Above the Law (1988).

Review #2038: Above the Law.

Cast: 

Steven Seagal (Sergeant Nicolo "Nico" Toscani), Pam Grier (Detective Delores "Jacks" Jackson), Henry Silva (CIA Agent Kurt Zagon), Ron Dean (Detective Lukich), Sharon Stone (Sara Toscani), Gene Barge (Detective Henderson), Chelcie Ross (CIA Agent Nelson Fox), Ronnie Barron (CIA Bartender), Nicholas Kusenko (FBI Agent Neeley), and Gregory Alan Williams (FBI Agent Halloran) Directed by Andrew Davis (#176 - The Fugitive, #187 - Holes, and #1877 - Under Siege)

Review: 

"The whole motivation behind me doing this film was my trying to make up for all the things I've seen-and done. I'm tired of seeing us try to destabilize governments, prop up dictators and get involved with drug smugglers and crooks."

Admittedly, it is hard to look at an action star unless you start with their very first film just to see where things could go from that point. This also applies to the director at times too, if you think about it. There apparently is a rumor that the career of Steven Seagal started because one guy in Michael Ovitz really thought that the man that instructed him in aikido could be in films. Of course, since Ovitz happened to be the founder of Creative Artists Agency, sometimes it really does help to have friends in high places. Seagal was born in Lansing, Michigan but moved to Fullerton, California when he was five years old. After his teenage years (spent between a local dojo and playing rock music), he became interested in Japan and lived between there and the U.S. for years (he taught at a dojo in Japan due to marriage). Seagal has claimed at times to have been close to CIA agents when living in Japan teaching aikido (along with setting up safe houses for the Shah of Iran in 1979), but who the hell knows? Seagal did have some film experience before this film with a total of three credits, which was as stunt coordinator in The Challenge (1982), martial arts instructor in Never Say Never Again (1983) and choreographer in A View to a Kill (1985). The screenplay was done by Steven Pressfield, Ronald Shusett, and Andrew Davis, while Seagal and Davis (who also served as producers) co-wrote the story, and it would be the last one Seagal was given a writing credit for until his direct-to-video days years later. Davis, a Chicago native, was actually a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before he became interested in film. He made his feature debut with Stony Island (1978), a musical drama that featured his brother Richard alongside a depiction of his hometown and musicians. The Final Terror (1983) failed to find a distributor for years, but his third film in Code of Silence (1985), featuring Chuck Norris in a crime action feature, was both a hit and one that pegged him as an action director.

Strangely enough, the movie does show pretty well just how a screen presence Steven Seagal could be from the very get go, one that utilizes its 99-minute runtime for a solid conspiracy feature that invites the viewer to see an action star come out of the blue with efficient nature. In lesser hands, it might have come off as a bizarre attempt at making a "Soldier of Fortune" magazine come to life, but Davis and company have stocked interesting characters and atmosphere that make this a film with interest in what it wants to say that comes off as sincere (for an action film anyway) and not fanatical. Seagal is a good reason for it, because there is something about his screen presence that manages to show his aikido skills along with a sobering presence that shows him kick ass but also look more than just a caricature trying to play a "Chicago cop with Italian roots". In other words, he stands on his own two feet to kick as a star, one that isn't so much about quips or rampant violence (not that those are bad things of course). The sequence involving the bombing in a church is probably a good scene to gauge just what Seagal can do within mounting levels of tension, or perhaps the sequence near the end with Ross about just who isn't above one's "law" is just as useful to highlight. Silva makes for a quality adversarial presence in those bits that he slithers onto screen, which relies more on terror lurking around, even if the lone fight sequence can only go one way. Grier makes a solid partner to bounce off Seagal in the procedural bits (Dean and Barge seem right at home there anyways), while Stone (a few years away from star prominence) makes quality weary support with Seagal. Of course, since my favorite presence to see is Ross in a delightfully scuzzy man on the side, your milage may vary. Released in a time where secret wars of the CIA could be read in book form in public, Above the Law maintains a steady pace in action and narrative that makes for a credible and solid first venture for its star and a neat feature for Davis to maintain consistency as an action director.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Ocean's 11 (1960).

Review #1709: Ocean's 11.

Cast: 

Frank Sinatra (Danny Ocean), Dean Martin (Sam Harmon), Sammy Davis Jr (Josh Howard), Peter Lawford (Jimmy Foster), Angie Dickinson (Beatrice Ocean), Richard Conte (Anthony Bergdorf), Cesar Romero (Duke Santos), Patrice Wymore (Adele Ekstrom), Joey Bishop ('Mushy' O'Connors), Akim Tamiroff (Spyros Acebos), Henry Silva (Roger Corneal), Ilka Chase (Mrs. Restes), Buddy Lester (Vince Massler), Richard Benedict ('Curly' Steffans), Jean Willes (Mrs. Bergdorf), Norman Fell (Peter Rheimer), and Clem Harvey (Louis Jackson) Directed and Produced by Lewis Milestone (#901 - The Racket and #1336 - The Front Page)

Review: 

See, the thing about heist movies is you have to make sure one really manages to collect either an interesting premise or a useful cast to generate excitement and the potential for a worthy payoff. This is a nice way of trying to dance around a movie that is probably the most star-studded mediocrity of its era. One cannot be too harsh to this film, if only because it was the penultimate work of Milestone as a film director, and his output had decreased in the 1950s (he directed seven features while shifting to television). This was the first film to feature a majority of what is dubbed the "Rat Pack", which was used to refer to a group of entertainers that made a bunch of films together along with appearing with each other in casino venues in Las Vegas (to be pedantic, it actually is the second "Rat Pack", since the first involved Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) - in this case, the group (who once referred to themselves as "The Summit", no kidding) referred to Sinatra, Davis, Martin, Lawford, and Bishop, although there were also "mascots", which involved folks such as Angie Dickinson and Shirley MacLaine. Again, it's a silly name to refer to folks that already worked with each other quite a few times before this film (such as It Happened in Brooklyn, which had Sinatra and Lawford). Over the next 24 years, there would be a handful of movies featuring at least two members of the group, which resulted in features such as Sergeants 3 (1962) along with Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964); perhaps fittingly, the last time they appeared with each other was Cannonball Run II, a vehicle movie designed to feature as many name stars as possible. The idea for the film was told to Lawford in 1955, and he later bought the outline for $10,000 (of course, a different account involves him hearing from a director that had heard it from a gas station attendant before buying the rights in 1958) - tasked to write the story was George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell.

The only heist that this movie manages to pull is tricking you into believing it really needs to be 127 minutes. You could probably grab the script and tear a bunch of scenes out and probably come out of it with no real loss. This is a movie made to stoke the egos of folks who never seem to take this film seriously at any bit of time, and Milestone seems thoroughly outmatched to do anything other than make a plodding affair with a little bit of glitz and vignettes that creak and moans before eventually moving on to an actual heist that can't even land the payoff. Perhaps the best way to describe Sinatra's performance is to use the account stated in a book about him, in which he "would show up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, do 20 minutes of work and then start drinking." Look, if you had to do a bunch of shows in the night and then do a bunch of filming in the morning for a film, who really wins out in the end? The "bare minimum" is a hard phrase to say about an actor who already has an Academy Award to his mantle, but there really isn't anything interesting to note about his performance beyond just saying that the charisma is lacking beyond corny phrases. The planning parts are okay, but it begs for something more than ad-libbing. Of course, the well might be a bit soiled by seeing a handful of movies with folks who seemed to be having a good time that had varied results. At least you get to hear Martin and Davis sing? Sure, Martin seems a bit too comfy at playing second banana, but at least "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" is somewhat fun to listen to. Davis suffers the most among the main group despite having the most interesting part to play in the heist, mostly because his time on screen doesn't register as much as it should (besides, the racial crack at the end is too lame to even mention). You might as well take Dickinson out of the story, because her presence is lacking to the point of comatose, packing zilch with Sinatra in attempts at playful combative chemistry that prove nothing to the actual film. Lawford might as well be replaced by a broom stick, if you think about it. The rest are here and there, essentially serving as dominos on a table with hastily-made legs that have no time for quirks. Honestly, the only interesting folks in the film are in small roles - Romero and Tamiroff (one used for leverage and the other used for comic relief). Taking nearly an hour to get to planning the heist and then getting near the 90 minute mark before actually executing it is a bit too much to ask for, no matter how much fun the folks seem to be having ad-libbing their way through. To me, you have two options with the heist: either it goes well, and they get away it...or it goes wrong. Honestly, by the time the last trick gets pulled, one just shakes their head at its mind-numbing futility. Well, I guess if one really needs a time capsule of easygoing folks in Vegas in the time before it became....well, Vegas, this might be the one to watch. If one is curious to see a bit of glitz to go with intimacy in a time long past and don't want to just look at a bunch of old photos of the city, this might be for you.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

Review #985: The Manchurian Candidate.

Cast:
Frank Sinatra (Maj. Bennett Marco), Laurence Harvey (Raymond Shaw), Angela Lansbury (Mrs. Iselin), Janet Leigh (Eugenie Rose Chaney), Henry Silva (Chunjin), James Gregory (Sen. John Yerkes Iselin), Leslie Parrish (Jocelyn Jordan), John McGiver (Sen. Thomas Jordan), Khigh Dheigh (Dr. Yen Lo), and James Edwards (Cpl. Allen Melvin) Directed by John Frankenheimer (#559 - Grand Prix)

Review:
This film is often billed as a neo-noir along with being called a suspense thriller, and while I'd argue the latter label applies more than the other, I can't deny the quality of the film, which is tremendous. It manages to be a cohesive thriller due to how it utilizes its cast. Each of the main cast members shine in the roles that they play, from Sinatra and his capable heroism to Lansbury and her cold calculative nature. Leigh isn't as big of a standout, but she does certainly contrast with the weirdness of the characters that form the story. Dheigh doesn't have much screen-time, but he does a fine job in an adversarial role. But it is Harvey and how he portrays this complex character that truly stands out. His scenes about how "unlovable" he is particularly a good standout in understanding the nature of his character, where he isn't merely an unlikable dupe. His moments in the film with Parrish and McGiver aren't too long, but they contrast perfectly in comparison with his scenes opposite Lansbury and Gregory, and those scenes certainly do lend to an emotional payoff, for better or for worse. Speaking of which, Lansbury and Gregory are also finely cast, with one of my favorite scenes being their exchange over the latter needing a more memorable number to use in his speeches. There are numerous parts of the film that serve as fine highlights (such as Harvey jumping into a lake with Sinatra watching), but I think the scene with Harvey and his men is a particular good one in how it executes itself with a fine sense of cleverness even with a premise as odd as brainwashing (or the motives) seems. This is a film that manages to lure you in with suspense without being too obvious about it along with taking its time, with a riveting climax to boot. On the whole, this is a fine feature that has enough from its cast and its style of telling its story with thrills.

Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.