0
of the three, penn's character provides the most interest. a muscled and tattooed corner boy, he's done the time for doing the crime, but since the death of his first wife the love of his daughter has kept him on the straight and narrow, though he does mix with the brutes and bruisers of his boston suburb and is clearly only too willing to take the law into his own hands. and by the end of the film there's innocent blood on those hands and you feel that, without his daughter there to keep an eye on him, he's going to descend into a world of crime beloved by classic jimmy cagney films, a king of the cons with a heart of gold hardened by mean streets and cruel fate, a real angel with a dirty face. laura linney (mary-ann in the adaptation of tales of the city) is pretty much wasted as his wife, this being a man's film where women are relegated to the background, but gets one final scene where she plays yet another hollywood version of lady macbeth, excusing his crimes and extolling a life for him as king of the underworld. cliched and all as that is, it's still the only strand of the whole film that has anything going for it, but the final credits are rolling by the time that promise comes around and you realise that the preceding two hours or so of screen time really weren't worth the effort.
filled with formulaic camera movements that only ever look contrived and self-important, never the hard-crafted easy-artistry of better directors, throughout eastwood hits more bum notes than a bar-room jazz band on an off night. there's that whole sub-plot with bacon's wife. there's the scene of robbins-as-a-kid being kidnapped by the (obviously roman catholic) paedophiles which isn't just echoed in a later scene with robbins enroute to his last sup but is repeated at the end in penn's memory of that sleepers day. then there's a lot of dreadful dialogue of the sort that helgeland seems to specialise in. and finally there's that perfectly timed moment when bacon and his partner (laurence fishburne - from apocalypse now to this via the matrix) rush in to disarm the real killers in a moment that can only leave you wondering what the hell they were doing to be in the right place at the right time.
there are things that are right about it - there's something dreadfully claustrophobic about the paedo-kidnapping, and there's something about penn meting out injustice to robbins that almost has you begging for some formulistic cavalry intervention, but overall they're not enough to give any real satisfaction. with eastwood helming it and such a cast of stars it's bound to win awards come the bangles and baubles season, but that doesn't make it a good movie.
Reply to Topic
