Harold Becker
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In 1986, it went by the name Vision Quest .
But the mother, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is reluctant to visit the nearby Santa Cruz beach; as a child, as seen in the film’s prologue, she wandered off from her family there, and what she discovered inside the right-off-the-boardwalk “Vision Quest” hall of mirrors (“find yourself,” dare its signs) left her deeply scarred.
In the flashback prologue, we witness her being separated from her parents as a little girl in 1986, wandering away from the carnival into the “Vision Quest” funhouse, which for some reason has been built facing the beach rather than the boardwalk.
Luke’s attempt to protect 11-year-old, super-intelligent Mei (Catherine Chan) recalls the 1998 Bruce-Willis-protects-a-code-breaking-boy-with-autism vehicle “Mercury Rising,” a movie I didn’t see but occupied myself trying to remember while Luke was busy punching and shooting in the many sub-standard action sequences writer-director Boaz Yakin coughs up between lines like, “Let’s go to war.”
At heart, it’s an addiction drama in the vein of “Clean and Sober” or “The Boost,” as Whitaker retreats deeper and deeper into the bottle.
Barry is the kind of charismatic sleazeball that James Woods used to portray in films like Salvador and The Boost.
A cozily Spielbergian story of a dad and his son and the bigger forces who are out to get them is rendered in Nichols’s usual earthy, muscular tones, so that little of Midnight Special plays in the key of schmaltz it easily could have—and did, in the similarly plotted Mercury Rising , a 1998 misfire in which Bruce Willis went on the lam with an autistic boy with government secrets locked away in his mind.
This set-up all sounds rather good, of course, and were it not for the splice-happy editing, the film might have come off as a sort of Deep South E.T. via Mercury Rising.
If you found pictures like Harold Becker’s “Malice” or Robert Zemeckis’ “What Lies Beneath” (2000) to your liking, this movie will provide a similar cup of bitter tea.
But this sci-fi tale, directed by Alex Proyas (“Dark City,” “The Crow”) and based on a story by Ryne Douglas Pearson (who wrote the novel “Mercury Rising” was based on), moves with urgency and unflagging energy.
About halfway through the first act of Waves, I already had my dumb “reaction tweet” being formed in my head: something like, “Move over, Vision Quest, there’s a new high school wrestling movie in town.”
Instead of the old school boxing of Rocky (or the underground Kumite of Bloodsport, or the wrestling of Vision Quest, or the karate of The Karate Kid) we are shoved into the vicious arena of regulated mixed martial arts.
Screenwriter Ezsterhas really doesn't do anything well: there's no sense of authentic cop milieu (which "Sea of Love" had in spades) and the dialogue is all generic; there's no genuine wit and the relationships aren't sharply imagined.
Announcing the big-budget erotic thriller cycle that peaked with Basic Instinct, Sea of Love has its Cinemax lapses in taste (Helen's grocery store seduction is cheesy beyond the pale), but most films of the genre lack sophistication from which to lapse.
It's one of the most realistic, terrifying and memorable murder scenes since "The Onion Field," and it underscores the movie's message that there is nothing even remotely romantic, dramatic or redeeming about murder.
Julia Roberts took this film off, but Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin last seen together 18 years ago, performing urgent stand-up sex in Sea of Love are on board for star wattage and the nostalgia factor.
The opportunity to rekindle Sea of Love sparks between the reunited Barkin and Pacino is wasted, the seduction being left to Matt Damon's fumbling Linus.
Sea of Love is unrestrained and completely hypnotic; thanks Steven Soderbergh for bringing Barkin and Pacino back together Ocean’s Thirteen; I know officially understand.
Livingston Dell (Eddie Jemison) can't corrupt a card game to save his life and Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) insists he can seduce Bank's assistant, Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin, Pacino's "Sea of Love" costar), wearing a prosthetic nose that makes him look like Crispin Glover.
As for Pacino (Barkin's "Sea of Love" partner many moons ago) he's every bit the bronzed, manicured bully.
Pacino and fellow newcomer Ellen Barkin, in their unexpected and frankly undesired post- Sea of Love reunion have the same sort of lazy fun that everybody else had in the first two except for Catherine Zeta-Jones in Twelve, and that's either your bag or it isn't.