Broken Ghost

Most teen angst can be relieved by soulful guitar player.

(2017) Thriller (Film Mode) Autry Hayden-Wilson, Scottie Thompson, Nick Farnell, Devon Bagby, Lessard Brandon, John Teague, Joy Brunson, George Griffith, Frank Lotito, Tyler Garrett, Lee Williams, Lexi Anastasia. Directed by Richard Gray

 

One of life’s great truths is that you cannot run away from your problems; they tend to follow you wherever you go, particularly when there’s a viral video involved.

Imogen Day (Hayden-Wilson) has left the building, or at least where she was living before and has moved to rural Montana along with her mother Samantha (Thompson) who has purchased the local pharmacy, and her artist husband Will (Farnell) who has gone on ahead to set things up at their isolated farmhouse.

There is definitely trouble in paradise (or at least Montana); Imogen now wishes to be known as Grace. She is a headstrong girl, but is sight-impaired. She’s not fully blind but most things are a blur to her and brightly lit so that necessitates her wearing sunglasses nearly all the time. She is somewhat suspicious of people and tends to shun them or at least drive them away but with good reason; she was severely bullied at her previous school and is trying to make a fresh start where nobody knows her. Will seems to have developed a porn addiction and an inspiration deprivation; he’s barely able to work on his art and ever since the issues with Imogen/Grace began. He has also had difficulty sexually with his wife. Samantha is severely frustrated and has taken to going out with her employee and friend Cath (Brunson) in the local bar after work.

To make matters worse, it turns out the isolated farmhouse they got for a song was a bargain for good reason; the previous resident, a somewhat eccentric and talented artist, slit the throat of his wheelchair-bound wife and 12-year-old daughter before hanging himself. Now there are some disturbing, unexplained things going on; drawings appear on bathroom mirrors, the television turns on by itself, there are strange noises coming from the attic that might be attributable to raccoons, but the whispers of Imogen’s true name that she hears at night are certainly not the work of raccoons.

The family is beginning to disintegrate from within. The source of Grace/Imogen’s bullying is discovered by new bullies at her new school. Samantha succumbs to her animal needs and has wild sex with a handsome stranger she meets in the bar, and Will finds a disturbing mural behind the wallpaper in Grace’s room. While initially Will denies that the house is haunted, he has begun to accept that it might be but that the spirits haunting the house if there are any seem to be benign. The goings-on in the house begin to mirror what happened previously to the homicidal artist – and there is the matter of a biker turf war that has escalated after the disappearance of two bikers that may or may not be connected with the Day’s home and suddenly Grace/Imogen has all the angst she can handle.

There are some things that work really well in this film and there are some things that don’t. To the good are the performances, particularly that of Thompson who is insanely sexy without being slutty, a desperate housewife who loves her daughter and her husband but sees everything falling apart and feels helpless to do anything about it. Hayden-Wilson has the kind of role that is all too common these days – that of the feisty, headstrong teen girl with a disability but she keeps the role from becoming tired or cliché. While I wonder how many parents would let a kid with vision issues as severe as hers wander around an unfamiliar landscape without someone to keep an eye on her, Hayden-Wilson has the confidence to play Grace/Imogen as the kind of young woman who would inspire parents to trust her that far.

While Gray does a fine job of building up the suspense in the first half of the movie, the pace is exceedingly slow and ponderous which is fine for European audiences but American thriller fans might not have the patience for it, particularly since the second half of the movie is an exercise in lost opportunities as the good will built up in the first part of the movie is all but spent by the time the credits unspool. The ending really is rather preposterous but although the temptation is great, I won’t spoil the elements of it even to give constructive criticism.

In the end this is a movie about loneliness; Grace/Imogen is lonely by choice, thrusting any would-be friends as far away from her as possible. Samantha is lonely in her bed as well as in her marriage and Will is isolated by his feelings of failure both as an artist and as a man. The family is isolated in their remote Montana farmhouse, and within that farmhouse each family member is alone. That’s not a bad metaphor for modern life if you ask me.

REASONS TO SEE: Gray builds up a decent creepy factor during the first half.
REASONS TO AVOID: The pace is very slow-moving.
FAMILY VALUES: There is quite a bit of sexuality and nudity, some violence and scenes of bullying.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The movie was filmed in Livingston, Montana.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, Fandango Now, iTunes, Vudu
CRITICAL MASS: As of 2/27/19: Rotten Tomatoes: No score yet: Metacritic: No score yet.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: See No Evil
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Stray

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War

Jason Statham and Jet Li prepare to face off in the tension-free climax.

(2007) Crime Action (Lionsgate) Jason Statham, Jet Li, John Lone, Devon Aoki, Kane Kosugi, Luis Guzman, Saul Rubinek, Ryo Ishibashi, Sung Kang, Nadine Velazquez, Andrea Roth, Matthew St. Patrick, Mark Cheng, Terry Chen. Directed by Phillip G. Atwell.

There are Asian martial arts movies, and then there are American martial arts movies. Asian ones tend to be way over the top, nonstop action sequences with plots that are almost an afterthought, more of an excuse to move the story from one action sequence to the next. American martial arts movies tend to be grim thrillers with double and triple crosses, lantern-jawed heroes and more guns than fisticuffs. 

War is an American martial arts movie with a pair of FBI agents – Crawford (Statham) and his partner Lone (Chen) who are monitoring a Triad smuggling operation into San Francisco when all Cleveland breaks out. Gunmen have come on the scene and turned it into a war zone. Lone wants to take a closer look, but the more cautious Crawford wants to wait for backup. Still, a closer look might not be a bad idea, so they go in and encounter a great deal of carnage. When Crawford spots a single bullet casing, he realizes that this is the work of the near-legendary assassin Rogue (Li), who was trained by the CIA and then turned on his handlers, becoming a mercenary for hire. By this time, however, it’s too late – Rogue shoots Crawford and is preparing to deliver the coup de gras when Lone rescues Crawford and shoots Rogue in the face, apparently killing him.

But of course, in an action movie, even people who are shot in the face don’t die, and a none-too-pleased Rogue pays Lone a visit, murdering his entire family and setting his home ablaze. Crawford is devastated by the fate of his partner.

Three years later, Crawford has obsessed over bringing the elusive Rogue to justice, but Rogue has fallen off the radar. His obsession has cost him his own marriage, as his wife (Roth) is happy to remind him. Still, even without Rogue, Crawford has a great deal to keep him busy. In addition to the Triads, run by Chang (Lone), the Japanese Yakuza have moved into the area, whose boss is the Japan-based Shiro (Ishibishi) who sends his daughter Kira (Aoki) to prepare his American operations for his arrival. 

Chang and Shiro are blood enemies; Shiro engineered the massacre of Chang’s family in Hong Kong and stole millions of dollars of art and artifacts from their home, all of which he has sold save for two ancient miniature statues of horses, made of gold. Shiro wants to sell these last two items as well, but nobody in Asia will buy them now that Chang has once again risen to prominence. So, he decides to sell them in America. Unfortunately, Rogue – now back on the scene – has apparently switched sides, having left Shiro’s employ for Chang’s. This act alone sets off a chain of events that leads to an all-out war between the Yakuza and the Triad, with many innocents caught in the crossfire. For Crawford, none of this matters – his chance to administer final justice to Rogue is at hand.

Where to begin here? This is a completely wasted opportunity. Statham and Li are two of the most charismatic action stars today, but most of their action sequences require little of them but to snarl and shoot. The script is a hodgepodge of action thriller cliches and forced twists and turns. The only real interesting twist here is Rogue’s identity (revealed in the final reel); the ending is terrible and essentially reveals that all the drama evolved from one of the main characters’ completely out-of-character actions. This plot point is so preposterous that you can only throw popcorn at the screen and boo or hiss, or whatever it is you do to reflect your displeasure at movie theaters. 

Statham and Li were both coming off of terrific performances, Li in Fearless and Statham in Crank, but they seem oddly flat here. The whole movie is building for their climactic encounter, but when it finally comes, it’s anticlimactic. There is almost no fighting nor is there any chemistry. Interestingly enough, the two would spend time on the same side in last summer’s The Expendables.

Atwell is making his feature debut; previously he directed music videos and quite frankly, he has problems keeping the story flowing over the length of the film. The whole subplot involving Benny (Guzman) and the plastic surgeon (Rubinek) is superfluous and unnecessary, much as having both “superfluous” and “unnecessary” in the same sentence is. While on the plus side he doesn’t have the tendency of most music video directors to use endless quick-cutting and surreal or symbolic passages, he doesn’t really show he has an aptitude for action.

That’s not to say that the movie is totally without merit. There are some nice sequences with Statham and his FBI team, and Aoki makes for a menacing baddie but for the most part, this is just wasted opportunity.

WHY RENT THIS: Some nice sequences. Lots of bullets flying.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Little or no chemistry. Plot is too cliché or overloaded with twists. Ending is preposterous. Soundtrack is barely listenable.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s a good deal of violence, some of it fairly gruesome and also a good deal of sex, some of it fairly gruesome.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The title for the movie was originally Rogue which Screen Gems changed to avoid confusion with a killer crocodile movie that Dimension was releasing more or less at the same time.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: The Blu-Ray contains a trivia track and a gag reel.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $40.5M on an unreported production budget; the movie probably broke even.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: Miss Potter