The Movie Critic Next Door™: Watching the Bad Movies so You Don’t Have To.
And yes, this one was really bad. Not that I expect much from a movie based on a video game, but even with low expectations it was still a disappointment. In a video game, it’s probably very useful to be able to identify the main villain at first glance, but in a film it’s just boring. When you know who the villains are, but the hero doesn’t (and should), then it gets both boring and frustrating. You can see where I’m going with this.
The previews looked pretty cool, at least as far as visual effects, but unfortunately, that’s about all of the visual effects, so if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve pretty much seen everything there is to offer here. There’s certainly no plot to hold your attention — Max (Mark Wahlberg, displaying his usual range of emotions, annoyed and confused) is a cop in cold case, filing things, mourning the loss of his wife and child. They say the child was killed, but there’s absolutely no visual evidence of that. In fact, there’s almost no blood, which was kind of a shocker. I was expecting a lot. But it’s still a video game in that you’re either barely bruised or completely dead, especially if you’re a hero.
Anyway, he got two of the killers but missed a third, and he’s been hunting the guy ever since, but every lead goes to a dead end. Sometimes literally, because people do die a lot, they just don’t show much. Then, about a third of the way through the movie, he gets a glimmer of an idea that he should’ve noticed years ago, and the hunt takes a new turn. Actually, I think he figures it out then, but later he seems surprised to notice that again, so I’m not absolutely sure.

Mark Wahlberg is the one on the left.

He joins forces with Mona (Mila Kunis, “That 70’s Show”), the sister of one of the recently dead — the dead sister was just a party girl, I think, but the other sister speaks softly and carries a big gun. A REALLY big gun. She implies she’s an assassin, but I’m not sure about that, either. The five-inch heels make it a tad doubtful, and the fact that she couldn’t hide that gun unless she was wearing a full nun’s habit makes it even less likely. None of the women wear much, of course — there’s an unintentionally funny bit where Max tries to get an informant to talk by threatening to search all of the guests at the party he’s hosting. It’s funny because 90% of the guests are female, and 100% are wearing just barely enough to keep them PG, so I’m not sure why he expects a search to find much.
There’s a strange street drug (it’s called Valkyr, looks like Windex, and makes everyone who uses it hallucinate the same bizarre things); an evil corporation (one room has a giant eyeball on the wall watching all the workers); and lots of cops blaming everything that goes wrong on Our Hero. And there’s those scary looking winged things from the previews, but they weren’t quite as cool as I’d hoped. When it isn’t snowing, it’s raining, and sometimes it even rains inside. The sun only shines in flashback, because those were the good old days. For atmosphere, several of the bad guys like to burn lots and lots of candles, but because they’re bad guys, they often recklessly leave them unattended. I suppose since it rains indoors so much that’s really not as hazardous as it sounds, though.
I’d better stop there. All you really need to know is that this movie gets one and a quarter idols. I might have been willing to stretch it to one and a half, but then they went and added a teaser about a sequel, and I just can’t have that. I’m making a stand against bad movies based on questionable source material! And thankfully, I didn’t even accidentally support this one with my dollars — I had a free pass.

Longtime readers (Hey, you never know, I might have a few of those) may recall that I described Sunshine as being a little like 28 Days Later in space, because so many of the same people worked on both films. Now we have Quarantine, which is 28 Days Later in a Los Angeles apartment building (the darkest apartment building on earth), only without any of the same actors or crew, and not quite as good.
It isn’t bad, either, but frankly, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before — except maybe the closeup view of a compound fracture of the leg, and I could’ve lived just fine without seeing that. There’s also the part where you get a close up view of someone being beaten to death, from the point of view of the weapon, but I could’ve lived without seeing that, too.
Anyway, it’s like 28 Days Later, that’s the point. It’s this small group of people fighting to survive as everyone around them starts going crazy and homicidal, except in this case it’s the residents of the apartment building and those few unfortunates that are trying to help them that are in trouble; and the rest of the world is okay. Probably. It’s also like Cloverfield because the story is told through a camera in a sort of first-person view, so be prepared for a lot of weird angles and the picture bouncing around all over the place. The middle-aged lady behind me complained about that. She also didn’t understand the plot and had to keep asking her friend what was going on. I don’t know how I always seem to end up within earshot of these people.

The film is actually never this well-lit, but it’s nice to see what the actress looks like.

A reporter, Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter, from that Dexter TV series), and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) are following around two firemen for the night, like on Cops. She follows them on what seems to be a fairly routine medical call, to help an old lady living alone who started shrieking for no apparent reason, and I’m sure she quickly wishes she hadn’t followed them, but such is the life of a reporter, I guess. One fireman (Jake, played by Jay Hernandez, who was a cop in Lakeview Terrace) wants to hit on Angela, of course, while the other is the mouthy comic relief. But actually, the characters are very believable for the most part, and it really does seem like you’re eavesdropping on things as they happen. And that’s cool.
The building tension is also very good, though the explanation at the end is only so-so. But as things get worse, you do feel like you get pulled in to the situation, so in that sense, the film really works. When the credits started rolling, no one in the theatre moved. Before this, someone always bolted for the door as soon as that first name appeared, so that was pretty strange. By the time the last credit rolls, I’m generally the only one left and the theatre employees are by the exit with brooms, dustpans and barely concealed impatience, waiting for me to leave. But not this time!
So it was an enjoyable 89 minutes, except for the gory parts. And you might get motion sickness, but this time I planned ahead and took dramamine, so I’m going by the middle-aged lady’s complaints, because I was fine. Yes, I am way too pleased with myself about that. Three and a quarter idols out of five this time — like I said, the reason behind all the death isn’t the greatest, but the acting is so good I’m inclined to forgive that little problem. It even demonstrates why having an antenna TV like mine is better than cable — at least when you’re under seige by the CDC.

As Halloween nears, and the midnight hour draws close at hand, here are 2 dark pieces: (sorry, can’t rhyme)
Road to Hell
A slow dark piece if there ever was one.
Decay
For once, the title really does explain it all.

Pure Attitude
Starting out with only synths, it moves to a heavy orchestral-electronic mix. Very nice.
BlockMan
Written for a side-scroll retro video game, this piece also introduces some very new elements.
Blipotron
Intro of a nasty distorted bass, this piece changes position a few times. Full of bleeping goodness.

Someone’s probably watching you right now. In this day and age, we all know that. Thanks to cameras the size of gnats and the general paranoia of the 21st century, if you live in a city that has the internet capability for you to read this, you might be on candid camera. So a lot of the things that are meant to shock and surprise in this movie really… don’t. Maybe that’s my personal paranoia, but it no longer shocks me to contemplate being tracked down on a busy street while driving because the traffic cameras have facial recognition software.
Still, all these things piling on top of each other in the film do get pretty overwhelming. The average person will be watched while pumping gas or using an ATM, but they’re not going to be electronically stalked. Some internet-savvy friends once explained to me the concept of “security through obscurity.” If you set up a web page that’s isolated, not linked to from any other page, the odds of anyone stumbling across it in all those billions of other web pages are pretty slim. Life is like that these days. If you’re not frequenting known terrorist hangouts or discussing plots to kill the president and his dog on your cell phone, no one’s paying that much attention to you.
Our heroes only wish that was true for them. Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf, Mutt from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull) is a very ordinary guy. He has constant five o’clock shadow, lives in a tiny walk-up apartment, and can’t quite manage to pay the rent on what he earns working at Copy Cabana and beating his friends at poker. His day gets worse when his mother calls: his twin brother, an Air Force officer with a bright future ahead of him, has just been killed in a car accident. Then his day gets even worse, when he returns from the funeral to find his tiny apartment jammed with boxes, containers marked “poison”, and bags and bags of amonium nitrate fertilizer. Since he’s apparently a complete idiot, he proceeds to open the boxes and get his fingerprints all over everything inside them, which include guns and ammunition and everything else a well-stocked terrorist needs. That’s when a female voice on his cell tells him to run, because the FBI is coming.
Meanwhile, Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan from Gone Baby Gone — we won’t mention that other debacle she was involved in, poor girl), single mother of a small, freckle-faced boy, is sending said small boy off on a trip to Washington, D.C., where his school band is going to play at the Kennedy Center. Then she gets a call from the same mysterious woman telling her that the adorable freckled child’s train will be derailed if she doesn’t do exactly as the voice says. It’s one of those voices that are determinedly upbeat and precise, maybe like phone operators used to sound, though I don’t really remember what it’s like to talk to a person anymore when looking for numbers and such.

The obligatory chase scene with the dome of the White House in the background.

The Voice on the Phone (VotP) brings her and Jerry together in a riotous car chase. That’s where the product placement begins — the VotP has provided a Porsche SUV for them, while FBI agent Tom Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton) has to chase them in something much less expensive. Later our fugitives get a ChoiceOne credit card, visit Circuit City, receive Visa gift cards, and talk on Sprint phones. (I think — I’m not very good at identifying those brands.) It’s like those phone commercials where they talk about the product placement movies of the year. Those might be Sprint, too, but I don’t know anymore.
After a lot of lead-in and dozens of the most wildly improbably computer-controlled coincidences you’re ever likely to see, the VotP is revealed… and it was kind of a let down somehow. I mean, I’d already guessed the basics of what was going on, so I wasn’t expecting a surprise, but it still just made me sigh a little, and I’m not even sure why. There are good moments — Michelle Monaghan even gets to whack Billy Bob in the face with one of those small metallic suitcases. (Billy Bob scares me, I have to admit.) Except for a few moments of stupidity here and there to help move the plot along, the two main characters react pretty believeably to all the chaos. Everything seemed good, but it just didn’t work out in the end… too much glitz and not enough substance, maybe, but I’m not sure it’s really as simple as that.
But if all you’re looking for is a good action flick with half a brain, this will do it. I’ll go with three idols, assuming you can tolerate Billy Bob. The big screen is almost a requirement to enjoy it properly, I think, though these days lots of people seem to have giant television sets, so that doesn’t necessarily mean seeing it in the theatre anymore. And it does also help support my theory that cell phones are inherently evil, so I have to like it for that, at least.

It’s only sort of a terrace, and there’s no lake around anywhere that I could see, but that’s the name of the place. And the movie isn’t actually the action-packed, how-will-they-survive thriller the previews imply, either. But Samuel L. Jackson lives on Lakeview Terrace with his teenage daughter and pre-teen son, his wife having died some years earlier. He’s an LA patrol officer, and he aims to keep his street clean if it kills you. Other than that, it seems like a nice place to live.
Young marrieds Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson, soon to be in Watchmen; and Kerry Washington, Alicia Masters from the Fantastic Four movies) have just moved into this dubious paradise, taking the house next door to Abel Turner’s. (That’s Samuel L. Jackson, with beard and shaven head this time. He still has his own personal hair stylist listed in the credits, though, so that little beard must require lots of attention. Or maybe it’s the shaving of the head. Anyway.) Abel is a weird guy, and everyone seems to know it, but like the neighbors and friends of a newly unmasked serial killer, they seem to take it in stride and assume he’s a decent guy underneath it all. But he’s something of a control freak, and is utterly convinced that he’s right even if the rest of the world disagrees with him. Maybe especially if the rest of the world disagrees. That’s good if you’re Galileo, maybe, but not so much these days.
Abel doesn’t like Chris and Lisa, or more precisely, doesn’t like that they’re of different racial backgrounds. Chris is blond and pale, you see, especially when compared to his African-American wife. Abel’s barbed comments and not so subtle disapproval put a strain on the marriage, especially when Abel starts in with the lights shining into their bedroom at night and the breaking in to their garage. But his neighbors like their house and they’re not ready to move yet. Who can blame them, with the economy the way it is? So they tough it out, and of course things escalate, and nothing works out well for anyone, basically.
Samuel L. Jackson is a great actor. There’s very little he can’t make work. But there were still times when I felt kind of embarrassed for him in this flick. The writers were apparently not quite sure if they wanted to make him a misunderstood victim, overreacting to the bad hand dealt him by life; or just a creepy, psychotic sort of person who wants to impose his particular brand of order on the world. So sometimes he’s one, sometimes the other, and while that might have made everything more realistic, somehow it just didn’t quite work.
But he’s still Samuel L. Jackson, for heaven’s sake, so it still gets three idols. If it seems shaky in places, it’s still a solid movie overall — probably more solid than the rebuilt hillside on which all those expensive houses are perched. Again, don’t go into the theatre expecting lots of violence and people hunting each other down with guns — that’s there, but it’s minor until the end when everything explodes. It also isn’t any kind of scathing look at modern race relations — that’s always lurking, but not quite the focus. Like Abel, it’s never quite all one thing or the other, which is a little annoying sometimes, but at least it keeps things interesting, just like your weird neighbors. We’ve all got those, but fortunately they’re not all Samuel.