The Croods; Rush; A Most Wanted Man

The Croods

The Croods is fine.  It’s pretty, it tells a nice story, and its voice cast includes personal favorites Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Cloris Leachman.

That’s about all I can say for it, however.  I didn’t laugh.  I didn’t cry.  I just sorta rocked along pleasantly for an hour and half.  That ain’t bad.  It ain’t great, either.  It’s fine.  No, really.  It’s fine.

Rush

I spent the first hour or so of Rush not enjoying the movie.  Like Amadeus, the film sets up a conflict between a natural talent (Chris Hemsworth, a British Formula One driver) and a grinder (Daniel Brühl, his Austrian nemesis (the actor also appears in A Most Wanted Man, discussed below)).   Thing is, I identified with the grinder. Hemsworth’s character put my teeth on edge.

Then the movie took an unexpected turn, went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and made me hold my breath, tense in sympathy to the action onscreen, and hang on every twist and turn of the competitors’ races.

I feel like I started out with Days of Thunder and finished with something wonderful.  Rush is the most surprising movie I’ve seen this year. 

A Most Wanted Man

Some deaths get to you, even if you never really knew the person in question.  I still miss Phil Hartman.  I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman plays the Hamburg chief of a small German intelligence organization occupied with hunting terrorists.  The film, based on a John le Carré novel, occupies itself not with fast cars and gadgets, but with the nondescript, dedicated, and frequently exhausted people who actually make the intelligence community go.  Hoffman, overweight, disheveled, and brilliant, is a perfect match for this world.  His character belongs in dimly lit bars, crafting plans and making deals, and I believed in him every step of the way.

The plot?  Well, it’s a le Carré story, so it features twists and surprises and a kind of mundane weariness that feels all the more immediate because we can imagine it happening right in the next booth over.

The effect?  Well, mostly sadness.  Sadness for the characters in the story, but particular sadness for the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our generation’s great actors and a talent that I’m sure to miss for a long time to come.

Narc

Joe Carnahan's NARC is a very well acted, rather overdirected, and ultimately satisfying procedural.

In NARC, Jason Patric returns to a character that seems right out of his criminally underappreciated RUSH. Det. Sgt. Nick Tellis is a cop in rough shape. He used to be an undercover narcotics officer, but he accidentally hit a pregnant woman in a gunfight and he's barely hanging on the paycheck from his administrative leave. Oh, and he may have been a drug addict, to boot. Tellis is given a chance to return to active duty to solve the murder of another undercover narc, and he's teamed with the always unpredictable (and possibly psychotic) Ray Liotta.

The story has its usual twists and turns, betrayals and redemptions. What makes it stand out are the subtle, finely tuned performances of Patric and Liotta. We come to believe in these guys and their journeys, and the actors bring a much needed reality to a film that might otherwise succumb to its love of blue filters, jump cuts, and dazzling feats of editing.

This movie has some strong positives and some mild negatives. Overall, I'd say it's worth the rental.