-Whenever you begin a film with an impossibly rude, gauche protagonist, you’re digging a hole for a film, which can certainly be entertaining, as it is in the beginning of the new “Oldboy.” Unlike the original film, which saw drunken Oh Dae-su snatched almost immediately and held for fifteen years, we spend a considerable amount of time with Josh Brolin’s Joe Doucett, an unrepentant asshole who seems to deserve some sort of unfortunate plight, openly flirting with a married woman and mocking his wife for her insistence he attend his daughter’s birthday. The only problem is that the film can keep digging that hole, as they arguably do in the original by having the character consumed with vengeance. The other option, the one pursued by this film (and the recent “Saving Mr. Banks,” for that matter), is to crawl out of that hole, in effect redeeming a character by teaching them the value of forgiveness, compassion and companionship. And the sarcastic, brutish Brolin doesn’t buy this, director Spike Lee doesn’t buy this, and ultimately the audience doesn’t buy it, even though it’s clearly the movie these guys have tried to make. The rest of the film is a hollow copy of the original, completely purposeless save for it’s superficial alterations of the original story. By the time you reached the denouement of the earlier film, you felt sick and borderline complicit in Oh Dae-su’s actions. With this picture, which amplifies the taboo elements of that major twist, it just feels like trivial box-checking.
-You already know walking in whether you’re going to like a Jason Statham movie, and in that respect “Homefront" doesn’t disappoint. It’s one of the oldest tropes in the book, a DEA agent laying low who soon has to deal with the past demons of his transgressions: no surprise it comes from Sylvester Stallone, who apparently wrote this script ages ago. Despite the access to technology, this is an analog action film driven by bullets, cars, manilla envelopes, and macho threats. James Franco shows up and brings actual character to meth lord Gator, a reluctant criminal who just wants to run an honest drug business, struggling to hide his contempt for his customers, including a strung-out sister played by Kate Bosworth. There’s the hint that the movie deals with the birth of a Hatfield & McCoys-type reunion, the origins of a rift that clearly runs through an entire community, Mostly it’s just an excuse to crack some skulls. You can read my review
here.