The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Great War was supposed to end all wars. World War II was supposed to finish the job and put a stop to the Hun threat once and for all. Then the Cold War settled in, like a damp winter day, and it was Germany Germany Germany all over again.

This is the world of John le Carré, of George Smiley, of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. It’s always winter here. Disillusionment permeates everything. Spies don’t drive sports cars, win at baccarat, and jump speedboats over islands. In the words of Alec Leamas, the film’s protagonist, “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.”

Richard Burton is Leamas, Section Chief of MI6’s Berlin bureau. He keeps losing men to Hans-Dieter Mundt, his opposite number in the Stasi. Perhaps it’s time for him to come in from the cold, to take a nice desk job in, say, the Banking Section back at Headquarters. Besides, George Smiley has an idea …

And so begins two hours of weary, bleary, tension. Of technicians who see the world not in shades of gray, but in varying levels of darkness. Of too much alcohol and too much time, of too much conscience or not conscience enough. Richard Burton, at the center of it all, is a world-weary force, a man who has been so long on the job that he can’t even tell if it’s a job any more. He’s magnificent, and the film is a marvel of care and maturity.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD works. It works on every level. I feel weary just thinking about it. I think that’s good.

Mortal Kombat

Recently, a friend asked whether all films I like make me suspend belief. I responded that I hesitate to say that all films I like do one thing or another, but that yes, that’s generally the case.

MORTAL KOMBAT is among the reasons why I hesitated. This film is so poorly acted, so lazily choreographed and shot, so lame in so many ways that it requires an act of conscious will to suspend one’s disbelief for its running time. I love it anyway.

Here’s why: there’s a bit during which Johnny Cage, who is essentially Jean Claude Van Damme, is fighting a villain who can make lizard heads on chains fly from his palms. The fight begins in a beautiful grove, then magically transports to a kickass set that appears to be made of old sailing ship parts, plaster skeletons, cobwebs, and red gel lights. Cage lays down the fu just fine, but then he finds a pullup bar conveniently placed near a platform. He goes on to do a full Tribute to Gymkata, flips onto a platform, then does a nifty jumpkick to the villain’s head. That’s just awesome. Later in the fight, the villain turns into a flaming skeleton, a la GHOST RIDER, which is also awesome. Then Cage finds a way to blow up the flaming skeleton and does a classic “leap away from the rear projection fireball.” Among the debris that comes fluttering down is, you guessed it, an autographed photo of Johnny Cage, inscribed to his “Biggest Fan.” I say that if your biggest fan is a recently exploded flaming skeleton, then your career is going GREAT!

So yeah, it’s lame. Christopher Lambert is a lousy Basil Exposition. Robin Shou spends too much time on his hair. Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Soto, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are terrible actors. The fu isn’t good enough to merit long takes. But Linden Ashby (as Cage) acquits himself well; the creature design, particularly for the multiarmed warrior Goro, is quite good; the sets and locations are fantastic and beautiful; and the soundtrack is thumpin’.

All things considered, MORTAL KOMBAT is way more fun than it has any right to be.

Hotel for Dogs

HOTEL FOR DOGS is an innocuous, pleasant family entertainment that will have special appeal for the dog lovers in your clan.

Here’s the setup: two kids stumble into a deserted hotel that they convert into a shelter for the neighborhood strays. While this sounds like a recipe for disaster, one of the kids is a brilliant inventor who comes up with a thousand ways to keep the canines entertained, fed, cleaned, and housebroken.

That’s pretty much it. There are jokes and silly villains and your standard three-act structure. There’s even The Great Don Cheadle, who is clearly there to make a movie he thinks his kids will enjoy.

It worked. My kids enjoyed it just fine. What more do you want?

Inglourious Basterds

Lots of people love INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. They say that it’s one of Tarantino’s best films. They say it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the first Tarantino film to really bother me.

The inconsistent tone, bouncing between excruciating suspense and neo-‘70s hip, kept me from settling into its groove. The performances, particularly Pitt’s painfully false Appalachian accent, Christoph Waltz’s affected silliness, and Eli Roth’s jarring presence, never felt organic. And most importantly, Tarantino’s imagining of a unit of Ike’s Army as being more despicable than Al Qaeda in Iraq, coupled with his invitation to root for this unit’s tactics as though being “on our side” made them excusable, felt like a betrayal of the American ideal. I got the feeling that Dick Cheney would have loved this movie.

The International Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Armed Conflict, they all exist for good reasons. They exist because of the all too human tendency to see outrages committed by “Team Us” as permissible and even commendable, particularly because “Team Them” has it coming. The reality, of course, is that combatants aren’t masterminds. Often, they’re just guys who got drafted, or who thought that signing up would be a good idea, or who were faced with the choice of putting on a uniform and maybe getting shot or refusing to wear one and definitely getting shot. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSes ignorance of or contempt for these laws and traditions, its glorification of brutality, was just too much for me to stomach.

Now, there are some great things about this movie. Tarantino crafts an image with smoke and light that may be one of the great shots of movie history. There’s some wonderful misdirection and a refreshing willingness to defy some rules of storytelling economy.

But I just couldn’t get past the film’s ideology. It felt deeply, profoundly wrong. It felt un-American. It really bothered me.

Sense and Sensibility

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is just plain great. Emma Thompson penned the adaptation and Ang Lee directed it, which is pretty much everything you need to know right there. But take a look at this cast: Thompson, Alan Rickman, and Kate Winslet, all of whom Can Do No Wrong, in the three primary roles; Tom Wilkinson, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, and Hugh Laurie among the supporting players. Patrick Doyle pulled down an Oscar nomination for the music. Thompson won an Academy Award for her writing, and the picture garnered further nominations for Thompson’s and Winslet’s acting, plus nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Picture (it lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT).

Ok, but you knew this was a good movie. I knew it was a good movie: I recall loving it upon its initial release. Seeing it again, however, I was struck by just how good Thompson is in it. Don’t get me wrong: Winslet and Rickman are literally great, but Thompson does so much with her part, conveys such a deep and rich personality beneath her character’s practiced decorum, that she makes herself a marvel to behold.

While watching the film, it occurred to me that Winslet is now old enough to play the Thompson role. Then it occurred to me that Winslet seems to be growing up to be Emma Thompson. A person could do much worse.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

I remember seeing THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION when I was a kid. I remember liking it and have always had a special place for it even as I've grown fuzzy on the details of what it's actually about. By the time I fired this film up again last week, all I had to go on was a general feeling of goodwill, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy shirt, and John Lithgow hamming it up. How would the film stand up to adult eyes?

Quite well, I'm happy to report. BUCKAROO BANZAI is that most difficult of creations: whimsy, pure and simple, that avoids being overcome by itself. The film lines up Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and Clancy Brown on one side and John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, and Vincent Schiavelli on the other, tosses a Maguffin between them, and then gets silly. It layers sight gags over character gags over situational gags, keeps the villains just villainous enough to serve as foils for the heroes, and generally invites its audience to sit back, grin, tap its feet, and groove along.

I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I can't wait to see it again in another twenty-five years.

Adventureland

ADVENTURELAND is a coming of age story about a guy who really really wants to be played by Michael Cera. The would-be Cera takes a job in an amusement park and has your standard coming-of-age experiences, and everything pretty much rolls along as you'd expect.

This isn't a film with big laughs or big ideas or big anything. It's just a story about a guy living through an important episode in his life. It has the feel of a fond memory, one that retains some of the prickly bits even if it has taken on a nostalgic sheen. I wouldn't go out of my way for it, but I was stuck in coach and there it was and it made two hours roll by.

I Love You, Man

I LOVE YOU, MAN, is a romantic comedy about two men. Yes, it's about two heterosexual men, but that doesn't stop it from hewing to the romantic comedy formula. That's part of its charm: this movie knows exactly what it's doing, exactly how it's subverting convention, and it's having great fun doing it.

Oh, and it's funny. Really, really funny. Laugh out loud funny.

Paul Rudd's a guy who has always gotten along better with women than men. That's a problem because, when it's time to get married, he has no close male friend - no best man. A normal guy would just choose a relative, but pay no attention to these technicalities: we're setting up a romantic comedy here! Desperate for a friend, Rudd has a meet-cute with Jason Segel (who wrote and starred in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, one of the few films that actually occupies space on my DVD rack) and asks him out on a man-date.

And there's your setup. The rest of the movie puts its characters (played by, among others, Jane Curtin, J.K. Simmons, and Andy Samberg) through the gears of the romantic comedy machine, which really serves only as a chassis on which to hang joke after joke after joke. The jokes are funny and well played, and this film kept me laughing from the opening to the closing credits.

I'm not going to write that I loved it, man. But I just did. I feel cheap.

Duplicity

Universal Pictures let DUPLICITY down. The studio clearly didn't know how to market the movie, going with advertising that hammered on the theme of "sexy sexy sexy." Yeah, well, we have the Internet now. We don't need to go to the movies for sexy. The marketing theme should have been "story story story."

Clive Owen is a Bond manque (as usual) who seduces Julia Roberts at an embassy party in swinging Dubai. She drugs him, steals some documents out of his briefcase, and disappears. That's the opening credits, and that's your setup for a charming spy vs. spy story that's a touch THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR and a touch ADAM'S RIB. Writer/Director Tony Gilroy knows how to create mature, enjoyable dialogue and situations, and he knows which actors to keep in check and which to let run. There are some supporting players here whom you will know but who didn't make the marketing the effort, and they flat-out steal the show. In fact, days later, I'm still chuckling at one of them.

DUPLICITY isn't laugh-out-loud funny, and it does cheat a bit at the end, but it's clever, it's fun, and it's a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. Throw it on while folding laundry and your chores will be over before you know it.

Marnie

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

MARNIE is the film about a poor, helpless felon who needs a repulsively self-satisfied man to trap her, rape her, and control every aspect of her existence until he cures her through the power of his manly will. It’s like THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, but in this version, both combatants are horrid criminals. Marnie’s signature line is, “Oh, Mark. I don’t want to go to jail. I’d rather stay with you.” That, kids, is romance.

The film stars Tippi Hendren as a woman who is so disconnected from her true self that she appears more blonde automoton than an actual human being. Or perhaps that’s just Hendren’s acting technique. Sean Connery plays the repulsive, sadistic rapist as, basically, Sean Connery (Interesting side note: his character, Mark, is from Pennsylvania, yet he has a Scottish accent. His father has an English accent. So much for the Pennsylvania Dutch!). These people have never been less interesting.

Alfred Hitchcock directed MARNIE, yet the film has all the polish of a poorly made rerun from Sunday Night at the Movies. Between the annoying use of red filters to show Marnie’s near-total paralysis at the sight of the color red (Really, what does this woman do when she menstruates? Curl up in a corner and scream for four days?) and its ridiculously amateurish in-n-out zooming at a moment of moral crisis, one can only forgive Hitch by assuming that he was on heavy psychotropic drugs throughout the process of making this movie and give him a pass.

Some people love MARNIE. But hey, some people love balut. I don’t ever need another go at either.

Watchmen

The print version of WATCHMEN always struck me as Reagan-era sour grapes hippie bullshit. Sure, it was famous for its deconstruction of the superhero comic, but I don’t care about superhero comics, never having collected ‘em as a kid. So I was wary of the filmed version of the story. After G.W. Bush’s parody of conservatism and THE INCREDIBLES’ brilliant study of the superhero genre, what did WATCHMEN, in any form, have to offer?

Not much, really. It’s still hippie bullshit and its “post-heroism heroes” conceit has nearly become a genre staple. But y’know what? It’s really good hippie bullshit, and it’s really good genre criticism. It looks great, hits its marks, and moves right along, and it does something the print version doesn’t: it actually makes me care about Rorschach and the Night Owl and Sally Jupiter and all the rest. The reveals feel less forced. The characters feel more organic. The political and artistic commentary works as part of a unified whole.

Had this film been released ten years ago, it may have been revolutionary. It’s too late for that, politically or artistically, but WATCHMEN is still a good story well told. Peace out, bro.

Waltz With Bashir

WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a visually striking, deeply personal film that did nothing for me.

The film, which makes brilliant use of animation to shift between times and places, follows the journey of a man who doesn’t recollect much about his time in the Israeli Army during the 1983 Lebanon War. As he interviews old friends and colleagues and fleshes out his memories, we see what he sees and experience his revelations.

I think the film didn’t work for me because I happen to have a sound knowledge of this particular conflict, having studied it in graduate school. Its revelations revealed nothing to me; I’d already plumbed its dark secrets. Even its devastating closing montage only revisited material I’d seen before.

But I think this film could be quite effective for the viewer who is unfamiliar with its subject matter. Filmmaker Ari Folman poured his heart into the production, and it shows. I respect WALTZ WITH BASHIR, even if it didn’t speak to me.

He's Just Not That Into You

Look , I get that HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU was not made with me in mind. I didn’t expect to see any stuff get blown up real good, nor did I expect to see anyone kick anyone else in the face. But I sat down for it anyway: a friend recommended it, and I like to tell myself that I don’t believe in guy movies and chick movies, but only good movies and bad movies.

This movie begins with a “girl talk” voiceover about the nature of relationships that effectively announced that not only was it not made with me in mind, but it was made with a mind to specifically exclude members of my gender and orientation. This movie was just not that into me.

And that’s ok. I’ve been out with my wife and sat drinking my coffee while she talks with her female friends or relatives. I get that things don’t need to cater to my tastes to have value. But while HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU is professionally written, photographed, and acted, it’s an intellectually dishonest film that spends 7/8 of its running time advocating for a world view that it abandons when it’s time to put smiles on faces before the closing credits.

I can forgive a film many flaws, but that kind of dishonesty is not among them. HE’S JUST NOT INTO YOU is a liar. Don’t get into it.

Valkyrie

VALKYRIE is the saddest film I’ve seen in ages.

Had the conspirators depicted in VALKYRIE succeeded, Germany could have thrown off the shackles of Nazi oppression and redeemed itself. It could have saved countless lives in the camps and on the battlefields. It could have prevented millions from living and dying under the boot of the Communists.

But, of course, the conspirators failed. Modern Germans still wrestle with the legacy of Nazism. Memorial walls carry the names of the countless victims of Nazis and Communists alike. Eastern Europe still struggles to catch up with the West.

Amazingly, VALKYRIE infuses this elegy with sympathy and tension, keeping us engaged and hoping, though we know how things end. It does so through the canny use of all-star casting, leveraging the recognizability of players such as Carice Van Houton, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson to build instant rapport with and sympathy for a cast so large it might be easy to lose track of who’s who. It does so through the efforts of Tom Cruise, a man who has been criticized for his offscreen behavior but who remains among the most gifted and charismatic stars of his generation. It does so by leveraging our knowledge of the broad outlines of history against our ignorance of the details: we all know things went wrong, but wmost of us don't know how.

This film largely succeeds in portraying its time, its place, its people, though it missteps in failing to recreate the paranoia that the all-seeing Gestapo engendered at the time. Its period details feel right, as does its grasp of German culture. While VALKYRIE, with its serious subject matter and foregone conclusion, may not appeal to everyone, it meets it goals.

If only its subjects had met theirs.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Here’s a review of a film that happened while I was writing it. I opened a blank page thinking that I knew what I was going to set down, but once the writing process forced me to give HAPPY-GO-LUCKY serious consideration, the film grew and turned into something quite remarkable. I liked HAPPY-GO-LUCKY when the credits rolled. Now that I’ve thought it over a bit, I see it as a laudable achievement.

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is one of those people who chooses happiness. She’s quick with a smile and a laugh and a silly quip, and she borders on irrepressible. She’s so relentless that, for a while there, I thought there was something wrong with her. If there weren’t more to Poppy than meets the eye, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY wouldn’t be much of a movie. In revealing her, however, the film doesn’t go where I thought it would: into an inner world of pain or sorrow. Rather, the film does something marvelous: it explores the depths of her goodness and the reach of her will to happiness.

Think about that for a minute. Think about the difficulty of the art of joy. How many films focus on desperation, or revenge, or depression, or greed, or fear, or any one of the myriad traps we may encounter on our lives’ paths? How many filmmakers (and audiences, for that matter) confuse darkness with maturity, desolation with wisdom?

Depression is easy. Anyone can write the blues.

But happinesss, real happiness, is hard. It’s hard to live and it’s especially hard to create in film. In HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, Mike Leigh doesn’t give us an idiot or a stunted human being (though we can see how some may regard her as such). Rather, he gives us a woman who sees the world as it is and responds to it with an almost Christlike compassion and love. He does this through a barely perceptible dramatic arc, inviting us simply to spend time with Poppy and her friends, to observe her and those whom she touches. He puts Poppy in a world of bright, inviting colors, surrounds her with cheerful music, gives her real conversations with real people, and watches her try to find what joy there is to be found. Poppy doesn’t always succeed, and she may occasionally have to walk away. But that’s life. The point is, Poppy gets it. How often do we see that?

Mike Leigh has created a wonderful film here. If you haven’t yet seen it, give it a spin. You’ll be happy that you did.

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.

Chocolate

Oh my God.

Oh. My. God.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.

Who is this woman, JeeJa Yanin? She has the physical presence of Johnny Depp. She nearly has the onscreen grace of a young Jackie Chan. She works her butt off: two years in training preproduction, two more years during production, and it shows. Muy Thai, Kung Fu, Jeet Kun Do, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Kendo, gymnastics, rail fu, chair fu, knife fu, glass table fu (c’mon – there’s always glass table fu), sign fu, ledge fu, ice fu, even neuromuscular disability fu: this woman can do it all.

CHOCOLATE, directed by Prachya Pinkaew of ONG BAK: MUY THAI WARRIOR and TOM YUNG GONG fame, continues the Thai eclipse of the hoary Hong Kong martial arts thriller. Featuring eye-popping stuntwork that’ll make you go “Wow!” showcased by direction and editing that give us space to marvel at the skill and craftsmanship of its performers, and complemented with a score that underlines the action beats just so, CHOCOLATE is a worthy successor to Pinkaew’s earlier work and a must-see for fans of martial arts pictures, dance pictures, and plain old action thrillers.

CHOCOLATE: it’s the second-best film, after FROZEN RIVER, that I’ve seen this summer. It has movie has absolutely everything you could want in an action picture: it looks great, sounds great, features phenomenal stunt work, and just plain rocks. Bring on the JeeJa Yanin / Tony Jaa teamup picture. I’ll be there.

My Best Friend's Girl

MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL is an affront to God and man. It's a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor funny.*

It's _Cyrano de Bergerac_ with Dane Cook as Christian, Jason Biggs as Cyrano, and Kate Hudson as Roxane. At least, that appears to be the structure that the film rips off. It deviates from the straight Cyrano story, which is fine, but it fails to give us any reason to care whether any of its annoying, shallow characters live or die, much less find love.

This film's cinematography is boring, its dialogue is boring, its story is boring, and its actors are boring.* I saw this movie for free (It was playing in the background in the place where I'm using the computer), and I still want my money back.

MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL can take a hike.

*Except when Alex Baldwin is onscreen. When did this guy turn into a comic genius?

Knowing

There are two kinds of people in this world: DARK CITY people and THE MATRIX people. DARK CITY has atmosphere; THE MATRIX has gunfire. DARK CITY has style; THE MATRIX has fetish wear. DARK CITY reveals; THE MATRIX tells.

Yeah, I’m a DARK CITY guy.

You know what else I am? A Nicolas Cage guy. Ok, not enough of one to sit through NATIONAL TREASURE 2, but enough to forgive him for BANGKOK DANGEROUS. VALLEY GIRL can earn a man a lifetime of cred, as far as I’m concerned.

Thus, when Alex Proyas (the director of DARK CITY) puts Nicolas Cage in front of a camera, I’m there. In KNOWING, Proyas directs Cage as an MIT astrophysicist who unlocks a terrible secret and races to discover its ramifications. Cage is fine in the Nicolas Cage Dressed Up as a Professor role, but what makes this film so enjoyable is its Proyas style. KNOWING just plain looks great, even if it does go full Emmerich at times. Proyas knows how to get solid performances from even his child actors, and he knows how to build a world whose every detail serves to advance his story.

Is this as fine a film as FROZEN RIVER? Few are. Is this a solid thriller with strong supernatural and science fiction elements? Sure is. Is it also better than THE MATRIX? Oh, oh yes. If Proyas and Cage are your cup of tea, you’re sure to enjoy KNOWING.

Taken

A group of actors is about to become unemployed.

There’s a certain kind of actor out there – you know the type. A thespian like Mark Dacascos, say, or Steven Segal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. This guy is a working actor, he’s paying the bills, and he’s turning out one direct-to-video feature after another. In one film, he’s an ex-soldier out for revenge. In another, a kung fu master come down from the mountaintop to get the precious MacGuffin. In yet another, he’s a cop, or a spy, or an accountant who works out a lot. It’s all the same, and it all pays the bills: the actor sneers, he shoots, he kicks people in the face. Then he goes home, cashes his check, and everybody’s happy.

And then, a Liam Neeson comes along. An Academy Award nominee. A marquee name. Darkman, for Pete’s sake! And he makes a movie like TAKEN, in which he plays an ex-CIA agent who is both Out for Revenge and Getting the MacGuffin. Not only does he act the pants off of everyone else in the genre, but it turns out he’s got some pretty good moves in the stunt department, to boot. Hey, Liam, bit of advice: it’s unwise to enter these guys’ territory. They may be desperate men.

TAKEN, then, serves as an exercise in the farfetched: what happens when you take a capable, respected actor, surround him with stuntmen, and tell him to go kick some ass? I’ll tell you what happens: asses get kicked, and they kicked by a guy whose conviction the audience never thinks to question. Liam Neeson takes TAKEN, your standard, DTV-type revenge / MacGuffin thriller, and elevates it to something more: a study in desperation, in love, and in high-class ass-kickery the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

In the process, however, TAKEN calls the entire future of the DTV thriller into question. Will Judi Dench soon play an edge – of – retirement assassin out to do one … last … job? When can we expect Sean Penn to show us his chops as an idealistic former cop who must kickbox his way through a corrupt police force to avenge his former partner? Personally, I’m holding out for the mother lode: Kate Winslet as a post-apocalyptic savior, preferably one with a totally awesome car, or maybe eyes that blink sideways.

It’s only a matter of time. But when that day comes, a certain class of actor will be out of work. It’ll be Neeson’s fault. Perhaps he can hire a few members of the old cadre as bodyguards.