Black Sea

First Hit:  Jude Law was great, the film lacked gripping drama and action.

There is a scene when they are pulling the gold across the bottom of the ocean floor and there was nothing that made all this compelling. This was the problem with the whole film; the setups and results were lackluster.

Captain Robinson (Law) did his best to make all this work but it wasn’t enough to carry the film. In essence this film is about working class people trying to find a way to use their skills to get something back. This group of men British and Russian decide to locate a sunken German U2 submarine that is carrying ~80 million dollars’ worth of gold. The crew is motley and they may or may not be trustworthy.

The film explores this with a few choice characters and script choices. Most of the film takes place in an old sub, therefore the sets are limited but they were wonderfully detailed.

Law brings a wonderfully full and expressive character. His maturation as an actor really shows here and I found myself very drawn into his character. All the other actors we OK including; Ben Mendelsohn, Tobias Menzies, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Michael Smiley, Karl Davies, and Konstantin Khabenskiy. Dennis Kelly wrote the plodding script. Kevin Macdonald directed this, and as with most underwater movies, it was dark.

Overall:  Law was the film.

Taken 3

First Hit:  Third time was not a charm for this series.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is back for a third time and instead of his wife or daughter being directly held hostage, here we have a situation where his former wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) is killed to get his attention.

He is being framed for the killing and it is up to him and a LA cop Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), to find the truth. As with all “Taken” films, there is a lot of violence, amazing skills of eluding his pursuers, and the righteous ending of his innocence. The frame-up is staged by his former wife’s husband and a Russian mobster.

The film felt constricted and Neeson is getting a little long in the tooth do be riding a car down an elevator shaft and magically surviving.

Neeson is good in this role he owns. However, the script, his age and the tired franchise all need to be retired with this last film. Janssen has a small and shortened role which doesn’t give her much room to show her skills. Maggie Grace, as Kim Mills, Bryan’s daughter, is good in this safe, non-eventful role. Whitaker is, as always, a scene stealer and is a strong presence in the story. Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen wrote this weak and uninspired script. Olivier Megaton was the director and the finished result was rather week.

Overall:  This was a very uninspired film.

The Gambler

First Hit:  Didn’t hit the mark in many ways, but there were some wonderful performances.

When playing certain characters, Mark Wahlberg definitely hits the mark and does it well. Here as Jim Bennett an Associate Professor in Literature, it doesn’t really work. It wasn't believable to me.

As an obsessed gambler, attempting to find a way to care about anyone including himself, he’s rather good. Mixing the two didn’t work for me, although I enjoyed is pointed stabs at the students in his class. His negative and sorrowful attitude didn’t play well with this students as well.

Whereas the classroom was full when the film starts, in the seven days over which the film takes place, the ending count of students was about 12. His relationship with his mother Roberta (Jessica Lange), his dying grandfather (George Kennedy), and everyone else is toxic, antagonistic and indifferent. What makes all this worse, is that he starts a relationship with Amy (Brie Larson) one of his students. I got that he was searching for a way to learn how to care about himself and others, but getting to this point was not well done.

However, I really liked that the director did not overuse mainstream gambling casinos, but focused more on private gambling dens.

Wahlberg was great as a non-caring gambler but the rest of his role didn’t seem to fit very well. Lange was interesting and well placed as the well-to-do mother running out of patience and willingness to support her self-destructive son. Larson was interesting and good as the brilliant student writer. Michael Kenneth Williams (as loan shark Neville Baraka) was very good and, at times, riveting. John Goodman (as Frank another loan shark) was absolutely commanding and it was him that elevated this film. William Monahan wrote an, at times, interesting, playful and poignant script. Rupert Wyatt directed this film and I’m not sure Wahlberg was the best choice to be the lead.

Overall:  The interesting gambling scenes did not make up for the overall mediocre plot execution.

The Imitation Game

First Hit:  The amazing acting tells a truly amazing story about belief and perseverance.

This is the amazing story of how Germany’s Enigma machine was decoded and used to assist the allies in winning World War II.

Alan Turing is featured here as the father of machines that think (the way machines think/process information – today we call them computers). As a young boy Turing (young Alex play by Alex Lawther) is a smallish, nerd who is picked upon by his fellow classmates. He’s smart and begins to discover his homosexuality through caring about, of, and for his one true school friend – Christopher.

During the war he’s asked to participate in decoding the German Enigma machine. He’s grouped with Hugh (Matthew Goode), John (Allen Leech), Peter (Matthew Beard), Jack (James Northcote) and then Alan finds and adds Joan (Keira Knightley) to the team. Each of them are good puzzle solvers, chess players and/or mathematicians.

Problem with this team is that Turing (adult Turning played by Benedict Cumberbatch) doesn’t work well with others. He believes that he can build a machine that will solve the problem and thinks trying to decode Enigma manually is a useless endeavor. He thinks working with a team will slow him down.

This is an amazing story and the acting is top shelf. However, the problem I found with the film is that it tells this story in three different time frames and juggles them in a way that didn’t work for me. I was fascinated by the young Turing, and as I begin to fully drop into this child’s experience, bang we’re in the 1950’s and he’s being arrested for homosexuality, then bang we’re back into the story of him building a machine to decode Enigma.

All three stories are great and the acting in them is great – it is the jostling of my emotions that I didn’t like by the way it moved from one story to another. However, all told it was an amazingly acted film that told a wonderful and powerful story.

Lawther is absolutely mesmerizing as the young Turing. His expressions and soulful eyes told a huge story. Cumberbatch as the adult Turing is stunning and embodied a man who understood problems and math far more than people. I loved the scene where he stated that he was always decoding because people never said what the meant. Knightly is, again, sublime. She’s perfect as the only bright light in Turing’s relationships with people. Goode is very strong as the chess master who learns to respect what Turing can do. Leech, Beard and Northcote are great in their supporting roles as code solvers. Mark Strong as the MI6 manager of this team is cunningly strong. Charles Dance is perfect as Commander Denniston the man who wanted to run a tight ship. Graham Moore wrote a strong script but he and director Morten Tyldum could have, in my opinion, made a better film if it was more chronological in nature.

Overall:  This was an excellent film sharing an amazing story about how World War II was shortened.

Before I Go To Sleep

First Hit:  Nicole Kidman was outstanding as a woman who cannot remember one day from the next.

This is not a film that will have a large audience as there is little that is uplifting about the story.

Christine (Kidman) wakes up every day and has no memory of the previous day. She wakes up in a man’s arms, doesn’t know who he is. She goes into the bathroom where there is a wall of pictures showing her and her husband, getting married, kissing, holding each other and they are appropriately labeled. She comes back into the bedroom and her husband Ben (Colin Firth) begins to explain who he is and what has happened to her.

She also is seeing, unbeknownst to Ben, a therapist who calls her every morning and asks her to review a video camera hidden in her closet. She watches the video she has taken of herself over the previous days, which begins her learning process for the day. At the end of each day she has a story, only to forget it by the next morning.

However, is her husband her husband? Is her friend her friend? What was her life before the accident which rendered her with this memory affliction?

Kidman is very believable. I am constantly amazed as how she can take these odd, sometimes dark, and brooding parts and bring them to life in a way that is so engaging. Firth is almost perfect as the guy who shows, remorse, anger, and darkness while being human. Rowan Joffe wrote and directed this film. From a dialogue point of view there were moments of crisp beauty and other times it seem to drag a little. However, the direction was very strong. He got a lot out of the actors, while creating a feeling of brooding darkness with both the sets in the house as well as outside (rarely sunny and the in nondescript home).

Overall:  Strong acting with a difficult non-uplifting subject ended as a good with a limited audience film.