Tag Archives: Colm Meaney

Con Air (1997, Simon West), the extended edition

Posted on 7 January 2011 | Leave a comment

I loathed Con Air back when I first saw it. I’ve only seen it that one time, opening night thirteen years ago. And many of my complaints at the time still hold true–Nicolas Cage is awful, John Cusack is awful (worse, his jokes fall flat), Simon West is a terrible director (but thirteen years later he’s not as bad as the mainstream directors who’ve followed) and the music is bad. All those complaints do hold true. The writing’s really bad in parts too, mostly as how it relates to Cage and his wife. Monica Potter plays the wife.

But it’s a whole lot of fun to watch John Malkovich go crazy as a poorly written bad guy. Malkovich is so good chewing up the scenery here, I realized him never getting to play Lex Luthor is one of the great Hollywood tragedies. I don’t know if he had fun here, but it sure seems like it.

The supporting cast is mostly impeccable–I haven’t seen one of these Bruckheimer super-cast movies in a while–except Colm Meaney. Meaney is awful.

But Ving Rhames, Mykelti Williamson, Rachel Ticotin and M.C. Gainey? They’re all amazing. Or Steve Buscemi, charged with making a Dahmer-like serial killer likable? Buscemi practically makes the movie on his own.

One of the other big failures is the CG and the composite shots. And the hair. Cage’s extensions look ridiculous and Cusack looks like he refused to cut his hair so they greased it back.

It’s diverting Hollywood junk food.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Simon West; written by Scott Rosenberg; director of photography, David Tattersall; edited by Chris Lebenzon, Steve Mirkovich and Glen Scantlebury; music by Mark Mancina and Trevor Rabin; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer; released by Touchstone Pictures.

Starring Nicolas Cage (Cameron Poe), John Cusack (U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin), John Malkovich (Cyrus ‘The Virus’ Grissom), Ving Rhames (Nathan ‘Diamond Dog’ Jones), Nick Chinlund (William ‘Billy Bedlam’ Bedford), Steve Buscemi (Garland ‘The Marietta Mangler’ Greene), Colm Meaney (DEA Agent Duncan Malloy), Rachel Ticotin (Guard Sally Bishop), Dave Chappelle (Joe ‘Pinball’ Parker), Mykelti Williamson (Mike ‘Baby-O’ O’Dell), Danny Trejo (Johnny ‘Johnny-23′ Baca), M.C. Gainey (Swamp Thing), Steve Eastin (Guard Falzon), Renoly Santiago (Ramon ‘Sally-Can’t Dance’ Martinez) and Monica Potter (Tricia Poe).

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Posted in 1997, Action, Adventure, ★½, Color, Crime, English, Thriller, Touchstone Pictures, USA

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Get Him to the Greek (2010, Nicholas Stoller)

Posted on 7 June 2010 | 1 Comment

From Nicholas Stoller’s writing credits, I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such a funny movie. I hadn’t realized he’d directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Get Him to the Greek is a spin-off more than a sequel (though Kristen Bell shows up for a cameo). Stoller’s third act problems–when Greek becomes painfully unfunny and life affirming–aside, it’s almost the funniest movie in years.

Stoller does luck out to some degree, given his two leads. In one lead, he’s got Jonah Hill, who plays the Jonah Hill persona (Superbad grown up with girlfriend) and whose quiet delivery is perfect. The other lead, the absurdly extroverted Russell Brand, has a perfect loud delivery. Brand infuses his drug-addled rock star with these occasional moments of sarcastic clarity, which really adds to the experience.

Both Hill and Brand stumble through Stoller’s anti-drug message at the end, however. And while Stoller recovers the ending, he doesn’t resolve lots of issues he raises after turning it into a friendship drama.

For the majority of the running time, Greek‘s the funniest human comedy in a long time. Brand’s character is great for allowing absurd situations firmly set in reality. It never feels artificial… even with Sean Combs showing up.

Combs is hilarious in the film but gives one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen.

The rest of the cast–Rose Byrne (until the dramatics) and Colm Meaney in particular–are great.

It’s good. It should have been a lot better though.

2.5/4★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Nicholas Stoller; screenplay by Stoller, based on characters created by Jason Segel; director of photography, Robert D. Yeoman; edited by William Kerr and Michael L. Sale; music by Lyle Workman; production designer, Jan Roelfs; produced by Stoller, Judd Apatow, David L. Bushell and Rodney Rothman; released by Universal Pictures.

Starring Jonah Hill (Aaron Green), Russell Brand (Aldous Snow), Elisabeth Moss (Daphne Binks), Rose Byrne (Jackie Q), Colm Meaney (Jonathon Snow) and Sean Combs (Sergio Roma).

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Posted in 2010, ★★½, Color, Comedy, English, Universal Pictures, USA

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Layer Cake (2004, Matthew Vaughn)

Posted on 30 August 2009 | Leave a comment

I tried. I really did try.

It’s absurd, in a lot of ways, to even give Layer Cake any kind of chance at all. It’s one of these hipster British crime movies.

I don’t remember why I thought it might be all right–there was no empirical evidence to influence that thinking. The direction is CG aided Tarantino–well, Tarantino of the 1990s. I doubt Tarantino is as static as his emulators. He really ought to get a cut of any hipster crime movie.

What’s so crappy about Layer Cake is it pretends it’s something original. It lifts lines and scenes from Scarface–made some twenty years before–and thinks its revolutionary. And these aren’t the popular Scarface scenes, these are the drab procedural scenes–which means “The Streets of San Francisco” probably did them eight years before Scarface.

Now, I love a lot of British cinema. Well, I like a lot of it and I love some of it. A bit of it. But the lack of originality is distressing. Did every British director from 1992 on try to make something so Miramax would pick it up for U.S. distribution?

Layer Cake makes me wish Panavision had never been invented, much less popularized. Vaughn’s a pretentious director, but he’s nowhere near as atrocious as the narration.

Yes, get the author of the hipster novel to write the script of the hipster movie. It works out so well.

I loathe this film.

I loathe myself for giving it twenty minutes.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Matthew Vaughn; screenplay by J.J. Connolly, based on his novel; director of photography, Ben Davis; edited by Jon Harris; music by Lisa Gerrard and Ilan Eshkeri; production designer, Kave Quinn; produced by Adam Bohling, David Reid and Vaughan; released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Starring Daniel Craig (XXXX), Colm Meaney (Gene), Kenneth Cranham (Jimmy Price), George Harris (Morty), Jamie Foreman (The Duke), Sienna Miller (Tammy), Michael Gambon (Eddie Temple), Marcel Iureş (Slavo), Tom Hardy (Clarkie), Tamer Hassan (Terry), Ben Whishaw (Sidney), Burn Gorman (Gazza), Sally Hawkins (Slasher), Dexter Fletcher (Cody), Steve John Shepherd (Tiptoes), Louis Emerick (Trevor), Stephen Walters (Shanks), Paul Orchard (Lucky), Dragan Mićanović (Dragan), Nick Thomas-Webster (Dragan’s henchman), Nathalie Lunghi (Charlie) and Jason Flemyng (Crazy Larry).

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Posted in 2004, ⓏⒺⓇⓄ, Color, Crime, Drama, English, Romanian, Sony Pictures Classics, Thriller, UK

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Monument Ave. (1998, Ted Demme)

Posted on 12 February 2008 | Leave a comment

An utterly depressing Mean Streets knock-off–but beautifully directed by Ted Demme, who manages to make it both derivative and affecting–which might not have much potential, but certainly has the cast for it. Even though Denis Leary is over forty as the guy who wants to get out but they keep pulling him back in–and, honesty, if the film had taken Leary’s age into account, it would have been a lot better–he’s real good. It helps Demme shoots it so well, but the movie’s got a great cast.

Besides Leary–and Billy Crudup, fantastic in a small role–there’s, in particular, Ian Hart and Colm Meaney. Hart’s got the sidekick role. He doesn’t do anything to break out of it, but he inhabits it perfectly. Meaney’s the heavy and he’s great at it, looking like he should be having more fun than he is–but he never lets the character go wild like most heavies in the genre do and the result is a much finer performance. Meaney and Leary are both these exhausted men… one of the other nuances ignored.

There are some mediocre performances, of course, given this one’s a neo-indie film from the late 1990s and everyone has to be a name. Famke Janssen, for example, isn’t entirely bad, but she is completely unbelievable as the neighborhood girl who never could get away. Noah Emmerich, however, is just bad. And Martin Sheen turns in one of his least impressive performances ever.

But John Diehl’s great.

Demme also shoots these wonderful drug use scenes–I suppose, given his death by overdose, it would have been better if he’d shot them poorly–and he really makes Monument Ave. work better than the script deserves. Besides some stylistic flourishes on Demme’s part, as well as the good acting, nothing makes the movie stand out. To some degree, those qualities ought to be enough, but Demme was obviously trying for more… but the script just doesn’t have anything more to give.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Ted Demme; written by Mike Armstrong; director of photography, Adam Kimmel; edited by Jeffrey Wolf; music by Todd Kasow; production designer, Ruth Ammon; produced by Joel Stillerman, Demme, Jim Serpico, Adam Doench, Nicolas Clermont and Elie Samaha; released by Lions Gate Films.

Starring Denis Leary (Bobby), Ian Hart (Mouse), John Diehl (Digger), Jason Barry (Seamus), Noah Emmerich (Red), Billy Crudup (Teddy), Greg Dulli (Shang), Famke Janssen (Katy), Colm Meaney (Jackie O’Hara), Martin Sheen (Hanlon) and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Annie).

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Posted in 1998, ★½, Color, Crime, Drama, English, Lions Gate Films, Thriller, USA

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Perfect Witness (1989, Robert Mandel)

Posted on 25 January 2008 | Leave a comment

Perfect Witness is a standard TV movie, even if it was on HBO (I’m not sure what got it on HBO even… language, maybe?), even if it does have a great cast. During the opening credits, it’s names like Brian Dennehy, Stockard Channing, Delroy Lindo, Joe Grifasi, and Aidan Quinn. Robert Mandel directed it. It should have been better, instead of just the standard TV movie (lengthy–four to five month–present action and more complicated plot, though I don’t know why legal TV movies have always had complicated plots… it’s not like TiVo has been around forever).

Mandel does a so-so job. He disguises Toronto quite well for New York, but the TV movie is not something he’s suited for. He’s only got one really nice moment in the whole thing, which is disappointing, especially since Brad Fiedel does the score and Fiedel can always deliver good moments. The score’s nice, better than the movie deserves, but there just isn’t the material for Fiedel to strengthen.

Quinn’s fantastic. The movie works because of his performance, nothing else. Dennehy is okay, good in parts, but his character is practically a villain, which Dennehy isn’t playing. Channing is okay too, but unimpressive in the emotional female role. Lindo and Grifasi both have small, nice parts. The only important lousy performance is Laura Harrington as Quinn’s wife. She’s real bad.

I suppose there have to be other TV movies like Perfect Witness out there, completely competent time wasters with better-than-they-deserve casts, but I was really expecting something from Mandel and Dennehy, who’d worked together just a few years before on F/X. And not having a Grifasi and Dennehy reunion (they played Mutt and Jeff cops together in F/X) is just tragic.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Robert Mandel; written by Terry Curtis Fox and Ron Hutchinson; director of photography, Lajos Koltai; edited by Wendy Greene Bricmont; music by Brad Fiedel; production designer, Richard Wilcox; produced by Elaine Sperber; released by Home Box Office.

Starring Brian Dennehy (James Falcon), Aidan Quinn (Sam Paxton), Stockard Channing (Liz Sapperstein), Laura Harrington (Jeanie Paxton), Delroy Lindo (Berger), Joe Grifasi (Breeze), Ken Pogue (Costello), Markus Flanagan (Woods), David Margulies (Rudnick), Nial Lancaster (Danny Paxton), James Greene (Paddy O’Rourke), Colm Meaney (Meagher), Tobin Bell (Dillon), Tony Sirico (Marco), Sam Malkin (Stefano), Kevin Rushton (Rikky), David Cumming (Kevin O’Rourke) and David Proval (Lucca).

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Posted in 1989, ★★, Color, English, Home Box Office, Thriller, USA

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Under Siege (1992, Andrew Davis)

Posted on 20 March 2007 | Leave a comment

I suppose, if there were a quiz or something and I thought about it real hard, I’d remember Under Siege brought Tommy Lee Jones… well, not back exactly, so I guess just brought Tommy Lee Jones. Looking at his filmography and the dates, someone could wrongly argue Oliver Stone tried championing him–but it didn’t work out. Under Siege kicked off the unending deluge of bad Tommy Lee Jones movies and signaled the end of Steven Seagal’s career in a way. Seagal ruined the success it gave him.

Watching the film, which I haven’t seen since in twelve years or so, I was surprised at how passable a job Seagal does acting in much of the time. He has absolutely no chemistry with female “actor” Erika Eleniak, but she’s so terrible, it might not be Seagal’s fault. The only reason I thought he might be contributing is how bad he is in certain scenes–like when he has to play the character in a verbal, not physical fashion. Seagal’s first few scenes in the film, when he’s hanging around with the familiar-looking 1990s action movie supporting cast–he’s good in those scenes, he’s visibly having some fun. When he’s alone, he’s fine too, but once he and Eleniak are going on adventures throughout the ship, it’s painful to watch her performance.

Under Siege also put Andrew Davis into the Hollywood mainstream and it’s a little perplexing. While Davis did cast a lot of his standard character actors, only some of them are good, and I’m sure the script had the structure–keep Seagal peripheral for the first act, letting Tommy Lee Jones run away with the movie and give it the pretense of some solid quality–but maybe that one was Davis’s idea. He sure didn’t coax a good performance out of Gary Busey, who’s so annoying the film loses a lot of credibility when the bad guys don’t just kill him so they don’t have to hear him talk anymore.

The action scenes are rather blah too–Seagal’s an unbeatable killing machine–he mows down fifteen guys in one part–and understanding his role as an unbeatable killing machine is part of watching Under Siege. But he doesn’t really kick any ass. I mean, the guy can kick ass, but instead he just shoots at people. It’s boring. The film never establishes itself as “real,” so Seagal’s feats are never particularly exciting.

Also, I’m not sure what the end is supposed to mean–it seems to suggest Seagal, while he doesn’t agree with it, understands why Hawaii needs to get nuked.

But it’s still mildly entertaining, if only because the first act is so incredibly well-done. I mean, the moment where I was wondering when the hostage-taking was going to start (thinking, it’s getting to be about as long as one can wait for it), it started. So it does do something significant right.

CREDITS

Directed by Andrew Davis; written by J.F. Lawton; director of photography, Frank Tidy; edited by Robert Ferretti; music by Gary Chang; production designer, Bill Kenney; produced by Arnon Milchan, Seagal, Steven Reuther, Jack B. Bernstein and Peter MacGregor-Scott; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Steven Seagal (Casey Ryback), Tommy Lee Jones (Strannix), Gary Busey (Commander Krill), Erika Eleniak (Jordan Tate), Patrick O’Neal (Captain Adams), Colm Meaney (Doumer) and Andy Romano (Admiral Bates).

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Posted in 1992, Action, Color, Crime, English, France, Thriller, USA, Warner Bros.

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