‘Life of Crime’: Leonard’s ‘Jackie Brown’ crew back at shenanigans, for lesser haul
Elmore Leonard, the beloved master crime and western novelist, transcended seamlessly the divide between pulp and celluloid. His career is littered with great novels that became great movies (“Get Shorty,” “Jackie Brown” and “Out of Sight” to name a few), a smattering of original screenplays (“Joe Kidd”) and even took a few turns as producer. Cormac McCarthy might be his only peer.
Leonard passed last year. Among his last labors were executive producing this adaptation of his similarly named novel.
The prolific writer’s cinematic gems have always been imbued with quirk and the kind of dark comedy that can be found only within the hardboiled world of crime. The characters are larger than life and full of foibles and flaws, and as a result always quite accessibly human. Leonard clearly loved his darlings, and so do we, which makes “Life of Crime” a treat or a total disaster to see Robert De Niro’s floundering ex-con Louis and Samuel Jackson’s lethal Ordell Robbie played by John Hawkes and Yasiin Bey, current name of Mos Def. Hawkes carries Louis forward, but Def is no sub in for Jackson. Part of that is he lacks Jackson’s thespian firepower, and part is that the script by relative newbie Daniel Schechter (who also directs) makes Ordell less potent. Continue reading
That premise might sound silly, and it’s hard not to think of Putin and the Russia of the moment, though there’s never any mention of the notorious president (the film’s based on Bill Granger’s 1986 book “There Are No Spies,” which clung to Cold War fumes). That aside, as a straight-up spy thriller, “The November Man” does offer fierce and feverishly paced rewards. The rub is that Devereaux happens to have loved the double agent in question (with whom he has a 12-year-old daughter – and a cafe on Lake Geneva – that none of the folks running the machine know of) and that causes his handlers some concern, so they assign Devereaux’s former protégé, a young can-do field operative by the name of Mason (a hunky yet generic Luke Bracey) the task of cleaning up the stink Devereaux is stirring up in Belgrade. 
Like its predecessor, “A Dame to Kill For” is broken into four segments. Interestingly, the character of Dwight, which was played by Clive Owen in 2005, is played here by Josh Brolin and Miho, the lethal blade-wielding assassin from Old Town originally played by Devon Aoki is updated by Jamie Chung (“Sucker Punch”). The other players remain, including Mickey Rourke as Marv, the pulp-prose-spouting strong man with an iron jaw, Jessica Alba as the troubled object of desire, Nancy, and Powers Boothe as the corrupt and ruthless Senator Roark, whose family seeded Sin City (Basin City, but the “Ba” is X-ed out) with the pillars of ill repute back in the day to draw a dollar from those settling out west. The use of Rodriguez’s rich black and white photog helps mask some of those nine years in between.
Old-school old guys schooling buff newbies with plenty of tongue-in-cheek ha-has was the way of the first films. “Expendables 3” starts off that way, somewhere in a Baltic/Eastern Bloc country with Barney Ross (Stallone), the series quarterback of a covert military ops group, springing an old colleague (Wesley Snipes) amid great, witty barbs about “tax evasion” and “blades.” Then it’s onto Mogadishu, where Barney and crew go on a routine mission to stop an arms trade and get their asses handed to them. The fly in the ointment, and adding to the heavy list of new names, is Mel Gibson as Conrad Stonebanks, who’s as bad-assed as the whole Expendables crew and arguably the dark side of Gibson’s already certifiable Riggs persona from the “Lethal Weapon” franchise.
“Storm” is a humble effort with the budget of “Sharknado” and the big-screen aspirations of “Twister.” Even bolstered by a meaty budget, that 1996 film was no masterpiece, but it had masterful thespians Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the cast, and flying cows. It also had well regarded cinematographer Jan de Bont (he shot “Die Hard” and “Basic Instinct”) taking the reins (his prior effort was “Speed”), which in a way ties us back to “Storm”: Director Steven Quale has toiled as second unit director on James Cameron projects. He might not quite have his hands around sculpting a full-bodied drama just yet, but the one thing he clearly does know are FX. The rendering of the massive twisters – one a flaming tornado – is vivid and viscerally done. As far as character and plot, that’s pretty much the eternal overcast sky while sitting in a steel-plated storm-chasing vehicle hoping for lightning and mayhem to strike.
Colin Firth gets a big scene-chewing role as Stanley Crawford, a 1920s illusionist who takes the stage as a Fu Manchu-like incarnation known as the Great Wei Ling Soo. He wows audiences, making elephants disappear and sawing women in half and, like Houdini did in his time, debunks hoaxes, which Stanley agrees to do when fellow magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) asks him to come to a country villa in France to expose a young American woman shaking down a susceptible and well-off widow (Jackie Weaver). The young American woman in question, Sophie Baker, is played by none other than Emma Stone, a big-eyed cutie with auburn locks and by logistical association alone muse du jour to Allen. But she’s no Diane Keaton, not even a Mia Farrow or Mia Sorvino, for that matter. She’s game, but asked to do a lot with a little and beyond her range. Thankfully she has Firth to play off of, and he’s masterful. Initially when the game is afoot in the gorgeous greenery of Southern France, there’s promise and a playfulness in the air. The film suggests twist and turns to come, false reveals and oneupmanship, but then romance floats into the picture, and the notion of god too. What a buzzkill.
For What it's Worth 