Fast Charlie: Pierce Brosnan’s Biloxi Blues

If Charlie Swift worked in corporate America, he would be transitioning to a part-time “consulting” gig. However, as a fixer for the Biloxi mob, you are either in or out—and he is not ready to retire yet. Honestly, his aging boss needs him now more than ever. One messy job leads to a whole lot of complications, including a woman he rather likes, in Phillip Noyce’s Fast Charlie, which opens today in Brooklyn.

This hit was supposed to be a favor for “Beggar,” the brutal new school head of the New Orleans mob. Swift’s boss Stan Mullen also wanted to use it as a try-out for an eager beaver new assassin. Unfortunately, problems ensue when the kid blows apart their target’s head, which was needed as proof of completion. However, the level-headed Swift reaches out to the victim’s ex, Marcie Kramer, who helps provide a way to identify the corpse.

Swift is rather impressed by Kramer’s level-headedness. In fact, he invites her to dinner, much to his own surprise. However, he is not too distracted to foil an attempt to rub him out when Beggar launches a full-scale attack on Mullen’s organization. Seething for revenge, Swift teams up with Kramer to find her ex’s dirt on Beggar. Yet, he might be even more concerned with her safety.

Fast Charlie is a lean and mean little revenge thriller that far exceeds its VOD/token theatrical distribution expectations. Screenwriter Richard Wenk’s adaptation of Victor Gischler’s novel has a lot of Southern attitude, but not so much that it could be pigeon-holed as regional or parochial. While not exactly a twisty-turny kind of thriller, it does not travel a predictably straight line either. It has a slightly eccentric inclination that serves it well.

The King’s Daughter, Co-Starring Fan Bingbing

It is hard to get a good clean look at Fan Bingbing playing a heavily CGI’ed mermaid in this film, but it is easier to see her here than in China, where she is still being “rehabilitated” after the powers-that-be yanked her from the public eye and “detained” her for several months in 2018. (Subsequently, she has been considered to be one of the first celebrities to receive the “Peng Shuai treatment”). Nobody will call this a “comeback” vehicle, but it is certainly a curiosity piece. (You can also see the logo for the financially-precarious Evergrande’s liquidated film unit in the opening credits, for extra added notoriety.) Our protag—don’t call her the princess—forms a friendship with Fan’s weird mermaid in Sean McNamara’s The King’s Daughter, based on Vonda McIntyre’s novel, which opens today in theaters.

Louis XIV has just returned victorious from war, but a would-be assassin’s too-close-for-comfort bullet makes him suddenly mindful of his mortality. He is played by Pierce Brosnan, so apparently the Sun King was Irish. Who knew? The court doctor, who also dabbles in alchemy tells the king he can make him immortal, if his men can capture one of the mermaids living in the lost city of Atlantis. He needs to transplant its uncanny life force into the king—but it will only work with a full-grown female. Of course, she will die in the process, but he can live (forever) with that.

Meanwhile, Louis summons the secret love child he tucked away in a convent to serve as the court composer. Marie-Josephe D’Alembar is a rebellious klutz who could make even Katherine Hepburn say: “you could carry yourself with a bit more grace, kiddo.” She knows nothing of her true origins or her father’s intention to marry her off to a wealthy young nobleman. Instead, D’Alembar falls in love with Yves De La Croix, the slightly tarnished sea captain who captures the mermaid.

It is hard to believe this production was allowed to film on-location at Versailles, but they were, way back in 2014. Obviously, this has been on the shelf for years, for good reason. The effects are cheesy and so are the performances. Brosnan looks embarrassed and Kaya Scodelario’s Miss Maisel-ish portrayal of D’Alembar is ridiculously anachronistic. Honestly, Fan really doesn’t do anything except let the FX team superimpose her head on the big fish. Ironically, only William Hurt brings any sense of dignity to the film as the good Father La Chaise, an original character not in McIntyre’s novel.

False Positive, on Hulu

Horror movies love to corrupt good things. Of course, it is hard to build a film around an evil apple pie, but it is much easier plum the dark side of motherhood. Rosemary’s Baby remains the champion at this, but tons of flicks tried to follow its example. Some were even pretty good, such as Aneesh Chaganty’s Run, Franz & Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy, and Stewart Thorndike’s Lyle. It is debatable whether this is a proper horror film or rather a dark thriller, since it really isn’t scary, despite the sinister turn an expected mother’s pregnancy takes in John Lee’s False Positive, which premieres this Friday on Hulu.

Lucy and her doctor husband Adrian Martin have been trying to get pregnant for two straight years with no success. Finally, he books her an appointment with his old colleague, ultra-arrogant fertility specialist Dr. John Hindle and voila. She’s not just pregnant. She has two healthy boy twins and a smaller, iffy-looking girl. Of course, Hindle and her husband want to abort the girl because you know, patriarchy. (Ironically, their arguments are much like those used by abortion advocates in the abortion debate.)

After the insert-your-own-term-here, everything should be fine, but she feels off physically and emotionally. Martin starts experiencing strange dreams and visions, but nobody takes her concerns seriously. Instead, she finds herself increasingly alienated from her supposed support system.

Of course, you can easily guess some of the skullduggery, because it is mandated by the film’s sexual politics. That is the problem with polemical films. They are so inevitably predictable. Fortunately, Lee and cinematographer Pavel Pogorzelski crafted some nicely eerie-looking scenes, which makes the film watchable. Honestly, if you are okay with laughing through Pierce Brosnan’s smug, preening villainy, then the film is a fair amount of fun.

The Foreigner: The Jackie Chan Crossover We’ve Been Hoping For

Jackie Chan is sixty-two and has broken more bones than most people knew they had. The same is true of Quan Ngoc Minh. The Chinese-Vietnamese Navy SEAL-trained commando lost nearly everything after the fall of South Vietnam, but he was content to watch his young daughter grow up safe and happy in London. When she is cruelly murdered in an IRA splinter group’s terrorist attack, Quan will stop at nothing to avenge her. Of course, he will need names, which he assumes the former IRA deputy minister for Northern Ireland Affairs can supply (and not without reason). A violent cat-and-mouse game thusly commences in Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Quan and his family were part of the Vietnamese boat people exodus, but his first two daughters were murdered by Thai pirates before they reached Singapore. From there, Quan managed to immigrate to England and establish legal citizenship, but his wife died giving birth to Fan. When the so-called “Real IRA” blows up the dress shop she was patronizing, Quan’s American training kicks in.

Hardnosed Commander Bromley is leading the investigation. He doesn’t seem to have many leads or any love for the IRA, so Quan keys in on the super-slick Liam Hennessy, who is essentially deputy minister for keeping a lid on the hotheads. There was a time when he was the one planting the bombs, but now he is “reformed.” Hennessy is playing a dangerous game, trying to extract more concessions from the British in exchange for intel on the terrorists. Naturally, he patronizes and grossly underestimates Quan, until the grieving father starts leaving warning bombs of his own. He also seems to be more than Hennessy’s former IRA thugs can handle, but just barely.

Chan is not a superman in The Foreigner. Frankly, he acts his age and maybe a little extra, taking some beatings nearly as bad as those in the bizarrely under-appreciated Police Story: Lockdown. It is somewhat surprising how much screen time he concedes to the rest of the cast, but this still might be his best straight-up dramatic performance. Still, the fights and stunt work is first-rate, so fans will not be disappointed on that score.

Just as the dour, angsty Chan will be new for most fans, the sleazy, venal, self-pitying Hennessey is a Pierce Brosnan we haven’t seen before either. He is such an unpleasant character, we quite enjoy watching him take flak from all sides. Orla Brady makes a spectacularly evil Lady Macbeth type as Hennessy’s slightly disappointed wife Mary, while Ray Fearon’s Bromley swaggers with authority.

Screenwriter David Marconi also deserves tremendous credit for updating Stephen Leather’s Troubles-set novel to the post-Good Friday era. Frighteningly, the hidden IRA weapons caches that are frequently mentioned are very real. Marconi and Campbell also clearly establish the factional rivalries and alliances within the IRA and its subsidiaries that they suggest still persist to this day. Sure, this is an action thriller, but it leaves viewers convinced the current peace remains perilously fragile.

Frankly, a lot of the IRA infighting material would still work in a movie without Jackie Chan, but adding him as the destabilizing fuse kicks it up to another level. This really is the kind of polished crossover production Jackie Chan fans have been hoping. Campbell has had a few misfires, like Green Lantern, but The Foreigner should re-establish him as one of the top action directors in the business (along with Casino Royale). Very highly recommended for general audiences, The Foreigner opens tomorrow (10/13) in several New York theaters, including the AMC Empire.

I.T.: Pierce Brosnan’s Life Gets Hacked

Someone should warn Mike Regan the women you meet through online chats sometimes turn out to be men. The corporate jet magnate just isn’t very computer savvy. He is about to reveal his smart home passwords to his company’s new systems temp. In doing so, he will learn a perennial management lesson. Good help is definitely hard to find in John Moore’s I.T. (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Regan is about to take his firm public to raise capital for his uber-for-private-jets app. Rather embarrassingly his launch event is nearly sabotaged by technical glitches, but Ed Porter, the new socially awkward temp saves the day. Impressed by his resourcefulness and full of his own fake egalitarianism, Regan invites him over to the house to speed up the wifi and do other computer stuff. At this point, he should be writing his own ticket to full time employment and quick promotion, but his horrendous misunderstanding of boundaries ruins all his good credit. Since he continues to do creepy stuff, like showing up to cheer on the Regan’s prep school daughter in her field hockey game, his almost-mentor cans him. Feeling betrayed, Porter uses all his backdoors and Trojans to makes the Regans’ lives absolutely miserable.

For about ten minutes, I.T. gets smart when Michael Nyqvist blows into town as Henrik, the mysterious “cleaner,” who specializes in shutting down cyber menaces like Porter. Unfortunately, it soon reverts back to its previous dumb self. When it comes to stupidity in Don Kay & William Wisher’s screenplay, nobody can touch the moronic cops, who bizarrely identify immediately with the twitchy computer nerd rather than the wealthy airplane dude. At one point, Regan’s real I.T. department suggests Porter might be able to crash their planes out of the sky, but they never follow up on this potentially catastrophic plot point.

As Regan, Pierce Brosnan sort of plays his age without giving up on playing good guy-leading mean. Nyqvist is slyly droll as the Cleaner, while James Frecheville does some of his best work yet (certainly compared to Adore and Animal Kingdom, in which everyone else just overwhelmed him) as the staggeringly inappropriate Porter. However, they are just working with a screenplay that is dumber than a bag full of hammers.

Seriously, the logic of I.T.’s narrative collapses faster than Hillary Clinton on a day in the mid-eighties. In feels like a throwback to mid-1990s films like The Net that were just discovering the shenanigans that sometimes happen online. It might have gotten more benefit of the doubt then, but it just feels shopworn now. Therefore, I.T. just isn’t recommendable when it opens this Friday (9/23) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

No Escape: the Reign of Terror Commences

It looks a lot like Thailand, but the use of Khmer lettering somewhat upset Cambodia. The anarchy and mass killings engulfing the fictional Southeast Asian city also rather parallel the brutal fall of Phnom Penh, which could be the real reason for the Cambodian government’s censorship decision. On the other hand, the head of state’s official garb bears a vague resemblance to that of the King of Thailand. Unfortunately, we will not have time to learn if he is also a jazz lover and amateur musician, like Bhumibol Adulyadej. The dear leader is about to become the dearly departed, unleashing murderous bedlam in John Erick Dowdle’s No Escape (trailer here), which opens today in wide release.

After his tech start-up crashed and burned, Jack Dwyer accepted a middle-manager position with Talbott, an international engineering firm. He is in the process of relocating his family to a country that is one hundred percent not Cambodia but happens to border Vietnam, where he will help construct a water plant. For this he should die, according to the ninety-nine percenters that are about to launch an insurrection. It is nothing personal, just ideology.

As the terrorists work their way through the Dwyer’s hotel, summarily executing guests room-by-room, Dwyer scrambles to lead with wife Annie and two daughters to safety. He will get some heads-up assistance from Hammond, a suspiciously cool-under fire Brit. However, things start to get truly desperate when the leftist guerillas call in the helicopter gunships to strafe their presumed safe haven on the roof.

No Escape would be a nifty thriller (sort of like Bayona’s The Impossible, if the tsunami came packing an AK-47), had it not felt compelled to periodically bring the action to a screeching stop in order to blame everything on western imperialism, or is it globalism in this case? In any event, we are responsible, please chastise us. That would be Pierce Brosnan’s job as Hammond, who assures Dwyer the men who just murdered scores of innocent bellhops and office workers are only trying to protect their families, like you Jack. Of course, such moral equivalency is simply farcical.

Believe it or not, Owen Wilson shows some real action cred as the super-motivated everyman. Brosnan also takes visible delight in Hammond’s dissipated tendencies, providing some much needed shtick-free comic relief. Sahajak Boonthanakit also compliments him rather nicely as “Kenny Rogers,” Hammond’s country music loving local crony. However, the film suffers from the lack of a focal villain—a Robespierre to incite the mob.

Despite the shortcomings of the script co-written with his brother Drew, Dowdle certainly has a knack for filming riot scenes. In fact, the first act is quite impressively staged managed, as we see the Dwyers cut off from contact with the outside world, reacting to dangerously incomplete information. At times, No Escape is a very scary film, but it is frequently undermined by its inclination to lecture. As a result, it falls short of the visceral intensity and unrepentant black humor of the Eli Roth-produced Aftershock. No Escape very nearly could have been great, but instead it is marked by stop-and-start inconsistencies. Still, Brosnan fans will be happy to hear No Escape represents a return to form for the Bond alumnus after a half dozen or so B-level movies, when it opens nationwide today (8/26), including at the Regal Union Square in New York, but not in undemocratic Cambodia.

Survivor: Jovovich vs. Brosnan

Let’s face it, the terrorists are way more unified than we are. When there is an opportunity to strike a blow against the ever-tolerant West, they will put aside doctrinal differences to make it happen. In contrast, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are much more concerned about politics, turf management, and general career CYA-ing. At least that is the timely picture that emerges in James McTeigue’s Survivor (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Kate Abbott has only been stationed in London for five months or so, but it is clear the Foreign Service security specialist is really good at her job—too good, in fact. When she discovers Bill Talbot, the head of the visa department has personally intervened to admit several dubious chemical specialists into the country, he quickly arranges to have her killed in a bombing, along with the rest of the visa section. Naturally fate dictates she will be away from the table at the critical moment. That means the assassin, a veteran terrorist known simply as “the Watchmaker” will have to finish her off personally, spy-versus-spy style.

Of course, suspicion immediately falls on Abbott, with the American ambassador and Inspector Paul Anderson, the Scotland Yard point man being especially obtuse about it all. Only Sam Parker, the senior political officer, believes in her glaringly obvious innocence. Unfortunately, as the Yanks and the Brits chase Abbott, the Watchmaker and his allies have an open field to finish the last stages of their grand WMD conspiracy.

Having helmed the radical favorite V for Vendetta, it is rather odd to see McTeigue associated with a film that considers the mass murder of innocent civilians a bad thing—one to be avoided if at all possible. The credit is probably due to screenwriter Philip Shelby, who co-wrote the second novel in Robert Ludlum’s Covert One series. There are some flashes of inspiration to be found within, particularly with respects to the disturbing but seemingly unrelated prologue, but the film soon settles into a by-the-numbers “Wrong Man” style thriller. It is also disappointing to see Survivor wimping out in terms of the ultimate villains, who are mere schemers hoping to make a fortune selling short.

However, as Abbott, Milla Jovovich is a surprisingly credible presence. After ten or twelve Resident Evil films, we know she has action chops, but she is also convincing playing a smart, reserved character. A Lindsay Lohan or a Megan Fox just couldn’t carry it off. Strangely though, the film does not fully capitalize on her hardnosed potential, forcing her to be a little damsel-in-distress-y at times.

Of course, Pierce Brosnan is no stranger to international intrigue, but he cruises through Survivor on auto-pilot. It is hard to forget how much better he was as a ruthless assassin opposite Michael Caine in The Fourth Protocol. Still, Robert Forster is reliable as ever humanizing the treasonous Talbot (he has his tragic reasons), but James D’Arcy’s unintuitive Inspector seems to be hinting at every repressed, twittish cliché about British public school civil servants.

To its credit, Shelby’s screenplay acknowledges some important realities, such as the events of September 11^th, which were Abbott’s motivation for her current line of work. Survivor makes a strong case Jovovich has been grossly underemployed by Hollywood, but as a big picture thriller, it is rather routine. Perhaps worth a look streaming or on cable, Survivor opens tomorrow (5/29) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

The Love Punch: Where’s the Pink Panther When We Need Him?

Due diligence is a general business term for the standard practice of verifying everything is on the up-and-up before engaging in a long-term contractual arrangement. For instance, Richard Jones might have at least googled the French outfit he sold his company to. Instead, he blithely signed on the dotted line and received a nasty surprise when the company and his entire pension were plundered. On the plus side, he will have time to reconnect with his ex-wife and fellow wiped out pensioner when they pursue a little payback in Joel Hopkins’ The Love Punch (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Jones was scheduled to retire one week after the transfer, but when he arrives at work he finds the offices padlocked. Not only did he sink his entire pension in the company, he also convinced all his co-workers and his ex, Kate, to do the same. Yet, Jones does not even have a contact name at the French conglomerate he somehow made the deal with. After an awkward conversation with Kate, they skype their hacker college student son to get some intel. It turns out the robber baron in question is Vincent Kruger, who just purchased the world’s largest diamond as a wedding gift for his fiancée, Manon.

Since the most famous diamond on earth will be a snap to fence for first time thieves, the Joneses (she kept his name for convenience sake) set out to steal it. They will enlist their mutual pals, Jerry and Penelope, to impersonate two Texan couples Kruger hopes to do business with. In the process, Kate unexpectedly befriends the ditzy but decent Manon.

Sadly, Punch’s humor is just as dumb as its business sense. It is rather painful watching Emma Thompson try to maintain her dignity. Still, her pleasant chemistry with Pierce Brosnan is about the only thing that works in the film. When Hopkins is not going for yucks, their couple stuff feels kind of real. It is also somewhat depressing to watch Brosnan suffering the aches a pains of late middle age, but as he himself admits, he was never a very good James Bond (Tomorrow Never Dies was by far his best, due largely to Michelle Yeoh).

Ordinarily, Timothy Spall is always the saving grace of a misfiring b-movie, such as Assassin’s Bullet, but his shtick as a former international adventurer-turned inconspicuous homebody might actually make matters worse. As Manon, Loise Bourgoin follows the same playbook she used in The Girl from Monaco, but it seems downright restrained here.

Thompson and Brosnan could have made a very good film playing a divorced couple that starts sparking again, but they are simply overwhelmed by Hopkins’ slapsticky screenplay. It is a shame to waste the inviting French Riviera locations on such a clownish mess, but hopefully the talented cast had a chance to enjoy the sights. Not worth hating on, but certainly not recommended for anyone, The Love Punch opens this Friday (5/23) in New York.