JOE’s DVD Round-up: Cage makes his comeback in Bad Lieutenant

Cage makes his comback as a Bad Lieutenant and Russel Crowe wrestles with the French and a Yorkshire accent in Robin Hood. Tina Fey and Bruce Willis make up the numbers in a couple of action comedies that don’t offer much action… or comedy.

DVD of the Week

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans

It would be hard for anyone to say that Nicholas Cage’s recent output has been consistent; for every interesting film such as Lord of War, there are two or three forgettable or outright rubbish ones like National Treasure and Knowing. It’s not like he’s unaware of it either as he has sleepwalked through the majority of those movies with none of that old Cage magic that made him a star in the first place.

Fortunately, 2010 is something of a renaissance year for him with an excellent comeback in Kick-Ass and now this little gem from eccentric German auteur, Werner Herzog. Cage plays Terrance McDonagh, a New Orleans police lieutenant with a drug habit and some seriously compromised morals as he navigates a murder case and his own disintegrating life.

The film is played as the blackest comedy you have ever seen and Cage commits to his performance in way that hasn’t been seen since Wild at Heart. Director Herzog matches his star and imbues the film with a crazy energy, culminating with the worlds first and only use of ‘Iguana-Cam’.

Bad Lieutenant is easily one of the best films of the year and our DVD of the week by a mile.

 

Robin Hood

Let’s get something out of the way; Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is not your granddad’s Robin Hood, it’s not your dad’s Robin Hood and it most certainly is not anything like Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood. This new version strips away just about every cliché and works hard to ground the legend in historical fact. The result is something enjoyable if not wholly successful.

Rather than stealing from the rich to give to the poor, this new version recasts the hero as a man of the people, fighting not just against taxes but against an oppressive political system that cares little for the common good. This take on the legend succeeds for the most part, but unfortunately much of the fun that you expect from a Robin Hood film is lost in the process.

Russell Crowe works hard in the title role but is burdened by an unfortunate attempt at an English accent which veers between Yorkshire and Sligo and never quite settles down. The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, particularly the trio of American actors who fill the boots of the merry men and the scenes that Crowe shares with them show an easy chemistry and the film’s few flashes of humour. Cate Blanchet and Mark Strong round off the cast nicely and the action scenes, while bloodless, are as stirring as you would expect from the director of Gladiator.

If you leave your expectations at the door and accept the film’s preoccupation with 12^th century politics, there is much to admire, but when the film finally gets to Sherwood Forest, it abruptly ends and teases a film that many would have preferred, but now may never see.

Date Night

Yet another film that features some seriously funny people but somehow struggles to raise even the slightest chuckle.

Steve Carell and Tina Fey play a married couple trying to get the spark back into their relationship whilst juggling kids and jobs. Thanks to the kind of dinner reservation mix-up that only ever seems to happen in the movies, they find themselves mistaken for drug dealers and end up getting chased around New York by corrupt cops and gangsters.

Action comedies are hard to get right and often end up being not as funny as they should be or not as action packed as they should be. Date Night is guilty of both offences and the best efforts of Carell and Fey go to waste as they and a parade of star cameos try in vain to wring a laugh out of the material.

Perhaps the worst part of the whole affair is that if you took a random five minutes from either Fey’s 30 Rock or Carell’s The Office, chances are that those five minutes would be funnier and more action packed that this.

While not nearly as bad as this week’s Cop Out, Date Night share some of the same sins and is very difficult to recommend.

 

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

This effort comes from the blockbuster king, producer Jerry Bruckheimer who has had a hand in such mega hits as Top Gun, Armageddon and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. With Prince of Persia, it seems that the magic formula has run out of steam as this videogame-inspired movie is the utter definition of mediocre.

There is no doubt that shedloads of money was thrown at the film and it looks great, but an utterly lifeless script robs the film of any of the wit or charm it needed to carry the story of Jake Gyllenhaal’s disgraced prince as he becomes the wielder of the mystical dagger of time.

The cast struggles gamely and no-one is particularly bad, but they are given so little to work with that it’s a miracle that the film is even remotely watchable. The action scenes are boring and the rest of the film degenerates into various characters explaining the paper thin plot. The highlight of the whole affair is another entertaining turn from British actor Alfred Molina; everyone else does their job and thinks about their pay cheque.

 

One to avoid.

Cop Out

The first film directed by Kevin Smith that he didn’t also write manages to be the worst film of his career. Bruce Willis teams up with 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan to play a pair of mismatched cops fighting some sort of smuggling baddies. Anyone expecting a buddy comedy with action will be sorely disappointed as there is just one laugh in the film and that belongs to co-star Sean William Scott.

Willis and Morgan are utterly miscast and share none of the camaraderie necessary to carry this sort of film and the few attempts and action fall completely flat. Cop Out is a contender for the worst film of the year and should be avoided at all costs.

 

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