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 

RoboCop (2014)

For F*** Magazine

ROBOCOP

Director: José Padilha
Cast:         Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Michael K. Williams, Jay Baruchel, Jennifer Ehle, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi
Run Time: 121 mins
Opens: 30 January 2014
Rating: PG13 (Violence & Brief Coarse Language)

It’s been 27 years since Peter Weller stepped out of a police cruiser and into pop culture iconography in Paul Verhoeven’s now-classic RoboCop. A violent, biting and darkly comic piece of sci-fi action satire, the film had a lot to say about the state of late-80s America and cleverly hid all that beneath its franchise-ready action hero. The 1987 film spawned two sequels, various incarnations on TV both live-action and animated, comic book crossovers (Robocop vs. The Terminator!), video games, toys and the like, and after years in development hell, Alex Murphy returns to the big screen in this reboot from director José Padilha.


It is the near future and robots manufactured by conglomerate OmniCorp are helping to keep the peace abroad, but are still banned from enforcing the law on domestic streets by a bill passed by the U.S. senate. OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Keaton) enlists the help of his chief scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Oldman) to create a robot-human hybrid to convince Americans of the viability of a robotic police force. Dr. Norton’s guinea pig arrives in the form of Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Kinnaman), near-death after being caught in a car bombing. Murphy’s wife Clara (Cornish) and son David (John Paul Ruttan) are uneasy about his new form, while fiery political commentator and TV host Pat Novak (Jackson) champions the arrival of Robocop onto the scene. Murphy is now a souped-up crime-fighter, a shiny commercial product, a poster boy – but is he still a human being under all of that?



Change is painful. We at F*** are geeks and fans and we totally acknowledge that and this review is going to be filled with comparisons to the original RoboCop. The RoboCop reboot has been met with outright hostility from the moment of its announcement, many holding Verhoeven’s film sacrosanct. The internet erupted with cries of “I won’t buy that for a dollar”. Robocop’s matte-black suit was revealed, and what followed was possibly the largest backlash against a cosmetic change to a character since Michael Bay put flames on Optimus Prime. And what’s up with that ungloved hand? Suffice it to say that we definitely had our doubts going into this but the end result was surprisingly decent.

Yes, we’ve all heard that remakes and sequels are the only things that get made these days, but a remake/sequel doesn’t have to be bad and first of all needs to make a good case for its existence. RoboCop 2014 does that to a degree. There’s still satire, the targets are different and it’s heavy-handed, but it’s still there. Most of it is provided in the form of Samuel L. Jackson’s future-Glenn Beck who proclaims America as “robophobic” and whose show The Novak Element helps establish and frame the world of the film. An opening scene is set in “sunny Tehran” where suicide bombers protest the presence of American OmniCorp robo-troops – uncomfortable, questionable in terms of taste, but more daring than we expected from this movie. Greedy mega-corporations take the most hits – which is more than a little ironic seeing as this comes from Columbia Pictures, a Sony entertainment company.

Joshua Zetumer’s screenplay is well-written, there’s forward momentum to the story and it doesn’t drag its feet, though some references to the original movie are somewhat awkwardly shoehorned in. The story differs in quite a number of ways from the 1987 film. The PG-13 rating does mean that the brutality is less in-your-face, but this does not cripple the film and there are several very impactful scenes of body horror. However, it is disappointing that the character of Anne Lewis, the tough cop who was also the primary refuge for Murphy’s humanity after his reconstruction, has been dropped. Robocop is built in a lab in China and his new, sleek Iron-Bat-Dredd look can’t compare with the charm of the shiny, bulky Detroit steel designed and built by Rob Bottin for the 1987 picture. The camera also has a rather annoying tendency to swoop 360 degrees around characters whenever they’re having a conversation, in addition to going all shaky-cam during action sequences.

This is Joel Kinnaman’s first major lead role, and he’s not bad, but this reviewer did miss the distinct physicality and vocal performance Peter Weller brought so memorably to the part of Alex Murphy. The weakest part of the film is probably the relationship between Murphy and his wife, seeing as how Kinnaman and Abbie Cornish have next to no chemistry so the audience can’t feel the loss and hurt of separation and of Murphy possibly losing his humanity as deeply as would have been possible. A scene early in the film where they’re about to make love but stop short because, well, PG-13 is markedly rote and passionless. This take goes into the impact that Murphy’s transformation has on his family in greater detail and a good chunk of the movie is spent contemplating philosophical issues far deeper than the title RoboCop would suggest, but to mixed results, seeing as Murphy’s lack of closure in the 1987 film was a heart breaking driving force of the narrative and he actually gets to see Clara and David again here.

In the midst of the jeremiad of gripes stalwart RoboCop fans had about this reboot, one would occasionally hear “well, that supporting cast sounds awesome” – and that is wholly accurate. Gary Oldman lends the film heart and credibility, completely believable as a well-meaning but ultimately flawed scientist and in some ways he’s even more of a “wife” to Murphy than Clara is. Michael Keaton, replacing the initially-cast Hugh Laurie, is oh so deliciously slimy as corporate creep Raymond Sellars. Samuel L. Jackson brings the bluster and the posturing, perfectly cast as a larger-than-life, hyperbole-prone TV personality. Jackie Earle Haley entertains as well as the mercenary who’s put in charge of training Robocop and is none too fond of Murphy, dubbing him “tin man”. Haley has the remarkable ability to raise one eyebrow and form wrinkles on only one side of his forehead; he makes this face a lot.



Nothing’s going to replace one of the best films of 1987 but let’s face it, a carefully-handled update might win the original a new generation of fans and it’s not like it’s going to wipe Verhoeven’s movie from existence. Director José Padilha has put together a remake that’s slick, sharp and yes, a little sanitized, but not completely de-fanged nor pointless and soulless. This ends up trumping 2012’s Total Recall, also a remake of a Verhoeven sci-fi action flick. The prime directive here is to entertain, and that, RebootCop does. And hearing Basil Poledouris' original theme tune over the opening titles will probably put a smile on your face even if you were dead-set against this remake.

Summary: It won’t be easy for die-hard fans of the original to warm up to this remake, but Padilha’s RoboCop is a surprisingly solid outing, benefitting from several clever story changes and a killer supporting cast.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Jedd Jong