Goon

Goon is a funny, violent, vulgar, sweet, formulaic, and endearing film about a guy who finds his calling in punching other people in the mouth.

Seann William Scott plays Doug Glatt, not the sharpest arrow in the family quiver.  Dad's a doctor, Brother's a doctor, and Mother is disappointed in him.  He's athletic, he knows how to throw a punch, and he works as a bouncer.  It's honest work, sure, but nothing to brag about down at the synagogue.  Glatt is a fundamentally nice and decent guy, and there's no fulfillment in strong arming weaklings.

Everything changes when he attends a minor-league hockey game with his best friend (Jay Baruchel, the voice of Hiccup in the surprisingly good How to Train Your Dragon.  He wrote and directed this movie.) and finds himself standing up for his buddy when a heckled player climbs into the stands to throw a few punches.   Glatt knocks the guy out, attracts the attention of the home team's coach, and he's on his way.  Finally, he has the chance to be part of something, to work in an organization that values his talents, and to beat up worthy opponents.

From there, the film follows the structure of your basic sports story, complete with an on-ice showdown with the league’s reigning master enforcer (Liev Schreiber, proving yet again that a great actor in a small role can raise the game of an entire film.).  But that’s just the structure.  The joy in this film comes from the wickedly funny writing, the spot on delivery, and the real affection it shares for the damaged people of and around minor-league hockey.

I laughed all the way through Goon, and I was delighted to learn that there’s an actual Doug Glatt out there, busting heads as an officer with his local police department and, hopefully, banking his royalties from this film.  Goon was released to little fanfare, but it’s a winner.  Queue it up.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

What would you rather see: yet another movie in which an indestructible superman unflinchingly walks away from a rear-projected fireball, or a film in which a girl stands atop a file cabinet, unbalances it, then somersaults down the slope while it falls to the ground? Would you rather see yet another CGI-heavy revenge picture, or a movie with real stuntmen about an autistic kid who's trying to get money to pay for her mom's medicine?

If you chose the former two out of two, then X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE is the movie for you. I'm sure real stuntmen and real explosives guys and real pilots and such were used in the making of this movie, but the fact is that there's less drama and less entertainment value in animated supermen destroying stuff than there is in real people doing things like sliding under tables and doing backflips.

Unfortunately, limp action setpieces are all this movie has to offer. The gifted Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are given little more to do than snarl and be thankful that the Actor's Guild doesn't require urinalysis, and the film even manages to take the voice away from the consistently funny Ryan Reynolds.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE simply has nothing going for it. What a waste of time.

The Manchurian Candidate

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE remake offers a twist on the paranoid thriller. It's a hippie paranoid thriller. Unfortunately, the hippie element so intrudes on the paranoid element that I had difficulty discerning whether the film wanted me to gnaw my fingernails, laugh out loud, or just peace out, man.

While the film hits many of the beats of the original, it also takes time to tap on pretty much every board of the Democratic Party's then-current platfom. From the Prescription Drug Benefit to Halliburton to G.W . Bush himself, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE sets 'em and knocks 'em down, one after another, to such an extent that it actually becomes a distraction. I mean, c'mon, Al Franken as a nightly news reporter?

That's not to say that THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE doesn't have anything going for it. Jeffrey Wright is, as usual, phenomenal; Denzel Washington is, as usual, so good that we don't notice how good he is; and Liev Schrieber makes me wonder why the hell that Mr. Clark movie never happened. None of them, however, are a match for Meryl Streep. Not only does she blow every one of them off the screen, but I bet that when this thing was running in the multiplexes, she blew everyone in all the other movies off their screens, too. She's evil, she's creepy, she's smothering, and she is 31 different flavors of awesome.

While THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE is a bit slight and more than a bit hamhanded, it's worth watching for Streep's performance alone. And who knows? Maybe the hippies are right.