Jane Got a Gun

For F*** Magazine

JANE GOT A GUN

Director : Gavin O'Connor
Cast : Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Rodrigo Santoro, Noah Emmerich, Boyd Holbrook, Alex Manette, Todd Stashwick, James Burnett, Sam Quinn
Genre : Action/Drama/Western
Run Time : 98 mins
Opens : 18 February 2016
Rating : NC-16 (Violence and Some Coarse Language)

In Marvel’s ongoing Thor comics series, Jane Foster is the current wielder of Mjolnir. In this western, Jane Hammond (Portman) wields more conventional weapons. It is 1871 in New Mexico territory and Jane lives with her husband Bill “Ham” Hammond (Emmerich) and their daughter Kate. When Ham rides home seriously wounded after a gun battle with the Bishop Boys gang, Jane has no choice but to turn to her ex-fiancée Dan Frost (Edgerton) for protection. John Bishop (McGregor), a notorious outlaw from Jane’s past, has returned to torment her. Dan is still broken after losing Jane to another man, but he resolves to help Jane protect her family and her home as the Bishop Boys come a-knocking.

            Jane Got a Gun was plagued by numerous production problems, and it will be remembered more for its behind-the-scenes tumult than on its own merit as a film. The original screenplay by Brian Duffield was a hot property, landing on the Black List of best-liked screenplays in Hollywood back in 2011. Natalie Portman was attached to star and produce, with Lynne Ramsay of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame directing. Severe disagreements led to Ramsay dropping out on the first day of principal photography, with a bitter legal battle ensuing. Warrior director Gavin O’Connor was roped in to replace her, but the film’s troubles were just beginning. Michael Fassbender, Jude Law and Bradley Cooper were all attached at different points and Edgerton ended up switching roles from the villain John Bishop to the ex-fiancée Dan Frost. The release date was shifted back multiple times, with distributor Relativity Media dropping the film and The Weinstein Company later acquiring it.

            For all the drama involved in getting the film made, one would expect it to, at the very least, be bad in an interesting way. No such luck. Jane Got a Gun is soporific and dreary, sorely lacking in a key element of any revenge story: passion. It looks, feels and sounds like a western, but there’s so little energy and momentum behind it. The title suggests a fun genre piece with a feminist twist, perhaps something akin to Kill Bill in the American frontier. Some of the expected ingredients are there, including a tragic back-story and a score to settle with an old enemy, but it’s so plodding and self-serious that getting invested in Jane’s tale is quite the task. It’s sometimes a pretty movie to look at, but most of the time it’s visually dull: the picture is sepia-tinted, then the flashbacks appear to have another layer of sepia tinting on top of that and this stylistic touch ends up creating even more distance between the audience and the story.

            Portman may be playing the titular protagonist and has championed the film through the myriad obstacles it faced in getting made, but Jane Hammond will not go down as one of the great ass-kicking female characters in cinema history. There’s some emotional impact to Jane’s tortured past, but her supposed transformation into a gun-toting damsel no longer in distress is underwhelming. The love triangle between Jane, Ham and Dan bogs the movie down in melodramatics instead of creating any fireworks and nothing unconventional comes of the dynamics between the three characters. The villain in a revenge western should get to chew a good deal of scenery, but McGregor has too little screen time and too little material to work with, unable to create a particularly intimidating or striking villain. With Padmé, Obi-Wan and Owen Lars in the same movie, it’s a mini Attack of the Clones reunion.

            Jane Got a Gun has a round or two in the chamber: the climactic standoff brims with tension and the sombre atmosphere is sometimes effective. It is morbidly fascinating to read about how a straight-forward western got mired in so many production troubles and it is admirable that last-minute replacement director O’Connor was able to salvage it all. However, in the aftermath of this hullabaloo, all Jane Got a Gun has to show for it is mediocrity.

Summary: Dour and slow, Jane Got a Gun fails to make good on its promise of a fun genre piece starring a dynamic female lead.

RATING: 2 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong 

Run All Night

For F*** Magazine

RUN ALL NIGHT

Director : Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast : Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Ed Harris, Vincent D'Onofrio, Boyd Holbrook, Genesis Rodriguez, Common, Bruce McGill, Holt McCallany

Genre : Action/Crime

Run Time : 114 mins

Opens : 12 March 2015

Rating : NC16 (Violence and Coarse Language)

Liam Neeson goes from training the Dark Knight to running all night in this crime thriller. Neeson plays Jimmy Conlon, an aging hitman who used to work for crime boss Shawn Maguire (Harris). Shawn has supposedly reformed, and refuses to do business with drug dealers who are brought to him by his son Danny (Holbrook). It just so happens that Jimmy’s son Mike (Kinnaman), a limousine driver, is hired by Danny and witnesses a deal go horribly awry. Jimmy ends up killing Danny to save Mike, which leads to Shawn ordering that both father and son be killed in retaliation. Mike resents his father for the strain that being a hitman put on their relationship, but the duo have to stick together if they want to survive this long, brutal night.  

            Run All Night marks the third collaboration between Liam Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also helmed Unknown and Non-Stop. Neeson claims that this will be his last action-centric leading role in a while. As cool as the actor always is, he is very much in danger of being a caricature of himself, if the Taken memes still all over the internet are anything to go by. Unfortunately, even though it’s meant to be more dramatic and character-driven than the Taken movies, Run All Night is still a let-down. Collet-Serra intends for it to be a gritty 70s-style crime flick, set in a grimy, misty New York City during the Christmas season over 16 hours. However, the scene transitions are Google Maps-style CGI camera moves, swooping out of one street, up over the city, and right into another. This comes off as nothing more than a jarring stylistic flourish, supposedly to disguise how surprisingly boring the film ends up being.

            The story is a predictable one – an ex-hitman must wade back into the muddy waters of his former life when things get personal. That logline can also be used to describe last year’s John Wick. Where that movie was surprisingly inventive, original and stylish, Run All Night is, well, a more run of the mill affair. The two relationships at its core are the personal connection between an enforcer and his old boss/long-time friend and between said enforcer and his estranged son. Brad Ingelsby’s screenplay strains to make this more than your typical father-son action movie team-up – the relationship isn’t amusingly dysfunctional, it’s downright toxic. And yet, it’s just not sufficiently compelling, some moments unintentionally funny rather than dark and dramatic. During the first half of the film, when Jimmy and Shawn wistfully reminisce about their youth, it’s meant to set up this deep bond that will inevitably be shattered over the course of the film, but it feels more like filler than anything else.

                Liam Neeson grimaces, wields a gun and talks tough through gritted teeth - daring, uncharted territory for the actor. We all love Liam Neeson but especially coming on the heels of the dismal Taken 3, it’s very easy to see why audiences are getting tired of this character type. Joel Kinnaman is good here as a clean-cut family man who wants nothing to do with the dangerous, seedy world which his father was a part of. He’s certainly less annoying than Jai Courtney’s Jack McClane in A Good Day to Die Hard. Alas, the clash of titans that is Liam Neeson vs. Ed Harris is something of a let-down. When all is said and done, it feels like Harris hasn’t really done all that much throughout the film, even though he has a substantial role. Harris is an unsung old-school cinematic badass, so seeing him go toe to toe with the old-school cinematic badass du jour should be more of an event. The macho friends-turned-enemies plot is undercut by what can be interpreted as homoerotic undertones between the two characters. Common shows up as an ice-cold bespectacled assassin; his night-vision eyepiece and high-powered pistol equipped with a laser sight likely referencing the first Terminator movie. He provides the best thrills of the film.  

            Run All Night is too predictable and contrived to work as an engrossing crime drama but also lacks the over-the-top action spectacle required to make it successful as a piece of escapist entertainment, falling into an uncomfortable no man’s land. It’s sturdily-constructed, shot well and solidly acted all around, but it has nothing to distinguish it from every other New York-set crime thriller out there.

Summary: Nowhere near as exciting as its title makes it sound, Run All Night never goes off the beaten crime thriller path. Its central trio do turn in strong performances, but even then the film can’t outrun the realm of the generic.

RATING: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong