Against All Odds

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Here we are at part 2 of the first ever Robert Mitchum Sorta Kinda Convoluted Remake Double Feature. But this post also has another theme to it. Following in the tradition of my posts for Cop and The Falcon and the Snowman, Against All Odds is another 80's movie that was more or less forgotten yet somehow ended up on my radar.

Damn, I should have just stuck with Cape Fear, because this movie kinda sucked. I'm gonna blame it on the forgotten 80's-ness thing.

The 80's were not a good time for noir. I'm sure there were a few good ones (The Big Easy comes to mind), but the overall aesthetics of the 80's did not fit the genre. Too bright, too laid back, and the synthesizer music is a total mood killer. And shit, I normally like this decade and all it's cheesy bullshit, but it's wrong for this kind of movie. Maybe if they tried to make more noir in the 80's that looked like The Terminator or Demons or something like that, with dark foggy streets and neon lights, that could have worked. But mostly the 80's noirs just looked like Weekend at Bernie's.

OK, so there was no way in hell that this was going to be as good as the movie it is a remake of: Out of the Past, which is, you know, a classic. But it could have been way better than this. We have Jeff Bridges and James Woods filling in for Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas; terrible choices if you're trying to make an approximation, but interesting if you're going for something different.

Outside of a few superficial details taken from Out of the Past, Against All Odds is a new beast, and if I didn't know it was a remake I never would have guessed. So it's not really fair to criticize it for failing to capture what was great about the original movie. It is, however, perfectly fair to criticize it for not coming up with anything good on its own.

In this one, the lead character is a football player who gets canned after an injury. Alright, I'm thinking, this is fine. This could make a decent backstory. Maybe they'll allude to it once or twice, flesh out the character a bit. But it turns out that the football thing dominates the first 30 minutes or so and pretty much stays a major part of the plot throughout. And I'll be honest here, the politics of running a football team aren't too interesting to me, and they definitely don't fit in to the noir template.

Really, this movie isn't too concerned with the noir templete, it more fancies itself as a character drama with strong mystery elements than it fancies itself a neo-noir. Which might have worked except the characters aren't very interesting, and although the mystery is complex, it's half-assed and not particularly compelling. Then there is the seductress/femme fatale, and I won't bother to look up her name, but she's not very sexy, not very seductive and has a bad looking, short 80's haircut. And she's not all that deadly. Maybe she's not really supposed to be a femme fatale.

There's occasionally some pretty good dialogue, and most of the cast is good (or at least watchable) but this is a bore. So I think the score tonight is Robert Mitchum: 2, 1980's: 0.

The Falcon and the Snowman

Monday, February 11, 2008

In the tradition of Cop, here's another mostly forgotten 80's movie that for reasons I do not recall has been on my Netflix queue for a very long time. I don't know what is going on with me lately... I wonder if this is becoming a habit?

This is an entertaining movie about two young American guys who find themselves in a position to sell US secrets to the Soviets. Based on a true story, although I'm guessing there's some serious dramatic license being taken. Any way, it's a good movie with an agreeably oddball Sean Penn performance.

First Cop, now The Falcon and the Snowman... I wonder what slightly above average forgotten 80's flick I can find next?

Cop

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Even I will admit that this was an odd, obscure choice of a movie for me to Netflix. It is not a treasured classic, so it's not part of my K2K. It's not some cult genre film that I wanted to catch up with. It's a mostly forgotten and dismissed hard-boiled neo-noir detective movie from the 80's, which is not a decade known for making a lot of memorable noir-ish films. I'm not sure how I even heard of it, but I put it on my queue a long, long time ago. I know I must have been tempted by the idea of James Woods in a dark, noirish thriller.

I had this bad vibe going into it that it was going to be terrible. It wasn't, it was actually kinda good, but in a weird way where some of it is awesome and some of it is really shitty.

It's based on a James Ellroy book, and I'm going to go ahead and assume without researching that the better dialogue and the crazy-insane plot comes from the book. And I'll go ahead and blame the terrible synthesizer music and some of the more inexplicably bad scenes on the writer/director.

James Woods is great in this, and I did love the very abrupt ending that skips all the boring, obligatory wrap-up shit movies usually feel the need to have. And... you know what? This is an OK movie, but it's a minor pleasure, it's 20 years old and has probably been forgotten for a good reason. I have more stuff I could say about it, but who cares? We all have more important shit to do.