul Walker). Together they scrape together a humble life on an old house boat. For Jared, being a diving instructor is just his day job, as he dreams of an exciting life as a prospector, hunting for buried treasure. A hurricane has recently swept through and he hastily gets fired, deciding that his time is now and that it’s “all part of the plan”.

The bad guy is introduced early in the form of Bates (Josh Brolin, the only real actor here), a successful prospector and bona fide asshole. He and Jared have a macho rivalry, though Jared doesn’t have much to show for it.

The plot thickens when Jared’s friend Bryce (Scott Caan) and his girlfriend of five days (Ashely Scott) arrive. Bryce has the dough that Jared needs to start doing some serious treasure hunting. Bryce is also a show off who is willing to put his pocket before his heart. Things start to get complicated when one of their diving expeditions leads to a sunken plane filled with cocaine. At this point, a moral battle starts bubbling to the surface. Jared can definitely use the money and for Blake there really is no question. Sam, however, will have nothing of it.

Into the Blue has magnificent underwater sequences, not the least of whcih involve Jessica Alba flummoxing about. On the other hand, the flim is often very lame, in particular when the cheesy soundtrack kicks in or when the wooden actors poorly deliver badly written dialogue. Big no five to Scott Caan whose non-performance is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Paul Walker is a bit less inept, and he certainly does have that blue-eyed, hawk look appeal, but he would be much more at home in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Into the Blue is certainly nice to look at, but you won’t discover much beneath the surface.

Buy Into the Blue [Blu-ray] or Into the Blue (Widescreen Edition) from Amazon.

Harsh Times, directed by the David Ayer, writer of Training Day, is the story of a former army ranger. Jim Luther Davis, played by Christian Bale, readjusting back to civilian life. Davis is one majorly conflicted guy. On the one hand he’s got his best friend Mike Alonzo (Freddy Rodriguez) and a penchance for chugging canned beer in his car, and on the other, straightening out, mid joint, to answer a phone call offering him a job at the Department of Homeland Security. He’s also got his “old lady”, a pretty Mexican girl (Tammy Trull) who lives in a tiny village in Mexico.

As in Training Day, Ayer places the majority of his scenes in moving cars. I guess, this is a way to keep things moving and pepper the dialogue, though Harsh Times in particular, is not exactly what you’d call plot heavy. I guess you can take this film as a mood piece, two guys cruising the streets of southern California, trying to be adults, and yet unable to repress their rather primitive intimacy.

Christian Bale is known for his extreme taste in film roles. He’ll always rank extremely high in my book for his amazing performance in American Psycho. I’m still not sure if he pulls off his character in Harsh Times. Somehow, I always see something somewhat refined and noble in his inner core, even when he’s spewing out the word “dude” every other sentence. As an actor he has a ton of intensity, but it seems kind of wasted here. His best friend Mike seems so wimpy in comparison, that the balance is off.

For a celebrated screenwriter like Avery, it’s hard not to be disappointed by much of the dialogue in this film. A few action sequences might have helped push things along, but this movie essentially boils down to immature adults chatting away about how they’re going to get wasted. The film gets boring pretty quickly.

Harsh Times is somewhat noteable for Bale’s character. A mentally disturbed vet who really wants to get back into the game, but this time on domestic soil. It’s terrifying, and Bale’s intense performance is the only thing driving an otherwise dull film.

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Street Kings is advertised as being directed by the writer of Training Day, which in my opinion, doesn’t say a whole lot. The ability to write a good film does not automatically make you a good director. Furthermore, Street Kings is not even written by David Ayer, the writer of Training Day, just directed by him. To be fair, Ayer does have one film, Harsh Times, under his belt as director.

Street Kings does have a a few big guns in its pack. Hot off his heels as an Academy Award winner, Forest Whitacker plays police captain Jack Wander. Wander is totally loyal to troubled detective, Tom Ludlow, played by a moping Keanu Reeves. Ludlow has a bad habit of drinking a few minibar bottles of Smirnoff and then heading into a house full of Korean gangsters without backup. Through his huffing and overly serious behavior, we realized that Reeves’ character is bothered by something. To quote Reeves’ most famous film dialogue, “Whoa”.

Ludlow’s gotten into a bit of trouble for his awful police work, and rightfully so, though we’re supposed to understand him and sympathize. Reeves does his darndest to with every acting bone and muscle in his body to show us that he’s battling inner demons. In capable hands, this could have been a character I really liked. Reeves, however, can’t do much more than avoid eye contact. This might have worked in other films, where other actors could have picked up the slack, but in a movie boasting a number of rappers/actors, Jay Mohr with a stupid mustache, and Whitacker who sounds like he’s foaming at the mouth the whole time, it just doesn’t cut it.

And yet, I keep getting away from the storyline. The fact is, there is not much of a story here. Reeves’ Ludlow mopes around, gets in a few gun battles, shows us he’s an unorthodox police officer. A fellow officer who he apparently used to be friends with, gets mowed down. Ludlow happens to be there, wants to get revenge. He then gets in over his head in some really bad stuff. All in all, really bland material. The interesting thing about Training Day was watching notorious good guy Denzel Washington play against the grain. In Street Kings we have notorious troubled inner demons guy Keanu Reeves doing the same thing he always does. Sure, he’s playing an insane detective who is the kind of guy who probably would have fit right in with the Stasi, but because he’s doing the Keanu vibe the whole time, we barely notice it.

One final word about the whole actor/rapper phenomenon. What’s the deal? 8 mile, where Eminem played a version of his rapper persona, was a load of crap, and I really like Eminem. Ludicrous in Crash was decent, but other than for box office returns, I can’t really see why they couldn’t have picked a capable actor. In Street Kings you’ve got Common and The Game both playing L.A. crime figures, in other words, not too far from their rapper personas. I though Method Man was pretty awful in American Gangster, but at least he was playing a straight cop. This is a trend that has just got to stop. I wonder if I’m the only one annoyed by gangster rappers playing their gangster rapper characters in movies. (In other words, not themselves, but copies of what they copy in real life. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.)

I really do enjoy a good action flick once in a while and I’m also totally cool with the whole Dirty Harry badass cop thing, but this movie really gets nothing right. If this thing had been a TV pilot, I doubt it would have ever passed the first round. Skip it.

An up and coming public prosecutor with a near perfect record takes on what looks like a cut-and-dry attempted murder case. Only problem is, it’s actually not really in the bag. Even after a hasty confession, the accused has done a great job covering his tracks. The bullet is lodged in his comatose wife’s brain and the gun has mysteriously disappeared. What ensues is a gutsy battle of wits between the attorney played extra tangy by Jake Gosling and his nemesis, played by what I guess is supposed to be an Irish Anthony Hopkins.

This is the umpteenth time we’ve seen Hopkins rehash his Hannibal Lector masterstroke and, personally, I can’t get enough of it. I even loved watching John Malkovitch channeling Lector in Ripley’s Game. Don’t get me wrong, the movie was horrible, but you can’t help but relish Malkovitch snarling, “Hold my watch because if it breaks I’ll kill everyone on this train.” Good times.

Hopkins is the only the good thing about this movie. I couldn’t stand Gosling’s overdone accent. It’s supposed to show that he doesn’t quite fit in with his rich girlfriend, a decent Rosamund Pike, and her people. It’s not all Gosling’s fault. The script doesn’t give him much too work with and the film doesn’t take the time flesh out his character. Then again, I didn’t really care to know any thing else about him. He’s caught in the tug of war between career advancement and doing the right thing. Deep in his heart, he seems more concerned with the former, even if we are shown otherwise.

Another problem with this film is the complete waste of Embeth Davidtz, who plays Hopkins’ wife. Her pre-comatose part is so brief, and yet the her character is left undefined. It’s hard to figure out what she would be doing with a creep like Hopkins and if you’ve got a talent like Davidtz on your hands, you’re a feel to not let her have a bit more screen time.

The sight of a detective played by Billy Burke also gave me the shudders. He also plays in the more recent disaster “Untraceable”, and the guy belongs on a soap opera. No offense, but when he undergoes a rather painful transformation later in the film, it’s hard to really care. It’s as pathetic as his attempt to portray a pathetic character.

If you like all things Hannibal Lector as much as I do, this movie will be worth your time. All in all though, it’s plot starts to wear thin, very fast. In fact, after the film completely runs out of steam, it takes a lame turn, a moment when many people probably left the theater. Fracture is a middling average legal thriller.

Buy Fracture (Widescreen Edition) from Amazon.