Boaz Yakin
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Connections, in both directions
The linking of Mr. Kickass and a precocious preteen girl recalls The Professional, only that film did something with its fanciful matchup.
Yakin somewhat goes that route by having the actor spend quieter moments with his young charge, which may remind some viewers with long memories of something similar between Jean Reno and young Natalie Portman in "The Professional."
Safe borrows a modified version of Leon: The Professional 's premise.
The picture could use more scenes like that one, although perhaps Yakin didn’t want to make a retread of Luc Besson’s crazy-wonderful Léon, which paired Jean Reno’s hitman with the littlest hitgal, played by an astonishingly young Natalie Portman.
Borrowing a page from Luc Besson’s “The Professional,” a hyper-intelligent little girl leads Luke out of his depression.
For Statham, the role doesn't venture far from the taciturn territory he occupied in the "Transporter" series, with a touch of "The Professional" given his empathy for this orphaned tyke, whose precociousness proves a hit-miss proposition as the movie progresses.
Yakin's no-nonsense, irony-free direction evokes the gritty, violent action films of the past, from The French Connection to John Woo's Hard-Boiled and The Killer.
Writer/director Boaz Yakin, who debuted with the gritty coming-of-age crime drama Fresh, and somewhere along the line detoured into fluff like Uptown Girls, relies too much on the swooshy hand-held ‘chaos cinema’ camerawork of recent vintage to generate mayhem, but the film also has a distinctly old-school Steven Seagal-circa-Out for Justice vibe that makes all that easier to tolerate.
Friday Night Lights (2004)
Directed by Peter Berg
influenced by Remember the Titans (2000)
Themes Plot
Though the film wants desperately to be a smart, cynical sports drama along the lines of the scathing "North Dallas Forty" or the recent documentary "Go Tigers!" (as opposed to the more formulaic and sentimental but crowd-pleasing "Remember the Titans") it does some surprisingly dumb things that undermine its best intentions.
From All the Right Moves to Varsity Blues to Remember the Titans , Friday Night Lights unfortunately doesn't completely distinguish itself from the pack of football movies before it--like those, this is all about how the young players--be they underdogs, second-string nobodies or stars--rising above the mounting pressure and playing the best they can, bless their hearts.
Based on H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling book and already hailed as “one of the top five greatest sports stories of all time” by Sports Illustrated, I was expecting another triumphant underdog story in the vein of Rudy or Remember the Titans.
Just out of curiosity, I watched "Remember the Titans"--the most recent critically acclaimed high school football epic--and marveled at how much more effectively "Titans" established its characters and plot in the first half hour alone.
"Friday Night Lights" gets you cheering for the Panthers, but it's a far cry from the usual rah-rah sports-movie formula--closer, in texture and ambition, to the documentary "Hoop Dreams" than to the pious "Remember the Titans."
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.”
Yakin's no-nonsense, irony-free direction evokes the gritty, violent action films of the past, from The French Connection to John Woo's Hard-Boiled and The Killer.
This isn't really a revenge movie � la Charles Bronson's Death Wish films.
British battering ram Jason Statham shows his sensitive side, and tries on an American accent, in " Safe ," an oft-ludicrous but not unengaging action thriller that's at least a partial throwback to old-school B-movies like " Death Wish ," not to mention old-school art-house wanna-B's like Cassavetes ' " Gloria ."
Yakin writes his story into a few corners, and the object of this, again having to do with numbers, is so pedestrian as to remind you the guy wrote “Prince of Persia” and the dreadful “Dirty Dancing” sequel.
Football films used to do this (North Dallas Forty, Brian's Song), but now mostly stick closely to their inspirational clichés (Remember the Titans, The Blind Side).
Usually for that to happen, it has to be a movie that involves sports, but where sports are not the main thing the movie is about like The Blind Side or Remember the Titans.
Both Docheski and his Chinese counterpart Hang Jiao (veteran Chinese-American stalwart James Hong, alumni of both Chinatown and Blade Runner) covet Mei’s beautiful mind because it contains the secret combination to a fortress-like casino safe where the Triads have stashed a vast fortune.
As said, it is inescapably formulaic, and somewhat simplistic in its idealism, but it's a long way from "Never on Sunday"'s self absorption.
Between the steely hero, the seedy sets, Stefan Czapskyâ??s gritty camerawork, Mark Mothersbaughâ??s old-school score, and the considerable body count, it feels like something that Eastwood cranked out in the â??70s, closer in spirit to The Gauntlet than something like Gloria (and pretty undeniably similar to 1994’s The Professional as well).
(So, yes, the movie is also a little bit like " The Gauntlet ," minus the bus and the nudity.
After a few lines of dialogue, it becomes clear that this kind-seeming, slightly tipsy stranger with a mustache, sunglasses, and hat is played by Will Patton, the stalwart character actor known, among many other cherishable roles, as the coach who passionately delivers the title line in Remember the Titans.
Building the mood out of spare parts from westerns and cop movies from the 1970s (the charging score by Mark Mothersbaugh is a distant cousin to David Shire’s work on “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”), the filmmaker maintains a steady pace of evasion, keeping Luke and Mei on the run as they figure out a master plan of survival, with the ex-cop firing up his protective instincts to ensure that his young charge remains unharmed and her mental parcel is handled with care.
The violence has the straightforward, unflinching characteristic evident in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , although Yakin's dialogue falls considerably short of Tarantino's, both in terms of substance and offbeat humor.
And that’s precisely the problem with Safe: Yakin hasn’t bothered to write or direct a single scene that brings real risk or emotion to the situation, or to persuade us that Luke and Mei are as fun a pair of rascals as, say, Ryan and Tatum O’Neil in Paper Moon.
The violence has the straightforward, unflinching characteristic evident in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , although Yakin's dialogue falls considerably short of Tarantino's, both in terms of substance and offbeat humor.
Simply put, it is the best sports film since 1993's "Rudy."
And thus a movie which opens with teasing echoes of Unforgiven or The Bourne Identity settles for being just another cookie-cutter star vehicle with almost no moral center or emotional depth.
Patton, who seems to have been cast as heavies ever since "Desperately Seeking Susan," seizes the opportunity to play a man whose comfortable world is jolted by societal change and he's sensational in the role.